Women in Communist states

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

One thing I've noticed about Communist history is that in the traditional leadership roles, men dominate almost all the positions (to use the vulgar expression, the politburo is almost always a "sausage fest") Not that Marxist-Leninist states have been alone in that regard. Certainly most cabinets and ministries in most governments around the world are largely men too, and men also dominate the corporate field.

But you would think that years after an egalitarian revolution, women would play a slightly more prominent role. For instance, in China there is only one (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liu_Yandong) woman on the politburo.

As a related question, was Jiang Qing fairly singled out for the excesses of the cultural revolution, or was she scapegoated? And if she was scapegoated, was there any implicit sexism in how she was criticized by party apparatuses?

[bailey_187]

I have been thinking about this too.

While the Communist states spoke of emancipation of women, and did greatly increase their rights and standing in society, where they can be said to partialy have acheived equality within the working class i guess to an extent (it varies ofc between states and times), they never seemed to in the ruling bureacracy or party, which is werid :confused:

[caramelpence]

As a related question, was Jiang Qing fairly singled out for the excesses of the cultural revolution, or was she scapegoated? And if she was scapegoated, was there any implicit sexism in how she was criticized by party apparatuses?

She was tried along with the rest of the Gang of Four and in anti-Gang campaigns she also tended to feature on posters alongside the other three male members, so in that sense it's not clear whether she was actually discriminated against as a woman. On the other hand, the document in which the party gave its view on the Cultural Revolution after the end of the CR and the consolidation of power under Deng Xiapoing was the 1981 resolution on party history, and in that document there is some indication that the party viewed Jiang Qing as more responsible or more devious than the other members of the Gang and that she might therefore have been discriminated against - she and Lin Biao are accused of having set up "counter-revolutionary cliques" and when the Gang of Four is referred to at various points in the document's account of the Cultural Revolution it is often expressed in the form "Jiang Qing and others" or the "Jiang Qing clique" rather than as the Gang of Four or the names of all the individuals who are said to belong to the Gang. From my own experience, talking to people in China today about her role in the Cultural Revolution, one of the emotions that people often express is that she is worthy of special condemnation and vitriol because the fact that she had a personal rather than a purely political relationship with Mao meant that there was greater opportunity for her to influence and take advantage of Mao than the other Gang members, so people often suggest that Mao was manipulated by her, or that she otherwise took advantage of his good intentions.

It's probably worth reading the resolution: marxists .org /subject/china/documents/cpc/history/01 .htm

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

One thing I've noticed about Communist history is that in the traditional leadership roles, men dominate almost all the positions (to use the vulgar expression, the politburo is almost always a "sausage fest")

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ana_Pauker

Though of course the real problem is party/politburo rule, which really has nothing to do with proletarian emancipation.

[psgchisolm]

What about in the Soviet Army? I remember during WW2 the soviets used women as snipers but that's about it. Did any women become officers?

[Tim Finnegan]

I tend to think that a great deal of the proclaimed gender egalitarianism of the communist regimes was really just a way of rationalising the exploitation of the working class. The nuclear family has historically been useful in reproduction exploitative conditions, but is not essential to it; if you can communalise some part of the "women's work", then you're able to increase the total labour power available for exploitation. The Marxist-Leninist states were lucky in that they had an ideological basis for doing this, while the bourgeois states have never really been able to hammer it out.

[caramelpence]

if you can communalise some part of the "women's work", then you're able to increase the total labour power available for exploitation.

I find this to be an overly simplistic analysis. It assumes that the socialization/communalization of household labour is both feasible and desirable for the bourgeoisie, at least in theoretical terms. It is in fact not desirable or feasible, because if household labour were socialized (carried out through neighborhood nurseries, canteens, and so on) then it would be necessary to pay those responsible for carrying it out, as wage-labourers, whereas the advantage of society being divided into individual families and women carrying out household labour without monetary reward within those families is precisely that it enables the reproduction of labour power (on an ongoing basis) at no cost to the ruling class, save those costs that are required to maintain the ideological hegemony of the family as the dominant if not the sole form of social organization. There are also other important benefits associated with the family that would also not be available if the family were replaced through socialization - whereas we can assume that the family as such is not necessary for ideological socialization, a crucial advantage of the family is its role as a unit of consumption, as the division of society into families that carry out tasks (e.g. the preparation of meals) independently of one another expands the market available to the bourgeoisie when it comes to goods like appliances and even foodstuffs. This too would be lost were the family replaced.

It's partly for these reasons that so-called Communist regimes (i.e. capitalist regimes with an ideological facade) did not undertake consistent measures to replace the family but often gave direct legal sanction to the family in ways that mimicked the behavior of non-Stalinist states. Your argument makes it seem as if bourgeois states would benefit from being able to replace the family but that they are somehow prevented from doing so by autonomous ideological factors.

One thing you are right about, however, is that it is not feasible for the bourgeoisie to limit the activity of women entirely to household labour to the extent that they are withdrawn from the labour market entirely, because this would, by severely limiting the size and flexibility of the labour force, have a negative impact on capital accumulation - and it is precisely for this reason that women today face the double burden of having to be wage laborers and having to perform the main part of household labour. The bourgeois state and its ideological state apparatuses are faced with the dual task of enabling the involvement of women in the labour market and maintaining their role as providers in the home. It's this task and its roots in the requirements of capital accumulation that have to be the staring-point for any revolutionary analysis of the position of women in contemporary capitalist societies.

[Tim Finnegan]

I find this to be an overly simplistic analysis. It assumes that the socialization/communalization of household labour is both feasible and desirable for the bourgeoisie, at least in theoretical terms. It is in fact not desirable or feasible, because if household labour were socialized (carried out through neighborhood nurseries, canteens, and so on) then it would be necessary to pay those responsible for carrying it out, as wage-labourers, whereas the advantage of society being divided into individual families and women carrying out household labour without monetary reward within those families is precisely that it enables the reproduction of labour power (on an ongoing basis) at no cost to the ruling class, save those costs that are required to maintain the ideological hegemony of the family as the dominant if not the sole form of social organization. There are also other important benefits associated with the family that would also not be available if the family were replaced through socialization - whereas we can assume that the family as such is not necessary for ideological socialization, a crucial advantage of the family is its role as a unit of consumption, as the division of society into families that carry out tasks (e.g. the preparation of meals) independently of one another expands the market available to the bourgeoisie when it comes to goods like appliances and even foodstuffs. This too would be lost were the family replaced.

It's partly for these reasons that so-called Communist regimes (i.e. capitalist regimes with an ideological facade) did not undertake consistent measures to replace the family but often gave direct legal sanction to the family in ways that mimicked the behavior of non-Stalinist states. Your argument makes it seem as if bourgeois states would benefit from being able to replace the family but that they are somehow prevented from doing so by autonomous ideological factors.
I think that you are very much mistaken in describing the domestic chores of the traditional housewife as being undertaken at "no cost to the ruling class". The cost, while certainly not directly charged to the bourgeois, is still financed by them through the wages of the housewife's husband, and, in those circumstance which she is employed, to the housewife herself. This means that the rationalisation of the reproduction of labour has the potential to allow a great exploitation, by lowering the labour-cost of the reproduction of labour (assuming that the division of labour will here, as in most things, increase productivity) but continuing to extract the same amount of labour from a given family unit through the employment of both adults in commodity production, one can significantly increase exploitation. In fact, one of the reasons for the stagnation of real wages in the West in recent decades is that entry of women of into the labour force allowed the cost of reproduction for most nuclear families to be split between two wages; many families today could barely survive on a single pay cheque, let alone at the relative level of comfort that their equivalent may have done fifty years ago. (Of course, this is certainly not an argument against women's entry into the work force but for increased organisation against exploitation with the full participation of women workers.)
This project is easier for Marxist-Leninist states for capitalist ones, because they have both the ideological basis both to present such a scheme as acceptable, and to present the mechanics of such a scheme- a point I failed to stress previously- acceptable, i.e. the provision of domestic labour by the state. Western capitalism, being individualistic and more overtly patriarchal, ends up demanding that any such externalisation of domestic labour take place in the market, which, given the short-sightedness of the bourgeoisie and the lack of state intervention means that this sort of externalisation becomes a luxury of the wealthy, who can afford it privately, and, to a certain limited extent, to white collars workers with more generous employers.

Furthermore, I would question the extent to which the loss of the nuclear family as a consumer-unit would mean a loss of market for the bourgeoisie; as Marx explains, the cost of the re-production of labour is culturally determined, so in a society in which gadgets, branded food, and the like were not expected- this being the exact state of things for workers throughout the history of capitalism- then wages could take a corresponding dive. That commercialism and the resulting compulsion to consume currently serves to inflate wages- that the process of competitive accumulation actually hampers accumulation- simply reflects the insanity of free market capitalism.


One thing you are right about, however, is that it is not feasible for the bourgeoisie to limit the activity of women entirely to household labour to the extent that they are withdrawn from the labour market entirely, because this would, by severely limiting the size and flexibility of the labour force, have a negative impact on capital accumulation - and it is precisely for this reason that women today face the double burden of having to be wage laborers and having to perform the main part of household labour. The bourgeois state and its ideological state apparatuses are faced with the dual task of enabling the involvement of women in the labour market and maintaining their role as providers in the home. It's this task and its roots in the requirements of capital accumulation that have to be the staring-point for any revolutionary analysis of the position of women in contemporary capitalist societies.This I certainly agree with.

[Hit The North]

But you would think that years after an egalitarian revolution, women would play a slightly more prominent role. For instance, in China there is only one (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liu_Yandong) woman on the politburo.


There was/is no relation of equality between the rulers and those they rule over, so why would you expect the ruling elite to be representative of society?

[Red Future]

What about in the Soviet Army? I remember during WW2 the soviets used women as snipers but that's about it. Did any women become officers?

They tended not to rise above the rank of Lieutenant

[Tim Finnegan]

There was/is no relation of equality between the rulers and those they rule over, so why would you expect the ruling elite to be representative of society?
Systems of inequality of race, gender, sexuality, etc. tend to overlay economic classes, rather than existing within them, independent from each other. It is the same patriarchy, white supremacy, etc. that imposes itself on (sociological) minorities among the bourgeoisie as among the proletariat, even if the results may differ, so its presence among one is broadly indicative of its presence among the other.

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

From the recent Party Congress in Cuba:

"As their names were called for membership in the Central Committee, each newly elected official stood up, revealing a mix of young and old, including many women and Cubans of African descent." - http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110419/ap_on_go_ot/cb_cuba_party_congress

[Hexen]

Those weren't "Communist" states (a oxymoron actually) but their deformed worker states and state capitalism.

Communism as envisioned by Marx/Engels has never existed nor ever been attempted.

[bailey_187]

Those weren't "Communist" states (a oxymoron actually) but their deformed worker states and state capitalism.

Communism as envisioned by Marx/Engels has never existed nor ever been attempted.

oh wow thank u for your contribution with such an engaging new idea, revleft was unaware of such views