Is the family at the root of the Bolshevik failure?

[Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages]

First off I apologize in advance for breaking my own rule and acknowledging the existence of the Russian revolution on revleft. I will add that if we could avoid going off on tangents about whatever delusional tendency or anti-tendency you've taken the liberty of including yourself in, that would be much appreciated.


I was goofing off on marxists.org and came across "The Tasks of the Working Women's Movement in the Soviet Republic" https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/sep/23a.htm A couple things popped out at me in this text, and I could use some contextual help.


Throughout this speech he makes numerous remarks about the domestic slavery experienced by women: "Here we are not, of course, speaking of making women the equal of men as far as productivity of labour, the quantity of labour, the length of the working day, labour conditions, etc., are concerned; we mean that the woman should not, unlike the man, be oppressed because of her position in the family. You all know that even when women have full rights, they still remain factually downtrodden because all housework is left to them. In most cases housework is the most unproductive, the most barbarous and the most arduous work a woman can do. It is exceptionally petty and does not include anything that would in any way promote the development of the woman." At face value this is a pretty radical analysis, especially considering it was written in 1919. However, its noticeable that Lenin never questions the existence of the family itself in the Soviet Republic, only the distribution of domestic labor currently being performed by women. He seems to assume that a revolutionary woman should continue to attach herself to a male, with the exception that the responsibility for domestic work should fall to the state machinery rather than any individual.


He explains a little bit about this solution of his "We are setting up model institutions, dining-rooms and nurseries, that will emancipate women from housework." but then unfortunately he caps it off with this: "And the work of organizing all these institutions will fall mainly to women." he follows this up with some noise about the oppressed needing to liberate themselves, blah, blah, blah. I assume though, that he would be opposed to women actually splitting off from his male-dominated party and forming their own organizations so this is a deflection on his part imo.


Anywho, I then found this gem:https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/jan/17.htm a letter he wrote a few years earlier where he expresses horror that a “demand (women’s) for freedom of love” might imply a woman having the freedom from (!)Child Birth(!), "The serious element in love" which is vague and could mean a lot of things and the freedom of adultery.


Often when soviet society under Lenin is brought up, we get the usual spiel about the decriminalization of homosexuality, radical art movements, etc during his time in the party. It's true that the 1920s were a time of grand social experiments in Russia where people tried out a number of new ways of living and relating to one another, and we all know what followed in the 30s with the criminalization of homosexuality and the state's re-commitment to the traditional patriarchal family. Typically this shift is blamed on Stalin. With the result being that Lenin becomes some kind of counter-cultural icon to be contrasted with crusty old Stalin and his conservatism. With these statements made by Lenin 10 years earlier is that actually a fair view after all? Lenin himself comes off as the arch-conservative on the question of women.


So what are some concrete examples of the Bolsheviks' (and Lenin's specifically) commitment and to these social experiments in 20s? Lenin in 1915 thinks a demand for free love on the part of women is a bourgeois demand, what did Lenin of 1924 think?


Question deux: Is it even possible today to postulate a communism without first attacking and upending the institution of marriage and the family?

[Tim Cornelis]

Question deux: what do you think mean exactly? Is it possible to have a communist revolution without first attacking marriage and the family as is implied in the title?

[Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages]

Yes, typical rhetoric seems to suggest that the elimination of the family is something that comes after communism. I'm asking if you think this is backward and that the elimination of the family is actually a prerequisite for communism.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

While I would agree that the Bolsheviks did not give enough thought to the question of family, which was corrected when my delusional tendency came along, I think the question is posed in a strange way. Lenin, as far as I can tell, was Victorian to a fault, and a bit of a hypocrite since he himself didn't exactly father any children during his own sexual relations. But Lenin wasn't the king of the Soviet Union. The progressive social experiments depended, not on the attitude of one man, or a circle of powerful men and women, but on the momentum of the world revolution. Once that momentum had been lost, the tail started wagging the dog. It would have wagged the dog "even if" Lenin or Trotsky or Kollontai or Bonch-Bruevich were the unofficial Bolshevik leader.

[Tim Cornelis]

I don't see how it'd be a prerequisite. I don't think anything you said in the op indicates such a causal relationship with the failure of the revolution.

[Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages]

I'm not suggesting that Lenin was king of the soviet union. This sort of defense always seems to rest on the assumption that since he was not the king, his influence on the political and philosophic orientation of the party was nonexistent. Obviously yes he was not king, and yet he was wildly influential. So anyways...your position would be that the social reaction in the USSR following the 20s had nothing at all to do with the Party or the State's views on these experiments?

[Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages]

I don't see how it'd be a prerequisite. I don't think anything you said in the op indicates such a causal relationship with the failure of the revolution.

How could a society of free producers and consumers realistically come into existence with 50% of the population still in bondage? A revolution that has no intention of liberating women from reproduction is destined to continue recreating our own society rather than creating a new one.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

I'm not suggesting that Lenin was king of the soviet union. This sort of defense always seems to rest on the assumption that since he was not the king, his influence on the political and philosophic orientation of the party was nonexistent. Obviously yes he was not king, and yet he was wildly influential. So anyways...your position would be that the social reaction in the USSR following the 20s had nothing at all to do with the Party or the State's views on these experiments?

I don't think I'm defending Lenin. In fact, to be honest, I find his attitude to be hopelessly outdated even by the standards of 1918. And there is a tendency in Trotskyist circles to ascribe everything positive about the Soviet Union to Lenin, Trotsky or Lenin and Trotsky. Lenin's influence in these matters seems to have been negligible, as opposed to the influence of, say, Kollontai (whose personal views were just as bad as Lenin's).

And yes, while I think the destruction of the family is part of the construction of the socialist society, I don't think the Party is responsible for the social reaction of the twenties. The failure of the revolution in Germany was.

Another point was that people can have backward views while being forced to act in a progressive manner by the times. I don't think that's a defence of Lenin.

[Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages]

Do you have anything that specifically relates to the Party's actions towards these experiments though? I had a book about this at one point but I must have lost it the last time I moved. I don't think it really addressed the Party's attitudes though.

Edit: I apologize for sounding a little incoherent, my writing normally needs 2 or 3 revisions before it starts sounding like it came from a human rather than a broken chat-bot.

[Rafiq]

I'm not suggesting that Lenin was king of the soviet union. This sort of defense always seems to rest on the assumption that since he was not the king, his influence on the political and philosophic orientation of the party was nonexistent. Obviously yes he was not king, and yet he was wildly influential. So anyways...your position would be that the social reaction in the USSR following the 20s had nothing at all to do with the Party or the State's views on these experiments?

Victor Serge, to paraphrase, once recalled that it is indeed true that the germ of Stalinism was implicit in the October revolution itself, but that there were many other germs that one ought not to forget as well.

In other words, only with the specific appropriation of the socialist puritanism of the 1920's could history have been re-written in such a way as to recognize the germ having been implicit in Soviet sexuality all along. But a critical understanding of sexual relations following the October revolution shows that a different trajectory path all-together was a very possible thing, contingent upon the victory of revolution in the advanced capitalist states. What should be noted here is that Lenin's sexual puritanism is not simply bourgoeis sexual conservatism, and his encounters with Zetkin, which are published online, demonstrate this very well. The Bolshevik conception of love rested upon, if you will, the polarization between Agape and Eros. Lenin firmly approached sexuality in pertinence to the former: Sexual pleasure, while perhaps not shameful, is a distraction, and that mutual love must be subordinate to the unconditional universal love of the revolution. Lenin correctly recognized that the energy of the youth ought to be better directed at the building of socialism and the defense of the revolution.

This doesn't mean that sexuality itself is a triviality, but that APPROACHING IT consciously as such was a distraction: Sexuality will change in accordance with social changes, but this will not be wrought out from incessant debauchery. There is nothing wrong with it, per se, but to repeat the mistake of the counter-culture in pretending that "free love" is a revolutionary act is nothing short of delusion. Amidst this, Lenin as any Marxist recognized that the victory of socialism would entail the destruction of the bourgeois state. As such, even though the Soviet state was an Agappean state in its approach to sexuality, major changes in the organization of family and sexual life occurred throughout the country, ones that were hardly "traditional".

These were not social "experiments" that failed, they were inevitably connected with the social changes brought about the October revolution and a logical extension of the proletarian dictatorship. They proved to be unsustainable not because they were structural failures, but because their applicability to the countryside was disastrous, and finally because the Soviet state did not have the resources to fund, propagate and institute systemically on a mass scale the changes in family life - primarily because of the problem of the peasantry. Because the revolution failed to spread, the powers of the state had to be subordinated to the industrialization and modernization of the country, which was impossible by the parasitic social elements formed via the NEP who had no inclination whatsoever toward large-scale modernization, and certainly could not do it in the time period that would have been necessary to have the necessary armaments production capacities to defend the country from an invasion ten years later.

Part of this revolution in agriculture, necessarily meant the institutional encouragement of the "traditional" family on a mass scale. The state lacked the organizational initiative, structural predisposition, or resources to fund state-based communal rearing centers, this would have had to be the task of an already energized proletariat. So, while the nuclear family was encouraged, the connotations were hardly similar - the family only resembled the western family in terms of what was apparent. in the intricacies of its expression, there were stark differences between the Soviet family and the western family, namely in its interaction and relation to others.

[Spectre of Spartacism]

The nuclear family is an integral part of capitalism. You cannot disrupt the essential relations of the family without disrupting the essential relations of capitalism. It is circular to ask the question if the treatment of the family caused the eventual failure of the Russian Revolution. It pretends they are external to one another. Both were tied together and the cause of the failure to reorganize both family and society must be sought elsewhere.

[Islam Muslim Muhammad]

Victor Serge, to paraphrase, once recalled that it is indeed true that the germ of Stalinism was implicit in the October revolution itself, but that there were many other germs that one ought not to forget as well.

In other words, only with the specific appropriation of the socialist puritanism of the 1920's could history have been re-written in such a way as to recognize the germ having been implicit in Soviet sexuality all along. But a critical understanding of sexual relations following the October revolution shows that a different trajectory path all-together was a very possible thing, contingent upon the victory of revolution in the advanced capitalist states. What should be noted here is that Lenin's sexual puritanism is not simply bourgoeis sexual conservatism, and his encounters with Zetkin, which are published online, demonstrate this very well. The Bolshevik conception of love rested upon, if you will, the polarization between Agape and Eros. Lenin firmly approached sexuality in pertinence to the former: Sexual pleasure, while perhaps not shameful, is a distraction, and that mutual love must be subordinate to the unconditional universal love of the revolution. Lenin correctly recognized that the energy of the youth ought to be better directed at the building of socialism and the defense of the revolution.

This doesn't mean that sexuality itself is a triviality, but that APPROACHING IT consciously as such was a distraction: Sexuality will change in accordance with social changes, but this will not be wrought out from incessant debauchery. There is nothing wrong with it, per se, but to repeat the mistake of the counter-culture in pretending that "free love" is a revolutionary act is nothing short of delusion. Amidst this, Lenin as any Marxist recognized that the victory of socialism would entail the destruction of the bourgeois state. As such, even though the Soviet state was an Agappean state in its approach to sexuality, major changes in the organization of family and sexual life occurred throughout the country, ones that were hardly "traditional".

These were not social "experiments" that failed, they were inevitably connected with the social changes brought about the October revolution and a logical extension of the proletarian dictatorship. They proved to be unsustainable not because they were structural failures, but because their applicability to the countryside was disastrous, and finally because the Soviet state did not have the resources to fund, propagate and institute systemically on a mass scale the changes in family life - primarily because of the problem of the peasantry. Because the revolution failed to spread, the powers of the state had to be subordinated to the industrialization and modernization of the country, which was impossible by the parasitic social elements formed via the NEP who had no inclination whatsoever toward large-scale modernization, and certainly could not do it in the time period that would have been necessary to have the necessary armaments production capacities to defend the country from an invasion ten years later.

Part of this revolution in agriculture, necessarily meant the institutional encouragement of the "traditional" family on a mass scale. The state lacked the organizational initiative, structural predisposition, or resources to fund state-based communal rearing centers, this would have had to be the task of an already energized proletariat. So, while the nuclear family was encouraged, the connotations were hardly similar - the family only resembled the western family in terms of what was apparent. in the intricacies of its expression, there were stark differences between the Soviet family and the western family, namely in its interaction and relation to others.
Masha'Alllah Brother, I am in full agreement with you. As Friedrich Engels proclaimed, "guerre aux cons, paix aus trous-de-cul"!.

[Rafiq]

So, "brother", deepest apologizes for not being clear enough as to leave room to justify your reactionary sexual conservatism, as Engels might apologize for not being clear enough as to leave room for the misconstruction of his text as somehow bolstering homophobic sentiment in the 21st century, but you will do well to fuck on off from this site before you're banned.

[GiantMonkeyMan]

Since Rafiq mentioned Serge, he lists all the gains of the proletarian revolution that had been reversed or made meaningless by mid 30's in 'The Conditions of Women' in Russia Twenty Years After: "The establishment of paternity, the compulsory pension payable by the father for each child, with the amount fixed by the courts, paid vacations during pregnancy and nursing periods, contraceptive freedom, the recognition of free union, the right of divorce, the freedom of abortion, the equality of rights". The right of divorce, for example, remained but a tax was introduced charging couples with 50 roubles each or 150 for a second divorce. Since women were generally on lower incomes, divorce proceedings once again became an economic fetter for women.

It's clear to me that, whilst nevertheless being lead by individuals who developed within the boundaries of capitalist life and so were no doubt influenced by reactionary ideas, the proletarian revolution itself necessarily breaks the pillars of capitalist life. You might as well be asking 'should we be destroying the economic bondage of the wage worker before having a revolution?'. It's the revolution itself that starts the process of sweeping away the last vestiges of patriarchy but if the revolution falters, if it fails to spread, if it degenerates, then the old ideas are restored.

[Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages]

These are all well written defenses of the primacy of the economic revolution over the sexual revolution but they still miss the point. So far each of you seem to have underestimated the power that the traditional family holds as a regulator of human activity. To leave it in tact as though it were something you could concentrate focus on at a later date would be like removing a bullet from someone's shoulder while leaving the knife sticking out of their chest. I'm not asking if it should be accomplished separate from the struggle for communism. I'm asking if we could imagine the sexual revolution that dismantles the traditional family and the social distinctions between genitals as the act which actually creates the conditions for communism rather than the other way around.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

Do you have anything that specifically relates to the Party's actions towards these experiments though? I had a book about this at one point but I must have lost it the last time I moved. I don't think it really addressed the Party's attitudes though.

Edit: I apologize for sounding a little incoherent, my writing normally needs 2 or 3 revisions before it starts sounding like it came from a human rather than a broken chat-bot.

It's OK, I originally planned to refrain from posting this week since I'm sick as a dog, but I ended up only refraining from posting that requires thought, leaving RL.

I also don't think it's possible to speak about "the Party's" attitude, as different people had different attitudes. Lenin didn't seem to be particularly concerned by it, Krupskaya expected a gradual end to abortion, Kollontai careened between supporting "children's republics" and expecting women to provide babies for the workers' state, Trotsky showed interest in the women's question, particularly with regards to domestic labour, but seems to have been entirely silent on homosexuality, Bonch-Bruevich founded a library to collect homosexual poetry... the RKP(b) was pretty diverse on the subject.

I could look for the sources, but not right now, it's almost 2AM here and I'm only online because I can't sleep.


These are all well written defenses of the primacy of the economic revolution over the sexual revolution but they still miss the point.

I would question the difference you seem to assume. I mean, yeah, something like the "sexual revolution" of the sixties isn't an economic revolution, but we're not talking about that, we're talking about things like fully free abortion on demand, and end to the family, an end to homophobia... all of this amounts to one aspect of the economic revolution, the change in how direct producers are reproduced. So I think we can't separate the two.

[Sewer Socialist]

The family is certainly an economic unit, and the Russian Revolution did not destroy that conservative bastion, as my libertine heart yearns to do. I excitedly clicked this link as my pulse quickened, expecting your presentation of some exciting new theory, Ethics Gradient.

But I was disappointed in reading this topic. How, exactly, would a reorganization of the family have saved the Russian Revolution? Would some hot Bolshevik orgy porn, Lenin rimming a Trotsky-blowing Stalin perhaps, have have successfully inspired revolution in a horny Germany? Would a massive nationwide orgy have satisfied forces of reaction, sparing revolutionary proletarians from mass deaths of the civil war? Would empowered women, riot grrls nearly a century ahead of their time, have implemented a successful socialism in one country; would they have succeeded where men failed?

What circumstances might have changed that could have saved the revolution?

[Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages]

I'm not sure what effect if any women's liberation would have had on the project of socialism in one country. We could assume that some of the initial gains of the revolution might have been saved as the economy settled back into its capitalist framework at least, a less sexually repressed soviet union at least. But that's still beside my point. By the time the revolution had already broken out it was already too late, as the specific male dominated economic character had taken hold by then.

870 says that for them the sexual revolution cannot be separated from the economic revolution. Practice, and even rhetoric seems to suggest otherwise for the majority of revolutionaries though. Even in this thread we can see the "simple" explanation that the failure of the economic revolution caused the liberation of women to take a back seat until conditions ripened at some future date. My own thoughts are increasingly that this equation is backward. Yes the family is an economic management unit, but it also serves to reinforce the fundamental reactionary ideology within capitalism. It seems very backwards indeed that we should expect an economic revolution to succeed anywhere while this logic is not only in place, but is daily reinforced by social institutions that seem quite natural for men, even revolutionary men.

I dug out some Wilhelm Reich as I was thinking about this last night. A couple of his quotes seem relevant:

"If an ideology has a "retroactive effect on the economic process" it must have become a material force. If an ideology becomes a material force as soon as it takes hold of the masses, then we must ask: how does this take place?"

"The ideology of any given society not only reflects the economic process of the society, it also has the function of anchoring the economic process in the psychological structure of the individual members of the society. Man is influenced by the conditions of his existence in a twofold manner: directly by the influence of his economic and social position, and indirectly by the ideological structure of his society. For this reason, he develops, inevitably, a contradiction in his structure, a contradiction which corresponds to the contradiction between the influence of the economic position and that of the ideological structure of society."

I'm not trying to present a new theory, which is why I put this in the history section

[QueerVanguard]

I don't know if it was the *immediate* cause of the Bolsheviki failing, but it was a failure in its own right. The Family being eliminated is the first sign Capitalism has been destroyed, IMO

[Rafiq]

The sexual revolution cannot ever be the primary vehicle of the social revolution, and the counter-culture proves how dynamically capital can appropriate such 'sexual revolutions' to its will.

[Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages]

Ok for sure, the 60s and 70s are a good example of the ways that the spectacle can manipulate some of the more superficial elements of sexual liberation. However we can look at the attitudes held by those revolutionaries themselves and see the overwhelming macho and heteronormative orientation emanating from inside the (male dominated)counter-culture itself rather than being forced in from the outside. So that's definitely not the solution in my mind, just a bit of fun perhaps. When I say sexual revolution I'm not simply talking about free-love in the sense of orgies and the like. I mean attacking the fundamental divide that runs through all existing social relations. In the Dialectic of Sex, Firestone puts forth a somewhat undeveloped idea of women seizing the means of reproduction in the same fashion that conventional revolutionaries forward the dictatorship of the proletariat. Rather than women's liberation as an outgrowth of the struggle for communism, she inverts it.

Looking at the field of battle before us, the truly revolutionary demands are and have been emanating from the feminist movement, not the workers movement. Changing the structure of reproduction would fundamentally challenge the structure of production, but we can see from past attempts that the opposite is not true. Communists have been chasing after the wrong agents of change.

One last Wilhelm quote and then I'll stop:
"Revolutionary practice is any field of human existence develops by itself if one comprehends the contradictions in every new process; it consists in siding with those forces which act in the direction of progressive development. To be radical, according to Marx, means "going to the root of things." If one goes to the root of things, if one understands their contradictory character, the means of mastering the reaction become plain. If one does not understand them, one lands inevitably in mechanism, economism, or metaphysics. Any criticism, therefore, is justified and of practical value only if it can demonstrate what contradictions in social reality are overlooked. The revolutionary achievement of Marx did not consist in writing proclamations or pointing to revolutionary goals, but in recognizing the industrial productive as the progressive social force, and in realistically describing the contradictions in capitalist economy. The failure of the workers' movement can mean only that those forces which hinder social development are still incompletely comprehended."

This feels like it could have been published yesterday. Every revolutionary analysis one reads regarding ideology still focuses entirely on the worker's relationship with the economic ideas of their rulers, without noticing that a huge chunk of the workers themselves are at the heart of the ruling sexual ideology. How could this not play an enormous part in the development of revolutionary consciousness or rather the aversion to it?

[Rafiq]

the reason for this, however, is not because feminists are "revolutionaries" but because the social basis of "feminism" is by in large already present. Women have been increasingly entering the same jobs and domains as men in the past few decades, so today's feminism, rather than being some kind of manifestation of social change, is merely a logical extension of this reality. Of course it is divided on class lines, and while worthy of support, it remains dominated by bourgeois-feminist currents who won't dare touch upon the real foundations of bourgeois sexuality.

The point is that the POSSIBILITY of a change in sexual relations only can be wrought out from a working class political movement, which, thanks to the developments in bourgeois liberalism, can already pre-suppose feminism as a given. Workers themselves are only "at the heart of ruling sexual ideology" insofar as they are at the heart of ruling bourgeois ideology in general.

[Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages]

Hm, I'm not sure it's intentional but you've more or less taken a bourgeois-feminist position with your response. Even Lenin in my OP admits that simply being allowed into the workforce and the public sphere is hardly an act of equality, as is actually just adds to the workload of women when coupled with the existing family relations and the distribution of unpaid labor. Whether or not there exist any revolutionaries in the feminist movement today is beside the point, the demands implicit in their positions are what is revolutionary. Whether women today are willing to demand the abolition of the family or not has no bearing on the fact the actual demand for equality means exactly that.

As for whether there is an implicit feminism in the communist movement today, I can say emphatically that you're wrong on this one. Even ignoring the glaring lack of attention women's liberation receives even after almost a century of criticism, the more obvious proof is how prevalent instances of sexual assault, victim blaming, and bullying are within 'revolutionary' organizations themselves.

I'll also disagree on the issue of ideology. Workers are at the center of bourgeois-economic ideology only insofar as they are the main propagators of it, while in practice it of course works against them. The sexual ideology on the other hand benefits at least 50% of them directly, and overthrowing this ideology means disenfranchising that same group immediately. Is it realistic to expect slave owners to become abolitionists and expropriate themselves?

[Rafiq]

Hm, I'm not sure it's intentional but you've more or less taken a bourgeois-feminist position with your response. Even Lenin in my OP admits that simply being allowed into the workforce and the public sphere is hardly an act of equality, as is actually just adds to the workload of women when coupled with the existing family relations and the distribution of unpaid labor.

There seems to be a misunderstanding here. You claimed that feminism today, moreso than the worker's movement, has been the forefront of revolutionary politics. My response was precisely that this feminism is largely a bourgeois-feminism (not revolutionary by any means), as I already stated - as a result of women increasingly entering into the workforce and occupying the same jobs as men. My point is that while this is still a bourgeois-feminism, it none the less carries in it the possibility of a revolutionary feminism, and that it ought to be supported because it unburdens us with having to deal with the double-issue. It is confusing, so let me be more clear:

Ruling bourgeois ideology is presently burdened with the responsibility of defeating this, let's call it, "anti-feminist" backlash against increasing women's "equality". Proletarian feminism derives from this pre-supposition. While we oppose bourgeois feminism, we none the less only oppose it insofar as we are revolutionary feminists. Think about Marx's attack on the so-called defenders of the sacred family, rightfully pointing out that family relations have largely, in their previous form, already fallen victim to the onslaught of industrialization (can the same not be said of neoliberalism?).


As for whether there is an implicit feminism in the communist movement today, I can say emphatically that you're wrong on this one.

But again, I made no such statement. I claimed that sexual emancipation is implicit in the communist movement. But the Communist movement - as it happens, does not presently exist, but is none the less identifiable as a possibility, within the intricacies of our present day politics. Marx, more than anyone saw the same thing: he saw the tendency of Communism as a movement even before it came to fruition as one. All the muddled politics, all the identity politics, the political correctness - this exists precisely because of the absence of a Communist movement.


The sexual ideology on the other hand benefits at least 50% of them directly, and overthrowing this ideology means disenfranchising that same group immediately. Is it realistic to expect slave owners to become abolitionists and expropriate themselves?[/QUOTE]

Lo and behold, then, that it is precisely THIS which encapsulates the logic of bourgeois feminism, the infantile idea of a battle of the sexes. The comparison between man and women is only comparable to the position of master and slave insofar as it revolves around a family unit which only the propertied benefit from. There is no antagonism between the two halves of the working class insofar as they are predisposed to revolutionary politics, because you cannot be a consistent Communist if you are not for sexual emancipation. It is not a matter of adopting positions out of some kind of 'empathy' for women (which is what you're construing, essentially), the rejection of bourgeois sexual relations is implicit in the Communist movement itself, and must be else it would eat itself. This held true for every social upheaval which took a proletarian character, from the Paris Commune to yes - the October revolution. So in fact, to reiterate: Working men do not by any means benefit from ruling sexual ideology, INSOFAR as they remain exploited, working men. They may benefit "as men", but not "as men" while proletarians struggling for emancipation. Ruling sexual ideology reproduces the rule of the ruling class, If you cannot see this difference, I do not know what to say to you.

One could try to argue that, despite the huge proportion of women in the workforce - let's pretend they are all domestic slaves. EVEN THEN, working men still do not benefit, because in case you didn't know, the unit of the family must be affirmatively REPRODUCED, it cannot take on a "vestigial" role. In what circumstance would a newly emancipated, all-male proletariat find it necessary to perpetuate the enslavement of women? How could this even be possible, with the absence of relations of private property?

The anti-racism of the class-conscious working class organizations was not a result of self-imposed political correctness, it followed suite: The labor unions which were essentially racist, were never "just" racist, they also were more amply willing to compromise, and so on.

[John Nada]

I do think the effect of the family and gender relations on revolutions and counterrevolutions is often neglected. For example, http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/05/20/314054405/how-russias-shared-kitchens-helped-shape-soviet-politics . IIRC there was a push after the "Kitchen debate" away from a communal household towards something more like a bourgeois nuclear family. Women were encouraged back to traditional gender roles at home because "socialism freed women from doing men's work" and "they now had time to raise children and look pretty for their husbands".:glare: Gains that the soviet women won were being rolled back co-currently with a rising feminist movement in the west. Directly effecting over 50% of the population, and how you're raised influences your growth into adult, the effect of the family on the counterrevolution might be understudied IMO. I'd be interesting to look at the question the other way around, how a change in the family was a root for a revolution's success.

[Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages]

There seems to be a misunderstanding here. You claimed that feminism today, moreso than the worker's movement, has been the forefront of revolutionary politics. My response was precisely that this feminism is largely a bourgeois-feminism (not revolutionary by any means), as I already stated - as a result of women increasingly entering into the workforce and occupying the same jobs as men. My point is that while this is still a bourgeois-feminism, it none the less carries in it the possibility of a revolutionary feminism, and that it ought to be supported because it unburdens us with having to deal with the double-issue. It is confusing, so let me be more clear:

Ruling bourgeois ideology is presently burdened with the responsibility of defeating this, let's call it, "anti-feminist" backlash against increasing women's "equality". Proletarian feminism derives from this pre-supposition. While we oppose bourgeois feminism, we none the less only oppose it insofar as we are revolutionary feminists. Think about Marx's attack on the so-called defenders of the sacred family, rightfully pointing out that family relations have largely, in their previous form, already fallen victim to the onslaught of industrialization (can the same not be said of neoliberalism?).



But again, I made no such statement. I claimed that sexual emancipation is implicit in the communist movement. But the Communist movement - as it happens, does not presently exist, but is none the less identifiable as a possibility, within the intricacies of our present day politics. Marx, more than anyone saw the same thing: he saw the tendency of Communism as a movement even before it came to fruition as one. All the muddled politics, all the identity politics, the political correctness - this exists precisely because of the absence of a Communist movement.



Lo and behold, then, that it is precisely THIS which encapsulates the logic of bourgeois feminism, the infantile idea of a battle of the sexes. The comparison between man and women is only comparable to the position of master and slave insofar as it revolves around a family unit which only the propertied benefit from. There is no antagonism between the two halves of the working class insofar as they are predisposed to revolutionary politics, because you cannot be a consistent Communist if you are not for sexual emancipation. It is not a matter of adopting positions out of some kind of 'empathy' for women (which is what you're construing, essentially), the rejection of bourgeois sexual relations is implicit in the Communist movement itself, and must be else it would eat itself. This held true for every social upheaval which took a proletarian character, from the Paris Commune to yes - the October revolution. So in fact, to reiterate: Working men do not by any means benefit from ruling sexual ideology, INSOFAR as they remain exploited, working men. They may benefit "as men", but not "as men" while proletarians struggling for emancipation. Ruling sexual ideology reproduces the rule of the ruling class, If you cannot see this difference, I do not know what to say to you.

One could try to argue that, despite the huge proportion of women in the workforce - let's pretend they are all domestic slaves. EVEN THEN, working men still do not benefit, because in case you didn't know, the unit of the family must be affirmatively REPRODUCED, it cannot take on a "vestigial" role. In what circumstance would a newly emancipated, all-male proletariat find it necessary to perpetuate the enslavement of women? How could this even be possible, with the absence of relations of private property?

The anti-racism of the class-conscious working class organizations was not a result of self-imposed political correctness, it followed suite: The labor unions which were essentially racist, were never "just" racist, they also were more amply willing to compromise, and so on.

No, my position is that the demands emanating from the feminist movement are at heart more radical than those proposed by the workers movement because they entail 1.) a higher level antagonism and 2.) address the root of the issue in a more holistic fashion. The family cannot be attacked without an assault of the system of production, while as I've already said, the opposite is not true. The history of the workers movement shows that we can attack the economic system directly, win, and then paradoxically end up exactly where we started if not in an even worse position. Even when we consider the time when the communist movement was present, as you claim, we still see the same lack of attention to the family institution. Where it does receive attention, it is only insofar as it was necessary to placate the immediate demands of women in the movement, bourgeois feminism one might say. The allocation of domestic work to the state for instance. Nothing about the development of communist thought, political practice, etc has changed this. If your claim is that a communist movement will arise at some future date with an implicit bias towards the destruction of the family, the burden of proof remains on you to show why. So far we have only your assertions matched up against history which shows quite the opposite. Sure, we would have to assume that a commitment to communism implies a commitment to the destruction of the family, but we would probably also assume that commitment to communism would imply a commitment to the destruction of the wage system as well. I wonder what a casual look at the history of the workers movement would tell us about that though?

I don't even know how to respond to your last blast of words here, "the infantile idea of a battle of the sexes" would seem to speak for itself. If you honestly think that proletarian men do not benefit on a personal basis from the existing family relations under capitalism, and that this personal benefit could not play a role in the development of consciousness, that's flat out pure delusion on your part. Like that's honestly completely fucking crazy that you could even write this. One can even see how the logic of previous failures lives on in what you present for us here. Your rigidity is showing with this conversation, others may see that as a positive attribute but I certainly do not.

This isn't a call for desertion into identity politics or any phony empathy for women, it's a reassessment of resources. The workers movement has failed and current events suggest that it will continue to go on failing (you were pro-Syriza if I recall?). If your response to this is just further assertions, I'd say your existing posts on the matter are sufficient, I grasp your position.

[Rafiq]

To repeat myself: Working men do not by any means benefit from ruling sexual ideology, INSOFAR as they remain exploited, working men. They may benefit "as men", but not "as men" while proletarians struggling for emancipation. Ruling sexual ideology reproduces the rule of the ruling class.

So, a clear reading of this suggests not that working men do not benefit from existing sexual relations, but that this is just as interesting as a revelation as the reality that white working men benefit from institutionalized racism. The same systemic functions which perpetuate exploitation, allow men to "benefit" from existing sexual relations. So ti follows that a Communist movement which seeks to destroy the existing order would not have to place primacy on the family. The point that you're failing to grasp is that - the notion that through the "more radical" demands of the feminist movement, or some kind of programmic strive to transform the family, will capitalist relations be weakened, is essentially an idealist one. It is all very well that in the domain of abstractions, without existing family relations capitalist relations could not be perpetuated. But there is no implicit coordinate of struggle that would allow us to "attack" the family, independently of the workers movement. You claim that the demands prompted by the feminist movement potentially are more radical than that of the workers' movement, but what you fail to realize is that there is no vehicle for the realization of these demands, if it is not the workers' movement. Again, we should have learned this from the counter-culture. Why did it fail? For precisely this reason. A 'feminist movement' can make a lot of noise, and it can even win many victories. But divorced from a revolutionary social basis, the working class, this noise will be recuperated into the existing system.

The ideas you're giving us rest upon two false assumptions: 1) That because of the failure of the revolution in the Soviet Union, and the coincidental failure to transform the family, there must be a casual relationship between the latter and the former, and that 2) The primacy of capitalism's perpetuation is not in social relations to production, but in the family, which Marxists had previously "erroneously" believed was merely an institution to reproduce social relations.

Firstly, one should not mistaken failure for lack of effort - there was a clear drive to transform the family, and the reason for this failure was largely a result of its inapplicability for most of the Russian population, the peasantry as well as the inability for the now exhausted state to mobilize a mass program of reconstructing family relations. These would be disastrous in the countryside. The family ended up resembling the bourgeois family, because the state was forced to assume the role of the bourgeoisie in revolutionizing agricultural production and modernizing the country, which could not be done on "proletarian" lines as a result of the absence of an actual strong proletarian demographic, and finally, because the isolated Soviet state could not accolate the resources to create state-funded child rearing institutions. You erreneously claim that:


If your claim is that a communist movement will arise at some future date with an implicit bias towards the destruction of the family, the burden of proof remains on you to show why.


The language here is rather obfuscating. Rather than an implicit bias, there exists an implicit PREDISPOSITION. This was true for every sophisticated Communist movement, and it was most certainly true for the Soviet Union during its emergence. One shouldn't mistaken the "sexual puritanism" of the Bolsheviks, which remains justified to this day, with an insistence to leave the family unit unchanged. The point of the sexual puritanism was the necessity of subordinating sexuality to the revolution, which was just as necessary as the necessity to subordinate sexuality to capitalist production for the bourgeoisie, to recognize that in conceiving sex as "its own freedom", one falls into the trap of precisely obfuscating real freedom. The reasons for the inability for the project of transformation in the family to be sought through did not cause the October revolution's failure, rather, it was a result of it. You intentionally make impossible demands of me, to "prove" something which has not yet existed - but what you fail to understand is that this is just as worthless as telling Marx and Engels that the "burden of proof" is upon them to recognize that the family unit would eventually be abolished. Likewise, I can shoot right back at you and say - The burden of proof is equally upon you, Ethics gradient, to demonstrate that primacy upon "attacking the family" could destroy capitalism. My point isn't to start dick waving with "proofs", but to show you that this discussion cannot rest upon implicitly false pretenses to "empirical" evidence, that these are theoretical questions, inductive questions.

Secondly, we know very well that the basis of primacy in our society is not the family, but in relations to production - precisely because of the malleability in the essential appearance of the family has changed, and continues to change, a lesson we ought to have learned from the counter-culture, and that not only has this not threatened capitalism, it has strengthened it. Marx taught us that the process of production is not simply a utilitarian human process to "meet our needs and wants", exercised "incorrectly", but that production truly exists for its own sake, for the sake of its own reproduction, perhaps in the same vein that the biological organism, likewise, exists for its own sake, for the sake of reproducing itself. The process of production subordinates biological reproduction, for the reproduction of this process (i.e. mode of production) itself in the same vein that the biological organism reproduces the atomic for its own sake:


Sure, we would have to assume that a commitment to communism implies a commitment to the destruction of the family, but we would probably also assume that commitment to communism would imply a commitment to the destruction of the wage system as well. I wonder what a casual look at the history of the workers movement would tell us about that though?

Well, if you continue to keep regurgitating the failure of the Soviet Union as a means to support any causal explanation, it could lead you to a number of interesting hypotheses, from religion to consumerism, from aesthetics (YES, this failure was reflected in the arts!) to dietary considerations. This is the problem of overdetermination, the reality that this failure reflected in various, infinitely many domains, and that confusion of being incapable of grounding the failure in any single one of them. But to be incapable of doing this is to repeat the gravest sin of bourgeois thought, to discard a scientific evaluation of these processes and substitute it for implicit, unquestionable assumptions. The question of why Communists were incapable of seeing through the destruction of the wage system and the family is a question of what constituted the fundamental basis of the Communist movement, and we know this not to be a conglomeration of angry housewives or de-classed theoreticians who were upset with the practical effects of the wage system, but the proletariat whose goal was to abolish itself, whose goal was the political sophistication of the sum-total of the demands of the working movement as a whole.

This is what you keep bypassing, practically: There will never be a mass-movement to abolish the family, if this mass movement is not a logical elaboration of a proletarian movement, because movements do not spring up from the whimsical thoughts of people who "want" this or that, but from its approximation to their lives. Feminism will fail for reasons you've implied: If it is not a logical extension of the ideas of Communism, then working men have no reason to care for it whatsoever, neither do blacks struggling to end racism, ETC. - this entanglement of over-determination can only be given a thread of consistency with its unification in the working class movement and the primacy of anti-capitalism, against the existing "system of production". What you fail to realize is that these are not abstract ideas which people, in a vacuum, see to - attacking "systems of production" has a plethora of other implications in every domain as well, but attacking the family alone logically extends itself to conforming to existing relations of production. And despite the failures of the workers movement, they were at least still capable of being wrought out into existence as mass-events which could potentially fail (and they did). But why did they fail? Why can't we ask these questions, instead of jumping to superstitious conclusions about how the "workers movement is always doomed to fail"?

[Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages]

I just skimmed it rafiq. You're misrepresenting me, I have not argued for a movement independent of anything. Nor did I suggest that capitalism reproduces itself via the family independent of social relations to production. This is a contrived reason to continue arguing with me, I'm not interested in some ridiculous back and fourth with different colored fonts and shit. Granted, I asked for your position but you've expressed it like 4 times. Got it man. Crystal clear.

I'm just starting this line of thought for myself. I'm not going to be satisfied by assertions from random people on the internet

[John Nada]

Ok for sure, the 60s and 70s are a good example of the ways that the spectacle can manipulate some of the more superficial elements of sexual liberation. However we can look at the attitudes held by those revolutionaries themselves and see the overwhelming macho and heteronormative orientation emanating from inside the (male dominated)counter-culture itself rather than being forced in from the outside. So that's definitely not the solution in my mind, just a bit of fun perhaps. When I say sexual revolution I'm not simply talking about free-love in the sense of orgies and the like. I mean attacking the fundamental divide that runs through all existing social relations. In the Dialectic of Sex, Firestone puts forth a somewhat undeveloped idea of women seizing the means of reproduction in the same fashion that conventional revolutionaries forward the dictatorship of the proletariat. Rather than women's liberation as an outgrowth of the struggle for communism, she inverts it.The sexual revolution in the superstructure was within the confines of a capitalist base, so in the main the patriarchy was left intact. Feminism for the rich, misogyny for the poor.

However, what I think you're proposing is rather than building a communist base leading to the construction of a superstructure that liberates women, women's liberation can build a counter-superstructure that leads to a socialistic base relation. Interesting.
Looking at the field of battle before us, the truly revolutionary demands are and have been emanating from the feminist movement, not the workers movement. Changing the structure of reproduction would fundamentally challenge the structure of production, but we can see from past attempts that the opposite is not true. Communists have been chasing after the wrong agents of change.The most radical of feminist demands probably appears more revolutionary in that it'd more approximate the cultural superstructure of a successful socialist revolution, whereas the purely economist demands may resemble a minimum program, with the maximum program seemingly in the realm of theory at the moment.

Women make up 51% of the population. The stereotypical proletarian should not be a white man, but a woman of color. In fact, who says the proletariat is 49% male, or the bourgeoisie 51% female? It's entirely possible, no likely, that women are disproportionately represented in the proletariat, and men the bourgeoisie. Due to sexism it's likely for a man to move up in class to the (petit-)bourgeoisie or labor aristocracy, and for a woman even from those class backgrounds to fall down into the proletariat or even the lumpen.

It's been shown empirically that in the US, women are paid about 75% as much as men, even in the same field of work. Women tend to be underrepresented in managerial positions, and are underrepresented in government. So while the male proletariat as a class doesn't gain much from the patriarchy, the bourgeoisie and the other classes do benefit materially from the patriarchy, to the point where even women of the other classes have a bases for maintaining the patriarchy. This is the flaw in bourgeois feminism, that women like Thatcher and Clinton shatter the glass ceiling for themselves, the female proletariat gets stabbed with the falling shards down below.
One last Wilhelm quote and then I'll stop:
"Revolutionary practice is any field of human existence develops by itself if one comprehends the contradictions in every new process; it consists in siding with those forces which act in the direction of progressive development. To be radical, according to Marx, means "going to the root of things." If one goes to the root of things, if one understands their contradictory character, the means of mastering the reaction become plain. If one does not understand them, one lands inevitably in mechanism, economism, or metaphysics. Any criticism, therefore, is justified and of practical value only if it can demonstrate what contradictions in social reality are overlooked. The revolutionary achievement of Marx did not consist in writing proclamations or pointing to revolutionary goals, but in recognizing the industrial productive as the progressive social force, and in realistically describing the contradictions in capitalist economy. The failure of the workers' movement can mean only that those forces which hinder social development are still incompletely comprehended."

This feels like it could have been published yesterday. Every revolutionary analysis one reads regarding ideology still focuses entirely on the worker's relationship with the economic ideas of their rulers, without noticing that a huge chunk of the workers themselves are at the heart of the ruling sexual ideology. How could this not play an enormous part in the development of revolutionary consciousness or rather the aversion to it?I think the role of sexual ideology in maintaining capitalism is taken more seriously in certain communist movements. You can see it in various militant orgs(mostly in the peripheral of the world) that try to promote greater roles for female cadre(who often make up 40-60% of these orgs) and make serious attempts at changing gender relations in their base areas. Conversely, reactionary movements go in the opposite direction, violently maintaining traditional gender relations, or imposing more oppressive ones.

If you look back at the Revolutions in Russia, it was during WWI. A lot of the men were drafted into the military. This left a lot of women in charge of the household by necessity. Many women were employed in factories for the war effort. I do think this was a large factor in the February and October Revolutions.

After the Revolution women did achieve a lot of gains. This was rolled back with bans on abortion and laws to encorage marriage and discorage divorce, among other things. Nevertheless, the USSR was still relatively progressive for women compared to much of the world. To an extent these sexist acts were later repealed. However, even from the 60's-80's there remained a conservative attitude towards women. For example, over 50% of engineers were women, wheras in the US that field is a sausage fest to this day. Yet rather than view women's greater role in public life as a positive, it was viewed as a necessary evil. The woman at home was the ideal, and there was campaigns to try to encourage stereotypical gender roles and foster a consumerist culture not unlike the US.

I do think that even with the economic gains women achieved in the USSR, the sexist culture that remained contributed to the counterrevolution that achieved it's complete victory in the 90's(though long in the making). I'd argue that failing to completely destroy the patriarchy at all fronts was one of the largest reasons for the failure of all the revolutions, seeing as it directly concerns 51% of the population.

[Sibotic]

Re: 'sexual revolution,' one might want to be careful with the choice of diction. Wanking would not have in fact hastened the proletarian revolution, it's unlikely that other forms of such hypothetical pleasures would do so, or that Lenin's rejection of such would be an issue. Such things are surely about positivistically taking various instincts and etc. as good simply for existing - and in a sense suffer from this a) the conflation of various issues and with other struggles entirely, b) a lack of much real feminist theory years later - and this isn't going to further the proletarian struggle to overthrow the established order of capitalism, and in a sense bourgeois feminism only exists in that sphere because capital is a distorted society which establishes itself vis-a-vis feudalism via such positivism and an identification with it and etc. without this making much sense.

In any case, other than the case for freer divorce and such being wedded to a certain tendency to misinterpret for instance New Testament texts which also forms an annoyance among socialists, marriage is a law against divorce but getting rid of it really doesn't change much which would affect the working class struggle, at least in the general case of marriage as being such.


The sexual ideology on the other hand benefits at least 50% of them directly, and overthrowing this ideology means disenfranchising that same group immediately. Is it realistic to expect slave owners to become abolitionists and expropriate themselves?
Is it realistic to expect the working class, who are alienated absolutely, to be capitalist - was their aim in any case not power for the proletariat, which is of course power and hierarchy, etc. This is a strange way of marginalising the economic aspect in favour of more marginal struggles, while still giving lip-service to it perhaps.



Looking at the field of battle before us, the truly revolutionary demands are and have been emanating from the feminist movement, not the workers movement.
The working class' demands are by nature revolutionary in essence, and are not to be distorted, while saying that the feminist movement has been making 'revolutionary' demands would have only been true in a colloquial sense of the term, or in the sense that feminism often just makes stuff up, which is distinct from being revolutionary.


I'm asking if we could imagine the sexual revolution that dismantles the traditional family and the social distinctions between genitals as the act which actually creates the conditions for communism rather than the other way around.
On a socialist understanding of 'social,' as opposed to a Freudian pseudo-pessimistic one, abolishing social distinction between genitals might well be vulgarising but certainly wouldn't increase them in importance, the latter aspect might be worthwhile. This would imply indifference to the whole question, however, or that they are unused.

It seems misleading to equate the reaction against the family with the 'sexual revolution,' as the attack on the family had existed in communistic contexts far before eg. pseudo-Freudianism and so on took hold to the same extent, and in any case would generally not be represented as simply a reaction to marriage per se so much as the overall structure (not that there isn't a rejection of the roles presented in marriage, etc., nonetheless in isolation this tends to lack substance due to simply conflating this with a struggle against such things because they limit freedom or something, evidently people are often free to accept social stimuli), such that socialism undermines the 'family' - obviously, hence slogans such as brotherhood of man, etc. - as indeed a sort of vulgarised Robinsonade, nonetheless other movements evidently do not have a monopoly on such things and indeed frequently just co-opt substantial communist critiques of such things in favour of something less meaningful. You figure that a certain rejection of the traditional family, which is an aspect of civil society or capitalism in essence and after this can survive only in apparent dregs and leftovers which are eventually removed, is a part of communism in any case, and in a sense there might be something to the question when it isn't treated as an aspect of a different movement with different aims which often leaves the basic heart of this untouched.


Firestone puts forth a somewhat undeveloped idea of women seizing the means of reproduction in the same fashion that conventional revolutionaries forward the dictatorship of the proletariat. Rather than women's liberation as an outgrowth of the struggle for communism, she inverts it.
Females aren't a class. They are frequently teachers, if that makes more sense. In any case, the means of reproduction are surely just means of consumption or receiving things, isn't that just shoplifting, etc., which occurs in various forms of riots and so on.


The sexual revolution cannot ever be the primary vehicle of the social revolution, and the counter-culture proves how dynamically capital can appropriate such 'sexual revolutions' to its will.
Appropriate could be slightly overstated at this point - although it might be noted that such movements did themselves appropriate feminism somewhat - nonetheless it could certainly appropriate those movements back in the day.