To what extent can one ‘avoid’ patriarchy in capitalist society?

[Invariance]

[FONT=Verdana]This was in response to someone’s post, but I thought I’d start a new thread. Firstly, I wanted to quote some passages by Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State which I feel really demonstrate the historical materialist approach to patriarchy which separates Marxist feminism from liberal feminism, radical feminism etc in looking at patriarchy from the viewpoint of productive relations, rather than as something independent in its own right or which can be overturned simply by legal equality. If you can’t be bothered reading, then just skip.

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[FONT=Verdana]Originally written by Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

Sex-love in the relationship with a woman becomes, and can only become, the real rule among the oppressed classes, which means today among the proletariat-whether this relation is officially sanctioned or not. But here all the foundations of typical monogamy are cleared away. Here there is no property, for the preservation and inheritance of which monogamy and male supremacy were established; hence there is no incentive to make this male supremacy effective. What is more, there are no means of making it so. Bourgeois law, which protects this supremacy, exists only for the possessing class and their dealings with the proletarians. The law costs money and, on account of the worker’s poverty, it has no validity for his relation to his wife. Here quite other personal and social conditions decide. And now that large-scale industry has taken the wife out of the home onto the labor market and into the factory, and made her often the bread-winner of the family, no basis for any kind of male supremacy is left in the proletarian household – except, perhaps, for something of the brutality towards women that has spread since the introduction of monogamy. The proletarian family is therefore no longer monogamous in the strict sense, even where there is passionate love and firmest loyalty on both sides, and maybe all the blessings of religious and civil authority. Here, therefore, the eternal attendants of monogamy, hetaerism and adultery, play only an almost vanishing part. The wife has in fact regained the right to dissolve the marriage, and if two people cannot get on with one another, they prefer to separate. In short, proletarian marriage is monogamous in the etymological sense of the word, but not at all in its historical sense.

Our jurists, of course, find that progress in legislation is leaving women with no further ground of complaint. Modern civilized systems of law increasingly acknowledge, first, that for a marriage to be legal, it must be a contract freely entered into by both partners, and, secondly, that also in the married state both partners must stand on a common footing of equal rights and duties. If both these demands are consistently carried out, say the jurists, women have all they can ask. This typically legalist method of argument is exactly the same as that which the radical republican bourgeois uses to put the proletarian in his place. The labor contract is to be freely entered into by both partners. But it is considered to have been freely entered into as soon as the law makes both parties equal on paper. The power conferred on the one party by the difference of class position, the pressure thereby brought to bear on the other party – the real economic position of both – that is not the law’s business. Again, for the duration of the labor contract both parties are to have equal rights, in so far as one or the other does not expressly surrender them. That economic relations compel the worker to surrender even the last semblance of equal rights – here again, that is no concern of the law.

As regards the legal equality of husband and wife in marriage, the position is no better. The legal inequality of the two partners, bequeathed to us from earlier social conditions, is not the cause but the effect of the economic oppression of the woman. In the old communistic household, which comprised many couples and their children, the task entrusted to the women of managing the household was as much a public and socially necessary industry as the procuring of food by the men. With the patriarchal family, and still more with the single monogamous family, a change came. Household management lost its public character. It no longer concerned society. It became a private service; the wife became the head servant, excluded from all participation in social production. Not until the coming of modern large-scale industry was the road to social production opened to her again – and then only to the proletarian wife. But it was opened in such a manner that, if she carries out her duties in the private service of her family, she remains excluded from public production and unable to earn; and if she wants to take part in public production and earn independently, she cannot carry out family duties. And the wife’s position in the factory is the position of women in all branches of business, right up to medicine and the law. The modern individual family is founded on the open or concealed domestic slavery of the wife, and modern society is a mass composed of these individual families as its molecules.

In the great majority of cases today, at least in the possessing classes, the husband is obliged to earn a living and support his family, and that in itself gives him a position of supremacy, without any need for special legal titles and privileges. Within the family he is the bourgeois and the wife represents the proletariat. In the industrial world, the specific character of the economic oppression burdening the proletariat is visible in all its sharpness only when all special legal privileges of the capitalist class have been abolished and complete legal equality of both classes established. The democratic republic does not do away with the opposition of the two classes; on the contrary, it provides the clear field on which the fight can be fought out. And in the same way, the peculiar character of the supremacy of the husband over the wife in the modern family, the necessity of creating real social equality between them, and the way to do it, will only be seen in the clear light of day when both possess legally complete equality of rights. Then it will be plain that the first condition for the liberation of the wife is to bring the whole female sex back into public industry, and that this in turn demands the abolition of the monogamous family as the economic unit of society.

With the transfer of the means of production into common ownership, the single family ceases to be the economic unit of society. Private housekeeping is transformed into a social industry. The care and education of the children becomes a public affair; society looks after all children alike, whether they are legitimate or not. [/FONT] [FONT=Verdana] This removes all the anxiety about the “consequences,” which today is the most essential social – moral as well as economic – factor that prevents a girl from giving herself completely to the man she loves. Will not that suffice to bring about the gradual growth of unconstrained sexual intercourse and with it a more tolerant public opinion in regard to a maiden’s honor and a woman’s shame? And, finally, have we not seen that in the modern world monogamy and prostitution are indeed contradictions, but inseparable contradictions, poles of the same state of society? Can prostitution disappear without dragging monogamy with it into the abyss?

[/FONT] [FONT=Verdana]In the vast majority of cases, therefore, marriage remained, up to the close of the middle ages, what it had been from the start – a matter which was not decided by the partners. In the beginning, people were already born married –married to an entire group of the opposite sex. In the later forms of group marriage similar relations probably existed, but with the group continually contracting. In the pairing marriage it was customary for the mothers to settle the marriages of their children; here, too, the decisive considerations are the new ties of kinship, which are to give the young pair a stronger position in the gens and tribe. And when, with the preponderance of private over communal property and the interest in its bequeathal, father-right and monogamy gained supremacy, the dependence of marriages on economic considerations became complete. The form of marriage by purchase disappears, the actual practice is steadily extended until not only the woman but also the man acquires a price – not according to his personal qualities, but according to his property. That the mutual affection of the people concerned should be the one paramount reason for marriage, outweighing everything else, was and always had been absolutely unheard of in the practice of the ruling classes; that sort of thing only happened in romance – or among the oppressed classes, who did not count.

[/FONT] [FONT=Verdana]Such was the state of things encountered by capitalist production when it began to prepare itself, after the epoch of geographical discoveries, to win world power by world trade and manufacture. One would suppose that this manner of marriage exactly suited it, and so it did. And yet – there are no limits to the irony of history – capitalist production itself was to make the decisive breach in it. By changing all things into commodities, it dissolved all inherited and traditional relationships, and, in place of time-honored custom and historic right, it set up purchase and sale, “free” contract. And the English jurist, H. S. Maine, thought he had made a tremendous discovery when he said that our whole progress in comparison with former epochs consisted in the fact that we had passed “from status to contract," from inherited to freely contracted conditions – which, in so far as it is correct, was already in The Communist Manifesto.
[/FONT] [FONT=Verdana]But a contract requires people who can dispose freely of their persons, actions, and possessions, and meet each other on the footing of equal rights. To create these “free” and “equal” people was one of the main tasks of capitalist production. Even though at the start it was carried out only half-consciously, and under a religious disguise at that, from the time of the Lutheran and Calvinist Reformation the principle was established that man is only fully responsible for his actions when he acts with complete freedom of will, and that it is a moral duty to resist all coercion to an immoral act. But how did this fit in with the hitherto existing practice in the arrangement of marriages? Marriage, according to the bourgeois conception, was a contract, a legal transaction, and the most important one of all, because it disposed of two human beings, body and mind, for life. Formally, it is true, the contract at that time was entered into voluntarily: without the assent of the persons concerned, nothing could be done. But everyone knew only too well how this assent was obtained and who were the real contracting parties in the marriage. But if real freedom of decision was required for all other contracts, then why not for this? Had not the two young people to be coupled also the right to dispose freely of themselves, of their bodies and organs? Had not chivalry brought sex-love into fashion, and was not its proper bourgeois form, in contrast to chivalry’s adulterous love, the love of husband and wife? And if it was the duty of married people to love each other, was it not equally the duty of lovers to marry each other and nobody else? Did not this right of the lovers stand higher than the right of parents, relations, and other traditional marriage-brokers and matchmakers? If the right of free, personal discrimination broke boldly into the Church and religion, how should it halt before the intolerable claim of the older generation to dispose of the body, soul, property, happiness, and unhappiness of the younger generation?

[/FONT] [FONT=Verdana]These questions inevitably arose at a time which was loosening all the old ties of society and undermining all traditional conceptions. The world had suddenly grown almost ten times bigger; instead of one quadrant of a hemisphere, the whole globe lay before the gaze of the West Europeans, who hastened to take the other seven quadrants into their possession. And with the old narrow barriers of their homeland ell also the thousand-year-old barriers of the prescribed medieval way of thought. To the outward and the inward eye of man opened an infinitely wider horizon. What did a young man care about the approval of respectability, or honorable guild privileges handed down for generations, when the wealth of India beckoned to him, the gold and the silver mines of Mexico and Potosi? For the bourgeoisie, it was the time of knight-errantry; they, too, had their romance and their raptures of love, but on a bourgeois footing and, in the last analysis, with bourgeois aims.

[/FONT] [FONT=Verdana]So it came about that the rising bourgeoisie, especially in Protestant countries, where existing conditions had been most severely shaken, increasingly recognized freedom of contract also in marriage, and carried it into effect in the manner described. Marriage remained class marriage, but within the class the partners were conceded a certain degree of freedom of choice. And on paper, in ethical theory and in poetic description, nothing was more immutably established than that every marriage is immoral which does not rest on mutual sexual love and really free agreement of husband and wife. In short, the love marriage was proclaimed as a human right, and indeed not only as a droit de l’homme, one of the rights of man, but also, for once in a way, as droit de la fem?", one of the rights of woman.

[/FONT] [FONT=Verdana]This human right, however, differed in one respect from all other so-called human rights. While the latter, in practice, remain restricted to the ruling class (the bourgeoisie), and are directly or indirectly curtailed for the oppressed class (the proletariat), in the case of the former the irony of history plays another of its tricks. The ruling class remains dominated by the familiar economic influences and therefore only in exceptional cases does it provide instances of really freely contracted marriages, while among the oppressed class, as we have seen, these marriages are the rule.

Full freedom of marriage can therefore only be generally established when the abolition of capitalist production and of the property relations created by it has removed all the accompanying economic considerations which still exert such a powerful influence on the choice of a marriage partner. For then there is no other motive left except mutual inclination.

[/FONT] [FONT=Verdana]And as sexual love is by its nature exclusive – although at present this exclusiveness is fully realized only in the woman – the marriage based on sexual love is by its nature individual marriage. We have seen how right Bachofen was in regarding the advance from group marriage to individual marriage as primarily due to the women. Only the step from pairing marriage to monogamy can be put down to the credit of the men, and historically the essence of this was to make the position of the women worse and the infidelities of the men easier. If now the economic considerations also disappear which made women put up with the habitual infidelity of their husbands – concern for their own means of existence and still more for their children’s future – then, according to all previous experience, the equality of woman thereby achieved will tend infinitely more to make men really monogamous than to make women polyandrous.

[/FONT] [FONT=Verdana]But what will quite certainly disappear from monogamy are all the features stamped upon it through its origin in property relations; these are, in the first place, supremacy of the man, and, secondly, indissolubility. The supremacy of the man in marriage is the simple consequence of his economic supremacy, and with the abolition of the latter will disappear of itself. The indissolubility of marriage is partly a consequence of the economic situation in which monogamy arose, partly tradition from the period when the connection between this economic situation and monogamy was not yet fully understood and was carried to extremes under a religious form. Today it is already broken through at a thousand points. If only the marriage based on love is moral, then also only the marriage in which love continues. But the intense emotion of individual sex-love varies very much in duration from one individual to another, especially among men, and if affection definitely comes to an end or is supplanted by a new passionate love, separation is a benefit for both partners as well as for society – only people will then be spared having to wade through the useless mire of a divorce case. [/FONT]

[FONT=Verdana] A couple of things to note. Engels seems to argue that capitalism has quite strongly rebelled and clashed with patriarchy; unlike previous modes of production (e.g. agricultural feudal production) there is no inherent requirement or rationale in the capitalist system for patriarchy. Capitalists, as a class, have no interest apart from expanding their capital and protecting that relation. Hence, whether they side for, or against, patriarchy depends on whether it advantages their interests as a class. For instance, capitalism rebelled against patriarchy in the case of extending women’s rights/interests to participate in the economy – allowing for an extended and more expendable workforce and hence lower wages and thus higher profits, or when it struggled against the Church and landowners in pursuit of class dominance against the receding monarchy. Yet, sometimes capitalism supports patriarchal institutions –e.g. to increase the birth rate so as to increase the workforce. Of course, there are also areas where capitalism takes no explicit side in patriarchy because it is irrelevant or trivial to their stance as a class.

[/FONT] [FONT=Verdana]On the other side of the coin, if we are to recognize the male privilege which husbands in patriarchal relations enjoy, then gay men effectively don’t have that (I’m not saying that they have chosen their sexuality, but merely that because of it they won’t enjoy the benefits that being a married man has –e.g having a domestic servant). In a sense, this is why homosexual men (and women) are considered a threat to the family structure – because they represent a family relation not-necessarily based on the raising of children or an unequal division of labour between the sexes (which is, of course, impossible in their case).

[/FONT] [FONT=Verdana]Likewise, abortion represents a threat to patriarchy because if you’ve allowed women to make decisions regarding their own body, then you also allow them the possibility of being financially independent – something which is anathema to patriarchy. It allows for the possibility of relations on grounds other than the forming of a family – which is why reproductive rights are essential.

[/FONT] [FONT=Verdana]Whilst some evidence shows that married women occupy a superior economic position versus unmarried women I think that can be misleading. Of course, a married stay-at-home mum is not going to be facing prejudice in the sense that a lesbian might – the stay-at-home mum is the idealized woman in society. Yet, the point is to look at her position in a more materialistic manner - she is totally financially dependent on her husband, her financial independence is something she has 'exchanged' in order to be his domestic servant. Lenin wrote that "The woman continues to be a slave of the home, despite all the liberating laws, because she is overburdened, oppressed, stupefied, humiliated by the menial domestic tasks, which make her a cook and a nurse, which waste her activity in an absurdly unproductive, menial, irritating, stupefying and tedious labor. The phrase emancipation of women will only begin for real in the country at the time the mass struggle begins (led by the proletariat already owning the power of the State) against this petty home economy, or more precisely, when their mass transformation begins in a large-scale socialist economy." Whilst someone who defies gender roles in society is going to face more explicit social prejudice (e.g. as a lesbian), they simply do not face the same sort of economic oppression that the housewife faces. In many respects, I would consider the individual who challenges patriarchy the more liberated one.

[/FONT] [FONT=Verdana]Engels states: “if she carries out her duties in the private service of her family, she remains excluded from public production and unable to earn; and if she wants to take part in public production and earn independently, she cannot carry out family duties.” This got me thinking as to the extent to which one can ‘avoid’ patriarchy. If you either do not have children and refuse to marry into a situation which compromises your future financial position, then to what extent does patriarchy affect you at all? However, is patriarchy something which mutually reinforces itself? Does the comparatively poor economic position of women compel/pressure them to patriarchy, which in turn continues to deprive them of a fair economic position – so it reciprocally enforces itself?

[/FONT] [FONT=Verdana]Is gender equality achievable within capitalism? To what extent can one ‘avoid’ patriarchy in capitalist society?[/FONT][FONT=Verdana]
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[Jimmie Higgins]

[FONT=Verdana]Is gender equality achievable within capitalism? To what extent can one ‘avoid’ patriarchy in capitalist society?[/FONT]

It's an interesting question. And interesting points made.

I'd say that the modern ruling class uses the oppression of women less for population control these days than in pre-victorian times. I think oppression and the importance of the family tends to serve a more ideological purpose for our ruling class. Because of the ideological importance, things like gay equality as much as heterosexual women's equality could have a huge impact.

As far as getting rid of women's opression under capitalism? Well I think it's possible to make big reforms. All sorts of things could be won from the system (and have been won in some countries) such as maturnity/paternity leave, childcare at work, universal healthcare, abortion. All these reforms could allow women to live fairly equally. But these are all reforms and so capitalism would always try and create divisions in the working class as well as push the responcibility for raising children on induvidual workers or nuclear families. Abortion, for example, was won on the basis of women's control over their own bodies and yet, now the ruling class has been able to push that back materially by gutting the laws, but also ideologically because there isn't a strong left or women's lib movement.
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[Luís Henrique]

[FONT=Verdana][/FONT][FONT=Verdana]Is gender equality achievable within capitalism?[/FONT]

Well, yes and no.

Theorically, capitalism is not gender-oriented. If the pre-capitalist modes of production relied on matriarchy instead of patriarchy, then capitalism would be matriarchal (in the same way it is patriarchal in reality: with a visible trend to minimise it, without ever suppressing it).

But since historically the pre-capitalist modes of production relied on patriarchy, capitalism has inherited this. And while capitalism is not gender-oriented, it is discrimination-oriented, ie, it actually needs discrimination for its reproduction. Particularly, it needs discrimination for labour division, and it needs to keep the reproduction of the labour force as a separate task from the production of commodities. And as the discrimination at hand, inherited from the past, is patriarchal, patriarchy will be maintained, even if incrementally reduced in a systematic way.

Luís Henrique

[Aobi]

Simone de Beauvoir commented on this sort-of dilemma in 1976

Well, of course, since the rest are conservative, meaning they want to conserve what has been or what is. Women on the right do not want revolution. They are mothers, wives, devoted to their men. Or, if they are agitators at all, they want a bigger piece of the pie. They want to earn more, elect more women to parliaments, see a woman become president. They fundamentally believe in inequality, except they want to be on top rather than on the bottom. But they will fit fine into the system as it is or as it will change a bit to accommodate such demands. Capitalism can certainly afford to allow women to join an army, allow women to join a police force. Capitalism is certainly intelligent enough to let more women join the government. Pseudosocialism can certainly allow a woman to become secretary-general of its party. Those are just reforms, like social security or paid vacations. Did the institutionalization of paid vacations change the inequality of capitalism? Did the right of women to work in factories at equal pay to the men change the male orientation of the Czech society? But to change the whole value system of either society, to destroy the concept of motherhood: that is revolutionary.

A feminist, whether she calls herself leftist or not, is a leftist by definition. She is struggling for total equality, for the right to be as important, as relevant, as any man. Therefore, embodied in her revolt for sexual equality is the demand for class equality. In a society where the male can be the mother, where, say, to push the argument on values so it becomes clear, the so-called “female intuition” is as important as the “male’s knowledge” – to use today’s absurd language – where to be gentle or soft is better than to be hard and tough, in other words, in a society where each person’s experiences are equivalent to any other, you have automatically set up equality, which means economic and political equality and much more. Thus, the sex struggle embodies the class struggle, but the class struggle does not embody the sex struggle. Feminists are, therefore, genuine leftists. In fact, they are to the left of what we now traditionally call the political left...

[Response to the question 'Do women have any more power today, after almost a decade of the women’s movement?']

In the sense in which you ask, no. Intellectual women, young women who are willing to risk marginalization, the daughters of the rich when they are willing and capable to discard their parents’ value system: these women, yes, are freer. That is, because of their education, life-style, or financial resources, such women can withdraw from the harsh competitive society, live in communes or on the fringes, and develop relations with other similar women or men sensitive to their problems and feel freer. In other words, as individuals, women who can afford it for whatever reason can feel freer. But as a class women certainly are not freer, precisely because, as you say, they do not have economic power. There are all sorts of statistics these days to prove that the number of women lawyers, politicians, doctors, advertising executives, etc., is increasing. But such statistics are misleading. The number of powerful women lawyers and executives is not. How many women lawyers can pick up a phone and call a judge or government official to fix anything or demand special favors? Such women must always operate through established male equivalents. Women doctors? How many are surgeons, hospital directors? Women in government? Yes, a few, tokens. In France we have two. One, serious, hardworking, Simone Weil, is Minister of Health. The other, Françoise Giroud, who is the Minister in charge of women is strictly a showpiece, meant to placate bourgeois women’s needs for integration into the system. But how many women control Senate appropriations? How many women control the editorial policy of newspapers? How many are judges? How many are bank presidents, capable of financing enterprises? Just because there are many more women in middle-level positions, as journalists say, in no way means they have power. And even those women must play the male game to succeed. Now, that doesn’t mean that I do not believe that women have not made progress in the struggle. But the progress is the result of mass action. Take the new abortion law proposed by Simone Veil. Despite the fact that abortions will not be covered by the national health program and hence will be more available to the wealthy than to the poor, the law is certainly a great step forward. But for all the seriousness with which Simone Veil fought for such a law, the reason she could present it is because thousands of women have been agitating all over France for such a law, because thousands of women have publicly claimed that they have had abortions (thus forcing the government to either prosecute them or change the law), because hundreds of doctors and midwives have risked prosecution by admitting they have performed them, because some were tried and fought the issue in the courts, etc.

What I’m saying is that, in mass actions, women can have power. The more women become conscious of the need for such mass action, the more progress will be achieved. And, to return to the woman who can afford to seek individual liberation, the more she can influence her friends and sisters, the more that consciousness will spread, which in turn, when frustrated by the system, will stimulate mass action. Of course, the more that consciousness spreads, the more men will be aggressive and violent. But then, the more men are aggressive, the more women will need other women to fight back, that is, the more the need for mass action will be clear. Most workers of the capitalist world today are aware of the class struggle, whether they call themselves Marxists or not, in fact, whether they even heard of Marx or not. And so it must become in the sex struggle. And it will.