Why Should Women Care About Marxism?
Radical feminists often criticize certain aspects of capitalism, like the beauty industry and sex industry. The sex industry pre-dates capitalism as a societal institution, but may be an early example of it in history: the pimp, the brothel owner, as the bourgeoisie, extracting profit from the women who are both labor and resource.
Patriarchy pre-dates capitalism as well, and the patriarchal family model may also be seen as the earliest form of micro-capitalism: the man as head of household owns everything. The woman is both labor and resource. The family unit produces children to the man's benefit at his whim. She depends upon him to survive, the way a worker depends on their wages from the business owner.
Men object to capitalism because of the exploitative structure--now they are the wives whose labor profits the owners, the husbands, of the property at which they work.
Why should women object to capitalism?
Firstly, they, the bourgeoisie, the owners, are distant husbands even to single women, even when they are women. And secondly, because capitalism requires patriarchy to function, we can never rid ourselves of patriarchy until after capitalism has been destroyed.
Capitalism consolidates power in the hands of the bourgeoisie. They control the structures and foundations of society by how they shape law, infrastructure, economy, human rights. Patriarchy benefits them because they need a high birth rate to keep a growing population. They use that to create competition in the labor force, to keep wages low. They also need a steady stream of fresh bodies to die in their wars of acquisition. This is why you see worries in the media about a low birth rate.
All of the structures of patriarchy benefit the elite, and they have no incentive at all to end women's oppression, because it would end their ability to exploit everyone for profit.
Only patriarchal women will ever be allowed to rise to the top in these structures, and the only progress we can make under these structures will be limited just enough to keep us from revolt.
How can Marxism benefit women?
Past communist victories should be put in to perspective of what it was like for women before and after. We must note both their failures and their successes in order to properly learn from the past.
Thomas Sankara outlawed FGM, child marriage, and polygamy. Mao ended footbinding. There were strides made, yet still these things were not enough.
That is why female leadership in revolutionary action is critical.
What Marxism has to offer women is economic freedom--under a communist economy, businesses are not owned by the bourgeoisie, they are owned by the workers of that business. The workers vote democratically on if a certain job deserves more shares of the profits due to specialization, or if workers deserve more shares after a certain number of years.
This not only means that the hard work you do pays off for you, but also a complete closure of the wage gap, which is something private businesses under capitalism enforce. And the bourgeoisie enforce this because it enables patriarchy. It keeps women dependent on men and subject to reproductive exploitation.
Freeing women from economic dependence on men is the first step to liberating women. It allows women to choose to live on their own, without being forced to depend on marriage to men for survival.
