Communism and Women’s Emancipation

Workers Vanguard No. 1129	9 March 2018

TROTSKY

LENIN

Communism and Women’s Emancipation

(Quote of the Week)

In commemoration of International Women’s Day (March 8), we publish below an excerpt from the theses on work among women adopted by the Third World Congress of the Communist International (CI) in 1921. The theses are a key document of the early revolutionary years of the CI under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks. The International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist), standing on the first four congresses of the CI, is committed to the fight for the emancipation of women as a crucial part of the struggle for international proletarian revolution.

The most decisive efforts of the feminists—the extension of women’s suffrage under the rule of bourgeois parliamentarism—do not solve the problem of the actual equality of women, especially of the non-propertied classes. This can be seen in the experience of women workers in all capitalist countries where in recent years the bourgeoisie has granted the formal equality of the sexes. Suffrage does not eliminate the primary cause of women’s enslavement in the family and society. Given the economic dependence of the proletarian woman on her capitalist master and her breadwinner husband, and in the absence of broad protection in making provision for mother and child and socialized education and care of children, replacing indissoluble marriage with civil marriage in capitalist states does not make the woman equal in marital relations and does not provide a key to resolving the problem of the relation between the sexes.

Not formal, superficial, but actual equality of women can be realized only under communism when women, together with all members of the laboring class, become the co-owners of the means of production and distribution, participate in managing them and bear their work responsibilities on the same basis as all members of toiling society. In other words, it is possible only by overthrowing the system of the exploitation of man’s labor by man under capitalist production and by organizing the communist form of economy.

—“Theses on Methods and Forms of Work of the Communist Parties Among Women,” 1921 (ICL translation, published in the Women and Revolution pages of Spartacist[English-language edition] No. 62, Spring 2011)