Introduction¶
Core Argument¶
The introduction establishes that the crisis of capitalism, intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic, falls most heavily on women, whose democratic rights are under sustained attack even as their resistance grows. The roots of women’s oppression lie not in human nature but in class society and private property; the patriarchal family is fundamental to capitalism, assigning women unpaid domestic labour while enforcing sexual and racial identities that sustain their degradation. Gender, sexual and racial prejudices function as reactionary flagships. The right to abortion, won through mass struggle—in Ireland (2018), the United States (1973), and the Soviet Union (1920)—remains contested, while forced sterilisation of poor women of colour continues in the USA and India. The US Equal Rights Amendment remains unratified, and the electoral system is inherently undemocratic, with gerrymandering and voter suppression targeting the poor and people of colour. The Black Lives Matter movement, mobilising 26 million demonstrators, forced limited concessions but left fundamental questions about policing unanswered.
The Bolshevik programme held that women’s full emancipation required a social revolution abolishing the basis of exploitation. They fought for immediate demands under capitalism—equal pay, an end to workplace searches—as part of building militant class unity. The fundamental social division was class, not gender; other oppressions could not be resolved without ending capitalism and the bourgeois family. The revolution aimed to replace the family as a shut-in petty enterprise with collective institutions: crèches, kindergartens, social dining rooms, laundries. However, the early Soviet state was devastated by war, civil war, famine, and blockade; resources were insufficient. As Trotsky noted, human consciousness changes unevenly, and male chauvinism persisted even among communists. Lenin argued working women must emancipate themselves by developing these institutions.
Stalinism reversed Bolshevik policy, rehabilitating the bourgeois “socialist family,” re-criminalising homosexual acts in 1934 and abortion in 1936. This placed women’s emancipation in a blind alley and formed an important step toward capitalist restoration. A comparative table shows the Soviet Union granting women the vote, abortion rights, equal pay, discrimination-free university access, no-fault divorce, free healthcare, paid maternity leave, and child allowances between 1917 and 1920; the UK achieved these between 1928 and 2022, the USA between 1920 and 1971, with some rights still absent. The collapse of the USSR allowed a natural experiment: capitalism immediately worsened women’s lives—unemployment surged, pay fell, childcare and healthcare were cut, life expectancy dropped, and prostitution expanded. NGOs funded by the West promoted identity politics, ignoring class inequalities and undermining defence of state provision. The struggle for women’s advancement is a fundamental duty.