 All right, could I get a hands up if one of the things that radicalized you was the women's oppression? Yeah, that's basically was one of the things that also radicalized me. I felt so angry about constantly seeing sexism, discrimination, inequality, violence and harassments towards women. And obviously we know that this is a huge problem. Globally, almost one in three have been subjected to physical or sexual violence, at least once in their lifetime. And in 2021, there was around 45,000 women and girls who were killed by an intimate partner or family members. And many women, as we know, they're struggling to leave abusive relationships because they are economic depending on them. And a big part of that is, of course, the pay gap. Globally, women earn an average of 16% less than men. And it's estimated to take 257 years until you can actually close that pay gap around the world. At the same time, across the world, women and girls are performing more than three quarters of all the unpaid domestic care and work. And it's not only a question about trying to fight for reforms that would benefit women, but also just defending the ones that we have worn in the past. Last year, as I think everyone is aware, the US Supreme Court, they overturned the case of Roe versus Wade, making it possible for states to basically ban abortions. So how do we fight the oppression of women? How do we end it? Millions of people all around the world are asking themselves this question and is drawing ever more radical conclusions from it. And this was the case for me. Like, back in 2014, a few months before I met the International Marxist Tendency, I had joined the Left Party and its youth organisation. I had, previous before that, come across some Marxist theories. I wanted to know more about it and I wanted to specifically know more about its approach to fighting oppression. So I was very surprised when I joined the Left Party and discovered their views on Marxism and the approach to women oppression. Because according to the Left Party, Marxism is only useful when you study class society, but not patriarchy. And they argue that Marxism cannot explain why women are being subordinated to men. The Marxism cannot explain the division of labour, the rises between sexes, the role of unpaid work. And therefore we need feminism to understand and fight oppression. And as I said, feminism, it claims that women's oppression is based on patriarchy, the structure of men dominance over women, which they say is not completely relying on class society. And many radical feminists, they think that patriarchy is rooted in reproduction. And this boils down really to biological determinism, that the idea that your behaviours is rooted in purely biological traits amongst humans. The Left Party, they claim that patriarchy is rooted in reproduction and it has existed in all kinds of societies to preserve the political and economic power within a tribe, a clan, a family and a household. And the only conclusion that you can draw from this is that men are naturally aggressive towards women. You also have the liberal feminists who understand oppression as a result of very unfortunate ideas and norms. And the struggle therefore against oppression is to struggle against people who have oppressive ideas and try to convince them to stop doing these behaviours, stop having these oppressive ideas. And they are idealist, which means that they view society as a consequence from the ideas, morals, norms that people have. Now Marxist, we don't believe that men has a biological trait to make them hate women. We don't think that oppression is just a result of a set of reactionary ideas that humans are either just born with or fell through from the sky. Or that it slowly comes down to the fact that women are able to reproduce. They don't, we don't obviously deny that it exists, you know, ideas and gender, norms, etc. But the question is, where does these ideas come from? Now, Marx says, life is not determined by consciousness, by consciousness, by life. It means that our morals, our philosophy, our thoughts, our norms, they don't drop from the sky, but they are a result because they are shaped from society. It needs and its history of development. And by using the method of historical materialism when studying history, we can learn that the oppression of women, classes, the state, it has not always existed. For 97 to 99% of humans existence, we have lived in relatively egalitarian hunter-gather societies. And in Engels very famous work, The Orgents of the Family, Private Property and the State, he shows that the family, human relationships to one another and societies are constantly undergoing a process of development throughout history. In Engels and Marx, they based themselves on Lewis Henry Morgan's text, Asian Society. And Morgan, he explained that he thought it was possible to understand basically how human society as a whole evolved by looking at different societies at different stages and comparing them to one another. And by doing this, he developed a theory about social evolution. And he explained that human societies across the world, they go through similar stages of development and that it is a direction of a process from less to more developed forms. Now, Morgan, he divided human societies into three different stages, which he called savagery, barbarism and civilization. And within these stages, you had lower, middle and upper levels. And it was a development of technique, of tools, which moved humanity from one stage to another. And today we call these stages, the parallelithic ages, which is where humans are living as hunter-gatherers. You then have the neolithic age, which is where humans start to discover agriculture, settle down, work on the land. And then what Morgan calls civilization is the Bronze Age, where you have the development of more urban civilization and class societies. Now, Morgan, he was limited to the scientific levels of the mid 19th century. But the essence of what he said, that human society, including the family, goes through stages from lower to higher, based on a development of techniques. It is correct. Basically, the changes within the family is linked to the development of the productive forces. And he argued that the idea of the family has been a growth through successive stages of development, in which monogamy is only the last in its series of forms. Now, Morgan, he thought that humans societies, they must have started up from a stage where inbreeding was normal. And at a certain stage, human realized that this is not very good and it's a bit dangerous. So you started to see an involvement of more complicated mating networks to avoid inbreeding. Now, during the paralithic age, the development of group marriage within hunter-gatherers starts to emerge. And this is where you see alliance between different clans were being established, where individuals could select a partner from another group, basically. And these partners, they were not tied to each other for life. And it was also common to have several partners, basically. Both men and women could very easily break up or free from a relationship and start another, etc. And these hunter-gatherers, these societies, they tended to be matrilocal and he meant that the women that was born into a clan, they tended to stay there, together with their sisters, their mothers, their cousins, etc. The men that they would mate with would come from a different clan. And recent studies have shown that it confirms because you have found DNA that support this. Later on, during the Neolithic age, you have the existence of pairings and couples. And this is not how we, for example, see marriage today. These pairings, they were mutual decisions and separations were an option for both parties. And it's under this stage, as well, in history, where you have the development of the gens, which was based on a matrilinical kinship. But the existence of pairings of couples did prepare the ground for monogamy and the future nuclear family later on. Now, Morgan, he came to his conclusions on the basis of his fieldwork that he did amongst the Iroquois and other indigenous people in America. And this fieldwork gave him a glimpse to what the early human society might have looked like. For example, he saw that women amongst the Iroquois, they were very much more equal than what it was in the so-called civilized world. And so when you have these people that lived as hand-togethers, you had big family groups living together with the children that was born into the clan, but taking care of everyone and did not matter that you did not know the biological father to the children. And observations from the 17th centuries made by Western traders and missionaries of the native people Montaghani's Nascope in Canada, it confirms basically Engels and Morgan's theory of the family. Because in the 17th centuries, these native people, they lived as Elegarian hand-togethers and the women within these groups were very respected. The family relations amongst the Gens were matrilineal and all the children that was born into the group were taken care of collectively. And in one of these observations that you can read from these missionaries, you have an indigenous father saying to one of the French, you seek missionaries, he says, you French, you only love your own children, but we love all the children of the tribe. And this shows that women's oppression is not based on reproduction because in pre-class societies, child rearing was communal and women were being treated as equals. And the matrilineal descent amongst hand-togethers was part of the reasons why women had an equal role within the clan, but it also comes down to the egalitarian nature of these groups. Now what was this based on? As I said, there was no classes, there was no state that existed in these hunter-gatherers groups. No one owned the land, no one owned productive forces or property. And Marx and Engels, they described this stage as primitive communism because there was no concept of private property and private ownership. Most of the days were just spent trying to search and collect food, living from hand to mouth. And human were completely depending on each other to survive. And even if there had been selfish people during this stage who wanted to appropriate a surplus, there was usually nothing to spare, basically. It was absolutely necessary to share the food within the tribe completely equally with every single member. And it meant that you could not have a material base for classes or privileges or elites. Again, you see this amongst their Montaghani's Nascarpis because they had no formal leaders within the tribe. And the social ethic in the group was generosity, cooperation and patience. You had one missionary who said that the people in this tribe have good humour, lack of jealousy and a willingness to help out. Those who do not contribute, their share are not respected. Instead, in these hunter-gathered societies, production and distributions were carried out in the common, where both men and women were taken decisions. It does appear though that there is a certain division of labour between men and women in the daily work. When women became pregnant or had small children, they spent a lot of time collecting roots, food, berries, etc. Did work that was closer to the community, like childcare, but also making tools and weapons for the clan. The men on the other hand, they were a bit more able to do the hunting. However, this does not affect the position between men and women within the tribe. The hunting was not always reliable. You could have bad luck, basically, and come home without anything. It was the gathering of berries, roots, nuts that usually brought most of the food to the clans. And it meant that men and women contributed equally to the survival. But after the Neolithic Revolution, a lot of things started to change. For the first time in human history, you see the development of new tools, domestications of animals, development of agriculture. And it allowed humans to produce, not just to meet the basic needs of the day, but to create enough to have a surplus. So, basically, the division that you have seen in pre-class society, it became much more extreme now. With the adoption of agriculture, you saw the rise of birth rates, basically, that increased. And that also had an increased childcare responsibility on women. The men that they primarily worked on the livestock and agriculture. And the women did mainly the work that was, you know, the task that was close to the home childcare, cooking, etc. However, it was, you know, the work that was carried out by men that produced the surplus. So the surplus fell into the hands of men. And now men and women did not no longer contribute equally to the survival. And this process steadily meant that women became to be seen as interfered to men. As it was from the work that the men did that produced the surplus. Still, when a man died, the surplus that he had produced, it would not stay within his new family, but would go back to his mother again, basically. And as men did the work that produced and controlled the surplus, it led to greater desire to trace the inheritance through the main line. And the creation of an ever-growing surplus also meant that private property and classes began to emerge. But to trace the inheritance through the main line, it would require the enforcement of female monogamy. And therefore the line of inheritance had to be forcefully shifted from the mother's to the father's side. And this here where we see the origins of marriage, of the patriarchal family. And this transition took place at some point between the start of agriculture and the rise of the first-class society, roughly five to six thousand years ago. And it happened independently in many parts of the world, like Mesopotamian, South America and China, South Asia, and other parts of sub-Sahara. Morgan explained that after houses, lands, flock, herds, and great exchangeable commodities became so great in quality and held by individual ownership, the question of their inheritance became much more important. And the family, this is now where you start to see how it's breaking up into smaller patriarchal nuclear units with strict monogamy for women to assure that the children that she birthed was really her husband's basically. And that they would have the asserted right to inherit the property of their deceased father. Now, Engels explains that the emergence of the patriarchal family represented the world's historic defeat for the female sex. He said, the man took command in the home. Women were degraded, reduced to servitude. She became a slave to his lust and a mere instrument to produce children. So since the emergence of class society, it has been the men who has done predominantly the participated in production and provided food and economic stability to the family. Women on the other hand were literally seen as property isolated within the family and her only task was really to produce children to her husband. And therefore, she became financially dependent on her husband to survive. And in order for a man to control her children basically, the husband had to control women and his wife sexually basically. And we can see this in Asian Greece where women were falsely kept inside 24-7 to eliminate the risk of making sure that her offspring was not from someone else basically. If she was raped, she was seen as damaged goods. And the person who did rape her, he had to pay for his damage to either her husband or her father. And families, they could just give women away and sell them as wife without consulting them. It was at this point as well where you see prostitution to become a to emerge because as women were completely removed from production, women from the poorest social classes were forced in order to survive to sell the only commodity that they had, their bodies. And moreover, Engels points out that while wives had to obey strict monogamy, prostitution was another mean for men to continue with polygamy basically. Sexualized violence, men's power over women has since the emergence of private property it origins in keeping women financially dependent on a man being his property where he controlled her body and her children. So as what we can clearly see is that the oppression is inherent in class society so the fight against women's oppression must be linked to the struggle against class society and capitalism. But many feminists, they would say that well men would never willingly give up to fight or oppress women because they have a material interest in keeping it. For example, Hage Hartman who wrote The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism believes that all men benefit from controlling women because they receive personal services within the home like cooking, cleaning, taking care of the kids, the elderly, sexual services etc. And because that women are the ones who are doing most of the domestic work men also have more time for leisure basically which she says they will not give up basically. And she says that men as a group maintain this control by excluding women from actors of essential productive resources. Now Hartman, she's conflating how men and women are socially to act with the objected material interest of a working class man have just because that we are socialized in certain gender forms, gender roles it does not mean that men have in their material interest an interest to uphold these norms and uphold this oppression. The gender roles that we see today, where men are viewed as providers women as caring mothers etc. They are rooted in class society because that has been the roles that men and women have had for thousands of years in class societies. But does that mean that men as a group benefit from women's domestic work or that men for example earn less than men and it's really easy obviously to get angry about all the injustices to get angry about discrimination inequality towards women but we cannot let that anger fools us into thinking that men as a group are the root problem. Now Marxism is a science, we don't look at the surface of things and draw moralistic conclusions from it but we try to under cover the real material interest the reasons why for example we have gender norms and why we have oppression and it's not true that all men as a group have an objective interest in keeping oppression working class men have much more to lose with the existence of oppression and discrimination. It is the capitalist, no matter if there are men or women who have real interest in keeping and upholding the oppression oppression is the best weapon for these capitalists to divide the working class to make workers fight each other rather than to fight in the root cause of oppression and exploitation capitalism and class society. For example they try to divide the working class on examples and questions like the right to abortions which has been under attack in many different countries the capitalist you know the most rabid conservatives and so on they try to justify this attack by saying that abortion is a blow against religion it's a blow against the family it's a you know a threat to male workers dominance within the family and they use this to pit one part of the working class against another making workers who do support the right to abortion align themselves with liberal capitalist and liberal politicians who claim to you know support it obviously they never do and to make these workers not just see the conservative politicians as enemy but also conservative workers as enemies and the same thing with conservative workers to make them see that women's rights but also other things like same-sex marriage, trans rights as a threat towards themselves and the family and by having workers aligning themselves with one part of the capitalist wing against another sector of the working class it stops them from seeing who their real class enemy is and this is what all capitalists want no matter if they are liberal conservatives culture war hinders a united struggle against capitalism when in reality both wings of the capitalist want to attack workers' conditions now oppression is obviously as well very profitable for capitalism capitalist society requires different groups who are paid different amounts that can act to bring down the overall level of workers' conditions and wages with the existence of a group who is generally seen as interferia it can be also justified to pay them lower give them poorer conditions and a so-called unskilled worker can therefore also be used to threaten a male worker you know if you are too much trouble we will replace you with a woman for example so the argument that men as a group has an interest in keeping women's oppression working classmen is completely wrong they have much more to win in a united struggle for common interest as it will help to raise the conditions and working condition and living condition for all now competition between workers is therefore always encouraged by the ruling class and the representatives forcing women to work part-time as well as having greater responsibility within the family is also very useful for the ruling class it allows greater competition and at the same time producing the next generation of the working class and there are different mechanisms within capitalism to ensure that women are forced to do most of the domestic work since women earn less than men generally family benefits from the fact that it is women who work part-time or take longer apparently as long as women are paid less than men you can't just force men to take as much childcare as men because it could be a financial punishment for families with low income and many feminists they don't understand this because they believe that the reason why men don't want to stay home with their children is just because a consequence of gender norms and so on but for working class family it could be an economics issue employers are also aware of the risk that women at a certain age might want to have children which makes it more difficult for women at a certain age to get a full-time job or to be promoted which then helps to withhold women's wages so capitalists they don't have an interest whatsoever in paying men and women equally the capitalists make huge profit out of this inequality and the reason that men and women don't share domestic work equally is not just a matter of gender roles and norms it's a consequence of the economic structure that is inherent within capitalism and these structures give men and women roles in society which in turn maintain these norms of men and women and capitalism they rely on these gender norms and the family because the task of caring for children elderly, cooking, cleaning is something that has to be done within society to function and the main role for the family in capitalism is to ensure that there is a new generation of workers to be born so the capitalists can exploit them in the future so as long as the family exists as an institution where women are becoming financially depending on a man not only narrow gender roles will continue to exist but violence and sexual harassment which is a consequence of power that men have over women now the key to liberate women is to free her from the family and allow her to participate in the governance of society to make her financially independent it must be put under the same conditions as a man in production with the same working conditions and salary with the right to work full time if she wished to if a woman wants to divorce or raise children of her own it should not be a financial loss for her and to free women from the family we must liberate her completely from the unpaid domestic work however these domestic tasks still need to be carried out we can't just stop doing dishes however revolution would be for society to take care of these tasks however clearly that would only be possible if we had a socialist society run on the basis of needs rather than profit it would not after all be profitable to have free high quality canteens for everyone under capitalism but this does not mean that Marxists have to wait to fight oppression until the socialist revolution to fight for any reform that would benefit oppressed groups and working class such as better working conditions equal pay for more housing for more women shelter better and free healthcare childcare education better conditions for parents etc but we had to explain that you can't just simply reform your way out of oppression under capitalism the overthrow of capitalism absolutely necessary to get rid of the material basis of oppression not simply fight oppression today we don't do that just because of moral reason but also because we understand that a successful revolution requires the unity of the working class you cannot overthrow capitalism we're just one part of the working class participating more than this it is only through mobilizing the working class and prepare them for the overthrowing of capitalism that you can do so by the daily struggle for improvement now although capitalism we know it cannot liberate women it has played a progressive role in history women joining the workforce has allowed us to participate in the class struggle capitalism massively developed the productive forces which has created the resources and the technology that could be used to completely do away with domestic work and feminists they look at this with horror because they see history from a moral point of view how can you say that capitalism is progressive and they point to the fact that oppression has intensified under capitalism and argue that you Marxist you don't look at history from the perspectives of women but only through the male proletariat like for example Sylvia Federici who is a so-called Marxist feminist she doesn't think that capitalism has played a progressive role and she claims that Marx only focus on economics and they had a blind spot to women's unpaid reproductive work and sexual divisions of labor in capitalist accumulation Federici says I should add that Marx could never have presumed that capitalism paves the way for human liberation had he looked at his history from the viewpoint of women now Marxist we don't look at history from the moral lens the reason why we say something is progressive is because it has moved society forward by developing the productive forces but that does not mean that we are denying human suffering Marx says that capital was born dripping from head to foot from every pore with blood and dirt the point is that capitalism has through the development of an interconnected economy run by multinational monopolies and the creation of the working class it has created a conditions for socialism in the future the money and the resources are there to completely erase hunger, poverty, inequality and scarcity you can have the capacity to produce enough food housing, free education, healthcare for everyone the resources and the technology is there to completely do away with unpaid domestic work all of this would have a real impact for women's life if these were implemented but what's stopping us is that workers are not in control of the production it comes down to the question of private property and who owns the means of production so the solution is that the working class which includes all layers of society of oppressed and for them to come into power and plan society according to our needs Marx says we don't limit ourselves to what we can fight for under capitalism but instead we put forward a revolutionary way forward on how we can end oppression altogether it is through having a correct understanding of theory and history that you can put forward a programme that would completely pay the way for a true liberation of humanity but feminism, they don't have a correct understanding of the orders of oppression and they end up with strategies that is directly harmful for the struggle like Hady Hartman she says women should not trust men to liberate them after revolution in part because there's no reason to think that they would know how in part because there's no necessity for them to do so in fact the immediate self-interest lies in continuing the oppression so the strategy that she's proposing is a separate women's movement led by all women after what class you belong to all women should just unite to fight all men and it opens up this illusion that working class women can trust a female capitalist more than a male worker's colleague and at the end of the day the female capitalist will never support the struggle that will truly lead to the end of oppression of women as it will threaten her profits they limit themselves towards achievable for them as individuals the bourgeois feminists they are happy to stand on other women to get to the top and that's why we say we can have no collaboration with the ruling class at the end of the day these so-called Marxist feminists they are reformists they don't believe that the workers can take power and run society for themselves and by themselves they don't believe that socialist revolution is achievable or even necessary to bring down the material base for oppression they limit themselves to what is achievable within capitalism which is not very much as capitalism is in its deepest crisis ever there are no rooms for reforms what's on the agenda today is counter reforms and attacks on women and another so-called solution that is being brought up is wages for housework Sylvia Federici she claims that it's the most revolutionary perspective for women by demanding wages for housework it would legitimize women's real work instead of being an act of love but what it boils down to is moralism why are women not paid for the work that we do why are we not valued as equal as men but the thing is she completely misunderstands how capitalism works and the role of the family within capitalism and by raising demands of wages for housewives you actually cement the isolation of women within the family and the idea that it's unpaid labor is not actually completely true workers' wages, their paid labor are giving to them because the capitalists want them to reproduce themselves and in a lot of countries where you have larger layer of women being housewives the men's salaries are also covering their needs within the family so wages for housework is a reactionary demand and it would not help women to attain more freedom or equality now all of these feminists they have a lot to say about Marxism not being enough so let us see the track record of what Marxists have achieved when they have come into power like they did in the Russian Revolution of 1917 before the revolution women were treated as property to men children and especially girls they worked in the factories as an average of 12 to 14 years they started to do so and with the outbreak of war you did see a larger amount of women coming into the workforce and this had huge implication for how the revolution unfolded it is not a coincidence that women often play a leading role in revolutions and that's the reason because oppressed groups has the most to win if a revolution succeed but also the most to lose if it don't and the Russian Revolution started on the International Workers Women's Day and the living conditions in 1917 they had become intolerable for women with the brutal war and the hunger in the city and women had reached that point to what they could stand so the women in the textile factories they went out on strike and they sent out delegation to all of the factories in Petrograd and asked the workers to join them these demonstrations they grew into a general strike and an insurrection and five days later they had overthrown the Tsar nine months later the working class came to power through the Soviet led by the Bolshevik Party and I want to mention what that really meant for women and it's also important to note that without the unity between men and women within the working class during the revolution it would have never succeeded Lenin said this he said in Petrograd here in Moscow in other towns and industrial centres the women workers acted splendidly during the revolution without them we would not have been victorious that's my opinion how brave they were how brave they still are think of all the suffering and the deprivation they bore they are carrying on because they want freedom they want communism yes our proletarian women are excellent class fighters now after getting into power the Bolsheviks immediately abolished all laws that put women in disadvantages to men all the restrictions of freedom of movement was removed and other laws of women's equal rights to own lands and function as head of household she was given free access to abortion registrations of children and marriage was taken out from the control of the church and now happened just as a simple process the only needed mutual consist each partner could take each other's name or keep their own if they wanted to the walls was made as easy as possible and could be achieved if only one person wanted it the concept of illegitimate children was abolished women were given paid paternity leave before and after the birth was introduced and night shifts for pregnant women or women who just have become mothers was prohibited you had instead an addition of special maternity leave being set up childcare facilities were advanced equal pay for work with equal value was established and equality for the law was just the first step now the question was also to involve the masses into the governance of society so four days after the Bolshevik took power introduced the eight hour working day which is enormous important for allowing women to participate in politics they also set up different educational system to teach women how to read and write and to draw them into politics they also attempted to socialize their housework by building communal kitchen public restaurant, laundry to unload the burden on women in the family and this was the beginning to implement a program that could really create material conditions to allow genuine equality however the successful revolution there was no successful revolution in west Soviet Union remained isolated in condition of poverty low technology productive development it was subjective to imperialist war to civil war to famine so it's not possible to build socialism in one country and especially not the country like Russia was in 1917 it requires a very well developed economy that can afford to expend the welfare and to completely eliminate unpaid domestic work it also requires a working class that can have the time and education to run society by themselves and due to all of these setbacks the mood of the working class became disheartened and the working class could no longer participate in the governance of society and you started to see under these conditions a counter-revolutionary bureaucracy developing around Stalin and because they could not move the economy towards socialism they were unable to fully liberate women instead to defend the position the Stalinist bureaucracy they tried to then romanticize the family again because they could not keep up with advancing the welfare so they had to justify it and later on they removed the right to abortion they criminalized again homosexuality and this was predicted by Marx where he said that when one disgeneralized the old crap revives and with the generation of Soviet Union came the return of women's oppression and it's not because socialism cannot abolish women's oppression but it's because the Soviet Union never reached socialism so when people criticize Marxism it's often Stalinism that they have in mind which has of course played the sources role to the real meaning of Marxism but despite the difficulties Soviet Union was one of the first countries that was the most democratic one and has achieved more things for women than any other capitalist did and the majority of all improvements for women has also been won through revolutionary class struggle it is not a coincidence that a number of countries were seeing the right for women to vote just a few years after the Russian Revolution and it was because of the ruling class were terrified that the workers in their countries was going to revolt and carry out a revolution against them so they gave concessions so with that said let's take inspirations of what the Bolshevik did in 106 years ago and finish the work that they began