 Hi everyone and welcome to our podcast series women's liberation the marxist position brought to you by the marxist voice the podcast of socialist appeal in this episode we will answer the fundamentally important topic on the origins of women's oppression many people claim that it's inherent and part of human nature to oppress one another however this doesn't explain anything we as marxists are only interested in the in the true scientific explanation of our own human history where the depression arises from and how is it linked to class society and therefore how can we bring this to an end this series will help to clarify why marxism provides the only true revolutionary answer to these important questions to introduce myself i'm lubna badi member of socialist appeal and today we will republish a talk by lori on the origins of women's oppression he will explain this question thoroughly and we highly recommend also the book written by engels the origins of the family private property and the state to read with this to fully grasp this topic now let's get started with this week's episode of the marxist voice the podcast of socialist appeal we all know that women still today face unique levels of oppression under capitalism and this is despite kind of capitalism and liberal so-called bourgeois democracy having claimed to produce progress on this point you know looking around us today we can see that the the fact of the matter is that this progress is very thin at home obviously women are still shouldering at the massive majority of domestic labour at work we still see massive gender pay gaps and COVID-19 has turned back the clock even further women are bearing the brunt of redundancies mothers are 1.5 times more likely to have been made redundant or furloughed than fathers and domestic violence has increased massively victoria already gave the the shocking statistic in the first few weeks of lockdown alone 14 women were murdered in the UK so i guess the question that we want to answer here is is why is this the case after all labour under capitalism mostly doesn't rely on physical strength and women even have full legal equality in many countries domestic abuse domestic violence is supposedly illegal there's the right to divorce there's things like maternity pay women have the vote they have the right to work in fact they have more than just the right women are expected to work in order to support their families just like any other worker and why hasn't this done away with the oppression of women well you often hear the argument that this is basically because women's oppression is biological it's rooted in in our nature men are biologically physically stronger than women shouldn't this just allow them to get what they want and this exact this this argument that oppression is somehow natural is popular among some you know evolutionary biologists psychologists is very popular among conservatives who see this gender oppression and put it forward as some kind of evolutionary advantage that's kind of hardwired into us but shockingly enough you know this argument is also quite popular amongst some feminists who argue that a sort of male monopoly on force allowed them to dominate and exploit women basically since the beginning of time and this understanding which sees the oppression of women is something that has always existed is a very depressing one after all what can be done against human nature however it's not correct luckily after all even if men are biophysically stronger if you watch any detective movie you'll you'll know it takes more than just the means to make a crime if you're if you're studying your crime trying to figure out why it was committed you also have to work out a motive and an opportunity uh and the question then is have men always had the motive to oppress women uh and have they had the opportunity to do so well i think to understand this we really have to look back to the past uh and that the origins of women's oppression can't be understood on its own but as part of massive changes in the whole of human society so it's very convenient for the ruling class to encourage people to believe that the way things are now is the way that they have always been that inequality is an eternal fact of existence that selfishness is biological and evolutionary that women's oppression has always existed that we have always been governed by kings and by states but all of this is a convenient lie you know it's a convenient falsehood because in actual fact human beings haven't always lived in a class society where one small group of exploiters are living off the labor of everyone else in fact for the vast majority of the 300 000 years that anatomically modern humans have existed uh we lived in in relatively egalitarian conditions uh the Engels actually described as primitive communism and in these societies uh we can conclude that selfishness was not considered moral or normal that there was no conception of things like private property there were no kings um and in this time period uh what today uh we would call the paleolithic or the lower stone age uh archaeologists have also found little to no evidence of genuine kind of institutional inequality of any kind including women's oppression it's only with the sort of the beginning of the holocene uh or the end of the last ice age that we start to see some evidence of things like differences in wealth but even then this is very minimal and wealth doesn't appear to have been passed down from generation to generation we don't see any class differences um and right up until the bronze age we don't find wealthy burials and we don't find anything resembling money now obviously i want to come on to the specific topic of women's oppression but i think it's important to give kind of concrete examples of what this kind of society would look like so just to talk about one uh there's this place in the UK called in in britain called star car and it's a mesolithic site which is about 11 000 years old and at at this site hunter gatherers lived this quite basic kind of subsistence lifestyle they were fishing on the lake they were hunting birds and deer and they lived in temporary dwellings so no house was bigger than the other there was no intergenerational wealth and in fact the only permanent house we have is this one large round house uh that was a shared building uh that was the central to the community so it's clear that in these kind of primitive communist societies the community was working together to build and share resources um and at root all of this kind of egalitarianism came from the fact that there wasn't any private property and there couldn't be any uh beyond the possession of tools and other small personal items because these were for the mass park relatively small uh mobile hunter gatherer society so they were successful what they did but they lived day to day or year to year they didn't accumulate any significant surplus and in these societies we also have very little evidence of any kind of institutional oppression of women whatsoever in fact we have many results that show the exact opposite uh people might have read about the discovery of hunting gear hunting kit recently in the grave of a young woman in in the Andes and this grave is about 9 000 years old and this discovery led to research that shows that women in the early americas many of them participated in hunting and this basically destroys the idea that I was talking about earlier that in every society men have had this monopoly on force on violence they've been the dominant armed hunters and women have been confined to the camp and actually it's the opposite there was joint participation in economic activity and this strongly suggests a degree of you know real social equality and women weren't locked out of any kind of activity any kind of profession in primitive communist society like men they could likely do anything they put their minds to so long as it served the community now obviously uh there are qualifiers to this this doesn't mean that you know we don't recognize any kind of sex-based differences which obviously existed in prehistory but without the monogamous family and the economic domination of men over women that wasn't patriarchy we didn't have these fixed notions of the role of women or the role of men and in different societies sex-based differences probably would have had more or less impact depending on the particular conditions uh that that society in that community was was working in for example in these early societies it's possible that people might have been chosen to join hunting parties based not on kind of gender but on a physical characteristics such as how fast you could run or how far you could run and this may have meant you know that fewer overall female hunters compared to men but it certainly wouldn't have been an insurmountable obstacle like gender oppression later became and so women kind of occupying this different position in the division of labor uh at this stage in in society didn't result in oppression or exploitation and to go with this you know where when men and women were doing different work the work was regarded equally highly women who couldn't go out on like long hunting parties because they were caring for their children played an important role in either gathering food or playing a role at the central camp uh and this domestic work wasn't just cooking and caring for children not that's not important but it was also things like making tools which have caused vital for the whole community to survive and again you know this isn't just us making this up we have evidence of this if you look at a lot of paleolithic cave art archaeologists have compared like the size of ham prints in the art to skeletons from the same time period we can tell that these ham prints were were made by women and this cave art was obviously of extreme spiritual significance and these you know it would have taken a long time to do and these caves were often very difficult to get to and these women would have had to take a lot of time out of their day and time out of doing work for the for the tribe in order to create these and this is an indication of kind of the high regard that women were held in uh by by society and we can also see this in the actual art itself uh and paleolithic art a lot of it does emphasize the physical differences between the sexes you know we've all seen these like little prehistoric statuettes of women um but there's there's little art that implies this kind of came with any social distinction so one major convention in art is to draw people of higher standing vigor but we don't really see this uh in any art uh for example there are these cave paintings in Burzaham which is in India and these cave paintings are about 8 000 years old and they depict men and women but they're both depicted hunting and we can't see any indication of any difference in higher status or any class um so again this outlines all of these conclusions about the the position of women in prehistoric society and these are conclusions that many archaeologists and anthropologists have finally come to today but Engels actually anticipated them more than a century ago and in his work in the origin of the family private property in the state which I would very strongly recommend to read if there's anyone here who hasn't given it a read already he says one of the most absurd notions taken over from the Enlightenment is that in the beginning of society women was the slave of man uh and he says among all savages and all barbarians the lower and middle stages the position of women is not only free but honorable and alongside this uh you know this isn't just a woman as an individual but alongside this the monogamous family as we know it also didn't exist in fact non-monogamy uh group marriage cooperative parenting was the norm for for most if not all societies in this period of history uh and without marriage without monogamy lineage was traced through the mother's line rather than the father's and this you know it's obvious because the mother would always know who her children were and because there wasn't any way of dividing society by wealth there weren't cities social groups were often divided by kinship and this was most probably determined matrilineally passed down through the mother's line and so on a rare occasion that there was any inheritance that there were any kind of heirlooms to pass down there would be passed to the tribe or the group that were related through maternal lineage and we can actually see traces of this in early societies for example Engels uh he writes about the Germanic tribes uh who were described by Tacitus who was a Roman historian and the Germanic tribes uh just to say they weren't kind of pristine hunter-gatherers in fact they were agriculturalist but their society was significantly less developed compared to the Romans economically speaking and you could still see the the traces of this kind of matrilineality in these German tribes so if a man was sworn to an oath or a promise in such a way that a hostage would need to be taken uh it was far more effective the Romans uh observed to take a man's nephew hostage uh the son of his sister rather than his actual son and this is because it would be you know a personal tragedy for for the man to lose his own child and it would be a sneer on his honor but the loss of the nephew would actually be considered an injury to the entire clan uh and Tacitus also like aside from this even remarked that the Roman soldiers were taken aback by the relative respect for women that the Germans had and they took this as evidence of their barbarism and this is something that we see traces of actually even up to the dark ages in Europe with things like Viking women being able to get a divorce which of course certainly was not a right really afforded to women in medieval Europe later down the line so you know what changed then if women haven't been oppressed forever how did they go from from that position to the position of women in kind of early class societies which is very different well nothing in the world is static as we know and these human societies weren't static either even though they existed for hundreds of thousands of years in very similar forms they were also developing right and over the course of these millennia humans first developed more and more refined stone tools and these tools could be used to harvest well plants more effectively and this allowed us to domesticate crops like wheat and this is a very short summary but effectively all of these millennia of development provided the basis for what we now call the Neolithic revolution the development of agriculture humans settled down we began to live in stationary village communities we began to farm the land uh and as societies adopted agriculture the first time they could produce a consistent and regular surplus product this product could be owned it could be stored and traded with this regular trade people could become full-time craftsmen for example they could sell like the products that they made things like jewelry and and pottery and this could be sold in exchange for this surplus agricultural product objects of wealth heirlooms jewelry they became not just personal belongings but things that could be passed down from generation to generation but this obviously raises the question who has a claim to the surplus produced on that land and so for the first time we see the question of private property basically being put to human society uh because whoever owned that property whoever owned that surplus product would also come to dominate society uh so we'll get back to this in in a minute right because something else that's that's really important is also happening with the origins of agriculture which is that the the biological differentiation which existed between males and females which previously led to certain like tendencies in the division of labour but no institutional exclusion of either sex from positions of power actually under agriculture that was also developing into a much more extreme division of labour this is for a couple reasons uh for the first hunter-gatherer groupings right they tend to be mobile they can't rely on a consistent food supply and so the birth rate is relatively low in these groups and this means the burden of childcare on the mother is smaller women have more time to participate in the rest of society but with agriculture bigger families mean more hands at work on the land and the birth rate massively increased and as a result women are spending more time on childcare and in addition uh many domesticated crops actually require huge amounts of processing time things like wheat and barley right they have to be ground into flour and then baked into bread as these become a staple this work becomes a vital part of the economy and for the first time this resulted in the huge majority of what we would today call domestic labour falling on women in a way that it hadn't in the past and again like this isn't just uh theorizing we have proof of this we can see the evidence in the skeletons of women uh from who are living at the dawn of of these agricultural societies uh there's a settlement called Abu Hurayra which is one of the oldest sedentary farming villages in in the Near East uh and in female skeletons from that site they have arthritis in their toes because basically they're spending hours kneeling uh rocking backwards and forwards using their body weight to grind grains into flour and so this new division of labour you know actually like changes their bodies and when we can see proof of this um and now in primitive communist society of course maybe this wouldn't have resulted in a change in the position of women compared to men because what we would call domestic labour was equally respected to activities such as hunting as as I've already discussed both after all were necessary right to the survival of the community and that was you anything that really mattered but with the origins of private property the work that men were doing uh became connected to the production of a surplus things like farming things like herding cattle and so even if the men were using the tools and eating the food prepared by women they were able to claim the right to that surplus and basically claim power over women and so the male owners of property were becoming the new masters of society uh and an equal measure as families grew people are beginning to live more and more as as families working the land men are starting to own their own property rather than it being owned collectively by the the tribe or the family group and the connection with their gens uh what angles called the tribe uh became thinner and so men who already now were the owners of this new kind of property were also starting to wonder why they should even be passing back this property to their mother's family after their death rather than passing it on to their own children and of course this raises the question of inheritance which is the logical conclusion of this development of private property uh so we can see right with the origins of private property with the origins of male ownership over that property women also lose the right of lineage men want to pass down their property to their children and so for hundreds of thousands of years for 97 percent of the time anatomically modern humans and homo sapiens have existed parentage have been traced through the maternal line but now it had to be passed through the father so that they could pass down the wealth that they have produced and unlike naturalineal parentage of course this is in no way natural because a woman will obviously always know she is the mother of her own child but how can a father know that the child of his wife is his own only by the imposition of strict moral rules and a strict monogamous family in which women are no longer free to do as they pleased they're considered the property of their husbands and they have to be strictly regulated and watched uh and so women essentially become commodities themselves they're reduced from being their own people to just being vessels for inheritance and again Engels talks about this and he was you know one of the first people basing himself on the work of people like LH Morgan who was an anthropologist studying these kind of societies to really challenge the idea that the monogamous family was natural and Engels explains the natural fact monogamy was the first form of the family to be based not on natural but on economic conditions on the victory of private property over primitive natural communal property uh the sole exclusive aims of monogamous marriage were to make the man supreme in the family and to propagate as the future as to his wealth children indisputably his own and he goes on to explain that thus when monogamous marriage first makes its appearance in history it is not as the reconciliation of man and woman still less as the highest form of such a reconciliation monogamous marriage comes onto the scene as the subjugation of one sex by the other and it announces a struggle between the sexes unknown throughout the whole previous prehistoric period this is a pretty big indictment of monogamy right um but but there's a reason for it which is that you know it really degraded the the position of women uh and for women you know it was a real tragedy um and or speaking of tragedy Engels points to the Greeks as a very good example of this not only see ancient Athenian society pretty much typifies how the overthrow of mother right and the origins of the monogamous family degraded the position of women uh so the Greeks have previously held women in very high regards this was shown by their goddesses you know in Greek mythology we can still see the traces of mother right we can see that like for example the goddess here as child Hephaestus is born a god even though his father isn't a god when his youth fathers children with mortals they only become demigods are demigods and this is because like godhood is being passed down through the female line right uh but unlike Greek mythology which in many ways was a sort of holdover from a bygone age in Athenian law and Athenian society the situation is completely reversed and an example I think that's that's really illuminating actually comes from sort of early Athenian legal texts there's this text called on the murder of Eratosthenes which is by an orator called called Lysius and it's not clear obviously whether this is a speech from a genuine trial whether it's more of a kind of advert for for Lysius's services but in it Lysius is defending this this man called Euphilitos Euphilitos catches his wife in bed with another man and murders the other man in a fit of rage and he justifies his actions by explaining the the adultery Moichia is is the greatest of all wrongs in society and he explains that this is the case not just on an individual level but because it's a danger to the whole of society he says to Eratosthenes the guy that was that he caught sleeping with his wife your executioner isn't me it's the law of the city whose violation you thought less important than your pleasures you committed an offense against like this against my wife and against my children so you can see that adultery is presented as this very serious crime in fact more serious even than rape because it calls into question the whole security of the man's bloodline and thus his property and his inheritance and it calls into question his children so it's an offense against the whole bloodline and in this work on the murder of Eratosthenes it's explained the only solution to this the only mistake that Euphilitos makes is not keeping a tighter control on his wife since the very beginning so his fatal mistake isn't committing murder it's trusting his wife enough to allow her liberties and imprivacy and here we can see very clearly right the position of women in Athenian slave society have been completely you know debased and degraded compared to the earlier societies that are still organized based on a sort of tribal structure and on top of this right it's also worth pointing out monogamy in these societies was basically for women only it wasn't for men men were still free to do whatever they wanted well women were strictly regulated every second of their day was watched they were basically locked in houses and we can still see traitors of these attitudes today right in the way that women who have multiple partners still treated very different socially to men who do and with this degradation of women's place in society from being a free equal individual to suddenly becoming the property of the man also came the degradation of women's work Engels explains that household management lost its public character it no longer became a public service it became a private service and the wife became the head server until all this labor was still vital to the maintenance of society was suddenly considered far less important it didn't produce items that could be sold for a profit so by kind of understanding this the rise of patriarchy in this way we can see matrilineal pre-class societies weren't similarly similar in any way to the patriarchy of class societies it wouldn't be accurate to describe these like pre-class societies as matriarchies because they were based on a natural reality a mother being sure who her children were but like and so they didn't require the dominance or the domination of of women over men but by contrast patriarchy involved by nature the subjugation of women to men and it resulted from the dominance of economic factors over natural ones and so women become subordinate to men basically for the sole purpose of amassing wealth and at the same time their labor all of the work that they're doing loses its value in society importantly obviously we can also see this whole situation didn't just emerge out of nowhere men didn't wake up one day and decide that they were going to you know use their power to subjugate women suddenly instead they subjugated women for a material reason and that material reason still exists today it's property it's private property now I don't have a huge amount of time but I do want to quickly talk about the bourgeois family because we can see the family has changed multiple times throughout history from kind of like the patriarchal household of ancient society to the extended family of feudalism to the bourgeois nuclear family and this again proves that it's not a natural form that the family develops as is required by like the economic structures of society and as capitalism developed family relations also developed into this kind of nuclear family a lot of things haven't changed Engels explains that in capitalism marriage according to the bourgeois conception is a contract it's a legal transaction and I would say that that's still true today in many cases it's a legal transaction for the exact same purpose as marriage always has been for defending property for protecting the bloodline for protecting inheritance and in many cases for the woman continuing to be the property of the man and these attitudes persist even in bourgeois law you know in the UK marital rape wasn't made illegal till the 1980s there's still exception for marital rape in many countries which sums up this attitude of basically women being being property in this marriage and this attitude that has existed for thousands of years and under capitalism you know arguably there's this kind of veil of choice arising but it's still a veil of choice in fact going back to Engels he compares the marriage contract to the contract that the worker enters into with the capitalist on the labour market because in theory he says right in theory the worker is completely free to refuse the contract with the capitalist and find another employer or find no employer at all but in actual fact what would happen if he did that if he refused to work he and his family would starve and no matter what capitalist he went to he would still be offered the same exploitation and therefore even though there's this kind of veil of choice over the whole thing the worker still comes out of the transaction poorer and this is unfortunately also true for women who even today when they're marrying out of choice or marrying out of love they still undoubtedly come out of the situation during the vast majority of domestic work come out of the situation with worse wages and even though women legally have the right to divorce many are remaining trapped economically in abusive marriages because they cannot afford to leave so we can see that this veil of choice actually conceals what is still in many cases an incredibly exploitative situation but even with the emergence of the bourgeois family we also have the emergence of the proletariat of course and that actually challenges those family relations just as you know capitalism in itself it contains the seeds of its own destruction also you know the proletariat almost contains the seeds of the destruction of the bourgeois family as well because capitalism is forcing women has forced women into work alongside the domestic labor that they already carry out this undermines the bourgeois family this was true even when Marx and Engels were writing in fact it was very obvious then the time when Engels and Marx were writing women's labor was cheaper than men's and so at various points the men were actually being forced out of work while women were the sole breadwinner and of course for the first time this was giving them power to basically challenge their husbands and of course this was something that absolutely scandalized bourgeois commentators who were used to bourgeois women who didn't work and who were completely relegated to the home and many people kind of felt outraged they felt that polite society was basically being turned upside down with this kind of turning upside down of the family however Engels writes in the condition of the working class in England and he points out he says we must admit that so total reversal of the positions of the sexes can have come to pass only because the sexes have been placed in the false position from the beginning and if the reign of the wife over the husband is inhuman the pristine rule of the husband over the wife must have been inhuman too and if the family of our present society is being thus dissolved this dissolution merely shows that at bottom the binding tie of this family was not family affection but private interest lurking under the cloak of a pretended community of possessions and of a fact he basically exposes that the fact that women are being called into work and thus that position in the family is changing exposes that this position has always been a false one for as long as it has existed now the rise of the working class obviously is playing and has played a very progressive role in the dissolution of the bourgeois family but it hasn't completed the process rather women under capitalism are being left with basically two jobs a dual burden of domestic work to do on top of being brought into the workforce we can see this now today has been exposed even more clearly by Covid right working moms who are already taking on the bulk of the childcare and now taking on education responsibilities too so we can see the bourgeois family structure has never fit the proletariat and that there are changes in the composition of the nuclear family that reflect this but on its own the existence of the proletariat is not sufficient to overthrow the bourgeois family not sufficient to overthrow the nuclear family and not sufficient to overthrow women's oppression after all you know we've had decades of of hard fought battles by women workers who've generally been fighting alongside men and after all that women now have full legal equality as we discussed earlier that's equal payloads right that's maternity leave that's the right to divorce but what does legal equality actually mean it means women at shouldering three four or five more hours of work at home every day on top of an eight nine or ten hour working day it means a couple of women are breaking the glass ceiling well most of them are underpaid even compared to their male colleagues who are also being underpaid and it means 14 women murdered in two weeks in the UK at the start of lockdown so we have genuine uh so we have legal equality but we don't have genuine equality why is this uh well you know Trotsky talks about this in in his writings on the changing role of women in the family after the Russian revolution and he says a deep going plow is needed to turn up heavy clods of earth what does this mean it means the oppression of women is deep seated in society it's based in prejudices based on material conditions dating back millennia the nothing short of the total transformation of society can actually change this despite centuries of change the conditions that first gave rise to women's oppression still exist the existence of private property the existence of class society so of course we can and we should fight for whatever improvements can be made under capitalism but if we aim low you know if we aim that low we limit ourselves to that all we will achieve are temporary or partial measures and those measures will be scaled back when necessary again as we're seeing with COVID so what's the way forward then well I'd argue and I hope you'll agree with me that it's the struggle for a socialist society to completely change all of this um so uh just to sum up uh let's see if I can sum up everything that's been said we can see that far from being a natural development the overturn of mother right and the relegation of women from being a free individual to being a possession basically is one of history's greatest upheavals it's a violation of all of the morality all of the norms of the old primitive communist society but we can also see there was a reason for this those early primitive societies they had ceased to serve their purpose there wasn't any room for development and only with the origins of agriculture only with the growth of the earliest class societies could humanity actually move forward could we further develop the productive forces and with it the whole potential of human civilization uh and that development it required the overthrow of all the old forms of millennia past and this included the tribe included the old forms of the family and its replacement with with new ones and as the saying goes you know there's no use crying over spilt milk it's true the origins of class society was to step forward historically we're in reality a tragedy for for hundreds of thousands of people uh millions of people not in the least women uh but that has also brought us to where we are today and what we are today is that capitalism and in fact all of class society is now just as outdated as paleolithic and mesolithic society was back then and unlike previous classes unlike previous revolutions the working class doesn't have any interest in continuing with private property doesn't have any interest in continuing class society because unlike the past unlike previous class societies like feudalism we now produce everything socially right thousands of workers are working as one to make the economy run even if all the wealth produced from that is then being privately appropriated by a few individuals and so we can see now the very existence of private property is now a contradiction in fact it's private property itself which was you know the motor force of development 10 000 years ago there's now become a fatter to further development and you know if you look around you know everywhere you can see that we can see that capitalism is grinding to a halt and so it's in the interest of the working class actually do away with private property fight with for a socialist society where property is once more collectively owned so capitalism today is now just as defunct as stone axes were all those thousands of years ago and for you know the second time the whole of human society we actually have the chance to build a world where everyone's equal where no one section of society dominates the other and that won't be based on the scarcity of resources that will be based on all the abundance that millennia of development has produced and in other words that won't be primitive communism it will just be socialism and communism and with that the family can and will change too because with the shift under socialism from private property to collective property we can abolish this kind of possession of women we can abolish the idea that the women is property and the family also no longer has to be a private unit with the women as as angles described her as the chief and now the only servant in the household domestic labor can be the collective responsibility of all of society the position of women can be improved not as a temporary or a partial step forward but as a real improvement and women's oppression you know has existed for millennia it's very ancient it's very deep rooted and so are all of these prejudices but despite that it does have an origin and it hasn't existed forever and that means that it can be done away with it can be got rid of and if people take anything away from this i'd say take take that we don't limit ourselves we don't need some of ourselves to fighting for short-term improvements can also fight we can also fight to do away with private property with class society and on that basis we can build a world free from the exploitation of women but also free from exploitation and oppression of any kind listening to this episode of women's liberation the marxist position if you would like to read more on this question i highly recommend visiting our education hub socials.net slash education where we have a range of resources on everything from how to fight oppression to philosophy and more the website of our international the international marxist tendency has also a wealth of material that we highly recommend and if you like the ideas that we have spoken about then you should join us women are involved in social struggles and the question of women's oppression is on the agenda to a degree that we have not seen in decades sexism and the oppression of women is integral part of capitalism and they can only be removed once we do away with the material conditions that allow this to exist this is why we fight for socialism and this is why you should join us in our struggle so stay tuned for next week where we'll discuss the historic examples of women's struggle and the main focus on the russian revolution and what the bolshevik attitude was to the to the woman's question i've been your host lupin abadi and thanks for listening to the marxist voice brought to you by socials appeal