 First of all, I'd just like to thank you for inviting me to speak today. It's great to see all the familiar faces that I've known for a while now, but I think it's even better to see so many new people come to this event this weekend and get to meet so many new people that are interested in ideas that for us are essential in the fight for a better world. And within that, I think discussing the question of women or what role women can play in bettering society really is essential as well. And as Tash said, these texts were quite fundamental in allowing me to gain a better understanding of what the women's struggle is and also what the Bolshevik party was able to achieve in relation to women's liberation. So I strongly recommend that you take a look at this material. But going to sort of what we're here to discuss today and what I hope I can sort of enlighten you a little bit about and have a bit of a discussion about what role did women play in the Russian Revolution and what was sort of the situation in what we would call the bourgeois family in the period of the Russian Revolution and the years after. Well, the 23rd of February by the old Russian calendar was the equivalent of today's 8th of March. It was International Women's Day. And in the year 1917, there was a mass demonstration of women in Petrograd. This demonstration was led by striking textile women workers. And this demonstration marched onto the Duma demanding bread, demanding basic needs for the family, demanding basic needs for children. And obviously, as we still see today, the Tsarist government made every attempt to crush the demonstration, to crush the call for liberation of these women on International Women's Day. But you see, the fact is, is that you'll often see that women have a lot more to win in a revolutionary situation and they've got a lot less to lose. And so they carried on on that day. And it also helped that there was another 90,000 workers that were out on strike supporting the cause of women's liberation. And that's also without counting a solidarity strike that was taking place of washer women who were actually demanding the nationalization of laundries under the control of the local authorities. Now interestingly, this position of the washer women was considered premature by the Mensheviks. They considered this to be quite a premature demand that Russian society wasn't quite at the right stage in history to be debounding something like that. But the Bolsheviks were the only ones that gave full support to this demand. And in fact, sort of enabled these women to go forward to push forward and carry on in the struggle. And therefore, the women that were out demonstrating were able to gain the support of those same soldiers that were sent out to repress the demonstration. And these soldiers ended up actually turning their bayonets not towards the women that were demonstrating but towards the Tsarist regime in Russia. This is one of the events that marked the beginning of the great Russian Revolution. And it's important for women to remember that. It's important for women to know that, to give them courage to do the same today, essentially. The Russian Revolution marked a period that was the first time in history that the working class seized power and was able to begin running society democratically for themselves. And it's also, secondly to that, it's an incredibly important landmark for the question of women's liberation. Because the demands of the Bolsheviks, the demands of the revolution itself included the need to occupy the shut-in, private enterprise that is the family and replace it with social care, with social housing to allow the absorption of all the privately, the private housekeeping functions of the family to allow the social absorption of these functions by social, by public institutions. And this was a way to liberate women from that nucleus, let's say. And the Bolsheviks understood that this was only going to be possible if the commanding heights of the economy were to be nationalized in the interests of the masses, in the interest of women as well. And this, obviously, doing this would have, well, it did, as I'll explain, it allowed women to be free, it liberated women from the role that they have in that family and allowed them to participate fully in the running of society. I think a good way to explain what socialism aims to accomplish is, as Marx's characterization of a socialist society gives quite a good example of this or explains it quite well, he said it would be a society in which the sentences from each according to their ability and that means both in a physical sense but also in a psychological sense what their ability is to each according to what their need is. Now this in itself highlights that men and women have different abilities and they have different needs. So this sentence in itself kind of immediately wipes away any illusion that communism aims to have equality between genders in a mechanical sense. We're not talking about equality between people in a mechanical sense. We're talking about distributing the wealth in society for all in an equal manner but we do understand that obviously every individual has different abilities and every individual has different needs. The revolution was very important because it demanded that the majority of society would be educated in order to be able to run society. So there was a demand for further education and that obviously included allowing people to understand that motherhood is an important social function. It's a productive social function and that essentially women are the mothers of humanity and the Russian Revolution aimed for this to be protected as such aimed for motherhood to be protected in that way. It also demanded for people to understand that abortion is not something that is easily carried out by women but very often it's a necessity. It's something that women are compelled into doing because of the social conditions that they're in and the option of raising a child in poverty is not exactly appealing let's say and so it's an act of necessity and the Russian Revolution had the aim not only of enabling people to understand this but actually to remove any cause that would lead a woman to have an abortion. And also it was important for society to understand that the emancipation of the woman was actually a lever for the emancipation of man and that as Camilla Rivera said the woman will not be free until the man is also free. Trotsky in this wonderful text says that women are the mothers of the nation and that in a way implies that it implies that the enslavement of the woman that her enslavement will therefore breed further prejudice it will breed further enslavement and that highlights the need to liberate her and it's only with the help of the working class that we will be able to achieve and fulfill the demands of women's liberation allow them to become a reality. Now the demands of the Russian Revolution were not just like dreamt of by the Bolshevik Party by the leaders of the Bolshevik Party but they were actually based on a series of needs that women have and therefore the demands were to abolish all that tortures all that humiliates and oppresses women in the household, in the workplace and at the time in the peasantry. And so therefore it was not just a question of sort of fighting for women's demands on the surface of things but it was necessary to go right to the core to go to the origins of what oppresses women of how women's oppression has arised and so very briefly I'm going to try to just give you kind of an overlook of what happened in order to bring women into this position. So Marxism has analysed the origins of women's oppression and in a way laid the theoretical basis or this has allowed Marxism to lay a theoretical basis to overcome it. So with the settling of hunter-gatherer societies there came also a division of labour in which women dedicated more time to raising the children more time to sort of dealing with household domestic tasks and the man sort of dedicated their time to increasing production in agriculture and cattle raising so there was a distinct sort of division of labour let's say. So the labour of the man actually allowed him or gave him the capacity to produce a surplus i.e. more than was necessary to the individual or to that clan. And therefore marked a distinctive change in the balance of forces within the family within the clans that had settled because obviously it was the labour of the man that allowed for trade and it allowed for development of private property and therefore it was a tool for further enrichment and further wealth to be produced whereas the labour of the women was not as productive in the eyes of that economic structure let's say the labour of the women did not produce a value in that way, a productive value. And this further on led to the abolition of what was called the mother right which in a polygamous society, in a polygamous clan would have been the only way to determine sort of what the family line was because obviously women are the ones that give birth so that was sort of the way in which the line in the clan was determined and that was replaced with the rise of class society that was the rise of private property that was replaced by father right because obviously the men that were producing the private property wanted to have someone to pass that private property onto essentially to maintain it, to keep it inside the realms of the clan of the family so therefore they wanted to be able to pass that property onto a blood related heir essentially and what that meant was essentially that women became the kind of air producing property of men and along with that what that meant was that women were also forced into a monogamous relationship with men whereas men obviously were not compelled to do the same. So really this is just kind of to say that it's absurd to think that women since the beginning of time have been socially inferior to men and it's absurd to think that there's a functional reason for why or a functional significance to the role of women in society that this division of labor was meant to be or is the way that humans have developed naturally let's say and this culture you might ask yourself well how did it become such a predominant idea in society well that this culture of the patriarchal culture really spread, was able to spread through trade because the different clans having developed the private property were trading with other clans and that allowed for those ideas also to go along with the trading and also it's interesting that religion definitely played a part in sort of or religion assisted this process of spreading of culture I'd just like to to read out something that was written by the so-called he was an Abbot, Abbot Rosmini and he was a contemporary of Marx and he was a political advisor in Italy and he says that it's for the health this is by the way sort of a sentence or a concept that is used in educating young girls that was used in educating young girls in Italy so it is for the husband according to the convenience of nature to be Lord and Master is for the woman and so it should be to be almost an appendage a compliment to the husband entirely consecrated to him and dominated by his name now this might seem like completely backward and you know appalling to most of you but it actually formed it was inscribed in law in Italy up till 1975 when a series of very very sort of courageous women fought for this to be abolished let's say so another sort of concept is that capitalism obviously this implies that capitalism did not mark that capitalism did not did not create women's oppression but it definitely is a major obstacle in overcoming women's oppression because capitalism encourages all possible divisions within the working class not just the division between men and women but the division between people of different colour of skin people of different sexuality there's all possible divisions that have been dreamped up by the capitalist ruling class and also the patriarchal culture in capitalism guarantees a layer of women's labour that is cheap that is very cheap that can be sort of pushed in and out of the labour market when it's needed essentially when it's required by the capitalist system and capitalism also unloads a series of responsibilities onto the family onto the family nucleus so obviously what that implies is that it's unloading these responsibilities onto the woman that is we could say enslaved in the household and families within capitalism have further developed into becoming sort of an entity or a private entity that has to economically provide for itself you could say and be self-sufficient in a way especially self-sufficient with relation to domestic tasks we rely on our family nucleus for our clothes to be washed for our food to be made and so on and this obviously is the reason that or it's very convenient to have one individual that takes care of these responsibilities in the family and that is the woman but obviously what that means is that women are taken away from social production and engaged in private production and so therefore women are confined to the structure of the family now going back to sort of the Russian Revolution what was the role of women in the Russian Revolution well Lennon in this you can purchase this issue of the IDOM in which there's a quote from Lennon in which he says that in Petrograd here in Moscow in other towns and industrial centres the women workers acted splendidly during the revolution without them we should not have been victorious or scarcely so this is my opinion how brave they were how brave they still are think of all the suffering and deprivations that they bore and they are carrying on because they want freedom they want communism yes our proletarian women that the energy, the willingness and the enthusiasm of the women comrades their courage and wisdom in times of illegality is an indication of the good prospects for the development of the work in Russia so women clearly had important roles in all aspects of organisation of political organisation in the party it's important to say that in the Bolshevik party women had the same standing as men they were not given privileged positions in the party they had equal rights and equal responsibilities as men did in the party because after all a woman communist is no different from a man communist and therefore should not be given a privileged position women played an important role in educating the party ranks in educating the party ranks as to what the methods of female life are and how to assist their needs and I guess this is a good way to explain why this was Trotsky said that in order to change the conditions of life we must learn to see them through the eyes of a woman and this is exactly what the Bolsheviks did with the Russian Revolution and the period following that women were vital in conducting work among other women that were not already part of the Bolshevik party that had not joined the ranks of the Bolshevik party and this was not feminist agitation it's important to say it wasn't just they weren't just tackling feminist they weren't conducting feminist propaganda but what they were actually doing was conducting sort of it was doing socialist agitation within groups of women which I think we can talk about that a bit more in the discussion but I think it's quite a fundamental point to understand and actually something that Lenin said which is quite funny I think he said that work among women is not feminism it's actually revolutionary expediency I like to remember that so women went into the factories they went into workplaces they went into homes and they related the experiences of the women that they were speaking to in one place with the experiences of the women that they were speaking with in another place and they educated them regarding sort of the ideas of communism they produced communist literature they had a newspaper, Comunitska and this served the purpose to provide these women with revolutionary ideas with the idea that capitalism needed to be overthrown in order to fulfill the demands of the liberation of women and also the newspaper was also used to report on the daily experiences of women in different places and obviously the women that were already in the party made every effort to involve the women that they met outside of the party ranks in the work of the Bolshevik party and the Bolsheviks emphasized at all stages the need to not not create separate women's organizations the women that were conducting this work were not to aim to achieve to create a separate organization but to to bring the women inside the Bolshevik party to conduct work inside the Bolshevik party with these women and this work was actually so successful that in 1919 a section of the Central Committee of the Bolsheviks well a section was established to be dedicated to dedicate itself entirely to agitation amongst women and I can't pronounce this very well but I think it's Zenotel and it was the name of the group of the committee that had the task of organizing amongst women and this was led by Alexandra and Inessa Armand and this was never a separate organization they really sort of carried on that work truthfully and never carried on any work outside of the party ranks but their aim was solely to bring women inside the party and the work was so successful that by 1927 they actually had issued 400,000 copies of their newspaper Komunicka and by 1928 there was 2.5 million women that were organized in socialist discussion groups so I mean I remind you of the context of extremely backward Russia as well that this happened in but the revolution I think demonstrates above all that women are an integral part of the structure of a communist society and the Bolsheviks absolutely understood this and in fact at the third congress of the third international they approved the document that stated that unless millions of women are with us it will be impossible to realize communism and I must say I think every day of the existence of the Soviet Union demonstrated that and proved their theory let's say because the involvement of women in the decision making and the involvement of women in the decision making that occurred in restructuring society guaranteed the socialization of those tasks guaranteed the exportation of the domestic tasks into society and out of the household but really what moving on to sort of like what were the achievements of the Russian Revolution and why are these important what were the achievements in relation to the women's question and why is it important to discuss what the achievements of the revolution were in relation to women well Marx and Engels said that the degree of emancipation of women is the natural measure of the degree of universal emancipation and Fourier who is a French utopian socialist also said that social progress is measured by the progress of women towards freedom and that the position of women in any social regime is a graphic indicator of the health of that regime and I think therefore it's safe to say that the Bolsheviks and the Russian Revolution definitely fulfilled every obligation that they had in relation to women and women's liberation in fact women's demands were no longer an object of struggle they were no longer a bargaining tool like we see today that is used by the ruling class but that is used by the bourgeoisie it's no longer there were no longer sort of that bargaining tool used when the working class moves into struggle but they actually formed part of the structure of the communist society they became a reality and after the Bolsheviks actually conquered power they immediately passed a series of laws that gave women formal equality liberation in a formal sense let's say Lenin was very very clear in emphasising that there was a need to build a material basis in order to support that formal liberation or to sustain that formal liberation and this was to be done by planning the economy and socialising the household tasks so in relation to poverty and health the revolution gave women the right to abortion in 1920 and this was done in order to abolish the condition of menace that women find themselves in when they're forced to have a child in a situation of poverty and Russia was actually Soviet Russia was actually the first country on earth to legalise women had a right to maternity leave for a period of up to one year pregnancy consultation centres were built maternity homes were built and that also sort of led to the fact that life expectancy amongst women more than doubled to 74 years of age by the 1970s and that was going from an average of 30 years in Zora's times a department for the protection of mother and child was appointed by Alexandra Kolentai in 1918 and women were exempt from heavy labour it was illegal to fire pregnant women and women were exempt from carrying out night shifts as Trotsky said the question of motherhood is above all a question of housing a question of having running water and a question of having a great enough food supply and the consideration having consideration for the mother is the truest and deepest way of improving the fate of the child and in fact consequently to all the changes that were implemented the child mortality fell by 1925 in the Vladmer province it was 17.5% by 1925 whereas it was 29% in 1913 and in the Moscow province it fell to 14% and it was 28% in 1913 there were free school meals for children that had milk and so on food and clothes were provided for orphans kindergartens and schools were available to all children in an indiscriminate manner now in relation to marriage women had a right to divorce and this could be requested by either party so it could be requested it's important to say that women could request the divorce as well and if the spouse was unemployed so if the woman was unemployed she was given six months subsistence and what this did was it liberated her from the economic dependence of the relationship with the man so also husband and wife were considered equal in the eyes of the law and social housing provided the role that social housing played was that it provided a home for the divorcee so if a woman divorced a man she had a place to go she wasn't tied to the home with the man civil partnership was legalized within six weeks following the revolution and in relation to freeing women from domestic slavery there were social dining rooms that were built boundaries were built public seamstresses were also built and things like prostitution were replaced with paid social production so a woman was involved in social production and didn't have to result to selling her body there was equal pay in the workplace and women were given insurance if they were to fall ill or pregnant this was all done to maintain the economic independence even if she was unable to work even if she was unable to produce socially let's say and this meant that as a whole women were no longer discriminated against because of their gender they were no longer in the workplace they were no longer discriminated against and this is because with socialism with the development of socialism the overall productivity of labour increases and this means that the amount of labour necessary to produce the necessities of life by a single individual decreases and therefore pregnancy in the case of a woman no longer hinders her ability to contribute to social production and so therefore questions such as pregnancy, questions such as gender become irrelevant in that economic situation in relation to education 49% of students were in higher education sorry 49% of students that were in higher education were women by the 1970s and by that time only Finland, France and the USA had more than 40% of women in higher education so you could say that in a way you could say that being against the third international was like being against the emancipation of women it was that's one of the main tasks of the third international now change outside of the family in relation to social production inevitably marks a change within the family as well that's mainly because the way that people live is determined by the development of the means of subsistence and the development of the social institutions in society so the social structures in society such as the family will be linked to the degree of development of the productive forces therefore this implies that families can't just be abolished it's not possible to just from one day to the other abolish the family but the family must be must be replaced with something else and in Russia what happened was in Russia there was the transference of the economic and educational functions of the family these were transferred over to society which was able to provide economic freedom for the family and in fact what this meant was that the old social ties in the family were broken and new ideological relations began to arise in the family therefore what this means is that there was no economic pressure on the woman to remain in a relationship with the man to remain inside of the household because essentially there was there was a lack you could say of a social economic pressure on the woman to produce an heir for the private property of that family and in this circumstance obviously the bond between a man or it would be possible for society to allow for a woman and a woman to be in a relationship or for a man and a man to be in a relationship because there's no there's not an economic determinant on that relationship so the bond between individuals would solely be based on mutual affection and it wouldn't have an economic base for the attachment furthermore in the Russian Revolution what was essential was that the courage and the courage of these women that went out and realized what their potential was inevitably also made itself felt in the family women went home and demanded that the men of the family would respect them in the same way that the Bolshevik party respected them that their communist comrades respected them but sort of very briefly it is important to mention what happened in the later years of the Soviet Union and that the the Russian Revolution was greatly isolated and it was isolated in conditions of extreme poverty second to the First World War the Civil War the consequences of the civil war and Russia was invaded by over 21 imperialist had over 21 imperialist invasions and there was still a great deal of cultural backwardness in Soviet Russia so this gave way to a Stalinist what we would term a Stalinist degeneration if you were at the meeting last night gave a brilliant lead-off explaining the process of this I won't go into too much detail but what is worth explaining is what the effects of this were in relation to the women's question and in relation to the family so the bankruptcy of the state caused a restoration of money relations which later on also saw forced collectivization of the peasantry and so on and this really delayed the socialization of domestic tasks therefore the bourgeois family could not be replaced and people were forced to come together again to glue together again to return home to dine because society could no longer provide that need and therefore there was a restoration of the old bourgeois family relations that took place which inevitably meant also the return home of the woman the enslavement of the woman and also sort of to further enforce this abortion was also bound in 1936 so these rights were to an extent taken away but overall it's just important to say that the process of emancipation of women was immensely slowed down now I've got to sum up so I think it's just important to say about in terms of what is our task today what can we learn from the Russian Revolution what can we learn with respect to what was achieved by the Russian Revolution because this event today is completely written off by the bourgeois you will not hear about these achievements in any university in any bourgeois text so it's important to mention these things here because it's an inconvenient truth essentially to the bourgeois to the ruling class so the Russian Revolution really demonstrated that it demonstrated to women the importance of the working class coming to power it demonstrated also the importance of women being involved in that process I think that's a major thing that we should take away from that and I think the experience of the Soviet Union taught or at least cleared away more prejudices than volumes of feminist literature could ever do but that experience alone is something that demonstrates what can be achieved and in fact it has taken capitalism a hundred years we could say now to achieve what was achieved by the Bolsheviks in just a period of two years in a condition of extreme poverty, extreme backwardness in Russia and if we look at the conditions of women today well in a great situation if we look at society through the eyes of women today women are still there are still differences in terms of pay there are still differences in terms of living conditions in different countries that have different developments of the productive forces so today the communists of today the communist international of today has a need and has to fight for progressive reforms for women to whatever extent is possible within capitalism but above all the communists of today must understand that we must first lay the material conditions that will enable for liberation of women to become a reality with today there's billions of dollars that are in private hands that could be ripped away and poured into social production that could be poured into the social structures that maintain people today and I think the main thing that we need to realise is that until the power of property of the power of capital and private property remains it will be impossible for women to achieve an actual liberation and that this will only allow her or the greatest extent that we can see is that this will only allow her to also own private property in capitalism and that women may also earn a wage and they may also have equal rights in front of bourgeois law but these rights are completely tied into the demands of the capitalist market so these demands or these rights can be taken away depending on the degree of development of the capitalist system and so therefore they're completely tied into that and so the women's question is not an extra issue to deal with when we're talking about the emancipation of the working class as a whole but it's actually a decisive issue that advances the struggle or the struggle against capitalism now I know I'm running far ahead but there's one thing when I started doing reading for this for this lead off there was something that I read that I thought this is what I have to do when I come and speak to this crowd this is what Lennon is telling me to do today so Lennon says that the thesis must clearly point out that real freedom for women is possible only through communism the inseparable connection between the social and human position of women and private property in the means of production must be strongly brought out that will draw clear and irradicable line of distinction between our policy and feminism and it will also supply the basis for regarding the women's question as a part of the social question of the workers problem and so bind it firmly to the proletarian class struggle and the revolution the communist women's movement must itself be a mass movement a part of the general mass movement not only of the proletariat but of all the exploited and oppressed all the victims of capitalism or any other misery in that lies its significance for the class struggles of the proletariat and for its historic co-creation communist society we can rightly be proud of the fact that in the party in the communist international we have the flower of revolutionary women kind but that is not enough we must win over to our side the millions of working women in the towns and villages win them for our struggles and in particular for the communist transformation of society there can be no real mass movement without women so I hope this is what I have in some way relate to you and I hope that all the women in this room that have not yet our fellow comrade men in the fight for our emancipation choose to do so today thank you