Part three, Nasser Paydar
Gender discrimination, patriarchy, and inequality between men and women are twin phenomena of class society, whereas movements for women’s rights against inequality emerged from the flourishing era of the labour movement. The fact that bourgeois intellectual and political circles have based on the same legal criteria associated with capitalist exploitation shown alignment with certain reformist demands of women here and there merely reflects a tactical retreat in the face of pressure from the struggles and expectations of the working class. The history of capitalism is everywhere a history of the double exploitation of women a history of harnessing pregnant women to heavy carts, chaining young girls to carpet looms in dark hovels, and, at best, treating the female population as a source of cheap, inferior labour power. Even when the bourgeoisie spoke of so-called “human rights” while battling feudalism and archaic medieval relations, it remained fiercely hostile toward any independent expression of women’s lives, any social engagement, or any cry of protest against the severity of their exploitation and deprivation. The banner of women’s liberation is inseparable from the banner of humanity’s liberation from the yoke of wage slavery; it was the workers who raised this banner high over human life. One hundred and forty years ago, the Paris Commune while demonstrating the proletariat’s first great historical uprising to shatter the chains of wage slavery also embodied the magnificent epic of dismantling gender discrimination and the disenfranchisement of women. Just as the Commune represented the working masses’ offensive against the exploitation and misery stemming from capitalist relations, it also embodied the working class’s protest against gender discrimination and the double oppression of women. In other words, the class struggle unfolding within the Commune uprising while manifesting the battle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie over the abolition or perpetuation of wage slavery also reflected the confrontation between these two hostile camps regarding women’s rights. Setting aside mere rhetoric, one can observe this reality by examining the stances taken on one side, the threats issued by the representatives of capital, and on the other, the defiant messages of the proletariat during those historic days of the Commune. The *Times-Tribune*, a mouthpiece for bourgeois policies at the time, expressed utter loathing for any assertion of women’s agency; with staggering insolence, it wrote regarding the heroic female Communards: “If the French nation consisted only of women, what a terrible nation it would turn out to be!” In stark contrast to this misogynistic class brutality of the bourgeoisie, the working women of Paris composed the most stirring and beautiful epics of gender equality amidst their heroic struggle against wage slavery. Louise Michel, a prominent communist who played a pivotal role in organizing the female Communards, cried out as she faced the firing squad of capital’s henchmen with a profound, burning hatred for all forms of exploitation, oppression, and inequality:
“I am accused of having collaborated with the Commune. Undoubtedly, that is true. Moreover, I take pride in having been one of the champions of the Commune’s cause; for the Commune sought, above all else, the social revolution and the social revolution is my dearest aspiration. Since it appears that any heart beating for freedom earns nothing but a bullet, I, too, claim my share. If you leave me free, my cry for vengeance will never be silenced.” Communard women had realized that eradicating the true roots of their misery and manifold exploitation was ultimately bound up with dismantling class society and its material foundation: wage labour. Since then, in every corner of the globe, women’s success in mitigating gender oppression and their own double exploitation has been directly proportional to the working class’s capacity for struggle and its offensive power against capital.
The history of the labour movement is, in general, also a history of the struggle to eliminate the dual exploitation and gender-based oppression of women; yet, to this day, we witness the most atrocious forms of gender apartheid against women across the capitalist world. In a vast number of societies, virtually all medieval forms of female disenfranchisement remain in force. In these countries and, for instance, throughout the Islamic world women are deprived of their most basic human rights. Women are compelled to dress as if in the era of slavery. They lack the right to marry or choose a spouse without the permission of parents or even other male family elders. They inherit only half as much as men, and in many regions, they are forced to gift even that half to the family’s male offspring. They are strictly prohibited from any form of free human contact or conversation with men. In all legal matters, they are regarded as weak and deficient beings. They are barred from serving as judges, and in courts of law, their testimony carries only half the weight of a man’s. Women have no right to divorce, whereas a man may divorce his wife whenever he chooses, without consulting her. In the event of a separation, the woman receives no share of the joint family assets. A divorced woman is deprived of any right to the custody or guardianship of her children; even if her ex-husband dies, the child is not entrusted to her instead, a male heir with legal entitlement assumes responsibility for the child’s care. A woman has no right to work, choose her profession, travel, or leave the house without her husband’s permission. Women are prohibited from any free or independent presence in public gatherings or places where men are present. All men other than her husband are considered *Na-Mahram* (unrelated males) and a form of taboo; a woman is required to conceal her head, face, eyes, and entire body including even her fingernails and hair from them. Any woman who fails to submit to these barbaric rules is subjected to the severest punishments. A woman or girl who does not cover her hair and fingernails from unrelated men must be publicly flogged to the point of death by religious enforcers. If a woman engages in sexual intercourse with a man other than her husband, she is invariably stoned to death in public.
These are merely examples of the barbaric religious and legal regulations prevailing in parts of the capitalist world rules and decrees imposed upon women with utter brutality on a daily basis in countries such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and Algeria. Yet, all of this represents only a fraction of the disenfranchisement and horrific living conditions women face in these societies. Within the family, in society at large, and across social norms and culture, a woman is by no means regarded as an equal human being possessing an independent legal and personal identity. She is routinely viewed as a helpless, weak, and intellectually deficient creature someone who, at best, merits pity, yet who at the slightest misstep deserves a beating. Medieval-style patriarchy reigns supreme, exerting its full force over every aspect and corner of family and social life in these countries. A woman plays the role of a mere servant to her husband; her duties generally consist of cooking, child-rearing, and cleaning. She has no right to make decisions or even offer an opinion regarding shared family matters. She is subjected to punishment by her husband for various pretexts. Fundamentally, the man is regarded as her owner and master, meaning she has no right to do anything without his permission. Under the prevailing domestic division of labour, she bears the burden of all arduous physical tasks yet possesses no right to make decisions or exercise intellectual input regarding the management of the household. A man has the right to take another wife or wives whenever he chooses, without consulting her. All these pressures, acts of oppression, forms of discrimination, and instances of savage, shocking treatment inflicted upon women in these societies are preserved and reproduced entirely and without abatement by capitalism. The bourgeoisie exploits this lack of rights on a daily basis as a mechanism to intensify the exploitation of the working class and perpetuate wage slavery.
Intellectual representatives of capitalism including the opposition that champions modernism and bourgeois secularism insist on seeking the source of this double exploitation, these crimes, and this barbarism outside the “sacred realm” of capital, attributing them entirely to the fetid remnants of the culture and traditions of bygone eras. This analysis is as flawed and unscientific as, for instance, interpreting the land rent of mechanized capitalist agribusinesses as a phenomenon of feudal economics. The facts that women’s disenfranchisement or double oppression existed with great intensity and scope in past historical periods, that these phenomena originated in earlier modes of production, and that the methods of their enforcement in contemporary societies bear a striking resemblance to the era of medieval dominance all these points are valid; there is no doubt about their accuracy. The fundamental issue, however, is that today, all these forms of misogyny, disenfranchisement, and criminality are utilized by capitalism on a vast scale, serving as mechanisms or crutches for the system’s survival and for intensifying the exploitation of workers. Even the most heinous feudal forms of patriarchy prevalent in these countries are not isolated, extinct relics of the past; rather, they constitute cultural, social, civil, or customary institutions that are fully integrated into the social and legal structure of capitalism. It is not due to the remnants of feudal culture that millions of Iranian women and hundreds of millions of women across Asia, Africa, and Latin America are condemned to the humiliating status of domestic servitude and menial labour within the confines of the home; on the contrary, it is the imperatives of value creation and capitalist profitability in the twenty-first century that have imposed housework, childcare, and scores of other gruelling tasks upon this vast population as forms of forced, unpaid labour. Patriarchy casts a heavy, sinister shadow over women in these countries because, trapped under the yoke of capitalist crimes, exploitation, and wretched disenfranchisement, they face no path toward free social development. Archaic religious laws relics of the era of slavery have devastated the lives and destinies of hundreds of millions of women in these nations because the capitalist system does not seek to dispel catastrophic religious delusions; on the contrary, it preserves and employs them as mechanisms to reproduce the conditions for the reproduction of social capital. For intellectual representatives of both the Left and Right wings of capital, attributing the gender apartheid and agonizing disenfranchisement of women in these countries to “ancient culture,” political underdevelopment, and the like is merely an attempt to obscure the true roots of this lack of rights, inequality, and misogyny. Ancient culture and the lack of civil and political development in these countries are not phenomena incongruous with capitalist production; rather, they are integral parts of the conditions required for the reproduction and profitability of social capital.
Let us turn to the status of women in other parts of the capitalist world to countries that, according to the analyses of bourgeois thinkers, lack nothing in terms of civil and political development or cultural refinement. Undoubtedly, the deprivation or subordination of women in these countries is not as severe as in the former societies; yet this is solely because, at a specific historical juncture, the proletariat in these societies exerted greater power in the struggle against capitalism. Here, women are not compelled to wear the *chador*, veil, or shawl; they are free to choose their own spouses, possess the right to vote, and participate in political affairs. They are neither flogged for conversing with men nor stoned for engaging in sexual relations with others. These are significant differences distinguishing the status of women in this region from that of their counterparts in other parts of the capitalist world. Nevertheless, women in these countries still endure the stark pressures of gender-based inequality and discrimination. Generally, they receive unequal wages for work equal to that of men, and their presence in the sphere of social decision-making is far weaker and less perceptible. They are frequently employed in low-status, arduous jobs. They constitute a far larger share of the unemployed population than men and are the first to fall victim whenever jobs are cut. They bear the primary burden of child-rearing and perform the majority of household chores. A significant percentage of women even in the most advanced nations—are subjected to physical abuse by their husbands; in these very countries, a number of them are beaten to death by their spouses each year.
The exploitation and dual gender-based oppression of women are inevitable phenomena of capitalist society as a whole. In a society where human worth, status, dignity, and rights are determined entirely by the “law of value” and the expenditure of labour power in the production of surplus value, there can be no possibility of eradicating any form of discrimination or inequality unless the fundamental pillars of wage slavery are challenged by the socialist indictment of the proletariat.
The notion that patriarchy or various forms of social discrimination such as racial, ethnic, or religious oppression can be brought to an end while capitalist relations persist is utterly misleading; it is a manifestation of the process by which the dominant capitalist ideology and culture distort material realities. Gender discrimination between men and women in capitalist society is an integral part of the routine process of capital valorisation and one of its legal and civil imperatives. It is not the individuals’ gender itself that compels capital to discriminate against women; rather, it is the differing positions individuals occupy in the production of surplus value and profit that cause one to be prioritized over the other. In this context, it is not the essence of patriarchy that capital seeks to preserve and sustain; rather, it is the process of capital accumulation and profit generation that finds its necessary social mechanisms and instruments within the persistence of patriarchy. Within capitalist “civilization,” individuals whether men or women derive their status as citizens and their civil and legal identities from the roles they play in generating surplus value or in upholding capital’s productive and political order. Had capital been able to draw the entire global workforce into wage labour, it likely would have shown no insistence on confining women to the home, nor would it have loudly extolled the virtues of the “warm embrace” and “tender lap” of motherhood. Indeed, whenever the market’s demand for labour rises even briefly representatives of capital, great and small, immediately shed crocodile tears, cloaking themselves in the rhetoric of feminism and the exaltation of women. Under such conditions, the mass recruitment of women into the capitalist labour market is trumpeted across all media and platforms, accompanied by a barrage of political philosophies, legal arguments, and countless maxims, scriptural verses, and rationalizations. Yet, capital is incapable of carrying out such a process.
Capitalism invariably and inevitably carries with it a vast contingent of the unemployed, serving as a reserve army of labour. This immense army whose numbers globally exceed several hundred million and even surpass a billion is not composed solely of dispossessed rural inhabitants or workers displaced from industries and workplaces. The vast masses of housewives across various nations also constitute its subterranean or concealed segment. Women’s confinement to the home and their engagement in domestic labour along with the persistence and even expansion of such work within capitalist society precisely reflect the inherent contradiction of capital and the natural mechanism of this mode of production: a system that exploits the unpaid labour of hundreds of millions of workers while offloading the cost of their subsistence onto the shoulders of the employed workforce.
According to the conditions of capital accumulation and the pressure on Yemen from the labour movement, the extent of this homesteading and homesteading in more advanced capitalist countries is less than Asian, Latin American or African societies. But even in the most advanced of these countries, with every capitalist crisis, representatives of the right and left of capital, from conservative to liberal and social democrats, shed tears of compassion on German, Swedish, French and English children! They preach about the importance of replacing kindergartens by stay-at-home mothers! Psychologists and their educational and educational researchers, at the expense of workers, store a mountain of research results, to explain the effect of the warm embrace and loving lap of mothers on the intellectual development of children. Universities, schools, newspapers, radio and television are bombarded from all sides, in order to plant the legendary miracle of the preference of mothers over the kindergarten environment in the minds of the masses of the society. Parties and thinkers and researchers who, in the conditions of the prosperity of capitalism and the need of capital for the labour force, spoke with thousands of words about the physical and mental benefits of women entering the labour market and the harms of staying at home, suddenly with the onset of the crisis, they remembered the deep spiritual needs of children falling into the loving arms of mothers, and in this way, their sensitive and active conscience turned away from western secular civilization to a spiritual feeling and the awe of divine revelation. It goes through!! Capital does not understand men and women, humanity, rights, and any human standards and rules. What capital knows best is the labour power it purchases and consumes directly or indirectly in its process of value creation. Capital always requires a specific quantity of labour power; anything beyond that constitutes the reserve army of labour. Women are the most suitable component of this army, as their confinement to the home can, under certain conditions, serve as an effective lever to increase surplus value or prevent its decline. While receiving no remuneration from capital, women confined to the home raise the labour power required by the capitalist system free of charge. They relieve the capitalist state of the cost of childcare; through their domestic labour, they lower the cost of reproducing the employed workforce, thereby boosting capital’s profits.
When women’s domestic labour or confinement to the home becomes an integral link in the social order of capital, and when employment, education, professional expertise, and all other facets of human life become subordinate to the processes of capital accumulation and profit generation, it is entirely natural that the education of women particularly in less developed capitalist societies occupies a far less significant position compared to that of men. The specific economic and social status that women acquire amidst this lack of rights as subordinate beings or a “second sex” in turn solidifies the foundations of patriarchy in the relationship between men and women. At the same time, this reinforces the basis upon which capitalism exploits medieval traditions, conventions, and institutions as levers and mechanisms to boost profits. By its very nature, capital is compatible with patriarchy and the status of women as a “second sex” deprived of rights; consequently, it reshapes the legal, religious, customary, and cultural legacies of past historical formations which serve as vehicles and justifications for patriarchy to align with the imperatives of its own expansion within the new social order.
Socialism is the only social system that truly champions the eradication of patriarchy and the dismantling of all forms of inequality between men and women. To eliminate gender inequality from society and the world, the root causes of human inequality in general must be uprooted a task that only socialism, through the abolition of wage labour, can accomplish. The socialist organization of labour embodies a form of social relationship wherein all members of society regardless of gender participate entirely voluntarily in managing economic and social affairs, in accordance with their inclinations and abilities, and without distinction. When the goal of production and labour is to ensure a life of maximum freedom, self-sufficiency, and prosperity for all; when the direct, effective, and free participation of every individual in planning social production and labour is an unquestionable right for every man and woman; when everyone voluntarily undertakes a share of the work required by society solely according to their capacity; and when the ultimate aim of production and labour is the flourishing and liberation of the human being then no grounds remain for discrimination between men and women.
Socialism addresses all social affairs and responsibilities stemming from women’s biological characteristics by incorporating them into social labour planning prioritizing women’s interests and upholding equality for all members of society across every sphere. Pregnancy, breastfeeding, child-rearing, and similar activities become integral parts of socialist social labour. The work of a woman who is breastfeeding or pregnant is deemed just as essential to society as the work of a surgeon or any other form of social labour; it is in this context that the “double burden” placed on women in society is eliminated.
Socialism fundamentally transforms the existing family an institution that enforces capitalist civil order, serves as a tool for intensifying the exploitation of labour by capital, and acts as a site for the exploitation and compounded disenfranchisement of women under the yoke of wage slavery. It abolishes all forms of economic dependency whether of woman upon man, man upon woman, or children upon their parents and puts an end to domestic labour, thereby eradicating the material basis for the double burden borne by women.