Marxism and daily issues of the women’s issue

This model offers the most sophisticated, persuasive and straightforward model for examining social change.

By working within working class movements the other issues regarding most democratic movements become embedded within the struggle for equality.

Materialism: begins with control over access of the power to operate and control the resources necessary for life is the roots of exploitation, hierarchy and domination. Working class women who are forced to work outside the home may have their own source of income, but are still dependent upon a job for that income. Like men then they reliant on an employer for that work. It is the continuing search for cheap labor that in part defines the issue of why on average women traditionally got paid less then men of equal skill levels. This created a double exploitation both as workers and as women workers. Most poor women work for survival, and not personal enrichment. Reduced to the lowest common dominator, the unskilled workingwomen is degraded to little more than an underpaid machine. If she has children they to suffer because like a man at work she is not at home, and at home she is exhausted and chastened by her depleted silhouette. She finds the origins of liberation in union movement as women’s issues can, and should be incorporated into the larger labor movement.

As this the relationship to resources changes the relationship between groups also changes. As women in the work force become both leaders and rank and file activists there comes a real possibility that gender specific issues can be included in the larger struggle. Family issues like living wage, childcare or birth control are central to working class concerns. Issues like respect, comparable wage, opportunities for education and skills upgrading must also be included.

Beyond the job site, the economy is global in its origins. Marxism not looks at the relations of capital to labor on the shop floor level, but capitalism in the search for cheap wages and resources and investment opportunities has always from the earliest days of the industrial revolution been global in nature. Industrial and financial capital building upon mercantile capital has always been about World Empire.

Nationalism is limiting in the effort leading to liberation because it leads to xenophobia and exploitation within a group between those who control the resources and those who are dependent on those who do.  National liberation solves that problem by a two-stage revolution. First, it is anti-colonial, anti-imperialist and anti-neocolonial. Second, class struggle moves to the forefront.

Radical social organizations in the larger anticolonial movements have had direct participation of women as founding members and central players. Both types of Anarchism Communist and Syndicalist as well as Revolutionary Marxism women characters played an essential, valuable and undisputable part. The women’s issue is not only moral but it is imposed upon the circumstances out of necessity. We need all the fighters we can get. Thus, as the Wobblies use to say we do not put the women the front of the fight, we do not hold the back.

Gender issues are both central and embedded in class issues. Capitalist class, professional class, and working class women face different issues within each class.