Accueil > 20- ENGLISH - MATERIAL AND REVOLUTION > Capitalism is incompatible with women’s freedom…
Capitalism is incompatible with women’s freedom…
lundi 15 juin 2026, par ,
Decaying, subsidized capitalism, more antisocial and bloody than ever, is even more incompatible with women’s freedom…
With the new period of systemic collapse, social and political crisis, and war, women, more than ever victims of oppression, repression, and discrimination, are being called upon to lead revolutions.
Capitalism has never been compatible with women’s freedom, and it is less so than ever as it collapses…
Violence against women is not decreasing : it is increasing !!!
https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article5414
https://www.vivamagazine.fr/les-violences-faites-aux-femmes-ne-baissent-pas/
The oppression of women is not something that happened in the past or elsewhere : it is happening now and here at home !
https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article1594
Women, more than ever victims in rich countries as well as in poor countries…
https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article2537
http://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article2509
Where women are particularly attacked, raped, harassed : Mexico, India, South Africa, but also USA, England, Sweden, France....
https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article2584
A comforting lie circulates in Western bourgeois "democracy" : that women are increasingly free, recognized, protected, and equal to men. The opposite is true !
https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article2222
Crimes against humanity… specifically against women, are not a thing of the past !!!
https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article4397
https://www.wsws.org/fr/articles/2019/06/22/faut-j22.html
https://www.wsws.org/fr/articles/2021/11/16/zvpq-n16.html
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meurtres_et_disparitions_de_femmes_autochtones_aux_%C3%89tats-Unis
Long live the revolt against rape and harassment of women !
https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article2583
Enough with the oppression of women !
https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article4185
The capitalist world’s new offensive against women
https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article3363
Women’s liberation has never come and will never come from bourgeois institutions.
https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article2931
Women are more oppressed as a result of the collapse of the system…
https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article2545
During the pandemic and economic collapse, violence against women and children has increased.
https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article6100
Patriarchy and capitalism reinforce the oppression of women…
More than ever, patriarchy is the instrument of war of big capital against women and against the people…
https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article5352
https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article3785
Women are victims of all religions, not just Islam…
https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article167
https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article1038
http://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article1037
All religions and all bourgeois states are united against women !!!
https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article4409
Women, victims of all police forces in the world…
https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article5507
Women, the most radical and the most rebellious…
Women in revolt... around the world
https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article1970
When women rise up, they are at the forefront of the exploited and oppressed.
https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article5350
Women at the forefront of revolutions…
https://www.challenges.fr/france/les-femmes-sont-au-coeur-du-mouvement-des-gilets-jaunes_631423
https://www.matierevolution.org/spip.php?article6441
Women workers and workers’ wives in struggle all over the world
https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?breve696
Domestic workers are fed up with being treated as domestic slaves and sex slaves
https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?breve520
Women are doubly exploited…
https://www.marxiste.org/theorie/oppressions/2366-femme-et-salariee-doublement-exploitee
The working woman is not more free
https://www.streetpress.com/sujet/1491840909-le-travail-libere-femme-idee-de-riches
Building socialism involves emancipating women and protecting mothers
https://www.marxists.org/francais/trotsky/oeuvres/1925/12/lt19251200.htm
When women get involved, it’s a social revolution…
https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article254
The fight against the oppression of women is inseparable from social revolution
https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article256
Oppressed women and exploited workers, together for the overthrow of capitalism !
https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article6903
In Iran, as in France and elsewhere, the liberation of women and the liberation of the exploited are inseparable.
https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article6985
https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article6946
Feminism and class struggles
https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article7405
The escalating world war is also a war against women and children...
https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article7467
https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article7694
Workers, women and youth of the world, let us not accept being cannon fodder in the next global slaughter of an exploitative system on its last legs !
https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article7636
Decaying, subsidized capitalism, more antisocial and bloody than ever, is even more incompatible with women’s freedom…
To liberate themselves, women have no choice but to overthrow the system of exploitation and unite with the proletariat to achieve this…
Home > 11- Book Eleven : WOMEN - AGAINST OPPRESSION > The liberation of women has never come and will never come from (…)
Women’s liberation has never come and will never come from bourgeois institutions.
Sunday, October 20, 2013 , by Robert Paris
Trotsky wrote : "Without a doubt, sexual oppression is an important means of enslaving man. As long as there is oppression, there can be no true freedom. The family, as a bourgeois institution, is completely obsolete. We must talk more about this instrument..."
Lenin replied : "...And not only the family. All prohibitions on sexuality must be abolished... We can learn from the suffragettes : even the prohibition of homosexual love must be abolished."
cited by W. Reich in his work "The Sexual Revolution"
For a number of women’s rights activists, it is the State that must decide in favor of women’s rights, through legislation adopted by parliamentary chambers that enact laws which the State apparatus should then enforce. History has not shown this type of process. It is women themselves who have asserted their rights, not the legislature that has finally understood that women are within their rights. Neither since the "rule of law" of the French Republic nor before have legislators ever independently recognized the validity of women’s demands. When the State decides to issue a law supposedly in favor of these rights, it always signifies social setbacks elsewhere, or hypocrisy in the law itself, its implementing decrees, and the way the State apparatus applies it. The State is the antithesis of freedom, and this is not only true with regard to women. The state can exploit the women’s issue to pit men against women and thus divert attention from the social question. Or it can feign support for women, again to divide and further exacerbate tensions. It depends on the political and social circumstances.
While we may occasionally observe a small concession from the State towards women, we notice, after a certain time, that it has served to pave the way for other attacks, either from women or from the other side. And the State’s policy is necessarily to ensnare women and men within the social and political system, thus trapping them.
It is important to first recognize that even the most modern capitalist bourgeois society cannot do without the divisions between men and women and the oppression of women, even if it hypocritically claims the opposite. Western societies certainly practice a feminine form of hypocrisy, but women gain nothing from it. The same politicians who pass laws on gender equality are still essentially "men" politicians. Yet, it is common practice to claim that attacks on women’s rights only come from poor, non-Western countries, preferably Muslim ones, according to the propaganda disseminated to us daily.
The reality is very different : Western societies, far from liberating women, actually oppress, despise, and exploit them in a particular way. Women in wealthy Western countries are subjected to a truly violent form of racism, beginning with propaganda claiming that "all women are whores," that those who are raped brought it on themselves, and that women are simply manipulating and subversive.
It is already remarkable that this country, which claims to be the birthplace of the great French Revolution, is incapable of acknowledging the role of women in the revolutionary action that brought an end to feudalism, the monarchy, religious oppression, and medieval backwardness. Virtually no one in France can name a single female politician who played a major role in the French Revolution, and yet how many great names there were among the revolutionary women of that era !
However, the legislators who emerged from the French Revolution never had the slightest intention of relying on this revolutionary role of women to grant them, by law, the slightest political right to speak ; quite the contrary !
The civil and political laws of the Republic were clearly legislation in favour of property owners, the only ones with the right to vote and stand for election, and the only property owners that the republic recognized were men….
The French Revolution, which proclaimed the "rights of the citizen," did not in any way recognize the rights of women, since they were in fact the property of their husbands, in order to ensure that the inheritance remained within the descendants…
Bourgeois marriage made women into mere property, the producers of offspring, and servants of men. Confined to the role of eternal second, they had neither the right to practice important professions such as doctor, surgeon, or professor, nor the right to own and run businesses, nor the right to speak out in politics or to intervene in laws and the State.
The triumphant bourgeois society had perfectly seen the revolutionary character of women and, precisely because their rights had been won, the bourgeoisie no longer wanted to experience social revolutions….
If, during the revolution, bourgeois revolutionaries were already fighting tooth and nail to silence revolutionary women, afterwards it was the great era of the institutionalization of the oppression of women…
Even during the Middle Ages, the rise of the bourgeoisie coincided with a decline in freedoms, particularly women’s rights. The bourgeoisie added its own exploitation and oppression to all those imposed by feudal law and oppressive lords. It was with the rise of the bourgeoisie and the end of the Middle Ages that a major campaign against free women, labeled witches, was launched. See "the witch hunts."
Even this campaign against free women, branded as whores and witches, exploited women’s feelings, their fear that other women would seduce their husbands, steal from them, or cast spells on them. The state and institutions of the time, particularly religious ones, organized deception and murder and gave them a legal framework… These crimes were committed in the name of defending the very interests of women and couples…
The past has seen many ways of enslaving and deceiving women. There was the cult of Mary which, under the pretext of highlighting the role of the woman who gives birth and protects her, placing her at the very top of social and religious recognition, transformed women into mere procreators. The purity of the "virgin" who had produced a child without sleeping with a man (!!!) was used to denounce women’s sexual freedom and their right to make love for pleasure. The laws of bourgeois marriage, under the pretext of ensuring the future of children, decreed that the woman was a minor, incapable of managing the household affairs on her own, while the man was destined to do so…
The result : for decades, it would be difficult to name a single woman who had contributed as a writer, professor, doctor, surgeon, artist, or who had advanced any field whatsoever. Delivering babies—the midwife—or cleaning the sick—the nurse or the nursing assistant—these were the very few areas in which women could work. Even apothecaries and dentists had to be men. This means that at least half of all talent, discoveries, progress, and arts were systematically destroyed. Since the male segment of society was primarily concerned with warfare, hunting, and feudal oppression, it is far more than half of human thought and creation that was destroyed while women’s aspirations for freedom were systematically silenced.
Let us remember that a woman who refused the marriage that was being imposed upon her could be locked up in convent-prisons.
For centuries, under the domination of Western feudalism and then the bourgeoisie, female talents were crushed, discredited, stifled, thrown in the trash, and condemned to disrepute and opprobrium…
The little that has come to light shows us that these talents did indeed exist despite the great efforts to convince women that this was not their role.
The violence of the remarks made by male "good minds" towards women is sometimes surprising when one quotes numerous French authors, for example.
This ignores the fact that the role of these authors, in disseminating the dominant ideology, was to discredit women…
The dominant bourgeoisie, far from removing these behaviors from the Middle Ages, has confined women to a secondary role, not to say worse.
His democratic discourse stopped at the boundaries of gender. One only has to look at how long it took Western bourgeoisies to grant women the right to vote.
It is also important to understand that this was not done at all out of democratic concern or because of an awareness of injustices, but to make the acceptance of the unjust social order more palatable after a particularly atrocious world war in which women were the main heads of the household while the men were at war….
To create the illusion of openness at the end of World War II, bourgeois society needed to include women in elections. The initial aim was to make people believe that democratic elections would henceforth be the true means of expressing popular aspirations—a blatant lie and a blatant deception. And we have seen that women’s suffrage, far from addressing women’s rights, only served to solidify the existing power structure, including the prevailing machismo, both politically and socially.
Just as, in theory, a proletarian’s vote was supposed to be equal to a capitalist’s vote in Western bourgeois democratic society, women’s suffrage was presented as equal to men’s. Well, this changed nothing in the real lives of women in any concrete way, any more than it changed the lives of the proletariat ! Women may have voted, but it did nothing to diminish their devaluation, their inferior status, the degradation of their image, the contempt and violence they endure, or even their political inferiority. For example, the image in the vocabulary
Class domination requires, more than ever, diversions such as racism against women, against foreigners, against young people, against other religions, etc. Regarding male/female relations, bourgeois society continues to offer men the possibility of having an exploited woman at home, the right to oppress others as well, even if they are proletarians. There is always someone more exploited than the exploited, more oppressed than the oppressed, more foreign than the foreigner : his wife.
The bourgeoisie, conceiving of everything through the lens of private property, also conceived of male/female relations through this lens. It is no coincidence that marriage plays such a significant role in bourgeois thought and that joint or separate property ownership is central to marriage, with its various types of "marriage contracts" : marriage is a bourgeois contract…
The other remarkable point is the importance the bourgeoisie attaches to the defender of its general interests : the bourgeois state. Here again, there is no marriage without state intervention. One can conceive, in the bourgeois sense, of a marriage without religion, but no marriage between two individuals without state intervention. What makes the relationship between two people recognized is the act of appearing before the mayor and being registered by the state… In short, no private aspect whatsoever, even though bourgeois society prides itself on being the epitome of individual liberty !
Marriage is therefore a commercial transaction between two individuals, which also involves their shared assets, from the property they may acquire to the children they may have. Everything is conceived within the framework of private property… Everything is marked by the idea of future inheritances, potential disputes between co-owners, etc.
Individuals who believe themselves to be free and independent of any predetermination are caught up in these bourgeois criteria without even realizing it. Even if many people no longer marry, they don’t necessarily see or aren’t shocked by the fact that marriage is conceived primarily as a business relationship.
This is the whole strength of bourgeois democracy : to make modern slaves, the proletariat, believe that they are free and act only in their own interest when they are led to act only in the interest of capitalist society.
This is striking in the context of labor relations, since it is the exploited worker who is forced to chase after their exploitation. But it is equally striking in the context of male/female relationships, which are just as determined by the interests of the exploiters, even if those involved are unaware of it.
Women themselves are often led to view marriage as a safer and more lasting alliance, more secure if there are children, to the point that couples who have not been married for many years sometimes get married when they have children born.
However, it is obvious that marriage in no way guarantees a relationship or the future of the children. On the other hand, the bourgeois order attaches great importance to the number of couples who "go through the mayor," in fact, who are recognized by the bourgeois state…
And this marriage certainly wasn’t arranged for the woman’s security. Just look at how, for many years, the woman within the couple didn’t have access to the bank account, while it was the husbands who most often squandered the family’s money !
The hypocrisy of bourgeois society is to pretend that everything is done for the good of the individual and his personal success when everything is done to make him chained to the social order, including making the wife put pressure on the husband so that he does not demand too much at work and does not get involved in politics "so as not to take risks for the children".
Hypocrisy has only grown in recent years with a dominant discourse that calls for equality between men and women as much as it calls for "sustainable development," and with just as much bad faith…
Women who are raped or beaten (including by their husbands) are no better received at police stations, nor are they better protected or treated. Maternity wards are far from being shielded from austerity measures. Abortion clinics are severely understaffed and under-resourced. Those who exert moral and physical pressure against the right to abortion and contraception are not challenged by the bourgeois state, its police, or its justice system. Social inequalities, of course, persist. Not to mention the education system, which discriminates between men and women from a young age.
The bourgeoisie and its supposedly democratic state have not liberated women, neither in the West nor elsewhere, nor in a Christian, Jewish, Protestant, Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, or Muslim world…
Westerners who claim to be outraged by the plight of women in poor countries are equally hypocritical. Were they outraged when these countries were part of Western colonial empires ? Why didn’t they then use colonial domination to fight colonial oppression ? Have we ever heard of a Western colonizer fighting harems, female genital mutilation, the sale of women and children, the abduction of women, the repudiation of women, and other rotten "traditions" when these regions were under colonial rule ? Certainly not !
And today, have we heard of a Western state condemning these practices when the dictatorial regime imposing them is a friend of Western governments, as is the case with Saudi Arabia ? Never !
Have we heard that France has used its recent popularity in Mali, its military occupation, or its close ties to the new government to combat female genital mutilation in Mali ? Certainly not ! And everyone knows that French imperialism only denounced the plight of Malian women under the military occupation by Islamist armed groups in the north to justify its military intervention.
Could French imperialism be concerned about the fate of women and, at the same time, exploit the region for its uranium, seriously contaminating nearby villages, men, women and children, as a result of this exploitation, as recalled by a recent demonstration against the French nuclear trust Areva ?
In Western countries, there is a false impression that all authorities—government, justice system, police, administration, parliaments, city halls, etc.—are fully mobilized to protect women. But violence against women is by no means declining in the West ; quite the opposite. Prostitution, far from decreasing, is on the rise, utilizing all the latest technologies, such as the internet.
Of course, everyone remembers that the bourgeois state accepted the right to abortion and contraception. Simone Veil (a right-wing political leader and minister at the time, not to be confused with the revolutionary mystic Simone Weil) is constantly glorified for this. But abortion (which led to the guillotine not so long ago in France) would never have been legalized if women and men hadn’t had the courage to give their names and declare, "I have performed abortions !"
Where is the concern for the fate of women when families of undocumented immigrants, Roma, and other immigrants are deported ? Where is the concern for the fate of women when bourgeois states around the world reduce their aid to poor countries, particularly cutting aid to women and children ? Where is the concern for the fate of women in the numerous wars waged by Western countries ? For example, in Afghanistan, where these countries claimed to be intervening militarily to defend women against the Taliban, and where they are now preparing to bring the Taliban back to power after massacring civilians, destroying, and bombing under the pretext of liberation… Where is the concern for the fate of women when Western countries support the dictatorships of the oil principalities against the Arab Spring ? And so on…
Nowhere in the world have bourgeois states mobilized for women, even when they suffer horrific atrocities. No action was taken by the Mexican authorities to protect the murdered women of Juarez. No action was taken by the Indian state in the face of the increasing number of rapes. See India and Women
On the contrary, with the crisis of bourgeois domination over the world following the economic collapse of 2007-2008, the ruling classes are considering all means of increasing violent opposition, even civil wars, between segments of the poor population, and the contempt for women is one of the ways to promote fascism… See : The oppression of women is worsening worldwide, in connection with the capitalist collapse that began in 2007
The more capitalist domination of the world appears threatened to the ruling classes, the more they will reactivate hatred, contempt, and violence against women.
Terrorizing women is a key way to prevent social anger from turning into social revolution. Just look at how the Algerian ruling classes extricated themselves from the revolutionary wave that began in 1988 by supporting the development of a fundamentalist movement violently hostile to women, before turning the country into a bloodbath, ostensibly to fight these same Islamists, but in reality to preserve the bourgeois military dictatorship.
The ruling classes have very good reason to fear women particularly in this situation of destabilization of capitalist society. Every era of social revolution has seen women at the forefront of the revolution : from the French Revolution to the Paris Commune and the October Revolution, not to mention the Spanish Revolution…
The future of the world depends on the common struggle of women, young people, and the working class…