Women and the Liberation of Labor

Women are at the forefront of the workers struggle for liberation.

Within recent history the mass of the world’s women have won more civil liberties than any other time in history. There are still many places where the legacy of old types of oppression of women persist, but these are receding as the process of global industrialization and commercialized divisions of labor have appeared across the world; dying are the types of brutal patriarchy that were the facets of much of “civilization”.

Where civil liberty of women has arisen as legal patriarchy has been extinguished, it has crafted a world that has turned the gendered division of the private sphere into those of division of capitalist industry. Former modes of gendered reproductive private work are now commercialized business operations that exploit labor on a mass scale. Meanwhile women are beginning to break into those industries that have been long secluded to the sphere of “men’s work”. The hypocrisy of course is that while the whole time women have been brought deeper into capitalist exploitation, they were discounted from true citizenship. Their labor was integrated for profit but they as citizens were not.

The whole struggle for full citizenship for the masses of people has been a painfully slow enterprise. Class democracy has always been class tyranny. The elders of Greece sat above their helot slaves. The founding fathers over their chattel. But women have been sat over and against by even the lowliest peasant. The creation of class society in ancient times brought with it dispossession of women’s labor and personhood into property. The expropriation of labor into private hands was always a family affair that took place under the name of the father. That is what patriarchy is.

Workers around the world today celebrate the historical gains of women’s rights, which are full human rights to manifest themselves throughout political and civil society as full citizens. They, like anyone else, have the right of full self-determination over their decisions over their own personage. Dispossession of the right of women to their own self-determination over their personage is simply nothing more than violence. Labor around the world must defend women’s self-determination against all those who would bring barbarity against them, to dispossess them in the name of the patriarch, of patriotism, and faith. The backward pull of reaction split the workers against themselves with appeal to such oppression. Women hold up half the sky and should not be discounted.

What are all these “rights” if disconnected to power at the points of production? Although women are integrated everywhere into production, this integration is still within the framework of patriarchy. It remains necessary to continue to promote the legacies of equal opportunity hiring and programs that break barriers for working women to begin finding work among men and not simply secluded to themselves.

Seizing production alongside men as equal comrades in a class conscious labor movement is the basis for full liberation and the final overthrow of the vestiges of patriarchy.

Happy March 8th! Power to our Comrade Sisters in the Labor Movement!