No Woman, No
Revolution, Part 3
Socialism
impossible without the women
If we do not draw women into public activity,
into the militia, into political life; if we do not tear women away from the
deadening atmosphere of household and kitchen; then it is impossible to secure
real freedom, it is impossible even to build democracy, let alone socialism.
The above
quote from Lenin [pictured, speaking in the open air in the revolutionary year
of 1917] expresses as clearly as can be the full meaning of our series title: “No Woman, No Revolution”.
Yet it was
not democracy “in general” of which Lenin wrote. Democracy is an instrument of
class struggle, and can never be a substitute for class struggle.
The
following words were written by Lenin for the second anniversary of the Great
October Revolution (and are included in the downloadable document linked
below):
“Let the
liars and hypocrites, the dull-witted and blind, the bourgeois and their
supporters hoodwink the people with talk about freedom in general, about
equality in general, about democracy in general.
“We say
to the workers and peasants: Tear the masks from the faces of these liars, open
the eyes of these blind ones. Ask them:
“Equality
between what sex and what other sex?
“Between
what nation and what other nation?
“Between
what class and what other class?
“Freedom
from what yoke, or from the yoke of what class? Freedom for what class?”
“Down
with the liars who are talking of freedom and equality for all, while
there is an oppressed sex, while there are oppressor classes, while there is
private ownership of capital, of shares, while there are the well-fed with
their surplus of bread who keep the hungry in bondage. Not freedom for all, not
equality for all, but a fight against the oppressors and exploiters,
the abolition of every possibility of oppression and
exploitation-that is our slogan!
“Freedom
and equality for the oppressed sex!
“Freedom
and equality for the workers, for the toiling peasants!
“A fight
against the oppressors, a fight against the capitalists, a fight against the
profiteering kulaks!
“That is
our fighting slogan, that is our proletarian truth, the truth of the struggle
against capital, the truth which we flung in the face of the world of capital
with its honeyed, hypocritical, pompous phrases about freedom and
equality in general, about freedom and equality for all.
Lenin, Soviet Power
and the Status of Women, November 1919
In the
document linked below you will also find that in September of that year (1919)
there was already a “Fourth Moscow City Conference Of Non-Party Working Women”,
that was addressed by Lenin (and also by Trotsky).
When Lenin
wrote in 1917 - between the two revolutions of that year, and before he had
returned to Russia - that “it is impossible even to build democracy, let
alone socialism” without the women, he also prefigured the National Democratic
Revolution altogether, with the clear implication that democratic class
struggle is a prerequisite of socialism.
In the last
line of the text for this session, Lenin repeats the “No Woman, No Revolution”
message:
The
proletariat cannot achieve complete freedom, unless it achieves complete
freedom for women.
Lenin, To the Working
Women, February 1920
- The above is to introduce the original reading-text: Lenin on Women, 1919 - 1920.
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