The World Health Organisation (WHO) has argued that “violence against women is a global problem of pandemic proportions.” UN Women, an international organization, has estimated that 70% of women will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime and 137 women are killed daily by a member of their family. According to the WHO, 30% of women globally face intimate partner abuse. The effects are devastating to the lives of women and children. Following the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, the economic and social consequences have increased rates of domestic violence in every country. The pandemic, however, has only exacerbated a pre-existing ongoing historical legacy of oppression. This is systemic.
But this oppression is preventable and does not need to exist. The abusive treatment of women is deeply rooted in the existence of capitalism, and class society in general. In The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Friedrich Engels explained how the modern status of women came about through the development of private property, the patriarchal family, and state-organized violence. He argued that with the division of society into classes reaching the stage of commodity production, the “prevailing form” of the family unit becomes “the supremacy of the man over the women.” This is still relevant today.
This foundational text applied the Marxist method of analysis to the oppression of women in relation to the historical development of class society. Engels’ historical and materialist method has shown how women’s condition deteriorated under the establishment of patriarchy.
Engels observed how women’s subjugation “has gradually been palliated and glossed over, and sometimes clothed in a milder form; in no sense has it been abolished.” Despite the development of technology, social movements, and forms of political liberty, patriarchal structures of social organization continue to destructively harm women’s ability to freely participate in society. Engels stated, “Within the family he [the husband] is the bourgeois and the wife represents the proletariat.” While social and political reforms make a real difference in the lives of women, they do not alter this ongoing situation. The existence of capitalism-imperialism relies on and reproduces the patriarchal family and the inequalities facing women.
The only viable long-term solution is revolution. The birthplace of women’s oppression, which is private property and class society, must go. However, this does not remove the need to fight for reforms, here and now. This is not an either-or question, as revolutionaries need to fight for reforms on the path to revolution. Indeed, the struggle for women’s rights in Canada has a long and varied history, one which the Communist Party of Canada (CPC) has often been a driving force.
The fight for reforms, as Rosa Luxemburg argued, must be linked into an overall chain of revolutionary socialist strategy. The CPC has a long and proud record of taking precisely this approach, especially through its many early fighters for socialism like Becky Buhay, Florence Custance, and Annie Buller. These heroic women devoted their lives to building the labour movement and the Communist Party. In She Was Never Afraid: The Biography of Annie Buller, Louise Watson has pointed out that “Annie was a tireless fighter for peace. Even in later years, Annie braved the bad weather to join in the Easter March in the mid-1960s against U.S. imperialist aggression in Indochina.” Annie Buller selflessly struggled for the rights of the working-class women, as well as for the cause of international peace and solidarity. She did this by serving as a spokesperson and organizer for the CPC, a union organizer, a builder of the workers’ press, and a promoter of Marxist literature. Annie Buller stood for socialism and the liberation of working women.
The CPC continues this struggle today. Thus it has called for a people’s recovery for women and gender-oppressed people, which includes such demands as employment insurance reform, raising the minimum wage and benefitting women and the youth, greater reproductive rights, closing the wage gap, maternity rights for all, and action toward ending violence against women. The CPC has taken many strides to enhance the condition of women in Canada through networks like the Congress of Canadian Women. No other political party has been at the forefront to improve the lives of working women in Canada with a revolutionary program as greatly as the CPC.
From supporting and funding women’s shelters and organizations, to organizing and unionizing workplaces, to leading strikes furthering the pursuit for equality by demanding more than basic rights for working women, the CPC has maintained a hundred-year tradition of making women’s liberation a priority. Realizing the connection of capitalism and sexism, we understand the need to organize for a socialist solution. Fighting for reforms can make real material gains, but these will never be enough because the root cause of our oppression is capitalist exploitation. So we do not want to fall into the trap of seeing reforms as the be-all and end-all. Women’s liberation and socialism go hand in hand as only socialism can free the workers and oppressed peoples of Earth from the shackles of exploitation and discrimination.