Misogyny: Unveiling the Hypocrisy of the Left

Theoretical Background

Marx and Engels

When Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the forefathers of contemporary leftist thought, declared that class and relations to means of production have been the root cause of social inequality, they were not much flawed, as class is indeed a defining factor in assessing social hierarchy. Social status and economic background have rather supplemented each other, and not complemented, in the maintenance of this hierarchy. In such a case, rigorous historical analysis by Marx and Engels led them to conclude that all societies have been classed societies, forming the primary force of inequality. 

But human civilisation predates the advancement of class divisions. What has remained more fundamental to human history is a hierarchy based on sex and gender. In an imagined prehistoric era, men are generally portrayed to be hunter-gatherers and women as caretakers of their kin, their tribes. However, very recent evidence has shattered this popular belief and has asserted that women, too, very well contributed to the acts of hunting and gathering. 

But what led to the collapse of this egalitarian order? Engels in his The Origin of Family, Private Property and State says that it was the advent of the family as a social institution which restricted women to homes for the mere reproductive process. This was due to the “biological role” of carrying the offspring; the women were restricted to private spaces. This “biological role” expanded itself to a “social role”, where the women were assigned the role of nurturing it after birth. Engels writes, “The patriarchal family emerged alongside private property, turning women into ‘private property’ of men.” This continues to this date, where employers are generally averse to providing women jobs due to their social roles of being pregnant and the biological role of having periods. The traditional roles of women were preserved socially, economically, and politically. Socially, by asserting the limited role of women in the public sphere through religious and cultural sanctity; economically by denying them the right to means of production, treating them as mere properties of their husbands; and politically by repressing their autonomous voices and by claiming that women will be represented by men.

In fact, the godfather of the ultra-left libertarian socialism (also termed left-anarchism), Pierre Joseph Proudhon held very misogynistic views as he vehemently denounced women’s role in society and was averse to gender equality. In L’Opinion des Femmes (January 1849), Proudhon believed that women lacked rational and moral qualities required for public and intellectual life and declared that “A woman can only be a housekeeper or courtesan,” limiting their roles to domestic chores and sexual gratification. In his work La Pornocratie, he launched harsh attacks on the early feminists, painting their ideas as corrupting and unnatural. Later, anarcha-feminists like Emma Goldman strongly attacked Proudhon. In her The Tragedy of Women’s Emancipation, Emma Goldman not only criticised capitalist society but also the left’s failure to treat women as equals, arguing that “women’s freedom is closely allied with man’s freedom, but not at the cost of her individuality.” American anarcha-feminist Voltairine de Cleyre wrote, “Anarchism means not only freedom from government but from all institutions which upheld tyranny over the human body”.

Emma Goldman

Every repression had an outcome of a revolution, whether failed or successful. From Olympe de Gouges heroics in the French Revolution of 1789 and his subsequent authoring of Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Female Citizen, to Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of Rights of Women, to Simon De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, to various contemporary writers like Nivedita Menon’s Seeing like a Feminist, each one of them have tried to revolutionise the feminist lens based on their timeline. The most significant being the second current of feminism during the countercultures of the 1960s, when feminism saw its first crossover with intersectionality, realising that feminism isn’t about empowering only the white-rich woman. Feminism stood for the equality of sexes and genders and was no longer just a counter to male authority. It became a well-established ideology which talked about the whims of men suffering under patriarchy and intersectionality as much as it talked of the unique struggles of women from varying backgrounds. Feminism, now, stood not just for “women’s rights”, but with the second (1960s) and third (1990s) waves, it turned itself into the most powerful force against every oppressive system. The Black Panthers in the US or the Dalit Panthers in India may have been primarily based on black rights and dalit rights, respectively, but feminist thought complemented their fight against the oppressive social structure in both contexts. Scholars collectively called this new group to have been the “New Left”, who were very inspired by the feminist, black rights activists, queer, environmentalists and Western Marxist writers.

The Women for “Left”: India and Elsewhere

But the situation did not change much everywhere. There grew a wide distinction between this “New Left”- who sought the revision of original Marxist thought to make it compatible with contemporary challenges, and the “Old Left” or the “Orthodox Left” who still installed their faith upon class-based revolutions as led by Marxist-Leninist-Maoist ideology. The problems escalated in this second strand, particularly highlighting the case of India, where Western Marxism and the New Left have little to no influence on the political discourse of India. All the active left political parties in India- the CPI, CPI(M), Forward Bloc, Revolutionary Socialist Front and their respective student and youth organisations have generally shown more proximity to the orthodox strand of Marxism and have generally been aversive to the “new” additions, denouncing them to be “revisionism.”

Assessing the USSR of Stalin’s era, one might point out that women formed a large portion of the industrial workforce and had considerably served the army in its fight against fascism in the Second World War, but it was only due to the immediate needs of increasing production and national need respectively rather than to enable them towards equality. Working conditions remained pathetic, and women were dragged back to their private traditional roles. In brief, the average Stalin-era woman had to serve the state in the morning and serve their husbands at night.

Chinese Communist Party

It will also be imperative to analyse the current politburo structure of the CPI(M)- the largest left party in India, with only one woman member serving the highest body of decision-making of the party, and none ever serving as the General Secretary of the party. Although this is a better condition than the politburo of the Chinese Communist Party, which is an all-male Han body, such low representation of women in such “progressive” spaces leaves room for male domination. In fact, the communist parties across the world have been seen to denounce gender movements as mere ‘identity politics’, accusing them of deviating from the real problem- the class problem.

While Marxist Feminism has been a phenomenon of the countercultural wave of the 1960s and the emergence of the New Left, orthodox Marxists have shown little to no interest in the emancipation of women. Even if we analyse Maoist China, gender equality had received a great push- with the 1950 Marriage Act in Mao’s China banning arranged marriage, making divorce legal and outlawing concubinage and child marriage. Mao famously declared, “Women hold up half the sky”, which was a radical change from the traditional Confucian values. But this feminist overtone was missing from the Naxalbari movement in Bengal of the 1970s, which was deeply inspired by the Maoist strategy of agrarian revolution. The Naxal trailblazer- Charu Majumder, even though he didn’t have any separate feminist philosophy, had seen gender inequality as a byproduct of capitalistic-feudalistic exploitation. Even though Charubabu didn’t explicitly attack patriarchy and saw women as the only agents of a revolutionary struggle, just like men, later Maoists like Anuradha Gandhy laid much emphasis upon the miserable conditions of women and lower castes in India. In his well-known essays on Philosophical Trends in the Feminist Movement, she presents a critique of Western liberal bourgeois feminism, highlights the intersection of caste, class and gender and even criticises the radical feminists arguing that its tendencies to focus solely on patriarchy as the primary source of oppression would lead to an individualistic and depoliticised view of liberation.

The “Pro-prostitution” Leftists

Second-wave feminism had emerged from the counterculture of the 1960s, from the radical students who criticised the status quo and sought a radical reorganisation of society that would ensure equality, justice, and equality for all. But the challenging feminist wave was seldom welcomed by the leftists. Anti-feminist campaigns too had bases on the left, where socialist men adopted patriarchal sexual politics under the disguise of “proletariat morality.”

Support for the sex industry is too common in male-dominated leftist spaces, yet the harmful effects of such support on women are inherently lacking. It is never defensible to advocate for labour conditions where workers face serious health risks (like in Stalin’s USSR), especially for women who might face an even wider range of biological cycles, like menstruation. Is the bodily autonomy of women in these leftist spaces protected, or even respected?

Andrea Dworkin, a radical feminist, in her book Right-Wing Women (1983), points out that the difference between the right wing and the left wing in its relations to women is the differentiation of where they place their boots. For the right, the woman’s body is private property, while for the left, it's publicly available. Many leftists have not only depoliticised the concerns of women but have also promoted their collective suffering as ‘liberating’. The difference between a neoliberal model and a socialist model has been the oppression of women through the market lines and public lines, respectively. Prostitution is created and sustained by a male-dominated society where male sexuality and masculinity are socially constructed by patriarchy, and female sexuality is controlled and denigrated.

While the leftists have accused capitalism of having no ethics other than amassing profits and turning women into mere sex objects to be bought and sold, the self-proclaimed socialists, too, have not been very averse to the sex industry. Dworkin points out in her book Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1981) that “Leftists think that capitalism isn’t wicked when the commodity is a woman, violence by the oppressor against the oppressed isn’t oppressive when it is called sex”.

Red Light Area India

Some on the left argue that prostitution, as the “oldest profession,” is both inevitable and natural. There are even leftists who claim that “right to sex” (and not “right to sexual satisfaction or right to sexuality) is needed to make some women available to men to resist broader sexual violence. Basically, it advocates for making some women the scapegoats of sexual violence to resist it in public spaces. Also, this right not being granted to women equally is a purposeful dismissal of women’s sexuality, which sounds eerily similar to the talking points of the right. The commodification of sex also reduces women’s bodies to a mere transaction, depriving them of their free will and right to consent.

While these leftists are generally in favour of the legalisation of prostitution, it is not a solution because legalisation implies men's self-evident right to be customers of women’s bodies and sexualities. Legalising it as a regular occupation would be an acceptance of the division of labour, which men have created: a division where women's real occupational choices are far narrower than men's. It will not remove the detrimental impact of the sex work industry that is suffered by women. Women will still be forced to protect themselves against a massive invasion of strange men. In the Indian situation, most sex workers are Dalit, Adivasi, or OBC women, indicative of profound structural inequality. Prostitution is unregulated, informal work, stigmatised, but a necessary component of the current oppressive system. Capitalism commercialises their bodies, while the state criminalises their presence without touching root causes such as unemployment or gender violence. Neoliberalism also celebrates elite sex work and excludes the poor. A nuanced view calls for recognising sex work as labour, dismantling caste-capitalist structures, and ensuring dignity and rights for all.

Conclusion

While class forms the basis of social stratification and hierarchy in Marxism, sex and gender form a more fundamental and historical form of social stratification. Engels pointed out that this social stratification based upon labour is a direct outcome of property relations and the division of labour between sexes; sex-based discrimination predates a class-based society. Therefore, many leftists who have been ignorant about sex and gender-based discrimination will need to look into the intersectional aspect of class, gender and race/caste for a proper assessment of social hierarchy.

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