WOMAN AND MARXISM

As a person who was raised in a family that believed in capitalism, when I first heard about the communist ideology, it looked utopian to me. A space where everyone is equal and everybody finds a home. That was the definition that the seventeen-year-old me believed in. However, as I continued to read, it dawned upon me that, while Marx framed it to be a war against the businessmen, who accumulated capital, he missed to address the war within the worker class, who paid for the meal and who made the meal?

The answer was usually women taking up the unpaid labour, and men playing the role of the breadwinner. It gives him the immense power, almost an authoritarian equivalent, in his own household.

This pattern aged poorly. With more angry radical feminists (I say that with utmost pride one can muster) demanding a space and taking it up, women finally entered the workforce. However, it is unfortunate that the situation did not change much in the households. In the 1980s and 1990s,in Tamil Nadu, a new group of first-generation graduates (both men and women), entered the market. This led to the concept of dual income household, a house hold where a man is no longer primary breadwinner, but a woman was still the primary care taker.

These new dynamics somehow managed to achieve both extremes of the outcomes. While a part of the working women population had their spouse or other women of the family take care of a share of the house work, burdening her less, another part completely had to take the burden of both office and house work. Unfortunately, in the beginning, the latter was the pattern that was seen more. Even in shared office spaces of the leftist communities, women were expected to take up cleaning and unpaid chores.

Another interesting extreme was the autonomy of the money. When a woman earned her first salary, whom did the money belong to? Who is she expected to give it to? A huge population, believed in giving to their spouse, with various reasoning, the most common being “lack of financial literacy of the woman”.

It was seen as if men were naturally smarter with money. That is not true, but society made us believe that. That’s why a woman tend to save more, while a man takes risk with his money. Money is not a real resource, but a scarce one. You owning it, stops others from owning the same cash. This is what we call private good in economics.

Marx argued that there must be no private resources, resources must be shared between the workers, but not once questioned the nature of the workforce, whether the workforce even contains women. The book “Woman revolution” puts is rather beautifully. A marriage between Marxism and feminism is a failure, because when unite to become one entity, it always becomes Marxism.

PS: I might be right or wrong or both. I am open to criticism, and would love to learn from my mistakes.