This article was originally published in Issue 49 of Unity and Struggle, May 2024
Organisation for the Construction of the Communist Workers’ Party of Germany (Arbeit Zukunft)
In this article, we want to address some of the questions that have arisen in current debates about gender, both in Germany and, as far as we can see, in other countries. The aim is to defend the materialist position against various unscientific views and to contribute to the discussion on the stance of Marxist-Leninists in the current women’s and LGBTI movements. (LGBTI stands for “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans- and Intersexual”).
In recent years, the debate surrounding issues of gender has become increasingly heated, particularly as part of the cultural struggle between a reactionary-conservative and a liberal-progressive camp in bourgeois politics. At the heart of the discussions is the question of what gender actually is, the answer to which can be used to derive the specific policies of the various currents. It is clear that the real, political attacks by the conservative camp in many countries mean attacks on women’s rights that have been fought for, as well as massive restrictions on the democratic rights of LGBTI people and an increase in violence against this already vulnerable group. They are a popular propaganda tool for right-wing populist forces in particular, which have achieved significant electoral success in a number of countries. The reinforcement and cementing of conservative role models between men and women goes hand in hand with attacks on the right to abortion and women’s economic independence.
At the same time, we see a clear lack of scientific, convincing counter-positions in the left-liberal-progressive camp. Rather, for years there has been a rejection of any political approach to the issues mentioned and a retreat to a merely cultural standpoint of the diversity of identities, in which explicitly irrational, post-structuralist theories are the foundation. Of course, these ideological shortcomings are also an expression of the bourgeois class character of both the current women’s movement and the LGBTI movement, in which the proletarian, materialist elements are still very weak. The influence of these theories not only means that little can be countered to the attacks on democratic, women’s and LGBTI rights. Based on these theories, we also see tendencies of the women’s issue to be made a subordinate issue in a general “queer movement” that claims its goal to be the liberation of all oppressed “identities”. This approach, which is not based on any materialist analysis, prevents the causes of gender-specific oppression and its specific effects on women and LGBTI people from being recognized. Consequently, a well-founded political program against this cannot be developed. Of course, the question of what gender actually is touches on both the women’s issue and the LGBTI issue – but the current conflation of the two issues stems from ideological weakness and has negative consequences for both political struggles. The more attacks on women and LGBTI people increase worldwide, which must also be understood as part of the general strengthening of fascist forces worldwide, the more important ideological clarity on these issues becomes in order to strengthen our struggle.
Most of the theories and views that we find in the women’s and LGBTI movements today are a reaction to biological determinism. In the conservative camp, we find numerous biological determinist views that assume that men and women have clear, biologically determined roles in society. Women are destined by their biology not only to bear children, but also to raise them, take care of the household and provide emotional care. Some theories go so far as to claim that women are not only destined to be housewives and mothers because of their role in reproduction, but also because of their physique, the size of their brain or their hormonal balance. Men, on the other hand, are intended to be providers, the stronger sex, politicians and leaders for the same reasons. This idea, which is propagated in a more or less radical way by religious and conservative politicians and media figures today, is obviously unscientific – just like the Rassenlehre (the world view that divides humankind into different races), for example, which racists still try to justify biologically. Conservative role models argue with a state of nature that is supposedly disregarded by modern, feminist ideas. This alleged state of nature is based in particular on religious ideas and does not stand up to even a brief historical examination. The monogamous marriage and the bourgeois family are a historically recent occurrence whose necessity is based on a certain economic condition. The bourgeois family concept of a man who earns money outside the home, analogous to hunting, and a woman who, as a mother, remains limited purely to the domestic sphere and maternal duties, could not and cannot exist for the working class. Capitalist class society portrays this reality day after day. We will not go any further into these unscientific, reactionary ideas at this point, except to say: social roles cannot simply be derived from biology, but are the results of a historical process, differ depending on the historical period and are inextricably linked and ultimately determined by the basis of human life, the mode of production and reproduction.
More than a century ago, Marxism provided us with the tools to get to the bottom of both racism and gender-specific oppression: Historical materialism was already applied directly to the role of women and the family by Friedrich Engels (which is why Clara Zetkin described his work “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State” as “of fundamental importance for the liberation struggle of the entire female sex” – more on this later). Unlike for the proletarian women’s movement, however, historical materialism is naturally foreign to the bourgeois feminist camp that dominates the women’s and LGBTI movement today. The two common theories around gender clearly show the deficiency that this circumstance causes. So – what are the common ways of looking at gender in these movements and what are their shortcomings?
Is there no biological gender?
On the one hand, there is the current that denies the existence of two sexes in an attempt to reject biological determinism. These views, largely summarized in Queer Theory, are rooted in post-structuralism, a philosophical movement that perceives social reality itself as constructed and sees the so-called deconstruction of ideologies as the key to change. In post-structuralism, social conditions are fundamentally not materially contingent, but the results of a discourse that is first constructed by people (primarily through their terminology) and can be deconstructed accordingly. In short, post-structuralism is a very popular alternative to Marxism in Western universities today (one of its founders, Michael Foucault, formulated it in 1977 as follows: “[…] we must fundamentally question the important tradition of socialism, because everything that this tradition has produced in history is to be condemned”). Judith Butler is one of the most important representatives of Queer Theory and puts the following considerations up for discussion: “Is femininity a natural thing or a cultural performance, or is naturalness constituted by discursively limited performative actions that produce the body through and within the categories of gender?” This question (which is typically complicated for post-structuralism) aims to suggest that not only social role models, but also biology itself is socially constructed. In feminist circles and literature today, we find views that fundamentally reject the idea of the binarity of sexes in biology; interpreting two sexes into biology is the result of a sexist social order and has no basis in the biological processes themselves.
However, this idea is very easy to refute. Human reproduction is fundamentally based on binary sex. Humans have a double set of chromosomes. These consist of DNA and contain the genetic information. Women have XX chromosomes and men have XY chromosomes. During reproduction, half a set of chromosomes from the father and half from the mother come together, resulting in a double set in the fertilized egg cell. The only cells that are not diploid but haploid, i.e. have only one set of chromosomes, are the germ cells: egg cells and sperm cells. Depending on which chromosomes come together in the offspring – an X and a Y or an X and an X – the sex of this offspring is determined. Humans then develop sexual characteristics, whereby the production of hormones plays a role in determining which primary (genitals) and secondary (breasts, body hair, etc.) sexual characteristics we develop. Of course, not all men have the same amount of facial hair and not all women have equally pronounced breasts. There can even be deviations in the primary sexual characteristics, i.e. the sexual organs. The term intersexuality describes the phenomenon of ambiguous gender affiliation, for example due to ambiguous primary or secondary sexual characteristics (in the past, children born with ambiguous sexual characteristics were operated on after birth in Germany and other countries in order to be clearly assigned to a gender – a dangerous practice with serious consequences for those affected. These operations are uniformly rejected by intersex advocacy groups in Germany. However, the (quite rare) phenomenon of intersexuality represents a deviation and is by no means proof (as is sometimes claimed) that sexuality in biology is a spectrum and that male and female are only two poles of it.
The fundamental defect of this current is not that it attempts to reject biological determinism. The problem is that Queer Theory has absolutely no counter to biological determinism – it cannot explain how biological differences and social role models are connected, but throws biological differences out of the window along with social role models. There is a saying: “to throw out the baby with the bathwater” – in other words, to eliminate what is worth preserving with good intentions. Post-structuralists actually agree with biological determinism to a large extent – because they implicitly share the assumption that if there were biological differences, these would inevitably lead to strict social role models and constraints. Post-structuralism itself thus reveals that it is completely incapable of explaining where gender-specific oppression could come from (and what the phenomenon of class society, which is completely foreign to the post-structuralists, could possibly have to do with it). Devoid of any explanatory power, it falls back into irrationalism and enters into direct contradiction with biological facts, which inevitably invalidates its project of rejecting biological determinism.
Is there a biological and a social sex?
There is another theory that is now so widespread in the women’s and LGBTI movement and also in German social science that its background is sometimes no longer even questioned: The distinction between a biological sex and a social gender (In German, there is no linguistic differentiation between sex and gender, as Geschlecht functions as the word for both). In contrast to the biologically determined sex, social gender includes the social implications that go hand in hand with the terms man and woman – from typical professions and ascribed or actual characteristics to the identity and self-image of the respective person. The original idea of those who introduced the distinction was also to reject biological determinism, i.e. the idea that the social roles of men and women are determined by biological factors. The distinction attempts to take biological factors into account, but to deprive them of their effectiveness by adding another, independent category alongside biological sex: social gender, which is seen as the decisive and identity-forming category and is understood to be independent of biology. The separation between biological sex and social gender is thus an apparent solution to the contradiction that human identity cannot be divided into two rigid and biologically determined categories. But this solution is only an apparent one because the distinction does not explain anything at all; on the contrary it raises further questions: on the one hand, the strict separation of biological sex and social gender says nothing about the connection between the two categories. On the other hand, it cannot explain how social gender is created – in practice, gender is therefore usually simply equated with self-perception. A person may have a biological sex, but gender, i.e. identity, is determined by their perception, i.e. the feeling of belonging, which can then be male, female or in completely different categories (e.g. non-binary). It is understandable in every respect that some people today, especially young people, say: “I don’t feel I belong to the two role models that are presented to me in this society. If you ask me about my identity, I won’t be able to give you a binary category”. The fact is that gender perception is a complex, psychological process. The specific idea of a social gender attempts to find a category for this feeling, but brings further problems with it, because: what is a female or male self-perception? Is there a feminine or masculine essence apart from biological factors? Is this essence innate, as suggested by the phrase “born in the wrong body”, which is used to describe the feelings of trans individuals? By viewing the category of gender as a merely individual identity, it inevitably becomes an idealistic category. (This also does not solve the problem that gender forms the framework for perception and identification in the first place – in some cases, gender is even exaggerated in its significance because it is considered to be synonymous with the entire individual identity.) We are therefore faced with a distinction between biological sex, which, depending on the interpretation, allows for either two sexes and intersexual deviations from them or a multitude of biological genders, and social gender, which is purely an identity category. The two have nothing to do with each other and are not connected within this construction. The lack of explanatory power of this approach is obvious. It is an understandable reaction to not forcing the diversity of human feeling into biologically determined categories. It does not offer a politically meaningful platform that goes beyond the recognition of all gender identities and also recognizes the origin of oppression and provides a perspective. This is a task that, to date, only historical materialism has achieved.
The origin of the oppression of women
For historical materialism, “the determining factor in history is, in the final instance, the production and reproduction of the immediate essentials of life.” Marx and Engels write that “[…] people, who daily remake their own life, begin to make other people, to propagate their kind: the relation between man and woman, parents and children, the family.” The concept of reproduction describes the concrete creation and preservation of human life. Engels concludes: “The social organization under which the people of a particular historical epoch and a particular country live is determined by both kinds of production: by the stage of development of labour on the one hand and of the family on the other.” The question of how production and reproduction are organized is decisive at every historical point in time. It is the material basis on which morality, law, culture and, ultimately, role models and identities can be formed. It was this historical materialist approach that allowed the labour movement to confront any idealist, reactionary or religious ideas on a scientific basis. Be it racism or sexism, historical materialism helps us to understand: These orders are not set in stone. They have conditions under which they arise and conditions under which they can disappear. In order to create them, we need to understand them. It was Friedrich Engels and Clara Zetkin who took up the women’s question early on in the German and international labour movement and examined the origins of women’s oppression from a historical and materialist perspective. Within these considerations of the women’s question, there are also valuable points of reference for the question of gender in general. It is true that neither Engels nor Zetkin explicitly considered gender identities other than man and woman. However, their treatises on the question of women reveal the fundamental approach of historical materialism with regard to the genesis and maintenance of gender roles. Of course, biological sex plays a role here, but historical materialism shows us that this does not necessarily lead to oppressive role models, but why society and the way it functions are decisive for role models and gender perception, oppression and liberation.
The question of reproduction is particularly crucial for the role of the different sexes in society. This is also where biology comes into play. For it is not the case, as claimed by biologically determinist ideas, that biological differences determine all other social tasks of men and women. Of course, there are biological differences – but their extent is completely exaggerated by the proponents of these views (for example, the average differences between men and women emphasized by biological determinists, e.g. in brain size or muscle mass, are sometimes smaller than the differences between individual women or individual men). But there is, of course, one difference that cannot be denied and has an impact on the historical development of gender roles that can hardly be underestimated: The role of the sexes in reproduction. It is women, one half of society, who have to carry children in their wombs for nine months, give birth and care for them (i.e. breast feeding) them, at least in the early stages of childhood. This fact has never been reversed in any society and, depending on the form of society, has led to a more or less strict division of tasks between the sexes. And it will not disappear in future societies, regardless of how production and reproduction are organized. The decisive factor for gender roles is therefore how social production and, in particular, reproduction are organized and whether or not this type of organization systematically leads to oppression and coercion.
Engels undertook the first explicitly historical-materialist study of this question in “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State”. In it, he devotes himself in detail to describing the various family forms in primitive society and their impact on the position of women. According to Engels, the division of labour in primitive society was a primitive one, based on the positions of men and women in the reproductive process, but by no means as strict or associated with disadvantageous role models as it is today. Due to the low level of development of the productive forces, no economic sector in primitive communism was capable of creating a surplus product, neither in production (where men tended to play a more important role) nor in reproduction (where women tended to play a more important role). All members of society collectively produced the material basis of life. Engels concludes from this that the role of women in primitive society must also have been different from today. As long as private property and the acquisition of wealth did not play a role, the natural division of labour did not put either sex at a significant disadvantage. In this respect, Engels famously calls the emergence of private property the “world historical defeat of the female sex”.
With the emergence of private property and class society, both the organization of production and reproduction changed fundamentally. Since then, production has served to create the surplus product that is privately appropriated. However, we see that reproduction is of course also inseparably linked to production and that the role of women, who inevitably play a special role in this reproduction, also takes on a different character in class society. Reproduction is also subject to the necessities of class society. Since reproductive labour does not create any surplus product, but the social order is now based on private property, women lose their previous position: “The running of the household loses its public character. It was no longer a matter for society. It became a private service; the woman became the first servant, ousted from participation in social production”.
Let us note: there are biological differences, but these are not, as the biological determinists claim, primarily decisive. It is society and explicitly the economic basis of society, the way in which production and reproduction are organized, that assigns the sexes a place in society and explicitly leads to sexual oppression for women. How the biological factors are translated into a gendered task and their role is therefore ultimately determined by the economic conditions of the given society. It was also the change in economic conditions that led to the modern women’s question in the first place, as Clara Zetkin vividly demonstrates, and it is also these conditions that must be fundamentally changed if sex is no longer to become a category of oppression and coercion. The fact that this historical-materialist view is not only able to explain the conditions under which the oppression of the female sex arose, but also shows the prospects for its elimination, becomes particularly clear in Clara Zetkin’s remarks on women under capitalism and socialism. In 1889, Zetkin wrote: “The question of women’s emancipation is a child of modern times, and the machine has given birth to it”. On the one hand, industrialization simplified the tasks of the household; on the other, capitalism catapulted the working-class woman into the production process in the form of wage labour, initially out of financial necessity. It was capitalism and the emergence of the proletarian woman that brought about the division of labour by sex and the fundamentally different positions of the sexes in the family and in society. For if women are equally involved in the production process alongside men, then the question of equal political rights is not far away: “In the past, there could be talk of a gradual improvement in the position of women in one sense or another, but not of a women’s question in the modern sense of the word, of a shaking up of the entire basis of their position […]” Capitalism thus creates the basis for the social liberation of women. Engels writes: “It was only the great industry of our time that opened the way to social production for her – and only for the proletarian woman.” The necessity of marriage for the inheritance of property is also abolished for the proletariat, the propertyless class. (Zetkin also refers to demands from the conservative camp, still prevalent today, to restore the sexual division of labour within the bourgeois family, in which the woman would be a pure housewife: this is reactionary and the pure housewife in capitalist society is an “anachronism”.) Capitalism does create the first basis for the liberation of women. But only under socialism, in which both production and reproduction are not subject to the creation of surplus product for private appropriation, but to the satisfaction of the needs of all, will women also be liberated as part of the entire working class and the separation of production and reproduction will be abolished.
Historical materialism and gender
What does historical materialism and its treatment of the woman question tell us about gender in general? First of all, it absolutely recognizes that there are biological facts, a female and a male sex, which occupy a certain place in reproduction. However, it is society and its organization that creates role models, depending on economic necessities. Today there is a whole catalogue of supposedly female and male characteristics – tenderness, caring, naivety for women; leadership, strength and toughness for men. These role models have remained more or less similar since the existence of class society, as there has been a separation of production and reproduction in every class society – but we also see differences and variations in the various class societies, each within the confines of the respective social order. And of course there have always been people who deviated from these role models – these models are not natural or God-given, they are not inherent to the respective sex, but are shaped by society. Zetkin’s argumentation, for example, makes it clear how fundamentally she views the change in the role of women, which began with capitalism and would end with communism. With the change in the position of women in the production process, not only does the view of women change, but also their own self-perception. Zetkin attests to the role of educator and caregiver for women of the future only in infancy – the time when this task is actually naturally determined. Beyond this, it is impossible to say whether women are better educators or teachers than men, for example, or whether they have any biological predestination that would force them into a social task. She thus takes a direct stance against biological-determinist ideas, for example when it comes to the supposedly natural destiny of women as educators: “[…] the woman producing in society was deprived of her ‘natural’ [quotation marks by Zetkin!] occupation, which was only natural at all as long as it coincided with the basic economic conditions.” Historical materialism cannot assume a male, female or (in relation to the discussion about gender) non-binary essence, but recognizes that human beings are first and foremost human beings, that their feelings in general and their gendered feelings are constantly developing psychologically and that this development arises within the framework of their social tasks and activities. So if we do not assume an idealist male, female or even non-binary gender essence that emerges independently of time and society, but only gender roles whose boundaries are set by the respective society and can therefore also be broken down, then it also becomes clear what significance socialism has for the liberation of gender roles. This observation has strong implications not only for the liberation of women, but also for political demands regarding alternative gender identities. More than 100 years ago, it was already clear to Zetkin that the role patterns of capitalist society would inevitably come into contradiction and lead to a women’s question. Today, we can see that these role models have by no means been broken down, but are becoming increasingly entangled in contradictions, especially in Western societies, which are made all the more influential by all-encompassing propaganda in the media. The explicit marketing of gender-specific products and their psychological influence on the self-image of young people, the oversexualization inevitably created by the media and advertising and the screaming contradiction of so many different expectations and demands on the two genders inevitably lead to increased non-identification and the desire to turn away from the binary gender system and its barriers to development. Within bourgeois society, in academia and within the spectrum of bourgeois ideology, this urge finds expression in the form of post-structuralist, idealist ideas that aim for equality and individual development of identity. Due to the weakness of the labour movement and thus the proletarian women’s movement, as well as the associated relative ignorance regarding materialist explanations of how gender roles come about in the first place and how they must be fought accordingly, the women’s and LGBTI movements today are increasingly becoming a movement that can essentially do nothing more than identity politics.
In Germany, for example, the International Women’s Day, March 8th, is now celebrated in many places as “FLINTA-Day” (FLINTA means women, lesbians, non-binary, inter-, trans- and agender people), in which everyone who feels they belong to the respective genders is welcome, but men are explicitly excluded from participation. The term FLINTA is an explicit symptom of the aforementioned mixing of different issues, which prevents them from being taken seriously politically. This conflation weakens all these issues and especially the women’s struggle, which becomes one of many different initials (apart from the fact that this term means nothing to the absolutely staggering majority of people (including women) in Germany). This shift in terminology goes hand in hand with a degradation of the protests to mere demonstrations of diversity, which are only meant to empower instead of making political demands that are sorely needed today. The current strength of post-structuralist theories and their focus on identity must also be linked to capitalist, neoliberal ideologies and, not without reason, can in many cases be easily integrated into corporate diversity concepts in which the benefit of personal development is intended to promote the productivity of the workforce. And last but not least, the class character of these views must become clear when they are increasingly used against materialist approaches. In the aforementioned movements, for example, forces that insist on the term “woman” because it is both politically indispensable and the central category of analysis are accused of biological determinism. Materialist approaches have generally fallen into disrepute as “queer-hostile” and are fought ideologically and politically. Yet only historical materialism explicitly provides us with the means to both answer the women’s question scientifically and politically (as the proletarian women’s movement has done historically, which deserves its own considerations) and to show the way for the most far-reaching liberation from gender roles per se, which would be so important for those who see themselves restricted by them (which in today’s society is likely to be not only non-binary and trans people, but a much larger part of society). The aim must be to fight for social conditions in which gender no longer forms the framework within which people can or cannot develop. There is no point in naming categories for divergent feelings and stopping at the fact that all these categories must be accepted – this not only does not eliminate the material causes that lead to oppression in our society, it distracts from them. In contrast, a materialist understanding of the oppression of women and the strengthening of the women’s movement on this basis is at the same time the key to liberation from oppression based on gender and gender roles in general and should therefore not be subordinated to a general movement for the “liberation of the sexes”, but should be asserted as an independent movement encompassing half of the working class with its corresponding demands.
However, the political and programmatic foundations of the proletarian women’s movement show the way to fundamentally change role models and the associated constraints in our society: The bourgeois family will no longer be an economically necessary unit in which reproductive activity takes place and which assigns clear roles to the sexes in the production process, as it is under capitalism. Education and care work, like all production and reproduction, will be largely socialized (which incidentally also has positive consequences for these areas themselves, as areas such as education, but also food supply etc… can be collectivized, professionalized and performed at a higher level if they are socially organized. In other words: not every single mother has to have had a pedagogical education in order for children to enjoy a high-quality upbringing, and not every household has to produce three meals a day on its own, which can be organized much more productively across households). Marriage loses its character as a binding contract (as it did in the young Soviet Union, where divorce was the first in the world to be liberalized) – under socialism it is no longer necessary even as a unit for the inheritance of private property. It is important to understand how central these demands are not only for women’s liberation, but also for LGBTI people. Other demands of the proletarian women’s movement are political, but especially social gender equality, realized in the form of equal pay for equal work. This also means social security and economic independence, which is lacking for both women and LGBTI people in many places today and leads to dependency and violence. It is the realization that the gender roles that lead to oppression are rooted in the relations of production (and not in biology) that lets us today and must continue to let us formulate political demands that change the economic basis for gender roles. The strength of the bourgeois theories mentioned in this article is an explicit and direct expression of the bourgeois class character of these movements today, which must be consciously pushed back by Marxist-Leninists. In doing so, materialism is not in a defensive position towards the issues of gender and liberation, but must denounce those who seek to obscure the causes of oppression and win over those who seek to liberate themselves from it.