Maricarmen Martinez
Engels believes that private property causes the oppression of women. He supports this claim in several ways. First, he accepts the Marxist principle that the environment shapes the individual. Then he discusses the historical development of the family. According to Marx, individuals derive their identity from the way they fulfill survival needs in their environment. This principle could be summarized as follows: "You are what you do." Marx believes that the ways in which historically individuals produce their survival needs and material goods, or "modes of production". As well as the relations they create to produce them, or relations of productions, shape their thinking patterns, and belief systems. This thesis is called historical materialism.
For Marx and Engels, economics is the most important factor of human life. There is equivalence between a person's identity and what he/she does therefore, the cause human oppression should be found in the relationship of the individual with the forces and mode of production. One the cause of oppression is identified, men can proceed to eradicate it and reconstruct their lives in a just and fair social and economic environment.
The fundamental oppression of one human being by another is economic exploitation. When the drive for private property arises in a community it causes exploitation. The focus of men shifts to the acquisition of material goods and wealth, rather than in the productive activities that generates them. Labor is the mayor productive activity of any economic system; yet, in capitalistic societies the workers are alienated from the products of their work. They are exploited since the worker works for the owner who enjoys the products and the value of the worker's labor. The owner pays the worker less than the worth of his labor and so he cannot even purchase the products that he creates. The worker becomes alienated from his work and cannot identify with it. Work is something he does but not something he is. If someone cannot be defining for what he does, he has lost his species being, his identity. He who is alienate from his "self", is also alien from humanity, but, since "you are what you do", alienated labor that is the basis for in capitalistic societies violates the very identity of each of its individual members.
Women's oppression is also economic oppression. Angels gives a historical account of how the oppression of women generated from the rise of private property. Engels discusses the evolution of the human family to discover the cause of the oppression of women. According to Engels, when men began to domesticate cattle and to develop tools with which they obtained food, they associated these products with their person. They kept products for themselves and claimed ownership. Hence, private property arises. In order to leave this new acquired wealth and property to their children, men overthrew maternal rights. This is for Marx the historical defeat of women. Maternal rights are abolished and men control property and wealth. The wife becomes similar to a social class and her position within the private sphere of family is similar to that of the worker in the public sphere. The monogamous family legally strengthened marriage ties making it more difficult for women to separate from their husbands.
Patriarchy is the social order that results from the rise of private property and the unequal distribution of wealth. The Marxist solution for the oppression of women in patriarchal and capitalistic societies is as follows: eliminate private property and generate a system in which the means of production are in the hands of the workers. In this kind of society men and women will recover their own species being by successfully identifying with the product of their work, and men and women will relate to what they do as a contribution to humanity. In such society, the State will guarantee the economic equality of all individual. This is a communist society, which will lead to a total liberation of men and women. Finally the State will no longer be needed since technology will work for men women, rather than men and women for technology. Each individual will devote him/herself two those activities that are more akin to his/her species being. The monogamous family will also be abolished as the fundamental unit of the patriarchal economy.
Rubin argues that private property is not the necessary cause of the oppression of women. In order to support this claim, all that is needed is at least one case in which the necessary causal connection between the oppression of women and private property is not present. Rubin finds that instances in tribal societies that are based in a kinship system. She points that in these societies men exchange women as gifts and that the "givers" do not gain tangible wealth for such exchange. In fact, the traffic of women as gifts in these tribal societies is one of the many exchanges in which men engage. They might exchange gifts, food, names, but with the sole purpose of solidifying the relations between groups.
However, Rubin argues that the exchange of women can be distinguished from other forms of exchange by the fact that the relations between the groups that are formed through this exchange are relations of kinship. Women are given away, especially as brides, since their exchange creates permanent blood ties among the groups. Yet, the "gift" cannot change places with the" giver", and women are alienated from the outcome or products of their circulation. This outcome is the social organization.
The social organization caused by the exchange of women creates systems of beliefs, procedures, roles and division of labor in which the giver (man) has rights over the gift (woman). Rubin calls this organization or a sex/gender system. She concludes that the economic oppression of women is derivative of the modes in which sex and gender are organized and its abolition requires political action. Rubin envisions an androgynous society in which obligatory sex roles are abolished.
Both Rubin's and Engels' arguments depend on the idea that there is a necessary cause of women oppression. I will call this kind of argument, the argument of the fundamental cause. Among the many multiple causes that can explain a phenomenon there is one cause which explains it. If this cause can be abolished, the whole apparatus of built on it will crumble. Yet, it can be argued that there could be more than one cause that explains a phenomenon. Thus, cigarette smoking causes cancer, but ceasing to smoke does not necessary guarantee that someone will not get cancer, other causes might be involved, such as pollution or hereditary traits. Cancer prevention requires action upon all those causes. By the same token there could be several causes that simultaneously explain the oppression of women, among them, the social cause proposed by Rubin and the economic causes proposed by Engels.
Moreover, the cause of oppression does not have to be fundamental of basic. This implies that social and natural events are organized in a pyramidal fashion so that the base should be demolished for the pyramid to collapse. It might be that social as well as natural phenomenon are organized like a network of relationships which are so intricate and interconnected that it is impossible to talk of a fundamental cause. Therefore, oppressive events can occur at any moment in any of the multiple connections that make up the socio-economic environment. In order to obtain a world as egalitarian as possible, it might be a good strategy to attack oppression at all the points in which it becomes manifest in the socio-economic network. This has to be done by those who are actors in that particular site of the network in which a high level of oppression is occurring.
