Rosa K’s Reviews > Women and Socialism: Essays on Women's Liberation > Status Update

Far from ignoring oppression, the Marxist view is that the working class cannot hope to win a socialist society unless the working class movement is united on the basis of ending all forms of oppression and exploitation. Thus, it is in workers' objective interests to fight oppression in all its forms.

Marx distinguished between a working class 'in itself' which holds objective revolutionary potential, and a working class 'for itself,' which acts in its own class interests/ The difference is between the objective potential and the subjective organization needed to realize that potential. An essential part of this process is the development of political consciousness among workers.

Rather than downplaying women's oppression, the emphasis by Marxists on the source of oppression leads to the conclusion that class society must be overthrown in order to create the possiblity of ending it. Moreover, understanding oppression as a necessary function of class society-which benefits capitalists, not workers-explains why the entire working class has a interest in ending oppression in all its forms.

Capitalism has continued to depend upon the subjugation of working-class women, even as it has expanded the corporate ladder to middle- and upper-class women.

Margaret Sanger, a founder of planned parenthood and an early pioneer in the fight for birth control, abandoned earlier arguments for women’s rights and replace them with eugenicist arguments as she sought allies in the ruling class to fund her projects.

Winning legal equality for women can help to make it clear that women’s oppression can only be ended when the relations of production on which it is based are overthrown. Society has more than enough wealth to turn housework & the more burdensome aspects of child rearing into a socialist industry: into paid productive labor