Building Socialism, A Retreat from Struggle to Transform Daily Life
In the Soviet Union and elsewhere, communist parties have made the biggest advances when they actually fought for communism. When the Bolsheviks retreated from the goal of communism, they necessarily retreated from the fight against sexism.
Women played key roles in the Russian Revolution. They rejected patriarchal marriage and male dominance. They anticipated that the family itself, removed from its economic base in production and consumption, would wither away in communism along with the state.
Communist women advocated the socialization of household labor, freeing women from isolated housework and involving them in collective labor. They saw child-rearing as a social responsibility and looked forward to the day when people would choose their partners freely, unfettered by economic dependence or inequality.
War Communism – and the Retreat from It
The massive disruption of the Russian Civil War forced immediate solutions to the problems of survival of children and families. During the period of war communism (1918-21) the Bolsheviks established public dining halls, free food for children, wages in kind and state rationing of commodities.
While some comrades saw this as a foretaste of the free family of the future, Party leaders saw it as an emergency measure. They agreed with Marx that socialism was a necessary stage in the development of communism. They believed that advancing to communism had to wait for industrialization and abundance.
The 1918 Code on Marriage, the Family, and Guardianship was the most advanced of its day. But it assumed a continuing temporary need for the family as an economic unit.
It abolished the inferior legal status of women. It undercut the backward influence of the Russian Orthodox Church by giving legal status only to civil marriage. It allowed divorce at the request of either spouse, and alimony for both men and women. It abolished illegitimacy, declaring that all children were entitled to parental support.
Abortion was legalized in 1920, free of cost and performed only by doctors, and birth control in 1923.
The New Economic Policy (1921-28)
The Bolsheviks didn’t build a mass base among rural workers, the vast majority of the country. They had fought for “peace, land, and bread,” not communism. These errors prevented them from overcoming divisions between rural and urban workers.
By 1921, they faced starvation in the cities and uprisings of workers, peasants and soldiers. Hundreds of thousands of children were starving, homeless and abandoned. The Bolsheviks responded by retreating to the New Economic Policy (NEP). Over the next two years, they instituted capitalist relations of wage slavery, markets and banking.
Capitalist production relations included unequal wages and high unemployment for women. Children’s homes and daycare centers were closed. Children were sent to relatives or fostered out to peasant families. Many single women resorted to prostitution to survive.
By 1925 the party had officially retreated from collective childrearing and the collectivization of socially necessary labor of cooking and laundry. By 1927 the society no longer offered women contraception, children’s homes or employment. They were thus dependent on men within the traditional family or for alimony and child support.
Still, the Zhenotdel, the Bolshevik women’s organization, struggled for the transformation of family life. It was an uphill battle against the realities imposed by the New Economic Policy and the resistance of male Party members at every level. The traditional family remained the basic societal institution.
Five-Year Plans Bring Women into Industry
The Five-Year Plans (1928-32 and 1933-37) ended the NEP with a massive State-sponsored campaign of rapid industrialization and collective agriculture. Some 6.6 million women entered the wage-labor force. The largest influx was in 1930, when the wives and daughters of industrial workers were recruited to largely male-dominated heavy industry.
Largely female industries (garment, textile, laundry) became entirely female. Women in male-dominated industries entered the lowest-paid jobs, especially janitorial and unskilled work. Skilled jobs and professions like medicine, typically lower-paid, became largely female.
Communal laundries, socialized dining facilities, child and baby-care facilities were built to make women workers available for industry. They became part of the social wage. Access to them became part of labor discipline, rather than liberating women to participate in social life. The Zhenotedel became an organ for winning women to rapid industrialization before it was abolished in 1930.
Real wages fell by half. Families now needed two incomes to survive. The socialist state relied on the family to intensify capital accumulation, realizing the surplus from two workers’ labor for the price of one.
The wage system – even in socialism – made it impossible to replace the traditional family as an economic unit with a working-class family that takes care of all.
1936: Socialism is Declared as Women are Celebrated as Mothers
By 1936, the international communist movement was responding to the rise of Nazi Germany by retreating from communist internationalism and proletarian revolution to the United Front Against Fascism. In the Soviet Union this meant:
*Intensifying the program of industrialization begun in the Five-Year Plans.
*A new constitution that declared that socialism had been achieved, “from everyone in accordance with his abilities, to everyone in accordance to the quantity and quality of his labor.” The class struggle was declared to be over. The “defense of the fatherland” was called “the holy duty of every citizen of the USSR.”
*An ideological campaign to strengthen the traditional family.
The 1936 legal code strictly limited divorce. It outlawed abortion and homosexuality. Women were offered incentives to bear more children. Maternal clinics and childcare institutions were expanded. But women had to assume the double burden of work and constant motherhood. They increasingly encountered harassment in the workplace
Most important, the Soviets abandoned the goal of the transformation of everyday life. Today we are fighting to do that – and by mobilizing for communism we will win!