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How Did Karl Marx Respond To The Oppression Of Women?

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Literature review The essential reading for the question under the examination were the works by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. In particular, the most relevant appeared to be ‘Capital. Volume I: The Process of Production of Capital’, ‘The economic and philosophic manuscripts of 1844 and the Communist manifesto’, and ‘The German Ideology’ due to their insights on the role of women. In the first volume of Capital K. Marx devotes a part ‘Appropriation of Supplementary Labour-Power by Capital. The Employment of Women and Children’ of Section 3 in which he illustrates the role of women’s, as well as child’s, labor in the economic process of production. In ‘Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844’ K. Marx and F. Engels proceed further and point out to the importance of elimination of the current form of social relation in order to obtain the desired form of classless society, where people would be valued for their identity, rather than for …show more content…

This work offers an important idea which might be interpreted as the suggestion that the oppression of women will end only with the end of capitalism because then people would re-appropriate their ‘social creativity’ or true human essence. ‘The German Ideology’ provides a small contribution to the view that women’s subordination is unnatural and is prevalent in the underdeveloped forms of society. Finally, more attention is devoted to the women’s subjugation in F. Engels’s book ‘Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State’, in which he recognizes the fact of women’s oppression and examines the origins of it. He makes a hypothesis that the oppression of women comes from their role as reproducers of the inheritors for private property in the

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Marx, through his communist manifesto, believed that “modern industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist”, taking society from one epoch of social stratification and forced labour to Capitalism, under which the inequality between the Bourgeoisie and the Proletariat grew and became more evident. On the other hand, Durkheim saw industrialisation as a mainly positive occurrence which, along with the division of labour, provided the necessary institutions are in place to maintain it, as it causes society to change and develop and thus “civilization develops because it cannot fail to develop” (Durkheim: 1933: 337). Yet despite differences in their views of the effect, both Marx and Durkheim used the process of industrialisation to explain how society progresses and how society is held together or broken, with Durkheim, in particular, looking at just how much the structure of society changes as the division of labour progresses (Morrison:

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he explores sexual inequality down to its very base. Engels published his book, based around much of Marx’s notes, titled “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State” in 1884, one year after the death of Karl Marx. According to Engels “with the patriarchal family, we enter the field of written history”. With the advancement of agriculture and the domestication of farm animals, moving society from the hunter-gatherer ways, properties were soon developed. Men wished to have a means of lineage, now that they had something substantial worth passing on to their sons, so men became the primary individuals in the home as their strength and mobility in caring for their land was ‘superior’ to that of their female counterparts.

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