WE MARXISTS are internationalists. “Workers of the world, unite!” was the call of Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto. “You have nothing to lose but your chains.”
Does this mean, then, that Marxists turn their backs on national oppression? “Since Marxism is based upon international workers’ solidarity,” a one-sided Marxist might argue, “we therefore denounce all forms of nationalism as a hindrance to that international workers’ unity.”
Critics of Marxism who argue that it cares only about economics and has nothing so say about questions of oppression might attribute such views to a Marxist. But it was Marx who said that a nation that oppresses another cannot be free, and Lenin who argued that nations oppressed by imperialism have the “right to self-determination.”
Nationalism is a very real phenomenon that cannot simply be ignored. In the U.S., national patriotism—the idea that “USA is Number One,” is used to bind workers to rulers, to convince American workers that they have the same interests as wealthy profiteers and their friends in the White House.
Freedom and asylum for Julian Conrado, balladeer of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia - People’s Army (FARC-EP), unjustly imprisoned in Venezuela.
Rally June 6, 2012 - Bolivar Monument, Santago, Chile
Manuel Rodriguez Patriotic Front (FPMR)
HOW CAN we end women’s oppression? This question can only be answered by posing yet another question: why are women oppressed? Unless we determine the source of women’s oppression, we don’t know who or what needs changing. This, the “woman question,” has been a source of controversy for well over a century. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels located the origin of women’s oppression in the rise of class society. Their analysis of women’s oppression was not something that was tagged on as an afterthought to their analysis of class society but was integral to it from the very beginning. When Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto in 1848, ideas of women’s liberation were already a central part of revolutionary socialist theory:
The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production. He hears that [under communism] the instruments of production are to be exploited in common, and, naturally, can come to no other conclusion than that the lot of being common to all will likewise fall to women.He has not even a suspicion that the real point aimed at [by communists] is to do away with the status of women as mere instruments of production.1
Marx and Engels developed a theory of women’s oppression over a lifetime, culminating in the publication of The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State in 1884.2 Engels wrote The Origin after Marx’s death, but it was a joint collaboration, as he used Marx’s detailed notes along with his own.
