Nonetheless, the surplus value from our labor and from our wombs helped to produce the bourgeois society in this U.S. Empire! But how necessary is it for the bourgeois educators to omit this historical development from the classrooms today.
Sixty-one years from the day Sojourner Truth stood begging for the rights of Black women Luxemburg pointed out the reality material conditions since the advent of capitalism--that the underpaid and free labor of poor and working class women "is productive for society like the men" ("Women's Suffrage and Class Struggle"). What of those women, millions of proletarian women, who work at "factories, workshops, on farms, in home industry, offices, stores"--aren't these women as "productive in the strictest scientific sense" in our present society? These women are "productive," but they are also "women exploited by capitalism."
The proletarian woman marches with the tunnel workers from Italy to Switzerland, camps in barracks and whistles as she dries diapers next to cliff exploding into the air with blasts of dynamite. As a seasonal worker, she sits in springtime amidst the commotion of train stations on her modest bundle, a scarf covering her plainly parted hair, and waits patiently to be hauled from east to west. ("The Proletarian Woman") [4]
And there is another kind of work women do that is not considered work because it does produce a profit for the capitalist rulers Luxemburg told her audience ("Women's Suffrage and Class Struggle"). Raising children and housework is not "productive in the sense of the present capitalist economy no matter how enormous an achievement the sacrifices and energy spent...This is but the private affair of the worker," a "nonexistent" worker. By contrast, the work of the "music-hall dancer" is work. Her "legs sweep profit into her employer's pocket," but "all the toil of the proletarian women and mothers in the four walls of their homes is considered unproductive." This "brutal and insane" treatment of the proletarian women "corresponds to the brutality and insanity of our present capitalist economy."
The first task of the proletarian woman is to "clearly and sharply" see this "brutal reality."
"The education and intelligence" of women has served to bring women to the Social Democracy organizations and to unions, crying "injustice!" In turn, Socialism has benefited from this "mental rebirth of the mass of proletarian women." But so has the capitalists, for the Party no doubt also made these women "capable productive workers for capital."
"The current mass struggle for women's political rights is only an expression and a part of the proletariat's general struggle for liberation."
While there is injustice in the capitalist system, it is not enough, Luxemburg pointed out, for proletarian to cry "injustice!" and look to the leaders and the electoral process for relief. We should note, she told her audience, that the Social Democracy organizations and unions in Germany do not "use the argument of "injustice.'" And why should they? We experience injustice, leaders! And the response: What injustice!
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