Understanding Sex-Roles

We make no claim that the solution of economic problems created by capitalism will miraculously address all the issues discriminations and prejudices between us as human beings as men and women. However real permanent change in social relationships is not fully possible without a basic change in society. Much of capitalist culture make women more slaves than they need to be. The many wishes and desires of women are not realisable under private ownership and the profit system. They cannot attain and hold such reasonable goals under capitalism mainly because much of the system that stands in the way.

There are many aspects of woman’s liberation which are centred upon their economic problems. There is the demand for equal pay for equal work. There is the fight against discrimination in the work-place. There is the need for access to child-care to enable women to reproduce and be producers. These are problems of working-class women who have a requirement  to earn a living for herself and a family. Within capitalist society few women, or men, can find such work without a fundamental change in society.  The pressure and misery of economic necessity must be removed and human happiness must replace the profit motive. Hours of work and conditions have to be planned on technological possibilities and society’s consumption needs, with distasteful labour reduced to the minimum and instead where everyone will be in a position to exercise a choice about work, to train and qualify for that which may bring each individual fulfilment. Socialism seek to dissolve the separation between “woman’s work” and “man’s work.”

Boys and girls should both be taught housework chores such as cookery, and since both may become parents, they will be instructed in childcare. Motherhood is not the entirely a woman’s role and, in fact renounce motherhood if she so wishes.

We are aware that capitalism as an exploitive society means that many relationships in daily life cannot be tackled without first establishing a more favourable social, economic and political milieu. So we say we do not know whether under socialism whether it will be a woman’s or a man’s place in the home, other than socialism will relieve men and women of the dreary drudgery of a earning a income. We say that the place NOW for all people regardless of gender, sexual orientation and ethnic origin is in the revolutionary World Socialist Movement.