The Subjugation of Women Under Capitalism:
The Bourgeois Morality

Bourgeois Morality and Contractual Marriage

Bourgeois sexual morality reflects property relations insofar as it defines a woman’s body, the children produced from her body and her labor power as the private property of the husband or protector. From this perspective, it is clear that bourgeois morality is fundamentally a justification of the marriage contract, which itself is no more than a legal agreement giving husbands the right to appropriate wives’ productive and reproductive powers.

Under the trappings of the bourgeois morality – the frail, dependent, helpless wife, the hypocrisies of romantic love, the idyllic images of the happy housewife – is a system which justifies and rationalizes the subjugation of women. It does so by mystifying the real meaning of married women’s labor, convincing a wife that her labor is valueless, a mere service to compensate her husband for her dependency upon his valuable labor power. In the same way, the bourgeois morality emphasizes monogamy, chastity, modesty and obedience. These serve to ensure a woman’s subservience by convincing her that it is “God’s law” or “Nature’s intent” that her labor power is valueless and her children belong, by right, to her husband; that her duties are, above all, service and obedience; that her acceptance of the tutelage of her husband is necessary to her survival since she and her children are dependent upon the husband’s providing.

A woman’s enforced dependency and her consequent subjugation is further justified in the social definition of woman as primarily a sexual object, whose principal reason for existence is in passively giving her body for male sexual satisfaction and in the bearing of his children. Laws against adultery, for example, serve to keep access to women’s sexuality the exclusive right of husbands. Fidelity and monogamy have always been strictly imposed upon women while men have been permitted to violate these norms (the ubiquitous double standard). The imposition of fidelity and monogamy has always been justified morally in terms of a husband’s desire to know that he is the father of the woman’s children. In fact, the question of establishing paternity is only of esoteric interest. The real function of monogamy is to ensure and stabilize an individual husband’s right to appropriate his wife’s labor power and reproductive power. Throughout most of human history, children were valuable pieces of property, potential and real labor power, and a husband needed a “deed” (paternity) to establish his claim to the labor power of his children. Monogamy has always functioned to seclude a woman to one man as his property in order to guard against wife-stealing and to brand her as his property – since women, as with all human beings in bondage, are not above running off, depriving the husband of both her labor power and the labor power of the children she produces.

Every mechanism of social control – moral, religious, governmental – has been used to lock women into marriage and the family. The bourgeois morality for this reason creates a psychology that asserts that a woman is not psychologically complete until she has chosen her mate, that her very human nature cannot be realized without childbearing, that her life is empty and meaningless if she is not a wife and mother -no matter what she may have accomplished. A woman who does not marry is presented as a freak, as incomplete or humanly inadequate. None of these limitations apply to men whose realization is defined in terms of work and in terms of their life outside of the family. Indeed, the power of men to actualize themselves is manifested in the double standard, by which men are thought to require many women to establish masculinity while a woman can realize herself only through a complete submission of her own will and personality to that of a husband.

Women have always resisted, always resented, for the human spirit cannot forever be locked into a servant’s worldview. This is why women are depicted in popular and bourgeois culture as either pure or sluts, where evil lurks always within the Madonna-Whore.

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Heterosexuality and Homosexuality

Human beings are high-order primates. Primates are not noted for displaying a fine degree of sexual discrimination, and neither is the primate homo sapiens. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that a variety of sexual styles have existed in most societies from ancient times. Homosexuality has been extensively documented in primitive communist societies, among some slave-owning classes, among the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie and among the proletariat in all advanced capitalist countries. There appears to be little or no homosexuality among serfs and peasants – probably because the economy was based on family production and exclusive homosexuals don’t generally make families.^[2] In one study of 77 primitive communist societies it was found that for 64% (49 societies) “Homosexual activities of one sort or another are considered normal and socially acceptable for certain members of the community.” In 36% (28 societies) homosexual activities were rare, absent or carried on in secret. In one example, homosexuality was practiced by women only.

Well-known bourgeois sexologist Alfred Kinsey has the following comments concerning the common belief that only heterosexual activity is normal for all mammals:

Biologists and psychologists who have accepted the doctrine that the only natural function of sex is reproduction, have simply ignored the existence of sexual activity which is not reproductive. They have assumed that heterosexual responses are a part of an animal’s innate, “instinctive” equipment, and that all other types of sexual activity represent “perversions” of the “normal instincts.” Such interpretations are, however, mystical. They do not originate in our knowledge of the physiology of sexual responses and can be maintained only if one assumes that sexual function is in some fashion divorced from the physiologic processes which control other functions of the animal body.

The attempt to define heterosexuality as the norm of human sexual behavior is an example of metaphysical science and is not based on the material facts of the diversity of human sexual styles. Therefore the moral and social meanings attached to these styles is a doctrine of bourgeois morality which has evolved with the development of capitalism, and must be understood as an element of the superstructure serving the ends and purposes of imperialism and not as a “natural order of the universe.”

Historically, it is clear that the social meaning of sexuality does not inhere in the style of sexuality (homosexuality, heterosexuality and bisexuality) but in the social meanings attached to styles. In ancient Greece mate homosexuality was philosophically extolled as a love between equals, far superior to the heterosexual coupling between man and beast-woman. Female homosexuality in ancient Greece was obviously a woman’s response to her bestial status – a relief from the social oppression and deprivation of a woman’s life. The rise of lesbianism in the modern women’s movement was a rejection of both bourgeois morality and the prevalent nature of heterosexual relationships in which strong and competent women are virtually sexually ostracized by men. Sexuality and its expressions in sexual styles are so obviously linked to the specific historical conditions in any given society at any given time that it is simply absurd to argue that one or the other style is more or less “natural.”

The real analytical problem lies in understanding the origin and functions of the social meanings ascribed to any given sexual style at any given time. The problem is not psychological in nature but a question of social analysis. We must therefore understand the definitions of “natural” sexuality and acceptable sexual norms in their socioeconomic context. A doctrine of rigid heterosexuality, as it evolved to its present representation in bourgeois morality, must be understood as an element in the superstructure of capitalism, needful to the ends and purposes of capital, rather than a metaphysical exercise in determining a priori the natural sexual order in the universe. Considered within its social context, heterosexuality seen as a natural absolute (in which all other sexual styles are “deviations” or “perversions”) is quite obviously related to the maintenance of the family and the male supremacy around which the family is organized. Sexual control lies at the heart of the doctrine of monogamy; but sexual control also lies at the heart of the doctrine of heterosexuality.

For both men and women, sexual regulation is in fact regulation of reproduction. Thus, the enforcement of anti-homosexual laws is primarily aimed against the working class and lower petty bourgeoisie while homosexuality is tolerated in the upper petty bourgeoisie and ruling class. The selective toleration of homosexuality has, then, a class basis which preserves the material conditions beneficial to capital.

To the primate in us, sexual style is irrelevant. But sexual style is not irrelevant to male supremacy and it is not irrelevant to controlling human reproduction. Equally, the doctrine of the “naturalness” of heterosexuality and norms of rigid heterosexuality are overridingly central to the subjugation of women: they contain some of the principal justifications for sexual and social submission within the family. Above all, the doctrine of natural heterosexuality is the ideological bulwark of male supremacy.

Homosexuality and “Proletarian Morality”

The imposition of the bourgeois morality by means of religious beliefs, social norms, social legislation and education – by all the superstructural institutions of capital – has provided the controlling ideology for the promotion and justification of the subjugation of women and has been the principal means by which capital exercises social and moral control over proletarian life and consciousness. To speak of a special “proletarian morality” arising from within the working class makes as much sense as positing that the revolutionary ideas of Marxism-Leninism spring spontaneously from the consciousness of the proletariat. What is usually invoked as “proletarian morality” is precisely of the same order as trade union consciousness, that is, nothing more than bourgeois ideology reflected in the proletariat and adapted to its conditions of life.

The depiction of homosexuality (or indeed any concern with sexuality) as “bourgeois decadence” is nothing more than the expression of the bourgeois morality itself. The claim that “proletarian morality” condemns homosexuality as “decadent” or “perverted” ignores the bourgeois nature of morals in capitalist society; ignores the widespread existence of homosexual practices in all social classes, including all strata and sectors of the proletariat; fails to make class distinctions (lumping all homosexuals into one group defined by sexual style alone and “declassing” the whole group by definition); ignores the real differences between the social meaning of male and female homosexuality; and above all, refuses to view the nature and origins of sexual style analytically as part of capitalist society.

The result of substituting bourgeois morality for Marxist analysis is a purely liberal debate: 1) homosexuals should be tolerated, i.e., be given “democratic rights”; or 2) homosexuals should be condemned as decadent and be given therapy to overcome their “bourgeois decadent” deviation from the sacred heterosexual absolute; or 3) homosexuals should stay in the “closet” and not bother people.

In fact, the left’s attack against homosexuality is an attack against women, for the attack invariably takes the form of a defense of the bourgeois morality, which is a defense of male supremacy. The left’s attack provides a handy weapon to silence “uppity” women demanding discussion of sexual problems and the position of women, who can thus be accused of condoning “decadence” or of failing in their duty to maintain “unity” with men (especially husbands), or, horror of horrors, lapsing into “bourgeois feminism” and questioning the holy precepts of the nuclear family.

The most destructive consequence of the left-wing sexism has been to drive women and homosexuals into “sexual politics.” Women’s Liberation itself and, later, lesbian vanguardism were consequences of denying women any legitimate place, as women, in the socialist left. People were thus forced back into a fight for their social equality and limited to a fight against their social oppression. Women were forced to fight the left even as they were forced to fight the capitalist society as a whole. The consequence of left-wing anti-feminism was in this way profoundly reactionary, contributing to the rise of reformist and even fascist social movements. The left was in error, for so subjective and self-interested was the anti-feminist attack that class analysis or a class perspective was never addressed to the women’s movement. In time, women themselves undertook to engage in a Marxist analysis of themselves, but only after having spent years of confusion engendered by the self-interested sexism of petty bourgeois male chauvinists in the left.

The predominance of “sexual politics” among homosexuals can be explained in the same way as the prevalence of “sexual politics” in the women’s movement – a response to the left’s definition of a “whole human creature” by but one (socially defined as negative) aspect of human existence: sex or sexuality. The distaste of heterosexual male leftists for any discussion of sexuality is, in fact, a distaste for any discussion of their objective supremacy, of their oppressor roles, of the direct benefit they personally enjoy from the subjugation of women.

Let us suggest that from the point of view of Marxism-Leninism a preference for one sexual style over another is principally irrelevant, and all the more so for the general alienated state of sexual relationships in contemporary society. Opposition to separatist politics, if principled, should be based upon class analysis and political analysis. Thus, we should oppose those groups organized around petty bourgeois class-based reformist demands; we should oppose those groups that make sexual oppression the principal contradiction, whether these are groups of women or groups of homosexuals; we should oppose all those groups holding that the first priority of proletarian revolution should be “sexual liberation” (for example, the contemporary Reichians with their various forms of sex-pol therapeutic politics, etc.).

In the end, we do not aspire to make revolution in order to free people to enjoy any sexual style they please, nor do we agitate for revolution in order to justify the practices of one group or another. We struggle to abolish capital, to liberate the masses of human beings, to build a society in which our species-being can be free to seek its greatest potentiality. It is foolish and wrong to drive dedicated people into a dead end of sexual politics by defining their humanity sexually, and then, on the basis of that definition alone, bar people as “unworthy” of revolutionary struggle. It is sexism – and like all sexism, it is madness.