Is Silvia Frederici a Marxist?

[APPLAUSE] Thanks. Yeah, so a few weeks ago, I was rage-baited by my FU page on TikTok because I came across a TikTok with a list of prominent Marxist feminists that the person who posted it thought were really key for you to understand. And this list had on it, Eleanor Marks, Rosa Luxembourg, Alexandra Colin Ty, Angela Davis, and Sylvia Federici. And this got me thinking about this title of Marxist feminist, right? Because I think this title allows the smashing together of really radically different kinds of figures. So yeah, let's talk about these figures for a little bit. Eleanor Marks spent her life building socialist organizations. Rosa Luxembourg obviously she fought not only German capitalism, but she fought the opportunist wing of our own party, which led to her brutal murder. Alexandra Colin Ty, a complicated figure. She was a leading Bolshevik organizing the women's work in the Bolshevik party, but actually ends up siding with Stalin and backing the kind of degeneration on women's rights. She writes an article defending the banning of abortion. Angela Davis, who comrades will know in recent years has backed the United States Democratic Party. And then of course, the topic of this discussion, Sylvia Federici, who is an academic, who has spent her life at the front of university lecture halls, being paid a really high wage to talk and to write. So the idea that all of these people can be placed under the same banner that they all have the same kind of ideas is obviously a completely ridiculous one. But it is something that's very common, right? And as much as I was annoyed at that TikTok, I don't blame the poster who sees these people as Marxist feminists. This is how they're talked about. But in reality, actually, none of the people on this list would refer to themselves as Marxist feminists. Elana Mark, Rosa Luxembourg and Colin Tai, they would all have been disgusted with the idea of being associated with feminism. Because they saw that word as being synonymous with middle class and bourgeois women who were looking for their own individual liberation, their own individual ability to be able to exploit people, to be able to exploit workers in the same way that the men in their class did. And even Angela Davis, in the days that she stood closer towards the Communist Party, she specifically distanced herself from the label of feminist. And she called herself a Marxist instead. And you can see as she's moved further right, she has begun to use phrases like intersectional feminist to describe herself. And that's come as she's been doing things like defending the democratic party. And Frederic She, as Ruth said in the introduction, Frederic She has never called herself a Marxist feminist. Frederic She calls herself a feminist critic of Marx. So in her magnum opus, the Caliban in the Witch, she begins by kind of marking the USP of the book. And she says, the USP of it is, I want to say both radical feminists and Marxists have got it wrong on women's oppression. And she claims very clearly that Marx only viewed history through the lens of the white male proletariat. So I think in truth, Marxist feminism doesn't really exist. It's a title that is slapped equally on both female Marxists and feminists who pay lip service to the idea of class and capitalism. And that latter category, they warp, they critique, and they deny the Marxist method in their writings. And that's the camp that Frederic She falls into. But because the title of Marxist is given to her, her ideas do have a sort of popularity, right? They are relatively popular. Someone who is anti-capitalist who cares about women's liberation, they see a TikTok like the one I described and they think, oh, I'll read Caliban on the witch, right? But these ideas, I want to be very clear, these ideas have nothing in common with Marxism. Because Marxism, as we know, is not the admission that class or capitalism exists. It's a method to study the world around us, which leads to revolutionary conclusions. So I'll talk about the Marxist method a bit in a second, but for a second, let's just talk about Frederic She's method, right? So Frederic She, rather than studying how to fight women's oppression by looking at the whole history of their suppression, looking at it all the way back to its roots, she just kind of randomly plucks a few hundred years from history and says, that's what I'll study. I won't look at anything else, that's what I'll study because this is where I've decided already that women's oppression comes from. So she takes the 300 years that last between the 15th and the 18th century, when the witch trials were happening across Europe. And the argument that she has for focusing her study on the period of the witch trials is number one, that apparently hundreds of thousands of women died, which is not actually true, right? In fact, it looks like it's between like 30 and 45,000 people died, not all of them were women, most of them were, but not all of them were women. Two, a second argument for focusing on this period is that previous scholars that she respects have looked at the dawn of capitalism as the origins of women's oppression, and the witch trials generally kind of happened around this period. And three, that no one else has studied the witch trials specifically, and therefore this is a new angle that she can have, it's something new that she can say about women's oppression. Clearly, none of that is a serious method for studying history, for studying theory, for studying oppression, right? This is dodgy facts, it's an A priori view. All of these classic traps of bad theory that people fall into, which has already decided where she wants to place the blame, and she says, "That's what I'm gonna do basically." For Marx and Engels, they did the opposite of this, right? They studied as much of history as they possibly could. They looked at all of the changes that occurred over thousands and thousands of years of history. And then, from that study, they pinned down where they think the oppression of women comes from. But Freda Ricci instead, she begins with the idea that she wants to blame the transition to capitalism, just because other people have and because she kind of thinks it's right. And therefore, she does, she blames capitalism. But actually, I would say even more so than blaming directly capitalism, she blames the existence of the working class. I eat the most progressive development that capitalism had. That's what she blames for the oppression of women. She blames both the existence of the female working class for its creation, it's for the creation of the double burden, right? The fact that you have to work and do the domestic labor and then also work in a factory, do an informal exploitation. Obviously, this is completely ridiculous, right? As if female serfs weren't working the land and taking care of the home and de feudalism. It's completely ridiculous to say that capitalism just created the double burden. So she blames the existence of the female working class, the female proletariat, on the oppression of women. But she also blames the existence of the male proletariat. She says this is a class that has been created basically to oppress women. Again, completely ridiculous. As if men under feudalism didn't degrade and repress women, right? She just completely picked this out of nowhere and says that it's correct with no backing for it. And I think this is only one example of how limited her understanding of even that, just that period that she studies, right? She's only picked 300 years and she still hasn't done a very good job. I've actually learning about what that period is about, right? And you can see this in Caliban on the witch. She admits loads of facts that don't work in the favor of her argument. Throughout the book, she blurs the lines of capitalism and feudalism. She blames capitalism for what she considers the state repression of women when the state that she's talking about is a feudal state, not a capitalist state. She also slanders and bastardized enlightenment thinkers such as Hobbes and Descartes. She claims that they are anti-woman and reactionary figures because they push for reason against magic and spiritualism. She conflates random events across different parts of Europe she takes into account at all the different stages of development of these different areas. And of course, importantly, she claims that Marx misses everything that she's discussing, despite the fact that many books and many chapters of books are dedicated to all of the topics that she says Marx misses. So the core point of Caliban on the witch is basically that the transition to capitalism has been a step back for women and therefore that Marx's idea of progress is absurd. And she says this in the introduction. She says I should add that Marx could never have presumed that capitalism paved the way for human liberation had he looked at history from the viewpoint of women. That quote is a real thread that runs through all the threads of each of these ideas on certainly this book. She's claiming that Marx did not study the role and the plight of women in the development of capitalism. But this is entirely incorrect. In a capital volume one, Marx dedicates loads of time to this question. And Federici actually mentions capital in the introduction to Caliban on the witch, right? She says that she's read it. I don't think she has. I think maybe she's done what a lot of us do and we're 17 and read half of the first chapter and be like, "That was too hard, let me leave it for later." Because if you manage to get to chapter 10 and chapter 15 of capital, Marx talks extensively about women. In chapter 10, he talks about the brutal conditions that women faced when entering the factories. He talks about how capitalism has forced women into work and he talks about how it's broken down the traditional structures of the family. He talks about the impact this has had on mothers, on working women. And he also talks about how the ruling class viewed this and their fear over falling birth rates and the legislation that they put into place to try and fight against this. And again, in chapter 15, Marx talks about how and why women have found themselves on the factory floor. He talks about it being partly because of the need for capitalism to constantly expand, creating new ways. work is to exploit, but he also talks about how it's the development of machinery that has allowed for women to do a wider range of jobs. Also, in Engels' conditions of the working class in England, there are numerous sections of the book that dwell specifically on the life of women under early capitalist development. He talks about the drudgery, the hardship and the oppression, but he also talks about how all the old family ties were being ripped apart in the development of capitalism. But Federici ignores all of this, right? She also ignores, she has this whole thing about the double burden, right? That is her main point that she thinks it's really bad that women have to do domestic labour and labour in the factory, which it is, right? It's this very stultified, awful work. But she says, you know, Marxists don't understand this. Marxists have never considered this kind of oppression before. I just want to give you two quotes from Lenin that completely show how ridiculous Federici is being here. So Lenin said, under capitalism, the female half of the human race is doubly oppressed. The working women and peasant women are oppressed by capital. In addition, and this is the main thing, they remain in household bondage. They continue to be household slaves, crushed by the most petty, most menial, most arduous, and most stultifying work of the kitchen and the individual household. And he said this, you all know that even when women have full rights, they still remain fatally downtrodden because all the housework is left to them. In most cases, housework is the most unproductive, the most barbarous, and most arduous work a woman can do. So clearly, this understanding that women face a double oppression under capitalism is not specific to Federici. It's not something she's come up with. And it's not specific to people who call themselves Marxists feminists. It's not something that orthodox Marxists have missed. The difference, instead, is actually what is the solution to that burden. Because for Federici, the solution is to remove the burden of formal employment for women, to send them back into the household and to give them only one burden to be the slave to their husbands. For her, the development into capitalism has been a wholly negative thing for women because it has forced them into formal exploitation in the factory. And importantly, she says that it is lowered the social importance of domestic and reproductive work. So Federici says this, she says that the women's movement must realize that work is not liberation. Work in a capitalist system is exploitation, and there is no pleasure, pride, or creativity in being exploited. So Federici instead sees liberation, not in the involvement of women in economic and political life, but in reverting to what she sees as kind of natural in the female existence, to reverting to caring for and living off the local land, to healing, and as the title of her book suggests, to magic and witchcraft. This is what she sees as being naturally women's work, female in the female body. In Caliban and the Witch, she spends a large chunk of the book discussing how in the medieval period, women supposedly had access, free access to this communal land, which was then taken away from them in the dawn of capitalism. And she says that meant they were forced to either work for a wage or be kept by a man's wage in order to access the necessities of life. But we have to be really clear on this point, feudalism was not some beautifully free communal, like, communist society. Federici is in this classic style of her method, she's cherry-picking fat, and she's been really deliberately vague, so she's not exposing the holes in our argument. Because the communal land that she's talking about women having rights to, this was bad land, right? This was land where not much could be grown. It was used for the grazing of animals. It was land that the Lord had said, yeah, whatever, I don't care about that, it's bad land, I'm not going to get anything from it. It would have been difficult to even provide for one person on that land, let alone the idea that you could care for a whole family living off this communal land. And that is why, if you look at the free serfs, the serfs that weren't tied to a Lord, which Federici seems to paint as the bastion of women's liberation. These people were mostly found kind of hopping from Lord to Lord, like begging for employment by him in order to achieve access to better land, basically, right? Clearly, because that communal land that existed was not able to provide for people. And obviously, once you were then in the employment of a Lord, all of the serfs had huge chunks of what they produced taken by the Lord. So this idea that Federici has that women could live freely and without a massive burden is completely ridiculous. And actually, if you read Caliban on the witch, you'll see no evidence that she puts up that suggests there's no examples, no, like, this happened here and this, just didn't even tell this one woman did that, like, she has nothing to say that women were able to live in this way, able to live free from the general mode of production. I also think that this reversion into kind of looking at the feminine ways of doing things or what the female body is made for, it's like caring and healing. This is obviously incredibly reactionary and regressive. And I do think this idea has a certain kind of popularity today. I think there's like an increased propaganda around home birds and natural birds and like, denying modern medicine and so on. Obviously, that propaganda is increased as the NHS has continued to be defunded. And then you go on social media and you watch like Nara Smith and she's making Cheerios from scratch and a ball gown and this kind of thing. It's all this at all, this is what it is to be a woman, right? Clearly, that is incredibly backward-looking ideas around what gender roles should be. But actually, this is exactly the kind of politics that Federico promotes. She claims that under feudalism, the witch and the prostitute played an important role in the social order and therefore that they were more appreciated and more liberated than women who work today and also raise children. So for her, what is progressive and regressive is purely based on a kind of moralistic feeling, right? It's purely based on whether she thinks women's work is appreciated or not. And there's an example of this. Federico sees the enlightenment as this reactionary attack on women because it casts aside this magic in witchcraft and she claims, well, this is women's work, right? This is what women are meant to do so the idea that you would be against magic, yeah, means that you're anti-women. She's against modern medicine in general and she references a lot of like Foucaultian and postmodernist arguments to struggle against the idea of modern medicine. And she claims, yeah, that women's work doesn't hold the same respect that it used to, right? That it doesn't have the same kind of position in society it used to. She mixes that up with the actual oppression of women under capitalism and then she claims, well, it's agreed just that Marxists seek capitalism as a progressive step forward from feudalism. But, and I think this is the most important point in answer to Federico. This is a complete misunderstanding of what Marxists mean by progress. Our prognosis of what is progressive or not is whether something develops the productive forces. And why is that the case? It's because the development of the productive forces gives us the ability to be able to provide the necessities of life with as little human effort as possible. Ultimately, that, of course, lays the basis for socialist and communist societies. But progress is not some sort of one-sided thing, right? Class society has been a necessary stage for the development of the productive forces. And that means that each society that has come into existence has had a lot of different poisonous ideas and features that have existed within it. Clearly, for example, when we look at pre-class society or primitive communism, as we often call it, this lacked the exploitation and oppression which came with all societies that succeeded there. But this egalitarianism, as we understand, was based on necessity rather than want. People were only providing the very basic necessities of life for themselves, and therefore culture, art, and philosophy were all lacking from these societies. Life was this very narrow and parochial thing, right? The development of the productive forces gives the ability for both the freedom from survival combined with the freedom from human to human exploitation. But in order to get there, lots of different stages of development have been necessary. And through different forms of class society, each of these things have had their own oppressive ideas. And that's how Marx both claims that capitalism came into the world dripping with blood and dirt. But simultaneously, that capitalism has created wonders greater than any society prior to it. And Marx actually talks about this specifically through the lens of women's oppression. He says this. He says however terrible and disgusting the disillusion under the capitalist system of the old family ties may appear. Nevertheless, industry, by assigning, as it does, an important part in the process of production, outside the domestic sphere, to women, to young people, to children of both sexes, creates a new economic foundation for a higher form of the family and for relations between the sexes. So, yeah, again, you see, Marx really did not ignore this. He did not like cast this aside. This is not something new that Frederichi has figured out and begun to study. So either Frederichi doesn't understand that or she just chooses to ignore it, right? It's not Marx that is missing anything. It's of course her that's missing things. She is seeing capitalism in a very one-sided way, right? She's purely looking at the fact that women have been forced to take on lots of domestic labor on top of also being involved in capitalist industry. But the reality is that in an advanced capitalist country today, the objective ability for women to be freed from domestic labor exists. Household technology and machinery exist. Socialized child care exists. Socialized elderly care exists. Places to eat outside of your home exist. Pain killers exist that seriously. limit the pain of childbirth, safe abortions exist, methods to limit or completely stock your periods in reversible ways exist. Of course, all of these things are hampered and unheld hostage by the profit motive, right? They're either run for profit or they're part of the NHS, which is obviously, as I said, being like systematically underfunded. But they do exist, right? They are there, and that is a creation and a development of the productive forces and the capitalism, the ability to have the socialisation of the domestic labour. But actually, the socialisation of domestic labour is also something that Freda Ritchie is against, and this is a very classic kind of petty bourgeois anarchist-y sort of idea, because she's against all the socialisation of domestic work, and she says there's very clearly in wages against housework, which is the pamphlet that Ruth mentioned at the start. I'm going to give a slightly lengthy quote to I apologise in advance. She says, as for the proposal of socialisation and collectivisation of housework, a couple of examples will be sufficient to draw a line between these alternatives and our perspective. It is one thing to set up a daycare centre in the way that we want it and demand that the state pays for it. It is quite another thing to deliver our children to the state and ask the state to control them, to discipline them, to teach them to honour the American flag not for five hours, but for 15 or 24 hours. It is one thing to organise communally the way we want to eat, buy ourselves in groups, etc, and then ask the state to pay for it, and it is the opposite thing to ask the state to organise our meals. In one case, we regain some control over our lives, and in the other, we extend the state's control over us. So clearly, this is a direct response to the gains of the Russian Revolution for women, and actually I think this really shows Freddie Ricci's lack of understanding of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Because in that quote, you can really hear Freddie Ricci's disdain for the state, right? She sees it as this naturally negative feature, this thing that always will oppress and hold down the masses. She can't imagine a state that is run by and for the working class. She can only imagine one that run in the interests of a small minority. In reality, she's disgusted by the idea of being a part of society, right? She's disgusted by the idea of her children listening to anyone but her, or maybe the nanny that she employs and can tell her whatever to do. So she's for the privatisation of domestic labour. She's for women's den outside of the social, political, and economic life, and continuing her woman's work as she sees it. But of course, Freddie Ricci herself doesn't stick to this, right? She has her own income, she has her own social circles, she has her own life outside of this domestic bliss. So it's only other women that she wants to not be involved in work, right? And of course, in spite of the double burden, right? Under capitalism, women's rights have taken great steps forward. You've got the right to vote, the right to an equal wage, the right to own property, the right to abortion, the right to divorce, the right to live independently without a man. These aren't small gains, even the fact that some of them are not fully realised right there, four more gains. These are still not small gains, these are still massive steps forward for the liberation of women. These fundamental democratic rights that have been fought for throughout capitalism. And I think this is another really important point for us to consider. Why and how have these gains been made? Have they been made through this kind of abstract women's movement that Freddie Ricci talks about? Or have they been made through class struggle methods, right? They have, they've been made through classical methods which have involved both working class women and sometimes working class men often working class men behind the working class women fighting for these things alongside them. An example of this is, of course, the Dagenham strike, which achieved the legal right to equal pay for women in Britain. The vast majority of these gains have been made because the bourgeoisie felt the threat of socialist revolution breathing down their necks. The involvement of women in the workforce, it hasn't only given them their own wage and therefore greater independence. It's not only given them social circles and human connection outside of the family, but it has put women's demands on the agenda of class struggle, which actually gives them a real way to be fought for and achieved. But for Freddie Ricci, she doesn't see any of that right. She doesn't see any of that progressive development that has existed. She sees only one side of the development of capitalism, this double burden for women. And she can't imagine how that can be moved beyond. So her solution, rather than automating and socializing domestic labor, which women are shackled by, her primary demand is just wages for housework. And her argument for this is that by paying for this work, it will grow to be seen as work, rather than something separate. And therefore, it's going to be respected more, right? And that's going to raise women's social status and society. So again, it's really clear to see this like moralistic and idealist method that Freddie Ricci falls into. She doesn't actually care about freeing women from the drudgery of domestic labor. She just cares about it being respected. And Freddie Ricci really, she specifically says this, right, in this pamphlet. She says it's not about giving women more financial independence, but it's actually just about the dignity of a housewife, right? It's about paying lip service to the dignity of a housewife. Again, I'm going to quote her in a bit of length here to show what she means by this. She says, when we view wages for housework in this reductive way, i.e. viewing it for many, we start asking ourselves what difference could some more money make to our lives? We might even agree that for a lot of women who do not have any choice except housework and marriage, it would indeed make a lot of difference. But for those of us who seem to have other choices, professional work and lightened husbands, communal way of life, gay relations, or a combination of these, it would not make much of a difference at all. For us, there are supposedly other ways of achieving economic independence. And the last thing we want is to get it by identifying ourselves as housewives, a fate which we all agree is so to speak worse than death. The problem with this position is that in our imagination, we usually add a little bit more money to the shitty lives that we have now and we ask so what? On the false promise that we could ever get this money without, at the same time, revolutionising all of our social relations. And we have to take it as a political perspective, blah, blah, blah, blah. But for her to reach, she doesn't even explain how wages for housework would actually be struggling for. She doesn't explain what the struggle for housewives would look like. Because this is a real question about what methods to housewives actually have to struggle against their oppressors, right? To struggle in favor of whatever demands they want, be it wages or anything else. She doesn't name any of these in her writing. Actually, she focuses and said on the aftermath of getting the wages. So she said, okay, the struggles weren't, let's talk about afterwards. And she claims that this would allow housewives to see their work as actual work, rather than as something that is just natural to the woman. And she says, therefore, women could like conduct strikes or partial withdrawal of labour to show how important their domestic role is. But she doesn't explain why wages would be needed in order for women to withhold their domestic labour. Because surely refusing to do your husband's laundry is going to cause him the same stress, whether you'll be impaid by the state for it or be in kept via his wage. In fact, actually, being paid by the state for this work would only entrench women's roles in the household. It would confirm women as the domestic servant. And I think this idea is particularly panicious and dangerous when it comes to sex. Federici says that, you know, prostitutes, they used to play this important role in pre-capitalist society and respect was given for the job of being a prostitute. Obviously, this is completely outrageous thing to say. prostitutes, yes, they have played important roles in all societies that have needed the existence of a monogamous family for the order of society. They have been the horde to the Madonna wife, right? In all these societies, men's monogamy obviously does not matter for the development of the monogamous family. But the idea that they were respected in these societies is obviously completely outrageous. These women were at high risk of rape, a high risk of murder, infection, all these kind of things. And they were viewed as machines, not as humans. And of course, under capitalism today, that still exists, right? prostitutes also face these conditions of deep pain and fear under physical or economic coercion. But Federici actually thinks that basically all housewives should be turned into prostitutes because she says that part of the wage that a housewife should receive should be for the sex that you have with your husband. Clearly, that is only going to further the problem of marital rape, of men thinking their old sex by their wives, of the role of sex being to pleasure the man at the cost of the woman. And once again, actually, we come back to the problem, how do women struggle for their freedom in this situation? Because we know the most revolutionary aspect of the working class is that they are united, that they're pulled together in large workplaces. And therefore they can struggle together, they have the same interest that they can talk about, discuss, raise their own consciousness and struggle together. And on the opposite side, we also understand that the backward-looking nature of the petty bourgeoisie is because of their individualistic nature of work. So, Federici thinks that women would be better placed to struggle if they're just individually isolated in their homes, if they're working all hours of the day, unable to meet up and discuss with each other. And again, she gives no examples of where that kind of thing has been successful, right? Because there haven't been any way, she couldn't find any examples if she tried to look for them. So she continually obfuscates as well, who the housewife is going to struggle against? In part, she says we would need to struggle against capitalism, she kind of pays lip service to it. but never puts anything concrete forward about that. But in reality, when you read her work, she's advocating for the struggle against your own husband. And she says this that sums that up very well. She says, "When hundreds and thousands of women are in the streets saying that endless cleaning, being always emotionally available, fucking at command for fear of losing our jobs, is hard hated work which waists our lives, then they will be scared and they will feel undermined as men." So it's not capitalism, it's not the bourgeois that she wants to struggle against. It's the male proletariat, right? And that is where her clear feminist ideology comes through. Because yes, of course we understand. It is often the man who is the direct perpetrator of the direct oppression that exists in women's lives. But that doesn't mean that it's men who have created and can destroy patriarchy or oppression. Because as comrades know, from a Marxist point of view, it's the rise of class society and private property which led to the fall of women out of occupying an equal status in society to men. And Engels Marx, the point at which domestic labor was degraded as the fall of mother right, essentially at the origins of the monogamous and patriarchal family. It wasn't created consciously by men, right? It was created automatically by the development of private property which needed to be passed down. At this point, women became property which could be owned as well. And ideas that reflected that real relationship in society began to take place, began to take hold in society. Women's, there was a degradation of women's bodies and minds in the public consciousness. But it reflected the real relations not the other way around. And since the dawn of class society, that has been upheld by the ruling class of every single society, right? And under capitalism today, even though women have been allowed into the upper echelons of the ruling class in their own right, these women still uphold and promote the poisonous oppression of women. Because it's an important divisive tool that exists under capitalism and it can be used to cut across the class struggle. Rosa Luxembourg summed up about these bourgeois women. She said, once they've got their rights, they'll trot like docile lambs into the camp of reaction. And that is exactly what exists today. So what difference does it actually make to struggle against the male proletariat? Because his ideas don't come from inside his own mind. They come from the real relationships that exist between men and women. He sees his wife as his servant or his prostitute because under class society, that is the relationship, that is the role that women have to play. And actually, what is it that has begun to wither those ideas away, that has begun to create more freedom for women in the kind of public consciousness? It has been the involvement of women in the workplace. It has been pulling women out of the home. It has been sending them into the workplace. I am materially blurring the lines, materially blurring the roles that men and women play in society. That's what's begun to change ideas, right? Not the other way around. So embedding women as domestic servants and then just demanding respect for that role is only going to have a negative bearing on the real relationship that exists between men and women. So there are all of these holes in Frederic's argument already. And we haven't even got onto how would these wages actually be paid for? And what would they mean for the wages of those in formal employment? And I think in order to understand that, the best place to start is it's marks, right? It's best to-- with what wages are under capitalism. In capital, Mark says, the value of labor power is the value of the means of subsistence necessary for the maintenance of a laborer. So essentially, wages are around the kind of cost of what a capitalist needs to pay the worker in order to keep them able to turn up for their next shift, just healthy enough, just happy enough to turn up for their next shift. And that can vacillate, of course, depending on features like the class struggle, the general economic situation and so on. But when women were on mass out of the formal workplace, when they were on mass in the home, as a general rule, the man's wage existed as the maintenance of the man, the woman, and the 2.4 children that they were probably going to have. So we can also count as well in those wages, social services, which don't cost the individual money. So state schools, the NHS, state pensions, all these kind of things. So then you have to ask yourself, well, where would these wages for housewives come from? Federity doesn't directly answer that. But I think it would be assumed that they would be paid for by the state, because the idea that you could get any individual capitalist company to pay for something that doesn't directly improve their profits is obviously not going to happen. So where does state money come from then? It comes from taxes, which makes it mainly a cut from the direct wage which goes into the workers' pocket. So even if it was possible to convince the state to spend money in this period of austerity, this money would have to come from somewhere else. Either taxes would have to be increased on those informal employment, or the last remain in social services would have to be cut. So not only would these wages materially and socially embed women as housewives, but they would also undercut the wages of people in formal employment, which would further the problem of people's economic situation, would further the problem, for example, of people having to stay in abusive relationships, because they can't afford rent by themselves. It would further all of these issues, but it would also undercut services, which take the pressure off the domestic burden, which take the pressure off women, right? So to have a wholly negative effect in every sense. Federity's method for freeing women is, of course, the complete opposite of the method of communists and of Marxists. For Earth's liberation, it doesn't begin or end in how society views domestic labor. Instead, we are looking to do a way with domestic labor altogether. And as the need for domestic labor withers away, those who are shackled to the sink will be able to step further and further into society. They'll have more involvement in the social and political and economic worlds that exist outside of the household. You could see this in the Russian Revolution. After the Russian Revolution, women were given free access to abortion. The church and state were separated. Marriage, registration of children, all that was separated. It was all taken out of the control of the church. Marriage became a very simple registration process based on mutual consent that you had. Marriage is not even needed to be registered after 1926. And you had divorce made incredibly easy, right? There was also real material improvements made for women-paid maternity leave. That it was existed after birth, before and after birth, actually, a network for pregnant women and women who had just given birth was prohibited. And Lenin and Trotsky, of course, also looked towards the development of social canteens to take the pressure of cooking for your family, of socialized nurseries, to take the pressure of the burden of childcare. All of this precisely in order to give women control over their own lives. And actually, it was women who organized and built these social services, right? Through the what we've called the genital, which was like the women's department of the Soviet state. They were put at the forefront of organizing their own faith. And this massively increased the confidence of women and led to, in the Petrograd Soviet, 20% of the delegates being women, which is something that most bourgeois parliaments can't claim today, right? So this is a clear indication that the old social ideas around women were starting to wither away, especially amongst the women themselves, right? They were gaining confidence. And you can see this in a report that was written that was written online women in the Soviet system. It said, "The proportion of women who performed the most basic civic duty that of voting in elections rose steadily in both urban and rural areas, from 42.9% in urban areas, in 1926, to 89.7% in 1934, and in villages from 28% to 80.3%. Efforts to extend the level and scope of political involvement by drawing women into the work of the local Soviets also achieved substantial results. The proportion of women deputies in local Soviets rose in rural areas from 1% in 1922 to 10% in 1926, and 27% in 1934. And in urban areas, it rose from 5.7% in 1920 to 18% in 1926 and 32% in 1934. And that was not only the product of resources that undercut domestic labor and brought women out of the household, but it was also the product actually a revolution itself of the act of revolution. Because the act of women's involvement in class struggle, this Fiona was talking about this in terms of racism last night. The act of women's involvement in the class struggle in revolution, it has a profound impact on the confidence of women and on men's views towards them. Of course, in Russia, it was the women who called the men out in February, who started the February revolution. And the men weren't like, oh no, it's women calling me out, I refuse to come out, right? They saw their objective interests as the same as the women workers who were out on the streets and they followed them into battle. And in other moments of intense class struggle or revolution, relationships between men and women have completely turned on their heads. For example, in the 1984 Miner Strike, relationships between men and women in these very socially backwards mining villages were transformed. I was reading a BBC article that had a lot of different quotes of members of a group called Women Against Pet Closures, who were like the wives of the miners. I copied down three quotes 'cause I thought they were, I thought they really proved this point. Sean James, who was one of these women against pet closures, she said, for the first time really, these men were setting and listening to women. Michaela Horkin said the women did feel empowered. yn ffordd oeddwn ymwyr yn ffordd ymwyr yn ffordd yn ffordd ymwyr yn ffordd ymwyr yn ffordd ymwyr yn ffordd ymwyr yn ffordd but more importantly, I felt powerful. The square was an egalitarian and inclusive space. I felt that I was accepted and that I belonged. Zainab Magdi said, "Teria Square felt like a gender bias free zone." Women felt safe in teria, and we were not constantly afraid of being harassed. That in a society like Egypt, right, that has a huge problem with the oppression of women. That is the mood that is created in revolution. Not out of a feeling of anything more realistic, but because both women and men realize that a new society can only be built by the involvement of the greatest proportion of the working class possible. Imagine how that kind of feeling, that revolution in Egypt that I talked about those quotes from. That was only 18 days long, right? Imagine if that feeling was extended to a successful revolution to that classical being successful and work has taken power of society. All of the old ideas would be up for question just as they were in the bourgeois revolutions. A post-revolutionary world would be a blaze with a discussion of what kind of society we want to build. And this would be backed up with the real material gains to wipe away domestic labour. In the USSR, these attempts were hampered obviously by the economic underdevelopment that existed in society at that time and by the civil war, of course. But in Britain today, socialised canteens don't need to be built from scratch. Every chain restaurant could be nationalised, you could pull down the prices drastically and mean that people could actually go and use restaurants, could actually take themselves out of the household and take away that burden of domestic labour. Socialised nurseries don't have to be built from scratch. They can just be brought into public ownership, getting rid of the need for parents to pay half of their full-time wage for childcare. Care homes for the elderly already exist and if he ended the profit motive, they could be used without the exorbitant costs. Hospitals, if they were properly funded, could do more aftercare for patients, keep them in the hospital until they're able to live independently instead of placing that burden on the women in their lives. Machinery also exists which can make cleaning your home as easy as possible, a robot vacuum cleaner or dishwashers in every single home. And whatever else could be created with the unleashing of the productive forces when they're allowed to expand again. Empty homes could be brought into public ownership, more could be built with the many expropriated from the bosses, which would mean that no woman would be forced to stay in a home with a boyfriend or a husband she no longer wants to live with. This would completely transform the relationships between men and women. It would allow for relationships to exist on the basis of real human attraction and love, not on economic necessity. So it's on that basis that communists look towards the liberation of women, not through pain respect to the domestic labour that oppresses and holds down women today, but to the existence of a new stage of society where all of this so-called women's work could be automated or socialized. Where rather than trying to change ideas around women's roles, we change the reality of the roles that women have to play. Where women have actually been involved in the building of this society, where they're not only a victim or a beneficiary of the political and economic whims of the ruling class. Where both working class women and working class men control society themselves and control their lives, free from both the economic exploitation and the social oppression of capitalism and class society. I want to leave the final words to Engels, because I think he must still be today considered the greatest teacher on women's oppression and on the struggle against it. And I think he pointed the way forward for the freedom of women in origins of the family. I'll end on this quote. The emancipation of women will only be possible when women can take part in production on a large social scale and domestic work no longer claims anything but an insignificant amount of her time. Thanks.