Tag Archives: Inequality

It is 130 years since the publication of The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, by Friedrich Engels. Long considered by Marxists an important text regarding the origin of women’s oppression, it has been criticised by those promoting alternative explanations of women’s second-class status in society. CHRISTINE THOMAS weighs up the book’s relevance for women’s struggles today. In the preface to the first edition of the Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Friedrich Engels modestly described his work as “a meagre substitute for what my departed friend [Karl Marx] ... Read More »

Time to Build a Powerful Movement for Equality The misogynistic massacre of Santa Barbara, California is yet another horrific expression of a society that is based on the constant oppression of women. However, this expression of hatred also triggered a massive backlash.  A storm of tweets around the Twitter hashtag #YesAllWomen showed not only deep rooted anger but also the potential to build a powerful mass movement against sexism. The enormous outcry reveals that, together, we DO have the power to resist hate crimes against women, end domestic violence, and fight for equal rights in workplaces ... Read More »

On Tuesday the European Parliament endorsed a proposal from the European Commission to introduce a quota of at least 40% for each gender among non-executive directors in major European companies that are listed on stock markets. Should it be approved by the governments of EU member states the quota will fully come into effect from 2020.The fact that only a tiny proportion of the members of boards and senior management of major companies are women is a symptom of the systematic oppression and discrimination that women face under capitalism. The Commission and the EU establishment ... Read More »

As a socialist and women’s rights activist who continues to be perplexed, gob-smacked and horrified by the seemingly growing orthodoxy in left and feminist circles that Ekman entitles, “the story of the sex worker”, by which she means a sanitising of the sex industry and a justification for men buying sex, I felt a gushing sense of relief and also gratitude to the author while reading this enormously accessible, sharp and erudite book that looks at both the questions of prostitution and surrogacy. Ekman puts both prostitution and surrogacy in the context of patriarchal capitalism; ... Read More »

The global capitalist crisis affects girls and women especially harshly. The World Bank estimates that a 1% fall in economic output increases infant mortality by 7.4 deaths per 1,000 girls against 1.5 for boys. Similarly the crisis has resulted in a 29% fall in primary school completion for girls globally, and a corresponding 22% fall for boys. In the richest country in the world, the US, 17 million women were living in poverty in 2011, and 12.6 million men. The inequality is despicable – and so is the enormous poverty and destruction of living standards that the profit system is bestowing upon the majority of women, men, children and young people of the ... Read More »