Pathfinders: Without distinction of race or sex (2025)

The Pathfinders Column from the May 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the USA, Trump’s MAGA gang is ruthlessly savaging everything they don’t like, including climate science, Ivy League universities which they see as being hotbeds of radical leftism, and diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI). Their DEI bête noire is what’s called ‘affirmative action’, which they take to mean promoting ethnic candidates over more talented white ones, in defiance of the principle of meritocracy.

This presupposes that a white-dominated ‘meritocracy’ is ever genuinely capable of being ‘colour blind’, in the sense that it doesn’t notice whether a person is white or black. Critical race theory, which the MAGA gang also loath, mocks this self-serving pretension and argues that disadvantaged groups will never get a fair shake unless a little positive discrimination is introduced into the mix. As things stand, the system will always promote whites over more talented ethnic candidates.

Logically speaking, discrimination is not in the interests of employers, if through their own prejudice they are reducing the pool of talent they can draw from. But prejudice is not logical. Moreover, economically disadvantaged whites may not see or admit that there is a racism problem in the first place. To them, any positive discrimination in favour of other disadvantaged groups, together with talk of ‘white privilege’, will seem like a wholesale liberal attack on their ‘rights’. Populists like Trump are experts in exploiting such concerns.

During the USA’s infamous Jim Crow era, segregation required race-defining laws to determine who was black and who was white. The concept of ‘race’ has no scientific basis, so the laws were inevitably arbitrary, leaving some white-appearing people designated black, and vice versa. This legal nonsense imposed an artificial binary categorisation on what in reality is a spectrum, in order to enforce an iniquitous social oppression.

Constitutional lawyers teach that ‘parliament can do everything but make a woman a man and a man a woman’. In its judgement last month the UK Supreme Court seemed to agree but they were making a purely legal ruling. They were not seeking to reflect the scientific view which is much more nuanced.

‘Most traits ascribed to males and females fall along a spectrum that has two peaks. One is the average for females. The other is the average for males […] But almost nobody fits in the peak for their sex on all of those measures.’.

As molecular evolutionary biologist Nathan Lents puts it, ‘How we define sex really depends on what we’re talking about. We want this to be a nice, neat, two-bucket category system where there’s no grey area, but unfortunately biology doesn’t traffic in binaries very often’. He describes a huge range of sex-related cardiovascular functions, hormone levels, blood, liver and brain conditions and disease dispositions, which don’t necessarily correspond to the external visible anatomy, or what’s called the phenotype. ‘While it’s very understandable to want to collapse all of this diversity into very simple categories, it really misses a lot of important biology. Life is complicated, life is messy, life is multi-dimensional’ .

He goes on: ‘We have anatomy all throughout our body that shows sex differences, but those differences are overlapping, and the variation within the sexes is larger than the difference between them’.

He concludes: ‘We’ve invented categories such as male and female, we invented these words, we invented these labels and we created the definitions, which means that they’re not necessarily a biological reality’.

For instance, women typically have two X chromosomes, and men have an X and a Y chromosome. But this is far from being universal. Around 1.7 percent of babies are born as ‘intersex’ or as having ‘differences of sexual development’ (DSDs), meaning they have traits of both sexes. This is about the same proportion as those who have red hair, or globally, around 110 million people. 1 in 650 newborns assigned male at birth have two or more X chromosomes and one Y (Klinefelter syndrome). 1 in 1000 newborns assigned female have just one X chromosome (Trisomy). In some cases, the SRY gene, important for male sex development, jumps out of the Y chromosome and bonds to an X instead. In others, X and Y have genes which prevent bodies from responding to testosterone and other male sex hormones (androgens), so that their bodies develop as female while having testes inside their abdomens.

Stigma surrounding such conditions often led to surgery at birth that was kept secret by the child’s parents, leading to severe mental health problems for the child later in life, in particular gender dysphoria, in which the person’s perceived gender does not align with their assigned sex.

Some of us may have mismatched sexual traits and not even know about it. In 2014, a 70-year-old father of four seeking treatment for a ‘hernia’ turned out to have a uterus with fallopian tubes (youtu.be/kT0HJkr1jj4).

The Supreme Court ruling is likely to have heartrending repercussions for transgender women, and will no doubt be contested. It’s a political ruling that will allow one large oppressed group to feel a measure of protection at the cost of another, far smaller one. But it is not based on science, which has nothing to say on wider questions about sports or hospital beds or prisons. And it allows politicians to ‘dodge responsibility over one of the most contentious and toxic debates of our age’.

In socialism, ‘legal’ definitions will be irrelevant. Equality doesn’t mean we all have to look or be the same. What it does mean is that we will cooperate, practically, ethically, and creatively, to build a post-capitalist society of common ownership for the emancipation of the whole of humanity, in the words of clause 4 of our Declaration of Principles, ‘without distinction of race or sex’.

Paddy Shannon

Transgender issues and capitalism (2022)

From the December 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

There’s an issue causing much aggravation in the UK, the ‘issue’ of transgender people. You will find it in parliament and being talked about in all corners of the country. So, what do transgender people and their supporters argue? Many put a soft-left liberal case against discrimination and for tolerance but there is also a ‘gender socialist’ theory, based on a part of Marx’s analysis of society. This part of Marx’s theory to is found in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, where Marx divided society into two parts, the base and superstructure; the base is the economic mode of production that creates and informs the superstructure of a society, while the latter is the social, legal and political apparatus that reinforces the mode of production while also influencing it; the base makes and changes the superstructure but the superstructure can also react on the base.

Analysis of prior modes of production and the many superstructural features arising from them implies that Marx’s theory was correct: settled agriculture created patriarchy, feudalism created the divine right of kings and capitalism created individualism. None of those societies existed in isolation from one another, and every mode of production so far has retained elements of the society that it displaced. These may be primarily cosmetic features, such as the UK’s constitutional monarchy, or they may be more deeply systemic, such as patriarchy. Capitalism too has incorporated superstructural features from prior societies, and just like all prior societies, it may be incapable of ending these features, indeed it may intensify them. Patriarchy has retained its power under capitalism with 88 percent of billionaires being men and 19 CEOs being men for every 1 woman; this isn’t said to beg for female representation under capitalism but rather to show that capitalism perpetuates male-dominated societies just as the systems before it did.

Gender Theory

Patriarchy is not the only legacy that capitalism retains. Gender is one such legacy, an ancient and foundational idea which we’ve built cultural concepts on and around. Placing these concepts on top of sex started before we can even remember. And capitalist institutions continue this extended delusion because they significantly rely on, and so encourage, gender’s continued existence for the sake of economic sustainability. Under capitalism, gender is informed by the roles we undertake to produce the next generation of workers, this is called reproductive labour. These roles can be anything from the actual act of reproduction to childcare and education; femininity under capitalism has historically been defined by the performance of the role of the primary caregiver to children, while masculinity has been defined by performing the role of both provider and protector. Capitalist gender lazily assigns people these gender roles in part due to its own apathy towards ending these prejudices but also to make working-class people enforce their own oppression under the threat of being considered unfeminine or unmasculine and thus being rejected by the mainstream culture of capitalist society. The effect of this is two-fold, to provide identity and to create the next generation of workers for the capitalist machine. Gender forces an identity on every person, which it attempts to justify by basing itself upon biological sex while imposing cultural roles and expectations that have nothing to do with genitals, chromosomes or anything remotely biological. Gender is based rather loosely on semi-plausible and simplified abstractions, i.e, men are the providers because they are stronger and women stay at home because they are less strong. This is inaccurate for several reasons: some women are stronger than some men, not all work is based on strength especially in the modern world, there’s no evidence that women are naturally more able than men to raise children but rather that they’re schooled into parenthood, and many more beyond those. Most gender roles are learned, forced onto young children so that they’re efficient at producing and being members of the workforce. It would be more logical, efficient and empathetic to the human race as a whole to liberate ourselves from these roles and simply fulfil the roles which we wish to.

Transgender people revolt

Many binary transgender people (those who transition from male to female or vice versa) often seem to not challenge capitalist gender at all but rather perform its stereotypical features aggressively to make themselves the gender they identify as. While on the surface this seems correct, trans people don’t perform gender stereotypes to become the gender they identify as (no trans man believes that trousers make them a boy); rather they perform the stereotypes in order to be seen by capitalist society as the gender they identify as and to protect themselves from the discrimination and violence they might face if they don’t fully ‘pass’ (succeed in being perceived) as that gender. A person who is willing to cross the lines of socially-conditioned gender, regardless of reproductive ability and conditioning into parenthood, is revolting against ideas of womanhood and manhood as defined by involvement in reproductive labour; the transgender person undertakes the same act of revolt as the lesbians and gays of the 1960s who refused to participate in traditional reproductive labour and the women’s liberation movements who refused to define themselves by their ability to reproduce.

But capitalism, as always, sets people against each other rather than acts for the good of humanity. We can see the backlash against the increased awareness of socially-constructed gender through the October 2021 BBC article ‘We’re being pressured into sex by some trans women’ by Catherine Lowbridge. This article was an attack on trans women, claiming that the alleged actions of a few trans women could be seen as representative of all trans women, based on a study conducted by a dubious group with only 80 online participants (Get the L out, Lesbians at Ground Zero), providing merely anecdotal evidence and including the opinions of Lily Cade, an accused rapist, who would go on to use the attention she got from the article to publish a manifesto calling for the lynching of trans women (www.them.us/story/lily-cade-violence-terfs-bbc). In the article (which the BBC has since changed) the writer cited Lily Cade without mentioning that she is an accused rapist (despite being told this by a transgender activist), skims over the unreliable nature of the study and claims not to have talked to a transgender person for an alternative viewpoint. This biased piece of propaganda from the BBC betrays the prejudice in capitalist society against those who attempt to change its superstructure in this way and the fear that this may disrupt and change capitalism.

Every socialist who understands the composition of society should expose and oppose such prejudice, armed with the knowledge that changing just the superstructure would merely be soft-left liberalism, and that changing just the base, without disrupting prior ways of thinking, would not work; a socialist society with a capitalist mindset would collapse in on itself. Socialists are liberationists, liberationists from capitalist ideas of race, gender and sexuality because liberation is incompatible with capitalism as a system and, of course, liberationists should be socialists, to free themselves from wage slavery, gender prejudices and state power.

SHERIFF

Gender myths (1979)

From the December 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

Many words have been written to explain, justify or rationalise women's social inferiority as against men. There are those like racists with their particular prejudice, who have claimed that this social inferiority is a direct reflection of women's biological inferiority. For example, it has been said that the average brain size in women tends to be smaller than that of men, the inference being that women are less intelligent. It is true that the brain of the female sex in homo sapiens tends to be smaller than in the male, but then the whole morphological structure tends to be smaller in the female than in the male — something known in scientific jargon as sexual dimorphism. The Neanderthal human, who preceded — and was for a time a contemporary of—homo sapiens, had an average brain size of 1,4550 cc. or 100 cc larger than the modern human. However there have been few, if any, attempts to claim that Neanderthal people therefore must have been more intelligent than homo sapiens.

There can be no doubt that the social position of women is closely bound up with the emergence of private property relations and class society. Lewis H. Morgan who, together with Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, can be said to be the founders of social anthropology, was the first to discover this connection. His claim was that people living in those stages of human development which he called savagery and barbarism, had social organisation democratic in character. They practised communism in living and operated a matriarchal kinship structure, in contrast to institutionalaliscd private property and territorial government which. Morgan claimed, had evolved from primitive society. He was able to show that the patriarchal and monogamian type of families had not always existed — a complete break from the theory of original sin and the idea that primitive people were the result of degeneration from previous civilisation.

Morgan’s works greatly upset the academics of contemporary society. While Morgan put no special emphasis on the social position of women in primitive society, in the much more free society he described the implication was that women were not oppressed as in civilised periods. Much of what he claimed for primitive society is substantiated by modern anthropology.

However, it must be remembered that the peoples he studied were organised in tribal society and were not primitive in the prehistoric sense as understood by modern anthropologists in their studies of hunter gatherer bands. For example, Elman R. Service, who has made a close study of hunter gatherer peoples still existing in various parts of the world, and who are the closest approximation of early homo sapiens society of 40,000 years ago, says this in his book The Hunters:

Food gathering is the major enterprise of course, but more than that, it is a direct confrontation of man with nature. That is to say, there are no specialised groups who get their food by buying it from, the producer or exchanging services for it in some way. There is no full-time specialisation of labour other than the domestic age and sex divisions that are found in any family. Among hunting-gathering peoples this division of labour is simply that men do the hunting, at least the kind of hunting that takes them any distance from the camp. Women, probably because of the relative confinement of bearing and rearing children, are left to forage near the camp for vegetable foods and such small game as can be easily caught. But this does not mean that men's hunting is necessarily of greater economic importance than women's work.

Service calculates that in aboriginal Australia, even on the northern coast where game and fish are abundant, vegetables make up 70/80 per cent of the people's diet—collected, of course, by women. Woman’s work is important: most hunting-gathering populations could not be maintained without it. On the other hand, they can, and do, go for long periods without meat hunted by men. Only the Eskimos live by hunting and fishing alone, and Eskimo women do most of the fishing.

The question now arises: why was it that the oppression of women by men took place at all? In spite of its shortcomings, the probable explanation for this is that contained in Engels' The Origin of the Family Private Property and the State based, as it is, on the concept of historical materialism and with much use of the researches carried out by Morgan. 

Needless to say, this explanation has been, and still is, rejected by most of the supporters of that epitome of all private property societies, capitalism — and by sonic of those who are interested in what is constantly referred to as “the liberation of women”. One such is Simone de Beauvoir who, in her work The Second Sex, says:

. . . On the same grounds it is impossible to deduce the oppression of woman from the institution of private property. Here again the inadequacy of Engels' point of view is obvious. He saw clearly that woman’s muscular weakness became the real point of inferiority only in its relation to the bronze and iron tool; but he did not see that the limitations of her capacity for labour constituted in themselves a concrete disadvantage only in a certain perspective . . . 

Instead, she implies as a metaphysical explanation:

Thus it is that man’s interest in his property becomes an intelligible relation. But we see that man's interest cannot be explained through the tool alone: we must grasp in its entirety the attitude of man wielding the tool, an attitude that implies an ontological substructure, a foundation in the nature of his being

It is not surprising that someone with these ideas can write the following passage in relation to the aspirations of women:

I have pointed out in the introduction how different women's situation is, particularly on account of the community of life and interests which entails here solidarity with man — and also because he finds in her an accomplice: no desire for revolution dwells within her, nor any thought of her own disappearance as a sex — all she asks is that aspects of sexual differentiation be abolished.

In other words, let capitalism remain providing women are not discriminated against. If the determining factor in women's inferior standing is an existentialist one and is not linked to the rise of private property relations and class society, why did women allow it to happen? If the special oppression of women is not a necessary corollary — as de Beauvoir suggests — why was it that the agitation for woman’s liberation had to wait for the 20th century?

During the 20th century there has been much anthropological field work and study of the cultural diversity — and similarity — of various peoples in different parts of the world, with the emphasis on the differences. Margaret Mead, in her book Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, describes her study of three tribes living in New Guinea; the Arapesh, the Mundugumor and the Tchambuli;

We have now considered in detail the approved personalities of each sex among the primitive peoples. We found the Arapesh—both men and women displaying a personality that out of our historically limited preoccupations, we would call maternal in its parental aspects and feminine in its sexual aspects. We found men as well as women trained to be cooperative, unaggressive, responsive to the needs and demands of others. We found no idea that sex was a powerful driving force either for men or for women. In marked contrast to these attitudes, we found among the Mundugumor that both men and women developed as ruthless aggressive positively sexed individuals, with the maternal cherishing aspects of personality at a minimum. Both men and women approximated to a personality type that we in our culture would find only in an undisciplined and very violent male. Neither the Arapesh nor the Mundugumor profit by a contrast between the sexes. The Arapesh ideal is the mild responsive man married to the mild responsive woman: the Mundugumor ideal is the violent aggressive man married to the violent aggressive woman. In the third tribe, the Tchambuli, we found a genuine reversal of the sex attitudes of our own culture, with the woman the dominant impersonal managing partner, the man the less responsible and the emotionally dependent person. These three situations suggest, then, a very definite conclusion. If those temperamental attitudes which we have traditionally regarded as feminine, such as passivity, responsiveness and a willingness to cherish children — can so easily be set up as the masculine pattern in one tribe and in another be outlawed for the majority of women as well as for the majority of men, we no longer have any basis for regarding such aspects of behaviour as sex-linked. And this conclusion becomes even stronger when we consider the actual reversal in Tchambuli of the position of dominance of the two sexes, in spite of the existence of formal patrilineal institutions.

Whatever the other conclusions or speculations one can draw from this, one thing is certain. It show's that human society is capable of a variety of behavioural patterns, and that the so-called masculine and feminine characteristics are not based on fundamental sex differences, but reflect the cultural conditioning of their societies. The question could be posed here, what are the crucial factors which determine the cultural conditioning? It would seem that these studies go some way to support the implication of Simone de Beauvoir of an ontological explanation, and to invalidate the universal approach of Morgan in his insistence that “The history of the human race is one in source, one in experience, one in progress.” However, what has to be taken into account is that all of these studies have been carried out with peoples living in tribal society where private property relations had already developed to a considerable extent, as indeed were Morgan’s, and should not be regarded as examples of the hunter-gatherer society of prehistoric people of some 40,000-50.000 years ago. As E. R. Service points out in his introduction to The Hunters “All the hunting gathering societies listed above have certain characteristics in common that serve to set them apart from tribal and other higher levels of society.”

As mentioned earlier, the hunter-gathering peoples studied by Service and others are the nearest approximation to the society of primitive humanity. There is no substantial evidence whatever to suggest that ownership aggression or the domination of one sex by the other has any part either with the hunter-gatherer peoples living, or in the society of primitive peoples of prehistoric times.

The agitation for women’s liberation is a phenomenon of modern capitalism. The oppression of women by men only arises in those societies where the form of marriage and the family is patriarchal or monogamian. and is associated with private property relations of an advanced kind. The problem is only recognised after the possibility of its solution has become apparent.

The social problems engendered by capitalist society, which dominates the whole world, cut across all speculation, all special pleading. The liberation of women is inextricably bound up with the liberation of the whole of humanity. Capitalism exploits its working class regardless of their sex. The question to-day is not just the emancipation of women, but the emancipation of the working class, regardless of sex.

Harry Walters

A Gender Item (2021)

From the July 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Is there a distinction between sex and gender? In the vast majority of cases the sex of a person can be established through physical attributes and these are determined by two sex chromosomes, the X and the Y. Two X chromosomes results in the female, X and Y chromosomes produces the male.

There are exceptions. Human cells usually contain 46 chromosomes, but occasionally, approximately 1 in a 1,000 males have a 47th, an extra Y. This can result in being taller than average, have learning difficulties, speech problems or weaker muscle tone. They don’t have distinguishing physical features and their sexual development is normal, although infertility can result.

It is possible for females to be karyotype 46 (usual number of chromosomes) and XY. This is gonadal dysgenesis and results in females with normal female external genitalia, but malfunctioning gonads that are prone to becoming cancerous and are usually surgically removed.

What all this demonstrates is there are naturally occurring variations that may cause physical and psychological issues, but do not alter the basic biological determination of females and males. That would seem to be a matter of material reality and not one of personal choice.

Can the same be stated in relation to gender, or are gender and sex merely interchangeable words in this context? There is an argument that avers sex to be as stated above, while gender takes into account social roles that may be determined by a person’s sex, or by personal definition according to subjective awareness.

There are at least eight gender identity terms – transgender, two-spirit, cisgender, non-binary, genderqueer, gender expression, gender fluid, gender neutral – and there may be others. The majority of the population are, in this list, cisgender, that is, their gender matches that which they were assigned at birth.

The question then arises as to what the material basis is for the plethora of alternatives with which a minority identify. People are, of course, free to choose the identity they present to the world, but such a choice suggests gender to be merely a social construct; or is there a genetic basis?

Scientific study of transsexuality appears to be minimal. Transsexuals are individuals born as one sex, but identify as being of the other sex. Studies of twins indicate a genetic basis for transsexuality, although there is presently no clear understanding of what that genetic basis is.

Nor is there an established common terminology used across studies. This means there can be no clear accounting of numbers as to how many individuals are transsexual. Approximations range from 7 to 9 out of every 100,000 people as being transgender.

Amnesty International estimate there are 1.5 million transgender people in the EU, about 0.3 percent of the population. An Equality and Human Rights Commission 2011 survey in the UK of 10,026 respondents found 1.4 percent were in a gender minority group, of which 1 percent had gone through some part of a gender reassignment process. That process did include actual actions taken, but also thoughts about it.

Everyday speech often uses sex and gender interchangeably, but some academic disciplines reference different definitions while others do not, which is also the case with dictionaries. Languages such as German and Finnish don’t have different words for sex and gender, the context of use being the defining factor.

All this indicates a great deal of uncertainty, which makes the possibility of giving offence all too real. A minority, however small, needs to be accepted on its own terms and not become subjected to a despotism of the majority.

Capitalism has done a great deal to break down social barriers and overcome discrimination. Driven by the constant need to realise profit, differences between people, actual or perceived, cannot be allowed to hinder that process. This is not a moral, but an economic imperative, and is a long way from being fully realised.

That prejudice and discrimination continue to exist cannot be denied, but neither can the progress made. A ‘No Blacks, No Irish’ notice is now utterly beyond the pale even though ‘Black Lives Matter’ remains pertinent.

In matters sexual, homosexuality has gone from illegality and the subject of barbed humour to celebrated wedlock in half a century. This is not to suggest all is well, far from it. Human attitudes are not fixed and need to be challenged. What one generation regarded as deviant, the next (or perhaps the next but one) accepts without question.

If this is not the case then we socialists are wasting our time promoting far-reaching changes that can only come about if the generality of popular ideas radically change. If the basis of present society, capitalism, cannot be replaced by a superior system, socialism, then human progress will have stalled.

While accepting that capitalism has allowed a great deal of progress to be made, it cannot go beyond its own economic imperative. For socialists, the free development of one is contingent on the free development of all. For a society in which this is possible, the constraints and divisions engendered by capitalism must be overcome.

Capitalism reduces most if not all aspects of society to commodities to be traded for profit. Sex is certainly a category with many such commodities. From pornography to gender re-alignment, from commercial stereotyping to lifestyle products, no possibility for profit is ignored.

The prevailing ideology of capitalism is individualism: Margaret Thatcher’s (in)famous pronouncement that there’s no such thing as society was a clear expression of this. No society equals no classes in any meaningful sense. People are free to self-define their identity, and woe betide anyone who might contradict or question.

However, denying society does not mean it doesn’t exist. An obvious lesson of the Covid pandemic is that not only does society exist, it must act in concert for the well-being of all. It also cannot be denied that society plays a major role in defining gender roles.

Recent history shows gender roles are not fixed because society is not fixed. There’s a continuous dynamic between individuals and sub-groups with society at large that initiates social change. Science plays a huge part in this by bringing new understanding to play.

There are hormonal and surgical ways of physical gender realignment, to match external sexual characteristics with psychological disposition. This patently does not bring about a chromosomal change.

Self-definition has merit: who has the right to decide how another should dress, deport and generally live? There are, though, women who, to say the least, are uneasy about those born men redefining themselves as women.

Caution should surely be the watchword during adolescence, a period of sexual uncertainty as the brain transitions from childhood to adulthood, which is perhaps the only transitioning that should occur at that time.

After detransitioning, former transgender man Charlie Adams established the ‘Detransition Advocacy Network’. This was in response, Adams claims, to being contacted by a significant number who’d transitioned in their teens and then changed their minds in their 20s.

The claim is that, triggered by gender dysphoria, transitioning seems not to have alleviated the condition, leading to a realisation that the change had not addressed deep-seated issues. These include body image problems, eating disorders and even, in some cases, autism.

However, following a survey in the USA of 28,000 transitioners, the ‘National Center for Transgender Equality’ reported only 8 percent detransitioned, of whom 62 percent only did so temporarily after succumbing to pressure. Just 0.4 percent detransitioned having changed their minds.

There does not seem to be peer-reviewed in-depth research into transitioning, its causes and consequences. The two examples featured here illustrate in the titles of the organisations the lack of objectivity.

The Adams charity declares its advocacy of detransitioning, while the ‘National Centre’ is clearly supportive of transitioning. Similarly, much of the comment available on the internet is of a partial nature from right-wing and actively anti-LGBT news outlets to radically pro-transitioning groups, with a plethora somewhere in between.

This is an area of uncertainty that science will undoubtedly continue to help clarify. Meanwhile, minds need to remain open. There cannot be progress if people are silenced by either legislation or social, largely media, pressure.

There is a responsibility to express contrary ideas without malice, with those shown to be wrong exposed through reason. Such is the very basis of democracy, open discussion without fear of censure.

One of the basic misapprehensions of a socialist society is that equality will be achieved through uniformity, when actually the opposite is the case. Diversity is integral to socialism, for it’s through the dynamic of difference that progress will continue to be made. Socialism cannot be static, a once and for all arrangement of relationships and roles.

Dave Alton

Japan: A woman for Emperor? (2006)

From the June 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

No male heir born in 40 years sparks a debate about bringing “gender equality” to the Japanese monarchy. What is the role of the Japanese monarchy? Would a female monarch be a step forward?

Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi is an unlikely advocate of women’s rights. But earlier this year the well-coiffed leader was keen to promote gender equality. Not for all women, mind you, or even a few, but rather a four-year-old girl known as Her Imperial Highness Princess Aiko. He supported an effort to revise the Imperial House Law that would allow her to “ascend” to the throne one day. Why this concern for the plight of royal women? Well, the fact that no male heir has been born for the past 40 years might just have something to do with it. Unless something is done, or a prince is born, the monarchy faces the prospect of withering away.

Koizumi responded to the succession crisis by setting up an advisory council in late 2004, which issued a report recommending that women and their descendants be granted the right of succession. The proposal had strong public backing and seemed uncontroversial, this being the 21st century. So it came as a surprise when right-wingers mobilized to oppose the reform. Considering that the reform was intended to save—not abolish—the monarchy, it seems strange that these “traditionalists” (to use a charitable term) are dead-set against it. But there is a certain logic that underlies their stance.

Some commentators have explained the fierce opposition to the reform as stemming from sexism, pure and simple. In a February 23 Asia Times article, J. Sean Curtis argued that the opposition to the reform, which he views as “a significant leap forward” for gender equality in Japan, “exposes the deep-seated anti-female bias at the heart of the Japanese establishment.” Certainly, those opposed to the reform are sexists. But in this case their motivation is not merely to keep women in their place, but to keep all Japanese workers in their place.

Above all, they treasure the monarchy as a valuable means of fostering nationalism. Their concern, often explicitly stated, is that casually throwing away one long-held dogma could threaten the entire ideology surrounding the “imperial household.” Suddenly admitting the triviality of male lineage, after harping on its importance for centuries, could raise other doubts, including the question of why a monarchy is even necessary. Monarchy enthusiasts found it hard enough to accept the idea that the emperor is not a deity, which Emperor Hirohito admitted in 1946. And some still haven’t let go of this idea, as reflected in Prime Minister Mori’s comment, in 2000, that “Japan is a divine nation, with the Emperor at its center.” Today, they are unwilling to make further sacrifices.

In particular, the traditionalists cling to the notion of an unbroken “eternal” line of succession on the paternal side stretching back 2,666 years. Starting on February 11, 660 B.C., to be exact. This “bloodline” is said to be the longest in the world and the very essence of Japan. Perhaps psychology can account for the odd fixation on length, but there is also a social explanation. The idea of continuity is comforting to the rulers of Japan. They have a vital interest in convincing workers that class-divisions will always exist—as symbolized by a distinction between royals and commoners. At the same time, almost conversely, the monarchy conveys the idea that all Japanese are part of a family headed by the emperor that transcends class. Of course, the “facts” mobilized to support this comforting and useful notion are not so convincing.

First of all, outside of Nazi scientific circles, anyone who harps on the importance of blood in relation to genealogy, not to mention its purity, is regarded as a fool. Even if “blood” is a synonym here for DNA, considering that every child is the product of a man’s sperm and woman’s egg, it is hard to see why the male side of this equation should be fixated on.

Turning from biology to history, the claims of the traditionalists hold up no better. The figure of 2,666 years is based on the first recorded histories of Japan, Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters) and Nihon Shoki (Chronicles of Japan). Both texts are a mixture of myth and historical fact, written in the early eighth century at the behest of the imperial family to boost its prestige. Given this patronage, it is not surprising that the authors were prone to exaggeration. Not only is the length of the imperial line stretched out considerably, but the origin of the Japanese monarchy is actually traced back to a sun goddess named Amaterasu. Those who rely on facts, rather than historical fiction, generally think that the first “emperor” (tenno) appeared some time around 400 AD. Unfortunately, carrying out such archeological research in Japan is impeded at every step by the Imperial Household Agency, which restricts access to tombs and artifacts.

The first emperors, whenever they existed, were hardly social types unique to Japan. Similar despots emerged throughout the world, as an early manifestation of class divisions. (In fact, there is speculation that the imperial family is of Korean origin.) And if older is better, as jingoists in Japan insist, they would have to bow down to lands where these religious/political leaders scratched and crawled their way to the top many centuries earlier. Granted, as our jingoists would surely point out, the Japanese monarchy stretches all the way to the present. But this is only because the emperor was grafted on to subsequent modes of production, whereas despots in other lands often had the good grace to exit the historical stage after playing their roles. The name tenno may remain—although even it was only coined in the eighth century—but the person bearing this title has been shaped by the times, tossed back and forth by the tides of history no less than the “commoners.”

Traditionalists speak of the imperial family as the core of the Japanese nation, but apart from the early centuries of real power, emperors have functioned primarily as figureheads. During the feudal Edo Period, for example, it was the Tokugawa clan, based in Edo (Tokyo) that ruled over a network of fiefdoms, while the Emperor rusticated in Kyoto. Some have argued that the 1868 “Meiji Restoration” (capitalist revolution) marked the emperor’s return to real power, but despite the emperor taking on new ideological significance under capitalism, his role has remained primarily symbolic; first as a unifying symbol wielded by the revolution’s leaders to forge a modern nation-state, and later as a bulwark against calls for greater democracy and as a tool to mobilize workers to fight imperialist wars. Even if we accept the argument that some emperors, most notably Emperor Hirohito, played an active political role, this does not deny that the ruling class as a whole utilized the emperor as a useful ideological tool.

Since the light of such historical facts erodes their cherished myths, the traditionalists’ campaign against the reform has relied heavily on scare tactics. The rank-and-file have been told that a female emperor would be more susceptible to manipulation by politicians or that “Japanese culture” is incompatible with a man playing second-fiddle to his empress wife. And their Japanese blood really boiled when former trade minister Takeo Hiranamu depicted a nightmare scenario, in which Princess Aiko becomes the reigning empress, “gets involved with a blue-eyed foreigner while studying abroad and marries him” so that their child becomes the emperor. Here we have Mein Kampf in reverse, with an “Aryan” peeing in the sacred gene pool.

Most of their energy was focused on attacking the reform, but the traditionalists did manage to offer a few solutions as well. One was to swell the ranks of royal welfare recipients by reviving the status of royals who were stripped of their titles after the war. The emperor’s cousin, Prince Tomohito, offered a more cost-effective solution. Quite unburdened by new-fangled notions of equality, he suggested the reintroduction of concubines, whose wombs could service the needs of crown prince and nation alike.

But before other solutions could be offered, the debate suddenly came to a halt in February. Whether they realized it or not, the opponents of reform had an ace up their sleeve in the emperor’s mustachioed second son, Prince Akashino. While the debate was raging, he set aside his research on catfish (I’m not joking!), to attend to a vital matter with his wife, Princess Kiko. The royal couple, already parents of two teenage daughters, announced that a third child is due in September. This revelation immediately silenced talk of reform—although the birth of another girl might rekindle interest in gender equality.

Compared to the insincere reformists, the traditionalists are refreshingly principled. They have little use for equality in general, not to mention gender equality, and do not conceal this fact. This is reflected in other efforts they are making to mold society, all supported by Koizumi, such as: revising the history textbooks so children “feel good” about Japan, forcing schools to display the national flag and students and teachers to sing the national anthem, encouraging politicians to visit the war-glorifying Yasukuni Shrine, or revising the Constitution to cut out the bits about democracy and human rights. Their message is simple: “Obey!” Although it remains to be seen whether this prewar template of nationalism, centered on the emperor, will be effective.

We have looked at unprincipled “reformists” and block-headed traditionalists, but what are we to make of those who genuinely saw the reform as a step, or even a leap, forward for gender equality? Can an institution based upon inequality become a beacon for equality between men and women?

Just posing this question highlights its absurdity. But more importantly, this view of an empress as a positive role model implies that achieving gender equality is primarily a matter of changing people’s way of thinking. This ignores the relation between the social system (capitalism) and the way people think and act. The continued existence of discrimination against women throughout the world suggests that there is such a relation. There is not space here to fully explain this, but in part gender discrimination stems from the general interest of capitalists to divide the working class, and the tendency of employers to hire a man over a woman if childbirth or raising a child might interfere with work.

To be fair, capitalism has contributed to gender equality by bringing large numbers of women into the workforce, to be exploited along with their male coworkers. And states are willing to introduce legislation to protect women’s rights when gender discrimination itself negatively affects the smooth functioning of the profit-making system. In Japan, for example, there is alarm over the extremely low birth rate. Unless the state opens the doors to foreign workers, which it is reluctant to do, it may have no choice but to improve working conditions so more women can continue working after childbirth. If this does occur liberals will be ready to supply the flowery rhetoric, but the fact remains that the state would be acting in the common interests of capitalists, not because their “way of thinking” suddenly changed. It is also worth remembering that the state giveth, and if conditions change, the state will gladly taketh away (or at least curtail) any right — whether it be health-care and pension benefits, shorter working hours, or women’s rights.

And even if capitalism could be reformed to eliminate gender discrimination forever, we would still be left with the inequities of this system. Capitalist equality is limited to the relation between buyers and sellers of commodities. Workers, as the sellers of labor-power, are also granted this right (although few commodity owners are swindled so regularly). This marketplace equality, however, conceals inequality within production, where workers have no choice but to work under, and enrich, the owners of the means of production (capitalists). Under this system, gender equality is nothing more equality between men and women as wage slaves. And even this remains a unfulfilled dream.

Socialists are serious about achieving equality—between men and women, and between all human beings—and recognize that true equality can only be achieved when humanity bids farewell to capitalism.

MS

Pathfinders: Speaking of tongues (2021)

The Pathfinders Column from the March 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

A year ago most of us were hearing terms like lockdown, social distancing and furlough for the first time. Since then the pandemic has spawned a host of new coinages, such as Miley (as in Miley Cyrus, geddit?), covidiot or morona (someone who behaves as if there’s no Miley), quarantini (home martini) fresh from your isobar (well-stocked booze fridge), zoom bombing, coronials (babies conceived in lockdown), and spendemic (the increase in online shopping).

These neologisms probably won’t last, but they do showcase the effervescent wit and ingenuity of the working class. People like language. It’s not just a tool, it’s a toy. And it can be a political hot potato.

Just last December it was reported that Germany is going to revert to its pre-1940s phonetic spelling table (equivalent to English call-signs Alpha, Bravo, Charlie), which the Nazis had altered as being ‘too Jewish’. Now Germans will have to remember to say Samuel instead of Siegfried, Zacharias for Zeppelin, Nathan for Nordpol, and David for Dora. It’s kind of funny, in a dark sort of way.

Not that we should laugh. Jack went up the hill with their bucket while Jill fell down and broke their crown. Er, whose bucket, whose crown? Apparently it doesn’t matter. The woke war against pronouns is making us all into undifferentiated plurals, even when our individual gender is neither an unknown nor a contentious issue. English is abandoning clarity for the sake of a political point, but perhaps that’s the price we have to pay for diplomacy. The Germans call each other ‘they’, the French retain the polite you-plural centuries after the English stopped caring about politeness, while the Italians were put off the you-plural because Mussolini liked it, and now call each other ‘she’.

From the standpoint of modern English, which has dispensed with a lot of language rules we were too bored or incompetent to follow, the use of gender in other languages seems bizarre and mysterious, as well as hard to learn and inconsistent. Why is salt female in Spanish, but male in French? Why does the German for ‘girl’ have a neuter article? Why does ‘hand’ in Italian have a male form but a female article? What is it with all this sex anyway? It’s very unBritish.

After much official foot-dragging, the French are now feminising male nouns so as to recognise the existence of female ‘docteures, professeures, pompières’ (firefighters), although in highlighting gender instead of erasing it completely they’re arguably rowing the language in the wrong direction. Meanwhile the appearance of the weird composite form ‘musicien.ne.s’ and ‘lecteur.rice.s’ (readers) is creating a Gallic backlash against what is known as ‘inclusive writing’, with the French Prime Minister in 2017 imposing a ban on its use in state documents. It may well be true, or at least plausible, that male-biased language forms tend to create male-biased social paradigms, but structurally there’s a limit to what you can do. Gendered noun classes run through a huge number of languages like Brighton through a stick of rock. To make them gender-neutral you’d have to dismantle the languages and rebuild them from the ground up.

That’s not going to happen, on purpose anyway. People with good pattern-recognition skills often learn to like the forms and structures of languages for their own sake, and can become prim sticklers over its rules, decrying the slightest deviation as an offence of ignorance or heresy. But language was always a matter of ignorance and heresy. People spelt things the way they sounded, and frequently misheard. Un napron became an apron because the Saxons wrote it down wrong. Snottingham became Nottingham because the Normans couldn’t pronounce it. Latin crocodilus became coccodrillo because the Italians couldn’t pronounce it. Jewellery becomes joolery, nuclear becomes nucular. What the hell, we know what we mean.

The intolerance set in with Dr Johnson’s dictionary and a desire for standardisation. It’s impossible to imagine modern capitalism managing its business and communications successfully without such language standards, but it ultimately goes against the grain of what language is, a dynamic and creative process that does not want to lie still and play dead. And it won’t, no matter what the rules say.

After dropping genders, case systems and polite forms English is now busily merging its simple past with its perfect past (Sink, sank, sunk = Sink, sunk, sunk). It often doesn’t bother with a future tense (I’m going tomorrow), even less with archaic subjunctives (If I were you), and seems increasingly confused about perfect conditionals (I should of known).

Somewhat counter-intuitively, languages tend to become simpler as they evolve, at least if they’re allowed to. That being so, it’s tempting to wonder if socialism will strip out a lot of legacy linguistics that only really mean anything in culture-bound capitalism.

Most obviously, you’d expect vocabulary changes. For instance, we may see words like property, money, market, trade, buy and sell fall out of use entirely, along with an entire lexicon of financial, business, judicial and military terms. The words steal and robbery would surely disappear, and hopefully murder and rape along with them.

As for gendered noun classes, it’s not hard to envisage socialist society dropping them. And in a society where time isn’t money and you don’t have to watch the clock, is it a stretch to suggest that even tenses might simplify or even disappear? It’s not impossible. Mandarin Chinese manages quite well without tenses (It is cold yesterday).

How might this realistically come about? By revolution, of course, not reform. Consider what happens if people become more mobile, as is quite possible when location and occupation cease to be a ball and chain, and where available transport systems are free at the point of use. Suppose you are a sixteen-year-old and you want to go off and see the world. There’s nothing to stop you travelling, perhaps to every country in the world, helping out with the menial jobs wherever you fetch up, and soaking up a global cultural and linguistic experience beyond anything conceivable today except for the idle rich. When 18th century officials of the East India Company returned to England after plundering Bengal, they spoke fluent Hindustani, wore flowing Indian silks and turbans, and built ‘Nabob’ country houses replete with minarets and domes. They also brought curry to England, thereby transforming the British favourite food. Imagine what worldwide free and open mobility might do for your local town and culture. And with this mobility, languages might flow and merge into a global travellers’ creole with remnants of everything in it, just like we get ‘sky’ from the Vikings, ‘telephone’ from Greek, ‘shampoo’ from Hindi and ‘paradise’ from Persian.

Young white Londoners today speak a hip new Asian-Cockney that didn’t exist a generation ago. ‘Street’ dictionaries have to be updated weekly. The one constant thing about language is change. And that’s just as true of the people who speak it. When people get around to creating the post-scarcity world of common ownership which we call socialism, we should expect our languages and cultures to start doing all kinds of interesting and surprising things.

Paddy Shannon

Raging Hormones (1994)

Book Review from the March 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Raging Hormones, Do They Rule Our Lives? by Gail Vines. Virago, 1993, £6.99.

If Gail Vines is right, "the 1990s seem set to witness a resurgence in ’biological’ explanations of human capabilities and frailties". Her book is a timely attack on a scientific determinism which seemed long dead. Although primarily a feminist critique of the medical profession’s supposed objectivity, her arguments work equally well against all attempts to treat science as a thing unbiased by the perceptions of its time, to "push human agency and the social context of our lives out of the picture".

Thus, we find that men who are dominated by their hormones are "deviant", yet for women it is expected. The "feminine" hormone, oestrogen, even takes its name from the Latin for gadfly, "that which causes a frenzy". Gender roles are socially constructed, so society covered its tracks with the ideology of the hormone, giving an unchangeable basis on which these roles could be justified.

It is an ideology, moreover, well suited to late twentieth century capitalism. The study of hormones betrays a fascination with the uncontrollable within us, a deep psychological anxiety which stems (Vines convincingly argues) from instability in the social and economic spheres.

The Victorian medical profession — male, of course — was obsessed with menstrual bleeding, the fear of obstruction and accumulated waste mirroring the laissez-faire economics of free-marketeers like Herbert Spencer. The fad of today, fatness, symbolises our modern concern with self-control and the "correct" management of desire. Women cope with fears for their role in a consumption-driven society by dieting, men by transposing them on to the unstable "other" woman: woman herself.

The menstrual cycle is seen as defining the essence of womanhood, and its end at the menopause as a loss of allure. Nevertheless, from puberty onwards, girls are conditioned not to let their "private" time encroach on the "public" time of their working environment, whether school, home or workplace. Any conflict between the two is met by attempts to "get the woman regular".

Many accounts of pre-menstrual tension (PMT) stress the loss of mental and physical discipline, the very things which capitalism demands. Another classic symptom, anger, is usually the cue for therapy. Rarely is it hinted that women have anything to be angry about. Vines questions the hormonal basis of PMT (there seems to be no link between its occurrence and hormone levels), and explains its survival in medical folklore partly through casual sexism, but also through a more easily quantifiable reason: the drugs companies enjoy having such a large market for their “cures". The causes of stress, too, come less from within than from the inability to control and predict the environment, most noticeably the working environment. Again, capitalism’s problem becomes a women’s problem in particular, because they are urged to conquer stress not just for their own sake, but for others — boyfriends and husbands (in advertisements), and customers and clients at work (contact work, for example in shops, is done most often by women).

Likewise, hormone replacement therapy (HRT) has two faces. Originally introduced to combat the short-term symptoms of the menopause, its pioneer, Robert Wilson, claimed rather more. His 1966 book was entitled Feminine Forever, a ploy followed by modern HRT evangelists such as Teresa Gorman MP, who tells women that "if they want to keep the older man from leaving home for a dolly bird, they too will get smart and use HRT" .

As with PMT, powerful pharmaceutical interests stand to gain from hormone replacement treatments. A mere $1.3m of their money paid for the establishment of the Wilson Foundation in 1963, while by 1991 American women alone bought $730m-worth of oestrogen products every year. Better still, the market is set to expand as the baby boom generation reaches middle age.

Like PMT too, however, the menopause itself is, at least in part, a creation of our society. In Mayan villages, women look forward to it as the end of child-bearing and lack the symptoms found in the West, such as hot flushes. It is only now appearing in Japan, at a time when their gynaecologists’ traditional income from abortions has fallen because of better contraception. In this, the situation is similar to that in the US, the biggest market. In Britain, at least until recently, doctors under the NHS had no need to sell drugs to give them an income, and HRT was consequently much less popular.

Vines maintains that gender and sexuality are the result of upbringing, and no more determined by our hormones than aggression is, or (we might add) greed. There is no "brain sex" which determines, for example, that women have poor spatial awareness, and therefore make bad drivers or bad engineers. In most cultures, boy and girls are treated very differently from their first months, and it is therefore impossible to distinguish biological and cultural factors.

To pretend that people are as they are because of their biological programming, whether by hormones or genes, carries obvious risks of discrimination and worse: it oppresses the individuality of all of us, and takes our sexuality "out of its lived context". This book is designed to give us a better idea of how hormones, and scientists, work. It is designed to put us back in touch with our bodies. "Such empowerment will come only with the knowledge that in reality, collectively and individually, we are continually creating ourselves."

Toby Crowe

Proper Gander: With Kid Gloves (2019)

The Proper Gander Column from the June 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

For children, all being well, the world is there to be explored with open-minded enthusiasm. By the time we reach adulthood, much of life has sadly lost its sheen and turned into a series of routines and/or things to be stressed out by. Growing up means learning what society’s expectations are, and how to try and deal with them. As shown by the ITV documentary series Planet Child, an important time is between the ages of four and seven, when children are finding their own personalities and boundaries. In the programme, twin doctors Chris and Xand van Tulleken look into what attitudes and values children have, and what they are capable of doing without their parents around. Through experiments disguised as fun activities, it’s revealed how youngsters react and behave in various situations. The kids taking part are a lively, happy bunch from different families around the UK.

Planet Child’s three episodes each focus on children’s autonomy, moral sense and gender identities. In the first episode, how independent the children are is gauged by the van Tullekens asking them to navigate across a city park, buy a souvenir and get a bus to the London Eye all by themselves (apart from the undercover chaperones, cameras, in-on-it shopkeepers and fake bus).All the groups make it to their destination ok, but the footage of them running around London without adults looks strange and even a bit worrying. These days, we’re not used to seeing children out alone as much as before. In Britain, the area in which kids roam away from home has shrunk 90 percent on average compared with the late 1960s, and 97 percent of primary-school-aged children are taken to school, a figure which has increased over recent decades. People now have a heightened awareness of risks, whether from paedophiles or car accidents, and while common sense should be used, this reflects a more wary, paranoid society.

In the second episode, the children’s sense of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ is investigated. The groups are left alone in a shop with cameras hidden among its tempting rows of jelly sweets and plates of chocolate-dipped marshmallows. ‘Don’t let anyone touch or eat my sweets’ says the show’s pretend shopkeeper as she leaves. The four- and five-year olds last a lengthy twenty minutes before they start guzzling like the proverbial kids in a sweet shop. The six- and seven-year olds stick it out for longer, until an in-on-it adult comes in and helps himself, giving them an excuse to start tucking in. Later, the younger children are quick to own up, probably because they haven’t thought enough about the possibility of reprimands, whereas the older group come up with an elaborate fib that a robber ‘wearing a black woolly hat with no bobble on’ made them eat the chocolate. The question of whether grown-ups would abstain for as long in the same test was left unanswered. The issue here isn’t so much about the requirement to pay for sweets (or anything) before having them, it’s more about doing what you’re told. In many circumstances, there’s a sound reason for kids to do what we tell them, but they like to push boundaries, and some are worth pushing.

The last episode looks at children’s awareness of gender roles. Research affirms that boys prefer to play with toy fire trucks and girls prefer to play with dolls, and that blue is a ‘boys’ colour’ and pink is ‘for girls’. But gender roles are now less rigid than these stereotypes suggest. Studies from around the turn of the millennium found that boys defined themselves according to actions and abilities while girls defined themselves more according to close relationships and appearance. When the kids taking part in the programme talk about themselves, the girls speak more about what they do and want to be than their earlier counterparts might have done. There are still differences in expectations, including over intellect. Asked to draw a picture of a clever doctor, nearly all the children draw a man. There’s a tendency for boys to overestimate their abilities and for girls to underestimate theirs, reminding us that inequalities persist from a young age.

Unfortunately, Planet Child doesn’t consider enough how these attitudes and viewpoints are acquired. Children learn how we’re supposed to behave within society’s accepted values. These evolve over time; parenting in Britain seems to place more emphasis on risk awareness and challenging some stereotypes compared with the past. And of course, the norms children learn to accept differ between cultures. The show also features a tribe in Namibia, where traditional gender roles are defined sharply and children walk miles across the desert away from their village to look for wood. In a Japanese school, good behaviour is taught through encouraging a kind of top-down co-operation and shared responsibility for the surroundings, which means they have committees to report on leftover milk, for example. The values which our behaviour is shaped by reflect how our culture aims to get things done. All societies need their own boundaries and norms, but it’s a shame that as we learn capitalism’s rules and expectations, we also tend to lose that wide-eyed energy kids have. Maybe we shouldn’t teach children what to think as much as how to think.

Mike Foster

Throw Away the Stick (2017)

From the November 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

Last month's headlines were dominated, to the surprise of many, by the revelation that a Hollywood producer was in the habit of using his position of power and influence to get aspiring young hopefuls to have sex with him.

This can't have been news to anyone but the naive. Theatre like everything else in capitalism has been reduced to a squalid money business where the rich exploit the efforts, and sometimes the bodies, of young people desperate for advancement and not rich enough to say no. Actors are workers and workers have to sell themselves as commodities on the labour market. That labour market is nearly always a buyer's market, and when the buyer is a man who has sex instead of scruples on the brain, it's not hard to grasp what is likely to happen.

Some of the online comments from readers of these news stories accused the women who had spoken up of being prostitutes, who had been willing to sleep their way to riches and were now hypocritically whingeing about it. Many of these comments were from women. The anger and bitterness behind such trolling is all too obvious. To poor people, there's no such thing as a rich victim. The fact that male actors can get ahead without supposedly resorting to prostitution didn't enter the debate.

What became plain, as the story grew, was how widespread the problem is. Women often experience harassment in some form, whether it's being whistled at, groped, or inappropriately chatted up. They generally keep silent because they feel powerless. Society generally keeps silent because it doesn't care. And this is just the everyday stuff. Underneath this culture of silence lies a nightmarish landscape which includes rape, domestic abuse and murder. Any woman living in this terrifying landscape is almost bound to think that the world is primarily defined by male power and dominance.

Historically there's no question that this has been true, and still is in many parts of the world where the hangover of the pre-capitalist past still hangs heaviest. In advanced capitalist countries the trend has been more towards political, legal and economic parity, partly so that employers can cherry-pick exploitable workers from the largest possible bowl. But these limited freedoms have been offset by an intensifying commodification of women through advertising, the media, and the film and music industry, a commodification now also turning its attention to men. We are not even human beings anymore, just products with a package and a price and a sell-by date.

If society is primarily patriarchal, as some think, then most men are doing astonishingly badly out of it. This is really because they, along with women, are ultimately in thrall to a higher power, a tiny fraction of people who own and control all of society and most of the world. What is decisively important about this power elite is not actually their gender at all but their property portfolio.

To socialists, it doesn't matter what colour or gender you are. What matters is that you are a worker. The politicisation of gender, like ethnicity, helps keep the working class divided and thus too weak to break out of its own misery. Capitalism is a master at instilling its oppressive and divisive structures at an early age. The task of revolutionaries is to identify and break those structures. And we can do it, so long as workers are willing to try to understand each other. Women have been speaking out, and must continue to do so in order to lift the veil of silence. For their part, men need to understand that ignoring women's subjective experience of patriarchy is the same as perpetuating it. Either you are fighting oppression or you are complicit in it. When a man suffers rage, helplessness and frustration, he is experiencing what it means to be a worker. But when he takes his rage out on a woman he is doing the bosses' dirty work for them and he is a class traitor. A class that wants to be free also has to know how to take responsibility. Socialism is not possible otherwise.

There is, incidentally, nothing in the rules of capitalism that forbids it from being gender-neutral. In a gender-neutral capitalism, workers would still be poor, overworked, exploited, powerless and bitter.  And capitalism would still be hell-bent on self-destruction through war and environmental damage. The identity of the oppressor can and has changed among and between cultures and over time. What hasn't changed, and what will never change in capitalism, is the ability of some to oppress others. This is one reason why socialists call for the abolition of the property-owning principle. Private ownership is a big stick, whoever wields it. If you don't want to be beaten, you need to throw away the stick.

Paddy Shannon