The great significance of Friedrich Engels’s Origin of the Family, Private Property & the State is that it is one of the first Marxist analyses of development of family and origins of women’s oppression (the first was August Bebel’s Women & Socialism, 1879) — a subject in which most men were uninterested. A Short Summary... Continue Reading →
Sex Work Is Not Work: A Marxist Feminist Analysis of Prostitution – PART III
Part III: We cannot abstract labour from its social context ‘value converts every product into a social hieroglyphic.’Marx, Capital Vol I In light of the enormous sex disparity between producers and consumers within the sex industry(majority female sellers; majority male buyers), prostitution and other 'sex work' cannot be considered outside of its historical, material, social... Continue Reading →
Book Review: Eleanor Marx A Biography
This single volume new edition of Yvonne Kapp’s biography of Eleanor Marx, first published over 40 years ago, was deservedly highly acclaimed at the time. EJ Hobsbawm praised it as “one of the few unquestionable masterpieces of 20th century biography” and Michael Foot described it as “a work of scholarship but also a work of... Continue Reading →
Book Review: The Women’s Revolution by Judy Cox
Premised on the indisputable fact that women’s role in the revolutions in Russia of 1905 and the two revolutions of 1917 have been largely hidden from history, Judy Cox’s book redresses the imbalance in the torrent of publications two years ago marking the centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution which largely ignored it. Her slim volume... Continue Reading →