9 - The Communist Manifesto's Transgendered Proletarians

Summary

But the bourgeoisie has not only forged the weapons which bring it death; it has also produced the men who will wield these weapons - modern workers, proletarians.

The more modern industry has developed, so the labour of men is more and more displaced by that of women.

Some 150 years after the Manifesto was published it is clear that one of the great curiosities of the text and the subsequent characterisation of the proletariat in Marxism concerns the mystery of its gendered character. The evident contradiction between the two following sentences leads to the heart of the problem.

As manual work requires fewer skills and less exertion, that is, the more modern industry has developed, so the labour of men is more and more displaced by that of women. Differences of age and sex have no social validity any more for the working class.

In effect capitalist industrialisation produces gender neutralisation for the working class and yet this involves a displacement of male by female labour (I am ignoring the equally problematic question of age here). Essentially I want to ask: how much of the way gender arises as an issue in the Manifesto is related to a genuine knowledge of the gender system and how much to political character and demands of the vision held and developed by Marx and Engels? In this chapter I want to examine the possibility that Marx and Engels knew a great deal about the gendered aspects of the social forces they analysed, yet this knowledge was not very convenient for the theory and perspective they wanted to present. Rarely did the huge contradiction between the various theses developed in historical materialism with respect to the gendered character of the proletariat come clearly into the open.

The story of the way the Manifesto was commissioned by the Communist League has been told in various ways many times. The current introduction to the Penguin Classic edition by A. J. P. Taylor dates from 1967 and itself has become a classic, but really adds very little to the story that is not in some way presented by Marx and Engels, especially the latter's ‘On the history of the Communist League’ of 1885.