Family and Class

The resolution states: "With the rise of capitalism and modern industry, the economic foundation on which the traditional family was based was destroyed. Women were taken out of the home and put into the factory. But the special exploitation of women, who became a cheap reserve labour force, continued. To justify the double exploitation of women workers, the ruling class fostered the ideology of male chauvinism."

To set the record straight, at the very beginning of the industrial revolution women and children formed the bulk of the industrial proletariat. The reasons for this are well established. Women and children were cheap, unskilled, docile labor used by the rising capitalists to batter down the wages of men (usually more highly paid) and to destroy the craft industries employing (relatively) highly paid male artisans.

Consequently, workers with large families were often given preference by early capitalists who, as a matter of fact, often compelled the worker to require his entire family to work in his factory or lose his job.

The destruction of the traditional family by employing women and children in production creates the possiblity of founding the realtionship between the sexes on a new economic basis.