R. Palme Dutt: The subjection of women has always been inseparably bound up with class-society, and is one of the indispensable foundations without which private-property society could not maintain itself. Capitalism has taken over from the preceding period and adapted to its own purposes the social institutions built on the subjection of women. While revolutionising and organising production and trade on a gigantic scale throughout the world, it maintained, preserved and even intensified in a still more limited and narrow form the primitive and anarchic basis of the small-scale individual household, of the family and its ties, and sought to make of this pre-capitalist institution its most powerful conservative pillar of support. Only on this basis could capitalism, with its complete individualist cash-nexus repudiation of all social obligations and ties, nevertheless successfully maintain itself, and through the institution of the family throw off its own shoulders all social responsibility for the proper conditions of motherhood, of the bringing up of children, of the support of the sick and the aged, as well as the enormous volume of so-called "domestic labour"-all socially necessary labour indispensable for the maintenance of society, but offering no profit for capitalism to organise, and thrown off as unpaid labour on to the shoulders of the working-class wives and mothers to be performed in the heaviest, dirtiest, most unproductive and wasteful pre-machine conditions alongside highly organised large-scale machine industry in the world outside. The consequent economic and social institutions, involving the subjection of women and the forcible compulsion of the majority of women to economic dependence on marriage as their sole means of livelihood, are bound up with the existence of private-property society, and can only be ended with communist social organisation. wordsmith.social/protestation/…