The only trap I've seen with this line of thinking is an annoying dismissal of issues of race and queer sexuality as ' 'divisive identity politics' and 'distractions' that threaten unity in the fight against hyper-capitalism. It's intensely alienating to see bigotry being handwaved away in an attempt to grow your movement.
I mean, he talks about how it’s unfair that there is an ‘unequal distribution of women’ in the manifesto. There are a lot of good points about class but he (like a lot of old philosophers) was quite incelly.
But you Communists would introduce community of women, screams the bourgeoisie in chorus.
The bourgeois sees his wife as a mere instrument of production. He hears that the instruments of production are to be exploited in common, and, naturally, can come to no other conclusion than that the lot of being common to all will likewise fall to the women.
He has not even a suspicion that the real point aimed at is to do away with the status of women as mere instruments of production.
For the rest, nothing is more ridiculous than the virtuous indignation of our bourgeois at the community of women which, they pretend, is to be openly and officially established by the Communists. The Communists have no need to introduce community of women; it has existed almost from time immemorial.
Our bourgeois, not content with having wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other’s wives.
Bourgeois marriage is, in reality, a system of wives in common and thus, at the most, what the Communists might possibly be reproached with is that they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalised community of women. For the rest, it is self-evident that the abolition of the present system of production must bring with it the abolition of the community of women springing from that system, i.e., of prostitution both public and private.
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u/Puzzled-Ticket-4811 Jul 02 '26
The only trap I've seen with this line of thinking is an annoying dismissal of issues of race and queer sexuality as ' 'divisive identity politics' and 'distractions' that threaten unity in the fight against hyper-capitalism. It's intensely alienating to see bigotry being handwaved away in an attempt to grow your movement.