Vol. 75/No. 11      March 21, 2011

The following are remarks by Mary-Alice Waters, president of Pathfinder Press and National Committee member of the Socialist Workers Party, at a February 14 event in Havana, Cuba, to launch a new Spanish translation of Cosmetics, Fashions, and the Exploitation of Women by Evelyn Reed, Waters, and Joseph Hansen (see article on facing page).

The book, Los cosméticos, las modas y la explotación de la mujer, was recently issued under the Ciencias Sociales imprint of the Cuban publishing house Editorial Nuevo Milenio. Waters, who is the editor and author of the introduction to the 1986 Pathfinder English-language edition of the book, wrote the preface to the 2010 Spanish translation (reprinted in the February 21 issue of the Militant).

Notes on page 10 and subheadings are by the Militant. Waters’s remarks are copyright © 2011 by Pathfinder Press and reprinted by permission.
 

I would like to begin by thanking Sonia [Almaguer], [Osvaldo] Padrón, and all the compañeras and compañeros of Ciencias Sociales who made this book possible, with a particular note of appreciation for Susana de la Cruz, who designed the eye-catching cover for this Cuban edition.

I also want to extend a special thank-you to three compañeras, each of whom played an important part in bringing this book to fruition, and who intended to be here today but were unable to make it due to other book-fair responsibilities this afternoon.

Esther Pérez, the editor of Caminos magazine, published by the Martin Luther King Center here in Havana, volunteered her time and very fine abilities as a translator to make this book available in Spanish for the first time ever.

Pilar Jiménez, who has carried major editorial responsibilities at Ciencias Sociales for many years, was instrumental in convincing a few skeptics that Cosmetics, Fashions, and the Exploitation of Women was indeed a subject worthy of consideration by a serious Marxist publishing house.

And last but far from least, Carolina Aguilar, one of the founding leaders of the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC), and a tireless fighter for the socialist revolution and for women’s emancipation over more than half a century, was among the comrades in the FMC leadership whose collaboration and encouragement were irreplaceable. I don’t know how many years ago it was that Carolina, Isabel, and I first discussed getting this book into Spanish, and that is one of the reasons why it is so appropriate that Isabel, together with Julio César, is here to present the book this afternoon.  
 
From U.S. to Cuba and Iran
I want to say a few words about where the book comes from, what it is about, and why it has been one of Pathfinder’s most popular titles over the last 25 years—and not only in the United States and elsewhere in the English-speaking world.

For instance, more than 4,000 copies of the book have been bought in Iran. A Farsi translation, now in its second printing, was released there almost a decade ago by Gôlazin, an Iranian publisher that has edited numerous titles promoting women’s struggle for equality.

I’ve thought about that every time I’ve turned on the TV in recent weeks and seen pictures of so many women among the millions from Tunisia to Egypt and beyond taking to the streets in massive demonstrations against brutally dictatorial regimes, propped up by Washington, that had lost all pretense of popular legitimacy.  
 
Debate in the ‘Militant’
Los cosméticos, las modas y la explotación de la mujer was born more than 50 years ago. In fact, the first article in the book appeared in the July 26, 1954, issue of the Militant—a fighting socialist newspaper, based in New York, whose masthead proudly proclaims it is “published in the interests of working people.” It was a coincidence, of course, but as you here are well aware, that was the first anniversary of the assault on the Moncada barracks, the act that sounded the opening shots of the revolutionary war against the U.S.-backed Batista tyranny.²

The U.S. economy at the time was in one of its cyclical recessions—something far different from the profound crisis of production, trade, and finance that the capitalist system worldwide is in the opening years of today. With unemployment relatively high and household cash tight, working women in 1954 were spending less on cosmetics. Profits of many big companies were sagging, and the cosmetics manufacturers were ramping up an advertising campaign to convince women they just had to have some new color of lipstick or magical skin cream to make themselves sexually desirable and to be able to compete successfully with other women in selling their labor power.

The editor of the Militant, Joseph Hansen, published a very humorous and at the same time a very serious article about the “marketing” plans of the so-called “merchants of beauty.” Most readers of the paper loved it, but a few responded with angry letters accusing the author of making fun of women. The use of cosmetics was a woman’s “right,” they argued; working women were only seeking a little beauty in their lives.

The lively, sometimes heated debate that ensued in the pages of the Militant, and then in a discussion bulletin of the Socialist Workers Party, went deep into the real historical, the real class questions involved.

In our class-divided society, it is not working people who determine what is considered beautiful or moral or true. The worldwide standards promoted—or better, professed—by the imperialist ruling classes are imposed on us, as part of maintaining and justifying their rule.

Hansen wasn’t making fun of women for using cosmetics. To the contrary. The Militant article was exposing where the compulsion all of us live under—women and men—comes from and why such questions, far from being frivolous, are questions of great concern to working people.

The end product of the debate, published here as Los cosméticos, las modas y la explotación de la mujer, can accurately be described as a textbook in fundamentals of communism and class struggle.  
 
Commodity fetishism
I want to underscore two questions among many that could be emphasized.

First, one of the most enjoyable articles in this collection is Joseph Hansen’s “The Fetish of Cosmetics.” It is in fact a popular introduction to Marx’s Capital—a book that is not only the most comprehensive critique of political economy that exists, but the best book ever written to help us understand women’s oppression and the struggle to end it.

Hansen succeeds in rendering the seeming mystery of what Marx calls “commodity fetishism” understandable even to the newest reader.

The ways in which the owners of capital, with total calculation, target the economic, social, and sexual insecurities of women—and those of adolescents as well—to sell products and maximize profits is a lesson you won’t forget.

Hansen asks the rhetorical question: “Has the bourgeoisie ever gone about cultivating the fetish of commodities more cold-bloodedly than American big business?” Those of us who continue to live and work under its daily bombardment have no doubt of the answer.

Moreover, the siren song of the commodity fetish has become an imperialist weapon, like none other, against peoples across the earth. Already a hundred fifty years ago, the Communist Manifesto described this reality with unmatched eloquence:

The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which [the bourgeoisie] batters down all Chinese walls…. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.³

Today more than ever, those prices, that cynical cultivation of “demand” for must-have brand-name products of capitalist industry, are the heavy artillery aimed at Cuba. It is a battle we confront with full knowledge of the stakes for working people the world over.  
 
A working-class battle
Secondly, at the center of Los cosméticos, las modas y la explotación de la mujer is the class question. The fight for women’s emancipation is not a battle of women against men. It is a class battle, a battle between those who own no property and those who own and control the land, the mines and factories, and who expropriate for themselves the product of our social labor.

The second-class status of women as a sex is not rooted in biology or “human nature.” It was born only a few thousand years ago, a microsecond in the history of the human species. It emerged in bloody battles out of which a handful of men established their domination over others, men and women alike, and women themselves were reduced to a form of property.

Most important for us: as it was born, so shall it die.

The forms and expressions of women’s oppression have evolved and changed over the millennia. In today’s capitalist world, we are generally not bought, sold, and traded like cattle or slaves. Some women are even allotted positions of leadership at the head of giant capitalist corporations, bourgeois “charitable” foundations and educational institutions, and imperialist government ministries.

But women remain the second sex, and the elimination of that status will never be achieved as long as class-divided societies exist. It will only be achieved along the road we are fighting to make our own—through socialist revolution.  
 
‘Measure of general emancipation’
As Marx emphasized so clearly in one of his earliest works, citing what he called “the masterly characterization of marriage” by utopian socialist writer Charles Fourier:

The change in a historical epoch can always be determined by the progress of women toward freedom?. The degree of emancipation of woman is the natural measure of general emancipation.⁴

The natural measure of general emancipation!

And the caliber of a revolutionary leadership today can always be measured with the same yardstick—by how they act on that reality.

That is where the example of the Cuban Revolution, since its beginning, has been unique. And it remains so today.

The course fought for by the forces led by Fidel—from Moncada and the Mariana Grajales Women’s Platoon⁵ on; the course set by the thousands of women in the sierra and the llano, the mountains and the plains, who put their lives on the line in countless missions during the revolutionary war; the course set from the beginning by the FMC under Vilma’s leadership;⁶ the course set by Cuba’s proletarian internationalism.

These are acts that have confirmed and reconfirmed the class character of the Cuban Revolution and its leadership for more than half a century.

And I would add that the presence here today of compañero Fernández, vice president of the Council of Ministers, to celebrate the publication of a book such as this—something that would be inconceivable in any other country of the world—is but a registration of that class course and leadership caliber of the Cuban Revolution.

No one claims the work is done, least of all those of us here. But one scorecard has already been filled in. In a few short decades, women—and men—in Cuba, as they fought to advance the socialist revolution, conquered the economic and social ground that it took women in what are today the imperialist countries a century and a half to cover.

Above all, the people of Cuba, unlike anywhere else in the world today, have in their hands a government of the working class, the most powerful weapon possible to use in fighting to end every aspect of the millennia-old oppression of women, once and for all.

This is but one of the conquests we will be celebrating on April 16.

We hope the book we are presenting today will make a small but useful contribution in arming us in face of the battles that lie ahead.

2. On July 26, 1953, Fidel Castro led an attack on the Moncada army garrison in Santiago de Cuba, which marked the beginning of the revolutionary struggle against the U.S.-backed tyranny of Fulgencio Batista. After the attack’s failure, Batista’s forces massacred more than 50 captured revolutionaries. Castro and others were captured, tried, and sentenced to prison. They were released in May 1955 after a public defense campaign forced Batista’s regime to issue an amnesty.

3. Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970, 1987, 2008), p. 36 [2010 printing].

4. Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, “The Holy Family,” in Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), vol. 4, p. 196.

5. A female combat unit of Cuba’s Rebel Army, founded September 1958. It was named after an ardent supporter of Cuban independence, eight of whose sons died fighting Spanish colonial rule. One of those sons was Antonio Maceo, known as the Bronze Titan, a legendary general of the independence army, killed in battle in 1896.

6. Vilma Espín (1930-2007), was a founding member of the July 26 Revolutionary Movement and, together with Frank País, leader of the underground in Santiago de Cuba. She joined the Rebel Army in July 1958. Espín served as president of the Federation of Cuban Women from its foundation in 1960 and was a member of Cuban Communist Party Central Committee from 1965 until her death.