quick reference for a brief but balanced review of what has been happening in eastern Europe. Notes [Portions of this review are taken from a paper 'Bukharin, Perestroika and Eastern Europe' presented by me at a seminar organised by the Social Scientist on 'History of Socialist Societies and the Implications of Current Reforms1 at New Delhi on March 24-26, 1989.] I Timothy Garton Ash, 'Reform or Revolution', New York Review of Books, October 27, 1988. The third of three articles; the earlier two appeared in NYR of October 13, THE emancipation of women had always been an issue of central concern to Marx and his disciples. The early Marxist literature is replete with references to the exploitation of women and the necessity of ending this exploitation for achieving a truly socialist system. True to their framework of analysis, the early Marxian authors viewed this exploitation as arising from the same set of socio-economic factors as all other forms of exploitation. The causal chain, the theory ran, began from the need to control 'labour power' in a system characterised by the ownership of non-labour means of production. Thus, the emergence of the family and of slavery were not contemporaneous merely by coincidence, but because the two were simply different institutional arrangements for achieving the same end. Later developments in the organisation and modes of production led to more sophisticated means of labour control in the extra-family sphere, but the family continued to remain as the basic mechanism for the exploitation of women.
