4 SOCIAL SCIENTIST not surprisingly, strengthened the anti-imperialist feelings of the people in these countries, and revived the democratic content of the women's movement5. Here we see that the aspirations of the women's movement are quite divergent from those in North America and Western Europe, although feminists in these countries also have attempted to raise divisive issues, which mobilise some sections of the urban middle and upper-middle class women, but such groups remain sectarian, without making any contribution other than the 'visibility" of the woman's cause6. The primary theoretical issue that arises between Marxists and Feminists is one of definition: Are women a 'class', in struggle against 'androcentric' assumptions regardless of the struggle between workers and capitalists, under the capitalist mode of production? Does the male vs. female concept, which is central to the feminist theory as a potential area of conflict, indicate that unity between men and women in the common struggle for peace, freedom and equality is an audacious assumption? Although the concept of social class has become a widely used analytical term, it is not always used with a common understanding. In much sociological literature, class is defined either by a) social grading-by skills, income groups etc., orb) by convention, occupation or profession7. Marxists understand class to mean the relations of production that predominate in a given mode of production. For Marxism, therefore, a sex category cannot operate independently of its members' class affiliation and in politics also it cannot transcend antagonistic relations between classes. Marxism recognises that a sex category cannot possess the structural conditions to achieve solutions which surpass the limitations of the system, and therefore cannot be considered the social force which has the greatest subversive impact. On the question of social and civil rights, which are compatible with the system, sex categories may show cohesion and unity, but they do not constitute a 'historic mission'. Their social and political actions must therefore be limited in scope and achievement8. Any attempt to raise a sex category beyond its structural position and orientation is to preserve the status quo, in terms of the division of society into social classes, and the domination of one class by another. That is why Lenin wrote in Pravda (Nov. 6, 1919)9 that neither legal democracy, nor equality or freedom from the guardianship of men was possible unless the focus of the oppressed sex was on the following questions : a) Equality between what sex and what other sex? b) Between what nation and what other nation? c) Between what class and what other class? d) Freedom from what yoke or from the yoke of what class? Freedom for what class? For the Marxist therefore, the inseparable connection between the social and human position of the women and private property in the means of production, is only clearly brought out by the concept of class. The feminist argument leads further to the 'domestic' mode ofproduc-