Feminism will never free women; rather, it will continue to halt progress towards women’s liberation.
Feminism functions as a bourgeois ideology that obscures the root of women’s oppression in class society. Its political categories – ‘patriarchy’, ‘identity’, ‘equality’ – reflect the interests of the petty bourgeoisie and distort the reality of capitalist exploitation. Rather than offering a path to emancipation, feminism fragments the working class and replaces revolutionary struggle with individualised reformism.
Promoting unity among ‘women’ as a universal category is fundamentally wrong, as proletarian women have distinct and often opposing interests from those of the bourgeoisie. Proletarian women’s liberation cannot be achieved through cross-class alliances, but only through revolutionary struggle against the material basis of their oppression.
Feminism must be examined through a Marxist-Leninist lens – exposing the limits of bourgeois feminism, the ideological contradictions of so-called Marxist feminism, and the idealism of Judith Butler and materialist queer theory, all of which ultimately conceal the class basis of women’s oppression.
The strategy for women’s liberation needs to be rooted in the class struggle: aimed at the revolutionary transformation of production relations alongside the destruction of the economic and ideological foundations of gender oppression.
All this and more will be discussed in a roundtable with the Communist Party (Germany) @kommunistischepartei.de, with the aim of sharpening our theoretical understanding and advancing a revolutionary strategy for women’s liberation grounded in class politics.
We believe that the liberation of women is inseparable from the emancipation of the working class, and we are ready to organise and fight for it.