Feminism is not a path to liberation – it is a bourgeois ideology that obscures the class basis of women’s oppression. By detaching gender from material exploitation, it fragments the working class and reinforces capitalist rule.
Feminism detaches gender from class
Feminism treats women as a homogeneous group. But class determines material conditions. The interests of bourgeois women are not the interests of proletarian women. Unity on the basis of gender is illusory.
Bourgeois feminism seeks integration, not liberation
It fights for the interest of bourgeois women, demanding formal rights and career advancement for those who already have privilege. It ignores the economic dependence, reproductive burden and intensified oppression faced by working-class women. Bourgeois feminism only wants women to climb the capitalist ladder.
‘Marxist’ Feminism obscures the central contradiction
‘Marxist’ feminism (eg. Silvia Federici) presents reproductive labour – such as childbirth, child-rearing, and housework – as the central axis of capitalist exploitation. This perspective is fundamentally flawed. It replaces the exploitation of wage labour – the core contradiction of capitalism as identified by Marx – with the oppression of women in the reproductive sphere.
In doing so, it detaches women’s oppression from the relations of production and instead grounds it in the sphere of the household or the body, resulting in ideological confusion. Women’s oppression under capitalism is a product of class society, maintained through the dual role women often play: as exploited wage workers and as unpaid reproducers of labour power. This does not mean that women are ‘doubly’ or ‘extra’ exploited – as at home no surplus value is created – or that they are the only oppressed section of the class – all workers are oppressed under capitalism, but women’s oppression is ‘intensified’. In capitalism, the central contradiction remains the wage relation, and the strategy for liberation must be rooted in class struggle and the transformation of the relations of production.
Queer feminism denies the materiality of sex
Queer feminism (e.g. Judith Butler) denies the materiality of biological sex. Gender becomes a discursive performance, and sex itself a linguistic effect. This theory dissolves the political subject ‘woman’ and offers no path to collective liberation. It abandons the analysis of production and class relations, replacing it with a focus on language, identity, and individual subjectivity. By reducing oppression to discourse and performativity, queer feminism detaches gender from its economic and historical foundations and leads to a retreat from collective struggle into atomised identity politics.
The rejection of the material basis of sex also reflects a broader rejection of science. But for Marxists, science is a method of understanding objective reality in order to change it. Without science, we lose the ability to analyse exploitation, define political subjects, or develop a strategy capable of overthrowing class society.
Intersectionality leads to political confusion
It treats class as just one identity category among many, rather than the structuring principle of capitalist society. In doing so, it collapses exploitation, which is an objective relation rooted in the mode of production, into oppression, understood as a matter of personal or group experience. This blurring leads to an ideological jumble, where class, race, gender, and sexuality are flattened into equivalent “axes of oppression” without analysing their material roots.
Intersectional frameworks often produce contradictory theories that substitute subjective standpoint for objective analysis. As a result, they obscure the class structure of society, disorganise the working class, and fragment political struggle into competing identities. Rather than clarifying the path to liberation, intersectionality weakens it by detaching struggle from the relations of production and replacing it with a liberal politics of recognition.
Proletarian feminism is an incorrect name for socialism
While many comrades sincerely believe in the idea, what is often called ‘proletarian feminism’ is, on closer examination, simply socialism. As Clara Zetkin explained, the liberation of women cannot be separated from the struggle of the working class as a whole. The path to women’s emancipation is not through a parallel, gendered movement – but through the socialist-communist revolution. This struggle must be led by a united working class, not divided by gender, but organised against capitalist exploitation and class oppression in all its forms. There is no special feminism for proletarian women – only the class struggle.
Women’s intensified oppression is rooted in class society
Women’s intensified oppression began with the emergence of private property and class division. Working class women experience exploitation and oppression as any members of the working class, but capitalism also relies on the unpaid reproduction of labour mostly performed by women to survive. This produces a condition of intensified oppression experienced by women and only the revolutionary transformation of production relations can truly liberate them.
We begin the fight today – but without reformism
We do not believe women must wait until socialism to improve their conditions.
We fight for free universal childcare, wage equality, access to healthcare and housing, the socialisation of unpaid labour in the household and so much more… But these demands are not ends in themselves. They are part of a strategy for socialism. Only through participating in such struggles the working class can strengthen themselves enough to prepare the revolution.
We begin the fight today – but without reformism
We do not believe women must wait until socialism to improve their conditions.
We fight for free universal childcare, wage equality, access to healthcare and housing, the socialisation of unpaid labour in the household and so much more… But these demands are not ends in themselves. They are part of a strategy for socialism. Only through participating in such struggles the working class can strengthen themselves enough to prepare the revolution.