Marxism and women's liberation

Larisa Reisner a Bolshevik, revolutionary life

Larisa Reisner (1895-1926) lived an extraordinary life. She fought for working-class socialism at its high point a century ago, but died just before Stalin snuffed out the workers ’ state she had fought to defend. Cathy Porter’s newly updated Larisa Reisner: A Biography captures Reisner’s passion and sheds new light on her life. EARLY LIFE Larisa Reisner was born on 2 May 1895 in Lublin, then in tsarist Poland. (Both her names are often misspelt with two “ss”.) In 1898, her father Mikhail Reisner was exiled to Siberia for his political activities and for the next five years the family lived in...

Social reproduction and the roots of transphobia (in full)

Read a substantially abridged version of this essay here (or in Women's Fightback 27 ). As revolutionary socialists, we fight for the expansion of freedom and human flourishing, and seek to rid our world of oppression and discrimination. We stand in solidarity with the downtrodden, champion individual self-determination and bodily autonomy, and organise to empower people to take control of their own lives, and to determine how they socially identify, present, and relate to others. For all these reasons and more, we fight for the liberation of trans, nonbinary, intersex, and gender non...

Social reproduction and the roots of transphobia

Substantially longer version of this piece here As revolutionary socialists, we fight for the expansion of freedom and human flourishing, and seek to rid our world of oppression and discrimination. We stand in solidarity with the downtrodden, champion individual self-determination and bodily autonomy, and organise to empower people to take control of their own lives. For all these reasons and more, we fight for the liberation of trans, nonbinary, intersex, and gender non-conforming people. This struggle flows naturally from our liberatory principles and our commitment to solidarity, combined...

Join our Socialist Feminist Reading Group

Live in or near London? Come along to our monthly socialist feminist reading group in Brixton, hosted by our South West London branch. Each time - currently the first sunday of the month - we have an informal discussion about a book, which might be a new release or a classic from the movement. Recent titles include Berlin’s Third Sex , by Magnus Hirchfeld; The Right to Sex , by Amia Srinivasan; The Transgender Issue , by Shon Faye; and Rape , by Mithu Sanyal. For more information write to: womensfightback@workersliberty.org

Charlotte Despard, a rebel from age 46 to 95

Part one of a series on the feminist and socialist Charlotte Despard (1844-1939). Part two is here . At her 89th birthday party, in 1933, Charlotte Despard made a speech urging her friends to fight fascism, and she quoted Lenin as she put the case for revolution. Days earlier she was making a speech in Trafalgar Square, bent with old age and shaking her arthritic fist as she made the case for anti-fascist mobilisation just as she had made countless other speeches in the previous four decades in support of socialist, feminist, anti-imperialist and republican causes. Charlotte was also a...

Against sex-based feminism

"Feminists do not conflate sex and gender. Sex is a scientific term for one's biology, and this cannot be changed. As materialists we believe the root of women's oppression lies in her biology, a view underpinning socialist theory for generations. Gender theory does not provide an alternative credible analysis and it is regressive. Queer theorists see the intimate connection between biological sex and oppression and react by trying to dismantle the notion of biological sex whilst socialists and feminists react by seeking to dismantle oppression." - from the Women’s Place UK website. One of the...

The split in SDS

Across the world large and radical student movements came into prominence in the 1960s, fighting on their campus and against university administrators but raising wider political questions: opposition to the Vietnam War, opposition to the police, and opposition to capitalism. Their politics were often muddled and contradictory. In America, students organised themselves on a national level into Students for a Democratic Society. This was a serious organisation, which had 30,000 supporters by the time of its collapse, and along with the black civil rights movement became a feared bogeyman for...

The socialist roots of International Women's Day

By the beginning of the twentieth century, the relatively-young capitalist system had thrown millions of women in industrially-developing countries into factories, domestic service and other work. Many occupations were gender segregated, and “women’s work” – such as textiles – was often in the most appalling sweatshops, with low pay, terrible safety standards, and long hours. But at least workers were together, rather than isolated in the home, so they were able to fight back. Women workers, both unionised and not, organised industrial disputes to win better conditions. Although women had...

Introducing: social reproduction theory

One of the key texts of early social reproduction theory was Lise Vogel’s Marxism and the Oppression of Women, published in 1983. Vogel’s aim in the book was to criticise the ‘dual systems theory’ that emerged from the 1970s, which saw (a) Marxism as an explanation for class exploitation, and (b) patriarchy as an explanation for women’s oppression: two linked but fundamentally separate systems. Some, like Hartmann, explicitly stated that Marxism was ‘sex-blind’, which necessitated a 'specifically feminist analysis': of patriarchy. Some socialist-feminists went further and suggested how the two...

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