This month’s Socialism Today is a special issue to commemorate International Women’s Day (IWD), which takes place on 8 March. Socialist Party national committee member BEA GARDNER gives an overview of the articles which have been included in this issue and explains their relevance to the struggle against women’s oppression today.
This year, 2025, marks 115 years since the idea of an international ‘women’s day’ was first endorsed by the International Socialist Women’s Conference, meeting as part of the World Congress of the Second International – an organisation embracing socialist parties and trade unions including the early Labour Party, but also the formally Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party.
On the agenda was how to strengthen the relationships between different sections of the international involved in agitation and campaigning among working women, a programme of demands to improve conditions for mothers and their young children, and how socialists should relate to the women’s suffrage movement.
The proposal for an international ‘women’s day’ was part of the response to these questions: whereby the various affiliate organisations of the second international would organise, in conjunction with the workers’ political and trade union organisations of their respective countries, a dedicated day to aid the attainment of women’s suffrage, in line with socialist principles.
The IWD founders recognised that women workers were being mobilised on issues relating to their oppression, and socialists needed to address the specific problems that women faced. To do anything else would be to abandon working women to the false promises of bourgeois feminism which ultimately offer a limited vision of equality for a few, not genuine liberation for all.
They understood that ending gender oppression for good is fundamentally linked to the need to overthrow the capitalist system, which economically and ideologically benefits from reproducing existing inequalities and divisions of all kinds. This includes the perpetuation of ideas which are at the root of women’s oppression in all its forms, including violence and abuse.
Among the delegates was Alexandra Kollontai, in exile from Russia, who was deeply concerned with how to involve working-class women in the struggle to change society, and how a new socialist society could address their specific oppression. As the article on her life and ideas on page 25 outlines, building a new socialist society, based on democratic control of resources by the majority, requires a united struggle of workers of all genders. Kollontai argued this therefore required a conscious approach to organise and build socialist ideas among women.
Theory as a guide for action
The current social, economic and political context has many differences to the situation in 1910. There have been phenomenal changes in social attitudes – a result of many factors, including women’s wider participation in the workforce and the struggles of the working class that contributed to the expansion of welfare services in the post-war period. Also because of the changing and shifting needs of capitalism. However, in the context of capitalism in crisis, many gains are under threat.
The period since the financial crisis of 2008-09 has been marked globally by movements of women. The re-election of president Trump, and the rise of right-wing populist forces elsewhere, only adds to the likelihood that there will be further eruptions of struggle in Britain and globally over issues relating to women’s oppression.
Therefore, the question of how socialists relate to movements around women’s oppression is just as pertinent as it was in 1910. An essential first step is getting to grips with a theoretical understanding of women’s oppression, rooted in Marxist methods. The articles featured in this special edition assist in this task, laying the foundations for a socialist feminist approach to fighting women’s oppression in all its many forms.
Selecting which articles to include was no easy feat. In the 30 years since Socialism Today was launched there have been dozens of articles directly on theory and strategy relating to fighting women’s oppression, including on specific issues such as abortion rights. Added to these are articles on key historical figures and movements, as well as book reviews and more.
The proliferation of material is not out of an academic concern, but the recognition that ideas shape strategy, demands and tactics. Theory is a vital guide for action. It is essential that socialists grapple with how the core ideas relate to the specific issues and struggles of the moment as well as how struggles may develop in the future. From this, a programme can be put forward offering the next steps for the movement.
Ideas and strategy
Engaging with conflicting ideas and strategies being discussed is an important part of this process. Because in every campaign and movement, there is a battle for ideas including over demands and tactics. This is even more so the case in movements against women’s oppression, which are inevitably cross-class movements given women of all social classes can experience forms of sexism and misogyny.
For example, the article In Defence of Socialist Feminism on page five explains how the goals of those engaged in the campaign for the vote were not aligned. For upper-class leaders, the vote was a means of achieving equality with men of their class. For working-class women, the vote was not an end in itself, but a means by which they hoped to improve other aspects of their lives including ending exploitative working conditions and low pay.
The battle of ideas today includes the continued influence of different strands of feminist thought. Several of the articles unpick the main characteristics of these ideas and the ways they continue to find an echo. In Defence of Socialist Feminism locates the ideas in the context of the waves of struggle they emerged in, including the social, economic and political conditions which shaped them.
Different Identities, Common Struggle, on page 19, elaborates on some of the contemporary developments including intersectionality and privilege theory – arguing against the idea it is possible to fully eliminate oppressive social attitudes that are generated and sustained by capitalism based on appeals for individuals to change themselves.
Differences in how the theoretical understandings of oppression impact strategy are outlined in the article A Tale of Two Feminisms, on page eleven, which focuses on opposing approaches to combating violence against women and girls. The shocking rates of abuse experienced by women globally is a pressing issue, and the urgency of steps toward addressing it is of central importance for many women, including many of the 97% of young women in Britain who have experienced harassment.
As the article explains, the Campaign Against Domestic Violence (CADV) was a broad campaign initiated by Militant Labour, the forerunner of the Socialist Party. The CADV did aim to raise awareness and fight for legal changes but also campaigned for the economic resources needed to enable women to have a safe exit strategy from abusive relationships. It argued for the trade unions to mobilise their millions of members to be involved in that struggle, and to take up the issue in the workplace.
The CADV achieved widespread success of its aims – including establishing domestic violence as a workplace issue, resulting in many workplace policies still in place today. But that approach conflicted with that of others, including Julie Bindel and her supporters of the feminist organisation Justice for Women, who argued against mobilising the trade unions because they were male-dominated and would not act in women’s interests.
A Tale of Two Feminisms examines the basis for these differences of approach, with Bindel’s ideas stemming from the idea that women experience oppression due to ‘the patriarchy’, which is loosely defined as a system of male domination of women. The article answers the theory that violence and oppression are the result of a system which stands entirely separately from actually existing capitalism, and points to the direct effect such ideas have on how to end violence against women.
Resurgent class struggle
However, that does not mean that those who are at this stage attracted to the idea that patriarchy is responsible for sexist abuse have entirely adopted the kind of radical feminist position of Bindel. Many are open to socialist ideas.
As a consequence of the financial crisis and the subsequent attacks to living standards through austerity policies – which have disproportionately impacted women – many more people are drawing anti-capitalist conclusions. Young women largely reject what has been called ‘girl boss feminism’. This is the kind of liberal feminism dominant in the 1990s that promoted the false idea that ambition was the only thing stopping women from ‘having it all’, not recognising the structural inequalities which hold working-class women back.
Recent years have also seen the resurgence of working-class struggle on a greater scale than in the 1990s and 2000s, marked as they were by the ideological retreat from socialism and the effects of this on workers’ organisations after the collapse of Stalinism. Within that resurgence women have often played a leading role. These are important steps towards greater numbers drawing socialist conclusions.
It is important to understand why a Marxist approach is fundamentally different to that offered by other feminist trends. The articles help to develop that appreciation. But it will not be based on a solely theoretical discussion that those who are currently attracted to, or even advocating for, ideas that have roots in alternative feminist theories will be convinced of socialist feminist ideas.
As is explained in the article Different Identifies, Common Struggle, through the experience of struggle many can come to recognise the roots of their oppression lie in the structure of capitalist society. The civil rights movement is an example of this, with the Black Panthers actively fighting for socialism as a means for ending racist oppression.
The task is to grapple with how best, through the experiences of struggles, to demonstrate to a new layer radicalised first based on their gender oppression that ending capitalism is not only necessary to end the economic inequality they face. Eradicating the capitalist system, and the network of unequal economic and power relations that is woven into its fabric, is also the means by which the basis can be laid for ending rape, sexual harassment, domestic violence, sexism and gender discrimination too.
Preparing for new struggles
The articles featured in this edition draw on more than a century of struggle. They demonstrate how socialist ideas have been applied at different periods, and to address different questions, issues and strategies thrown up by women’s movements. This is vital preparation for thinking of how to approach the looming struggles of today and means close studying of the articles is essential, even for those who have an already developed understanding of the basic approach of Marxists to the question of fighting oppression.
The articles are foundational, but not exhaustive. Pages 35-36 list important further reading on areas where there was insufficient space within this edition to cover in detail. This includes material on Friedrich Engels’ seminal ideas on the origins of oppression, the role of the family, social reproduction theory, and the so-called crisis of masculinity.
Developing a Marxist understanding of women’s oppression is not a one-off task and new material will continue to be developed reflecting serious engagement with economic, political and social developments in society.
We are now in a new period which will be unlike anything the majority of those alive today have experienced before. The world is more volatile today than it has been for the vast majority of the last century. It is an increasingly multipolar world in which US imperialism is losing its predominance, and in which the capitalist system is increasingly unstable. That is the basis for increased class struggle, political instability and polarisation.
In this context, there will be eruptions of struggle in Britain and globally in which women will play a leading role. This will include struggles specifically on issues related to women’s oppression.
In the face of new developments, the same task confronts the re-emerging socialist and workers’ movement today as confronted those at the international socialist women’s conference in 1910: how to relate to the women’s campaigns which emerge and how to win a new generation of women fighters becoming radicalised based on their oppression to the struggle for socialism.
The core challenge for socialists is – as the conclusion of In Defence of Socialist Feminism states – “to participate in the movements, engage with the ideas and strategies which emerge, while maintaining ideological clarity”. This special edition is a valuable tool for achieving the foundations of that clarity, and drawing on lessons from previous struggles so that we can effectively “explain how the struggle to end gender oppression in all its forms is only possible in the framework of a broader struggle by the working class against the capitalist system itself”.