Even the most ardent enemies of communism cannot deny that it has always considered the equality of women with men and the liberation from any oppression as a fundamental part of its program and revolutionary practice. In various successful revolutions, such as the Paris Commune, the October Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, or in the countries of Indochina, and especially in Democratic Kampuchea, women have played a crucial role.
We can say the same about the current people’s wars taking place from Peru to the Philippines, from Turkey and northern Kurdistan to India, where millions of peasant women, dalits, adivasis, workers, and intellectuals confront the semi-feudal and oppressive regime every day, alongside their male comrades, which is based on saffron fascism and the caste system.
They are the true heroines of our time, far removed from the falsely radical discourse of the petty-bourgeois women of Western university feminism and their vision of “gender, feminine.”
Bourgeois feminism intentionally ignores the class struggle as a driving force of history, in order to replace it with a “transversal” (a euphemism for interclass) struggle between genders, within the bourgeois politics of fragmenting the struggles for specific demands of various oppressed groups. This is a means to provide cosmetic “solutions” within the capitalist system, without fundamentally questioning it, as us communists do.
This is not about criticizing the just struggles of oppressed collectives; women, homosexuals, transsexuals, or discriminated races in capitalist societies. It is about clearly pointing out that all this oppression, which primarily affects the people’s classes, can only be resolved within the framework of a Socialist Revolution or New Democracy. Through these revolutions, cultural revolutions must also take place to sweep away the old habits of the oppressive capitalist society.
This is not a reductionist view, as some will undoubtedly rush to say, it is the key to all the multiple contradictions existing in the societies of developed capitalism or bureaucratic capitalism.
Chairman Mao pointed out that we must never forget the class struggle, and we not only need to remember this important instruction of Chairman Mao but also have the obligation to implement it in our practice as communists.
Patriarchal societies, intrinsically linked by the ideological superstructure of monotheistic religions, are connected to the emergence of private property and its hereditary transmission through the family nucleus. Without challenging and dismantling these mechanisms both ideologically and materially, true progress in ending human exploitation by other humans will not be achieved.
However, bourgeois feminism, in its crudest version, blames everything bad on men, holding them responsible for all its woes by talking about “safe spaces” that exclude men and, in practice, promoting gender segregation. They spread the false myth of being “beings of light and peace” and even decry the “glass ceiling” for women in the upper bourgeoisie, deliberately ignoring the fact that reactionary women like Margaret Thatcher, Christine Lagarde, or Hillary Clinton, while supposedly oppressed by sexism in their positions, have increased the exploitation and suffering of the common masses, both men and women, worldwide.
And what can be said about the theories of division based on sexual orientations, which label both men and women with terms like “cisgender,” portraying heterosexuality as another oppressive monster; the hetero-patriarchy, which is grounded in unscientific and postmodernist theories like Queer.
For communists, it is simply liberalism or opportunism not to confront these and other theories in order to avoid creating controversy with a feminist lobby that has the support of the majority of the liberal bourgeois press. Furthermore, it is even more concerning to join, as the tail end, these feminist movements that, as we saw on March 8th, have tried to usurp the class character of International Working Women’s Day with their transversal interclass discourse and gender war.
In the Spanish State, these forces are composed of the old revisionists of IU [United Left], Podemos, or the PSOE [Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party], and their media spokesperson, the newspaper Publico and the television network La Sexta.
The Bolshevik leader Alexandra Kollontai, in 1907, in a document on the women’s question1, clearly pointed out the two existing lines. Words that are still relevant today:
“The women’s world is divided, just as is the world of men, into two camps; the interests and aspirations of one group of women bring it close to the bourgeois class, while the other group has close connections with the proletariat, and its claims for liberation encompass a full solution to the woman question. Thus although both camps follow the general slogan of the ‘liberation of women,’ their aims and interests are different. Each of the groups unconsciously takes its starting point from the interests of its own class, which gives a specific class colouring to the targets and tasks it sets itself...
However apparently radical the demands of the feminists, one must not lose sight of the fact that the feminists cannot, on account of their class position, fight for that fundamental transformation of the contemporary economic and social structure of society without which the liberation of women cannot be complete.”
(...)
“Is it then really possible to talk of the feminists pioneering the road to women’s work, when in every country hundreds of thousands of proletarian women had flooded the factories and workshops, taking over one branch of industry after another, before the bourgeois women’s movement was ever born? Only thanks to the fact that the labour of women workers had received recognition on the world market were the bourgeois women able to occupy the independent position in society in which the feminists take so much pride.”
To conclude these notes, below I outline some basic points of a proletarian, anti-revisionist class-oriented approach to the issue of women’s oppression:
Disassociate from bourgeois feminism and its false theories, opposing a strong critique of its ideological principles based on documents crafted by well-known proletarian leaders like Comrade Anuradha Ghandy or Comrade Jiang Qing.
Promote the creation of an International Classist Women’s and People’s Movement with its own program for the revolution.
Program based on the rich historical experiences of proletarian revolutions to liberate women from the realm of domestic work or childcare, empowering childcare centers for proletarian and peasant women, as well as the creation of popular cafeterias or a new model of urban planning and housing construction in which domestic tasks, cleaning, or food preparation are carried out collectively or professionally, breaking away from the bourgeois nuclear family model.
This article aims to provide some tools for the ideological struggle against the mainstream bourgeois and petty-bourgeois feminism from a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist perspective and to confront all forms of opportunism in this crucial issue for the revolutionary movement, as women hold up half the sky, and any form of oppression must be swept away, because communism is, let us not forget, an ideology of liberation in all spheres.