Part 1 in our series ‘Marxism and the struggle against oppression’
A hallmark of many of the tremendous mass movements that have convulsed the world over the last decade has been the radicalisation and determination of oppressed people. We have seen this in huge mass protests on the streets – in the new feminist wave, Black Lives Matter, freshly politicised Pride and Trans Pride events, and so on. We have seen it in the huge shifts that have taken place in people’s outlook and consciousness – the increasing unwillingness of young people to accept that systemic racism, violence against women, homophobia and transphobia, or oppression of disabled people is just ‘part of life’.
As part of this radicalisation, millions are looking for answers as to what is at the root of different forms of oppression, and how it can be ended. We believe that the ideas of Marxism have a central contribution to make to this discussion, as they offer a framework both for understanding society as it is now and for what needs to be done to change it.
The most fundamental social conditions for Marxists to examine are the relationship between classes, which themselves arise depending on how society organises production. Different modes of production give rise to different classes. History has known a number of different forms of class society. But the common feature is a minority ruling class which exploits the working majority by expropriating the surplus wealth created by their labour.
Different systems of belief emerge to justify the position of the ruling class and to persuade the masses to accept their exploitation. Different forms of class society require different ideologies to justify them. However, the history of slave uprisings, peasant revolts, and the mass revolutionary struggles of the working class in our own time shows that the ruling class only ever partially succeeds in fooling the classes they exploit.
While class oppression and exploitation is the fundamental division at a societal level, for individuals, it can often be our experience of another form of oppression which can first make us question the way things are, or inspire us to get active in struggle. Socialist Alternative and our sister organisations around the world in ISA – like socialists through history – have therefore been active in the growing number of movements against oppression that have taken place in the last decade.
Our members have been on the front lines of protests like those that were part of the George Floyd Rebellion. After the overturn of Roe v. Wade in the US, while most of the liberal feminist organisations were paralysed by inaction, our sister organisation mobilised thousands to take to the streets. In Britain, Socialist Alternative has participated in the movement against femicide, including protests sparked by the murders of Sarah Everard and Sabina Nessa. We have organised solidarity with the mass movement that has swept Iran against the regime’s brutal violence against women. Following the murder of the young trans woman Brianna Ghey in February 2023, Socialist Alternative took part in vigils and protests called to mourn her passing and demand an end to the climate of transphobia which undoubtedly contributed to her death. In the aftermath, we also organised a series of events around Britain for International Women’s Day which had fighting for trans rights and against transphobic violence as a core theme. Around the world, ISA has prioritised bold socialist interventions into, and organised ‘Pride is protest’ style events wherever we have forces.
As well as striving to be the best fighters within these movements and putting forward a strategy to win, it is always our role to emphasise the need to simultaneously fight capitalism – which benefits from and perpetuates all kinds of oppression – linking up these struggles with those of workers, and putting forward a socialist alternative. Fundamentally that is because we understand that there is nothing natural about any form of oppression. Racism, sexism, rigid gender norms and so on have not always existed. We have to understand and be able to explain how these ideologies stem from, serve, and are entirely entwined with the interests of capitalism.
The origins of gender oppression
For the big majority of human history, people survived on the basis of hunting and gathering. Evidence suggests that in these societies, men and women may have had different roles. But these roles were not differently valued and so did not lead to a different social status or standard of living. In fact, there was not the possibility of significant material inequalities between any sections of these communities, because they could generally produce only enough for day-to-day subsistence and were unable to store any surplus in any case. They relied on the collective effort of the whole group to meet their basic needs.
The development of agriculture allowed a surplus to be consistently produced and stored for the first time, which led to a transformation of every area of life and the way society was organised. Fundamentally this was a development which thrust human societies forward, freeing people from total subjugation to nature. But, as Friedrich Engels, collaborator of Karl Marx, wrote in his seminal book Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State:
“The lowest interests – base greed, brutal appetites, sordid avarice, selfish robbery of the common wealth – inaugurate the new, civilised, class society. It is by the vilest means – theft, violence, fraud, treason – that the old classless gentile society is undermined and overthrown. And the new society itself, during all the two and a half thousand years of its existence, has never been anything else but the development of the small minority at the expense of the great exploited and oppressed majority; today it is so more than ever before.”
The division of labour became much more complicated – not just hunting or gathering but agriculture, trade, shipping, handicrafts and money-lending. The population grew exponentially and began to live in areas more according to their trade than their tribe, while others migrated for work, meaning for the first time people living among peoples that were not their own. This changed the relationship of people to the land, which for the first time was claimed for ownership, bought and sold. There were conflicts, war and slavery in the quest to produce and control more land and resources.
In this context, individuals – perhaps initially on behalf of the groups they lived in – were taken out of day-to-day productive work in order to act as administrators of the surplus and the means of producing it. These (mainly) men in power were increasingly making decisions about the use and division of resources. More and more, these leadership positions, along with material posses- sions, were passed to the nearest blood relation, establishing the earliest form of noble families.
These families began to group together on the basis of their wealth and privilege, forming a class which gave itself legislative advantages and saw the means of producing wealth as their own property.
Women tended not to be in leadership positions because of the importance of the military aspect of the role – meaning particular physical strength was prized – even more so as securing the best land and resources became more important. Due to the physical nature of agricultural work as well as it requiring being far away from the domestic setting for long periods, women tended not to do the bulk of this labour either. At the same time, the growing importance of inheritance – of titles and wealth – meant the need to be sure of bloodlines and parentage. This led to the development of various mechanisms to control women’s bodies and sexualities, and their subordination to men in the developing family structure, as well as in society at large.
The origin of the oppressions suffered by LGBTQ+ people is also closely connected to the emergence of women’s oppression. As the patriarchal family structure became established, new sets of social norms and cultural expectations were crystallised. Notions of ‘masculinity and femininity’ as distinct and opposite began to emerge. While these gender norms have often been arbitrary and certainly have not stayed the same over time, they have been used to oppress not only women, but all those deemed to be transgressing them – often extremely violently. The emergence of capitalism gave a particular fresh impetus to this, with the establishment of the nuclear family and the emergence of the specific oppression of those with LGBTQ+ identities.
At the same time, these identities became more clearly established, in part in reaction to this, but also reflecting the way in which capitalism supported new ideas of individual choice, freedom and identity. Meanwhile, the family and the institution of marriage created a rigid straightjacket into which human sexuality was supposed to be restricted. Prejudiced and hateful ideas were often codified in new ways during this period and preached by religious authorities, as well by states. Those whose sexuality or gender expression fell on the wrong side of such laws or norms faced violent persecution. All this has led to queer sex and relationships being cast as wrong or sinful, brutal violence being employed against trans and gender non-conforming people, the failure to recognise people’s gender identity as they experience it, and much more.
What about racial oppression?
Systemic racism – the discrimination and persecution of a whole people based on permanent prejudices of supposedly inferior ancestry, skin colour, particular physical or other characteristics – is a much newer phenomenon. Feudalism was a system of rigid and brutal class hierarchy. It saw murderous discrimination against certain groups, particularly religious minorities such as Jewish people. Some of the early seeds of modern racism can be seen in the scapegoating and othering which was employed in this period. And, indeed, anti-Semitism and some other such prejudices have evolved and continued under capitalism.
But prejudice based on skin colour as a basis for permanent discrimination was not something necessary for the interests of the feudal ruling class. In fact, in a lot of ways, such ideas would have contradicted the ideologies that legitimised their rule. It took the development of capitalist relations and the rise of the capitalist class to exert the pressure toward the formation of nation-states, mainly because of the need for a sizeable national market that would allow the capitalist class to develop the scale of production needed in order to increase their wealth. Once this process was underway, it stimulated nationalist ideologies to correspond with it. In the course of capitalism’s development, racism and nationalism would increasingly intertwine. Conflicts over the character of the nation arose. Who was and was not to be included? What was the nation’s language? What was the nation’s religion? What did the nation’s people look like?
But still racism as a developed ideology required the further material impetus that came from the development of the Atlantic slave trade. It would be false to conclude that racism came first before slavery – the reality was the opposite way around. As the historian, Eric Williams in his book Capitalism and Slavery put it: “It had to do not with the colour of the labourer, but the cheapness of the labour” before anything else. It was thus a decision based purely on what would enrich the capitalists in Europe. Who would supply the labour for profit making? This took different forms before the emergence of the institution we know came to be systematised black slavery. In the early capitalist period, slavery maintained its multi-racial character. When the first merchant slave ships arrived in Africa in the 1440s and began a small-scale barter trade with West African rulers for black slaves, their trade existed alongside the West African practice of taking slaves in war, the long established trans-Saharan slave trade under the control of North African Muslims and the continued enslavement of white people in parts of Europe.
It was to take a long, protracted period of time before mass-scale black slavery and a corresponding anti-black racism rose in tandem. The first Atlantic slave ship to carry black slaves sailed from Africa in 1510. Fifty black slaves were taken to the Spanish controlled island of Hispaniola (the modern day Haiti and Dominican Republic). This ‘innovation’ took place because the indigenous American populations that were the first to be enslaved and put to work in the new silver and gold mines, as well as on the new tobacco and sugar plantations, died too readily from the diseases carried by the Europeans. Up to the 17th century, the Atlantic slave trade remained intermittent and on a small scale compared to what was to come. The social conditions for a general and pervasive anti-black racism had not yet been sufficiently prepared.
The turning point came in the 17th century, when sugar became the main cash crop throughout the Caribbean and South America. This rapidly accelerated the need for labour which was most easily satisfied by the importation of black slave labour from Africa. Over the next two centuries, over twelve million black people were enslaved and sent to the Americas. They came to constitute a vast slave population. Their status as slaves, the bottom rung of the social ladder, became inseparable from their skin colour. It was this that created the social conditions for anti-black racism.
However, the ruling class were just as prepared in the initial period to try out whatever forms of bonded labour to serve their aims. When the North American landowning class took shape in North America, they initially tried to enslave the indigenous Native American population. When they failed, they next turned to white indentured labour to solve their labour shortage. To be indentured meant to work as virtual slaves for a period of up to seven years before being set free. At the same time, there was also a steady arrival of black people purchased from slave traders. However, there was no system of outright slavery in North America. Upon arrival, these black slaves were converted into indentured servants and integrated into the existing labour system.
In the fields of the plantations, black and white indentured servants worked together. Shared misery and a sense of class solidarity prevented the emergence of racism between the exploited. Amongst the ruling class, all were dehumanised and equally regarded as ‘filth and scum’. An explicitly anti-black racism served no purpose in these social conditions, and accordingly did not arise. The turning point in the development of anti-black racism in North America came with the 1676 Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia. In this uprising against the aristocratic landowners, black and white indentured servants, runaways, landless free labourers and small farmers united. The Rebellion was brutally crushed. The final group of rebels killed, who chose to stand together in class solidarity and fight to the bitter end, comprised “eighty Negroes and twenty English,” according to an account of the time.
After the suppression of the Bacon’s Rebellion, the ruling class set about creating a privileged middle layer to act as a social buffer for their rule – to make sure that white was consciously divided from black. The legal position of white indentured servants was improved. Whipping was forbidden. When the period of indenture finished, whites were to be provided with “corn, money, a gun, clothing and fifty acres of land” to give them a stake in the existing order of society.
Meanwhile, black indentured servants lost all of their rights. Indentured labour became lifetime slavery. On the big plantations, white and black living quarters were segregated, while the whites given superior clothing and easier work to distinguish them. Whites were taught that they were ‘superior’ as racist prejudices were consciously encouraged. It was this that created the social conditions for anti-black racism, and a whole ideology was developed in order to justify it by the mouthpieces of the ruling class in academia, the media, the science of the day, and organised religion.
Imperialism
The development of colonialism, imperialism and vast capitalist empires – the largest of which was the British Empire – also played an important part in developing and cementing systemic racism. The idea of darker skin being ‘inferior’ was generalised further and employed as a tool to justify the subjugation of people across Africa, Asia and the Middle East. But skin colour was not the only marker used by the ruling class to subject people to racism. Dehumanising ideas and prejudice were also promoted to justify the colonisation of Ireland, for example.
In fact many of the brutal techniques later used to establish and maintain British rule around the world were first developed there. Irish people continued to be a go-to scapegoat for the British capitalist class until very recently in history. Traveller communities are another group which continues to face discrimination and persecution which predate capitalism, but which have evolved in new and specific ways under this system.
The oppression of disabled people
Meanwhile, the rise of capitalism, and the commodification of human labour, bodies and lives brought about a change in the status of people with chronic conditions, and physical and mental impairments. On the one hand, advances in medicine, education and technique (the invention of Braille, education of deaf people, and invention of mechanical aids and adaptations, for instance) and new models of care and treatment demonstrated the potential for disabled people to play a full role in economic, civil, and cultural society. On the other, the replacement of household and agricultural production with individual wage labour in manufacturing excluded disabled people to a far greater extent.
Consequently, the struggle of disabled people for equality and inclusion implicitly became a challenge to capitalism and exploitation. Probably the first disabled rights organisation in the world was a British trade union, the National League of the Blind, formed in 1894 to resist the su- per-exploitation of blind workers enabled by charities and the poor relief system. Similarly, Helen Keller, a pioneer campaigner for the rights of disabled people, particularly those with sensory impairments, was also an active feminist, socialist and anti-racist.
In the 1970s, a disabled rights movement emerged, alongside the black power, women’s liberation and gay liberation struggles. In Britain the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS) made a clear class analysis: “To the employer of labour, the physically impaired are not usually as good a buy as the non-impaired. We therefore end up at or near the bottom of this society as an oppressed group.” Consequently, they went on to state: “society which disables physically impaired people. Disability is something imposed on top of our impairments, by the way we are unnecessarily isolated and excluded from full participation in society. Disabled people are therefore an oppressed group in society.” The same analysis has since been taken up by people experiencing mental ill-health and the neurodiverse community. It is often described as a ‘social’ rather than ‘medical’ model of disability, which argues that people are disabled and excluded by class society rather than any innate lack of ability.
Following UPIAS, later disabled people’s struggles sought to unite with the wider working-class movement. In particular, the Disabled People’s Direct Action Network (DAN) gained support from transport unions, particularly the RMT for its campaign of civil disobedience over access to transport in the 1990s. The Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC) campaign formed to resist the 2010 coalition government’s austerity programme. In the 1990s, a caucus of disabled members in Militant Labour, our forerunner organisation, developed a transitional programme linking this approach to the need to overthrow capitalism.
Why does oppression persist today?
Society has clearly changed a lot in the centuries – or in the case of gender oppression, millennia – since most of these developments. But neither the division of society into classes, nor the systematic oppression of women, or black and brown people, have been overcome. They have only been developed and maintained by each form of class society since.
In some ways, capitalism has brought about changes that counteract some of those described above. The transatlantic slave trade was abolished. The myriad of jobs needed for a modern capitalist economy, as well as the development of services like childcare, along with mass production of machinery to make domestic tasks easier, should theoretically mean that women workers can participate fully in production. In most countries, there have been major steps towards the legal right to equality. And yet, even in relation to these rights, inequality remains rampant. Worldwide, only 25% of parliamentarians are women, despite comprising half of the population. Women are paid 63% of what men earn. In the UK, people from ethnic minority backgrounds are twice as likely to live in poverty as white people. Black graduates earn 23% less than their white counterparts.
Capitalism benefits from oppression. It benefits economically through the unpaid labour women do in the home – thought to be worth £140 billion a year to the UK economy, for example. It benefits from the criminal underpayment of billions of women, disabled people and black and brown workers, particularly concentrated in low paid sectors like retail, hospitality, care and health. The system also benefits from the commodification of women and LGBTQ+ people’s bodies – through advertising, cosmetics and the sex industry. And it benefits from propagating divisive ideas that prevent the maximum unity of working-class and young people in fighting for systemic change.
It isn’t only because of these material benefits that oppression persists, though. We should not hold the idea that it is entirely conscious on the part of the capitalist class. When the dominant form of society has changed throughout history, it hasn’t done so in a total break. Remnants of the old remain within the new. Engels wrote:
“According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Other than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase. The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure – political forms of the class struggle and its results, constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc., juridical forms, and even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas – also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form. There is an interaction of all these elements in which, amid all the endless host of accidents (that is, of things and events whose inner interconnection is so remote or so impossible of proof that we can regard it as non-existent, as negligible), the economic movement finally asserts itself as necessary. Otherwise the application of the theory to any period of history would be easier than the solution of a simple equation of the first degree.”
The oppressions and ideologies that emerged as a byproduct of the needs of the ruling class became facts deeply embedded into every aspect of human life. They developed their own dynamics. That is why, while gender oppression has its roots mainly in women’s role as child-bearers as described above, the resulting ideas from it impact all women and LGBTQ+ people. It’s also why no amount of anti-racist rhetoric from the capitalist class could eradicate capitalism’s racism, and why nearly three decades after the Disability Discrimination Act became law, disabled people remain excluded from society.
This approach also explains why sections of classes, under certain conditions, can support ideologies that do not correspond with their fundamental interests. Marx observed that “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.” This means that the ruling class’ control of society gives them the means to partially impose ideologies that reflect their interests onto society in general. Under the right historical conditions, reactionary ideologies of the ruling class can succeed in creating divisions amongst the working class and poor, preventing them from uniting against their common exploiter: the capitalist class.
This has, of course, been influenced by the stage and needs of capitalism. But throughout its history, the system and its political representatives have reinforced oppression in a myriad of ways: paltry, if any, laws against violence and harassment; underfunding female and black-dominated jobs and services; propaganda from politicians about the responsibility of individual families to prevent anti-social behaviour; limits on trans people’s rights to affirm their gender legally, and access health services, etc.
Where do individuals’ attitudes come from?
Of course, many people – increasingly so in fact – consciously reject this oppression and are repulsed by attacks from the capitalist establishment. But even then, none of us can totally free ourselves from the impact of capitalism on the way we view the world. 23% of people in Britain think it is not racist to ask someone who isn’t white where they are ‘really from’ if they explain which part of Britain they come from, and 27% think it is not racist to tell jokes that include racial stereotypes. 32% of people in Britain think that men need more sex than women, and a third of men (as well as 21% of women) think it would not usually be considered rape if the woman had flirted on a date.
These are totally unacceptable and wrong ideas which are slowly becoming more uncommon, in large part thanks to combative movements which managed to gain both tangible concessions from the capitalist class, and a shift in consciousness among the masses. But their continued prevalence shows that these attitudes are entrenched far beyond the individuals holding them. The ideas we hold, and behaviours that flow from them, reflect the type of society we live in. So while it is absolutely necessary to challenge every individual expression of reactionary ideas, ultimately, significant shifts across society – which must be our main focus – require us to challenge the root cause of oppression – class society, and its current form, capitalism. Reactionary ideas do not spontaneously originate in the minds of individuals, and as we’ve described above for most of human history they did not exist at all, which contradicts the idea that they automatically exist in whole ‘oppressor groups’.
The main factor in changing the ideas that people hold is experience. In 1987, 48% of people in Britain said that they agreed with the statement “a man’s job is to earn money, a woman’s job is to look after the home and family”. In 2017, the figure was just 8%. One of the biggest reasons for this transformation of attitudes was the influx of women into the workforce. The proportion of women in the UK in full-time employment increased from 29% in 1985 to 44% in 2017. Main- ly, this was driven by the needs of capitalism. But the relationship between reality and ideas is two-directional. In simple terms, there being more women in work changes attitudes towards women working, which contributes to more women wanting to work, and so on. That is why it is important to fight for legal rights and material resources. It is also why it is so wrong to argue, as some in the movements do, that reforms only bolster the power of those who hold it already. Lack of childcare, jobs, pay, healthcare and so on can hold (especially working class) women back from being able to play the role in society they might otherwise like to, which in turn impacts on attitudes towards women. In turn, those attitudes are partly stoked by the establishment in order to justify the lack of resources and opportunities.
The impact of struggle
Another central element of the experience that can change attitudes is struggle. Mass movements against oppression can force very rapid transformations. For example, surveys have found a significant reduction in both explicit and implicit racist attitudes among white people in the US since the start of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2013. Similar studies have found a reduction in dismissive attitudes towards sexual assault since #MeToo, and one even reported that 51% of men claim to have changed their behaviour as a result of that movement. These movements have brought into popular consciousness a discussion about oppression, prejudice and inequality, and made people – especially but not only those who have actively participated in the protests – see things differently.
Struggles over other issues, where people of different genders or races fight side by side, can also have a transformative effect. During the 1984-85 miners’ strike, many women participated in a key way, despite not generally working at the mines themselves. They began to raise money, speak at meetings, and organise solidarity events. The shared experience of this heroic battle changed many of the male miners’ views of their partners, sisters, etc, and it increased women’s confidence to demand better treatment too. Similarly, the strike also provided a window into the possibility for oppressed groups and the working class to enter into struggle together.
One famous campaign to do this was Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners. LGSM based itself on solidarity work with a Welsh mining community. They not only raised money to support the strike, but used this as an opportunity to point out the shared interest that LGBTQ+ people and workers have in forming a united struggle. Despite at first encountering elements of backwardness and prejudice, it was this focus on struggle that began to break those ideas down. The London Pride march of 1985 as a result saw the biggest (and only) mobilisation of a union to Pride at the time. The NUM marched in solidarity with their LGBTQ+ comrades. Working class unity and mass struggle is an essential part of the battle against backward ideas.
But as explained earlier, even these movements, while having an enormous impact, have not been enough to anywhere near eradicate sexist, racist or LGBTQ+phobic ideas, which still have a huge impact on all of our lives. That’s because the system that underwrites these ideas remains intact. Socialists support all struggles against oppression, whether or not such movements are supported by broad sections of the working class. At all times, we aim to advance a programme which can point a way forward for such movements, including by pointing to the potential power that lies in the workers’ movement. But we would never suggest that those willing to fight oppression must ‘wait’ for mass support.
In reality, it is the impact that already-living movements can have which is most effective in changing attitudes and broadening the solidarity of the workers’ movement. However, as Marxists, we understand that to really have the opportunity to end oppression once and for all, we need to fight for a united struggle of the multi-gender, multi-racial working class to end capitalism and establish a socialist society, in which the economic roots of oppression are abolished and the ideas flowing from this wither away. This means the workers’ movement must not only support movements against oppression, but must place itself at the heart of the struggle to end it, connecting this with the fight to change society fundamentally.
The example of the Russian Revolution in 1917 gives a glimpse of what would be possible through socialist transformation. In the initial phase following the revolution, before Stalinist degeneration, enormous leaps forward were achieved for women and LGBTQ+ people. In 1917, before women even had the right to vote in Britain, the workers’ government granted not only that right but became the first to legalise divorce and abortion, as well as homosexuality. But the improvements won through revolution went well beyond legal changes. Public laundries and nurseries were established to help end the imprisonment of millions of women in the home.
The Zhenotdel, or women’s commission, was established with a wide remit – from challenging backwards attitudes, to setting up public restaurants, to developing schemes to support the recruitment of women workers to traditionally ‘male’ roles, as well as much more. While many of these gains were reversed under Stalinism, this experience still indicates the vast potential that would exist, on the basis of the overthrow of capitalism, for tremendous leaps forward in the conditions of women and all oppressed people in a relatively short period of time.
