Part 2 in our series ‘Marxism and the struggle against oppression’. Soon to be followed by Part 3 – ‘Intersectionality, privilege theory and identity politics – a Marxist view’
Over the last decade, there has been an increase in struggle against oppression, particularly amongst young people. This is shown in the re-establishing of International Women’s Day as a day of regular feminist strikes and protests in countries such as the Spanish state, Russia and Brazil, in the explosive Black Lives Matter movement, which spread internationally and through the emerging campaigns to reclaim Pride as a protest. Such struggles have not developed in a vacuum. They are part and parcel of a general radicalisation of the working class and poor internationally. Working class people are moving into struggle against the impact of the economic, social and political crises of capitalism. 17 years after the global crash in the economy and faced with a new crisis, workers are drawing the conclusion that they need to fight back.
The last decade and a half have seen not just a worsening of the economic position of women and gender non-conforming people, but also a smashing of the neoliberal ideas of a post-feminist or post-racial society. The idea that oppressed people have all but achieved equality, along with gaslighting rhetoric like the claim women ‘hold themselves back’, for example by selecting less lucrative jobs, have been shown to be the lies that they are. Indeed, the emphasis on individualism – the idea that changes can be made primarily through individually changing your own life or attitudes – has begun to be turned into its opposite, as we see the trend towards mass collective action, including by workers and young people. In the huge revolutionary struggles that have swept the world, many of those most deeply marginalised and oppressed under the capitalist system have been to the fore – women and people of colour especially.
It is in this context that the question increasingly being asked by millions is not if it is necessary to struggle against oppression, but how we must do so. How is real and lasting change achieved? Is it even possible? In what ways can victories be won? How can different struggles be linked? What goals should our movements set themselves? Do we need leadership? And if so, what is its role?
Socialist ideas can offer answers to these questions. In ISA, we strive to build and sometimes initiate movements to fight oppression. In doing so, we advocate an approach that has militant struggle at its core. We stand for mobilising people to take real action – on the streets, in workplaces, at school or university. We point towards the necessity of huge protests and strikes. We support linking up with workers and workplace struggles to build a mass movement that can bring the huge economic power held by the working class to bear.
As socialists, we analyse the role of the capitalist state, including the police and the justice system whose ultimate purpose is to defend it, and state clearly that we cannot rely on such forces to keep us safe or to provide justice. A socialist approach means learning our history, that all gains we have won – from the right to vote, access to contraception and equal pay have been won through mass struggle. It means linking the battle against gender violence with the battles to defend our jobs and for funding to the services we need. It means a movement which is inclusive, fighting together with people who face other kinds of oppression, such as racism, homophobia and transphobia, and developing a programme which tackles prejudice in all its forms.
Socialists support and fight for proper education about oppression – in schools and universities, but crucially also within the workers’ movement itself. But prejudice and oppression cannot just be ‘educated away’. No matter how much former waves of struggle have changed attitudes or won rights for oppressed groups, it will always be a feature of capitalism, because it is an intrinsic part of the system. Any gains made can potentially be taken back by the ruling class as soon as they feel able to do so. Oppression has its roots in class societies like capitalism: a system based on inequality and the power of a few over the majority. This is why in order to end oppression, we must fundamentally change society and eradicate capitalism.
The role of the working class
The last decade has shown that to limit our aims to getting more women, queer people or people of colour into politics or business is a complete blind alley. The 2022 Kill the Bill protests were opposing a policy that was spearheaded by a woman of colour, Priti Patel, who despite her ethnicity was responsible for a draconian law which limited and criminalised protests, while allowing the police to target women and people of colour more than anyone. The next Home Secretary Suella Braverman, also a woman of colour, continued her predecessor’s brutal legacy by fighting tooth and nail to implement the abhorrent plan to permanently deport thousands of refugees to Rwanda.
Priti Patel and Suella Braverman acted in this way, despite the terrible impact such policies will have on millions of Black and Asian people, because they are seeking to advance the interests of the capitalist class to which they belong. Meanwhile, many of the people protesting such policies are supporters of Jeremy Corbyn: an old, white, straight, cis man. This is because of what he stands for politically.
Socialism offers a vision of the transformed society we need. But it can also help us in building the type of movement that is necessary to achieve this in a concrete way. We raise the need for a united working-class struggle not just because solidarity is important, but mainly because it is the only way to truly get rid of capitalism. It is only the working class which has the power to fundamentally change society. Workers’ position as wealth creators means that when we go on strike, we have the power to bring the whole of the country to a standstill. More than that, the working class are the people who are needed to make society run and have a central role to play in the building of the new socialist society.
To be able to achieve this, we need a united movement. Socialists would say that there is nothing natural about the divisions between men and women, white and Black people, straight and gay people, cis and trans* people, and so on. These divisions were and are fostered by the capitalists to allow the ruling class to super-exploit sections of workers and ultimately the working class as a whole. This doesn’t mean that racist and sexist attitudes don’t exist within the working class, but it points towards how we can challenge them through collective struggle.
Attitudes change most rapidly when it is revealed through collective struggle that workers of all backgrounds have more in common in terms of shared interests than we do with people with the same gender, race, sexuality or nationality among the ruling class. United struggle also reveals how much stronger we are when we come together than when we fight alone – a point currently underlined in Britain by the hugely diverse makeup of those currently leading the strike wave against the cost of living crisis.
This type of movement can only be built democratically with the mass involvement of working class people, including those who suffer oppression, participating in not just action, but also in discussions about what the movement is fighting for. Mass assemblies and meetings are a good way of hearing from as many people as possible and making decisions in a democratic way. These types of events could also look at how best to build solidarity and links with other workers in struggle. Trade unions also have a responsibility to take up and fight for the demands of the oppressed, both in the workplace and within society more generally, by actively building a united movement which all working class people can be active in.
The immediate economic demands of the trade union movement, if won, would mean an important improvement in the lives of women, people of colour and LGBTQ+ people who are often the lowest paid. But these demands can be most effectively fought for only if women, people of colour and LGBTQ+ people are able to play a role in workers’ organisations which are actively bringing to the fore the struggle against sexism, racism, LGBTQ+phobia and so on in the workplaces and communities.
What type of strikes?
Across the globe, we have seen strikes being utilised as a tool against oppression, from Latin America to Poland. This is an extremely positive development of the feminist movement – adopting the methods of the working class to demand and win change. However, it is important to ask what kind of strikes we need to make them as effective as possible.
Some actions organised around International Women’s Day have been organised as “days without women” – strikes of women, as opposed to feminist strikes whereby women lead, but men who support and want to take part in the struggle also join. Those making this call have made reference to Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) – particularly the idea that the work that women do in the home should be treated in the same way as work done in a capitalist workplace, and therefore to challenge the unequal nature of this work women should strike from housework and even ‘strike from sex and smiles’.
SRT argues for some accurate points. For example, many thinkers who support SRT have pointed out that housework is often seen as ‘women’s work’ because of sexist ideas about natural attributes of the female physique and personality. Women in the home are atomised and often socially isolated. It is therefore correct to talk about bringing this struggle ‘out of the kitchen and the bedroom and into the streets’. But the methods many such thinkers propose for doing so involve taking actions which are simply not possible for most women. Striking from unpaid work such as picking children up from school or feeding the baby are not practical, and other tasks will likely have to be picked up the following day.
Done this way, such actions also regularly miss the opportunity to highlight demands which many working class women and men would support – around the lack of affordable or public services for childcare, for example. The most important point, however, is that whilst these kinds of actions can be used to raise awareness, they do not have the same potential power as striking from waged work, in that they don’t hit the capitalist class where it hurts: in the pocket. Nor do these actions point towards the role that working class people can collectively play in building a new society – a new economy, in which we make the decisions.
Throughout history, it has been the case that those experiencing oppression have been the most confident to fight once they have become part of the workforce, gaining greater economic independence and the ability to organise collectively as part of the working class. This does not mean that strikes have taken place purely on economic issues such as pay or equal pay, but in many cases it has been on other issues such as food prices, reproductive rights, the right to vote, civil rights, workplace childcare, and so on.
In recent years, feminist strikes against femicide and to demand reproductive rights have become a feature in many countries. In the Spanish state, a huge wave of feminist struggle, including feminist strikes involving workers and school students, was triggered in response to a horrific gang rape in 2016, which became known as the ‘wolf pack’ case. The justice system’s victim blaming and minimisation of the seriousness of the case – with the attack described as “abuse” rather than rape – triggered an enormous wave of anger. Ultimately, this movement won some important victories, including pushing the Supreme Court to recognise the case was indeed one of rape, and increasing the sentences of those responsible.
Examples throughout history
Struggles on social issues have a tendency to split along class lines – between those who were fighting for the rights for just a small, middle class or bourgeois minority, and those who were fighting for all the oppressed. The suffrage movement is a prime example. The middle class leadership of the Women’s Political and Social Union, the famous ‘suffragettes’ who used methods such as hunger strikes and individual acts of sabotage such as smashing windows, arson and occasional bombs, whilst brave, did not have a strategy of seeking to build a mass movement of working class women. When the East London Suffrage Federation began building just such a class movement they were expelled from the WPSU for the crime of participating in a rally in support of victims of the 1913 Dublin Lockout.
Meanwhile, many groups of working class women continued to work within the more ‘moderate’ National Union of Womens Suffrage Societies. They organised in their workplaces and fought alongside the male-dominated trade union movement to win suffrage for all. They argued for the need to build a workers’ political party which would be worth voting for and which could both introduce democratic rights and also address social and economic questions. This meant even fighting within the workers’ movement for questions of women’s rights to be taken up.
In 1914, the majority of the middle (and upper) class leaders of both the WPSU and the NUWSS supported the imperialist war effort in the ‘national interest’. Many members of both organisations who opposed this betrayal, such as Sylvia Pankhurst, Helen Crawfurd (WPSU) and Ellen Wilkinson (NUWSS) drew the conclusion after 1917 that the Communist International was the most effective vehicle for peace, along with both gender and class liberation. Meanwhile, the leaders of both WPSU and NUWSS supported the 1918 Representation of the People Act, which restricted the vote to property owning women over the age of 30.
The radical roots of International Women’s Day include strikes of garment workers in New York, who demanded the vote, along with an end to sweatshops and child labour in 1857 and 1908. It was International Women’s Day in 1917 which sparked the Russian Revolution, with strikes by women textile workers demanding bread and peace. Some of these Russian women were involved in strikes in previous years against sexual harassment in the workplace, for paid maternity leave and workplace nurseries. In Britain, equal pay (in law at least) was won by the historic strike by women machinists at the Ford car factory in Dagenham in 1968.
Working-class unity
As well as splits along class lines in movements, we also see the building of unity within the working class in times when workers move into action and engage in struggle. One of the most clear examples is that of the 1984-85 miners’ strike in Britain. As mentioned previously, during the dispute, solidarity was built between the miners and their wives, many of whom played a political role for the first time in their lives by travelling the country speaking at meetings and fundraising for the strikers. Links were also built between the mainly white miners and Indian and Pakistani communities – in some areas by migrant groups bringing food to picket lines. The common ground for them all was their struggle against the Thatcher government and capitalist oppression.
Another celebrated strike in British trade union history is the Grunwick dispute of 1976-1978, in which migrant women took on bullying bosses to win trade union recognition. Despite the strike failing, important links were built between South Asian women and many white, male workers who joined the mass picket lines. Some of those white male workers may have started with some illusions in racist or anti-migrant ideas. But their common experiences as workers fighting back and the trade union movement’s tradition of solidarity, will no doubt have helped to undermine any such prejudices. They understood that if Grunwick workers had their union smashed, then workers elsewhere else could potentially be on the chopping block next.
In the US, the Stonewall Riots in 1969 marked a turning point in the struggle for LGBTQ+ rights and led to the foundation of the Gay Liberation Front, which also consciously built solidarity with the Black Panther Party and collected money for striking workers. Both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King were developing their ideas in a socialist direction shortly before they were assassinated. Martin Luther King was killed just after speaking at a rally of striking sanitation workers. Malcolm X was also increasingly pointing to capitalism as an intrinsically racist system and coming to the conclusion it was necessary to build unity between Black and white workers.
Struggle against oppression needs to be socialist
Struggles against oppression cannot be neatly siloed off and separated, nor should they be treated as separate to the overall struggle of the working class to transform society. The huge potential power of the working class needs to be at the forefront in how movements are built and the strategy they develop.
Although people of all classes can experience oppression on the basis of their identity, the struggle for true liberation is ultimately a class question. It is the division of society into classes which creates the ground for oppression, and it is only by eliminating class society that the basis for ending it can be laid.
German revolutionary and socialist feminist fighter, Clara Zetkin, once said:
“The liberation struggle of the proletarian woman cannot be similar to the struggle that the bourgeois woman wages against the male of her class. On the contrary, it must be a joint struggle with the male of her class against the entire class of capitalists… Her final aim is not the free competition with the man, but the achievement of the political rule of the proletariat.The proletarian woman fights hand in hand with the man of her class against capitalist society.”
It is the role of Socialist Alternative to help fight within the workers’ movement for it to be truly representative – a movement in which workers of all genders, sexualities, races and abilities can participate. We do not view the struggle against special oppression as separate to the wider struggle against capitalism. But it is also not straightforward or automatic that workers’ organisations will organise mass struggle against special oppressions, or against the system as a whole. There have been important examples recently of the trade unions supporting social struggle and vice versa, but this needs to be deepened.
It is also our role to put forward the ideas and methods of mass, class-based struggle to win not just improvements in our lives today, but to win oppressed working class people to our Marxist ideas, to strengthen our forces to fight for a socialist society in which we can end oppression of all kinds.
