Feminism

When I first started writing this series of remarks in Italian (“Riflessioni degeneri”), subsequently collected into a single piece for the English version Remarks on Gender, my aim was twofold. The first was to make a complex debate – one that has unfolded over the course of several decades – accessible to a public of activists and people interested in gender, race, and class politics. The second was to contribute toward reopening this crucial debate about how we should conceptualize the structural relationship between gender oppression and capitalism.

Feminist theorists today are increasingly returning to the insight that capitalism must constitute the critical frame for understanding contemporary forms of gender oppression. Investigating the relationship between feminism and capitalism raises a host of difficult questions, however, which Cinzia Arruzza faces head on in her lucid essay Remarks on Gender. She gives an illuminative roadmap of the terrain in which this issue was debated in the 1970s and 1980s by laying out three different theses on how capitalism and gender oppression are related: dual or triple systems theory, indifferent capitalism, and the unitary thesis. She begins by assessing carefully the problems of the first two positions and concludes by defending the third, the unitary thesis: in capitalist societies, a patriarchal system that would be autonomous and distinct from capitalism no longer exists. Instead of treating gender and sexual oppression as separate forms of domination, a unitary Marxist-feminist theory must incorporate them in the total framework of capitalist accumulation.

Feminism requires us to recognise that "women" is neither a stable nor a homogeneous category. Does intersectionality as a universal framework help us to capture this complexity? This paper argues that it does not. It addresses this question through the intricacies of the terrain that feminist politics must negotiate, using the Indian experience to set up conversations with feminist debates and experiences globally. Feminism is heterogeneous and internally differentiated. We need to pay attention to challenges to the stability of given identities— including those of "individual" and "woman." These challenges constitute the radically subversive moments that are likely to be most productive for feminism in the 21st century.

On 17 January 2015 thousands of people demonstrated in Paris and other cities in France to commemorate the fortieth anniversay of the law legalising abortion in France for the first time, but also to denounce the inadequacies in its application, and to highlight other forms of women’s inequality. On this occasion the monthly journal of the NPA l’Anticapitaliste la Revue published this article retracing the struggle for the right to abortion in France.

The repression of women by the Irish state has been exposed yet again by the case of a clinically dead woman being kept alive in order to continue a pregnancy. The responsibility of the state for this woman’s situation was summed up in the claim by doctors that they were unable to accede to her family’s request that life support be switched off for “constitutional reasons”. In this case the legal imperative to preserve the life of the unborn raised the prospect of a woman’s body being maintained for up to twenty weeks despite there being no possibility of a live, never mind healthy birth.

In recognition of the 42nd anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision, we present this article summarizing the history of U.S. policy around reproductive rights from 1973 to present, with a special focus on new developments from the past couple of years.

“If women’s liberation is unthinkable without communism, then communism is unthinkable without women’s liberation.”

—Russian revolutionary Inessa Armand

Shomi Yoon gave this talk as part of Marxism 2014 in Melbourne.

This article forms the Introduction to a collection of Fourth International resolutions published by the International Institute for Research and Education in collaboration with Resistance Books.

This paper was presented at the Historical Materialism Conference in London, 10 November 2013, in the panel on “A comparative analysis of socialist/class struggle feminism in France and Britain in the 1970s and 1980s”.