Sexual politics

This interview with Silvia Federici, a feminist activist and scholar, and author of Caliban and the Witch: Women, The Body and Primitive Accumulation and Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction and Feminist Struggle was published on The North Star website on 24 February 2014.

In 1921, when the Communist International (Comintern) held its Third World Congress, Clara Zetkin was the most widely respected Communist outside Russia. Yet she was the victim of vigorous efforts on the eve of the congress to vilify her and drive her out of the Comintern leadership, if not from the movement. Nonetheless, she ranks, together with Lenin and Trotsky, among the dominant intellectual figures at the congress.

This article was written in May 1960 and originally published in Quatrième Internationale. This translation is from Fourth International, Autumn 1960. We are publishing it as part of our effort to constute an archive of the Fourth International’s writings on women’s liberation.

We’re at an interesting (and terrible) moment where we’re witnessing attacks on most every gain working people have made for at least the last half century. The curious exception to that has been the advance of marriage and civil rights for gay and lesbian couples in many U.S. states and core imperialist countries. But while we can celebrate the dismantling of many of the legal barriers to equality, we need to be mindful of the cost assimilation has had on “gay” communities, the movement’s relationship to other progressive causes, and lastly how it measures up to radical ideas of gender and sexual freedom.

“Although we are in essential agreement with Marx’s theory as it applied to the very specific economic relationships he analyzed, we know that his analysis must be extended further in order for us to understand our specific economic situation as Black women.”
—the Combahee River Collective Statement, 1977

Let us begin with an image: a naked white man pursuing a low-wage Black female asylum seeker down the corridors of an expensive Manhattan hotel in order to force her to have sex with him. The man, of course, is the then-director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), French politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and the woman, thirty-three-year-old Nafissatou Diallo, a housekeeper at Strauss-Kahn’s hotel who was also at the time seeking asylum in the United States from her native Guinea, a former colony of France.

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”.

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”.

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”.

This article was published in the theoretical review Fourth International, Volume 15 No.3, Summer 1954, pp.84-90. This version is republished from the Marxist International Archive Evelyn Reed Archive, transcribed by Daniel Gaido and proofed and corrected by Chris Clayton.