By Camila Bustamante
Art by Raegan Boettcher
1. What is feminism?
Feminism is the ideology of women's liberation. It is materialist; that is, it analyzes society and history through the method of dialectical materialism, which constitutes its scientific character. It is also radical; that is, it goes to the root of women's oppression — the existence of social classes.
2. What is a woman?
Woman is a category referring to a social sex-class, which has specific cultural, economic, and political relations to its opposing sex-class, man.
3. What is sex-class?
Sex-class refers to the understanding that womanhood is built up as a social class, following the Marxist logic of economic class, where there is a class that appropriates and exploits — the male sex-class — and a class that is exploited — the female sex-class. Obviously, this is a general rule — there are certain exceptions and gray areas, which further highlights the social construction and relativity of the matter. “Sex” is used here with the understanding that it is an unstable social category, not an essential one.[1]
It is extremely important to note that the appearance of sex-class is not the root of all oppression. Rather, it is from the division of the world into economic classes, with the appearance of private property, that all oppressions — including those based on sex-class — form.
4. How does the female sex-class relate to the male sex-class?
The primary expression of woman as a sex-class is in female subordination to systemic male supremacy, expressed in virtually all areas of social life.
5. How is womanhood constructed?
It is constructed upon the presumed presence of female sex characteristics — both primary and secondary, in a manner that is either partial or full — and the cultural implications said presence has upon the social-life of an individual. As such, womanhood is made inseparable and is derived from the category of female itself, which is a collection of bodily characteristics which present themselves in about half of the population.
In short: a person who possesses female sex characteristics to the point that they are seen as female by the whole of society, and who thereby lives a female social-life, thus assuming a subordinate position to the male sex-class, is, in this imposed structure, a woman. A materialist feminist analysis reveals this insight, otherwise buried beneath social phantasms and distortions.
6. How did the oppression of women begin?
The oppression of women has its roots in the creation of economic classes and the advent of private property in the earliest civilizations, marking their transition from class-less primitive communism into class-based, agricultural, slave societies. The physical, observable fact of sex-division marked a generally clear line of demarcation, upon which social and productive roles were compelled — particularly in terms of reproductive roles.
Even in the earliest societies, women already constituted a specific sex-category, even if not necessarily oppressed. However, with the rise of economic classes, woman became linked to the domestic, the reproductive, and the subservient.
7. What were these lines of demarcation?
Women's general capacity for pregnancy, as well as their sexed, physical difference to men, led to the bestowing of domestic roles designed to maintain female reproductive labor for the benefit of class society. Social enslavement through reproduction generalizes itself to the whole of society, arising next to sex-based segregation, repression, and abuse. This was the world birthed from the womb of class.[2]
8. How did these lines manifest themselves in the earliest days of sex-based oppression?
In nomadic societies, the biological fate of childbearing kept the female sex closer to her strictly natural function, whereas men — made by their surrounding material conditions to perform the tasks of hunting, gathering, and protecting — were forced to innovate and to create. In doing so, under the Marxist concept of species-being, men were given the ability to rise beyond their own animal nature, towards a genuinely human nature. Women, on the other hand, were denied the ability to transcend — to create — and to become human. This is the default, unfortunate, material template from which patriarchal society would eventually rise.
9. How did Sex-Class manifest in ancient agricultural-slave societies?
In spite of the aforementioned template, there were no institutions from which sexism could be perpetuated before the emergence of economic classes. With the rise of agriculture came the rise of classes, where the dominant economic relation was first that of the slave and master. Here, as women took on stewardship roles in agricultural production, the association between woman and land was born, tied together with notions of fertility, destiny, and sedentarism. For some time, the land was a woman's domain at the micro-level — yet both were still under man's domain. As such, the man who acquired land by extension acquired the women who worked it.
The invention of bronze and iron further tempered the heavy chains that bound women to an inferior position in relation to man. As man made fellow man into slave, he found superior sources of production in all fields, thus casting women entirely into the domestic sphere. Now, not only was she excluded from the productive process, but her own existence could not be recognized by the male as similar to his own. “Man” comes to mean “human,” resigning “woman” to something else. A relationship of exploited and exploiter fully takes shape. In short, as per Beauvoir, woman was dethroned by the advent of private property. All around her, the walls of patriarchal society begin to cover the shining sun and fertile fields that had once been hers.
10. How did Sex-Class manifest in the age of antiquity?
As civilization developed, woman fully became the property of man — he controlled her home, her movement, and her existence. Babies born female were often killed, as they were undesirable and burdensome, and female adulthood, when it was allowed to persist, became merely a gift conceded by the patriarch. From the Arabian Peninsula to the Western Zhou and back to Rome, these social divisions on the basis of sex continued to extend into a web of inescapable sex-based exploitation. Religions, philosophies, and moral systems were erected, creating cultural justifications for this state of affairs. Female torture, rape, and murder became collective spectacle, and God thus decreed that woman was traitorous, evil, and inferior, her only worth coming from blind devotion to her divinely-bestowed subjugation.
Of course, not all societies were the same. In Egypt, for example, due to the fact that all land belonged to the king, yet was worked by the populace, inheritance was meaningless. The lack of any landed private property relations beyond the royal court afforded women some level of equality to men. Similarly, in Sparta, where communal property relations still existed and the nuclear family had not yet been formalized, women were free, genuine adults with similar legal and de facto rights to men. Nevertheless, this situation was extremely rare, and it would not last. Elsewhere, for the most part, the law made woman an inferior being, justifying itself with the “obvious truth” of her sex's inferiority. Women were kept in the infantile status of eternal children, always watched by a male superior, chained to the home, and robbed of political agency.
11. How did Sex-Class manifest in feudal societies?
Feudalism involved massive changes in property relations across the Old World, which led to many confusing, contradictory realities for women. It was the time of lords and serfs, of knights and priests. In some regards, women’s rights were elevated — in most others, they were further restricted, most significantly in relation to her economic privilege or dispossession. A woman was most free when unbound and unassimilated to polite society. Marriage, now monogamous and inseparable from property, became the newest institution from which to enforce the “natural” inferiority of the female sex. At the same time, love became primarily restricted to the realm of the extra-marital. Prostitution thus became truly endemic, and whilst church and state feigned opposition, St. Thomas Aquinas himself argued its utility in maintaining social order: “Prostitutes are to a city what sewers are to a palace.” Guardianships slowly shifted from private to public, both affording women more protection, yet further restricting her freedom and mobility. Nevertheless, wives continued to be treated like property and routinely abused.
These convulsions were not limited to Europe. Across the world, in China, with similarly-rapidly changing property relations during the Song dynasty, Neo-Confucianism arose to be the dominant societal ideology. Thus, woman's situation deteriorated to the point that she was barely above the status of cattle. For example, brutal practices like foot-binding became common, even among aristocratic women. Chinese women were physically rendered subservient, their mobility severely reduced, their dependence on males made complete. Only after a millennium of humiliation and exploitation, with the establishment of the People's Republic in 1949, did circumstances change.
12. What was the influence of colonization and the rise of global European empires?
In much of the New World, relations between the sexes were markedly different from those of the Old World, principally due to the different material development of said societies. For example, José C. Mariátegui, founder of the Communist Party of Peru, described the Inca Empire as a society which largely escaped Marx's traditional model of historical development, women holding a role complementary to men's. Whilst their domesticity was an enforced fact and patriarchy was the law of the land, women retained a certain degree of autonomy and freedom due to the fact that property was, as in ancient Egypt, owned by the king and worked on by the community. With the Spanish conquest of Peru, this system was violently replaced with a semi-feudal regime, drastically reducing the rights of women. Similar stories repeated themselves across the Americas, Asia, and Africa. This is not to say that these societies were paradises for women — most were still strongly oppressive and exploitative. Nevertheless, European conquest often only worsened the female situation by bringing destructive changes to their material conditions.
13. How did the creation of race impact the female sex-class?
The concept of race was absent in human culture until the late 16th century. Its first emergence was in the context of European New World colonies as a tool to force people into different social classes based on their physical attributes, thus creating a strict hierarchy from which to enforce European rule. The goal: to maintain the flow of capital from the colonies to Europe, thus enriching colonial powers. Within the female sex-class, race created subdivisions from which to enforce the most brutal patriarchal exploitation. For example, in much of the New World, Indigenous women were degraded nearly to the status of slaves and were forced into marriages with their conquerors, serving as their spoil of war. African women found themselves in the New World as actual slaves, forced to produce more slaves to perpetuate the accumulation of wealth for their master. These are a few of the many specific relations, born out of property relations and the need to accumulate capital, that largely determined how the artificial creation of race impacted the oppression of women.
The creation of race is intimately tied to the project of colonization. It is important to note, once more, that said project was largely carried out with one principal motive: the accumulation of capital in the context of rising industrialization in Europe. Without South American gold, the factories of England could have never arisen. Colonization did not occur because Europeans were inherently evil or hateful, nor was it initially driven by racial ideologies, as they did not previously exist. Existing notions of race emanated from changing class relations, as well as Europe's geographical and historical position.
14. How did sex-class manifest throughout the rise of capitalism?
Industrial development gave some European women an escape route from the confinement of the home. Far from an emancipatory historical event, however, it was the substitution of one oppression for another. Across the rising factory-scapes of the continent, women toiled for the very lowest wages. Legalistic battles driven by class struggle and the reactionary state continued to pull between greater freedom and greater repression. Marriage ascended to a higher expression: as a bourgeois economic contract principally about the consolidation of the family, property, and inheritance.
15. Why is economic class the central contradiction throughout all of human history?
All forms of oppression stem from economic class divisions — between a class that exploits and a class that is exploited. As such, sex-class itself flows from economic class. This is a historically observable fact, and it is indisputable. To say that all oppressions stem from and are manifest in class is not class reductionism. At the same time, it is important to resist the notion that all oppressions operate on the logic of serving capital. Banning abortion in certain US states is not a decision made because of mechanistic capitalist profit motives — it is primarily made due to misogyny. Materialist feminism argues that said misogyny, historically, originates firstly from economic class and private property, which in turn created divisions based on sex-class. The end of sex-based oppression can thus only be met through the abolition of class, both economic and sexual.
16. Can bourgeois women struggle side-by-side with proletarian women?
No! Although bourgeois women belong to the female sex-class and are oppressed on such basis, their commitment to their capital-accumulating position in terms of economic class makes them incapable of truly advocating for female liberation. Patriarchy is a system entangled within the capitalist system at large, having long been a consequence of class societies as a whole. As such, the interests of bourgeois women conflict with global female liberation, in spite of shared points of oppression.
Unless a bourgeois woman renounces her class position, understands that feminism seeks an end to her privileges and social position, and thereby subjects herself unequivocally to the leadership of working-class organizations, she will stand resolutely in opposition to the feminist movement.
17. Can white women struggle side-by-side with women of color?
Yes. However, they must do so with a clear understanding of their position. While we are all oppressed on the basis of sex, women of color have the added burden of colonial, race-based oppression. White women must uphold, defend, and apply the anti-colonial, anti-racist struggles spearheaded by colonized women, especially in the Third World. They must defer to colonized women whenever these oppressions arise, and furthermore, be accomplices.
18. Is the struggle for women's liberation global and generalized?
Yes. The socialist revolution is a global event, involving every country and peoples of the world. As the feminist revolution is a necessary component of the socialist revolution, it too must be global. International revolutionary sisterhood does not currently exist — it is our historical mission to organize, actualize, and weaponize it against the forces of patriarchy and capitalism.
19. What are the types of feminism today?
a. Bourgeois
i. Liberal
This is the feminism of “black square” Instagram infographics, TikTok “bimbo” videos, and “I’m With Her” establishment politics. It is a shell of feminism, lacking any kind of systemic, material analysis of society. It is the feminism of simplistic, uninterested, often bourgeois, often white women, primarily concerned with their immediate problems. As such, it defends the current system of exploitation and death, remaining blind to the struggles of working-class women, principally colonized working women. The necessity of a more radical road causes the liberal feminist to shiver in fear and duck her head in the sand.
ii. Intersectional
Intersectionality begins its life as a useful, if bourgeois, legal framework, pushed forth by Kimberlé Crenshaw in the context of DeGraffenreid v. General Motors. As it developed, the advocates of intersectionality — by this point, a principally academic movement — posited it as a response to all that came before. It also takes from postmodern philosophy, mainly that of anti-communist pro-imperialist child-abuser Michel Foucault. Scientific socialism, materialism, and class politics were critiqued as outdated, reductionist, and “Western” — ironic, coming from an ideology which barely exists outside of the United States! Instead, under intersectionality, all axes of oppression are considered equally, making class just another axis, rather than the central contradiction. Furthermore, the rejection of materialism means there is no adequate historicizing of social phenomena, instead relying on anachronistic idealist visions that say history happens mainly due to changing ideas, not economic changes. This prevents intersectionalists from adequately tackling the political problems of our era.
Intersectional feminists are certainly more advanced than liberal feminists, and this is their greatest strength. Yet, despite pushing for a vague revolutionary transformation, they are often unable to think in a strategic, concrete, long-term manner. In this sense, they are similar to anarchists. For example, they seek prison abolition in our current system, believing that abolishing prisons will lead to “post-capitalism.” Nevertheless, just as the abolition of chattel slavery led to the prison system, prison abolition alone will only lead to a similarly unjust industrial complex if done under the capitalist system. One must abolish capitalism first — a process that will itself require many prisons![3] Similarly, they focus their energy on crafting anti-racist, anti-sexist workshops and circles, which, while a net positive, do not truly address the root of the problem. One cannot eliminate oppression simply by shaming or changing individual people — these problems are structural and material, and as such, they demand structural, material solutions.
Lastly, and quite importantly, the hyper-focus on identities works to reify said identities as transhistorical and crystallized — a process that is a byproduct of abandoning materialism — as opposed to depending on their historical era and context. If a brown Bolivian woman is truly free, then she is no longer a brown Bolivian woman — rather, she is human. She remains physically female, her culture is still Bolivian, and her skin is still brown, but these categories have lost all their social meaning. She is, just like the rest of the human race, a human being. Intersectionality stands in resolute opposition to this liberation. Because it does not historicize nor analyze materially, it fails to see that identity categories are specific to bourgeois capitalist society, and that with it, they are condemned to vanish.
b. Reactionary
In an article for First Things, Mary Harrington posits that American Liberal Feminism has simply gone too far, demanded too much, and stirred up too much trouble. Reactionary feminism, rather than simply upholding the current system, seeks to rewind it, returning to a provincial, semi-feudal womanhood. This movement is obsessed with the supposed essence of womanhood, declaring that a woman's happiness depends on her conformity to a patriarchal society. They are often vitriolically bigoted, particularly towards trans women and girls, seeing their very existence as immoral. For the reactionary feminist, a woman is only her womb, her pretty face, and her ability to keep her husband content. In other words, it should truthfully not count as feminism. It seeks not to smash our chains, but to thicken them and paint them in floral patterns.
c. Materialist
Although severely unarticulated in the First World, the materialist tradition of feminism is one that spans two centuries, seven continents, and thousands of nations. It is the feminism of the early materialists, of Eleanor Marx and Clara Zetkin. It is the feminism of Alexandra Kollontai and Rosa Luxemburg. It is the feminism of the millions of nameless women who dared to look up to the sky from the misery surrounding them, climbing the steepest mountains to build, brick by brick, a new society.
Materialist feminism is continually shunned and marginalized in the academy, in the media, by “common sense.” And yet, in every action, protest, or social movement where the demands of the female sex-class make themselves heard, materialist feminism finds its rooting. It is the feminism that, upon coming home from the protest, analyzes with the pen, yet refuses to simply remain in the page. Academics analyze — we seek to transform all currently existing social conditions.
20. What are some of the ideological positions that the feminists uphold?
The feminists are ruthlessly critical of all that exists.
The feminists hold an anti-essentialist view, decrying any notion of innate femininity, masculinity, divinities, energies, traits, or other such idealist dribble. They understand womanhood as a category arising from social interaction, built in correlation with and from sex, as previously defined.
The feminists oppose liberal reformism. Though they may lend their strategic support to certain temporary measures through traditional, bourgeois political channels, such as electoralism, their true aims are clear: nothing short of revolution will free us. As such, they uphold the truth of all revolutionary movements: “It is Right to Rebel!”
The feminists oppose the sex trade as an inherently exploitative, abusive industry. They struggle for its total abolition. No person should have to sell their dignity to survive.[4]
The feminists oppose the porn industry on similar grounds, as an abusive, coercive hub of assault and child-abuse. It is the greatest propaganda arm of female hatred. As such, the feminists struggle for its complete abolition as well.
The feminists stand in unyielding solidarity with the struggles of all other groups oppressed by the patriarchy, such as the LGBT+ community. They support and partake in their liberatory movements.
The feminists uphold revolutionary Marxism, the most advanced methodology and ideology of liberation in the present world.
21. What is the relation between the feminist struggle and the struggle for the abolition of class?
One cannot exist without the other. Both the struggles of women and of the oppressed classes are historically inseparable. As such, to be a feminist is to be a communist, and vice-versa.
22. What is the final goal of the feminist movement?
The abolition of woman as a sex-class. The creation of a world without classes, money, or states, a world where we are finally free, joyful, and fully human. The closing of the gap between being female and being human, so that being born is never again a crime punished with a lifetime of oppression, humiliation, and exploitation.
Women have nothing to lose but our chains. We have a world to win.
23. So… Will you dream with us?
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[1] It is also worth pointing out that there are other sex-classes in which people may be sorted by society at large. This social phenomenon may be due to a person's status as intersex, a consistently androgynous presentation, crossdressing in daily life without taking cross-sex hormones, etc. These other sex-classes are often closer in experience and political interests to the male or female sex-classes, depending on their circumstances, their social interactions, their early-life experiences, etc. In many ways, this can be thought of as analogous to the class Marx calls the petite-bourgeoisie, which, whilst not proletariat or bourgeois, will align with whatever class serves its political interests better. The social relations between the male and female sex-classes with other sex-classes is infinitely complex and certainly deserves its own analysis in a later piece. Nevertheless, for the most part, the impositions of binary sex-class rules supreme across all of society, and it is in itself a source of pain for the millions of individuals who simply do not conform to it.
Furthermore, it must be noted that sex-class is merely a framework from which to understand social imposition, not identity in the abstract. Thus, for example, a person whose personal identity is non-binary may be imposed a sex-class by society that differs from their identity—the reasons for their identity itself being irrelevant to this point. Sex-class as a concept does not attempt to explain a person's self-perception or its validity—it only seeks to examine social dynamics with the goal of abolishing them.
[2] The sections following this are brief summaries of Beauvoir’s historical tracing of women's oppression, from Primitive Communism to modern Capitalist society. It can be found in full in her seminal work, The Second Sex.
[3] Of course, we understand that the purpose of the prison system is, fundamentally, to oppress the masses. The seizure of state power by the proletariat means that the working class will have the reins of the state — the main organ used by one class to oppress another. As such, the state will be used to oppress the oppressors, to destroy previously existing, exploitative relations of production, and to build the new society. An unfortunate reality of this process will be the necessity of dealing with reactionaries, imperialists, and other powerful enemies of the people who oppose the socialist transformation of society, principally those concentrated, elite few who exploit the masses today. As such, prisons, during this phase, are an absolute necessity if the socialist state is to survive.
[4] To learn more on this specific issue, you can read “Revolution Through a Woman's Eyes,” published in the Apparition edition.