Ideology that defends the existence of an interclassist historical and political subject, "women", which transcends social classes, with its own differentiated interests standing above the class struggle.
Origins and history of feminism
Feminism was born as an organized political current out of the evolution of the British abolitionist circles, heirs of the puritanism of the Cromwellian era. Its first political expression, "suffragism", would defend the extension of the right to vote to women of the propertied classes, a demand it would finally obtain from the British government after its enthusiastic participation in recruitment and in the war effort during the First Imperialist World War.
Made irrelevant by the world revolutionary wave, feminism would return in the depths of the counter-revolution in the USA. Far from breaking its ties with imperialism, it would base its narrative on the incorporation of women into the war effort and their participation in the US military industry during the slaughter. Its most widely used icon even today is still a war propaganda poster whose aim was to recruit working women into the war industry.
Coinciding with the collapse of the wave of workers' struggles that overlaps with and marks the end of the post-war reconstruction (1962-89), feminism mutates. The new evolution (self-styled "third wave") feeds on the power struggles of the petty bourgeoisie in American universities. There, already in the eighties, postmodernism and relativism had begun to become hegemonic, turned into a tool for generational change within the university power groups.
The rise into the university elite and the corporate bourgeoisie of elements coming from the black petty bourgeoisie threatens to relegate feminism to a single, necessarily shared niche. The theory then mutates, taking up the most relativistic and subjectivist elements of postmodernism, to promote a fractalization (the discourse of "transversalities") that turns feminism into an ideology of the categorization and affirmation of "identities"... each one with its quota ensured by the existence of its own "perspective", equally opposed to the perspective of the "white heterosexual male".
The result becomes even more aggressively divisive in relation to a working class that to many already seems "dead" or "vanished". The working class is identified with the "uneducated white male" and is routinely denigrated as the archetype of "privilege" and of "feminicidal" and "patriarchal" reaction.
On its arrival in Europe and its spread through the Americas, the discourse of "identities" linked to feminism would become, slightly softened, an ideology of the state, generating a bureaucracy and a technical body specialized in "gender equality" and feeding divisive strategies organized by the state itself, such as the Spanish "feminist strike" of 2018 or the proposal of differentiated collective agreements and labor contracts for each sex.
Marxism against feminism
Tied from its first manifestations to the petty bourgeoisie, feminism would apply to the political subject it defines, "women", the interclassist and nationalist political logic of the concept of "people". In their battle to make room in the boards of companies and in government for women of the petty bourgeoisie and the upper classes, the suffragettes soon tried to win over the working women's organizations, much larger in number and above all much better organized.
The feminists proposed an interclassist front of "women" whose goal would be to get bourgeois women deputies elected within the property-qualified (censitary) suffrage system. They promised to represent the "common interest as women" that supposedly united working women with the bourgeois women of English radical liberalism.
The left of the Second International, with Rosa Luxemburg and Clara Zetkin at its head, radically opposed this, waging a powerful ideological battle between 1887 and 1917. A year before the formation of the first suffragist group in England, Zetkin had presented at Gotha, the true founding congress of the German socialist party, a report on "The Question of Women and the Tasks of Social Democracy", which was approved unanimously.
From then on the German socialists had devoted themselves to organizing and educating thousands of working-class women, promoting mobilizations for universal suffrage for both sexes. From the Stuttgart Congress of the International onwards, the left, with Zetkin and Luxemburg at its head, takes the battle to the global level. Not against a supposed machismo of the leadership, but against the concessions to feminism of some parties, such as the Belgian one, which had approved at its congress support for the extension of property-qualified suffrage to upper-class women.
The Congress of the Second International held in Stuttgart committed the social democratic parties of all countries to begin the struggle for universal female suffrage as an essential and inalienable part of the general struggle of the proletariat for the right to vote and for power, in clear opposition to feminist aspirations.
Clara Zetkin
The ideological battle grows more and more intense over the years. Rosa Luxemburg shares in her correspondence her intimate rejection of the "moral and spiritual" arguments of feminism and of the appeals to the "development of one's own personality", when what the feminists were really demanding was equality between the men and women of the strata in power within that power.
She is clear that "woman" is not a historical subject above or outside social classes, and that is why she deeply rejects the claim of a supposed "women's right" that would benefit working women independently of the development of the workers' movement in general and of the struggle against capitalism. For Luxemburg, the feminists are trying to turn the proletariat's rejection of the oppression of women into a way of diverting the struggle and consolidating a system that was then ending its historically progressive phase, in the same way as nationalism did by manipulating resistance to cultural-national oppression:
The duty to protest against and combat national oppression, which falls to the class party of the proletariat, finds its basis not in any particular "right of nations", just as the political and social equality of the sexes does not emanate from any "right of women" to which the bourgeois movement for the emancipation of women refers. These duties can only be deduced from a generalized opposition to the class system, to all forms of social inequality and to all power of domination. In a word, they are deduced from the fundamental principle of socialism.
Rosa Luxemburg. The National Question and Autonomy, 1908
Contrary to what feminist propaganda tells us today, Rosa Luxemburg not only was not a feminist but fought against feminism all her life. She even doubted the usefulness of the specific organizations of working women within the socialist movement that her friend Clara Zetkin had begun to organize.
She did so for the same reasons for which she had fought against the formation of specific organizations of Jewish workers within the Polish socialism that she herself had founded: a rejection of the very bases of what they now call "identity", which defines each person, from a very individualistic viewpoint, as an "intersection" of identities. For Luxemburg it is not conflicting "identities" that define the political struggle, but a historical framework in which a universal class, indivisible in its interests, can free the whole of society from all exploitation and, consequently, from all oppression.
The advocates of bourgeois women's rights wish to acquire political rights in order to take part in political life. Proletarian women can only follow the path of the workers' struggles, the opposite of setting foot in real power by means of basically juridical statutes.
"Die Gleichheit", the newspaper edited by Zetkin, makes it clear that the power of the women who would benefit from property-qualified suffrage arose from their social position in the bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie, and that the legal reform of the right to vote they proposed would entrench that power; working women, on the other hand, could only assert themselves through the workers' struggles, hand in hand with their class comrades.
One might think that the entire female sex, deprived of political rights, should fight as a phalanx for the achievement of universal female suffrage. But this is not so. (…) The battle for universal female suffrage, too, is dominated by class contrast and by the class struggle; there cannot be a unitary struggle of the whole female sex, and much less so when what is at stake is not an empty principle but a concrete, vital content, such as that of universal female suffrage.
We cannot demand of bourgeois women that they go beyond their own nature. Proletarian women must not count, therefore, on the support of bourgeois women in the struggle for their civil rights; class contradictions prevent proletarian women from allying themselves with the feminist movement. (…) Proletarian women must be perfectly aware that the right to vote cannot be conquered through a struggle of the female sex, without class distinctions, against the male sex, but only through the class struggle of all the exploited, without distinction of sex, against all the exploiters, likewise without any distinction of sex.
Clara Zetkin. Speech explaining the resolution of the International Congress of Stuttgart, 22 August 1907
The creation of 8 March as a day of struggle, of strike, in 1910, under the name of "Day of International Solidarity among Proletarian Women", on Zetkin's proposal, is part of the same thing. It is a matter of affirming the socialist and working-class character of the movement for truly universal suffrage, that is, including the winning of the vote by women. In other words, the creation of 8 March was part of the struggle of the women of the Left of the Second International for the democratic rights of all workers and against the feminist idea of the "union of women", "against which I have fought all my life", as Rosa Luxemburg would write.
Feminism and the imperialist war
The moment of truth that would demonstrate the substance and the reason of the battle of the left of the Second International against feminism would come with the world war. The suffragettes literally "demanded" of the governments the incorporation of women into the war effort and the carnage of war. As a reward, in 1918 the British government gave the vote to the 8 million women from the wealthiest families, still far from universal suffrage. This is what the press now celebrates as "the winning of the vote by women", forgetting to say that only a few of them got it.
Zetkin and the groups of working women, on the other hand, would convene the first international conference against the war in the midst of the most savage repression of the internationalists by all governments. It is the first political act organized by a group of the Second International against the war, at a time when Luxemburg, Rühle or Liebcknecht are already in prison.
To lead the proletarians to free themselves from nationalism and the socialist parties to regain their full freedom for the class struggle. The end of the war can only be achieved by the clear and unbreakable will of the popular masses of the belligerent countries. In favour of such action, the Conference calls on socialist women and socialist parties in all countries: War on war!
Declaration of the International Conference of Socialist Women against the War
On 8 March 1917, the 8 March demonstration in Petrograd which, as was traditional, the groups of socialist working women organized, calling on all workers regardless of sex and asserting demands for the class as a whole, would become the trigger of the Russian Revolution.
Separate organizations of working women?
Rosa Luxemburg denounced any organization "of women" and any "front of women's organizations", because she realized that organizing in a deceitful interclassist space only served to swell the power of the petty-bourgeois (and, as we shall see, patriotic) layers that sustained feminism and to divide the class movement.
Luxemburg is so clear that the organization of women-only groups must not open the door either to interclassism or to separation from the class that, when Clara Zetkin invites her to the first congress of socialist women, she makes fun of it in a letter to Luise Kautsky: "Are we feminists now?", she writes. Of course, there was not a trace of feminism in what Luxemburg and Zetkin would do.
The "women's organizations", like the youth organization created by Karl Liebknecht, another of the pillars of the party's left, had the same function that Lenin proposed for the Bund -the organization of Jewish workers- within the Russian party: to serve socialist education and the dissemination of the party's program in a specific milieu of women, most of whom were still in waged domestic work, in small workshops or devoted exclusively to caring for the family.
This approach would be taken even further by the Third International at its First and Second Congresses. The logic was the same as was applied to linguistic minorities, youth and cooperativists.
In a document of guidelines drafted for the International by Zetkin herself to clarify its positions, she makes it quite clear that there will be no "separate organizations" or differentiated programs, but "specific organs" of the International at all levels -from the factory to the Secretariat- devoted to promoting the education, participation and training of women cadres, given the "historical backwardness and the particular position that, owing to her domestic activity, she often assumes", the working woman of the time.
There is only one movement, only one organization of communist women -formerly socialist- within the communist party together with communist men. The aims of communist men are our aims, our tasks [...] The women members of the communist party of a given country must not gather in particular associations, but must be enrolled as members with equal rights and duties in the local organizations of the party, and must be called upon to collaborate in all the organs and at all levels of the party. The communist party, however, adopts particular regulations and creates special organs to take charge of the agitation, organization and education of women
Clara Zetkin. Guidelines for the Communist Women's Movement, 1920.
The Second and Third Internationals would not create ethnic, gender or generational organizations, but would promote the full, real equality of all militants within the party. The universal character of the proletariat is translated in organizational terms into centralism.
Oppressions and "identities"
Throughout the work of Luxemburg or Zetkin there is one idea that is clear at every moment and in every period: there is no "oppression in the abstract", nor are "the nation", "youth" or "woman" historical subjects. All of them exist within the framework of a given mode of production and are therefore cut across, broken by class conflict. Rosa Luxemburg is very clear when she lays the foundations from which to discuss the national question, and what she says about the "nation" and the "people" applies literally to "woman" as well.
The concept of nation is used as a whole, as a homogeneous social and political unit. But that concept of "nation" is precisely one of the categories of bourgeois ideology that Marxist theory has subjected to a radical revision, showing that behind the mysterious veil of the concepts of "bourgeois freedom", "equality before the law", etc., there always lies a concrete historical content.
In class society the nation does not exist as a homogeneous socio-political entity; rather, within each nation there are classes with antagonistic interests and "rights".
There is absolutely no social terrain, from the most primary material conditions to the subtlest moral ones, in which the possessing classes and the conscious proletariat adopt the same attitude and appear as an undifferentiated "people".
In the sphere of economic conditions, the bourgeois classes defend the interests of exploitation, and the proletariat those of labor. In the sphere of legal conditions, private property is the cornerstone of bourgeois society; the interests of the proletariat demand that those who have nothing be emancipated from the domination of property. In the sphere of the administration of justice, bourgeois society represents "class justice", the justice of the well-to-do and the rulers; the proletariat defends humanity and the principle of taking into account the social influences on the individual.
In international relations, the bourgeoisie pursues a policy of war and annexations, that is, in the present phase of the system, a policy of restrictive tariffs and trade war; the proletariat, on the other hand, a policy of general peace and free exchange. In the sphere of sociology and philosophy, the bourgeois schools and the school that represents the proletariat stand in open contradiction (…)
Even in the sphere of so-called human relations, of ethics, of opinions on art, edification, etc., the interests, the world view and the ideals of the bourgeoisie, on the one hand, and those of the conscious proletariat, on the other, constitute two camps separated from each other by a deep abyss. In those respects in which the formal aspirations and interests of the proletariat and of the bourgeoisie as a whole, or of its progressive sector, seem identical or common, as, for example, in democratic aspirations, the identity of forms and slogans conceals a total rupture of content and of practical policy.
In a society of this kind there can be no collective and unitary will, there can be no self-determination of the "nation".
When "national" struggles and movements have developed in the history of modern societies, they have generally been class movements of the leading bourgeois layer, which, at best, may to a certain extent represent the interests of other popular layers insofar as it defends, as "national interests", progressive forms of historical development, in which the working class has not yet separated itself from the mass of the "people" led by the bourgeoisie to constitute itself as a politically conscious and independent class. (…) For social democracy, the question of nationalities is, above all, like all other social and political questions, a question of class interests.
Rosa Luxemburg. The National Question and Autonomy, 1908
For Marxism, there is no "identity" outside the class struggle. There are no historical subjects other than the main classes into which bourgeois society is polarized, and therefore no revolutionary possibility other than that of the universal class. That "universality" is not only geographical, it is above all one of interests: the abolition of capital and wage labor has been, for more than a century, the only progressive future to which Humanity as a whole can aspire. It is also the end of all exploitation... and, by destroying its material bases and giving rise to a new morality, of all discrimination. Something that is anticipated as a tendency in the very forms of the workers' struggle (centralism).