Charles Fourier on “the progress of women”
Women's freedom is the sign of social freedom.
―Rosa Luxemburg
“Life is not an easy matter…. You cannot live through it
without falling into frustration and cynicism unless you have before you a
great idea which raises you above personal misery, above weakness, above all
kinds of perfidy and baseness.”
― Leon Trotsky, Diary in Exile, 1935
This new book, Breaking Our Chains—Women, Marxism and the
Path to Liberation, written by Sarah Bates, Judy Cox and Sally Campbell, is a
feminist-Marxist polemic or, as the authors state, a manifesto that examines
women’s oppression as a historically specific phenomenon rooted in class
society.
The authors present a materialist conception of history,
which insists that the emancipation of women cannot be separated from the
struggle to overthrow capitalism and replace it with a socialist society. This article
situates the book within classical Marxist theory, traces its
historical-material logic, assesses its contemporary relevance, and contrasts
its outlook with reformist and bourgeois feminist tendencies.
As Judy Cox states, “ it is important to stand with all
those who want to fight back against sexism. But strategies do matter. I
remember being told that we were all equal now and we didn’t need to worry
about sexism anymore. We were told that the key was a few women winning
individual success who would then “feminise” or “humanise” the boardroom.
These ideas have proved to be disastrously wrong. Lots of
people are attracted to Marxism, but they think it needs adding to or building
on to explain women’s oppression properly. I am absolutely for developing
Marxism to address new ways of thinking about the world. But actually, I think
Marxism, when it is properly understood, can explain the world and point to
effective strategies for change. So, I welcome any engagement with Marxism, but
I think Marxism is the theory of women’s liberation. We see women’s liberation
as inextricably linked to the overthrow of capitalism.[1]
At the book's heart is the application of the dialectical materialist
method. The authors trace how social reproduction, the sexual division of
labour, property relations and the state interpenetrate to produce gender
hierarchies. Classical Marxism views ideas about gender not as timeless truths
but as expressions of concrete class relations and material interests. The
authors therefore locate patriarchy’s deepest roots in private property,
commodity production and the wage system—showing how ideological forms (sexism,
“tradition”, cultural myths) mediate and naturalise material inequalities.
Collectively, the authors situate women’s oppression within several
distinct formations: precapitalist patriarchies, the rise of capitalist private
property, and the modern wage-labour system. Historically specific institutions
like household labour, unequal access to independent means of production, and the
monetary valuation of labour have shaped the content and limits of women’s
social power. The book charts how reformist struggles (suffrage, workplace
protections, social-welfare reforms) have won partial gains but have been
repeatedly constrained or reversed because they do not alter underlying class
relations.
Marxism treats the question of women’s oppression not as a
moral add-on but as an integral moment of class society. The materialist
conception of history shows that family structures, gender relations and the
legal status of women are rooted in modes of production: how people make their
living shapes social relations, property, law and ideology.
As Frederick Engels argued, “We must admit that so total a
reversal of the position of the sexes can come to pass only because the sexes
have been placed in a false position from the beginning. If the reign of the
wife over the husband, as inevitably brought about by the factory system, is
inhuman, the pristine rule of the husband over the wife must have been inhuman
too.”[2]
The book is not just an examination of past liberation
movements and struggles; it also has contemporary relevance. Today, intensified
economic poverty, neoliberal austerity, the casualisation of labour, and the
rollback of public services have further commodified and privatised social
reproduction. The book explains why these trends disproportionately impact
women: cuts in social care and public provision shift unpaid labour back into
households; precarious employment deepens women’s dependency and vulnerability.
It therefore argues that feminism divorced from class struggle can be absorbed
as a market-friendly ideology or reduced to identity-based bargaining within
capitalism.
The authors are correct in their insistence that real
emancipation requires linking demands around wages, workplace democracy, social
provision, childcare, reproductive rights and an end to militarism to a program
to abolish wage labour and capitalist property—i.e., to socialist
transformation. All women’s organisations must be rooted in the working class,
not subordinated to bourgeois parties or union bureaucracies that manage
capital’s interests. That perspective distinguishes genuine Marxist-feminism
from reformist “management-of-inequality” approaches and the bourgeois
“lean-in” model that leaves hierarchical structures intact.
To sum up, Breaking Our Chains provides a necessary
corrective to bourgeois and reformist versions of feminism by grounding the
fight for women’s liberation in Marxist historical materialism. Its central
lesson: the liberation of women requires the revolutionary overthrow of
capitalist social relations and the building of working-class political
independence and international organisation. Women’s liberation is not
attainable as a partial reform of capitalism. It requires the collective
political mobilisation of the working class to overturn the property relations
that underlie gender oppression and to build democratic, social institutions
that free labour from private, unpaid burdens. For students and activists seeking a
theoretical and practical guide, the book underscores that only by combining
rigorous theory, mass organisation and revolutionary strategy can genuine,
lasting emancipation be achieved.
One major criticism of both the authors and the Socialist
Workers Party that they belong to is that, despite the occasional publication
of books that adopt a classical Marxist standpoint with references and quotes
from Marxist revolutionaries Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, and Russian
revolutionaries Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, they usually offer a platform
for the flotsam and jetsam of pseudo-left politics. The group is
thoroughly convinced of capitalism's power and longevity and is hostile to the
working class and to genuine socialism. The SWP’s sole purpose is to oppose the
independent political mobilisation of the working class on a revolutionary and
internationalist programme.
