--- Title: Against feminism arguments and 16 references Date: 09/03/2021 Category: Critique of ideology Tags: feminism URL: https://marxismo.school/communia/en/against-feminism --- Feminism is not a movement fighting _for equality_, but an identity-based movement that for almost a century and a half has been committed to the framing of working women in favor of the expectations of social advancement of a part of the female petty bourgeoisie. Since its origins, it has been linked to the militaristic framing of the working class and to the most destructive mercantilizing morality. ### In this article ## Feminism is not a movement for equality but an identitarianism Feminism defends the existence of an interclassist historical and political subject, _women_, which transcends social classes with its own, differentiated interests over and above the class struggle. Read the _[Feminism](https://dictionary.marxismo.school/Feminism/)_ entry in our Marxist Dictionary As this interclassist subject is rendered unworkable by the contradictory nature of the interests of working class women versus those of petty bourgeois and bourgeois women, feminism time and again creates a slippery and ambiguous terrain. The reality: even the so-called _working class feminism_, born [in a non-paradoxical way](http://blog.antorcha.info/el-feminismo-es-de-clase-pero-no-de-la-nuestra/) within the university, is in the end nothing but class collaborationism within the framework of the affirmation of an _interclassist community_, that is _women_, from which at best they exclude female bankers. ... but not the bureaucrats and never the female cadres of the corporate petty bourgeoisie. Another significant fact: from its inception feminism has been linked to imperialist warfare. In both world wars it was a recruiting agent of women for slaughter. Even today, its most widespread symbol remains a U.S. Army recruiting poster. Read _[Why do we reject feminism? (in Spanish)](https://marxismo.school/communia/es/por-que-rechazamos-el-feminismo)_, 4/5/2019 ## Feminism applies itself to creating deformed identitarian representations of reality with which to blur the contradictions between classes For instance, in order to present a non-existent equality of interests between female managers and directors of the companies and female workers, it uses the concept of a _gender pay gap_, defining it in very precise terms that make it useless and misleading for female workers. Despite what they are trying to suggest, the gender pay gap does not measure wage discrimination against women, but at present and above all, the distribution of positions of power between men and women in the ruling class. That is why the indicator has served as a slogan of framing of a part of the female petty bourgeoisie in order to storm the boards of directors -that is, to ascend to the bourgeoisie- dressing their aspirations as a necessity of women as a whole. Read [_Gender Gap_](https://marxismo.school/communia/en/gender-gap), 7/3/2021 In a similar way, it needs to portray violence against women by their partners and ex-partners as _macho violence_, an _ideological crime_, a sort of terrorism by _men against women_. All this shows is that in order to make _women_ visible as a political subject, i.e., the need for women in general to close ranks around the women of the ruling classes, they need to invisibilize over and over again the great life-crusher that capitalism has become. Putting on the same scale as these murders the hundreds of thousands of deaths preventable by Covid, product of a management that prioritizes saving lives before investments; suicides and work accidents is directly reviled. It is true that the numbers are very different: suicides outnumber femicides by 80 times in a _normal_ year, and it would take 1,400 years of _gender violence_ to produce a Covid-like slaughter. But the root is the same and it is not so concealed. The system has reached a point where it is directly anti-human and anti-historical and keeps destroying and dehumanizing people... which irremediably turns into violence of all kinds and at all levels. Society self-destructs because the system that governs it as a whole is harmful to it. But separating the part from the whole is the special skill of identitarianism. And if the goal is to create an essentially distinct _woman_ category pushing working women into the camp of their exploiters, nothing could be easier than to rely on past ruling-class archetypes of masculinity. Read _[Are men violent? (in Spanish)](https://marxismo.school/communia/es/son-violentos-los-hombres)_, 4/11/2019 But capitalism returns again to the forefront over and over. And to deny this or pass it off as a _secondary_ problem, feminism in the last third of the 20th century builds its discourse around _patriarchy_. The aim is to redefine [discrimination](https://dictionary.marxismo.school/Discrimination) against women as a [form of exploitation](https://dictionary.marxismo.school/Mode of production) prior to and simultaneous with capitalism. Thus patriarchy would be a system of co-exploitation. Only in this way can feminism propose a sort of _permanent revolution_ by phases in which patriarchy should be confronted _first_, or in which, simply, the struggle against capitalism should be set aside because no overcoming of it would produce anything other than exclusion unless the sexual division of labor and the specific and systemic exploitation of women are resolved _first_. The only problem is that capitalism does not need any specific form of exploitation of women. The discourse on patriarchy is just a way of throwing the ball forward in order to ensure that we will follow, today, the good and progressive women of the ruling class and their _feminist_ institutions. Read _[Does Patriarchy Exist? (in Spanish)](https://marxismo.school/communia/es/existe-el-patriarcado)_, 20/12/2018 ## The capitalist morality beneath feminism In few things is feminism's commitment to the maintenance of the system more apparent than in the most basic moral questions. For today's mainstream, so-called _third wave_ feminism, prostitution and surrogacy for example are _moral acts_, even _empowering_ ones when performed freely on the market. For capitalism any _need_that can be expressed as a _free_ commodity exchange is moral. Feminism radicalizes that idea, which consciously ignores the dispossession of the means of production for the vast majority, to whitewash various forms of commercially-mediated rape as a _need_ which becomes legitimate when it turns into _equivalent exchange_. Lee [_Prostitution and surrogacy (in Spanish)_](https://marxismo.school/communia/es/prostitucion-y-gestacion-subrogada), 2/5/2019 It is true that there are other feminists who disagree with this discourse and propose the outlawing of prostitution and surrogacy by the state. They are those of the so-called _second wave_, born, of course, from a government initiative in the USA. But their morality and prospects were not much better. Dworkin, the main theorist of this trend, ended up condemning as rape all forms of sex with males and persecuting _obscene literature_... that is, in an open regression to the puritanical origins of feminism. Read _[Feminism in the U.S. and the Biden Era](https://marxismo.school/communia/en/feminism-in-the-us-and-the-biden-era)_, 3/1/2021 ## Feminism systematically fakes its own history and that of the socialist movement Because right from its very beginnings - which feminism calls the _first wave_, British suffragism - it was openly a movement of property-owning women, founded in the last circles of abolitionist puritanism and whose aspirations for equality were limited to the ranks of the bourgeois classes. A movement, moreover, deeply linked to the preparation of the imperialist war. Read our history of early feminism: 1\. _[The Birth of Feminism (in Spanish)](https://marxismo.school/communia/es/el-nacimiento-del-feminismo)_, 10/10/2018 _[2\. The first feminists to address women workers (in Spanish)](https://marxismo.school/communia/es/las-primeras-feministas-que-se-dirigieron-a-las-trabajadoras)_, 11/10/2018 [_3\. Sylvia Pankhurst v. feminism (in Spanish)_](https://marxismo.school/communia/es/sylvia-pankhurst)__, 12/10/2018__ This suffragist movement is the origin of today's feminist movement not by virtue of being a _women's_ movement, but by having affirmed _women_ as a historical subject over and above classes. Which in practice, then as now, meant that working women had to make common cause with petty-bourgeois women in order for the latter to succeed in consolidating their rise to power. At the time, this meant fighting for the latter to obtain the right to vote and political representation. The approach could only clash with the socialist movement and especially with the left of the Second International, which even before feminism existed was already fighting for universal suffrage as a class-wide goal. Despite the falsifications we are told by feminism today, the left wing of the Second International, which would later found the Communist International, fought a long battle against feminism. In fact, **IWD was born as a call precisely in opposition to the calls for _sorority_,** i.e. the sacred union with the female bourgeoisie, made by the German feminists. Read also: \- _[Rosa Luxemburg against feminism](https://marxismo.school/communia/en/rosa-luxemburg-against-feminism)_,12/2/2018 \- [_Enough of Rosa Luxemburg's falsified quotes! (in Spanish)_](https://marxismo.school/communia/es/basta-de-citas-falsificadas-de-rosa-luxemburgo), 9/6/2018 \- [_Why feminism falsifies Rosa Luxemburg today (in Spanish)_](https://marxismo.school/communia/es/por-que-el-feminismo-falsifica-hoy-a-rosa-luxemburgo), 2/12/2018 \- _[Alexandra Kollontai was no feminist](https://marxismo.school/communia/en/alexandra-kollontai-was-no-feminist)_, 8/3/2020 At the forefront of this battle of the left of the Second International first and the first communist parties later against feminism, were militants such as August Bebel, Rosa Luxemburg, Clara Zetkin or Alexandra Kollontai. And a final detail. Although almost all of them -with the exception perhaps of Rosa Luxemburg- were in favor of the creation of specific organizations of working women, their conception of these was very limited to the instrumental, to the propagandistic. The place of the female class militant was... among the rest of the class and within the organization, in the assembly. There was not the slightest concession to sex or gender identity as there was not - especially in Rosa Luxemburg - to linguistic and even less to national identities. Read also [_Marxism and identities (in Spanish)_](https://marxismo.school/communia/es/el-marxismo-y-las-identidades), 14/6/2018