Class Struggle & Women’s Liberation
why we need Marxist Feminism originally published in Swedish in 2019, this is an article written by elin Gaufin, international Socialist alternative (iSa) activist based in Stockholm. elin is responding to an article written in Bang, Swedish feminist magazine, in which Marxism and Karl Marx himself was dismissed as economistic and irrelevant to questions of oppression. we re-publish this article with thanks, as it makes the case succinctly as to why genuine Marxism is not economistic, looks nothing like the crude and lazy stereotypes proffered, and how in fact socialist feminist struggle is urgently needed.
strikes in Europe. Similarly, feminist strikes and mass demonstrations have swept across Latin America as well as India and South Africa and were a main feature of the revolts in North Africa. The protest movement in Hong Kong also challenged sexism.
In recent years, the global women’s movement has reintroduced the strike as a form of struggle on a mass scale, starting in Poland in 2016. International Women’s Day on 8 March in 2017 and 2018 saw internationally coordinated strikes in many countries. In 2019, up to seven million people went on strike in Spain on 8 March, which, like the feminist strike in Switzerland on 14 June, must be among the largest ever
“Economic conditions had first transformed the mass of the people of the country into workers. The combination of capital has created for this mass a common situation, common interests. This mass is thus already a class as against capital, but not yet for itself. In the struggle […] this mass becomes united and constitutes itself as a class for itself. The interests it defends become class interests.”1
the reemergence of the strike It was in the labour movement that the strike as a form of struggle was born, and for socialists it has always been a central strategy. The youth climate movement striking is a very important step away from individualism (the era of postmodernism and liberal identity politics) and towards collective action. Shutting down their workplaces or schools by sitting down or filling the streets clearly signals that the machinery must be stopped for change to be possible. When workers strike, class struggle becomes more conscious. Karl Marx wrote that:
AuTuMN / WINTEr 2021 l SocialiSt alterNative l 23
