DailyRadical

Lis Mandl looks at how Rosa Luxemburg considered the women#8217;s question as inseparable from the struggle of the working class as a whole. She also looks at how the struggle for women#8217;s rights was also a struggle against the reformists within the movement who constantly tried to limit demands for full women#8217;s emancipation.

Lessons From The Transfeminist Movement

One hundred years ago today, 99 women from 17 different countries attended the Socialist Women's Conference held in Copenhagen in the House of the People. In this first part, we look at the origins of Women's Day, the origin of women's oppression in class society, how capitalism lays the material foundations upon which the question of women's emancipation can be tackled as part of the struggle of the working class for the emancipation of the whole of humanity from class oppression.

Lis Mandl spoke at the IMT Winter School on the subject of Women and Revolution . She looks at how the recent financial crisis has affected working women and how the women’s question is inseparable from the struggle of the working class as a whole.

Anarchism can learn a lot from the feminist movement. In many respects it already has. Anarcha-feminists have developed analyses of patriarchy that link it to the state form. We have learned from the slogan that "the personal is political" (e.g. men who espouse equality between all genders should treat the women in their lives with dignity and respect). We have learned that no revolutionary project can be complete while men systematically dominate and exploit women; that socialism is a rather empty goal--even if it is "stateless"--if men's domination of women is left in tact.

Biological differences between the sexes are often raised to justify all kinds of reactionary concepts, such as supposed differences in intelligence. These are also used to justify confining women to the four walls of the home, as if this were somehow biologically inbuilt. In reality, these ideas reflect material forces that have emerged as a result of the development of class society, where one class oppresses another.

Except for Jelveh Javaheri, a women’s rights activist, all the women arrested in Tehran’s Laleh Park on May Day have now been released on bail. Around 30 women were set free pending further proceedings by the Iranian regime’s legal authorities.

The present economic crisis, through its sheer scale and reach, is bringing about a wholesale change in the consciousness of working people the world over. It is the poor, the oppressed, and the workers who shoulder this weight in order to hold up the privileges of the rich. There is no portion of the working class that has so greatly and extensively borne this affliction than working women.

The idea of guaranteed quotas
for women on trade union and party committees has become fashionable. But there
are no shortcut solutions to this problem. Inequality exists because of
capitalism and will continue to exist as long as capitalism exists. This
inequality can only be fought by a united struggle of the whole labour
movement. Only when capitalism is abolished and a system of democratic...