 Welcome to our podcast series, Women's Liberation and Marxist Position, brought to you by Marxist Voice, the podcast of Socialist Appeal. There will be a three-part series where we put forward the Marxist position on the women's question. We will cover the following main topics, how to fight for women's liberation, which we will be discussing today. For the next episode, we'll be republishing a talk on the origins of women's oppression, and another episode will be published on what are the lessons from historical struggles, such as the Russian Revolution. There are a lot of different outlooks and answers to these questions. However, what we will do is answer these from a Marxist position that is on a materialistic and class basis. This series will help in clarifying why Marxism provides the only true revolutionary answer to this important question. If you would like to read more on this question, I highly recommend visiting our education hub, socialist.net, where we'll have a range of resources on everything, from how to fight oppression, to philosophy and more. The website of our international Marxist tendency has also a wealth of material that we highly recommend, which is marxist.com. To introduce myself, I'm Lubna Badi, member of Socialist Appeal, and today we have a guest speaker with us, Fiona Lali. She is here to discuss the fundamentally important topic on how to fight against women's oppression and how to liberate women. And of course, what is the Marxist position on this? Hi, welcome, Fiona. Hi, thank you. Yeah, my name is Fiona. I'm the National Organiser of the Marxist Student Federation, and I've been an activist with Socialist Appeal for a number of years now. Thanks. Great. So, yeah, as we know, today is of course International Women's Day, or should I say International Working Women's Day, as we of course are claiming back, essentially, as Marxist. You know, the working aspect has of course been dropped over time, but it has been celebrated, you know, by the working class, essentially, and has really like truly revolutionary roots. So I guess like to go into like the first question here for Fiona is like what we're discussing today is obviously, you know, how to fight for women's liberation. But essentially, like, of course, this is something that the first question is, why are we talking about this? Because given, you know, in Britain, and I would say like in many, say, Western countries, women have gained the legal rights, essentially, like the legal equality to men. So, of course, on paper when women are equal and they're all should be treated equally. But yeah, what is it essentially that we still see, you know, cases of oppression and sexism and things in today's society? Yeah, thanks. Well, I'm glad that you mentioned that it's actually International Working Women's Day, because the first thing to know is that we are oppressed as women and as workers. So also an answer to your, you know, your introductory point about the legal equality that women have in certain countries, why that isn't a solution to the problems that women face is that because women are also oppressed as as workers. And, you know, women all over the world on average are paid less than men, typically about 20 to 30% less for similar kinds of work, lower pay usually means lower or no benefits, a smaller pension on retirement and so on. There was a recent report by Oxfam, which stated that there were 13 million fewer women in employment in 2021 compared to the previous year. 20 million girls on top of that are expected never to return to school due to the strain that coronavirus has put on poorer households. I think the COVID pandemic in general has exacerbated all forms of inequality in society and that applies to the oppression of women as well. Many like domestic abuse charities reported a huge surge in calls and contacts that they were getting from women just as the lockdowns were implemented. And this happened all over the world in many different places and that's just a real stark example of how women bear the brunt of the worst aspects of capitalism. I also wanted to say that I think we live in a particular period in which we're witnessing an onslaught or an attack on women's reproductive rights in particular. The question of abortion is one that's come up in a lot of countries in Poland, Argentina and recently also in America, in Texas. Texas passed an anti-abortion law, a real draconian anti-abortion law, which is so punitive that you can be punished, you can be sued if you help someone getting an abortion, let alone try to get one yourself. So if you drive someone to an abortion clinic, you can be sued by a private citizen. So this is the period that we're living in and women are angry because they're being attacked on all different fronts, right? On an economic front, but also in their own political, democratic rights such as the right to abortion, for example. Yeah, and I guess like indeed when women look of course at these say law makers and things like this, they're obviously often men who pass these laws. And you know, therefore, I would say like on the surface of things, like it seems to be that men are kind of like to blame for this, right? Like different conclusions can be drawn from that, that, you know, is it something biological to men? It's like a stronger sex that therefore are basically bound to oppress women. And I guess like, yeah, like how do Marxists look at this question? Yeah, so I think this question of biology is an important one. And as Marxists, we have an understanding on where the oppression of women comes from. And I know this is something that's covered in a separate podcast. So I'm not going to go into all of that now. And I would encourage anyone listening to listen to what we have to say about that. It comes with the origins of class society. But this idea that there's something innate to men or that men just hate women or that men are physically more powerful and therefore try to dominate women is something that has been popular for a while. It was quite popular with radical feminists in the 60s and 70s. But as Marxists, we understand that there's an economic reason as to why these as to how this oppression happens and why it manifests itself in the way that it does. One of the fundamental parts of the oppression of women takes place in the form of the privatization of domestic labor. This is a really important thing for us to talk about. So when we talk about domestic labor, we're talking about housework, cooking, cleaning, childcare, the rearing of a child. The maintenance of the home, essentially everything that we need to do in order to live our lives, right? Cooking and cleaning so that we can go into work. Everything that that requires, the bourgeoisie, the capitalist class don't provide for, right? That's not just given to us in some capacity. And so because the oppression of women has existed for hundreds of years under capitalism, rather than reinvent the wheel and come up with a new and costly way to provide this maintenance of the home or the production of the home, if you will. The capitalist simply use the oppression of women. It's a tool to keep the domestic labor private and to keep them from having to pay for it or provide for it, right? And this hangover, if you will, of the oppression of women that predates capitalism actually is useful for them in order to promote certain roles in society, certain gender roles that make women feel that they have to take up these jobs, sorry. Yeah, and I guess like the economic reason for this, you know, when we see that women are of course also having, you know, the big issue of gender pay gap, women are obviously usually in precarious work conditions. They don't have necessarily like the same stability that men have at work, you know, just, you know, proper say permanent contracts. They are usually in jobs that are like quite precarious, for example, like healthcare and retail where they don't have the same security as men have, you know, lack of maternity leave and healthcare, you know, accessibility and things like this. And of course, I work in long hours and heavy jobs and stuff. And you can see how they are usually therefore the ones who have been hit the hardest at, you know, in times of crisis. So we can see like clearly that this is not something like a cultural attitude as, you know, for example, like professors like Jordan Peterson answer on this question and say that women are just, you know, too nice to basically ask for more. This is of course not an actual answer to the systematic oppression and exploitation that we see that women have to deal with. And there are clearly like profit making reasons behind this, right? Like that the bosses would find women too much of a risky investment to provide them with maternity leave and, you know, all of these sort of questions. Yeah, I was wondering like, what are your thoughts on that front? Yeah, I mean, so fundamentally the capitalist system regards women a convenient source of cheap labor. That is how they are oppressed in the home. And one thing we can say about this is that sometimes it's described as having a double shift, right? As a woman, you go to work, you're probably in a precarious job, as you've just explained, you're probably not paid very much. And then you come home and there's the added burden of all this domestic work. But on the gender pay gap specifically, as you said, there's an economic reason as to why women are disenfranchised, if you will, in the workplace, a boss. And this could be a male boss or a female boss, because by the way, their interests are fundamentally the same. They don't change on the basis of their gender. They're less likely to pick a woman who could get pregnant and therefore they have to pay for all the things you've just described. When they could pick a man, it's more profitable for them to go down that route. So, yeah, when Jordan Peterson says that women are too agreeable, I think that's how he described it. And that's why they don't get these high positions. We can point out that that's complete nonsense. And actually, it's the economic necessity. It's the economic question that creates the cultural attitude, right? It's not the other way around. It's the profit desire that forces people to make these decisions. And then as a result, cultural attitudes come out of that, which might perceive women to be less able to be a boss or less able to have that manager role or whatever it is. So, yeah, it's important for us to understand where these cultural attitudes come from and it's economic fundamentally. Yeah, definitely. And I guess besides economic reasons why women are being exploited, we do see as well huge cases of direct violence against women, right? Because I guess you can say there's a sort of like, you know, almost like oppression that women have to endure on a daily basis that might go a bit unnoticed underneath the economic conditions. But this is like an actual attack of women. For example, like the Sarah Everard killing that has caused so much outrage in Britain, but also internationally. And you know it within England and Wales every year, like 85,000 women are raped and over 400,000 women are sexually assaulted. So this sort of academic of violence against women is something that is, of course, like something that we as Marxists really interlink with capitalism. But yeah, could you explain like how that is? Yeah, I think this question of violence against women is really important. We have to start by saying that capitalism is a brutal violent system based on this kind of artificial scarcity and it pits people against each other in the most desperate manner possible, right? It's a violent system that reproduces violence. And that's what we have to understand. On top of that, I would say there's an ideological struggle that is waged on behalf of the ruling class across many different countries. The heavily limits or tries to limit the sexual freedom of women and tries to relegate them into a certain role that's based on child rearing and caring and this kind of maternal sort of sort of figure. And it does this in many different forms. Religion has always been used by the ruling class, particularly on this question. That's where a lot of anti-abortion kind of cultural norms come from in many cases. Certain governments, a lot of governments really draw on this idea of the traditional family and the way that it should look. And so I wanted to make this point that although capitalism economically is a violent system, the ruling class does have an ideology and it does promote that throughout society in many different ways. That ideology is disseminated through many different forms. And obviously working class men, working class in general are born and bred and educated in that society, the one that the ruling class promotes its ideas into. And so they're not immune from its pressures. The ruling class through the media and other forms, I think push this idea that men have an interest in maintaining capitalism and maintaining the system the way that it is. And crucially that they have something to lose if women do gain more independence in all these different forms, whether it's sexual freedom or whatever it is. All of that, and if you take on top of that just the violence of the situation, the desperation that capitalism forces people into, that is what produces violence. That is what produces unfortunately the violence that we see. The oppression of women historically is buried under the weight of culture and religion and different societal norms. But these norms are produced and reproduced in different forms of society in order to justify this extra, this double exploitation that women face as women and as workers. Therefore I'd say that the violence that we see is a reflection or even a regurgitation of class society itself. And that's why the only approach we can have to it to ending it is a revolutionary one that uproots the entire system itself. We cannot reform away this violence or educate it away. We have to smash the whole system and smash the class that is pushing those ideas into society. Yeah, and I guess this touches indeed well upon the point of, as a woman, when you are angry at the system and you are angry at what's happening to women internationally, then of course you're going to look for ideas on how to fight this and how to end this. Now I guess the mainstream way of how to liberate women essentially is of course given these ideas are given by the bourgeois as you were saying. So bourgeois feminism is of course like a very common, I guess, ideology amongst a lot of women who first like say start to radicalize in changing society and fighting against oppression. But yeah, obviously we as Marxists, we have of course a class point of view. So what is basically our main criticisms against like this bourgeois ideology? Yeah, so I think we should start by pointing out that the bourgeoisie has made a bit of extra room at the table for a few women together, as managing directors, as judges, as bankers and bureaucrats and various other things. There's a couple of women up there. 419 out of the Fortune 500 now have at least one woman on the board and a third of them have two or more. So some women are doing very nicely. And what we have to understand is these women will also claim to be in favor of the emancipation of women and they would even call themselves feminists. This is a thing even with this term feminism and feminists today. Justin Trudeau famously called himself a feminist. Theresa May called herself a feminist. We've got loads of feminists in society who are in favor of the emancipation of women one by one starting with themselves. That's how we can understand it. But that's not what we're interested in. We aren't interested in the freedom or the equality to exploit and for more women to sit at that table to exploit other working class women and men. That is what those bourgeois feminists are interested in. That's what the bourgeois are interested in. But that is not what we're interested in. And that's why we're firmly against any ideas around representation as some kind of tool or way in which we can overcome the oppression of women. It's very important to understand that oppressed groups and women in general who are an oppressed group are not oppressed because they're underrepresented. They're oppressed because of the systemic oppression in society that produces barriers that prevents them from taking part in life and politics in particular. Politics, you need a lot of time to be involved in politics. And because of this burden that is put on women, they're often unable to take up this role. But specifically on this issue of representation or maybe not even just representation, but this idea of just having more women at the top of a system or involved in the system in the capitalist system as a way to undo some of the problems that women face. If you look at Mexico, Mexico is a country that has a real horrific issue with femicides, right? Ten women a day are killed or murdered in Mexico. And yet in Mexico, women make up half of its Congress, right? So we can't look at the surface to find a solution to any of these problems. Surface changes don't undo the root. They don't undo the root of this issue, especially when it comes to the violence that we've just been talking about. Because that is a reflection of the economic system. And so if you're not talking about changing the economic system, you are not changing. You're not talking about liberating women. That's important for us to understand. Yeah, I guess like one of the other things that they mentioned, say bourgeois feminists and stuff is basically the idea of safe space, right? Like excluding basically men from these political discussions and from even political movements. Because they would be like, say, too dominating to, you know, to women, essentially, like to have our own safe space, essentially, to just talk about our issues and our problems that we're facing and things like this. But yeah, what is the Marxist position on this then, like on the idea of safe space and even excluding men from these political fights, essentially? Yeah, I think this raises a few different things. Obviously, because of the ideas that exist in society. And by the way, Marx makes the point that the dominant ideas in any society are that of the ruling class. So the cultural attitudes that exist that make men, you know, generally act in a certain way or women generally act in a certain way. Ultimately, our reflection of that we have to start off by saying that. Yeah. So when it comes to the question of safe spaces, I think the first thing to say is there's a difference between. And I think, you know, obviously women have the right to a safe space from violence and abuse. And, you know, anyone who's a victim of such things, they need shelters and adequate facilities to help them deal with that. But there's a difference between that and political organizing and the class struggle. The victory of the class struggle is dependent on the unity of the working class. And that means men and women and any oppressed group under capitalism coming together on the basis of class in order to uproot our main enemy, which is the ruling class, which is the capitalists and the capitalist system itself. And this is really important because what we have to think about is what does it mean in practice this idea of excluding men from the struggle? What does that look like? And what would it do to a movement? If we understand that capitalism is the source, is reproducing the oppression of women, then we need a class struggle. We need a revolution fundamentally to overthrow that. And that involves the advancement of the class struggle. So just to give an example, in Spain, there was a powerful women's movement that had been developing for some time. And it had managed to win over certain unions to make the unions call for a general strike. And this was to take place on International Women's Day or International Working Women's Day, as we should call it. And this is a huge thing, a general strike, because a general strike poses the question of power concretely. It shuts down the entire economy and it shows people who has the real control and the real power in society. It's about consciousness at the end of the day. So this had the potential to be quite an instrumental, you could say, in the advancement of the women's movement and women's liberation, but also the working class in general. But the point is some of the leaders of that movement, some of the feminist leaders, declared that men shouldn't be a part of it and it should only be for women. Only women should take part in that strike. So effectively, what that meant is, well, how can you have a general strike if half of your population or half of the workers aren't invited to take part in it? Not only are they not invited to take part in it, but essentially made to be strike breakers, right? Made to be scabs, to go back into work and actually to leave the women out on the streets. It's a completely reactionary idea actually then. If you follow this idea that men shouldn't be a part of the struggle to its conclusion, you end up going down a kind of rabbit hole of constantly separating out the movement into smaller and smaller, smaller and smaller parts. And I think that that's the wrong way. The other thing is the best way to combat the prejudices or backward ideas that might exist and that do exist amongst different working class men or male colleagues. The best way to combat those prejudices is to actually bring them into the struggle of women, incorporate them into it and make them aware of the problems, right? And it's through that process that we start to see the undoing of some of those ideas. It's through struggle that workers learn and that applies not just to the immediate economic or political struggle that's in front of them, but also how are we going to win this, right? It's through strength. It's through unity. And so any idea or policy or suggestion that is raised in the labour movement that is about making it smaller or dividing it or segregating it is one that I think must be really firmly and sharply opposed because the conclusions of it are a weakening of the struggle overall. Yeah, yeah. No, thank you. I think like indeed like it's these, what you were saying about how, how, of course in revolutionary times that a lot can be changed in the consciousness of the working class in, you know, in our, I guess, in our attitude towards the women's question and things like this, because this is of course the reason why we're going to devote like an entire episode on the Russian Revolution and the lessons of historic examples to go further into this question of how much can actually be achieved for women, you know, in revolutionary times essentially, and by of course overthrowing the system, how much have how much women have gained through that. But I guess like now that we have sort of laid out our criticism of, of course, bourgeois liberalism, you know, I guess like the next point is, well, what is the Marxist position then on how to fight for women's liberation? We say that the best way to fight sexism is to bring in male workers into the fight, right, to make them a part of the class struggle itself. And this is for two reasons. One thing is that if we want to fight the oppression of women, we have to fight capitalism. The way that you're going to do that is through the unity of the working class, which can then have the power and the consciousness to overthrow it. But also in terms of our day to day lives in terms of the violence that some women face, intimidation, male chauvinism, all of these issues. It is still through the class struggle and huge mass movements that we're able to undo this because that is a question of consciousness at the end of the day, which moves and advances on the basis of huge events and the class struggle is an important aspect of that. There's also concrete things in history that we can look to as evidence of this that I think are worth mentioning. One famously is the minor strike in this country, which was a huge battle that took place and through it, through the development of that battle and that class struggle, there was a transformation in terms of the way the men viewed women and viewed their wives. And there's a lot of personal accounts of this that you can look at because of the role that women played in that struggle and how needed they were in order to help support the strike. Men's consciousness and their understanding of the role of women, especially those male workers in particular, was completely transformed on the basis of a concrete struggle. And after that fight, there's a lot of accounts of how the role that men played in their families in terms of looking after children and so on and so forth was completely different. There's another example that I want to highlight, which was a couple of years ago in Pakistan. There was a huge movement, the Pashtun movement, which was surrounding really vicious state repression that was being waged against a specific group in Pakistan. And there were huge rallies and protests in defiance of this situation, people coming out to talk about the state repression, the kidnapping, and women were a really huge part of this. They were at the rallies, they were speaking, holding up images of their family members that had been kidnapped and tortured by the state. And many of the women who took part in that said that they felt safer and more empowered in those rallies at those protests than they did in their day-to-day lives, just walking down the street. And that's because the attitude that many of the men in those protests had towards them was completely transformed because they're looking at them, not just as women who are supposed to have a certain role in society that the ruling class consciously promotes, but actually looking at them as comrades and realizing that if we're going to win against the state, if we're going to win this struggle, we need everyone, we need comrades, and we need to unite. And we're seeing that these people are strong and that there are comrades in struggle. And that's a really brilliant example, I would say, of the importance of actually bringing people together, men and women in this case, in order to undo these backward ideas and undo that kind of social interaction that does dominate women's lives in that way. And it's a model for how to overcome sexism, also in our day-to-day lives, not by pushing men out or not by pushing anyone out, but actually bringing people together on the basis of events. That's what's going to transform things. Yeah, and I guess this shows how it lies on a class basis, right, that they united as a class. And of course, yeah, in the fight against capitalism, obviously, is what we need to fight for, as women are, of course, fighting for all of these class questions, like housing, healthcare, jobs, all of these security, essentially, in life. Which is very much like, yeah, this scarcity that is, of course, created by capitalism is something that they are fighting for, you know, united as the working class, essentially. Yeah, and it's a false scarcity, right, at the end of the day, because we actually have the resources to provide adequate housing and healthcare. And all of these things would be the solution to many of the problems that women face in terms of if you're trapped in an abusive relationship that you can't leave and you're in a lockdown and all of these questions. If we lived in a society in which women could just live in and they didn't have to worry about their rent on their housing and their financial situation, then they would be free from those constraints. But also going back to the question of domestic labor and housework, all of that can should be socialized. We could have mass laundrets, mass canteens. There's no reason why that has to remain a private issue, the burden of which put on women or any single individual. But capitalism is the barrier to all of those things. Capitalism will not invest in those issues, in those sectors. Especially capitalism today, which is in crisis and unable to provide any kind of reforms, let alone what we were just talking about. But the money exists, right? I just said that the resources do exist. So what I mean by that is that the resources exist, but they're privately held. And that's why fundamentally the fight for women's liberation is the fight for socialism, because what we're talking about is expropriating that money and putting it into what is needed in order to build the infrastructure that would allow women to live freely, that would allow women free from men, both free from capital. Look, I've spoken a lot about the importance of the class struggle here today and the advancement of the class struggle, but that's not going to happen on its own. The overthrow of capitalism is not going to happen on its own. And ultimately, that's what we're trying to build here. We're trying to build a revolutionary organization that is able to see it through to the end, right? To see through the overthrow of capitalism, but not just that, but the construction of a socialist society where we do plan the economy and we can invest in what we need to in order to liberate women and to liberate the whole of the working class. We need people to join us in that fight. We need people to join our organization to fight for Marxist ideas to make this a reality. And so I'd say if you agree with our analysis and our understanding of women's oppression and where it comes from, then I'd ask you to join us, join this organization and fight for what we're trying to build. Well, thank you so much Fiona for these brilliant explanations and answers to these very important questions. And thank you to our listeners of this episode of Women's Liberation and Marxist Position. Before we go, please make sure to check out our website, socialist.net and the wealth of material that we have on the women's question. Also make sure to follow us on social media for regular updates on what we are up to. And if you like the ideas that we've spoken about, then you should join us. The question of women's oppression is on the agenda to a degree that we've not seen in decades. Sexism and the oppression of women is an integral part of capitalism and they are only to be removed once we deal away with the material conditions that allow this to exist. And that's why we fight against capitalism and that's why you should join our struggle. And thank you again and stay tuned for next week where we'll be discussing the historic examples of the women's struggle with the main focus on the origins of women's oppression and the Russian Revolution and what the Bolshevik attitude was to the women's question. So thank you again for listening to the Marxist Voice, the podcast of Socialist Appeal.