https://iclfi.org/pubs/wr/46/editorial
Every day we are witness to the unraveling of the liberal status quo of the last 30 years. As the Soviet Union breathed its last and the liberal democratic capitalist model of the West emerged as the victor from the Cold War, liberal ideologues prophesied about the “end of history.” According to this view, this new era would be one of gradual, lasting progress through the international expansion of the free market. This was a form of liberalism suited to the conditions of the post-Soviet period.
Looking at the state of the world today, this notion of continued gradual progress under capitalism rings utterly hollow. Nowhere is this clearer than when we consider the state of various oppressed groups—women, LGBTQ+ people, and racial, religious and national minorities. The election of Trump has accelerated the dynamics fueling the growth of right-wing reaction internationally, bringing the rights of such groups under increasing attack and rolling back whatever gains were made in the preceding period.
The Pussyhat marches came and went and #MeToo happened, but Roe was axed and Trump is back in the White House. Yet the women’s movement is nowhere to be seen. What we have instead is more and more young men turning to misogynists like Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson. Indeed, #YourBodyMyChoice was the trending hashtag after Trump’s election. Trans people and kids are under attack across the board internationally, yet the LGBTQ+ movement continues cannibalizing itself, weakening itself ever more in the face of growing reaction. And in more and more countries in the West, it’s open season against racial minorities—witness the surge in popularity of Le Pen in France, Meloni in Italy, Farage in Britain, or the AfD in Germany. In these very countries, the working class faces deteriorating conditions, but instead of unity, different sectors of the oppressed are pitted against one another. Whether it’s women, sexual, racial or religious minorities, there is no clear road forward. Why?
The same question is posed, albeit with some differences, in countries under the imperialist boot. Gaza has been razed to the ground. In 2022, Iran saw enormous protests against the regime when Jina Amini died in police custody. In India last year, we saw yet another horrific rape and murder that led to mass protests across the country. In Mexico tens of thousands of women took to the streets in 2022 to protest femicide, and similar events took place in Türkiye in 2024. In Poland, the movement for abortion rights was defeated in 2020, and Milei is attacking abortion rights in Argentina today. And in East Asia, from China to Japan and South Korea, governments are rolling out policies pushing women to have more babies. In all these cases, we see two trends: either there is no significant challenge to these attacks, or the various protest movements against them have gone nowhere and nothing has changed for the better. Again, the question is: why?
As we enter this new turbulent period, the movements of the oppressed stand disarmed, dazed and confused, unable to answer the most elementary question: how did we get here, and what next? Why is it that instead of the gradual progress for all promised by the liberals, the oppressed are increasingly isolated and face growing reaction, including from the ranks of their natural ally, the proletariat?
Liberal Betrayals and the Rise of Reaction
The singular reason for the defeat of the various movements is that they have been led by liberals. Today, many across the political spectrum, including liberals themselves, criticize liberalism. But what do we, as Marxists, mean by liberalism, and why do we insist that it led the struggles of the oppressed to defeat?
Liberalism was the dominant ideology of the U.S. ruling class. Simply put, since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. pillaged the world under the guise of liberal values: free trade through globalization and open borders that would allow finance capital to penetrate all corners of the earth. Under the aegis of U.S. imperialism, other imperialist powers followed suit willingly, while the majority of countries in the oppressed world were forced to align themselves with the liberal world order under threat of financial strangulation.
Domestically, the ruling classes in imperialist countries pushed liberal identity politics: Tony Blair in Britain launched a pro-LGBTQ agenda at the same time as he presided over deindustrialization and privatization; Angela Merkel in Germany opened her arms to refugees while she squeezed the poorer European nations, starving Greek workers. Australia presented itself as a beacon of multiculturalism and progressive values in Asia, while at the same time incarcerating refugees in island concentration camps. And the U.S. put a black president in the White House to bail out the big banks as millions lost their jobs and homes. At bottom, these liberal ideals were the ideological means through which the imperialist ruling classes advanced their interests at home and abroad. It is because of this that it was a reactionary ideology for the working masses.
Faced with the barrage of social liberalism from the ruling class itself, the socialist left was (and remains) politically disoriented, unable to meaningfully justify its existence. We can trace two trends in the socialist left in the last period. On the one hand, an embrace of the fundamental premises of liberal identity politics, calling for such measures to go further, or advocating that socialists be the best enforcers of liberalism (see “Sex Scandals, Moralism and the Left,”). In response to this the “orthodox” trends realized that liberal identity politics was not the road forward, but they were unable to effectively counter it. As a result, they stood aside from the various movements in favor of the “pure” class struggle. Both, however, amounted to a complete adaptation to liberalism since neither could answer liberal identity politics from the point of view of the interests of the working class.
This failure on the part of the left meant that the various struggles were left in the hands of liberals. In other words, the interests of the oppressed were left to be defended through the ideology of the imperialists! The simple reason why liberalism betrayed the interests of the oppressed is because it kept these struggles within bounds acceptable to the ruling class. This ensured from the outset that they would not challenge the status quo, but would channel the energy of the masses into this or that cause—usually in opposition to another social group—rather than the ruling class. The bulk of the left, having hitched itself to the liberal bandwagon, failed to present itself as a serious alternative to the status quo.
These dynamics have created a huge gulf between the working class and specially oppressed groups, and divisions within the working class itself. As enlightened liberals used woke politics as a battering ram against the “backward” working class, more and more segments turned to right-wing challengers to the status quo like Trump and Le Pen out of sheer revulsion. The result is a working class divided along lines of progressive versus conservative values, instead of uniting in opposition to its common exploiter: the ruling class. The decline of U.S. hegemony has only accelerated these trends, and absent a real socialist challenge, they only promise to get worse.
The re-election of Trump marks a decisive break with liberalism. While it is not dead as a political force, it is no longer the dominant ideology of U.S. imperialism. Following the election, we explained:
“When the U.S. stood as the uncontested world power, it could afford the luxury of liberal democracy at home and abroad. Now that the pressure is increasing on all fronts, liberalism is an unnecessary hindrance to U.S. global dominance. There was always a mailed fist under the velvet glove. But now the glove is too expensive and it’s coming off.”
—“Trump’s Comeback: The Death of Liberalism,” Spartacist supplement, 7 November 2024
As the velvet gloves come off and liberals ditch their various causes of yesterday, it will be the most oppressed in society that find themselves on the receiving end of the mailed fist.
Why the ICL Is Relaunching Women & Revolution
The international political context is shifting for the worse. What is needed is frank and broad-ranging political debate that can thrash out the burning question: how to go forward? Instead of confronting this question, however, the left is either liquidated into various movements, waiting for them to be resuscitated by external factors, or is busy discussing communism and revolution in the abstract, divorced from the conditions of today. This simply won’t do. The left has spent far too long being an irrelevant factor in the struggles of the oppressed. As a result, it finds itself isolated from the masses in most countries. It is in order to help bridge this gap between the left, the interests of oppressed sectors and the working class that we are relaunching Women & Revolution.
This journal grew out of our interventions into the radical women’s movement in the U.S. in the 1970s. We fought for a road forward for women’s struggles in keeping with the Leninist determination to be a tribune of the oppressed in the workers movement. In the inaugural issue published in 1971, its manifesto stated:
“Our liberation and the liberation of the working class go hand in hand. We shall not separate ourselves from the mainstream of the revolutionary movement, but shall make our struggle an integral part of it.”
Our political struggles with the left wing of the women’s movement in the San Francisco Bay Area, New York and Boston resulted in substantial recruitment to and enrichment of the SL. This work drew other leftists and groups such as the Buffalo Marxist Caucus and the gay-liberation collective Red Flag Union to fuse with us.
Jim Robertson, a founding member of the Spartacist tendency, saw W&R as a journal whose remit extended to social issues more broadly. Browsing old issues, we find regular publication of articles on sexuality, black oppression in the U.S. and international struggles such as the state of women in Castro’s Cuba (1974). Most of these articles were written in polemical opposition to the feminists and the reformist left. W&R also included archival pieces on the history of women in the labor and communist movements and cultural pieces on art, architecture and anthropology.
Over the course of roughly 25 years, W&R gained a dedicated following. In 1998, the ICL decided to cease its publication as a special journal and instead publish W&R pages in Spartacist, our theoretical journal. At the time, this was posed as a question of scarce resources, which was a real problem confronting our organization. This decision was tough for the party and it was a deeply felt loss. Assessing this decision in the context of the recent political rearming of the ICL, it is clear that liquidating W&R was part of our overall abdication of providing leadership to advance the struggles of the working class and oppressed. This decision thus left the fight against women’s oppression in the hands of the dominant liberalism of the period, which fostered the illusion that reformism and liberal identity politics are the road forward. One can see reflected in past W&R articles evidence also of the Spartacist tendency’s deformed political perspective on permanent revolution that did not view the struggle for national emancipation from imperialist oppression as the strategic task in countries of the oppressed world.
Yet we are consciously building upon our heritage, taking forward what is good and correcting what was wrong. The relaunch of W&R is possible only because of the political rearming of the ICL, central to which has been our understanding of the role of communists: to lead the struggles of the oppressed and exploited, from the shop floor against the bosses, to the final victory over the ruling class as a whole. Our aim with this journal remains the same as when it was first published, captured in the quote above. The only difference is the political context: we are no longer in a period of radical upsurge, but one of defeat and reaction. In this context, there is an urgent need to build the unity of the proletariat and specially oppressed groups against reaction.
Our Answer: Women, Workers, and Communists
Our task today is simple. First, to champion the struggles of the oppressed by taking a stand against every injustice and encroachment upon their rights. Second, to fight incessantly within the left and within the various movements to rebuild them on stronger political foundations, away from the liberalism and moralism that led them to defeat. Both are only possible by linking the interests of oppressed groups to the material interests of the international working class as a whole. To illustrate this, this issue presents three distinct packages, all of which show in different ways why the oppressed must look to the working class, why the working class must also champion the struggle against oppression as part of its own emancipation, and how the socialist left continues to fail on both counts.
1) Marxist Answers for Trans Liberation
The movement for trans rights is at the front line of the attacks against the oppressed. Yet despite massive attacks against trans people coming one after another, the trans movement has no clear answer and no road forward to break out of its current social isolation. The liberals who yesterday painted themselves as pro-trans have fallen silent. Essential to providing a road forward is drawing lessons from the liberal and idealist program which the trans movement has followed so far. The lead article of this issue explains why trans rights are the last frontier of liberalism and why a program of gradual reformism is bound to fail:
“The notion of free choice and tolerance runs up against the economic and social limits of capitalism. Scarcity of material resources and vested conservative interests make it ultimately impossible to transcend a social organization based on the monogamous heterosexual family....
“The only prospect for substantial gains for women and sexual minorities would be through a renewed and sustained period of global economic prosperity. However, this is completely ruled out given that the U.S. capitalists are intent on maintaining their grip on the world and can only do so by increasing national competition and generally driving down living standards.”
What this means is that for the trans movement to go forward, it must reject its current course and look to the working class. This is not because all workers are pro-trans and socially open-minded—as a whole, they certainly are not. But the working class is the only force that has a direct class interest in overthrowing capitalism and eliminating the basis for gender oppression.
Accompanying this broad-ranging theoretical piece are two short articles: one opposing Trump’s sports ban against trans people, and another opposing the Cass review in Britain. The latter shows why the defense of the rights of all trans people, regardless of age, requires a complete rejection of the moral principles propagated by the bourgeoisie. We hope that these articles will provoke a wider political debate in the left and the LGBTQ+ movement about the road forward.
2) Anti-Imperialism and Women’s Liberation
The second key component of this issue is a set of articles on the conditions of women in countries oppressed by imperialism. The back-page article is a key contribution that explains why the fight to improve women’s conditions is inseparable from the fight for national emancipation from imperialism. Crucially, it argues that without attacking the material foundations of women’s oppression, attempts to improve conditions for women can provoke a backlash. We illustrate this dynamic through recent examples of social struggles including Rojava and the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. This is our application of Trotsky’s perspective of permanent revolution to the woman question. The article on China explains how the Communist Party of China’s conciliation of U.S. imperialism is undermining the inroads made by women after the 1949 Revolution; the article on India puts forward a program for communist intervention in the movement against rapes; the article on Mexico provides a concrete answer to the question of self-defense in a country where violence against women is rampant.
3) Healthcare and Women’s Oppression
The last component of this issue concerns a burning question for not just women, but the working class everywhere: healthcare. Written during the strike wave in Britain in 2023, the article on the NHS explains how the fight for women’s liberation must be at the heart of the strategy to save this beloved institution of the British working class. This stems from the fact that in Britain (as in most countries), women are a key component of the workforce in healthcare, and as such, it is the duty of revolutionaries to champion their needs as women, rather than waging the struggle in the realm of wages alone like the union bureaucracy does. The accompanying piece concerns the case of imprisoned British nurse, Lucy Letby, who is falsely accused of murdering babies. We explain how she is in fact a scapegoat for a failing healthcare system, and why the labor movement must stand for her defense.
We hope that this new issue of Women & Revolution will engage our readers, old and new. In the spirit of political clarity, we welcome proposals for discussions, debate, and correspondence.
