Quote:Radical feminists’ anti-porn work throws into sharp relief the dangers of misidentifying the roots of women’s oppression. Relying on the state for censorship, emboldening the carceral apparatus, making alliances with opponents of progressive change — this is where radical feminism’s analysis leads us.

At the core of radical feminism’s theoretical blunders is its conception of class.

For radical feminists, the two main classes in society are not the working class (who sell their labor power) and capitalists (who exploit them), but men (the oppressors) and women (the oppressed). They call this patriarchy theory.

Quote:As Marxists, we know the enemy is not men, but the capitalist class — which itself is multi-gendered and multiracial — and that our strategy must reflect this. Women’s oppression is not innate in humans but instead arose at a particular historical and political moment, alongside the development of class society and the nuclear family. 

Women’s oppression persists not simply because men hate us, but because of the role we’ve played historically in the nuclear family. While men headed off to work each morning to engage in capitalist production — making cars at the factory, writing legal briefs at the office — women typically engaged in what is known as social reproduction: the biological reproduction of new workers (i.e. having children) and the day-to-day reproduction of workers — doing laundry, feeding the family, getting children ready for school, and so on.

Even in recent decades, as women have entered the paid workforce en masse, they’ve still tended to be saddled with the “second shift,” carrying out social reproduction at home after they return from work.

These tasks are all vital to capitalism. Workers must be fed, clothed, and prepared every day for capitalism to function. But it is in capitalism’s interest for this work to be done for free and in the private sphere.

As a result, socialist feminists argue that the only way we can liberate women is to end class society, once and for all.

Quote:This exclusion isn’t just bigoted — it’s hypocritical: while radical feminists campaign vigorously against sexual violence, it’s trans women who suffer from disproportionately high rates of sexual and physical violence (particularly trans women of color).

TERFs may argue that trans women do not share a reproductive system with cis women, and thus can’t understand women’s struggles for birth control and against forced sterilization. But then what do they say of solidarity with lesbian women, or cis women who cannot or choose not to have children? The arguments that TERFs put forth are both weak and prejudiced.

Quote:Radical feminism is also noticeably silent on the question of racism, and is burdened by a politically suspect strategy for fighting it.

Men of color perpetuate sexism just like white men. But their experience of racism also binds them together with the women of color in their communities. As Sharon Smith writes, “the need to fight alongside men in the fight against racism or in the class struggle [has] made separatist ideas unappealing” for women of color.

Quote:While radical feminists posit separatism as a political strategy — and for some, the goal — socialist feminists understand that our power lies in our numbers. The division between working-class men and women, between cisgender people and transgender people — these fissures are detrimental to our overall aims. They only make us weaker and our fight against capitalism that much harder.

Socialist feminists’ goal is to build solidarity across the entire working class. Our fates are tied together, and the struggle against gendered oppression is inseparable from the struggle against transphobia, racism, and capitalism more broadly. Any movement or theory of feminism that either explicitly or implicitly excludes trans people, intentionally misgenders them, or perpetuates transphobia has no business being on the Left.