Liberal Feminism and the Socialist Critique

Different strands of feminist thinking. Liberal feminism and the socialist critique. Radical feminism and dual systems theory. Feudal patriarchy and its replacement. A patriarchy adapted to capitalism. How this worked out in the rich countries. Red Riding Hood in fact and fable. The patriarchal economy as a good cop/bad cop routine. The circularity of domestic and public patriarchy.

Transcript

Ch 14: Liberal feminism and the socialist critique

Terry Leahy 2024

This chapter is on what was called in the seventies ‘liberal feminism’. A phrase invented by ‘radical feminists’ and ‘Marxist feminists’ to indicate what they thought was mistaken in the liberal feminist perspective. In the early seventies these three contrasting positions divided the women’s movement. Here I will look at some of the criticisms of liberal feminism coming from leftist currents within feminism. Both in the seventies and more recently.

One way of defining ‘liberal feminism’ is to refer to the classic liberal position of John Stuart Mill. Basically, that people should be free to do what they want, so long as it does not harm other people. So, this is a feminism with an emphasis on women having a choice. Liberal feminists view gender roles as a constriction on women’s free choice. The term ‘role’ fits with a sociological usage at the time of the birth of second wave feminism. A social role is a set of expectations about how you should behave in a particular role. So, the role of bank manager, the role of student and so on. In this case, the role of a woman. The implication is a consensus view of society. The society, as a whole, has imposed this cultural or legal constraint on your behaviour. For example, the expectation that men would have a paid job — while women stayed home looking after the children and doing the housework. Just one aspect of gender roles being questioned by liberal feminism. This is the analysis that Serene Khader gives of what she calls ‘freedom feminism’. 

A second way of thinking about liberal feminism is that the central idea of liberal feminism is that women can be liberated from sex roles within a market economy. We do not need to overthrow capitalism to get women’s liberation. All we need is a societal shift in expectations about what women should be doing. Along with any necessary legal changes to make this possible. As this happens women will diversify their activities and break down the silos. For example, many women with children will take up paid work. Maybe their partners will stay home looking after the children. Or perhaps couples will use state subsidized childcare. The current consensus about gender roles will be dismantled and may even evaporate entirely.

What liberal feminists talk about are for the most part common concerns of feminism. If women were to be free to take up jobs and careers, you would need a change in social attitudes along with legislative changes such as state support for childcare. Legal contraception and abortion rights for women. An end to gendered sexual assault and domestic violence. Rights to property in divorce settlements. Equal pay when men and women are doing the same job. End the glass ceiling. End the gendered division of occupations. Equal incomes through equal participation in the labour market. Supporting parent payments and leave. Equal representation of women, in politics and business. Men to take an equal share of childcare and housework. 

Stated in this way, these concerns may be regarded as common to all types of feminism. But as well, this account assumes that the current market economy and capitalism will continue. It may be tweaked by legislative changes that enable market equality for men and women. But basically, at the end of the day we are talking about married couples and nuclear family households. We are assuming that people get their income through paid work supplemented by state provision of services or payments. For example, we are not talking about a collective owned by workers, allocating goods and services by need. With rostered domestic work and childcare. 

Liberal feminism assumes the equivalence of freedom and equality. We will free women from social constraints. For example, the government starts off by subsidizing childcare, or even better, providing a free service. Women who previously felt compelled to stay at home can take jobs. They will be freed to make this choice. The outcome will be equality. Women entering the labour market will earn as much as their male partners. But clearly, as time has revealed, this is a big leap in the argument. For one thing, women may choose to stay at home regardless. Liberal feminists are torn. Wanting to say that a free choice is all that they aim for as feminists. And recognizing that a woman’s choice to stay at home — while their partner has a paid job — does not make for equality.

Liberal feminism is the kind of feminism most apparent in the mainstream media today. Especially in media targeted at a middle-class audience. Supporting these feminist goals while assuming that the context of a market economy is fine — that women can progress within that context. A classic of liberal feminism is Betty Friedan’s, ‘The Feminine Mystique’. It was written in the sixties, just prior to the outbreak of second wave feminism. It was a very popular book at the time and certainly paved the way for more radical versions of feminism. It is quite explicit in addressing an audience of middle class and college educated women. 

The socialist critique – the background

To understand the socialist critique of liberal feminism in recent writing, I am going to begin by sketching three other positions that developed in the early years of the women’s liberation movement. 

Radical feminism

Radical feminism was the version of feminism that was strongest in the United States and also in Australia. I say the latter from personal experience. A key author was Shulamith Firestone. These activists believed that patriarchy was a cross cultural and transhistorical reality of human societies. The oppression of women was constructed by men and gave men various benefits through exploiting women. It took different forms in different societies and in different class niches. Ultimately, according to many radical feminists, it had come about because men taken advantage of women’s ties to reproduction to oppress women. The current women’s liberation movement had been partly premised on technologies of birth control. Women’s control over reproduction was consequently a key demand. Radical feminists were strongly anti-capitalist. They argued that capitalism was like other class societies in so far as it arose out of patriarchy. Patriarchy was the psychological foundation of all types of class society. The feminist movement was committed to overthrow capitalism as an expression of patriarchy. But also, a feminist victory over patriarchy would undo capitalism and prevent any new class society from coming up from the ashes. Radical feminists believed in separate women only organizing and pioneered the consciousness raising group format. 

Marxist feminism

Marxist feminism was the response of the New Left and Trotskyist parties to women’s liberation. It had its strongest support from these groups in every country. It also was a strong influence on British women’s liberation. It had both a popular form, printed as small anonymous booklets, and academic versions. Relying on Engels writing on the family it argued that gendered inequality was originally a product of class society. For example, ruling class men wanted to secure their ownership of property in their heirs and enforced monogamous ownership of their wives. Within capitalism, gendered inequalities were used to divide and rule the proletariat. It was not working-class men who benefited from gendered inequality, it was capitalists. A popular argument was that capitalists relied on the exploitation of women’s cheap and unpaid labour to make surplus value from the proletariat. There was no need for women to form an autonomous women’s movement. Women should join the proletarian struggle against capitalism, securing a victory for women through that. Men from some Trotskyist parties turned up at women only events, implementing this analysis.

Socialist feminism

Confusingly called ‘socialist feminism’, dual systems theory was developed in the later seventies by academic feminist authors. It argued that patriarchy and capitalism were two partly independent systems of oppression that interacted with each other to form capitalist patriarchy. An autonomous movement was necessary to combat patriarchy. At the same time, the struggle against capitalism was also necessary if we wanted to overthrow oppression of every kind. 

The socialist critique – an overview

Of course, the fourth kind of feminism developed in this period was ‘liberal feminism’, which I will explain in more detail soon. My sense of the current ‘socialist critique’, as I call it, is as follows. In much of the writing in this recent position, the framing fits exactly with dual systems theory. For example, these writers often say without hesitation that it is men who benefit from women’s oppression, that the inequality that they are talking about as feminists is between men and women. At the same time, there is also much about this writing that is closer to the ‘Marxist feminism’ of the seventies. This will become apparent.  

The socialist critique of liberal feminism draws on earlier leftist positions, dating back to Engels and Kollontai. Much of this critique is shared with radical feminist authors of the second wave, such as Shulamith Firestone and the Redstockings collective. Recent books that criticize liberal feminism from a left perspective are ‘Feminism for the 99%’ by Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya and Nancy Fraser. Also ‘Faux Feminism’ by Serene Khader. 

A central aspect of the socialist critique of liberal feminism is that in practice, liberal feminists have only improved the lives of elite women. More middle-class women are entering the labour market, getting professional jobs. Even a few are getting into management positions in business or government departments. But it has made little impact on the vast majority of women. Most women are suffering from the problems created by neoliberalism. For example, the casualisation of work. Neither women nor their partners can get full time permanent positions. The effective decline in incomes in the bottom twenty per cent of the labour market in the rich countries. The jump in house prices relative to wages. The cost of medical care. The intensifying costs of education, especially tertiary education. In countries where childcare does get some support from the state, the costs are still outrageous. While the women doing the paid work in childcare are on rock bottom wages. Poor working conditions for women in all sections of the labour market, but especially at the lower end of the labour market. Sexual assault and harassment at work. The poverty of women from marginalized ethnic groups. The racialized underclass of many countries. High incarceration rates for men in these communities puts the burden of family support on women. 

The socialist critique argues that these are problems for women that feminism must address if it is to be truly concerned with the welfare of women. It is not enough to argue for equal rights and opportunities if the playing field ensures there are only a few winners. The market economy cannot provide a satisfactory life for most women.

A common argument of the socialist critique is that the partial victories of feminism in the professional managerial class have been at the expense of working-class women. Middle class men have not been doing any more housework. This domestic work has just been palmed off on underpaid working-class women. In the USA these care workers are often undocumented and insecure migrants from Latin America. With no option to organize for higher wages and better conditions.

In much of this critique, it is capitalists, rather than working class men, who benefit from patriarchy. Low pay for women makes profits for capitalists. Unpaid work by women creates the conditions for households to prepare workers for the labour market. Feed and recuperate the workers. Socialize and educate the next generation. The capitalist does not pay a cent for these services. 

Initial comments on this dispute

Before I get into all this in detail, I will say a bit about where I agree with the socialist critique and where I disagree.

The socialist critique is very apt in this way — as Connell pointed out decades ago. Ruling class men embody the ideals of patriarchy in a way that working class men can never attain. It is all very well getting drunk and having a fight in a pub. But if you want real power in this society you need to have billions of dollars. Men like that can buy anything that makes for status in a patriarchal hierarchy. They have the real power to command the labour of others to do what they want. You can look at displays of hegemonic masculinity in the working class as to an extent compensatory. Compensating for the lack of patriarchal power implied in workplace hierarchies, in insecure housing and poor medical care. The petty criminality of working-class teenagers breaking into houses and stealing car keys. A current moral panic in Melbourne.

At the same time, the socialist critique goes too far if it concludes that patriarchy benefits only the capitalist class — and not working-class men. Men in each socioeconomic niche are advantaged by patriarchy. Compared to the women of the same class. So, the truth of the radical feminist viewpoint is that it doesn't matter what niche you're in. Whether it's underclass, working class, marginalized, black, or ruling class. Men have more power in each of these class niches and get benefits from exploiting women in their class. 

Other aspects of the socialist critique 

Women’s income and the capitalist economy

Given this broad analysis I will now get into more of the detail of the socialist critique of mainstream feminism. I find that this topic gets away from me. From wherever I start to unpick these arguments, there are a hundred divergent pathways. 

Let us start by looking at a claim often made by socialist critics of mainstream feminism. Capitalism is a feminist issue because capitalism depends on women’s subordination. As ‘Feminism for the 99 %’ calls it ‘capitalism’s structural undervaluation of women’s labor’. To explain. Capitalist extraction of surplus value from wage workers depends on women doing unpaid domestic work. Likewise, the extent of extraction of surplus value depends on the fact that employed women are working at a lower rate of pay. 

If capitalists had to pay for unpaid domestic work at the same rate that they pay for similar jobs in the commercial economy, they would hardly achieve any surplus value. For example, cooking, cleaning a house, sex work, emotional support, childcare. They need this unpaid work to be done. Without it, workers would not be socialized as children or cared for as adults. They do well by not having to pay for these services — which are the background for a successful capitalist economy. 

A similar argument applies where women’s low pay is concerned. The labour market now is divided into women’s jobs and men’s jobs. For example, work now usually carried out by women on low incomes — nursing, childcare, cleaning. While men in jobs like construction and trades are paid considerably higher rates. If capitalists had to pay for women’s work at the same rate that they are paying men, they would hardly make any surplus value. They need this skilled and demanding work to be done for low pay to allow their current level of extraction of surplus value. 

Yet, these arguments are totally bogus. From a purely economic point of view, capitalists could achieve the same outcome and the same extraction of surplus value if men and women shared unpaid work equally. Meaning that more women would be in the labour market and more men would be staying at home. Or that more men would go to work exhausted by domestic tasks and more women go to work less exhausted. Likewise, they could achieve the sameeconomic outcome if men were paid a lot less for their work and women at work were paid more. 

Liberal feminism is only for the rich 

Let us look at the argument that mainstream liberal feminism is only concerned with reforms that will help rich women. I cannot see this as a necessary implication of the liberal feminist analysis. Liberal feminism implies that sex roles restrict women in every class niche. Also, that equality between men and women in every part of the class hierarchy is the feminist program. Liberal feminists believe this can be done through a set of cultural changes and political reforms that do not undermine the capitalist economy. It could be that in practice some liberal feminists are middle class women who ignore problems of patriarchy for women outside their class. But this is no logical necessity. 

My suggestion is that there are a variety of liberal feminist activisms taking place. Some of these are concerned entirely with reforms that will only impact more wealthy women. You could see this as a partial reform of patriarchy that does not extend to other parts of society. In other cases, feminist activists, for one reason or another are supporting reforms that have a broader impact. 

We can look at this more inclusive version of liberal feminism as analogous to social democracy. Social democratic leftists accept capitalism and attempt to ameliorate its impact. This project has had some successes. For example, in some capitalist countries, state housing, free medical care, social security benefits. None of this has destroyed capitalism, contrary to what some Americans may think. This social democratic framework is quite compatible with liberal feminism.

The socialist critique suggests a vast gulf between feminist tactics informed by socialism and the failed nothings of liberal feminist activists. I doubt this. For a start, how can you distinguish anti-capitalist feminist activism from reformist liberal feminist activism? In the absence of a revolutionary mass movement, both are pushing feminist causes in the context of capitalism. The democratic socialist demands that the state reduce the cost of childcare. As a transitional demand. The social democrat demands that the state reduce the cost of childcare. As a feminist reform to capitalism. I recently attended a ‘slut walk’ and a ‘domestic violence’ march. Both events included women from the ALP (a pro-capitalist social democratic party), the various Trotskyist parties, and anarchists. Not to mention many unaffiliated leftists. The demands at both marches were much the same. Cultural change and more funding for women’s refuges.

To make this distinction fly, Khader gives the example of abortion rights. She attacks ‘freedom feminism’ for concentrating on the struggle to legalize abortion. To give women choice. A reform that may help women who can afford medical interventions. But if there is very meagre state support for medicine (as in the USA), then working class and underclass women may not be able to use this legal right. Here we have a reform that challenges patriarchy — where upper class women are concerned — but has little impact on the working class. Anti-capitalist feminists would want to go further. 

But my argument is that many liberal feminists would also want to go further. In Australia, abortion is now legal in all states, with mainstream parties bowing to pressure from feminists that has lasted for decades. In terms of access to abortion, this movement is still short of a total success. States vary. Rural areas are poorly provided. Despite this, to a considerable extent, the state funds abortions and working-class women are getting access. These reforms were pushed by many who do not embrace anti-capitalism as a feminist project. A coalition of feminist activists, politicians from both major parties and medical professionals have engineered these reforms. Most of these activists have been middle class. Their argument has been that feminist activism must empower all women. In so far as this activism has been carried out by people on the left, the dominant tendency has been social democracy. State supported medical care has been the norm since the introduction of Medicare by the ALP. It is only to be expected in this context that abortion, once legal, would be included in this ambit. 

These issues are very much case by case. Let us look at each piece of feminist activism through the lens of class, race and colonialism and see where it stands. But not presume there is a vast gap between reformist liberal feminism and more anti-capitalist feminism. Consider the list of causes typical of mainstream liberal feminism. Sexual assault, domestic violence and femicide. Reproductive rights. Equal pay for equal work. Women’s poverty. Domestic work and childcare. Beauty standards. Sexual pleasure and agency in sex. None of these are issues that are only relevant to elite women. How this activism is pursued and implemented may make victories more relevant to elite women. But this is not an inevitable outcome. 

Feminism in the mainstream media

Writers of the socialist critique often characterize liberal feminism as ‘mainstream’ in the sense that this perspective dominates the media. I would certainly agree with that. 

Khader makes the point that mainstream media feminism can concentrate on culture, while turning a blind eye to the economic structures that affect women’s lives. I agree with this and it one of the long-standing critiques of liberal feminism made by Marxist feminists, radical feminists and socialist feminists. It is no accident, it seems, that supporters of the capitalist system are going to ignore the economic structures that engender women’s oppression in the subordinate classes. On the other hand, as I have been arguing in this chapter, the reality of liberal feminism as a movement is that campaigns to change the structural context for all classes are also an aspect of liberal feminism, at least in its social democratic guise. 

Khader discusses research on the Eastern European countries before the fall of communism. The orgasm gap that exists in countries like the USA was much reduced in these State Socialist economies. Her explanation is that state policies reduced the burden on working women. For example, free provision of state childcare, maternity leave, free reproductive health care, even campaigns to urge men to do more housework. Mainstream feminism tackles women’s sexual pleasure as a cultural problem, requiring media bombardment with sex-positive messaging. Meanwhile, economic constraints are in fact more determining. This is a fair comment. 

One explanation of this emphasis on culture is that for the mainstream media, cultural change is a low hanging fruit. A strategy that is more likely to be implemented than structural changes in the economic context. Something which, as media, fits their brief. More structural changes in the economics of patriarchy are usually harder to achieve. In the context of a capitalist economy, they depend on government funded services. The resistance of pro-capitalist pressure groups to state intervention varies in efficacy and intensity in different countries. Clearly stronger in the USA than the UK or Australia or France. In the United States it has been close to impossible to even get a public medical system set up. Obamacare was light tinkering compared to what is available in other rich country capitalist economies. State supported maternity leave and childcare are close to pie in the sky for the USA but already implemented to different degrees in most rich countries. 

While the tendency to supply cultural change as the answer to feminist problems is understandable, this mainstream logic also reflects the failure to understand the structural supports of patriarchy. For example, domestic violence and sexual assault are always conceived in the media as coming out of a culture of toxic masculinity that must be overturned by various forms of education. I do not completely disagree with this analysis. But the structural factors are rarely mentioned. For example, women are trapped into unsatisfactory relationships, when it is a huge financial upheaval to break up a marriage. The most likely outcome being single parent poverty for the woman. 

While liberal feminism dominates the media this does not in fact mean that structural issues are always ignored. Let us look at an example of how feminist issues are treated in mainstream media in Australia. Jacqueline Maley is a frequent columnist in ‘The Age’, a mainstream newspaper addressed to a middle-class audience and owned by Channel 9, a big capitalist media company. In a recent article she talks about a recent popular movement among women in South Korea. No dating, no sex, no marriage, no babies. She points to the way this movement has been provoked by South Korea’s poor performance in supporting women in parenting. Along with the gendered inequality in wages. She notes a similar expression of opinion in United States social media. Women are responding to Trump’s victory by resolving to have nothing to do with men. Most likely these movements in social media are dominated by middle-class well-educated women. Nevertheless, the issues are relevant to women of any class. The failure to ‘support’ women in parenting must relate to state provision of childcare, state subsidies for working parents, parental leave for new parents. Without a doubt, these are the issues that Maley is talking about. The same with the issue of abortion and reproductive rights in the United States. These are issues of concern to every class of women. The overarching framework of Maley’s mainstream liberal feminism is the maintenance of capitalism and the monetary economy. But the feminist angle is all about reformist interventions of relevance to all women. 

Celebrity feminism

It is common for authors of the socialist critique to attack celebrity feminism. For example, the #metoo movement was awash with accounts of sexual harassment and assault coming from media celebrities. How can these massively wealthy starlets have anything useful to say to racially marginalized and working-class women? The short answer is that, as radical feminists have been saying, versions of patriarchal power are relevant in any class or racial niche. The long answer is that this critique fails to understand how the media works in current capitalism. There is much about the media that fits Adorno’s gloomy outlook. The wealth of celebrities is treated as capitalist meritocracy at work. On the other hand, celebrities come to represent the everyday person. People make sense of their own lives through the fictional dramas and personal narratives of celebrities. That does not mean that they ignore the difference between their own experience and the lives of the stars. 

The nanny wars

A common critique of mainstream feminism concerns the hiring of domestic labour. Wealthier women have gained some economic power through entering the professions or business. They have been able to do this by cutting back on their domestic responsibilities. But not by getting their husbands to do more domestic work! Instead, they have employed cleaners and nannies. Also women. In the USA these domestic workers are often illegal migrants, with no security and no possibility of organizing to improve their conditions. 

For the socialist critique, this solution does not bring equality to women. It consolidates the inequality between upper-class women, on the one hand, and low paid working-class women, on the other hand. Let us look at how this issue might be approached by liberal feminism. A feminism that seeks equality in every class niche — while at the same time accepting the inevitability of capitalism. 

From the perspective of the middle-class woman. If your time is worth $100 an hour and you are being worked to death in a professional job, does it make sense to be doing your own housework? Or getting your husband, who is in a similar situation, to do it? Who would that benefit? Not the migrant cleaner. The authors of the socialist critique are no doubt using an iPhone made in a Chinese factory and driving a car made in South Africa. It is a bit opportunist to focus on the nanny issue to argue that liberal feminism has no answers for working class women.

In any case, this liberal feminist strategy for the upper middle class is only partly effective. In a typically patriarchal upper middle-class household, the husband will still exercise patriarchal power despite the outsourcing of some women’s work to cheap labour. 

(a)   Because the couple will treat the payment for this work as coming out of the wife’s income, not the husbands. They will judge the economic viability of her paid job in relation to these expenses. 

(b)  The wife will still be attending to the emotional needs of the husband and children. 

(c)   She will still be doing the housework and childcare once the cleaner and nanny have gone home. 

(d)  The wife will still be organizing the women’s work of the household – taking the kids to ballet classes, seeing the school principal, arranging the cleaner and nanny.

(e)   The wife will have interfered with her career by staying home when the kids are very little, she will be on duty at night when the husband can go to work parties and connect with other powerful men, she will be earning less income than her husband. 

(f)   She may at any time be dropped for a trophy wife and left on a very reduced economic footing and with de facto responsibility for the children from their relationship – her power is conditional and vulnerable.

So, middle class women have other issues of patriarchy to contend with, even if they are able to get some relief from housework.  

Looking at the impact on the families of the women who are the poorly paid cleaners and nannies. These women are at least getting some power vis a vis the men of their class by having a job. They would be a lot better off with paid childcare and holiday pay, a good wage and legal barriers to unfair dismissal. It is quite within the parameters of liberal feminism to recognize these issues and push for better conditions for these women — if only to undermine patriarchy in the working class. But more likely as part of a social democratic politics.

Writers of the socialist critique are likely to see one alternative to private nannies as state funded childcare. As also promoted by most liberal feminists. So, all women can get more access to paid work. But this is not a vast leap from the paid nanny strategy. It is a measure to enable women to participate more fully in the labour market by paying someone else (usually women) to do some of the domestic work and childcare. Public childcare subsidized with taxes and employing childcare workers. Why the moral panic about wealthy women paying for childcare — when it seems perfectly okay for working class women to pay for childcare? 

Conclusions

In conclusion to this chapter, I tend to think that what is at work here are very different definitions of feminism. Not the difference between an analysis based on free choice and an analysis based on equality. But more about who is being supported to be equal and how. Liberal feminism seeks equality in each class niche. To me that makes perfect sense as a feminist project. If it was ever successful, it would mean a gender egalitarian capitalism. If you came from Mars and observed such a scenario in action, you might well say that it was not a patriarchal society. By contrast, the authors of the socialist critique want to define feminism as a movement that aims at the equality of all women as well as their equality with men. An equality in which all people are equal. In other words, socialism in the broadest sense.

For me, that socialist critique definition of feminism is just muddying the waters. It defines feminism in terms of oneversion of feminism. If feminists do political work that addresses patriarchy in the upper classes, it is not ‘feminism’ on this definition. Because it does not at the same time address patriarchy and other forms of social inequality in every class niche. For me, this ignores a key insight of dual systems theory socialist feminism. That patriarchy intersects with capitalism producing different kinds of effects for people in different class and race positions. So, feminism must work with campaigns that address those effects in those situations, rather than always trying to do everything at once. It makes total good sense to point out that a campaign addressed to upper class women does nothing for working class women. Yes, let’s criticize that as a failing of liberal feminism. But it is another thing to try to create an argument that it is not a ‘feminist’ campaign. The example of abortion rights that Khader gives is a good one. Are we going to say that legalizing abortion is not a feminist victory — because only upper-class women can afford abortions? Really? 

The effect of this re-definition of feminism is to obliterate feminism as a separate movement necessary to liberate women from patriarchy. It is a revival of the ‘Marxist feminism’ developed in the seventies. It suggests that feminism does not need to be a separate movement — because capitalism depends on patriarchy. So once capitalism is defeated, patriarchy will evaporate. I read this quote from ‘Feminism for the 99%’ with trepidation. Feminism for the ninety nine percent ‘cannot be a separatist movement’. Meaning that it should be a part of the socialist movement. Subordinating an independent feminist movement to a socialist movement that treats feminism as a wing of its broader political project. The ‘ladies’ auxiliary of the left’ as radical feminists called it. Implying also that feminist anti-capitalist leftists would have no reason to ally themselves to reformist pro-capitalist feminists. On topics like abortion, sexual violence, housework. Not particularly helpful. 

The current revival of this ‘Marxist feminist’ perspective is down to the failures of social democratic reformism. If you believe that feminism is about equality in every class niche, then you will need strategies that can achieve that for the vast mass of ordinary women. Including racialized minorities, the working class and most of the middle class. Within a social democratic politics, these strategies will very often mean state support of one kind or another. Like free childcare and medical services. That is the only way to achieve gender equality in the context of a capitalist economy. We all know that such strategies have worked in the past, in the heyday of social democratic reformism in the rich countries. But we also know that such policies and strategies are now threatened. In Australia our first female Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, pulled back from the feminist victories of an earlier Labor government. Cutting supporting parent benefits to those whose children are older than twelve years. A cost cutting measure typical of neoliberalism. That is just one example. Another is the under-funding of women’s refuges. This list could go on.

I have discussed the failure of reformist politics in more detail in other writings. Here I will just say briefly that globalisation has been responsible for a vast reduction in the power of the organized working class in the rich countries. Picking up the pieces from a casualized labour market eats government money — forcing cutbacks on other services. Any government that increases taxes on the rich will drive its economy into recession. As the wealthy take their capital to countries with a more favourable investment climate. 

It is these changes that have undermined the options for liberal feminism, in its social democratic version. That is of course a very good reason to support a revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. On the other hand, it is no reason to mix up patriarchy and capitalism — as though they are all the one thing. It is no reason to abandon an independent feminist movement. It is no reason to break off alliances with reformists working on feminist causes. 

I think what I also find a worry in the writings of the socialist critique is the vagueness of plans for a post-capitalist society that is to be free from oppression. Most of the time, these authors seem to be pushing for left leaning social democratic reforms — of the kind associated with the Bernie Sanders campaign for Democrat nomination. To me, that is not post-capitalism by any stretch of the imagination. Worse, a strong implementation of these reforms in the context of a continued market economy is likely to lead to the kind of economic chaos that took place in Venezuela. When their writing envisages something more thorough, it suggests a democratic socialist nationalization with economic planning. I would like them to be a lot more blatant about this if that is what they think. There is no sense in these writings that the left might aspire to a post-money bottom-up grass roots communism of the kind envisaged by some anarchist and socialist writers. The socialist critique of mainstream feminism is waving a big flag to say how middle of the road is liberal feminism. Well yes. But what is not so obvious is that as far as left wing alternatives to capitalism go, they are not particularly leftist.