The Manifesto of Marxism-Feminism

Feminism without Marxism has failed to dismantle patriarchal systems. This is a radical statement, I acknowledge, but I have been on the frontline of the failures of bourgeois feminism to the marginalized. Feminism is incompatible with bigotry, with carcerality, with capitalism, with empire, and with purity. All attempts to create a feminism without Marx are doomed to failure; women, who have historically been viewed and treated as property, can only be freed from the shackles of our oppression when the notion of property is abolished. We can come close through intersectionality, but it fails to resolve how the mechanisms of patriarchy are reproduced, even within progressive movements. Even if Kamala “Holocaust” Harris became the first woman of color leader of the chained world, that would not stop her from assisting Benjamin Netanyahu’s running dogs from subjecting Palestinian (and Syrian, and Kurdish, and Lebanese) people of all genders to sexual assault, torture, and murder.

Non-Marxist feminism has failed to abolish women as property, instead making some women property owners under the system of patriarchal capital. We can view the feminism of the first waves as sort of a bourgeois revolution: An incredible leap forward for the world in which massive progress was made, but a job left unfinished. We must synthesize a new feminism from the ashes of these previous attempts. These feminisms were outdated, prioritizing white women, cis women, heterosexual women, abled women, neurotypical women, monogamous women, and upper-class women. Some even excused the worst excesses of misogyny in the name of preserving or altering these dialectics.

Dialectical Systems of Gender

We must assemble this new feminism from successes and failures. We take the first revolutionary step forward, solving the riddle of gender in the same way Marx solves the riddle of history. We must dissolve three dialectics of desire first: owner-property, id-ego, and valued-unvalued.

The owner-property dialectic — the desirer and desired — is simple. As we chart the history of gender, this is the first system developed. Under primitive communism, it did not matter who did hunting or gathering, unless one was pregnant. However, the first systems of gender considered women property, and multiple women being bequeathed onto a man through marriage is simply an extension of such. Farmland and women were the first types of property, and men were the first property owners. In this way, marriage is nothing more than possessing the other partner as property. The idea that a person should have only one other person to share their life with, to experience sex with, is a near-Orwellian idea to me. 42% of marriages fail, and countless leave only a mutual resentment between deathbeds. Possessiveness is not a bug in the oppressive system of marriage-ownership, but a feature. It also, until recently, was a double standard; while Penelope must refuse every suitor who comes to her door, Odysseus and Circe are fucking and sucking. Concubinage and extra wives were the norm throughout most of human history; women and children are entirely treated as property.

The second dialectic, id-ego, we shall return to Freud to understand. The absence of the superego is intentional, as a reflection of reality. The “superego” does not truly exist; it is not the synthesis of id and ego, but rather the lack of synthesis. There is no mediating force; there is the nonrational and the rational brain. Freud believes that sexual repression is necessary to civilization; the exact opposite is the case. The only thing that sexual repression causes is violence. A lonely, isolated man will lash out and wish to get his “fair share” of women believing they are his property. Romans would go on campaigns of mass rape and pillaging, and say they brought civilization, the same pattern repeated across the modern world.

The superposition, by way of holding two ideas together but preventing them from synthesizing, is the base of reaction. As we can see:

• The enemy is impossibly strong and impossibly weak
• The fascist state must be in a protracted struggle against the other
• Donald Trump is an incredible businessman despite his numerous obvious failures
• The interests of the business owners and workers are aligned under corporatism
• The homophobic politician who’s hiring twink sex workers on the side

The third dialectic, the pure-impure relationship, is the key to oppression and repression. This is a key stumbling block for even the most progressive of past feminisms: The failure to reckon with equality for women under capitalism is not possible while women are viewed as either beacons of purity or defending purity. This is what we have failed to understand, this moralist, pseudo-Christian brainworm that has infected too many.

These three dialectics are the rocks upon which the modern system of gender has been built. To illustrate what I mean, let me make clear the five sexual roles that are thrust upon people. Bourgeois feminism has largely been about making these roles more porous; “equality of opportunity” (which, as anyone remotely familiar with the term almost intuitively understands, does not exist) rather than true equality. These three dialectics result in five roles under the standard system of patriarchy, all filtered through the view of the first. No one is in any of these roles specifically, but instead are assigned them by society.

• The property owner. Caught between ego and id, eternally tortured by superposition. Repressing their sexual urges yet desiring to unleash them, they constantly fear becoming viewed either as the libidinal other, who does not respect other property owners, or a eunuch who does not have cuckold anxiety[1]. This dialectic — where one has to be masculine, but not too masculine, where repression is a good thing despite hurting everyone, where sex and touch are confined to the home or close relations — causes immense pain. As second-wave feminists observed, patriarchy makes the dominating gender miserable, too, and they inflict this misery on others, from Legionaire to Conquistador, from John Calvin to William Hays.
• The object of value to the property owner. Under white supremacy, this is the “purity and virtue of the white woman” (this can be useful as a lens to which to analyze other dynamics by replacing “white woman” with anything that’s threatened; from the purity of the husband’s monogamy in modern-day relations to the integrity to the racial purity of Germany) that the property owner possesses. People in this role have the power to use the property owner as a weapon. One only needs to look at the murder of Emmett Till to see this in action.
• The objectified person is of no value to the property owner, who can have the system of violent supremacy of the property owner forced on them. If a woman willingly consented to sex with a black man in the Jim Crow South, she’d be killed for violating the property of the projected self (all white property owners); if she were raped, she would instead be written as a woman violated but able to be saved. Somehow, having sex with the libidinal other, “devalues” these women. Supply and demand applied to human is a paramount evil, and yet this system
• The corrupting libidinal other, who is viewed as not respecting property. The libidinal rutting-beast, the barbarians at the gates, the threat of black men to the sexual purity of white women. In ancient times, although the system of gender was different, small penises were admired by the Greeks and Romans; the restraint on their perceived libido, their sexual repression, being perceived as the thing that separates them from the other. We see this logic today, where the concept of a hypermasculine otherized figure haunts patriarchy, thinking of the hypermasculinized trans women and lurking fear of black men’s supposed hypersexuality. Women of the oppressor classes are uniquely positioned to weaponize their supposed purity and innocence against the supposed bestial libido of the oppressed class. Whiteness is a relation to property, and these are the people that the property must be defended against.
• The eunuch is viewed as a deserter from masculinity. These are what owner-patriarchs project onto men who aren’t masculine enough. In the same way becoming homeless is an implicit threat that if you don’t play by capitalism’s rules, you’ll get dumped on the street. Furthermore, the eunuch can also be an object of desire, and, in pre-Christian times, when gender roles were looser, eunuchs were acknowledged as their own half-feminine gender. This Roman tradition continued even when the western half of the empire fell.

It’s worth repeating that none of these are individual, and bourgeois feminism has helped make these more porous; a black man can be a libidinal other by the police on his way to work, a eunuch to his white boss who he must be differential around, a desired object to his wife showing off her husband, and a patriarchal owner of his suburban home and family.

This can be seen reproduced on the macro scale: Fascism is a fundamental outpouring of the owner-property dynamic. Hitler (who the owner-patriarchs projected onto) sought to “decuckold” Germany by getting rid of the libidinal other (Jews and communists, all heaped into “Judeo-Bolshevism”, the indistinct libidinal other) and after proving he was more aggressive and masculine than the liberals who participated in the Weimar Republic (the eunuchs), to defend the nation (which he was symbolically married to, viewing it as desired property) and extract resources from the conquered nations (who were made concubines of Hitler’s ownership, the unvalued property).

What does the SS Officer get out of Hitler’s reign? Corporatism, of course, the old devil. While they project themselves onto Hitler, they also get to repeat him in micro; Hitler invades Poland, and SS Officers can get out their sexual aggression by abusing women who have been devalued, Slavs, Jews, lesbians, trans women, anyone they can harm, because they have been denied the ability to connect with others as anything other than a competition.

The places with the harshest restrictions on sexuality tend to be the worst for women; think of Saudi Arabia, where women are viewed entirely as objects of temptation and are property of their husbands and fathers. In South Korea, the ban on pornography has not stopped one of the worst misogyny problems in the world. The “modesty” of the hijab is nothing but a fetish for purity; the nun habit is far more objectifying than the bikini. We must see these as what they’re meant to convey by their creators: The purity-based objectification of those who wear them. People are welcome to wear the nun habit or the hijab as they like; they are not doing anything wrong themselves. What is wrong is the idea that this is somehow less objectifying than the bikini.

Sexual repression is a fundamentally misogynistic impulse. It always stems from men who refuse to deal with their sexuality and complete themselves dialectically, instead choosing to blame women for being “temptresses”. Anyone who supports sexual repression, rather than healthy outlets, is de facto supporting misogyny. A common tactic among abusers is that they can’t help it. This is blatantly false; they merely haven’t done the work to confront and understand their sexuality, and let that rupture into something terrible. This is the fault of the abuser for not dealing with their urges in a healthy way.

On the opposite end from Germany occupied by the Nazi menace, the white suburban family is patriarchy distilled down to a small plot of land. The owner-patriarch commands his desired property (women and children) must be prevented from being stolen by fellow patriarchs (who he’s in competition with) and the libidinal other (people of color, the perceived Satanists who seek to corrupt his children). In the corporate structure, where power is loaned, the suburban white women view their children as property.

You can also see purity portrayed in desirability. People who’ve bought into the patriarchy tend to be absurdly picky about their sexual partners, only desiring a certain type of partner that shows off status. Indeed, the most misogynistic men love only what the patriarchy tells them to love, because it’s a competition with fellow men.

Being in either of the “civilized” positions is an inherently oppressive experience. For men, the system of patriarchy, in which they compete for property ownership, makes them miserable in a solipsistic way. They are either in competition with each other or not. For women under patriarchy who are treated as a valued object, it promises to protect their children from the influence of tabletop roleplaying games and homosexuals. Nonetheless, she is still miserable, captured by being owned by her husband.

The Past Feminisms

Now that we have established the system we’re working with, it’s worthwhile looking into how feminism failed and succeeded in abolishing these systems. In first-wave feminism, it was simple: The right for white women to vote. This is, once again, a corporate structure; the British suffragist movement was about giving British women equal say in the empire, a middle-class movement for co-ownership, focused on respectability politics. They sought to be desirable objects. Their political empowerment was undoubtedly historically progressive, but it was also still a liberal-bourgeoise revolution; Emmeline Parkhurst’s suffragettes were an evolution; “Deeds, not words” is a rejection of the liberal theory of change. One of her daughters, Sylvia Pankhurst, was a Marxist, completing the evolution.

In second-wave feminism, the structure of patriarchy received more critique, and legitimately radical ideas, like gender abolition, were introduced. However, this radicalism was met with reaction. Andrea Dworkin, who I am mostly picking on for distilling all these ideas down to one lamentable-but-odious person, being anti-sex worker, anti-pornography, and viewing all men as predators. She, however, has been largely misrepresented; she has not said all heterosexual sex is rape. Dworkin instead believed that all sex involved coercion from society. As Marxist-Feminists, let’s look at it dialectically. Her objection was that patriarchy, power, and marriage contracts made sex coercive. I would agree with this. If one only sees men as beings capable of having desire, and women only as being desired, her opinion makes sense. This is heartbreaking. A survivor of sexual assault who tried so hard to escape patriarchy, shackled by the chains of patriarchal realism.

I have been in a similar position, trying to make myself seem as demure and nonthreatening as possible. As a transgender woman, I never had a chance. Too overwhelmed by my trauma to think straight, to the point of delusion and suicidality, After years of lashing out, unable to come to terms with my trauma and my desires, I finally made the breakthroughs because I was able to purge the last elements of repression from my soul. Only through taking time to pick apart my trauma and understand my desires, dialectically completing myself as both subject and object of desire, I could escape the hell that I had walked into. Dworkin lacked revolutionary imagination, only believing that the “purity and virtue of the cis woman” could be achieved through political separatism. It is no coincidence that she was a Zionist; radical feminism, ultimately, was trying to use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house[3].

Men, penises, and sex are not inherently corrupting. This is an extension of property ownership, and, in a twist out of the 1700s, applying supply and demand to human beings. The idea that sex with men is inherently violating only makes sense if one views men as entirely as the libidinal other, and is reinforcing the idea that women are property and objects to be valued. This additionally excuses sexual assault; if all men are fundamentally rapists, this means men cannot help it. I completely reject this notion. Dworkin does not seek to dismantle white patriarchy, but rather to seize it and use it for her own ends, in the same way Zionists took the genocidal-supremacist Christian framework and applied it to the people of Palestine. Men who sexually assault women have to be taught this behavior. Men are not inherently rapists, and to assume otherwise is to apply the Settlers (by FBI agent “J. Sakai”) framework to feminism.

This “radical” — that is to say, anti-sex, anti-porn, transphobic, sex worker exclusionary, pro-child abuse[2] “feminism”s — do not seek the liberation of women, but instead reactionary appropriation of liberatory language in the same way Mussolini called Italy a “proletarian nation”. A common talking point is about how Marxists view women’s bodies as property— which is, in addition to being wrong and ignoring years of socialist feminist tradition, is projection on their part, as is common among reactionaries. They view women’s bodies, including their own (via internalized misogyny), as property that must be defended against the libidinous hordes of men. It goes without saying that this dovetails with racism, transphobia, Islamophobia, antisemitism, and classism. They are, in fact, saying, “We must defend our purity and virtue of cis women against communists and trans people”.

One must take care not to over-focus reactionary feminism however; this could be appropriated into misogyny. They only have success when they collaborate with the far right. As annoying as it is, and as much as we must guard against them infiltrating our movements, it is only through collaboration with patriarchal and capitalist systems that they gain power. We must call it out wherever we see it.

The advancements of second-wave feminism are still deeply important. They were historically progressive. Women had a choice besides being a suburban housewife, and that helped some, but it still prioritized women who could get jobs and afford childcare. They still were isolated domestically if they chose to have children in the suburbs.

The third wave of feminism was fundamentally radical. With the synthesis in 1989, ironically the year in which the Berlin Wall fell, was the closest to Marxism the postwar feminist movement had gotten. Intersectionality as the basis of the new feminism, where class, race, and other axes of oppression were considered. Intersectionality is an idea fundamentally linked to unity of fields. The understanding that everyone is a human being is the key here. The abolition of gender was not, anymore, a bludgeon against trans rights, but a re-enforcing of our rights and our ability to be free of cishet patriarchal demands.

Fourth-wave feminism was a thermidor, a recapture, a liberalization. The movement — which started mostly to counter GamerGate, a counter-reactionary rather than liberatory movement — could not liberate women. It turned a systemic problem, of the only desires allowed being patriarchal ones, into your-fave-is-problematic nonsense. It saw that patriarchy only allowed a specific form of desire, and proclaimed that the desire itself is a problem. This pervasive misogyny in the arts, focusing on the erotic interests of heterosexual men with a consent understanding that waffled from “deeply upsetting” to “fervant rape apologia“, was real and suffocating. But like Dworkin before them, they were using the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house. To achieve dialectical unity, people of all genders must be subject and object of desire. The lack of this created a relatively sexless, sanitized ecosystem, where desire isn’t allowed to be shown.

As Marxist-Feminists, we must recognize criticizing the media as anything other than the outcome of material conditions is simply a dead end. We must understand that culture reinforces society, not the other way around. You cannot solve women being unable to leave abusive relationships because they can’t afford a house by making the job of art to educate someone on abuse.

In addition, it worryingly prioritized the idea of being a “good feminist”, a being devoid of the corrupting influence of desire, which is simply another form of purity. Predators hide as “good people”, which can be seen in nature — the poisonous prey animal is brightly colored to advertise its danger, whereas the predator uses camouflage. “@I_DRINK_DOG_CUM”, a leftist shitposter they/them, is far more likely to be a safer and kinder person than “@JoanArcLesbianXX”[4]. Neil Gaiman, a man who’s branded himself as a soft-spoken feminist, turned out to be sexually abusing vulnerable women who were working for him while I was revising this essay. If you are performing your feminism rather than doing it, you are failing.

My experience on Tumblr and its descendants (Twitter after the Tumblr porn ban, Bluesky post-flight) is indicative of how reactionary the fourth wave was. Moralism gripped even supposed left-wing zoomers, creating the movement that we are now identifying as the puriteens. This became a thousand microfascisms. Rather than basing things in solidarity, it became a breeding ground for reactionary feminism. Asexual people suddenly weren’t queer, the origin of DID became its validity, transmedicalism took hold, and in the dumbest of cases, people sent each other death threats over which of the indistinguishable Voltron boys were boning. We had abolished gender on paper, but not the purity dialectic. People were both object and subject of desire, but purity remained. There was no sense of solidarity. Only justifying victimization of your fellow human for social capital. The victims of moralism are almost always the most vulnerable; it’s no coincidence that Hot Allostatic Load[5] and the concept of trans disposability came out of this period.

In the end, when I survey the ruins of fourth-wave feminism, I see an utter defeat. Trump talked about sexually assaulting women, which was leaked, and it did nothing. America’s state enemy, Cuba, has better rights for women and queer people than we do, adopting a revolutionary family policy. Roe v. Wade fell. #MeToo died with Depp v. Heard. Fourth-wave feminism failed. It failed women, it failed people of other marginalized categories and genders, it failed people whose sexual tastes were influenced by trauma, it failed victims of abuse, it failed people who need abortions, it failed people trapped in loveless marriages, and most damningly of all, it failed to change anything. Mark Zuckerberg is pivoting right, Elon Musk is supporting the all-but-explicit neo-Nazi party in Germany. There is no liberal middle of the road, there is no alternative: It is socialist feminism, or it is fascist barbarism.

What Is To Be Done

There is hope. A new feminism on the horizon. Neoliberalism has sold us the kindling; the failure of mass movement fascism has provided the spark. We live in a time when change is possible. It is easy to free ourselves if we have the will. Creatures of both id and ego, both desired and desiring without purity. As Marxist-Feminists, we must understand that pink is a shade of red. Material reality must inform our feminism and our solutions. We have seen what doesn’t work. Our feminism shall be revolutionary, it shall be anti-moralist, and it shall be solidarity-based.

Humans must be able to take out their neuroses through kink in the same way a child’s anxieties might be taken out through play. Kink is the evolution of play for adults, the ability to take out our desires somewhere safe. The victim of domestic abuse takes the anger that bubbles up inside her out in a video game; a man of color engages in caregiver/little play to reclaim the innocent childhood he was denied by white supremacy viewing him as a threat; the German soldier who saw his friends die in the trenches writes an anti-war novel to deal with his grief rather than join the Freikorps; the girl who survived child sexual abuse and the pedophile who wishes not to harm both look at the same shotacon comic to heal from the psychic wounds of being sexually abused and of having the desire to sexually abuse. Recontextualizing these traumatic conditions in a safe place, meeting them in play, and being able to confront and defang the ways they’ve shaped your desire is how people deal with trauma, not through suppressing their feelings. Prohibition has never worked for anything that is not inherently harmful. Banning pornography is merely banning a way to work out emotions in a safe place. Sexual hangups develop when people are ashamed of what they’re into, and this results in violence.

This is what divides humans from beasts: We are animals, but we can channel those into healthy outlets. By acknowledging our instincts, not as a separate corrupting force, but as something to be met and satiated. That is how we are sexually liberated. When love is freely given, when we are not limited by the domestic trap, is when we can free ourselves.

I will outline the following proposals:

Abolishing the notion of private property. One can have their stuff, personal property, but everything else is for the collective good of people. This includes abolishing the institution of marriage as a legal concept. We should move away from monogamy as a default as much as possible. Sex is merely a form of bonding; the reproductive element is separate. In addition, the communal raising of children must be a priority. This will require a while to go through, but it is imperative. Sexual abuse does not happen via strangers, but in the home, at church, and at school. Anywhere where victims can be isolated. Teenagers should have their privacy to discourage the psychosexual ownership dynamics that develop in suburban households.

The de-domestication of sex is necessary. We must seek to make sexuality something that can be discussed between adults in spaces made for them. One should be able to be open about who they are sexually in places designed for it. A variety of these spaces is necessary. Gay bathhouses, hookup spots, brothels that are worker-owned. A woman is far less likely to be raped in a love hotel with resources and security than at a stranger’s house. Red light districts should be seen as valid and encouraged, with strict boundaries on keeping minors out.

There needs to be absolute equality under the law. Sex segregation has gone on longer than racial segregation. All bathrooms made gender-neutral, all schools were integrated. Locker rooms as well, although everyone should have a private changing room, honestly. Segregation breeds misogyny in boys; think about how Trump defended his remarks about sexually assaulting women as “locker room talk”. Anyone who claims sexual assault would be more common in locker rooms clearly has no idea how much sexual assault already goes on in locker rooms. IDs with no gender, passports with any gender option. Gendered segregation is allowed in cases of community building (e.g. lesbian bars), and affinity groups (e.g. men’s liberation feminist theory reading groups), but should only be loosely enforced. Hormones and transition-related care provided on the basis of informed consent.

Age-appropriate sex education in mandated public schools should also be a priority. Teenagers are always going to find porn, from the first erotic cave paintings to Playboys buried in the woods to a romance novel left on the dresser. That’s not a good thing; that is how it is, especially in a post-internet world. We gain nothing from assuming they won’t, even in and especially in countries where porn is banned. Teenagers will inevitably act sexually, as deeply uncomfortable as that is for us to think about it; what we as adults must do is prevent predators from taking advantage of this. Teenagers should have an education to grapple with their developing sexualities without having to enter the leering gaze of predatory adults. Also, on this topic, Physical education should not be mandatory in schools; it effectively becomes a sexual humiliation ritual that wastes school funds. Installing a pool in my white suburban school when kids in the next town struggle to afford school supplies is a deep indictment of how pathetic physical education is.

Men’s liberation must replace men’s rights. A healthy approach to masculinity and understanding that patriarchy binds them, too, especially given reactionaries tend to make their appeals to men. We do not need a left-wing Joe Rogan; we need men to understand their pain is a result of patriarchal competition. A ban on medically unnecessary circumcision on minors is often made fun of, but as Marxist-Feminists, we must approach these things dialectically. Not only is it an issue of bodily autonomy, it also provides more material for bottom surgery for trans women. Men may have power under patriarchy, but they are made poorer from it.

Pornography must be considered an artform; the internet has done much of this work already. The quality and quantity of erotic art has increased dramatically. Live-action pornography as big business has failed, because it’s forced to pander to the lowest common denominator. Let the countries that ban pornography quiver in fear at socialism’s digital libraries of porn with quotes from Marx on the banner. Pornography only caters to the lowest common denominator because we have failed to develop a culture of art criticism around it. This isn’t even unusual; science fiction, horror, fantasy went through similar stages. We must set the stage for the Isaac Asimovs of pornography, who in turn will produce the Ursula Le Guins and Gene Wolfes. It must lose its nature as a shameful product to become artistic. There is a place in the world for art both including and focusing on erotic elements for adults. With the Terrifier films in theaters, every detailed act of violence down to the gory detail displayed for viewing pleasure; it is merely puritanical to believe that erotic art by and for adults is somehow something worse. People only interpret their fiction as reality when they’re not educated on the matter.

Complete anti-carcerality while prioritizing victims is key. Even for basic movement building, it’s far harder to make an informant when you have a culture of anti-carcerality. By the same logic, we must accept the dialectical conclusion that there are some crimes too great. Sexual and domestic abuse are unconscionable crimes; while the perpetrators can heal from their evil, they must stay away from our movement so the victims can heal.

The complete annihilation of moralism at the hands of solidarity and materialism must happen. What matters most is supporting your fellow human being, your fellow revolutionary. The politics of purity, the moralist urge, will not divide us. Already, I see the glimmers of hope: The unconditional support for the Axis of Resistance to end the genocide in Palestine comes to mind The far-right and the liberal center are widely disliked, both in the US and around the world. Together, we can collapse the superposition; together, we can liberate ourselves, solving both the riddle of history and the riddle of gender. We have a world to win, comrades.

Footnotes:

[1] highly recommended further reading: The Semiotics of the Word “Cuck” by Innuendo Studios
[2] referring to various groups and people (Germane Greer primarily) who have claimed that women sexually abusing children is somehow okay at the most extreme end, and the radfems on Twitter who talk about sex work with 14 year olds following them in the less radical end. The former is obviously evil, while the latter creates the ideal grooming environment, with a safe in-group that are supposedly pure.
[3] One could even say that liberal feminists were “Dworkin’ it”. I wouldn’t, but I understand the desire to.
[4] Not an original or new observation.
[5] An essay I have issues with and do not appreciate uncritically.