A revolutionary transfeminism in and against our time

In this talk, given at rs21’s Festival of the Oppressed event in London, Ira Hybris argues that revolutionary socialists must address gender oppression – and liberation – not as secondary questions, but as primary concerns

Over the last decade, a renewed feminist movement with a broadly anti-capitalist character has emerged in response to an organisation of social reproduction based on the invisibilisation and devaluation of the feminised and racialised activities that sustain working-class life. In 2015, the popular response to the femicide of Chiara Páez in Argentina gave rise to the ‘Ni Una Menos’ movement, marking the beginning of a cycle of feminist mobilisation on an international scale. This cycle of protest reached its political high point on 8 March 2017, when feminist organisers from a number of countries – drawing inspiration from earlier campaigns such as Wages for Housework’s global women’s strike – issued a call for a ‘paro internacional’. Such initiatives came to be known as the feminist strike(s) and, in the Spanish state, extended into 2019 and marked a transformation in the feminist political programme.

One of the movement’s central slogans, ‘If we stop, the world stops’, captured a conceptual shift in the feminist struggles that emerged in the wake of the financial crisis: the aim was no longer merely to demand formal equality with men within capitalist society, but to identify the strategic position that women and gender dissidents could occupy in and against this order of accumulation and expropriation. By taking up the workers’ tool of the strike and grounding feminisms in self-organisation, the movement rearticulated this struggle as part of a broader historical bloc against racial capitalism. In this way, it achieved mass reach, filling the streets of both cities and towns, incorporating numerous working-class women who had historically been excluded into grassroots experiences and becoming a vector of radical politicisation for a new generation of young people. I was lucky enough to start getting organised in this electrifying context.

One of the key features of the feminist strike was its capacity, following social reproduction theory, to position feminism as the bearer of a project of radical transformation open to all those who are exploited and oppressed. In other words, if the demands articulated on 8 March were pursued to their fullest implications, they would require a profound change in the lives of all members of the dispossessed classes. Such a change would likely demand confronting exploitation, racism, imperialist war, coloniality, cisheteronormativity, ableism, the devaluation, privatization and commodification of social reproduction, ecological devastation, and more. Ultimately, it would mean confronting the capitalist system in its totality. That is why we speak of a transfeminism of totality.

Building such a feminism today requires us to acknowledge, without nostalgia, the closure of the previous cycle of mobilization and to confront the task of renewing the revolutionary potential of the struggle for gender liberation. Indeed, periods of political ebb can also provide an opportunity for collective reflection on what the feminist movement can become. While we must learn from our tactical mistakes, refine our analyses, and develop more effective forms of organisation, we continue to see feminism as one of the most dynamic and genuinely transformative expressions of contemporary class struggle.

Although feminist struggle has lost some of its former visibility and mass character, it has not disappeared from the political horizon of the working class. Rather, it has assumed new mediations and emerged on new terrains of struggle —terrains that we, as communist militants, must continue to cultivate. In fact, questions of gender have become increasingly central to some of the most vibrant struggles of our time, including housing movements and tenants’ unions, solidarity campaigns with the Palestinian people, and queer movements. Each, in its own way, has expanded feminist horizons and demands towards new sites of confrontation with capital. Therefore, we reaffirm our commitment to feminist theory and praxis as indispensable tools for navigating the current political moment.

This phase is marked by a deeply regressive international agenda with regard to women’s rights, reproductive justice, and the rights of trans, queer, non-binary, and intersex people. This is no coincidence. The reinforcement of gender binarism is closely tied to the current reorganization of the capitalist system. Contemporary reactionary gender politics thus assumes a threefold form:

1. The re-familialization of social reproduction, at the expense of feminized and racialized sectors of the working class.

2. The production and mobilization of proletarianized and surplus masculinities to fill the ranks of imperialist warfare.

3. The construction of bodies that fail to conform to, or actively defy, gender norms as scapegoats onto whom the worst consequences of the crisis can be displaced.

Taken together, these dynamics reveal that contemporary attacks on gender and sexual dissidence are not peripheral cultural disputes, but central mechanisms in the reproduction of capitalist social relations under conditions of crisis. These reactionary pedagogies of cisness do not merely naturalize structural inequalities and the gendered and racialized division of labour; they also train us to become politically disarmed subjects in relation to the expropriating classes. By redirecting real and legitimate forms of social discontent – the absence of credible and desirable futures, the inaccessibility of housing, alienation, permanent instability, and so on – towards individualized solutions such as refusing to ‘think like the poor,’ paying for yet another expensive course on how to become a successful alpha male, or retreating into the private sphere, they work to foreclose any revolutionary response to the crisis before it can emerge. They say it is being a ‘real’ man or a ‘real’ woman. We say it is a sentence to isolation in the kitchen and death in their wars.

To confront the challenges of the present moment, we must revitalize the tools of Marxist-feminisms. Our understanding of Marxism is totalizing. By this, we mean a politics whose struggle against this order is waged across every front. The reality we seek to transform is not an abstraction; it takes shape in our everyday lives through multiple determinations, through social relations of domination such as race, gender, sexuality, and ability, among others. This requires understanding our everyday oppression as women, feminized subjects, and gender dissidents as inseparable from the historical dynamics of class society. For this reason, we consider it essential that revolutionary socialist projects address gender oppression – and liberation – not as secondary questions, but as central political concerns.

The need to adopt a specifically transfeminist perspective in the construction of socialism rests on four interconnected grounds. First, there is an analytical necessity. We must understand capitalism in all its determinations if we are to transform it. As Cinzia Arruzza has argued, anything less would be like trying to understand the functioning of the body by studying the heart alone. Second, there is a tactical necessity. Feminist and queer struggles expand the terrain of class struggle, pushing it beyond the immediate point of production and strengthening our collective power. Third, there is a strategic necessity. The class unity required for revolutionary organization can only be built through diversity – that is, through the struggle against the social relations that differentially reproduce and divide us. Finally, there is a prefigurative necessity. Gender oppression affects all of the world’s exploited and oppressed, while queer and feminist liberation hold out the possibility of a richer, freer, and more pleasurable world for everybody. The struggle against gender oppression is therefore not merely a means towards emancipation, but also a glimpse of the world we seek to create.

To this end, as communist transfeminists, we help build autonomous feminist and queer movements while also seeking to amplify their potential in the broader struggle against capitalism. Here it is important to distinguish between organizational autonomy and political autonomy. Organizational autonomy is necessary because as women and gender dissidents we experience specific forms of oppression and must therefore organize ourselves to determine how, when, and around which demands these struggles are articulated. This does not, however, imply political autonomy from the wider struggle of the working class. Rather, it means working within these movements to develop a revolutionary orientation that situates them within the broader horizon of class struggle.

What is at stake, then, is the construction of movements in which the struggle against oppression is carried out by the oppressed themselves. Such autonomy is crucial because, whether we acknowledge it or not, the working class is internally diverse. Within it exist oppressed groups with specific interests, desires, and needs that cannot be reduced to their shared condition as proletarians. These interests may sometimes come into tension with one another, and they will likely continue to do so even after a revolution. For this reason, I do not believe it is desirable to extinguish the transformative potential of autonomous queer and feminist struggles, even in a socialist context. Their specific demands can deepen, challenge, and enrich the work of revolutionaries.

We do have confidence in our revolutionary perspective. We firmly believe that sexual and gender liberation requires the emancipation of oppressed humanity as a whole, and ultimately the construction of a classless society free from domination. Yet this consciousness cannot be introduced into a movement from above. Rather, our daily practice has to encourage our comrades to arrive at similar conclusions through their own experience and political activity. If our political tools and forms of struggle are indeed the most effective means of achieving collective liberation, this must be demonstrated in everyday practice through tangible experiences. Political trust is not won through proclamation, but through a shared process of struggle in which revolutionary politics prove their capacity to illuminate, strengthen, and advance our collective fight for emancipation.

Finally, the articulation of a revolutionary transfeminism of totality requires the development of a specific political programme and new imaginative horizons. Against anti-rights feminisms, femonationalisms, and liberal feminisms, ours must be a project of total liberation. In 1978, feminist militants of the Fourth International formulated their own set of transitional demands, including the nationalization of the pharmaceutical industry, the abolition of legal property rights over children, the decriminalization of sex work, free childcare centres, schools, laundries, and cafeterias, and an end to the racist application of sexual assault laws. Today, our task is to recover and extend this programme. We must connect it to the imperatives of ecosocialism, to trans liberation, to anti-ableist politics, to a twenty-first century anti-imperialist internationalism, to renewed debates around the abolition of the family, and beyond.

A revolutionary transfeminism of totality must therefore be capable of linking immediate demands to a broader horizon of social transformation, making liberation imaginable as a concrete and collective project. A project capable of providing the basis for the recomposition of a diverse working class as a political subject able to remake the world. Because, as the historic poem reminds us, we want bread, but we want roses too, comrades.