What socialist feminists owe each other

In this adapted speech from Festival of the Oppressed 2026, Sylvia M asks what feminist strategy and mobilisation should look like for revolutionary socialists, and what it would take to build a socialist feminism that liberates all.

Ten years ago, I was in a situation which some feminists would describe as ideal, even utopian: When I first came out as trans, I was lucky enough to live in a houseshare with anarchist trans women. Around the same time, I was involved with groups like Action for Trans Health (ATH), trying to organise for democratic trans healthcare, whilst grassroots feminist groups such as Sisters Uncut were gaining national attention. This was a period of discovery for myself, including my first experiences with radical democratic practices such as consensus decision making and exploring (trans)feminism and abolitionism. But the reality of this was not an attempt to actively engage and organise with other women in mobilising against patriarchy. It was necessary to come out, necessary to survive. This necessity did not produce the utopian feminist politics or femme socialities that I expected. Survival is the first step, but we need tools and structures to develop this further, into mobilisation.

What is feminist strategy and mobilisation?

Any attempt at understanding feminist strategy and mobilisation must first be able to define what this means. There is not one feminist strategy or mobilisation – there are many. The multitudes can be overwhelming, but they also provide us with a wide variety of discussion and tactics. Yet, as Marxists, some feminisms are more applicable (such as social reproduction theory, transfeminism, abolitionism) in developing our own Marxist feminist strategy towards mobilising mass political power amongst working class and oppressed peoples.

In Mike Macnair’s Revolutionary Strategy, there’s a few important paragraphs about the women’s liberation movement. Macnair argues that whilst the emancipation of the working class requires the self-emancipation of women as part of the struggle, he also says that ‘the idea of a united, cross-class, feminist movement as an effective political actor has proved illusory in the course of the last 30 years’. I agree that effective Marxist feminist organising must develop from independent working class organisations, but I think it is still possible to acknowledge the transformative potentials of engaging with cross-class feminist movements. Regardless, the statement is important in considering: what is the intent of feminist strategy?

As Marxists, our strategy must result in the overthrow of capitalism, imperialism and patriarchy. Evidently, feminist organising alone has not accomplished this, and also does not necessarily try to do so. However, feminist movements have helped in many ways to change the outlooks of wider society and challenged what once were heavily patriarchal norms and attitudes. Cross-class feminist movements globally have influenced Marxists and feminists in developing political consciousness and attempts to mobilise throughout history. My experiences in ATH ten years ago included a range of organisers, from academics, liberals, radical feminists, anarchists, etc. Yet somehow, we produced material that still resonates amongst transfeminists today, including conceptualising theories on Wages for Advocacy and the radical manifesto published by the Edinburgh branch.

The appeal of feminism to me is that it opens up Marxism to the areas of struggle outside of the workplace alone. Without the interventions of feminism, Marxism would likely remain economically deterministic and unaware of the potential in organising within domestic and intimate spheres – struggles that are more important than ever as many of us face insecure housing and a return to rentier capitalism. In her piece for Feminisms, Abu Leila remarks upon how her work in London Renters Union (LRU) and how this ‘powerful starting point’ of the tenants union in ‘building communities of struggle’ helped raise awareness of the differences between tenants, including more socially conservative members sympathising with the struggles of the LGBT+ community and the work of Trans Action for Housing Justice (TAHJ). 

Feminist analysis is also crucial in highlighting gendered dynamics in organising. Class struggle and Marxist strategy at the very least owe a debt to feminism for bringing the question of patriarchy forward, but also for what George Stevenson concludes in The Women’s Movement and the Politics of Class in Britain:

The Women’s Liberation Movement changed the ‘common sense’ of class and class politics, most powerfully by creating a politics of production and reproduction that sought to address the totality of the social structure.

Feminism and Marxism might have an ‘unhappy marriage’, but in their brief moments of unity they have transformed relations in ways that contribute to the analysis we need in order to build effective, disciplined forms of socialist feminist strategy.

Where should socialist feminists be organising, and how?

Even if there are limits to cross-class unity as feminists, engagement with these movements and understanding how they organise is crucial. Britain currently lacks a grassroots feminist movement that is organised nationally, so we have to start in the smaller spaces that might focus solely on immediate material needs, or aim for liberal reform. In Sheffield, trans organising in a small city fragments between trans healthcare support/guidance, student societies, radical pride organisers, cultural events and fundraising for gender affirming services in the city. Even building up a profile of what your city is doing is part of this process in engaging with and developing political consciousness towards more radical, liberatory demands.

Marxist feminists also face the duality of being too Marxist in feminist organising and too feminist in Marxist organising. Even here at the Festival of the Oppressed, how we organise ‘feminist’ sessions is worth mentioning. When planning this, a key concern was how to differentiate gendered struggles: do we discuss feminism for everyone in one session, or produce sessions that reiterate cis-centric narratives of the feminist or ‘girl’ session and the LGBT+ or ‘trans’ session? I think effective feminist strategy and mobilisation must avoid this, and try instead to bring all workers and oppressed people into the umbrella of socialist feminism.

The legacies of harmful cultures and unequal power relations against women and marginalised genders define Marxist and feminist organising even today. Yet, in our attempts to remedy this, socialist feminists must also avoid the trend of reiterating gendered norms against explicit political work and organising. This includes the framing of this reaction as an anti-political form of ‘feminist’ care. Care is vital – and sadly often ignored – in Marxist feminist strategy. We must also be ready and willing not just to develop programmes and strategy, but to find the right balance between caring practices and incorporating feminist forms of discipline into our organisation. Care is something that requires democratic structures and the discipline to share it out in equitable ways, but it is also something that can be framed as something ‘soft’ against the ‘hard’ realities of Marxist organising. This is a concern when women and marginalised comrades already struggle with integrating themselves into Marxist organising. We always have the supposedly easier, softer options of care that in turn, means reinforcing gendered norms surrounding which comrades engage in emotional labour and which ones are actually in power within Marxist organising.

Verónica Gago says, ‘the feminist movement inhabits a desire for theory… This trait differentiates the feminist movement from other social movements, where the anti-intellectual gesture is often trotted out as a kind of guarantee of authentic experience.’ Anti-intellectual trends within feminist strategy can nonetheless emerge from these re-valorised norms. If we have enough experiences of survival and hardship as feminists and posit ourselves as carers instead of organisers, there is a danger that our experiences (such as mine as a trans woman) can reinforce a tokenisation of the oppressed. We might be well-represented in our groups, but comrades should be challenging anti-political and anti-intellectual trends by working together to contribute a total analysis of patriarchy, capitalism and developing the theories and strategies we need to defeat them.

My experiences of organising, including in rs21

Before I joined rs21, I started a non-partisan socialist feminist reading group. It was a reflection of my political dissatisfaction after many attempts to organise in small Marxist groups, and an attempt to provide a space for feminists and socialists to unify and take the ideas from these sessions back into their own organising. Despite the support of attendees and of the wonderful feminist bookshop in Sheffield, Juno Books, who let me use their space, after a year I stopped running it.

The latter half of 2025 was tumultuous for Marxists, when Your Party launched to roaring success and then fell almost instantaneously. My own political priorities changed through engagement not only with the reading group, but with the content we were reading and my attempts to engage with Your Party and, in turn, speaking at The World Transformed and eventually joining rs21. I noticed more and more that this reading group was not what I wanted it to be.

Political education requires cadres, an organisation that can guide theoretical development, and most importantly comrades with the tenacity to engage with the material. Over time, I noticed that a reading group can only remain passive without these criteria – especially when many of the books we read reached the same ‘vague’ conclusions for socialist feminists, with allusions to London-centric or defunct community organisations led by small affinity groups, and very little to say on strategy, organisation and discipline. It was difficult for us to translate this into our reading group discussions in a small city like Sheffield. 

Despite my criticisms, I am also aware of the importance of these groups, what they mean to people and how, fleeting as they can be, they provide the building blocks for comrades to develop something further. Like Action for Trans Health, I took the lessons away from that, including the group’s flaws and took them with me into my own socialist feminist organising – ‘part of the point of the movement is the movement as a process.’ Yet there is a concern that within the reading group and contemporary feminist literature, little is being said on strategy and mobilisation, as the far-right increasingly makes gains and a mass anti-fascist, socialist feminist movement is sorely lacking. 

Joining rs21 was about having that organisational space to develop socialist feminist ideas. It changed my relationship to how to approach political organising, from being alone running a reading group, to being surrounded by comrades with whom we can exchange our knowledge from a variety of movements to develop feminist strategies that can be applicable across the wider British left-wing and feminist movements.

As a Marxist organisation, we are also documenting trans struggles beyond the current organising climate through comrades’ engagement in trade union movements, and building the connection between trans liberation and class struggle. This includes the Day of Solidarity for Trans Rights on 7 May 2025, organised by Trade Unions for Trans Rights (TU4TR), composed of members of rs21, trade unions and other Marxist organisations, and distributing our pamphlet, Fighting Transphobia.

This approach is vital as trans organising faces many obstacles: the trans liberal response to EHRC guidance, or the well-meaning but short-lived forms of radical trans organising located in small affinity groups. As vital as the work of many NGOs, charities and trans organisers has been in challenging this guidance and other forms of state-enforced transphobia, we have also seen how the capitalist state responds to gendered violence, Palestinian solidarity and climate activism. We cannot rely on the state or legal interventions alone to protect us.

Any strategy also has to be aware of why so many of us are alienated by Marxism, and to think about what we can do to bring these politics together into something effective and disciplined. Jo Freeman said it best:

If the movement continues to keep power as diffuse as possible because it knows it cannot demand responsibility from those who have it, it does prevent any group or person from totally dominating. But it simultaneously ensures that the movement is as ineffective as possible. Some middle ground between domination and ineffectiveness can and must be found.

Finding this middle ground is difficult; even small affinity groups contain strong personalities who can determine the (in)activity of an organisation. We have to find a balance between ensuring that we can be effective in our agitation, whilst also having accountability, democracy and outreach that can begin to bridge the gap between Marxism and feminism. The aim of any socialist feminist, anti-fascist mass movement must include the development of cadres and worker-leaders from the diversity of working class and oppressed people in left-wing and feminist movements in Britain.

Does a socialist feminist discipline exist?

I might be complaining a lot about the tasks ahead of us as socialist feminists, but as Sara Ahmed said: ‘Having your complaints heard is about being able to change the conditions in which you live or work. Unheard complaints mean unchanged conditions.‘ Our task as socialist feminists is making connections between the organisation and autonomous feminist organising, bridging the gap between Marxism and feminism, and closing the gap between organisational commitment and community engagement. We also need to think seriously about producing effective and engaging analysis on patriarchy as Marxists that is total: total in our analysis, and total in our social relations as comrades and organisers. 

We are not there yet in developing a socialist feminist discipline, but we can begin this work. By beginning to take patriarchy seriously in our programme, uplifting women and marginalised comrades to become cadres, worker-leaders. We must do more than carry on with the current vague, soft-left approach that treats care as a substitute for structure. As socialist feminists, we owe it to each other to come together and seriously begin the work of developing an anti-fascist, mass feminist movement that fights back.