John Medhurst - No Less Than Mystic - A History of Lenin and the Russian Revolution for a 21st-Century Left

After a period of internal debate, the modern feminist response is increasingly “intersectional”. Intersectionality as a theory arose in the 1960s in response to mainstream feminism’s assertion that gender is the prime factor determining a person’s experience in society. Black women, in particular, challenged this, and denied that they and affluent white women shared the same oppression. This gave a boost to socialist feminism. In the 1970s and 1980s the socialist movement was enriched by an infusion of feminist thinking on consensus decision-making and non-hierarchical organising. By the 1990s feminism was exploring the idea that it was impossible to challenge social, cultural and sexual oppression in separate categories. For example, it was one-sided to focus on gender oppression of working-class black women without also focusing on their racial and class status.

The feminist sociologist Patricia Hill Collins, who first defined the concept of intersectionality, identified a “matrix of domination”, or an inter-locking system of power constructs and their baleful effects, that was intended as an extension of orthodox Marxist theory. It was a reaction against an identity politics that put those resisting a particular form of oppression, i.e. homophobia, in an organisational and political ghetto where only that form of oppression was challenged. Yet critics of intersectionality continue to miss the point. In 2013 Eve Mitchell pulled feminist analysis back to the Marxist concept of waged work which produces value for the capitalist, and unwaged work, i.e. domestic and carer work, which does not. The gendered division of labour thus produced is, in this argument, the basis of women’s oppression and should be the primary focus of political challenge. The only factor that matters in defining anti-capitalist activity is not one’s cultural identity, but the status of one’s “labour-power”. 17

There may be economic logic here but it is the politics of a pie chart. It implies that any “identity” felt under capitalism, not simply of occupation but of sexuality, gender and race, is transient and artificial. Mitchell’s conclusion that “we will struggle for a society that does not limit us as ‘bus drivers’, ‘women’, or ‘queers’, but a society that allows everyone to freely use their multi-sided life activity in whatever ways they want” is a noble vision for a hypothetical utopia, but it places individuals alive right now, in all their complexity and subjectivity, into one big category (or two: proletariat and bourgeoisie). But while one’s labour–its rewards and status, or lack of them–may determine one’s position in society, it need not determine one’s identity .

Ironically, many on the left who dismiss identity politics out of hand often exhibit a form of working-class identity politics which privileges the older, white, male proletariat (or its patronising stereotype) over more diverse forms of working-class identity, i.e. younger, female, BAME and LGBT. The outcome of the UK Referendum on the EU, and the 2016 US Presidential election, boosted and legitimised reactionary social attitudes in those countries, not solely anti-immigrant xenophobia but an entire corpus of racism, sexism and homophobia. It is a reactionary wave that some on the left have indulged, echoing the far-right’s condemnation of “liberal elites” and their cosmopolitan values. This can only end in disaster. If the left does not uphold and defend liberal cultural values, it is paving the way for the right’s victory. Not least because, as the socialist writer Owen Jones had to remind those who secretly yearn for the traditional working class circa 1957, “The emancipation of the working class means the whole working class: men and women, white and black, straight and LGBT” 18.

The alternative is to whitewash patriarchal attitudes within “the class”. One of the most culturally working-class and undemocratic trade unions in the UK, the GMB, notoriously advised its women members on Birmingham City Council in 2007 not to challenge unequal pay as that might negatively impact the higher pay of its male members (the women ignored the advice, took the legal route and secured a record pay-out and historic victory). There are always excuses for these attitudes. “We will never free ourselves of machismo within the movement”, wrote Mitchell, “without abolishing gender itself, and therefore alienated labour itself”. Unfortunately, it may take some time to abolish gender and alienated labour, leaving the problem of machismo within the movement unaddressed.

Today’s feminism has recovered from the backlash of the last two decades. Groups and websites like Everyday Sexism and UK Feminista have left old debates behind to engage with specific examples of misogyny and discrimination. Social media means that sexist and misogynist attitudes in politics, the media, advertising, sport and business can be immediately challenged, although its dark side–the freedom given to viciously sexist men to spew rape threats and other insults at any independent-minded woman–more than balances that. Anti-austerity campaigns like Sisters Uncut emphasise that austerity economics and social welfare cuts hit low-paid, single-parent women hardest. They also call-out middle-class corporate feminism.

Dawn Foster’s Lean Out (2016) is a blistering response to Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg’s advice book for under-promoted female professionals. As Foster puts it, “Sandburg’s corporate feminism doesn’t extend to calling for collective rights such as state maternity pay, or a stronger welfare net, or even encouraging women to unionise”. 19New feminist writers such as Foster, Jessica Valenti and Nina Power encapsulate a revived, culturally savvy and politically radical feminism. Trade unions and left parties will have to keep up with them or risk irrelevance to younger feminists looking for action and justice now. Sadly, the appalling response of the leadership of the British Socialist Workers Party (SWP) to allegations of rape against one of their own demonstrated that the Leninist left has a very long way to go.

By the standards of his time Lenin himself was not especially misogynist. He had supported his wife in the work required to research and write The Woman Worker and after the revolution he endorsed the broad thrust of Kollontai’s legislation. In a speech delivered to the Fourth Moscow City Conference of Non-Party Working Women in September 1919, Lenin began by asserting that while Western democracies had aspirations to make men and women equal, none had done so, “because wherever there is capitalism, wherever there is private property in land and factories, wherever the power of capital is preserved, the men retain their privileges”. But, he claimed, the Soviet Union had “left nothing of the old unjust laws that were intolerable for working people […] In the sphere of legislation we have done everything required of us to put women in a position of equality and we have every right to be proud of it”. 20

He was right. Sovnarcom’s decrees on equality were exemplary, especially at a time of massive social upheaval. But practical legislation on education and childcare, whilst progressive, was not the same thing as a fundamental transformation of sexual relations and attitudes. As a rule, Lenin distrusted any kind of sexual liberty or experimentation, seeing it as an impermissible distraction from revolutionary activity. In 1920 Clara Zetkin, a founding member of the German Communist Party and a friend and supporter of Kollontai, discussed with him the Soviet state’s policies on sex and marriage, specifically what was widely regarded as the excessive sexual license it provided to the young to engage in pre-marital sex and to explore different varieties of sexual experience. “I was told that questions of sex and marriage are the main subjects dealt with in the reading and discussion evenings of women comrades”, Lenin admonished Zetkin. “What a waste!”