By Rebecca Durand

For some of us, a crucial panel at #FiLiA2021 was the one from the Radical Notion journal, with Jane Clare Jones, Judith Green, Cátia Freitas and Dani Ahrens. The title was Female Class Politics.

It felt intense and purposeful, a chance to gather up strands from the weekend and figure out what to braid them into.

The argument put forth was that women’s oppression is class oppression. Structural oppression is a class-based relation of material extraction, through which the dominant class profits from the oppression of the subjugated class.

Importantly, not all forms of discrimination, or disadvantage, are instances of structural oppression. Those that are structural require there to be a dominant class profiting from the disadvantage. In the case of women, men benefit from women’s reproductive, sexual and caring labour.

It matters because undoing structural oppression requires much more fundamental changes to the system of power and the extraction of resources, than tackling instances of discrimination that are not linked to class-based material extraction.

The misuse of the important term ‘intersectionality’ to mean ranking people according to how many privileges they have/don’t have has helped obscure the differences between structural/class oppression and oppression more generally.

The focus of activism now is moralistic - rewarding the saints, punishing the sinners. It pays little attention to class, and actively opposes understanding of sex as the basis of women’s oppression. It’s clear why this sort of non-politics works so well for the corporate ‘wokeism’ that poses absolutely no challenge to structural oppression.

There are three main axes of structural oppression: class, race and sex. Other forms of discrimination/disadvantage including homophobia are damaging and cause suffering but are not structural, because there is no class or people materially benefitting from it.

The sex question is not new, it’s been part of the class struggle tradition since Marx and Engels. What women have in common, despite our material differences, include sexual violence, threats to our reproductive autonomy and doing the lion’s share of domestic and caring labour. All of these are backed by the threat of violence and are most experienced in individual or family settings.

We in the audience were asked to speak to those around us at two points in the talks and at the end. These sessions were also intense and productive.

The first question was ‘what are women’s class interests?’

The next, ‘how can we build solidarity across differences?’

The third, in the final discussion, was practical: ‘What are the actions we need for the women’s liberation movement’?

Women’s solidarity across differences including social class and race is not a given but something we have to create. Starting from the low point we are at, we need to rebuild the understanding of solidarity including class solidarity. We need women-only spaces, publicly declared. We need to listen to one another with the commitment to carry on finding a way to work together, not derail into identity issues.

There were women in the room who remembered the painful, sometimes productive but often damaging confrontations over race and class and there was determination in the room not to ignore or paper over the differences between us but also not to derail or to continue to seek solidarity

The theme of intergenerational relations that was so present throughout FiLiA was brought up, with a woman describing how she did not know how to approach the topic of sex-based rights with her own beloved daughter at university, and a woman who facilitated a lesbian workshop telling us that the young women who attended said they had never been in a lesbian space before; many never in a women-only space. Lesbian women's sexual self-determination, and boundaries, are part of the interests of the entire class of women, because they represent women entirely apart from men.

A passionate plea to not denigrate or shame the young women who oppose us, who were protesting us outside, continued the theme of creating solidarity across difference. Indeed solidarity is the opposite of identity ideology, empathy is antidote to scapegoating: how can we relate to the young women protesting us? How can we help them overcome the continued attempts to derail and contain their rage?

As Jane said in summary, the crisis created by incursion of gender identity has given us another chance to fulfil the promise of second wave feminism.  And beyond that, we surely can’t tackle the catastrophe of capitalist crisis and its attendant climate emergency without a powerful movement with women’s liberation at its heart.