Alabama denies vital healthcare to trans youth

The pandemic has exposed in the starkest terms how capitalism oppresses and exploits women.

A workers’ movement divided by prejudice cannot unite against the system that exploits and oppresses us.

The entire Labour and trade union movement must organise to resist the Tories’ attack on existing, inadequate, rights and fight to extend trans rights to include self-ID.

Under the guise of the coronavirus pandemic, Viktor Orban has been granted the power to rule Hungary by decree. His first act? To attack trans rights.

Urte March reviews Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto by Cinzia Aruzza, et al

Many in Western imperialist countries believe that the battle for equal rights is now won due to the rainbow-tinged corporate logo bombardment that is Pride Month and with the ever-increasing presence of LGBTQ+ people in the public eye. British society doesn’t appear as overtly heterosexist and cissexist as it was several decades ago, but does that mean the struggle for queer liberation is over?

50 years after the Stonewall riots, over a million people flooded central London for the biggest ever annual Pride celebration. The actual march, limited to just 30,000 participants by Pride organisers, was overwhelmingly a jamboree of corporate and government pink-washing

Pride must not be handed over to the corporations or the liberals, let alone the police, just to show “how far we have come”. We owe it to those facing beatings and murders today to make it a militant demonstration of solidarity with them.

Resolution on the oppression of trans people.

It is vitally important that we prevent LGBT+ individuals from being forced out of public life by discriminatory policies that seek to invalidate anyone that dares transgress society’s gender norms.

Oppression is a fundamental, necessary part of capitalism, and can only be destroyed along with it.

By Joy Macready The 1917 Bolshevik government advanced a revolutionary programme for women’s rights, struggling to break with the backwardness and prejudice of Russia. The Bolsheviks argued that for women to be liberated, they would have to be relieved of their semi-slave status within the family. This would only happen if the state, now based […]

By Martin Suchanek  This article was originally published in Neue Internationale – Frauen Zeitung, the German language magazine of the League for the Fifth International The war against Islamic State, the renewal of state bans on Islamic women’s dress in the West and the spread of Islamist terrorism has renewed the focus on Islam as […]

By Dave Stockton The murder of 49 people at Pulse, a gay night club in Orlando, Florida is a horrific event which provokes the deepest sympathy both for the survivors and for the grieving families, partners and friends of the dead and injured. Our sympathy and solidarity should also be extended to LGBT communities throughout […]

The revolutionary legacy of Clara Zetkin By Joy Macready CAPITALISM from its earliest years gave birth to the modern women’s question. Women, particularly the women of the poorest classes, played a major role in its model revolution – in France in 1789. But the Rights of Man and Citizen it proclaimed turned out to be […]

Joy Macready reviews Katha Pollitt, Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights

By Joy Macready Hundreds took to the streets in major Indian cities and other countries on 15 December for a ‘Global Day of Rage’ against the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold Section 377, a law that criminalises gay sex. Protests took place in New Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Kolkata, Pune, Mysore, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad and Chennai, as […]

The methodology of ‘intersectionality’ is currently gaining increased support on the left in the UK. Joy Macready argues why it shouldn’t be used as the basis for a socialist approach to liberation ‘Intersectionality’, or the study of how multiple systems of oppression or discrimination interact, is gaining prominence amongst the left in the UK. For […]

Joy Macready reviews 'Beyond the Fragments: Feminism and the Making of Socialism (2013)'

In celebration of International Women’s Day and as part of an ongoing debate about the principles of women’s organisation and the revolutionary movement, Joy Macready looks at the history of early Soviet Russia and its lessons for today The Marxist position on women’s liberation owes a great debt to a remarkable group of women in […]

Revolutionary communists start from the view that working class women are the central agency in the struggle against their own oppression, aided at every step by class-conscious working class men. As Lenin wrote: “We say that the emancipation of the workers must be effected by the workers themselves, and in exactly the same way the […]

Chris Newcombe reports on the rise of homophobia in Britain today

Capitalism does all it can to preserve its form of the family and with it the oppression of women, lesbians and gays.

WHY IS homophobia still so prevalent around the world? Can lesbians and gay men achieve equality under capitalism? To answer these questions, we need to understand the role families and relationships play within the current social and economic system – capitalism.

David Kato was bludgeoned to death in his home with a hammer on 26 January. David was a gay rights activist in Uganda, leading the Sexual Minorities Uganda (Smug) campaigning organisation. David knew he was a target in a country renown for its anti-gay laws. It is already an offence, punishable by 14 years in […]

We staged a 24-hour “teach-in” on Wednesday 8 December in a form of protest against this coalition Government, which has now voted for the raising of tuition fees up to £9,000. The main reason for the occupation was to raise awareness through media coverage about this rise in tuition fees, and we feel we were […]

The day after the mass student walkout on 24 November, the Daily Mail ran the headline, “The Rage of the Girl Rioters”, supposedly exposing a new generation of mindless female thugs. Although the Mail described the images as “disturbing”, I think it was an inspiration to see so many young women protesting. Ninety years on […]

Our series on the lives and struggles of great revolutionary women continues with Marija Cubalevska’s look at the life of Russian underground militant Ludmila Stal Ludmila Stal was born in 1872 in Yekaterinoslaw in the Russian Empire, which today is Dnipropetrovsk in Ukraine. Although her family were well-off, she was a rebel from her early […]

“Strike against war, for without you no battles can be fought!” Here we look at the life of Helen Keller as part of our series on revolutionary women in history Many people have heard of Helen Keller, the blind and deaf woman who learned to talk when her friends wrote sign language on her hands. Films […]