Learning from Our History

Revolutionary Marxists and the Fight for Women’s Liberation

Flier for this year’s forum celebrating International Women’s Day, held by the Internationalist Club at Hunter College of the City University of New York. For many years the Club has held such forums on a wide range of issues related to the revolutionary Marxist program for women’s liberation through socialist revolution. Click on image to enlarge.

The following is based on a presentation by Carmen at the CUNY Internationalist Clubs’ International Women’s Day 2025 forum, held on March 25 at Hunter College.

We are holding this forum amidst a sweeping assault on basic democratic rights. This is occurring across the board, from the rights of immigrants to the right of women to get an abortion, from transgender health services to scientists’ research, the right of teachers to teach and students to learn the actual history of this country. The right of free speech, which was won through major struggles, is being rabidly repressed, as part of the genocidal war on Gaza. This U.S./Israel war would not be possible without the bipartisan ruling class funding and arming of the genocide.

The assault on our rights is not new under Trump. Under the Democrats and the Republicans, the capitalist class that rules this society has been eroding democratic rights for decades, from building up the deportation machinery to the powers of the “imperial presidency” and intelligence agencies to racist police violence to the endless series of U.S. imperialist wars. Roe v. Wade, which was a concession from the ruling class after the big social and political upheavals of the 1960s, was chipped away at persistently for many years before it was finally overturned in June 2022. The reactionary crusade against abortion, which is a fundamental democratic right, and against the rights of transgender people – not only to healthcare but to their legal existence as human beings – has been brewing for quite a while.

This is often referred to as part of the “culture wars,” but these clashes are not fundamentally about disputes in the realm of ideas. It’s about regimenting society to crush dissent and to shore up the nuclear family, the cell unit of capitalist society and the nucleus of women’s oppression. The attack on basic rights is also meant to stoke racism and bigotry and to drive fear into the hearts of the most vulnerable layer of the working class, undocumented immigrants, without whose labor this country would not function. And it’s about making us all fall in line behind the U.S. imperialists’ war drive and machinations to keep their grip on the world as U.S. hegemony starts to crack.

All these things are connected, as part of the decay of the capitalist system. Society’s productive forces have grown ever more international, they depend on the social labor of huge numbers of people, and all of us depend on that to survive. But they are still bound by private ownership by the capitalist rulers, driven only by the ruthless pursuit of profit. Increasingly, capitalist society has been shedding the veneer of liberal democracy and showing what it really is: a dictatorship of capital. It’s a profoundly unequal society where black people are murdered by the police on a daily basis; where many women in the U.S. must travel hundreds of miles to get to the nearest abortion clinic; where tens of thousands sleep in the streets and the cost of living continues to soar while the value of wages has been stagnant for decades. All while we inch closer and closer to a third world war aimed centrally at China.¹

This is the big picture: you can’t effectively fight black oppression, or the oppression of women, trans and gay people, immigrants, or any other group, without fighting all forms of oppression. And to actually do away with all forms of oppression requires a struggle against capitalism, the system that nurtures these oppressions, that constantly reproduces them, and that depends on them to function.

We’re here today to talk about women’s oppression and the revolutionary socialist – that is, communist – program to do away with it forever. We’re here to talk about women’s liberation. Women’s oppression is bound up in the very roots of class society, older even than capitalism, which later gave rise to racial oppression and other forms of oppression that have life-or-death consequences for millions today. Because of this very fundamental quality of women’s oppression, the task of women’s liberation is a central part of our program as revolutionary Marxists, who see working-class revolution as key to fundamentally changing society.

Where Women’s Oppression Comes From

The first thing we must understand is that women’s oppression is a key part of how the society we live in functions, and that its origins are material and historical. These are interwoven with the emergence of class divided civilization, when society developed to such a point that different classes emerged with mutually opposed interests. (For most of human history people could not produce enough to create a stable surplus that a ruling class could live off of.) Property being passed down through the father’s line became central to one kind of class society after another and meant enforced monogamy for women.²

Society has changed a lot since the birth of civilization, but in modern day capitalism we very much still live with women’s oppression. Women workers face “double oppression,” as workers and as women. Around the world, hundreds of millions of women toil in near slavery conditions of exploitation, while here in the supposed pinnacle of civilization, black, Latina and immigrant women workers are triply oppressed. And even before the overturn of the constitutional right to abortion, the reality has been that only rich women have unfettered access to abortion.

Women’s oppression is central to “social reproduction,” in other words the everyday recreation of the world we live in, along with all its unequal and oppressive dynamics. Under capitalism the nuclear family, the central institution of women’s oppression, must be preserved, keeping women chained to the home, to domestic tasks and child rearing. Working-class women come home from work to perform these tasks, rearing the next generation of the working class. Bourgeois women hire nannies, often immigrant women with families of their own, to raise their bourgeois children.

Marxists call for the socialization of household functions – laundry, cooking, caring for children, etc. – to free women from their domestic prison, and to allow them to flower as full members of society. We also call for free abortion on demand, no questions asked.³ The stultifying restriction of women to the domestic sphere, discrimination and bigotry against gay and trans people, the crime of forcing a woman to carry to term a baby she does not want – all serve to tighten the grip of the institution of the family.

For the family’s functions to be superseded by collective institutions emancipating women from household servitude – this requires a society based not on profit but on fulfilling human needs. This is only possible under a workers government, after a socialist revolution has smashed the old capitalist state and constructed a workers state to lay the foundation for socialism: a classless, stateless society based on abundance and radically lowering the time that needs to be devoted to labor. This is the basis for our slogan, “Women’s liberation through socialist revolution.” Women’s oppression, like black oppression, is bound up in the very roots of this deeply racist, sexist society. To end oppression, we not only fight all its manifestations in the here and now, but uproot it by doing away with its material basis.

Marjorie Stamberg: From Feminism to Revolutionary Marxism

As revolutionary Marxists, we stress that political clarity is essential. As the great Polish communist Rosa Luxemburg put it, our program does not come from “indiscriminate odds and ends just because they sounded desirable.”⁴ Instead, it comes from a long political tradition that is rooted in struggles of the working class and oppressed, and in the application of the lessons born from those struggles. The Internationalist Club holds an International Women’s Day event every year to discuss with young people interested in changing society about the history of this socialist holiday, the struggles of women workers and the rich political traditions that were shaped through these fights, which inform what we do today.

One of the posters made by Club members to decorate the room for this
year’s revolutionary International Women’s Day event at Hunter College.

In that vein, I want to talk about an important revolutionary fighter who died recently, our comrade Marjorie Stamberg. Her life and what she fought for help us concretize some of the points we’re talking about today. Marjorie became politicized as a college student and participated in the first “teach-in” against the Vietnam War, in 1964. She moved to Washington, D.C. to be a full time activist with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, the radical wing of the civil rights movement, and Students for a Democratic Society, the principal organization of what was called the New Left. Marjorie took a revolutionary position for the victory of the Vietnamese Communist forces against U.S. imperialism. She became a writer for the Washington Free Press, the earliest of many “underground newspapers” that emerged during that time. After moving to New York to write for another radical paper, Marjorie became a pioneer of the radical women’s movement, which revolted against the male chauvinism that was widespread in the New Left. In the late ’60s, she was an early member of Redstockings, a major group in the movement we now know as “second-wave feminism.”

We often say “La lucha educa” – struggle educates – a slogan from militant teachers’ struggles in Puerto Rico. A powerful example is Marjorie’s account of how she was won to the Marxist program for women’s liberation. It is a very concrete example of the difference between the fight for women’s liberation, which is a major part of revolutionary Marxism, and feminism, a bourgeois ideology that actually stands in the way of effective struggle for women’s liberation.

Another poster created by club members for this year’s IWD event. In 2021 a group of immigrant women laundry workers organized against dangerous working conditions and abuse at Wash Supply/Liox cleaners in NYC. Members of the  Internationalist Club and Revolutionary Internationalist Youth supported their campaign, marching alongside the workers and connecting their struggle to the 1909 Uprising of the 20,000, which led to the creation of International Women’s Day.
Click on image to enlarge.

In the late 1970s, while working as an operator for AT&T, which at the time was known as Ma Bell or “the phone company” (it was a monopoly), Marjorie was part of a radical women’s organization called Oakland Women’s Liberation (O.W.L.). She had helped found a feminist journal called Tooth and Nail, which became the voice of this group. Operators, workers who manually connected phone calls at the time, were almost exclusively women and were presented as the gentle, caring feminine voice between the customer and the company.

These women worked in awful conditions, under constant surveillance by the company, which was a notoriously repressive employer. They were required to sit on tall stools at a specific distance from the switchboard, could not smoke, chew gum or even (in many cases) cross their legs. They could be accused of neglecting their jobs for supposedly “looking around too much,” which in practice meant looking away from the switchboard at all. To us today it sounds a lot like Amazon’s monitoring of warehouse workers’ so-called “time off task.” The pay was terrible and the bureaucratic leadership of the union they were part of, the Communication Workers of America (CWA), often ignored their demands.

Marjorie went to work at the phone company, as did some other members of O.W.L., to organize among working-class women. As operators they were part of the CWA and they also started a group called the Operators Defense Committee to fight for the rights of women phone operators. In O.W.L., as Marjorie described it in a talk she gave in 2015, “we were unionists, we were radicals, we were feminists and revolutionaries, and we saw no contradic­tion.”5 They did not involve men in their political work and rarely if ever had men at their meet­ings. Marjorie and others worked in a big phone building in downtown Oakland, where many of their coworkers were in or around the Black Panther Party. Oakland is where the Panthers got started.

At AT&T there was also the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), which represented workers in skilled jobs requiring a lot of training, who were all men at the time. The IBEW went on strike in 1971. Marjorie and her comrades in O.W.L. watched as women workers they had recruited to their operators’ group with the politics and rhetoric of feminism scabbed on the IBEW strike. In other words, they crossed the picket line of the striking workers, undermining the power of the strike and breaking the fundamental principle of working-class solidarity.

This was horrifying to watch, especially as Marjorie and others heard these women echo feminist arguments they had used to win them over. Operators crossing the picket line justified this with things like “We’re the most oppressed, we earn much less money, so we don’t have to honor their strike,” or “That union never fought for women, so we don’t have to support their strike.” Marjorie, in a state of shock, immediately helped publish a leaflet calling for operator solidarity with the IBEW strike. She participated on the picket lines and along with her comrades demanded that nobody cross the picket line. But in this experience came a major moment of reckoning, and of realization. As she put it, “in order to hold the class line, we were forced to break with many of the feminist constructs we had previously held and come to grips with the contradictions we didn’t see before.”

Another group at the phone company was the Militant Action Caucus, which was politically aligned with a group called the Spartacist League (SL), which for three decades represented the revolutionary Marxist politics of Trotskyism. (Leon Trotsky, co-leader of the 1917 Russian Revolution along with V.I. Lenin, defended the Bolshevik program against the conservative bureaucracy headed by Joseph Stalin that usurped political power in 1923-24.) Members of that group invited O.W.L. to carry out political discussion with them, beginning a year-long period of study during which Marjorie was won to the program of Trotskyism. She remained committed to this revolutionary political tradition – one from which our club draws its lineage – and fought for its program until the end of her life. After moving to New York, Marjorie became the first woman switchman in the city. She also joined the staff and later the editorial board of the SL’s newspaper Workers Vanguard. The eventual degeneration of the SL led to her and other comrades being expelled in 1996, after which they founded the Internationalist Group.

“For a Socialist Fight to Save New York”

In 1978, Marjorie ran for New York state assembly as the SL’s candidate during the throes of the New York fiscal crisis, when landlords were having their buildings burned in the Bronx to collect insurance money. This is also the period during which tuition was imposed at the City University of New York (CUNY) for the first time, an assault on the city’s working-class and immigrant population masses who sent, and send, their children to CUNY. “For a Socialist Fight to Save New York” was the slogan of Marjorie’s campaign, which was a far cry from the reformist electoralism of “Democratic (Party) socialists” then and now. For example, one of the campaign platform’s central points was “Break with the Democrats – For a workers party to fight for a workers government!” And it called to expropriate the banks, real-estate and other capitalist enterprises – including such hated companies as Ma Bell and Con Ed.

In 1985, in the middle of Ronald Reagan’s new anti-Soviet Cold War, Marjorie ran again as the Spartacist candidate, this time for mayor of New York against the racist Democrat Ed Koch. Her campaign slogan was “From Soweto to Harlem: Smash Racist Terror.” Soweto is the black township near Johannesburg, South Africa, where a huge revolt against apartheid occurred. There is a long list of other inspiring struggles that our comrade Marjorie was part of and helped lead. Among them, the organization of mass labor/black mobilizations to stop Ku Klux Klan provocations in Washington, D.C. and elsewhere; the fight against capitalist reunification of Germany and for a “red Germany of workers councils in a socialist Europe” in 1989-90; organizing solidarity with militant Mexican teachers strikes and the defense of indigenous education in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, and many others.

In the late ’90s she started a second career as a teacher in the NYC school system, where she became a union delegate and leader of Class Struggle Education Workers, battling tooth and nail against the capitalist government’s racist and anti-working-class assault on public education, teachers’ and students’ rights. Her work exemplified the meaning of class-struggle opposition to the union bureaucracy that chains the unions to the Democratic Party.

Liberation Can’t Come Through “Sectoralism”

Posters at literature table at March 2025 International Women’s Day forum, showing aspects of the life and work of our comrade Marjorie Stamberg (1944-2024). Marjorie was a founding member, and a key leader, of the Internationalist Group and League for the Fourth International. (Revolution photo)

One of the major lessons Marjorie emphasized, and which I think her revolutionary political journey shows, is that the program of revolutionary Marxism is counterposed to “sectoralism.” This is the ideology, which the New Left pushed heavily, that each sector of the oppressed would and should pursue its own struggle with a “multivanguardist” perspective, instead of the fight to win over the multiracial working class to using its huge potential power in the fight for liberation of women, black people and all doubly or specially oppressed groups.⁶

To give a couple of examples, we fight for labor to defend the abortion clinics, for workers action against racist police terror and for the working class to bring its power to bear in the struggle against deportations – as those of you know who have been involved together with Internationalist activists in the Hunter Committee to Defend Immigrants. As Lenin emphasized, a revolutionary Marxist party must be “the tribune of the people,” the champion of all the oppressed. Only by destroying capitalism and establishing workers rule can we dismantle the material basis of the different forms of social oppression, which are constantly reproduced by the workings of the system of capitalist exploitation.

But you can’t get there by reinforcing the divide-and-conquer divisions this system makes between sectors of the workers and oppressed, or dividing up who is allowed to fight for whom. In her life and work, Marjorie was by no means exclusively concerned with women’s oppression; she saw this as inseparable from fighting the oppression of black people, which in this country founded on slavery has always been key to virtually every political and social question. As a Marxist educator, she was very effective at explaining the tradition of Marxism, which teaches that liberation for all the oppressed is the task of the whole working class and that this requires revolutionary leadership.

Marjorie, who died in May 2024 after a three-year struggle with cancer, fought until the end of her life for the freedom of all the oppressed through socialist revolution. Her death was a massive loss to our organization, and to the movement she dedicated her life to. But together with the Internationalist Group and Revolutionary Internationalist Youth, we in the CUNY Internationalist Clubs carry on her memory and the Marxist program she fought for.

In closing, there are a few points that I hope people leave with. First, the question of women’s liberation is a class question. Marjorie’s story of coming to terms with what the politics of feminism lead to in practice – when, at Ma Bell, she saw how consistent feminism led to strikebreaking – is an example of why revolutionary Marxism and feminism are counterposed. While feminists draw a line between men and women in society, we Marxists draw a class line, between the working class and the bourgeoisie. And that understanding is crucial for winning the fight against the oppression of women and all forms of oppression. This is crucial today, when the rights of every sector of the oppressed, which were won through struggle, are under attack and being stripped away one after another.

We must grasp the big picture: the current onslaught from the Trump administration didn’t come out of nowhere – it is an expression of the social and political decay of the capitalist system and U.S. imperialism’s desire to maintain its dominance worldwide. In so many different ways, as we have shown in our press, the Democrats paved the way for Trump. We cannot forget, for example, that Democratic icon Jimmy Carter, together with then-Senator Joe Biden, were instrumental in pushing the infamous racist Hyde Amendment barring federal funding for abortions, hitting poor working-class, black and Latina women the hardest.⁷

Today we keep seeing how support to the Democrats chains the power of the workers and oppressed to this system. This means that to fight the current escalating assault on the rights of us all, to unchain that power it is essential to break with the Democrats. Our insistence on this struggle for the political independence of the working class is one of the basic things that make the Internationalists different from other groups that may label themselves socialist or Marxist but whose actual politics are based on class collaboration, not class struggle.

Instead of looking to the parties of the racist ruling class, we need to look to the class power of the working class. We need to fight for a revolutionary workers party, to defend the rights of all the oppressed and fight for their liberation through socialist revolution. As Lenin emphasized in his speeches on women’s emancipation, for example on International Women’s Day after the victory of the October Revolution in 1917, women’s fate is tied to the triumph of socialism. The situation of women is at the heart of any society’s character – her liberation can only come with the full liberation of humanity in a society freed of exploitation and oppression. ■

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