NYC Women's March: Feminism will not defeat sexism

NEW YORK CITY, January 21—At the second annual Women’s March, Progressive Labor Party (PLP) marched to demonstrate our determination to see sexism defeated once and for all. Yet capitalism needs sexism like we need air to breathe.
The mass bravery of the #MeToo trend points the way forward. But powerful elements of the U.S. ruling class are engaged in a comprehensive effort to re-direct the anger of this moment into the waiting arms of the Democratic Party.
The same capitalist class that has mounted attacks on women of breathtaking scope and violence now wants to own/control the movement against “systemic” sexism.
Many signs pointed to voting and the 2018 election as the next step in the anti-sexist upsurge. Our leaflet with the headline “It’s not just Trump, It’s Capitalism” was met with an enthusiastic reception from many, and a handful of PL’ers were even able to turn that slogan into a chant that was taken up by marchers nearby as we made our way through midtown Manhattan.
As the march turned the corner from 59 Street to Sixth Avenue and passed the Trump International Hotel,  liberal chants, “No hate, no fear, refugees are welcome here” resounded; our slogan “stop racist deportations, working people have no nation” did not strike as much of a chord with the mainly white middle-class elements that formed the bulk of the participants. Anger is high but consciousness is relatively low.
In other portions of the demonstration where more Black, Latin, and Asian and youth formed the body of the crowd, when the crowd chanted “Hey hey, ho ho, Donald Trump has got to go,” we chanted “Capitalism has got to go” and people switched and joined us.
As we chanted, people grabbed up leaflets and challenges from us. Hundreds of papers and over 1,500 leaflets were distributed. We made short speeches and some people thanked us for calling out more than just Trump as the problem.
Liberalism: the main danger
The Trump agenda—from the tax bill to the proposed attacks on Medicare/Medicaid, a re-imposition of a global gag rule on abortion and more—is a huge attack on working-class women. Yet we delude ourselves in believing that power in the hands of Democrats means progress.
Capitalists and their media don’t care for women workers. The bosses see women workers as instruments of production of future workers, or as objects. The capitalist media empires rake in staggering profits from sexist marketing and pornography, while their friends in the informal capitalist economy traffic women into slavery.
Women and girls comprise the majority of refugees forced across racist capitalist borders from Central America to East and Central Africa, and the Middle East to the Bay of Bengal. Tens of million of our working class sisters are herded into refugee camps and subject to extreme poverty, abuse, exploitation and trafficking by the forces of imperialism that remain the same from Obama to Trump.
We cannot cheer the fact that record breaking numbers of women ran for public office under Democratic banners in 2017, a trend looking to continue into 2018. Supplying racist and sexist U.S. capitalism with more women and nonwhite politicians to front for rising war and fascism is the core mission of the Democratic Party.
Advances against sexism
The women’s movement in the U.S. struggled for seventy years before the ruling class granted women the right to vote in 1920.
In the Soviet Union women won this right three weeks after the seizure of power in 1917. In then-revolutionary China, communists banished foot-binding forever. Prostitution was abolished in Cuba after the 1959 revolution.
The list of massive advances for women goes on. Even the women’s strike of March 2017 took place on International Women’s Day, a communist-inspired holiday.
As capitalism has returned to Russia and China, sex trafficking and oppression of women have returned. Women have paid perhaps the highest price for the reversal of communist revolutions.
Feminism will not defeat sexism
Learning from the errors of the old movement and rebuilding the movement for communism is priority number one for the Progressive Labor Party.
Feminism aims to bring about a capitalism that “works” for women, too. It relies on the fatal strategy of “all-class unity:” erasing the difference between the experiences and interests of working class women and ruling class women.
The special oppression of Black women is a matter of cardinal importance, and the heightened dangers of capitalism across the board for Black women, from adverse health outcomes to racist police murder, cry out for abolition of this entire social order, not the minor rearrangements of oppressive relations that feminism entails.
Feminism, in tagging men as the source of sexism and not capitalism, serves to further divide the working class. In demanding “equality” within a system built on exploitation and war, feminism leaves us advocating for arch-imperialist demands such as putting women in combat in imperialist wars.
Oppurtunity for fightback
The #MeToo struggle is an opportunity for communists to raise anti-sexist fightback at their place of work, and dig deep with their friends about the roots of sexism. Until the international working class—multiracial, multi-gender, multigenerational—abolishes capitalism, no one is liberated. Build a communist movement with Progressive Labor Party.