WHAT? Another Zoom meeting? And it’s on Saturday? And it’s all-day?

Well, yes. And here’s three reasons why, despite Zoom fatigue, you should log on and participate in what will be a fantastic conference organised by women, about women and open to all.

First, as previous articles in this paper have reported, the conference will be addressed by a galaxy of national and international women speakers, all of whom will make a matchless contribution from which we can all learn. 

Second, and importantly, the conference as a whole provides an opportunity to analyse and challenge the reality of women’s lives and struggles nationally and internationally. 

Third, and above all, the conference will chart a way forward for women based on a Marxist feminist analysis of women’s oppression and super-exploitation. 

Through our analysis and vision we hope to inspire a revitalised and reinvigorated socialist feminist women’s liberation movement. 

The conference will commence with a session devoted to a Marxist analysis of women’s oppression. 

This explains that women are super-exploited as workers because they are oppressed as women — doubly so if they are black. 

Women’s biological sex, reinforced by gender stereotyping, means that women face a double burden because of the contradiction between their dual roles: as workers in social production and in their position in the private realm of domestic reproduction. 

The conflicting responsibilities imposed by the double burden of work life and family life accounts for the super-exploitation of women. 

We will examine the way in which a divisive form of identity politics which seeks to fracture and undermine the mobilisation of women and, at the same time, malignly contests socialist feminist theory and practice. 

The practical application of our Marxist analysis is the foundational basis of a practical and campaigning programme expressed in our Charter for Women. 

Originally conceived by the Communist Party, the Charter is now the property of the movement and has been adopted by many trade unions and women’s organisations. 

It was relaunched in 2020 under the aegis of the National Assembly of Women. The Charter spells women’s demands grouped into three sections — Women in Society, Women at Work and Women in the Labour Movement. 

These three areas of women’s lived reality form the basis of the conference programme. 

Under these headings our speakers will thus cover such issues as racism, misogyny, women’s self-organisation, discrimination and harassment at work, the gender pay gap, abortion, the environment and much else. 

They will also address the problems preventing meaningful advance for our cause in all three facets of our lives. 

Our struggle is not confined to Britain — it is worldwide. Crucially, our international session will hear from women speakers from North and South America, Africa and Asia. 

They will inform us of their decades-long fight for women’s rights in the context of the struggle against imperialism, racism and war. 

Now, more than ever before, given that women constitute 50 per cent of the workforce in this country, a different approach to what has been called “the woman question” is needed. 

This must break with the past and be based on a recognition that women’s oppression is indissolubly linked to the operation and maintenance of the capitalist system and that the fight to end women’s oppression is no mere optional extra, but is an intrinsic and essential part of the struggle for socialism.

Linking women’s liberation to class politics is based on an understanding that there is a conflict between labour and capital in which those who sell their labour power for a wage are exploited by those who buy it. 

This is central to the capitalist mode of production. But this is not the concern of identity politics which renounces class and collectivism in favour of individual self-identity. 

Communists recognise that women’s rights and protections, fought for and won through struggles over the last two centuries, are now facing sustained and serious ideological attack. 

This has been the result of the growth and ascendancy of neoliberalism and its accompanying ideological attack on collective identity and unified class struggle. 

We are therefore committed to defending existing, albeit inadequate, rights for women, as well as campaigning to greatly extend them.

This entails, at a very minimum, retaining reserved and separate spaces and distinct services to protect women from violence and abuse as well as defending and promoting the sex-based rights and protections of women and girls. 

We are committed to ensure that our movement clearly understands the distinction between sex and gender, and the relationship between oppression and exploitation in Britain and around the world.

Communists recognise that the oppression of women, and of people of colour, is fundamental to the maintenance of class society, and the struggle to overcome this is not only central to the class struggle, but crucial for its success.

The road to socialism will be unattainable without an understanding of the link between women’s oppression and class exploitation. 

A regenerated women’s movement is a vital core element in such a struggle. 

The building of a broad-based women’s movement and a strengthened labour movement which rejects capitalist ideology must go hand in hand. 

However, without a robust renewal of Marxist-feminist theory, which challenges patriarchal and other divisive ideologies, such a project will remain a distant vision. 

The conference will help to stimulate this project.

The fundamental and most important principle underlying the Marxist analysis of the “woman question” is that the oppression of women is rooted in class exploitation. 

The super-exploitation of women as workers and their oppression as women is a fundamental prerequisite for the operation of capitalism – economically, politically and ideologically. Hence, the eradication of class exploitation is the essential precondition for the liberation of women. 

Socialism provides the only means by which the most complete form of class exploitation (ie that represented by the capitalist system), can be ended. 

This was clearly understood by working women 150 years ago. The final session of the conference is devoted to The Women of the Paris Commune and led by Lydia Samarbakhsh, head of the international department of the French Communist Party. 

The women of the Paris Commune inspire our struggle today. 150 years ago the working women of Paris formed the Union des Femmes. Led by such women as Louise Michel, Elisabeth Dmitrieff, Andre Leo, Anne Jaclard, Paule Mink, and Nathalie Lemel, they pioneered a class analysis of women’s oppression. 

These women had connections to the First International, and explained that the liberation of women could only be achieved if all workers, men and women, united to take control of the means of production and end exploitation for ever. 

Women rose then. We will rise again!

This is the challenge of our conference tomorrow. Its programme reflects its rousing title of Communist Women Rising; Sisterhood Socialism & Struggle. Don’t miss it — be part of our struggle for sisterhood and socialism. 

To register please go to: tinyurl.com/sisterhoodsocialismstruggle.