New Perspectives for the Liberation of Women

Revolutionärer Weg, Nos. 27/28
Class Struggle and the Struggle for the Liberation of Women
Published in 1999

Book title: New Perspectives for the Liberation of Women – A Polemical Treatise

Since the 1990s a militant women’s movement has again developed which is closely linked with the working-class movement. The new, manifold experiences and questions coming out of the militant women’s movement had to be treated theoretically. The foreword states: “The critique of the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois mode of life of society constitutes a necessary foundation of any struggle purposefully directed towards emancipating women. This critique must not in any way be limited to the specific situation of women, but must uncover, in all its aspects, the entire system of exploitation and oppression in state-monopoly capitalism. The social liberation of the working class and the liberation of women are two facets of the joint struggle for a liberated, socialist society.” (Revolutionärer Weg, No. 27, p. 9)
Revolutionärer Weg, Nos. 27/28, develops the fundamental positions of the Marxist-Leninists regarding the struggle for the liberation of women. It begins with the historical experience of the women’s movement and introduces the reader to the basic positions of Marx, Engels and Lenin. It criticizes the disregard for these principles in various socialist countries and resolutely opposes the crossover to petty-bourgeois feminism by the modern revisionists. It contends in an all-around way with bourgeois and petty-bourgeois feminism as well as with the bourgeois fiction of the equality of men and women in capitalism. The real liberation of women can be accomplished only in unity with the proletarian class struggle and in socialism. With this issue of Revolutionärer Weg, for the first time the strategy and tactics in the struggle over the mode of thinking of the masses and the fundamental interrelation of revolutionary party building and non-party-affiliated self-organization of the masses are developed.