Socialism offers the absolute guarantee of emancipation to all of humanity regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation or identity. To pursue socialism is to undermine the root cause of gender inequality and discrimination, capitalist exploitation and the social degradation issuing from it. A Socialist democracy will enable the policy possibilities and measures needed to overcome the obstacles of gender inequality and the cultural backwardness that sustains them. Socialism is intrinsically pro-woman and believes, as it believes in the universal rights of all humanity, in the fundamental rights to gender equality. Socialism is as much the abolition of all gender inequity as it is the abolition of class inequality, the former flowing from the latter and enmeshed together in the struggle against the capitalist system. In any substantial way, true gender equality can be realized only by the abolition of the capitalist system. Otherwise, inequality of the genders and division between them will always be promoted by capitalism and its conditions of chronic backwardness.
Bourgeois feminism rejects the struggle for social equality in favor of an egocentric redistribution within a continued state of inequality; a change of hands in the top 10% and among holders of powerful positions. To the bourgeois feminist the millionaire woman has more in common with a working-class woman than a working-class woman has with a working class man. To the bourgeois feminist the working class man has special privileges that the bourgeois woman does not have and are part of the ruling patriarchy no matter how exploited they are under the capitalist system. The bourgeois feminists use these positions to divide the working class while defending the basic operation of the capitalist system and the state. They only seek, in the end, the introduction of gender quotas in business and administration, and increasingly, the regimentation of male and female behavior.
The working class must reject bourgeois feminism. Its purpose in relation to the mass of the population is the division of the working class and the prevention of revolutionary change.
What Way Forward? 