The capitalist system and its state maintain and expand countless forms of social oppression not strictly limited to class relations. But they are intertwined with the relation between social classes and their various concrete manifestations because nothing escapes this. Racism manifests itself very differently for a black bourgeois or a Supreme Court judge than for a black worker or street vendor living in a slum. This does not mean, on the other hand, that racism does not cross class barriers, but that Marxists cannot, even for a moment, lose sight of the fact that it is against the working class and other oppressed classes that these oppressions usually manifest themselves more drastically.
Racism remains one of the strongest remnants of colonial ravaging and African slavery, a remnant appropriated and strengthened by the capitalist system as an additional tool for exploitation. Black and non-white people in many countries are segregated to the lowest sections of society and are concentrated mainly in the working class, including many strategic trades, and the reserve army (the mass of unemployed). Racism has historically been the biggest obstacle to political action of this oppressed sector of the class. Marginalized racial groups disproportionately make up the millions of workers, urban and rural, that are unemployed and living without housing, without food, without security, without medical care or basic sanitation. These are minimal demands that capitalist states are unable to resolve, since their main objective is to keep profits always on the rise.
Across the globe, capitalism breeds and molds racism; against the black decedents of chattel slavery, against Asian, Latino, or Arab migrants and their families, against nationally oppressed minorities and indigenous victims of colonization. Capital utilizes racist oppression and white supremacist attitudes both to divide the working class and to ensure the existence of a doubly marginalized segment of the class which can be more easily, intensively, and profitably exploited. This makes the anti-racist struggle a core task of the Marxist movement.
The struggle against the racist brutality of everyday life, both in its material and cultural manifestations, and against the role played by the police, is central to the world socialist revolution, particularly in countries like the United States, Australia, and Brazil. The struggle for workers’ power is directly linked to the struggle to end racist oppression, as they are directed against the same capitalist structures. Marxists must be involved in the struggle of the most precarious sectors of workers (such as informal, casualised and outsourced workers), who are mostly from marginalized racial groups, as a priority. The struggle of informal workers for decent wages, stability and full rights, and equal pay for equal work, is central.
The organization of workers self-defense guards in the face of racist attacks also plays a decisive role, as it demonstrates in practice an alternative to the racist police. We advocate the repetition of past examples of union self-defense against racist attacks suffered by workers. The police are an instrument of legalized oppression by one class over the other. Those who suffer most from the police are precisely workers under direct fire by the racist capitalist state, victims of its racial genocide, reinforced daily by the capitalist media and other ideological apparatuses. The end of the racist police of the bourgeois state will be an indispensable step towards the elimination of racism.
The oppression of women plays the role throughout the world of subjecting them to double or triple work shifts, as they are put in charge of taking care of the home, children and the elderly – services that should be of universal right and public responsibility. This unpaid work exempts the bourgeois state and the capitalists from counting it in wages and providing them as public services, and that is why the nuclear family has become a sacred and idealized paradigm. In reality, mothers would have much more time for developing affectionate, healthy relationships with their children if there were not so much distress marking every material aspect of bringing them up, which women are often unable to fulfill by themselves. More so, they should also have a right to independence as women without life being reduced to caring for the home and children.
The elimination of the oppression of women demands, as one of its prerequisites, the guarantee of full employment with decent pay. All women must be entitled to work and not be paid a penny less for jobs performed on an equal basis with men. At the same time, women who are mothers must be free from double or triple work shifts. With full female employment, domestic services must be socialized: male and female public workers will fulfill the main functions of maintaining the households and people’s basic needs. Public cleaning services and public restaurants will meet the demands of the working class for food and cleanliness. Children must have access to safe childcare facilities available on demand, which receive children during their parents’ working hours, they must be provided at least three meals a day and free, quality education and leisure.
We are for the facilitation of the full right of to divorce, in order to free women from the yoke of marriage out of material necessity, and demand decent aid for destitute divorced women, single mothers and widows, aid that meets the real basic needs of working women. A democratic demand still absent in much of the world is the legalization of safe and on demand abortion, as part of a public and accessible healthcare system.
In addition to the basic requirement of equal pay for men and women in the same positions, we also defend as a partial reform that women’s wages be increased according to the number of children they have. We advocate that unions create action commissions against verbal and sexual harassment of women in the workplace, and encourage their participation in the workers’ movement, from which they are often excluded. Unions can also carry out actions to help women workers in situations of social vulnerability. The workers’ movement must reinforce campaigns against the chauvinist bourgeois culture which condones and defends rape and material and cultural manifestations of sexism.
Homosexuals, bisexuals, transgender people and other minorities in matters of sexual orientation and gender identity suffer oppression based on the defense of the traditional values of the nuclear family, the same values that also play a role in the submission of women. The central structures responsible for this are the homophobic religious institutions and conservative political organizations, which create and foster bigotry against LGBTQI+ people. Psychological effects, derived from persecution and aggression, are recurrent. The LGBTQI+ population are often rejected by the family and marginalized, especially the members of the working class, and the formal job market is much more closed to them. In the case of transgender people, in many cases sex work ends up being the solution to avoiding economic misery.
Some sectors of the bourgeoisie are more tolerant with this issue, but workers continue to suffer insecurity, fear, abandonment and unemployment caused by the overwhelming homophobia and transphobia reinforced by reactionary religions and false moralism. We defend the expropriation of the properties (including their media) and fortunes of the criminal churches and conservative institutions that foster such practices and ideologies, as well as the end of tax exemptions for religious institutions in general. These resources should be used for the implementation of programs against homophobia and transphobia in all schools, as a way of combating these ideologies, and aid programs for the LGBTQI+ community, as well as guaranteeing full employment for its members. We advocate full equality of civil rights for LGBTQI+ people, including the right of social identity and medical transitioning for transgender people.
Another oppression that is crucial to combat for the unity of workers is that suffered by immigrants, foreigners and refugees. Working class people of this background are thrown in the worst jobs, while living with the risk of deportation and xenophobic and racist attacks. Imperialism fosters wars and exports its contradictions to the periphery of the system. In the pursuit of its interest in increasing profits, it destroys the traditional livelihoods of countless peoples, leading to desperate waves of immigrants in search of a better life in the imperialist centers. There, they are seen by the bourgeoisie and their ideology as scum, as “job thieves” (as if unemployment were not an intrinsic characteristic of capitalism) and as scapegoats for the problems of urban violence. We fight these reactionary ideas and demand the full right of citizenship to all immigrants, refugees and foreigners in search of work and a better life, as well as the right to housing and decent work. At the same time, we know that it is the socialist revolution, both in peripheral countries and in imperialist centers, which is the only way out of the global contradictions of capitalism.
For the working class it is a matter of life and death to combat these oppressions. They are not only used to exploit the oppressed sectors of the proletariat more heavily, and to reduce costs for capitalists as much as possible through unpaid and underpaid labor, but also to divide workers, scapegoating some for hardships that have their real origin in capitalism itself and in its repercussions, therefore releasing capitalists from the blame.
Against this, the strategy of Marxists is the centered in the proletarian class and its unity against all oppression. In unions and workers’ organizations in general, we fight for the greater involvement in these struggles of the entire working class, against the union bureaucracy’s indifference to, and fostering of, sexism, racism, homophobia, xenophobia, transphobia, etc. in our society. We are not content with solidarity in words, we want action and active support.
In the movements against oppression, the party should seek to intervene mainly through the creation of a transitional organization, a faction of the movement led by party members and supporters who are in the oppressed groups, but aided and also composed by those who are not. Their line must be to defend the proletarian revolution as the historically necessary way to destroy the structures that maintain oppression, a pre-requisite for their end. Additionally, the educational and cultural apparatus of a workers dictatorship established by a proletarian revolution must struggle to eradicate its ideological remnants. Here, as in all other cases, we do not mechanically oppose reform and revolution: we fight for all improvements and against every small abuse, sometimes together with other political forces. But we defend the centrality of the proletariat, without giving in to the illusion of liberalism and other ideologies that preach that equality and inclusion are possible within the limits of the capitalist system.
We do not give any support or praise to the demagogy of so-called “inclusive” or “progressive” companies and capitalists whose only interest is to profit from these ideas. We reject the so-called “identity” discourse, which generally contains nothing more than an innocuous reformist or liberal perspective, too often with sectarianism and anti-working class sentiment against sectors that are not victimized by a particular form of oppression. The identity of oppressed groups is commonly suppressed as a way of preventing their recognition and alterity. Taking this step in recognizing identity is progressive for the oppressed, but it shouldn’t stop there. Liberal lines of thought tend to have a culture of resignation about the existence of oppression itself, that is, the absence of a strategy to put an end to it, fighting only its individual and marginal manifestations. They also tend to spread division in the movement. Not defending proletarian unity, they view those who do not suffer from a specific oppression as unable to fight against it or, to some extent, automatic oppressors themselves. There is also a focus from these sectors in promoting purely cultural representations to fight racist, sexist, transphobic, or homophobic ideologies.
Combat at the cultural level is an essential expression of the fight against oppression, but it is not in itself the way to achieve the elimination of its structural basis, embedded in capitalism. It is not enough to spread black culture, for example, without denouncing capitalism, private property and the police force, which are cornerstones of racism. The fight against oppression in the arena of cultural representations must not lose sight of the denunciation of the capitalist system and its state.
Although there are more and less oppressed workers in capitalist society, the totality of social relations demonstrates that racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia etc. are used as a form of domination that ultimately harms all workers, and that it is in the interest of the entire working class to eradicate them. The opposite of this view, the idea that oppression is advantageous to white heterosexual working class men, for example, ends up being a concession to the bourgeois ideology that wants to convince them of this.
Oppressive behaviors are programmed historically and socially, they are not in the genetics or in the objective interests of the proletariat, and can be overcome through political struggle. We do not consider male workers in general to be enemies of women, nor white workers to be automatic enemies of blacks, latinos, etc. Nor do we try to distill feelings of Christian guilt, as if they were great beneficiaries of oppression and should feel guilty for their existence. This is useless for the movement. On the contrary, we argue that all workers must be active participants in the struggles of the oppressed, in a broad joint movement, centered on the proletariat, against the capitalist system and all its reactionary ideologies. Within the party, we fight all manifestations of oppression and prejudice, and we strive for equal conditions and treatment among members.