International Context and the Fourth Feminist Wave

The fourth feminist wave, which can be traced back to the global uprisings of 2012–2013, arose from the crisis of neoliberalism and as a response to the politics of misogyny. Far from being merely a form of “digital” or “hashtag” feminism, it combined online visibility with massive street demonstrations and assemblies, becoming the specifically feminist expression of broader popular rebellions. From Latin America to Europe and the Middle East, women and LGBTQIA+ people took to the streets with demands such as an end to gender-based violence, the right to abortion, equal pay, and freedom of gender expression. The International Women’s Strike, the Ni Una Menos movement, and countless 8 March mobilizations in over 80 countries drew millions into action and created new organizational forms, often horizontal and assembly-based, that brought together diverse feminist currents and social sectors.

This fourth wave reached its peak between 2015 and 2020, inspiring a radicalized youth open to anticapitalist and revolutionary ideas. Yet today the movement faces a downturn— not only because of the pandemic or the partial victories it achieved, but also due to the global rise of authoritarian and far-right regimes. Reactionary forces have made the rollback of feminist and LGBTQIA+ gains a central plank of their political agenda. In this sense, the backlash against the fourth wave is not only cyclical but also structural, part of the authoritarian recomposition of global capitalism. Defending the gains of the fourth wave therefore cannot be separated from the broader struggle against authoritarianism, the far right, and the neoliberal order itself. An anticapitalist, revolutionary, and internationalist feminism must confront this offensive with the same creativity, radicalism, and internationalism that marked the birth of the fourth wave.

Reactionary Far-Right Offensive Against Gender Rights

The far right advances with a global offensive targeting women’s and LGBTQIA+ rights, as part of a broader anti-social and anti-democratic agenda. Far-right governments across continents are actively undermining hard-won rights.

An overview of the situation of women and dissident groups worldwide:

•North America: Under leaders such as Donald Trump, policies aim to define gender biologically, dismantle HIV prevention programs, and promote a traditional family model that reinforces women’s subordination. The U.S. lacks femicide laws, which leaves it behind many countries in documenting and prosecuting gender-based killings. Although up to half of murdered women are victims of their intimate partners, the absence of a legal definition makes statistics unreliable and underreported. In March 2025, the U.S. again refused to endorse CEDAW, remaining the only G7 nation outside the treaty—consistent with ongoing attacks on reproductive and LGBTQIA+ rights. At the core of this agenda is the Christian right, rooted in white evangelical Protestantism. Although originally mobilized in the 1970s to defend racially segregated Christian private schools, the movement turned to abortion as its unifying cause. Today it plays a decisive role in anti-gender and anti-LGBTQIA+ legislation and was fundamental in overturning Roe v. Wade, framing its positions on biblical authority. In this context, the conservative Heritage Foundation drafted the infamous “Project 2025,” which sets out four main objectives: restoring the “American family”; dismantling the state; defending national borders; and securing the “divine right” of individuals. In other words, an offensive agenda based on a reactionary, anti- rights ideology.

•South America: In Brazil, Bolsonaro established an anti-rights agenda, deeply misogynistic and LGBTQIA+-hating. He introduced changes in the education system and created obstacles to the implementation of the Abortion Law (legal under four causes), among other reactionary attacks. In Argentina, since the beginning of his government, Milei has attacked democratic and gender rights, dismantling policies that had previously been won, though with limitations. Since his speech at the Davos Forum in early 2025, attacks have intensified, targeting the LGBTQIA+ community and threatening to repeal the Voluntary Interruption of Pregnancy (IVE) law, the legal category of femicide, and even denying the existence of gender inequality. In El Salvador, Bukele leads an offensive against what the far right calls “gender ideology,” similar to the previous examples, attacking hard-won rights. Nevertheless, large antifascist and antiracist mobilizations across the continent have slowed down the South American far right’s plans.

•Europe: Far-right figures such as Giorgia Meloni in Italy and Marine Le Pen in France attempt to “feminize” their public image, but maintain a xenophobic, racist, and anti-migrant

rhetoric, particularly against Muslim and African populations. There is no genuine defense of women’s rights.

•Africa: In 2024, Africa had the highest rate of intimate partner-related killings in the world—more than double the global rate. In Western Sahara, occupied by the Kingdom of Morocco, repression is particularly violent against Western Saharan female activists. In South Africa, a woman is killed every three hours. In November 2023, South Africa’s Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) published the country’s first national study on gender-based violence, which found that such violence is rooted in “deeply entrenched social norms and structures that perpetuate male domination and reinforce gender hierarchies… leading to female subordination, systemic inequalities, and violence against women.” Kenyan politician Peter Kaluma is currently leading a campaign for Parliament to pass a family protection law that would ban same-sex relationships, queer activities, and related advocacy campaigns. Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni enacted one of the harshest anti-homosexuality laws in the world. Ugandans now face life imprisonment for same-sex relations and the death penalty in cases of “aggravated homosexuality.” It is important to note that European groups and the U.S. far right have renewed their interest in Africa, hosting numerous conferences across the continent to promote the 2025 agenda driven by Trump’s reelection. Child marriage continues to be defended by archaic norms across the continent, where the laws of Cameroon, Nigeria, Senegal, South Sudan, Sudan, and Tanzania still allow it.

•Middle East: The agenda of the Zionist far-right movement is to create an authoritarian, nationalist Jewish state founded on Jewish law. The implications for Palestinian women living in Israel (20%) under these laws are even more harmful. Elsewhere in the Middle East, we see the same type of far-right attacks on women and LGBTQIA+ people in so- called “religious fundamentalist” governments and regimes, where hyper-patriarchal actions are on full display. Legislative reforms in Iraq that allow child marriage from the age of 9 and grant more authority to Islamic courts in family matters are clear examples of this offensive. In 2021, Iran criminalized abortion, contraception, and voluntary sterilization. In 2024, a law was passed to enforce mandatory hijab, imposing fines and long prison sentences, as well as restrictions on employment and educational opportunities for women and girls who do not comply. (The law has been suspended after public protest but not repealed).

•Asia: According to the World Bank, more than half of the world’s female population lives in Asia-Pacific. In countries such as Indonesia and Malaysia, sexual violence is widespread, child marriage remains common, and laws discriminate against women, granting broad powers to husbands. Many Indonesian women migrate due to lack of opportunities and face exploitation and violence, even in destinations like Hong Kong. In countries such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Afghanistan, homosexuality is criminalized and can be punished with imprisonment or even death. In the UAE, which applies a conservative interpretation of Sharia, sexual relations outside heterosexual marriage are also a crime and can result in prison, fines, chemical castration, deportation, and execution.

A central element of this offensive is the ideological push to reinstate the traditional (Western) family picture as the only legitimate social model. By doing so, the far right seeks to relocate reproductive work into the private sphere, naturalizing women’s subordination and undermining collective, social responsibility for care. This ideological maneuver also feeds into the broader “culture war” or fight against so-called wokeism, which has become a unifying banner for authoritarian, nationalist, and conservative forces across regions.

This offensive is not simply a backlash to feminist advances but part of a structural recomposition of global capitalism. It employs tactical adaptation to broaden support, and its growing appeal among young men who often mobilized around misogynistic and xenophobic ideologies which demands active vigilance and coordinated international resistance.

Feminization of Poverty and Gender-Based Violence

According to UN Women (2023), gender equality is centuries away from being achieved. Women continue to face wage inequality and bear the brunt of reproductive, care and childrearing work. Gender-based violence remains alarmingly high, and is further exacerbated by economic, climate, and armed crises—disproportionately affecting women and girls, as seen in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan and Ethiopia.

These realities underscore the deep link between gender oppression, capitalism, patriarchy, and global crises. The struggle for rights cannot be isolated from the broader fight against economic exploitation, climate injustice, and war.

Institutional Feminism, False Progressivism, and State Cooptation

In recent years, institutional feminism has grown under so-called “progressive” governments that adopt feminist rhetoric without implementing real structural changes. This institutionalization channels the movement into electoral or symbolic frameworks that fail to challenge capitalism—separating feminist struggle from anticapitalist struggle. While some gains have been achieved during these periods, they remain fragile and limited, reaffirming the need for continued struggle against capitalism.

Cases like Chile demonstrate how such strategies dilute radical mobilization, reducing it to local actions that compromise with the state. These forms of “false progressivism” do little to improve the lives of working-class women, and often exacerbate the feminization of poverty, abortion restrictions, and rights violations. Reforms tend to be superficial, subordinated to capitalist logic and austerity measures.

In Argentina, the Kirchnerist period saw some advances, including legal abortion. The trust placed in these governments led to mobilization and a sense that all goals had been achieved. However, the inability to implement abortion access without restrictions, and the rise of Milei, demonstrated that no victory is lasting under capitalism.

The Need for a Revolutionary Solution

No victory is possible without class struggle. Unity within the working class is essential in order to advance alongside all other intersecting struggles and demands. Therefore, the working class must adopt the feminist program as its own, incorporating it into its broader strategy for the emancipation of all humanity. Only then can we build a truly revolutionary, feminist, and diverse force.

Furthermore, faced with the right wing shift of reformist feminisms and the failures of pseudo-progressive governments, women and the LGBTQIA+ community must build a revolutionary alternative alongside their fellow working-class comrades.

Anticapitalist feminism emphasizes the importance of mass mobilization and broad organization, since capitalism perpetuates gender inequality as a means of maximizing profits and maintaining social control. Therefore, feminist struggles that do not challenge capitalism will always be partial and temporary.

Origins Capitalism and its relation to patriarchy

I. Origin of Patriarchy: The Foundation of Male Domination

The origin of patriarchy must be sought in the material transformations of the first agricultural societies. With the rise of sedentary agriculture and the private ownership of land, new hierarchies emerged: control over economic resources became fundamental, and those who owned property could also control reproduction and family life. Patriarchy therefore does not arise from any “natural instinct” or divine will, but as a social structure functional to the management of property and the reproduction of labour power. Men, as holders of land and political power, controlled lineage and women’s reproductive labour, thus integrating gender domination into the economic and social logic of the community

Patriarchy, understood as the “rule of the fathers,” is a form of social organization where authority lies with the male head of the family, extending beyond the domestic sphere to structure society and legitimize male dominance over women and children (Gerda Lerner). Its existence dates back millennia predating capitalism.

Although women held a more autonomous status in primitive societies, the transition toward patriarchal organization is linked to the rise of private property and wealth accumulation. Marx and Engels pointed out that the patrilineal family consolidated female oppression in order to ensure the accumulation and inheritance of wealth under male control. The modern state, through laws and economic structures, perpetuates this subjugation, reinforced by institutions like compulsory heterosexuality (María Milagros Rivera Garretas), which are key to controlling female reproduction and sexuality.

II. Origin of Capitalism and Its Relationship with Patriarchy

Capitalism, as the most recent mode of production, found in patriarchy a functional structure to intensify accumulation and exploitation. Patriarchy possesses great power for adaptation and restructuring. It did not invent gender domination, but it deepened and reconfigured it.

●Family: A key institution in reproducing gender hierarchies and labor power. It relegates women to domestic, reproductive, and care work—unpaid labor that subsidizes the capitalist system. Family also functions as a unit of consumption and a social safety net in crisis, disproportionately burdening women especially for the working class, while for the capitalist class it secures the transfer of wealth and legitimizes ideological inheritance rather than redistributing resources to society.

●Sexual Division of Labor: Capitalism has maintained the sexual division of labour, which forms a central material basis for gender roles and, consequently, for the oppression of women and LGBTIA+ people. Women are systematically pushed into unpaid or underpaid care work, often confined to the private sphere, and funneled into precarious, low-wage jobs in the labor market. This is not because women are “naturally” better caregivers, but because capitalism requires the reproduction of labor power to be privatized and shouldered disproportionately by women. By reinforcing these gendered roles, the system maintains wage gaps, job insecurity, and the ideological narrative of women’s “place” in the household. At the same time, anyone who challenges binary gender norms or refuses prescribed roles such as LGBTIA+ people faces heightened forms of social, economic, and political repression.

●Control over the Body and Sexuality: The commodification of women’s bodies, beauty standards, the idealization of the heterosexual nuclear family, and restrictions on reproductive rights reinforce patriarchal control and capitalist logic.

●Structural Violence: Violence against women is multidimensional—domestic, workplace, and state-based—and sustains both systems by keeping women vulnerable and subordinate.

●Institutions: The state, legal system, police, and religious foundations reproduce inequalities and perpetuate structural violence through complicity or inaction.

III. Imperialism and Women’s Oppression

Imperialism is not an additional aspect of the current shift to the right; it is the very foundation that shapes the world we live in today. It defines the framework of exploitation, plunder, and domination in which women’s oppression is reproduced. To understand the present moment, we must recognize that imperialism is inseparable from capitalism itself: it is the system’s highest stage and the terrain on which class struggle unfolds globally.

This perspective explains why we situate ourselves as revolutionary feminists: Gender oppression can be understood in its current forms only by analyzing it through the lenses of imperialism and class struggle; however, to grasp its origins and historical continuity it is necessary to trace it back to the different modes of production – Asiatic, slave-based, feudal, and capitalist – and to the specific material relations that in each of them have determined gender hierarchies. And it also explains why we are internationalists: because imperialism is global in character, our struggle for gender liberation must also be global.

From Ukraine to Palestine, from Kurdistan to Western Sahara women are on the front lines of resisting imperialist wars and occupations. Patriarchy remains the backbone of the capitalist system, but in this stage of capitalist development, the drive for imperialist hegemony multiplies exploitation and violence, with particularly severe consequences for women, migrants, and oppressed peoples.

This is why feminist liberation must be both anticapitalist and anti-imperialist. False hopes in liberation through imperialist actors such as the European Union’s role in Ukraine only reinforce domination and undermine struggles for genuine emancipation. Our task is to carry forward the ideological battle against these co- opting narratives, and to root the women’s movement in an uncompromising fight against imperialism, capitalism, and patriarchy alike.

IV. Anticapitalist and Internationalist Feminism: Toward Comprehensive Emancipation

The inseparability of patriarchy and capitalism means they must be dismantled together. This dual oppression also affects the LGBTQIA+ community and calls for a feminism that goes beyond formal equality and promotes deep social transformation.

●Holistic Vision: Oppression is intersectional and indivisible; addressing gender or economics alone is not enough.

●Material Foundations: Unpaid and invisible domestic and care work is a fundamental pillar of capitalism and must be recognized and socialized.

●Critique of Formal Equality: Legal equality does not eliminate oppression without real structural change.

●Class Struggle: The liberation of women and the LGBTQIA+ community is inseparable from the emancipation of the entire working class.

●Radical Transformation: A joint struggle is needed to transform economic and social relations, socialize reproductive labor, and challenge private property.

●Comprehensive Struggle: The interconnection between gender violence, job insecurity,

wage gaps, and reproductive rights demands a comprehensive and inclusive feminist response.

●Socialist Perspective: The definitive eradication of sexist oppression requires the construction of a different, socialist society, accompanied by a broad cultural and educational struggle. Anticapitalist feminism proposes a program that combines immediate demands with a revolutionary perspective—remembering that “no theory is valid without action.”

Oppression and Exploitation: Gears of Patriarchal Capitalism

The False Promise of Formal Equality

To understand gender oppression under capitalism, we need a Marxist, historical materialist

feminist framework that views gender as a historically constructed social relation, embedded in the reproduction of class society. Binary gender division and sexual hierarchy are not eternal truths, but mechanisms to organize and discipline the workforce, uphold the heteronormative nuclear family, and ensure the unpaid reproduction of labor power.

Reproductive, care, and child-rearing labor—feminized and devalued—is indispensable to capital. Gender roles assign reproductive responsibilities, naturalize hierarchies, and structure the sexual division of labor. Patriarchy is not a separate system: it is a constitutive part of capitalism.

LGBTQIA+ oppression follows the same logic. Heteronormativity is institutionalized through the bourgeois family, which reproduces labor power and social norms. The criminalization and pathologization of queer, trans, and intersex bodies serve purposes of social and labor control. Violence against trans people, forced surgeries on intersex individuals, and labor exclusion are structural expressions of this order.

The legal equality achieved in some countries does not eliminate material oppression. Women enter the labor market under precarious conditions and face the burden of a “double shift.” In 2023, women’s global labor force participation stood at 48% (compared to 70% for men), with extremely high levels of informality, particularly in Africa and Latin America.

Women’s so-called “inactivity” is marked by caregiving burdens and unequal access to services, education, and employment.

Crises exacerbate this reality: the pandemic pushed many women out of employment and multiplied domestic violence; in disasters and conflicts, sexual violence and human trafficking rise sharply. State responses largely neglect the needs of women and gender dissidents and we see how easily LGBTIA+ rights can be taken back.

Oppression, Exploitation, and Violence

Capitalism combines labor exploitation with structural oppression. Because exploitation and oppression are interlinked, they cannot be separated into “primary” and “secondary” struggles. There can be no genuine liberation without abolishing the material basis of exploitation, but the fight against oppression is not a side issue. It begins here and now.

Capitalism fuses the exploitation of labor with structural forms of oppression, and overcoming exploitation is only possible if we also dismantle the divisions and fragmentations that oppression creates within the working class. Women, the LGBTQIA+ community, and migrants are overrepresented in precarious, informal, and underpaid jobs.

Unpaid reproductive and child-rearing labor underpins capitalist accumulation. Austerity and privatization erode rights, while workplace harassment, wage gaps, and repression of union organizing persist.

Patriarchal violence such as femicides, sexual assaults, state violence has its roots in the de-subjectification of women and the LGBTQIA+ community, reducing them to objects of

male domination. At the same time, oppression serves capitalist order. It denies access to healthcare, housing, and reproductive autonomy, and intensifies during crises, wars, and disasters. The state and its institutions reproduce this violence as a form of social control.

Climate Crisis, Wars, and Migration

Capitalist environmental destruction disproportionately affects women and marginalized communities, who are often responsible for reproductive, care, and child-rearing labor, and informal economies. Imperialist wars provoke mass displacement, sexual violence, and patriarchal militarization. From Gaza to Sudan, militarism profits from bloodshed and normalizes gender violence.

Forced migration due to war, climate crisis, or economic dispossession places migrant women at the intersection of labor exploitation and gender-based violence. Capital profits from their cheap labor while fostering xenophobia to divide the working class. Current migration flows are rooted in colonial histories and imperialist policies.

Racism and Colonialism

Capitalism was built on racism and colonialism, which continue to structure the global division of labor and social segregation. Gendered racism manifests through specific forms of violence, medical neglect, and economic exclusion, affecting Black, Indigenous, and racialized women especially—including queer and trans individuals.

Contemporary colonialism is perpetuated through debt, military occupation, and resource plundering. Women in colonized territories face hyper-exploitation, ecological devastation, and militarization. The far right has repackaged racist discourse in a “feminist” guise to justify Islamophobic and anti-immigrant policies, such as bans on the voluntary use of the veil.

LGBTQIA+ Community Today

In a context of polarization and the rise of the far right, the LGBTQIA+ movement faces a reactionary offensive aimed at rolling back the gains won in earlier progressive periods. This backlash relies on hate speech centered on attacking “wokeness,” using biologicist and religious arguments, as well as individualistic narratives that justify the dismantling of social policies. However, these rights were won through collective struggle—not by individual merit or the free market. The far-right measures deepen polarization and require from the movement a unity of action and a revolutionary policy that confronts conciliatory leaderships, which failures paved the way for the current attacks.

In the face of the Zionist hypocrisy of the State of Israel, which uses “pinkwashing” (a propaganda strategy by the Israeli government that cynically exploits LGBTQIA+ rights to project a progressive image while concealing Israel’s occupation and apartheid policies that oppress the Palestinian people), we must strongly raise within the LGBTQIA+ movement an anti-Zionist and anti-imperialist policy. No people can fight for the democratic freedoms that the LGBTQIA+ movement demands without first getting rid of the Zionist beast.

At the same time, we denounce the complicit role of Arab bourgeoisies that abandon the Palestinian people and subject their own populations to renewed fundamentalist oppressions in order to maintain authoritarian regimes that are enemies of workers, women, and LGBTQIA+ people.

In Africa, in the Sahel countries currently experiencing a renewed anti-imperialist upsurge, we draw strength from the shared hatred of colonial relations to demand the protagonism of the working class and its own organizations, against the Bonapartist concentration of power in certain leaders. Women and LGBTQIA+ people will not postpone our demands—we demand the uprooting of the entire old colonial society and its structures of gender and ethnic oppression. We want to be the protagonists of our own liberation.

In countries governed by authoritarian leaders who claim to be leftist or anti-imperialist, our intervention in the women’s and LGBTIQ+ movements is essential to combat the suffocation of all autonomous expression by those regimes and to prevent activism from falling under the influence of pro-imperialist currents.

Revolutionary Marxism, Feminism, and the Fight Against Gender Oppression

Revolutionary Marxists must take a categorical stance against all forms of gender and sexual oppression, defending the right to self-determination of women and LGBTQIA+ people. It is essential to confront both reactionary and religious sectors that reduce women to mere reproductive instruments, as well as “progressive” sectors that strip civil rights struggles of their content by separating them from class struggle and a truly transformative perspective.

We must fight against reformist policies that redirect struggles into institutional frameworks without challenging the established order, as well as currents that weaken working-class unity. As revolutionaries, we support struggles for reforms that improve the living conditions of the working class and oppressed. However, we are equally clear that reforms in themselves cannot abolish exploitation or oppression. This is why we insist on linking every partial struggle to the broader fight against the capitalist system. And we fight radical feminism, which focuses on men as the main enemy; identity politics, which fragments the movement by placing difference above collective action; autonomous feminism, which sidelines the strategic role of the workers’ movement in social transformation; and bourgeois feminism, which promotes individual advancement within the capitalist system, the “girl boss” logic while leaving intact the structures of exploitation and oppression.

In the face of the global advance of reactionary forces, mass responses will not be long in coming. But the real impact of these mobilizations will depend on the level of organization and political clarity built by the radicalizing vanguard. In this context, revolutionaries have an urgent task: to build a force capable of mobilizing thousands of activists, youth, and working- class sectors with the will to fight, one that is committed to a revolutionary project to intervene in future class battles and pave the way for a political tool of the working class that raises the banner of socialism.

We know that under patriarchal capitalism, the rights won by women and sexual dissidents will always be partial and vulnerable. The only definitive solution is the profound transformation of this society. As Trotsky affirmed, the true emancipation of women will only be possible with a general elevation of living standards and culture, and with the socialization of domestic and care work, which today falls mainly on their shoulders.

The fight against gender oppression cannot be reduced to representation or legal equality: it must address the material bases of exploitation, such as the feminization of poverty, the commodification of care, and wage inequality, recognizing that race, migration, age, or disability mediate overexploitation, especially in the Global South. The struggle against patriarchy requires the destruction of the capitalist system.

Strategic Principles and Methods:

●Historical Materialism: Analyze gender as a social relation linked to the organization of capitalist reproduction and production. But also the structural foundations of multiple forms of oppression and discrimination in class societies.

●Social Reproduction: Collectivize and socialize childcare, elder care, and domestic tasks. On all hands in society, not only the private sphere of family!

●LGBTQIA+ Liberation: Gender self-determination is non-negotiable and part of the class struggle.

●Abolition of the Patriarchal Family: Promote collective forms of care and communal life.

●Work in Feminized Sectors: Organize domestic workers, garment workers, caregivers,

teachers, and nurses.

●Revolutionary feminist Internationalism: Women’s oppression, LGBTQIA+ discrimination, racism, and other forms of structural oppression exist worldwide because of the imperialist system we live under. Our fight must therefore be international. Internationalism is the basis of our analysis and the foundation that connects our struggles across borders. But such struggles will only be successful when guided by a revolutionary socialist program that aims to abolish both exploitation and oppression on a global scale.

Progressivism and Bourgeois Feminism

Many progressives promote an agenda that fragments social struggles and turns the legitimate demands of women and LGBTQIA+ people into superficial reforms that do not affect the capitalist structure. For example, allowing same-sex marriage but restricting adoption, or legalizing abortion without ensuring effective access, are examples of formal concessions that leave social hierarchies intact. These sectors are dominated by a bourgeois feminism that promotes “equal opportunity” limited to upward mobility within the system, without questioning it.

Demarcation with Reformists and Reductionists

Reformists channel struggles into institutional paths that dilute their radical content and divert the energy of mass movements from their real goal: revolutionary transformation. At the same time, we must confront reductionist positions within the revolutionary camp itself, such as those held by Stalinist currents, which subsume the struggle of women and the LGBTQIA+ community into the economic struggle, denying its specificity and autonomy.

These positions fail to recognize that oppression and exploitation, though intertwined, are not the same, and that overcoming them requires specific and aware intervention from an anti-capitalist perspective.

Petty-Bourgeois Theories

Though they arose in response to the abandonment of these struggles by degenerated Marxism, several petty-bourgeois feminist currents present significant limitations:

●Identity Politics: Emerging to highlight the specific oppressions of marginalized groups, it ultimately fragments the struggle, abandoning a collective and unified class strategy. By giving political and organizational priority to differences of race, gender, sexual orientation, or migrant status, it leads to divisionism and thus weakens the struggles. Like radical feminists, these sectors are openly anti-revolutionary left.

●Feminism of Difference: Rooted in idealism, it reduces oppression to symbolic and ontological levels, abandoning materialist analysis. In some cases, it leads to reactionary positions, such as rejection of trans women (TERF/FART).

●Radical Feminism (Radfem): While recognizing patriarchy as an autonomous or parallel system to capitalism, many of its currents fall into separatism or the identification of men as the enemy, ignoring class mediation. Some current versions attempt to overcome separatism by incorporating critiques of capitalism through social reproduction perspectives. It is characterized by being anti-party and primarily anti-revolutionary left.

●Poststructuralism: Influenced by the thinking of Foucault and Butler, it argues that gender and sexuality are social constructions. It proposes the “deconstruction” of dominant narratives but limits its action to the cultural sphere, offering no revolutionary horizon.

●Intersectional Feminism: Hegemonic in many countries, it raises the interrelation of different oppressions (race, class, gender). However, in particular in its academic version, it dilutes the question of class. But in general, it downplays the fundamental social contraction between capital and labour by see capitalist exploitation as just another form of oppression amongst many. This is not fundamentally altered by authors like Bell Hooks and Angela Davis, even though they have tried to bring in some material dimension.

●Feminism of the 99%: Attempts to synthesize various currents (socialist, intersectional, identity feminism, etc.) under a critique of capitalism as a social system. Although it defines itself as anti-capitalist, it lacks a defined strategy and a transitional program, making it vulnerable to reformist deviations.

•Abolitionist Feminism: Emerging primarily in the US, it makes valuable contributions by exposing the role of the police, prisons, and the state in sustaining patriarchy, racism, and capitalism. Its emphasis on abolition connects directly to struggles against state violence and mass incarceration, especially affecting Black, migrant, and working-class women and LGBTQIA+ people. However, it tends to remain within an anarchistic horizon, rejecting the necessity of a revolutionary party and a clear strategy for the overthrow of capitalism. Its false method leads it to call for the abolition of institutions (like prisons, repressive apparatus of the bourgeois state), without challenging the capitalist relations of production, which necessarily bring about such institutions, therefore leading to utopianism, rather than scientific socialist. Like Feminism for the 99%, it often remains vague about how class consciousness can be built, limiting its potential to a moral critique of oppression rather than a program for revolutionary transformation.

The Role of Stalinism in the Struggle of Women and Gender Dissidents

The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 opened an unprecedented period of achievements for women and LGBTQIA+ people: legal abortion, free divorce, civil equality, decriminalization of homosexuality, the creation of the Zhenotdel (a women’s department), and the partial socialization of domestic tasks. These transformations were possible because, from its origins, revolutionary Marxist feminism unequivocally united the class struggle with the demands of women and all oppressed sectors, breaking with bourgeois feminism and breaking with bourgeois feminism, and fighting inside revolutionary party to confront patriarchy at its material roots. Lenin expressed this clearly: “We absolutely must create a powerful international women’s movement, founded on a clear and precise theoretical basis.”

While the material conditions in the early Soviet Union made the socialization of housework difficult, the Stalinist bureaucracy carried out a true counterrevolution in terms of gender. It dissolved the Zhenotdel, criminalized homosexuality, penalized abortion, and reinstated the figure of the “heroic mother” as the feminine ideal. As Trotsky described, the bureaucracy “began to sing hymns to the family dinner and the family laundry, that is, to the domestic slavery of women.” This policy wiped out fundamental gains and reinstated patriarchal oppression, weakening the link between the working class and oppressed sectors, and fueling the development of separatist and petty-bourgeois feminist theories. The previous experience, with figures like Clara Zetkin and Rosa Luxemburg, had shown the opposite path: organizing working-class women within the labor movement, in a common struggle against capitalism. Zetkin clearly differentiated the Frauenbewegung (bourgeois cross-class movement) from the Arbeiterinnenbewegung (working women’s movement), arguing that “it is not women’s work itself that lowers wages, but the exploitation of that work by the capitalists who appropriate it.”

Stalinism, by breaking the “virtuous marriage” between class struggle and the fight against gender oppression, caused a historic setback that conditioned the development of the women’s movement for decades, both in the USSR and internationally. However, even in the postwar period, revolutionary Marxists like Evelyn Reed and Clara Fraser resumed this tradition, defending the inseparable articulation between the struggle against all oppressions and the anti-capitalist struggle.

The lesson is clear: the real emancipation of women and LGBTQIA+ community is only possible within the framework of the revolutionary struggle against capitalism, and requires a total break with the distortions, methods, and misogynistic policies of Stalinism. Only revolutionary Marxist feminism, as developed by Trotskyism, offers a program capable of simultaneously confronting patriarchy and class exploitation to advance toward the only society where we can be free: communism.

Toward a Revolutionary, Internationalist and Communist Strategy

Overcoming gender and sexual oppression requires a socialist, revolutionary, and anti- capitalist strategy that recognizes the specificity of these struggles, integrates them with the class struggle, and orients them toward the structural transformation of society. The struggles of women and LGBTQIA+ people are not secondary—they are indispensable for socialist revolution.

This means fighting simultaneously against the capitalist system, patriarchy, racism, colonialism, heteronormativity, and all forms of structural oppression, with a perspective that links immediate demands to a transitional program toward a society free from exploitation and domination.

That struggle is synthesized and organized through the construction of the revolutionary party and the international, which are the only means of achieving and defending these rights. This is the guiding axis of revolutionary feminism and the LGBTQIA+ community, without which everything else is limited and abstract. Reformist or petty-bourgeois currents are destined either to fail or to betray the feminist and LGBTQIA+ movement. There is no possibility of defeating patriarchy without defeating the capitalist system. And at the same time, there is no possibility of destroying this system of oppression, violence, and exploitation without a party organized nationally and internationally under a revolutionary and socialist program and theory. This is a fundamental debate we have with much of the feminist and LGBTQIA+ movement, and we must take it up with all our militant strength in order to bring the best elements of the vanguard who mobilize and act on these fronts into the ranks of the party and the revolution. In revolutionary parties, the organizations debate and define policies and guidelines for intervening in reality. Committees or commissions are also established to exchange opinions, make contributions, and enrich the policies voted on by the organizations.

The sexist and LGBTQIA+phobic patriarchy must be destroyed. With socialism, this historical task will begin, but its total defeat will only be possible with the complete overcoming of relations of oppression—that is, with communism. That is why, even after the seizure of power by the working class and the establishment of socialism, we will continue to wage a determined battle against patriarchy. Our feminist policy and program must be present throughout the entire revolutionary socialist process.

A constant task within our parties and the International

We will not be able to achieve a society in which all human beings are equal without showing determination to overcome sexual inequality within our own movements. We support the right of women within the labour movement and trade unions to meet independently in order to identify and challenge discrimination, and their right to proportional representation in leadership structures. We also support the right to establish commissions or action fronts within revolutionary parties, within the framework of democratic centralism functioning.

The difference between a Stalinist view and a Trotskyist-Bolshevik perspective on intervention among women and the particularly oppressed lies in the fact that, for the latter, this intervention is the task of the whole party, but also requires specific tools—just as gender oppression is specific. Stalinism abandoned these instruments. The struggle against patriarchy, cisheterosexism and capitalism must be coordinated within a revolutionary strategy with the aim of overthrowing the current social order and building socialism. That is why it is necessary to create special commissions—at the local, national and international levels— to intervene in women’s movements and those of people oppressed due to gender, sexuality, racialisation or disability. This is not liberal feminism or identitarianism, but a concrete revolutionary policy, which assumes that the emancipation of women and the particularly oppressed is not a by-product of communism, but an essential tool for its construction.

Our Programme

Against exploitation, for equal pay and rights! All over the world, women are paid less than men for the same work, or are pushed into more precarious and underpaid jobs that increase their economic dependence on families and partners. LGBTQIA+ people face similar forms of exclusion and marginalization in the labour market. Real emancipation cannot come from welfare measures that reinforce dependency and subordination, but from economic independence, access to decent work, and the recovery of labour rights. That is why we fight for equal rights wherever they are denied, and for equal working conditions for all. The struggle against gender oppression must be inseparable from the class struggle, confronting the fragmentation imposed by capital and its union bureaucracies. Only by taking control over our own living and working conditions can the working class open the road to a socialist transformation of society.

We demand:

●We are not less! Equal rights and equal pay for women and LGBTQIA+ people. Repeal all counter-reforms that rolled back rights.

●Work less, work all. Reduction of working hours without wage cuts, to create more jobs and redistribute labour.

●End economic dependency and poverty in old age. A national minimum income, automatically adjusted to inflation, guaranteed for everyone, administered under the control of workers’ organisations. – Instead of homemakers.

●Abolish forced labour and precarious work. End slavery, informal work and exploitation through public works programs that provide full-time jobs with decent wages.

●Full protection for parents. Protection for pregnant workers, exemption from physically demanding work, guaranteed job security upon return, and equal paternity leave to ensure shared responsibility in childcare.

●No tolerance for abuse in the workplace. End harassment, blackmail, and sexual violence at work through worker-run, self-managed committees. Trade unions must lead broad campaigns in schools, universities, and workplaces on consent and against sexism.

●Socialisation of reproductive, care, and child-rearing labor. It means that all reproductive tasks as raising children, caring for sick relatives, cooking or housework are organized by the whole society and stopped being pushed into the private sphere (family), where we women often have to take on the extra work.

●End women’s dual burden through the socialisation of domestic labour: For free 24- hour childcare and a massive expansion of cheap, quality public canteens, communal kitchens, restaurants and laundries under workers’ control!

No More Forms of Male Chauvinism and LGBTQIA+-Phobic Violence

Reshaping this section to better categorize: Violence against women and LGBTQIA+ people is not an exception but a structural expression of the patriarchal capitalist system, which takes many forms. Femicides, travesticides, sexual, domestic, and institutional violence all stem from the logic of ownership and domination embedded in capitalist society, where relationships are shaped by power, control, and commodification.

The statistics on murders, rapes, and harassment are overwhelming and normalized just like workplace deaths. Both are symptoms of a social order that treats as disposable those lives that do not fit its logic of production and reproduction. Liberal democracies, authoritarian regimes, and reactionary religions alike uphold this system of domination, systematically attacking sexual and reproductive rights while reinforcing narratives that perpetuate violence and exclusion. Travesticides, conversion therapies, harassment in schools and workplaces, and state and religious repression all reflect the same matrix of patriarchal, LGBTQIA+phobic, and capitalist oppression.

We demand:

•Public budgets to address the emergency of gender-based violence, no cuts to social services.

•Funding for anti-violence centers and shelters for abused women, under the independent control of women themselves, not religious entities. Secure funding for survivors’ social and labour reintegration.

•No to laws that either force or forbid women to wear religious clothing. Women must have the legal right to dress as they choose. Abolish all anti-LGBTQIA+ laws and guarantee gender self-determination.

Sexual harassment and violence still shape our daily lives. Despite the myth that “strangers are the danger,” most violence is committed by men known to the victims. Women are still treated as property within the nuclear family which is the ideological pillar of capitalism and LGBTQIA+ people face physical, sexual, symbolic, and economic violence both within families and across society.

We demand:

•End parental authority (patria potestad), child marriage, dowry, and all patriarchal legal practices.

•Comprehensive contact points for reporting sexual violence and free, immediate psychological support on request.

•End obstruction of complaints: instead of police commissions, investigations must be overseen by committees of trade unions and representatives of survivors, with full access to police resources. Ban interrogations that blame victims for their clothing or behaviour.

•Free legal aid and coverage of legal costs for victims, as well as long-term social support, financed by the state. Paid leave and a minimum income indexed to inflation for survivors.

•Immediate removal of violent men from the home. Free legal assistance and protected pathways for victims to escape violence. Expansion of rehabilitation programs for perpetrators.

The brutal realities of prostitution, trafficking, and the porn industry also expose capitalism’s destructive logic. On one hand, more and more especially women are forced to survive through sex work; on the other, human relations are commodified, producing distorted and exploitative images. This does not mean criminalizing sex work. We fight instead for workers’ rights, social exit paths, and a world where sexuality is truly free.

We demand:

•Ban pimping and trafficking; confiscate the assets and profits, and put sex workers in control of their working conditions.

•Free health checks and contraceptives. Funded programs for voluntary exit from prostitution through education, training, and socially useful jobs, paid for by corporate profits.

•Unionization of sex workers.

•Workers’ control and veto rights over discriminatory pornography and sexist advertising.

Faced with this barbarism, legal reforms and cultural change are not enough. We must dismantle the patriarchal, heteronormative family as the system’s ideological cornerstone, socialize care work, and secure real self-determination over our bodies and desires. Only a socialist revolution—abolishing private property and planning the economy for human need, not profit—can create a society free from gender and sexual oppression.

We demand:

•Worker-run self-managed organizations to fight workplace violence.

•A guaranteed path for survivors of hetero-cis-patriarchal violence, rejecting mandatory reporting.

•End femicides through proletarian, anti-patriarchal self-organization.

•Comprehensive education on gender, sexuality, consent, and disability rights, organized by trade unions and women’s organizations in schools, universities, and workplaces.

Against all gender-based and LGBTQIA+ violence in situations of war, migration, and climate crisis. For a socialist, anti-imperialist, antiracist, and anticolonial feminism

Imperialist wars devastate populations for the benefit of global capital. Women and LGBTQIA+ people are targets of sexual violence, forced displacement, and militarized repression. War economies normalize gender-based violence, destroy social life, and reinforce authoritarianism. From Gaza to Ukraine, from Sudan to Yemen, capitalist states and arms industries profit from bloodshed. Patriarchal militarism silences diversity and mobilizes masculinity as a tool of control.

Our party opposes any attempt to divide the working class through racist border policies, cultural nationalism, or labor segmentation. Migrant workers must be active agents in building revolutionary politics.

Indigenous, peasant, and working-class women are organizing against mining, deforestation, and water privatization. Their ecological knowledge and organizing capacity are indispensable.

The capitalist exploitation and oppression of women and LGBTQIA+ people intensifies when they also suffer from racist and colonial oppression. Black, Indigenous, racialized women and those from colonized or semi-colonized countries face multiple oppression that places them in situations of hyper exploitation and violence articulated by capital/patriarchy/racism/colonialism.

We demand:

●Support for antimilitarist, feminist, and working-class resistance in war zones For democratically organised self-defense committees of the population, which also have access to weapons and democratically manage humanitarian aid supplies!

●No to imperialist wars, sanctions, and blockades. Down with all imperialist occupations such as Russia’s in Ukraine and previously in Chechnya, NATO powers’ occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq, Israel’s occupation of Palestine, and the U.S. blockade of Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela. We support resistance to all these occupations and blockades.

●Non-payment of public debts to financial institutions and international banks.

●No to Zionism, no to the genocidal Zionist pinkwashing and any other imperialist interventionist in the claim of democracy, women’s or LGBTIA+ rights!

●Redirect military budgets to care infrastructure, ecological recovery, and investment in education, housing, and healthcare for racialized communities

●Grant asylum and citizenship, open all borders, abolish all controls: Free Movement for everyone who seeks work or asylum, grant them full citizenship, welfare, housing, and labor rights to all fleeing dictatorships, brutal wars, oppression based on race, sex or gender identity, and poverty in their countries of origin

●Abolish all controls preventing the free movement of people seeking work and grant them full citizenship, welfare, housing, and labor rights

●Full rights to work, organize, and access services regardless of legal status

●Pathways to citizenship without cultural assimilation or economic conditions

●Cross-border joint organization between migrant and local workers

●Universal labor protection for migrant workers, including union rights

●Inclusion of migrants in social policy, decision-making, and housing programs

●Multilingual public services designed to meet migrants’ needs

●A just ecological transition led by frontline communities. Protection of Indigenous ecological governance

●Nationalization of extractive industries and fossil fuels under workers’ control

●Ecosocialist production focused on community needs, not profit

●Reparations for slavery, colonialism, and structural racism. Redistribution of wealth looted through colonialism

●Abolition of racist police forces and prison institutions. Establishment of a workers’ militia under the direct control of workers’ councils.

●Antiracist political education integrated at all levels of the socialist movement

●Self-determination for colonized nations and Indigenous peoples

Against reactionary and conservative attacks from the far right:

The far right and fascists have a systematic policy of attacking the democratic rights that have been won, and with conservative and reactionary discourses and policies, they attack the rights of women and LGBTQIA+ people. Therefore, at this stage, our program must include slogans that respond to these attacks and express our policy to confront and defeat this reactionary offensive.

We demand:

●The abolition of civil and family codes divided on religious grounds. For a single, secular code in all countries.

●Full rights for LGBTQIA+ people, including legal rights to civil union and marriage.

●The right of LGBTQIA+ people to raise children.

●The abolition of all laws that pathologize LGBTQIA+ people and the establishment of protected, free, and guaranteed pathways for self-determination.

●No prohibition on educating people about their sexual orientation. No interference in the sexual lives of consenting adults. For the free expression of all forms of sexuality and relationships.

●The abolition of female genital mutilation and patriarchal violence practices against women’s bodies.

For the right to decide over our bodies and lives. For comprehensive public health policies:

The imposition of mandatory motherhood is directly linked to the maintenance of private property, turning people with uteruses into reproduction instruments and overloading them with invisible and unpaid care work that sustains the capitalist system. We defend abortion as a matter of public health, reproductive justice, and human rights.

The criminalization of abortion is a form of violence and mainly affects working-class black, indigenous, migrant, and poor women, depriving them of autonomy over their lives. We also fight so that the legalization of abortion does not benefit the bourgeoisie, which profits from health privatization, but that it be a universal right, guaranteed by a public system accessible to all people.

We demand:

●Legal, safe, free, voluntary, and public health system abortion.

●Universal sexual and reproductive health, with a gender and sexual diversity perspective.

●Humanized childbirth. Fight against obstetric and misogynistic violence in women’s medical care.

●Free, accessible, and guaranteed contraception.

●Effective support for motherhood through the socialization of care tasks and adequate facilities to support mothers.

●The abolition of all laws that hinder the decisions of women and LGBTQIA+ people over their bodies.

●The expulsion of religious institutions and practices from health counseling centers and hospitals.

●Public policies to meet the demands of women and dissidents in old age.

States separated from all religious foundations:

The institutions and legislation of the bourgeois State aim to guarantee exploitation and patriarchal oppression, with misogynistic, homophobic, and transphobic characteristics that are constitutive of it. The Catholic Church, as well as others, has a direct relationship with the State, which is its main financer. Churches have the power to act within the State by exercising patriarchal oppression over women and LGBTQIA+ community.

We demand:

●The abolition of all state funding to religious organizations, in any form.

●For a true Comprehensive Sexual Education, scientific and without clerical interference.

●No to violence of reactionary and religious fundamentalism: abolition of the law veil and all segregationist laws in theocratic countries, freedom of choice for women.

●Abolition of civil and family codes divided according to religious identity. For a single secular code in all countries.

●Equality of rights for same-sex families, full recognition of the rights of children and families for all, right to adoption for same-sex families.

Trade Unions

Trade unions are one of the most important expressions of the working-class movement – but they are often not democratically structured. Especially in imperialist countries, we must fight against the trade union bureaucracy, which frequently upholds politics of class collaboration. In doing so, it reproduces racism, sexism, and other divisions within our class. That is why, wherever possible, we fight for their democratization – including the election and recallability of officials at any time, and strike leadership being directly accountable to the strikers themselves.

We demand:

●For the right to separate meetings and structures for socially oppressed groups – women, young people, migrants, gays, lesbians, trans and non-binary people, and people with mental health issues – without any paternalism from the apparatus! For the active struggle to organize these groups and against all racist, sexist, or homophobic discrimination!

●For the right of members of a particular industry to organize themselves into specialist structures! This includes organizing campaigns in sectors with low union membership (such as precarious workers, employees in service and high-tech industries, and women). It also means actively organizing the unemployed and oppressed with full membership rights in trade unions!

For the worldwide socialist revolution

Revolutionary Marxist feminism and LGBTQIA+ movements operate among women and LGBTQIA+ people by linking their liberation with the overthrow of bourgeois society, in all countries and on a global scale. Only the overthrow of bourgeois society can free women and LGBTQIA+ people, particularly oppressed by capitalist exploitation, family labor oppression and care tasks (socialization of domestic work), and the thousand legacies of patriarchal tradition. Hence their main social reference: the working class in general, the peoples oppressed by imperialism, and particularly the female proletariat and the mass of oppressed women. Both in imperialist and dependent countries.

Our strategic objective is a world without exploitation, without oppression, and without national borders—a communist world. We fight for the government of the working class. We struggle to build an international organization that will be the tool to defeat capitalism and build a socialist feminist and diverse society. Our horizon is a multiethnic, internationalist working-class women’s and LGBTQIA+ movement, rooted in unity with the broader struggles of the working class as a whole. Our liberation will be achieved together, as part of the collective emancipation of humanity.

Long live the socialist feminist and LGBTQIA+ revolution!

Long live proletarian internationalism!

Long live the international socialist revolution!

Adopted by the III World Congress of the ISL