On the project of a Marxist-feminist international: a project in movement

Good afternoon, Professor Frigga Haug, many thanks for engaging in conversation with us. You are the very dear and well-known German philosopher who wrote the first version of the 13 Theses. Why do we have a Manifesto titled 13 Theses of Marxist feminism?

Our project of summoning Marxist-feminist women internationally will be 9 years old this year (2024). It was clear right from the start that we needed common grounds, a programme or a manifesto, which laid down and passed on what united us, which was at the same time binding for the initiative while it had still to be worked out together, i.e., something that came about as we were walking. In the process, we needed to take down what united us and also what we still needed to discuss further so that we would not lose our footing in the turmoil of events. At the same time, our connection needed to be strong enough to prevail during storms to be expected while it also had to be open enough to keep track of the many changes in society so as to be a real force within numerous upheavals, to represent a voice bearing weight. But already when we discussed the title of this text (on Marxist feminist theses), there was discord and irritation. Should we call it a manifesto, which was its intended content or rather opt for a humbler name? Since a combination of both the references of our great project, Marxist thought on the one, feminist partisanship on the other hand, was new and, at the same time, could build on respective traditions, it was obvious that we had to write a manifesto, with the proximity to the ‘Communist Manifesto’ being simultaneously desired, intended and avoided.

Eventually, in the face of the manifold crises and developments, steps forward and throwbacks, calling it a manifesto seemed both too extravagant a name and pointing in the wrong direction especially with regard to defeats and pessimism. We neither wanted to bear the burden of the Communist movement nor pay its debts. Basically, we wanted to emphatically ‘inscribe’ women, the female sex, into a history of struggles for liberation, thereby making use of Marxist theory as the heir to the Enlightenment and at the same time enliven, enrich and critically expand it through feminist dissent. Our claim is a great one: the goal must be contained in the path and can, at the same time only be achieved in the walking. We wanted difficult things on untrodden paths while holding on to what we had achieved in order to continue.

What is the link between the 13 Theses of Marxist feminism and the International Marxist feminist Conferences?

Nine years ago, in the face of the crises of capitalism, in which the safety valves were unscrewed so that each crisis came to affect our everyday lives and our ways of living more strongly in the precarious planning of which women were stuck in increasing isolation and burdened with double duties, I called together the Marxists among the feminists whom I knew from the movement of the 1970s from events, trips, guest professorships to collectively deliberate the situation. It was high time that the Marxist-feminist forces came together on a global stage just as capitalism and its crises had become global. In short, time was ripe for a Marxist-feminist International.

Within only one week, forty women from all parts of the world responded to my first circular letter, with thirty-four offering contributions to the congress envisaged. This first congress took place in Berlin from March 22nd to 25th, 2015, with more than 500 women from twenty countries taking part. The institutional framework for this was the Institut für kritische Theorie in Berlin, which served to highlight the scientific character of our initiative and its independence from any party. This was essential. The Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung provided the financial support and the space in which the event was held. This was also crucial. That only 500 of those who very soon registered could be sent confirmations did not contain the onrush – for days the rooms and corridors, the stairs and internal courtyard of the Neues Deutschland building overflowed with life. In this way the participants went part of the way toward the goal of not simply connecting Marxism and feminism – but making the feminist movement sustainable with a Marxist spirit and bringing Marxism to life in the first place. The event, with 27 presentations, altogether 34 interventions from 20 countries, is documented in the Argument publication. ¹

Keeping our history alive in this way is indispensable if we are to sustain. The topics at that time, none of which have lost their relevance today, were: violence against women, intersectionality, women and revolution, the care revolution, gender relations as relations of production, a Marxist refounding of feminism, a critique of the neoliberal adaptation of feminism, standpoint theory, learning from our mistakes, nature, crisis, and domination, and also country reports on the state of the movement.

To have this International not as a singular event but, at the same time, to anchor it for the future, I wrote 12 Theses for the concluding plenary which I had distilled as a consensus from the thirty-four speeches. In a process of discussion at the Berlin plenary, in which the voices of many women were heard, modifications, improvements and expansions were demanded and finally I wrote down a new version. There was no dissent at all on the question whether this congress should be continued.

The issues debated in the first congress were changed, or further developed, in the second International Marxist feminist Congress. And how did this affect the broadening of the Theses?

The Austrian group jumped in and organised the second conference. Here we have to make special mention of the organisational energy of Heidi Ambrosch and her group around Transform! Europe. There are always individuals who grasp those things whose time has come and intervene where there is most need. So, the follow-up congress took place in Vienna in 2016, with, again, more than 500 women from thirty countries taking part. ² What was new and wonderfully different was the occupation of a part of the old city centre of Vienna with its democratic spirit that was felt in the very architecture of the building we used. Once again, the space overflowed. But the discussion was different, less oriented to excited connection and commonality and more to boundaries and the struggle for every position, also in the manner of speaking. What had happened that these differences – which in Berlin the spirit of the women’s movement was able transfiguratively to put aside – now erupted, as if the individual women, who already had group affiliation when they arrived, had to fight for dominance rather than against the reign of a patriarchal capitalism?

With wise foresight we had established, through a set of common theses, what the foundation of a Marxist-feminist international ought to be and done so sustainable enough for them to stand the test through the specific changed conditions of our historically determined spaces of movement, and flexible enough that they would not harden into chains. The intention was to re-examine these theses at each (hopefully) biennial meeting, if necessary to improve them, and to fill them with our life in such a way that they become usable.

In the meanwhile, taking after the history of the labour movement, we renamed our organisation the Marxist-feminist International, a move that, disturbingly, met with little excitement, probably due to the quite different circumstances under which the host group was fighting for its survival. Also, the Theses had to be elaborated on and improved in a further discussion so as to be passed on to the next conference. Merely the name, if they were a Marxist-Feminist manifesto, or just my theses, was left undecided. They could not be published, but were distributed, translated and used by individual women’s groups. This was the main point, after all.

So, at the Vienna conference, the Theses were again discussed and modified, and again we failed to publish our arguments in a way that would allow them to be passed on, at least temporarily, like good concepts. At this conference a further 13th thesis was added, which emerged from the discussion about the third conference.

So, how did the third conference contribute to the development of the 13 Theses as we know them today?

Under pressure of necessity, to not let what has been started fall apart, in the knowledge that historically there will be no more opportunity for a refounding, the Swedish women organised the third conference in the small university town of Lund, whose format and lecture-hall atmosphere could hardly justify the designation ‘congress’. However, as regards the content of this conference, and despite the divergent currents, we agreed on the general object, namely, that the fusion of Marxist thinking, as the most advanced inheritance of the Enlightenment, with the women’s movement, whose demand for liberation could not be satisfied by the labour movement alone, was essential to think on emancipation. Accordingly, we continue to study the forces of production as what drives social formation and its collision with the relations of production that form it. I argued that they have developed within capitalist relations of production in such a way that within the latter’s fetters they cannot develop their societal quality to the benefit of all; instead social wealth is deployed privately and destructively as if, for example, the development of communication networks, as Mark Zuckerberg has achieved with Facebook, is nothing else but an opportunity for the general banalisation of human relations, a frozen movement, a mere mockery of the socialist hopes for the multi-faceted development of human potential, including in its personalities.

The climate crisis was also central in the third conference and pointed to another asynchronism in the ungovernable relations of humans to nature. People behave like bad proprietors of the earth, a perspective that Marx, in his few predictions, expressly excluded. As nature’s temporary possessors, he warned, we have to leave it to the next generations in an improved state. The way of dealing with natural resources, the capitalist mode of production, with its competition over extraction without regard for the natural limits of the conditions of life on earth results in an unpayable debt that is being left to future generations.

We also agreed the Theses should be the building blocks for our manifesto as Marxist feminists. They are a piece of luggage, always put up for discussion in the big forums in changing contexts, in order to be used. They are a working tool and at the same time a reassurance of who we are and where we want to go.

In the fourth international conference, you achieved to bring together hundreds of young feminists from many countries. It has been the conference with the largest number of attendees, despite adverse conditions such as a worldwide pandemic. Why do you think it had such repercussion?

The fourth conference took place in 2021 in a modified online format as Zoom-events, organised by the women of Bilbao, both by the BIBA team (Bilbo-Barcelona Critical theory group) and Iratzar Foundation led by Elena Beloki. And, yes, this time, we were more than 700 women and has been the most widely known conference reaching to the five continents with a special focus on the Global South. Diverse entities such as the Berliner Institut für Kritische Theorie and Nico Poulantzas Institute took part and many young women organizations such as the Latin-American Pan y Rosas from Chile and Argentina, the Mexican women, the Andalusian feminist unions, the national liberation movements of Europe, the Chinese, Afghan, and Iranian women. I am happily shocked by the potential and organizational capability of Basque feminists and want to thank Jule Goikoetxea for her clarity, and efficacy at all levels. I think this organizational and communicative capability is one of the reasons of the success of this fourth conference. On the other hand, the pandemic has shed light on what are the paramount factors when speaking about human survival and well-being, and all those factors are realized by women workers. So, there were a lot of women who wanted to speak from such divergent conditions that diversity was probably one of the main characteristics, and yet, most of the panels confirmed the necessity to think on Marxist feminism from intersectional, decolonial, postcolonial and communitarian ecofeminism to understand the workings of current patriarchal capitalism.

Considering there were a lot of participants, from a lot of countries, how did you organize the debate on the 13 Theses?

One of the main round-tables was dedicated to discuss the 13 Theses. The panel was carried out in four languages and some of the themes discussed will be at last published. The Theses are a collective process and, in themselves, just a beginning. The fact that they were changed in a polyphonic discussion in the conferences has the disadvantage that they are no longer structured systematically and chronologically. Yet, it has the advantage that their character of belonging to a movement appears more clearly. The number of Theses has changed along the making of the final version and the latest version is this one (see Goikoetxea & Clua-Losada 2024).

The start in the first conference in Berlin in 2015 was overwhelming in terms of the number and diversity of women who had come, their commitment, their willingness to listen and to speak up themselves – it seemed all the easier to capture what we had achieved by giving ourselves a big name. But precisely because our project was understood by many, calling it a manifesto was not open enough to new ideas. Therefore, we decided to counter the suspicion that we were trying to repeat old mistakes by leaving the naming unresolved for the time being. We called our new connectedness Our Theses and numbered them one by one intending to regularly update them and so improve their durability. This numbering was important so that everyone could refer to the same thing in the discussion, yet it also proved to be a new problem when additions were made which had been dealt with elsewhere or when gaps became apparent which required new additions. So, you become unhappy when you take an older version of the theses and fail to find what you had hoped for, because it now appears under different number or has been deleted altogether. But even that is no problem as long as the spirit of the whole is passed on in a comprehensible manner. Thus, we had 20 Theses after our meeting in Vienna – the place with the most heated discussions – but after Lund (Sweden) and Bilbao (Basque Country) we speak only of 13 Theses. We trust each other that the most recently agreed version is the one which was passed on in trust to the meeting in the next city, Warsaw, in Poland (2023). These, in the truest sense of the word, are Theses in motion.

Now, thanks for such a detailed explanation of how the Theses have been proposed and debated, could you tell us a little bit more about the content and genealogy of each thesis?

First, let me dwell shortly on the first 10 Theses and how they were changed already during the debate in the congress of Vienna in 2016. It is in the last session of the first congress in 2015 that I presented 14 Theses for discussion. These were not only my own suggestion, the result of my forty years of work on the women’s question, but compiled by me from the thirty-four lectures at the congress insofar as they were available in writing, and from the discussions in the workshops insofar as I was able to follow them. I had originally suggested to author a common manifesto for our self-understanding as feminist Marxists. This met with so much resistance that we left it at the Theses some of which were so self-evident, that they could be accepted without further discussion, while others were hotly debated.

Theses 1 and 2 started out with an attempt of determining Marxism-Feminism which is in itself provocative and requires consensus. The connection has to be made, a process in which both Marxism and feminism undergo a change. As far as I remember there was only one voice opting for a feminism without Marxism, which was somewhat strange in an event dedicated to the refoundation of exactly this connection and thus remained completely without an echo. There was dissent about the consequences for the revitalisation of Marxism if the focus of the analysis was put equally on those activities traditionally reserved for women, mostly unpaid and mostly taking place in the domestic sphere, and on gainful employment, around which the labour movement was founded.

In short, it begins with the question of the relationship between class and gender. This discussion remains open – it is partly documented by the objection of Martha Gimenez in the book Wege des Marxismus-Feminismus (Das Argumentbuch 314, Berlin-Hamburg 2015) and deserves further consideration.

Equally controversial was the solution offered in Thesis 3 to focus in Marx and Engels towards the two productions, of life and the means of life, and from there to historically and concretely, study the conditions of how humans organise and produce their lives in these double relations of domination. Thus, the comprehensive research question in Thesis 4, that gender relations are relations of production remains a further task to be tackled (for the latest version of the Theses, see Goikoetxea & Clua-Losada 2024).

Thesis 5 sought to determine the position of Marxism and, hence, of Marxism-Feminism, within the sciences of capitalist societies, both seen as resistance to the dominant science of legitimation. It is oriented towards self-empowerment or acting from below which (since Brexit in Europe and other referenda such as the one on Stuttgart 21 in Germany and the elections of the year 2021, in which the party ‘Die Linke’ fell below the 5% mark) has become a recognisably difficult and risky work. This was not discussed controversially.

Thesis 6 was actually a thesis which could provoke contradiction because it was the beginning of endowing women, feminist Marxists, with a historically legitimate task of liberation, that is, the reason proper why we come together at all. It is important to take a closer look at it and to make it a subject of discussion, because together we will find something that will last.

Theses 7 and 8 were both philosophically founded in Marx and in the border zones of ontology and anthropology, they seek an answer today to the age-old question: Who is man? Which prompts the question: Who are we as women in patriarchal relationships? As feminist Marxists, we always have to orient ourselves in different directions at the same time. The wording in Thesis 8 was particularly controversial and it was later excluded:

The human being has yet to come into being – this refers to all and historically also to the relationship of the sexes, who are still in the process of rising from the brutality of the animal world to the social-human. The savage forms of violence (against women), of brutalisation, readiness for war, etc. (on which Zillah Eisenstein focused) are to be seen as non-simultaneous horrors transferred or originating from ancient relations. For Marxist feminists this catching-up development is an integral part of their liberation struggle on both sides: for themselves to achieve their subject status and their rebelling against male-human underdevelopment.

We could agree that the assumption that the animal world was more brutal than the world of humans, that is, that there is a kind of higher development from animal to human in this respect, was not justifiable and even contradicts experience. That is why a reformulation was needed here which captures the thought that people, who are not guided by instinct, can use their reason, are therefore reason-controlled beings and that a different coexistence is possible. But the struggle against violence must remain as a dimension of the feminist struggle for liberation which is always one of the achievements of what we understand to be full humanity (this wording, too, remains difficult.)

Thesis 9 summarised in a nutshell how the Marxist legacy must be expanded and adapted according to today’s questions, insights and dangers in order to remain alive. Although this thesis formulated a tension with the labour movement, there was consensus and was afterwards converted into Thesis 7.

Thesis 10 was intended to gather the content of the several workshops on intersectionality, but results remained unsatisfactory. It was clear, though, that non-linear thinking was required and that this connection between race, class and gender had to be a major point on the agenda. In the latest version, it became Thesis 8 and the inclusion of intersectionality was more satisfactory.

Theses 11–14 formulated the various crises we are currently facing and responses so far.

Theses 14? I thought they were just thirteen.

In the current version, they became Theses 9–12. They were programmatically formulated in terms of a joint task and presented once and again in the conferences to encourage further discussion. Before going deeply into them, however, I will report what Thonette Myking (Norway) from the working group on the Theses writes in letters and as a summary:

What had been important again and again was the inner connection between organisational and structural questions on the one hand and content, i.e., theory and the praxis deducted from it of an international feminist-Marxist congress that is scheduled (for every other year) to last, on the other. It was not to be a conference among many others but one that founded an international movement and force. Agreeing on this goal also determines the content that is being argued about, that is, the topics of the conference, who the participants will be and who will help prepare the next one. Accordingly, six further theses were set up and formulated for future discussion.

Thesis 11 stated that in the upheavals since the crisis of Fordism, manifest in the series of crises of the rapidly globalised economy and driving people into more and more precarious conditions, women are among those that lose out, just as other ‘unequal’ ones (cultures, peoples, modes of production). This crisis of Fordism includes the dismantling of the welfare state, which in a globalised economy leaves the responsibility for life to women in unpaid domestic work or in low-paid wage work, as Thesis 12 declared. We can conceive of this as care crises, as a necessary consequence of a capitalist society, which in the shift of its economic centre to services gets into a profit squeeze, while it seizes on ever more barbaric forms of handling the crises through unequal creation of value levels (as Tove Soiland from Switzerland proposes). Here, I suggested to analyse the crises around life as the consequence of unequal time logics within hierarchically organised areas. As a politics I suggested the four-in-one perspective, ³ i.e. to let policy-making be led by the disposition of time, thereby not to adapt the areas to each other, but to free them from hierarchy through generalisation. Only when all are active in all areas is a liberated society possible. Accordingly, Thesis 13 (which is currently Thesis 11) proposed we need to move ‘life’ into the centre of our struggles and thus the struggles for collectively self-determined time.

All these Theses were discussed in the fourth Marxist-feminist conference in Bilbao. The following five Theses 14–20 are neither included in the current version nor in this Special Issue.

Wow. These are six theses more which are unknown. Could you please elaborate them?

Yes, I think it is worth to briefly comment on them.

Thesis 14 states that our struggles are directed against dominant power and are radically democratic – this requires politics from below. Resistance is situated culturally and temporally in different ways. But we are in union with Marx, to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, forsaken, despicable being. The latest involves what Thesis 15 states, namely it ties in with individuals’ diverse activities of resistance, in different spheres of society, to capitalism and patriarchy, religious fundamentalism, western sciences (called secular fundamentalism), castes, racism, sexism, heteronormativity, gender normativity and militarism. This assumption leads to Thesis 16 which emphasises the need for strong democratic practices and plural societies which include the protection of the natural environment and of life.

Thesis 17 aims at constructive conflict solving and claims the existence of contradictions as necessary in the development of consciousness. Special measures for positive conflict resolution should be sought and employed in order to avoid silencing, mechanisms of exclusion, ridicule, withholding information and harassment. Thesis 18 speaks thus of different forms of cooperation, while Thesis 19 promises the further development of the previous theses in order to mediate between theory and practice in such a way that the organisational method serves to develop our own democracy as initiative. This latter is again underlined in Thesis 20 both for individuals and for all movements.

At the end of Vienna’s plenary discussion in 2016, the demand was loudly voiced to include ‘war’ in our debates but also topics such as ‘the state and indigenous peoples’, ‘colonialism’ and the ‘concept of reproduction’. It was agreed to conduct a discussion on the Internet and set up a blog dealing with the Theses and their development, thus further developing participatory forms at the same time.

Were we, in Lund, at the third MarxFem Conference of 2018 in which these last theses were no longer passed on, more realistic, concrete, more down-to earth than in the hopes nourished in the years before? Conversely, we could also conclude that meanwhile the time for general Theses has passed and that we must become more specific. Accurate analyses of reality as a basis for our politics should take their place. This is the objective of this Special Issue where the reader will find both: specific analyses of reality which depart from the first 13 Theses. These analyses, together with the report about our project which we have shared and passed on so far, must determine the future of our initiative.

I hope the initiative goes on for many years, and hopefully decades. I really want to thank you for the time you have given us, for your work over these last years and for founding the Marxist feminist International. Thanks.

You are welcome. You are the future and so you have an enormous and interesting task ahead.