Breaking our chains in an age of catastrophe

A review of Breaking Our Chains: Women, Marxism and the Path to Liberation by Sarah Bates, Judy Cox and Sally Campbell (bookmarks, 2026), £10.00

“It’s the pussy-grabbers’ world—we just live in it,” quipped Marina Hyde back in February 2026.1 It is certainly easy to feel fatalistic about the rise of misogyny in society. The revelations surrounding the Epstein files give the term “predatory hegemony” a whole new meaning. It is a story of powerful men trading predominantly working-class women and girls like financial assets. For all the semblance of advancement and progress, capitalism is genetically laced with sexist ideas—and we have entered a period of regression.

The far right is on the forward march and has waged a war on women. Sexual abusers sit in positions of power. There has been a reassertion of the nuclear family and the traditional gender roles enshrined within it. Pro-natalist, anti-abortion policies have found their way into British politics, as manifested by James Orr’s arrival as Reform’s head of policy, a man who opposes abortion under any circumstances. Meanwhile, the war on “gender ideology” punishes anyone rebelling against this rigid and binary code of biological sex. This is the context in which Judy Cox, Sally Campbell and Sarah Bates wrote their new book Breaking Our Chains: Women, Marxism and the Path to Liberation.

It is also a book written after two and a half years of the Gaza genocide and amid Donald Trump’s imperialist adventurism. Understandably, international solidarity and the anti-war movement are a key focal point for Cox, Campbell and Bates. Although Trump has pursued a more unapologetic warmongering on account of his “divine right” to do so, women’s rights have routinely been wheeled out to legitimate war. The book’s chapter “Imperialist Feminism and Global Solidarity” unveils this chequered history of Western middle-class feminists and the unfortunate allegiances they made with imperialism. The illusions in liberal—or “girlboss”—feminism have been weakened over the past 20 years, particularly by the impact of bloody forever wars in the Middle East, but they have not vanished. Women’s safety and violence against women continue to be leveraged for racist and warmongering ends—and have become a key frontier of the far right. Breaking our Chains is a book that ultimately links the struggles against all forms of oppression, while reasserting the relevance of class in the fight and the enduring relevance of Karl Marx.

Of course, these ideas have come under intense pressure. As the authors argue, the feminist movement in the latter half of the 20th century often counterposed Marxism to women’s liberation. It was purported that Marxism lacked the tools to take up this question effectively—and that “socialism” in the Soviet Union and China demonstrated these limitations. This uneasy climate for the revolutionary socialist tradition was worsened by the erosion and dismantling of the working-class movement. This is why Breaking Our Chains is such a valuable intervention: although the tradition associated with this journal has preserved and strengthened the Marxist analysis of women’s oppression over the years, the book updates and revises previous works, adapting and synthesising them in the current age of catastrophe.2

In defence of Engels

The book makes an important defence of Frederick Engels against the charge, popular even within Marxist feminist currents, that his writings are outmoded. The authors maintain the relevance of his seminal work, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, insisting on its importance to understanding the roots and nature of women’s oppression. The anthropological evidence used by Engels has to be updated, but his method is robust. Moreover, rather than reflecting a deviation from Marx’s historical materialism, it is consistent with it.

Engels challenged the commonsense narrative that women’s oppression is innate or everlasting. Instead, he understood it as a phenomenon that emerged out of the rise of class society and became enshrined in the institution of the family. Engels unpicked the long and messy process through which women became severed from the productive forces and instead made to carry out the privatised reproduction of labour power in the home, something he insisted is akin to “domestic slavery”.3 The authors write:

For Engels, there was a “historic defeat” of the female sex because something fundamental changed in the economic base of society—we created ways to produce a surplus, not by nature’s bounty but by our own labour. Engels’s historical materialism was developed along with Marx and was a shared approach.4

Defeat does not represent an absolute and fatalistic turn here. The authors are right to interpret this quote as a polemical comment about a pivotal change in women’s lives, inextricably tethered to the changing mode of production. Critically, rather than Engels dismissing women’s agency and capacity to fight back, the theoretical thrust of Origin of the Family is a recognition that sexism is not inevitable but can be overcome.

The family, sex and gender

The family has evolved and exists in many forms. Yet, it remains a prominent form of societal organisation. The authors draw out that profit accumulation and care is a key contradiction within capitalism. Invoking Engels and Marx’s writings on Britain, the authors recount how the insatiable drive for profits necessitated the absorption of women and children into a rapidly growing industrial workforce. The high mortality rates and extremely low quality of life, however, put extreme pressure on the ability of the working-class family to survive. The long-term need for capitalism to be supplied with a healthy and skilled workforce had to be prioritised, explaining why the privatised nuclear family was promoted, epitomised by the idea of the family wage. These dynamics remain relevant today. During economic crises, and when the welfare state contracts, the family can be used as a buttress against the consequences. Chris Harman summarises this contradictory role: “the logical thing is to see the family as part of the superstructure—something created by the needs of accumulation at a certain point in capitalist development, which capitalism now begins to undermine, but which it is prevented from abolishing because of its own crisis-prone nature”.5

Building on the work of both Jeffery Weeks and Harman, the authors emphasise how there was a conscious and “concerted push from the top of society that women’s role as wives and mothers was their primary role and the central concern of their lives”.6 Women and men needed to be socialised in accordance with their relationship to production and reproduction. This required a strict sexual demarcation between men and women and the reification of sex and gender as binaries. Women became gendered as passive, nurturing and subordinate; meanwhile, men would face pressure to fulfil the role of the provider.

A key feature of the women’s liberation movement in the 1960s and 1970s was a push back against these rigid conceptions of sex and gender. It is a shame that some people in the name of feminism now strive to gatekeep “womanhood” as an immutable biological category, with the intention of excluding trans+ people. As the authors point out, this view not only defies the latest scientific and anthropological research, but it also represents a backwards trajectory in the fight against sexism. Indeed, one of the consequences of the UK Supreme Court ruling of April 2025 has been an intensified policing of sex and gender, entrenching traditional heteronormative stereotypes of how women should look and behave.7

Under the guise of protecting women’s safety, the ruling ratifies a biological determinist view of sex and gender into law. To promote this view, so-called feminists form an alliance with the far right, which has waged a war on “gender ideology” to bolster its base. Indeed, transphobia has become a symbolic glue binding elements of the right together. They are able to unite over the notions that the gender binary is natural and that social differences between men and women are biologically innate. The authors also challenge those on the left who use materialist philosophy as a cover for transphobic ideas. Drawing on the work of biologists such as Richard Lewontin, the authors make clear that biology is not static but in a state of flux, constantly evolving in accordance with how we relate to our environments. Indeed, “the concept of what is natural changes over time—as we labour on nature to satisfy our needs, we change nature and we change ourselves”.8 Our biology is implicated in this process.

Challenges to Marxism

Marxism is a living philosophy that needs continuous adaptation to changing circumstances. However, there is a tendency, particularly within academia and new social movements, to argue that even fundamental Marxist assumptions no longer hold. Underpinning this idea is the claim that Marxism is reductionist, and that, by insisting on the relevance of class, Marxists can diminish and obfuscate issues of oppression. Marx never wrote a comprehensive analysis of gender or race. Yet, as Bates, Cox and Campbell maintain, he did not neglect these issues. He weaved them into a totalising framework linked to class.

One of the major challenges to the Marxist understanding of women’s oppression, arising out of the feminist scholarship in the 1960s and 1970s, was the patriarchy concept. As the authors explain, despite the widespread, all-purpose usage of patriarchy now, it carries a theoretical burden. Proponents of the concept have diverse views, but they argue that, alongside capitalism, there is another system—patriarchy—that oppresses women. The authors set out several lines of argument from patriarchy theorists such as Juliet Mitchell and Heidi Hartman and systematically dismantle them. Some of these arguments have already featured in the pages of International Socialism, but patriarchy theory lingers, saturating commonsense and reformist understandings of women’s oppression to this day.9 A key issue with the concept is that it treats sexism almost as if it emerges autonomously from class society, rather than being a product of it.

At an individual level, it can certainly feel like men benefit from women’s oppression. However, men have not entered a conspiratorial cross-class alliance to subjugate women. As the authors remind us, oppression works to debilitate and divide the working class, subverting the struggle against capitalism. Sharing a gender does not imply the same interests. This was brutally exhibited by the role of women from the ruling class in aiding and abetting the actions of Jeffrey Epstein’s grooming gang.

The authors also briefly engage with the debates around Social Reproduction Theory (SRT), an ever-expanding body of work, the remit of which is continually being stretched. SRT typically argues that Marx overlooked the reproduction of labour power in the process of capital accumulation, work disproportionately done by women. The authors accept SRT theorist Lise Vogel’s assertion that Marx did not fully develop his ideas in this area. At the same time, they correctly contend with the notion that unpaid labour in the home is a form of exploitation and the key frontier of workers’ struggle, as some advocates of SRT suggest. As the authors affirm, “production and reproduction are part of a unitary system, but production plays the dominant role in generating social change”.10 This is both because changes in social reproduction tend to reflect changes in the production of surplus value and because the centrality of wage labour in this imbues workers, both men and women, with potential power over capital. Likewise, the book is right to question authors such as Tithi Bhattacharya’s transformation of SRT into an all-encompassing approach. The authors insist that all forms of oppression cannot be neatly and sufficiently explained by SRT, which is “an analysis of one element of Marxist political economy”, not a totalising theory.11

Rather than a vulgar take-down of intersectionality, the book draws out the many positive instincts of its proponents. The authors recognise the need to incorporate a robust anti-racist and anti-imperialist analysis in approaches to women’s oppression. This is a theme throughout the whole book. The authors also point to the historic failings and one-sidedness of the leadership of left and feminist movements, often upholding oppressive and colonial structures in exchange for concessions for white women or British workers. Yet, they also remain resolute in their critique: “Intersectionality obscures the role of capitalism in creating oppression. The theory assumes that different oppressions are constituted separately and encounter and interlock with each other like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle”.12 They add that “class is more than a subjective element of our identity. Being working class means you have a dynamic relationship to production in society—so workers are both central to the system and the ones whose collective action has the power to challenge it most effectively”.13

Indeed, experiencing oppression or marginalisation certainly shapes one’s understanding of the world. Yet, this, in and of itself, is not enough to confront and overcome the system. It is right that the authors maintain that it is workers’ unique relation to the point of production that gives them the ability to throttle capitalism. For the same reason, the references made to the 1917 Russian Revolution and its aftermath are important. It is a reminder that, in struggle, new and liberatory ideas can flourish and that through the self-emancipation of the working class we can start to uproot oppressive ideas.

Breaking Our Chains is a welcome and illuminating synthesis of the rich tradition associated with International Socialism on women’s oppression. It introduces key theoretical debates and engages thoughtfully with challenges within and outside of the Marxist tradition. It is not only a captivating read but, critically, a weapon in the ideological struggle against the prevailing backward ideas in society and increasingly strident interventions from the far right.

Katie Coles works in the national student office of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP).

Notes