The lie of socialist feminism
In light of Gloria Steinem’s death, Jenny Brown writes in Jacobin how Gloria Steinem Was the Godmother of Neoliberal Feminism:
The establishment’s favorite “radical” feminist, Steinem worked with the CIA to promote reactionary propaganda and helped direct the women’s liberation movement into a corporate-friendly, anti-socialist direction.
Jenny tries to emphasise the shortcomings of neoliberalism by commenting on its feminist manifestation. She juxtaposes neoliberal feminism with the supposedly benign form of socialist feminism. The notion of a socialist feminism sounds appealing until we think it through, at which point we uncover the familiar individualism that undermines society.
Collectivism or individualism
The essence of socialism is its collectivist ethos: the group is above the individual. This does not mean that individuals do not matter or that they have no rights, but only that the common good takes precedence over the individual interest in cases where the two are in conflict. This is the basis for arguing that, say, a billionaire should not profit at the expense of society.
The consistent collectivist cannot subscribe to a view of the world where the individual has inalienable rights. Such jurisprudence necessarily reifies the singular person as the supreme good and, by extension, does not recognise any social body as an agent of political will.
To the collectivist, all individual rights can, in principle, be forfeit, including one’s life, if the common good demands as much. This is because the individual is ephemeral, whereas societies—and, by extension, cultures—subsist through intergenerational solidarity.
There will be cases where this tension is necessarily oppressive from the perspective of the individual, should the individual be pulling towards a certain extreme away from the midpoint. Such are the demands for the society qua organism to survive long-term: it has to maintain its integrity, which is a function of the roles it enforces among its members, the rules it embeds, and the hierarchies it establishes.
An organism cannot be heteroclite. Indeed, organism essentially is the spirit that is discerned as the organising principle which sets together the otherwise disparate parts into a system. “System” literally means “jointly standing”. There is a superordinate goal of resisting entropy for as long as possible to which everything else is subordinate.
A society, then, forms an organism through the organising principles it generates. The national interest, the want for energy and resources more broadly, the cultural expression… These reveal the overarching objectives which no longer account for the feelings or wants of individuals. Each person is subject to the workings of the whole, whether they like it or not.
The individualist does not recognise any body that is superior to the individual. In its most honest expression, individualism fully rejects collectivist thought, for it does not treat anything as a public good. There is no group whose interests are above those of the individual.
The individualist will be in principal agreement with notions of inalienable rights, such as human rights or a very strong conception of property rights as the foundational codex of collocation. Consequently, the billionaire is not a problem in principle: that is just shrewd entrepreneurship.
A country of individualists inevitably develops into an association of marauders and pillagers, who will seek to exploit other lands to make up for the fact that they are living beyond their means. They do so because they put private interest above anything else and, as such, think only of short-term gain.
The group, then, is an aggregation of selfish opportunists. It cannot be allowed to have a life of its own, the way an ethnic community does, as that gives rise to the collectivist ethos. The individualist must actively sever ties and break roots to remain individualistic.
The common good starts with the extended family
To the collectivist, the common good is understood as concentric circles that extend from the family, to the local community, to the homeland, to the nation.
The collectivist will argue, for example, that someone may not cut down the oak tree that lies within their property, since cutting down trees will be harmful to the community long-term. Monoculture begets disease and endangers the ecosystem, for instance, while the absence of trees and other vegetation makes soil erosion more likely and floods more devastating.
In this example, the individualist will cut down the trees indiscriminately because the only relevant person and thus the supreme good is that of oneself. Their own short-term interest reigns supreme. The individualist cannot live in harmony with a tree’s lifespan, which often goes on for centuries. “Whatever can happen, must happen now, and may the others be damned”, is their rationale.
The common good starts with the extended family in present time as well as intergenerationally. The elders, for example, will plant trees whose shade they will not sit under. They do it for their grandchildren as well as for all the children that may live in that land. Their plans concern the long-term, which is no longer about their individuality. They are interested in the conditions that may favour the next several generations.
We may describe this longer-term outlook as “patriarchal” or “matriarchal” or, simply, “responsible”. Within the confines of a single extended family, the patriarch and matriarch are the masculine and feminine tutelary figures who together uphold and pass on the cultural norms. They are examples to be followed. Through their leadership, which happens in a spirit of love, they give life beyond their own by creating the environment for social reproduction: reproduction in biological terms within the framework of a culturally defined society, else ethnicity.
There is no patriarchy that is opposed to matriarchy. The two complement and invigorate each other for there to be ethnic continuity. What the man does, the woman cannot emulate, and what the woman does the man is incapable of doing. Both are necessary for the collectivist ethos to be understood through one’s sense of duty to the commons. The man is a good man when he tends to his family instead of, say, gambling away his money. Same for the woman whose attention is on her offspring instead of various kinds of plastic.
The common good starts by sacrificing the individual interest. One’s own convenience has to be set aside for the collective to prosper. The parent must for a while accept fewer hours of uninterrupted sleep, for example, so that the baby may survive. The child, in turn, must learn that not every capricious want of theirs is satisfied because those can be self-destructive once realised. Children conform with the norms of the society and are not allowed to do only as they wish.
Whatever good, then, may be experienced at the local level is made possible by the good of the wider space in which locality is understood. There has been a past for there to be a present and this cycle continues into the future through responsibility. The collectivist thinks about the homeland and the nation at-large, not merely their parochial gain.
The individualist is not conditioned to serve any common good. They will continue to pollute the environment, for example, because fundamentally they believe that whatever happens to the planet long-term is not their problem to deal with.
Such is the midpoint of our modern world, especially in Western culture. Its values are individualistic, its real god or moral lodestar is the ego, whence come all the patterns of behaviour that are detrimental to longer-term wellness.
There cannot be a socialist feminist in earnest. There will come a time when they have to decide whether they are socialist or feminist, else collectivist or individualist.
To the feminist, family is hell
Which brings me to the lie that is socialist feminism. Consider the following statement from the 1972 publication Socialist Feminism: A Strategy for the Women’s Movement. Emphasis is mine.
Many analyses have identified various institutions (e.g., the family or sexual relations) as the crucial contradiction of sexism. However, these contradictions reflect the social relations of a sexist society, or institutions in which sexism occurs. Eliminating these “prime factors” would neither eliminate sexism nor necessarily create supportive alternatives for women. As the factory may be the locus for capitalist exploitation, it is not the basis of that exploitation. Private ownership and profit is the basis, giving rise to the class relations. Similarly, the family is a crucial locus of sexist oppression but it is not the basis of that exploitation. Control by men over women and the relegation of women to secondary roles is the basis of sexism, giving rise to a sexist society.
This is the irreducible storyline of the feminist narratives. According to it, men are oppressive qua men, men effectively enslave women, and the immediate domain of their tyranny is the household where family life happens. This family life is dismissed rhetorically as “secondary roles”. It follows that the emancipation of the woman comes at the expense of the household, familial ties, and manhood as such.
By extension, the most free woman is the one who is not under the control of any man and recognises no family. If the woman has children, even if she is a single parent, she still has duty towards them, so children will become a problem as well that needs to be externalised for the mother, now the individual who matters above all, to be free.
What will the woman do once she gets rid of the “secondary roles” of the household? She will pursue the presumably primary role of the girl boss, or socialist agitator, or, if she is so inclined, will find an inadequate outlet for her maternal instinct in the form of some ideology that seeks to rescue the forlorn; an ideology that will sooner or later be her own enemy, though her bleeding heart will not let her recognise the danger ahead of time.
Feminism is insipid poison for society. It is the ideology that seeks to render shameful and eventually eliminate the single skill women are peerless at: motherhood. It works to make the woman an enemy of the man, which will not only destroy intimacy or reduce it to a ruthless transactional exchange but also tear asunder the social fabric. Once the ground is saturated with enough toxicity, there will be no family, no communities, no nation, no hierarchy whatsoever.
Feminism effectively argues that the problem for women is womanhood, which consists in the fact that they are endowed with the disposition to raise children. Feminism treats womanhood as the core evil and encourages the woman to effectively become a lesser man in pursuit of some stupid “primary roles”.
The feminist only thinks of children as a burden to be managed through deferral to some impersonal “childcare”, which supposedly relieves the woman of her maternal duties although it actually encourages her not to bother with children at all. Continuing from the same publication:
A second problem we faced was in our understanding of our oppression as women. We knew that childcare was an issue for many women, but failed to take into consideration the problems such women face. The very women we hoped to involve (those with young children) were among the least likely to ever be active in any kind of social movement. They simply don’t have the time (because they don’t have childcare), are less mobile, and don’t think of themselves as active community members. The prevailing notion that women need something to do after their children are in school also makes these women less likely to consider becoming involved.
Later we find other snippets, like:
With material changes such as children, a mate, a home, one often becomes more circumspect because such a person must be able to provide for others (by law and social pressure).
So the women could not be activists, which presumably is the apogee of this vaunted freedom of theirs, because they were performing the vital function of motherhood. The publication goes on to argue for some superficially socialist scheme by which funds are directed towards childcare. Make no mistake though, the essence is not socialism, else collectivist ethics, but to sever the mother from her children in phase one, to make her detest motherhood in phase two, and to render her a rootless individual in phase three. Socialism is just the vehicle by which hardcore individualism proceeds.
The feminist enterprise dehumanises both men and women. To the woman, it denies her of her nature by making her think of her potential of motherhood as innately burdensome and of her femininity as proof of the fact that she is not man enough. To the man, it treats him as inherently malevolent, owning to his propensity to enslave women. The man cannot escape his manhood to be seen as something more than a penis with a penchant for tyranny. The composer, the poet, the painter, the engineer, the philosopher, is still a man, after all. Whatever intellectual qualities and sensitivities he is endowed with, no matter how pro-social his integrity and discipline are, he still is the primordial enemy. When it comes to manhood, the feminist tends to interpret everything as a phallic symbol of power and control.
The feminist must have never heard about the mother-in-law, for example, or never met one of the countless men who are wrapped around their girlfriend’s or wife’s little finger. Only men do the controlling and the abusing. They must have never heard about the lengths men have gone to in order to be seen favourably by a woman. As such, they have not bothered to understand the psychosynthesis of the common man; the man who finds fulfilment only through female validation and who lives broken by self-loathing while he is single—not because there is anything wrong with him, but simply due to how nature makes him seek out the female counterpart as the ultimate end. The man who is strongly independent is a rarity in this regard and effectively irrelevant to any discussion about numbers.
Yes, there are men who are tyrannical and abusive, just as there are women who would rather destroy society than accept lifelong duty towards others. But we cannot reduce everybody to a simplistic “men/women are bad” kind of formulation.
The gist of the aforementioned is that “socialist feminism” is a walking contradiction. Once we read past the generic socialist talking points we find gendered individualism that teeters on sociopathy. In present time, this gender talk also comes from the side of men, as in the case of Andrew Tate and friends, that I have commented on recently in About rootlessness and broken relationships (2026-08-21), as well as to a lesser extent On the war in Ukraine and social expectations of manhood (2026-07-20).
Family is the natural unit of solidarity
The collectivist ethos is about serving the common good. Put differently, it is expressed as solidarity in the form of people supporting each other.
The natural unit of solidarity is the family. Within the family exist bonds of blood which are held together by mutual feelings of love. The vitality of the family culminates in solidarity between generations: the elders are in the same space as the children and all are enveloped by a community of such extended families who know each other’s lineage. They have a defined homeland for their clan with a culture that is preserved across the centuries. Put differently, they are not rootless and will seek to grow roots even when forced to emigrate. Solidarity is thus organic.
In the countryside of Cyprus where I live, there is a growing number of people of Syrian Muslim background. They found refuge here from the civil war of the 2010s that sent their country into disarray. There were only a few of them back then. Now the women have five children each and are young enough to have another five. They support each other and live close together, from the little ones to the elderly.
These communities are the only ones which are vital in the Cypriot hinterlands. By contrast, the locals are walking dead. Old people whose posterity daydreams of the princely life that Hollywood promised them away from the countryside; a posterity that has turned radically individualistic and thus only finds excuses to not have children and to not take on the mantle of social reproduction.
The Syrians are neither rich nor are they enjoying some legendary “childcare” that was brought about by the socialist reconstitution of the state. They thrive under the prevailing conditions and their future is bright regardless. They simply understand that you have to put the common good above the personal interest: you submit to the authority of the collective.
Here, the Syrian man makes a basic salary by working in the construction sector. He spends his day at the construction site. He labours under the punishing Cypriot sun to provide for his loved ones, which he returns to as soon as the workday is over. The woman stays at home with the rest of the extended family, tending to matters of the household and keeping everything together. She is the cornerstone of the community. Her work is not “secondary” in any way. She is best person to raise her children together with her relatives and, while doing so, to instil in them a strong sense of honour so that they too go on to do the same.
These people do not outsource the most important of duties to some faceless “childcare”, nor do they have faith in the abstraction of the nanny state. They make things happen through the resilience of their collective character. Their meagre income is enough to raise several healthy children, all of whom have good manners and are eager to provide a helping hand to their neighbours. By contrast, the zombie nation of the Greek man and the Greek woman, and of the Western man and woman in general, finds it too bothersome to even have a single child and will complain to no end about it.
Muhammad was a supremely gifted leader because he understood the essence of religion as a framework of rules for life on earth. Forget about the angels: Christians have plenty of those too. Muhammad’s project aims, in practice, to have strong communities whose vitality is intergenerational. Whereas the Christian world gradually turned religion into a private escapist affair about one’s relationship with some effectively voiceless father in the sky. This has transmogrified into the various brands of individualism that are ravaging our societies.
Muslims are going from strength to strength because they accept that the collective is above the individual. They will lose their momentum as soon as they forget what grants them vitality. Christianity, on the other hand, is becoming the spirituality of the undead; people whose last hope is that there exists a better afterlife, as this life they have already forsaken.
The particularities of the Muslim quotidian paradigm need not be emulated. The collectivist essence is what matters. I cannot cosplay the Arab man. I can, however, seek to rekindle the essence that we had only a few decades ago, the essence I was raised in, and which have since been sacrificed to the altars of overabundance, of individual profit at the expense of rapid ethnic disintegration.