ResoluteReader: Sarah Bates, Judy Cox & Sally Campbell - Breaking Our Chains: Women, Marxism and the Path to Liberation

Sunday, November 15, 2026

Sarah Bates, Judy Cox & Sally Campbell - Breaking Our Chains: Women, Marxism and the Path to Liberation

Around the world the far-right are pushing a misogynist agenda and trying to roll back and attack women's rights. Ironically they are often doing this while claiming to defend women. But their vision of the role of women in society is a remarkably backward one. Their vision is that women work in the home, rearing children and doing domestic duties.

I start this review with these points because they form a central point of this important book on women's liberation. But also because the far-right's vision of the role of women is an extension of the way that women are oppressed under capitalism. In particular, the role of the "capitalist family" means that the oppression of women is closely linked to the dynamics of capitalist exploitation. Understanding the way that women are oppressed, the book argues, means understanding the structures and history of capitalism. As the authors say:

The capitalist family is nearly impossible to escape. Attempts to build collective, experimental, or radical alternatives have remained small-scale and short-lived.... the private family is a relatively recent creation of class society - barely 10,000 years old. Its currently capitalist form, the nuclear family, is presented as natural and eternal. But it didn't emerge by chance; it is a product of class domination and the system's need for profit, shaped by the needs of industrial society.

Breaking Our Chains draws on the work of Marx and Engels. It defends this approach from feminist and leftist traditions critical of Marxism, arguing that the approach of Marx and Engels means we can understand the rise of the family and women's oppression in the context of the history of class society, class society and the specific needs of capitalism. This is not to say that the authors merely talk about how Marx and Engels wrote. One of the great strengths of the book is how it discusses the way oppression has changed through time. For instance there is a really useful section on "Misogyny and the manosphere" that examines how online misogyny is linked to developments in capitalism, both in terms of technology but also the way that women's lives have changed and how the right respond. The writers say:

The manosphere is also shaped by the way women's lives have changed. Women today face the pressure of expectations to have both a family and a successful career. Women's visiblity in employent and public life is used to justify one of the central claims of figures like Andrew Tate - that feminism has gone 'too far' and women now have the dominant role in society. FEminism, the yassert, is causing a crisis of masculinity.

The conclusion has to be to challenge these ideas, but it is not enough to educate boys and young men, what is needed is "the act of fighting together and the xperience of living alongside each other [which] often forces people to confront the contradictions between te ideas they find online and the relationships they have with those around them.

In part this is a problem for the right. Their desire to attack abortion rights, for instance, is a weak link for the right because millions of women understand that abortion rights are something they need. The book quotes useful figures about how abortion rights are supported across (for instance) the US political spectrum, undermining Trump's claim to defend women.

Two other important sections of this book should be highlighted. The first is the section on transgender. Here the authors show how a materialist approach to biology, which places human biology within wider social contexts, undermines the crude biological reductionism of many "Gender Critical Feminists": "Our bodies do not exist outside history and society. They are shaped by imperialism, by gender, and by class". They continue:

How we understand our bodies and interpret our gender is both deeply personal and influenced by wider social forces. Marx argued that there is no such thing as a fixed 'natural' state for humanity. 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.

The second section that I want to highlight is the critical engagement the authors make with "challenges to Marxism". In particular I found the section on Social Reproduction Theory very interesting, because the authors point out the limits of SRT that while it begins from the limits of capitalism's approach to things like women's labour in the home, it wrongly places social reproduction as the drive for capital accumulation. The authors argue this is wrong, because it is the quest for profits that drives the system and this has "produced a dynamic system that constatnly exerts pressure on existing socail relationships and ultiamtely fuels changes in the family". The key thing, they emphasise, is that "production and reprouction are part of a unitary system, but production plays the ddominant role in generating social change".

This is a short book of just 130 pages, but it contains within it a breadth of material and a depth of understanding that I genuinely was impressed with. It serves as an excellent primer on Marxism and Women's Oppression and is thoroughly up to date with the latest arguements from both the feminist and right-wing. But it also constantly points out that there is a powerful tradition of struggle from below that has both won women further rights, but also pointed the way forward to revolution which can produce structural change. The final chapter deals with the gains of the Russian Revolution and demonstrates the potential for how we can all win true liberation. Well worth a read.