NEW YORK CITY, March 17 ­­— Monday night, my friends and I had a dinner and discussion about sexism. This is part of a series of study groups for college students leading up to May Day. We began by looking at clippings from ruling-class newspapers. One “news” article was about pop-star Taylor Swift insuring her legs for $40 million. Another was about the systemic starvation of women in India, a country where kids are shorter, smaller, and more likely to be malnourished than the world’s poorest countries: Congo, Zimbabwe, or Somalia.
We then watched clips of PLP’s “The Fight against Sexism” educational documentary. We learned that sexism is the super-exploitation of women and the gendered division by the bosses for profit. It also includes the brutal ideas and practices that justify this oppression. Some target culture and religion as the origin. We agreed that human nature is not the cause of sexism.
We searched for the economic foundation of sexism: class society. There wouldn’t be unequal gender division of labor without such things as private property and surplus value. What became “women’s work” was free and cheap. Now, we have the division between unpaid work and paid work, which is the root of sexism. Raising the next generation of workers and sustaining family units just enough to be exploited is a lot of work, and saves the bosses a lot of money.
Today, sexism equals profit. Capitalism isn’t the birthplace of sexism, but it has intensified the super-exploitation and oppression of women. Sexism helps the bosses to make their money. It has become the lifeblood of capitalism along with racism and all the other ills that capitalism breeds.
We also watched a clip about violence against women during the depression of the 1930s.
This clip helped us target the root of domestic violence, and violence against women in general, such as cuts on healthcare, food stamps, and other social services.
One student commented how just a couple of years ago, he thought he couldn’t be with a woman who made more money than he did. However, being around the Party and his life experience has taught him the importance of uniting with women. He noted that, “Now, taking care of the kids, massaging her feet when she gets home after work, I could do that.”
The final clip we watched was about how feminism cannot defeat sexism. While well-intended people who consider themselves feminists are fighting for the equality of workers regardless of gender and sexual orientation, we asked what solution does feminism offer?  We can elect Hillary Clinton as president. Or we can equalize exploitation to the same level as men workers.
Or, there is a better alternative than feminism.
I don’t want to be associated with an ideology where Miley Cyrus, Bell Hooks, and Allexandra Kollantai can exist in the same sphere. A movement that could be diluted so that anyone no matter their class can identify with it, where the bosses can promote it, is a losing strategy for women workers. Feminism is a ruling-class movement that dilutes, muddies, avoids, or outright rejects a class analysis.
If we believe in an anti-sexist society, fight directly for communism. No half-way houses needed! One student commented, “I never understood how you could marginalize your power [by labeling men as the enemy]!”
Now the most important question remains: how do we combat sexism? Fight against the cuts in daycare at work? Wage a campaign against the rise of sexual violence on campus? Join the fight against police murders? Target the enemy: the administrators, the politicians, the school and hospital bosses, the cops, the state? Develop women leaders to lead mass struggle? The people around the table had a lot to think about.
Finally, I looked around and noticed the international quality of the dinner. We had mostly Black students from the Caribbean and Africa. We also had someone from Europe and South Asia.
One student was someone we met just four hours ago through a friend on campus during a CHALLENGE sale. After the study group, he said, “I vaguely knew a teacher in high school who had these communist ideas like you.”
We quickly figured out who that teacher was. “If you come to our retreat next weekend, you will be sure to meet him,” we said.
This just goes to show how the work our high school teacher did a decade ago had a profound effect on this youth, enough to identify communist politics years later through a chance encounter. Thank you to PL teachers who plant deep roots in working-class youth, for their work continues to bear fruit years later.

*********

We are getting ready for May Day! More than 30 people, including many City University New York (CUNY) professors and students, came to Astoria, Queens for a spirited radical cultural event this evening. It was a collective effort: members and friends of Progressive Labor Party prepared delicious food for dinner, helped set up, and provided amazing performances. We sang revolutionary songs celebrating anti-racist and militant workers struggles, we listened to powerful anti-racist poems from a young artist whose book of poetry has just been published, and we listened to the virtuoso guitar playing of a young comrade.
We watched a phenomenal one-woman performance of a short play about the life of Harriet Tubman, the courageous abolitionist who escaped slavery, but then returned to the South thirteen times to liberate 70 other slaves via the Underground Railroad. Tubman was an important figure in the great 19th century struggle against chattel slavery. She was an ardent friend and supporter of militant abolitionist John Brown, and she helped him prepare his attack on Harper’s Ferry, which was the opening shot in what would become the U.S. Civil War that decisively crushed the country’s slave regime. When Brown was hung, Tubman declared he had “done more in dying, than 100 men would in living.”
Today the struggle is to end capitalist wage slavery and to bring to birth a new society that isn’t based on class exploitation and profits. That was the dream of Albert and Lucy Parsons, the radical leaders of the first May Day march in 1886, when 80,000 workers marched down Michigan Avenue in Chicago on behalf of the eight-hour day. They advocated the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism.
Our May Day rallies and marches this year will carry on the hopes and aspirations of the Parsons and the millions of others who have fought hard for a communist society, which is needed today more than ever, as capitalist crisis pushes down the living standards of workers everywhere, from Greece to South Africa to Mexico. A comrade urged every one at the event to join PLP on Saturday, May 2 in marching along Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn on behalf of revolution and a communist future. We collected money for the May Day dinner, and our friends said they were looking forward to May 2.