The One Thing The SWP Cannot Grant

Marxism 2026, and why the real argument between the IST and the Fourth International is no longer about theory

I saw the programme for the Marxism event on Tuesday, and it took a moment to register what it was saying. Marxism 2026, the Socialist Workers Party’s four-day festival at the start of July, and on the timetable the whole of human oppression filed under a single strand. Women under LIBERATION. Race, disability, trans politics, antisemitism, Islamophobia, the manosphere, body image: LIBERATION, every one of them, one heading. And the strand resolving, on the Sunday, into a session called ‘Marxism vs identity politics?’ One Saturday title asked, flatly, what the rest of the grid had already answered: ‘Is capitalism a patriarchy?’

The architecture is the argument. Gather every oppression under one banner, subordinate the banner to the class line, stage the relation to everything else as a versus. You could read the SWP’s theory of oppression off the timetable before a single session opened.

What made it a piece rather than a note was the calendar. The same weekend, also in London, Anti*Capitalist Resistance has its own conference, and ACR is settling on the word ‘anti-oppressive’ in its self-description. Two traditions, the SWP inspired by Tony Cliff’s International Socialists, ACR a year into its affiliation to the Fourth International, the same question, the same four days. The obvious story is that one of them takes oppression seriously and the other dissolves it into class. The obvious story is wrong, and the way it is wrong is worth more than the way it would have been right.

The SWP moved past the caricature

Name the caricature before burying it. Post-Delta SWP: crude on women, deaf to oppression, the talk-about-jobs-and-drop-the-rest left given a coat of theory. It is the reading an ACR member reaches for in the pub after a counter-demonstration, and the SWP’s own festival refutes it.

Read what they publish. SWP CC member Judy Cox, running two of the festival’s sessions, spends her recent International Socialism essay attacking not feminism but its economist enemy: George Galloway campaigning on class and Gaza while turning on trans rights and immigration, his ‘for the workers, not the wokers’; Sahra Wagenknecht splitting from Die Linke over its supposed indulgence of minorities. Cox reaches for Lenin on the duty to answer every instance of oppression, whoever it touches. She calls intersectionality a real advance and credits its dialogue with Marxism. Breaking Our Chains, the women’s liberation book Cox has just written with Sally Campbell and Sarah Bates, is explicitly trans-inclusive, and grounds women’s oppression where the Fourth International grounds it, in class society and the unpaid reproduction of labour. The party’s house journal on social reproduction lines up with Lise Vogel and Johanna Brenner against Heidi Hartmann’s dual systems. On the theory of patriarchy, the SWP in 2026 holds, near enough, what ACR holds.

The obvious reading is that they are reductionists. That is not quite right either. Lindsey German wrote the founding text, the case that Marxism explains women’s oppression better than any theory of patriarchy, but German left for Counterfire in 2010, and quoting her against the SWP is quoting a ghost. The living organisation has moved, and it has moved close. This is not a quarrel about whether oppression matters. It is a quarrel about who can end it.

And there the gap reopens, along two seams.

The men-benefit argument

The first is the one I find hardest to close, so let me state it at full strength. There is a case that working-class men have a real stake in women’s subordination, now, this side of any revolution: the unpaid labour at home, the competition kept out of the labour market, the wage that flatters the male packet. The SWP says no, and has said no for forty years. Cliff, in 1984, called the men-benefit argument nonsense outright, and charged, through Jane Humphries, that it writes working women out as passive victims, objects of a settlement struck between capital and men. Judy Cox makes the same denial promoting the book in 2026: men’s only real interest, she says, is in smashing the system too. The benefit is a trap, not a stake.

Grant the warning its force, because it is not stupid. A theory that makes men the beneficiaries of patriarchy can end with women as objects acted upon rather than agents acting, and that road runs out of class politics into something colder. But the concession does not dissolve the reality. Men’s benefit can be real and this-side-of-the-revolution without being a second system, because it is a local maximum: a peak on the one terrain of class society, lower than the peak liberation would reach, but a peak men sit on now and have reason to hold now. To say so is not to set a second engine turning beside capital. It is to describe one landscape with more than one summit. Whether that reframing settles the question or merely postpones it is exactly the kind of thing a polemic should not pretend to have closed.

Autonomous women’s organisation

The second seam is the one that counts: autonomy. The book is emphatic about how its authors define themselves: we are Marxists, Cox says, not feminists or socialist feminists. That is the self-definition, and the agency claim sits beneath it: Cox writes in International Socialism that only the working class has an interest in sweeping away every form of oppression. The privilege-theory critique Esme Choonara and Yuri Prasad wrote for the party says socialists should engage positively with those fighting oppression, and then treats the autonomous, identity-based organising of the oppressed as a drift from the solidarity only class supplies: engage with them, and organise them through the party rather than alongside it. The autonomous movement is admitted as pressure and folded back. ACR goes the other way: the right of oppressed groups to caucus, a survivor-centred complaints procedure, a coalition built on bodily autonomy. Where the SWP subordinates, ACR devolves. That is the durable disagreement, and it is not a matter of theory.

Which is the point, because the catastrophe was not a matter of theory either. You cannot call a tradition that runs Cox on social reproduction and publishes a trans-inclusive book on women’s liberation thin in its grasp of oppression. What failed in the SWP failed at the level of structure. When a woman member accused Martin Smith, the national secretary and a central figure in Unite Against Fascism, of rape, the party heard the complaint through its own Disputes Committee, a panel that included his colleagues and friends, and acquitted him: unanimously on the rape charge, the chair dissenting on a separate charge of harassment. The full anatomy of that failure, and of the SWP’s twelve-year refusal to reckon with it, is the subject of an earlier piece. What matters here is narrower. There was no standing for the complainant anywhere outside the structure she was accusing, because the framework treats autonomous standing for the oppressed as a deviation, and a body built on that premise has nowhere to put a woman when the man she accuses is central to it. The disputes committee and the versus on the festival grid are the same proposition, written once small and once large. Hold every admirable position the SWP holds in 2026, every one, and you can still build the thing that broke, because autonomy is the one thing the framework cannot grant.

The IMG and Socialist Woman

Here is where the piece is supposed to turn to ACR and say: and we, the Fourth International tradition, understood all along what they refused. The truth is more particular, and more to the tradition’s credit, and the sting it carries is sharper for being narrow.

The IMG built autonomous women’s organisation, and not as a concession. Socialist Woman was the paper of the International Marxist Group, the Fourth International’s British section in the 1970s, the lineage that runs down to ACR, and the IMG’s paper in those years carried a name this publication might recognise: Red Mole. Where the workerist groups treated women’s organising as a recruitment arena or a dangerous distraction and ran off a dutiful document or two, the IMG was in the abortion campaigns, in the movement, building women’s organisation week in and week out, with a national paper to carry it. Inside its own ranks, it argued hard and for years about how far women members should organise separately as women, a question it took to the 1979 World Congress. This is not a tradition that mistook autonomy for a deviation. It practised it. What it rejected, in so many words, was the other thing: the radical-feminist move of answering male chauvinism in the revolutionary organisation by quitting it for an autonomous movement. The answer to a male-dominated party, the IMG held, was to fight the party into shape, not to leave it.

And yet the grand claim, when it came, came in terms a reader of Cox will find familiar. The spring 1974 Socialist Woman editorial holds women’s oppression to be a class question, inseparable from the class struggle as a whole, and locates the family itself as integral to capitalism, its structure and enforced roles rooted in what capitalism needs: social reproduction theory before the term existed. Then the close. Those who cut women’s liberation from the class struggle, it warns, set up a road-block between their goal and ‘the only social force which can achieve it: the proletariat’. The only social force. At the level of final agency the IMG, too, made the working class the single subject of liberation, in nearly the words Cox uses now.

The impact: comrade Delta

So the difference between the two traditions is not what the easy version claims. It is not that the Fourth International embraced autonomy and the SWP refused it; both placed the mixed revolutionary party at the centre, and both, in the last instance, named one social force as the agent. The difference is that the IMG built the autonomous organisation anyway, treated the women’s movement as a thing to join and strengthen rather than merely to pressure and fold back, and held that the workers’ movement itself had to be changed by it. That is real, and it is a difference of practice as much as of doctrine. What it is not is the difference between understanding autonomy and refusing it, because on the question of who finally emancipates whom, the FI tradition gave the answer the SWP gives. And the principle it gave, fight the organisation into shape rather than build standing outside it, is precisely the principle the Disputes Committee tried and broke in the Comrade Delta crisis. Feminists to the IMG’s left pressed exactly there: not on whether the IMG built, which it did, but on whether routing the whole question through the only social force left women’s liberation, in the last instance, holding someone else’s coat. Whether it does is not a thing this piece can settle, and the honest position is that the tradition has been arguing about it, internally and well, since before 1979.

Which leaves the questions a weekend of conferences cannot vote away. Whether the autonomous standing the SWP folds back into the party is precisely what would have held when the man accused was central to the organisation, or whether the fault is older and wider than any single theory of agency. And whether the benefit men draw from women’s subordination is a second system or a single summit on one slope, a question the local maximum reframes and does not close. The analysis comes before the programme. Anyone who tells you otherwise this weekend, in either hall, is selling the conclusion before the work is done.