Sexism and the Left: Case Studies in an Epistemology of Ignorance

Many left organizations pride themselves on their commitment to women’s liberation, and socialist feminism is a significant and important current of left praxis. Socialist feminists, for instance, have been central to the long history of social movement organizing to defend abortion rights in Canada. This record of feminist engagement and support of women’s rights is not, however, a consistent pattern in the Left. There is also a long history that demonstrates a persistence of sexist practices within socialist organizations. This article suggests that sexist practices, as well as feminist analyses of and responses to sexism, have been too often epistemologically minimized, dismissed, distorted and ultimately forgotten, enabling a normalization of patriarchal hegemony on the Left, producing what the late Charles Mills termed an epistemology of ignorance. To demonstrate this, the article draws on three case studies, spanning recent and distant history of socialist organizing. These are: the crisis of the International Socialist Tendency and Socialist Workers’ Party UK (2010-13); the founding period of the International Socialists in Canada (1975-6); and the Bolshevik-Menshevik division in Tsarist Russia (1902-3). The argument is based on extensive original research addressing the history of socialist practices internationally, and four decades of personal archives from socialist and feminist praxis relevant to these case studies.