A Reexamination of the Specialized Path Theory of Women's Liberation—A Review and Reconstruction Based on Historical Materialism

Abstract

Contemporary feminist theory takes patriarchy as its core concept, constructing gender as an axis of oppression independent of class, from which it derives the political strategy of a cross-class feminist alliance. Based on historical materialism, this paper traces the evolution of the concept of patriarchy from Engels to contemporary feminism, and points out that the specialization of women's liberation from the overall process of social liberation is a fundamental theoretical error, which violates historical materialism and dialectics, and confuses the principal contradiction with the secondary contradictions. The root cause of women's oppression lies in private ownership and class division, and the concept of private ownership, as a remnant of private ownership, persists in the form of bourgeois rights under socialist conditions. The correct path to eliminate the remnants of gender oppression is not an anti-patriarchy movement independent of the whole of social liberation, but to integrate it into the overall practice of restricting bourgeois rights and preventing the restoration of capitalism. Taking the historical experience of China's socialist revolution as a case, this paper demonstrates the decisive role of the simultaneous advancement of ownership revolution and ideological revolution in disintegrating patriarchy, and thus responds to the challenges of feminist theory to Marxism. Therefore, this paper proposes that to resolve the dilemma of contemporary gender politics, it is necessary to take historical materialism as the methodological cornerstone, and critically absorb the micro-insights of feminism into gender experience on the premise of adhering to class analysis. The essence of women's liberation is an organic part of social liberation. Only by embedding the demand for gender equality into the revolutionary practice of abolishing private ownership and reconstructing social relations of production can we transcend the myth of identity politics and achieve the all-round liberation of human beings in the deepening development of socialism.