We come together not because we may identify as women; rather, we come together because we believe that we can only be free and live better lives with the end of capitalism, white supremacy, Western empire, and patriarchy. - Feminist Library

This is rather unobjective. You could just as easily say that capitalism has had the same result everywhere, which is hundreds of thousands of people regularly dying in wars and famines, sometimes millions in major events. Capitalist societies are on the brink of WWIII as we speak. Both systems are flawed and have resulted in mass deaths.

The Soviet Union thrived in the 1960's and 70's and became the communism success story, lots of people from that region are nostalgic for that time.

It's hysterical and hyperbolic to be calling me "morally bankrupt" for simply pointing out that having the security of a free home, the guaranteed free holiday, financial equality between most civilians, and the security of having many jobs available, are among the positives of communism. Nowhere did I say that communism was perfect or should be recreated. I am personally not a communist.

It's ironic that you can be so aggressively close-minded on a board filled with women persecuted for having minority political beliefs. It's fine to disagree with communism, it's not fine to attack people you disagree with.

Are you kidding me? Communism’s supporters were those who liked the idea in theory but never experienced it in practice. It’s not that communism hasn’t been properly tried either, communism has had the same outcomes everywhere it’s ever been tried so perhaps it’s now time to re-evaluate it rather than try it all over again?

Stalin put about 22million people into gulags or Siberian exile to be worked or frozen to death. That was the fate of roughly 1 in 6 people in the Soviet Union at the time. The other 5/6ths lived under constant fear and terror.

Chairman Mao killed over 40 million people. His cultural revolution destroyed most of the cultural treasures of a great civilisation over 1,000 years old.

Paul Pot’s regime is estimated to have killed up to one third of his entire nation’s population, if could be less than that bits difficult to say but his regime was absolutely appalling.

Anybody that knows anything about communism and still thinks it’s a good idea or wants to give it another try is morally bankrupt. But then again the far left is every bit as immoral as the far right.

I'm not referring to Gulags.

The Soviets had holiday camps and spas in places like Georgia and Crimea where people could go to for free.

In our society, we have time off, but no guaranteed actual holiday unless we can pay for it, and chose to pay for that rather than something else.

We mostly have homes, which people work themselves into the ground to pay for. In communist societies, homes are free.

There is no need to be snide; if communism was all bad then it wouldn't have had so many supporters.

oh yes fantastic holidays to the Gulags! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag

... we have guaranteed holidays and mostly have homes for everyone

The Soviet union had guaranteed holiday for everyone, and homes for everyone. When successful, in communist societies, basics were there for almost everyone.

The thing people seem to not understand is that communism has to be under a totalitarian state. It's not possible to get an entire country of people to agree to ''share fairly'' and willingly go along with the rule, so the only way it can ever work is if it's imposed with surveillance, strict laws and limited speech. At least a capitalist society is free.

what bits were good?

We come together not because we may identify as women

No, because God forbid that women put themselves front & centre in feminism or anything.

Ffs.

I'm not fully opposed to communism, there were some good parts of it.

However, I note that the vast majority of people loudly supporting communism in the west are strident and spoiled upper-middle class individuals, who would be among the first to have their wealth re-distributed under such a revolution.

Or shot for being a degenerate.

Yes I think people who come out with this rubbish are spoilt. They would s* themselves if they had to live in a communist country or somewhere like Iran.

This reminds me of the student union decades ago. It’s been a long time I have heard people talk about ending capitalism.

it’s very easy to be a communist in a semi-free capitalist country like the U.K. Its a lot harder to live under communism though as almost anyone whose lived under it will tell you.

growing up in that sort of system can leave you with trauma as an adult.
we need to go back to the drawing board and figure out something else

it's intersectionality to the point where distinction no longer exists. It's every single claim of 'opression' against every single 'oppressor' without any critical thinking involved. And nothing get's done. It's word-salad, theory-salad, identity-salad, and all that is left is confusion and chaos. And do you know who always fall to the bottom of this pile, no matter what? women.

What I wrote above has nothing to do with my views on the horrors that are taking place in Ghaza and Israel, by the way.

It's about the way organisations (though mostly only feminist ones) are expected to state their views on some important political questions but not on others, and about the seeming lack of any deep thinking in how those statements are formulated.

For example, I might agree that capitalism is not the best economic form of organisation, but when it comes to finding realistic alternatives to it that would not be actually worse for most women we might come rather short, with the possible exception of Scandinavian welfare economies.

But those are not realistic alternatives in the Middle East. Theocracies are the most likely alternatives, and those are dreadful for women's rights. And communism, as it has been practised in the real world, seems not to have made a dent in sexism or hierarchical arrangements of people on the basis of sex.

I note that the Feminist Library has made two statements of this sort, since 2018. This one, and an earlier one explaining that 'woman' for them is based on innate, abstract feelings of femininity, and that this category is open for all, but, nevertheless, those who are female but do not identify so are also included if they are nonbinary and gender-nonconforming*.

They have made NO statement in support of women and girls in Afghanistan or in support of women and girls in Iran. That should provoke some thought and introspection among those in charge of creating these statements. There are also many other international disagreements which are about human rights but not specifically about the rights of women, and yet none of those has merited a statement of any kind.

*As an aside, I would have thought that being a feminist IS being gender-nonconforming in all male-dominated societies, but that appears now to be forgotten.

Amnesty made that choice very deliberately when they decided to stop being neutral on abortion. They lost a huge number of significant supporters, and very much had the attitude, well, we don't want those people anyway.

Which led them to a place where they actually were uncomfortable advocating for political prisoners who had views they disagreed with. It's totally crazy.

I can confirm this. I was asked by an elderly sister who has an interesting collection of 1960s/ 70s feminist material if I'd take it to the Feminist Library for her last year. Phone calls and emails went unanswered. I think the material is now in the Glasgow Women's Archive.

Hello @IwantToRetire what do you mean by the humiliation of older women who established the collection? I went to the 'closing weekend' at the old venue in waterloo a few years ago and it was an amazing collection - do you know how / why they had to move and what exactly happened with the changing of the guard?