Anti-capitalist feminism offers a powerful lens to understand how capitalism and patriarchy work together to oppress women and marginalized genders. Unlike mainstream feminist movements that often seek inclusion within existing capitalist frameworks, anti-capitalist feminism demands a radical restructuring of economic and social systems. It connects gender justice to broader struggles against exploitation, colonialism, racism, and environmental destruction. In this guide, we explore the core principles of anti-capitalist feminism and how they shape a more transformative vision of gender politics—one rooted in solidarity, care, and systemic change. This is not just about equality; it’s about liberation for all.
Introducing Anti-Capitalist Feminism
Anti-capitalist feminism is a political framework that recognizes capitalism as a root cause of gender oppression. It argues that the capitalist system profits from the exploitation of women’s labor—both paid and unpaid—and sustains inequality through structural mechanisms like wage gaps, racial hierarchies, and privatized care work. Rather than seeking gender equality within capitalism, anti-capitalist feminism calls for dismantling capitalist systems altogether and replacing them with models rooted in collective ownership, cooperation, and care-based economies.
This approach also rejects the individualism often promoted by liberal feminism. Instead, it centers the struggles of working-class women, women of color, queer and trans communities, and those impacted by imperialism and environmental destruction. Anti-capitalist feminism builds solidarity across these movements, recognizing that gender liberation cannot be achieved in isolation from economic and racial justice. It is a call to radically reimagine both our economy and our society.
Principles of Anti-Capitalist Feminism
#1. Intersectional Solidarity
Anti-capitalist feminism demands an intersectional approach that connects class struggle with racism, colonialism, ableism, and queer and trans liberation. It’s not enough to fight gender inequality in isolation. You must recognize how multiple forms of oppression intersect and reinforce one another under capitalism. For example, the labor of migrant women is often devalued because of their race and immigration status, not just their gender. Anti-capitalist feminism builds coalitions among diverse communities, resisting any feminism that centers only white, middle-class, cisgender women. This solidarity strengthens resistance and ensures that solutions do not benefit one group while further marginalizing others. Intersectional solidarity shifts the focus from individual empowerment to collective liberation rooted in justice for all marginalized people.
#2. Rejection of Profit Over People
Capitalism prioritizes profit, often at the expense of human dignity and well-being. Anti-capitalist feminism challenges this by opposing economic systems that exploit workers, privatize care, and underpay essential laborers—especially women and racialized communities. Under capitalism, healthcare, childcare, and education become commodities, inaccessible to many and profitable for a few. This feminist framework calls for economies that prioritize human needs, not corporate gain. When you reject profit as the primary goal, you create space for systems that value equity, safety, and sustainability. Anti-capitalist feminists demand the redistribution of resources and decision-making power to the people most affected by inequality, rather than allowing markets and elites to dictate the terms of everyday life.
#3. Valuing Care and Emotional Labor
Care work—such as childcare, eldercare, community building, and emotional support—is essential for human survival, yet capitalism devalues or completely ignores it. Anti-capitalist feminism insists on recognizing care as central to society and treating it as real, indispensable labor. This includes unpaid work done in households and underpaid jobs in care industries, which are overwhelmingly held by women, especially women of color. By valuing care, you challenge capitalist assumptions that only profit-generating labor matters. Instead of outsourcing or undercompensating care work, anti-capitalist feminism promotes public investment in care infrastructure and labor protections for caregivers. This principle aims to rebuild society around mutual support, empathy, and collective well-being rather than market efficiency and individualism.
#4. Collective Ownership and Cooperation
Anti-capitalist feminism promotes collective ownership of resources, land, and labor as a direct challenge to capitalist systems that concentrate wealth and power. Instead of allowing private corporations to control the means of production and profit from exploitation, this approach envisions cooperative models such as worker-owned businesses, communal housing, and public services. These structures prioritize community needs, democratic participation, and equitable distribution of resources. When women and marginalized genders gain collective control over economic structures, they reduce dependence on exploitative employers or state systems. This principle also supports mutual aid networks and solidarity economies as tools for survival and resistance. It redefines success not through competition or accumulation but through cooperation, shared care, and dignity for all.
#5. Anti-Racism and Decolonization
Anti-capitalist feminism directly confronts the colonial and racial foundations of capitalism. Modern capitalist systems were built through colonial conquest, slavery, and the ongoing exploitation of Indigenous lands and Black labor. This feminist framework insists that gender justice cannot exist without racial justice and the dismantling of settler-colonial structures. It amplifies the voices and leadership of Indigenous women, Black feminists, and other racialized communities who resist dispossession, police violence, and imperialist war. Anti-capitalist feminism demands reparations, land back movements, and the end of border violence. You cannot separate capitalism from the systems of racial hierarchy and colonization it depends on, and anti-capitalist feminism makes that reality central to its critique and its vision for liberation.
#6. Challenging Gendered Division of Labor
Capitalism divides labor along gendered lines, funneling women into low-paid, insecure, and care-oriented work while reinforcing the expectation that they perform unpaid domestic labor at home. Anti-capitalist feminism actively resists these patterns. It calls out the structural forces—like wage gaps, lack of paid leave, and cultural stereotypes—that confine women and gender-nonconforming people to specific roles. This principle emphasizes that liberation requires more than breaking glass ceilings; it requires dismantling the entire system that sorts labor based on gender. It also pushes for universal labor rights, such as paid family leave, fair wages, and protections for domestic workers. By confronting the gendered division of labor, anti-capitalist feminism opens the door to shared responsibilities and true economic autonomy.
#7. Environmental Justice and Sustainability
Anti-capitalist feminism recognizes the deep ties between gender oppression, environmental destruction, and capitalist expansion. Women, especially in the Global South, are often on the front lines of ecological harm caused by extractive industries and climate change. This framework opposes the commodification of nature and promotes sustainable practices rooted in Indigenous knowledge, local stewardship, and ecological balance. Environmental justice includes fighting for clean water, land rights, food sovereignty, and protection from corporate exploitation. Anti-capitalist feminism also critiques “green capitalism,” which merely repackages environmental harm as market opportunity. Instead, it supports systemic transformation that prioritizes life over profit. Caring for the planet is not separate from feminist goals—it is integral to collective survival and gender liberation.
#8. Dismantling Patriarchal Structures
Capitalism and patriarchy reinforce each other by institutionalizing gender hierarchies and concentrating power in male-dominated structures. Anti-capitalist feminism challenges patriarchal norms that limit women’s autonomy, normalize gender-based violence, and marginalize queer and trans people. It fights against laws and social systems that police gender roles, restrict reproductive freedom, and maintain family structures designed to serve capitalist interests. This principle also recognizes how patriarchy operates in leftist and revolutionary movements, holding them accountable to feminist values. Dismantling patriarchy means uprooting authority systems that perpetuate control, whether in the workplace, home, or state. Anti-capitalist feminism insists that no liberation is possible without ending the domination of one gender over others at every level of society.
How Anti-Capitalist Feminism Shapes Gender Politics
#1. Reframing Gender Oppression as Systemic and Economic
Anti-capitalist feminism reframes gender oppression not as a series of isolated injustices, but as outcomes of systemic economic exploitation. Instead of treating sexism as a cultural issue alone, it examines how capitalism depends on gendered divisions of labor, undervalued care work, and wage inequality. For example, when women are overrepresented in low-wage jobs or forced to work unpaid in the home, it’s not accidental—it’s profitable for capital. This framework exposes how reproductive labor subsidizes the market and keeps capitalist economies functioning. By naming gender oppression as structural and tied to economic systems, anti-capitalist feminism challenges individualistic solutions and demands collective, systemic change rooted in labor justice and wealth redistribution.
#2. Challenging Neoliberal Feminism
Neoliberal feminism promotes individual empowerment, career advancement, and market inclusion as the path to gender equality. It celebrates the success of women CEOs or politicians while ignoring the broader systems that exploit working-class women, especially women of color and migrants. Anti-capitalist feminism directly challenges this narrative. It critiques the co-optation of feminist language to justify austerity, privatization, and exploitation—such as when governments cut social programs in the name of “equality” while relying on unpaid or underpaid female labor. Anti-capitalist feminism insists that real liberation cannot be measured by how many women enter elite spaces. It pushes for structural transformation that lifts up the most marginalized, not just a few privileged individuals.
#3. Centering Intersectionality and Collective Struggle
Anti-capitalist feminism shifts the focus from individual rights to collective liberation through intersectional struggle. It acknowledges that gender inequality is experienced differently depending on one’s race, class, disability, immigration status, and more. Rather than trying to create a universal experience of womanhood, it builds coalitions across differences, uniting people in struggles against police violence, housing insecurity, labor exploitation, and environmental degradation. By doing so, anti-capitalist feminism strengthens social movements by addressing the full spectrum of oppression. It redefines power not as dominance but as the ability to transform systems together. Gender politics become about collective action—strikes, protests, mutual aid—not just personal identity or professional advancement.
#4. Influencing Policy and Activism
Anti-capitalist feminism is shaping both grassroots activism and policy demands by insisting that gender justice must include economic and social transformation. Activists inspired by this framework fight for universal healthcare, paid parental leave, housing as a right, and protections for sex workers and care workers. They organize tenant unions, cooperative food systems, and feminist labor collectives. In the policy realm, anti-capitalist feminists advocate for taxing the rich, defunding the police, expanding public services, and recognizing reproductive labor as economic work. These demands go beyond inclusion and aim to shift the very foundations of how society allocates resources and power. By bringing feminism into class-conscious movements, they push for lasting, material change.
#5. Reshaping the Role of the State and the Market
Anti-capitalist feminism radically rethinks the role of the state and the market in gender politics. Instead of viewing the state as a neutral actor or the market as a path to empowerment, it sees both as arenas of struggle shaped by class and patriarchy. The state often enforces gender norms through welfare policies, criminalization, and family regulations, while the market commodifies women’s labor and bodies. Anti-capitalist feminists call for alternatives to both state repression and market dependency—such as decentralized public services, community governance, and cooperative economies. This approach refuses to rely on corporations or traditional political institutions to deliver justice. It envisions systems where care, equality, and democratic participation replace profit and control.
Closing Thoughts
Anti-capitalist feminism offers a bold and necessary reimagining of gender justice, one that links the fight against patriarchy with the struggle to dismantle capitalism. It challenges the limitations of mainstream feminist movements and centers those most impacted by intersecting systems of oppression. By valuing care, demanding economic transformation, and rejecting profit-driven models of empowerment, anti-capitalist feminism builds a foundation for true collective liberation. As gender politics evolve, this framework invites us not just to include more people in broken systems, but to radically transform those systems from the ground up—for everyone’s dignity, autonomy, and survival.