Sophie Lewis’s Enemy Feminism has been hailed in academic and pseudo-left circles as a daring critique of modern feminist politics. However, it is fundamentally a politically reactionary work, with its theoretical foundations and practical outcomes favouring the interests of the wealthy elite that control the gender-studies academic sphere and publications like Jacobin, n+1, and Salvage. Rather than promoting a socialist view of women’s oppression, Lewis’s book illustrates a further decline of identity politics amid escalating capitalist crises.
Enemy Feminism occupies a distinct space in modern academia, branding herself as a “communist feminist” linked to the broadly defined “social reproduction theory” and publications like Salvage and Jacobin-related outlets. Her goal is to delineate a boundary between what she views as a corrupted, reactionary feminism—such as TERFs and liberal “carceral” feminism—and an authentic, radical alternative.
There are valid targets to critique in her focus—liberal feminism that depends on police, prisons, and imperialist military forces to “liberate” women is genuinely a bourgeois dead end. However, Lewis’s approach itself has significant political issues that a Marxist cannot ignore. Identity Politics in Socialist Clothing: Although Lewis’s work hints at anti-capitalism, it still primarily organises around gender as an independent category of analysis and action.
Her earlier book, Full Surrogacy Now, demonstrates this by prioritising a queer-theoretical perspective that diminishes rather than clarifies class relations, focusing mainly on identity categories such as gender, queerness, and trans identity rather than on the working class as a historical class. This approach is not a praise for Marxism but a replacement of one form of identity politics with another. From a Marxist perspective, gender and sexual oppression are genuine consequences of a class society, rooted in the family as an economic unit created by private property. They cannot be eradicated through new identity-based coalitions; instead, they require a socialist restructuring of society’s material foundations.
Lewis’s framework, despite its seemingly radical language, remains focused on bourgeois social relations. The “Social Reproduction” framework: Lewis extensively cites “social reproduction theory” (SRT), associated with scholars like Tithi Bhattacharya. SRT correctly highlights that reproductive labour is vital to capitalist accumulation, offering important insights into how capitalism functions. However, when Lewis and others apply it, it often becomes a universal theory in which “reproduction” encompasses all social aspects, thereby obscuring the specific role of surplus-value extraction and the significance of the industrial working class.
A genuine feminist struggle requires adopting a Marxist perspective on women’s oppression, starting with history and political economy instead of gender theory. Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State remains crucial: it argues that women’s oppression began with the rise of private property and the patriarchal family as key channels of transmission. Consequently, overcoming this oppression demands abolishing private property through a socialist revolution, rather than forming a new feminist alliance.
The most significant advances in women’s equality during the 20th century were driven not by feminist movements alone, but by working-class revolutions: the early Soviet Union eliminated legal discrimination against women, secured rights to divorce and abortion, and socialised domestic labour on an unprecedented scale. However, these gains were dismantled during Stalinism. Today, the goal is not to develop a better feminism, but to establish a revolutionary socialist party rooted in the working class, where fighting women’s oppression is fundamentally linked to challenging capitalism as a whole.
Identity Politics Masquerading as Marxism
Lewis’s main theoretical focus is on prioritising gender and sexual identity as key categories in political analysis. Her earlier book, Full Surrogacy Now, illustrates this perspective by framing the exploitation of reproductive labour within a queer-theoretical context that blurs class distinctions into a mix of affective and identitarian categories. As the document notes: “The analytical centre of gravity is always identity… not the working class as a historical subject.”
This is not just a minor flaw; it defines the pseudo-left’s core trait: replacing class with identity, materialism with subjectivism, and revolutionary politics with moral-therapeutic language. Lewis’s feminism, despite its radical terms, still lies within bourgeois ideological limits. Marxism, however, starts from the material conditions of society, where women’s oppression stems from private property and the patriarchal family—a mechanism for its perpetuation. As highlighted in the document: “They cannot be abolished by building new identitarian coalitions—they require the socialist transformation of society’s material foundations.” In contrast, Lewis’s approach leaves the capitalist foundations unchanged.
The Inflation of Social Reproduction Theory
Lewis relies heavily on “social reproduction theory” (SRT), a framework associated with Tithi Bhattacharya and others. Although SRT offers useful insights into how reproductive labour contributes to capitalist accumulation, Lewis and her group reduce it to a comprehensive schema that overlooks the unique processes involved in the extraction of surplus value. The document highlights this issue clearly: it “tends to expand infinitely into a theory of everything… dissolving the specificity of surplus value extraction.”
This conceptualisation of inflation is politically useful. By substituting the industrial proletariat with a broad category of “care workers,” SRT endorses the politics of NGOs, academic activism, and community organising—the favoured domains of the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia. It promotes a politics of fragmentation rather than unity; favours localism over internationalism; and emphasises moral exhortation instead of class struggle.
Abolitionism: Anarchist Gesture in Place of Revolutionary Strategy
Lewis’s support for “abolition”—including prisons, police, and even the family—illustrates the pseudo-left’s retreat from addressing state power. These slogans, which became prominent after 2020, are framed as radical alternatives to reformism, but in reality, they function as substitutes for a genuine revolutionary strategy. Abolition’politics sidesteps the question of state power entirely, substituting prefigurative gestures for a revolutionary strategy.”
The abolition of the capitalist state cannot be achieved through moral appeals, community initiatives, or expanded activist networks. Instead, it requires the organised working class to overthrow it. Lewis’s form of abolitionism is essentially anarchism, wrapped in Marxist rhetoric—a politics focused on negation without a clear plan for gaining power.
The Pseudo‑Left Milieu and Its Class Interests
Lewis’s prominence cannot be separated from the environment that elevates her. The document notes: “These are not socialist institutions. They are cultural platforms of the upper-middle class that redirect radical-sounding discontent into safe, identity-based activism.” This environment is antagonistic toward the working class. Its politics mirror the anxieties and hopes of a privileged group whose material interests depend on maintaining capitalism. Its “radical” stance is largely performative, with exaggerated rhetoric, and its activities are mostly limited to academia, nonprofits, and social media. Lewis is not an anomaly in this environment; she embodies its main characteristics.
The Marxist Perspective on Women’s Liberation
Marxism argues that fighting women’s oppression cannot be separated from opposing capitalism, countering the pseudo-left’s identity politics distortions. The document notes: “Women’s oppression arose with the emergence of private property… Its abolition… requires the abolition of private property itself.”
Women’s greatest progress in the 20th century largely stemmed from working-class revolutions rather than feminist movements. The early Soviet regime abolished legal discrimination, introduced rights for divorce and abortion, and socialised domestic labour, all on an unprecedented scale. However, these gains were later diminished by the Stalinist distortion of the revolution. Today, the aim isn’t to create a “better feminism,” whether radical or not. The primary focus is on forging a revolutionary socialist party rooted in the working class, with a Marxist program committed to overthrowing capitalism and establishing socialism.
Conclusion
Sophie Lewis’s Enemy Feminism does not advance socialist theory; instead, it highlights the political decline of the pseudo-left. Its focus on identity politics, exaggerated emphasis on social reproduction, anarchist abolitionist ideas, and ties to the academic-NGO sphere all distract from the core importance of the working class in the quest for human liberation. Combating women’s oppression calls for a revival of revolutionary Marxist traditions, including those of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky. It also necessitates establishing the International Committee of the Fourth International as the global socialist revolutionary party.
A Trumpet of Sedition 