“All The Rage” in Manchester

On Saturday 14 March, Workers’ Liberty hosted All the Rage, our annual socialist feminist conference. Around 80 people attended the day of talks, workshops and discussions in Manchester.

We covered a host of contemporary issues: how we fight the far-right in the context of increasing attacks on women, trans people, migrants, and racialised people in the UK and abroad; the politics of sex and sexuality in the age of the sexual counter-revolution; the fight for the decriminalisation of sex work and support for sex workers in the trade union movement (led by an organiser from Decrim Now and the Sex Workers’ Union); how attacks including on trans healthcare, poor provision for women’s healthcare, and increasingly capitalist organisation of our health services are damaging our mental and physical health; and the Iranian resistance to Iran’s clerical-fascist regime, over decades of rebellion and to the forces today that can bring the regime down.

We also had sessions connected to our regular socialist feminist work: a book club session discussing Tithi Bhattacharya’s essay How Not To Skip Class: Social Reproduction of Labour and the Global Working Class (on how capitalism exploits us in both the workplace and the home); and a workshop on the Manchester People’s History Museum’s collection of socialist feminist publications, seeing how the culture of these publications has developed through from the Red Rag in the 1970s to our own socialist feminist publication, Women’s Fightback, today.

This year’s All the Rage provides an opportunity to reinvigorate our socialist feminist work: using Women’s Fightback and our regular book clubs in Manchester, Edinburgh, London, and Sheffield to develop liberatory socialist feminist politics; and bringing more feminists into our work.

Contribute to renewing socialist feminism and write for Women’s Fightback by getting in touch with our editorial board — womensfightback@workersliberty.org