The idea of an international marxist-feminist conference was originally brought into being by the feminist section of the Berliner Institut of Critical Theory (InkriT) around the German sociologist and philosopher Frigga Haug.
A call for a Marxist-Feminist International was sent out. Within only one week, forty women from all parts of the world responded to Frigga Haug’s first circular letter, with thirty-four offering contributions to the congress envisaged. This first congress that took place in Berlin in March 2015, intended to pick up the threads of past Marxist-feminist research and engagement and was – even to the surprise of the organisers – a great success. More than 500 people attended the workshops, panel discussions and lectures, the speakers and participants spanning several generations and countries as well as political and academic fields of intervention.
In the introduction, the organisers of the first international Marxist-Feminist Conference wrote: ”More than 40 years ago, feminists among Marxists in many countries spoke out. They criticized the concept of labour that was then commonly used in Marxism, they criticized value theory, views on domestic labour and the family, the way of dealing and interacting with each other and with nature around us, the economy and wars; and they discussed their visions of the future and raised their voices for women’s liberation. They triggered passionate debates and their criticism was not totally ignored. But the work they have carried out on an international scale is far from complete. For some decades feminist Marxist debates subsided because neoliberalism, stumbling from one crisis to another, had brought other issues into focus”.
The urgency to diversify topics and Marxist Feminist approaches to theories made it necessary and inevitable to organize subsequent international Marxist Feminist conferences.
Since then, several editions of the International Marxist Feminist Conference have been organized on a regular basis, always with enormous success: a second Marxist Feminist Conference, increasingly international, took place in Vienna in 2016, the third Marxist Feminist conference was held in Lund (Sweden) in 2018. Due to the pandemic crisis, the IV International Marxist Feminist Conference was held online from Basque country in 2021, followed by the V MarxFem edition Warsaw (Poland) in 2023 and, in 2025, the VI MarxFem conference took place in Porto (Portugal).
