8 maart en meer
henk - 08.03.2003 12:30
8 maart
 http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FrontlinesNewspaper/message/593
MARCH 8 : WL DAY
Women's Liberation Requires More than Declarations
By Gina Alvarez
On March 8, 2003 once again political and social organizations will put
forward statements and declarations about the condition of women in
capitalist society. They will give us these known facts about the
oppression of women.
Women constitute roughly half of the world population, but lack the
level of political representation, equal rights and wages that men
possess. In some societies they have remained at the bottom of the
social scale. In others they have scratched the glass ceiling by acting
as a human pyramid so that women in the upper middle class and the
bourgeoisie, by extending their hands, could reach to where no other
women have reached before, while standing on the backs of the mass of
women at the bottom of the social scale.
Some organizations will raise the point that, after two centuries of
struggle, social evolution and political accommodation, women in fact
have made some gains. In some countries not even conservatives dare to
talk about maintaining the status quo of women's oppression at the
levels that existed at the dawn of capitalist society.
Social and Political Regression
But few will concentrate on the fact that social conditions are now
regressing in most of the world. Not just for women, but for all the
most oppressed layers of society: immigrants, people of color, workers .
every gain of the past is today threatened by this worldwide regressive
wave.
The "death agony of capitalism and imperialism," this epoch in which the
system is fighting for its survival, is threatened with a worldwide
drop of the rate of profits, facing scarcer sources of energy and water
and a looming environmental catastrophe, is featuring a US
military/economic offensive against the world.
Countries, nation states and artificial states in Africa, Central Asia
and regions of the former Soviet Union and even regions in Latin America
are collapsing, left outside the gates of the dying civilization that is
more and more concentrated in a small number of nation-fortresses in
Europe and the US.
Attacks against the remaining democratic rights of the system are on the
rise in industrialized countries, while democratic rights no longer
exist or they are scarcer in other countries. The scratch of
regressive ideologies and movements like religious fundamentalism has
grown into a massive gangrene in a number of countries.
The rights of women are being rolled back in the US and elsewhere. The
rights to abortion, to equal pay for equal work and full equality on the
job, never fully achieved, now are under further attack. Money for
education, social services, and economic aid to families with children
are being cut and cut again. These are the areas in which women rely on
state support in order to temper their role as chief caretaker,
unchanged while the bourgeois family collapses under the weight of its
own historical irrelevance.
Affirmative action, abortion rights and other legislation that
represented a gram of gain against the tonnage of women's oppression in
modern and "civilized" societies are either under intensive attack or
they have been rendered inaccessible by cutbacks in funding. School
grants for poor women - as well as for people of color and immigrants -
have been transformed into loans, that add a new chain around the necks
of the oppressed.
Secularism is on a downward spiral while entire societies go back into
pre-capitalist social structures which go hand in hand with the
resurgence of fundamentalism. In some cases women are subjected to the
oppressive laws of the shariah, physical and psychological oppression;
the death penalty selectively applied to women . the collapse of
capitalism and the overstaying of imperialist relations in many
countries have brought about a heavy concomitant price, especially for
women.
Regressive forms and fundamentalism are also present in "developed"
societies like the US where there is an offensive by the religious
Christian right wing against the rights and needs of women and a push to
put the remaining social services for families under the control of
religious institutions.
In can't be any other way under the capitalist system. If full equality
for women and freedom from the chains of oppression were not fulfilled
completely during periods of upswing of the system, because they were
resisted furiously every step of the way, why would we expect that these
rights won't deteriorate further during the senile stage of the same
system?
Women and the Mass Movements
Acknowledging this dynamic, however, should not lead us to the romantic
vision that there is nothing we should raise at present in the form of
demands and struggles specific to the oppressed layers of society while
we work for an abstract "unity of the oppressed" in order to realize the
socialist revolution that miraculously would resolve all the problems of
women and all other oppressed layers of society with the magic touch of
the socialist wand.
For oppression - whether discrimination against immigrants, racism
against people of color, homophobia, and inequality both legal and
economic of women - created through centuries of bourgeois ideological
supremacy has created material conditions of its own and has permeated
with prejudice and conservatism every layer, every class of society.
Even social psychology, with the help of religion and the state, has
been affected and has accepted many degrees of this oppression, even in
"progressive" layers of society.
The fight against oppression cannot wait for the success of a new
society, because that society will not arise and will not succeed
without resolving the struggles of today. Democratic and transitional
demands to end the oppression of women, end racism and homophobia today
will serve two objectives: one, to demonstrate the impossibility of the
system to address even the most fundamental democratic rights of the
oppressed and, second, to make it conscious to the working class, and
among youth, that no layer of society, including the working class, can
free itself from oppression and exploitation without taking up the
issues of all the most oppressed layers of society.
No mass movement for social change can succeed if it does not
consciously make the connection between economic exploitation and social
oppression.
We are today involved in a global battle against the US
political/military offensive, against the war, and in a parallel
struggle against the use of new forms of colonialism to build new
empires. These forms are promoted by a handful of European countries and
the US, empire building blocs which in turn are in conflict with each
other.
These movements, as was the case with the anti-globalization and
anti-capitalist movements and will certainly be the case for the labor
movement in the upcoming period, are embracing a global strategy to
confront the most visible elements of the decaying capitalist society.
Those movements, however, must be imbued with a relentless struggle for
the democratic rights of the oppressed. It is a complex issue and one
usually sidetracked by organizers and political organizations. We can't
effectively confront the Bush war drive to build an empire abroad
without fighting against the Patriot Act, or the cuts in education, or
the thousands of arrests without indictment, or the racial profiling of
people of color domestically.
We can't effectively mobilize every layer of society to oppose
globalization - the latest and senile stage of capitalism - by
addressing only the interests of the upper layer of the working class,
but must appeal to and fight for the rights of the most oppressed
sectors of society: immigrants, people of color, and women, who are the
most affected by globalization, both domestically and abroad.
A protest movement is transformed into a revolutionary movement for
social change when it is capable of universalizing a program for the
liberation of all layers of society oppressed by capitalism. That
program must take the form of new movements of the left based on the
working class and the oppressed, since there are no parties currently
within the system that will consistently fight for such an overall
program. Nor is there any shred of progressiveness or alternative vision
from those who oppose the system from within regressive fundamentalist
or reactionary movements.
Women, in many cases, have been and are at the forefront of the
anti-globalization and antiwar movements, as organizers and on the
streets. Women and people of color have been instrumental in forcing
changes in labor's position concerning the war - the AFL-CIO issued a
soft declaration against the Bush war drive - and on other social
issues, such as recent union support for some immigrant rights.
But there is still a long way to go for these movements, or the
worldwide socialist movement, to consciously create the basis for a
program for the liberation and freedom of all oppressed layers of
society and to admit those oppressed layers into the leadership, not
just the ranks, of the movements.
Once Again, the Question of the Program
From the democratic rights of women to free abortion on demand, free
education, money for social services, affirmative action, equal rights
under the law, ending of domestic violence .
. To the fight in unions and mass organizations, as well as in
workplaces, to take off from women the burden of family raising.
From the unrestricted access to leadership roles in society, starting
with the mass organizations.
. To the adoption of an internationalist view that women's liberation is
a task not just for "industrialized" countries, but includes the fight
against super-oppression in the semi colonial world. For that is where
empires are benefiting economically and politically from the
preservation of the most backward forms of oppression, grandiloquent
speeches notwithstanding.
From the democratic right of separation of church and politics and
social policy making.
.To the ideological struggle to overcome the preservation of the family
as a rudimentary reproduction of a class society instead of a freely
adopted relationship.
From the adoption of programs linking the struggle against the
oppression of women with the struggle of the working class and their
organizations and other oppressed layers of society, the struggle
against racism and anti-immigrant bashing.
.To the development of new organizations of the left with mass support
embracing as their own this program and this method, these are the tasks
for the present, not the future.
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