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NEWS & LETTERS, March 2004EditorialWomen's worldwide struggle for freedomThere can be no better month than March, Women’s History Month, and International Women’s Day, March 8, to see that women’s worldwide fight for freedom is one of the greatest challenges not only to degenerate capitalism, but to all obstacles standing in the way of a new human world. That is clear when we look at women’s struggle against politicalized religion be that Israeli and Palestinian women fighting Sharon; Muslim women fighting a politicalized fundamentalist Islam; or women in the U.S. fighting the likes of Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and their man in the White House, Bush, whose reign has been a disaster for women around the globe. It is clear when we see women’s multifaceted opposition to war. Women were in the lead in the international as well as local protests against the U.S. invasion of Iraq--the largest anti-war movement in history. Women were the vanguard in protesting the war in Afghanistan and continue fighting a U.S. policy that sacrifices women’s freedom for political expediency and capitalism’s inhuman direction. The search for women’s history has always been about what our past can tell us about how to fight back today. Women’s voices are now heard more clearly. Through much agitation, they have created new departments in human rights organizations like Human Rights Watch that focus on and publicize violations of women’s rights as they attempt to deepen what "human rights" means. The dialectics of liberation reveal the reality that women refuse to be victims, they fight back in creative ways that point to new human relations. For example: women in Sri Lanka did what their leaders couldn’t when Sinhala women worked with Tamil women, speaking in one voice against violence and rape. We recorded in the pages of N&L how women in Serbia risked their lives in reaching out to their sisters in Bosnia, and later in Kosova, and vice versa. And recently, women in Iraq--Kurdish and Arab, Sunni and Shia Muslim, and Christian--demonstrated against the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council’s introduction of Resolution 137, and won repeal of the Resolution which would have replaced existing civil law with Islamic law, Sharia, thus stripping women of the rights they fought for and won in Iraq decades ago. The struggle will continue, for women lost the fight for a 40% representation in the future national assembly. The new constitution provides only 25%, though women are in the majority in Iraq. All of these struggles overlap and bring into view other questions such as rape as a weapon of war; rape within the U.S. military (including U.S. soldiers in Iraq raping women soldiers and Iraqi women); prostitution and the trafficking of women and children; outright slavery, both sexual and labor; the feminization of poverty, which is now a global phenomenon; and the sexual politics of AIDS. The fact that we know about each of these horrors has to do with women’s revolutionary agitation; and in each case, women fight back. Women resist under the most dire circumstances. Nawal El-Saadawi pointed out at the World Social Forum that women’s resistance means fighting those who try to prevent women from thinking, organizing, "or seeking ways to resist." Weapons used to keep women down include "The repeated banning of books and articles, TV programs discussing the situation of women, criticizing religious fundamentalist thought, exposing patriarchal values and practices, extolling...real democracy...or defending the rights of women." "Hence," she points out, "the accusations of apostasy, the threats of assassination and the campaigns of character assassination launched against activists...who dare to defend the rights of women." What El-Saadawi describes is what Iraqi feminist Yanar Mohammed is experiencing and why supporting her is so crucial (see page 2). Women in different countries are living under fascism, where speaking out for women’s rights, or trying to live a human life, is an invitation for a prison sentence, a beating, or death. That is also why the cause of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) demands our support. Despite dire circumstances RAWA survives as an organization. Their condemnation of all sides in Afghanistan is unbending. They say of the U.S. war that was supposedly to liberate them: "Under the Taliban, if a woman went to market and showed an inch of flesh she would have been flogged; now she’s raped." Karzai's government "has done nothing for women." Their critique of cultural relativists is devastating: "Feminism does not need to be imported; it has already taken root in Afghanistan. Long before the U.S. bombing, progressive organizations were trying to establish freedom, democracy, secularism and women’s rights." The maturity of women’s struggles in 2004 shows that Marx was right when he wrote in his ECONOMIC-PHILOSOPHIC MANUSCRIPTS OF 1844 that "on the basis of [the man/woman relation] we can judge the whole stage of the development of humanity." Marx wasn’t only exposing the alienations, frustrations, and exploitation of capitalism; to him the man/woman relationship showed how total a revolution was needed. What women are struggling against--from Bush’s attack on women’s control of our own bodies to religious fundamentalism’s attempt to push women back into the dark ages--reveals the retrogressive times we face. But this has not stopped women from fighting for freedom, it has only deepened their struggle. In that struggle for freedom, for new human relations, a glimpse of the new society that is our goal is revealed. |
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