From Felicity Dowling:
"Women Against the Cuts Merseyside"
No revolutionary can consider
the tasks of the 21st century without standing with the women; this
is the only revolutionary standpoint.
“Give me a place to
stand and with a lever I will move the whole world.”
In India women and men rose
in their hundreds of thousands to protest the terrible rape case, in Pakistan
and Bangladesh Textile workers reacted angrily to the deaths of their workmates
in avoidable fires, in China working women play a huge role in the workforce
and in Labour disputes, in Ireland more than ten thousand marched in
commemoration of Savita Halappanavar who died miscarrying a foetus which
should have been aborted to save Savita’s life. In Russia, the campaign around
unlikely but deeply political heroines, Pussy Riot continues to reverberate.
In Africa the women working
in the farms are striking. The women of the minefields of South Africa marched
just days after the slaughter of the men, and kept the flame alive. The women
of the townships forge new ways of struggle as the service users.
Ninety eight per cent of
Roman Catholic women in the UK ignore the church and use birth control.
The old order changes.
Yet in the background deep
structural changes in women’s lives are being engineered by the ruling class.
The current assault that we (in the UK) are most aware of is the onslaught on
women in Europe including the UK, through the destruction of the welfare state,
from the attacks of “austerity”.
Seventy per cent of the UK
cuts affect women primarily. A friend tells me that the Citizens Advice reckon
that older women are those most likely to be referred to food banks, to have no
other resources at all.
These societal changes will
have repercussions on women’s lives as they pick up the burden of social care;
once their traditional role. As 3 out of 4 old people’s homes in Spain are
closed the women of the families will be picking up the pieces. In Greece unemployed
single mothers get €80 per month to feed their children, yet their cost of
living is close to that in the UK.
These changes to women’s
living standards and conditions are accompanied by deep, thorough and pervasive
propaganda; media conditioning to split the class and to set neighbour against
neighbour. The traditional solidarity of working class areas is slow to re-form
(though regenerate it must if we are not to descend into some kind of
Dickensian slum life).
The deep propaganda from the
media is stressing again and again the differences between boys and girls.
Never in the 40+ years I have been buying toys for children has the gender
divide been so blatant. Lego have even produced a “girls” Lego brand. In
Student Unions there is sexism we thought had been eradicated in the 1970s.
“Equalities” officers are given little resources and less respect, but “rape”
themed parties are tolerated. Anti-women talk is rife on the net and in printed
media. Women writers report onslaughts of sexist abuse when they publish
online. The extent of pornography is reported as a problem for some youngsters
trying to form real relationships.
Further disturbing, power
abusing, relationships such as the Saville case in Britain, the grooming cases
where vulnerable young girls in care were abused, and the abuse in the eighties
in children’s homes highlight the pervasive and corrosive effect of the sexist
and patriarchal structures of our society.
Figures for the number of
women who experience sexual or domestic violence (http://onebillionrising.org) should
shock every person alive, yet it is not regarded as serious by the media, the
ruling politicians the judiciary or the police.
Deeper still in the morass of
capitalism is the destructive attitude to children. While women bear the brunt
of cuts, those who suffer most and will suffer throughout their lives from the
cuts are, and will be, the children of the poor as the effects of early
childhood poverty reverberate throughout their lives. The police in Glasgow are
reported to be sending shoplifters to food banks rather than prosecute them (http://www.eveningtimes.co.uk/news/police-refer-starving-shoplifters-to-charity-food-banks-103770n.19092582
. those in London sending kids to food banks
This in 21st century Britain.
Yet the assault in Europe is
not the first. Women have suffered similarly in Africa and Asia when the IMF,
the world bank or the EU have imposed “restructuring” on the economy. Zimbawe
had the best primary education in Africa, the best health service and qualified
Social workers. Many of these professionals are now employed aboard and the
country is bereft as the services are cut.
Women die in child
birth in terrible numbers and virtually every death is preventable with modern
medicine.( A British woman had a bad time giving birth and the incredulous
husband said “It can’t be that bad, women in Africa don’t have this care, what
happens there?”, “They die”, he was told). Chile ,Sri Lanka, country after
country, have experienced re-structuring. Re-structuring, I would argue, is
fundamentally an attack on women and families, taking into the hands of private
companies all that the state had built to protect the people in the aftermath
of liberation struggles and world war two, and forcing the responsibility for
‘unprofitable’ care back onto women.
A pornography of poverty
exists where we are told that a child dies of poverty every 3 minutes, and we
are shown pictures to prove it. The subtext is that you, human, poor human of
the working classes and peasantry, cannot protect your young, you are powerless
in this the most basic duty of an adult animal. When asked to defend the use of
drones, which we know kill children, the US spokesperson says “Yes, well, it
kills less children than carpet bombing” Again the killing of children acts to
discipline and debilitate the power of adults.
Some argue that the attack on
women can be dated from the 1970s when birth rates in Europe began to fall as
contraception gave women choice and they chose not to have children if society
would not help with the social tasks. In Italy the birth rate plummeted. Women
no longer provided the next generation as fodder for the factories and rates of
profit began to fall.
“Women hold up half the sky”
as Mao famously said. Today women are both the butt of the attacks from
capitalism and the blood and bone of the new working class in Asia, Africa and
Latin America. Our enemies attack women ruthlessly in many ways, yet unless
those women rally to the cause of revolution there can be no change. Women and
men are either part of the solution or part of the problem. This must be an
even bigger feature of revolutionary theory than it was in the time of Eleanor
Marx and of Rosa Luxemburg, of the bread and roses strike or the strikes
of the match women, of the Ford workers struggle for equal pay or of Grunwicks.
The SWP are not the only left
group to be blind to the role women are playing, and must play, in any
successful struggle to defend conditions and to change the world. Britain’s
largest left group, the SWP, has fallen into a morass of its own making, at
least in part, because they did not consider the issue of women’s rights and struggles
to be at the core of socialist thought and agitation. There is no happiness to
be had from this. The SWP have the largest youth membership and won some of the
best of the students who came into struggle after the imposition of fees for
higher education in the UK. We can only wish well those who want to struggle to
reform the party and keep its cohort of young militants together, and offer to
work with those who find such a task impossible.
There is a place to move the
world. You find it when you stand with the women.
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