Women workers. Enormous potential to lead movement for change.

Women factory workers making profits for the world's giant corporations and at the same time being organized into a potential force for changing society.

I am trying to read more about women workers under capitalism. Here is one of the most powerful of the facts I have come upon. Today half the world's factory workers are women. This means the international working class has been transformed and objectively tremendously strengthened. This is a major major step forward. What a potential change for the better. Just think what is possible and what should be done.

The leaders of the international workers movement should launch a campaign for equal rights and equal wages for all. They should launch a campaign for a wage that allows any person, female or male, to bring up a family on their own. They should launch a campaign for paid childcare and maternity and paternity leave for all. And along with that a campaign to ensure that women have control over their own bodies, that is the right to family planning and abortion and the economic means to have a child if they wish. Such a campaign would mobilize this incredibly powerful section of the workforce and could be the basis for a mass movement of hundreds of millions to challenge capitalism. The refusal of the labor leaders to challenge what capitalism offers working people and especially women workers is enough to make you despair. These leaders are utterly cowed by capitalism. They have forfeited the right to lead the movement.

Then I was reading another book. This book explained that in the time of prehistory the deities were all female, all goddesses and no gods. It explains that the reason for this was that the role of men in procreation was not known. It just appeared that women in some mysterious way and all under their own volition got a round stomach and a baby came forth, new life came forth, from women came the entire job of replenishing the species without any help from men. Old statues and art work from this period seem to support this view as so much of this is based around statues of women in which the sexual parts are emphasized. In Ireland there are the little statues, I think they are called sheila na gigs or somethings like that. Small statues of women holding their sex open.

Then when the role of men in producing new life became known this enhanced the view of men and their relationship to women in general. Along with this came the change in material conditions, production of food and living necessities, the development of animal husbandry, the development of the productive forces and this process in turn had an effect on the male female relationship giving the males with their increased mobility an advantage over the female.

Of course I am only feeling my way here so I may be wrong on a lot of these interpretations of mine. I will be pleased to be corrected. But on one issue I am very confident. That is on the enormous potential power of the women workers who make up half the factory workers in the world. I hope I live to see the day when they are organized and marching and striking and leading from China to the USA, from Russia to Brazil, from South Africa to Germany, from India to Australia, from Iran to France, from Saudia Arabi to Ireland, everywhere. They are already moving in China. Things are looking up.

Sean.