Adivasi women in India protest deforestation
Sexism and Racism, Caste-ism, Religious Bigotry, and Xenophobia Intersect in Capitalist Wage-Slavery. End All Divisions Within the Working Class with Communist Revolution
Capitalism’s gender roles mean that its racism often attacks men and women workers in different but interconnected ways. Capitalism’s racist and sexist ideologies divide and weaken the working class. To wipe out both racism and sexism, workers must build a revolutionary movement to end capitalism and build a communist future.
The South African Apartheid system forced Black people into barren desert “homelands.” Black men had to carry passbooks and become wage slaves in mines and factories. A woman without a job and passbook couldn’t join her husband in the city. In 1956 20,000 women marched to Pretoria demanding an end to Apartheid and its pass laws. They were key to that victory.
But racist capitalism still forces Black men to leave their families in the countryside for the factories and mines. Black women struggle to raise children in poverty. Black women who are wage slaves in the cities do a “second shift” of housework.
Capitalism in crisis spawns increasing racist and gender-based attacks, particularly against working-class women of oppressed groups. These have sparked mass struggles. Working-class women, notably women of color or lower caste status, have given key leadership worldwide. We need more of them in the International Communist Workers’ Party.
Mobilizing masses for communism creates the material basis to end all these divisions. But ending the wage system will not automatically do that. Before, during and after communist revolution, we need long-term political struggle against the divisive ideas and habits inherited from class society.
Rape and Suicide: Two Faces of India’s Caste-ist Profit System
In India, five Dalit women (considered below the lowest caste) per day endure rape. Lower-caste women, Muslim women, tribal women, and poor women of every caste and religion face the same. Meanwhile, a dozen male Indian farmers die from suicide daily.
Capitalist agriculture drives millions into bankruptcy. Capitalism demands that men provide for their families, then makes that impossible.
Women in India have led demonstrations demanding punishment for rapists. They’ve united with men in general strikes and mass protests defending Dalits and Muslims and denouncing the debt burdens on farmers.
Men and women in India are joining and building ICWP to fight for a communist society that will end capitalist oppression and exploitation. Communism can win the fight against capitalist practices and ideas of racism, sexism, and caste discrimination that divide us.
Police Murders and For-Profit Health Care: Two Faces of the US Racist Profit System
A New York City cop choked Eric Garner, a Black man, to death in 2014. His daughter Erica joined a movement led largely by Black women who mobilized millions to protest racist police terror. In December 2017, Erica (age 27) died of a heart attack just weeks after giving birth. This is a terrible legacy of slavery.
Racist US police kill people at a higher rate than any other industrialized country. That includes hundreds of working-class white people. But cops are four times more likely to kill young Black men than young white men.
The racist profit-driven US health care system sucks up more money than any other industrialized country. It has some of the worst results, including the highest maternal death rate. Working-class people of every description suffer the consequences. But Black women are almost four times as likely to die after childbirth as white women.
The stress of living in a racist police state is a risk factor for Black mothers. Racist police killings and maternal mortality are two sides of the coin of a racist profit system.
The Solution: Ideological and Armed Struggle for Communist Social Relations
Racist and sexist attacks on the working class take different forms. But the cause is the same: the capitalist system of private property and wage labor.
The need to maximize profits drives capitalism-imperialism to exploit the masses as wage slaves and to superexploit sub-groups. It must keep our vast international working class divided through racism, xenophobia, caste-ism, tribalism, nationalism, sexism, religious divisions (communalism) and more. We must destroy this deadly system through an armed revolutionary struggle for communism.
Communist society will value each person as a comrade within a huge interconnected social network. Building communist social relations and a mass party will mobilize the masses to consciously fight against all remnants of capitalist behavior.
That struggle starts now. Communist practice today must include open and honest criticism and self-criticism. That will make it possible to defeat sexism, racism and all the rest in the process of mobilizing masses for communism.
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