LIMA, PERU, November 27—International day of protest against anti-woman violence.
November 29—In the United States over the past few weeks, dozens of women have accused powerful men—entertainment figures and politicians—of sexual harassment and sexual assault. Women (and some men) around the world have spoken out as well. With hashtags such as #MeToo, #YoTambien, #Quellavoltache and #Balancetonporc, they accuse men of abusing their power, especially in the workplace, to carry out verbal and physical sexual attacks. When China Daily printed an article stating that sexual harassment was a Western problem, Chinese women spoke out, revealing that in a 2013 study by China Labour bulletin, up to 70% of female factory workers in the southern city of Guangzhou said they had experienced sexual harassment in the workplace.
While there may be a shift in what men in the public eye can get away with, the wage system makes all women workers vulnerable to sexual harassment. A statement by Latina farmworkers from the US organization Alianza Nacional de Campesinas reflects this reality. “We share a common experience of being preyed upon by individuals who have the power to hire, fire, blacklist and otherwise threaten our economic, physical and emotional security.” Under capitalism, women are forced to put up with sexual assault and sexual harassment in all its forms to survive.
Communist society will put an end to the material basis of these attacks by putting an end to jobs as we know them. Ending money and the wage system will mean that there will be no more bosses. No one will be forced to put up with humiliating and degrading treatment to survive. Instead of having to find a job, and put up with whatever the boss or supervisor requires of you to keep a job, we’ll work together to produce what we need.
Neither will a woman be forced to suffer domestic abuse by her husband because he’s the economic support of the family. We’ll organize ourselves in collectives to share the fruits of our labor. No one will be forced to stay in an abusive relationship due to economic necessity.
But it won’t be automatic. The history of the communist movement shows that it will take political struggle to wipe out the sexist practices we inherit from the old order. One example comes from Fanshen by William Hinton, based on the experiences of the Chinese village of Long Bow after the 1949 revolution. Men in positions of party leadership abused their power to take sexual advantage of women, among other forms of corrupt and individualistic behavior. This was wide spread enough in Long Bow that the party leadership tolerated it for quite a while.
Finally, a young woman exposed her husband’s abusive behavior and asked for the support of the village in applying for a divorce. A mass mobilization of women supported her and went on to denounce the abuses of power that had resulted in the sexual abuse of women, both by party cadre and by the husbands of many women. Women communists took the lead in doing this, but the mobilization required the mass and active participation of the whole village to change the power dynamics between men and women.
When we take power, the struggle will intensify to wipe out the remnants of capitalist ideologies and practice among the Party and the masses. The party must take the leadership in that struggle. The fight against sexism is similar to the fight against racism. These bosses’ ideologies divide the working class. To fight for communism, we must overcome those divisions. We’ll never be able to smash capitalism and build a communist society until we do. However, to win the final victory over sexism, we’ll have to wipe out its material basis in capitalism.
Sexism came into existence with private property and class society. Sexist culture has justified unequal power relationships, demeaned women’s intellectual potential and encouraged sexual violence in all class societies.
Capitalism has used sexism to increase the exploitation of men and women workers, by super-exploiting women workers, especially women of color, as well as taking advantage of their unpaid household labor. Sexist culture has commodified women’s bodies, using sex to sell everything from cars to toothpaste.
Communist society will come into being burdened with the remnants of the society from which it sprung. Men and women in capitalist society have internalized sexist norms. Women have suffered sexual assault, from their class brothers as well as from the bosses.
But women throughout history have also played key roles in revolutionary movements in Russia, China, South Africa and Latin America. In our own party, women maquila workers in El Salvador and young women in the US and Mexico are taking communist leadership. Fighting against sexism in our party and making the fight against sexism a mass issue in our work will strengthen women’s leadership, the Party and the masses in general.
We invite the women workers around the world who are standing up to sexist behavior to join us in mobilizing the masses for communism. The international communist movement needs your anger and energy in the fight against sexism. And you need a communist world, where doing away with the wage system will allow us to win the final victory against sexism and all forms of oppression.
Murder of Women in Mexico and Central America
In Mexico, more than 10,000 women have been killed between 2012 and 2017. These are our class sisters, and every day 6 or 7 women lose their lives. In several cities there is a higher murder rate than in the countries of the northern triangle of Central America (Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala) named by the organization Small Arms Survey as among the 12 most dangerous countries in the world to be a woman. The majority have been killed violently, either shot, dismembered, raped, suffocated, or beaten to death.
Between 1985 and 2009, 34,176 women were killed in Mexico. The upward trend continues to increase. More women were killed in the state of Mexico; between 2000 and 2009, there were 2,881 women killed. Every 15 seconds a woman is attacked and every 9 minutes a woman is raped throughout Mexico. This is not the product of “offended machismo (sexism)” but of a capitalist system in decline. This cries out for communist revolution to put an end to this sexist system. Women and men to arms!
Soviet Poster for International Women’s Day: “The Eighth of March Liberation of Women”
