Following the call to action of the Anuradha Ghandy Campaign in
support of proletarian feminism, we are publishing a short speech
written by a supporter of the RAH and given at the International Working
Womenʹs Day event hosted by the Stonewall Militant Front in Austin this
year. Proletarian feminism was birthed in the class struggle, in
Peopleʹs War, and in our modern movement we must honor our martyrs and
theorists like Comrade Anuradha Ghandy and carry that struggle onwards.
Ten years after her death, the memory and spirit of Comrade Anuradha
Ghandy lives on, in the Peopleʹs War in India, and in the international
communist struggle. It is this spirit which drives us forward now to
build a militant womenʹs movement which can crush the class enemy here
in the belly of the imperialist beast.
Long live the struggle of proletarian women for their liberation!
Honor to Comrade Anuradha Ghandy!
Onwards in the development of a proletarian feminist movement in the world!
The
oppression of women has existed for so long in our world, and is so
pervasive and total in our society, that it appears to be almost
natural, undefeatable, something which we can only improve or manage but
never fully do away with. The capitalists themselves, when they
acknowledge the oppression of women, tell us that it is either natural
or that we should seek only to improve the representation of women
within the ruling class and their toadies within the state. Both serve
the same purpose: to preserve the oppression of women, to continue their
subjugation and domestication and to liquidate revolution. The
capitalists cannot end the oppression of women, and they do not seek to
because they are the only people who benefit from it. But this does not
mean it cannot be abolished in its totality. The oppression of women was
born at the dawn of class society, as the very first ruling classes
emerged. At the very establishment of private property, women became
subjects, domestic slaves bound to the home and to reproduction, bound
to the most demeaning drudgery, as men established control over
production and property. Women have been oppressed since the moment
oppression was born into this world, and they cannot be truly freed
until private property and class society are demolished and withered
away, until all of humanity achieves dignity and freedom at last under
communism. The oppression of women has existed for so long in our world,
and is so pervasive and total in our society, that it appears to be
almost natural, undefeatable, something which we can only improve or
manage but never fully do away with. The capitalists themselves, when
they acknowledge the oppression of women, tell us that it is either
natural or that we should seek only to improve the representation of
women within the ruling class and their toadies within the state. Both
serve the same purpose: to preserve the oppression of women, to continue
their subjugation and domestication and to liquidate revolution. The
capitalists cannot end the oppression of women, and they do not seek to
because they are the only people who benefit from it. But this does not
mean it cannot be abolished in its totality. The oppression of women was
born at the dawn of class society, as the very first ruling classes
emerged. At the very establishment of private property, women became
subjects, domestic slaves bound to the home and to reproduction, bound
to the most demeaning drudgery, as men established control over
production and property. Women have been oppressed since the moment
oppression was born into this world, and they cannot be truly freed
until private property and class society are demolished and withered
away, until all of humanity achieves dignity and freedom at last under
communism.
Though this may seem distant and unreachable, we know
that we can achieve this, and that in fact it is the natural progression
of class struggle. To bring about this world we must build revolution,
and understand that revolution is the violent struggle between classes,
and never succumb to any delusions that there can be any kind of
peaceful revolution. In building revolution, the role of women must be
understood as essential to its success, as strategic and not tactical.
As comrade Lenin said ʹThe experience of all liberation movements has
shown that the success of a revolution depends on how much the women
take part in it.ʹ Marxism-Leninism-Maoism teaches us, synthesizing the
lessons of a century of class struggle, that protracted peopleʹs war is
our universal strategy for the seizure of state power. To better explain
the role of women in peopleʹs war and the peopleʹs army, Iʹm going to
briefly touch upon these concepts.
The peopleʹs army is an army of
a new type. It is utterly unlike the bourgeois military forces we
associate with the word ʹarmyʹ. It is in short a political army with a
military face, which is always lead by the party and its guiding
ideology, never letting the gun take command over its decisions. While
it has officers and soldiers, their relationships is nothing like that
of the bourgeois forces. The soldiers are able to criticize their
officers and the officers receive no medals, no special privileges. The
way it engages the enemy is also completely different: its actions are
political attacks given military form. It relies on the enemy as their
quartermaster, stealing arms and ammunition from them, and captives are
treated fairly and every attempt is made to win them over to revolution.
In peopleʹs war the warfare is also of guerrilla and not a conventional
nature. But the greatest difference between a peopleʹs army and a
bourgeois army is in its relationship to the people. A peopleʹs army is
not one which takes from the people, it is not one which relies
parasitically upon the society in which it operates. A peopleʹs army
seeks to be as fish among the ocean of the masses, seeking to unite with
them fully, meeting their needs, and producing its own supplies, paying
fairly for whatever they need from the people. A peopleʹs soldier is a
true servant of the people. To be absolutely clear: the peopleʹs army
and the soldiers within it carry out the majority of the mass work
during peopleʹs war. They produce infrastructure and agriculture for the
people within the base areas and defend them from the forces of the
state.
The role of women in peopleʹs war and the peopleʹs army is
one of strategic importance. Peopleʹs war brings about transformation in
women, and women bring about transformation to the peopleʹs army. They
not only double the potential pool of fighters, they improve the quality
of the work of the peopleʹs army and themselves often prove the better
of male fighters. Women in fact have been active participants in every
attempt at socialist revolution, from the first blows of the Paris
commune, to the victory of the October revolution, to the long wars of
the Chinese revolution, and every peopleʹs war since. Among any segment
of the masses, women are the most oppressed, and this oppression is
turned into fury in peopleʹs war, which is unleashed upon the bourgeois
and their running dogs. In Peru, the PCP paid special attention to the
condition of women, who would make up almost half of the peopleʹs army
and eventually 60% of the central committee, the highest amount of women
to be represented on the central committee of any communist party. They
became soldiers and indeed commanders and officers, and terrified the
bourgeois forces, who made many observations that they were more furious
fighters than their male counterparts. The influence of such women
within both the army and the party cannot be understated. Because women
understand fully that the forces of reaction will only bring them back
into subjugation, that their freedom lies only at the end of the road
from socialism to communism, they fight all the more ferociously both
for the socialist revolution and to safeguard its gains against
capitalist revisionism.
mfp
In Nepal a large amount of women
joined the peopleʹs army, and were both an asset to it as soldiers and
had a great role in transforming its nature to that of a true peoples
army. In their documents they note that women played an important role
in giving the army its mass character, ensuring it was not only active
in fighting but also in organizing the masses and in engaging in
productive labor. Women were able to go among the masses more easily,
better integrating themselves in the families in the areas the peoples
army was in or moving into. They took away the masculine image from the
army, showing the people it was truly an egalitarian force and making it
more approachable. In the theater of fighting itself, women were no
less valuable. They were found to be more tenacious fighters, more eager
to go on the offensive, and more resistant to torture. It was found
that where men lay down arms and gave up, women would continue to fight.
They were less prone to big-headedness after victories and skulking
after defeats, being more patient and retaining their composure. Despite
facing conservative thinking among some men in the party and in the
army, they proved that they were not less physically able than their
male counterparts, and as in Peru they were decisive force in the
successes of their peopleʹs war.
Not only were women of benefit to
the peopleʹs army, they were drawn to it in large numbers from other
organizations. In Nepal, an internal survey of women in the movement
found that between the army, the party, and the united front, women most
sought to be within the army (about 40% identifying it as the field
they were most drawn to). In Peru we can also see that women joined the
people’s army through the movimiento femenino popular in large numbers,
and there are also large numbers of women within the new peoples army of
the Philippines right this moment. Why are women so drawn to peopleʹs
war, to the peopleʹs armies? There are many aspects of peopleʹs war
which appeal to women. It’s productive and compassionate nature to the
people, itʹs egalitarian nature which allows women the chance to
advance, and the opportunity to turn their righteous fury upon their
class enemy are some examples. The base area itself, the ability to
begin to nurture the fruits of the revolution and build a more just and
free world where they themselves can taste the beginnings of their
liberation, has great appeal to women struggling for revolution. Of
greater appeal, however, is the affect the peopleʹs army and peopleʹs
war has on women inside and outside of it.
Violence and struggle
are the only ways change occurs in this world. This is true for
everything from physics to society. War has an immediate effect upon
those taking part, and the nature of the peopleʹs army and peopleʹs war
makes these effects into positive transformation. Women are changed by
peopleʹs war both in essence and also in form. Where she lacked
confidence, where she was made meek and told to focus on her appearance
over her physical and ideological development, she is now given
leadership, she is trained into a soldier who is upright and armed, able
to fight for long periods of time or in quick succession. She is given a
political education and the equal place to argue with the men around
her both over matters of class struggle as well as gender. Where before
her spirit was quashed and she was made to be quiet, now she is
rebellious, furious and armed. Long have women endured quietly the
private and public violence of men, made powerless against this
predation and humiliation by the forces of the bourgeois state. During
peopleʹs war womanizers, abusers and rapists fear maoist women, and
those who commit acts of violence against women are swiftly punished by
the peopleʹs courts. In Nepal especially it was noted that women who had
been oppressed by the feudal system transformed wholly and completely.
Previously women had worked dawn till dusk on land they had no rights
to, which was owned completely by their husbands and would only be
passed to their sons, they were not even permitted to remarry after
their husbands death. After the initiation of peopleʹs war these same
women learned how to plant time bombs, listen for enemy intelligence,
and plan complicated attacks against reactionary forces. Women who had
previously been illiterate and confined to the home now argued
complicated matters of philosophy. Before they faced the endless
drudgery of feudal life, the only escape being urban life, which itself
offered only trafficking into prostitution or enslavement in sweatshops.
Prostitutes who had previously known only the gravest indignities,
deepest humiliation and most grotesque violence were freed and became
dignified and powerful fighters, able to attack the very state that had
forced them into such destitution and earning a dignified death in
service to the people, for which they would be celebrated both by their
comrades and the people. Peopleʹs war offered freedom, an exciting new
avenue for young women to challenge themselves alongside men on equal
terms, to prove themselves physically and mentally. Women were, for the
first time, given an opportunity for a dignified life and a dignified
death in service to the people and indeed to the whole world revolution.
nepal women
This
change however swept far beyond the women directly involved in the
peopleʹs war. The peopleʹs war had dramatic affect upon the women within
the base areas as well. A base area is in short an area in which the
party has seized full control and from which it attempts to build the
embryo of a new socialist state. These conditions within the base areas
create fertile ground for women to assert themselves and act in ways
that feudal and capitalist oppression never allow. In Nepal it was
found that women began plowing agricultural fields which was not
religiously permitted and tiling roofs which was not culturally
permitted. When their husbands were killed by police they would shun
traditional widowhood ceremonies and instead would print in newspapers
resolutions to avenge their husbands in revolutionary struggle. The
shame and stigma around remarrying after widowing was also eroded away,
and women began to marry for the first time based on love and
ideological commitment, and also divorce men who were found to be
traitors to and enemies of the revolution. Women were no longer having
children until they had sons, and were infact limiting the number of
children they had such that they could continue their revolutionary
activities. Where before they had no options against polygamy, cheating
husbands, and sexual violence they could now find dignity through the
peopleʹs courts, and began to speak out against their abusers. Before
rape victims were stigmatize, but as the state engaged in organized rape
campaigns, this shame gave way to a deep class hatred and a burning
desire for rebellion. Women were able to take an active role in shaping
the new state, both in infrastructure and in policy, and the absence of
men lead to women being more cooperative and alongside the leadership of
the party they engaged in many collective works, collective farming
being one such example which both improved the lives of the people and
brought many families, including those whose male leaders were
reactionaries, to the side of the revolution. In the base areas, women
began at last to grasp dignity.
Outside of the base areas in Nepal
peopleʹs war radically changed the nature of womenʹs lives and womenʹs
organizing. Before peopleʹs war the backwards, reformist feminist
movement found itself scarcely able to do anything. After the initiation
of peopleʹs war, women’s organizations began to abandon the struggle
for reforms and began to take action, and likewise the reactionary
nature of NGOs and their sham activists were exposed. No longer did
feminist organizations discuss the representation of women in parliament
or amongst the bourgeois. The fraudulent nature of such struggles was
exposed as counter revolutionary, and instead violent demonstrations
against beauty pageants were organized, and organizations came together
to protest the rape torture and murder of revolutionary women. In urban
areas where the peopleʹs war had not touched, women began to become more
class conscious and the womenʹs movement began to see class as the key
link to their oppression. Likewise was the failure of reform and charity
laid bare in Peru, as NGO activists were exposed as snitches selling
revolutionaries to the state, and as reformists called for the end of
armed struggle in favor of participation in elections even as the state
engaged in horrific campaigns of violence and slaughter against the
people. Such reformism is the betrayal of the womenʹs struggle, of the
struggle for true and final liberation. It liquidates the fury of women
into that domesticated meekness the bourgeois seeks in all its subjects
but especially among women. A sugar coated bullet is still a bullet, and
in the face of peopleʹs war, it is plain to the masses and especially
to women that such capitulation can lead them no where but back into
shackles.
Sadly enough, the communist party of Nepal itself
capitulated to capitalist ideology emerging within the movement, which
we call revisionism, and liquidated the peopleʹs war to engage in
parliamentary struggle. When the party laid down itʹs weapons, the
condition of women immediately became worse. In their own propaganda
they admitted that women became less involved in the party, that the
womenʹs struggle went backwards, and these phony ʹMaoistsʹ began to talk
of the representation within parliament and of reform that they had
railed against just a few years prior. When the peopleʹs army was taken
from women, they lost everything they had fought and died for. In this
defeat we find stark lessons: firstly, that we must guard against
revisionism within our movement. Revisionism turns our struggle into its
opposite, it turns the party of the proletariat into the party of the
bourgeois, and the peopleʹs army into the lapdogs of the capitalists,
the struggle for revolution into one for reform. The other lesson we can
take from this and from other failures and defeats is that women can
only be emancipated through the armed struggle. Truly, without the
peopleʹs army, the people (and women especially) have nothing.
In
our present movement, we must begin to build for this struggle here and
now. We cannot be deceived by those who tell us that the path to our
freedom as women lies in reforms, in representation, in community
healing. The only way forward for women is revolutionary violence. Our
whole lives as women we are cowed, domesticated, made meek and demure.
Our bodies are not our own, and any concerns of physical health or
physically ability seconded to aesthetic and sexual appeal, particularly
to men. We are assaulted by friends, by lovers, by family and by
strangers, and we are never truly allowed the means to defend ourselves
and to strike out against those who prey upon us. Our bodies are viewed
as things to be consumed, to be used by others, to be bought and sold in
advertisements, or often as prostitutes, sugar babies, and in nudes
over snapchat. We are denied access to much of the workforce, and those
areas we are expected to exist within are devalued. When we do share
work spaces with men we are valued and payed less than them, and we are
often sexually harassed and assaulted by our bosses and male coworkers.
Women who are of oppressed nations or who are LGBT face a triple
oppression, subject to further violence and indignities, pushed further
into prostitution and out of the workforce. We are butchered in our
streets, in our homes, and even alongside our families. How many black
women must vanish, how many lesbians must be found butchered in their
homes, how many girls must be assaulted before we discard the vulgar
lies of reformism? Despite the supposed successes of bourgeois feminism
we are still largely confined to the domestic sphere, we still lack in
dignity and in autonomy. Our president is a fucking rapist. Nothing
these phony ʹresistersʹ and #bossbabes offer us can lift us out of this
indignity. But there is a way forward for women. Reclaiming
revolutionary violence can give us our dignity, peopleʹs war can give us
a correct direction for our violence to destroy this corrupt, bastard
world and birth a new one. Socialism towards communism is the only road
to freedom for us. Womenʹs participation in revolution is a condition of
itʹs success, and the condition for the emancipation of women is our
participation in revolution, in peopleʹs war.
npa women 1
There
is more to draw on than historical examples, even more recent than the
people’s war in Nepal which continued into the early 2000ʹs. In the
Philippines today women make up a large portion of the New Peopleʹs Army
and indeed have place within the party as well. Women are celebrated
within the NPA, and simply checking twitter or facebook you can see
smiling women in battle dress, determined women training with stolen
AKʹs and ARʹs, and videos women holding philosophical and political
discussions. A recent tweet illustrates quite clearly the view of women
in the NPA: ʹWomen who chose the revolutionary path – the new women –
have already emancipated themselves. They are no longer beholden to any
repressive authority and, in fact, gained the freedom to smash them.ʹ It
is accompanied by a picture of woman of the NPA with an AK standing
alongside a man with an AR. As of IWWD, this was tweeted a scant 6 days
ago. But we do not even need to look so far as that! Within our own
budding movement we can see this struggle begin to take shape. In Kansas
city, the Proletarian Feminist Committee has, for about a year now,
organized self defense classes for everyone but specifically aimed
towards women. The organizers have themselves said that women take these
more seriously than men, and fight in them more viciously and train
more regularly. In Los Angeles, today, the same day that I deliver this
presentation, Red Guards Los Angeles announced the formation of their
own ʹWomenʹs Guerrilla Defense Unitsʹ in an absolutely inspiring
statement. To quote them quite directly:
ʹWith the participation
of the Ovarian Psyco-Cycles we will be starting a Boyle Heights
proletarian Womenʹs Guerrilla Defense Unit open to all genders but with a
principal focus on proletarian oppressed nationality women.
The unit
will be one part internal self-defense training for women, one part
external (public) self-defense training for women, one part political
development – all united principally under the philosophy that only
through revolutionary vengeance/violence is it possible for proletarian
women and their allies to be transformed and emancipated from
patriarchal capitalism-imperialism.
Patriarchy cannot be simply unlearned. We must literally arm ourselves and go to war with U.S. capitalism.ʹ
In
our own locality, the Stonewall Militant Front has reaffirmed its
commitment to carrying out revolutionary violence against the forces of
capitalist patriarchy. More concretely, our comrades here in the
Revolutionary Student Front -ATX have started an absolutely ruthless
campaign against the loathsome domestic abuser in the faculty,
Morrisette. They have brought great scrutiny and attention to his
history of domestic violence and have inspired the masses to carry out
multiple graffiti attacks against him and against UT for harboring him.
Itʹs militant proletarian feminist leadership has called for
revolutionary violence against all abusers and him in particular,
expressing their desire to see his throat crush by a militant womenʹs
movement in an impassioned speech delivered on campus. These are our
first stumbling steps down the road to real proletarian feminism, a
feminism that brings violence to the forces of capitalist patriarchy, to
abusers and to the capitalists that are, ultimately, responsible for
them and who alone benefit from womenʹs subjugation. We must not be meek
on this matter: we must begin building for peopleʹs war in everything
we do. Proletarian feminism means nothing less, women deserve nothing
less, our class deserves nothing less, than the violent overthrow of the
capitalists, of patriarchy and national oppression. These forces
oppress and exploit us for the benefit of a few, who set us at each
others throats like beaten dogs to squabble amongst ourselves for the
pathetic morsels of reform they ever so often condescend to toss us. But
the fury of women, of working class women, is boundless. Our oppression
was born at the dawn of class society and it will die at the birth of
communism, with our hands firmly around its throat. Women hold up
nothing so little as half of the sky, and we must bring the full force
of that down upon the capitalists in violent revolution.
Long live the revolution!
Long live proletarian feminism!
(Source: https://houstonra.wordpress.com/2018/04/12/women-in-peoples-war-past-present-and-future/)
In one of the largest organized marches in the history of the world,
tens of millions of Shia Muslims made an incredibly heartening
statement, by risking their lives to travel through war-stricken areas
to openly defy ISIS. This massive event that would have undoubtedly
helped to ease tensions in the West was almost entirely ignored by
corporate media.