Women are confronting outmoded
patriarchy:
capitalist-imperialism and religious
fundamentalism!
3 March 2014. A World to Win News Service. Following is a statement
issued on 19 February by the 8 March Women Organisation
(Iran-Afghanistan)
The 8th of March, International Women’s Day, is coming,
and we will continue our struggle to achieve the dream of emancipation. We are
seeing the struggle of our sisters to join together with the countless hands of
oppressed women all over the world to break the thousand-years old
chains of oppression that bind us.
Women carry out 2/3 of the world’s labour, but obtain only 10
percent of its income and own less than 1 percent of its wealth. Seventy per
cent of the world's poor are women. We are the main makers of the world and
carry its load on our shoulders, but what is our lot?
Our lot is ever-increasing organized state violence, alongside the
domestic and social violence which a third of the world's women experience on a
daily basis. There is ever-increasing rape, murder, honour
killings, prostitution, degradation, insults and threats and an unprecedented
use of women’s bodies as commodities. Women’s "beauty" is presented as our only
capital, and motherhood as the only source of our identity, with fighting over
whether our bodies are to be controlled by being covered up or auctioned off by
the state, religion, tradition and culture, by the demands of the market and
even men's personal tendencies, just as there is fighting over the right to
control or terminate our own pregnancies. This is the context in which our
bodies have become commodities and assigned a price day after
day.
Our bodies are commodities that are mass advertised by a
pornography industry that gives training in their use. They are used in human
trafficking and are priced in the sex markets where they are traded for money.
In marriage contracts, financial considerations are accepted as completely
legitimate and are reinforced by law and public opinion. Ultimately this
commodity is sometimes appropriated free of charge as women are raped either
individually or by gangs.
As part of the basic way this patriarchal system functions,
imperialist powers confront each other over the division of the world, and in
the name of "freedom" and "democracy" they wage war to invade the third world –
and again, women are the first victims.
Although women are the cheapest, most obedient and most profitable
work force for turning the wheels of capital, they name us" housewives" and hide
our super-exploitation. They justify our low wages and rob us of any possibility
of organizing ourselves. In the third world they force us to leave our small
plots of land in our villages and move to urban shanty towns in our millions, an
"unofficial"work force in the service industry, forced labour, all while taking
care of their children who have been abandoned by society and the authorities.
And when we join in struggle to change the existing order, backward
Islamic regimes again become our lot, as we are once again the first
victims.
Unfortunately, the repetition of our experience as women in Iran
has clearly demonstrated that the ideological foundation, the outlook and
specific feature of an Islamic regime is the inferior position of women, our
enslavement and deprivation of rights – this is how the religious
fundamentalists with their international partners have harvested the fruit of
the people's just struggle. Thirty-five years ago, when this backward and
anti-woman regime posed as a possible replacement to the Shah as the people of
Iran rose in revolutionary struggle, the religious fundamentalists tried to
legitimise their rule and integrate Iran into the world capitalist system.
Islamicizing the patriarchal system was their most important contribution to
this effort. By utilising the full force of state power, the oppressive
relations enchaining women were recast on the foundations of Sharia law. This
was not some "eternal" culture of "Muslim women" being re-born, it was the
culture and relations of Islamic patriarchy being given the full backing of
state repression. The Islamic Republic thus codified the subjugation of women in
law, and to enforce such laws established a set of courts and repressive
forces.
The existence of these forces is directly related to the setbacks
suffered by revolution in the world today. It is not a coincidence that one
after another Islamic regime is being established either through the imperialist
invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan or in the wake of the struggles of the people
in the Middle East and North Africa. And at the centre of these transformations
women are the first social force to be controlled and oppressed. In Afghanistan
and Iraq the legalization of Sharia law against women; in Libya the legalisation
of polygamy; in Egypt the unprecedented increase in female genital mutilation;
in Syria the re-establishment of punishing women by stoning; the rise in the
hijab (head covering), whether enforced or arbitrary – all these are undeniably
a concentrated expression of Sharia law.
All these represent the real bloody wars of these two outmoded
forces – capitalist-imperialism and religious fundamentalism – to subjugate,
oppress and control women. These two forces are equally oppressive and act as
brothers in preserving their common interests, as they establish militarized
regimes against women through hate and extreme
violence.
We women are at the centre of this war, which once again repeats
the bitter tale of rape in the name of preserving and defending virginity. Once
again the teeth and claws of patriarchy are shown so as to control and auction
off women's bodies. Once again we see the tragedy of women courageously taking
part in their masses in the process of social change, but winding up in the end
pushed back down, without change. Once again women are pushed to choose between
the "lesser evil" of who would violate them.
This is the so-called democratic choice facing women: do you prefer
to be covered by a hijab and stay untouched and "supported" by Sharia law and
Sharia-raped by your male lords, or do you prefer to be displayed in shop
windows wearing the latest designer fashions and adored while you’re priced and
abused and molested? Do you prefer to be placed next to male rapists in Tahrir
Square or under the boots of Western dependent armies claiming they support
you?! Do you prefer to be an obedient wife and a "real" mother in your own
country and single-handedly bear the heavy load of years of raising children
without the presence of a father, or to be perched in the shopping windows of
Europe or the private brothels (called harems) in the Gulf States?! Do you
prefer to take part in the process of exploiting other people and oppressing
other women for your own personal interests and advance and be protected by the
laws of the world capitalist patriarchal system, or do you prefer to work and be
exploited in some small or big factory or farm, or do you prefer to remain a
"housewife" and expect god to protect you through his male representative in an
effort to obtain and then safeguard your privileges in the "next world"? Do you
want to take part in the population increase programme of the Islamic Republic
on the basis of its Sharia law and thus bear more jihadists, or to be turned
into a mere incubator by the churches and Christian
fundamentalists?
All these options lie on the endless wheel of choice between these
two poles that are outmoded and rotten. These two forces have no future for
humanity. Indeed, the danger of collapse they both face push them not only to
have a go at each other but also to support each other and hide their
contradiction when they face the protesting masses.
The dynamics of this outmoded and backwards-turning wheel mean that
struggle against one of them, in the absence of a clear stance against the
other, invariably winds up pushing people into the other camp. Therefore,
supporting one of these two poles, even if the intention is to fight and weaken
the other, in practice actually strengthens the other pole. Everyone who is a
victim of the existing order, all those who hate it and want to struggle to
change it, ultimately have no other choice than to take a clear stance against
and fight both of these poles. Women are at the heart of this contradictory
situation and the struggle against these two poles. For both of these
reactionary poles, women are an army of labour, foot soldiers of the system, a
valuable commodity whose role is indispensable to the operation of this system
of exploitation and oppression. And on the other hand, because of this strategic
position, if women enter the arena of struggle with the aim of emancipating
themselves and all humanity, they are capable of destroying all the rotten
patriarchal barriers, which are facing historical collapse, and building a new
world.
Because of all this, we as women can, through revolutionary
internationalist struggle against these two outmoded and anti-women forces,
succeed in lifting their blood-soaked, male and "holy" hands from the lives of
millions of women who are being crushed in homes, factories, fields, streets and
brothels violently, mercilessly and without precedent. Only through this kind of
struggle can women chart the course of their emancipation and achieve a society
without exploitation and oppression.
Without the fight and overthrow of these two outmoded forces, there
is no other clear prospect for the emancipation of women and
indeed of all humanity – which is impossible without the full participation of
women.
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