The crisis of the corona virus is
objectively amplifying what was the condition of exploitation and
oppression that the majority of proletarian women already suffered in
our country.
The emergency is affecting all
aspects of women's lives: work/non-work, wages/non-wages, the burden
of social services, the problems of sexual violence and femicides,
abortion, etc.
On the problem of work, on the
one hand because of the corona virus a large number of workers women
lost their jobs due to the closure or suspension of some “non
essential” sectors, such as social cooperatives, tourism,
restaurants, shops, cleaning/services, as well as some factories.
Many workers women who were already in a precarious situation are now
at risk of not going back to work even at the end of emergency.
The social security measures for
those who are forced to stay at home are definitely insufficient,
very late and in any case they mean at least a 20% cut of wages,
which often were already very low.
In a whole sector where female
workers are mainly immigrants, employed as carers, domestic workers,
they not only are in a very hard condition of non-work (and many of
them lost the housing), but also excluded by the wage support
programs.
On the other hand, the women who
continue working are in a condition not only of more exploitation but
even of no protection of their health and life, no prevention, risk
of dying, as happened for example, in logistics. The front line is
certainly made up of all the workers who work in the
healthcare
system, above all in the CoViD-19 dedicated hospitals. The doctors,
the nurses, the health workers, the cleaning women, are in the vortex
of the crisis, with grueling work shifts, lack of adequate protection
and safety devices; a situation that is clearly bringing out the
devastation of the health system made by all governments which today
heavily weighs on the patients as well as on workers, putting life at
risk. More than 100 doctors and dozens of nurses died: Rosaria from
Milan, two nurses in Bergamo and Cremona, etc. ad also Daniela in
Monza who committed suicide killed by stress and despair. For all
these deaths the masters, government, bourgeois state, have to
pay.When health workers rise asking at least masks and gloves, they
risk being fired, as happened in the hospitals in Livorno and Genoa.
Until recently, factory workers
have had to work because what matters for the capital is the surplus,
the profits and not the life of the workers, so it is quite possible
to continue to produce even in those non-essential factories, and
without the necessary safety. Only the spontaneous strikes of workers
in different factories forced the government to restrict the number
of the so-called essential production, but many factories are going
to be reopened soon, under the pressure of owners.
For the women who are continuing
to work in the food or pharmaceutical factories, the supermarkets,
despite the protocols that the government has signed with the unions,
the condition is still not safe, they are at the risk of getting
seriously sick.
Not to mention the whole sector
of agricultural workers, in which there are many migrant women. These
either have lost their jobs or are even worse today than modern
slaves, because corona virus is now added to a very difficult working
condition and these workers are left in disarray.
The government in recent months
has come out with a whole series of decrees, however nearly nothing
has been done regarding to the living conditions of women; for which,
instead, the main measure “stay home” is harmful and risky.
When they say "stay home",
they show us advertisements with scenes of peace and relax which are
absolutely not true and do not correspond to reality. Staying at home
24 hours a day for the majority of women means an even heavier burden
of work for the care of family, children, husband, aged relatives,
domestic work, etc., it means undergoing a psychological stress that
makes you sick more than the corona virus.
It
is as if it were taken for granted that for women "stay home"
is usual, it corresponds the role that the bourgeois system entrusts
to women: care, assistance, reproduction, "social security
cushion". The government also takes advantage of this situation
to keep us more chained to the role that this society wants for us,
mainly: wife, mother, "alternates of the state".
The
measure of a bonus to buy groceries, which consists in a few tens of
euros to a few "poor" families when a huge number families
are now without wages, is ridiculous and offensive, an unworthy alms,
against which many people, especially women, rightly rose up refusing
to pay groceries, as happened in Palermo and Naples.
Even
for those women who have a “smart work” at home, this solution
turns into a chain more: women at the same time as they work must
take care of the children, must help them in distance learning, must
do the cleaning, must cook; that is, they must continue working with
no time limit (as was home work), with a very heavy psycho-physical
stress.
Masters
and government have achieved the perfect "reconciliation of work
and family", not by separating them, but by weaving them minute
by minute, thus making double exploitation and oppression evident.
They want to get us
back to work at home, in a modern key, with which the capital made
and realizes "two birds with one stone": lengthening of the
exploitation times, reduction of wages, control of work (now more
facilitated by computer means). While the role of reproducing the
workforce of women with domestic work is guaranteed.
But
being closed inside the house also means exasperating and amplifying
a situations in which women are forced to live 24 hours a day with
violent husbands and partners. In recent weeks, there are dozens of
femicides, various forms of sexual violence, mistreatment favored by
the forced coexistence, not least the girl killed in Messina by her
partner. For women, who the official stats show as stronger, less
infected by the corona virus, the death risk comes from being locked
in the house with their killer more than from the CoViD-19. And the
ironically it comes from the state itself, as happened in Taranto,
where a judge sent to house arrest who a husband had tried to kill
his wife.
What
is the government's solution? To entrust the police to defend women
against femicides, releasing an app by which women in danger can
sound the alarm. An absolutely useless and even ambiguous solution.
Useless because the women who called to the police have already
experienced how those complaints remain locked in a drawer and then
they were killed anyway. But we also say ambiguous, because such
police app is the same with which people are invited to report the
bully or the drug addict or the homeless, created in the name of
mobilizing citizens to play an active role in the security policy,
the control of the other who becomes my enemy; in the same way as who
stay behind the windows to see whether someone goes down the street
and report it to the police, and that walker becomes your main enemy,
deviating you from the real enemy, that is the government.
All
the opposite of an active climate of solidarity/unity among women
that only can defend them against femicides.
The
MFPR in the platform for the women's strike says: removal from the
houses of violent husbands/partners; immediate interventions against
the reported for violence, stalking, mistreatment; shelter houses,
anti-violence centers, women's houses.
Then
there are the women who are previously included in count of deaths
for coronavirus.
They
are the immigrants in Centers of Permanence for Repatriation (CPR),
inmates who are simply deleted, they exist only when they rise up.
In
the CPR of Ponte Galeria, the immigrants live in terror of getting
the CoVid-19, they are 6 in small rooms, they eat, they wash, piled
up as before. The same for women in prisons, from Poggioreale,
Naples, to the Vallette, Turin, they risk their lives every day, no
health care is guaranteed, indeed in the emergency it has decreased.
The "distances" do not apply to them. The riots in many
prisons have shouted this announced death by the state. But this does
not enter into government decrees, the response in massacres,
punishments made by law enforcement.
And
today are mainly women those who continue the protests outside
prisons, asking that their family members be treated like all other
people, staying at home during the emergency.
But
this emergency also means much more for women's lives.
Women
give birth in the corridors of emergency rooms. Women today cannot
abort. If before women already had enormous difficulties in aborting
in a country where there is a very high rate of conscientious
objectors and absolutely inadequate hospitals, today, with the
collapse of hospitals, they are in a heavier condition. It would be
normal and logical that solutions already proposed by some women's
associations were adopted, such as drug abortion, the lengthening of
the period in which it is possible to take the pill, but it is not
discussed at all. If this is a way to solve the problem of poor birth
rate - of which the Minister of the family of the current government,
as before the fascist fundamentalist like Salvini, had complained -
we must say that with the corona virus helps them to solve it…
If
this is the situation, it is equally true that it makes it even more
necessary for women to rebel, unite and fight even more than before.
This
year on March 8th and the women's strike occurred in the midst of
corona virus crisis. They went out of their way to prevent the
women’s strike but the MFPR observed it anyway. The women’s
strike this year alongside its political ideological significance as
an important step in the path of women's revolutionary struggle, has
had an added value, of being a challenge against the state and the
government which had tried to ban it, announcing heavy sanctions. But
many women workers, precarious workers, challenging the prohibitions,
said: "If we are good at working side by side, we are good at
striking!".
And
this strike has shown even more clearly that there is a petty
bourgeois and bourgeois feminism that accepts bans, accepts to "stay
home" by giving up the struggle and becoming a docile follower
of the call to the "national solidarity" by the bourgeois
state, and a proletarian revolutionary feminism that says: more
rebellion, more struggle is needed, to strengthen the march of women
for revolution, to put an end to the true "pandemic", that
is the capital system that increasingly shows its inevitable
patriarchal face against women.
We
women for our condition carry out a condemnation, a criticism, a
perspective, a 360° struggle, which affects all aspects of the
living conditions, the work, family, sex, culture, all aspects of
humanity! This must encourage us, make us more determined.
In
this "emergency" we want to impose even more "our own
emergency": that our whole life must change!
We
continue the struggles we were doing and indeed new struggles must be
done and we do.
This
emergency puts the need to reorganize ourselves also in new forms, in
creative forms.
We
say NO to closure, the attempt to isolate ourselves, to
individualize.
YES
to unity, connection, socialization, starting from flats, from
neighborhoods, from the queues for shopping, etc.
Active
solidarity, mutual help is needed at this moment, certainly not to
unload the state from responding to women's needs but to strengthen
women's unity and mobilization against this system.
We
also use IT in a more creative and wider way to connect nationally.
We use this longer time at home to study, to arm ourselves
theoretically; because for women, revolutionary theory is a weapon to
be addressed with more force and perspective against this bourgeois
system. We use time to arm our heads, and thus to arm our hands, our
bodies.
We
organize a day in which as women we make our protest and our reasons
for struggle strong.
For
contact information to connect us, our email is: mfpr.naz@gmail.com
Our
blog: https://femminismorivoluzionario.blogspot.com/
Our
Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/movimentofemminista.proletariorivoluzionario/
Revolutionary
proletarian feminist movement.
Aprile
2020
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