Workers World Dec. 21, 2000: Excerpts from a talk by Naomi Cohen

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------------------------- Via Workers World News Service Reprinted from the Dec. 21, 2000 issue of Workers World newspaper -------------------------

Women's oppression: What is and what could be

From a talk by Naomi Cohen at the Dec. 2-3 Workers World Party conference.

No discussion of capitalism, imperialism, racism and all the other ills of the system of private property that we seek to abolish would be complete without raising our Marxist perspective on the oppression of women.
This is a difficult question to tackle because we cannot point to any immediate solutions or recent victories that might point the way for us. On the contrary, the defeat of the socialist camp in the last years of the 20th century marked a catastrophic reversal in the status of women worldwide. The spread of the slave trade in women and young girls from Eastern Europe and Asia is just one of the most shocking aspects of this setback.
Nevertheless, as Marxists with a worldview, we cannot forget that this question of the oppression of women in all our forms--lesbian, bisexual, straight and trans--represents more than half of the working class and oppressed peoples.
The oppression of women in capitalist society today is so wide, so deep, so expansive and so old that it's like the air. We breathe it in every second of every day, and yet we don't see it. And herein lies the problem.
Notwithstanding the tiny layer of token women in powerful positions, the subjugated position of the vast majority of women is so pervasive as to become invisible and an accepted condition of everyday life.
This subjugation runs the gamut from ridicule to violence and murder. And the most oppressed women of color and lesbian, bi and trans women are its most frequent victims.
In recent years we have seen the passage of the so-called Welfare Reform Act that plunged ever more women and children into desperate situations.
We see the continued and deepening poverty of millions of women in this society who work as semi-slaves in either domestic positions or sweatshops where there are no unions, nor even any labor standards.
We see alarming rates of battering, rape and murder of women with little or no consequences for their mostly male batterers. Why? Because these men are taught that their aggression is part of an unwritten, but widely recognized, code of conduct in this society that allows them the power of life and death over "their" subjects.
We see a sharp decrease in women's access not only to abortion services, but all forms of reproductive health care. And, worldwide, women account for the majority of cases of AIDS.
Here in the U.S. we see tens of thousands of our sisters in the last decade or so incarcerated in a widening dragnet of racist repression known as the "war on drugs."
But as Marxists we are trained to rebel against what is, and champion the possibility of what could be.
We look at history and take courage from the fact that before private property and the exploitation of labor, human society was based on cooperation and gender equality.
Thus, we do not believe that the domination of male over female is an eternal category, just as we do not see the ideas of white supremacy as an innate and permanent part of the human condition. These notions, these traditions grow out of class relations that depend on dominance and violence to keep the oppressed in their place.
These ideas were formulated over a century ago by the founders of the communist movement: Marx and Engels. But the ruling class has tried to lock the ideas of socialism in a dungeon and throw away the key, to bury the record of the gains that women made in the areas of education, healthcare, childcare and workplace equality in the former socialist camp.
Certainly the steps taken were just a beginning. But socialism took root in the poorest countries where they did not have the resources to fulfill their aims. It was a beginning, but one that the ruling class was determined to snuff out.
In spite of that defeat, the capitalist class does what it must do to exist--creates the working class, which, as Marx said, is its own gravedigger. With the process of globalization, imperialism has created a vast working class in every corner of the globe.
The high-tech revolution, for example, has brought into the workforce millions of women worldwide. Their needs and issues go unmet by this sexist exploitative system. Capitalist society has no solution for them.
To overcome the long history of women's oppression, to cleanse the capitalist culture of the hateful stereotypes that hurt women--as well as people of color and lesbian, gay, bi and trans people--will take a determined and conscious struggle. That struggle begins with recognizing the problem first and then making space for the oppressed themselves to formulate the solutions.
Workers World Party is attempting to make that space, to build that place where we can recognize our differences and our special oppressions, yet struggle together. Join us.

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