FROM WORKERS WORLD PARTY TO APRIL 25 MARCHERS
It takes women to change the world
We of Workers World Party--a revolutionary
fightback organization made up of many nationalities, sexes,
genders and sexualities--extend our warmest greetings to the
April 25 march to defend women's lives.
The centerfold of this issue of our newspaper is devoted to
the struggle of women to defend their rights to determine their
own destinies--which is not possible without full reproductive
rights--and to widening this fight to unite against racism and
bigotry, repression and war for empire. And in this issue,
you'll get more of a feel about why our Party members, and
millions of people around the globe, are fighting with every
breath and sinew for socialism.
We live in a society where the billionaire capitalist class
rules. A huge propaganda machine exists to divert activists in
movements demanding change from seeing that the path forward to
liberation lies in the overturning of the capitalist economic
system.
Those struggling for economic justice and social equality
are admonished by those at the citadel of power that we should
be grateful to live in the richest, most democratic country on
the planet. The fact is that, although this is certainly the
richest ruling class in the world, the people lack many, many
things freely available in other countries--health care is just
one--and even the gains won in the imperialist centers can be
wiped out in a period of political reaction.
What's omitted from every attempt to defend the brutal
status quo is that the ruling class in the United States has
grown into a world power because of the super-exploitation of
much of the world's most oppressed people by imperialist
globalization of capital. And within the U.S., economic and
social inequities based on nationality, sex, gender, sexuality,
physical abilities and age are fostered to foment division,
keep the vast laboring class divided, and drive down the
overall wages and living conditions of all.
That's why we believe that organization based on
solidarity--conscious unity among people who do not share a
common oppression but who face a common enemy--is the most
powerful weapon that working and oppressed people have to carry
out a revolutionary transformation of society.
Some will scoff that such change is utopian. A few will
argue that capitalism--the private ownership by a wealthy few
of the vast apparatus of production produced through collective
labor--is the highest form of economic and social organization
to which humankind can aspire.
We say the idea that capitalism is the "end of history" is a
fantasy, the delusion of eternal rule shared alike by all
owning classes--slave-owners, feudal landlords and barons of
banking and industry.
The working class and its most oppressed sectors are already
doing the daily labor that keeps the world's economy running,
but we have no say in how the world is run. The immense
concentration of production into giant monopolies, fusing
finance and industry, makes them ripe for takeover from the
handful of families who have grown unimaginably wealthy through
these fruits of cooperative labor. The potential and capacity
to produce to meet human needs--and desires--has already been
reached, but it requires collective ownership and planned
production to be a reality.
Women play a key and numerically huge role in world
production. And in the U.S., women--particularly oppressed and
immigrant women--have entered the "high tech, low pay"
workforce in large numbers.
Those who have the least to lose and the most to gain from
profound economic change hold the greatest potential for
revolutionary leadership. This has been proven from the class
battles of immigrant women garment workers on the Lower East
Side of Manhattan to the downtrodden Russian women workers
whose fight helped spark the Russian Revolution, from the Cuban
women today on the frontlines defending their island revolution
from imperialist encirclement to the Palestinian and Iraqi
women fighting to help defend their national
self-determination.
Capitalism cannot meet the needs of the world's population.
It will continue to generate hunger and homelessness, racism
and bigotry, political reaction and imperialist war.
The oppression of women under capitalism, including denial
of reproductive rights, brought you to this April 25
demonstration. We're here with you. If you've been looking for
a revolutionary organization, check us out.
Start with our web page: www.workers.org.
Reprinted from the April 29, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
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