IWD: Oppression transformed into revolutionary power

This article originally appeared on The Kasama Project, 8 March 2014. Reposting here to preserve a broken link. It may also be accessed here.

Where does the revolutionary spark come from? How do some people come to transcend and challenge the crushing oppressions of the world? International Women's Day (IWD) has something to teach us. If the political theoreticians of the radical movements of the 19th and early 20th century were mostly men, it was radical women, close to the grinding brutality and poverty of industrialism's golden age, who encapsulated the personal rage and determination needed to transform suffering and oppression into resistance. It was female anarchist Emma Goldman who said succinctly and straightforwardly, "Ask for work. If they don't give you work, ask for bread. If they do not give you work or bread, then take bread.”

The IWD holiday was first carved out as a day for working women to celebrate their mutual solidarity and empowerment back in 1908, by striking women workers in Chicago. A few short years later in 1914, the world socialist movement adopted March 8 as a political holiday to demand political and social rights for women. The ideals of that socialist movement were promptly tested as the world plunged into war and much of the socialist movement betrayed internationalism, but brave women kept the holiday alive.

And then by 1917, this simple holiday showed its revolutionary potential: A women's day demonstration in Russia for peace and bread (shown above right) turned into a mass strike which quickly became the February Revolution that overthrew the centuries-old rule of the Tsars. Revolutionaries had been organizing against the Tsars for decades with increasing mass success. But it took a demonstration of women workers, of mothers, sisters, daughters, wives, lovers, making an urgent heartfelt plea for an end to death and hunger that captured the mass imagination and changed the once unthinkable into the possible.

After the October revolution in Russia, International Working Women's Day, often shortened to just International Women's Day, was added to the canon of revolutionary holidays celebrated by communists around the world. It became a moment of recognition for women attempting to create new realities in socialist countries, and a rallying cry for women around the world challenging capitalism and imperialism.

In the modern era the holiday has been often co-opted by the mainstream bourgeois feminist movement: instead of radical appeals for social transformation, this depoliticized holiday came to celebrate the "sisterhood" of reactionary female politicians, or served to elevate women celebrities. But even cheapened into a feel-good holiday affirming the humanity and achievement of women, IWD has not lost all its power. (It's a remarkable statement that after all these years female humanity still needs to be affirmed.) The deep connection between women's experience of oppression and their potential to lead revolution remains.

In 1979, Iranian women played a major role in the overthrow of the U.S.-backed Shah. Communist women had joined guerrilla forces and urban revolutionary groups and been subject to bloody, brutal and violent repression along with their male comrades.

The Iranian revolution triumphed when the political opposition was joined by the mass Islamist movement. After the Shah was overthrown, the new rulers attempted to impose conservative religious laws on the general population: On IWD 1979, thousands of Iranian women filled the streets of Tehran to object (right). Under slogans like "In the Dawn of Freedom There Is no Freedom!" "Women's Liberation Is Society's Liberation!" and  "We didn’t make a revolution to go backwards!” they organized marches and sit-ins for six days. While the laws mandating compulsory hijab were eventually put in place, Iranian women's resistance ensured that, even under the forms of repression that followed, women were not driven from the political sphere.

Today women are a significant part of the revolutionary movement: whether in the rural regions of India where armed women Maoist rebels challenge Indian capitalism (photo at top), or in the mass movements of the squares from Egypt to Wall Street, or in the spheres of theoretical exploration and debate necessary to take the communist movement to its next stage, women's voices are a crucial part of grounding the struggle in the reality of experiencing and challenging oppression.

Revolutionary sisterhood is indeed powerful. Let's see what it can do next. Happy IWD! —ISH

March Writings

I have a couple new pieces up on the Kasama site.

First up I wrote a short piece for International Women's Day. Entitled "International Women's Day: Oppression transformed into revolutionary power," it's a brief survey of some of the history behind the March 8 holiday:

"Today women are a significant part of the revolutionary movement: whether in the rural regions of India where armed women Maoist rebels challenge Indian capitalism (photo at top), or in the mass movements of the squares from Egypt to Wall Street, or in the spheres of theoretical exploration and debate necessary to take the communist movement to its next stage, women's voices are a crucial part of grounding the struggle in the reality of experiencing and challenging oppression. Revolutionary sisterhood is indeed powerful. Let's see what it can do next."

But what I'm really happy with is a short survey of some of my favorite radical songs. "Urban rebel music subverting your earwaves" takes a look at a handful of songs from Jill Scott, Ursula Rucker, Erykah Badu, Boots Riley and the Coup, and Welfare Poets. Faithful readers of The Cahokian will recognize a couple of these: I've written about the Rucker song and about Erykah Badu before.

I've combined a little bit of cultural critique, music appreciation, lots of song lyrics, and music clips and videos to discuss some surprisingly radical songs outside the more expected realms:

"When people start talking about radical or political music, I'm always surprised how the topic of conversation rarely moves outside the genres of hardcore head-banging punk or earnest sing-along folk. Sometimes talk moves on to the well-worn populism of mass-appeal pop-rock, the Springsteen/Mellencamp/Fleetwood Mac tunes so beloved by bourgeois politicians trying to put something over on voters, and there's the counterpoint of classic hip-hop with its righteous anger against cops and sometimes problematic derision of women and gays. Without disparaging any of these rich genres of music, I want to recommend some really great and really radical tunes from genre-busting urban musicians who sometimes defy easy categorization but whose visionary art is something that revolutionaries can really embrace."

There's some really great songs discussed. The Jill Scott number "My Petition" is a must-listen, and it really is amazingly subversive. The article was set off by re-listening to this song while riding the bus and paying attention to the lyrics. I hadn't noticed before how slyly Scott hooks you in to a critique of America while assuming at first she's talking about her love life. There's a song clip provided. Check it out!

I've also written a few short introductions for re-purposed content on Kasama. You can follow my postings there at this link.

Finally let me put in a plug for my daily work at the "Anti-Imperialist League" on Facebook. Every day I've been posting a picture with a first-person quote from a huge spectrum of revolutionaries. Each Saturday I post a quote about a little-known or forgotten episode of rebellion.

It's been really educational and rewarding. I've come to realize the importance of letting people speak on their own, and seeing how much traditional history actually disparages the record of oppressed people themselves. I don't find myself agreeing 100% with every analysis of imperialism offered, but the people featured, a worldwide mix of women and men, are all actual fighters or theoreticians against empire. And I've been able to feature some of the struggles that have always interested me, like the tragically brave Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Party (EPRP) May Day rally of 1976 featured in the graphic above.

My goal is to continue the anti-imperialist quote of the day project for at least an entire year.

International Women's Day, 2012

In getting used to the idea that women's rights to control their own bodies, including the right to have abortions, would remain a social battleground, I can't say I ever really expected the field of battle would actually shift backwards. But so it has done, and now it seems that even women's right to contraception is under attack. At the extreme end may be the putrid neanderthal spokesasshole Rush Limbaugh and his verbal assault on Ms. Susan Fluke, suggesting she was a "slut and prostitute" and out to get the government to support her licentious lifestyle, but at the other end are all manner of politicians including both Republicans and Democrats who think that it's high time that society controls women's genital organs. Apparently the small government types have problems with regulation of pollution and corruption but no problem at all with regulation of women's bodies. That they yearn for a time when women were nothing but baby machines says so much about their general worldviews.

I counter this 1950s style assault on women with a classic propaganda image from the other 1950s, the era of Soviet/Chinese solidarity against the American-led Cold War. Against a field of multilingual banners labelled "Peace," a Chinese and Russian woman gaze determinedly and resolutely against all odds. One boldly grasps a red banner, and yet almost tenderly they grasp hands between them. While certainly representing a different shade of stereotype, these women know that even peace is something that might require a battle to defend. And there remains so very very much to defend.

Happy International Working Women's Day. Stand shoulder to shoulder with your sisters.

Happy International Working Women's Day

Above is a Soviet poster from 1961 for International Women's Day -- originally International Working Women's Day. Although the holiday was originally celebrated later in March, this year marks the centenary of the celebration. Not intended as a sentimental holiday a la mother's day, International Women's Day was a political holiday created by the world socialist movement not only to honor women and their struggle for equality and civil rights, but to advocate for the transformation of society along lines of political and economic justice. Disturbingly it was less than a hundred years ago in the United States that women were considered fully human enough to be able to vote in elections.

In honor of the holiday here is a passage by Alexandra Kollontai, the under-sung forward-thinking heroine of women's liberation in the Russian Revolution. This is from her essay "Sexual Relations and the Class Struggle," written way back in 1921. Her challenging essays break out of the mold of simple moral arguments: she advocates a revolution in human relationships inexorably linked to that economic and political transformation, away from the inequalities of class society.

"The “inequality” of the sexes – the inequality of their rights. the unequal value of their physical and emotional experience – is the other significant circumstance that distorts the psyche of contemporary man and is a reason for the deepening of the sexual crisis. The double morality inherent in both patrimonial and bourgeois society has, over the course of centuries. poisoned the psyche of men and women. These attitudes are so much a part of us that they are more difficult to get rid of than the ideas about possessing people that we have inherited only from bourgeois ideology. The idea that the sexes are unequal, even in the sphere of physical and emotional experience, means that the same action will be regarded differently according to whether it was the action of a man or a woman. Even the most “progressive” member of the bourgeoisie, who has long ago rejected the whole code of current morality, easily catches himself out at this point since he too in judging a man and a woman for the same behaviour will pass different sentences. One simple example is enough. Imagine that a member of the middle-class intelligentsia who is learned, involved in politics and social affairs – who is in short a “personality”, even a “public figure” – starts sleeping with his cook (a not uncommon thing to happen) and even becomes legally married to her. Does bourgeois society change its attitude to this man, does the event throw even the tiniest shadow of doubt as to his moral worth? Of course not.

Now imagine another situation. A respected woman of bourgeois society – a social figure, a research student, a doctor, or a writer, it’s all the same – becomes friendly with her footman, and to complete the scandal marries him. How does bourgeois society react to the behaviour of the hitherto “respected” woman? They cover her with “scorn”, of course! And remember, it’s so much the worse for her if her husband, the footman, is good-looking or possesses other “physical qualities”. “It’s obvious what she’s fallen for”, will be the sneer of the hypocritical bourgeoisie.

If a woman’s choice has anything of an “individual character” about it she won’t be forgiven by bourgeois society. This attitude is a kind of throwback to the traditions of tribal times. Society still wants a woman to take into account, when she is making her choice. rank and status and the instructions and interests of her family. Bourgeois society cannot see a woman as an independent person separate from her family unit and outside the isolated circle of domestic obligations and virtues. Contemporary society goes even further than the ancient tribal society in acting as woman’s trustee, instructing her not only to marry but to fall in love only with those people who are “worthy” of her.

We are continually meeting men of considerable spiritual and intellectual qualities who have chosen as their friend-for-life a worthless and empty woman, who in no way matches the spiritual worth of the husband. We accept this as something normal and we don’t think twice about it. At the most friends might pity Ivan Ivanovich for having landed himself with such an unbearable wife. But if it happens the other way round, we flap our hands and exclaim with concern. “How could such an outstanding woman as Maria Petrovna fall for such a nonentity? I begin to doubt the worth of Maria Petrovna.” Where do we get this double criterion from? What is the reason for it? The reason is undoubtedly that the idea of the sexes being of “different value'’ has become, over the centuries, a part of man’s psychological make-up. We are used to evaluating a woman not as a personality with individual qualities and failings irrespective of her physical and emotional experience, but only as an appendage of a man. This man, the husband or the lover, throws the light of his personality over the woman, and it is this reflection and not the woman herself that we consider to be the true definition of her emotional and moral make-up. In the eyes of society the personality of a man can be more easily separated from his actions in the sexual sphere. The personality of a woman is judged almost exclusively in terms of her sexual life. This type of attitude stems from the role that women have played in society over the centuries, and it is only now that a re-evaluation of these attitudes is slowly being achieved, at least in outline. Only a change in the economic role of woman, and her independent involvement in production, can and will bring about the weakening of these mistaken and hypocritical ideas.

The three basic circumstances distorting the modern psyche – extreme egoism, the idea that married partners possess each other, and the acceptance of the inequality of the sexes in terms of physical and emotional experience – must be faced if the sexual problem is to he settled. People will find the “magic key” with which they can break out of their situation only when their psyche has a sufficient store of “feelings of consideration” when their ability to love is greater, when the idea of freedom in personal relationships becomes fact and when the principle of “comradeship” triumphs over the traditional idea of inequality” and submission. The sexual problems cannot be solved without this radical re-education of our psyche."

Take THAT, trash TV.

International Women's Day: Fantasy v. Reality

Above, a Sandinista billboard in Managua. "Por la igualdad de participacion de la mujer": "For the Equality of Participation of Women." Below, women on a train returning home from the market in Managua to Diriamba. Both photos by me, both from 1986. I guess the lesson here is that it takes more than good intentions to change oppressive class relationships. Legal equality, which technically even the United States has failed to embrace, is one thing; the breakdown of gender roles is quite another.

March 8 is International Working Women's Day

What don't you see on these stamps from the early years of the (Soviet-backed) Democratic Republic of Afghanistan? The top stamp celebrates the International Year of the Child, 1979. The bottom, celebrates Mother's Day in the Revolution from 1980. What's missing? The burqa!

Yes, the full-body covering for Afghan women, face concealed behind a mesh mask, so condemned by Western feminists, was not the fashion under Afghanistan's progressive secular government in the years of, and before, the so-called Soviet invasion. Women worked, served in government, served in the armed forces, went to school, and didn't wear the burqa. You may thank the Western-backed Mujahedeen, and its primary backers Ronald Reagan, George Bush I and Saudi Arabia, and the Taliban for the burqa.

With respect to all the well-intentioned do-gooders on the coattails of the continuing US invasion of Afghanistan trying to undo some of the Taliban's oppressive anti-women policies, one wonders what the state of Afghan women might be had not the superpowers and regional powers decided to spend the last thirty years mucking Afghanistan up.