On this crucial International Women’s Day, when women face a heightened worldwide assault...
If You Want to Break ALL the Chains, You Need to Get Into BA
March 6, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
As you are celebrating International Women’s Day, and especially if you are someone who is marking it by standing up against the oppression of women, the most important thing you can know is this: there is an answer to WHY the horrendous, millennia-old oppression of women is not only still going on but now taking a leap... and there is an answer to HOW this oppression can be eliminated from the face of the Earth. There is someone who has done the work to grasp that, to make that understanding available, and on that basis to lead people to carry forward that struggle to actually eliminating the oppression of women. That person is Bob Avakian, and you need to know about his work.
Look at this world we’re in. All around the world, women are degraded, brutalized, assaulted, owned... treated as less than human. In the U.S., the Trump/Pence regime is promising this—and moving to enforce this in ways that are already costing women’s lives—on a whole other level. Trump celebrates rape and sexual assault, pornified viciousness, and violent degradation. He treats women as objects to be owned, ogled, and grabbed at his will while also insisting that women are there to serve men with a model of the traditional family... and he has a program aiming to enforce this. Pence is a theocrat, a Christian fascist who believes women’s role is to be breeders and nurturers, full stop. He thinks abortion should be outlawed under every circumstance—which is nothing more than female enslavement. These dangerous programs have a deep unity: women as objects, the virgin or the whore until they’re a mother with fixed and forcibly maintained gender roles. Women being denied their humanity.
In the past four decades, this oppression has been taken up and intensified as a key part of the political and ideological “glue” of worldwide reactionary movements rooted in religious fundamentalism. On the one hand, religious fundamentalism hammers women into the grip of tradition’s chains. On the other is the equally oppressive and co-existing rape culture, featuring the mainstreaming of ever more violent pornography and widespread sexual assault. Both reinforce the patriarchy and heighten the oppression and degradation of women to new levels. And this has assumed an even more direct and dire urgency with the ascension of the Trump/Pence fascist regime to the height of power in the top imperialist empire in the world, which embodies both those trends. Should they succeed in consolidating their rule, all this will be enforced by the rule of law in a way that will actually slam women into an even worse—a qualitatively worse—situation. Every outrage against women must be opposed and, more than that, it must be linked up to the whole of the fascist program and the resistance needs to become part of a larger movement to drive out this whole regime.
The installation of this fascist regime has been met with significant resistance, with millions filling the streets in countries around the world on January 21, 2017. Millions of men and women from the U.S., to Europe, to India and more came out in the Women’s March. And this resistance has continued since then in important ways. It is righteous and it is beautiful and it must spread. Every outrage against women must be opposed and, more than that, must be linked up to the whole of the fascist program and needs to become part of a larger movement to drive out this whole regime.
People are raising their heads and asking why? Why, in 2017, is THIS what women are facing? And what the hell can be done about it?
If you are seriously asking these questions, then you need to get seriously into Bob Avakian’s work. In fact, if you care at all about this, it is unconscionable NOT to check this out. Bob Avakian (BA) is the architect of a new stage of communist revolution and he leads the Revolutionary Communist Party in the U.S.
If you want to understand what the fight for abortion is really about and why these fascists have so much initiative on this... if you want to know what unites the pornified guy culture and the Christian fascist view of women... if you want to know where the oppression of women came from and how it’s related to the system of capitalism, and why you can’t get rid of it under this system... if you want to know how the stultifying patriarchal gender roles help keep all this locked into place and how the struggle for a different morality contributes to bringing into being a whole new world... if you want to know why we now face the consolidation of a fascist regime and what must be done to fight against it... if you want to understand how the first stage of communist revolution made great strides in the direction of women’s liberation but also how they fell short in important ways... if you want to understand how the struggle for the liberation of women is essential for revolution, and for ensuring it’s an all-the-way revolution that breaks ALL traditions chains and casts off ALL outmoded thinking... then you need to get deeply into BA’s work, the new synthesis of communism overall, including as one essential aspect, his work on the relationship between breaking ALL the chains of oppression and emancipating humanity.
The fact that there are answers to these profound questions is an incredibly precious thing for the people of the world. And it is something that needs to be deeply engaged and spread, with the urgency that these questions merit. BA has developed a scientific analysis, with fury and heart, that makes sense of all this madness and charts a path forward to emancipation, for the women of the world, and for all of humanity.
Find out about Bob Avakian here...
Volunteers Needed... for revcom.us and Revolution
If you like this article, subscribe, donate to and sustain Revolution newspaper.