A “Wave”—of Hype and Delusion?
Or What Humanity Needs: an ACTUAL Revolution!

January 16, 2019 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

On Saturday, January 19, tens of thousands of women and men marched around the country. The following statement was part of a REVOLUTION broadsheet passed out to thousands and thousands at these marches.

To all those who have come out to the Women’s March angry and anguished about what is happening to women and to all the billions of people all over the planet…

You are being played. This march will take you nowhere—at least nowhere good. We do not need a “wave” that will end up washing our anger and desire to fight back into the confines of the very system that causes the problems in the first place. We need an actual revolution.

All over the world, women aspire to break free from the shackles of male domination. They increasingly demand to be treated as full human beings in every sphere. Yet they are being slammed back on every front, and misled and misdirected by those claiming to stand for them.

It is no wonder that women dress as “handmaids” to protest when:

• the most fundamental right of a woman to decide if and when she will bear a child is being actively repressed by governments worldwide, with the U.S. Supreme Court increasingly infested with justices who intend to overturn this basic right;
• one in three women will be victims of sexual or physical assault at some point in their lives;
• tens of millions of women and children are bought and sold in the multi-billion dollar global enterprise of sex trafficking;
• hundreds of millions of women are trapped in virtual slave labor, working in sweatshops or in fields, or as maids, where sexual harassment and assault is the price of survival; other hundreds of millions in better jobs, or more professional situations and the arts, or in schools likewise face discrimination, harassment, abuse and assault, as has been graphically brought out in the past year;
• social relations between men and women in every sphere, from the home to the culture as a whole, are saturated with putrid male supremacy and “guy culture”;
• Dark Age religious fundamentalists with their even more openly repressive attacks on women have increasingly metastasized into the ruling cliques in a number of major countries—with the Trump/Pence fascist regime as a prime example.

But everywhere—including at the “Women’s March”—we are deluged with triumphalist bullshit in the face of this intensifying horror. Women’s March 2019 proclaims with great pride that “The 2017 Women’s March inspired hundreds of women to run, millions more to vote, and dozens to win elected office”; and that “The 2019 Women’s March marks two years of resistance to the Trump Presidency, two years of training new activists, and two years of building power, and this time we are coming back with an agenda.”

This idea that if you just get involved in working inside the system you can make a difference is a very old worn-out scam, but it gets refashioned every time people rise up, every time they hunger for change. It is the number one way to deceive and confuse people into thinking that this system can be made to work for the good of the masses of people.

It cannot. The oppression of women is stitched into the fabric of capitalism-imperialism, and you cannot fundamentally eliminate the one without getting rid of the other. Go here to find out why this is so. These horrors, among many more, are completely unnecessary at this stage in history. They are kept going not by a few men or some wrong-headed policies that can be easily switched out, but by the system of capitalism-imperialism. All this cries out NOT for the replacement of some men at the top of that system with some women, but for the overthrow of that system!

Think about it: women have headed up governments all over the world, from India to Germany, from Brazil to Britain (see “‘Women’s Waves’ of the Past: Know Your History—DON’T Repeat It!!”).  But has this fundamentally changed the conditions of the masses of women, or the people more generally, in any of these countries? NO! Why? Because no matter who gets put in that position, they have to play and govern by the rules of the system—or the system won't function and likely they would be forced out before that.

The point is NOT to stop fighting. The point is to see and wage that fight as part of something larger: making revolution, overthrowing (not reforming) this system, with the aim of emancipating all humanity.

And the possibility of revolution is real. There is a Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, which would be established as foundational law after the victorious revolution in this country and which clearly states the following in its preamble, as part of the fundamental principles of the new society:

The oppression of women arose together with the emergence of exploitative class divisions among human beings thousands of years ago, has been carried forward and become deeply entrenched in all societies ruled by exploiting classes, and was a marked feature of the imperialist United States of America and its domination and influence in the world. Abolishing and uprooting all this is one of the most important objectives of the New Socialist Republic in North America. This is expressed not only in full legal equality between women and men, but beyond that in the declared orientation and policy of this Republic to overcome all “tradition’s chains” embodied in traditional gender roles and divisions, and all the oppressive relations bound up with this, in every sphere of society, and to enable women, as fully as men, to take part in and contribute to every aspect of the struggle to transform society, and the world, in order to uproot and abolish all relations of oppression and exploitation and emancipate humanity as a whole.

That Constitution is the work of Bob Avakian, BA, who has brought forward a new communism and who leads the revolution in the U.S. As a critical part of this work, BA has done extensive and trailblazing work on the roots of the oppression of women, and the specific ways it is bound by a thousand threads to this capitalist system we live in today. He has critically drawn on past revolutionary experience, and developed a deeper understanding of what a socialist society must do to carry the fight further, after revolution has been made, in order to fully break every chain and emancipate all humanity. If you are really serious about ending the oppression of women, and of all humanity, then you need to get into the revolution and you need to get into BA.

Revolution will not be easy. It will involve tremendous effort and real sacrifices, facing twists and turns and solving a lot of complex problems; but it IS possible. (See HOW WE CAN WIN—How We Can Really Make Revolution, put out by the Revolutionary Communist Party.) We can bring into being a new world, in which all of humanity could flourish. Join with those who have already set out on the road to do that!