Bro culture seething with the hatred of women. Gleeful taunts of “Your body, my choice.” Fascist enforcement of patriarchal gender codes. Trump/MAGA 2.0 is moving at lightning speed. Alongside his genocidal racism, his threats against the people of the world, and the sledgehammer he is taking to any remaining democratic norms or basic rights of the people, Trump is pushing for the open enslavement of women and complete erasure of trans people.

We Stand At A Crossroads

Never before have so many women in so many parts of the world broken free of so many traditional chains of patriarchy. Women have fought their way into public life and into every profession. In the U.S., women outpace men in higher education. Women dominate pop culture. Growing numbers boldly reject the shame that has long attached to female sexuality, to abortion, and to being a victim of sexual assault. Meanwhile, LGBT people have become widely visible, won important basic rights and achieved growing respect and acceptance.

Yet, not only has the oppression of women and LGBT people never let up, in direct opposition to every hard-fought advance, a pressure cooker of hateful patriarchal resentment has been building and now is erupting into new levels of bigoted violence and depravity. Incels openly uphold the “right” to rape women or slaughter those who will not submit. Trump brags about sexual assault and uses the force of the state to utterly erase trans people. JD Vance's Christian fascist “theo-bros” salivate not just for a national abortion ban, but for a ban on birth control, on divorce, even on women's right to vote. And all around the world women face femicide and torture, forced veiling and “honor” killings, the industrialization of sexual slavery of millions of women and girls, and rape as a weapon of war.

Such a wildly divergent situation cannot go on for long. One side or the other will win out.

Bob Avakian, A Prescient Voice Who Must No Longer Be Ignored

The revolutionary leader Bob Avakian (BA) foresaw this coming showdown forty full years ago. In 1985, he wrote:

The whole question of the position and role of women in society is more and more acutely posing itself in today’s extreme circumstances—this is a powderkeg in the U.S. today. It is not conceivable that all this will find any resolution other than in the most radical terms and through extremely violent means. The question yet to be determined is: will it be a radical reactionary or a radical revolutionary resolution, will it mean the reinforcing of the chains of enslavement or the shattering of the most decisive links in those chains and the opening up of the possibility of realizing the complete elimination of all forms of such enslavement.

Bob Avakian didn't just identify this trajectory towards all-out confrontation which is currently coming to a head. BA deeply analyzed the material roots of women's oppression in the system of capitalism-imperialism we live under and the powerful ideology of male supremacy and patriarchal gender roles that are woven into thousands of years of oppressive, class divided societies. Over decades, BA has consistently called out this oppression and diagnosed it as it has further developed and morphed. BA has called out dead-ends and false paths that have caused the well-intentioned efforts of many to run aground, while providing strategic leadership for how this fight can actually be won. And BA has done all this while advancing humanity's understanding of what it will take to make the kind of radical and sweeping revolution that enables us to finally uproot and abolish all oppression based on sex, gender and sexual orientation as part of a struggle that moves past exploitation and oppression in every form here and all over the world.

But instead of engaging this incredible work that is of life-and-death importance to billions of people, all too many have refused to engage this because Bob Avakian is an “old white man” and a communist.

If we are to have a future of real liberation, and not one of brutal enslavement, this has to stop.

So, before you give in to the knee-jerk urge to dismiss this because you've been socialized your whole life to wince and retreat from critical thinking in the face of the word “communist,” recognize that doing so would only mean allowing yourself to be played by the very system that enforces all this oppression.

And before you give in to the knee-jerk urge to dismiss this because you don't want to hear “an old white man 'mansplain' about women,” recognize that if it is an oppressive lie to claim that women are hard-wired to be submissive and obedient and less smart and the rest, it is no less harmful to dismiss the insights of a serious revolutionary scientist and innovator because he happens to be old, white and a male.

Truth is truth. It is what corresponds to objective reality. And when truths are discovered that shed light on how we can get free, then everyone has a responsibility to take them up and fight for them if you really want to get free.

Where Would We Be If This Work Hadn't Been Ignored?

Ask yourself this:

Where would we be today, if over the last 40 years since BA said the above, more people had listened and joined the fight to build up the side of all the way liberation?

Where would we be if, rather than wasting decades following the Democratic Party's morally defensive attempt to seek “common ground” with Christian fascist women-haters, more people had heeded BA's recognition as far back as the 80s that the assault on abortion was never about “babies” but had always been about controlling and enslaving women? Where would we be if, in 2022, as the Supreme Court moved to overturn abortion rights, more people had joined with me and others in leading a massive fight to prevent this rather than attacking this fight by demonizing Bob Avakian and myself for following him?

Where would we be if more people had listened to Bob Avakian's courageous clarity in calling out the way that the mainstreaming of ever more violent and degrading pornography—alongside the mushrooming of industrialized sexual slavery on a global scale—was part of a violent revenge against women, not something to rebrand as “empowerment” or attempt to “own”?

Where would we be if, rather than remaining trapped within the terms of this system of capitalism-imperialism, people had listened to Bob Avakian's scientific insistence that in order to fully liberate women and put an end to all oppression based on sex, gender and sexual orientation, we need a revolution that brings about a radically different mode of production? Take the time to dig into this. You've probably seen the sign held up by righteous furious women protesters: “I can't believe I still have to protest this shit!” Well, BA's analysis provides the answer to why we are still having to protest this shit—and to how we get beyond this!

Where would we be if more people had had the intellectual curiosity and integrity to engage what is radically new in the new communism that Bob Avakian has forged, including the way he was willing to interrogate and break with long-standing traditions in the communist movement that downplayed the need to take up the fight against women's oppression in its own right and which included outmoded and oppressive views about gender and sexuality? Where would we be if more people had seriously engaged his breakthroughs in grasping the centrality of the fight against this oppression to ensuring the revolution we make moves all the way forward to complete emancipation?

There's much more I could cite—ways that Bob Avakian has gone hard against the erasure of women, the way he's led the fight against the relativist epistemology and woke lunacy that leads to and has fed this erasure, the way he's consistently challenged men to see that they have to take this fight up as their own, the way he is providing leadership for defeating Trump/MAGA fascism, the way he has identified that we are in a time when revolution is more possible than it has been in generations and much, much more.

A Challenge for International Women's' Day 2025:

Instead, I'll end with a second quote from Bob Avakian, and then a challenge:

You cannot break all the chains, except one. You cannot say you want to be free of exploitation and oppression, except you want to keep the oppression of women by men. You can't say you want to liberate humanity yet keep one half of the people enslaved to the other half. The oppression of women is completely bound up with the division of society into masters and slaves, exploiters and exploited, and the ending of all such conditions is impossible without the complete liberation of women. All this is why women have a tremendous role to play not only in making revolution but in making sure there is all-the-way revolution. The fury of women can and must be fully unleashed as a mighty force for proletarian revolution.

—BAsics, 3:22 

As we approach International Women's Day, March 8, 2025, the forces of women's enslavement and LGBT hatred are breathing down the neck of every woman and non-gender conforming person on this planet—and yet the possibility of the most radical and liberating revolution in human history is greater than it has ever been if we dare to learn about it and fight for it. Isn't it time for you to put aside any ill-founded prejudice and seriously and with an open mind engage this far-sighted, deeply scientific, big-hearted revolutionary leader humanity is lucky to have?