International Women’s Day—Let’s fight to emancipate women and create a new world!
Aurora Roja, voice of the Revolutionary Communist Organization, Mexico
| Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
English translation by revcom.us, of a statement in Spanish by the Organización Comunista Revolucionaria, México, accessed on February 28, 2019.
Patriarchy—the domination of women by men—permeates every pore of this system throughout the world. Of all the horrendous ways in which capitalism-imperialism dehumanizes and oppresses people, there is none that is more openly defended, and even justified as something “natural,” than male domination over the female half of humanity.
On December 29, 2018, Yessica Guadalupe Medrano Hernández, a 21-year-old single mother, was shot and wounded by soldiers in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas. She was driving in her car, she heard shots, she stopped and got out looking for safety. The soldiers shouted at her, she turned around, and a soldier knelt down in position to shoot her. She started running and was hit with a shot in the right side. She told a journalist, “They shot me for no reason, and when I fell, they came up to kick me. Their paramedic came to help me, and another soldier shouted ‘Let the bitch die, she’s gonna get fucked!’” Yessica did not die. She was operated on to remove a piece of shrapnel from her kidney, while officers of the Military Police and the Federal Attorney General’s Office fabricated the crime of transporting gun magazines and cartridges. The military threatened her with jail if she did not sign a “pardon.” She refused and demanded that the prosecutor perform tests that would show her innocence. Five soldiers returned to threaten her, and she finally signed out of fear of being imprisoned without her wound healing. After leaving the hospital, she formally reported the soldiers who attempted to kill her.
Across Mexico, the forces of the state harass, rape, torture, and murder women. This is not an army “of the people,” as the current Mexican president López Obrador insists. It is an army for subjugating the people in general, educated in misogyny and trained to viciously practice patriarchal terror against women. Let’s remember Valentina Rosendo Cantú and Inés Fernández Ortega, Me’phaa Indian women raped in Guerrero in 2002; Ernestina Ascensio Rosario, a 73-year-old Nahua Indian, raped and murdered by soldiers in Veracruz in 2007; the women arrested in Atenco, raped by police in 2006. These are emblematic examples of thousands more. It has been documented that forces of the state systematically use sexual torture against detained women, with even more cruel outrages against lesbian, bisexual and trans women.
Why do they do this? Fundamentally because the subjugation of women is fundamental for the functioning of the current capitalist system subordinated to imperialism.
While the big Mexican and foreign capitalists dominate the economy and are enriched by the exploitation of the socialized labor of millions of people, the patriarchal family is the basic unit to try to cover, in each family isolated from the rest, the needs to survive in a competition of all against all so characteristic of this system. This family is the nucleus of the structure of male supremacy: It enslaves women with the main or total burden of caring for children and the home and for inheriting the wealth of those who have wealth and inheriting the poverty of those who do not, it reproduces relationships of inequality and exploitation, including the oppression of women, subordinated to men, justified with ideas such as “the woman, like the shotgun, in the corner and always loaded,”1 and that the essential value of every woman is to be a mother. There will never be full emancipation of women while their primary role is to give birth and raise children.
Part of enforcing forced motherhood is the criminalization of abortion, promoted by the Catholic Church and the fundamentalist Christian churches, which are even seeking to get rid of the limited right to legal abortion in Mexico City. Although the law establishes the right to abortion in cases of rape, authorities and doctors refuse to respect it, and impose motherhood, even on girls as young as 9 or 10 years old. Hundreds of women have been imprisoned for having an abortion, sentenced to up to 30 years in prison for “homicide by reason of kinship,” even for miscarriages. In January 2019, Daphne McPherson Veloz was released from the penitentiary due to the revocation of her original sentence in San Juan del Río, Querétaro, after three years in jail for a miscarriage without knowing she was pregnant. This is a victory that must be celebrated and defended, since the prosecution seeks to challenge her acquittal. The right to abortion on demand and without apology is absolutely necessary, because women will never be free if they cannot decide whether they want to have children or not, or when and how many they want to have. The fetus is not a baby! Women are not incubators! Abortion is not murder! Forced motherhood is slavery!
The oppression of women is also a source of enormous profits for the world capitalist-imperialist system: The super-exploitation of women in sweatshops and agricultural fields, low wages for women in general, as well as the cruel enslavement of millions of women and girls in human trafficking and pornography networks, a multimillion-dollar “industry” protected by the authorities.
Misogynist (hatred of women) violence is increasing: Throughout the world, women are degraded, humiliated, beaten, raped, sold, and murdered—by their partner or former partner, by soldiers or police, or a relative, teacher, boss, or by strangers anywhere. Every 18 seconds a woman is raped in Mexico—almost 200 every hour, 4,800 every day. Rape by groups of men like “La Manada” in Spain or the “Porkys” in Veracruz, who filmed and uploaded their viciousness to the Internet, boasting of their “manhood,” illustrate male supremacy in action: The courage and power of a man are measured and proven by brutally dominating and dehumanizing women. The most extreme expression of this is the terrible increase in femicide of women and girls—like the recent case, in Chimalhuacán, State of Mexico, of Giselle Garrido Cruz, an 11-year-old girl who was raped and murdered. These crimes continue to increase despite the government’s “gender alerts,”2 which have served no purpose.
This increase in vicious violence and objectification against women is in part due to machist revenge against what some men consider a challenge to their “right” to dominate women, because economic changes have led to greater female participation in the work force and other changes collide with traditional forms of patriarchy. Powerful forces in the world are battling not only to maintain patriarchy but to impose even more retrograde forms of male domination, as part of a fascist and religious fundamentalist program: Fascist forces like Trump and Pence in the United States, president Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, El Yunque and other fascists in Mexico, as well as the fundamentalist Christian movements that support them.
On the other hand, in Mexico and around the world, there is a new awakening of women, defying patriarchal relations, protesting in the streets, demanding an end to so many horrors. We should not have false illusions that hard-core defenders of patriarchy will disappear: Ultimately, we will either advance towards the liberation of women, or even more horrible situations of oppression and degradation will be imposed.
A much more powerful struggle of women and men against the male supremacy and all forms of oppression of women is needed. As the initiative End Patriarchy and the War against Women says, the courage and fight against the causes and people responsible for so much violence and injustice must be unleashed, independently and against the representatives of the same system that causes all these horrors. Instead of focusing on appealing to the capitalist and patriarchal state for ineffective measures such as the “Gender Alert,” we need to rely on the masses of women and mobilize more and more people and collectives to fight with the spirit and goal of putting an end to all forms of oppression of women.
Male supremacy has nothing “natural” about it. It is an oppressive social relationship that is completely interwoven with the division between exploiters and exploited. Human beings lived for millennia without this oppression. The subjection of women arose with the division of society into classes: The division between a minority that controls, as private property, the means of production (land, animals, tools, today factories, etc.), and the majority that they exploit and oppress. The development of human society has reached a point today when it is possible and necessary to overcome all that. It is through a revolution that overthrows this system and eliminates all relations of exploitation and oppression, that it will be possible to put an end to the fundamental division in which half of humanity is subjugated and dominated by the other half.
This is the revolution guided by the new communism, a revolution aimed at overthrowing capitalism-imperialism throughout the world to achieve the complete emancipation of women and of all humanity. As La revolución liberadora, Orientación estratégica y programa básico [The Liberatory Revolution, Strategic Orientation and Basic Program] points out, with the triumph of this revolution in Mexico, immediately patriarchy will begin to be dismantled and leaps will be made in the liberation of women, with a program that includes: * Eliminate immediately sexual slavery and the pornography “industry.” * Establish the right to safe and free abortion at the free and exclusive will of women. * Unleash the revolutionary struggle of women as a powerful force for the transformation of the entire society. * Combat all forms of discrimination and sexual harassment until eliminated, criticize the ideology of machismo and undertake the transformation of the traditional patriarchal family. * Full respect for sexual and gender diversity. * Establish relationships of equality and mutual respect in the family, mobilizing women in collective action to put an end to domestic violence and breaking with stereotypical and oppressive gender concepts. * Begin to collectivize what now is housework and raising children, with childcare centers, community kitchens, etc., with the participation of men and women in these tasks. * A new sexual culture, free of antiquated and oppressive concepts for women, of guilt, sin or the “sacred character” of virginity, based on relationships of love, affection, equality, and mutual respect.
The Revolutionary Communist Organization is forging the necessary leading force and movement to make this revolution and we call on all those who no longer tolerate the world as it is to get into this great struggle.
Let’s fight from here forward to end patriarchy and emancipate women!
Aurora Roja, voice of the Revolutionary Communist Organization, Mexico
1. This means something along the lines of “women should be barefoot and pregnant”—in other words, a patriarchal expression that women’s “role” is to stay at home, bear children, and cook and clean the house. [back]
2. The phrase “gender alerts” refers to federal, state and local government measures to supposedly combat violence against women, instituted starting some years ago under pressure from civil organizations and groups due to high rates of femicides. As of December 5, 2018, 18 of the 31 states in Mexico have such measures on the books, as well as many dozens of municipalities and other districts. [back]
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