For An Internationalist
March ۸-The International Women’s Day
Revolutionary Women Cry Out: Revolution is the Way
out for Humanity
Pause and ask yourselves: what kind of society
is this (in the world) that the subordination of half of humanity to the other
half is one of its pillars and moral canons? What kind of world are we living
in that from one end to the other, organized (state sanctioned) women’s
oppression and religious ignorance are used for maintaining “social coherence”?
Honor killing, stoning to death and forced marriage
in parts of the world like Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, Kurdistan, and India
are rampant, while hidden conjugal violence in the “civilized” West kills women
in silence, and yet all this is said to have resulted from the “weakening of
family values,” “abortion,” and the “weakening of religious beliefs”—these are
all too pervasive features of our world.
The Islamic Republic of Iran is the most
reactionary oppressive state that the women of
Trade in women’s flesh is accepted as another legitimate
capitalist commodity to be bought and sold. Marx said capitalism generalizes
prostitution. Indeed, we see that today. In
Women’s overall conditions in societies across
the world can only be defined as modern-day slavery. This it is not in spite of
the way overall human society is organized today across the world, but rather
because of it! It is not “collateral” damage of the system: women’s oppression
is inscribed in every cell of our present social systems.
Pause and ask yourselves: How is it that
women’s oppression becomes more aggravated with any turning of the wheel of the
capitalist system, the launching of imperialist wars of aggression? How is that
with downward and upward movements of the stock markets, we have witnessed an
upward movement of women’s oppression and the rising star of clericalism in the
world? This is a world in which young girls are sold by fathers who “own” them.
Capitalism has turned these children into commodities and thousand-year-old
religious tenets have been revived to give it legitimacy and a “moral” face.
Women’s oppression has everything to do with
the oppressive and outmoded political, economic, social and belief systems
which dominate our countries and the world.
All of this is a profound sign of something:
the system dominating the world is rotten and stinks, and calls upon us to
overthrow it. Pause and ask yourselves: what kind of system is running our
human society? Why should we tolerate it? Why should we be accomplices to this
monster by “business as usual” behavior?
We are approaching March ۸, which is a day of
struggle against women’s oppression and a reminder to everybody that our movement
for uprooting women’s oppression has a say on all kinds of oppressions that the
system metes out to different parts of humanity.
Obama has promised to be different than the
Bush regime; he says he will only pursue “good” wars! He asks us to respect the
holocaust of the Palestinian people by
What kind of world is this that warmongers can
pose as “peaceful” and wars of aggression as “self-defense”?
This is the same sick system that makes people
respect women’s oppression under the name of respecting “life” and
patriarchal “family values” are at the heart of its morality. This is the same
sick system that makes people respect religious obscurantism as a timeless
“human spirituality.”
This system destroys us in a variety of ways.
And once we rebel, its executioners suppress us and then show us the magic
ballot box which supposedly holds the key to our emancipation. They tell us we
should hinge our hopes on their democracy and that we should help boost their
capitalist markets because these are supposed ly the
apex of human achievement. They rob us of all our humanity and instead they
present us with a different looking president and say this is a “revolution”!
But this greedy and war-hungry system requires and can only produce a bloody,
ruthless leader, and Obama will prove no exception.
Just think a bit: how is it possible that an
African-American (or a woman for that matter) sitting on top of a system of
exploitation and oppression would or could change our situation of oppression
and exploitation? It can only make us doze off for a while. The same
hypocritical game is played in
The Islamic fundamentalists as well as the
imperialists are reactionary forces. There are no “good oppressors” vs. “bad
oppressors.” This is a deep lesson that the peoples of the world should draw
from the bloody experience of women in
It is a system that we are facing! Misogyny and
women’s slavery, poverty, homophobia, racial and gender apartheid, child labor, religious slave mindedness, wars, holocausts and
genocides are continuously produced by this system.
While weaving and integrating the whole world
under its thumb, capitalism has reached the apex of its rotten existence. It
offers absolutely no way of reforming or moderating its dreadful way of life.
But this system will not go away on its own accord. It must be pushed out of
existence by conscious people. We declare, if this system lives longer, it will
tighten its noose around our necks and the lives of majority of the people of
the world will become even more horrendous and amongst them, as usual, women
will receive most of the brunt.
In our countries of
It is more than one hundred years that we women
have been fighting against our imposed inferiority and subordinate position.
Through the ups and downs of this battle we have better grasped the nature of
the class systems that perpetuate this oppression. We have come to know that we
must fight in an organized way. We have come to know better that having a
crystal clear and uncompromising perspective for our battle is vital, because
otherwise our fighting energy would be diverted in false directions such as a
simple restructuring of women’s oppression and keeping the system intact. We
can not allow ourselves to be duped by false promises and false roads.
Revolution is our only way out. Women have the most to gain from revolution.
Common oppression makes the women of the world a vast and powerful army of the
wretched of the earth who have nothing to lose and a world to win. Women’s
oppression is international and the struggle to uproot it can and must have an
internationalist character.
The road to the world capitalist imperialist
system has been paved by the enslavement of women. The road to its undoing
deeply depends on the women of the world consciously rebelling against it.
Therefore, let us celebrate IWD
March ۸ Women´s
Organization (Iran-Afghanistan)
March ۲۰۰۹
For this and other literature in English please
go to Other Languages section of the following internet site:
www.
۸mars.com
Contact e mail: zan_dem_iran@hotmail.com