March 8, IWD: This Moment and The Oppression of Women

by Mike Ely

The oppression of women is rooted in horrific silences and self-righteous conservatisms. The oppressions festers behind the walls and traditions of family “privacy.” It is wreathed in shame and custom. It is denied as it is so vigorously enforced by state and church and male fists. It is harvested in the great global productive loops of sweatshops and field labor — from endless days of labor at sewing machines and assembly lines, in the nights of domestic slavery and in lifetimes sacrificed to enforced childbearing.

This oppression is symbolized by the veil and the strip club. It demands that women be invisible and excluded, and then that they be sold vulnerable and naked in darkened rooms. It is present in the first whispered exchanges of teenage lovers, in the father-right imposed as tough love and in the experimental struggles of conscious people to forge something different. And that oppression is now, in a historic way, running solidly into the deep underlying transformations of life and production — and the global emergence of a female determination to live and speak in a different way.

The oppression of women and the liberation of women are posed in an unprecedented way today. All across the world, women are involved in revolution and social life in new ways. Their contributions and status are being fought over with an intensity that has never been seen before.

Quite simply, after ten thousand years of great subordination and resistance, the liberation of women is a change whose time has simply come. Vast forces are arrayed for and against. The struggle takes place in the world of ideas, in the workplace, in the peasant fields. It takes place within revolutionary movements and in the mind of each revolutionary fighter. It takes place in the confines of family intimacy and in the very streets of very village and city. And it is a crucial part of our Kasama project — as we conceive and regroup. There is much that is new in all this. There is much that is unspoken. There is much that is wrong in what has been said.

Today on International Women’s Day (IWD March 8), this Kasama site honors the revolutionary struggle to abolish the subbordination of the female half of humanity, and it upholds the central and growing role women are playing in the great movement to finally overthrow all the oppressions of modern class society.

We at Kasama do not yet have much original work (yet!) to contribute to this great transformative struggle of our time. But we urge you to join us in our theoretical and practical projects — as we reconceive and regroup for revolution.

Kasama’s posts for International Women’s Day.