March-International Women’s Month
By Laura Garcia
March is International Women’s Month. We take this time to show the direction women are taking society, and why?
Today, women are leading the global fight for a new society. What kind of society are women fighting for? It’ll be one where no child, women or men will ever be discriminated, killed, maimed, burned, or raped, because of their gender, because of their national origin or because their poverty. It’ll be a society where the fruits of the new technology will be used to eradicate, hunger forever, illnesses forever, racial and gender hatred for ever. It’ll be a society with no wars. It’ll be a society where humanity will be in harmony with Mother Earth.
Women are leading the global fight for this new society. It can’t be otherwise given their oppression as a gender and their exploitation as members of the working class. Women working class leaders have no option but to throw their lot in with the fight to change society.
As a result, they are in the direct line of fire between the State and the new masses of poor. For example, women led the teachers’ strike in Chicago and are leading water struggles in Detroit and the fight against foreclosures in the U.S. In Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, they’re fighting against the brutality and ineptness of a State that can’t or won’t stop the killings of young girls and women.
In the Middle East they lead rallies and marches today and during the Arab Spring. In Delhi, India women greeted 2013 with their fists up. On January 2, 2013 thousands of women and men took part in a rally in Delhi, India, to protest against the recent gang rape of a 23 year-old medical student on December 16.
Regimes strike back
A new form of State violence — physical and economic — is rising. This violence can be defined both as crimes directly perpetrated by State forces (police and military) and as economic, i.e. regressive agendas and draconian fiscal austerity measures by the State.
While the form is still brutality, rape, burnings, mutilations, and killings in the hands of criminals protected by the State, and in some cases by the hands of the State, the content of this violence is different. Though linked to the historical relations of oppression and exploitation of the capitalist system, it’s different because of the global epoch of social revolution.
Society is at the end of one epoch, the private ownership of the means of production, and confronted with the possibility of the means of production being owned in common by society. The introduction of labor-replacing technology (automation, labor with robots) is objectively presenting this opportunity with the rise of a new class of workers — the majority of which includes contingent, below-minimum wage and part-time workers. With the loss of a job workers are losing everything. With their backs against the wall they are forced to fight for a new society where society owns the means of production and the social product is distributed according to need.
This is the meaning of the fight for a new society today, and women are leading this fight.
