A necessary and urgent debate among the world Left
We are facing a catastrophe worldwide. An unprecedented situation, when the violence against women has become a daily practice, a true standard of conduct which has been producing increasingly appalling cases, with women being brutally attacked in the streets, raped in buses, assaulted in their own homes.
This ghost has already been established among us. The Working and the poor women, in the colonial and semi-colonial countries, are the main victims. But the rich countries are not immune to this situation. This is the picture of a bourgeois society where the few achievements that we, women, won during the last decades of struggles for our emancipation have been taken off from us one by one. A wave of rapes, sexual violence and barbarism that comes in reaching an uncontrollable pace, with no bourgeois government willing to face it, throws away our hard-won steps towards emancipation. In fact, when facing death, our achievements vanish.
In addition, two major events have provoked outrage and mass mobilizations in the world: one in India and another occurred within the Marxist left. The recent attack against a 23-year-old young Indian woman, raped in a bus by four men at the same time, is a very serious symptom of what we’re talking about. The refinements of cruelty applied during the crime startled everybody; not to mention the extreme brutality with which the girl was raped and killed by her abusers. The whole world was shocked and India, for the first time in its history, saw large masses, men and women together, shouting in the streets to demand the Indian government the punishment of the criminals and stricter laws against rape. To our knowledge, it was the first time that the rape of a woman caused a popular uprising of this magnitude. And with a clear political character, because it turned rightly against the bourgeois State and its laws that protect the killers.
Like a wildfire, the facts in India have been repeated worldwide. Women are being violently attacked, raped and killed in every corner of the earth. In the so-called “third world”, not a day goes by without a woman being beaten or raped. The biggest victims are young working and poor women, including small children. The fact of just quitting a relationship with her partner is enough for a woman to become an easy target for an attack or even a head shot. For whatever clumsy reason, beatings have been occurring on a daily basis, women are bound, burned with gasoline, murdered and thrown to the dogs. The psychological torture, the constant and veiled mistreatment are turned into physical attacks and deaths.
Following the example of India, governments of all countries, instead of taking tough measures against rape and violence against women, give free rein to this kind of crime. Just last month, two cases, similar to that in India, occurred in Brazil. In Rio de Janeiro, a young French tourist was raped eight successive times by three men in a van, leaving her near to death. But, not satisfied with their actions, the attackers “offered” her to other men in a slum, who did not accept it because the body was “very injured”. A similar case involved a 14-year-old teenager in Bahia, who was forcibly removed from inside a bus and taken to a thicket, where she was repeatedly raped by a string of angry men.
Violence against women is established in the world. Our time is marked forever by this type of crime, which has been increasingly spread, creating a society of fear, terror and darkness for women.
This all is fruit of the degeneration generated by the bourgeois values of machismo, the power of man over woman; fruit of unbridled exploitation of millions of workers, leaving the poor and the working class at the mercy of the basest living conditions, without adequate housing, without health care, without a perspective of future for millions of youth and children of all nationalities. The bourgeois governments, especially those headed by women and many feminist organizations try to convince us that women now have advanced and liberated themselves.
Nothing more false. What is advancing is not liberation, but otherwise, the arrest, silence, death. The most reactionary bourgeois ideologies gain more space in the media. The woman as a sexual object, as a man’s private property, an ideology that is mixed with mysticism to demonize and abash women, an ideology that feeds itself from backwardness to meet the most barbaric and primitive instincts of man.
In India, this ideology is mixed with the legacy of years of colonization and domination by the English empire, which destroyed the Indian culture and left in its place the values of the colonizer, the dominator, exacerbated selfishness and individualism. It’s the ideology of the caves, where brute force prevails; where the strongest, the most cruel, the most ferocious win.
Crisis in the English SWP
But, what makes us even more outraged is seeing that within the leftist organizations this also occurs. Like the recent case of the English SWP, where one of its leaders was accused of raping a female militant and sexually assaulting another comrade. The two assaulted militants were prevented from expressing openly and the investigation was done in a superficial manner, so that the party leader was left unpunished.
Given that serious fact, the SWP leadership, instead of uniting the party against the offender, chose to turn their backs on the party to protect the abuser.
The party’s reaction was immediate and indignant, demonstrating that most of the militants still had blood running in their veins and wanted to defend the party. There were many protest statements, whole groups split with the party, and many militants have proved disillusioned with the Left. Even the most recognized public figure of the party, Alex Callinicos, was unable to attend a Marxist forum in India, because his presence could generate protests, since the country is still living in the climate of the recent rape of the 23-year-old girl.
That a leader of the stature of Callinicos, worldwide respected, has been repudiated in this way is something to think about the dimension of this fact, because it is also a victory in the defense of women against oppression.
No leftist organization is immune to Morals deviations like the one that hit the SWP. In our International, IWL-FI, we too have gone through this kind of problem. But what divides the organizations on this issue is how they face it: open and wide discussion among all militants, thoroughly investigation of the incident and remove away the aggressor from its ranks, or adopting all sorts of tricks to hide what happened, disqualifying the victims and keeping the aggressor in the leadership team. To join the party against those who incur in serious moral deviations, as in the cases of rape and machismo against women, or rather destroy the party to protect the leaders’ peers: this is the dilemma we face.
In IWL-FI, our method has always been the clear and unequivocal confrontation over any Morals deviation, whether relating to theft, lies, privileges, complaints and especially expressions of machismo, as sexual assault against comrades, harassment, prejudice, and especially rape.
All this is incompatible with the revolutionary Morals that we stand for and that is the cement with which we are proud to build our International. In this field, we are the most faithful followers of Lenin and Trotsky, who have always posed an insurmountable dividing line between bourgeoisie and proletarian revolutionary Morals.
The result of this policy is not small. It meant for us the strengthening of our members and of our inner operation; it meant a strengthening of our sections and even allowed us to join other countries where fighters and leftist activists saw in the IWL-FI a concrete possibility of building a truly revolutionary International, because it´s founded on firm Morals principles and the absolute and uncompromising defense of the interests of the working class and leftist militants, whether ours or from other trends, facing the bourgeoisie, the army, the bureaucracy and all our enemies in the field of class struggle.
Given the advancement of class struggle, with the masses facing genocidal governments, it is urgent that the whole world Left stand in defense of the revolutionary Morals. The only Morals that can lead us to build an International as a tool to face a relentless struggle against bourgeois Morals and its capitalist system, which has brought so much suffering to humanity and now is solely responsible for the catastrophe that hits the poor and working women worldwide, thrown at the mercy of violence, rape and all kinds of aggressions with which we cannot agree, not to mention to reproduce it within our parties.
It is urgent that all Left trends discuss, in a brotherly and broad way, the relationship between revolutionary Morals and oppression of women, to extirpate from ourselves this poison with which the bourgeoisie tries to destroy us.
