#communism 101

[inqilabi]

Dr. Naziha al Dulaimi - was an early pioneer of the Iraqi feminist movement. She was a co-founder and the first president of the Iraqi Women League, and a member of the Iraqi communist party.

In 1952, she wrote the book The Iraqi Woman. It was about women from the peasant class (al-fallahin) who were deprived of all rights both in terms of male suppression and class oppression. She also wrote about women from higher classes who had higher material status but were still property and not considered human.

[inqilabi]

How we will deal with men in a communist state.

[inqilabi]

basically what I mean when I say dominant western ideology comes from the ruling class. They killed leaders and actual revolutionary movements, then created movements that are atomized by identities, compatible with capital, with no revolutionary potential.

[inqilabi]

International Working Women’s Day has origins in communist movements. USSR was the first nation to create and implement IWD. Clara Zetkin and Rosa Luxemburg proposed the idea for an international day for women in 1910 at the International Conference of Working Women in Copenhagen. Kollontai and Lenin officially declared it a holiday in the USSR in 1917.

It use to be considered a communist holiday before 1967, which is thought to have slowed it’s adoption. It was adopted more widely by western feminists by the 70s, and it’s associations with communism were attempted to be removed during the Cold War propaganda era. Here’s what these Marxist originators of IWD had to say, specifically about the reasons why they felt IWD was important to create with the express ideological ties to communism:

“The Socialist women of all countries will hold each year a Women’s Day, whose foremost purpose it must be to aid the attainment of women’s suffrage. This demand must be handled in conjunction with the entire women’s question according to Socialist precepts. The Women’s Day must have international character and is to be prepared carefully”

— Clara Zetkin

Women’s Day is a link in the long, solid chain of the women’s proletarian movement. The organized army of working women grows every year. A powerful force! A force that the powers of this world must reckon with.

The day of working women's militancy helps increase the consciousness and organization of proletarian women. And this means that its contribution is essential to the success of those fighting for a better future for the working class.

— Alexandra Kollontai

The proletariat cannot achieve complete freedom, unless it achieves complete freedom for women

“We must create a powerful international women’s movement, on a clear theoretical basis [...]. In Petrograd, here in Moscow, in other towns and industrial centres the women workers acted splendidly during the revolution. Without them we should not have been victorious. [...] How brave they were, how brave they still are! Think of all the suffering and deprivations they bore. And they are carrying on because they want freedom, want communism. Yes, our proletarian women are excellent class fighters. They deserve admiration and love. [...] We still have no international communist women’s movement, and that we must have. We must start at once to create it. Without that the work of our International and of its Parties is not complete work, can never be complete.

— Vladimir Lenin

There has not been in the history of mankind a single great movement of the oppressed in which women toilers have not participated. International Women’s Day must become a means of transforming the working and peasant women from a reserve of the working class into an active army of the emancipation movement of the proletariat.

— Joseph Stalin

[inqilabi]

That's the problem with you American feminists, you don't care if your bombs kill us. You just want to make sure we die with our clitorises

— Nawal El Saadawi, in an interview on the Iraq War, when an American journalist asked a question about FGM instead

[inqilabi]

i find ppl struggle with right wing vs left wing, and keep swinging back and forth in reaction. But communism should be a synthesis. Just because western LGBTQIA2S+ fetishizes womanhood, or considers kink integral to homosexuality, does not mean we swing to embracing rigid gender norms or homophobia

Just because in the west, many liberals celebrate and individualize hijab as a choice, doesn't mean that we embrace hijab as a divine feminine prescriptive. On a similar note, just because the west sexualizes women's bodies beyond compare, doesn't mean that religiously modesty, hijab, niqab are liberating.

Just because in the west, in liberal cities, the family form is destroyed due to capitalism, does not mean that the family stopped being a site of oppression since it's not an integral unit in the current mode of production. It actually continues to be the main site of women's oppression nonetheless.

Just because capitalist state would now rather that people be culled en masse, especially that poor women do not reproduce as they are among the largest cohort that gets abortion, does not mean that men are not impregnating women without care. In fact, most women who get abortion are in some form of committed relationships, having atleast one child already. Meaning that it is a man who is impregnating his partner when they're not ready (even if that lack of readiness is because of economic coerion ie poverty).

[inqilabi]

Why don't you consider yourself a radfem?

radfem theory makes sex the prime contradiction, the motor force of history. While it certainly is a contradiction, and was the first contradiction that gave birth to the first oppression/first class society which was enslavement of women, it is not the main motor force driving everything we see in the world today.

The marxist view would be that the motor force can change and develop, and marxist method is by which you identify what is this motor that is moving class contradictions in society today. So if you see Dworkin e.g, when she concludes that colonization of Palestine is a result of male supremacy. This is not the reason why colonization of Palestine happened. The logical conclusion of this analysis would be that if we deal with male supremacy then you deal with colonialism.

Obviously many marxists miss the sex class angle, especially because of CIA postmodernism infiltration making many so called marxists straight up liberals 😭 These people often think that women are just equal participants in colonialism and imperialism etc etc. This is incorrect and is explained by the Marxist position that women have not and even still largely do not own the means of production. And women are triply oppressed: by men, by capitalism and by imperialism.

But i do think atm with current trends in women's movement because of western marxists being basically liberals - radical feminism has a greater revolutionary potential than the current marxist positions on women. Hope that makes sense.