Venezuela Celebrates Women’s Day, Discusses Abortion Rights

As a late finale to our International Women’s Day coverage, here’s a story about IWD in Venezuela, plus links to more articles on women’s rights in Venezuela and Latin America.

by Tamara Pearson

Venezuelanalysis.com

Venezuela celebrated International Women’s Day [March 8] with a ceremony involving 200,000 women and some of Venezuela’s highest political female leaders. The women also formed a Bicentenary Front of Women. Meanwhile, a National Assembly committee is discussing women’s right to abortions.

Women swearing themselves into the Bicentennial Front of Women

IWD discussion: Catherine Delahunty

Catherine Delahunty

Green MP

1. What (if anything) does International Women’s Day mean to you?

International Women’s Day always makes me think of how many women are still in economic slavery or have internalised the capitalist oppressor and think they’re fat and ugly. It’s a great continuum to think about, which shows what a fun person I really am.

But seriously, every day is unequal pay day for women in a rich nation like this one. And if you are tangata whenua, Pacifica, refugee or migrant, or with a disability – don’t even think about pay equity! We have a Government who axed the pay equity investigation unit “because of the recession”, as they say about everything they want to cut to pieces. 

Then there’s domestic violence statistics here and everywhere. A recent open hearing on maternal health in the Pacific stated that five women per day die from maternity related deaths in the Pacific region, so that is a statistic we need to address! 

2. Is there a feminist or women’s movement in Aotearoa New Zealand? If not why not? If so, what is it doing?

So why do we still need feminism? Well how long have you got? The feminist movement does still exist but it’s not so much a movement as a series of small baskets full of energetic passionate women. Some are academics, some are Te Tiriti workers and some are anarcha feminists but all are isolated compared to the heady days of 70s feminism. Young women feminists in particular have to struggle with their peers being too scared to use the “f” word. 

There were always deep divisions related to class, culture and privilege in the women’s movement but there was once a consensus around the patriarchy and the need for a level of unity for economic, social, sexual and cultural rights. There is some great work going on in the Pay Equity Challenge Coalition and there are some amazing women political craft workers in all senses of the word, and the women who lead Rape Crisis and Refuge are stoically heroic. But it’s not an easy in the community sector to stand up for a feminist analysis let alone in a university, in the bedroom or at work.

3. What are the biggest issues and challenges facing women and feminism in Aotearoa New Zealand today?

The biggest challenge from my perspective is the way capitalism co-opts feminism and turns it into shopping and careers for the individual. 

But at a deep level – both locally and internationally – I have faith that women will continue to form groups to challenge patriarchy and that if we listen to history and indigenous women everywhere we will find the strength to save the earth and everyone from a model that fails all the vulnerable. But it’s not going to happen fast enough for some of us!

IWD discussion: Torfrida Wainright

Torfrida Wainright

1. What (if anything) does International Women’s Day mean to you?

I am a 59 year old public servant whose main feminist activity has been focused round building lesbian community and living an alternative way of being female. In this respect I’ve felt remote from International Womens Day for many years. These days I’m resonating more with the climate activists and wondering how we re-ignite the fire that sent womyn to Greenham. 

2. Is there a feminist or women’s movement in Aotearoa New Zealand? If not why not? If so, what is it doing?

Again, I feel a bit remote from organised feminism, as well as from the queer consciousness of many young lesbians. Some of the old dykes who identify with lesbian community are exploring how we can support one another as we get older. 

I think society is much much more fragmented than it was 20-30 years ago – we are hyperconsumers not just of material goods but ideas, causes, interests. People are much more diverse in what they do & think and it is very difficult to cut through all this ‘noise’ with any message at all, let alone create or maintain a cohesive movement for specific change.

There are lots of good things happening for women compared to 30 years ago as well as lots of areas of stagnation and backwardness (read any ‘women’s’ mag). I don’t think the various platforms of the feminism movement per se (eg equal pay, access to abortion etc) will make any basic difference if we continue with the current hyperconsumerist capitalist economy that turns everything into something to buy and sell, and seduces everyone into ignoring the dreadful price we are paying.

I find myself being drawn back to the anarchist roots of the radical lesbian movement and its passionate identification with the earth and its creatures – eg “Two women loving one another is the earth healing itself”. Radical images of living totally differently and simply, turning people’s usual approach to the world on its head, being shocking and subversive. 

3. What are the biggest issues and challenges facing women and feminism in Aotearoa New Zealand today?

The destruction of the natural world. The likelihood that in the next few decades most people will need to relearn many basic skills – eg farming, mechanics, community building, doctoring etc – with far fewer material resources than we have now. The likelihood of a flood of climate refugees reaching NZ, desperate for land and survival. The challenge of maintaining civil society and the rule of law in these circumstances, and not going back to the times when a woman had to have men around to be safe from other men. Lots of good opportunties, as well as dreadful challenges and difficult things to bear.

IWD discussion: Bronwen Beechey

Bronwen Beechey
member of the UNITYblog editorial board


1. What (if anything) does International Women’s Day mean to you?

For me, as a socialist and a feminist International Women’s Day has a lot of significance. It was socialist women who first proposed the idea of an international day of action for women’s rights and continued to keep it alive, until the “second wave” of feminism in the 1960s and 1970s revived it. The women’s liberation movement was largely responsible for giving thousands of women (including me) the desire and confidence to struggle for equality for women and a better world for all.

International Women’s Day gives us the opportunity to celebrate the acheivements of women, to honour their often overlooked contribution to the struggle for worker’s rights, peace and civil liberties, and to protest the injustices that still exist. But we need to make sure that these issues don’t just get token attention on March 8, then get ignored the rest of the year.


2. Is there a feminist or women’s movement in Aotearoa New Zealand? If not why not? If so, what is it doing?

The feminist movement still exists today, although considerably diminished. There is general (though not complete) acceptance in society that women have the right to work outside the home, to control their fertility and to live free from violence. But despite the efforts of the mass media to convince us that we live in a “post-feminist” era, the reality is that women are still not equal.

While NZ women have a high rate of participation in the labour force, they are still concentrated in the lower-paid occupations and still carry out the majority of unpaid work in the home. Women are more likely to be subjected to rape and domestic abuse, and it’s probably in this area that the organised feminist movement has been most visible. Campaigns such as the one in support of Louise Nicholas and other women sexually abused by police have been successful in highlighting the issue, and countering sexist myths about women “asking for it”.


3. What are the biggest issues and challenges facing women and feminism in Aotearoa New Zealand today?

For women on low incomes who are already struggling with rising unemployment, low wages and high accomodation costs, the decision by the National government to raise GST will make life even harder. There is a real need for feminists to take up the real issue of economic inequality, as well as supporting campaigns that aim to improve the living standards of working people generally. There are also going to be attempts to cut back the already inadequate funding for women’s services – the attempts by ACC to cut funding for sexual abuse counselling is just the beginning. We need to build a strong, independent women’s movement as part of the global struggle for justice and the survival of our planet.

IWD discussion: Christine Dann

Christine Dann
author of Up from under: women and liberation in New Zealand, 1970-1985



1. What (if anything) does International Women’s Day mean to you?
International Women’s Day does not have any official status or recognition in New Zealand, as it does in a number of other countries (and it is the United  Nations ‘official’ women’s day). In the 1970s and 1980s there were efforts  by women unionists in NZ to celebrate it, and to raise its status as a day  for honouring the work done by women, but little seems to happen around it here these days.

Perhaps this is because it has been up to the enthusiasm of unfunded individuals to organise events, and perhaps it is because New Zealand has another home-grown day for celebrating women as public citizens (Suffrage Day on September 19). Or both.

For me personally, it is a day when I am reminded to think about women’s labour struggles, past and present.


2. Is there a feminist or women’s movement in Aotearoa New Zealand? If not why not? If so, what is it doing?

There are no longer any women’s organisations (such as the Women’s Liberation Movement and the National Organisation of Women) campaigning, lobbying and protesting for women’s political, economic and social rights and participation across the board, as there were in the 1970s and 1980s.

There are support services (e.g. Rape Crisis, Women’s Refuge) which owe their existence to the women’s liberation activists of the 1970s, and from time to time there is some feminist activity within existing organisations and institutions e.g. unions, churches, political parties, the health service. But the ‘Second Wave’ of feminism, as the Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1970s was dubbed (the ‘First Wave’ being the militant feminism of the late nineteenth century) has well and truly washed up on the shore.


3. What are the biggest issues and challenges facing women and feminism in Aotearoa New Zealand today?

The first and second waves of feminism in Aotearoa were effective in securing women’s ‘freedom to’ and ‘rights to’ be fully participating members of political and economic society. Unfortunately the freedom or right to fully  participate in a capitalist society which is run by a business-political  elite does not ensure that all women have freedom from poverty, violence, malnutrition, preventable illness and economic and physical exploitation. Nor does it ensure that women (and men) will have a physical/natural environment that is both pleasant and safe to live in now, and capable of sustaining their needs and those of their descendents adequately in the future.

In the thirteen years since NZ gained its first female prime minister, chief justice and attorney general, a few more women have entered the political, legal and business elites, while the majority of women have experienced a de facto cut in their pay rates and other income, and significant cuts in educational and social welfare support. Rates of violence against women remain high, and women largely remain segregated in the narrow range of  (relatively) low-paying occupations they were in thirty years ago. Where women are in non-traditional occupations, they earn less than men.

In the 1980s decisions were made at the highest level to stop teaching domestic and trade skills at secondary schools, and to turn NZ into an importing economy rather than a manufacturing one. Thus women (and men)were simultaneously deprived of training in useful home and work skills, and diverse opportunities for paid employment making useful goods. 
A few people (some of them female) have gained at the expense of the many, and the country as a whole is worse off socially, economically and environmentally than it was thirty years ago, despite the rise in money-denominated wealth.

If women as a whole are to do better in the future in NZ, then feminist activists must address the economic and political causes of this state of affairs, and propose and implement alternative economic and social arrangements. The globalist expansion of neo-liberal capitalism is in any case entering its end game, with the peaking of global oil supplies and other cheap resources on which it is based, and the subsequent increasing frequency and severity of debt crises and collapses. Global trade will contract - which will be good for the environment and for employment in NZ, as we stop pumping out milk powder to the world and start making more useful things for each other at home once again.

But planning and managing this transition to a sustainable economy, so that it is more positive for women than globalism, is a major challenge ahead. Interestingly, I am only one of a number of Second Wave feminists who are currently involved with some aspect of the growing Transition Towns movement in NZ (www.transitiontowns.org.nz), which is a community-based, democratic response to the huge environmental and economic challenges of the 21st century. The local level is where we can be most effective, and the local level is going to be increasingly important for sourcing our needs as the global and national economy ‘powers down’.

20th century feminism was largely about creating opportunities and choices for women within existing economic and political structures. 21st century feminism will be about changing those structures from the ground up, and creating more genuinely equitable and sustainable ways to live for everyone.

International Women’s Day: Auckland Events

Mellow Yelllow blog has listed these International Wom*n’s Day Events in Auckland:

* Shakti: Equality, Justice, Peace & Empowerment

* AUSA/Campus Feminist Collective/Oxfam: International Women’s Day Lunch 


* Coalition against Violence to Women and Children: Flash Mob


Full details here

International Women’s Day discussion

Next Monday, March 8 is International Women’s Day. To celebrate, UNITYblog has invited a bunch of feminists / woman activists to share their thoughts on International Women’s Day and the women’s movement in Aotearoa. We asked the following questions (but noted that we were happy to receive anything related to these topics): 1. What (if anything) does International Women’s Day mean to you? 2. Is there a feminist or women’s movement in Aotearoa New Zealand? If not why not? If so, what is it doing? 3. What are the biggest issues and challenges facing women and feminism in Aotearoa New Zealand today? The first few responses will be posted next Monday, with more over the next couple of days, depending on how many we get.

Women's struggle within the Venezuelan revolution

Contradictions and Tensions in Venezuela’s Bolivarian Process

February 6th 2008, by James Suggett - Venezuelanalysis.com

Carmen Pulido quietly sits on a crowded public bus in Mérida, Venezuela. The bus overflows with impeccably dressed students who tend to their tightly gelled hair and top-of-the-line clothing as they head to class on University Avenue. The bus driver's favorite Reggaetón songs blast through the breeze on this bright day in the Andes Mountains. Out the tinted window Pulido gazes upon row after row of glossy posters of ultra-skinny, mostly lighter-skinned beauty pageant contestants who are half-wearing lingerie and pointing their limbs in all directions. Alternating with the posters are beer ads portraying excited, ordinary-looking men holding bottles at waist level pointed towards the sky, surrounded by everything except women's heads. Pulido studies audio-visual media in the prestigious University of the Andes, but her destination this afternoon is not the classroom. Instead, she plants her feet on the six-lane Avenue of the Americas where she and three hundred others, mostly supporters of President Hugo Chávez, block traffic with linked arms and angrily chanting voices. Overhead, a pedestrian overpass is plastered with the "revolutionary" municipal government's message, "Mérida awaits you." Surrounding the words are seductive portraits of the beauty pageant contestants, the logos of giant commercial retail corporations and luxury hotels, and a matador boasting triumphantly over a dying bull. The annual International Sun Festival has once again swept through Mérida, a city just south of the oil powerhouse Lake Maracaibo where rural agricultural quaintness rubs shoulders with bustling, high tech, petroleum-richness. The festival's controversial "Girlfriend of the Sun" beauty pageant, bullfights, and massive commercial promotion have re-ignited internal dialogues among supporters of the Bolivarian Revolution over the types of cultural and material progress to which Venezuelan socialism should aspire. Mérida's mayor, Carlos León, compromised with protesters this year by using festival funds to put on three days of flamenco dancing activities and assured that the police kept the protesters safe as they exercised their rights. But he claims the yearly activities must continue because they are part of regional tradition, art, and culture. Meanwhile, León appears on billboards sporting a bright red shirt and raising his left fist in the air along side cut-and-pasted images of President Hugo Chávez. For Pulido and others, however, the torrent of the Sun Festival remains an assault on their values, sexual identity, and vision of what "Socialism of the 21st Century" should be. Their counterproposal hits the streets this week as they stage defiant tomas culturales, or "cultural takeovers" of institutional and public spaces, filling them with peaceful artistic expressions of what participants assert are truly socialist values. Demonstrators pass out flyers to receptive pedestrians, denouncing the bullfights as "Not Art nor Culture: TORTURE". However, participants in the protest are adamant that this is about more than animal rights. "The Sun Festival is a huge business deal that diverts public resources toward an imperialist inheritance from Spain, bullfighting, and private companies that contract with the government to promote consumerism and commerce and contaminate the environment," Pulido assails, adding that "women are submitted to total sexual exploitation." She explains her group's view that "art and culture are necessities of the People for re-creating the world they live in," avowing that social movements must fight for "the vindication of women and the vindication men through values that promote respect for life and humanity." Even though a major target of the demonstrations is the mayor, Pulido thinks this struggle is not really against the government, but instead "it is an internal struggle among the People over our conceptions of the world." Confrontations of this sort are common amidst el proceso, "the Process," which is how masses of Venezuelans proudly describe their country's current political project. More than just another name for radical Chavista politics, it has a deeper cultural meaning that seems indefinable in normal political and academic language. It legitimizes all the ambiguous changes and hopeful new relationships that go along with deconstructing a historically oppressive social order and emerging from marginality. El proceso takes shape outside of major centers such as Caracas, through the creative community work of unpretentious organizers who relentlessly tend to society minute-by-minute without needing to pledge allegiance to a vanguard, political parties, or Marxism. Mérida is a historically agricultural state that was uprooted by Venezuela's hyper-specialization in oil exportation in the latter half of the twentieth century. Dominant cash crops like coffee had already pushed out traditional farming, but even those declined in the face of burgeoning service and tourism economies glossed with oily economic and cultural appeal. Displaced workers all over Venezuela were left to migrate precariously to the fringes of the cities and grapple for leftovers. Rural Transformations Braided into the organizing philosophy of the Chávez administration is a response to this devastating history called municipalización, "municipalization". This principle of development prioritizes local decision-making processes and social change grounded in well-organized neighborhoods. In Mérida, this has spurred a fervor of municipal organizing that is most advanced in the rural countryside where it plays upon concepts of community already embedded in the local culture. In rural Mucuchíes, an hour and a half and a world away from Mérida's metropolitan area, María Vicenta Dávila's 27 years of community organizing have made municipalization like her blood type. She exalts that since an April 2006 law laid the foundation for consejos comunales ("community councils"), her community has been galvanized. The 92 councils formed in Dávila`s municipality in the past year have given birth to projects that "seemed unimaginable in the past." In the prolific community council system, the federal government delivers funds directly to neighborhoods which organize into democratic assemblies and petition resources they need to solve the local problems they understand best. The idea is to avoid state and local bureaucracy and dismiss trickle-down myths. Every council in Mucuchíes has received the full amount promised by the federal government, but collectively deciding how to use the money has not been a smooth journey. When Dávila and a group of women proposed that they launch a worm composting project, they were "demonized," Dávila recalls, "People called me crazy, especially the men, who said it was not women's work." Persuading the assembly to allocate funds required patient efforts to educate the community about the value of organic trash and the importance of women's economic and social activity. The federal government's Misión Vuelvan Caras pitched in with cooperative business management training. Now, worms are a hub of community interaction. Neighbors deliver organic waste to a team of women (and a few helpful men) who operate the composting assembly, and then regional farmers purchase the rich product as an alternative to contaminative fertilizers. In the process, women have developed deep bonds and a bit of economic freedom beyond their domestic life. Instead of bragging about her revolutionary eco-feminism, hard-nosed Dávila admits, "we have a long way to go... we are still learning the concept of cooperativism." Community councils in Mucuchíes also collaborate with the Misión Sustitución Rancho por Vivienda (Substitution of Shack for Home) to organize unemployed construction workers into cooperatives and link them to people in their communities who need more dignified dwellings. This was how Dávila crossed paths with Ingrid Martínez, an architect who passed up a job designing commercial banks to work in the mission. Martínez draws up plans for the new homes so they fit with the communities' budgets, environment, and skills. She emphasizes informal connections with folks in order to overcome their preconceptions about people in her position who are traditionally patronizing and punitive. She is frustrated by co-workers who will not enter the poorer areas. In her opinion, "it's not about fear; it's that we do not recognize those people as legitimate ‘clients'. We are trained by the system to think of ourselves as educated professionals working under or over others." Martínez huffs that many of her higher-ups in the mission arrogantly believe that the locals are ignorant and act as though their college degrees make them the guardians of knowledge. She walks me through a community of new adobe homes built with support from the mission. Builders on this hillside are proficient in molding mud bricks from the mountain they live on, a style Martínez was not taught in college. "The people of this neighborhood know things that this institution will never understand if it does not listen," Martínez cries. Opening spaces for new voices to be heard is something Dávila attributes partly to the Bolivarian Constitution, passed by popular referendum in 1999. She and other Mucuchíes organizers benefitted from a gender-sensitive budgeting workshop meant to fulfill the constitution's principles of gender equality. Dávila optimistically comments, "Despite strong resistance among the men," who traditionally dominate public matters, "women are organizing ourselves to be present at the assembly every Wednesday when decisions are made, to ensure that community council budgets address women's issues". As a result, some community councils have created on-site childcare facilities so parents can attend public meetings calmly. While Dávila is ecstatic about what she calls the "beautiful revolution" and its abundant improvements to people's quality of life, she puts the president in his historical place: "I was revolutionary long before Chávez." El proceso seems to transcend the president as critically engaged citizens create new values, traverse cultural boundaries, and humbly facilitate new systems of power. The new constitution and the laws which fortify it open doors, but the communities pick themselves up and walk through. Gender and Cultural Transformations Undeniably, the efficiency with which the government has shifted money and prerogative to local communities has outpaced the necessary psychological and cultural conversion. This conversion requires dedicated "work that is not seen," according to Laura Díaz, who helps communities organize local cultural events with government support. Venezuelan cultural work is amidst a stormy sea of shifting methodological tides. The federal policy of the Misión Cultura, phrased el pueblo es la cultura ("the People are culture,") supports Díaz´s vision that culture is not sequestered in museums, theatres, or imported dance companies, but rather shines from the everyday customs and sounds of local communities. At the same time, Díaz has been pushed around by classist higher-ups who refer to her as chancletuda, a slur that chides her roots in the vast, economically poor, low plains northeast of Mérida where knowledge of bourgeois art is scant. Díaz needs no university degree to philosophically diagnose her country's politics. "There is an immense concentration of power, not in Chávez but in the mass of once passive historical objects like myself demanding change, and the only manner in which it will disperse is through the creation of new historical subjects." The most challenging aspect is that "change must be internal... we must honestly criticize our own lifestyles." That is why she insists on community council autonomy, assuring that "what they do with their funds is less important than that they be protagonists of those funds." I ponder the fact that in the middle class neighborhood where I live, 90% of the community council funds were used to build an imposing, remote controlled gate at the front and back of the community, with the remaining 10% going to fund youth theater activities. The image of a pretentious, paranoid middle class neighborhood is penetrated by smiling adolescents in fluorescent costumes waltzing through the gates on stilts. Díaz's experience tells her that local communities have more potential for deep cultural change than revolutionary activist groups, many of which are male-dominated. Díaz joined the Tupamaros after being radicalized by the April 2002 coup. The Tupamaros is a decades-old organization that has taken the electoral path in recent years but not left behind its guerrilla past. Laura found that when things got intense, she was converted into a servant of food, coffee, and moral support for the "completely machista" Tupamaros. The Tupamaros' black and white, territorial worldview is the reason Díaz finally left them. She tells me they posit themselves as the "moral reserve of the revolution", as opposed to other Chavistas who are corrupt. With this rationale, they domineeringly confiscate public spaces from potential allies they deem ideologically impure. Díaz thinks things are not so simple; el proceso takes many forms within every group, every person. She imagines that "those public spaces will be revolutionary only when communities peacefully occupy them, and collectively organize them into educational facilities and public cafeterias." Perhaps the Tupamaros, like the America's Cup, reflect social systems based on domination. Everybody must haughtily compete for higher status in some form, sexual if not economical or political. Díaz poetically describes her role in all of this: "I am pueblo and I am of the institutions, not one or the other. I am both at once." It is like she exists within a melee of social forces and does not identify with any one in particular, but traverses all of them. It is ironic but also promising that a rather militant Tupamaro man introduced the urbanization called Santa Elena to the Misión Madres del Barrio (Mothers of the Neighborhood Mission). Anyhow, residents Maribel Dávila and her adolescent daughter Elimar have since organized 20 Santa Elena mothers in situations of abuse, extreme poverty, and isolation to receive the benefits of the mission. The first phase will provide 80% of the minimum wage, and the second will go beyond this wages-for-housework concept by funding local micro-enterprises led by the women. The committee's funds are managed by their community council, which has been stifled by general apathy and power struggles. Thus, women with new hope for economic inclusion have emerged from social isolation, propelled into the grittiness of communal organizing. The mission has encouraged one mother to believe that "we too are capable of growing, producing, and constructing sovereignty". Dávila expresses confidence that this is all part of a hopeful process. "Beautiful things are happening in Venezuela," she smiles and takes a drag of her cigarette, "little by little". But it is clear that serious obstacles remain even within these hopeful new paradigms of community work. The experience of Angélica Gómez in the cultural center of rural Tabay is demonstrative. Gómez and her co-workers had a revolutionary organizing philosophy. Instead of working on museums and beauty pageants, they trudged up and down mountain streets for two months crafting a registry of local theatrical and musical artists. These artists were defined as "common people who practice artistic expression, with or without formal training." Once the thousands of registrations were collected, locals were hired to give piano lessons to middle-aged mothers, drum lessons to young fusion rock bands, and mount puppet shows in elementary schools about recycling. Gómez even set up an after-school workshop for adolescents to practice writing lyrics to hip-hop and Reggaetón songs, become conscious of the sexism in mainstream hits, and then record themselves in the community radio up the road. This innovative project was on a roll until Gómez pushed limits by organizing tertulias. These women-only "get-togethers" in quaint, local settings had the intention of creating safe, healing spaces where trustful relationships could be built among neighbors who are victims of domestic violence and domestic isolation. Putting an end to women's separation was not the ultimate goal of the tertulias, but a temporary tactic. Men were invited by Gómez to lend support by preparing pamphlets and local resources for participants, and assist with logistics. Even so, Municipal Culture Director Hector Arriaga (who had scraped by as a kid-friendly street puppeteer for years before being promoted as a cultural worker by the Bolivarian government) became "visibly uncomfortable and threatened" that women were organizing without men, Gómez recalls. Advocating that the revolution requires teamwork, Arriaga crashed the tertulias with lengthy, overbearing discourses on what he said was a "balanced" approach to women's rights, threatening to withhold funding if Gómez objected. When Gómez and her co-worker Salomé García refused to stamp "for a culture of community and gender equality" along with Arriaga's official signature on institutional correspondences, they were abruptly informed that their jobs had become part-time, one working mornings and the other afternoons. Arriaga claimed the local legislative council had reprimanded him and threatened to cut his budget because "a director should not have the privilege of two secretaries," never mind that the women's jobs were not secretarial. Gómez and García grieved, having been divided and conquered by someone who was simultaneously benefiting from patriarchy and the government`s new empowering philosophy of culture. Like many Venezuelans, they ask, what are the values of "Socialism of the 21st Century"? Maybe the state coordinator of the Misión Sucre (a free higher education mission) in Mérida, Oscar Araque, knows the answer. "We must un-learn the anti-human values of the past, so we can re-learn... how to co-learn," he quips. Or maybe not. In my own distasteful experience volunteering for Araque, I have found that his sincere efforts at innovative educational strategies are frequently accompanied by the typical vices of authoritarian male-supremacist bureaucrats. Perhaps everyone involved in el proceso is inevitably on a journey through old, transforming, and new standards. Everyday people are spliced as they carry out acts of ambiguous cultural renewal. They are led by a Bolivarian compass that is useful but thwarted by a bubble of decrepit past traditions. The Bolivarian Revolution is a boiling pot of newness into which Venezuela is being dipped and will emerge redefined.

Source URL: http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/ Printed: February 12th 2008 License: Published under a Creative Commons license (by-nc-nd). See creativecommons.org for more information.

From UNITY magazine: women and revolution in the 21st century

Women and revolution in the 21st century

by ANNA POTTS

It would be nice to think that the battle for gender equality had been more or less won, but unfortunately all the evidence points to the opposite conclusion. The media and the police blame women for being raped. Many western governments have taken a paternalist attitude to (mainly young) Muslim women, seeking to dictate their dress and their identity under the guise of liberating them. We are all expected to feel grateful that we have the “equality” of earning not-as-much-less than the same shitty wage earnt by working class men, and that we can join the army and go off and kill or be killed in another imperialist war. And we’re expected to think that something significant has changed because the person that pays those low wages, starts that war or denies access to abortions may well be a woman.
That’s not to say that we haven’t come a long way. There are few places in the world where women have a life expectancy of 26, as was the case for women working in the textile mills of Lawrence, Massacheutsetts before the ‘Bread and Roses’ strike of 1912. Queer women, single mothers, mothers in paid work, and other women who don’t conform to traditional gender roles are far more accepted, both legally and socially than they were fifty years ago. Most western countries have introduced equal pay legislation, and though it certainly hasn’t solved the pay discrepancy between men and women, let alone the issue of low pay generally,
But the most important thing about all these achievements is not that they don’t go far enough, or that they have to some degree been assimilated into the capitalist system, but that they were achieved by groups of women (and often men) working together against the system, against the bosses and against the government. The oppression of women is not a phenomenon that exists alongside the capitalist system, or even an unfortunate side effect, but an inherent part of it. And therefore any fight for women’s liberation has to challenge that system.
The German socialist Frederich Engels described the oppression of women as emerging with the start of class society. The emergence of private property resulted in a patrilineal society – that is one in which the male line of decent, along which property was inherited, took primacy. Women became largely excluded from the ownership of property and the concept of monogamy, and thus the nuclear family, was reinforced as, in theory, it allowed the the father of a child to be determined.
It is that nuclear family which both helps prop up the capitalist system and is also a central part of the oppression of women. The structure of the nuclear family is inherently hierarchical. Though this is not always the case in practice, the idea of a man as head of the household is quite pervasive. What began as a direct comparison between the king as head of the country and the man as head of the household became a general metaphor for obedience to authority, reinforced by the frequent economic dependence of women on their husbands.
Secondly, the idea of the family as an independent unit reduces ideas of social responsibility. Rather than the state, or society as a whole, assuming responsibility for those who cannot care for themselves – children and the elderly, for example, that burden falls within the family. And from looking to a small group for support, it’s a natural step to seeing problems on an individual level. Those problems are seen as being moral ones, based solely on the choices made by, or the failings of, individuals rather than society as a whole. Women who don’t work outside the home in particular often remain isolated, with few to share their experiences with, let alone join together and fight. And lastly, as a unit for child rearing, the nuclear family provides free care for the next generation of workers.
Of course, family life is not all bad. Many people do find loving, caring relationships, but it is often in spite of the constant pressures of work, and financial pressure. And whilst for men the family and home is an inadequate haven from their worklife, for most women, still expected to assume primary resposibility for the home, it is no relief at all.
A media image has grown up of the“golden age” of the nuclear family. According to myth, there was once a time, always a couple of generations before the current one, when there was no crime and everyone knew their place, and gender roles were strictly defined - particularly that a woman’s place is performing unpaid housework and childcare.
However, the idea that women did not work outside the home is something of a myth. Although many middle and upper class women did not, for many working class women it has always been a matter of economic necessity. What is true is that “women’s work” is and has been disproportionately under paid, insecure and under valued. Not only do bosses get away with paying lower wages (and despite equal pay legislation women in New Zealand still earn around 15% less than men) as a result of this devaluing of the work women do, they encourage rivalry between men and women, giving some men a sense of superiority and having something to gain from capitalism. On the flip side, it has led some women to believe that working class men are the problem.
The subject of this article is a vast one, on which much has already been written. I could go on, for example, to explore reproductive rights and the commercialisation of sex and the position of queer women. But hopefully the points I’ve outlined give an indication of how and why women are oppressed under capitalism.
But this is only half the picture. As women are oppressed under capitalism, they also fight back against it. They have fought, and continue to fight, as trade unionists, both alongside men and independently. They have spoken up for abortion rights and against violence. And they have made their voices heard amongst the millions who protested the invasion of Iraq. And to many it is clearer than ever that women cannot be liberated within the confines of the capitalist system. As we look forward to “21st Century Socialism”, what can women expect?
There is no blueprint for the role of women within a socialist society. The details of that society will be determined by the revolution that makes it. But it can be assumed that women (and men) will be free to interact as human beings without being restricted by economic necessity. The upbringing of children will be the responsibility of society, not left to the individual. What precise form relationships will take is unimportant and unpredictable. As Engels put it; the people of a future socialist society “will not care a rap about what we today think they should do. They will establish their own practice and their own public opinion, conformable therewith, on the practice of each individual - and that’s the end of it.” And, as life under capitalism has been particularly harsh for women, the basic rights to a life free from violence, hunger and poverty, are all the more important.

Angela Davis

Moira Nolan looks at Angela Davis, who has campaigned against racism and injustice for over 35 years

In October 2004, the Not In My Name US anti-war coalition took out a full page advert in the New York Times condemning the war in Iraq.

Among the high profile academics and Hollywood stars uniting to oppose George Bush’s war was Angela Davis — a key figure of the black liberation movement in the 1970s.

Davis was catapulted to international renown in 1970 when the FBI put her on its Most Wanted list and issued an “Armed and Dangerous” poster of her — in those days an invitation to any racist cop in the US to gun her down in cold blood.

Yet for millions of black Americans Davis was a symbol of the movement to end the institutionalised racism of the US—and especially its prison system.

As a child in the 1940s Davis grew up in segregated Birmingham, Alabama, in an area known as Dynamite Hill because of the vast number of black American houses firebombed by the Ku Klux Klan.

The 1960s civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam war campaigns were springboards for radical change and brought Davis into struggle.

By the late 1960s the mass non-violent campaigns that led to desegregation across much of the South, led by Martin Luther King, had impacted across the whole country.

Black communities were involved in struggles against discrimination in jobs and housing, especially in northern cities such as Chicago and Detroit.

A minority began to see that real liberation for black people could only come about with economic justice and linked individual battles to a wider struggle against the entire capitalist system.

The more radical elements of the black liberation movement began to reject non-violence in the face of the increasing brutal response of the US government.

Organisations such as the Black Panther Party argued for the carrying of arms to use in self defence in the ghettos.

Davis was a Black Panther and a member of the US Communist Party. She argued, “The only true path of liberation for black people is the one that leads towards a complete and total overthrow of the capitalist class in this country.”

Her key campaigning focus was the justice system in the US — she railed, and continues to do so, against the way that the law is used to perpetrate great injustice against black people in the US.

The case of George Jackson was an example of this. He was arrested at 18 for stealing $70 from a petrol station and ended up serving over ten years in jail — seven years in solitary confinement. In 1971 he was killed in a prison riot in the notorious Soledad jail.

From her “respectable” position as a lecturer in philosophy at the University of California, Davis had played a key role in the Soledad Brothers Defence Committee to “Free George Jackson”.

Her uncompromising stance led to an attempt to sack her from her post in 1969.

Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, spearheaded a witch-hunt to get Davis sacked. This met massive resistance across campus and beyond — more than 1,500 students now attended her lectures.

Reagan succeeded when the US state found an excuse to carry his persecution of Davis onto a higher level.

As the movement for black liberation dissipated, the government carried out widespread repression of the Black Panthers.

Some 20 leading members were killed in 18 months and leading figures such as Huey Newton and Bobby Seale unsuccessfully framed for murder.

Davis was accused of supplying guns to Jonathan Jackson, George’s brother. He invaded a California courthouse and took hostages in an attempt to free two black Soledad inmates on trial.

The subsequent FBI manhunt for Davis could easily have led to her death.

After her arrest in New York, Davis was detained for 18 months and became the subject of the kind of campaign for justice she had led for others. She was receiving up to 400 letters a day from around the world.

Her writing from this period is passionate and polemical, and often contains a sharp analysis of race and class.

Women, Race and Class, Davis’s most widely read book, attempts to understand the dynamic between oppression and exploitation in capitalist society.

Her analysis sharply differs from the dominant ideas of many leaders of liberation movements in seeing the struggles for women or blacks as ones that need to engage wider sections of society.

Davis’s engagement with the modern anti-war movement is a testament to her belief that, collectively, we have the power to order the world anew.

Also in the Revolutionary women series:
» Constance Markievicz
» Alexandra Kollontai

"The cops should be afraid of us!"

Green Left Weekly reports on the marches in Auckland and Wellington on International Women's Day against police rapists.

Police Rape: The Tip of the Iceberg

(a leaflet written by Socialist Worker women for the International Women's Day marches in Auckland and Wellington) We are told that the police are there to protect us. But who will protect us from the police? Clint Rickards and his rapist cronies are just the tip of the iceberg of a system which not only condones but supports violence and abuse of power. Rape is not about sex at all – it's an act of power and violence. And those are two things that the police are good at. The police are nothing more than a gang - the biggest, best equipped gang out there. Like other gangs, they wear patches, have a code of honour, and band together against outsiders. Internal police culture is all about bullying and intimidation – not only of their prisoners and the general public, but of those lower down in their pecking order. They aren't there to defend us – they are there to defend our rulers, their property and their power. Compare how many police you see in the “nice suburbs”, compared to the places where working people live. The justice system is also set up to benefit the powerful over the powerless. Only five percent of rape cases are reported – women know perfectly well that it's usually not worth it going through the humiliation of the judicial process. Defence lawyers do their best in any rape trial to make it look as if the defendant somehow “asked for it”. Rape is a means of intimidation - and not for just women and children either. Just look at how this culture laughs and winks at the idea of men raping other men in prison - this, they say, is what happens if you step out of line. It's not just the police who target women, of course. Despite the offical concerns about the high rate of domestic violence and murder, violence against women in our society is still tolerated. While some women become Prime Minister or bosses of big corporations, most women are concentrated in low paying, low status jobs. This is not a simple question of men oppressing women. Ordinary men do not benefit from their wives, sisters and partners being poorly paid and under constant threat of humilation and violence. No-one in our society is free while women are treated like second class citizens. We need social change that will bring a living wage and free childcare for all. We need contraception and abortion on demand. We need to call a halt to the criminalisation of women raising children alone. And we need a better way to bring justice for rape victims. The only kind of society that can provide that is a society based on human need rather than profit – a socialist society. By organising and fighting back against sexism and police abuse, we are building the struggle for a better world right here and now. Women in the 1960s and 70s got angry at the way women were treated and won some important gains, but we haven't gone far enough. We need to make sure that Clint Rickards and people like him can no longer get away with abusing and humiliating the rest of us. It's time for women – and men - to get angry again!