Rallies for equal pay

From the May-June 2013 issue of News & Letters:

Chicago—On April 9 rallies were held across the U.S. to mark the day women’s earnings catch up to what men’s were at the end of 2012. I attended the rally at the Daley Plaza. Speakers included elected officials, leaders of business and professional women’s organizations and heads of NGOs. Statistics regarding equal pay for equal work are even worse for Black women and even worse than that for Latinas.

There was a call to tell truth to the lies that the reason women earn less is because they choose to work in jobs that pay less (blame the victim) or that women choose to work fewer hours to take time off to raise a family.

The truth is that traditional “women’s work” jobs pay less because of discrimination. There’s no good reason a nurse’s aide should be paid less than a construction worker except that nurse’s aide jobs have historically been held by women. As for the fact that women take time off to raise a family, this ignores entirely that most men do not do their share of childraising, so women are forced to be the primary caregiver.

A recent American Association of University Women study, “Graduating to a Pay Gap,” explores the pay gap between male and female college graduates working full time one year after graduation. They conclude that: “in 2009…women one year out of college who were working full time were paid, on average, just 82% of what their male peers were paid. After we control for hours, occupation, college major, employment sector, and other factors associated with pay, the pay gap shrinks but does not disappear. About one-third of the gap cannot be explained by any of the factors commonly understood to affect earnings…”

There was also a call to enforce the federal Equal Pay Act.

As I write this, all the Republican Representatives voted to block the Paycheck Fairness Act. What is wrong with equal pay for equal work?

—Sue S.

Violence ‘normalized’

From the May-June 2013 issue of News & Letters:

Woman as Reason

Violence ‘normalized’

by Terry Moon

We are living in contradictory times, especially when it comes to women’s struggle for freedom. On the one hand you have a Women’s Liberation Movement that has never been more radical, unified and global. On the other hand there is more repression, and the violence is more brutal and deadly than ever before.

In just the last few months we have learned of new atrocities: the gang rape and murder of 17-year-old Anene Booysen in South Africa; the 14-year-old Bangladeshi, Hena Akhter, who was charged with adultery after being repeatedly raped and brutalized by her older married cousin and ordered lashed by the local imam. She died after being hit 70 times. In India the attacks keep happening: a Swiss tourist beaten and raped by eight men at her campsite; a seven-year-old girl sexually assaulted at school. In the Maldives, a 15-year-old rape survivor has been sentenced to be whipped 100 times in public for “sex outside marriage” after being raped for years by her stepfather, who also murdered the baby she bore. The list never seems to end.

VIOLENCE NO LONGER WITHOUT PRECEDENT

Five years ago in March 2008, we wrote in these pages about the “obliteration” of women in Congo: “rape has become so brutal that not only are women’s reproductive organs destroyed, but so are their digestive tracts. Some, lucky enough to find medical care, undergo six operations to repair their injuries….Doctors Without Borders…reports that ‘acts of sexual violence accompanying the carnage have been without precedent in their frequency, their systematic nature, their brutality, and the perversity of the way they’re planned and staged.’”

What only five years ago was an astonishing level of violence in Congo “without precedent,” accurately describes the rape suffered by Jyoti Singh Pandey—the young woman in India whose rape and subsequent death galvanized massive demonstrations there—and the level of violence against women worldwide.

We are experiencing what some call a “normalization” of violence against women. You see that “normalization” in the USA when you have elected officials talking about “legitimate rape,” or that it is impossible for a raped woman to become pregnant, or that if she does, that is god’s wish and will. What is it but normalized if teenage boys in the heart of the USA think it’s OK to rape a 16-year-old honor student who is unconscious, strip her, urinate on her and post pictures and videos of her—and of them brutalizing her—on the internet?

Rape is so accepted as normal that—even with all the stress on stopping sexual assault in the military—an Air Force commander felt both free and justified in throwing out an aggravated sexual assault court conviction of an Air Force fighter pilot. He reportedly “wanted to show the pilot community [which evidently in his mind included no women] that he had their backs.”

RAPE AND THE LEFT

Nor has the Left escaped this normalization of violence and rape. That at least partly—and only partly—explains how the rape of a teenage British Socialist Workers Party (SWP) member by a Party big shot was dealt with in such a disgusting manner that it has brought scandal and mass flight from that Party. The case was tried by the SWP, with friends of the accused doing the investigation. Surprise, surprise, they decided that the young rape victim had not proven her case. As in a bourgeois trial, the woman was treated like the accused: questioned about her sexual history, her drinking habits. She was the one punished, banned from speaking at the party’s 2012 conference. SWP members who had questions about what amounted to her prosecution were expelled from the Party for discussing it among themselves on Facebook; any others who objected were charged with being guilty of “bourgeois morality” and of capitulating to feminism. This is another way that feminism was presented by the leadership of the British SWP as an evil.

The Left in this case, which is supposed to be about the transformation of society, decided to try to save the reputation of their organization and its leadership and sacrifice a teenage girl. Whatever principles they may have had are thoroughly destroyed. What they accepted as normal was: the girl was lying, the sex had to be consensual (although sex between those with power and those without in any organization is always questionable as “consensual”), feminism is bad, and anyone who questions our authority is the enemy.

The escalation of violence is not happening in a vacuum. It is at least in part a response to women’s increasing demands for freedom, demands to be treated as whole human beings who are determined to change their reality.

Be it in Egypt, Tunisia, other Arab Spring nations; India or the U.S.—in fact anywhere in the world—there can be no turning back, no retreat for women. The barbarity of the present makes clear that what is a necessity is for women’s demand for full freedom—for full personhood—to be an articulated, nonnegotiable revolutionary demand. Today’s reality shows that nothing short of a deep and total revolution that can transform all human relationships will mean women’s freedom.

Chinua Achebe (1930-2013) and his legacy

From the May-June 2013 issue of News & Letters:

World in View

by Gerry Emmett

Chinua Achebe (1930-2013) and his legacy

Nigeria’s Chinua Achebe, who passed away March 21, was probably the greatest African writer from the era of its anti-colonial revolutions. His novels, from Things Fall Apart (1958) to Anthills of the Savannah (1987), portray the elations and dilemmas of that era. The world has barely begun to grasp the importance of Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Camara Laye, and the other writers of Africa’s freedom struggle.

Achebe could have coasted on his literary prestige, but he remained a dissident. He didn’t hesitate to criticize classic Western authors for racist attitudes, most famously Joseph Conrad. Perhaps as a result, Achebe was denied the Nobel Prize that he easily merited. He also criticized, in and out of his novels, the many corruptions and failings of Africa’s unfinished revolutions, especially in Nigeria. Nowhere did these contradictions appear more starkly than in the Biafran War.

Achebe wrote in a recent essay, “The Genocidal Biafran War Still Haunts Nigeria”: “Almost 30 years before Rwanda, before Darfur, more than 2 million people— mothers, children, babies, civilians—lost their lives as a result of the blatantly callous and unnecessary policies enacted by the leaders of the federal government of Nigeria. As a writer I believe that it is fundamentally important, indeed essential to our humanity, to ask the hard questions, in order to better understand ourselves and our neighbors…there is precious little relevant literature that helps answer these questions. Did the federal government of Nigeria engage in the genocide of its Igbo citizens—who set up the Republic of Biafra in 1967—through punitive policies, the most notorious being ‘starvation as a legitimate weapon of war’?…Why has the war not been discussed, or taught to the young, more than 40 years after its end? Are we perpetually doomed to repeat the errors of the past because we are too stubborn to learn from them?”

His last book, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra, is an effort to engage those issues. At the end of his life, Achebe made a great statement of responsibility toward the future. His questions are only more significant because they resonate beyond the Africa of newly-won independence to a world struggling with the meaning of history and revolution. He remained true to the fundamental question of his revolutionary age: what does it mean to be human?

Tunisia and the Left

From the May-June 2013 issue of News & Letters:

World in View

by Gerry Emmett

Tunisia and the Left

The Feb. 26 assassination of Tunisian Marxist Chokri Belaid is a tragedy, not least because it denies this serious and courageous activist a chance to help work out the contradictions in his own movement. His funeral—perhaps a million people took to the streets—became a massive demonstration in favor of continuing the Tunisian Revolution.

The popular theory that the “moderate” Ennahda Party has used the Salafists to its far right as threats to the Left is credible. The historic demonstrations in memory of Belaid may help defeat reactionary Islamism in Tunisia.

Belaid, a 1980s student activist and lawyer, led the Unified Party of Democratic Patriots, a small organization in the Popular Front. But his call for social justice and critique of reactionary religion spoke to millions.

BELAID’S LEFT AND THE WORLD LEFT

At the World Social Forum in Tunisia in March, some tried to use that critique of religion for their own purposes, for example, trying to justify support for Assad in Syria, claiming the revolution there was motivated solely by religion. A group styling itself “Shabiha Forever” actually beat up a group of supporters of the Syrian Revolution and vandalized their display booth.

Others attempted to counterpose the Syrian and Palestinian struggles—falsely, since most Palestinians support the Syrians, and vice versa. When some Leftists shouted, “Jihad is in Palestine, you religious clerks!” the sentiment was as misplaced as it was senseless.

NEGATION AND HUMAN EMANCIPATION

Marx’s critique of religion never stopped at this kind of first negation. His critique was based on revolution. It led him to recognize the greater personal freedom of North Africa’s Muslims, the greater intelligence of Australian animists, and “the heart of a heartless world.”

Marx began his search for revolution in permanence with second negativity:

“We do not assert that [the masses] must overcome their religious narrowness in order to get rid of their secular restrictions, we assert that they will overcome their religious narrowness once they get rid of their secular restrictions…The question of the relation of political emancipation to religion becomes for us the question of the relation of political emancipation to human emancipation” (“On the Jewish Question,” 1843).

In his 1844 Manuscripts, Marx equally criticizes religious alienation and abstract atheism that fails to grasp history. Out of respect to Belaid’s memory, the Left in Tunisia and elsewhere might want to grasp that principle of second negativity. It will bring them much closer to the thought and activity of the Tunisian and Syrian masses.

Venezuela election

From the May-June 2013 issue of News & Letters:

World in View

by Gerry Emmett

Venezuela election

The narrow victory of Vice President Nicolas Maduro over Henrique Capriles was a surprise. Hugo Chavez’ endorsement had been expected to carry more weight. Both the Chavistas and the opposition made much of the demonstrations and street fighting that followed.

More significant for the long run was the vote itself. The close Venezuelan elections of recent years have likely represented the tensions inherent in Chavismo itself. While Hugo Chavez did do things to benefit many of the poorest Venezuelans, he also maintained a relationship with the business community.

There are limits to how far such a balancing act can be pushed, especially in the present moment of economic crisis. Doubtless, some among Chavez’ bourgeois constituents will be attracted to the policies of Capriles, a more intelligent representative of the bourgeois opposition than the coup plotters of old.

Chavez’ Bolivarian Revolution has largely been able to walk this tightrope, but the laws of capitalism still hold. At some point serious revolutionaries must come into conflict with them, and that moment of decision is fast approaching in Venezuela.

The support Maduro got from the other Latin American governments, post-election, shows the extent politics in the region have changed. Direct imperialist domination has weakened but capital has not been profoundly challenged.

Rape and lies in Syria

From the May-June 2013 issue of News & Letters:

World in View

by Gerry Emmett

Rape and lies in Syria

Chicago—The second anniversary of the Syrian Revolution is marked, March 17, 2013. Photo by Roger Beltrami.

Two years on, Syria’s remains an “orphan revolution,” and like many orphans it is seen according to the prejudices of the observer. The extent to which reality can thus be falsified is frightening, but as the con man knows, the mark’s got to want it first.

Bashar Assad’s status as an ally of Russian imperialism, both as arms client and as guarantor of Russia’s only Mediterranean naval base at Tarsus, has had many consequences. Some are obvious, as the diplomatic cover provided by Russia’s (and China’s) seat on the UN Security Council. Some are quieter, as were the rubles smuggled in to finance Assad’s shabiha terrorists.

Less noticed yet has been the way Assad has inherited the ideological apparatus, the corrupt ideas and willing propagandists, first developed in support of Russian ally Slobodan Milosevic’s genocide in Bosnia. This apparatus was honed during Russia’s devastation of Chechnya, then Serbia’s invasion of Kosova. It finally found a massive Western echo chamber after Sept. 11, 2001. The Syrian Revolution has been met with attacks by this apparatus from the beginning.

ONCE AGAIN, RAPE…

It is instructive to compare the 1990s, when pretty much only the women’s movement gave vocal support to Bosnia, with Syria today. Some of the same crimes are happening now.

The Women’s Media Center’s Women Under Siege project, together with Syrian activists, has been collecting data on the occurrence of rape as a weapon. This followed reports from refugees that led to comparisons with Bosnia. Jody Williams, co-chair of the International Campaign to Stop Rape & Gender Violence in Conflict, has said, “With every war and major conflict, as an international community we say ‘never again’ to mass rape. Yet, in Syria, as countless women are again finding the war waged on their bodies—we are again standing by and wringing our hands.”

Perhaps it is actually more like Congo’s ongoing wars, where such scant attention is paid that little hand-wringing takes place. But the statistics that Women Under Siege has gathered show a definite use of rape (of both women and men) by Assad’s army and militias. Sixty percent of attacks are carried out by government troops, and 20% by the shabiha. Another 6% involve both these forces working together. For the rest: 15% of attacks are by unknown or “other” perpetrators, and less than 1% attributed to the Free Syrian Army.

LIE CALLED ‘NORMAL’

Along with the horror of mass rape as a weapon comes the big lie that Assad is defending “secularism,” presumably with the aid of both Iran’s theocrats and Lebanon’s Hezbollah, and is even defending women’s freedom. It is equal to the lie that he is somehow defending the country’s minority religious sects, despite his murder, torture and imprisonment of anyone who opposes him, whether Sunni, Alawite, Christian, Palestinian or Kurd. It would be hard to convince the bombed-out Palestinian refugees of Yarmouk, or the Kurdish villagers bombed in April, that he is their savior.

But again, there is a large body of propagandists who do assert this lie. They range from the many internet commenters, usually anonymous, who fill up news and web sites with pro-Assad comments (some that are known to me were also supporters of Milosevic) to a journalist like Patrick Cockburn who travels to Damascus and sees only what his prejudices incline him to see— mainly Assad in firm control with solid popular support.

Before the Arab Spring, Assad tried to project the image of a more “modern” ruler, and the world sent him architects, fashion designers, opera singers and musicians to create a Syria in its own image, without the torture chambers, or the massacres in Lebanon.

The celebrities are long gone. What remains is the desire not to see.

There are certain moments when the struggle for the soul of a revolution coincides with that revolution’s struggle for the future of humanity. I believe this is a basic understanding of Marxism. Maybe the world has such a hard time looking at Syria today because it fears to see itself there a little too clearly.

Portsmouth, England: unite against austerity

From the new May-June 2013 issue of News & Letters:

Portsmouth, England–Owen Jones, independent columnist and author of Chavs, joined people from across Portsmouth on March 20 to launch a community group to fight against austerity. The new organization, Unite Community Portsmouth, is part of Unite’s organizing drive that seeks to re-establish links between the trade unions and local communities. Unite is Britain and Ireland’s largest trade union, with 1.5 million members working across all sectors of the economy.

“We are going through the biggest squeeze in living standards since my granddad was born in this city in the 1920s,” said Jones, who cites his grandfather’s conversion to trade unionism precisely through his experience working in Portsmouth. “So I’m really glad to be here because of this fantastic initiative that Unite has set up.”

The Unite Communities project has been instigated across the country as part of an attempt to tackle the loss of influence the trade union movement has over local areas. In the past, when workplaces were more centralized and tended to absorb much of the nearby labour force, it was easier for trade unions to play a direct role in community politics.

Changes in the industrial landscape, from outsourcing of manufacturing to the greater role played by smaller service-sector enterprises, have partially eroded contact between a community and the union movement. Unite initiated the community organizing drive to not only address such issues, but provide an additional platform for anti-austerity politics.

“It’s a really exciting time,” said Liane Groves, Unite Community National Organizer. “These groups are mushrooming. People are literally meeting in front rooms, local community centers and so on in order to fight these vicious (government) policies.”

Gorves stressed that Unite does not wish to simply “bolt on” community groups to the rest of the union. “People have to decide how to do things themselves. What’s important is that people stand together. The government is trying to divide us between ‘scroungers’ and ‘strivers.’ We need to fight against that.”

Portsmouth has historically suffered with the decline of national manufacturing, having once had a thriving dockyard. With the advent of austerity policies, Portsmouth will be affected by the “black April” reforms, such as the unpopular bedroom tax.

“When you have people working mainly in the hire and fire service sector, you need to organize right across the community,” said Jones, “That is the point we have always got to remember; our own power and our own strength. That when we can collectively organize, when we have confidence and courage in our own strength, then we can win. We can turn this around. We can stand together. We fight together and we can win this together.”

–Dan Read

For further information, please contact danreadfreelance@googlemail.com