Tag: women

Bombing Iran will NOT liberate the People

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (3.3.26), damning the suggestion that bombing women liberates women, anywhere. International Women’s Day on 8th March should see a battle cry rage against Trump’s misogyny, racism, anti-Trans bile and deadly military imperialism. They’re all linked!

Bombing Iran Will Not Liberate the People!

Welfare not Warfare!

The illegal Israeli military mass-bombing of the girls’ school in Minab in the south of Iran killed at least 153 women and girls last Saturday. This cannot claim to be in the interests of the liberation of women in Iran.

The rights of Iranian people have never been on the agenda of Western powers. Women, and men in Iran have protested heroically to change their government towards women’s rights, with death their only answer. The bombing of Iran offers no solution to women’s oppression there or anywhere. War always treats women as targets.

There’s so much hypocrisy spoken about women’s rights that we should all take responsibility for calling it out. We live in a deeply sexist human world. A global system based upon individual power and control vested primarily in super-rich men. The Epstein files show how corruption and sexism are so pervasive and entrenched. Andrew represents the corruption, both financial and sexual, of unaccountable wealth. Trump symbolises white male supremacy. Women’s oppression and capitalist class society are intertwined.

The genocide in Gaza has exposed the brutality of war and the unique impact on women, famine, physical abuse and incarceration impacting menstrual health and pregnancy. We still have a long way to go to win a world free of women’s oppression.

Let’s be clear: women’s oppression encompasses all social, economic, and political spaces causing personal subjugation for simply being a woman. Its is based upon class: wealthy women whilst suffering the indignity of being considered primarily as sexual objects have sufficient agency to combat much of the oppression. They side with the class privilege of wealthy men and collude in the exploitation and oppression of other women as low-paid nannies, personal assistants and cleaners.

Most working class women’s experiences of oppression are internalised into self-blame. Interactions and relationships are all based upon sexism – the portrayal of women as objects to be used, owned and controlled permeate all aspects of women’s lives. The modern capitalist family requires women to fund the domestic budget by working as well as running the home as carer, educator, nurse, chef, bottle-washer and on-call lover.

Next weekend we celebrate International Women’s Day, March 8th, in deteriorating circumstances. The backlash against campaigns for women’s liberation is well-funded and growing. In the name of women’s rights, the far-Right now proclaim themselves the defenders of the “traditional” heterosexual family as the “natural order”, recruiting women to specific roles in political organisations, “Pink Ladies” mobilised to protest outside refugee hostels for traditional women’s roles and heterosexual family values, and to keep white children safe from Black men. Disgusting!

Farage and his Reform UK private business echoes vice President J D Vance in demanding women should have more babies, referring to Musk’s “population apocalypse” of white families in the face of migration, inter-marriage, LGBT+ parents and left-wing “wokism”. The far-Right are reawakening the fascist campaigns of last century, for “children, kitchen and Church”, opposing women’s rights and imposing a woman’s place apart from any self-determination.

International Women’s Day (IWD) has been celebrated for over 100 years, born from mass revolts of young women workers challenging exploitation and the abusive power of the Boss class. Today many companies and businesses use IWD to sell cosmetics and gimmicks to reinforce the cardboard cut-out female rather than address the issues women face.

But IWD has radical roots and is a day to remember those who have fought for women’s liberation – from the Suffragettes in the UK to the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement in Iran. The women trade unionists and the men who have joined their cause remain clear-eyed – the working class have nothing to gain from women’s oppression. Free domestic labour, tasks still primarily allocated to women, protect the profits of big business not having to pay for the child care and raising of the next generation of the workforce.

And so, women are kept down. One-in-four women in Britain suffer domestic violence and abuse, often sexual, an average for a period of 6 years of their adult life. Rape in this country is lawless, only 3% of alleged cases followed through to a conviction. Child sexual abuse is reportedly on the increase again, the vast majority of cases girls abused inside the family, the majority of families being white. Sexual abuse is not the preserve of the black male refugee but the privileged white misogynist.

The cuts to social welfare, repeated and enforced in order to divert essential funding away from our health and welfare services and into war and military spending, affect women most acutely. Women’s rights depend upon a well-funded Welfare State alongside the ideological struggle for liberation from this system enforcing roles and relationships of power-and-control.

Here in Plymouth, trade unionists are fighting the cuts to health services, including stopping the closure of Plymouth’s Sexual Abuse Referral Centre, reducing the support that women and children receive following rape and abuse. You won’t see the far-Right protesting about that except as a “drain on the tax-payer” and a symbol of the “Nanny State” they want demolished.

For socialists, the challenge to class exploitation has to have the fight against oppression at its heart. We encourage and support the struggle by women against all forms of oppression, including gender stereotyping, role-segregation and being made scapegoats blamed for the imposition of low wages, high child care costs and poor social conditions. Welfare not Warfare! On this International Women’s Day we must remember the struggles of the past and unite for social justice and women’s liberation today!

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The Divide and Pride

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly comment in the daily Plymouth Herald (25.6.24) which cut-out all the references to the Pride LGBTQ+ links that I wrote about. My purpose was to promote Pride whilst linking the reason for both gender oppression and other oppressions as doing a job for the bosses. Perhaps the editor didn’t get it, or perhaps the subject was seen as too delicate, or perhaps even too political. I simply don’t know, but if there is such fear in mainstream publication, its worse than anything I wrote about.

Trade unions exist because of the power imbalance between business owners as employers, their managers and supervisory staff, and the the workers who produce the goods. It’s a universally experienced pyramid of power.

The tension that exists, exists because when workers combine together we can create a power equal to or greater than The Boss. When we are treated like slaves, paid subsistence and ordered to undertake gruelling and unhealthy work we can unite, stop working, go on strike and show the employer that nothing gets done without us. 

We have bargaining power because, when work stops, so does the profit for the business owner. 

Indeed the greatest threat to profit is workers united in defiance. So employers worldwide have learnt the myriad of ways to divide and rule the workforce, and indeed, our communities.

For so long as we fret over each others’ differences and seek individual superiority based upon personal characteristics, there can be not unity. Division and competition in the workforce only ever benefits the bosses and their bigoted courtiers.

The employing class uses oppression to hold down workers’ confidence to fight for our rights by dividing us each from the other. Women continue to be paid less than men for the same work, the false ideas of femininity as emotionally weaker and less able than men still fed into workplaces to stoke competition and division. Sexual and gender superiority are tools of control, encouraging violence and domestic abuse. 

Bosses also always promote nationalism, even losing profit to give workers time off to watch the national football team play in the final. Nationalism tells workers we have more in common with our bosses than we have with the same workers from another country or even an associated rival business – such jingoism is an essential prerequisite for putting us into uniforms and sending us to war. 

Racism is encouraged to boost individual self-importance and prevent unity in struggle. White skin in the workplace remains a symbol of entitlement over those of colour, said to be “different” or “other”.

The categories proposing superiority and inferiority have differing roots but are all linked. There is no hierarchy of oppression. Those seeking personal power continue to campaign to cancel human rights across the board. 

Sexual and gender superiority is heavily promoted. So to consider the demand for women’s liberation as vital whilst collaborating with the continued oppression of trans-women simply maintains the power that prejudice wields over everyone.

We each have unique characteristics. We appreciate the family and friends we love, accepting of a wide range of sexual preferences and gender identities. Whilst the ruling class continues to present only heterosexuality as “normal” if not “god given”, we love and care for our relatives and friends who are gay or lesbian, bisexual or abrosexual, aromantic or asexual, transsexual or Queer – the term reclaimed by the LGBTQ+ members who have redeemed it from its use as a homophobic put-down and excuse for violent attacks – but  non-heterosexual and straight-gender characteristics are still portrayed as outside “the norm”.

The shift in social attitudes and acceptance of differing gender identities has been fought for through generations of struggle, and continues to be challenged, especially in the workplace. Trade unions have had a key role to play in championing the right to determine and express ourselves without prejudice or oppression in the workplace. Unity is strength.

It is little wonder then, in this period of heightened political debate, that the racist, sexist, white-supremacist millionaire profiteers and business owners are pushing “anti-wokism” to win the votes from those who want to bolster themselves and the power of prejudice at the expense of others. 

Campaigns have challenged oppression and won time after time. The Capitalists learn to adapt to the general consensus, only to then create new divisions, new demons they can intimidate us with. They seek to incorporate and commodify everything we do, but will destroy anything they can’t control. A pertinent example is of the arms manufacturers who are trying to sponsor our schools and universities, campaigns and community activities. Their purpose is to normalise an inhuman culture of individual competition, social conflict and imperialist war all based upon pre-judgement of “The Other” as lesser, invalid or inhuman.

This week’s Pride celebrations, and the Pride Month of June offers a voice to all the oppressed locally and internationally, and offers a powerful wedge against prejudice in the workplace.

Trade unionists are Woke to the core! When at our best we not only fight for decent jobs but for decency in the workplace, organising always against all oppression.

Time to mark International Women’s Day!

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My comment article this week in the daily Plymouth Herald (05.03.24) criticises both the lack of vigour with which the trade union movement prevents workplace sexism, and the detestable take-over of International Women’s Day (IWD) by the middle class small businesses seeking to exploit “womanhood” to make a profit from cosmetics and cleaning products. IWD belongs to the Working Classes of the World and should be a point in each year to restate our need and determination for Women’s Liberation.

Friday 8th March is International Women’s Day. Trade unions have celebrated and commemorated the event every year for generations and will do so again this year. That should hardly be surprising given that women constitute the majority of trade union members, highly represented across the public sector in particular. 

International Women’s Day has absolutely nothing to do with cooking, cosmetics and clothing that some events will focus upon, sponsored by Capitalists large and small, and seeing women as consumers not citizens. Such events actively promote the role-segregation and denigration of of women inside this sexist society.

The Day’s authentic celebrations will focus upon the struggles of working class women, starting with the Bryant & May “Matchgirls Strike” of 1888, when teenage young women, today considered children, formed a union for Health & Safety at work, much derided by employers then and now, and much needed still today. It was also a struggle against women’s oppression, for social justice, building the fight for equal rights at work and at home. A woman’s right to vote, to have full representation in society, to have control over their bodies, their finances and for the right to work.

One-hundred-and-thirty-five years later the struggle for women’s liberation continues, here in the UK and across the world. Internationally, the rape and killing of women is accentuated by war and social conflict.

At home, the Age of Austerity, officially blamed upon COVID, war and climate change rather than record Corporate and Banking profits, has produced mass domestic poverty, women suffering the brunt.

Whilst women constitute the majority of trade union members in the UK, trade unions have a chequered history of fighting for women’s rights. The false divide between men and women in the workplace is exploited by employers, portraying women as a threat to jobs, weak and unreliable – ideas not always challenged. There have been bosses campaigns to identify women as a threat to men’s jobs, unchallenged by unions until women themselves organised against prejudice and discrimination, having to educate male trade unionists as well as employers.

The Great Miners Strike of 1984-5, which began 40 years ago this week, was maintained for an entire year only through the determination of the women in miners communities and beyond, active and leading on picket lines and in support groups, and changing the “male culture” of the union in the process.

Yet today, despite a series of major employment laws for equal pay, won by strike action such as the famous women’s strikes at Ford Dagenham, women workers still earn less than 82% of the man’s wage undertaking work of equal value. 

For part-time workers (of whom many are women) the gap rises to around 30 percent. Over her lifetime a woman will earn on average half of what a man will earn, primarily because of the role women still play as primary carers for children – not to mention all the other family members women will often find themselves responsible for, simply because of oppressive social norms. 

Domestic labour is an asset for the employing class, women reproducing and looking after the workforce free of charge. Women’s oppression is essential to ensure high profits, minimising the costs of social provision of welfare, nurseries and care of the elderly.

Little wonder we see the continued media promotion of the backlash against Feminism, orchestrated by the far-Right from the 1990’s onwards, which has seen a rise in workplace sexism and discrimination, including sexual abuse. Much of the gains won from the 1970’s have been eroded. There is a deepening culture of violence against women and girls, institutionally and socially.

More than 80% of all domestic abuse is from men against women in the UK, with one-in-four women experiencing an abusive relationship for an average period of 6 years of their lives (compared with 1 in 18 of men) – that’s over 6 million women experiencing abuse right now, precisely the same statistic as recorded in the early 1970’s. No change. 

Worse still, 68,000 rapes were recorded by Police in 2022-3, half of which are carried out by the woman’s partner or ex-partner and six out of seven rapes perpetrated by someone she knows, with charges brought in just 2.4% of cases, and far fewer convicted. Little wonder that 5 in 6 women who are raped don’t report it, out of lack of faith in the police and legal system. The succession of cases of sexual abuse by police officers, politicians and sportsmen deliver appalling role models.

9 out of ten girls and young women say they’ve experienced sexist name-calling at school, the era of smartphones resulting in “dick pics” and other sexual images being received, unwanted and unsolicited, and causing a common sense of threat, fear and subjugation. 

The backlash against women’s rights is being ramped-up. The misogynist Andrew Tate’s vile internet broadcasts stating that “women are men’s property” is watched by hundreds of millions, influencing the current young generation, his bile being just the tip of a deep iceberg of political male-supremacy rising-up alongside white-supremacy and racism.

Working class men are stupid idiots to denigrate women – our partners, sisters and daughters, friends and workmates. Indeed, the sense of “protection” evoked by male-dominated culture that arouses men to action when their family members are abused, is hypocritically forgotten when putting down women in the workplace with sexist remarks, shielded as “banter”, and the objectification of women’s bodies, dehumanising women and exerting power over women as a source of domination and self-aggrandisement.

In Plymouth we have experienced, all too horrifically, the results of the campaign for male-supremacy, a gunman who expressed misogynistic and homophobic views shooting his mother and four passers-by, shown to have been part of the “intel” movement promoting male domination and the hatred of women.

The International Women’s Day events this Friday should not simply be a celebration, and certainly not any vehicle for reproducing the sexist imagery and Capitalist cultural domination of women as things and products. We need a huge campaign of education and challenge against women’s subjugation and for true women’s liberation.

The sexual division in the working class should not be underestimated as a the obstacle in achieving the class unity that can win decent pay and conditions for everyone. 

It took militancy and collective action to make the gains now at risk if not lost. Any decent working class men – and we exist in our millions – should restate the pledge this week to challenge all aspects of sexism and women’s subjugation, and join with women if they’re fight against oppression. 

Trade Unionists will stand in solidarity with Plymouth’s Women’s Liberation event 12-2pm on Friday at the Sundial, Armada Way.