Lesser-Evilism, and Single-Issue Thinking

.

We are compelled to denounce the ancient practice of blaming Jewish people for the world’s ills, because anti-Semitism (as prejudice and discrimination against Jews is commonly called) has been rearing its ugly head—within the U.S. Left. The incident we just experienced began August 29, when the administrator of a feminist email list sent around a virulently anti-Semitic video which, in the process of supporting ousted Libyan dictator Muammar el-Qaddafi, blamed global poverty and injustice on the Rothschild banking family. Only a few of the 100 people on the email list responded, even after we immediately pointed out and denounced the content of the video. Then we were shocked again by the tepid nature of some of the responses.

For centuries, racism against Jews has been integral to the cultures of Europe, many Muslim-majority countries, and the Americas. It waxes and wanes, but is especially strong in times of economic woes, for which Jews are always a convenient scapegoat. They are “outsiders” to the dominant religions, nationalities, and ethnic groups; Jewish merchants make visible targets; and Jewish “cosmopolitans” are portrayed as the agents of capitalism and modernity. For the same reasons, anti-Semitism has been a mainstay of conspiracy theories for centuries––conspiracies in which Jews secretly run the world.

Throughout the racist history of the U.S., Jews have been associated with Afro-Americans and gays for attack. Today, common misconceptions persist that all Jews are rich and that they control the U.S. media and Hollywood. However, overt anti-Semitism is seen infrequently outside the racist Right, at least as compared to the number of physical attacks on Jews and synagogues that occur regularly in France, Germany, Argentina, and elsewhere. And we do not expect the Left to find it acceptable. (For information about Left anti-Semitism today, see http://leftantisemitism.wordpress.com/ and the sources listed there, including http://contested-terrain.net/).

We are well aware that the Left can turn into the Right, as happened in Nazi Germany, and that racism, including anti-Semitism, flourishes in times like these. We urge the Left to expose and oppose anti-Semitism, along with all forms of racism and xenophobia, and to root them out of Left thought, along with the theories that support them.

The Feminist Email List Incident

Here is what happened recently: At a Left Forum conference a few years ago, we signed up to be on an email list for a “Left Feminist Conference,” which, as far as we know, never took place. The list was commonly used for announcements and commentaries. On August 29, the list moderator sent an email with the subject line, “FWD: LIBYA – Thoughts?” The email message said, “Please watch this video!”

Apparently British-made, the video shows Qaddafi riding through the streets with his head and torso poking through the open rooftop of a vehicle. He is pumping his fists. The people he passes on the streets are waving. The dubbed soundtrack is dreamy synthesized music. A written narrative is superimposed. The opening verbiage cites Qaddafi’s alleged humanitarian and economic accomplishments for his countrymen. It then goes on to say (emphasis added):

“The Libyan Central Bank is state owned and unlike ALL banks in the west is not owned by Rothschild and issues debt free money.”

We cringed at this mention of Rothschild, as anti-Semites have long used “Rothschild” as code for “Jews.” (The Rothschilds are a European Jewish family that has owned financial institutions since the 18^th century, and grew very rich.)

The video’s verbiage then states that Libya was falsely accused of the bombing of PanAm Flight 103 (and killing 270 people). It continues as follows:

“One of the first acts of the Libyan ‘rebels’ was to create a new central bank . . . to one that was owned by Rothschild, just as ours in the west are. The Rothschild family are estimated to own over half the world’s wealth. Rothschild owned banks create money out of thin air and sell it to the people at interest. This means we never have enough money to pay back what is ‘owed,’ so we and our unborn children are made debt slaves to Rothschild banking interests. Unlike our leaders, Cameron, Obama, Sarkozy, et. al., Qaddafi refused to sell his people out. Libya was DEBT FREE! Are you beginning to see why Qaddafi gets this response from his people and who is behind the NATO bombing of a free and sovereign people? Libyans had much that we do not have in the UK, USA & EU. They have a leader who has integrity and courage and who worked in their best interests and not the Rothschilds’ best interests. Libyans shared in the wealth of their country free from the shackles of usury and Rothschild banking interests. Without the tyranny of Rothschild control over the issuance of money, we could all live as wealthy people. We have been literally robbed of trillions of Pounds/Dollars/Euros by Rothschild bankers and their rent boy politicians.”

The term “rent boy” could be construed as a slur against gay men.

The video ends with obscenities against NATO, the U.N., and “the New World Order.”

That last term is code for “international Jewish conspiracy to run the world.” The Rothschilds have frequently been the subject of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. These take differing forms, such as claims that the family belongs to the “Illuminati,” a purported organization that acts as a shadowy worldwide government dedicated to establishing the “New World Order.” You can easily find instances of the continuation of these myths, which proliferate on the internet.

Conspiracy Theories Proliferate

Conspiracy theories used to be associated with the radical Right, at least in the U.S., although they have been prevalent in the European Left for some time. But the U.S. has changed dramatically in recent years, especially since 9/11. In their zeal to claim that the U.S. government planned and executed the events of 9/11, some of the Left has come up with explanations not very different in kind from those that blame it on “the Jews”—in spite of the fact that hundreds of Jews died that day. As Chip Berlet wrote in “ZOG Ate My Brains” in New Internationalist Magazine (http://www.newint.org/features/2004/10/01/conspiracism/):

“If you surf the web, you may have encountered the claim that the Israeli spy agency Mossad warned 4,000 Jews who worked in the World Trade Centre to stay home on 11 September 2001; or that a handful of Jewish lobbyists control US foreign policy; or the world is run by the Zionist Occupation Government (ZOG). All these claims are patently false, yet they have devoted defenders.

“The idea that a secret group of powerful people is conspiring to control world events is centuries old, and it is seeing a troubling resurgence on the political Left. Unlike most progressive theories about political power that stress systemic, institutional or structural analyses, conspiracy theories claim a handful of sinister plotters are mucking things up. This often devolves into charges that ‘The Jews’ are behind some sinister plan for global subversion.”

When the Left Feminist Conference moderator was questioned about the video she sent, she said she had received it from “one of the young radicals in New Jersey.” The email trail shows that it was from the email account of the Jersey City Peace Movement. Its founder and director is Erik-Anders Nilsson, a middle aged actor with a handful of credits. Nilsson has also aspired (unsuccessfully, it seems) to other leadership roles—president of the New York chapter of the Screen Actors Guild and a seat on the Jersey City Council. A video on YouTube shows Nilsson (presumably as activist, not actor) speaking prior to the screening of “9/11: Explosive Evidence – Experts Speak Out.” In introducing the movie, Nilsson cites “Rothschild” as a possible perpetrator of the September 11 attacks.

The anti-Semitic video about Libya is not only on the Facebook page for the Jersey City Peace Movement, but elsewhere on the internet, including the website of The Truth Seeker, http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk. There one can read such insane articles as, “Did New York Orchestrate the Asian Tsunami?” Here, “New York” is code for “Jews.” The premise is that “the Zionist Cabal” obtained a thermonuclear weapon from the U.S. and set off the December 26, 2004 tidal wave, killing 100,000 Muslims. One can also view the video, “Holocaust, Hate Speech, and Were the Germans so Stupid?” The website is a virtual treasure trove for the Holocaust-denier and Jew-hater.

How Did It Come To This?

In response to the video, Fran Luck, producer of the only feminist program on the formerly Left radio station WBAI (which is now featuring conspiracy theorists), wrote to the list:

“What’s really depressing about this video and what it may represent, is that Left wing anti-imperialist theory–and it’s becoming painfully obvious that the ‘rebels’ are financed by Neo-liberal governments–is being seamlessly blended with classic right-wing (dangerous) anti-semitic conspiracy theory–and perhaps not only in this video! …. All the more reason we MUST have a functioning Left–or this kind of dangerous rightwing populism will fill the vacuum.”

We agree, and we ask: How is it that so-called “young radicals” in New Jersey and a blatantly anti-Semitic website in the U.K. are promoting the same propagandist video? Why did only about seven people on the Left Feminist Conference list express outrage at the anti-Semitic message of the video, and why did some who distanced themselves from it nonetheless appear to excuse it because of the anti-imperialist sentiment it expressed? Why did the email list administrator disseminate it uncritically? Is she just ignorant? Or does the Left conflate anti-imperialism, anti-Zionism, and anti-Semitism to such an extent that Leftists are not able to discern (or do not care about) dangerous, targeted, and false rhetoric?

One wonders how something as medieval and patently untrue as blaming the Jews for everything evil in the world could gain traction in the 21^st century. The sorry fact is that emergent anti-Semitism tells us a lot about the degeneration of the so-called Left in the U.S. Divorced from any concept of liberation or any grounding in workers’ or other mass movements, a noisy segment of the Left has turned to conspiracy theories. They see the government’s purposeful hand in everything bad that happens, from 9/11 to the economic crisis. (We are sure the government would like to have that much power to control events, but it clearly does not—otherwise, Obama would not be in the trouble he’s in.)

Conspiracy theories substitute a small band of nasty people for the large historical and systemic forces at work in society. Such theories make it simple to understanding who is to blame for your troubles. Thus, they not only mislead people; they can lead them right into deadly racism. It is not such a big step to move from saying that the economic crisis and seemingly permanent recession conditions are caused by “greedy bankers” or “Wall Street bankers” (as just about every Left demonstration’s fliers and chants do say), to saying that they are caused by “Jewish bankers.”

And anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists are not the only ones who attribute world events to a small group of intentional actors rather than to the necessities of capitalism, as it constantly pushes to expand in order to survive as a system. As is discussed in many articles in With Sober Senses’ section on “Economic Crisis,” capital seeks out where ever it can make the highest rate of profit, and for many years the average rate of profit has been falling, causing businesses to fail and investment to slow, leading to crisis and recession.

The failure of the Left to grapple theoretically with Marx’s revolutionary philosophy, and the Left’s failure to understand the economic system which controls our lives, makes it vulnerable to simplistic and wrong explanations. (For a relevant analysis of the Left at the G8 protests in Germany in 2007, see http://www.zcommunications.org/g8-summit-protests-in-germany-by-rob-augman.)

It is easy to blame things on a conspiracy or other dedicated cabal if you start with the premise that the ills of the world spring from individuals’ intentions rather than from the capitalist system, which in fact has nothing to do with human needs or desires.

Anti-Americanism, Lesser-Evilism, Single-Issue Thinking Stifle Revolutionary Ideas

The Left’s failure to orient itself within liberatory mass movements leaves it floundering for explanations and susceptible to wrong ones. For example, the strong tendency in the so-called Left to support any person or nation that the U.S. opposes—“the enemy of my enemy is my friend”––results in mindless support for terrible tyrants such as Qaddafi and Iran’s Ahmadinejad. Such support does not make you Left; it just makes you anti-American. And anti-Americanism is no substitute for revolutionary ideas.

MHI people have battled this kind of thinking in the anti-war movement for many years, emphasizing that the movement needs to say what we are for as well as what we oppose. We have urged support work for Iraqi and Afghan, women, workers, youth, and national minorities who are articulating ideas about freedom, and the projection of that support to Americans, as the way to build the anti-war movement. We have urged this largely without success.

There are two worlds in each country: the rulers and the ruled, those who manage the means of production for capitalism and those who are forced to sell their labor-power to survive. Once you act as if all Jews are capitalists, or conflate Jews with the policies of the State of Israel, you cut off any basis for building a movement for real change, which can only succeed if it is international and based in ideas of workers’ self-emancipation.

One would like to think that the increased anti-Semitism in the U.S. Left springs from youth’s identification with those Arab masses who are misled into blaming Jews in general, rather than certain nation-states, for their oppression. But we fear that most of the U.S. Left doesn’t care any more about the Arab masses than it does about the American or any other masses. Rather, being anti-American seems to be the beginning and end of their radicalism, an end-in-itself.

Another noose around our necks is the limitation of “either-or” thinking. Once you accept that you have to choose between support for U.S. imperialism or support for Qaddafi, you have closed off further thought and stifled any possibility of developing liberatory ideas. The same is true of choosing between, or prioritizing, struggles against imperialism and anti-Semitism. Why should we forego fighting anti-Semitism while fighting imperialism, when both of them persist within, and benefit, the same capitalist system? Why should we designate (and overlook) one as “the lesser evil,” when what we want and need is for liberatory ideas to develop in another direction entirely?

Equivocal Reactions

While we were shocked at the apparently ignorant list moderator who posted the Qaddafi video, we were more shocked at the response to our objection to the video by a woman who was a brilliant theorist of Second Wave feminism, Ti-Grace Atkinson. She wrote the list,

“I am disturbed by the Rothschild references, but I am even MORE disturbed by what the US and NATO have been doing to Libya. Looks like we learned NOTHING from Iraq. Or maybe that’s the point: ‘Iraq’ taught the powers that be how much they could get away with in terms of atrocities. Looks like after Libya, Syria is next. Is it an accident that it’s the Left-leaning Arab countries that are getting the shaft now?”

She then thanked the woman who sent the video “for opening the subject up”!

Putting aside the question of whether there is anything “Left” about Qaddafi or Assad in Syria, we do not understand why a feminist like Atkinson thinks she needs to rank the atrocities in the world.

To us, saying that anti-Semitism is less disturbing than U.S. imperialism is a lot like saying that sexism is less disturbing than the Vietnam War—the reason that the male Left gave when it told women to wait for their rights until after we fought the war, racism, etc. It was precisely that attitude against which women on the Left rebelled in the 1960s and 70s, and which impelled them to start a women’s liberation movement. The new movement was not concerned solely with traditional “women’s issues,” but was also anti-racist and anti-war, bringing a new perspective to all the struggles. The fact that the women’s movement arose from within the Left, critiquing the Left’s limitations in practice and thought, gave the new movement a profound dimension of human liberation, and an ability to talk about human liberation, which Atkinson did very eloquently.

Why are we no longer discussing movements and ideas from a multi-dimensional standpoint? Why should anyone choose between the false alternatives of working against only one or another form of oppression, instead of working out an entirely different path for revolutionary movements, a path that can lead to the transformation of society? And are we so exhausted from a lifetime of fighting U.S. imperialism that we have given up fighting anything else, even something as potentially deadly (to people and to the Left) as anti-Semitism? If so, why bother to fight at all?

During the Left Feminist Conference list’s discussion of the video, there was another example of the limitation in current Left thought: A double standard that serves to excuse Leftists’ anti-Semitic actions and conspiracy theories, as if they were just stupid mistakes.

This attitude was evinced by Todd Eaton, who moderates and edits the NewYork Protest List. He first wrote the Left Feminist Conference list to say that Fran Luck’s message (above) had

“said it better than I could. I’m glad that video didn’t pass unnoticed. One disagreement. PREVIOUSLY, I’ve seen nothing but worthwhile-sounding actions & politics from Jersey City Peace Movement. (…OK, well, maybe give or take a touch of occasional Trutherism, which is just not my thing.) JCPM is good people and only I wish that half NYC’s groups were as active. They simply did something stupid, sending out that crackpot crypto-racist nonsense” (paragraph breaks omitted).

Only after the list was sent the link to the Erik-Anders Nilsson video described above, which mentions his affiliation with the Jersey City Peace Movement, did Eaton write again and say, apparently after watching the Nilsson video,

“Oh hell. OK, he’s nuts. I thought the rest of the speech was well to the Left of most Truther analysis, though” (paragraph breaks omitted).

This kind of thinking—that an anti-war group simply did something stupid, and that a Leftist’s conspiracy theory can be better than a Right one, reminds us that the designation “Left” can cover a lot of things that are not Left at all. Everyone knows that Hitler called his fascist party “National Socialist.”

We believe in calling racism and xenophobia exactly that, and always condemning them loudly and unequivocally, without any ifs, ands, or buts.

How Leftists Could Better Spend Their Time Than By Cozying Up To Anti-Semitism

Here’s a short list:

• Talk and write about what’s wrong with anti-Semitism, and how it differs from opposition to the policies of the Israeli government. Opposition to U.S. support for the Israeli government should not be put in anti-Semitic terms.
• Study up on what does cause the world’s ills. Read Marx. Share your knowledge.
• Engage in solidarity work to support those “Arab Spring” rebels who are talking about human liberation, and warn them of the dangers of mimicking the anti-Semitism of the dictators they oppose, and of hurting their ability to re-build their countries by buying into false explanations of how the world economy runs.
• Engage in solidarity work with the new Israeli protest movement. Help them and Arab- Springers to forge links. Now, wouldn’t that alliance raise the prospects for real social-economic revolution all over the world!

[Note added Oct. 14, 2011: Shortly after we published this editorial, anti-Semitism appeared at Occupy Wall Street; see "Wall Street Protests Marred by Anti-Semitism."]

A virus from the revolutions in the Middle East is spreading to everywhere, including to Wisconsin, where recent mass demonstrations tried to stop the new law curtailing collective bargaining. A banner at the Wisconsin demonstrations read, “Walk like an Egyptian!”

When I came to the U.S. previously, I’d find that people didn’t hold a good view of Egypt. They would say, “You receive so much U.S. aid, why are people still so poor?” The people didn’t get the aid; it went to U.S. companies and to President Mubarak. And the aid made us into a U.S. colony. Women can’t be liberated within a country that is a colony.

There’s a connection among neo-colonialism, male domination, and class domination. Some feminists talk only about patriarchy and don’t see poor women. There has been feminization of poverty in Egypt. Half the population now lives in poverty.

We live in one world––a capitalist, patriarchal one. We don’t have peace because we don’t have justice, equality between countries, sexes, and classes. I hope that Wisconsin and all of the U.S. states will revolt, so that we have a world revolution.

The Egyptian revolution’s slogans were “dignity, equality, justice.” Women participated equally with men. I was in Tahrir Square every day, although I didn’t sleep there like the men. The men are still sleeping there to protect against counter-revolution. On the day when Mubarak sent in his “thugs” [plainclothes police or militia], riding camels and horses, wielding whips and swords, I was almost knocked down by a horse. Young men carried me away. Hundreds of women and men were arrested and killed before Mubarak resigned, leaving the military in control.

Then the military’s High Council angered women and young men by establishing a committee to amend the constitution––with no women and no youth on the committee. That’s when we organized a “Million Women March” in Cairo for International Women’s Day, March 8. A few thousand women came. There were actually more men than women. The women went home after the march, but the men stayed in the square. At night, they were attacked by the remnants of Mubarak’s thugs. A coalition of women and young men are still in the square, refusing cosmetic changes to the government and insisting that the revolution continue.

The military was divided. Young officers collaborated with the revolution, but the top officers were Mubarak supporters, and Vice President Omar Suleiman, whom Mubarak tried to arrange to take over, had come to the vice presidency from the military. When Suleiman read the announcement of Mubarak’s resignation, what you couldn’t see on TV was the young officer standing behind him with a gun pointed at him, to make sure he read what was written for him.

During the revolution, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates came to Egypt and met with the military leaders. The next day, a Christian church was burned. No churches and no women had been hurt up until then, so it was pretty clear that the burning was done by Mubarak’s “thugs” to divide the revolutionaries by religion. Mubarak must have gotten the U.S.’ OK to suppress the revolution during that meeting.

For the past 50 years, I have fought for feminist issues, including fighting against female genital mutilation (FGM). FGM increased under President Anwar Sadat [1970-81], as did veiling. Today, 97% of Egyptian women have undergone FGM. I lost my job in the Health Ministry because of what I wrote and said about FGM and President George Bush.

My books were banned and my character assassinated as a result the political stances I took. I was called pro-U.S., although all my books link colonialism and feminism. If you work with the working class, you are called a communist by the ruling class. I was arrested for “crimes against the state” and sent to prison in 1980. When I got out, my life was in constant danger from religious fundamentalists. What I could say and do in Egypt was restricted from then until now.  I had to go abroad to teach.

I belong to the “historical socialist-feminists,” women who were inspired by our mothers and grandmothers, and by the goddess Isis. When I was a child, my illiterate peasant grandmother led a women’s rebellion against the British and the men who ran her village. They were selling the villagers’ cotton crop to the king and Manchester [British textile industry] for too little money. I remember visiting my grandparents; they were so poor that they never ate meat or eggs––even though they raised chickens to sell their meat and eggs to rich people in town. So we “historical socialist-feminists” have feminist ancestors. We are against all forms of male domination, including the traditional family and including imperialism.

During the audience discussion, this editor asked El Sadaawi about the different version of the IWD march that was given by Adef Soueif the week before, and Soueif’s implication that the women should not have made feminist demands so soon after the revolution. See “International Women’s Day 2011.” I expressed my fear that the revolution could repeat the course of the 1979 Iranian revolution, which also started as a mass movement of workers, women, and youth, but which was hijacked by fundamentalism. The Iranian women sounded a warning on International Women’s Day 1980, marching and shouting that “in the dawn of freedom, there is no freedom.” But the male revolutionaries did not listen and thought that they could make alliances with Islamist clerics. Before long, the clerics took over, killing and jailing the revolutionaries, and they have controlled Iran ever since.

El Sadaawi responded:

Some writers received prizes from Mubarak, like Soueif did, and were corrupted. The legal women’s NGOs were those women’s organizations that worked with Mubarak. The Egyptian Women’s Union, by contrast, was banned three times, under Pres. Mubarak and Pres. Sadat before him. Now we have re-established the Egyptian Women’s Union and the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association, which had also been banned.

About Iran: I visited it right before the 1979 revolution and can verify that the revolutionary movement was secular. The U.S. and European powers are more afraid of a secular, socialist revolution than a religious one. After all, the fundamentalists are capitalists too. Most of the Muslim Brotherhood’s money is invested in New York, London, and Paris.

Right after Mubarak resigned, we held a mass meeting in the square. A religious leader was flown in from outside the country to try to take over the meeting, but he was rejected. Religion is often used by the counter-revolution to try to abort the revolution.

When I’m in the U.S., I’m always asked about religious fundamentalism, but when I connect it to neo-colonialism, then what I say is censored. I am told to leave it out of my talks, and in a recent TV interview by Christiane Amanpour, what I said about neo-colonialism was cut out.  But the two things are opposite sides of the same coin. Why is there this revival of fundamentalism in the 21st century? Because religion survives and flourishes under repression. Islam, Judaism, and Christianity are similar in treating women as inferior, in fearing outsiders, and in their racism and classism. In spite of religion’s defects, however, I believe in protecting religious freedom.

I met a lot of youth from the Muslim Brotherhood in the square. The Brotherhood had opposed my work before then, but the youth in the square told me that they had read my books and they respected me. They said that they thought women and men should be equal and the constitution should be secular. But the struggle against fundamentalist religion continues.

I am confident that the young people who led the revolution will win. Among communists, socialists, secular, and religious groups, all discrimination dissolved during the revolution, and the coalition process is continuing. Every day brings a new achievement.

The revolution inspired me; I am reborn. I had dreamed about it since I was 10 years old—for 70 years! As a child, I was always furious about the condition of women and the poor. I demonstrated against British colonialism. I demonstrated against King Farouk in the 1930s and 40s. In 1950-51, my first husband was in the guerilla movement and went to the Suez Canal to fight, but his group was betrayed by Gamal Abdel Nasser and had to flee to the hills. Some were killed.

Egyptian governments have a bad history of cooperating with colonial countries. Our 1952 revolution was aborted after the “Free Officers Movement” deposed the king. As President, Nasser started off well, but he went the way of all dictators: power corrupts. At that time, two percent of the population owned everything—and they still do!

Nasser tried to diminish the gap between rich and poor, and to advance the rights of women, but the U.S., Britain, and France made sure he did not succeed. When he wanted to nationalize the country’s oil in 1967, they worked to get rid of him. I demonstrated against the U.S.  I demonstrated for 70 years, and I’m happy I lived long enough to see this revolution.

Iran

We hear from Iranians that women there conducted small, short, scattered demonstrations on March 8, attempting to evade the government’s on-going repression of all protests. Fearful that the uprisings in the Middle East will spread to Iran, the government has intensified the crack-down it began against the mass protests following the stolen election of June 2009. The regime not only jails and tortures protesters, but also executes many prisoners. See the news on  radiozamaneh.com and iranma.org, which published an “Iranian Call for Global Action for IWD.” Following are excerpts from the Call’s appeal to the United Nations:

• “Stop gender-based apartheid
• Stop the incessant execution of political prisoners
• Stop the stoning of women
• Send a delegation to Iran to investigate the conditions of the prisoners”

“Fact sheet on the discriminatory laws in Iran:

1. Testimony of two women is equal to one man.
2. A man can marry a female child as young as nine years old.
3. A female is considered male property and subservient to him even in matters of sex
4. Forceful sex by a husband is not recognized as rape.
5. Divorce is the right of man.
6. The custody of children is the right of man.
7. Men have the right to have up to four wives and many female concubines.
8. Inheritance right of a male is twice that of the female.
9. Mandatory Hejab (covering of women) with no freedom of clothes for women.
10. Honor killings of the women have increased in Iran. Iran Human Rights reported <http://iranhr.net/spip.php?article803> on November 29, 2008: “A high ranking official in the Iranian police said in an interview with the daily newspaper Etemaad that there have been 50 honor killings in the last 7 months.”
11. Article 1117 of the IRI constitution empowers the husband to forbid his wife from accepting a job.
12. Article 1005 of the IRI Constitution dictates that the husband has the right to control his wife’s freedom of movement and behavior.”

Egypt

The participation of women in the revolution was unprecedented, and WSS will carry a report of a recent talk on it by Nawal El Saadawi, the feminist-socialist writer. We heard about the “Million Women March” held on IWD, just a few weeks after the Mubarak dictatorship fell, from both her and from Ahdaf Soueif, another world-famous Egyptian writers, both of whom had just participated in the revolution:

Soueif, speaking in New York on March 8, was asked about reports that the march had been attacked by Mubarak-associated government “thugs.” She replied that she heard the march had only 200 women, and “they should not have gone out with so few.” She also stated that all the Egyptian women’s NGOs had maintained throughout that the revolution was about economics, justice, and equal rights of citizenship, and not about gender issues.

El Saadawi, speaking a few days later, had a different report of IWD. She said that several thousand people had marched, the majority of them young men. The demonstration had been planned by young men who were protesting the military’s appointment of a committee to revise the constitution that contains no women and no young people. And only one woman was appointed to the new cabinet, to a minor post. There was no attack on the march, El Saadawi said, but after the women went home, the young men resumed camping out in Tahrir Square in order to give notice to the military that the people intend to move the revolution forward. It was those young men who were attacked that night by “thugs.”

She also said that “legal” NGOs had worked with Mubarak, while the Egyptian Women’s Union, with which she worked, was banned.

Ukraine

The first-ever IWD demonstration in Ukraine was held in Kiev on March 8. It was called Feminist Ofenzyva, “protest against exploitation of and discrimination against women.”  Short videos can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/user/BRYUKHOVETSKA

Peru

Peruvian feminists marched on IWD under this banner: "Women of all races and desires, fighting for our rights!"

Peru has a long-established, vibrant feminist movement. For IWD, a coalition marched and proclaimed: “Women can change Peru! If we change the lives of women, we change the world.”

A Peruvian friend of MHI who is active with women’s groups sent us their proclamation:

We are feminists, grass roots and peasant groups, unemployed, housewives, women who work in homes, indigenous women and women of African descent, homeless women affected by political violence, lesbians, workers in unions, students, writers, artists, disabled, people living with HIV.  Being more than half the population and the electorate, we say to vote your conscience in the coming elections!

The proclamation includes a list of 10 demands, which are partially summarized below:

1. a political system, free of male bias, that guarantees women’s participation and interests
2. an economy that recognizes women’s domestic and voluntary work
3. decision-making power over our lives and our bodies
4. eradication of violence against women, lesbians, and transgendered people; an end to sex trafficking and exploitation, prostitution, and race and gender discrimination
5. sexual and reproductive rights, eradication of maternal mortality, decriminalization of abortion in cases of rape and other cases
6. truth, justice and reparations for women survivors of political or sexual violence
7. education without discrimination and that helps to eradicate machismo and includes the indigenous
8. an end to the corruption and impunity of the State, and for transparency and a public ethic
9. faced with climate change, we want policies of prevention, mitigation and adaption
10. we demand our right to engage in social struggles and an end to criminalization of protests. ­­­

Today even the legal right to abortion is increasingly threatened with elimination. This is a bedrock demand of the religious Right. The Supreme Court, now made up of a majority of right-wingers, could reverse Roe v. Wade. Or the states, Congress, and the President could simply make it impossible for anyone but the rich to obtain abortions. Even before they controlled one house of Congress, the Republicans managed to contort the new health insurance law into a vehicle for eliminating insurance coverage for abortions, and they imposed a ban that prevents abortion from being provided in the health care for women in the military.

The most immediate threat to women’s rights comes from the states. Last November’s elections increased the number of governors and state legislatures who vow to place more and more restrictions on abortion rights. Twenty-nine governors are now solidly anti-choice, and in 15 states, both the governor and legislature are anti-choice. Some of the laws they favor passing right away include outlawing abortion after the twentieth week, and forcing women seeking abortions to view ultra-sound pictures of the fetus.

Even in New York, where abortion rights are fully protected, an anti-choice group recently began picketing and harassing women when they enter a clinic in the Bronx. The anti-choice forces are undoubted emboldened not only by their electoral victories, but also by the temper of the times in Washington, where Obama has been willing to go along with many new restrictions on abortion rights.

Prior to Roe v. Wade, the slogan of the women’s movement had not been legalization alone, but rather “Free abortion on demand.” Our large and loud movement led to the Supreme Court decision. But afterwards, the movement was unprepared to keep fighting over and over, as it must do not only to keep the right legal, but to turn it into a reality for all women by treating abortion like any other health matter and by providing health care to all.

Like racism, the ideology behind controlling women’s lives can’t be uprooted by a law. It will take a revolution made by people who want to start a new way of life.

–Old Feminist

Exclusive interview by MHI with Yanar Mohammed, president of the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI), which she co-founded shortly after the US invasion in 2003.

Iraq is fast becoming a forgotten story to the rest of the world, but women continue to be killed in the streets of Baghdad simply for being women. OWFI activists are still in constant danger of assassination by political Islamists. I still have to sleep in secret locations and travel with guards, and we need guards to protect our office. Fortunately, we share a building with the Federation of Workers Councils and Unions in Iraq (FWCUI), who support all our endeavors, events, and programs.

One of our new projects is organizing women workers to lay the groundwork for unionization, a joint project with FWCUI. Few women in Iraq are in unions, and most other unions have shown little interest in bringing them in. Our project, called “Women at Work,” consists at this stage of finding interested nurses in private hospitals and helping them learn leadership skills, so they are able to start preparatory committees toward unionization. They are now organizing for a nurses’ annual conference. We found some “experienced” women who were union leaders under Saddam, but they tend to be nationalistic or patriarchist; we want to help new left-leaning leaders to emerge.

In October, we started experimenting with airing programs on our new radio station. I am really excited about that, because radio and TV were so important to letting people know about OWFI and raising discussion on women’s rights in general. After the government censored OWFI on their affiliated TV stations, we begin to need our own media outlets. We are already swamped with applications from groups wanting to put on programs. Our rule is that all the material we broadcast must be secular, egalitarian and women-friendly.  It is important to move the material people hear to the left, that they  hear something besides the religious programs that are all there is on the radio now.

We recently completed an anti-trafficking report that made a big splash. The study detailed the huge trafficking networks in Iraq who kidnap and smuggle girls and women to other countries where they are sold into prostitution. One line of trafficking takes girls ages 11 to 15, who are considered especially desirable in some other countries. We wrote a big report, and then we didn’t know what to do with it, because the Iraqi government will not admit this problem exists. When we sent an OWFI activist out of the country to announce the report on a TV station, the Iraqi government spent the next three days denouncing us on its television station, Al Iraqia. They kept showing a picture of “the woman who calls Iraqi women prostitutes,” which of course makes her a clear target for the Islamists and nationalists.

The government often denounced us before, but the extent of this campaign seems disproportionate to our threat to it. In fact, people have warned us that if we do anything further with this report, we surely will be assassinated by the trafficking networks!

OWFI continues to publish our newspaper, “Equality,” and to run shelters and safe houses for women fleeing the threat of “honor” killings. We now have three secret safe houses in Baghdad and suburbs. They are run by teams of families whom we train.

OWFI is not involved in the coming national elections. Some members were going to run on slates of individuals under the slogan “freedom and equality,” but now they are not going to participate, since we read the newly legislated election law, which is tailored to bring forward religious and ethnic groups to have full control of their areas. The last election was completely dominated by parties formed on religious and ethnic bases, and look what has happened.

It is completely untrue that women or men have benefited from the more than six years of foreign occupation. For example, the new constitution contains Article 41, which allows Sharia law to supersede the previous family law known as the “personal status law.” Another example: unionization is still illegal for public sector workers, who are a large part of the workforce.

In terms of how we live, Baghdad buildings, which received normal electrical service before the invasion, since it receive electricity for only one hour in the morning and one hour at night. If you want electricity the rest of the time, you have to buy it at a high price from a private seller. Fuel of all kinds is as expensive as it is in New York-a taxi ride costs about the same. The condition of women has deteriorated greatly from the dangers of war, lack of security and ascendancy of political Islam, especially because so many girls no longer get an education. In fact, I estimate that twenty percent of OWFI members are illiterate, especially the younger women.

For more information, see OWFI’s  website: www.equalityiniraq.com

One Comment on “Iraqi Women Still Fighting for Freedom and Equality”

1. 1Stéphane said at 2:44 pm on December 11th, 2009:translated in french at http://bataillesocialiste.wordpress.com/2009/12/11/les-femmes-irakiennes-luttent-toujours-pour-la-liberte-et-legalite/

Houzan Mahmoud, International Representative of the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI), had been scheduled to speak but was unable to make the trip to NYC. We hope she will come later in the year. The talks at the panel were, in this order: Bill Weinberg on various civil society organizations and the need to solidarize with them; Anne Jaclard on the work OWFI has done and its significance for freedom movements; and Michael Zweig on the recent conference he attended in Iraq at which a number of labor unions formed a coalition.

Building Solidarity with Iraq’s Civil Resistance, Part 1
Building Solidarity with Iraq’s Civil Resistance, Part 2

My title is tongue in cheek because I can’t possibly talk about all that in a few minutes. My point is to pose a theoretic challenge to feminists to work out the relationship of women’s liberation to the transformation of society as a whole. I think such a transformation of all human relations necessitates tearing up capitalism and starting a new society based on a new mode of production. My view is that the mode of production and women’s freedom are inextricably intertwined, not as if one were first and the other second, but as a revolutionary process of self-emancipation by massive movements of people before, during and after the overthrow of capitalism. And I argue that a philosophy of liberation—Marx’s humanism—is essential to this process. I can’t discuss very much of this project today, but I invite you to join the investigation.

Some background: The so-called second wave of feminism (1960s-80s) raised these issues in a period when there was widespread discussion of Marxism and revolution within mass social movements of African Americans, anti-war youth, students questioning their place in society and rank-and-file workers fighting automation. Many feminists came out of those movements and considered themselves to be “socialist-feminists” or “Marxist-feminists. ”

Debates raged over the relationship between feminism and Marxism. They centered on questions concerning the origins of oppression and the agents of revolutionary change, sometimes claiming a theoretic opposition between “workers’” interests and women’s interests. Some feminists turned against Marxism because they mistakenly identified Marx with the Soviet Union’s state-capitalism, the dominant Left tendency in the 20^th century. Some concluded that because no workers’ revolution had freed women, there was no use working for one; they failed to see that past revolutions had not freed men either.

“Radical feminism” developed theories of oppression and change based on patriarchy, a system of male domination said to explain the persistence and breadth of sexism. In my view, most theories of patriarchy suffer from the “genetic fallacy” (a philosophic term) in holding that the origins of a form of oppression determine the role that oppression plays in current society. No one disputes that patriarchal culture existed before capitalism, but that does not mean it plays the same role in reproducing modern society that it did in ancient ones. By making patriarchy the systemic basis for modern society, the radical feminists concluded that women need to fight against patriarchy instead of capitalism. When they declared “the personal is political,” they were eschewing much existing Left discourse around politics and economics. Unfortunately, most failed to investigate the Marxist-Humanist philosopher Raya Dunayevskaya, who hailed the expression “the personal is political,” not as a rejection of things political, but as a broadening of its definition. In fact, she saw the slogan as a virtual re-statement of Marx’s warning that a socialist society cannot be based on any opposition between the individual and the society. He wrote as early as 1844, in his “humanist” essays, that in the post-capitalist society “the individual is the social entity;” a concept he later elaborated that remained the core of his vision of a new society based on individual freedom.

The women’s liberation movement had conceptualized and concretized ideas about human freedom that very much accord with Marx’s philosophy. Yet the assumption persisted in most feminist theory that there is an inherent opposition between feminism and Marxism. This led to the creation of “dual systems” theories, in which “economic” oppression was attributed to capitalism while the additional oppressions of women—from sexual harassment in the workplace to unpaid labor and degradation at home–were attributed to patriarchy. For many theorists, these constituted distinct systems—a system being a self-contained method of operation. If capitalism and patriarchy developed independently and are independent systems now, then they need be overthrown separately. Even socialist feminists who claimed they were not creating dual systems, ended up combining some concepts from Marxism with a separate system of patriarchal relations.

The relationship between the two systems was left external, as if they could co-exist without interpenetration. This leaves Marxist-feminists in a difficult position:what do we fight for, not just against, and will “victory” within one system really change women’s lives?This is why the concept ofsystem is important. If we fight only the outward manifestations of oppression without changing the system’s inner workings, then we cannot make deep or permanent changes—a lesson we have now learned from the rapidity with which the women’s movement’s victories, such as reproductive rights, have been taken away again.

The seminal work on “dual systems” is Heidi Hartmann’s “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism,” published along with other views in Women and Revolution in 1981. Hartmann comes to the same conclusion as the radical feminists:that because men receive benefits from sexist society, sexism must be fought in a separate sphere. By focusing on men’s relative advantages, she misses the fact that capital is the real beneficiary of sexism; a post-capitalist world is the only realm in which to work out freedom for everyone. As Dunayevskaya discusses Marx, it is his standpoint of a future socialist society that enables him to expose the unfree essence of this one and to see what must be changed.

With “dual systems” theory ensconced—some paying lip service to “Marxism” by taking up just one idea of his, or merely including “class” in a litany of oppressions—most theorists focused their analyses on women’s lives as separate spheres. For some feminists, the shortcomings of Engels’Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State became an excuse to substitute pseudo-Marxist alternatives for examining his philosophy, or to label him an economic reductionist and disregard him altogether. “Dual systems” theory discouraged serious study of Marx by separating the mode of production and “class struggle” from women’s development. Within another decade, the women’s movement had largely lost interest in both Marxism and revolution. The triumph of “dual systems” was so complete that women’s economic and personal concerns are now widely held to be separate matters, and Marxism is virtually unknown.

I would argue that capitalism is not just one aspect of the world today. It is a system that has filled and shaped every nook and cranny; little of even a personal or cultural nature survives today that is not influenced by capitalism’s attempts to mold all aspects of life into its service. Capitalism is a system whose method and object is self-expanding value; value self-expands by the system pumping labor out of workers; its tendency is to increase the relative magnitude of means of production in relation to workers, leading to the continuous lowering of “socially necessary labor time” (SNLT ) by means of technological change. SNLT is the very essence of the capitalist mode of production, the method by which it expands value. SNLT controls production relations, workplace conditions, women’s labor, and whatever else one calls the miserable way people work today, alienated from our own mental and physical capacities. Capital is not concerned with what use values it produces; it is driven to seek the highest rate of profit possible as it expands value. Today, a huge amount of value is produced by women in sweatshops around the world. Moreover, even women who do not work for wages, such as peasants, have their lives and labor shaped by the domination of the value-oriented world system. This is the case both in the workplace and outside it.

Some ancient relations of oppression serve capitalism well, so those relations, including sexism, have been remodeled and incorporated into modern life. For example, sexism and racism help the capitalists to pit workers against each other, to “divide and conquer” so they can pay low wages to everyone, only relatively higher ones to white men. Doing away with the capitalism’s mode of production for value would change the nature of work to an entirely new, human basis. This would lay the material basis for women, men and children to work out new relations and to construct an entirely new kind of society.

The fact that capitalism is the system within which sexism is perpetuated today does not, of course, mean that there is an economic solution to sexism. On the contrary, a revolution in the mode of production is necessary, but not sufficient, to lay the basis for socialism and women’s liberation. A huge, thinking Women’s Movement is essential to the process of transformation, before, during and after the transcendence of capitalism. Only such movements can work out what freedom will look like for women. Today, I believe our main task is to develop theory which can help give direction to such movements.

If we need a new philosophic ground to create a new direction for the women’s movement, we should begin with a reexamination of “dual systems” theory and of Marx’s own writings. I believe feminist theorists ruled Marx’s philosophy inadequate to ground feminism due to gross misconceptions about his work (whether they intended to mislead or not, and some of them surely knew better).

Marx’s concept of an alternative to capitalism is based not only on overthrowing capitalism, but on a second negation (to use the Hegelian concept, as he did). The second negation he termed “positive humanism beginning from itself.” In other words, instead of defining ourselves by what we are against any longer, we will first begin to develop our full capabilities. The forms of private property that characterize capitalism and “vulgar communism” are historical, transitory, subject to the transformative activity of live human beings, who can make a revolution in the mode of production and re-make all other relations as well.

Today many feminists and Leftists have given up on revolution. They put all their energy into exposing the horrors of this society and supporting campaigns for reforms. Those who have given up on revolution may cling to “dual systems” or patriarchal theories, because they do not think that total societal change of the kind envisioned by Marx is possible. But such theories allow one to believe that we can achieve women’s liberation within capitalism—it’s not possible. I urge striking out on another theoretic road. Marxist-Humanists have as a major perspective theorizing alternatives to capitalism. I invite feminists to participate in this project, and thereby to begin to work out the idea of women’s liberation in reality.