Declaration of 25 November by the Lila-Rot Collective
The imperialist system, with its greed for profit and its striving for hegemony, causes wars and conflicts in many parts of the world that will not end until it ends up on the scrap heap of history.
Because we know: imperialism means crisis, imperialism means war and violence.
For more than a year, the Palestinian people in Gaza have been living through the bloodiest days of recent times. The Zionist state of Israel, with the full support of its imperialist friends, is using bombs and other military force against the Palestinian people every day, every hour and even every minute. The devastating and severe consequences of this attempted genocide are felt most acutely by women and children. Israel and its allies have attacked Lebanon and Syria in order to further intensify and expand the war in the Middle East, the main arena of the bloody struggle for hegemony by Israel and its allies. This development brings blood, death and horror in particular to poor peoples. The consideration of women’s bodies as spoils of war, as well as the fact that women are raped in wars, leads to a series of traumas for those affected, resulting in despair that is deeply ingrained in the memory. Women who are exposed to multiple forms of violence, poverty, harassment and rape in their daily lives and whose needs are ignored are exposed to an intensified version of what they experience in war conditions. War represents the most intense form of the system’s male domination, which strengthens masculinity, militarism, violence, rape, harassment, hunger and poverty. Furthermore, war is characterised by racism and sexism.
Women in the region are not only exposed to the serious consequences of wars. Another form of oppression is the misogynist policies of systems and states based on feudal forms of production and culture. This results in the systematic perpetration of violence against women in all its forms. In Afghanistan, it is the laws of the Taliban that require women to completely cover their bodies, including their faces, and forbid them from speaking. This represents a significant restriction of their fundamental rights. In Iran, it is the terror of the Irshad police with regard to women’s clothing that has led to a further deterioration of women’s already precarious situation. In Iraq, it is the reactionary policy of the government, which has officially lowered the age of marriage for women to nine years, although this is done under the pretext of sexual maturity. Israeli policy has made women’s identity with the figure of the ‘modern soldier’ in the Palestinian genocide an instrument of pressure. In Turkey, at least 40 women are murdered every month. Moreover, the fascism prevailing there has turned harassment and rape into a ‘social norm’. This has led to a race to legitimise this reactionary attitude throughout the region.
In all semi-colonial and semi-feudal societies that are dependent on imperialism, this kind of reactionary behaviour manifests itself in different outward forms. On a reactionary social basis, under the supervision of the imperialists, ruthless attacks are perpetrated on women and children. Violence against women is manifested not only in physical form, but also in the exercise of pressure through gender roles, the invented and imposed understanding of ‘honour’, and through economic and psychological pressure. This development is due to the ideological foundations of the ruling class and its institutions.
Violence against women is also practised in its most intense form in the imperialist centres. The exploiting classes pass on the bill for the economic crisis, which they cannot resolve, to all the oppressed classes, especially the working class, and maintain their power with policies that produce rampant exploitation, oppression and violence. The group of women in employment face double exploitation and unequal treatment. They work in precarious jobs, have inadequate insurance cover, are not unionised and have no social rights. In addition, they are paid low wages for their work, making them a cheap source of labour for the system. In times of crisis, women are often the first to be laid off. Women bear the brunt of unemployment and poverty. In some cases, this bill is paid by the female worker herself, in other cases by the wife whose husband has been evicted. Ultimately, it is she who experiences the misery most acutely. Furthermore, women are exposed to sexual violence. Those affected are exposed to a variety of dangers that manifest themselves in different contexts. These include, for example, public spaces, workplaces, prisons, markets, schools and other areas of life. The prostitution business reveals the full filth of the system in which women’s sexuality is used as a commodity. In this way, capital opens up huge profit opportunities by selling women’s sexuality. Furthermore, female sexuality is used and marketed in the most disgusting way by the media.
One area in which women are particularly enslaved and exploited is the domestic sphere. In particular, working women are particularly affected by slavery in their own household if they are additionally burdened with the already demanding working conditions at work by having to do the housework. For women who cannot be gainfully employed, the situation is even more dramatic: the ‘honour’ of a woman is that of a person whose ‘honour’ is subject to that of her husband. She can be thrown out the door, has to submit to his orders and is forced to go to bed when he wants. In addition, her work in the household is not recognised by him.
Nevertheless, women are demonstrating that they will not resign themselves to their ‘destiny’, but are putting up resistance. Women who rebel against the roles assigned to them by society, who break through the walls of their homes, who do not submit to exploitation and violence, are making themselves heard and filling the streets with their struggles for their rights and freedoms. These struggles are directed against the violence, exploitation and oppression they suffer, and especially against the system that produced them.
Women are playing an active role in national and social liberation struggles around the world, standing up to imperialism, feudalism, fascism and all forms of reaction. In Latin America, India, Iran, Turkey, Palestine and Rojava, women are the actors who actively resist oppression and write resistance stories.
They have shown us, the migrant women workers and labourers, that we too must be the subjects of our own liberation struggle. The will of the Mirabel sisters, who rose up against the fascist Trujillo dictatorship 64 years ago, lives on today in the resistance of Palestinian women barricading themselves against the bombs of Zionist Israel, and of Iranian women who do not submit to their fate and tear their headscarves as a symbol of oppression.
The struggle of women scares the rulers. But we continue to fight courageously. We will not be stopped by men and their bans, oppression, sexism and cruelty. We can no longer tolerate this system, which is dominated by men. It shapes our lives and the way power is produced and reproduced.
If you think that you can intimidate us women, who have discovered the power of resistance, with executions, bans, oppression, torture and sexist practices, then we tell you that this miscalculation will rebound on the resistance of women and peoples. We have not given up our fight and we will not give it up!
As the Lila Rot collective, we will take to the streets on 25 November, the ‘International Day for Solidarity and the Fight Against Violence Against Women’, to proclaim that we will fight against the exploitation of women’s labour, against the oppression of their will, their bodies and their identity, against the system that produces violence against women, and against the male-dominated understanding of this system. In this awareness, we call on the oppressed and labouring women to fight shoulder to shoulder with us and take to the streets on 25 November.
DOWN WITH THE IMPERIALIST-CAPITALIST SYSTEM AND ITS PATRIARCHAL UNDERSTANDING THAT HAS BROUGHT FORTH VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN!
ENOUGH OF ALL FORMS OF VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN!
LONG LIVE WOMEN’S STRUGGLE FOR FREEDOM AND LIBERATION!
NOVEMBER 2024
