Fighting Women's Oppression Under the 3 Junta

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*Anyone who knows anything about history knows that great social changes are impossible without feminine ferment"

Marx 1868 *There can be no socialist revolution if the huge majority of working women don't play a considerable part in it.. the experience of all liberation movements confirms that the success of the revolution depends on the degree to which women participate.

Lenin 1918 The 8th of March 1980 will be, once again a day of struggle for women and women workers the world over and in Chile. On this day women renew their determination to fight for full emancipation, which will only be made possible by socialist revolution.

International Women's Day, along with the true movement towards women's emancipation in general, is closely linked to workers' struggles. On this date we remember how on the 8th of March 1900, women textile workers occupying a factory in Chicago were cruel victims of a deliberate fire in which 129 of them perished.

The 1907 Congress of the Socialist International, which included the revolutionary currents at that time decided to make March 8th International Women's Day.

Women constitute the most exploited and humiliated sector of the working class and the people. When she is not marginalised from social life and relegated to the role of domestic slave, she enters the world of work only to suffer a dual exploitation and oppression: at the hands of the capitalist and the continuation of her role as household slave after a day's work.

In factories and workplaces women are usually the last to be employed and the first to be fired. They are victims of various humiliations practised by the bosses and to crown it all receive less pay for the same job.

In the home, where bourgeois ideology and propaganda attempts to paint women as queens, they must fulfil countless tasks which multiply in relation to the level of misery. Here too they are often faced with the low level of consciousness of their husbands or companions who tend to find an outlet for their own oppression by their male "superiority".

Although this is generally true of capitalist society (and of all class society) and has historically been the case in Chile the problem has recently been exacerbated. Military dictatorships as the concrete expression of the putrefaction of capitalism take to extremes all the reactionary tendencies of bourgeois society.

On the one hand reactionary propaganda about women has been reinforced. There is a current advertisement on TV by the Ministry of Culture which attempts to "dignify" the position of women, extolling "motherhood" and explaining that mothers deserve the "respect" and "deference" of males. This image of womer and their role in society which calls for "deference" (giving them your seat on buses and so on) hides an, enormous contempt: this is the "weak sex" which must therefore be protected.

At the level of ideology the bourgeoisie continues to bombard women with banal magazines, tearjerking soap operas and novelettes in which the "poor girl" always finds her release by marrying "the bosses' son"

But the attacks| of the dictatorship clearly cannot be reduced to its ideological features. In the first place the misery into which the dictatorship has plunged proletarian families hits women directly. Workers' wages cannot last out the month so women must go out to work or rather to look for work.

Classic Marxists have always affirmed that a condition for the emancipation of women is their integration in the social world, the world of work outside the strict confines of the home. In this sense Marx, while condemning the cruel exploitation of female and child labour, cons idered that capitalism in its ascendancy laid the material bases for women's (and children's) emancipation.

However, in Chile, capitalism has evolved in a dependant way, dominated by the needs of the imperialist metropoles and with a number of backward characteristics. This is why women's participation in the labour force has always been far less than in the imperialist countries.

FEMALE UNEMPLOYMENT Nevertheless, it is worth measuring the constant decadence of capitalism through the figures for female employment, that is through the capacity (or rather incapacity) of the dependant capitalism of Chile to absorb and integrate the female half of the population into the social sphere. In 1957 the percentage of women workers in the working class was 25.5%, by 1972 it had gone down to 22% and by 1977 it was a mere 20%.

Currently, the economic model which the dictatorship seeks to impose is based fundamentally on the constant increase of the rate of exploitation. Women have been one of the direct targets. Decree 2,200 stripped women of previous gains in maternity rights, leaving pregnant women at the mercy of their bosses who can sack them at their pleasure. Even the supposed "'guarantees" included in the decree are daily run over roughshod by the bosses. For example, although all workplaces employing more than 30 women are supposed to have a 'cradle room' , workers have to fight-not always successfullyfor this to be implemented.

LOWERING On the other hand, the economic model which forces more women to seek employment creates conditions for the further lowering of wages.

Another aspect of the attacks against women by the dictatorship are in relation to contraception and abortion. For some time the dictatorship-acclaimed by the Church-has run a tremendous propaganda campaign to encourage women to have more and more children to provide more and more cannon fodder for these bloodsuckers. The birthrate has fallen lately as. a natural consequence of the misery which abounds so the offensive has not simply been at the level of propaganda. The Ministry of Health has imposed fees on inter-uterine devices and other forms of contracep ion which were which h is increased th number unwanted pregnancies.

DEATHS

This has resulted both in forced births and in the terrible number of deaths and mutilations of women who have attempted to perform their own abortions or who have had them done by unskilled practitioners. It is calculated that in Chile there are 300.000 births every year and 100,000 abortions. The dictatorship wants women to be machines producing children for the "nation" even though they haven't the means to feed and educate them and are further enslaved in the process. Revolutionaries must raise clear slogans in this. respect "A woman's body is her own! For free abortion on demand"

Household tasks multiply, not only because of the extreme poverty but also because children stop going to school. The school-going rate-in primary as well as secondary school-is continually falling and this contributes further to women's domestic enslavement.

To a large extent, women are a sleeping giant. The bourgeoisie which feeds their passivity with ideological rubbish and home confinement, uses this sleeping giant while it can. Nevertheless, when the giant awakes, and begins to cast off her old chains, the bourgeoisie trembles. The history of all revolutions from the French Revolution itself through to the glorious Bolshevik Revolution has been animated by tremendous mobilisations of women. Protest lobby of Chilean embassy in London

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Demonstration of left wing groups in Santiago shortly before the coup arms Junta August/September 1980 TODDFMRA-CERMIS CHILE 5 MDA The two greatest modern revolutions, the French and the Bolshevik, bourgeois and proletarian, were fired by huge radical mobilisations of women. Between 19701973, the Chilean people also witnessed the waking of the giant throughout the trade unions and other popular organisations transforming many which had previously been controlled by bureaucrats. On many occasions the women proved to be more militant than the men.

The working class must take stock of this giant, try and wake her up and contribute to her organisation. However, the the most advanced layers of women are not asleep today by a long shot. On the contrary, it is surprising to see the proportion-often constituting a majorityof women to be found in all kinds of working class and popular organisations. This process must be encouraged to win more and more layers of women for the fight against the dictatorship!

Women have a series of problems and demands which-at first sight are specific and relate only to them. Nevertheless, these problems are integral to class society, to decaying capitalism. Women's oppression does not come from "man" in the abstract: it comes from man as determined in this society, unconscious labourer or boss. Equally, as revolutionaries we are not interested in the fate of rich women. For them the problem is "existential". Above all, they are part of the oppressing class. The working class woman is infinitely closer to men of her class than to the bosses' wife. The interests, the struggle for emancipation of working women and men can only be won through a struggle with the bourgeoisie, for socialism. In 1885 Engels wrote:

*I believe that a true equality between women and men will only be reached after the exploitation of one by another under capitalism has been exploited."

And whereas women need socialist revolution for their liberation, the revolution also needs women in order to come to victory.

Therefore, the woman question can only be understood correctly in a revolutionary way through a class perspective of class struggle. This is why we must be alert in fighting bourgeois organisations and the Church when they seek. to add grist to their own reactionary mill in the name of the problem of women. Bourgeois democrats have only brought women deeper and more subtle forms of oppres sion through their "liberal" verbiage. As Lenin said in 1919:

"Verbally, bourgeois democracy promises equality and freedom. In fact, bourgeois republics-however advancedhave not given women, who constitute half of humanity, full equality with men before the law, nor have they freed them from the yoke and oppression of men. Bourgeois democracy is the democracy of pompous phrases, of solemn words, of bombastic promises, grandiose slogans about liberty and equality, but in practice, all of this hides the lack of freedom and inequality of women, the lack of freedom and inequality of workers and the exploited."

At this time, only the Bolshevik Revolution managed to lay the real basis for the emancipation of women, repealing all repressive legislation, granting freedoms, tacilitating divorce, socialising a series of enslaving domestic tasks from the washing of clothes, to the education and care of children.

Nevertheless, women suffered the same fate as the rest of the proletariat under the Stalinist counter-revolution. In the 1935 Constitution, a series of laws favourable to women disappeared, and in general Stalinism sought to reaffirm the family in the knowledge that it plays a profoundly conservative role in all oppressive societies.

The Stalinists ran a massive propaganda campaign on this theme. Stalin himself appeared in photographs at his paternal home eating his granny's marmalade, demonstrating the fact that the "People's Father" loved his home and all good workers should do likewise.

Whereas Marx called the abolition of the family a communist objective in the Communist Manifesto, a contemporary Stalinist hack, A.F. Shishlein writes: "Only in a society where there is no exploitation of man by man can the monogamous family find its true and complete fulfillment."

This communist perpsective envisaged by A. Kollontai shortly after the October Revolution is very different to this tract which abounds in sanctimoniousness and pays its respects to the bureaucratic state.

"The family will cease to be necessary for the state as it has been in the past. On the contrary, today the family removes women uselessly from much greater and more serious work. The family is no longer necessary for its own members now that the task of educating children which fell Cor to it previously is in the becoming collective.

However, the ruins of the old family will be soon replaced by a new form which will be comprised of new relations between men and women, a union of affection, of companionship, a union of two equal members within communist society both free, both independent and both workers.

There will be no more domestic slavery for women, no inequality in the family. Women need not be afraid of being left alone, without support and holding the children if their husband leaves them.

"In communist society a woman will depend not on her husband but on her labour. She will be supported not by her husband but by her own working hands. She need not fear for the future of her children because the proletarian state will care for them. Marriage will be cleansed of its material side, of all calculations relating to money, that odious affliction of family life in the present.

"Marriage will be thus transformed into a sublime association between 2 souls who love each other, who have faith in each other, in an association which promises to every male and female workers the most complete fulfillment which is possible for a conscious being to experience. A union, which is free but strong in the spirit of companionship which inspires it, instead of the conjugal slavery of the past: This is what tomorrow's society will bring for men and women.

Revolutionaries should fight for this complete emancipation, for the abolition of all class and sexual oppression and there is no doubt that working and oppressed women have an important part to play in nat The Thatcher government stands foursquare behind the most barbaric dictatorships in Latin America. That is clear from the decision last week to lift the six-year ban on sales of British-made arms to Chile.

There is no doubt that this move will be followed up by sales of arms and other trade with Bolivia, Argentina, and other equally bloodstained regimes.

The British labour movement - many of whose leaders declare a verbal commitment to solidarity with the Chilean working class and to the Bolivian miners now fighting the new military junta there - must take active steps to force a halt to this trade.

Bolivia in particular is a landlocked Page this struggle. The Fourth International has written large on its banners slogans calling for working women to join the struggle. In its programme the Fourth International declares:

*The epoch of the decline of capitalism delivers the hardest blows to women both as workers and housewives. Each section of the Fourth International must seek support amongst the most oppressed sections of the working class and therefore amongst working women. They will find there an unlimited source of devotion, self-denial and self-sacrifice."

Conscious of this, of the fact that only socialist revolution can follow the path towards the true emancipation of oppressed women, that there can be no revolution without the mass mobilisation of oppressed women and that they have a vital role to play in the overthrow of the dictatorship which oppresses us, in this spirit we must celebrate International Women's Day as a day of struggle, as a day which will inspire further organisation and fighting spirit.

We salute International Women's Day!

For the mass organisation of oppressed women!

For real maternity rights women!

For the repeal of Decree 2,200!

Equal pay for equal work!

Free abortion on demand!

Free nurseries in every workplace! Free primary and secondary education for all Chilean children!

For the full integration of women in the struggle against the dictatorship!

Only socialist revolution can open the way for women's emancipation! country especially vulnerable to blacking action by the international labour movement. The Bolivian COB (TUC) has appealed for such support.

Moss Evans, who headed last year's Chile Solidarity march, must be called upon to instruct TGWU dockers and transport workers to black all trade, especially arms and military equipment, to Chile, Bolivia and Argentina.

Miners' leaders Daley and Gormley must be forced to mount an urgent fight for an all-out TUC programme of action in solidarity with the embattled Bolivian miners.

Pressure must be placed on union leaders in Peru also, to ensure that Bolivia's main trading route is cut by blacking and strike action.

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CHILE 5 ITE

POLITICO POPULA GOBIER

No Miss LA MIEL