En Passant

The point isn’t to bury our arguments, but to learn how to make them while operating in political arenas that aren’t just our own if we want to win people to more radical politics. Revolutionary socialists have a long and rich tradition of building united fronts, which seems more real now that 3 million people were in the streets.

We must do a better job at facilitating debate, discussion and argument so that we talk about how to build the kind of movement we want. But endless social media critiques with no commitment to diving into that struggle for the kind of movement we want is not a serious approach.

There are literally millions of people in this country who are now questioning everything. We need to open up our organizations, planning meetings, marches and much more to them. We need to read together, learn together, be in the streets together and stand up to this assault together.

If Malcolm Turnbull really is a Ā feminist why is he locking up innocent women and girls on Nauru and Manus Island and subjecting them to rape, torture and other abuses?

Bring them here. Let them stay. Ā That is what a feminist would do.

In the latest edition of socialist magazine Solidarity, Geraldine Fela discusses the new film Suffragette, and how the fight for the vote polarised between wealthy and working class women.

Why did Briggs distribute a photo of the female victim to colleagues before and after this blew up? Did he discuss the photo with anyone? If so, what was the nature of those discussions?

We know from the Royal Witch Hunt into Trade Unions that this is a government keen on stamping out bullies and referring all ‘errant’ behaviour to the relevant authorities. Well Mr Turnbull, here is your chance. Refer the photos and their leaking to the Australian Federal Police and Fair Work Australia for investigation. The AFP can see if taking the photos, distributing them to colleagues and leaking them to the press are crimes, and who did what in relation to the leaking and publication. Fair Work can protect the female victim from the bullying that is the leaking of the photos and their publication by investigating and then taking punitive action against the bullies. Over to you Mr Turnbull. Or are you just a smarmy version of Tony Abbott?

Here was a great opportunity to build a united mass movement against the oppression of women and indigenous Australians. Instead the focus was on getting the state to take top down action that does absolutely nothing to address domestic violence, anti-abortion bigotry, racism or women’s oppression. This is the very state which drives and reinforces that racism and oppression. There is nothing to cheer about in banning Brown and Newman.

If only the 24 women murdered by their partners or former partners in Australia so far this year had died in a plane crash we might hear about them and have some debate about how to address this systemic issue.

Having more women as bosses will not challenge the system that gives rise to women’s oppression. It will only reinforce it. In the meantime, women workers, including junior doctors, could join unions and turn them into organisations that defend their interests. In the words of the famous song, don’t be too polite girls, don’t be too polite.

A reminder that on International Women’s Day the Australian government still brutalises refugee women.

If this is the way Abbott treats ruling class women imagine what he has in store for working class women. What Abbott’s male dominated cabinet shows is a government trapped in the past, reverting to the thinking of the 1950s. It reveals an anti-woman attitude which will translate into attacks on poor and working class women, if we and our unions let them.

But the truth is, just as there are different strands of Marxism, some with fundamental political differences, so too there are different strands of feminism–and some of them are self-consciously left wing (including Black feminism, that of other women of color, socialist-feminism and Marxist-feminism), who are as critical of feminism’s political mainstream as we are.

Unless we acknowledge these political distinctions between feminists, it is impossible to engage with feminism in any serious theoretical way. In many respects, over the last few decades in the IST, feminism became a straw figure–even a caricature of a straw figure, made up of the unlikely mish-mash of separatists who simply hate all men and bourgeois feminists who selfishly care only about gaining access to corporate boardrooms–against whom we Marxists steadfastly defended the “interests” of working-class women and men.