En Passant

If there was ever any confirmation needed that the Liberals and the Nationals see women as props to rich men’s politics, the Liberals’ election launch on Sunday confirmed it. Canberra Press Gallery member John Passant reports. There was Prime Minister Scott Morrison, surrounded by three generations of women from his family – his mother, his […]

I oppose Hillary Clinton because she is the candidate of Wall Street. Her election will not improve the lives of most women in the US. It will make them worse. Clinton is the candidate of the elite, and their agenda is to drive down the living standards of working women and men to restore profit rates.

I also oppose Hillary Clinton because she is a warmongering imperialist who, like Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama, will slaughter tens of thousands of innocent women, girls, boys and men in her wars and drone attacks. Which side will Price be on when that happens – the side of the mass murderer Hillary Clinton or the side of those women and girls Clinton murders?

Jokes about violence towards women are indicative of systemic misogyny that normalises the oppression of women, writes John Passant In Independent Australia. To read the whole article in Independent Australia click here. Violence against women: the Price is wrong

If Malcolm Turnbull really is a  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.  That is what a feminist would do.

The Clinton campaign has a new line of attack against voters who won’t get in line behind their candidate: They’re caving to sexism. Elizabeth Schulte in Socialist Worker US begs to differ.

To read the whole article click here. Clinton’s corporate feminism falls flat

Laurie Penny has written an excellent article in New Statesman explaining why the racism of the bigots and their false claims about cultural differences explaining sexual assault are lies designed to give cover to bigotry.

She says among other things:

“The sensible thing to do in response to the Cologne attacks would be to call, as many German feminists are doing, for a far more rigorous attitude to rape and sexual assault across Europe. Instead, the solution on the table seems to be to clamp down on migration. That fits in with the shibboleth that only savage, foreign men and hardened criminals rape and abuse women – despite the fact that most rapes, in Germany and elsewhere, are committed by people known to the victim, …and migrants have not been shown to be more or less sexually aggressive than any other group. As usual, white supremacist patriarchy only concerns itself with women’s safety and women’s dignity when rape and sexual assault can be pinned on cultural ‘outsiders’. ”

To read the whole article click here. After Cologne we can’t let the bigots steal feminism

John McDonald and Mary Bowman review the movie Mad Max: Fury Road in Socialist Worker US and take up the raging debate about whether or not it’s a feminist movie. They say that while socialists should not shy away from our reputation as pessimistic killjoys in pointing out that we’re still a long way from a gender revolution breaking out in the entertainment industry, we should, nonetheless, be unequivocal in our defense of this movie.

Antony Loewenstein wrote an article in the Guardian recently about feminism lite. It has provoked a huge reaction. What do you think?

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.

So at this point in history, when feminism has been under sustained attack for the last 40 odd years with no end in sight, the last thing we should feel compelled to do is attack feminism. On the contrary, we need to defend feminism on principle, as a defense of women’s liberation and opposition to sexism. What is the definition of feminism? The advocacy of women’s rights on the grounds of political, social and economic equality to men.

So I would argue that today, our emphasis should be more in keeping with that of the theory and practice of the Bolsheviks, in which we do not attempt to minimize the degree of oppression faced by women–or any other oppressed group–inside the working class, but rather to make a serious effort on every front to combat it.