En Passant

With 180 million workers on strike in India it is the biggest mass strike in history. Let the ruling classes tremble. To read about it, because our media won’t cover it – it might send the ‘wrong’ message to workers in Australia and the rest of the West – click here.

The recent protests are tied to the wave of fightbacks against the system on an international scale. The women and men who have been filling the streets of various Indian cities have seen, in the last few years, dictators fall and public spaces be occupied. We need to see these protests as not just standing in the tradition of past women’s movements in India, but also as echoes of Tahrir, Tunisia and Zuccotti Park–and inspiring, in their turn, a new cycle of protests for women’s rights.

it should be clear that the protests in India against rape and sexism are about rejecting the culture of misogyny and moralism imposed by the Indian state and the global free market alike. They are not about the narrow interests of any particular class of women.

It would be wrong to condemn these protests as “middle class.”

Mass movements need to be seen in their full course of development, in which numerous factors come together to produce confidence and mobilization. It is not a matter of checking whether these protesters were there to stand in support of Neelofar, Manorama or any other individual rape victim, but to see how these past cases were part of a slow build-up of anger that finally came to a head in the aftermath of December 16 in Delhi.

…it is an urgent task for the left to actively intervene and try to shape the movement -and the broader struggles for a future society free of rape and women’s oppression.

The hope lies in the huge numbers of people who came out to protest in India. Even better was the willingness to direct that anger against the society and culture that justifies rape and sexual violence. However the dire situation women face in India has led some Western pundits to described the country as the worst place in the world for women.

But the problems aren’t confined to India’s borders. Many countries, including Britain, have shockingly low conviction rates for rape. And attitudes that blame women for rape and sexual violence aren’t confined to India.

The latest attack in India shows the urgent need for a change in the treatment of women and in responses to rape. And the mass protests that followed it show that many people are prepared to fight for that change.

‘A campaign against rape in isolation from all other aspects of women’s oppression will not serve the purpose. Rape, like domestic violence and sexual harassment, is a symptom of a deeply unequal class-based society that leads some men to think they can control women, including sexually. This is reinforced by women’s material inequality and lower status in society. We must challenge sexism and through the process of struggle will see millions of people questioning the brutal, sexist and exploitative capitlaist society in which we live and look for alternatives beyond capitalism.’

In India, we are seeing how this process of rapid-fire development on the quick has crossed the line that divides the development from the spectacle. Now not only are dissidents and workers endangered, the athletes themselves are imperiled as well. For the first time since the Second World War, the show may not go on. But this time, the war is the show and the show is the war.