Spanish State – Servir al Pueblo: The State and imperialism sustain patriarchal violence
We publish an unofficial translation of the Editorial of issue 10 of the Spanish State’s newspaper Servir al Pueblo.
The proletarian woman carries the weight of double oppression on her shoulders: capitalist and patriarchal. On the one hand she is a worker, suffering the capitalist exploitation of wage labor. Additionally she is a woman under the class society where patriarchy develops, suffering the reactionary force of custom and tradition, which maintains the yoke of domestic work once her workday is over.
And this not being enough, the capitalist and patriarchal exploitation suffered by the proletarian woman are intertwined, making her living conditions even worse. The proletarian woman is concentrated, in the labor market, in those sectors with worse working conditions and suffers belittlement, humiliation and sexual harassment. Meanwhile, in the domestic sphere, she suffers the consequences of these poor working conditions: she cannot reconcile family life and is forced to work split shifts and/or part-time. From the relationship between capitalist and patriarchal oppression, in the era of imperialism in its greatest phase of decomposition, it develops the cruelest forms of discrimination, vexation and humiliation. Even sexual slavery, such as prostitution.
Given this general situation, the picture does not improve in the Spanish context. The wage gap -the structural difference between what a man and a woman earn in the same jobs- remains. Although the government, the State institutions and the trade union leaders -who follow bourgeois feminism- affirm that the wage gap has decreased, they base themselves solely and exclusively on data from the increase in the Minimum Interprofessional Wage (SMI), leaving out millions of women who work off the books. The right to abortion is continually attacked by reactionary and ultra-Catholic groups -financed directly or indirectly by the institutions, parties of the bourgeoisie and by the Catholic Church-, which carry out campaigns of harassment and attack against abortion clinics, blackmailing women who wish to have an abortion in every possible way. The low number of public day-care centers that exist -and not in all cities- make life difficult for mothers, especially single mothers.
We cannot lose sight of the youth, whose culture and way of thinking is harshly hit by the ideological offensive of imperialism, developing cruel forms of patriarchal oppression of girls and adolescents. There have been several cases of gang rape by minors under 16 years of age. As if the harassment and hypersexualization of girls and adolescents in schools and institutes were not enough, new technological tools such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) are used as tools of blackmail and extortion. Thus, the case of how a group of students distributed fake photography created by AI showing their classmates naked was notorious. During class society, imperialism and patriarchal violence, those advances that should be good for humanity, such as AI, are used for imperialist war, sexual harassment and other patriarchal violence.
It is visible how the hypersexualization caused by patriarchal canons or standards of beauty affects the youth, but not only them. The proletarian woman, of all ages, is strongly subjected to this social pressure. It is notorious how the number of aesthetic operations has increased by 215% from 2014 to 2021, where it is women who undergo these operations (85% of operations are intended for women). The most common operations are breast implants, rhinoplasty, liposuction and modifications to the face in general. The great increase of aesthetic operations is due to a reduction in the price of surgery and the popularization of installment payments, added to a strong patriarchal pressure. That is how cruel patriarchal violence is.
All these cases are practical examples of how in the epoch of imperialism, in the phase of its greatest decomposition, the cultural expression of patriarchal violence becomes even more atrocious and humiliating for proletarian women.
Patriarchal violence, in all its forms, plagues women in all areas of their lives. In the past year 2023, 101 male chauvinist murders were officially recorded. So far in 2024 there are at least 10. There is no defense for women who are raped or assaulted. The “most progressive government in history” claims to be feminist, but does not defend proletarian women against abuse at work, does not break the yoke that binds them to the home, nor does it protect them from those who beat or rape them.
To be considered a “victim of gender violence” by the bourgeois justice system is a labyrinth in which many women do not succeed. Either because they do not have the economic resources -we already know that the free justice provided by the State is something that does not work in real life-, or because the institutions do not guarantee the right to denounce -how can a woman denounce if the police laugh at her or do not believe her? There are not few cases of rapes in police stations, prisons or Internment Centers for Foreigners (CIE). Is an assaulted woman going to trust the aggressors?- or for any other reason.
Even relying on bourgeois justice, to be considered a “victim of gender violence” and end up condemning the male chauvinist aggressor, guarantees absolutely nothing. There are not few news where in 2023 we could see how a person convicted of gender violence murders his ex-partner for revenge. Those convicted lead a normal life beyond the punishment -mild and punctual- that at the time is imposed on them. There are even autonomous and national deputies who were convicted in a final sentence, ran for election and were elected!
The conclusion is that the proletarian woman who rebels and wants to cut ties with the aggressor with whom she lives, cannot. If she reports, she is not assured of victory. If she achieves legal victory, she is not assured the protection of a timely revenge. If she has children, she is not assured of keeping them and the aggressor may have full or shared custody of them.
We cannot forget how imperialism, Spanish imperialism in this case, preys on women in semi-dependent and semi-feudal countries dominated by imperialism. The most common profile of a prostitute in Spain is that of a Colombian woman between 23 and 28 years old. More than 90% of the prostituted women are foreigners, mainly from these oppressed countries (Latin America, Eastern Europe, Africa). In Huelva, strawberry temporary workers in the countryside – who are mainly Moroccan – suffer miserable working hours and wages, along with numerous cases of rape and sexual abuse which they have denounced. Latin American women, throughout the country, are the most employed and sought after profile for cleaning and domestic care work, often being interned in the residence where they live and in conditions of semi-slavery.
The “most progressive government in history”, the government that says it is feminist, does not protect the proletarian woman. An it never will, this or any other government, because due to the very essence of a government of this nature (which manages the interests of the imperialist bourgeois state), it can not end the nature of the problem of patriarchy (originating in class society and developing in the epoch of monopoly capitalism, i.e., imperialism). The government can only mitigate the problem, and not even effectively!
Facing bourgeois feminism in all its variants, there was no purely proletarian feminism that imposed the class position of the proletariat, which is nothing else than the organization, mobilization and politization of the proletarian woman to destroy imperialism and class society to thus destroy the patriarchy. The proletarian woman can only liberate herself by liberating herself as a class, since the problems she suffers from come directly from class society.
Facing bourgeois feminism, we must defend, raise and apply proletarian feminism. The proletarian woman can not be a slave for much longer. The centuries of oppression, humiliation, violence and exploitation in all its forms must be sent to the place it should never leave: the trash heap of history.
Proletarian feminism for Communism!
Develop the fury of the proletarian woman as a powerful force for the revolution!
