By Jane Barros, LSR Brazil
Women's struggle is a global reality. In every corner of the world we have stood up against the macho and capitalist society, which insists on attacking us, withdrawing rights and attribute us as people of inferior rank. In recent years the attacks, as well as the struggle, have intensified. A scenario that expresses this new phase of capitalism, after the 2008 crisis, which has translated into greater austerity, cuts in rights, which makes life more difficult for the working class and, more severely, for women.
Women in Poland have taken to the streets against the setbacks in the law that authorizes legal abortion. In the Spanish state, women on March 8, around an agenda of extending rights, organize the general strike. In India hundreds of thousands of women embrace a temple as a result of the ban on their entry. In Ireland, women have won the legalization of abortion, which wouldn’t have been possible without the determined campaign of Rosa in Ireland. In Sudan, even at the risk of rape, women take to the streets, in the front line of the mass movement that took the streets of the country. It is not by chance that women in Argentina have taken to the streets in thousands, in defense of life and for the legalization of abortion. Just like the insurrectionary struggles in Chile, initially against the increase of the public transport, have been led by young people, girls. In Brazil the #NotHim, against the Bolsonaro, who today is president of the extreme right, took more than one million women to the streets in 2018.
The attack on women is of worldwide scale. Capitalism has already revealed that it is incapable of existing without using machismo and misogyny as tools to ensure its development. There is no full life for us women in capitalism. It is essential that we build the way out together. And the way out is outside this system.
The construction of socialist feminism is urgent, and it must be international. It is revealing how our specificities, cultural differences and demands, are not different when it comes to the attacks of male chauvinist capitalism. Even small advances are taken away when the system needs to reorganize itself. We can see this in the cutting of public services, such as education and health, or even in cases of legal abortion - with the closing of services - and networks of assistance to women victims of violence - which in the case of Brazil had its budget zeroed - that cease to exist when the policy of austerity gains space.
In this sense, the construction of Rosa as an international platform is urgent, important and fundamental. It can contribute to the articulation of international socialist feminism, from our local and territorial struggles. Allowing us to be stronger and therefore better able to defeat this system and build a world where we can, a socialist world!
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