ON NOVEMBER 25th, WOMEN WILL BE HAND IN HAND DOWN THE STREET FOR AN EQUAL, FREE, AND NONVIOLENT LIFE IN TURKEY AND AROUND THE WORLD!

ON NOVEMBER 25th, WOMEN WILL BE HAND IN HAND DOWN THE STREET FOR AN EQUAL, FREE, AND NONVIOLENT LIFE IN TURKEY AND AROUND THE WORLD!

The world economy is heading towards a period of stagnation.

With the war in Ukraine, imperialist rivalry is intensifying.

Nuclear threats are in play.

Conflicts and wars created by the race for domination between capitalist monopolies for maximum profit and market bring death, exploitation, hunger and mass migration. In countries where migration flows from conflict zones, nationalism, which encourages extermination by targeting migrants, and patriarchal hypocrisy, which buys and sells women and children as slaves, walk arm in arm.

We are in a barbaric period in which those who drag humanity to disaster speak in the name of humanity!

This barbarism also opens more doors to fascist threats. Right-wing, fascist, reactionary parties are in power in 71 out of 195 countries in the world ruled by bourgeois dictatorship.

The monopoly bourgeoisie shows hints that it will not refrain from putting the most terrorist methods into use in order not to lose its class domination over the world proletariat. Fascism, which we have seen in its most reactionary form organised around a sultanate of leaders ruling by decree in countries such as Hungary, Poland, India and Turkey, is gaining strength in Europe from north to south. Especially after the pandemic, the discontent of the labourers in the face of capitalist exploitation, which they call the “cost of living crisis”, is tried to be masked with fascist propaganda.

Labourers are facing deep poverty, unemployment and unbridled exploitation with the effect of increasing inflation and contraction in economies, so that the wealth created by surplus value around the world is concentrated in the hands of a handful of capitalist monopolies. In this picture, women are subjected to more oppression and exploitation through cheap, precarious work without rules, while all the work that should be done by the state, which has been withdrawn from the public sphere by neoliberal policies, falls on the backs of women as drudgery at home.

The monopoly bourgeoisie is more in need of the patriarchal family than ever before! This is why the extreme right, in the guise of parties and movements, calls on women to protect the institution of the “sacred family”. Attempts to mobilise the rising discontent among women to support their reactionary policies continue. However, the attacks on women’s equality rights are not limited to the initiatives of reactionary foci operating in the field of “civil society”; a process is taking place in which these attacks have become direct state policy.

WORKING WOMEN AND THE CAPITALIST STATE FACE EACH OTHER ALL OVER THE WORLD!

All reproductive rights, especially the right to abortion, civil rights, the right to access education and health care, and the right to organise, which is the sole condition for the enjoyment of all these rights, are wanted to be taken away from women under the name of “sacred motherhood”, “traditional family” and “spiritual values”. In many countries, the Istanbul Convention is under discussion to be amended and cancelled on the grounds of “attacking family values”.

We have seen the last example in Italy; it showed the whole world that fascism, one of the forms of monopoly capitalism, can attempt to implement its misogynist policies under the leadership of a woman. Georgia Meloni, the leader of the fascist party called Brothers of Italy and the first female prime minister of the country, is fuelling LGBTI hostility with the slogan “God, Family, Fatherland”, which they inherited from the historical fascism in Italy, and the propaganda of “normal family consisting of mother, father and child”.

The situation in Turkey is no different. For 20 years, the AKP government and its latest form, the one-man regime, have been looting all the country’s resources to capital through deposit-guaranteed funds and treasury-guaranteed loans.

In order to prevent the labourers, who face the threat of starvation due to rising inflation and the hikes in food and basic consumer goods, from breaking away from themselves, the AKP is putting religious, reactionary and nationalist chauvinist moves into action more and more. Sometimes it takes the form of hate speech or hate rallies against LGBTIs presented as an attack on “religious values and the traditional family”, sometimes it takes the form of Kurdish hostility in the form of “PKK members have 10 and 15 children, you need to have at least three children against them”. Sometimes it appears in lower-ranking anti-republican discourses. The female body is seen as an instrument of war for a fascist state organisation.

The withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention, the targeting of Law No. 6284 and the Lanzarote Convention, which is an international convention against child abuse, the introduction of mediation in divorce, turning religious officials into counsellors in the divorce process, attempts to restrict the right to alimony, attempts to restrict women’s right to custody over their children… While everything in the name of women’s rights and freedoms is targeted, reactionary policies are made the main basis of the fascist regime, which has taken important steps towards institutionalisation. In this political and economic atmosphere, violence against women is systematically increasing exponentially and taking an increasingly brutal form.

The “main opposition”, which limits its opposition ability to parliamentary elections, which are becoming less and less politically decisive, proves at every opportunity that it is another political alternative of the monopoly bourgeoisie, not of the labouring classes. The lie that working people and working women have no political alternative is organised and circulated through the bourgeois opposition.

NEITHER THE GOVERNMENT’S PAN-ISLAMIC DISCUSSIONS NOR THE MAIN OPPOSITION’S PARLIAMENTARY PROMISES! 

The Nation Alliance or People’s Alliance wants to overshadow the fact that the state is the state of the capitalists, no matter which bourgeois clique rules it.

However, working women are the first to face which class the state is the state of! The women who resist in front of their streams in the Black Sea region, in front of their olives in the Aegean region, in front of the factories in ETF and Marlboro for their rights stolen by the bosses, look into the eyes of the state at the gendarmerie and police barricades lined up against them. The women who stand vigil at the court gates after each murder of a woman, so that the murderers can be punished, know this state better than anyone else. After their husbands were killed in the mine in Amasra, the women said, “They knew that the mine was going to explode. They took no action. You publish, but they will censor”; so these women are well aware of whose state this is! 

EVERYWHERE IN THE WORLD, WOMEN ARE FIGHTING FOR FREEDOM AGAINST THE OPPRESSION AND REACTIONARY POLICIES OF THE BOURGEOISIE MONOPOLY!

In Argentina, women celebrate their gains in the 25-year struggle for the right to abortion. In India, women are at the forefront of the strikes of hundreds of millions of labourers demanding equality. The women of Afghanistan, deprived of the right to go out on the streets alone, let alone their freedom of organisation and expression, do not refrain from fighting against the sharia practices at the cost of their lives for “work, bread and freedom” despite the Taliban violence.

And in Iran… The mass popular movement sparked by the hundreds of thousands of women who took to the streets after Mahsa Amini was killed by the morality police of the Mullah regime is an example of what can happen when women’s consistent struggle for freedom is combined with the struggle of the working class and youth. It is being experienced once again that women’s demands for equality and freedom must be an inseparable agenda of the class struggle. Despite repression and massacres, workers are organising the struggle like workers, with class weapons, with strikes. Young people show that they are part of this struggle with protests and boycotts. Labouring women, young women, are marching at the forefront, throwing off their compulsory veils, which have become a symbol of exploitation and tyranny, as if tearing the veil in front of the light.

Just as they have marched for decades in the wake of the Mirabal sisters, who were raped and murdered by the state on November 25th 1960 for their struggle against the fascist dictatorship of the ruling classes in the Dominican Republic.

As the Labour Party, we call on all women who struggle for life in factories, fields, workshops, offices, laboratories, schools, hospitals, young women who wake up every morning with anxiety about the future but resist not to lose hope, to further increase the struggle against the aggression of monopoly capitalism, the patriarchal domination, oppression and violence it reproduces every day. We invite you to unite this struggle with the struggle to establish a classless, exploitation-free, war-free world and to organise in our party for this.

On November 25th, the Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women

For an equal, free, non-violent life

Women are standing up in Turkey and around the world!

Selma Gurkan

Vice-Chair of the Labour Party (EMEP)