{"id":22962,"date":"2020-04-03T01:09:21","date_gmt":"2020-04-02T17:09:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/chinaworker.info\/?p=22962"},"modified":"2020-04-06T22:00:02","modified_gmt":"2020-04-06T14:00:02","slug":"founding-declaration-of-rosa-international-socialist-feminists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chinaworker.info\/en\/2020\/04\/03\/22962\/","title":{"rendered":"Founding Declaration of ROSA: International Socialist Feminists"},"content":{"rendered":"

A new socialist feminist campaign organization launched by International Socialist Alternative \u2022 Get in touch with us today to join our network & struggle \u2014 \u201cgive us bread but give us roses!\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

ROSA International  RosaInternational.org<\/p>\n

All over the world women are fighting back against violence, discrimination and oppression. There is a growing awareness that the capitalist system feeds and creates oppression. We must rise from below and support each other\u2019s struggles in all countries. In the footsteps of the socialist pioneer Rosa Luxemburg and the resistance hero Rosa Parks we, who organise in the ROSA network, are socialist feminists and we want to contribute to a grassroots mobilization against the capitalist system and for an international struggle against women\u2019s oppression.<\/p>\n

Women workers are heavily exploited under capitalism. Women earn 24 percent less than men globally. They do more than 75 percent of the unpaid household work. Women make up the majority of today\u2019s poor. One in three women worldwide have experienced some kind of physical or sexual violence in their lifetime. But it doesn\u2019t have to be like this!<\/p>\n

In Latin America and Russia, for example, the huge epidemic of femicide has been made visible and fought by the growing feminist movement. Control over women\u2019s bodies stretches from governments imposing dress codes, to limits on the right to make our own decisions about pregnancy or parenthood, to the exercise of power through rape and sexual harassment. A stifling, out-of-touch view of sexuality stigmatises everything that is outside of or different to the heterosexual norm. We all suffer from this in one way or another. Gender roles in today\u2019s society teach men from the start to take more space and women to be more passive.<\/p>\n

We join forces and become strong in our common voice, we rage, we demand control over our own bodies. Women\u2019s struggles have won some important victories in the last couple of years, like the collective struggles such as #MeToo, Ni Una Menos and others that have raised consiousness against sexual harassment \u2014 leading to more stringent laws and trade union action programmes in some countries. Strikes by workers in McDonalds and Google on this issue have been vital in showing how we can win. Elsewhere there has been progress like the introduction of the right to abortion or the abolition of marry-your-rapist laws.<\/p>\n

But as soon as the movement cools down oppression will rise again. Examples include courts letting the perpetrators off and passing judgement on the victims of rape. A marry-your-rapist bill being reintroduced in the Turkish Parliament after having been pushed back by the movement in 2016. Militaries still using rape as a weapon of war.<\/p>\n

Capitalists make enormous profits through exploitative wage-labour and special oppression of women workers with worse conditions and lower wages. Governments slash the welfare state until it is on its knees while the rich and the war-machines are swimming in money. People in power are consciously promoting sexism, racism and LGBTQ+-oppression to set different groups against each other. Even in countries that have been \u2018progressive\u2019 forerunners in the world there are setbacks both concerning growing class differences and gender equality. It\u2019s inherent in the system.<\/p>\n

Capitalism has to be abolished. It is a system that uses and reproduces patriarchal gender oppression and heteronormality everyday by giving especially women and LGBTQ+-people lower wages and worse working conditions. Capitalism as a system relies on massive inequality and destruction, with ongoing economic crises. At this moment vast sums of money are spent on trade-wars to decide which global power shall control the world market, which imperialist power shall have more space to make poor people even poorer and disrupt nature and the rights of indigenous peoples. Wars are started as a result of this struggle for power with death, suffering and streams of refugees in its wake. And all the while capitalism brings us closer to a complete climate catastrophe by continuing it\u00b4s ruthless plundering of the natural world and pouring out ever more greenhouse gases.<\/p>\n

Capitalist society wouldn\u2019t be able to function without the huge number of hours spent on unpaid labour of women in the household. Many of these jobs could be performed more efficiently and more environmentally friendly by organising it collectively in public services, taking the burden of mainly women\u2019s shoulders.<\/p>\n

In 2019 there were uprisings against austerity, systematic inequality and corruption in a number of countries and often women were both organising and dominant in these. Some reports claim that women constituted two-thirds of the protesters in Sudan and upwards of 40% of the occupiers of squares in Iraq. Feminism has been a spearpoint of and has deepened the uprising in Lebanon. The Chilean feminist\u00b4s music perfomance against rape and the state is spreading like wild-fire over the world.<\/p>\n

In a number of examples, state forces are raping or blinding people with rubber bullets to stop them rising up. This is because the state works to protect not only neoliberalism but the entire capitalist economy and class society. Some states are permeated by corruption, national oppression and religious sectarianism to rule by division whilst other so-called democratic nations cut back on and privatise health-care and education so women and worker\u2019s lives are stressed to bits.<\/p>\n

Figures such as US President Donald Trump and Brazillian President Jair Bolsonaro have helped to provoke mass outrage and movements against their sexist attitudes. However, their resorting to attacks on women in order to whip up support from a small conservative section of the population is a sign of their weakness, not their strength. Mass movements can bring down these regimes. It is also not the case that there is widespread support for their bigotry. Generally the majority of people across the globe are angry with the inability of capitalism to provide a decent standard of living and support left-wing and even socialist policies. There has been no stable political force that has been able to give expression to this anger, which has allowed right wing populist or reactionary organisations to fill the vacuum in some cases. To provide answers and a way forward is one of the tasks of the global women\u2019s movement generally and socialist feminists specifically.<\/p>\n

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ROSA fights for democratic socialism, which includes:<\/h3>\n