Revolutionary Women’s (MLM) Movement Formed in Bangladesh

This is from a new Maoist women’s movement forming in Bangladesh. There is definitely an armed Maoist movement in Bangladesh, but it is not very large. They carry out armed attacks on a fairly regular basis and take and inflict casualties. It’s been going on for a pretty long time, but I’m not sure whether they have made much progress.

They are up against some serious issues, namely Islam. Islam is simply not friendly for Left movements. The debacle in Afghanistan should have shown us this. Many of the armed Maoist Bengali cadres are killed in attacks by armed Islamist movements, with which Bangladesh is rife. The Islamists kill the Maoists apparently on the grounds that they are atheists or some such.

This is a long-term trend. In the 1970′ and 1980′s, the Palestinian Islamists were not armed. They mostly argued about how long you should grow your beard or what not and often killed the actual armed Palestinian cadres on grounds that they were Communists (atheists).

In 1965, 1 million Indonesian Communists were rounded up and murdered with the help of the CIA. Islamist organizations played a major role in this genocide.

The sorry state of Pakistan’s Left is probably due in most part to Islam and the role of Islamists in society.

The Afghan Left is now quite weak after the debacle of 1978-1992.

When the Islamists came to power in Iran, the first people they killed were from the Left – the Communists. The Iranian Communist Party – Tudeh – was devastated by major massacres. I knew an Iranian woman who was a member of this party and many of her comrades were killed. She lived in a safe house for three months and was then smuggled out of the country on a donkey in the middle of the night across a desert border.

I am not sure how true this group’s portrayal of the glory days of early human society is. I figure men have always been in charge. As my mother says, men are bigger and stronger, so they simply force their will over will. Very Darwinian and brutal, but exactly what one would expect.

I wish the Bangladeshi Left well.

March 8 is the International Women’s Day. On this day in 1908, women workers in Chicago city in USA finally demanded reducing working hours, women’s right to vote, a humane factory environment, maternity leave, etc.

What is the real condition of our women?

Regardless of whether they live in rural or urban areas, women of workers, peasants and middle class are bound to give birth of children, raise them and do all the household hold work.

In the garment prisons [It’s like a prison] they have to work hard. There is neither a minimum wage nor a decent working environment in the factories. Bosses roam the aisles, berating the female workers and treating them worse than the male workers. In many cases, workers have burnt to death after the doors of the factories were locked by the management and a fire broke out. The female workers get a lower wage than a male worker only because they are women.

What is this outlook?

This is a male chauvinist outlook. It’s a special method of exploitation of human by human in exploitative society. Its origin lies in the imperialist world system and our semi-feudal semi-colonial society. This outlook pervades all arteries of this society.

Male domination over women began with the class system. When there was no class in primitive communist society, women were equal to men. Agriculture was invented by women. There was more work generated by farming than by hunting. Women were also honored by continuing the human line human generation by giving birth to children.

Later, a few people became clan chiefs, and they, by exploiting various opportunities, seized ownership of society’s property and riches, and then made the mass majority of people slaves. At that point, a class society emerged. After the invention of the plow, men captured agriculture from women. Men created a male chauvinist system by establishing ownership over children. As consequence, women came under the total domination of men. This male chauvinist system was sustained in slave society, feudal society and the present capitalist stage.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels first showed that the exploited class of society – the proletariat – can destroy capitalist society and construct a socialist and communist society. In Russia, under Lenin’s leadership,  the first socialist society was established, which continued under Stalin’s leadership. In China, the trend of new democracy – socialism – communism was initiated by overthrowing feudalism and imperialism.

The trend of women’s liberation is closely linked with the trends initiated by the great Marx, Lenin and Mao.

In Bangladesh, the imperialist collaborator bureaucrat bourgeois drags women to factories and confines them there, overworking them to get a maximum profit by paying tiny ages. The major portion of the profit goes to imperialists who use it to buying houses, shopping malls and big shops.

In those garment industries, women workers don’t even have fixed working hours. They are forced to work overtime, sometimes all night. Many times, those extra working hours have no payment, or if they are paid, they are paid very little, while the workers are the ones who are giving the country the major part of its foreign currency.

Religious fascism is carrying absolute feudal repression over women. Many women in rural areas and smaller towns are still subjected to the repressive veil system. Sometimes women are murdered by Fotwabaji [Fotwa is a so called Islamic rule in which Mullah give out various verdicts]. Recently in South Bengal, a young girl, Hena was killed after being targeted by a Fotwa.

On the other hand, the killing of Felani, a young handicapped girl, by the Indian BSF is an example of imperialist oppression over women.

A lot of women are working as housemaids for negligible wages. That work has neither respect nor a fixed wage. In reality, they are often subjected to unpaid labor or work for very low wages. In many cases, they have been tortured to death by members of the household they work for. Many women work as cooks in hotels. A lot of women work  breaking bricks (for building construction), digging soil (for road construction) or other hard physical work along those lines.

Despite having a great deal of responsibility as nurses and maids in hospitals, women are still brutally discriminated against in these workplaces. Men still pay dowry to marry a women. Innumerable women are still subjected to dowry system. Many divorced women suffer serious discrimination.

A lot of women, driven by poverty, are forced to take up prostitution. There too, the owners grab the major portion of her income.

The bourgeoisie is using women as commodities in in TV, movies and the theater.

In cottage industries, women work very long days manufacturing special products which only create huge big profits for capitalists and large markets, while the workers themselves can barely survive on meager earnings.

Grameen Bank, Brac, etc and other NGOs exploit and cheat rural women via compound interest. Many women commit suicide when they can’t pay back this debt.

In the nineteenth century, Begum Rokeya dreamed of emancipation for women. She wanted to break the restrictions over women prevalent at the time.

Similar feminists Priti Lata, Kalpana Dutt, erstwhile Ila Mitra and Shikha (of Payarabagan) are the pride of Bengali women.

Taslima Nasrin is a rebel but is not useful for women because of her surrender to imperialism. Bourgeois feminists don’t want to join the revolutionary movement, as they don’t want a revolutionary transformation of society.

On the other hand, the bourgeois reformists of the women’s movement, despite mouthing a few things about reforms like jobs and education for women are not doing anything useful for women because they want to protect the rotten semi-feudal semi-colonial society. But ideally the progressive part of these two trends should be convinced or swept to the revolutionary women movement.

This is why we commemorate great women’s leaders like Klara Zetkin, Rosa Luxemburg and Chian Ching who talked of a communist society where there would be no exploitation and where we will no longer be oppressed by capitalism, so male chauvinism will therefore disappear.

So, struggling women,
Let us unite to break the chain.
Let us unite under the banner of Revolutionary Women’s Movement to overthrow the semi-feudal semi-colonial society with the goal of creating a communist society.

Revolutionary Women’s Movement

March 8, 2011