Automatically translated from Basque, translation may contain errors. More information here. Elhuyarren itzultzaile automatikoaren logoa

"Working Women's Life Is Under Pressure in All Spheres"

  • The Organization of Socialist Women Itaia will hold a full day on 4 June in Hernani. There will be three conferences and concerts in the tent that will be installed in the Latxunbe sports complex and will foresee that they do not fit all in it, will adapt the possibility of continuing the talks through the screen in the patio of the Elizatxo school. We interviewed Maitane Urkola, a colleague of Itaia.

31 May 2022 - 07:38

You've organized three talks. The first will analyze “The oppression of women” and the second “The current situation of women workers”. What analysis do you make of the reality that women live today?

The lives of women, like the lives of other men, are defined by capitalist society and the lives of working women are trampled on in all spheres: in paid work it is a devalued subject, that is, it is generally paid less and it is up to them to perform work in unfavorable conditions, care tasks, cleaning... In addition, the burden of care is placed on us and the burden of surveillance is expected to be greater on us, due to the privatization of public services and the increase in these household tasks. In addition, through a more cultural way, society, the media, and digital platforms create a sexualized image or converted into an object of working women, which implies socializing or seeing women as a secondary subject. And another area would be that of male violence: institutional resources are put in place to deal with male violence, but it is not enough. Therefore, we see that the lives of women are trampled on in different spheres (material, cultural...) and socially defined as a secondary subject.

If we want to set in motion policies or concrete struggles, we would see these talks important, first to know what the oppression of women today is, to see what problems we would have to fight and give theoretical keys to political intervention.

The third presentation deals with the “challenges facing women” and the “political empowerment of women”. How are women’s struggle and the workers’ struggle united?

There are no two struggles to combine, two forms of struggle have not been distinguished. If we were to do so, we would respond to the logic of workerism, that is, as if the struggle of the workers were aimed at gaining improvements in wage work, or the struggle of women as a struggle to deal only with the injustices that we have women. We have to see what oppression or characteristics are produced in capitalist society, but to face them we have to fight in a unified and integral way. The term before expresses it: the capitalist system oppresses it in its entirety, creates a society divided into classes, and our responsibility is to respond in an integral way, integrating the different oppressions, that is, all those oppressions, be they young, women, students, immigrants, we have to fight in response to a common strategy.

One of the issues that will be addressed in the third intervention is the challenges of the feminine front, and in this set we will analyze the role that the feminine front should play, the function, so that women can also exert our liberation. Another point that will be addressed is the political empowerment of women, as it is essential that women become a political subject and for that we all have to work, but it has to be an integral political subject: women do not have to worry only about the female issue. The latest political trends, feminism and leftist currents, encourage everyone to care only about their issues. Of course, if the central point that affects us is the feminist issue, it is necessary to have greater responsibility towards it, but we have to respond to the general strategy of dealing with the female issue and, therefore, women must be configured as an integral political subject for the transformation of society itself, that is, to develop the capacities of women to work politics as a whole and to provide the necessary means for it.

Itaia uses the word “woman” to present these days. Why don't they use the word "feminism"?

We understand that feminism is an ideology or a concrete political proposal for the liberation of women, and we believe that it is not an appropriate proposal to be able to carry out the real liberation of women. We believe that the political proposal is communism so that we can really achieve it. The political proposal of feminism makes the current reality not to be fought in its entirety, but to act from the particular or in an isolated way. It means isolating every fight and oppression, analyzing it in a partial way. This is based on the transformation of women into a subject without internal antagonism, and the concealment of the antagonistic classes (bourgeoisie and workers) within women means favouring powerful women and, therefore, integrating the movement itself into the logic of the State and capital, if it is not integrated into a revolutionary strategy. If the struggle does not take place against the State or the capital that perpetuates oppression, or the antagonistic class of existing women is concealed, the movement becomes inter-class and is not sufficient to achieve the real liberation of women.

When socialist proposals for women’s liberation come out, feminism can use working-class rhetoric or the concept of class, but it does not alter the proposal itself in substance or in substance. It can raise everyday issues of proletarian women, but if the proposal itself is not going to overcome the current general logic, we see that it remains a reformist practice, although it can be achieved to improve the social or economic status of middle-class women, a radical change in the reality of working women is not achieved. Although working women are mobilized in feminism and are part of feminism, their personal will does not revolutionize the political program itself.

Can women not be oppressed in Communism?

We define communism as a society without classes or oppression. That is where we have to work since today, putting in that direction the struggles to cope with the current oppression. Communism is not going to be achieved overnight, today we are starting from a machista society and we have a lot of work to do to deal with all that. The oppression of women in communism is not communism, because it is not a total or integral freedom of the human being.

What place should women/Itaia occupy within the socialist movement?

Itaia has three challenges: on the one hand, working on the issue of working women. On the other hand, to situate all this work in a communist strategy, doing a pedagogical work that highlights the need for socialism and socializing the communist conception of the world in society, because we see that nowadays the capitalist logic is very integrated in our common sense, just as machismo is involved in the forms of empowerment... the objective is to face it and establish other social relations, socialize another worldview. And thirdly, empower working women, foster communist militancy.

The question of women is not just a matter for us. It is an issue that the Socialist movement must work and fight in its entirety. In this sense, Itaia's task is to put the problem of women and women's empowerment at the forefront of the political agenda of the socialist movement, to give keys and means and to propose policies to take steps towards the liberation of women and the integration of women into the militancy, but it is the responsibility of the socialist movement to ensure that all this is done well and is actually complied with. And in the ways of acting, our mixed spaces must be safe, women must feel confident in our activity and in the spaces in which we participate, and all of this we must do in the day-to-day, and we must put in place policies to achieve that trust and that assurance in the day-to-day. In the socialist movement we are moving there.


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