Midwest, March 2019
PRLF,
In solidarity with International Women's Day 2019, and as part of rebelling against guy/rape culture and fighting to end all oppression from an aspiring communist point of view, I thought it would be a great idea for us to take on the woman question, and unleash a righteous struggle based on substance, by engaging BA's sampler edition "Break All the Chains! Bob Avakian on the Emancipation of Women and the Communist Revolution."
Prisons not only capture the reality of the deep and defining contradictions of this system, but are part of the dominant institutions that enforce the oppressive and exploitive relations in this society, conditioning us to think and act in self-destructive ways towards each other and to half of humanity that just happens to be female, while unconsciously serving the interests of those in power who are currently ruling over us.
Going into this, I knew it was going to kick up a lot of dust and I was going to receive a lot of "push-back" - afterall, we are not only going up against the pornafication of prisons in general, but are grappling with the scientific understanding of the historical development of human societies and thousands of years of women being in an oppressed and degraded position. Brothers were approaching all of this through many different outlooks such as: religious fundamentalism "Adam over Eve", narrow nationalism of the "Farra-Con" type... "Our Black sisters give birth to future warriors and gods of the earth so they need to be protected", and the macho "I have a mother and daughter and I will f**k up anybody who mistreats them or calls them b*ch"...
"Break All the Chains!" speaks to all of this, and once we got to the part "More Postcards of the Hanging…", a lot of the initial "push-back" subsided and brothers became more receptive to learning and wanting to learn more.
This ongoing struggle is being waged on the basis of "hastening while awaiting", as well as with the orientation, and in the spirit of "The New Communism Could Change Everything - If ..." (Revolution #583) ...
BAsics 3:22
[Note from PRLF: BAsics 3:22 is: “You cannot break all the chains, except one. You cannot say you want to be free of exploitation and oppression, except you want to keep the oppression of women by men.
“You can't say you want to liberate humanity yet keep one half of the people enslaved to the other half. The oppression of women is completely bound up with the division of society into masters and slaves, exploiters and exploited, and the ending of all such conditions is impossible without the complete liberation of women. All this is why women have a tremendous role to play not only in making revolution but in making sure there is all-the-way revolution. The fury of women can and must be fully unleashed as a mighty force for proletarian revolution.”]