Using local patriarchy, retrograde feudalism, militarism and fundamentalism, imperialism continues and intensifies its global plunder and exploitation of peoples and nations. Imperialism not only strengthens the local elite and structures of oppression but creates new ways to exploit and extract profit. Women in poor as well as those in rich industrialized countries are under continued assault by imperialism as the latter exacerbates class, race, caste and gender oppression, and fosters intolerance and bigotry to create civil and ethnic wars.
The current US ‘war on terror’ brings new meaning and heightened level of consciousness and action for women fighting for their emancipation and liberation. The profound resonance for women of the need to fight US imperialism and its wars of aggression can be gleaned from the report that majority of the more than 100,000 Iraqi dead from the US occupation were women and children.
Moreover, wars of aggression breed conditions for the enduring victimization of women, violence characterizes women’s daily existence as rape, assault, and sex trafficking become the norm of women’s lives. The same daily violence restricts their social and political lives, as they become prime targets for kidnapping and slavery. Intense military assaults and maneuvers coerce women into leaving their homes forming the majority of refugees.
Toiling women of the colonized and semi-colonized countries experience loss of land and livelihood, the theft of their national patrimony. The value of their labor is cheapened to mere subsistence levels. Women in the imperialist countries experience the loss of employment benefits, and social welfare programs even as unemployment and underemployment increase, and cost of living and taxes rise.
Myriad indeed are the crimes against women that can be laid at imperialism’s door: unjust wages, slave-like working conditions, trafficking, prostitution, encouragement of right wing orthodoxies and beliefs that devalue women and enshrine gender inequality. Imperialism wields the twin book-ends of commodifying women’s sexuality while denying them control over their own sexuality, reproductive capabilities and sexual orientation. Imperialism strengthens feudal patriarchy to intensify women’s exploitation, devaluing her social status of her labor and contributions to society.
Imperialist globalization wages a war against women, shredding their cultures and traditions, and transforming them into labor slaves, sex slaves and/or mindless consumers of unnecessary capitalist products, both material and non-material. At every step of the process, imperialism reaps maximum profits.
Despite efforts of imperialism to depoliticize and co-opt them towards reformism, the women masses the world over are struggling to free themselves from class, gender, caste and race oppression, to dismantle local patriarchy and feudalism, and to smash the chains with which imperialism seeks to bind them.
The League resolves to:-
a. Fight to promote, protect and expand the rights of women and end all forms of gender discrimination, gender inequality, and all forms of exploitation, oppression, subjugation and violence.
b. Work to strengthen, consolidate and expand a global militant women’s movement so that the abilities and capabilities of millions of women can be harnessed in the struggle against imperialism, patriarchy and retrograde feudalism.
c. Engage women to participate in the national liberation struggle in recognition of the inseparable link of women’s liberation to national liberation. #