By ELENIRA VILELA*
If yesterday we said “Socialism or barbarism”, today we say “Socialism or extinction” and this socialism contemplates within itself the end of all forms of oppression.
Every day someone says that it is more important to fight for labor rights, for the minimum wage policy, for increased employment and that this business of representation, of neutral language is just nonsense, nonsense... Let's think about it?
Capitalism is a system that enriches some by exploiting those who can only work for others to survive. This means that there will only be billionaires if there are a huge number of poor people. Today, capitalism is in a deep crisis. As Lula said, there are three thousand people who have assets worth 15 trillion dollars, which is more than the GDP of many countries, including developed ones, combined. This inequality stops the wheel of exploitation.
So what? What does it have to do with Brazil having more women than men, but less than a sixth of the city council being women? What does it have to do with Brazil having more black people than white people and these people not even having access to the right to recognition as human, and later to any of the basic rights? What does it have to do with Brazil being the country that kills the most trans people in the world? What does the state government of Santa Catarina censoring a film about the sexuality of People with Disabilities (PWDs) have to do with it? What does it have to do with teachers who do their job and teach sex education in the classrooms and are therefore being persecuted and fired? What does it have to do with young people without prospects and elderly people without dignity and care?
The reality is: there is no class struggle in Brazil (and in most of the world) without confronting sexism, racism, ableism, speciesism and so many isms in the world! The reason? There is no class struggle without organizing the pain and demands of the real working class, the one that really exists, the one that is actually being exploited, going hungry, massacred by the police, without medicine… and there is no class struggle without liberating the most important factory of capital, the factory that produces the only commodity that generates value: uteruses! Especially the uteruses of black women from the outskirts of the city.
Recently, Oxfam announced a fact that should never stop being repeated by every feminist woman who is an activist in this debate: the super-rich steal 10,8 trillion dollars a year in the form of labor in the production and reproduction of the workforce, the work of women (almost always black women) that some call care and others call love! How could it be possible to create a Jeff Bezos, an Elon Musk or a Jorge Lemann without being able to commit this theft? And it is not possible to commit this theft without using sexism, racism and LGBTphobia as a tool to normalize the exploitation of women.
It is not possible to guarantee that there will be more people than they hire (to make those who have a job accept any salary and, for example, the 6x1 scale and those who do not have to accept being exploited under any conditions) if women and other people, especially LGBTQIAPN+, exercise their free right to their sexuality and the right to abortion.
Try googling “falling fertility rates” and see how desperate the headlines are. Free exercise of sexuality today means having fewer children in much of the world, and this affects capital. Let’s think: why is falling fertility rates a problem? The correct question is: for whom is falling fertility rates a problem?
It's not for women and people with uteruses, after all, every time they have the slightest choice, rates go down. It's certainly not for the planet, which is in need of recovery from an overpopulation of human beings.[I] But they say it's a problem for the economy. It would only be a problem for the economy if it were impossible, without increasing the number of people working, to continue producing what is necessary for people to live with dignity. On the contrary, with the technology we have and slower growth, we just need to reduce working hours and hire more people and this would no longer be a problem.
This is only a problem for the supercapitalists, the billionaires! Because only by controlling bodies can they exploit enough to continue increasing their wealth at the pace they want. It is no coincidence that feminism, sexuality and abortion are central themes of the fascist far right. The extremist authoritarian ideologies (colonialism, fascism, Nazism…) supported by fundamentalist religions (merchants of faith in neo-Pentecostal Christianity in Brazil, Islamophobic Hinduism in India, Zionism in Israel, Islam that follows Sharia law in Afghanistan…) are what provide the necessary support for the creation of violent authoritarian systems that have at their structural base the freedom of merchandise and exploitation and the oppression and domination of bodies. Without these ideologies, capitalism would collapse.
The other alternative for maintaining capitalism is war. And war also depends on machismo, on the side that builds a toxic masculinity that gives men the reference for self-recognition through violence and, only then, convinces them to put their own lives and those of so many others at risk in the name of heroism, fighting in a war that is never theirs.
As Paulo Galo would say, it is not possible to liberate the working class without liberating the smallest factory, which is the uterus of every black woman.
Therefore, there is no fighting against capitalism without fighting against sexism, racism, ableism, speciesism, LGBTphobia, cisheteronormativity and all forms of oppression that create the concrete conditions for all forms of labor exploitation. And there is no freeing bodies from oppression without freeing them from all forms of exploitation, after all, Noam Chomsky and so many others have already shown us that we are enslaved by capitalists.
The revolution against capitalism will be feminist, black, ecological, LGBTQIAPN+ and PCD or it won't be!
There is no such thing as an identity struggle (it really hurt me to use that word in the title, but I wanted you to read it…), because identity is part of the struggle for the right to life, for the democratization of power and for dignity. In the complexity of the human, language kills, the symbolic kills, the symbolic imposes hunger and misery, torture, miserable wages and consumerism, climate change and the consequent life with extreme scarcity of access to water! These are the revolutionary struggles.
If yesterday we said “Socialism or barbarism”, today we say “Socialism or extinction” and this socialism contemplates within itself the end of all forms of oppression and we can only achieve it through the concrete working class that wants to fight against its concrete pains. The woman will be revolutionary so as not to see her black, LGBT or disabled son die from gunshots, hunger, or in a flood.
*Elenira Vilela Professor of Mathematics at the Federal Institute of Santa Catarina and General Coordinator of SINASEFE.
Note
[I] Never imagine that I am defending some eugenics theory. There have been, and still are, situations in which capitalists exercise control over the bodies of people with uteruses through unwanted tubal ligations or genital mutilations. The issue is precisely that capitalists want to be able to decide for us when we will have children, when we will not have them, and if we do, how many. That is why we fight for autonomy.
the earth is round there is thanks to our readers and supporters.
Help us keep this idea going.
CONTRIBUTE
