We come together not because we may identify as women; rather, we come together because we believe that we can only be free and live better lives with the end of capitalism, white supremacy, Western empire, and patriarchy. - Feminist Library

[IwantToRetire]

We write this statement in the spirit of radical feminist collectives that have come before us such as OWAAD and the BWG, who took firm stances against apartheid and settler colonialism in South Africa and Palestine and were founded on the principle of transnational solidarity. Our solidarity is based on political and ethical principles that exceed gender. Sara Salem writes “We come together not because we may identify as women; rather, we come together because we believe that we can only be free and live better lives with the end of capitalism, white supremacy, Western empire, and patriarchy.” Transnational feminist practice requires us to analyse how people in different geographical spaces are subject to unequal power relations and ensure that every person has access to dignified life regardless of the borders that separate us.

https://feministlibrary.co.uk/statement-of-solidarity-with-palestine/

I'm posting this not to comment on the situation between Israel and Gaza (although realise some might want to) but because it seems another example of groups originally established on the basis on the oppression of women as a sex classhaving been colonised (to use their language) by women who see it as a platform to advance their personal politics.

Similar to this supposed manifesto to lobby MPs about women's rights posted here https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4900356-vawg-is-a-gendered-issue-which-is-deeply-rooted-in-societal-inequality-it-is-violence-that-is-directed-against-a-woman-because-she-is-a-woman-or-that-affects-women-disproportionately

Large gatherings like FiLia might be satisfying to attend, but if groups set up to support women are being occupied by women who dont see the oppression of women as being directly because of their sex, it means we are even further away from putting feminism into action.

ie what is the point of theory if there is no practice of it.

@MNHQ - thanks for showing my post.

To others on the thread, I just was surprised to see Million Women Rise issue the statement they have.

Again its the language.

We must hold our own British government and the U.S. accountable to stop the warmongering and enabling the Israeli state that they have weaponised to commit this Genocide on the palestian people for their own interest!

And of course the point of the thread which is if you care so much about a situation why not form a group to campaign about it. To just tag it onto the original purpose of a group you happen to be part of is neither beneficial to that group, not in fact to the cause you care about.

Although as a side note I did look to see if Women in Black had issued a statement, which you would have thought they would have, but no.

Apologies - Women in Black did issue a statement https://london.womeninblack.org/2023/10/12/israel-gaza-women-in-black-condemn-the-use-of-violence-by-all-states-and-organisations/

We come together not because we may identify as women

No, because God forbid that women put themselves front & centre in feminism or anything.

Ffs.

what bits were good?

The thing people seem to not understand is that communism has to be under a totalitarian state. It's not possible to get an entire country of people to agree to ''share fairly'' and willingly go along with the rule, so the only way it can ever work is if it's imposed with surveillance, strict laws and limited speech. At least a capitalist society is free.

The Soviet union had guaranteed holiday for everyone, and homes for everyone. When successful, in communist societies, basics were there for almost everyone.

oh yes fantastic holidays to the Gulags! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag

... we have guaranteed holidays and mostly have homes for everyone

I'm not referring to Gulags.

The Soviets had holiday camps and spas in places like Georgia and Crimea where people could go to for free.

In our society, we have time off, but no guaranteed actual holiday unless we can pay for it, and chose to pay for that rather than something else.

We mostly have homes, which people work themselves into the ground to pay for. In communist societies, homes are free.

There is no need to be snide; if communism was all bad then it wouldn't have had so many supporters.

Are you kidding me? Communism’s supporters were those who liked the idea in theory but never experienced it in practice. It’s not that communism hasn’t been properly tried either, communism has had the same outcomes everywhere it’s ever been tried so perhaps it’s now time to re-evaluate it rather than try it all over again?

Stalin put about 22million people into gulags or Siberian exile to be worked or frozen to death. That was the fate of roughly 1 in 6 people in the Soviet Union at the time. The other 5/6ths lived under constant fear and terror.

Chairman Mao killed over 40 million people. His cultural revolution destroyed most of the cultural treasures of a great civilisation over 1,000 years old.

Paul Pot’s regime is estimated to have killed up to one third of his entire nation’s population, if could be less than that bits difficult to say but his regime was absolutely appalling.

Anybody that knows anything about communism and still thinks it’s a good idea or wants to give it another try is morally bankrupt. But then again the far left is every bit as immoral as the far right.

I'm no supporter of communism but it could well be that those who implement communist systems were not that competent or nice (which could be said about any number of other countries with different political structure)

Equally, for all I know, christianity has many good points but my experience of it, which is of course really only a reflection of how those in this country have practised it.

This is rather unobjective. You could just as easily say that capitalism has had the same result everywhere, which is hundreds of thousands of people regularly dying in wars and famines, sometimes millions in major events. Capitalist societies are on the brink of WWIII as we speak. Both systems are flawed and have resulted in mass deaths.

The Soviet Union thrived in the 1960's and 70's and became the communism success story, lots of people from that region are nostalgic for that time.

It's hysterical and hyperbolic to be calling me "morally bankrupt" for simply pointing out that having the security of a free home, the guaranteed free holiday, financial equality between most civilians, and the security of having many jobs available, are among the positives of communism. Nowhere did I say that communism was perfect or should be recreated. I am personally not a communist.

It's ironic that you can be so aggressively close-minded on a board filled with women persecuted for having minority political beliefs. It's fine to disagree with communism, it's not fine to attack people you disagree with.

@slore Emmm no you couldn’t, you couldn’t just say the same about capitalism at all. The difference of course is every single attempt to implement communism has had those terrible results. That is not true of capitalism, there are many examples of successful capitalist countries but zero examples of successful communist ones. Knowing what we know now I conclude that communists, like fascists are immoral people.

I make absolutely no apologies for saying that anyone who supports communism is as bad as a fascist and they deserve to be treated as such. Words cannot express the contempt I have for both sets of extremists. They deserve to be shunned.

I don't think I've ever seen anything more blindly stupid and frightening on the FWR boards than:
Communism not's so bad: Yes 60 million people were killed by their own regimes but on the other hand there were free holidays for some people.

And what's capitalism done? Raised millions out of poverty and saved millions of lives world wide. Yes unrestrained capitalism needs to be critiqued but if there are really people who believe communism was pretty nice, we could be on the road to hell. Fast.

Jesus Christ

What is actually happening on this thread?

It's like a mental asylum

I am not surprised feminism has lost it's way if the desire is a literal introduction of communism. Jesus Christ.

I hope you are in your 20's or below @slore - that is the only reasonable explanation for a support for communism

And to the OP: that statement reads like naive show boating 6th formers who've read 2 books and now want a revolution to bring in their new idea of 'utopia'!

Except they don't know quite how they're going to run this utopia given pesky human nature, and their desire to stay alive and stuff, but they do know they are against bad things they don't like now.

It's not admirable, it's self serving narcissism dressed up as virtue.
It's pathetic.

As much as I despise people who blindly worship capitalism and 'the market', getting rid of it is just plain stupid. If you wanna live in some collective farm type deal go right ahead, but wanting to force that on everyone is the height of arrogance. Can't take anyone seriously who has such a position.

It's not admirable, it's self serving narcissism dressed up as virtue.
It's pathetic.

Exactly. And it would be fine if they were still messing about at school.

But they have hijacked a valuable women's resource and used it as a platform to make it sound like serious grown ups are talking.

Thank god for the last few responses, I have managed to retrieve my eyebrows which had risen so highly they had got lost in my hair.

If you support communism it probably means you don't know enough about it, which is fine, but I suggest going away and acquainting yourselves with some history books before making yourself look ignorant and/or morally bankrupt.

As stated befor, communism as a nationwide political policy can ONLY work if it is enforced. You cannot get millions or billions of people to agree to live by a fairly extreme set of rules (it's hard enought to get seven people to share a vision and live by the rules). So you enforce it. But what do you do when people don't adhere? work camps and death squads seem to be the result. It has proven itself to be so every single time it has occurred in history.

It also means that ALL the wealth and power of the entire country are in the hands of a tiny few. And not just a proportion of the wealth and power( like in capitalism) but ALL of it controlled by a minority. How do you ensure those people are the right people to hold that?

Quite frankly, saying that it didn't matter that millions of people were killed because some got to go to a holiday camp is one of the most idiotically distasteful things I have ever read.

what is weird, is that the TRAa seem to be anti-capitalist/pro communism (which is weird cos they also hold a 'fuck the system' attitude, even though communism is literally the biggest 'system' possible.

capitalism = the individual freedom over the collective.

communism = the collective over the individual

YET,

they want to put the rights of the individual -the right to self-identify, over that of the collective rights (such as women's)

Literally none of it is coherent.

DO THEY EVEN KNOW WHAT THEY WANT?

@BlessedKali

Yeap, and they are working in the interests of the pharmaceutical companies.

The only explanation I can come up with is sheer stupidity, selfishness and a remarkable capacity to ignore history.

@IwantToRetire

If they think women are so irrelevant why are they gate crashing these services.

PREACH!
I feel like if I could figure this out I'd have solved the puzzle of human nature or something.
The industrial scale gaslighting has kind of broken me.

Oh, the good old days — you know, the starvation, the gulags, the labour camps, the frostbite, being forcibly moved thousands of miles to work on the land with only starvation rations and no roof over our heads, that sort of thing. Fun, fun, fun.

Liking words, the feelz of the words, the costume and LARP of a word,

has nothing to do with actually knowing what the word means, having any contextual or historical understanding of the concept, or any commitment to the values it represents.

Hence the apparent total lack of coherence. The only linking point is 'I quite like feeling/enacting/the image of doing/saying this'. Once you get that bit straight, a whole lot more of this political movement makes sense.

It's rather like the whole

"Raaaahhh evil colonalists!" <insert long pomo rant here> while doing colonialism on homosexuals, women and anyone who believes in sex as a fixed reality. There is much identifying as being a Good Person Against Colonialism, but not seeing the links at all.

"Raaaaah evil slavery!" <insert long pomo rant here, plus willingness to tear things down and dramatically throw statues around> while believing that it's ok to dehumanise and give some people in society lesser rights in law and less equality/access/tolerance on the grounds of one specific characteristic that renders them untouchable. For the Nazis, it was skin colour and faith. For the American South, it was skin colour. For the current political movement it's believing that reality means sex is a fixed fact, and that women need sex based rights. There is much identifying as being A Good Person Against Such Things without apparent capacity to see any of the links or the irony.

Don't even get me started on 'inclusion' and 'be kind'.

I often think I could take some of the leading lights of this movement with the loudest public voices into a pub, as an under cover activist, and within a pint and a half get them to say out loud that Magdalen Laundries would be a great way of managing Terfs and should be brought back as a means of dealing with them, and that the concentration camps probably had a point in getting rid of people with political beliefs that are a bane to society. If you're willing to actually imagine and say that you think a woman should die in a grease fire or be 'kerb stomped' - the level of disturbance there is extreme - for non cooperation and different beliefs then you're already there. But if you then confronted them with this, they'd absolutely insist it was different and ok when they did it.