November 25: day of resistance and struggle
The fight against gender violence cannot be quarantined!
This year’s November 25th, as a status-established day for the elimination of violence against women, finds us in the midst of an unprecedented health, humanitarian and social crisis, where the spread of the covid-19 pandemic highlights in a most resounding way the criminal nature of the state and capitalism. The oppressed and the women of the plebeian parts of society are facing an all-out attack by the authoritarian patriarchal capitalist system. The state and capital are trying to benefit from the pandemic by further restricting human rights, social conquests and liberties and imposing even more unbearable conditions of exploitation and oppression on the struggling people.
After all these months of the pandemic, not only hasn’t the state upgraded the public health system, conducted mass tests on the population, requisitioned private hospitals, hired additional medical staff, but instead they have hired more cops, bought more patrol vehicles, given out millions of euros to the media, to airline and project development companies and they have gone on to pass a series of laws which further loot nature and the lives of the people from the social and class base, such as the legislation for the exploitation of nature, the bankruptcy law and the junta-inspired law banning demonstrations. In other words, they have not been facing the pandemic but the forthcoming and ongoing expression of social discontent due to their antisocial and murderous management of the pandemic.
At the same time, the regime institutions and mechanisms are trying, especially in the context of 25 November, to present themselves as advocates of the elimination of gender violence, through hypocritical videos and TV spots against domestic violence. Because there is no greater hypocrisy than having the very system that promotes gender violence through its laws and mechanisms talk about combating it. The “staying home” slogan is complemented by the “staying safe” one and the suggestion of the official institutions to women and children who suffer domestic violence – which takes off in confinement conditions with the murders of women multiplying- is to call the police! In other words, they refer them to the mechanism which by definition has the role of exercising violence against the oppressed women and men.
Because it is their state repressive army that strips women protesters naked in the police stations, beats women anarchists in protests, attacks struggling women prisoners, tortures women refugees and immigrants in the hellhole of the Petrou Ralli detention centre and in the concentration camps, makes sexist threats to young women and men, apprehends, arrests and attempts to terrorize the women who resist.
As much as they try to make every fighting claim and historical legacy lose their meaning and distort the cause of female emancipation, the struggle which is and has yet to be given in the streets by women – the women working at the understaffed and degraded hospitals, at the super markets, at cleaning services, call centers, schools, those that are held in prisons, concentration camps and police stations – is a struggle against the violence and the submissive terms that the state-capitalist system itself has imposed.
Against the bleak reality that’s being reserved for us by the oppressors in the entire planet, we propose the organization of the oppressed and the claim of everything that belongs to us, the organized class counterattack of all the oppressed, women and men, to overthrow
the world of patriarchy, state and capitalism, in order to create a society free of exploitation and oppression. Women’s fights all around the world show us the way of the struggle as the only way forward. From Mexico – where the struggling women are constantly in the streets for the last months claiming the obvious, their lives and survival – and the US, to Poland where women, by their presence in the streets, have won the suspension of the abortion law, and the fighting women in Rojava, we must unite our voices against the patriarchal, state and capitalist system.
GENDER VIOLENCE IS A REGIME AS LONG AS THERE IS A STATE AND CAPITALISM
AGAINST THE STATE AND PATRIARCHY, FOR EMANCIPATION AND ANARCHY
Group against patriarchy
Anarchist Political Organization – Federation of Collectivities
