Throughout history, the oppression of women has been one of humanity’s oldest and deepest wounds. However, understanding the true nature of this wound is absolutely impossible within the pathetic limits of bourgeois feminism, which treats it as a superficial issue of “sexism.” The roots of women’s oppression lie neither in women’s biological sex nor in some innate male wickedness, but in the emergence of private property, the rise of class society, and the history of human exploitation by human beings. What is imposed on us today as “feminism” is, in fact, a bourgeois distortion that hides this profound historical reality, seeks to reconcile women with their own exploiting classes, and, while pretending to critique the system, ultimately reproduces it. The truth, however, is this: women’s liberation is possible only and exclusively in a society where private property has been abolished, a society without classes and without exploitation—that is, in socialism.
The oppression of women is not an unchangeable part of “human nature.” In primitive communal society, women held an equal position with men; in fact, women were at the centre of social production. However, with the emergence of private ownership of the means of production, women’s social status underwent a radical change. While men became the owners of the means of production, women—through their fertility and domestic labour—were reduced to a tool for protecting men’s property and giving birth to the legitimate heirs who would inherit it. As Engels pointed out, “the overthrow of maternity-right was the great historical defeat of the female sex.” Women were transformed from producers into a part of men’s property, into objects. Throughout history, various forms of slavery have existed and disappeared. Yet the slavery of women, who were the first slaves in history, has continued to exist up to the present day. From Ancient Greece to Rome, from medieval feudalism to the bourgeois revolutions, in every period of history, class society has oppressed women, seizing control over their bodies, their labour, and their souls.
With the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the oppression of women took on a new and more insidious form. Capitalism took women out of their secondary position in the home and drove them into the factories, but this was not their liberation—it was a new dimension of their exploitation. The bourgeoisie used women’s labour as cheap workforce to multiply their surplus value, trapping women in the very heart of modern slavery through wage inequality and insecure jobs. In the early stages of capitalism, the working day lasted 18 hours or more, and wages were extremely low. Women are seen and exploited as cheap labour in capitalist society. They are typically employed in unskilled workplaces with low pay. Capitalism does not confine women’s oppression to the economic sphere alone. While drawing women into the process of social production, capitalism has also taken care to preserve their secondary status within the family and society. Even though women work in factories as individuals independent of their husbands and fathers, bourgeois society still regards men as the main breadwinners of the family, and thus women’s labour is seen as merely supplementary to that of their fathers or husbands. This auxiliary role of women, along with the assumption that their earnings are just extra income for the household budget, becomes the justification for keeping working-class women’s wages low. This double exploitation further intensifies the pressure on women.
Capitalism did not abolish male dominance, which it inherited from earlier class societies; rather, it reorganised it according to the needs of capital, thereby deepening the exploitation of women even further. Women are now not only exploited as wage labourers in all areas of production, but they also continue to bear the burden of housework, childcare, and the maintenance of family life. Thus, the exploitation of women, inherited from previous systems of exploitation, becomes even more intensified under capitalism. The liberation of women requires uprooting all the relations of dependency created by private property and the system of exploitation, and reorganising society from top to bottom on exploitation-free and free foundations. This means not only the transformation of production relations, but also the dismantling of male-dominated values, morality, and ways of life created by the exploitative order. This social transformation makes it necessary to reorganise economic, political, administrative, military, ideological, and cultural life in their entirety, and demands that women become the organised and founding subjects of this immense reconstruction. Such political freedom is possible only under the rule of the proletariat. Capitalism neither allows such a social organisation nor can it create the material conditions to eliminate women’s oppressed status as a sex. Only social revolution and socialism can create the possibilities for this.
It is precisely at this point that various currents of feminism enter the stage. However, bourgeois feminism in particular, abstracts the oppression of women from its class basis and tries to resolve it through cultural and legal reforms. The bourgeois women’s movement starts from gender inequality, but it never goes as far as the fundamental root of this inequality: private property relations. Feminism demands the elimination of women’s inequality, yet it believes that this can be achieved without touching the rule of capital. The biggest lie of bourgeois feminism is the fairy tale that women’s solidarity can transcend class differences. In reality, between a female boss and a female worker, there is no common interest other than being women. The female boss exploits the labour of the female worker, just like her male counterpart. Therefore, the liberation of women is not possible through an abstract sisterhood that includes all women, but through the class struggle of the working class together with all the oppressed. By pretending to critique the system, feminism in fact offers women the promise of “individual success” and suggests that they integrate themselves into capitalism. Women’s emancipation is not achievable through laws passed in bourgeois parliaments, but through the socialisation of the means of production and the abolition of private property. By concealing this truth and diverting women’s attention away from capitalism—their real enemy—feminism becomes the greatest enemy of the women’s movement.
The geography of Turkey and Kurdistan is among the regions where the women’s struggle is experienced most intensely, most bloodily, and most resolutely. However, in order to understand this struggle correctly, it must be evaluated not through the narrow frameworks of bourgeois feminism, but from a class-based and anti-imperialist perspective. In this geography, women are surrounded by the devastating effects of neoliberal policies, feudal remnants, religious oppression, national oppression, and direct interventions by imperialism. The oppression of women is intertwined not only with sexism, but also with class exploitation, national oppression, and reactionary ideologies. The woman who struggles here does not fight merely as a “woman,” but as a worker, a citizen, a revolutionary, and a defender of her people. The national question is always current because it carries the characteristic of easily mobilising people’s patriotic sentiments. But for women, the national question has a particular urgency. Because women, whose nation faces the threat of destruction and annexation, are constantly exposed to the most overt and brutal dangers of torture, rape, and massacre. Today, Kurdish working-class women are exploited and humiliated on the basis of nation, class, and gender simultaneously. And precisely because of this triple encirclement, Kurdish women participate intensely in the Kurdish National Liberation Movement. This is because the freedom of Kurdish women passes through the liberation of the Kurdish people. If Kurdish women of all ages had not shouldered the burden of war and taken part in every area of the struggle, the National Liberation Movement could never have become such a powerful popular movement.
In Turkey and Kurdistan, the class struggle against capitalism and imperialism has been waged at its highest and most intense level, especially over the past few decades. Right at the heart of this struggle, the women’s struggle has been one of its inseparable and strongest components of the class struggle. As revolutionary women from Turkey and Kurdistan, we take pride in being the foremost flag-bearers of this struggle. In our fight against imperialism, fascism, and reaction, we are fully aware that women’s liberation can only be achieved through a democratic popular revolution that turns its face towards socialism. Women’s liberation—sexual, national, and class-based, with the latter being the only way out—is possible only through revolution and socialism. Neither reforms, nor legal regulations, nor the half-hearted rights offered by bourgeois democracy can truly liberate women. True liberation means breaking the chains, and breaking the chains means destroying the system. That is why, while we fight for our democratic rights against all the pressures imposed on us by capitalist society – sexual discrimination, wage inequality, and every kind of religious and national reactionary cultural pattern – we draw our real strength and dynamism from the anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and socialist struggle. We have not only drawn clear lines between ourselves and all forms of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideologies such as feminism, but have also become the true representatives of the women’s struggle in the fight against these ideologies. Feminism is a distortion that separates women from the class struggle and condemns them to dissolve into the capitalist system. Our struggle, on the other hand, aims at the complete abolition of the system.
In our revolutionary struggle, we women, together with our male comrades, have been at the very front lines of combat at every moment when the class struggle has risen with all its intensity. From the smallest neighbourhood committees to factory worker actions, we have been present at every level of revolutionary communist party organisations, becoming an essential and inseparable part of the working class’s struggle for liberation. In prison struggles, between the cold and damp walls of detention centres, our women comrades who have resisted torture, isolation, and hunger have built the most unbreakable fortresses of this struggle. In death fasts, women who have rebelled in fascist state prisons by putting their lives on the line have fought not only to break their own chains, but also the chains of all oppressed peoples. And this struggle has not remained confined behind prison walls. Outside, working-class women who organised solidarity with their comrades in prison, expanded the death fasts, and raised their voices in the streets have also been an inseparable part of this struggle. Urban guerrilla warfare, mountain guerrilla battles, torture chambers—all are filled with the heroism of our women comrades who fought and became immortalised for socialism. Women who have been subjected to isolation in F-type prisons, who have defied through hunger strikes and death fasts, who have remained silent under torture—they are the most honourable and most determined soldiers of this struggle. They have fought not only for their own freedom, but for the freedom of all oppressed peoples and all working classes. This struggle is an expression of a historical responsibility too great to fit within the framework of bourgeois feminism.
Today, from the cities to the countryside, there is a great anger among all working-class and poor women—anger both against capitalism and against the oppression of the female sex, which is a direct consequence of class society. In strikes, the representatives of the workers occupying factories on the streets, the organisers of the strikes, are those ordinary housewives. Whereas in the past, strikers’ wives would at most bring food to the strike tents, now they are taking to the streets, risking confrontation with the police, and refusing to withdraw until the strike is over. Peasant women leave their men at home and stand face to face with the gendarmerie, armed with pickaxes and shovels. In anti-NATO actions, working-class women who take to the streets against imperialism’s war and aggressive policies have assumed the revolutionary leadership of this struggle. They have taken to the squares not merely as women, but as proletarians, as anti-imperialist fighters, raising their voices against NATO’s presence in Turkey and Kurdistan, against imperialist wars, and against fascist oppression. Our women comrades from the EKA who have been detained and arrested in these actions demonstrate the seriousness of the roles they have undertaken in every area of the struggle and their revolutionary determination. Their arrests are no coincidence, because the imperialists’ capital fear this organised, conscious, and resolute resistance of women. The presence of working-class women on the streets is the most powerful blow struck at the weakest point of the system. Today, these women who stand with their bare hands against the armed forces of the bourgeoisie, driven by the consciousness of protecting their homes, their children, and their livelihoods, will, once they are organised and as their political consciousness develops, take into their own hands the means to liberate themselves and their own sex. The working-class poor women of Turkey and Kurdistan possess a great potential to open the way for the revolution in Turkey and Kurdistan, just as the working-class women of Russia once opened the way for the October Revolution. If the proletariat mobilises the broad masses of women, it will see that today’s women carry the same determination and heroism as the textile workers of 8 March. Assessing the objective conditions and organising working-class women is the task of the proletarian party. We know, in this struggle, that the liberation of women is integrated with revolution, and revolution is integrated with the struggle of women. These two goals cannot be separated; they are two faces of the same process. Without women, there can be no revolution; without revolution, women cannot be liberated!
Within the class struggle, women created 8 March, opened the way for the October Revolution, and took their place in every area of the struggle with great dedication and commitment. In 1910, the International chose 8 March as the “Day of Struggle for Working-Class Women,” emphasising the need to strengthen the women’s movement in order to put an end to the oppression of women as a sex. This tradition of struggle is being carried on today in Turkey and Kurdistan by revolutionary women in every sphere—from prisons to the mountains, from factories to the streets.
The liberation of women will come together with socialism. However, socialism is only possible through anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, and anti-fascist revolutionary struggle and through democratic popular power. The true freedom of women will never be achieved without this struggle being won and without the establishment of a classless and exploitation-free society.
The revolutionary woman lives socialism not merely as a goal, but as a practice, here and now. Through her struggle, organisation, discipline, and sacrifice, she breaks down all the patterns that the capitalist order imposes on women. She is the herald of a new kind of human being—one who rebels against the weak, helpless, and dependent image that bourgeois society defines as “woman”; one who is combative, disciplined, produces theory, and determines her own destiny. The revolutionary woman in Turkey and Kurdistan stands right at the heart of this struggle to create that new human being. She fights as a single fist against sexual exploitation, national oppression, and class domination. Her struggle is one of the cornerstones of the free society of the future.
The liberation of women requires a transformation too great and too radical to fit within the framework of bourgeois feminism. While feminism drags women into a dead end of capitalism, revolutionary class struggle opens the door of history for them. In this geography, all revolutionary women struggling in prisons, in the mountains, on the streets, in factories, and in neighbourhoods have turned their backs on the deceptive promises of bourgeois feminism and have been forged in the fire of class struggle. They struggle not merely as women, but as proletarians, as revolutionaries, as socialists. Without women, there can be no revolution! Without revolution, women cannot be liberated! Any perspective that fails to grasp this truth, whether under the name of feminism or any other, betrays the cause of women. The revolutionary woman, against all such betrayals, will continue to fight for the victory of her class, for socialism, and for the liberation of humanity. Victory will belong to the women who stand by their class, their cause, and their revolution!
