But the capitalist's wars are always saving women!
For the powerful, women are anti-democratic except when they are useful to serve the capitalist in generating the illusion of democracy.
If Marxist scholar and activist Rosa Luxemburg were alive today, she would write again what she wrote over 90 years ago: We are confronted, she wrote, with the "awful proposition":
Either the triumph of imperialism and the destruction of all culture and, as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration, a vast cemetery; or, the victory of socialism [democracy], that is, the conscious struggle of the international proletariat against imperialism, against its methods, against war. ("Junius Pamphlet") [2]
The dilemma humanity faces is this "inevitable choice," and the "scales are trembling in the balance awaiting the decision of the proletariat."
What is the relationship of women's struggles to the proletariat's international struggle for Democracy?
Rosa Luxemburg's analysis of women's struggles within the broader struggle of the proletariat resonates today as we witness the vanguard leadership of the ruling class instigating more wars among nations and imposing ever more draconian repressive tactics to minimize and therefore better manage resistance within and without national boarders. Although a close friend to leading feminist of her day, Luxemburg refused to declare herself a feminist. She was critical of feminism, recognizing in the feminism of her time, as did Black, Chicano, and Indigenous women in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a racial and ethnic perspective that equated women with European women and an even specific class of European women, as Luxemburg discovered, when she asked: who is speaking and for whom? For what class of women does Feminism report to serve and why?
In a 1912 speech entitled, "Women's Suffrage and Class Struggle," Luxemburg told her audience that "the worst and most brutal advocates of the exploitation and enslavement of the proletariat are entrenched behind throne and altar as well as behind the political enslavement of women" (The Rosa Luxemburg Reader). And they were not exclusively men.
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