Trotskyists at Tamil Women’s Rally

We reprint below an edited version of the greetings given by a Trotskyist League/Ligue trotskyste representative to a March 17 International Women’s Day celebration organized by the Scarborough Tamil Women’s Association.

Good evening. I’m Janet Yeung on behalf of the Trotskyist League of Canada, the Canadian section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist). I extend revolutionary greetings to this celebration of International Women’s Day!

When I think about women’s rights, I think about struggle—a struggle against gender discrimination, against chattel slavery and class struggle against a system based on inequities. I think about the 1917 Russian Revolution. That’s when the Bolsheviks established full democratic rights for women. They also sought to replace the family—the root of women’s oppression—through the socialization of housework and childcare. However, the isolation of the workers state in a hostile imperialist world, and the later Stalinist degeneration of the Soviet Union, did not enable these aims to come to fruition.\\

The destruction of the Soviet Union was a disaster for working people. Today, the world we live in is one dominated by the bourgeoisie’s “war on terror.” There are imperialist troops occupying Iraq, Afghanistan, Haiti and other parts of the world. Whole peoples, from Tamils to Arabs, have been targeted, as well as groups like the Communist Party of the Philippines, Colombian FARC and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Tamil organizations like the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) have been targeted for attack by the Canadian state as it follows along with the other imperialists. This resulted in a cross-border roundup of 14 people of Tamil background last summer. This was done in the context of stepped-up military actions by the Sri Lankan government to drive the LTTE from its strongholds in the largely Tamil areas in the northeast. It is this same government that lords it over the heavily exploited Tamil women slaving on the tea plantations in the middle of the island.

While our Marxist views are opposed to the politics of the nationalists, we stand in their defense against the Sri Lankan army and government attacks, which have massacred tens of thousands of Tamils and forced hundreds of thousands more into exile since the 1980s. We are for the right of an independent Tamil Eelam. We stand in defense of the 14 arrested here last summer as well as the five men targeted by the “security certificate” provisions and the countless others who have been swept up in the dragnet of the Anti-Terrorism Act. We call on the workers of the world to protest these state-sponsored acts of terror against the population both here and abroad.

This brings me back to struggle. Marxists struggle for a world where people—regardless of their gender, sexual choices or where they were born—can live free from oppression. For a world where all their material wants can be met. For a classless society. This struggle must be waged against capitalism, a system based on inequities, that supports national and gender oppression. Come talk to us if you want to find out more. For women’s liberation through socialist revolution! Happy International Women’s Day.