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NEWS & LETTERS, June 2004Woman as ReasonWomen torturers as the face of capitalby Terry Moon It was a shock to see women's faces grinning at us from TV and newspapers as they participated in torturing Iraqi prisoners. It showed how wrong many were to think that, by nature, women are more humane than men. Those faces highlighted the mistake bourgeois feminists made when they insisted that equality means women should have equal access to the military in all its branches and all its tasks. Those faces revealed how abstract the demand for equality can be. We don't want equal participation in a military in the service of a U.S. government bent on world domination. Rather, we call for the abolition of the military, and have no illusions that it can be anything other than a training ground for brutality. The sexual nature of the torture imposed on the Iraqis flowed from a history as long as the military itself of brutalizing, dehumanizing, raping, prostituting, torturing and murdering women. RAPE, HARASSMENT ARE ENDEMIC This is what one woman wrote about the military she was a part of: "...we must consider that, due to this failure to address and change these problems, there is an unwritten military policy of 'normalizing' or utilizing rape, brutalization and inhuman treatment towards our own and others, on both a national and global scale. If so, this would make our nation, and our military, no better than other nations...where abuse and rape have been utilized as methods of gaining submission and compliance from others." Written before the torture of Iraqi prisoners was revealed, these are the words of nine-year career Air Force officer Dorothy Mackey, who was raped three times in one year by two senior officers from the Inspector General's office. In her struggle for justice she discovered that the responsibility for sexual assault and rape "plague our entire military system." Brutality against women by military men existed from the moment armies were formed. But when women joined the service, male resentment was overwhelming and abuse skyrocketed. In the U.S. over 200,000 women veterans have been sexually assaulted by servicemen; 30% of women Vietnam veterans reported rape or harassment; in the last decade, two Department of Veterans Affairs surveys show 30% of women reporting not just harassment but attempted rape or rape. Most military women don't report rape or harassment, so the real numbers are probably double. Any move to change this reality has been stymied by military brass for decades. CAPITALISM = DEHUMANIZATION This brutality against women predates capitalism, but capitalism so fragments us that human beings no longer understand our relationship to the community, the rest of society, or to the world of things that human beings create. In his 1844 Manuscripts Marx spoke to this, writing: "The infinite degradation in which humanity exists for itself is expressed in this relation to the WOMAN as the spoils and handmaid of communal lust....On the basis of this [man/woman] relation we can judge the whole stage of DEVELOPMENT of humanity. From the character of this relation it follows to what degree humanity has become HUMAN, and has recognized itself as such." Marx saw how capitalism deepened the view of women as less than human: "Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that any object is ours only when we have it, i.e., when it exists for us as capital, or when we possess it directly..." What those grinning faces of Spec. Megan Ambuhl, Spec. Sabrina D. Harman, and Pfc. Lynndie England made so clear is how capitalism's capacity for reducing human relations to relations between things, affects women as well as men. That thingification is a fact of life flowing from every aspect of the production process. It allows this perversion of human relations to become so universal that it affects women and others who have no stake in maintaining this system. In capitalism such dehumanization is NECESSARY for social reproduction in all its phases. The true horror is that this descent into animality is an expression of what is "normal." We have a different vision of the future from the degraded present captured in those pictures. A future where the form of human relations will be under our own control, and where people won't become objects to each other, but will be able to develop all their capacities and talents. Those pictures from Iraq and the degradation to which capitalism has subjected us, reveal how deep the uprooting must be, and how much is at stake in the struggle to make that vision of the future a reality. |
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