- by Amelia, Canberra Branch
- The Guardian
- Issue #2119
It is school holidays where I live, and the usually quiet rural commuter bus has become a theatre of Gender War. On one route, a sizeable group of high school boys started bullying a smaller group of young goths, sneering sexist and homophobic slurs, and abusing any adult who tried to stop them. I saw one of the boys from that group on the same bus route the next day. As he enters the bus, a young woman throws a plastic drink bottle at him, shouting at him that he had sexually assaulted her friend. The bus driver tells the young woman to go to the police, worthy advice that would be better in a less broken system. Women know how difficult it is to secure a conviction for sexual assault (the Australian legal system isn’t great at convicting rapists, but it certainly is at re-traumatising survivors). The young woman walks away, distressed. The bus driver works for a private transport company. He has to focus on driving. The boy laughs, gets on the bus. I write to the bus company when I get home, as I’ve done before.
Problems with our society and communities surface in the form of gender violence. Statistics on the sexual assault of girls and young women are harrowing, with a randomly selected sample of Australian women showing at least 45 per cent had experienced at least one unwanted sexual incident by 16 years of age.
Where does all this come from?
Marx and Engels used the phrase “social relations of production” to describe the kinds of societies that form from the economic superstructure of the day, from the way life is reproduced in any given historical period. The economic structure affects everything. Capitalism therefore has its own kind of social relations, as do colonial societies and indeed socialist societies. We can make changes to social relations, but to a large degree it is the social relations that determine us.
It is clear that what we see in our society, which is formed under capitalism, this kind of disharmony, anarchy, brutality – Gender Wars that spring up willy-nilly in the midst of a bus trip – all these phenomena have an origin: the broken social relations of capitalist society. In capitalist society, workers are made to be competitors, boys are taught to be predators, and in the absence of state guidance, groups turn against groups, ethnicities against ethnicities, men against women, subcultures against subcultures. Society deteriorates, it becomes sick, it splinters into warring individuals and groups. Capitalism reveals the brutality that was always at its heart.
But there is nothing universal about it. Society doesn’t have to be this way. Societies exist and have existed that are not broken.
Who then is at fault? In a certain way, it’s not society’s fault. It’s the government’s fault. Without stewardship in social relations, and without transforming production, a broken society is entirely and completely inevitable.
Communism is the solution. The youth of our time need to be given purpose, direction, balance, order. Great propaganda campaigns need to be launched that support social harmony. We need an education that strikes out against the anarchy of our society. Building a socialist society and solving these problems requires infrastructure, real stuff. We need a legal and police system that is equipped to handle sexual assault and domestic violence. We need more women’s shelters. We need youth and community organisations to give young people purpose. We need to build a society with hope and accountability.
Building a harmonious, communist society involves planning. It means not just developing the productive forces, but simultaneously addressing social relations – building socialist society and transforming the economic base.
Both bourgeois governments and liberal feminist approaches have failed miserably. Trying to make people “nicer human beings,” without transforming the economic base simply doesn’t work. Likewise, without funding and infrastructure, without education in social harmony, without order, social discipline and collective purpose, the anarchy continues.
