Hello comrades and friends. This is Back in the USSR on CFRU 93.3 FM. I am Siegfried and it’s good to be able to return to you after the enforced absence of a very poorly timed federal election campaign. As many of you will know, I was a candidate here in Guelph, running for the Communist Party of Canada, and it was quite the campaign. We got decent media coverage, despite gatekeepers shutting us out of practically all the local candidates’ debates. We reached more people than we did in 2019 and got more votes, even though the overall voter turnout was terrible. Our message that people’s needs must always come before profit really resonated in the present political climate and the Communist Party gained ground across the country because of it – earning more votes and supporters everywhere we ran candidates. Me and my comrades were able to do all this because we worked together. We were a real team and we supported each other through all the challenges and difficulties.
There is a reason why I was able to put so few episodes of this show out in the first half of this year, my mental health was absolutely shot. I was a mess. When the election was called in late August, I hadn’t even gotten a chance to re-connect with my friends and loved ones in the wake of the lockdown. I remember being so afraid in the first part of the campaign; constantly worried that I’d fail to get enough signatures to get on the ballot and of letting everyone down. I could barely interact with anyone socially, which is kind of a problem when you’re running in an election and trying to engage with potential voters. But my comrades came through for me. Everyone was so understanding and supportive. We were able to work out a division of labor whereby other comrades could handle the stuff that I didn’t have the comfort level to take on – like approaching strangers with election leaflets outside the Guelph Farmer’s Market for example or buzzing property managers so we could deliver leaflets to apartment buildings. It was also absolutely amazing to connect with people who were voting communist for the first time and were supportive of my campaign. In the end, it was through the campaign and all the people who supported me that I was able to regain some of my self-confidence and work through a lot of my mental health challenges. I’m so grateful to everyone. You know who you are. And I’m happy to be part of an organization that takes mental health seriously and actually makes access to mental healthcare a central part of its political platform. That’s very important to me as I know it is for a lot of people.
But I don’t want to dedicate this show to the federal election. Overall, it was pretty stupid, totally unnecessary and led to no real changes in Parliament. That seems to be the general consensus anyway.
I want to focus on the epidemic of sexual violence that exists in this country. It’s a topic that I’ve never properly delved into in the history of this show, and that really needs to change. When one in three women can expect to be sexually assaulted in her lifetime, we’re talking about a truly horrific situation that has deep structural roots in capitalist society and settler-colonialism.
As of September 17th, upwards of 8000 students walked out of classes at Western University in London, Ontario to protest against sexual violence. This action took place after upwards of 30 women were drugged and sexually assaulted at a party in the Medway-Sydenham Hall residence during the university’s orientation week.
I want to let that sink in for a moment. This is an absolute atrocity. A male student was even murdered after he apparently tried to intervene to stop it. This is what the students at Western were protesting when they walked out of classes chanting “stop this violence, no more silence.”
It’s absolutely horrific. But it has to be understood that drugging and sexual assault are common occurrences, not aberrations. There have been at least four reports of this happening at the University of Guelph so far this September, and there’s no way of knowing what the true number is because most incidents don’t get reported. Just like incidents of domestic violence and rape are underreported. The justice system in this country is not friendly to survivors, who are often not taken seriously or even re-victimized by the system. This was pointed out by the one of the speakers at a solidarity walk-out at the University of Guelph this past Thursday. They drove home the point that the cops don’t prevent rape and sexual violence, they only come in after the fact with a response that is itself often abusive.
While the solidarity walkout in Guelph was nowhere as big as the one in London, it was still impressive and a lot of students turned up to say that sexual violence needs to stop and that survivors should be believed and supported. I was happy to see that a decent number of men showed up, even though the crowd was still overwhelmingly made up of women. Another speaker at the rally, who was from Guelph-Wellington Women in Crisis, focused on how men need to stand up and confront the sexual violence and rape culture that is pervasive on college campuses and throughout society. Toxic masculinity needs to be confronted by healthy masculinity whenever it shows its face. And while they didn’t dwell on this point very extensively, it still really hit home for me. Being a male ally is hard. We’re living in a patriarchal society that doesn’t encourage men to take the voices and experiences of women seriously or challenge our friends when they engage in abusive actions. I admit I’ve fallen short in the past and failed to stand up in situations where sexist behavior was being expressed by the men around me. But it’s important to keep trying, keep caring, keep listening, keep asking for consent (always, always) and keep struggling for justice, safety, healing and equality for women – including queer women, trans women, racialized women, Indigenous women, and all women identified people.
The toxic situation that we see with regard to gender-based violence is no accident. It’s no accident that Indigenous women have been dehumanized and victimized to the extent that they have, when settlers from Europe seized their lands, trampled on their ways, and confined them to the margins of a society built on genocide. They were seen as obstacles to broken down by violence and the colonists benefited from their marginalization on reservations and their imprisonment in residential schools. Indigenous women continue to face violence and murder at a horrifically disproportionate rate because of what settler-colonialism did to this land.
In patriarchal societies the world over, men benefit from the unpaid domestic labor that women engage in and are willing to use force in order to keep those benefits along with unrestricted sexual access to the women they dominate. This patriarchal control of women by men arose alongside slavery and feudalism in which lords and plantation owners controlled and exploited vast numbers of serfs and slaves for the sake of wealth and power. It’s the same reason why capitalists exploit workers to this day. Wealth and power are not things that any ruling group gives up without a fight, whether in gender or class terms. Various oppressions intersect with one another: race, gender, class, sexual orientation, ethnicity etc. and all are based on keeping a certain group of people down so that another group may benefit from their suppression.
Those young men who drugged and assaulted those young women at Western knew what they were doing. I’m sure they felt powerful and in control. They were taking what they wanted and enjoying it, not allowing any lack of consent to stand in their way. They were “being men” as they understood it. And this toxic masculinity must be opposed and defeated, because it ruins far too many lives. Every woman who was targeted that night is going to carry this trauma with her for the rest of her life and no one deserves that, it doesn’t matter what they were wearing, or what they said or did.
As a Communist, I take the struggle for women’s liberation seriously. It is central to who we are and always has been. Every socialist revolution has elevated women, empowered them, and allowed them to seek out their potential while tearing down traditional barriers of patriarchy, and class and racial oppression. Every socialist revolution has done this in a systemic way. For all the good work that women’s shelters and organizations like Guelph Wellington Women in Crisis do in this society, they are few, underfunded and overly dependent on donations. Contrast this with the Federation of Cuban Women which has branches in practically every neighborhood, a reserved bloc of seats in the National Assembly, and has the power to intervene in cases of domestic violence. That and abortion is universally available in socialist countries like Cuba, unlike in Canada where the right to an abortion isn’t even guaranteed under the law, access to abortion is difficult, and women have to rely on the legal void opened up by the Morgentaler Case. Cuba has confronted patriarchy as a matter of national policy since the 1959 revolution and the results are plain to see. Women who have guaranteed access to housing, employment, medical care, education and genuine political/community support are unlikely to get stuck with an abusive partner or be vulnerable on the street at night. When women enjoy real self-determination, society as a whole becomes a safe space for them and that’s when the real healing can begin.
Throughout the election, the slogan of the Communist Party of Canada was “People & The Planet Before Profits” and I believe that this is central to the struggle for women’s rights as well. So long as society elevates exploitation over the needs of human beings, the vast majority of women are going to face oppression and abuse. Survivors will continue to be faced with an uncaring justice system and the insult of universities like Western appointing committees and “task forces” to make it look like they are doing something for the women who continue to face the same risks every day. What is needed is community, communication, accountability, justice, respect, consent and love. The pandemic has shown us just how important these things are and how important it is that we build them up in our daily lives and organize and fight for them politically. Women in Canada deserve all the guarantees that Cuban women currently enjoy and we must fight for these fundamental rights to be realized by all: from affordable housing to abortion access to the right to walk in safety after dark. Having individual women in positions of political power does not defeat patriarchy. Women as an organized whole must be empowered politically if patriarchy is to be overthrown and this is what Cuban women have done to a remarkable extent. Community-organizing, political mobilization and the winning of concrete political gains that improve human life is what will counter and prevent sexual violence, not more police. While sexual crimes such as a rape should be taken seriously and perpetrators punished, the real work consists of stopping those crimes before they even happen.
Women have the right to live in peace, as does everyone. And that’s the message that one of my positive male role models, the communist Chilean singer/songwriter Victor Jara, conveys in this song: El Derecho de Vivir en Paz (“the right to live in peace”).
Michael Parenti - Male Terrorism and the Political Economy of Sexual Oppression
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