NEWS CENTER – Under the perspective of the Women’s Revolution in Kurdistan and in the free area of Rojava, women across the world take example and hope from the Revolution and think about how to develop such struggle in their own territories. Lúbris Rubra is a women’s collective from Brazil that shared their view on the Revolution and the reality of the women’s struggle in Brazil. Our agency talked with Melissa, Julia and Carlota:
“I speak here as a representative of the organization Lábis Rubra and would like to thank you for the opportunity to talk about our work and collective, answer the questions that were put to us. Lábris Rubra is a classist feminist initiative, which emerged in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul (BR) but we do not intend to limit ourselves to staying only here. We want to create centers in other states of Brazil and later throughout Latin America.
Lábris emerged from the need to organize feminists from a class perspective, based on the understanding that women occupy a specific place in capitalist society are the political category that is historically assigned to the sphere of domestic work and care based on this, our collective focuses so much on scientific, informative and artistic production as well as in grassroots work and awareness, and it helps women – especially the peripheral ones. Our objective, therefore, is to create conditions for women to become aware of their agendas, unite and fight for the Revolution, because only it will free us from the contradictions of capitalist society.
This importance is given because historically individuals born as females, for millennia, they were and are considered a subordinate class of individuals born male. The male sex created these tools to subaltern us (women) in relation to them.
This subernalization happens primarily from our biological characteristics, and capabilities of the female reproductive system, which is used for sexual exploitation and production of labor to be exploited. So it’s important that we women are together, because we all because we have this body, it’s something that unites us – it’s something common. And how the body has been controlled, dominated, by this class which is placed as superior, which is the class of individuals born as male. From this observation, from the perception from this reproductive capacity, ideas are created – which we understand as a super structure – which are ideas that support this subarachnity of women, so men named all things in the world, they told the history of the world from their own perspective. So when we look back at this world named by men. So when we look back at this world named by men, there is a logic that does not concern our history, us telling our story, our point of view, our perception in relation to the whole history lived by humanity until now.
In these places, men even prevented us from being in collective place. They have always had places where they can be among their own, whether formerly in fraternities or taverns, the football game on Wednesday night, even in places where women are the majority, like in religion for example. Religion is something that if we look for data, women really have always been the basis, men are in a space of power but women are the biggest ‘consumers’ of religion, and yet, there is a man there which is the man who organizes that there. So, historically, we women don’t have places where we can be to tell our story from our perspective and understand what unites us, because when we start to tell a narrative from our perspective – from the perspective of women, we realize that even those stains, puberty, motherhood, all of this we can put together as a collective experience, we can expand from our own experience to a collective experience and there is nothing older than the work of generating a life.
Data on femicide, rape, prostitution, physical and verbal, psychological and property aggression women live, in fact, a true and extensive psychological war in which they are victims and many are far from understanding that they are part of a gear, of control and exploitation of their bodies and their workforce. They don’t even understand the countless symbolic tools created by patriarchy that serves to convince and alienate them from inequalities and violence. That’s because patriarchy shapes our way of thinking, it shapes how men and women are seen and even the desires of what we women want. That’s why we often see women who don’t even have the agency to actually choose a different life.
Well, we see that our current situation is one of retrogression of women’s rights, and of all minorities in general. Postmodernism diluted the class struggle into merely discursive problems, today in universities or in spaces of knowledge production in general, are no longer based on means of overcoming capitalism, the collective has been individualized but we know that these are the places where contradictions are most intensified, where there is the greatest reaction and resistance.
In Brazil there is still a relatively comfortable situation…What the revolutionary movement needs to do is throw open the contradictions of class, race and gender and organize the popular uprising into an autonomous and organized force. We believe that the Rojava experience is one of the most important to analyze and learn from Kurdish women. In Brazil, despite the misogyny and brutal violence that women suffer there has not yet been a female awareness and revolt. It is necessary to look at Rojava in its theory and in its practice, so that we can build a Brazilian women’s liberation movement in solidarity with women around the world.
Finally, I would like to say that the Rojava Revolution shows us that it is not possible to have individual liberation without social liberation. We learned from Rojava that the liberation of women determines the liberation of the entire society and all parts of life. Without women, there is no Revolution. We hope to build, in Brazil and Latin America, a society based on the principles of Rojava.
In women’s liberation, in truly democratic social organization – which counts on the participation of all, in international solidarity in the abolition of classes and in the abolition of the misogyny of the sex-gender system.”
