The sexual assault scandal that started with Harvey Weinstein has spread across Hollywood and engulfed the whole of the bosses’ media in the U.S., Canada, Britain, and France. Masses of women workers unleashed their wrath, publicly coming forward to call out their harassers and tormenters, many of them in the bosses’ entertainment industry and the bosses’ governments. Some were shamed into resignation. In France, women shared stories on social media with the hashtag, #Balancetonporc, or “rat out your pig.”
Waves of inspiring anti-sexist stories have even rocked local communities as women workers made the exposure of Weinstein their own.
Communists in the Progressive Labor Party salute this mass bravery. Our class will need it to build a communist world without racism and sexism. Fighting for a movement capable of eliminating capitalism also means analyzing reality, and investigating things like the exposure of Harvey Weinstein.
The reality is: these exposures have nothing to do with any justice under capitalism for the vicious sexist attacks against women workers. Harvey Weinstein’s depraved attacks on women in the movie industry were widely known for decades.
The New York City District Attorneys and the NYPD had evidence against Weinstein but never chose to press charges (NYT, 10/11). The editorial staff at major capitalist news outlets including the New York Times, NBC and New York Magazine suppressed stories exposing Weinstein for years. Reporters not only knew about what was going on, many of them had been victims themselves (Weekly Standard, 10/9).
Capitalists and their media don’t care for women workers. The bosses see women workers, at best, as instruments of production of future workers, or as objects. Capitalist media empires rake in staggering profits from sexist marketing and pornography, while their friends in the informal capitalist economy traffic women workers into slavery around the world.
Women and girls comprise the majority of the largest disaster facing the international working class: refugees forced across racist capitalist borders from Central America to South Sudan, DR Congo, Syria and the Middle East. Across these borders, women workers are herded into refugee camps and subject to extreme poverty, abuse, exploitation, and trafficking. In Yemen, the Saudi and U.S. bombings have forced women into even more extreme conditions.
The reason the bosses’ media is focusing on the Harvey Weinstein scandal has to do with shifting allegiances within and among the capitalist class, and their Democratic Party.
U.S. Capitalists: Changing Tactics, Institutions
In the first place, the movie industry, the media and the political gridlock in Washington, D.C. are losing a fair amount of the influence they once had. Animals like Weinstein and others play important roles for the bosses, but that role is changing thanks to political-economic pressures (Weekly Standard, 10/9) as U.S. capitalism becomes more desperate. No longer protected by the capitalist state’s media, old scores are being settled, and victims are stepping forward.
Weinstein’s exposure is also about the direction the capitalists may take the Democratic Party. In the opening months of the Democratic and Republican primaries for the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton’s campaign strategy revolved around promoting Trump as the Republican contender in the general election. Their thinking was that Trump’s gutter racism and sexism would make him easier to beat than a more mainstream candidate, like Marco Rubio.
The election result came as a shock to Clinton, the capitalist class, and probably even Trump himself. It led to disaster for the Clinton electoral machine and the Democratic Party, and there have been brutal internal fights within their party since. These fights reflect the capitalist class’ deep disagreements on how to win workers in the U.S. to support a more liberal, inclusive brand of U.S. imperialism to fight rival, emboldened imperialist powers like China and Russia.
The fight within the Democratic Party has on the one hand, politicians like Clinton, Obama, and Nancy Pelosi. On the other, there’s Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and others who have drawn masses of students and working class youth angry at the effects of capitalism, and looking for leadership.
Harvey Weinstein was not only one of the most powerful men in Hollywood, he was one of the Clintons’ principal donors. Less than one month after Weinstein was exposed, a new book by former Democratic National Committee (DNC) chairwoman Donna Brazile, attacking Hillary’s campaign, is a one-two punch to the Clinton-Obama wing. Taking down Weinstein is a blow to an entire wing of the DNC. For some in the capitalist class anxiously watching China and Russia’s imperial rise, the Clinton-Obama wing may have outlived its usefulness.
Hillary Clinton’s racist, sexist career of service to U.S. imperialism is rightfully hated by millions of workers, but her decline is no victory for the working class. On the contrary, the bosses’ media’s extensive coverage of these scandals and ensuing mass anger may indicate, or certainly precipitate, a resurgent Sanders-Warren wing within their party. And this wing, as beholden to capitalism and defending U.S. imperialism as Clinton or Trump, may pose the greatest danger to the working class yet.
Imperialism and Fascism Rising
It’s no coincidence that the bosses are also infighting over tax reform, to squeeze workers and even certain sectors of the ruling class to pay for their imperialist war machine and defend their blood-soaked empire. They’ll sort out their problems soon enough. To defend U.S. imperialism, the bosses will need fascism, which means first imposing discipline among the U.S. capitalist class.
The disagreements over how the DNC runs is a tactical argument about how to fool and mislead the working class into supporting U.S. imperialism the best.
And once the bosses settle their factional disputes, the next step will be to discipline the working class through a combination of increasing terror on one hand, and loyalty on the other. We are already seeing hints of this as the bosses try to imply that somehow young working-class children, particularly Black and Latin children are potential sexual predators who have to be brought into line. In a perverse hypocrisy that we cannot allow to go unopposed, the sick rulers who have been promoting this horribly sexist culture and destroying the lives of Black and Latin children through a racist segregated school system, pushing of drugs and cutting benefits are now seeking to engage young women in joining them in painting young men as the enemy.
At the moment, Black working class youth like those rebelling in St. Louis, and Charlottesville last summer are disillusioned with U.S. capitalism. That means opportunities for communists in PLP to grow our movement.
Smash Sexism, Racism and Imperialism
For communists, the bravery of the mainly women workers raising their voices and demanding justice demands support from the working class.
Support means both fighting back on the job, and building study groups to study capitalism and the science of revolution. Capitalism depends on sexist, racist and nationalist divisions among workers to extract maximum profits from them all. Under capitalism, women workers, especially Black women, suffer the sharpest and most intense form of capitalism’s exploitation and oppression.
The idea that the ruling class could take on sexism is absurd. The industries where these animals reign are the drivers of the sexist culture that glorifies the objectification of women. In fact, not only are women objectified, but men and women are constantly encouraged to objectify not only others but themselves as well.
Capitalism commodifies everything. Sex is used to sell everything from soap to cars. The wage system makes it impossible for workers to own anything, including our bodies. We are entrapped by the need to work for the capitalists, seek loans from the capitalists and make a living in the industries controlled by the capitalists.
What the bosses offer is more women in the halls of power as the best they can do. But the 500,000 children in Iraq starved to death on the orders of Madeleine Albright, or the now millions killed in wars started at the behest of Secretary of State Clinton let us know how that story always ends.
Wherever capitalism can divide workers the deepest, the worse off ALL workers are. One century ago, striking women workers in Russia knew this. When they convinced men workers to join their strike, together they set into motion what became the Bolshevik Revolution—and the world’s first workers’ state. They proved we can seize power and run the world for ourselves. It will be done again. Join PLP, and help make that day come sooner.