 See, there's no shortage of proof that women in the world that we live in right now are facing barbaric conditions. Everyday women and young girls are racked with fear about the man walking behind us in the dark about how to tell our partners that we're not in the mood. Women everywhere are facing violence, sexual assault and often times murder. A news during the first covid lockdown was filled with the stories of women facing domestic violence. The French police reported a 30% increase in domestic violence reports during this time. In Spain, a domestic abuse hotline reported an 18% increase in calls in the first two weeks of lockdown. And in 2020, 10 women a day were killed in Mexico. And this was not a product of COVID, but an ongoing problem which well predated this. And since the murder of Sarah Everard back in March, there have been 81 femisides in Britain alone, with Sabina Nessa representing number 78. And this statistic is actually already out of date, this is from October 2nd, so we can assume this number has risen. Essentially in 28 weeks, 81 women were killed. This is nearly three women a week just in Britain. Girls in schools and universities have exposed their male counterparts disgusting attitudes towards them with groups like Everyone's Invited, a website which aims to expose the disgusting attitudes of men towards these women and young girls. It's showing this horrendous talk of sexual violence against not just women, but really, really young women. Those who can remember back to 2018 will likely remember the hashtag shame on you Warwick, where a year and a half's worth of rape threats towards female students supposedly their best friends were exposed. And similar stories were revealed at Durham University, with male students discussing a Freshers Week competition on how to have sex with the most working class girl on campus, mainly by spiking their drinks, I might add. Women in countries like Pakistan and Afghanistan face up horrent conditions as part and parcel of their life. One of the main things that is done here is women have their noses cut off if they're suspected of having an affair, suspected of having an affair as well. Across the world, there are 12 million child brides every single year. And a few years ago the Me Too movement took off with women exposing wealthy men, especially those in media, for what they'd faced. Figures like Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby and many, many more were exposed for rape and sexual assault. And of course the whole ruling strata of society was caught up in the Jeffrey Epstein revelations. Our very own Prince Andrew was found to have engaged in sexual activity with a 17-year-old, and Bill Clinton was implicated in this as well, not that either came as particular surprises. Trump spoke of grabbing women by the pussy, and Boris Johnson suggested that men should be responsible for controlling their wives. End Violence Against Women, a campaign to carry out its name, says that one-fifth of women have faced some kind of sexual violence since they were 16. And I would even question this statistic as seeming low, as more and more women report these crimes and report that every woman that they speak to has been through these things as well. Social media has been awash with women discussing the best practices to keep safe, the best way to hold our keys as a weapon, to always have a man with us in the dark, but this isn't enough. It seems that whatever women do, however many precautions we take, there is no surefire way to stay safe. Sexual assault hashtags on all social media platforms have millions of hits to them. One thing is very clear. Women, and rightly so, women do not feel safe. So it is clear that this violence against women is an endemic problem. Across the world, women fear for their safety. But why is this the case? Why does this violence against women exist? This is an important question because it is only through understanding where this is rooted that we can ever truly find a solution. And in having the wrong analysis of where this violence comes from, there is no possible way to find a solution. If you look at a large sweth of academics, either from feminist or misogynist persuasions, you could be convinced that violence against women exists because men are naturally stronger, naturally more brutish, naturally violent. Depending on which side of the debate your author is on, they might argue that this is legitimate or illegitimate. The debate in these circles is not whether it is genetically inescapable for men to beat rape and murder women, but whether it is morally correct or not. The radical feminists of the 1960s and 70s are where these ideas take their highest form. So Shulameth Firestone, for example, author of Dialectic of Sex, made the argument that because of our bodies, women have always been a lower caste to men and that men are genetically just erotic creatures. Betty Friedman, for example, said men weren't really the enemy, they were fellow victims suffering from an outdated masculine mystique that made them feel unnecessarily inadequate when there were no more bears to kill. But what does this argument amount to in reality? That men have always wanted to kill and beat something and that if it can't be bears it must be women? That men are genetically strong and genetically violent and this is what leads to rape, assault and murder of women. Christophe Domenjeu from the University of Paris, who actually considers himself a Marxist, argues the male monopoly over hunting and weapons has everywhere given men a position of strength relative to women, meaning that women everywhere were placed in such a situation that they could be reduced to mere instruments in men's strategies. So men are strong with big weapons and women are small and weak with no weapons and therefore we are raped and murdered. But in reality of course these are the same arguments used by someone like Jordan Peterson. Take for example his idea of enforced monogamy. The idea that monogamy should be a hardline cultural norm because if it isn't then only a small number of men will be able to find women to mate with them and this will lead to more violent men. Essentially if men cannot get sex then they will be led to rape and murder women. But as Marxist we would disagree with the entire premise of this. It is not part of some unmovable nature of men to commit these violent heinous acts. This argument takes what is happening now and it places it unthinkingly on the rest of history. In fact the past was not just a less developed version of today, it was not just a more primitive version of today. It was fundamentally different in many many ways. The truth is if this system of women being treated as sexual objects to men, if this is in the biology of men and women then it must have existed in every single society where both men and women have existed, so every single society. If women being second class citizens is rooted in our biology, rooted in our bodies then it must be that this has always been the case in every society we could come across. But importantly that isn't true. So one study from 1989 found the traditional nomadic or semi-nomadic Sam people were one of only six societies in the world where domestic violence was almost unheard of. And what's different about this society? Well it's a tribal society, it doesn't have a ruling class, it's based on a more egalitarian premise mainly due to lack of surplus. And here violence against women, domestic violence, rape and sexual subordination were unheard of. This is one example and there are many many more but this one example alone disproves the entire premise of what these biological determinists say. Because if men are genetically determined to be violent towards women then why weren't the Sandmen violent? Another example of this is the Bisonhorn Marrier tribe in central India. So vice reported that there were no sex crimes in this tribe. There were no rules, laws or stigmas attached to sex but the tribe is allowed to experiment with sexual partners in order to see compatibility in relationships and sex before marriage is encouraged. And in this society rape and violence against women are unheard of. And this is in stark difference to the absolute crisis for women in the rest of India. So if it isn't the case that this violence against women has always existed, if it hasn't existed in every single society and therefore if it isn't rooted in the biology of men and women then what is it? Why for thousands of years have we been able to trace this back, trace examples of this rape and violence? Why were books like Tess of the Durbarville written for example and why are there examples in ancient Greek and Roman society of this kind of violence? Well, in order for this violence to exist two things have to be true. One, men have to have the desire and the will to commit these violent acts and secondly they have to have the opportunity and they have to be able to get away with it. And I will come on to the second, sorry I'll come on to the first part of this thank you, in a second but basically it seems from our anthropological understanding that neither of these two things existed. So to talk briefly about the ability and the means to commit this violence, this violence in many of these pre-class societies the general trend existed where partners and children lived in the women's families. In fact many men had to ask for the approval of the mothers and the women in the societies and this meant that they were surrounded day and night by the women's families and this of course increasingly lowers the chances of women being victims of this domestic violence. However this isn't the end of the story because it wasn't merely the case that they were surrounded by the women's family and the women's family had to constantly fight off these acts of sexual violence. Actually these acts did not exist en masse in these societies. So the question then becomes where did this change? Why now is it such a deeply embedded thing in society that women are the sexual objects of men and that men should display their power over women through this violence? In ancient Sumer, laws punished more harshly adultery than rape and in fact the gods engage in sexual violence with no recourse. Zeus is a well-known sexual predator and for example he pretends to be al-Khamini's husband which results in the birth of Hercules and in many situations rape actually resulted in the payment to the father or the husband possibly in the form of another unraped woman. In Mesopotamia this exact situation occurred with a famous rape trial resulting in the trading of wives between the rapist and the husband of the raped. The crime was not against the woman but against the man who had had his property damaged in this situation. So what this example shows from Mesopotamia is what we've seen to more or less of an extent ever since that women are considered objects of the sexual exploitation of men but why is this the case? Why do women hold this position in Greece, in Sumer, in Mesopotamia but not in the tribal societies which predated? Well what I think is clear from these situations is that women were considered this property and this is especially true of their sexuality. So having had this property damaged men received a repayment to make up for it and from Engels study of history we can begin to understand the development of this position for women. So Engels referred to the world historic defeat of the female sex which is still to this day being seen. Engels in the origins of the family private property in the state drawn on the work from anthropologist Morgan he says the position of the woman changes fundamentally in the development of private property and as private property began to develop in the hands of men suddenly there was a need to pass down this property to your children. When society is developing where society is developing where those who have private property will not have to suffer this brutal exploitation and oppression those developing private property will work to pass down their property to their own children to their lineage and in this change women became tied to men women became tied to the home and more than this Engels says the domestic labour of the woman no longer counted beside the acquisitions of necessity of life by the man the latter was everything and the former an unimportant extra. So women were tied to men in this cultural and economic sense and in fact the word family itself comes from the Latin word familiar which means domestic slave women are suddenly the domestic slaves of the men in their life but why does this matter you might ask why does a new form of how labourers divided a new form of how things work why does this mean the world historic defeat of the female sex and how does this lead to what we see today how does this lead to women having to know the best way to hold their keys to fight off an attack or being afraid to walk home in the dark well it was within this change that people became property when one class can own another class through slavery surf to more wage slavery it is in this transition that means women become the greater property of men they are considered sexual and child-bearing slaves to the men in their life and this is a product of class society and this is a product of a system where one class can own another this is a product of women becoming this the sexual object and existing for the pleasure and survival of men all of this is a conclusion of this material change in the mode of production and the truth is that the defeat of women in this time it did not stop with the economic and the material overthrow of their liberty but a battle of ideas took place in order to embed in the consciousness of both men and women that this lower status of women was genetic and this comrades this is what we mean when we talk about the material basis of violence against women and women's oppression and of course we can still see the product of this property relationship today under capitalism although it has eased so in the Sopranos for example if anyone's watched it Richie April sums up the situation when he says if you want to raise your hand to a woman you give her your last name first then it's not a my fucking business essentially once you're married to a woman it's your right to hit her because she's your property and in fact marital rape has only been a crime in Britain since the 1980s and despite this rape being technically illegal it is only a tiny minority of sexual assault cases which are ever prosecuted rape that happens in relationships and marriages it flies into the radar even more and many people don't even consider this rape but a fundamental right of marriage in 2018 a study was done in Britain which said that 24% of the 4,000 people questioned said that non-consensual sex in a marriage or in a long-term relationship wasn't rape and this statistic actually only slightly changed when you look at it between men and women so that means that that women as well as men see a long-term relationship or a marriage as constant consent for sex but this isn't the case and the last few years have been awash with women telling stories about raping marriage and long-term relationships it's not a fundamental product of love or of shared living that means that rape is likely to happen it is the relationship of women to men as one of property that means that this happens the creation of class society a private ownership and a private property in any sense that led to women being seen as part of that property and as the crisis of capitalism worsens so too does the situation for women who get pushed into more more brutish lifestyles get pushed into more crisis poverty breeds this violence in Myanmar for example during the COVID lockdowns prostitution rose exponentially women were forced to put themselves in harm's way to feed their families i read a story of one woman who previously worked in a garment factory who said that she had to stop breastfeeding her baby in order to become a prostitute and that she now feeds her baby cold rice and milk and it was a choice for this woman between continuing to breastfeed her baby until she was no until she could no longer get any more milk until she was so malnourished that she couldn't produce any milk or spending all of her time walking the streets putting herself in vulnerable situations with violent men and in India as well there is a strata of people who sit on the highways with nowhere else to go they beg for food and for money and they're in a situation where they will do anything to keep themselves fed and these people have absolutely no status in society when they go missing when they're kidnapped when they're taken by truckers driving past there's no search party no police report filed many of these people are children are really really young girls and their poverty means they can be taken without any recourse and as this poverty gets worse the people with power abuse it more so the role of the police in women's safety really points towards this obviously Wayne Cousins has been in the news lately but he is not the only person who has been implicated the murder of Sarah Everard was a vile and really disgusting example of this endemic problem in the police so since 2009 15 police officers are known to have killed women in the UK spy cops of course had relationships with women under false pretenses Mark Kennedy if anyone is following this case Mark Kennedy has been in the news for the relationship that he had with a political activist whilst being a spy cop and most importantly rather than this just being one bad apple Mark Kennedy's senior officers were aware of this relationship and turned a blind eye to it and another example of this is a recent testimony from Sue Fish a female police officer who reported that when she was in her 20s she was left in the car by a senior officer who went to have sex with a woman who he had come across whilst on duty the power imbalance of an on duty cop and a vulnerable woman does not leave much romance in this situation and in fact Sue Fish reported that sex on duty was seen as a perk of the job and there were 750 allegations of sexual misconduct made against the police between 2016 and 2021 and who is surprised by this the armed bodies of men that defend capitalism that are given a monopoly on violence they're committing violent acts the police are trained to hold a disdainful attitude towards the great unwashed and not to keep us safe but to violently hold us down when we look at the ruling class in and of itself the position that women hold especially working women is is that they are treated as an extreme object of sexual gratification for men so I'm not sure if anyone can remember a situation with the president's club charity dinner a few years ago where the all female weight staff were told to wear skimpy black outfits matching underwear and high heels and they had to put up they had to put up with holding hands with the guests with the guests pulling them onto their lats and putting their hands up their skirts and there is also a report from a student at St Paul's boy's school in London a very well off private school and he gave this report and he said you would be entirely correct in saying St Paul's boy's school is intricately built upon the unadulterated wish for boys to show their sexual prowess through rape and assault I recall that age old theme tune sung at rugby games including the lyrics I'm St Paul's till I die fuck her sleeping fuck her dying if she had wings I'd fuck her flying and when I looked up this school I found out that boys as young as seven attended so they hear this chant at the rugby they hear what the older boys are saying and this is what they look up to and what did the me too movement show if not exactly this that rich and wealthy men will use their power and their status in society in order to commit these acts of violence against women marks in the manifesto says the bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production he hears the instruments of production are to be exploited and common and naturally can come to no other conclusion than that the lot of being common to all will likewise fall to the woman and what's changed in 173 years under capitalism the issue is the same there may be more liberal views around women's sexuality than in Marx's time but women still face these horrors daily and this is all the more prevalent from bourgeois men because when everyone is property to you and your class women can be broken down into their sexual organs and presented as a machine for your benefit and of course working class men are born and bred and educated in a society which surrounds them with these ideas the working class is not immune to the pressures of bourgeois society and for thousands of years working class men have lived in a society with not just a material war but a war of ideas against women this is no accident but a survival tactic of class society which aims to tell half the working class that they benefit from this system and that if there were a revolution they would lose this benefit but what is beneficial about this relationship what is beneficial about the turning on its head of how men and women relate to each other it is not beneficial to have the de facto right to rape somebody and in fact this aspect of the relationship between men and women it holds men hostage in the idea that class society is beneficial for men where it actually exploits and oppresses everyone who is not a part of the ruling class Connelly once said the working class woman is a slave of a slave and the idea that violence against women is natural that it is something embedded in our biology this is still used by the ruling class today so it may have its roots in the earliest forms of class society but an idea which has come from the necessity of a ruling class to a press it can become woven into various aspects of culture today so in the legal scripts in the stories of the gods and the actions of these men in the early days of class society we see the origins of things like the St Paul's rugby theme song and to go back to one of my earlier points for this violence to be committed against women men have to have the means and the will and what is this but not if not the means the complete acceptance and not just acceptance but de facto praise of this violence holds men completely unaccountable for these actions so as Mark said philosophers have only interpreted the world the point however is to change it and this runs through the core of everything that marxists do and in this discussion it is so easy to see the need to overthrow things violence against women must be abolished in all of its forms and Lenin understood how fundamental the overthrow of women's oppression was when he said we hate yes hate everything and will abolish everything which tortures and oppresses the woman so in the wake of Sarah Everard and Sabina Ness's murders ideas are being thrown around about how we can end this violence Keir Starmer for example in his conference speech said that he promises more police on the streets to stop this violence so given what's been exposed about the police attitudes and the complicity towards this violence what would more police on the streets do if not just commit more violent acts Sadiq Karn has come out saying that the government should make misogyny a hate crime as if hate crimes aren't committed every single day as if the technical illegality of rape stops it Boris Johnson who is not known for his respect of women has suggested that we need more female police officers to stop the problem but when the police are fundamentally sexist and violent when this is trained into them at every level how will this help Cressida Dick the current commissioner of the met police is of course a woman and yet these crimes still go under the radar they are still allowed and this argument is extended even more by those who say that more representation across the board would mean less violent acts we just have to look at mexico to see the failure of these ideas where in the parliament women make up over half of the of the seats there yet femicide runs right through the country there is no solution for the masses of women who do not hold this power and the truth is under capitalism there is no solution for this crisis capitalism is rotten to the core the barbaric acts of violence of sexual assault and of femicide are so widespread that we can see in this situation alone the truth in what Lenin said capitalism is horror without end and the truth is that if this violence is rooted in class society then it is only if class society is overthrown that we can ever get rid of it the ruling class of every epoch is not only allowed but actually encouraged and embedded this violence in order to keep stability men are seen as the sexual objects of men we can never see the situation of women that's violence free and if what we as it's what more one is created in the world more women are pushed into these situations so the conclusion of this is two things one is that as the crisis of capitalism worsens women will be forced into more violent situations it is not just prostitution but it is being forced to stay in abusive relationships because of lack of money it is having no resources or simply no professionals able to help you because your services have been cut to the bone in australia in 2018 half the women asking for rooms in domestic violence shelters were turned away and things have only gotten worse since then even in 2012 in the uk between 275 and 300 women a day were turned away from the first domestic violence shelter that they turned up at because of lack of beds the lack of resources is not a secondary question and the second conclusion here is that until every person has complete economic liberation women will never truly be free and this is what the bolsheviks tried to do in the wake of the russian revolution almost straight away they legalized divorce and they made it legally very simple and this might seem like a small act but to have the right to divorce an abusive partner this is not something small for those who don't have it abortion was legalized another key step in allowing women to be free of men women visited workplaces to check the working conditions for the women there including their treatment by the men in the workplace and these reforms were great leaps forward for the safety of women but violence against women was not overthrown with the russian revolution and we must be very clear on this brutal prostitution still existed women still face terrible conditions at home with abusive partners so why was that the case the reality of this situation is there was still this one tier there was still scarcity and because of that a lack of economic liberation and the more that this economic hardship exists as we can see today the more that women are forced into these unsafe situations as Karl Marx once said if a socialist society is not able to build up the productive forces all the old crap will reappear so what we learn here is that it is a material war which must be fought for the liberation of women from this violence it is not simply a matter of just changing ideas but ideas do have an important role to play the cultural idea of women being less than men of women being the sexual objects of men this is something which has taken on a life of its own so as marxist we must understand how the role of this idea has impacted the way we live from the very origins of class society from the emergence of this violence against women the idea that women are subordinate to men this has been pushed through society at every single level so from the stories told in these ancient societies and the myths created around a woman's role as a slave to the man all the way to video games and tv shows which which show this violence to be glamorous we can see this idea being woven into the fabric of society however if we take even a glimpse at class struggle throughout history it becomes clear how even the beginnings of working class action can start to overturn this and all the old ideas start to disappear and this really shows to me that it is not innate in men these these ideas of violence these ideas that women are lower than them because with the honest unification on a class basis of men and women these ideas can be overturned so in the 1984 minus strike the position of women in these communities and how they were viewed by the men in their lives was completely overturned Brenda Proctor for example founder of women against pick closures said that miners had a new found respect for women and this is not insignificant women in their own communities in communities which had previously been awashed with these backwards ideas were suddenly seen not just as subordinate to men but as of equal stature and deserving of equal respect and then let's get forward 30 years and halfway around the world to pakistan and the movement of the Pashtun people the pakistani state represents some of the most backwards and abhorrent ideas for women women are often trapped in their homes by their fathers their husbands and even their sons and they face immense violence attacks and sexual assault at the hands of both strangers and relatives however in 2018 there was a movement of the Pashtun people with the women taking leading roles and in this in these moments these women were protected in a huge way from this violence by the movement around them and let's go back in time again to 1871 on the paris commune which there's a talk on this afternoon mistakes were made on the question of women for example women were not given the right to vote in the commune and there was also a trend which pushed the push the idea that prostitution be part of the commune because they were unclean and immoral however the material facts of the commune the battles of the commune itself created the necessity for these prostitutes to be involved in revolutionary activities and this lifted the idea that these women were less than uh lesser and that there were only sexual objects so what all of these examples express and really the fundamental point of the marxist solution to violence is that ideas are rooted in material reality and they need a material solution facing this violence is not something natural to being a woman and the idea that this is acceptable on a normal part of human life this hasn't just appeared from nowhere yes we must challenge these ideas we must say that it is not acceptable what women go through that women should be able to walk down the street at night that they should be believed when they speak out about what's happening to them and that they should have the autonomy to say no to their partners and have that be respected but this alone however will not be enough there must be a complete turnover of all the old crap there must be a complete end to class society which it's built itself on holding women hostage there must be a complete end to the need of a ruling class to divide and conquer there must be a complete liberation of both women and men on an economic basis no woman should ever have to choose between her safety um or the ability to house and feed herself and her children in order to make this a reality however we must live in a society which can provide housing and food to all those who need it and this cannot come on the basis of the free hand of the market this can only come through economic planning of the working class when we raise the slogan women free for men both free from capital this is what we're talking about look at what the russian revolution achieved massive reforms passed overnight because there was no longer a need for this division between men and women and we can achieve this again in the snap of our fingers with workers power but where they fell short where they didn't manage to economically liberate people we can do better than this we can go further than this because far from russia a hundred years ago we live in a developed society a society of mass overproduction a society where there are enough homes in london to house all of the homeless people where we have enough food to feed 10 billion people where we have the means to rid ourselves of this women's oppression as a whole and overturn this violent relationship between men and women far from the struggle for resources that the ussr faced we can develop a real socialism on the basis of this surplus and ability to feed house and close everyone we can develop the forces of production and allow for more real freedom more real liberty than we have ever seen before and as we see the withering away of class society the basis of this tension between men and women will two wither away we can see relationships on the basis of love on the basis of attraction and choice rather than economic coercion and then and only then can a propaganda war really begin to take hold lennon took very seriously the need to educate everyone on women's liberation on an end to discrimination and on women holding the same respect as men in society but until the material basis of this oppression is overthrown until women are no longer in any way at the mercy of men economically until all the old relationships all the old realities of humans being property slaves wage slaves until all of these are overthrown until we can rid ourselves of all of these realities ideas cannot begin to change ultimately while an idea still represents something real while it will continue it will continue to be embedded in the minds of the masses so before these ideas can ever properly take hold we need this economic liberation for men we need for example a fully funded women's shelters housing for all fully funded mental health services which can give women who have faced this trauma the ability to actually heal childcare which is free at the point of access to allow women to be able to work and be economically free of abusive men we need jobs which provide a genuine living wage and we need a reduction in the work week these are not small extras to end violence against women but vital aspects in allowing women to be free of abusive partners they're not separate issues they tie completely together the truth is that this system is more abundant in so many ways it's sending us into extinction in the face of climate change it's stopping us from developing any art and culture it's causing disease death and rampant distrust amongst people and the fight back is beginning women all over the world are standing up against these conditions that they face and not just conditions they face because they are women but conditions they face because they are working class in mexico where the situation is horrific for women the women's day march back in 2020 showed real militancy and it led to a women's strike on march 9 bringing the country to a halt half a million public sector workers struck showing the disguster that people have at a system which keeps them in fear every single day and of course in the wake of the sarah everard murder masses of women came out into london to the vigils and over the week these huge vigils and protests were carried out under the hashtag reclaim the streets and back in 2018 we saw a massive women strike in spain this brought millions of women out onto the streets to show that anger at the situation and actually led to a similar phenomenon in switzerland the year after so millions of women from mexico to spain to britain and many more places they're fed up of feeling scared every day and they're fed up of living in this sick system and many women are drawing the conclusion that without an end to capitalism we can never feel safe violence against women it is only one dot in the picture of the horrors that class society creates and it is only through ending this system that we can ever truly liberate women so i'll say again women free from men and both free from capital thank you comers