Mumia Abu-Jamal -- "What Women Want"

Mumia Abu-Jamal -- "What Women Want"

What half the world wants



"If we look to the ubiquitous commercials that zip past our eyeballs, we would think that most women want the bun-roller or a new and improved derma-peel. Each of which promises a brand new sexier you. But there is a world beyond the glare of the TV screen where women are organizing and fighting for- not a new toy but a new world.



On March 8th 2004, women around the world in LA, England, Argentina, Uganda, Peru, Philadelphia, San Francisco, in Guyana, in southern India, in Trinidad and Tobago, in Spain, women will be staging the 5th Global Women's Strike. A movement involving women in some sixty countries many involved in grassroots organizations. Fighting for payment for housework, for clean safe water resources, for housing, education, gender justice, and peace. In a world where war is now our norm, the Global Women's Strike is part of the vast throng against war and occupation. Not only in Iraq, but in Palestine, in Columbia, in the Congo and in Kashmir. Their organizing slogan, which unites strikers from a broad array of struggles, is deceptively simple: 'Invest in Caring not Killing.'



Although the movement had its beginning years ago in the 'Wages for Housework' movement in England, it has grown considerably into a worldwide anti-racist and anti-war movement. The movement recognizes the basic inequality built into the capitalist economic system. The class, racial and gender based exploitation underlying it all. Women's issues differ from nation to nation and between classes in the same nation. Yet there are also similarities in the fundamentals underlying those differences. On the supportive role played by women in the home, Marxist feminist Selma James in her influential 1973 pamphlet 'Sex, Race and Class' writes: 'Housewives are involved in the production and, what is the same thing, reproduction of workers. What Marx calls labor power. They service those who are daily destroyed by working for wages and who need to be daily renewed and they care for and discipline those who are being prepared to work when they grow up.' At base, James argues, because women's work performs such a critical role in capitalist reproduction, it should receive a commensurate return.



All around the world women are trying to better their condition and that of families and communities. In England, Crossroads Women's center at 230a Kentish Town Road, London NW5 2AB, is coordinating the strike. Their email address is http://www.globalwomenstrike.net. In Peru the Centro de Capacitacion para Trabajadoras del Hogar in Lima can be emailed at ccth [at] terra.com.pe . In Trinidad and Tobago, the National Union of Domestic Employees are organizing, their email address: domestic [at] tstt.net.tt . Here in the US, there are Crossroads women's centers in LA, San Francisco, and Philadelphia. Their email addresses are simple: la [at] crossroadswomen.net ;sf [at] crossroadswomen.net; and philly [at] crossroadswomen.net. Those without Internet access can call them by phone. LA (323)-292-7405, San Francisco (415) 626-4114, and Phily (215)-848-1120.



In Kampala, Uganda the Kaabong Women's Organization is concerned not with war in a distant land, but war at home. For Uganda, there has been war for the past 17 years. Their demand is not just for peace, but for land and for water. For there, as in much in the rest of the world, agriculture rests on the backs of billions of women. The Kaabong Women's organization can be emailed: akulum [at] hotmail.com.”



Available on the Global Women's Strike web: http://www.globalwomenstrike.net or in a

sound file 'mp3' or text on http://www.prisonradio.org/mumia.html