On April 9th, the Alabama Governor Robert Bentley signed “TRAP” bill HB-57. TRAP stands for “Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers”, but the acronym is quite apt given the implications of the bill. This latest assault on women’s rights has potentially catastrophic implications for women’s health, and most significantly impacts working and poor women in the state.

A socialist perspective on fighting women’s oppression by Hannah Sell, on behalf of the Socialist Party (CWI England & Wales)

For over a hundred years, March 8th has been the day on which to commemorate the great struggles of working women for a better deal at work and in society. It is also the day to celebrate the contribution of women – some famous, many unknown - in the fight against oppression and for socialism.

The right wing “war on women” was well-publicized during the months leading up to the 2012 presidential elections. This “war”, which largely targeted women’s reproductive rights, did not cease with the reelection of Barack Obama in November.

For working-class women worldwide, 2012 marked a year of vicious attacks. Ongoing austerity and budget cuts mean women are paying for the economic crisis more than ever. There have been a number of slanderous and outrageous accusations from right-wing politicians, pundits, and even a Supreme Court judge that, in “legitimate” cases of rape, a woman can control her body into not conceiving. Even though there is increased awareness around the issue of domestic violence, it has not slowed the violence that is forced on women every day.

Protests have broken out across India following the gang rape of a young women on a bus in Delhi which are now likely to continue following the victim’s tragic death. These protests, and the initial brutal attacks on protesters in Delhi, have brought to the fore the questions not just of women’s safety and rights but also of police and political corruption and oppression rooted in both India’s feudal legacy and modern capitalist development.

EVERY YEAR IN Britain alone 85,000 women are raped. One in four women and one in 20 men are thought to be affected by rape at some point in their lifetimes. The emotional and psychological after-effects of being raped are well documented. But it’s also not just about those individuals. Rape has a huge impact on our society.

With the support of big business, right-wing politicians have dramatically stepped up their assault on women. In 2011 alone, individual states enacted a record-setting 92 new laws restricting access to abortion services, largely through attacking reproductive health care facilities like Planned Parenthood. The facilities that don’t get shut down completely are being starved of the funding they need to provide crucial services for women.

The Joint Strike Coordinating Committee of Rustenburg calls on other strike committees to join in to march to the "Union Building", the seat of South Africa’s government and president in Pretoria, next Saturday, 13 October.

Street harassment is one of many ways that sexism presents itself. Capitalism conditions people to see women as subordinate to men. To fully end the problem in a permanent way, we need to fight for a socialist world where society isn’t organised around the production of commodities for profit and a new culture of cooperation, with everyone having a real say in how society is run, opens up the possibility of genuine equality in personal relationships.

This year has been marked by heinous attacks on women’s rights. The Slutwalk move­ment emerged after a Toronto cop, Michael Sanguinetti, suggested women avoid rape by “not dressing like sluts.” The protests that followed hinted at the revival of the feminist movement.

On the world stage, the case of Julian Assange is about U.S. imperialism’s need to punish WikiLeaks. There is no doubt that the Swedish state and the government would be happy to assist the US. However, the case is also about serious allegations of rape, which must be investigated.

It would have been difficult to predict a year ago that a group of “third generation feminist punk rockers” calling themselves “Pussy riot” and dressed in brightly colored balaclavas and wooly stockings would not only become a symbol of the rapidly growing opposition to Putin but also the subject of his vindictive wrath.

The European capitalists have created the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) to bail out struggling economies. But the combined debts of Spain and Italy, next in the firing line, amount to €2.8 trillion, six times the resources of the ESM! Economists and politicians say a collapse of the euro is inconceivable yet the same was said of the Soviet Union.

In this global economic crisis, there is again an opportunity for political representatives of capital to radically reconfigure class relations. To manage this systemic global economic downturn, which includes a crisis for labor (long periods of unemployment), crisis of accumulation (loss of profits), governments had to find a way to deal with the massive amount of commercial and financial debt in the system.