“The specific character of [women's] oppression cannot be explained away by equating different situations through superficial and childish simplifications[:]

It is true that both the woman and the male worker are condemned to silence by their exploitation. But under the current system, the worker's wife is also condemned to silence by her worker-husband. In other words, in addition to the class exploitation common to both of them, women must confront a particular set of relations that exist between them and men, relations of conflict and violence that use physical differences as their pretext.”

Source: Women's Liberation and the African Freedom Struggle

Last update Nov. 29, 2024. History

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Thomas Sankara12

President of Upper Volta 1949–1987

Melissa Farley (1942) American psychologist

Prostitution, Trafficking, and Cultural Amnesia (2006)

“Anti-feminism is also operating whenever any political group is ready to sacrifice one group of women, one faction, some women, some kinds of women, to any element of sex-class oppression: to pornography, to rape, to battery, to economic exploitation, to reproductive exploitation, to prostitution. There are women all along the male-defined political spectrum, including both extreme ends of it, ready to sacrifice some women, usually not themselves, to the brothels or the farms. The sacrifice is profoundly anti-feminist; it is also profoundly immoral…”

Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) Feminist writer

"Anti-feminism," Right Wing Women (1983), pp. 230-231.

“As a rule, white abolitionists either defended the industrial capitalists or expressed no conscious class loyalty at all. This unquestioning acceptance of the capitalist economic system was evident in the program of the women’s rights movement as well. If most abolitionists viewed slavery as a nasty blemish which needed to be eliminated, most women’s righters viewed male supremacy in a similar manner—as an immoral flaw in their otherwise acceptable society. The leaders of the women’s rights movement did not suspect that the enslavement of Black people in the South, the economic exploitation of Northern workers and the social oppression of women might be systematically related.”

Angela Davis (1944) American political activist, scholar, and author

Women, Race and Class (1983)

“workers then have a strong stake in the preservation of the very system that exploits them because the destruction of that system entails the destruction of their savings.”

David Harvey (1935) British anthropologist

Source: The Limits To Capital (2006 VERSO Edition), Chapter 9, Money, Credit And Finance, p. 263

“A worker is protected from his employer by the existence of other employers for who he can go to work. An employer is protected from exploitation by his employees by the existence of other workers whom he can hire. The consumer is protected from exploitation by a given seller by the existence of other sellers from whom he can buy.”

Milton Friedman book Free to Choose

Source: Free to Choose (1980), Ch. 8 "Who Protects the Workers?", p. 246

“Intersectionality is a concept for understanding oppression, not exploitation. Many Black feminists acknowledge the systemic roots of racism and sexism, but place far less emphasis than Marxists on the connection between the system of exploitation and oppression. Marxism is necessary because it provides a framework for understanding the relationship between oppression and exploitation and also identifies the agency for creating the material and social conditions that will make it possible to end both oppression and exploitation: the working class. Workers not only have the power to shut down the system, but also to replace it with a socialist society, based on collective ownership of the means of production. Although other groups in society suffer oppression, only the working class possesses this collective power. So the concept of intersectionality needs Marxist theory to realize the kind of unified movement that is capable of ending all forms of oppression. At the same time, Marxism can only benefit from integrating left-wing Black feminism into our own politics and practice.”

Sharon Smith (writer) (1956) American historian

A Marxist Case For Intersectionality (2017)

“There is no such thing as the universal ‘Man’ never has been, never will be, there is the worker and there is the one who exploits the worker and those who abet him.”

Elfriede Jelinek book Wonderful, Wonderful Times

P 219
Wonderful, Wonderful Times (1990)

“As women we are workers, organisers, managers, advisers and more importantly nation builders. One woman can make a difference but many women can change the world.”

Thokozani Khuphe (1963) Deputy Prime Minister of Zimbabwe

Source: Zimbabwe: Gender Equality A Right (2010)

“I'm a hard-worker because you need to be that throughout life. Musicians will be hard-workers until both political background and system to change - not this time. If those changes happen, we will be only "workers."”

Osvaldo Pugliese (1905–1995) Argentine pianist, tango composer

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“The worker and the employer are now brothers who cannot be separated one from the other. The days of exploitation of the whole for the benefit of the individual have gone. The worker and the employer are now brothers, working side by side in harmony and solidarity for the people and the immortal Iraqi Republic.”

Abd al-Karim Qasim (1914–1963) Prime Minister of Iraq

Speech delivered in the gardens of the Shaab Hall (May 1, 1959).
Principles of the 14th July Revolution (1959)

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