Compiled by Eric Ribellarsi and Toni Kim
” Women being not only oppressed among all the oppressed groups, but also the last group to be liberated are the most reliable, stable, and basic force which needs to be tapped not only in winning the revolution but also in waging continuous revolution.”
” Being left behind in history by no fault of their own, they need to be given space to make mistakes and to learn from them.” -Parvati
In 2006, the Nepali Maoist leader Hisila Yami (Comrade Parvati) published a new work, People’s War and Women’s Liberation in Nepal. This work discusses the experience of the Nepalese revolution and the new approach to women’s liberation that this revolution has developed. Sadly, very few in the West have had access to this work.
We would like to make available a few excerpts from this work which underscore the creativity and new approach being developed by Parvati and the Nepali comrades, as well as some the problems and questions that they are still grappling with in order to move forward in the revolutionary process.
This work has several theses which we have found helpful and interesting, including:
- The oppression of women rose with class society itself, and can only go out of existence with the abolition of class society. The oppression of women is a fundamental contradiction, as fundamental as the class struggle itself.
- Parvati believes that women’s struggle for liberation is fundamental to continuing the revolutionary struggle under socialism. Whereas, in China, emphasis was placed on the existence of equality between men and women with slogans like “women hold up half the sky” and “times have changed, men and women are the same,” Parvati places emphasis on the view that these goals can only be achieved in a communist future. She believes that the women’s struggle is central to carrying forward revolutionary struggle under socialism.
- Much time has been spent in her work to deal with the problems of the lack women’s leadership in revolutionary struggles. She argues that given thousands of years of class society and the way that women have been locked out of theory–not by any fault of their own–it is no surprise that many female comrades have not yet been able to develop as much theoretically. She argues that male comrades need to consciously create a space in the revolutionary struggle for female comrades to be able to step in and do theoretical work.
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Parvati believes that the legacy of Stalin and viewing things as singularities or monoliths (instead of viewing things as unities of opposites) continues to stand in the way of developing women’s leadership in the revolutionary struggle. She argues that many comrades have a tendency to prevent women from becoming leaders for fear that they will make mistakes. Certainly mistakes will be made, but this is part of the contradictory process of developing communist leadership, and not something we should be afraid of.
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