Feminicides in Italy: demonstrating that it is not matter of isolated cases
We need to focus the political climate, the ideological, and social framework in which the killings of women occur today, demonstrating that it is not matter of isolated cases, to be seen singularly, but a trend that unfortunately is increasing and can be responded only by the direct mobilisation of women.
The fact that the killings of women are taking an alarming scale, as a low intensity war against women, leads the courts themselves to start talking about “femicide”.
To describe the new level of the relationship between man and woman, we used the title of a book: the “Men Who Hate Women” reflects, although within the limits of the title of a novel, these relationships in the the stage of the modern fascism. The modern fascism is the structuring all that is reactionary, chauvinist into a system. In this sense, the killings will not stop, nor the measures of law and control those can slow down them. The modern fascism feeds on a mass level the killings. They have the characteristic of being repetitive, emulative - the more you talk about them, the more they are taken as example. The press, the Berlusconi TVs play a key role in this. They amplify or minimize and hide. On some of the events they build up obscene talk shows, on other they fall silent, this way they direct and/or divert attention, impose ideas, opinions, with selection criteria often racist and classist, that anyway try to use of these killings and violence to strengthen the ruling politics, ideology, “values”, while hide the social causes. Right there, rather, are the grounds of the escalating killings of women. They must be seen as a reflect of the overall condition of women and social reality. Often they tend to explain a femicide as private case, result of jealousy, or fit madness. But, even if we focus on single episodes, we see that individuals who kill find the humus suitable, favorable, which in a sense makes them feel empowered, not at all guilty, almost allowed. This humus is the modern fascism, and it makes the issue of violence against women, particularly the killings, quite different today. Of course, the killings and the violence there have also been in the past, why today is the problem. We must expose and oppose the aspects of the current killings and sexual violence, as parts of: the political climate - the sexist-racist humus – reaction to the women who want to rebel, who want to break oppressive ties - the role of the family. Today we face this war, and these are the battle fields.
While, earlier, women underwent in silence also the continuing violence, today men can not rely as before on this silence. Today women tolerate less, break the ties, rebel, they drive out boyfriends, husbands, etc. “You have to be mine, you are mine or you are not”, it is what a man said before killing his ex-girlfriend. The breaking of this concept of possession, property, that already existed but now is being questioned by women, is what is not accepted.
These killings and violence as a reaction of men to women who want to break the previous ties, the previous life, are fascist crimes, because they are moved by a fascist concept to attack every thrust of rebellion. And also fascist is often the atmosphere of widespread complicity, before and after the killings, in which men are considered respectable, where who knows does not speak and covers not only because he has an individualistic mind, but because he shares the same concept, sexist and fascist, against women.
Another aspect that today makes the femicide “new” is the role played by the family. The family has always been ground of the oppression of women, the tomb of love, a ghetto. We write “in death of the
family” because most of the killings take place within the family or family relationships.
What is family? Why the family is death?
In social terms, it is the cell of society, that expresses, in synthesis, processes and contradictions that then occur across society. The problem is that now the family, on the one hand, is actually in crisis, it can no longer be an element of conservation, but, at the same time, is extremely exalted by the Church, by the government, by the State. Also this aspect makes in certain sense different, modern the issue of killings of women.
The government, the State, use instrumentally the killings of women to adopt measures that do not help women, but increase the level of repression and control. On the killing of Giovanna Reggiani in 2007 in Rome, the government of that day, center-left, based the “security packet”, as desired by the Northern League and the “sheriff-mayors” of right and left. On that occasion, we wrote: “... The securitarian hysteria, the measures of public policy already adopted by the mayors in some cities, such as Bologna, Florence and Rome itself, which have as their main target the immigrants, put cities under control and turn them into a desert, are actually the best humus for the violence. The increased security measures and the increase in rapes and killings of women are directly related.” In the past years, like more recently, each measure adopted by the Government against killings, violence, etc., did not result in a real decrease of them, but rather, in a certain sense, produced the opposite effect, both the essentially repressive measures or those few measures that could be useful but, for how they are managed, are negative or even counterproductive. Take as example the law against the stalking made by the minister Carfagna. There have been dozens and dozens of complaints raised by women, but were never taken into account, the bureaucratic processes that activate the police or the judiciary are complex and long and the whole apparatus deputed to enforce the law they does not care. But it is especially the mind that guides the police, those who make investigation, that is buggy at the start, impregnated, and how could it not be, by a sexist, macho ideology, congenitally distant/contrary to women, their lives and needs, their rebellion.
The addressing the issue of violence with repressive measures, removing those elements of sociability, openness and solidarity that help us fight it, and aiming instead to the closure, to make the society fascist, to make the city a desert, promotes violence. They created a desert in the cities, at 9 pm there is no more people on the street, and are they surprised that a woman who walks alone in this condition is at risk? Who did create this condition? These measures create a obscurantist atmosphere, always ideal to cultivate fascist, sexist and oppressive ideas and practices, and therefore have the opposite effect of encouraging sexual violence at all levels, creating a city under control, uninhabitable, in which the common freedoms, the sociability among young people, between people, the normal use of the city, are banned. And when this happens, always the cities become a desert without people and a dangerous ground, especially for women, because it prevents, even criminalizes, the collective and social sense of the city and the problems, leading to a an individualistic, anti-social concept, companion of the abuse, an ideology always reactionary, racist and fascist , that against women is always expressed by sexism and violence.
Last year there was a massacre near Varese, where a husband killed in the night his wife and two children and then committed suicide. The context in which it occurred is typical: a small village, a closed reality, not only in terms of place and dwelling but because of the concept of “master of the house and the family.” The man at the gate of the house had put a large sign that read: “Beware of the dog, the owner and the whole family” with a drawing of rifle, gun and knife. A concept of "master" of his wife and children and their lives that obviously led him to decide that they should not live without him (she wanted to divorce).The EURES institute has analyzed that most of the murders of women by men and husbands occur in the North, especially in Lombardy: 59.3% compared to 21-22% in the Centre and 19% in the South. They are important data, in a certain sense unexpected, since it is the South that is seen as the most backward reality, linked to patriarchal values. Indeed the most common analysis, even among the feminists, sees in the patriarchy the root of the murders of women. If it were true, those data should be reversed, because patriarchal attitudes and habits are certainly more in the South than the North. Then maybe it is not the main cause of femicides!
Of course, the fact that in the South the number of violence and killings is less than in the North is also the result of more oppression, that more women still suffer in silence, that they rebel less against oppression (but not in big cities in the South), that they do not separate because they lack a job and it should be harder for them to sustain by themselves, especially with children, while in the North women divorce and break family ties more easily (but also in the South today more and more women do it, especially working women). Of course, basically, in the South the social relationships with the families, the kinship, work more, for better or for worse. The family is wider and there is a sort of generalized control. In the North there is a greater autonomy from the family of origin, and the divorces, especially for men, upset the conditions of life, there is a very tight weave with the material difficulties of people, the difficulties of living with a single salary facing the higher cost of living in the North. Many men are unable to fend for themselves, they have not the ability to create another life, they want to dictate law, and when the toy, the family, is broken, they do not accept it.
But, then, why more women are killed in the North? Why, to understand the modern killings, we have to look above all to the North? Because it is just in the more “advanced” realities that we can understand the “new”, here we see the new “honour killing”, that today we can call “killing of property”. Because there is a greater accordance between conditions of life, on the one hand, and the fascist, sexist and reactionary ideas and general atmosphere, on the other. “Beware of the dog, the owner, the whole family”... how many signs like this one we can find hanged at the gates in the areas of the Northern League, in Brianza, around Bergamo, in Veneto? It is a fascist, modern fundamentalist, concept, this concept makes to write the sign to warn that "everything is mine” and who touches this private property, the house or family, is someone to keep off or kill, if his own wife. A reactionary view, closed, that everything can be done in the family and anyone who dares to intrude, the thief, the immigrant or those who break the unity of the family, is an alien to kick out or delete. A concept that is fruit of and in full accordance with the Northern League ideology, modern clerical-fascist, racist, now more and more present and operating especially in the North, but carried out organically also by the main representatives of the Government, the Church and their mass media, and widespread in sectors of the masses, especially among the petty bourgeoisie and the upper strata of working class, but not only.
It is a concept against “the other”, against the immigrant, the security-first hysteria. Sometimes it is also fruit of the condition of greater economic insecurity, insecurity of life etc., to which, as woman said us, in the South we are more “used”. So there is also an element of “defence”, but it emerges in racist terms, of closure against the other. Therefore the women who rebel are something that comes to break a “balance” that rests on the oppression of women, as private property of men and safety nets for the capitalist society.
Also the killings in the South have to be analyzed within the current situation.
The murder of Sarah Scazzi at the end of August 2010 near Taranto is emblematic. Its deep roots are in a reality and idea of family, closed, oppressive, patriarchal. A family to defend against the outside even when it is barbarism and death. A family that is a chain, where if one falls all fall and that is why it is necessary to remain united to hold it, to defend its “honour”. A family that, especially for women, but also for young people, is an unacceptable modern middle ages, that imprisons and diverts energies that instead should be freed. But this is possible only if women, young people rebel and struggle against the real culprits of the modern Middle Ages: the State, the Government, the Church, the masters. It is the result of the life of many girls in the South, sometimes made of vacuum, suppression, but often also deviation of desires of a different world, free, rich, to impose false, deviated individual needs, instead of finding the common reasons for rebellion and struggle Although in this case may be that her cousin, another woman, has participated at the murder of Sarah, it does not change the basic background and shows in a even more rawer way the condition of the girls, made of oppression in the life but also ideological. It shows that behind any violence and killing, there are social conditions in which the patriarchy/sexism, in its various forms, with its false values and individualistic feelings of possession, is a fundamental and constituent ideology and, therefore, also ruling and sometimes deviating the conscience of girls and women themselves.
But today are primarily the thrusts of girls and women, especially working women, that come objectively, though often not yet subjectively, into conflict with the patriarchy and bring about breaking. Here, the contrast man/woman appears more clearly similar to the contradiction between the relations of production and the development of productive forces: the productive forces (the need of women to “emancipate”), developing increasingly, come into an open, antagonistic conflict with existing relations of production (patriarchal/capitalistic). But until they do not break those relations, are the productive forces that are destroyed, deviated or suppressed. This reality and, above all, this need of breaking/revolution is also true, and even more, for immigrant women and girls killed within their families, who had to face a triple oppression: the origin patriarchal/ feudal oppression, the gender man/woman oppression and the class oppression in an imperialist country.
The important link between all this and the politics, the legitimated politics, the legitimated general humus. If an idiot in Varese puts out the sign “Beware of the dog, the owner, the whole family”, he can be just an idiot, but when the chief of the Northern League Bossi or the Minister of Interior Maroni express the same concept, then they become rules and everyone feels entitled to do anything! If Berlusconi exploits women and prostitution, why could not any idiot do the same! It is now a generalized thing, this is the message that has passed. Among other things, an article on the newspaper La Repubblica, titled “Italy at gunpoint,” reported about a significant increase in the number of Italians, especially men and especially in the North, who buy
guns and go shooting at the shooting range, as if it became the necessary means to increase their perception of security, also economic. The latest killings took place in the summer with firearms at the hands of “good people” authorized to hold them. Almost all of them are “normal” or even “good” people, as said the employer of a coachbuilder who murdered two women. They are “good” carabinieri, servants of the order and the State, they are “good” people who have gun license because they like safety or for sport.
Most of these murders of women occur in the North, where good people cultivate and are encouraged, by good representatives of parties and government, as well as by mayors of each political side, by priests as well as by the police, to cultivate an ideology of property, conservation, an ideology sexist and also, objectively, fascist, and who put into question all this, whether women or immigrants, must be deleted,
In the same days when these murders of women occurred, the 2nd of July, a verdict of the Supreme Court were issued, which says that “if the wife is a strong woman it is not a crime to manhandle her.” In the same period in the newspapers come out several articles on sex tourism, where the first are the Italians: “Italy holds the record of sex tourism, mainly pedophile. First in Europe, they 80,000 males, almost 1 / 3 of which pedophiles and over 80% heterosexual. They travel to Kenya, Brazil, Thailand, Cuba, S. Domingo. In certain seasons charter flights to Brazil and Thailand are constant. In two weeks the predator is capable of having relationships with 20 different partners. You can find all kind of man, from family man to the priest. A pedophile is fully integrated in society: he is the normal husband, he does not looks like an ogre.” All this is managed by regularly authorized travel agencies, whose main activity is to do this.
With Berlusconi, the prostitution at the purpose of career in the show-business or political-electoral became a common and legitimized practice. The pornography of the show, a sort of renewed and modern “jus primae noctis” for the pleasure of the emperor, mean culture and practice of rape and pedophilia that become “normal”. We face the fact that the curriculum of women candidates and then PMs of the largest parliamentary party in Italy should be formed passing through the Berlusconi’s villas or the “Big Brother” show. We face the fact that laws that will have impact on the lives of millions of people, of women, are decided by soubrettes and clowns. The concept about woman of Berlusconi and his court, including women, how they consider the role of woman in the society, are a litmus test, the tip of the iceberg of the ideology and the degree of barbarism reached by a caste that, since can no longer lie and hide, now publicly claims as a legitimate expression of a mass feeling its style of life and views, openly stating that the understanding of their system is what we synthetically call modern middle ages, one in which the “God, Motherland, Family” is applied to others, must be imposed to others even through the law, but not to themselves.
The employers and government operate to push back home the women. Many women in our country have been affected in recent months in employment, workers sacked or in layoffs, temporary workers became more precarious, unemployed in struggle for a job attacked and fined by the police, women super-exploited almost to the conditions of modern slavery. With the attack on the education, the State is directly realizing the largest mass sacking in a sector overwhelmingly female. At the same time, hypocritically speaking about “equality” and as a first step of a general attack, they raised the age for the retirement working women. All this has done nothing but worsen the already heavy and discriminatory working conditions and wages of women, and Italy is among the last countries in the employment rate of women.
Violence against women does nothing but does nothing but does nothing but does nothing but does nothing but continues the continues the continues the continues the continues the discrimination, discrimination, discrimination, discrimination, discrimination, injustice, double injustice, double injustice, double injustice, double injustice, double exploitation and exploitation and exploitation and exploitation and exploitation and oppression of which we oppression of which we oppression of which we oppression of which we oppression of which we are victims in capitalist society.
Eva Gabrielsson, companion of the writer Stieg Larsson author of “Men Who Hate Women”, faced with the question of a journalist who asked what were the roots of this hatred against women, he replied: “As Von Clausewitz said, war is not merely a continuation of politics by other means. The same applies to violence against women, which does nothing but continue on a different ground, discrimination and injustice of which we are victims in our society. That’s why violence against women is violence against all citizens, it is not a private matter between individuals. “
On women are unloaded the cuts and the worsening of social services, the impact of the crisis in the family. And are women and children that pay the cuts to health services and the ruling merely utilitarian logic: the death in childbirth reappeared. In the meanwhile, the ideological bombing and practical attack by the Government and the Vatican against the freedom of choice for women, against their right to decide on the motherhood, are renewed. The recent attempts to block the use of the pill RU486 in our country represent a new attack against women, charged to be murderer, to practice violence, by abortion. This policy against women made by the State, employers, Government, Church, for women has as the inevitable result increased oppression, fascist sexism, sexual violence.
Again on the matter of family
We write “In Death of the Family” to say in a provocative way that the family plays a key role in the march towards the modern fascism of the government and the State. The modern fascism can not be achieved without the family as one of its main basis, both as subordinated, folded, functional to the decisions of the government and the State, and as active supporter, ideological fighter, symbol and vehicle of those values and policy. The family, especially if proletarian, is the central place where an increasingly poor social economy is managed, with lower or lost wages and increasing costs of living. In a period of attack on the proletarians, and crisis, the family allows to mitigate the devastating impact of those policies. The assistance within the family, from normal relationship between individuals based on emotional ties becomes an obligation, an intolerable slavery for women, and often for them it results in crisis and depression. In the family back the sacked workers, there the unemployed sons stay for years. Anyway the family guarantee their livelihood and allows to limit more serious and dangerous consequences for the social system. The family, for this system, must be a parachute to the frustrations, the crisis of privilege positions of man in the family. But the family, particularly in the middle- bourgeoisie and sometimes also in the petty bourgeoisie, also influencing sectors of proletarian families, plays also an active role in the march towards the modern fascism, as supporter of reactionary values such as the security, children to the fatherland, the control over young people, etc.. There is no escape for women, the chains of the family become tighter even if sometimes they are gilded. For the proletarian women, for the women of masses, the family is more and more a coming back to a modern middle ages, with processes of degradation, violence and apparent return to the past,
especially in man-woman relationships, that find are their most striking reflect precisely in the femicides. For the Church, which weighs in a more and more blatant and oppressive way on the social and political life, for the Government, for the State the family has become the “sacred family”. Deliberately more abstract, more neutral, not real. The family is a concrete reality, in the proletarian ones they do not get to the fourth or even the third week, they are unable to send the children to kindergartens because of high fees, women in these families spend years of their lives to assist aged relatives, they have to serve at home and outside, because it is often the only work they find, and when they have a shred of decent work, for example in a factory, because of shifts, for days or weeks they can not be with husband and children...
So there is not “the family”. There are “families”, families of the bourgeoisie, the capitalists, the rich, in which, as Marx said, the foundation of the relationship between man and woman, between parents and children, is given only by the capital, the private property, where the only value that is passed is the ability to make money and women are often rich and legalized prostitutes or loyal and dark “secretaries” in the shadow of the climbing of husbands whether financiers, bankers or masters. And there are the families of workers, temporary workers, unemployed, in which the lives and often also the feelings are consumed trying to go on in some way, in dashed hopes of a better life, where the only “distraction” for twice exploited, twice oppressed, women must be the reality shows of Berlusconi’s TVs, through which, however, are conveyed, in a brutalized form and without the counterpart of the glittering billions of bourgeois, the values of the bourgeoisie: the property, that can only be the wife and children, the role of the male who, crushed at work, in society will rival on the “proper” wife, the miserable sexist and fascist ideology against women.
The family must be abstract.
Because it, and the role of women in it, must be the foundation that safeguards the existing order, i.e. what saves their capitalist system, that operates as a “social safety net” against the worsening of living conditions of most of the broad masses, in which women must, as Ratzinger writes, “heal the wounds, keep silent those who want to scream and fight ...”, to prevent the class contradictions break out and erupt into rebellion, revolt, revolution.
No progress can be lasting and definitive for lasting for women without the revolution in the revolution.
This reality shows that in bourgeois society no progress for women can be lasting and definitive, that only a revolutionary struggle, in which the rebellion and the struggle of women is a vital and powerful force; only a new proletarian power based on the principles and the practice by law of the full emancipation and liberation of women, and the ideological struggle and mass education, can make those achievements definitive. For that it is not enough to establish a socialist government, or think that the revolution will immediately wipe out all the sexist ideas. The experience of the communist movement has shown, and developed with the Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China, that it is necessary a revolution in the revolution, a period in which you combine the power, that prevents practices and sexist ideas and imposes other kind of practices, and the education, the conviction at the mass level. Bebel writes on “The emancipation of women” that the existing form of the family in given epoch a time determined can not be separated from the existing social conditions. Marx writes that the family contains within itself in miniature all the antagonisms which later develop widely in society and in its state. Engels said that the monogamous family was the cellular form of civil society and in it we can already study the nature of the antagonisms and contradictions that in a civilization will unfold in their fullness.
In the current social conditions, in which the bourgeoisie only brings destruction, wars with and horrors that deny any humanity, in which the sex made by the American women soldiers hyenas ridens is used for fiercest torture on Iraqi prisoners, while the government, the State are marching towards a modern fascism, a social system where women are worth less than an embryo, in which the science is used against science, not to advance the welfare and health of humanity, but to build monstrosities, family and man/woman relationships change according to and in function of this modern middle ages and, at the same time, they contain in embryo all its contradictions. In this sense it is not a “backward” family compared to an advanced society. There are not, as sometimes is said, man/woman relationships apparently inconceivable compared to the progress of women. It is a thoroughly modern family, in the sense that it is adequate to what the existing capitalist social system is today, and serves this system.
It is impossible to fight this family without overthrowing the social system of which is product and support. This fight has nothing to do with (and indeed has to unmask) the politics of petty bourgeois feminism that wants to get rid of the family with a fully individualistic logic, nor it can be reduced into a mere struggle against men. In the family, even in the proletarian one, men are privileged compared to the condition of women, but these privileges are miserable! The family is a chain and it is unbearable also for the workers, for young people, who remain at home unloading the weight on women. They often use the family, but are anxious to escape from this prison, coming to hate it. Though necessarily this struggle, must be waged primarily in first person by women, who suffer all the chains, however, it is interest not only of women but of all the proletarians, because it is a struggle for a new humanity, new social relations. For us, communist women, “in death of the family” means to make the family, rather than a prop of the capitalist system and the current march towards the modern fascism, a lever for women’s rebellion to overthrow the system.
We hate “men who hate women”.
We took these words from the novel by Stieg Larsson, that contains some emblematic aspects. It is set in Sweden, a society where women have reached some achievements, are emancipated, but it is the case that in the last 2-3 years many writers, men and women, have come out with detective stories set in Sweden and most of them have women as subject: raped women, killed women and so on. (In the reality and not only in the novels). They are writings about the modern killings, killings that take place in most advanced capitalist societies, not in backward ones, and so they deny that violence today is only the result of a backward society, showing the decay of imperialism that has come to its end, which can not lead to anything progressive, but only to a modern Middle Ages. The main character of the novel, Lisbeth Salander, is a rebel against any attempt of “normalization”, she is considered a different for excellence, she tried to kill her father because he used to rape her mother, and so on. Lisbeth is rebellious to every rule and this rebellion is unbearable for others, especially for men who try to “tame” her, till to rape and try to kill her. But who are those men? They are big managers of industry, fascists, Nazis, who hate women. Lisbeth at some point, in discussion with the other protagonist of the novel, a journalist who also tries to justify the rapist and murderer, making a psychological analysis, she exclaims, “Bullshit!, this man hates women.” “Bullshit!” precisely! We must reject interpretations/explanations often made after killings, because they only serve to put a hat on. Something different is to collect some of these interpretations to show their entirely social character, common to thousands of men and explainable only with a social, class and gender analysis. This novel, also independently from the will of the author, helps to understand what we are saying. Indeed today there is actually a kind of “hatred” against women, as well as immigrants, homosexuals and so on. This outright hatred against women, because women who think, act, decide, is fascist. This hatred raises the bar, sets in motion the violence. ”Men Who Hate Women” reflects the image of the capitalist system in its phase of crisis, imperialist decay, a system that has no longer anything constructive, it is only destruction.
Therefore it must be destroyed. Women have double reason to do it!
Feminist Proletarian Revolutionary Movement
“The modern family contains within itself, in miniature, all the antagonisms which later develop on a wide scale within which later develop on a wide scale within society and in its state. Such a form of the family shows the shows the transition from pairing family to monogamy.In order to guarantee the fidelity of the wife, that is, the paternity of the children, the woman is placed in the man’’s absolute power; if he kills her, he is but absolute power; if he kills her, he is but exercising his right ...” - Karl Marx from The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State by Friedrich Engels
