Chapter 5: Women Of Color As Revolutionary Force: Structural Violence in the Neoliberal Age¹

It is of critical importance and foresight to recognize the role that working-women have always played in class struggle. Although historians have often been blind to and systematically excluded women’s contributions or relegated them to “so called” support roles in revolutionary efforts, increasingly we are seeing historical evidence that women have often been at the forefront of these efforts as far back as the Paris Commune established in 1971 (Eichner, 2004) and in the Russian Revolution of 1917 (International Communist League, 1871). Currently women have been at the root of the Black Lives Matter Movement (Garza, 2014) and of the Democratic Union Party (PYD) of the Syrian Kurds which liberated Kobane, Cizire, and Afrin, an area known as Rojava that set up councils for democratic decision-making in which 40% of its leadership are women. The PYD has even captured some of ISIS claimed territory (Tax, 2016).