the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Aug 23, 2025
The following is the text of a presentation given at the Spark public meeting in Chicago, August 23, 2025.
In April of this year, 41-year‑old Virginia Giuffre killed herself. When she was 16, Ghislaine Maxwell, who has since been convicted of sex trafficking, offered Virginia a job as a masseuse for Jeffrey Epstein. This led to five years of her being “passed around like a platter of fruit,” as Virginia put it, before being able to escape this nightmarish situation.
She eventually decided to publicly speak out about her experiences of getting trafficked by Maxwell and sexually abused by Epstein and many other powerful men. One of these includes Prince Andrew, the brother of the current King of England, who because of this case, stepped down from royal duties. They ended up settling privately, with Prince Andrew donating money to her foundation. She also played a key role in the eventual lawsuit and prosecution of Maxwell and Epstein and publicly fought against international sex trafficking done by and for the rich and powerful. Her speaking out made a difference. Since her death, her family has carried on this fight to make all of the documents related to Epstein public.
There has been a lot of publicity surrounding these so‑called “Epstein Files,” documents which apparently detail all of the abuses done by the wealthy and the politicians linked to this particular rapist. But this isn’t the only such case getting media attention, as we recently saw with Diddy’s case. So many people have experienced or been around abuse that it makes sense that there is public interest in these scandals, beyond dismissing them as conspiracy theories or just being celebrity gossip.
But the reality beyond the scandalous and sensationalized headlines is much more insidious and systemic. Epstein is just the tip of the iceberg. Virginia Giuffre herself was sexually abused as a child by a family friend, so even for her it didn’t start with Epstein. If anything, abuse begets abuse. Whatever sordid details are in those files, we all know the many disgusting ways that this entire society treats women.
Every woman that I have known closely has at least one story about a guy that has abused, sexually assaulted or raped her. But it goes beyond direct abuse or rape. Even if they didn’t experience the same horrors that Virginia Giuffre did, no woman can escape the problems that this society imposes on all of us. Women are portrayed as objects on TV and social media. Many women are relegated to being care givers and house cleaners, which are some of the low-wage jobs that my mother had, for example. Even before experiencing these problems myself, I saw physical and emotional abuse being inflicted on women close to me.
Women’s lives are often dictated and controlled by men. We all know women who wanted to leave a shitty relationship but couldn’t because they didn’t have the financial means to do so. So, they continued to put up with the emotional and/or physical outbursts of their partners. It didn’t take long for me to experience some of these problems myself. By the time I became a teenager, it was clear to me that women were at a disadvantage in this society.
Women aren’t the only ones suffering because of this situation. While men are the usual abusers, they’re also frequent victims of sexual abuse themselves. Look at the scandals surrounding the Catholic church, or the not‑very‑funny jokes about getting raped in prison. But more fundamentally—to be an abuser means blocking yourself from seeing people around you as human. Dehumanizing other people in this way means dehumanizing yourself. On top of those who directly and obviously abuse those around them, huge numbers of men have trouble building meaningful relationships with other people or expressing their feelings.
So why do men act in these ways? If we are given an answer at all, it’s that men are just naturally aggressive and violent.
But for most of human history, men were not encouraged to behave in these ways. The oppression of women didn’t always exist. For the first 300,000 years of human existence, human societies were organized very differently. Society wasn’t divided into classes where a small minority lived off of the labor of others.
Reports about the Native American Iroquois tribe from the 1800s show an example of a society that once existed without classes. The family was organized around the mother’s side. Because you could with absolute certainty know the mother of each child, unlike the father, the children would live with the mother’s clan. When it was time to train a boy how to hunt, for example, that job would fall to his mother’s brothers, not the father (whoever he was). Paternity, meaning knowing who the individual father of each child is, wasn’t that important. Women simply chose who they wanted to sleep with.
Because it was organized around the woman’s family, women also controlled the hearth. It was their domain where women spent a lot of time raising kids, growing crops that were the key foods for the tribe, and making clothing, among other tasks. Men spent a lot of time hunting and/or fishing, although these weren’t always stable sources of food.
Men and women had different roles within these communities, and contributed in different ways, but it didn’t mean one was inherently superior and could control the other. Men who tried to control or abuse women would be disciplined by the group. Women also decided who could live in the hearth and had the power to kick out any man by placing his belongings outside her dwelling.
Unlike today, older women were valued much more. Because they had lived through more, they knew how to solve problems. So, if they had experienced a strong storm when they were younger, they could help the clan figure out what to do if another storm happened again. Or if someone got sick eating a certain plant, they might know what treatment to pursue from their previous experience. Women relied on each other to help through childbirth and raising kids. Grandmothers and great-aunts played a key role. Especially in a society that didn’t have a system of writing, this type of knowledge was crucial for survival. So, women were valued outside of their sexual attractiveness in youth ... imagine that!
As far as we can tell, until about 10,000 years ago, most human societies were more like the Iroquois than our present sexist society. But in some places, class society began to develop. A class of rulers emerged who survived just off of the labor of others. They had certain privileges and wanted to pass these on to their children. But how does a man know that it’s his biological child that he is leaving his inheritance to?
In order to be certain, it became necessary to control who women had sex with. This laid the foundation of the oppression of women, whom men now needed to control. They lost freedoms that they previously had in a classless society. With property came oppressive systems that were needed to protect that property. And so female sexuality became something owned and controlled by men—just as Epstein treated it.
The U.S. is also a class society, one which was built on slavery. Human beings were brought over from Africa by force to be used as literal tools that could be bought and sold at any time for any reason. Slave traders tore families apart, ripping children away from their parents. Masters often raped the women. Their bodies were used to produce more slaves. The black population were branded as literal objects in the interest of creating profit.
After more than 150 years of this brutal system, slavery was abolished. But slavery is not the only way to exploit people. The Northern capitalists that took over the entire country also exploit workers. Their system also needs to use people to work and produce the wealth that the capitalists own. This whole giant city was built by workers, many paid very low wages—and those workers do not own what they built. The capitalists own it.
Capitalists make more if workers get less. And the more vulnerable workers are, the more they can be exploited. Capitalists took advantage of the desperation of people fleeing famine in Ireland and fleeing lynching in Mississippi. They also take advantage of the desperation and vulnerability of women.
Bosses have always paid women less for their labor than men, even for the same work. It’s not about physical strength. Women have been forced into an inferior social position and forced to take lower wages primarily because they are the ones made to take care of kids. It’s not about supposed physical or mental inferiority but social inferiority. Even though now that’s technically illegal, women still on average make much less money than men.
But even more than that, the capitalist class needs someone to raise the next generation of workers, which greatly falls on women. Raising kids is something that is necessary for the entire society; it is one of its most important tasks. Raising children takes a huge amount of work, time and effort. Not only is it a thankless job, it’s an unpaid job. And women also do most of the care for the elderly. Not to mention the necessary work to clean, and cook, and do laundry.... All this unpaid necessary labor done by women makes possible the capitalists’ continued exploitation of workers—both men and women.
Women have always fought back against the bullshit of this society.
Enslaved women killed their masters. They also killed their own children to save them from the brutal fate of enslavement.
Women were also crucial in revolutionary times. For example, the French Revolution was set off by women demanding bread from the King. In Russia, women workers began the strike wave that would eventually overthrow the tsar, setting off what would become the Russian Revolution.
Feminists in the U.S. fought for women’s rights to improve the situation for women. They fought for the right to vote, to own property, to have better wages, to make rape illegal, to have access to contraception and abortion.
Resistance takes many forms as women also fight every day against the problems they face. I know a woman who had broken up with a man who didn’t take it well. He marched into her workplace angrily demanding to talk to her. But her female coworkers protected her. They helped her hide and yelled at the guy, driving him away. Women take care of each other in similar ways hundreds of times every day.
But as capitalist society decays, we see things moving backwards. Any rights that women have today have been won through fights. But as the fights have receded, gains that were previously won are being taken away. Nothing won is guaranteed within this capitalist society which relies on exploitation and takes advantage of every vulnerability.
We see this with the attacks on abortion rights. Roe v. Wade, the ruling that made abortion a constitutional right, was decided in 1973 as a response to fights made by the population. But as quickly as that was won, the Hyde Amendment added in 1976 didn’t allow Medicaid to pay for abortions. This means that poor women lost their access to abortion only within a few years of the original decision. It’s also worth pointing out that this amendment has to be renewed with each budget vote, meaning that both parties have continued to pass it. Now with the recent Dobbs decision in 2022 repealing Roe v. Wade, some states are banning abortion altogether.
The Right has also grown as workers’ situation has degraded. There are no jobs available for working-class men that could allow them to provide for a family. Social services and schools have been cut again and again, forcing women to pick up the slack, imposing more child and elder care on us. Men and women workers have to take on more hours of work to make ends meet. We’re all under a lot of stress just to survive—which can set people against each other, even within families. And without anyone offering a working-class perspective in a big enough way, right-wing forces have been able to take advantage.
Misogynistic ideas have gained more popularity as our current economic crisis deepens. In addition to their racism and nationalism, right-wing groups tap into the real frustration that many men feel today of not being able to play the role of provider, which is still promoted as what men need to do. The internet certainly reflects that, where the incel movement took shape. Short for “involuntary celibacy,” men within this movement blame women for not wanting to sleep with them and justify rape as a legitimate reaction.
The incels may be some of the most extreme, but many right‑wing “influencers” blame women for the problems facing men, and right‑wing capitalists finance a lot of media put in front of people offering them sexist reactionary “solutions.” Self‑proclaimed misogynist Andrew Tate, who himself was charged with rape and human trafficking, has said that women should “bear responsibility” for being sexually assaulted. This got him banned from Twitter. But he was soon reinstated after Elon Musk bought the platform now called X, where Tate has over 10 million followers. And he’s certainly not the only such figure.
The Right’s attacks on feminists also serve to defend the capitalist order as is. They defend the interests of capitalism by reinforcing gender roles and keeping women down. These divisions help the bosses because they can take advantage of the subordinate role of women in the workplace and in the home. And all this right‑wing crap encourages men and women workers to blame each other even more, fight each other, and ignore the capitalist class which is really causing our problems.
In this way, the degradation that capitalism is imposing on all of us poisons all human relationships—sometimes up to the point of producing the sexual abuse of children.
The Epstein scandal exposes part of the ruling class, but the problem is bigger than the list. Proving whether one politician or celebrity is on the list, or not, is not going to improve the situation for women, or even to prevent young girls from being passed around by powerful men. The problem is the system that allows the rich and powerful to use the rest of us as tools. In order to address the problems that women face, it’s not enough to fight for a place within this horrid society. The fight needs to have the goal of getting rid of the whole system that is based on the exploitation of one human by another. A fight against the problems that women face could spark that bigger fight.