mike murray

Cumann na mBan did not ask for a seat. They took the whole floor. This was the mobilisation of the unwaged. These women were not the tea-makers of the rebellion. They were the architects of a total refusal. They understood that the British occupation was more than just a soldier on a street corner. It was a property relation. It was the forced enlistment of the female body into the national counting house. The state views a woman as a maintenance shed. You are the repair shop where the worker is patched up for free so he can return to the machine at dawn. To be a revolutionary woman is to resign from that post. It is to see the gendered binary for what it is: an administrative grid designed to manage the extraction of value. When the women of 1914 picked up the rifle, they were stealing themselves back from the state. We see the same women's history in Britain, the matchgirls in East London. The chainmakers of Cradley Heath. These women turned the industrial heartlands of Britain into a theatre of war. Different soil, but the same rot. Whilst Ireland’s voice is the only one that matters for Ireland’s sovereignty. It is a specific, unyielding cry for self-determination. We stand in total solidarity with our Irish comrades in @irelandcp because the fence around the North is the same wire wrapped around the heart of the working class everywhere. We refuse the "union of classes" that the bosses offer as a sedative. The state wants you to be functional. It wants you to be a reliable unit in a broken world. But the radical woman is a glitch in the breeding programme. She is the difficult subject who refuses to be a vessel for the next generation of exploited labour. She is the comrade who chooses affinity over the bloodline. From the streets of Dublin to the picket lines of the UK, the message is the same. We will not be the shock absorbers for the brutality of the workday. We will not scrub the boss’s dirt from the worker’s back for nothing. For an end to illegal occupation everywhere. Join the Communist Party of Britain: members.communistparty.org.u… #constancemarkievicz #cumannnamban #feminism