[ENG] Feminicide, the extreme facet of capitalism - Revolutionary Women's Movement

Revolutionary Women’s Movement (MRM) – December 3, 2025

In Brazil we have an epidemic of femicides, because when you cross-check with health data, which are higher, it reaches 10 for every 100,000 women, and this is when an epidemic begins to be recorded.” These words were spoken by Jackeline Ferreira Romio, coordinator of the research “Who Are the Women Brazil Does Not Protect?”, during a public hearing held at the National Congress on November 26. Ten years after the enactment of the femicide law, murders of women have increased in number and cruelty. From 527 cases recorded in 2015, the figure rose to 1,455 in 2024, a number that researchers unanimously consider underestimated. The brutal cases of the young woman Tainara Souza de Santos, 31, who was dragged by a car and had her legs amputated, and of another woman shot multiple times at her workplace, are only the most recent in an endless series. Just a week ago, Allane de Souza Pedrotti Mattos and Layse Costa Pinheiro were murdered at CEFET-RJ by an employee who refused to accept being supervised by a woman. These cases are the human face behind cold numbers: Brazil is the country with the highest femicide rate in Latin America and the Caribbean, a hell where a woman is raped every six minutes.

This proves the Brazilian State’s lack of interest in protecting women, especially poor and Black women, who are the victims in 68% of femicide cases. After all, far from being a neutral power standing above classes, the State is a coercive apparatus that serves to preserve the material interests of the ruling classes and the entire cultural superstructure that seeks to legitimize these interests. Built upon the brutal enslavement of Indigenous and African peoples, whose crucial component — including as a strategy for populating the vast territory — was the rape and commercialization of women’s bodies and those of their children, the Brazilian State is structurally patriarchal. Men from the dominant classes are the primary owners of the means of production and also the leading political agents in the highest spheres of administration. The few women who reach such positions are, almost without exception, from affluent backgrounds and cannot, and do not wish to, alter the character of the institutions they occupy.

On the other hand, when a white, middle-class woman is a victim of aggression, there is public outrage that does not occur when the same happens to Black women from the popular strata, even though they are, as we have seen, the overwhelming majority of cases. There is therefore no mechanical separation between class, race, and gender, even though patriarchal domination long predates capitalism itself and therefore constitutes a complete social institution, a weed terribly embedded in the social fabric, including within popular organizations. As we stated in our Thesis, the specificity of the female condition “lies in the fact that, while men belonging to the working classes (industrial workers, peasants, intellectuals, and the enormous semiproletarian masses) are oppressed for belonging to a dominated class, the women of these same classes also suffer restrictions on their very status as human beings.” Everyday machismo, often naturalized and rendered invisible, is only a consequence of this millennia-old force that oppresses half of humanity. We must remain vigilant and combat it wherever it manifests.

This social epidemic also shows the narrow limits of criminal law. Indeed, if the enactment of harsher laws were enough to prevent crimes, there would have been a decline in the murder of women, but exactly the opposite occurred. The same is observed in the debate on drug trafficking and robberies. As Judge Ivana David, of the São Paulo Court of Justice, acknowledged in an interview with Folha on December 2, the greatest problem in combating gender-based violence is not legislation: “The penalty for femicide is up to 40 years in prison, the highest provided for in the Penal Code. We need more investment in effective public policies that truly protect women.” This is all the more dramatic given that the majority of aggressors have or have had intimate relationships with the victims, which makes an approach centered solely on policing impracticable. The punitive populist discourse, the right's only approach to the issue, is nothing more than a theatrics with no practical effect, enacted by the same legislators who have spent at least ten uninterrupted years attempting to criminalize abortion in cases of rape, including of children.

There is a consensus among researchers and women’s movements that coercion, although necessary, is not enough. Broad reeducation of men is needed, as well as a capillary protection network for women that guarantees them material and emotional support to break the vicious cycle of financial and emotional dependence, whose extreme point is aggression and murder. But the capitalist State has no interest in providing either. A culture of female subjugation serves to keep women enslaved at home, which enlarges the reserve army of labor and helps depress wages; and the so-called pornographic industry, fed by a vast web of misogynistic depravity, prostitution, and human trafficking, is one of the main sources of profit and also a means of escapism for sectors of society marginalized from social life. As for protection networks, the trend of recent decades, exacerbated by the rise of the extreme right, moves in the opposite direction, that is, toward the dismantling not only of the institutional framework of the so-called “welfare state,” but of all fabrics of social solidarity. In truth, as we argued in our Thesis, “history has proven that the fate of women is indissolubly linked to the fate of all the oppressed. At every revolutionary upsurge, women advanced; in every period of reaction, they retreated.”

The political mobilization of women: an urgent task

In the case of psychological, sexual, and physical violence against women, it is not enough to denounce the ineptitude of the reactionary State. This must certainly be done, marking every step with a critique of liberal feminism, insofar as it misleads most women into believing that legislative protection alone will guarantee their rights. However, while it will not be possible to extinguish patriarchal oppression except through the construction of socialism, it is possible and necessary to work from now on to save every life that can be saved, winning women in large numbers to the revolutionary struggle. This issue cannot be understood as a “women’s issue”; on the contrary, it is an integral part of the revolutionary program. At the same time, it is up to women with greater political consciousness to lead this process of struggle, because it, like any other, does not take place without confrontation and active effort. No benign force will “grant” women’s emancipation: they must win it themselves. In this effort, we must work on two fronts, reeducation and coercion.

Regarding reeducation — and we say reeducation because we assume that under capitalism, the education received at home and in school tends to reproduce patriarchal values — we must firmly and unequivocally stress that Marxism admits no discrimination except that of class. Anyone who relativizes any form of segregation among the oppressed, racial, sexual, gender-based, or otherwise, is an opportunist who works to divide workers and in practice acts as an agent of reaction. Only the bourgeoisie has an interest in producing and perpetuating divisions among the people. We must be firm and uncompromising on this point.

Within popular organizations, we must practice constant criticism and self-criticism, as a way of making comrades aware of attitudes — which usually seem “natural” to them — of imposing themselves over women, whether through tone of voice, interrupting their speech, etc. Even comrades with high consciousness tend to reproduce such behaviors if the organization relaxes its vigilance, because we are all social beings. This is why we say that while combating patriarchy is a common task in the struggle, it can only be carried out under the leadership of women. There is no need to fear excesses: if the organization’s line is consistently revolutionary, based on solid Marxist principles, it will know how to correct mistakes. In a context of brutal discrimination against women, the fact that they may occasionally go too far in their criticisms must be seen as a secondary issue. Far more serious would be for them to withdraw and fail to seize half the sky with their own hands.

Still within the topic of reeducation, particularly concerning youth, it is necessary to combat pornography and prostitution, manifestations of cultural decadence typical of the acute general crisis of the imperialist system. There is no pornography without the objectification and degradation of women. Even its “soft” forms are nothing more than the “humanized” face of a brutal network fed by human trafficking and pedophilia, perpetuating the worst values against women, that is, mere mechanisms of legitimization. In fact, the subjugation projected onto women’s bodies is simply a derivation of the worst colonialist ideologies and values imposed on oppressed peoples. As for prostitution, it is unacceptable to treat it as “wage labor”: a woman in this condition does not sell her labor power, but her own body, and for this reason her condition is closer to that of an enslaved person than to that of a modern proletarian. Historically, this activity is a remnant of Antiquity! How can anyone in good conscience normalize such an anachronistic practice? The remedy for loneliness is not to foster artificial relationships, but to take active part in social life.

Alongside reeducation, the Revolutionary Women’s Movement defends women’s right to self-defense. This self-defense involves organizing support networks for women victims of violence, whose minimal condition is the possibility of their subsistence. Thus, in organizing the daily lives of women, beginning with the most basic dimension, which is food, we must see this also as a form of self-defense, that is, as the embryonic construction of a new form of social organization. We must support, not only with words but in practice, women who wish to divorce, who wish to terminate a pregnancy, who face abandonment in old age, and the many invisible forms of violence. Self-defense courses for women in all forms must be disseminated as widely as possible. In the most serious cases of aggression, the perpetrator must be sanctioned by the community in a manner proportional to the harm caused. Unlike bourgeois justice, popular justice must be swift, inexpensive, efficient, and relentless. In fact, given the nature of these episodes, only a popular organization structured by place of residence can prevent and punish them.

Down with the reactionary State, murderer of women!

Combating patriarchy is everyone’s task, under the leadership of women!

For women’s right to self-defense!

1 “Without women, no revolution!” Thesis of the Revolutionary Women’s Movement (MRM), link: https://novomepr.com.br/sem-mulheres-sem-revolucao-teses-do-movimento-revolucionario-de-mulheres/