Sunsara Taylor Kicks Off Feminist Lecture Tour At NYU, Wants You To Join Communist Party

By Pier Harrison

Leftist activist Sunsara Taylor’s lecture in the Cantor Center Tuesday night had a two-part message. Part 1: women are oppressed, Part 2: the way to emancipate them is by bringing the Revolutionary Communist Party to power. It was pretty much the opposite of when Ann Coulter gang rape at a Homecoming dance last October in California), and repeating, “You cannot tell me that women are not oppressed.” And after hearing that, say, if a woman self-induces an abortion in El Salvador (where abortion is illegal), the state can use her hysterectomized uterus as evidence against her in court to prosecute her for murdering her child, or that women are gang-raped so badly amid Civil War in the Congo that they can’t control their bowels and as a result are cast out by their husbands, you really can’t say that women are not oppressed in this world.

She kept positing this inner monologue for the audience, at one point saying, “That voice inside your head right now is saying ‘why is this woman so angry?’” But really I wondered ‘why is this woman yelling?’ Because she is angry, and because she wants her listeners to be angry too.

She took a theoretical leap to explain how capitalism and, more concretely, American imperialism are to blame for a lot of these problems, through the spread of violent American pornography in other countries, and in the case of the Congo, through our demand for tantalum for our cell phones, among many other offenses. Her proposed solution? Revolutionary Communists in public office. “This system cannot liberate women. The revolution can,” she nearly shouted. In this ‘revolutionary state,’ porn would be illegal.

Taylor and the moderator spoke with cult-like reverence for party Chairman Bob Avakian, whom they would purportedly like ‘holding office’ and whom they credited with conceptualizing these particular theories. Between Taylor’s speech and the Q&A staff sent around collection baskets, just like in Church, for donations to support her tour, and the goals of the RCP.

While the premises in Taylor’s argument all seemed logically supported by one another, the nature of this Marxist ‘revolution’ remained in question. I asked the moderator Annie Day whether, though their campaign was against violence, they intended to stage a violent or non-violent revolution. Her response: violent. So, would there be bloodshed?

“Revolution is a serious business. This is not just the frustrations of individuals. We are not pacifists. So to answer your question, yes,” Day said.

The most mind-blowing part of this whole event was realizing that by “revolution” they mean that they are willing to kill people. I left thinking, “Holy shit, I was just in a room full of people who are willing to murder to accomplish their goals,” but I think their point is, you can say the same thing after leaving a room full of capitalists or people who are pro-war. And like all communist dreams, once their temporary period of violence is over, ideally, that would be the end to all violence forever. This is of course assuming that the Revolutionary Communist Party spreads its power over the entire world. And this is where it starts to look like the RCP has hijacked the feminist agenda to further its own will to power, which, again, they do not hide.

In Taylor’s speech she also said acknowledged that “the Christian Right, or the Christian Fascists” use the same stories she shared about sex trafficking, the forcing of the veil in Iran after 1979 and other emotionally compelling stories about the international subjugation of women, to “shake our soldiers” and stir up support to promote their conservative agenda. I did not need to ask whether Taylor was using the same means for her own ends. So I asked whether she felt that her ends justified the means, whether her proposed solution would solve the problem, and whether or not it is always good to raise awareness about these horrific things that happen to women, regardless of one’s motives.

“Christians reinforce what give rise to these stories [in supporting the military and imperialism]. They are the ‘mirror opposite’ of the torturers,” she stated, and again brought up the spread of USA rape pornography. “We have to look at where the problems are coming from, and we have a responsibility to confront them.”

Another goal of the talk was to encourage support for women in Iran against the Islamic Republic and in resistance of US “imperialist democracy.” Taylor invited the public to march at 125th and Amsterdam in Harlem on March 6 for International Women’s Day.

Regardless of your political orientation — even Ryan Johnson expressed reservations about the ‘there will be blood aspect’ — the three hour talk was highly stimulating, and I recommend hearing Sunsara Taylor speak and furthering the conversation on the international economic questions that play into the present role of women in the world.