Poor and working-class women have long been at the base of the Bolivarian revolution. The first in the streets to fight back against the U.S. sponsored coup in 2002, they saved the revolution. They saw Hugo Chavez as an extension of their own struggle for survival. Chavez understood, saying: “Socialists must be feminists, or they won’t be complete human beings.”

Today, Venezuelan women continue to lead the way in the struggle to defend the Revolution, the Venezuelan Constitution and their democracy. President Nicolás Maduro was re-elected on Sunday, July 28 with the mass support of the Venezuelan people. The U.S. is determined to topple the Bolivarian revolutionary government and discredit Venezuelan democracy, but the Chavistas have vowed to defend the revolution against an opposition that won’t admit it lost. 

Women play a crucial role in Venezuela’s elections. They were the leaders of over 200,000 neighborhood units organized by the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) as part of its electoral strategy in the 2024 presidential election. Across the country, they woke up their friends and neighbors early in the morning of July 28, making sure that they voted and brought ten other people with them.  

Venezuelan women have good reasons to get out the vote for socialism. The Bolivarian revolution has made securing women’s equality into state policy by establishing a Ministry of People’s Power for Women’s and Gender Equality. One of the tasks of this ministry is ending centuries of patriarchal attitudes and practices. 

Article 88 of the Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, approved by popular referendum in 1999, recognized care work as economically productive. Women, Chavez said, “work so hard raising their children, ironing, washing, preparing food … giving [their children] an orientation … This was never recognized as work yet it is such hard work! … Now the revolution puts you first, you too are workers, you housewives, workers in the home.” Article 88 also enshrined the equality of women and men in exercising the right to work.

The Bolivarian revolution has taken two major steps in combating violence against women. One step is “The Organic Law of the Right of Women to a Life Free of Violence” which was passed in 2007. This law mandates protective measures for victims of gender-based violence. It also extends the period of detention for those accused of committing such violence. A second step is the establishment of communal defenders, women trained to prevent gender-based violence and support victims. Communal defenders organize in their local communes and maintain channels of communication with the Ministry of People’s Power for Women’s and Gender Equality.

Venezuela’s over 3000 communes are central to the building of Bolivarian socialism. These self-organized units are sites of economic production, political participation and community life. Eighty percent of the Venezuelans involved in the commune movement are women. Some of the communes explicitly understand their project as communal feminism — an important contrast to the individualistic liberal feminism promoted by the elite women and backed by US imperialism. According to women from the March 5 Commune, “When we talk about women’s networks, we are talking about the fabric we weave every day, one by one, but which are intertwined with other people’s fabrics, with other people’s threads and yarns, no matter how many kilometers they have between them.”

The 936 sanctions against Venezuela from the US and its allies have had a devastating impact on Venezuelan society, dramatically increasing poverty. Women’s work has been indispensable to the country’s ability to survive these brutal policies. It has even enabled Venezuela to turn adversity into opportunity by ending reliance on foreign food sources and becoming virtually food sovereign. Forced to return to subsistence farming, Venezuelan producers diversified their crops in order to meet basic needs.

Mairen Mendoza of the Born to Triumph with Chavez commune in Apure state described how their communal seed bank “aims to break dependency on the government and the capitalist market.” The project gives them autonomy and security because production is in their own hands. Her commune is part of a communal economic circuit that produces beans, meat, corn and cheese. Mendoza explained, “The blockade has been terrifying at times. The White House is set on toppling our government by any means, and it is no secret that their policies have set us back years in terms of our material well-being. However, it is also true that the hardship has made us more resilient and more committed to the communal project. Chávez wasn’t wrong; the commune is the only way to build a better world.”

On October 25, 2023, President Nicolás Maduro launched the “Great Venezuelan Women’s Mission.” It focuses on women’s health, education, economic independence, freedom from violence, and political participation. 

The victory of the Bolivarian revolution is a victory for all poor and working class women. They show that another world is possible – a communal world of solidarity and people’s sovereignty.

On July 6, Sonya Massey was brutally murdered by a Sangamon County, Illinois, sheriff’s deputy after she called the police to ask for assistance with a potential intruder. Like Breonna Taylor, Charleena Lyles and Atatiana Jefferson, Massey was a Black woman tragically murdered by police in her own home.

When sheriffs arrived at Massey’s home, they did not find an intruder outside and went inside to look around. Finding no one else, they began barking orders at Massey, escalating the interaction immediately. Massey complied with all the officers’ instructions, including removing a pot of water from the stove, and said “I rebuke you in the name of Jesus.” In response to mere words from an unarmed woman in her own home, Deputy Sean Grayson pulled out his weapon and shouted expletives as he threatened to shoot Massey in the face. Massey immediately set down the pot and went to kneel on the ground with her hands up. Despite Massey having no pot in hand, Grayson repeatedly shouted at her to “Drop the f—ing pot” and shot her multiple times while she was already on the ground. 

The Illinois Law Enforcement Training and Standards Board records show that Grayson, 30, worked three full-time and three part-time jobs in four police departments and two sheriff’s offices over the past four years, all within the state of Illinois. And court records show that Grayson was charged with two DUIs in Illinois’ Macoupin County – two years in a row. It speaks to the gross level of negligence of a system that gives men with track records like Grayson’s chance after chance and a loaded gun, while the very lives of Black women like Sonya Massey are treated as disposable.

Protestors from the Springfield, Illinois community took to the streets demanding justice for Sonya Massey. The public pressure no doubt contributed to the eventual release of the horrific and violent body camera footage. Demonstrators chanted and held signsreading “Black Lives Matter” and “Say Her Name” — refrains too often heard as a result of racist police violence in America.

Grayson, the killer cop, has been charged with murder. That criminal charges were levied is a testament to the power of the people’s movement against racist police terror in Springfield and across the United States.

According to her family, Massey was a descendant of William Donnegan, a Black man who survived a lynching by a white mob during the infamous 1908 Springfield race riots that took 17 Black lives over the course of two days. Those horrendous August massacres led to the creation of the NAACP — and clearly, the war on Black America has not ended. As one of Sonya’s family members said: “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

The entire racist, sexist system of policing makes working class and oppressed people less safe. “Don’t hurt me,” Massey said when the deputies arrived at her house – working class people know cops are dangerous and even deadly. Grayson’s words and actions prove this in the extreme. As Massey took her last breath, former deputy Grayson said, “the f—ing b— was crazy” and then directed other officers not to provide medical assistance. This killer cop had no regard for Sonya Massey’s life. Despite court documents citing Massey as “calm, possibly unwell, and non-aggressive” and her having assured Grayson that she was doing okay mentally and had taken her medicine, his actions show the blatant disregard and criminalization of a person with a potential mental health diagnosis. The heartbreaking footage confirms what we already knew: this killer cop perpetrated the cold-blooded murder of a civilian who had requested help.

In this case — unlike many other instances of racist police terror — the killer cop was actually charged with murder. This would not have been possible without the mass uprising of 2020 after the brutal murder of George Floyd by racist killer cop Derek Chauvin. But this is not enough. Former deputy Grayson believed he could act with impunity, which indicates just how guilty the entire U.S. system of policing is. Police have killed over 700 people already this year, putting 2024 on track to become the deadliest year for police killings since 2013. 

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have opportunistically used Massey’s murder to call for the passage of the George Floyd Justice in Policing act, which Harris co-authored in the Senate. Of course, reforms that would end qualified immunity, no-knock entry, excessive force, and other forms of police violence are a step in the right direction. But we shouldn’t be fooled – Kamala Harris built her career on mass incarceration policies that led to huge numbers of Black Americans being locked up. She aggressively pursued non-violent drug charges, supported the use of prison labor, locked up parents over truancy, and supported the death penalty. To really end the war on Black America, we need to get rid of this racist, capitalist system once and for all.

Sonya Massey, Breonna Taylor, Atatiana Jefferson, and all victims of racist, sexist police terror deserve a whole new system — a system where Black women can feel safe in their own homes. We need a system in our control that meets our own needs for housing, healthcare, and education – a system in which no woman feels compelled to say to the people who are supposed to help her: “please don’t hurt me.”