Views in brief

Liberation is a self-activity

Butheina Hamdah is right ("Banning burqas won't 'free' women")! Of course a government has no business in regulating dress. Period. Sarkozy's ban on burqas is one more example of "we" (French) men telling "you" Islamic men how to handle "your" women.

Liberation from sexism is a self-activity. Hamdah reminds us of this when she calls up the consequences of the ban--that some men will simply forbid "their" women from going out in public at all. How liberating.

While it is true that laws have never mandated less clothing, custom and practice have. Why was it, for example, that modern businesses have required men to cover their legs and women to expose theirs? As a middle school student, I organized my first act of civil disobedience when, along with several friends, I wore pants to school, until the school rule was changed to allow girls to wear pants. We got sent home a few times before we won, and the school rule didn't feel much different from a law.

I am a militant atheist. I've been against patriarchy since it was explained to me at age 12 that Eve was the cause of all misery in the world. I agree with other writers that the burqa is oppressive, with its implication that a woman is property, and the repository of the family's honor/shame.

Yet so is breast-augmentation surgery (for self-esteem?) and spiked heels and "buy-this-beer-get-this-woman" ads and behaviors women avoid so they won't be seen as a "tramp," "tart" or "strumpet."

It is women who will change this society so we don't get defined by these props.
Tina Beacock, Chicago

An incorrect comparison

REGARDING "THE Obama doctrine in Iraq": Michael Schwartz makes a very dangerous, a-historical comparison between Kurdistan and Israel.

He states: "The Kurds want Kirkuk to be the capital of the Kurdish autonomous region, which they say is historically part of Kurdistan. So they're attempting to create a fait accompli on the ground, not unlike what the Israelis do in the West Bank through colonization."

In fact, the only historical comparison that can be made is between the policies of the various Arab nationalist governments in Iraq (also in Syria) and the Israeli government. These governments have engaged in ethnic cleansing, via forced expulsion and settlements in Palestine, and via Arabization in Iraqi-occupied-Kurdistan and Syrian-occupied-Kurdistan.

For reference, simply check the policies of Arabization and the creation of the "Arab Belt" in Syrian-occupied Kurdistan beginning in the 1960s.

It is very concerning to me as a leftist to see that a news outlet like SocialistWorker.org is repeating Arab nationalist ideas and propaganda of comparing Kurdistan to a second Israel. If anything, Kurdistan can only be compared to Palestine, as it is the story of a people being occupied by another people ever since the notion of the nation-state was introduced in the Middle East.

I do hope that SocialistWorker.org writers and editors check their contents and facts in the future, especially when it comes down to Kurdistan.
Hikmet, Baltimore

Vanguards and state power

PAUL D'AMATO'S article on "The Marxist view of the state" struck me, from the first paragraph, as terribly compelling.

I am an anarchist. I am a socialist. I don't think I could be the first without embracing the second.

The author actually builds a very compelling argument for the inherent antagonism of Marxism towards the state. That he does so within a strict Marxist-Leninist framework, and while dismissing the Marxian description of the "primitive accumulation of capital," is a singular achievement.

However, D'Amato tosses it all out in the last two paragraphs. Lenin's quote is almost shocking on first read. D'Amato spends 18 paragraphs building and defending the idea that Marxist opposition to capitalism is necessarily anti-statist, yet destroys his own thesis by trotting out Lenin's endorsement of state machinery as a legitimate, neutral tool.

I agree with Bakunin's view on the state, as discussed here by Engels. So did Marx. Marx was a champion of the theory that capital can only have been accumulated, originally, by extra-economic means: namely, the state. A state is required to create and enforce a capitalist mode of production.

D'Amato asks, "[H]ow can a new society be built if the new revolutionary power refuses to establish a new power, i.e., a state, to prevent the old order from regaining its foothold?"

Lenin provides no answers. The Bolshevik Party provided no answers. A "Blanquist" vanguard party will provide no answers. Why not? Engels said, "All socialists are agreed that the political state, and with it political authority, will disappear as a result of the coming social revolution." There's your answer.

For a revolutionary society to establish itself to the exclusion of exploiters, its revolution must be social in character and scope. Revolutionary social institutions are the alternative to "revolutionary" state control, and the answer to ambitious political vanguards is societal involvement.
Bones Hulsey, Houston

Prisoner education saves lives

I AGREE with the article "What happened to prison education programs?" totally.

I am a current Criminal Justice major and have been arguing this point daily. Some of my classmates believe the total opposite. As I researched the education programs in prisons and the benefits of them, I can see now how it did a great disservice to society to remove the programs. Empowering the inmates allows them another chance. Their debt to society was paid by doing their time.

We (society, that is) will pay for not rehabilitating them and by allowing the system to create more cold-hearted criminals. They come out angrier than before.
Shantela Latimore, from the Internet