Oregon daily emerald., March 07, 1978, Page 4, Image 4

Letters
One thing missing
One thing is missing in Gary
Ley's otherwise commendably
comprehensive report (Mar. 2) on
the parking problem south and
west of the campus. No mention is
made of a factor which, if I’m not
mistaken, contributes heavily to
the problem: namely, around
the-clock parking on many
University-area streets by resi
dents of fraternity, sorority and
apartment houses, not all of which
have enough off-street spaces for
their tenants.
Use of the streets as open-air
garages is a city-wide problem,
rapidly becoming worse, but is
especially acute in the immediate
campus area.
Fixed-hour parking limits on all
streets, applying to residents as
well as to others, would not be the
ultimate answer to the parking
problem — there being none —
but it would help.
Charles T. Duncan
Professor of Journalism
Immature antics
I want to commend Valerie
Wood on her beautifully written
letter to the Emerald, dated Feb.
2. Her letter perfectly reflected my
own feelings toward the Greeks
and their immature and irrespon
sible antics. I know personally
how frustrating it is to have to take
a wool coat to the cleaners to have
splattered egg cleaned off it be
cause you have had the deep mis
fortune of having to pass through
Greek row on your way home late
some night.
I’ve also read with delight the
responses to her letter that have
come from a few of the Greeks
around campus, particularly Jerry
Martens of the Kappa Sigma
house To sum up their answers,
they criticize Ms. Wood for con
demning the whole system be
cause of the actions of a few mis
guided individuals.
Before I consider giving the
Greeks a "second chance” I’d like
an explanation regarding the ap
proximately 30 boys' that were
standing on the comer of 11th
Ave. and Alder St., right in front of
the Kappa Sigma house. Sunday
evening. They have a real cuty
way of initiating their pledges: the
old member have the new ones
stand out on the street comer with
sacks over their heads, while pre
tending to masturbate at passing
motorists and yelling at the cars as
they go by.
If the Greeks want to act like a
bunch of obscene morons, why
don’t they confine themselves to
within their own walls where the
rest of us don’t have to watch their
disgusting games?
Susan Oarlock
Senior, Finance
The Emerald will accept and
try to print all letters and opin
ion columns containing fair
comment on ideas and topics
of concern or interest to the
University community. Letters
and opinions will be run on a
first-come, first-served basis.
Both letters and opinion col
umns must be typewritten,
using 65 character margins,
and should be triple-spaced.
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Protest Iran massacres
Submitted by
Ahmad Razmandeh for the
Iranian Student Association
On the weekend of Feb. 18 a large scale upris
ing occured in the city of Tabriz in the northern part of
Iran. Workers, small shop owners, progressive cler
gymen, low income government employees and
merchants joined in an organized demonstration of
such magnitude that the demonstrators controlled
this city of one million for over 12 hours. According to
press reports, four banks were burned, 69 others
were damaged, the Rastakhiz Center (named after
the Shafts one party system) was burned to the
ground and the radio station was taken over for two
hours. Automobiles belonging to police and other
state officials were wrecked by the angry people and
unofficial estimates place the damage at hundreds of
million of dollars.
The people demanded the overthrow of the
Shah's regime and asked for bread, adequate shel
ter and freedom for the Iranian masses. The Shah
replied by sending his armored cars, tanks, helicop
ters and soldiers to quell the demonstrations. Peo
ple were machine-gunned from helicopters and
■ ■■ oninion
tanks pushed through the streets crushing people in
their way. At the last report the city was under heavy
seige by the armored cars and soldiers.
The recent Tabriz uprising marks one of the
largest demonstrations against the fascism and op
pression in Iran and reflects the people's growing
anger and resentment towards the Shah's regime. In
a country where the vast majority of the people still
lack the basic necessities of life, billions of dollars of
oil revenue are spent each year on weapons and
other military equipment purchased from the United
States. These arms are being used against the peo
ple in order to maintain the status quo and to sup
press any voice of opposition. During Carter s last
visit to Iran he promised even more arms, which
clearly exposes the nature and depth of Carter’s
commitment to human rights.
We seriously urge all freedom-loving people in
this country to oppose the United States' support of
the fascism in Iran and to protest the arms sates to the
Shah. In opposition to the recent massacres in Tabriz
and in support of the Iranian people’s struggle for
freedom and dignity, the Iranian students are calling
for a 72 hour hunger strike to help expose the dic
tatorship which brutally silences any voice of protest
in Iran.
Women’s day: an event in the working class struggle
Submitted by ismet Guchan (Senior, Architecture)
with Monica Lozano, Cameron Kelly
and Cheryl Stroll
In the battle against the double bondage and inequal
ity of women and oppression and exploitation, March 8th,
International Women’s Day, will be celebrated worldwide
as a day of unity between the millions of awakening
progressive people and the international working class. It
is important to correctly grasp the significance of this day
in the bitter struggle needed for the emancipation of
women.
Oppression puts an overwhelming majority of
women under bondage, while hitting the working-class
women the hardest in capitalist society. Among working
class women, women of the oppressed nations and
nationalities suffer the most. In 1976, twice as many col
ored women lost their jobs as white women.
In the U.S. the capitalist class has been intensifying
its attacks on working-class women. The last 20 years
have seen the gap between the annual wage of working
men and that of working women to increase three-fold
The average pay for a working woman in America now
stands 74 percent lower than that of a working man on the
same job! Daycare funds being cut left and right and
pregnant women being denied job disability benefits are
only part of the attacks of the capitalist class — which
aims to maximize its profit at all cost—to keep women out
of production and class struggle and keep them as
household chattels tied to the drudgery of housework
which strangles, crushes and stultifies their social and
intellectual development.
Women are the most dispensible commodity on the
market; they are the last ones to be hired and the first to be
fired. While women are kept as a reserve army of workers
during peace time, during time of war they are brought to
production to replace men. The capitalist class flagrantly
encourages concepts and social behavior that degrades
women and deems the female sex inferior to the male.
Even though the formal concept of "freedom and
equality’’ is loudly trumpeted by the heralds of the
capitalist class, it is in fact, a farce. For there can be no
equality between the exploiter and the exploited and,
thus, between men and women under private property
economy. Under capitalism, marriage too carries the
stench of private property, savage sentiments of owner
ship, personal gain, and careerism. Even the right to di
vorce becomes an abstract right, for women with no
economic independence and security cannot afford to
exercise it. Facing the fact that daughters of the working
class families get driven to prostitution, because of un
employment, the respected ladies” of the capitalist re
gime shamelessly propose to solve the problem with their
faithful twin-angels, police and the priest. While the
capitalist parasites dream of expanding their clan indefi
nitely, they attack the working class women with forced
abortions and sterilizations in the name of "population
control.”
Under the signboard of the Equal Rights Amend
ment, the capitalist class wants to attack the working
class and its gains and benefits with a measure that really
means equal oppression for both sexes.
The working-class men and women have been
struggling, side by side, against this bourgeois order of
things. It is dear to them that labor cannot be freed while it
is still chained to the material and ideological bondage in
the female sex. Realizing the immense power of
working-class women striving for total emancipation in
the nsing tide of soda! revolution worldwide, the capitalist
dass seeks to undermine the unity of the working class
men and women by implementing the Machiavellian prin
ciple of ‘‘divide and rule.' For this reason alone, the ruling
dass feverishly propagates that the man is the source of
women s oppression, while limiting childcare in the name
of "preserving the family.”
Allegedly, capitalism has become humane and
women can be free under capitalism, if they only followed
the examples of the First Lady, Billy Jean King and Erica
Jong. The "Feminist” movement is the new strategy of the
capitalist class to direct women away from class struggle,
but all this demagogy and hypocracy won’t save their
skin.
Enslavement of woman by man and the on-going
inequality thereafter stems neither from biological nor
from psychological factors but from the nature of exploit
ing social order. And at that, the establishment of private
property over the means of production and the institution
of inheritance constitute the underlying economic princi
ple of monogamy by whichjvoman became subjugated to
man initially. Thus the antagonism between the sexes is
the first manifestation of developing dass antagonism
which reaches its apex under capitalism. Thus the road to
the emancipation of women requires to be, at the same
time, the road of dass struggle of the working-class
against the capitalist class.
Like working men, working women are also the
grave-diggers of capitalism, wage-slavery and its reac
tionary theory of the superiority of the male sex. Working
women need no 'feminist flag", for they have the tested
flag of class struggle: Marxism-Leninism and proletarian
revolution. Nothing is as alien to women's emancipation
as the phony liberation of bourgeois coquettes. On the
road to proletarian revolution, working women must
forge a steel-like unity with the working class in this coun
try to beat back the attacks of the ruling class. Knowing
that the free woman can only exist in a society free from
political, economic and social oppression as well as from
the alien concepts and prejudices about women, the
working class men and women must see to it that their
class attains state power to implement the scientific
theory of their class — Marxian-Leninism. This is the
only strategy towards a total emancipation of women, of
the working class and all mankind.
Gigantic strides taken in this direction by socialist
women in Albania and China are unassailable testimony
to this thesis. Although the working class holding state
power is the precondition of the emancipation of women,
it doesn’t suffice by itself. Under their rule, the working
class and its party must ensure full and active participa
tion of women in social production and running the affairs
of the proletarian state.
Secondly, a stubborn and scientific battle must be
waged in ideological and cultural spheres to unfetter
womankind from the shackles of all forms of backward
and alien concepts and customs. Without this, socialism
cannot be built and the march towards a class society
would be obstructed until this error is corrected.
With this understanding, all progressive people —
and youth — must unite with the working class to fight
against women s oppression and to beat back the attacks
of the capitalists against the working class men and
women. We must demand complete freedom and equal
ity for women and oppose bondage, division and oppres
sion.
We must make the problem of women s oppression a
problem of all those who suffer under capitalism. The
struggle of women against oppression and exploitation
must be united with the struggle of the working class and
national-liberation struggles in the colonies of U S. im
perialists. We must dare to make a future free of classes,
inequality, discrimination and all forms of oppression.
Tucaday, March 7, 1978