At last we have something serious to celebrate on Valentine’s Day, rather than that infantile, wholly manufactured, sickly-sweet thing propagated by the high street chains. The details are on the One Billion Rising website but here is the back story. Global misogyny didn’t drop from the sky. It is firmly rooted in our socio-economic development dating back to the origins of human settlement and farming some ten thousand years ago. One of the unexpected side-effects of that settlement and farming was the creation of a food surplus, a surplus that the clever, the cunning and the greedy were quick to expropriate. Hence the dawn of class society of which we have yet to extrapolate ourselves from.

Not only did we humans divide into hostile classes the oppressor and the oppressed, the exploiters and the exploited, the slave owners and the slaves; but a further division by gender, whereby women became, as John Lennon so poignantly put it, the nigger of the world. The last vestiges of tribal matriarchy were finally swept away and a relentless era of brutal patriarchy descended across the planet, whereby women were systematically enslaved, brutalised, exploited, raped, beaten, murdered and humiliated not only by their slave owners, but also by their male counterparts. Misogyny, a tool of class oppression was enshrined in law and culture, both religious and secular, and has persisted unabated to this very day.

Britain and other similar western developed nations like to shake their collective heads in mock disgust at the abuses that women routinely face in the developing world; genital mutilation, female infanticide, so called honour killings, institutionalised rape, and any number of other barbaric practises, all condoned of course by priests, mullahs and military chiefs, but the shocking fact remains that one in three women in Britain today will experience some form of physical or sexual abuse in their lifetime. Furthermore, the demeaning objectification of women, in line with the commodification of all things under capitalism, gathers apace. So while at one end of the spectrum women are condemned to domestic imprisonment and slavery by the Taliban, in western society a different but no less debilitating enslavement shows no sign of abatement.

With a few notable exceptions, the hatred of women is a persistent, entrenched global phenomenon. How else do we explain the trafficking of tens of thousands of women each year for the purpose of forced prostitution across Western Europe and North America regions that are supposedly amongst the most civilised of communities? How else do we explain the endemic levels of domestic abuse, rape and outright murder that occur on a daily basis in our so-called civilised societies? How else do we explain the increasing pornification of mainstream culture; in music, in film, in fashion and of course, on the internet? Why even our own enlightened Church of England, supposedly the most liberal of Christian churches, cannot find a way of shedding its deeply engrained misogynistic practises. The least said about the other religions the better. As Dawkins would have it, there is no such distinction between good religion and bad; they all practise and condone forms of misogyny that would not be out of place in the darkest days of medieval feudalism.

But for the most part we are not living under feudal rule. Global capitalism is the dominant socio-economic norm and it too makes full use of the exploitation of women both as a form of cheap labour and as a means by which to sell its increasingly useless commodities. Capitalism itself is probably in essence neither racist nor sexist. Its only rationale is the maximisation of profit. But it is canny enough to exploit whatever prejudices it has inherited from previous epochs. By dividing the workforce along the lines of race and gender it is able to more easily suppress wages and discontent. This method of divide and rule has worked wonders over the centuries and shows little sign of diminishing. Yes, there are token gestures of increased female representation on the company boards and in parliament, but just do a quick number crunch on the key institution and we soon see that, despite some fine sounding rhetoric, little has changed. The global media, the big corporations, the civil service, the armed forces and parliament itself are still firmly the preserve of middle-class men. The male bourgeoisie is not about to voluntarily surrender its position of dominance any time soon.

Despite the vicious misogyny that persists both domestically and globally, the feminist movement that burned so brightly in the sixties and seventies, has been largely marginalised by the global media and giant industrial corporations. A core of enlightened and determined women has battled on tirelessly, but they have been swimming against a reactionary tide. But now, aided by the new electronic media, a renewed flicker of activity. One Billion Rising is capturing the collective imagination both in the third world and the first. It may prove to be just a one-off day of indignation, or it may signal a renewed push against the citadels of misogyny and prejudice. Either way, this is a day that must be supported by both women and men. Cultural relativism does not come into the equation. Oppression and violence on the basis of gender is an absolute and must be removed absolutely if we humans are to move to a higher stage of collective development. And clearly, gender oppression is inextricably linked to class oppression. We cannot be rid of one without being rid of the other.