MEXICO, March 19—The International Conference of Socialist Women, held in Denmark in 1910, established March 8 as the International Working Women’s Day, to recognize women’s struggle for their political and economic rights. This communist origin, and its significance in the revolutionary struggle to end the special oppression of working-class women, is generally unknown or purposelessly hidden.
Progressive Labor Party (PLP) organizes all workers to put an end to the capitalist system and its sexist ideology that justifies and promotes the special oppression of women. Financially, this oppression generates huge profits for the capitalists due to the super exploitation of women. Politically, sexist ideology divides the working class, limiting its capacity to organize and struggle.
On this holiday, PLP held a conference on sexism at a school on the west of the Mexican valley, in a community where the Party has worked for many years, and where recently several women have been murdered. We explained these murders are crimes against our class, caused by an oppressive system; that we should immediately unite as workers in self-defense, but that we should organize to get rid of the root cause of the problem: capitalism.
Capitalism dehumanizes women workers      
Capitalist “culture” degrades women: education, movies, music, books, magazines, and theater, show women as merchandise, focusing on the differences with men, and stereotype women according to the needs of the system at particular moments. Against this sexist ideology, PLP promotes the development of women as communist organizers to lead our class in the struggle against capitalist oppression and for an egalitarian communist society.
In spite of huge advances against sexism accomplished by communists, especially in Russia and China at the beginning of the last century, sexism is still hurting our class. For example, in Mexico:
●In 2018, 845 women were murdered, twice the numbers reported in 2015. Since January 2019, 70 women have been murdered, including 11 minors.
According to the UN, on average nine women are murdered daily, and six out of ten women report to have experienced some type of violence
●Sex crimes against women were also twice as many in 2018 compared to those reported in 2016, to reach 2,733 per 100,000 women; 40 percent of which were committed against minors.
One out of two adolescent women, 12 to 19 years of age, who start their sex life becomes pregnant as a result of sexual violence and early marriage”.
●Women earn salaries that are 34.2 percent less than men’s, that is, for the same job a man gets paid 100 pesos while a woman gets 75. Only 43 percent of working age women have a job and half are self-employed. On average one out of three lack health services, written contracts or benefits.
Capitalists derive huge profits from paying lower salaries to women, but also benefit from their unpaid work, which includes household work, care of other members of the family, such as children and the elderly, and the raising of children. The social and economic value of these activities is vital to capitalism.
As previous statistics have shown, capitalist institutions study the inequalities faced by women, but offer false solutions. These institutions hide the role of capitalism in the oppression of women, create justice and support organizations that misdirect the struggle towards legal or public policy demands that do not get to the cause of the problem, or towards their own feminist organizations, which they finance and promote.
In spite of all this, working women have played an active role in the recent strikes that took place at the Tamaulipas maquila factories, the Metropolitan Autonomous University (UAM), the Chapingo Autonomous University (UACh), the Benito Juarez Autonomous University of Oaxaca (UABJO), and in the recent sit-in of the Section 22 teachers belonging to the Coordinadora Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educacion (CNTE). PLP supports these struggles and organizes these workers in some of these universities and works with the Section 22 teachers.
We make an effort, however, to transcend the limits of trade union or feminist struggles and advance towards the revolutionary struggle for communism.