As U.S. bosses grow tired of lost profits after over a year of pandemic driven shut downs, we are seeing cities internationally struggle to “reopen.” Workers have been asked to return to unsafe work conditions, send their children back to schools that might not have their health as a priority, and mentally readjust to a world that has been further thrown into crisis. While these domestic duties fall on all workers, we still live in a society where women bear the brunt of these responsibilities. So we, in the Progressive Labor Party, ask our fellow sisters and brothers, what has been done fundamentally to advance the fight against sexism for the working class?  
Just as the bosses have largely succeeded in turning Women’s History Month into a pro-capitalist celebration of women who have “made it”, so too is Mother’s Day a way to mask the super-exploitation of household work with gifts such as flowers. In the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) we know that only a truly antisexist communist party can lead workers in the complete overthrow of this capitalist system which makes the daily nurturing  of the working-class the responsibility of women workers rather than the responsibility of our class as a whole.
Equality: humanity’s original state
Sexist inequality emerged in the past several thousand years of human history. For 10’s  of thousands of years, humans were based in egalitarian, hunter-gatherer societies, and during that phase of history women were central to the major decision-making around questions of production and distribution of a community’s resources. Although women both hunted and gathered—often tying their children to their front or backsides while casting a net or raising a bow and arrow—gathering tended to be a primary women’s task. This meant women had to be botanists. They had to know which berries, grasses, seeds, could be gathered so as not to poison their communities. In Central America and Mexico, for example, women were chiefly responsible for the domestication of corn (Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, p.15).
In short, women were the first farmers. Why is it important to know about that phase of history, when there was no private property or system of class-based exploitation? Because it demonstrates that maintaining  the conditions of daily life was—for most of history—not only a valued, but the chiefly valued form of work.
Origins of sexism in class rule
With the origin of private property, exploitation of all working people in the ancient world entailed the super-exploitation of women. It was not until commodity production came into being that domestically categorized responsibilities became associated with the unrespected, unvalued and unpaid labor largely performed by women.
Internationally, women and children were the first significant form of private property in slave society. It was not until the beginnings of class-based societies that there emerged the need to devalue the literal “labor” that women produced by giving birth to children. Under class rule, women’s primary function became reproducing the offspring of social classes—whether slave, peasant, free artisan, noble, or elite.
Capitalism creates modern forms of sexism
Without communist revolution, working-class women are tasked with ensuring  the well-being of children who will grow up to be the new workers and cannon-fodder for the capitalists of the world. Whether they join the military, end up in jail or die at the hands of killer cops, or working as educators or engineers, in textile mills or as hotel workers, our children will be  destined to serve the interests of the rich unless we overthrow this racist capitalism system.
Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, when schools closed and children were expected to stay home, home-care responsibilities primarily fell on women workers. Whether single, partnered, or living with family, many women workers  were themselves expected to work from home AND ALSO become the stand-in teachers while their children received either virtual schooling or no schooling at all. Covid-19 has been absolutely brutal for countless families around the world, and women in general, bore the brunt of that increased “social distancing” burden.
Socialism made advances against sexist oppression
Socialism in the Soviet Union, China and Cuba made a proven positive impact on the quality of life of all workers and particularly women, but they also made significant errors by relegating the fight against sexism to a women’s issue, failing to place the full force of the revolution behind the smashing of sexist inequality within their parties and in the society as a whole. In the past 100 years our class has made leaps in social progress when we took control of the state and production.
In the Soviet Union, within months of seizing power in Petrograd, Alexandra Kollontai and the Women’s Dept of 1919 was critical to the ushering in, under the leadership of the Commissariats of Education and Social Welfare, socialist programs that fundamentally overturned the capitalist notion that child-rearing is an atomized responsibility for each individual working family. In Communism and the Family (1920), Kollantai wrote:
We already have homes for very small babies, creches, kindergartens, children’s colonies and homes, hospitals and health resorts for sick children.... All this goes to show that the responsibility for the child is passing from the family to the collective.
In China, the brutal and widely practiced feudal remnants of footbinding, concubinage and slavery were abolished overnight wherever the Red Army and the Communist Party held power during war and revolution, and across the land after 1949.
In Cuba, thousands of women were sent to the Soviet Union to study engineering beginning in the late 1960s, and as early as 1961, prostitution”a legacy of both U.S. imperialism and domestic Cuban sexism” was outlawed.
But many of the gains made in the fight against sexism under socialist regimes were taken away, like so many reforms. Even as early as the 1930s, elements of the Kollantai-led programs began to be dismantled as the rapid industrialization of the economy, which also reintroduced wage incentives, helped the Soviets prepare for the impending war with Nazi Germany. In Cuba, the Fidel Castro regime had undone its own anti-sexist efforts by inscribing into law that only mothers were allowed to leave or miss work due to sick children. In essence, this meant fathers were barred from
tending to their children without risking punishment by the state. Now we see the vicious return of sex trafficking in the former Soviet sphere (UC Boulder, 2019) and concubinage among the rotten elite of the Chinese Communist Party (BBC, 10/2013) as a terrible cost paid by the working class for the failure of these parties  to defeat capitalist ideas and win a truly communist world.
Fight against sexism by fighting for communism
In order for sexism to end, workers  cannot return to hunting and gathering social systems and somehow roll back the clock on all the advances made in technology, science and culture that came through class society.
The truth is just the opposite: we must move all these levels of society FORWARD through communist revolution, where the best advances of modern medicine and technology can be re-appropriated and controlled by the working-class itself. We reject a politics of representation based on “identity,” but we understand that women workers, like all members of the working class, are not just critical, they are indispensable, for leading our class in the antiracist, antisexist world that we are fighting to achieve.
It is from the practices that we implement today, while we do not yet hold state power, that the seeds for communism must be sewn. We begin by fighting sexism in the class struggle—at our jobs, community organizations, schools, military, and streets.
From leaders who hold key positions in our Party, to the collective struggles that we wage with our fellow workers, to the ways we strive for equality within our personal lives, to the way our newspaper is produced and distributed, we fight to build an egalitarian world through building an egalitarian party. Fight for communism! Join PLP!