Bourgeois feminism and the movement of proletarian women are two fundamentally different social movements.”— Clara Zetkin, Die Gleichheit (Equality)

March 8 marks the 114th International Working Women’s Day since its initial celebration by NYC garments workers in 1909.

The struggle for working-class women was inextricably linked to the open call for overthrowing the czarist government. Today, working-class women’s demands are filtered into reforms that benefit bosses and their ruling-class servants. Still working women around the world are at the helm of class struggle, defying the bosses sexist and racist divisions.

From Baltimore to Brooklyn to Los Angeles to Haiti, women are leading the fightback against racist police terror and attacks on healthcare.

From Afghanistan to Russia, working women militantly defied the sexist national bosses and marched against imperialist violence.

The Progressive Labor Party fights to smash capitalism along with its special oppression against women that hurts all workers. Sexism relegates women to reproductive labor, such as cooking, cleaning, and care work, promotes sexist culture that cheapens, degrades, enables the exploitation and abuse of women as sexual objects, and ultimately pits men and women against each other, driving the global epidemic of femicide.

Across the capitalist imperialist world, the leadership and militancy of women, particularly Black women, is essential if we want to break free from the chains of capitalist oppression. Women workers—not “girl bosses”—should run the world alongside the multiracial, multi-gendered international working class.

How it began
International Working Women’s Day (IWWD) began in New York as “Women’s Day,” organized by the Socialist Party of America. After the strike of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union in 1909, women met at the international meeting of communist and socialist leaders, the Second International of 1910. They proposed establishing an International Women’s Day to commemorate their comrades in the U.S. By 1911, more than a million workers were celebrating IWWD.

We can also look to find lessons from the two great communist revolutions. The Soviet revolution was rooted in a firm rejection of sexism, from an early pamphlet by Lenin to struggles for more collective living experiments and job opportunities for women workers. Thirty years later, the Chinese revolution also began with an aggressive struggle to free women workers, most of them in agriculture, from the feudal oppression that had enslaved them. After both of these revolutions, important social and economic roles—including positions as doctors, teachers, and engineers--were opened to women workers as sexist notions of their “natural inferiority” were attacked. Divorce and abortion were made freely available. Relics of feudalism, such as the cruel binding of young women’s feet in China, were enthusiastically abolished.

Although sexism predates capitalism, all social relations under class societies like capitalism were always predicated on the idea of preserving private property and maximizing exploitation. Sexism, the special oppression of women, justifies dividing men and women into specific gender roles. Sexist divisions generate superprofits for the capitalists, oppress and objectify half the working-class population, in an attempt to paralyze any working-class unity.

International Working Women's Day belongs to the working class. Help build one world, one party for all workers by taking the lead in fights against police terror, exploitative landlords, and bosses. Painting banks pink and electing women politicians to a government that maintains the super-exploitation of women workers is far from the answer. Reformist solutions—such as  more "democracy"—will not end sexism. Under capitalism, they will only incentivize individuals to strive for their self-interest, the selfish, me-first thinking enshrined by capitalism.

Only by destroying the wage system can we bring an end to sexism. Only then will the profit system’s dogma--“Every man or woman for themselves”—be replaced by the communist principle, “To each according to need.” Only then will collective behavior overcome the selfish me-first thinking enshrined by capitalism.

A world led by PLP
Progressive Labor Party's deep commitment to seeing a world beyond the shallow gaze of identity politics is one of the tenets of our Party's line. Working class women are leading fights against the bosses’ racist and sexist attacks worldwide, including the recent nurse strike in New York City, protests against sexist political violence in Haiti, and battling sexist attacks in Iran against women who refuse to wear hijabs. Working women's power will be self-evident in a communist world, as they will be giving leadership in the fight against sexism. In a world led by millions of communists in the PLP, we have the basis for living an egalitarian life free from capitalist chains.

It is PLP’s obligation to expose and explain that women's liberation doesn’t come from voting, or electing women politicians to oppress us, or expanding the ranks of women CEOs to exploit us. J
For a deeper look at sexism, see PL magazine article “ONLY COMMUNIST REVOLUTION CAN END SEXISM” at www.plp.org/plmagazine