All the many brands of suppression – racism, sexism, heterosexism, ageism, classism – are historical; they have not always been with us. It was not ever thus. And it’s not going to be this way, come the revolution.
— Clara Zetkin

March 8 marked the 115th International Working Women’s Day since its initial celebration by NYC garments workers in 1909. The date was chosen in recognition of a rebellion by women workers that began the overthrow of both feudalism and capitalism in Russia during the victorious October Revolution of 1917. In 2024 working women around the world remain leaders of class struggle, defying the bosses’ sexist divisions as well as all other divisions meant to divide what would be an undefeatable, united working class.

From Palestine to Sudan working class women are serving as leaders in meeting the needs of their communities. From New York to Haiti, working women are leading struggles against the bosses to ignite the revolutionary consciousness of their fellow workers. 
In February Dr. Amira Al-Assouli, a physician working in occupied Palestine, displayed both indomitable courage and collectivism by running through Israeli gunfire to rescue an individual at the entrance of the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Yunis. [Palestine Chronicle 2/11). When interviewed later about the incident, with the incident widely circulating on social media, Al-Assouli said “If I feel someone needs me, I will never think about my life.” Her words and her actions prove how women and all working-class people’s values stand in stark contrast to the individualism championed by the capitalist system that is funding and profiting from Israel’s genocidal occupation of Gaza. 

Al-Assouli, herself a displaced refugee, had her home destroyed in an Israeli bombing, is far from the only worker volunteering to help other working class people being killed and maimed in Gaza. Many other workers in Gaza and around the world are putting their lives on the line to help their fellow workers during one of capitalism’s countless attacks on workers, serving nothing but the pockets of bosses, worldwide.

In Sudan, women workers are responding to Sudan’s own civil war, working to provide shelter, food, medical and healthcare supplies, as well as psychological support to workers displaced and in need of aid (UN Women July, 2023). Women also play crucial journalistic roles in conflicts worldwide, providing the working class with vital information about attacks on the working class.

Women workers in leadership

The Progressive Labor Party (PLP) fights to smash capitalism along with its special oppression against women that hurts all workers. Sexism forces women to prioritize reproductive labor, such as cooking, cleaning, and care work, promotes sexist culture that cheapens, degrades, and helps enable the exploitation and abuse of women as sexual objects. Capitalist-bred sexism pits men and women against each other, driving the global epidemic of femicide, in other words the murder of women and girls.

From NJ to Colombia, women in PLP are pushing to make the outcry against the Israeli State’s genocidal occupation of Gaza a fight against the system which created the occupation, capitalism. Women comrades have worked to attain positions of trust and respect in mass organizations, led chants, and sold CHALLENGE to workers. This is in marked contrast to reformist leaders and politicians making meaningless, toothless calls for ceasefires that not only fail to help women under attack by capitalist, imperialist attacks but in fact provide ideological cover for them.

Where workers worldwide are looking for leadership, women communist leaders are meeting that need! Join them in the fight for a communist future without sexism! Join PLP!