Every March 8th, and through our daily struggle, one of the main lessons the first communist women gave to us on March 8th, 1917 takes on great significance: the struggle for the rights of working-class women is inseparable from the struggle of the working class as a whole. Against exploitation, precariousness, and violence against women, class conscience and collective struggle are essential tools to advance towards the real emancipation of women.
Capitalist relations of production hit working-class women particularly hard. Women face the severe consequences of poverty, labour precariousness, flexible working relations, work without collective labour agreements and wages that do not cover their needs, the responsibilities of caring for the family, as well as the commercialization of education, health and welfare. These represent modern forms of women’s inequality that are disproportionately placed on working-class women.
At the same time, all bourgeois forces deny the structural inequalities promoted by the capitalist system and sow divisions among the working class. Such stances aim at concealing the material roots of the oppression of women. On the other side, social democratic views in particular seek to present women as a single category, regardless of their class, thus depriving the struggle for equality from its class-oriented content.
Against this ideological, economic, and political offensive, it is essential to reinforce the conscious organisation of working-class women within the workers’ movement, in class-oriented trade unions, and within their vanguard —the Communist Party. No right achieved for women has ever been the result of voluntary compromises by capitalist governments, but of organised struggle. Only through the class-oriented collective action is it possible to confront the exploitation and violence women endure under capitalism. This task demands the recognition of the particular conditions for exploitation affecting women, the organisation of working-class women according to their own interests, and the ensuring of their participation in every space of class struggle.
The European Communist Action reaffirms the role of communists in the struggle against every form of inequality affecting working-class women and women from other popular strata. This task means the struggle of the workers’ movement against the discrimination and oppression of women at workplaces and in every space for socialisation and living. The immediate demands of working-class women —decent salaries, humane working hours, safety at work, public and free social services that meet the needs of women and their families, guaranteed reproductive rights, an end to sexual exploitation and pornography— should be bonded to the strategic struggle against the capitalist system, with the unmasking of reactionary, social-democratic and other bourgeois positions, and with the promotion of political training and class conscience among working-class women. Faced with the intensification of war preparations, the sharpening of competition, and the escalation of imperialist wars, toiling women demand no involvement in and no sacrifice for imperialist slaughterhouses.
The true emancipation of women will only be possible through the overcoming of capitalism and the construction of socialism. The material bases for inequality and the end of sexual division of labour can be removed only in a society based on central scientific planning, the socialisation of caregiving responsibilities for dependent family members, including children, the elderly, and people with disabilities, and the full participation of women in all the spheres of the political, economic, and social life. Socialism is a socio-economic system based on real equality, solidarity between the peoples, and the meeting of human needs, eliminating private profit.
This 8 of March, we call on working-class women and women from the other popular strata in Europe to take the initiative in the struggle against exploitation, imperialist wars, and inequality, and to advance together with the working class as a whole towards the revolutionary overthrow of capitalist society.
