March 8th 2019: Only with Communism will Women come into their own

Proletarians! Comrades!

For many years now, the celebration of International Women’s Day has been emptied of its original purpose as a day of struggle to reaffirm the rights and needs of working women. It has been transformed into a nauseating, conformist ritual devoid of any authentic link to the cause of women’s emancipation.

For many years, the bourgeoisie and the miserable middle classes have pleasured themselves with bouquets of flowers, and they shed only hypocritical tears on the harshness of the female condition. International Women’s Day was thus bent to the ideological demands of the domination of the bourgeois class.

But the time has come for the women of the working class to reappropriate the meaning of this day and to resume the struggle for an effective improvement of their living and working conditions.

Comrades!

The now-chronic crisis of the capitalist economy makes the whole working class pay an ever-higher price.

But it is women who bear the brunt of the burden: wages are not growing, work rhythms are intensifying, while insecurity is increasing, ruining our dreams for the future.

Proletarian woman face a double oppression in the continuous abuses to which she is subjected, inside and outside the workplace, in the continuous blackmail of the bosses, who fire her when she is pregnant, or do not hire her if she is a mother and has to take care of her children.

In every corner of the world, proletarian women have to deal with the difficulty of earning a wage to live and at the same time face the problems related to reproduction, bringing up children and housework, which all too often fall mainly upon them.

But to the economic causes of our suffering are added the legacies of the historic patriarchy, which is alive and well even in the most modern capitalism. This imposes on women a condition of subordination and disheartening harassment, even up to legal inferiority and segregation. And in all cases this severely restricts our freedom of action and movement.

If this is still possible, it is because capitalism. The frustrating the expectations of general improvement in the condition of women beyond the narrow upper-middle-class elites, capitalism cannot solve the problem of their condition of dependence.

On the contrary, it must perpetuate it in order to preserve the anachronistic institution of the family, the consumer unit of bourgeois society and the privileged place of the most obtuse and anti-social individualism. Capitalism’s hidden patriarchy continues to prosper because it is indispensable to the capitalist economy.

The cruel aspects of patriarchy are not unknown even in economically advanced countries, even if the access of many women to paid work has allowed them to come out from behind closed doors.

But this advancement hasn’t meant much better conditions in our lives, with regards to what would be possible thanks to the current development of productive forces. Especially considering that such development could potentially offer opportunities that were once unknowledgeable.

Proletarians! Comrades!

In order to ease the chains of class and gender oppression of women, we need to return to the struggle of the entire working class, for common economic objectives, which are, provisions to defend motherhoods/parents/children, an increase in wages, equal wages and treatment between workingclass women and men, as well as a reduction of working hours and full pay for the unemployed.

At the same time, women workers must reject the misleading idea of a women’s struggle that unites women of all classes. The interests of a bourgeois woman and those of a low-wage, temp worker or, for example, of a immigrant domestic worker who will spend years away from her children’s childhood and adolescence, are not the same at all.

Even the most advanced capitalism cannot heal the various plagues which characterize the condition of women. Capitalist mercantilism can only condemn millions of women to the commodification of their bodies. This condition being a necessary complement to the preservation of the reactionary institution of the bourgeois family and marriage, a bastion of private property and an instrument for the hereditary transmission of property.

The causes of the miseries and distortions in the sexual and reproductive life of the present society are economic. For this reason, the bourgeoisie will never stop in its abominating legislative and judicial interference in women’s reproductive interests. The dying bourgeois society is helpless to generate newborns as it is to allow spontaneous and unconstrained reproduction.

Comrades!

The emancipation of women from the oppression of patriarchy can only be won if it converges with the struggle for the overthrow of the rule of capital.

Historical experience has taught us that in many cases it was women who started a revolutionary class struggle. And it was often working class women who terrorised the ruling classes most. Proletarian women have always been a subversive force equal or greater to that of their male comrades. Let’s remember the Russian revolution of February 1917, which broke out on International Women’s Day

But even in today’s times women have been at the head of many struggles of the working class. Last January the textile workers of Bangladesh, in one of their general strikes, took to the streets facing the harsh police reaction. In the United States hundred of thousands of teachers went on strike for better wages. In Italy we saw the workers in the agri-food sector, organized in rank and file unions, openly fighting and winning.

By fighting for our common interests, by organizing strong and combative unions, by uniting the working class, and led by the Communist Party, that we will finally be freed from the horrors of capitalism.

A society without classes and without the oppression of women is within reach!