El Partido Comunista 15

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!

The progress of globalization, accelerated in recent decades by the development of communications and transport, has involved every region of the planet in the hellish cycles of capitalist production. Production, based on the exploitation of waged labour and aimed exclusively at profit, is a volcano that constantly produces goods, mostly useless, in ever-increasing quantities. But capitalism, now in its phase of full economic, as well as intellectual and moral decline, tries to survive by exploiting every resource of the planet, natural and human.

Political and economic power have been concentrated in the hands of a few members of the bourgeoisie at the head of very large companies, which own or control wealth comparable to that of an entire state and dominate the fate of the entire world.

But it is Capital, an anonymous uncontrollable historical force, that determines the permanent clash between the different capitalists and national groups of capitalists and drags them inexorably towards the abyss of financial catastrophe.

If, on the one hand, the extreme concentration of Capital increases, collects, strengthens and unifies the working class, on the other, together with the crisis of overproduction, it also ruthlessly ruins the small-bourgeois, mercantile and productive classes, who are now socially powerless, deprived of any historical role and program – even when they express their noisy rebellion, as we have seen recently with the Yellow Vests in France.

Meanwhile, because of both the unstoppable progress of the crisis and the emergence of the new capitalist colossus, China, which has upset the previous imperialist balance of forces, the old international tensions have been exacerbated and new ones added. Already the major states have started the trade war, by means of tariffs, embargoes and blackmail, and local armed conflicts are being rekindled. It has now been proven that capitalism will never be able to keep its promise of ensuring a peaceful and harmonious development for the human species.

On the contrary, the bourgeoisie is rearming its military forces in preparation for a new general imperialist conflict, in which they would call tens of millions of proletarians to massacre each other: while the misery of working humanity is growing, hundreds of billions of dollars are poured into the production of ever more lethal weapons.

But the world war, this desperate last throw of the dice by the dying capitalist monster, will only impose itself after having divided the forces of its historical adversary, the international working class, pitting proletarians against proletarians. A nauseating “sovereign”, racist and xenophobic campaign has already started everywhere, with the sole aim of breaking the unity of the proletariat above the borders and preparing it for a new war.

The pretext for this foul propaganda is the displacement of millions of men, who have always left the poorest countries, today in Africa, Asia, Latin America, a displacement which is itself imposed by capitalism; on the one hand, capitalism forces a growing mass of underprivileged people into misery through its rapacious imperialist exploitation, and on the other hand it has an insatiable demand for cheap labour.

Millions more desperate people are forced to flee endless wars, fomented by the imperialist bourgeoisie to grab natural resources or to occupy areas of strategic and military importance, such as the Middle East or Central Africa.

Capitalism has turned the world into hell for those who work. Proletarians everywhere see their conditions and presumed securities demolished day by day by the attacks of the ruling class, which is driven only by the lust for profit, and which today takes advantage of the weakness of the working class, threatened as it is by the economic crisis. Cutting wages, increasing hours and workloads, reducing any guarantee of employment, assistance in maternity, old age and illness are the measures taken by the bourgeoisie to defend their profits. The economic crisis, caused by the falling rate of profit and the overproduction of goods, pushes the bosses to intensify the exploitation of workers involved in the production process while others, more and more, are condemned to unemployment.

In many countries, some of the workers are foreign immigrants, very often forced into illegality and blackmailed by the threat of expulsion; this wickedness, which is close to slavery, is maintained by the bourgeois state in order to increase competition between workers, poison their feelings and divide their forces.
Instead, a single historical force stands objectively in front of Capital: the international proletariat, organized as a class, united above nationalities and races. This proletariat will once again become a class for itself, not a commodity for Capital, it will defend its living and working conditions by reconstituting its class unions, an indispensable instrument to unite its forces against the bosses’ attack. In this way it will learn both to expose the trade unions loyal to the bourgeois regime and the opportunistic parties that are false friends, and to wage war against the political, police and military apparatus that protects it.

It will be led in this real class war by its vanguard, who will have joined the Communist Party, revolutionary and international, and its historically invariant program that cries out:

Proletarians have no country!

As class brothers and sisters, they will find themselves united in the world struggle for the overthrow of the regime of capital, for Communism!