Under capitalism, there can be no real liberation of women from their millennia-long oppression!

The double oppression to which the private property regime condemns women is a reality common to all countries, whether the most “backward” or formally the most “democratic” and modern; from the United States to Europe, from Iran to Afghanistan, from Africa to Latin America, working women pay a double price: in addition to the millennial oppression of women as women in class society, proletarian women also suffer the oppression of wage labour and the contradictions of a society dominated by capitalist relations of production.

While in some parts of the world women are still denied basic rights, such as the right to education and abortion, in all countries, including those that define themselves as the cradle of modern civilisation, the wages of female workers are, on average, lower than those of male workers performing the same tasks. Women are victims of systematic violence that bourgeois morality defines as “gender-based” and that its jurisdiction is unable to curb in any way.  

But it is precisely in the violent exacerbation of female exploitation under the rule of capital that the premise for the real liberation of women is also dialectically posited. The capitalist transformation of the economy has bred its own ruin, offering women the social and political means to strive for their own emancipation: the revolutionary struggle of the proletarian class, the only instrument of liberation from the yoke of capital, towards communism.

Women, workers, comrades!

In this world, where, according to the hypocritical bourgeois illusion, capitalism is supposed to have ensured universal well-being, while it is instead increasingly torn apart by poverty, wars, and the exodus of desperate masses fleeing conflict and famine; in a world where the proletariat spends its days in exhausting and alienating work, the condition of women can only become increasingly difficult.

The “democratic” reforms aimed at protecting women within and outside the now broken family have been and continue to be useless: women, still predominantly entrusted with domestic work, while still asked almost exclusively to look after children without any real social support, and whose motherhood is only formally protected, are also asked to work long hours in factories and offices, where they often perform heavy work for starvation wages.

Women, workers, comrades!

This world, now completely devastated by capitalist economics, which often fails to guarantee you even decent housing, sends your men to fight in infamous wars necessary to enrich the criminal bourgeoisie, speculates on the suffering of refugees to obtain cheap labour, and does nothing to alleviate the burden of your lives divided between hard work outside the home and caring for your children and family.

This society cannot offer any real improvement in your living and working conditions.

The vile regime of capital deprives you of the joys and satisfactions that all human beings could otherwise experience. It can offer you nothing but a parody of your emancipation, which sounds like a mockery to the proletariat.

Therefore, do not be deceived by the illusion of bourgeois feminism: without the destruction of the current property relations, true liberation of women is not possible. As long as the rule of capital, private property and wage labour exists, the true and full emancipation of women will never be possible.

The oppression of women can only end in a future classless and stateless society, that is, in communism. No reform within bourgeois society can bring about your real liberation, either as women, as workers, or as human beings.

The fragile rights wrested from the bourgeois state, such as the vote, divorce and abortion, are constantly being called into question under the capitalist system and do not eliminate the deeper causes of women’s subjugation in the family and society. They only achieve formal and legal equality, not real and organic equality. On the contrary, it is precisely in the much-revered and fallacious “civil equality” that the social subjugation of women is evident.

The liberation of women does not come about, as feminism claims, through the opposition of the “female people” to the “male people”, thereby preserving the status quo of current society. The demands of working women must be combined with, and added to, those of their own class, the wage-earning class, and converge in a common class struggle against the entire bourgeois society. Only under this banner can the women’s issue be fruitfully addressed and the specific demands of working women finally be victorious.

Women, workers, comrades: it is essential to hurl women’s demands against the bourgeois state!

The liberation of women is impossible without the abolition of all forms of private ownership of the means of production and distribution, without the conscious and voluntary participation of women in the organisation and implementation of collective life, that is, without communism.

The exaltation of the real essence of women as women, as well as that of men as men, is incompatible with the commodity form (labour power) to which capitalist society has reduced both.

Male and female workers must advance together and mobilise together: initially in defence of their living conditions and against capitalist exploitation, with immediate demands aimed at reducing their current suffering, and then tomorrow launching the final attack aimed at overthrowing the bourgeois state, the bastion of the oppression of the working class. Only in the context of the destruction of the apparatus of capital will working women be able to claim their rights as women and gain them for their new, true life. Unlike under the regime of class property, which, with its empty reforms, its fallacious legislation, its inconclusive jurisdiction and its hypocritical moralism, does not liberate them but also condemns them to double oppression!

Women, workers, comrades!

At this historic moment of serious and persistent crisis of Capital;

– Where the bourgeois state’s attack on the ephemeral rights won by workers through hard struggle has inevitably intensified;

– In which the “peaceful” national bourgeoisies, aware of the proletarian potential, seek to stifle the still faint stirrings of class struggle driven by the continuous deterioration of workers’ conditions;

– In which poverty and wars are forcing ever-increasing masses to flee from one part of the world to another, whose “global” character is only such for the business of the various imperialists;

– In which, once again, capitalism is plunging the working class into war to preserve its own existence; class struggle will need more than ever the contribution of women, who can offer that part of themselves that enriches and completes the battlefront and its determination!

Your presence is indispensable, both in the initial phase of the defensive struggle and in the subsequent and definitive struggle to seize power and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat, for the economic transition to socialism and finally for the transition to the society of the future, where humanity will be able to reclaim its life and vitality, communism.

As Lenin already stated, without the participation of women, the proletariat will find it hard to achieve its victorious revolution!

Without the mobilisation of women in the class struggle for communism, the confrontation with capitalism is more difficult to face and impossible to win, just as without the complete social and individual liberation of women, there can be no real step towards communism.

The proletarian world expects working women to fight to lift their humiliated and degraded lives to a new existence within the only social system capable of restoring and guaranteeing dignity and prosperity to today’s exploited.

The human species needs proletarian women to commit themselves with pride and courage to the struggle that will lead them towards a different future, in which they can fulfil themselves fully and joyfully as living beings free from the alienation of double oppression.

Women, working women, comrades!

This is the battle cry against oppression that only the class party can spread. It is the anti-democratic and anti-capitalist approach that emanates from the unchanging programme of the Communist Left, a comprehensive vision of the species’ general transition to a future society.

International Communist Party