On the 2020 International Working Women’s Day

International Women’s Day 2020
International League of Peoples’ Struggle
Women’s Commission
8 March 2020

The International League of Peoples’ Struggle and its member organizations call for the participation of all workers, peasants, youth, migrants, and anti-imperialist allies in mass mobilisations on International Women’s Day, March 8, 2020! We recognize that women’s liberation is inherently tied to the emancipation and liberation of all classes and peoples. Patriarchy and misogyny are reinforced by capitalism and imperialism–systems that exploit women as workers, constantly producing goods, services, more workers, and more profit for the wealthy.

Working class women have always been leading their communities and militant worker’s movements. We cannot forget the brutal history of working class women all over the world. Only a week after the first International Women’s Day in 1911, 146 garment workers, mostly young immigrant women, died in a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in Manhattan, New York.The disaster mobilized about 80,000 workers that included thousands of working women. They protested against their exploitative working conditions, for better wages, and benefits. This militant tradition of the 8th of March has lived on among the working and poor women of the world.

The struggle of women for equal rights has garnered significant victories but still has a long way to go. Women, especially the working class, continue to bear the burden of economic crisis, neoliberal reforms, budget cuts, and privatization of basic social services such as health care, child care, education. Stagnating wages and high rates of unemployment have led to the worsening conditions for working and poor women.

In semi-colonies and heavily plundered countries, local comprador bourgeoisie and foreign corporations have kept women under extreme poverty and food insecurity. Rural, peasant, and Indigenous communities have been displaced by foreign investments, corporate plantations, and resource extraction. These women and their families are forced to either endure hyper-exploitative working conditions on farmlands or migrate to urban areas to seek work there. In the Philippines, thousands of migrant workers, mostly women, leave the country each day to work abroad in order to escape displacement and poverty.

The United States remains the most aggressive and exploitative imperialist power in the world. As economic conditions in exploited nations worsen, the US government and its allies wage war, aggression, and occupation under the guise of anti-terrorism and democratization. As imperialist nations compete for the control of resources, land, and people, corporations and bureaucrat capitalists profit from private contracts with the military. Working class, poor, and peasant women who rise up against US domination and imperialism are suppressed by their own fascist governments. Human rights violations against women and children, including sexual violence and trafficking, run rampant in militarized areas.

In so-called Canada, the police and military suppress Indigenous-led movements against resource extraction and colonial genocide. Women have continued to lead the resistance against violent police raids in a pipeline on unceded Wet’suwet’en territories. For their resistance against the settler-colonial state of Israel, Palestinian women are arrested and detained in Israeli jails as political prisoners. Palestinian women have been leading their communities in the struggle against ethnic cleansing and decades of US-backed Israeli military occupation. From Palestine to Wet’suwet’en, women have militantly resisted multi-faceted US imperialist domination.

Women students across India are participating in mass protests against the fascist Citizenship Amendment Law. Women have been at the forefront of mass uprisings in Chile against gross income inequality, gender violence, the privatization of water, and the racial discrimination against Mapuche Indians. Kashmiri women face some of the most violent state repressions after India revoked the area’s autonomy, but they have continued to participate in protests and rally for the release of their political prisoners. Women all over the world are at the forefront of people’s struggles for democratic rights and against imperialism.

Women workers are the foundation of a global system of profit. It is on the backs of the working class about half of whom are women who suffer from low wages, landlessness, unpaid labor from in-grained gender roles, discrimination and other forms of exploitation and oppression that moribund capitalism has survived until now.

This is why women are rising up to resist. Working class women continue to carry the militant history of International Women’s Day on March 8 and beyond. Their lives are dedicated to the struggle for justice, genuine emancipation and social liberation.

Struggle for women’s emancipation from patriarchy and all forms of exploitation!
Down with imperialism, militarism and fascism!
Uphold people’s rights and women’s rights!
Long live international solidarity!