International Women’s Day: Women Lead Class Struggle vs. Capitalism’s Special Oppression

March 8 was International Women’s Day (IWD), symbolized by the 1908 New York City march of 15,000 women demanding better pay and shorter hours. In 1910, the Socialist Second International held the first International Women’s Conference and established International Women’s Day. It has since celebrated many women’s struggles — including the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and the women’s march to the municipal Duma (council) in Czarist Russia in early 1917, which helped spark the Bolshevik Revolution.
Internationally, workers will commemorate this month and day to honor the struggle against the special oppression of working-class women — sexism — and the capitalist system that promotes it, although the bosses and their media will use it to pay lip-service. We must recognize that this special oppression is an integral and necessary part of capitalism, which must be fought every day, not just on International Women’s Day or during Women’s History Month.
To Smash Capitalism, Smash Sexism
Exploitation of women hasn’t always existed nor have conditions become better; it has simply changed in form. In primitive communal society men and women’s labor was valued equally. In early class society, women were primarily unpaid domestic workers. As capitalism’s needs shifted during industrialization, super-exploitation of women in factories began. The ruling class uses the special oppression of women — like racism and nationalism — as a tool to oppress the entire working class.
There are many ruling-class ideologies that claim to be anti-sexist, such as feminism, which blames men for sexism and wants women workers to unite with their female bosses. The bosses misdirect many women workers’ anger against the ruling class and towards men, a divide-and-conquer strategy. For men, instead of fighting sexism and revolting against the bosses, they’re taught to take their anger out on women.
Unpaid and Waged Labor of Women = Double Profits for Bosses
Today, women are super-exploited globally, attacked by the U.S. racist destruction of welfare (especially Black and Latin women); paid $2 a day in China’s vast manufacturing economy and in Mexico’s maquiladoras. Women already make up more than half of the super-exploited sub-contracted manufacturing jobs in the U.S., while remaining the principal childcare givers. Women are still paid 70 to 80 cents to every dollar male workers for similar work, keeping all workers’ wages lower. The majority of women workers receive no wages for their work. Unpaid labor  — cleaning, shopping, cooking, and child-rearing — is essential to producing the generation of workers, the labor power that creates profits for the bosses. Because this work is done in the home and is seen as “natural” for women, it is not seen as profitable for the capitalists. This divide between paid and unpaid labor is central to class society.
In addition to being super-exploited, women arespecially oppressed. They subjected to mass rapes in the Congo’s wars for diamonds and resources; targets of blatant sexism of religious fundamentalists; and murdered, raped and forced into prostitution in the U.S.-led imperialist war in Iraq. In India, a woman is raped every twenty minutes.
Capitalist culture — music, poetry, movies, television — is more profitable because it perpetuates capitalist sexist gender roles that help maintain the system. “Successful” women in entertainment like singer Rihanna and singer Shakira promote near-nudity and sexual availability as qualities of powerful women. In Rihanna’s video for her song “Hard,” she wears a Kevlar and an open shirt with tape covering her breasts, straddling tanks, and ordering soldiers to fire their weapons in the desert, presumably the Middle East. The idea is that imperialist war and women-controlled sexism are something to be proud of.
The special oppression of women divides the working class, and dehumanizes women, and men. Economic exploitation makes women a commodity, leading to degrading them as sexual objects and prostitutes, victims of physical violence, rape and enslavement worldwide. We must ensure more woman — especially as soldiers and workers — take the lead in the effort to destroy the system that created and maintains sexism, racism, and its exploitation of all workers.
As communists, we fight in our everyday efforts to rid the world of capitalism. Women are at the forefront of these struggles against healthcare cuts, against capitalist education, and racist police murders.
Only by Black, Latin, Asian and white women and men workers uniting can the entire working class end the oppression of capitalism. Communism is the only system that values women as equals and allows all workers to reach their full potential. JOIN US!