Statement of the Secretariat of the European Communist Initiative on the 8th of March of Struggle

The Secretariat of the European Communist Initiative sends warm militant greetings, on the occasion of the International Women’s Day to the working women, unemployed women, women pensioners, urban and rural self-employed, to the young mothers, to the young women in university and school. It particularly salutes women refugees and immigrants, women from single-parent or large families, women with special needs and the mothers of children with special needs.

Female work exploitation, employer intimidation, dismissals, abuse of women, are clear signs of a rotten system, capitalism, based on the exploitation, at a time when all the rights, previously obtained through decades of class struggle, are being rapidly canceled.

The forms of gender and class discrimination continue to exist in every aspect of the economic, social, cultural life of women, as they are a source of additional profit for capital. They are utilized by all the bourgeois governments globally for the competitiveness of the monopolies. Inside this framework, the living standards of proletarian women are even worse. Women are the first ones to be fired, on the altar of the profits of big capital, they are underpaid in respect of men, they are forced to carry out a heavy work for free, or cannot access education because they cannot afford it, or endure violent cohabitation conditions just because they have no alternatives or simply do not know their rights.

Women are forced to supply social and family care services in substitution of the public sector, which has downgraded social services provided by local government, various NGOs and “social cooperatives”. This is the strategy of the EU and its governments to reduce social services and infrastructure, shifting the burden onto the workers’-people’s income.

Nevertheless, we are witnessing the ostensible paradox of women dying from exertion for 3 euros per hour or to stop looking for a job because they have enough of being continuously rejected.

The current social system cannot give answers to these problems.  

The bourgeois-social-democratic and liberal- parties and collaborationist trade unions are using gender diversity to blur the consciousness of class diversity. There is no affinity between bourgeois and proletarian women and there can be no solidarity between those who carry out class oppression and those who are subjected to it. Gender oppression is a consequence of class oppression and a division of labor that is functional to it. Therefore, women's emancipation cannot be obtained in a way, other than through the general emancipation of labor.

The right to permanent and stable work with rights, with a satisfactory salary and pension, to be provided with healthcare, assisted maternity and education are at the core of the contemporary needs of women and their struggles as a part of the general class struggle. Only a higher form of organization of society, with the overthrow capitalism and the establishment of socialism-communism can put an end to the double class and gender oppression of women.

The women of the working class must not accept that the children of the working class, of the people, their children become victimizers or victims in the imperialist interventions for the interests of the monopoles. They must demonstrate popular solidarity with the thousands of refugees, amongst them women, infants, unaccompanied children and adolescents and isolate the racist poison. They must honor in this way the contemporary internationalist message of March 8^th.

History confirms this truth. One hundred years ago, the Great Socialist October Revolution achieved for the first time the full and real equality of women's rights, taking a decisive step for the emancipation of women.

Therefore, March 8 should not simply be a celebration, but a day of political mobilization, marking the upswing of the struggle to win the contemporary rights and to satisfy the needs of working women and men, for a world free of exploitation. On the occasion of March 8^th, we address this call to reinforce the struggles for the achievement of our common goals and we greet the working women of Europe and the world.