As 8 March, International Working Women’s Day, comes around again, women everywhere are facing an onslaught of attacks – materially, politically, and socially.
In the USA, the right to abortion has been ripped up by the Supreme Court. And despite mass mobilisations in Spain, Ireland, and Latin America, and despite the #MeToo movement, violence against women is on the rise globally.
Last September in South London, for example, a 15-year-old girl was stabbed to death on her way to school by a young man reeling from rejection.
This senseless violence is the extreme consequence of misogynistic ideas that emanate from the ruling class, and that seep down into society.
These vile views are most crudely expressed through individuals like Andrew Tate. He and his reactionary ilk spew out a torrent of violent, objectifying messages about women on social media.
And these poisonous attitudes, in one form or another, find their way into classrooms, and into social interactions between young men and women.
But it is not just Tate or tech algorithms that are driving this. The whole capitalist system – and the sexist, racist, rotten establishment that upholds it – is to blame.
Toxic system
Young women today feel rage at bourgeois judges who ride roughshod over our democratic rights. In 2019, videos of female protestors in Chile went viral, with their chant in front of government buildings: “The rapist is you.”
In other words, it is the politicians, the police, the courts, and the system they defend that is responsible for the oppression that women everywhere face.
Every day, new revelations emerge about the disgusting, abusive behaviour of the supposedly ‘respectable’ elites. But no one is ever really surprised.
We know exactly what happened with Prince Andrew and those young women; with Trump and his victims; with depraved media celebrities, such as Jimmy Savile and Russell Brand, guarded by their friends in high places; and with all the MPs in Britain, across both the Tory and Labour benches, who are under investigation for harassment and misconduct.
One report in 2022 said that 56 Westminster MPs had been referred to a parliamentary complaints process. And no doubt there are plenty more degenerates and reprobates hiding in the House of Commons.
Every pillar of the establishment is filled to the brim with perverts, paedophiles, and serial abusers. The police, our so called ‘protectors’, are known to be institutionally racist and sexist.
And this isn’t limited to men. The toxic culture of the ‘boys in blue’ infects everyone in the force. In 2013, it was three female officers who strip-searched and sexually abused Dr Konstancja Duff when taking her in for questioning at a London police station. Similarly with the harrowing case of Child Q in 2022.
No doubt these officers all felt that the Met would shield them and support this ‘business as usual’.
Independence and empowerment
These daily experiences of oppression are overwhelming. It can feel at times like there is no escape. Sexism seems to pour into every corner of our lives, causing humiliation and degradation, and depriving us of any independence or freedom.
No wonder that young women everywhere are looking for a way out of this decrepit system.
Capitalism tells us that empowerment comes from making money; from being a boss. And bonus points if you can make more than a man!
Buy more products to make yourself look better – that will give you power over men! We can even sexualise ourselves and make money that way. This is the best that capitalism has to offer.
All of this rhetoric about ‘female empowerment’ is draped in nauseating ‘girlboss’ language; in an aesthetic that tries to entice us into superficial lifestyle changes; and in an ideological embracement of impotent individualism.
But this is nothing but a cynical cover up for the capitalist system, pushed by corporate bosses and the liberal establishment. And it is a lie.
It is a lie that promotes pernicious identity politics and a vicious culture war, which the right wing happily stirs up in their own interests; which pushes the idea that the battle we face is one of all men against all women, rather than a class struggle between the working class against the ruling class.
Class struggle
Real empowerment, freedom, and sense of self comes from understanding the world around us, from having agency, and from having the ability to change our conditions and transform society.
To genuinely fight against women’s oppression, communists study its origins. This oppression arises with the historic division of society into classes – of those who work and those who rule.
Sexism, in other words, is not innate to any man or woman. It is a product of our unequal, exploitative, oppressive social system.
Today that means capitalism: an economic system that prioritises profit over all else; that treats us as objects to be exploited in the bosses’ interests; and that relies on division to keep us – the working class – disunited.
This, however, highlights exactly where our power lies – not as isolated ‘empowered’ individuals or ‘girl bosses’, but in the class struggle.
Join the communists!
Communists stand for real, material liberation. This is only possible on the basis of revolution – a revolution to overthrow capitalism and rip oppression up at its roots.
This is not a fantasy. The class struggle has proven again and again that it alone holds the key to making genuine gains for ordinary women and men.
The origins of International Women’s Day lie in the socialist and communist movement. And it was on this day in 1917 that the Russian Revolution broke out (see centre pages).
It was the working women in the textile factories, coming out on strike against the war, who lit the flame that eventually brought down the Tsar. And later, in October of that year, the Bolsheviks led the working class of Russia to power.
On this revolutionary basis, the shackles of capitalist society that tied women to the home began to be unleashed. The right to abortion, the right to divorce, and genuine equality between men and women: all of this was introduced by the Soviet government.
This was possible because capitalism was smashed, society was transformed, and the working class was in control.
This is the legacy of revolutionary class struggle that we defend and continue today.
So if you want to fight sexism, then you need to join the communists – and join the revolution.
