Everywhere, obscurantist clergy, fascist groups, masculinist gurus, and fascist-leaning parties come together to divide workers, roll back the rights won by women, and subject them to patriarchal rule. In the United States, Christian churches are leading a crusade against abortion rights, which is now banned in several states. Zuckerberg (Meta/Facebook…) now praises “masculine energy,” while Musk (X/Twitter, Tesla, SpaceX…), who has just been appointed minister by Trump, has for years publicly made obscene and degrading jokes about women, homosexuals, and transgender people. The Russian state decriminalizes marital violence and hinders abortion rights. Speaking about Ukraine on February 7, 2022, the mafia boss Putin said: “Whether you like it or not, my pretty, you will have to endure it.”
In Gaza, during more than a year of systematic destruction of the territory and terror imposed on the population by Israel with the support of Western imperialist states, women and children were the first victims of famine. They suffered cruelly from the lack of anesthetics and medicines deliberately blocked by the Zionist army. Israel employs the same methods in the West Bank. Hundreds of Palestinian women, imprisoned and abused in Israeli prisons, serve as hostages of the Zionist state.
Due to wars or criminal networks, women are massively subjected to sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Chad, Haiti, Libya, Myanmar, Nigeria, Sudan, Ukraine, and beyond.
In Afghanistan, the Taliban government (a Pashtun movement created with the help of the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan in the 1980s) has issued more than 100 decrees against women. In rural areas, this means delivering poor peasants’ little daughters to the lust of rich landowners, lords, or the clergy; in cities, the Taliban prohibit urban women from employment, education, and leisure.
In Syria, the women of Rojava are under threat from the Turkish army and its Islamist auxiliaries of the SNA. Others, particularly those of the Alawite minority, remain wary of the Islamist power of HTS.
In Iran, repression particularly targets women from ethnic minorities and the working class. In the Salafist monarchies of the Persian Gulf, even female citizens remain subject to guardianship and legal inequality, while migrant domestic workers serving bourgeois women are deprived of all rights.
The subjugation of women is exacerbated by class division in human society. All religions justify patriarchy and gender inequality. While oppression does not spare women of the exploiting classes (slave owners, nobles, capitalists…), it falls most heavily on those of the exploited classes (slaves, serfs, proletarians…). While women of the dominant classes are freed from labor constraints and can enjoy leisure, women of the dominated classes endure a double burden: working, like exploited men, for the exploiters while also performing the bulk of household tasks, child-rearing, and elder care.
Like all the oppressed, women resist and revolt. In the dominant classes, as sovereigns, scholars, abbesses, entrepreneurs, etc., they improve their conditions without challenging other inequalities. In the subordinate classes, they negotiate with their companions and massively participate in the struggles of the exploited, as during the French Revolution (1789-1792), the Santo Domingo – Haiti revolution (1791-1804) …
Capitalism inherits gender oppression and sometimes reinforces it. But it also lays the foundation for its abolition: on one hand, the development of science and technology enables birth control and automation of some of domestic tasks; on the other hand, it creates the working class, which has an interest in overthrowing the old order and establishing a society free of scarcity and all oppression.
This historical task requires the mobilization of proletarian women within the mixed organizations of the workers’ movement (assemblies, trade unions, the revolutionary party, councils) as well as through specific structures of their choosing (such as women’s clubs and the Union of Women during the Paris Commune of 1871, the Socialist International of Women, which launched in 1907 International Women’s Day of March 8, or the Jenotdel of the USSR, created in 1919 by the Bolshevik Party and dissolved by Stalin in 1930).
“Marching hand in hand with the workers’ party, female workers are ready to share all the hardships and sacrifices of the struggle, but they are also firmly determined to demand, after victory, all the rights that belong to them.” (Clara Zetkin, July 1889)
Just as the preservation of the human species’ environment cannot be entrusted to bourgeois “green” parties, the emancipation of working women cannot be led by the female political leaders of the bourgeoisie (Meloni in Italy, Frederiksen in Denmark, O’Neill in Northern Ireland, Sheinbaum in Mexico …), nor by “feminist” movements controlled by bourgeois or petty-bourgeois women seeking to pit all women against all men.
If working women—factory workers, employees, domestic workers, poor peasants, students—do not wish to serve as stepping stones for the exploiters and their political representatives, they must break away from them! We must preserve or create organizations independent of bourgeois States and their UNO, capitalist parties, and cross-class feminist associations.
Nothing prevents “progressive” parties and “feminist” movements from joining us in real, practical struggles for concrete measures. But communists women advance a comprehensive program:
Full legal equality for women in all countries. Complete separation of religion and state; abolition of all public funding of clergy.
Job security and maternity leave for pregnant women. End of precarious jobs. Full wage equality between men and women. Redistribution of work among all through reduction of working hours without wage cuts, until unemployment has been eliminated.
Decent and accessible housing for all working women, especially those fleeing marital violence or raising children alone.
Automatic recovery of lost purchasing power due to inflation. Wages, social benefits, and pensions allowing all working women to live decently, including those who worked for their husbands (farmers, shopkeepers, etc.) or were excluded from employment due to childbirth and child-rearing.
Expropriation of private clinics, of capitalist retirement homes and healthcare services. Free and high-quality public services for commuting between home and work, childcare, and care for the sick and dependent.
Immediate removal of any religion from schools. A single, public, secular, free, and coeducational school system. Scientific sex education based on partner consent, sexual freedom, and love, regardless of orientation.
Prohibition of all genital mutilation. Free and accessible contraception and abortion covered by the public healthcare system. Universal, free, and secular healthcare. Consideration and appropriate medical treatment of diseases and illnesses specific to women. Free menstrual protection.
Prohibition and criminalisation of pimping. Prohibition of surrogacy (“wombs for rent”).
Freedom of movement for workers, refugees, and young people in training to cross state borders safely and freely.
Women’s self-defense against gender-based violence. End to sexist justice, removal of reactionary judges. For a democratic, non-sexist judicial system where judges are elected and can be recalled by workers’ councils.
Against Zionist colonialism in Palestine, U.S. colonialism in Panama, Ukraine, or Greenland, Russian colonialism in Ukraine, Chinese colonialism in Xinjiang, Indian colonialism in Kashmir …
End militarism, break imperialist military alliances (NATO, AUKUS, CSTO…), dissolve standing armies, people’s mixed armament.
Communist world organization of women linked to the future revolutionary workers’ international.
Workers’ governments in every country, as a first step toward global communism—without classes, exploitation, or oppression.
Permanent Revolution Collective (Argentina, Austria, France, Spain, Turkey)