For IWU-FU
8 March: International Women’s Day
The austerity plans that governments are applying to the working class in the face of the current capitalist crisis are especially damaging to women and dissidents from the popular sectors. Patriarchy and capitalism exploit the most oppressed, causing women and dissidents to suffer in the labour market, with low-paying jobs and vulnerability to being fired. Cutting budgets for social services, health, or education is gender-based violence that increases the burden of unpaid reproductive work. Migrant and racialized people, who face higher levels of discrimination, especially experience heightened economic violence. This 8th March we take to the streets to shout: Women workers must not pay the capitalist crisis!
We denounce the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, conducted by the State of Israel and facilitated by the US and European imperialism. In four months, Zionism has massacred nearly 30,000 people, most of them women, children and older adults. We denounce the war crimes, the systematic bombing of the civilian population and the lack of humanitarian aid. We stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people and their heroic resistance that today is fighting for their lives in the face of shortages of medicine, food, and drinking water. This 8th March we take to the streets to say ceasefire: Governments must break political, diplomatic, economic, and military relations with the State of Israel! The cause of the Palestinian people is a feminist cause!
Through strikes and mobilisations, the women’s movement and dissidents have challenged governments and achieved significant victories in the fourth wave of feminist struggles. That is why the new far-right political phenomena embody the patriarchal and religious reaction and attack our gains with particular viciousness. An emblematic case is the government of Javier Milei in Argentina, which positioned itself against the social recognition of gender violence achieved with the struggles of Ni Una Menos (NotOneLess), the right to abortion as a result of the mobilisation in the streets of the Green Tide and the visibility of the LGBTQI+ collective with all its demands. It mirrors the misogynist and ultra-reactionary Donald Trump and his attacks on the right to abortion won by the mobilisation in the United States in the 1970s. This year elections are taking place in several countries, and candidates are running for office who are proposing governments of the same kind. This March 8th we take to the streets to stop the attacks on our gains: They will not pass over our rights!
For their part, the governments that claim to be popular or centre-left have also failed to improve living conditions for women and dissidents beyond their double talk. With their policies of austerity and external indebtedness, they do not respond to the most urgent demands of the feminist movement. In Chile, Gabriel Boric, the self-proclaimed first feminist government in Latin America, hasn’t closed the 40 percent pension gap between women and men. In Brazil, the number of femicides is alarming, with four women murdered every day, according to ECLAC statistics. In Venezuela, inequality in household chores continues to increase, 54 percent of households are headed by women alone. And in countries where the right to abortion was won years ago, there are increasing obstacles to accessing it freely, and universally, as in Spain and Portugal. This 8th March we take to the streets to fight for budgets to combat gender violence and not for foreign debts.
We remember the New York women workers who fought for shorter workdays in the early 20th century and inspired International Women’s Day on March 8th. And today, we push for all struggles to succeed. But we warn that in this moment of deep capitalist crisis no conquest, no matter how small, can be guaranteed in the long term if we do not put an end to the capitalist system that survives at the cost of the degradation of humanity, and in the first place of most of the dispossessed, of the destruction of the planet and the oppression of women and dissidents.
IWU-FI is a socialist feminist organisation striving to unite the fight against patriarchy and capitalism for global socialism and the eradication of exploitation and oppression. Governments of the working class and popular sectors are the only ones to carry this task out.
International Workers Unity – Fourth International
2024 March 27
