Declaration of the International Workers’ Unity – Fourth International (IWU-FI)
8M: for a struggle world day against austerity governments and for all our rights
A new world day of struggle finds us women workers on the streets. We are the Bolivian women in the struggle against the reactionary civic-military government of Anez-Camacho. We are the French women workers fighting against Macron’s pension reform. We are the Ecuadorian and Puerto Rican women mobilised against the austerity of the IMF and its puppet governments. We are the Argentinian women on the streets for legal abortion. We are the Brazilian ones demanding justice for Marielle Franco and against the reactionary and misogynist Bolsonaro´s goverment, and his austerity measures. We are the Mexican women mobilised against femicide and sexual violence. We are the peruvians fighting gender violence. We are the panamanian women workers claiming against the mass layoffs of the Cortizo government. We are turkish women demanding enough criminalization of feminist struggles. We are colombians fighting against the persecution and murder of social fighters. We are the Iraqis and the Lebanese fighting against hunger, government repression and the attacks of US imperialism. We are young women and indigenous people fighting for the environment, for the expulsion of mining multinationals and the destruction of our territories and communities. We are the migrants who claim that no human being is illegal and that we fight for equal rights for access to work, health and education. We are the rebellion of women and dissidents in this new wave of feminist struggle expressed with force by adding demands and confronting capitalist governments on the front line. That is why we are, above all, the Chilean working women who confront the reactionary government of Piñera on the streets every day, resisting the repression and torture that takes on a double humiliating character with the political-sexual violence which punish us with rape because we are women.
This 8 March, the international day of feminist struggle for women workers around the world for over 100 years, We need not only to vindicate the history of the women workers who were burned to death in a New York factory in 1908 amid a wage increase strike or to remember the legacy the German socialist revolutionary Clara Zetkin left us by proposing our date at the 1910 International Feminist Congress in Copenhagen and by remembering the heroic struggle of the Russian women workers who in 1917 kicked off the great Russian Revolution by demonstrating on 8 March (February on their calendar). We need to set up a great day of struggle that will achieve progress in the international organisation of the women workers with independent from the capitalist governments and that will help us conquer all our demands.
In this capitalist and patriarchal world, women are the most oppressed among the oppressed and the most exploited among the exploited. We not only are we considered second-class citizens in much of the world where we have no right to drive or vote, as in many countries in the Middle East, but in all countries of the world we still continue unrecognized working a double day . In this patriarchal world, all cleaning and domestic care tasks that are usually carried out by women as if they were part of a «natural» sexual distribution of work, are not paid and are not even recognized as work. But, in addition, this workload appears as an argument of the capitalists to pay us less for the same task (wage gap) and to relegate us to the most precarious jobs. That is why we are hired in the worst paid jobs. With the plans of adjustments of the governments and the retirement reforms, we are the first to be dismissed and we will be the most perjuiced with the scrapping of the pension funds.
That is why, in this new day of struggle, we again demand that the trade union centrals, unions and workers ‘and workers’ organizations call the feminist International Strike as an effective measure that implies the strike of the entire working class for all our rights. We need the whole working class mobilized with us against feminicides and the crimes against trans transvestites, against deaths from clandestine abortions that churches support, against the great capitalist business of trafficking in women, girls and children for sexual exploitation, against the wage gap and discrimination labor, for the free migrants movement and for access to all social rights. We are going against the adjustment plans of the capitalist governments and the imperialism that want to continue paying the fraudulent foreign debts to the IMF, because we are not going to pay the crisis.
Let´s do a great world day of internationalist, anti-capitalist, anti-patriarchal and anti-racist struggle along the way for our emancipation.
International Workers’ Unity – Fourth International (IWU-FI)
