THE “cost-of-living crisis,” which is actually a crisis of capitalism, is getting worse by the day. The Morning Star recently reported that “workers are living in a nightmare.” 

Inflation is running at over 10 per cent, with many basic food items rising by much more and energy bills expected to exceed £5,000 by the new year.

Yet the wages and benefits of working-class people have fallen in real terms and as many as four out of 10 households are expected to be unable to pay their bills as the year goes on. 

Meanwhile, profits for the energy companies and the wealthy elites have sky-rocketed with huge bonuses and dividends paid out to bosses, CEOs and shareholders. 

As RMT leader Mick Lynch put it, driving up profits simply means driving down wages. 

Whether it’s the cost of living, the recent pandemic, or the climate crisis, working-class people are paying the price.  

What is more, it is the low paid, the disabled, the elderly, migrant workers, children and of course women who are being particularly badly impacted. 

Spiralling food and fuel poverty, substandard housing and rising rents mean this is the perfect storm for working-class women who are on the front line when it comes to household expenses and trying to make ends meet. 

Even the supermarket Iceland has raised the alarm, saying it is losing customers to foodbanks and will offer interest-free loans to families so they can afford to buy its products. 

Meanwhile, foodbanks in turn are running low as people can’t afford to donate. As Diane Abbott said recently in a piece in the Morning Star it’s not a matter of “won’t pay” so much as “can’t pay.”

Yet working-class people are fighting back; with a Tory Party that has nothing but more misery to offer the working class, resistance is breaking out all over the country. Workers are voting in unprecedented numbers for strike action or taking wildcat strikes in un-unionised sectors such as Amazon. 

The RMT, Aslef, Unite and the CWU are leading the way and Arriva bus drivers have already shown us that victory is possible, with a historic 11 per cent pay rise. Union membership is growing and union leaders are rightly calling for a summer and autumn of industrial action and solidarity. 

Even areas traditionally averse to striking like the legal profession are taking action; the female-dominated nursing sector will also be balloting members later this month and hoping to capitalise on the growing anger and desperation of health workers. 

The government of course knows it is engaged in a class war and is seeking to limit trade union powers and workers’ and citizens’ rights with even more legislation like that proposed by Grant Shapps to ban certain strikes and reduce picketing, and the Policing Bill which seeks to stop us fighting back against poverty, injustice and war. 

The campaigns being launched to address the economic crisis such as Enough is Enough are to be welcomed and supported. However, they need to be active at community level and involve women if they are to be effective. 

Rallies are not enough; we need practical collective action to support our communities and forms of protest that won’t see people losing their homes or energy supply and being sanctioned or criminalised. 

Moreover, as GMB organiser Helen O’Connor reminded us at a recent Morning Star rally in London, women are over half the population and any campaigns or actions by our movement that exclude or silence women, whether by accident or design, are not in the interests of the working class and should be rejected as anti-socialist.

In the context of heightened attacks on working-class communities, women and girls are being particularly impacted. Women have always been at the sharp end of poverty and this makes them more vulnerable to sexual exploitation. 

As Judith Cazorla reported in the latest edition of Communist Women, migrant women are particularly at risk of exploitation in the sex trade owing to poverty and lack of access to housing, benefits and education. 

Black women and girls continue to be affected by racist and sexist policing as evidenced by the recent scandal of Child Q, a 15-year-old girl who was strip-searched at school while on her period. It transpires that strip-searching of working-class children for drugs has been widespread practice in the Met.  

In times of heightened class conflict, culture wars come to the fore, which the ruling class tries to exploit to sow division among the working class. 

This can be seen everywhere in social and cultural life where, paradoxically, it is often right-wing commentators and politicians who are the ones drawing attention to the erosion of women’s sex-based rights in relation to language, services and spaces despite the fact it was a Tory government under Theresa May which, in England and Wales, initiated the move to make changes to the Gender Recognition Act and introduce gender self-ID, and the police and other state agencies that are pursuing and sanctioning women and men who speak out and challenge these attacks on our rights. 

Centre-left parties, trade unions, charities and NGOs have on the whole been absolutely woeful in their response to these attacks, failing to defend women members or service users and often leading attacks on women who speak about their rights by labelling them bigoted and beyond the pale. 

In Scotland, where the SNP is pushing ahead with gender self-ID, the paid post of period poverty champion, the first of its kind, was inexplicably and insultingly given to a man — no doubt the “best man for the job”! — despite the fact that it was only through a vigorous and long-standing feminist campaign that the issue came to mainstream attention. 

And in Cardiff recently, lesbians were removed by the police from their Pride march for protesting against the “cotton ceiling” narrative and defending their right to same-sex attraction. 

State-funded Pride Cymru labelled their actions “hateful” on Twitter. What this amounts to is ideological capture across the Establishment and the broad left by a reactionary identity politics that is at odds with class-based politics and women’s liberation.

Nevertheless, there are signs of a pushback: the more that ordinary working-class people learn about the cultural and political erasure of women and girls, the more they are challenging and opposing it. 

Moreover, women’s rights advocates have made some important gains, not least in the recent victories of Maya Forstater and Allison Bailey who won their legal cases against discrimination. 

We now need to rebuild mass support for women’s rights in our unions and organisations and bring together women across the labour movement to reinvigorate a nationwide women’s movement that puts working-class and black women front and centre. 

Alongside the urgent need for collective class action on the capitalist cost of living crisis, this must be a real priority now.