THE ridiculous “official” theme for International Women’s Day 2026 is “Give to Gain.”

What does this even mean?

And what corporate entity is behind the faceless and anonymous organisation that dares to tell us how to celebrate OUR day each year?

It’s our day because it was established by socialist feminists on the initiative of Clara Zetkin in 1910 precisely to combat the kind of bourgeois feminism rampant then and still existing, albeit in an altered form, in 2026.

A hundred years ago women were fighting for basic economic and social rights including the right to vote.

Zetkin saw this struggle as being based on middle-class women’s desire for equality with men in the fields of education and employment, and for personal fulfilment and achievement. While the battle for equality was of relevance to all women, the demands of working-class women were much greater than the struggle for equal rights.

Working-class women’s oppression was, she said, created by capitalism’s need for exploitable labour and hence women’s double burden — the conflict between their role as super-exploited workers and their role in domestic reproduction. Therefore, the solution for working women lay ultimately in the overthrow of capitalism and the achievement of socialism.

This is not the case for bourgeois women. Their struggle for equality, important though this has been historically, can, Zetkin said, be accommodated within the capitalist system. She exposed the limitations of bourgeois feminism, characterising it as reformist in that it sought to improve women’s status in “statutory legislation made by men” (Gleichheit, December 1891) rather than seeking to overturn capitalist property relations — an irrelevant issue for women who now had the right to own their own property before and after marriage. Thus, the commonality of women’s concerns cannot and does not transcend their social and economic class.

Zetkin’s insight is relevant today because we still live in a class-divided capitalist society and although women are not a class, we are still divided along class lines. Compared to previous centuries when women were the property of men and had no rights at all, it is clear that women’s status in many countries has improved juridically and politically. We’ve even had four women leaders of the Tory Party — three of them were prime ministers!

So, by such yardsticks feminism has triumphed — everyone can call themselves a feminist now and embrace innocuous IWD corporate slogans. Clearly feminism for the bourgeoisie means removing barriers to individual self-advancement.

Thus, equality for women as it now exists is based, by an unseen process of co-option, on the successes of a favoured few, but for working-class women little has altered. Despite the fact that women now account for over half the workforce, job segregation, precarious work and the gender pay gap persist, underpinned by the myth of the “family wage” and compounded by the lack of affordable childcare.

Austerity politics, having undermined public services, has led to the feminisation of poverty. In short, women’s oppression is palpable and persistent.

Socialist feminism — real feminism — means understanding and challenging the root cause of women’s oppression, namely, class exploitation.

However, while it is axiomatic that not all feminists are socialists, it is increasingly apparent that not all socialists are feminists.

This is evidenced by the uncritical adoption of an anti-feminist ideology by the left which regards gender identity as more important than biological sex.

The result of the adoption of this anti-materialist dogma explains the widespread opposition of the labour movement to the April 2025 Supreme Court judgment which ruled that “sex” in the Equality Act 2010 refers to biological sex and that a person’s legal sex is determined at birth and is not changed by holding a gender recognition certificate (GRC) for the purposes of the Act.

Women constitute 57 per cent of British trade union membership, and yet many women members have been silenced and intimidated for expressing support for this legal ruling.

The ruling merely confirms what women have always known to be true — that sex is determined by biology, not by opinion.

Women are also angered by the fact that policy capture in trade unions has given preferential treatment to gender identity over women’s sex-based rights and thus the fight to defend and extend our rights has been significantly weakened.

Bad theory leads to bad practice — in this case it leads to the abandonment of working-class women who have most to lose by the movement’s neglect of the multitude of issues outlined above — failure to campaign on them serves to confirm and perpetuate working women’s super-exploited status economically and socially.

Thus it is that much of the left and the labour movement in general have allowed the feminist cause in 2026 to be usurped by the liberal bourgeoisie with the consequence that feminism has been denuded of meaningful content beyond ritual expressions of abhorrence of violence against women and girls.

However, there is hope on the horizon with the emergence of a socialist feminist movement in the form of two new organisations — the FiLiA Trade Union Women’s Network and the Women’s Liberation Alliance (WLA).

The FiLiA Trade Union Women’s network fights for women’s power in the workplace and in unions with the aim of building solidarity across sectors to hold leadership to account, and to put women’s voices at the heart of the labour movement.

The founding statement of the Women’s Liberation Alliance (WLA) encapsulates the socialist feminist perspective initiated 100 years ago. Its founding principle is that the abolition of class exploitation, sex-based oppression and racism is the precondition for women’s liberation.

The WLA thus challenges women’s oppression in society and women’s super-exploitation as workers national and globally. (This is spelled out more fully on the WLA website www.womensliberationalliance.org.uk).

Such a perspective embraces the true meaning of International Working Women’s Day and encapsulates the real essence of women’s struggle going forward. With this we deconstruct the official theme “to give to gain” — we “give” our Marxist feminist analysis to “gain” a socialist society and hence the end of women’s oppression and super-exploitation.