ON International Women’s Day, we take inspiration from women’s long and arduous struggles against racism, for an end to poverty and oppression, for emancipation and for peace in a violent and dangerous imperialist world.  

We celebrate feminist movements the world over which have helped to raise political consciousness to the necessity of class unity against the enemy of global capitalism. 

The process of industrialisation began in Britain in the 18th century, spreading to other parts of the globe. The crushing exploitation of women workers in sweatshop factories drove them into organising themselves, taking on their employers in powerful struggles which forced economic and social change. 

Successful strike action by 1,400 women workers in the Bryant & May match factory in east London in 1888, demanding better pay and working conditions, was an inspiration to other unskilled women workers to unionise and fight.

Women in developing countries form a large part of the world’s workforce. They have risen to the challenges of superexploitation. 

Suffering dreadful working conditions and desperately poor pay while having to be the main carers of their children and other family members, women in Asia, Africa and the Americas have been at the forefront in uniting peasant co-operatives, trade unions and women’s home worker organisations into militant forces fighting for better pay, employment conditions and women’s workplace rights.

Women farmers in India, standing together with their men, defeated a right-wing government’s attempt to hand over even more of their country’s wealth to big business by privatising their agricultural sector.

Many of the civil rights activists in the United States in 1950s and ’60s who took part in the Montgomery bus boycott in Alabama, and the Freedom Riders who broke the segregation laws of the Southern states of the US and challenged the status quo, often in the face of violent reaction and deadly attacks by racist mobs and the repressive force of the state, were young women from the student movement.

And the tens of thousands of women whose long and peaceful resistance at Greenham Common to the installation of US cruise guided missiles challenged and exposed the British government’s collaboration with the US military machine continues to hearten peace movements worldwide to this day.

In countries with military dictatorships or fundamentalist governments antipathetic to the needs of women, in these most adverse circumstances, women have been to the fore in protest and in the struggle for peace, justice and democratisation at huge risk to their personal safety and freedom. 

Now, we face disaster at planetary level. Climate change caused by increased concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse gases released by industrial processes, burning fossil fuels, emissions caused by endless war and by large-scale changes of land use threatens the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of millions of the poorest people on Earth.  

The courage and example of indigenous Amazonian women, mobilising their communities to confront the huge predatory multinational corporations intent on destroying the tropical rainforest purely for commercial gain, is a fight on behalf of everyone. 

What’s more, when women participate in the overthrow of an old reactionary regime in order to make way for a progressive future, they lift the potential in all of us.

The involvement of women in the Cuban Revolution of 1959 was essential. At every point women were at the forefront, in the underground movement, integrated into the armed struggle and as part of the revolutionary leadership. 

Stereotypical prejudices held by some male comrades had to be overcome. The political objective of Fidel Castro and others in the leadership command was to include women in every sphere of the struggle. 

Their belief in the power of women to fight for the revolution was not only important for the struggles in hand, but for the future, for the whole question of what kind of society they were fighting for and women’s place within it.
  
The women’s protest in Russia in 1917, on February 23 (March 8 in our calendar) was born out of need — for suffrage, for an end to poverty, rationing and war, but it was informed by revolutionary ideas.  

They sparked a political crisis culminating in the great socialist revolution of October 1917 which brought them women’s rights and changed the world.

In the Latin American countries trying to throw off the yoke of US domination by electing left governments, women activists, through their collectives and movements, are vital in the push for genuine social and economic change to bring about an end to their oppression.

In Britain, wages and living standards are being forced down by capitalism’s drive for increased profits, impacting working-class women disproportionately, so they are playing a major part in the current huge trade union-led fightback against poverty pay and austerity.

The fight for real equality must be stepped up. Some of our goals must be closing gender pay gaps, preventing discrimination in the workplace, making travelling to work safe for women, providing adequate childcare and making it easier for women and young girls to access quality education. 

Capitalism has to be challenged on all of these issues and much more. The double oppression of women — tripled for black and Asian sisters suffering racism and discrimination — essential to a profit-driven economic system, must be ended.  

Violence against women and girls, endemic in our society and encouraged by exploitative, murderous social media sites, has to be stopped.

We look to the countries taking the socialist path for good examples of the treatment of women in society and the workplace and we need to highlight and proclaim the positive gains for women under socialism at every opportunity.  

It has never been more important to make the distinction — capitalism devalues, super-exploits and endangers women, socialism has the potential to allow us to develop and flourish.

The battle lines are drawn, capitalism has to be replaced by socialism. Economic and material necessity demand it. Oppressed women will fight for it. Class unity will deliver it.

Carol Stavris is Communist Party of Britain women’s organiser.