Another International Working Women’s Day, another appeal for the class war! 108 years on from women proletarians launching the 1917 Revolution in Russia, we find the fundamental issues unresolved.

As a way of example, let’s call to your attention two key struggles in women-dominated sectors:

• In New York City, homecare workers for the ill and elderly face grueling conditions, working sometimes up to 24-hour shifts due to legal loopholes. As a response, many workers held a hunger strike to City Hall and the SEIU union’s deaf ears.
• In Québec, daycare workers are set to go on strike this year against peanuts-for-wages, in a sector already seeing degraded conditions, as a rematch to their 2022 strike. This time, they will almost certainly be met by the government’s response that “there is no money for you” — perhaps it had to be allocated to the all-time high military budget!

Proletarian women across the board are facing great attacks by the capitalist class. Being part of that class which is ruthlessly exploited for profit, proletarian women also encounter the designation of women as “secondary” wage-earners, meaning degraded wages and viewed as “superfluous” (often taking on the most brutal poverty). In addition to being expected to work for less pay, harassment and other attacks must be endured. All gains are in reverse and recent events have revealed the rottenness of the capitalist system. From the Andrew Tate scum to the demonization of trans people, open chauvinism is on the rise. Even #MeToo, from the outset a reformist outcry against sexual assault in Hollywood, was crushed, with the Democrats landing the killing blow after the Cuomo scandal and Biden’s presidency. Let alone the 38% (at least) of proletarian women who have faced sexual harassment in the workplace!

The attacks on women proletarians are just one part of the greater assault on the working class. The fundamental crisis of capitalism, i.e. the tendency for profit rates to plummet as more and more capital is accumulated, results in both the extreme squeezing of the working class and the drive for imperialist world war. It’s no coincidence that as workers across North America are facing a decades-long decline in living standards, vicious chauvinism and world conflict proliferate. As Trump threatens annexations of the Panama Canal and Greenland due to “Chinese influence” and the widespread kidnapping of our migrant class brothers and sisters, as misogyny and transphobia become openly asserted, the working class as a whole is being told to pay for the capitalist crisis. Between inflation and bullets, evictions and sexual violence, work speed-ups and missiles, precarity and mass slaughter, the entire working class must fight back.

There’s no way around it– for us to put away for good misogyny, transphobia, poverty, predation, slaughter, the proletariat must unite in a single class movement to seize power and rid the world of the capitalist system. An attack on one part of our class is an attack on it as a whole. Not only do proletarian women have to unite with their class brethren in the class war against the bourgeoisie, but our class must be and is able to combat oppression as well as any chauvinism within its ranks (whether gendered, sexual, or other).

It’s through our fight as a single class of wage-workers that we can pose the question of the revolutionary transformation of society into a classless future, one where the family can no longer be an economic unit and where imperialist war will be a footnote in prehistory. We have a fundamentally different perspective from the feminists who want more women in positions of bourgeois power. It was not as women that the starving female proletarians of 1917’s St. Petersburg toppled the Russian Czar, but as members of the only revolutionary class, the proletariat. Today, we find the working class in a perilously weak position. We advocate everywhere we can for the self-organization of our class, which has been for too long dominated by capitalist “reformers” and the trade unions. Meanwhile, the highest tool available to it is notably absent– the revolutionary party. It’s the party that can unite workers from all different sectors and pose its historic mission of revolution. The creation of such a party is the goal set out for us in the ICT. If you broadly agree with what you’ve read, consider joining us.