International Working Women's Day, 8 March, is rooted in the struggle of the working class. Today, our class faces massive economic attacks from the same enemy that increasingly sees military conflict as the best solution to its crisis, and working women too often pay the price.

The picture is bleak for working women. In the US, the legality of abortion has been reduced in many states. In Iran, women who disobey the modesty law and protest against the state are subjected to brutal repression. Here and elsewhere, feminicides are uncountable. Around the world, patriarchal violence is being inflicted on women. For the proponents of "democratic progress," there is no explanation for this regression. For all the laurels that capitalism claims to have liberated humanity, the crown is covered in the appalling blood of working women.

The capitalist state can grant rights just as quickly and arbitrarily as it can revoke them. Worse, liberal feminists’ calls for “women’s rights” have been used to justify barbarism, often against women. To save women in Afghanistan and Yemen from their “barbarian” men, “humanitarian” drone operators of the US military fire “humane” missiles at wedding parties. To “liberate” Gaza from the grip of “backward” Hamas, the very “progressive” IDF (Israeli military) turns homes into piles of rubble.

Capitalist society is a social system that carries with it the muck of ages. The chauvinism of the past changes to adapt to the logic of capital. There is nothing to stop capitalism from being both feminist and patriarchal, as long as bourgeois feminism allows working women to continue to be exploited by bourgeois women. If the wage gap were closed, if the head of state were a woman and if the richest people on the planet were all women, it would not change the fact that capital constantly needs to attack the general conditions of the working class for its profits. Capital exploits the precariousness of certain sectors of the class, such as women workers, to lower the standard of living of all workers. In principle, capitalism can solve some of these inequalities, but only superficially, because their root lies in the fundamental inequality responsible for the system, namely the wage relationship. For this reason, the abolition of these odious conditions can only be achieved by breaking the power of capital.

As communists, we advocate not a class alliance for “women's rights”, but the unity of the working class for the liberation of women and all humanity; that women workers are part of the entire struggle of the working class to take the initiative and destroy the system that exploits the working masses.

The struggle of the working class opens the way to a world free from the ugliness of the past: exploitation, war and social antagonism. But this does not mean that the workers' struggle for purely economic demands automatically transforms into a true emancipation of women. On the contrary, only a conscious political struggle can do so. The workers' movement must recognize that its struggle is a struggle for human emancipation and that only through the workers' movement can there be human emancipation. It must drive out chauvinism from its ranks in order to unify, and this cannot be postponed, because it is inherent in the historical task of our class. There can be no women's emancipation without workers' emancipation! There can be no emancipation of workers without women's emancipation! There can be no emancipation without a revolutionary break with the capitalist-bourgeois order!