Communist Revolution, Not Elections, Will End Sexist Exploitation
Petrograd, 1917
One hundred ten years ago, the Socialist Party of America organized the first Women’s Day. An International Socialist Women’s Conference the next year proposed an international holiday.
The “foremost purpose” was the right to vote. However, these women were mainly workers. They insisted that “this demand must be handled in conjunction with the entire women’s question according to Socialist precepts.”
In 1911, over a million people marked the first International Women’s Day. In Vienna, women carried banners honoring the working-class heroes of the 1871 Paris Commune.
An International Women’s Day march of female textile workers in Petrograd sparked the February Revolution in Russia in 1917.
Liberal feminists today try to erase the radical roots of International Women’s Day. They focus only on women’s suffrage and participation in electoral politics.
But the “entire women’s question” can only be resolved by ending the material basis of sexism: class society itself.
To eliminate sexism and racism we need communist revolution. We need to build a society based on social relations of comradeship and collectivity, not profits or money. That is the struggle of the International Communist Workers’ Party (ICWP).
Today this struggle is more urgent than ever. Capitalism’s attacks on workers intensify amidst a worldwide crisis of overproduction that’s leading to the next World War. Sexism is one of their weapons of choice. Our working-class sisters are a special target of their super-exploitation.
Fearing workers’ potential revolutionary unity in response to these attacks, the rulers use sexism and racism to divide us. They hope to keep us from seeing each other as comrades. But they will not succeed!
Racist and Sexist Super-Exploitation in Memphis, USA
The scene: an XPO Logistics warehouse in Memphis, Tennessee. Linda Neal, a black worker, told her supervisor she didn’t feel well and needed to go home. The supervisor answered, “I’m not going to authorize that.”
Minutes later, Neal collapsed. Co-workers rushed to give her CPR. Management ordered them away, screaming “get the work out.” Neal died of a heart attack on the warehouse floor.
Tasha Morel, black mother of two, worked at the same warehouse. Shifts are often 14 hours of heavy lifting in stifling hot temperatures.
When Morel found that she was pregnant, her doctor said she could not lift more than 5 pounds. Management told her, “you don’t need any more kids. Go have an abortion.” Morel wanted her child but she suffered a miscarriage.
Within months, four of her co-workers also had miscarriages. The company denied them even the slightest reprieve from the heavy work. Morel calls XPO “modern day slavery.”
XPO is a $12 billion company with warehouses in dozens of countries. It handles shipping, packing and logistics for Nike, Disney, Verizon and, until recently, for Amazon. These companies are in a fiercely competitive race, driving workers to the bottom to increase profitability.
Morel is right. This is wage-slavery. Communism is the only way to end it.
Communist Women Lead Struggle in El Salvador
Globally, over 122 million women have to migrate to find work. Many find jobs in garment and footwear factories in Taiwan, Thailand and Malaysia, where they are forced to take regular pregnancy tests. A migrant working in a Malaysian factory found to be pregnant is immediately deported at her own expense.
In sweatshops in El Salvador, too, women may be fired if they get pregnant. Others are forced to work around chemicals that jeopardize their fetuses. Cruelly, if this results in a miscarriage the woman may be jailed under harsh anti-abortion laws.
Women workers, along with men, are fighting this wage slavery around the world. Some organize with unions or NGOs to try to win reforms. But these are at best temporary. Capitalist competition means that companies that treat workers the worst get ahead. The only way to end this vicious system of sexist, racist exploitation is with communist revolution.
In El Salvador, women maquila workers are giving leadership to growing ICWP collectives that are mobilizing in the factories for exactly this solution.
Communism: Collective Social Relations
In capitalism, many women have to produce commodities for a wage and also reproduce the labor power of the future. Exploitation creates a terrible contradiction between their economic survival and physical health.
Communism will end this dilemma. The masses will organize everything for the health and safety of workers and our children. Collectives will produce and distribute what’s needed. No more heavy, dangerous work for bosses’ profits! No more Amazon or XPO! No money! No wage slavery!
No individual will be forced into the impossible choice of working to feed their family or being able to have and care for a baby, between producing things and reproducing labor power. No one will be pressured to have an abortion or prevented from it.
Production centers will include on-site child care so that working mothers can nurse their babies and parents can see the children throughout the day. Caring for children – like all work – will be a collective labor of love.
In Soviet Russia and in revolutionary China, childcare centers nurtured collectivity. Children used big building-blocks to learn to work together and to share “our toys.” Unfortunately, the socialist system – which kept wages and money — reversed these early lessons that everything is held in common. That’s why ICWP fights directly for communism today.
Let’s dedicate this International Women’s Day — and every day — to use Red Flag and our pamphlet The Communist Fight Against Sexism (available at icwpredflag.org/sxse.pdf) to fight for the communist world we need!
