8th March - International Women’s Day - Salute Women’s Struggle

Written by: Mary P. and Alice M. on 7 March 2025

 

 

On this International Working Women’s Day the Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist) extends our warm and militant solidarity to the women of the world in their struggles against oppression, exploitation and imperialist wars.  Women of Australia stand in solidarity with our international sisters in our common struggles to end injustices, inequality and the violence of capitalism against women.   Like all working women around the world, women in Australia are fighting dual battle in the workplaces and in the social sphere!

The history of IWWD is the history of working women’s liberation movements struggling against capitalist and imperialist exploitation and wars, and in the fight for socialism. 

International Working Women’s Day grew out of working class women’s struggles for decent wages and conditions, equality and against exploitation and imperialist war.  Its communist roots have been obscured through its more recent appropriation by bourgeois political sectors with their long corporate breakfasts and high teas.

 IWWD was first proposed by German Marxist Clara Zetkin at the International Socialist Women’s Conference in 1910, which brought together burgeoning women’s movements from various countries concerned with universal suffrage, women’s labour rights and gender equality in all aspects of life. Later Zetkin and her women comrades, including socialist leaders Rosa Luxemburg in Germany and Sylvia Pankhurst in England, were at the forefront of the fight against the imperialist slaughter of WW1 and its ruthless conscription of young working-class boys and men as cannon fodder.

Capitalism, Exploitation and Oppression of Women

 The CPA (ML) views the contemporary oppression of women as stemming from capitalism; its exploitation of all workers for profit, and its requirement that (largely) women perform unpaid labour to sustain the current, and reproduce the future, generation of workers, necessary for continued capitalist exploitation. This means that as well as being exploited in their workplaces, performing some of the lowest paid, insecure work, women labour for the capitalist class for no wages in housekeeping, child-raising, and fulfilling the social needs of family and community, like volunteering. This is the ‘hidden engine’ of capitalism necessary for the creation of profit for the entire capitalist class. To pull off such a swindle as getting women to work for no wages, the capitalist system is constantly generating its ideology, culture and media which serves to reinforce their role in the labour force, social reproduction and the nuclear family, socialising and conditioning women and men to comply with their designated roles as wage slave labourers, creators of surplus value and profits for the capitalist class.  

So, when capital demands female and feminised labour it’s all ‘girl power” and when they aren’t required it’s ‘look after your family’. Often, it’s both at the same time. In the process the system exploits women’s genuine love and commitment to their children, partners, their extended families and communities. We recognise that while the family under capitalism is structurally a site of inequality and additional burden carried by women, it is often too a site of refuge and selfless care, nurturing and love in a heartless world.

Despite this, women involved in class struggle in their workplaces and communities, can loosen their chains and overcome the obstacles of capitalist and imperialist oppression.  It is in the struggle for socialism that women find the path to women’s liberation, and the liberation of all humanity.

Working women shoulder the heavy costs of capitalist economic crises and imperialist wars

The world today is in deep capitalist economic and social crisis.  This crisis is intensifying the economic and political competition between imperialist powers redividing the world amongst themselves.  This is leading to military conflicts and wars in all corners of the world. Fascism and state  repression by ruling classes is on the rise worldwide. 

Throughout history women have always fought and led struggles against the ruling classes shifting the economic crisis onto the shoulders of working people. Women are the nurturers and fighters for life.  We are the unacknowledged engine powering the day to day running of society.

Women are always at the forefront of liberation struggles against colonialism, imperialism and imperialist wars.  We are indispensable in the fight for socialism and building a socialist society.

Women in Australia 

In Australia today economic conditions for working people are deteriorating.  The rising cost of living crisis and the struggle to make ends meet is putting extra burdens on working class women juggling family budgets, their jobs and trying to keep their heads above water.  Over 50% of working women are in low paid, insecure and part time work.  Most single parent women and their children live below the poverty line.  The rising prices of food, utilities, healthcare, housing, education, childcare, the basic needs of life, are creating more hardship in the day to day struggle of working class women. 

In the family it is more often women who must balance the budget and try to make it stretch to meet everyone’s food, health and educational needs. In a cost-of-living crisis this puts even more strains on women than usual.

Poverty and homelessness amongst working class women, especially amongst elderly single women, makes them the fastest increasing demographic experiencing this.

The housing crisis and housing debt hits women hard.

Exploitation of women in the workplace intensifies.  

All workers are exploited in a capitalist society.  This exploitation is intensified with women earning 22% less than men annually, including significantly less superannuation. Women earn 78 cents in every dollar men earn overall. In Australia this means on average women earn $28,428 annually less than men. And that’s an overestimated figure for the majority of lowest paid women workers who are the majority of low paid workers.   The disparities between the cost of living and lower wages hit women hardest.

First Nations Women

For Australia’s Indigenous women the oppression and exploitation is doubled and far worse.  For 237 years, from the first day of brutal colonial occupation, dispossession and racism, Indigenous women have refused to succumb to the devastating effects of colonialism on their people and communities. First nations women are pillars of strength, keeping their communities together, instilling pride in their culture and heritage.  The countless deaths in custody of their children, families and community only strengthens their resolve to continue the fight against oppression, racism and for self-determination and sovereignty. A new generation of young Indigenous women are stepping up, leading militant First Peoples struggles, teaching and inspiring the non-Indigenous young people.

Women and imperialist wars 

Just as women for centuries have fought against brutal colonial occupations and imperialist wars, today women continue to mobilise and lead the anti-war and anti-imperialist struggles and movements for justice and peace.  Globally, women are at the sharp end of the wars mainly generated by imperialist powers, fleeing the devastation, poverty, displacement and persecution to protect their children and families.

As control of Australia’s economy, politics and military is tightened in US hands it is harder for women to fight for higher wages, more social services and a redistribution of wealth.

Australia’s US puppet governments have committed to spend over $400 billion of public funds on AUKUS, the aggressive US-led military pact to contain the rise of China.  This money will be spent on 8 US nuclear powered submarines over the next 30 years.  That’s more than $30 million a day diverted from the Australian people’s social and economic needs, and the Indigenous people’s sovereignty and land rights, to prepare Australia as a US military base and a proxy in a US- led imperialist war with China. 

Meanwhile these $billions are being denied for critically needed funding for women’s health, homelessness, child care, single parents’ payments, women’s workplace rights and women fleeing domestic violence, amongst other urgently required funds to meet human needs in Australia.  

Domestic and Social Violence against Women

Despite ideology which claims that women are liberated, capitalism still designates women as inferior to men and commodifies our bodies as sexualised objects for male gratification, control, and profit making.  This leads to sexual abuse, harassment, domestic and social violence across the society.

Marxist Feminists argue that violence against women is relatively normalised by the capitalist state, its legal system and commercialised popular culture to subjugate women into accepting their submissive roles.

International Solidarity

On this International Women’s Day we pay tribute to women of Palestine, the Philippines, Myanmar, Rojava, and all other women fighting in their people’s heroic armed struggles for liberation from imperialism, colonial Zionism, capitalism and all reactionary forces.  We pay tribute to women in all corners of the world.  

We recognise the women tirelessly fighting for reforms within the capitalist system to alleviate the burden of oppression and exploitation it employs.  History has taught us that the real and lasting end to the exploitation and oppression of women cannot be achieved without abolishing capitalism and replacing it with a new socialist society where women’s potential is fully liberated.

We fight for:

Funding for decent and secure public housing

Living wages for all

Full and secure employment for all

Properly funded free public health, education and child care

Sovereignty and Liberation of Australia’s First People

Equal pay and end to gender exploitation

Scrap AUKUS and spend $368+billion on people’s needs and the environment

End the US-Australia Alliance 

No imperialist war – peace with justice

For an anti-imperialist independent and socialist Australia

  

 

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