International Working Women’s Day was marked across Pakistan with rallies, marches, meetings, and cultural activities organized by comrades and friends of Progressive Labor Party (PLP), various women’s groups, trade unions, students, and working-class organizers. From major cities to smaller towns, thousands took to the streets to protest exploitation, rising poverty, and violence against women. These demonstrations showed both the growing militancy of working women and the urgent need to build an international revolutionary communist movement capable of confronting the capitalist system that produces this oppression.

Fight sexism at the root!

Participants raised demands against workplace exploitation, inflation, unemployment, and the brutal conditions faced by millions of women workers. Protesters condemned harassment and violence against women while exposing how these abuses are tied to the economic system that relies on cheap, insecure labor to generate profits for the ruling class.

In Islamabad, women organizers, political workers, and students attempted to gather  for a rally marking the day. Participants planned to march with banners and placards demanding an end to workplace harassment, domestic violence, and discriminatory labor practices. But the Pakistani state once again showed whose interests it serves. After a reactionary religious group threatened violence if progressive women were allowed to demonstrate, authorities imposed the restrictions under Section 144 of the Code of Criminal Procedure. Rather than protecting those exercising their “democratic” rights, the state sided with reactionary forces. Police blocked the rally and briefly detained several organizers and participants. This repression exposes the alliance between the capitalist state and reactionary religious forces that seek to keep women—and the entire working class—divided, intimidated, and powerless.

Despite these attempts at intimidation, organizers continued discussions and small protests to mark the day. Their determination reflects a growing understanding that real change will not come from the institutions of the capitalist state but from collective struggle by the working class.

Women workers show their power across Pakistan

In Lahore, larger demonstrations were held with the participation of students, trade union organizers, and working women. Comrades and friends associated with the PLP spoke about the need to link the fight against gender oppression with the broader struggle against capitalism and imperialism. Demonstrators carried placards demanding equal wages, protection from workplace harassment, and access to education and employment.

In Karachi, marches included large numbers of working-class women, laborers, fisherfolk, and community organizers. Many speakers focused on the crushing economic crisis facing workers, including soaring prices, unemployment, and the absence of basic labor protections. Women from coastal communities described how environmental destruction and land encroachment threaten their livelihoods.

Comrades made it clear that these conditions are not accidental. Pakistan’s capitalist ruling class—landlords, industrialists, and political elites—works closely with imperialist powers to maintain a system that enriches a tiny minority while condemning millions to poverty. Foreign investment projects backed by U.S. and Chinese capital are frequently promoted as “development,” but for working people they often mean land seizures, environmental destruction, and intensified exploitation.

Comrades and friends of the Progressive Labor Party, together with labor organizations and grassroots groups, played an important role in many of these events. Trade unions representing home-based workers, agricultural laborers, and fishermen have long organized working women around demands for better wages and legal protections.

Home-based women workers—who produce garments, handicrafts, and other goods from their homes—remain among the most exploited workers in Pakistan. Because they are pushed into the informal sector, they are often denied minimum wages, unionization, healthcare, and social security. Capitalists profit enormously from this arrangement, using women’s labor as a source of extremely cheap production.

Rural women and agricultural laborers face similar exploitation. Many have organized protests against land grabbing, displacement, and sexual harassment by landlords while demanding recognition as workers with equal rights. These struggles reveal the brutal class relations that continue to dominate Pakistan’s economy, where feudal landowners and capitalist elites maintain their power through economic control and political repression.

Comrades and friends of the PLP argued that International Working Class Women’s Day is rooted in the revolutionary struggles of working-class women who fought for dignity, equality, justice, and communism. The day emerged from militant labor organizing—not from symbolic celebrations or empty gestures by politicians.

Liberals and feminism will never stop sexism

Today, however, many March 8 events are increasingly shaped by liberal and NGO-based feminism that focuses on representation within the existing system. While calls for legal reforms or greater political representation may bring limited improvements, they do not challenge the capitalist system that produces inequality and exploitation.

Women’s oppression is inseparable from class exploitation under capitalism. Women workers are concentrated in the lowest-paid and most insecure jobs—garment factories, domestic work, agriculture, and informal employment. Employers rely on this inequality to maximize profits, paying women less and denying them stable working conditions.

PLP comrades also rejected the political approaches that portray men as the primary enemy of women. Such ideas divide the working class and weaken the struggle against the real enemy. The fundamental enemy of both male and female workers is the capitalist system that exploits their labor and concentrates wealth and power in the hands of a small ruling class.

The demonstrations held across Pakistan show that women are increasingly stepping forward to challenge injustice and exploitation. But these struggles must grow beyond protest and reform toward building an international revolutionary communist movement under the leadership of PLP capable of overthrowing the capitalist system. International Working Women’s Day should therefore be a day of working-class struggle and solidarity—not a symbolic celebration. The liberation of women cannot be separated from the liberation of the entire working class.

The path forward lies in building a mass international revolutionary movement under the red flag of the Progressive Labor Party.