The only day the world recognizes women is the one to celebrate their “reproductive” role as mother and wife, Mother’s Day. But it was the Soviets, the communist movement, that celebrated women as political beings with revolutionary power. March 8 is International Women’s Day (IWD), the day that communists organized to salute the strength and contributions of women workers.
Women are not docile but have been organizing and fighting back for hundreds of years. In the United States, the fight of the slave and of women began from the same thread. The Grimke sisters fought against slavery and for women’s rights as one and the same battle. Angelina Grimke declared, “Until he [a slave] gets his rights, we [women] shall never have ours.” Struggles led up to the German communist Clara Zetkin taking the initiative in 1910 to organize an official International Working Women’s Day. Anti-sexist struggle makes it a historic day for all workers, women and men.
Communists Fought to Smash Sexism
During Czarist Russia, the struggle for working- class women became synonymous with the open call for the overthrow of the government. During World War I, the Russian Bolshevik Party tried to turn March 8th into a demonstration of women workers against imperialism. On that day in 1917, the women of
St. Petersburg began and led the February revolution.
Re-centering IWD within its rich revolutionary communist history helps increase the class-consciousness and organization of working-class women. This
militancy is crucial to the future of the working class.
Sexism Inherent in
Capitalism
The inherent sexism in capitalism is clear within the context of maximizing profits. Historically, profits haven’t always existed as part of society. When people began accumulating wealth, society changed from a primitive egalitarian society to one defined by class (see PL pamphlet Communism and the Struggle Against Sexism). In fact, the enslavement of women, the ultimate producers of labor, was essential to class society. To produce surplus, despots had to have unpaid labor and therefore they subjugated and enslaved women. As bosses increased their accumulation of surplus value (profit, value produced by workers over and above their wages), the gendered divisions of labor — previously based on mutual agreements in hunter-gather societies — became coercive. Hence, sexism is an inherent part of capitalism.
Capitalism has become an international parasitic system, and the world is made dependent on the major capitalists. Women and families are alienated, coerced, evicted from their land, and forced to migrate to imperialist countries to earn wages. These women are given the lowest-paying, labor-intensive jobs, which again profit the ruling class. The U.S. profits significantly from the sweat and blood of black, Latino, and Asian immigrant women. Immigrant women are ruled under fascist conditions — working nearly from meal to meal, while nonimmigrant women workers, such as single mothers on welfare, are also treated in a viciously sexist and racist manner.
Sexism Means We Must Fight Back
Women workers have always fought back against oppression. In Bangladesh, thousands of garment workers, mostly women, shut down 700 factories and the roads to the capital, Dhaka. They also hurled bricks at the sexist cops who tried to tear gas and beat them.
These workers produce billions of dollars of profit for corporations such as Walmart and H&M clothing stores, while only earning pennies. Part of the struggle against sexism begins on the factory floor, where women learn to fight fear, an instrument through which the bosses’ state rules.
As these women fight against their super-exploitation, Arab women and children are defending their village against the Israeli fascists. Women nurses in Brooklyn joined their male colleagues in multi-gender unity, are also fighting hospital closings and massive cutbacks in benefits and wages.
Feminism HURTS Women Workers
Feminism, a bourgeois philosophy, disregards the class nature of sexism. Anti-sexist struggles must reject it, because it divides the working class by blaming male workers and shunning them from anti-sexist struggles. This all-class unity for women sets us up for fascism by mobilizing women against their own class interests and sharpening the racist attacks on all workers.
It is communism, never feminism, that fights to eliminate the sexist divisions of the working class. Only communism can eliminate sexism by abolishing the wage system where work will be divided based on need and commitment, liberating women from the direct responsibility of pre-natal care and child-rearing. It will be shared equally with men. This will remove incentives for sexist divisions and workers will struggle to eliminate gender roles. Women will be valued according to their role in giving political leadership. This egalitarian foundation will give way to producing a society free from treating women as commodities.
For Communism, Women Must Lead Revolution
Historically, women are the most exploited of the working class. Class struggle is sharpest among the most exploited sectors of the working class. The experiences gained from this special oppression provides the basis for this leadership. Therefore, women are key to communist revolution.
The battle against sexism is an international one. When the woman worker in Haiti is raped, when a girl in Pakistan is sold into marriage, when a mother from South Africa is faced with eviction, this is an attack on the working class as a whole.
When we sharpen the contradictions between the ruling and the working class, workers will put anti-racist and anti-sexist politics at the forefront, doing away with the identities capitalism uses to divide us. We cannot fight sexism without having strong communist leaders who are women.
Though communists had made the greatest advances for women in the Soviet Union and China, most of the leadership was still male. PL has been fighting against sexism by maximizing women’s revolutionary potential and having them take more leadership roles, as occurred with the women who led the bakery workers’ fight against Stella D’Oro (see CHALLENGEs in 2009).
We need to expose sexism at work and in all the struggles we are involved in. The fight against sexism is a day-to-day struggle. Challenge sexist notions of male supremacy among co-workers. Raise anti-sexist politics at school. Rally against sexist healthcare cuts at your workplace. Write to CHALLENGE about your struggle against sexism. Women and men, black, brown, and white, must embrace communism as the only weapon against sexism.

WHAT IS SEXISM

Much like racism, sexism is a systematic tool used by the bosses to divide the working class against itself. It is the special oppression of female workers. This is manifested in many forms. In 1921, Lenin wrote:
Under capitalism the female half of the human race is doubly oppressed....not only are they exploited as members of the working class, “they continue to be ‘household slaves,’ for they are overburdened with the drudgery of the most squalid, backbreaking and stultifying toil in the kitchen and family household” (Supplement to Pravda No. 51).
Part of this women’s unpaid housework includes raising children, which is seen as an extension of their “reproductive” role. These children go on to become the next generation of workers.
Bosses also use women as a disposable labor force. Not only are they paid less to do more work than their male counterparts, they are also sexually harassed, objectified, and subject to mass violence and genocide. Black, immigrant, Asian, and Latino women are triply exploited because of the racist nature of capitalism (see PL pamphlet Smash Racism). The super-exploitation and oppression of women workers affects the whole working class.
Men’s wages are depressed precisely because women’s are especially depressed. The differential pay between male and female wages serves to divide the working class. If men buy into the idea that their work is worth more, not only are they making it easier for bosses to super-exploit women, they are also making it easier for bosses to exploit them.Women working in unpaid labor at home are seen as profitable for men. The inexcusable violence against women is used to justify that it is “natural” for men to beat women. Both notions disregard the class content in sexism. When women are treated as domestic slaves, men become complicit with capitalism’s systemic inequality. Violence is a safety valve for capital, projecting men’s frustrations in their exploitation as wage slaves onto women.
How does a man who degrades his wife and children hurt from sexism? That male worker has divided himself against his family. In what could have been his source of strength against his alienation at work is now a source of disunity. And any temporary “gain” from having women perform tasks for men is greatly outweighed by the losses he experiences as a worker and as a father, partner, or friend of a female member of his own class.

When the massive famine of 1932-33 took hold, the Soviet leadership had no choice but to take grain from peasants in the countryside and redistribute it in a more egalitarian manner, as well as to feed the cities and the army. Excesses or cruelty occurring during collectivization resulted from errors in carrying out the plan; unevenness in the abilities of the tens of thousands of activists; the response of the peasants themselves; and attacks from kulak landowners. All were faced with a terrible situation under drastic conditions. Many people would inevitably die of starvation.
Two bogus explanations of this famine — known to Ukrainian nationalists as the “Holodomor” — have gained wide acceptance. The nationalists claim that Joseph Stalin and the Bolshevik leadership withheld grain from Ukrainian peasants in order to export it, or that they deliberately starved Ukrainian peasants to suppress the peasants’ strivings for independence.
Another distorted interpretation — the official position of the state capitalist Russian government — states that the famine was caused by the collectivization of agriculture, which led to disruptions, mismanagement, and peasant rebellion. This is the official position of the Russian government. There is no evidence to support any of these contentions.
A Mythical Genocide
Cynically modeled on the Jewish Holocaust, the “Holodomor” originated in the Ukrainian diaspora, particularly among those who had fought alongside the Nazis and fled with German troops to the West as the Red Army advanced. In true Nazi fashion, early proponents of this “deliberate famine” myth blamed the Jews for it.
When Ukraine became independent in 1991, these forces flooded into the country and took a dominant role in historical and ideological discussions. They celebrated the Ukrainian “freedom fighters,” who were guilty of mass murders of Jews, Poles, and Soviet citizens.
The “Holodomor” story was politically motivated from the start. Officially adopted by the Ukrainian state, it is now taught compulsorily in schools and promoted by Ukrainian academics. In fact, the main causes of the 1932-33 famine were environmental: drought in some areas; excessive rainfall in others; and plagues of crop diseases, insects, and mice that destroyed the crops. Weeds were widespread, caused by a shortage of labor due to population flight to towns and cities and the weakness of the remaining peasants, many of whom were starving. Labor shortages left much of the land unplanted or unharvested.
Many horses, the main animals used for plowing, had been lost or severely weakened by an earlier famine in 1931-32. Although the Soviet state imported and manufactured some tractors, they were insufficient to overcome the loss of horses. And much of the land had been planted with grain for year after year, resulting in soil exhaustion that reduced fertility.
As a result of all of these factors, the harvest was so small that the food available in the Soviet Union could not meet the needs of its population.
The Soviet leadership failed to fully understand the environmental causes, nor did local Party leaders. They tended to overemphasize human factors like mismanagement, faulty leadership, and peasant resistance and kulak sabotage. Nevertheless, the Soviet government greatly reduced its grain exports to support the population in Ukraine and elsewhere. It also began to ship aid in food and seed to Ukraine and other hard-hit areas.
Many peasants who hated the kolkhozy (collectivized farms) nevertheless worked hard on them. Many other peasants worked willingly throughout this period and sided with the socialist system. On the whole, peasants accepted collectivization.

The far right-wing is strong in Ukraine in part because it is backed by the Ukrainian government, which masquerades as “not far right.” Under Viktor Yushchenko, president of Ukraine from 2005 to 2010 and a leader of the so-called Orange Revolution, fascist lies began to be accepted as the official truth, taught in Ukrainian schools and promoted by Ukrainian academics.
The two basic lies involve the “Holodomor” of the 1930s and Ukraine’s “freedom fighters” during World War II.
Here are the facts
There never was any “Holodomor” or deliberate starvation of Ukrainians, or of anybody else in the Soviet Union (USSR). It’s a lie disseminated by Ukrainian nationalists and fascists, with no historical evidence. The “Holodomor” myth was politically motivated from the start. It originated in the Ukrainian diaspora (Ukrainians living outside Ukraine), a population led by veterans of Ukrainian Nazi forces.
While the famine of 1932-33 took a terrible toll, it was only one of a long series of catastrophes. Russia and Ukraine had experienced famine every two to four years for a millennium — yes, for a thousand years, at least —and devastating famines every decade or so. There were serious famines in 1920-1923, 1924-5, 1927-8, and again in 1932-33.
The Soviet leadership, Joseph Stalin included, did not understand the extent of these famines for some time. No one did. When they finally realized it, they sent millions of tons of food and grain aid to Ukraine and to other regions of the USSR. They also sent tractors and “political departments” to organize agriculture. The result was a good harvest in 1933, which ended the famine.
About 10 percent of the population of Ukraine died from the 1932-33 famine, roughly the same percentage as in 1920-23. The 90 percent who survived brought home the harvest and stopped the famine — with significant Soviet aid.
Thanks to the collectivization of agriculture, which took place mainly in 1930-31, farming was reorganized on a large-scale and increasingly mechanized basis. Collectivization was the greatest humanitarian triumph of the 20th century. It put an end to the famines that had devastated Ukraine and Russia for a thousand years or more! (There was one more famine in the Soviet Union, in 1946-47. It was caused by the devastation of World War II plus the worst drought in centuries, and affected all of Europe and much of Asia. Even England had to institute bread rationing.)
The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) were trained by Germany’s Nazis. They entered the USSR with Adolph Hitler’s troops and participated in mass murders of Jews, Poles, and communists. As many as 100,000 Polish civilians were slaughtered in 1943-44.
Stepan Bandera led the more hard-core fascist wing of the OUN and eventually consolidated control over Ukraine’s nationalist forces. He was deemed unreliable by the Nazis, who imprisoned him for a time. Then they let him out so he could fight the Red Army again. In 1941, the Banderist leadership declared an “independent” Ukraine state, which was in reality a satellite of Nazi Germany.
The Ukrainian Insurgent Army was formed in part from the 14th Waffen-SS Division (storm troopers) , an all-Western Ukrainian Nazi SS division.
Lies and Damned Lies
In short, both of Ukraine’s foundational historical myths — or, more accurately, lies — have a Nazi origin. And both are taught as “truth” in today’s Ukraine by the Ukrainian government and its institutions!
Russian-speaking workers in eastern Ukraine are affected by these lies as well. But they also question them, and many reject them. As they should do.
Now the open fascists are becoming prominent in the new Ukrainian government in Kiev. This isn’t surprising, since fascist lies have been officially propagated and taught in Ukraine for the past 15 to 20 years.

Unemployment rate: is it 6.7 percent or 23.2 percent? Obama’s Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) continues to understate the true number of U.S. unemployed workers by a huge margin. And it uses “guesstimates” that distort the true figures even further.
The BLS U.3 statistic — the one getting all the headlines in the bosses’ media — marked the February jobless rate at 6.7 percent. However, its U.6 statistic — generally ignored by the media — shows a rate nearly double at 12.6 percent because it includes what the BLS defines as the “marginally employed”: the short-term unemployed (the “discouraged” workers — those out of work up to one year) and those working part-time because they can’t find non-existent full-time jobs. But that is far from the true picture.
The BLS defines away millions of unemployed “discouraged workers” by no longer counting those out of work more than a year; one could define them as the “disappeared” jobless. There has been a heavy continuing rollover of the regular discouraged workers (less than a year) into the “disappeared” category, the worst since the Great Depression.
Shadowstats.com calculates the inclusion of these “disappeared” unemployed as raising the jobless rate to 23.2 percent, a far more accurate figure, completely buried by the bosses’ media.
However, two other factors make even that rate too low:
The BLS uses what it calls the Birth-Death Model (BDM). It adds in its “guesstimate” of the number of workers hired by newly-created businesses while assuming those firms going out of business as still having their previously reported payroll. This results in an overstatement of employment figures and distorts the percentages it has already used to assess the unemployment rates.
The BLS conducts two probes to figure the jobless: (1) the household survey, which counts the number of workers with jobs, and (2) the payroll survey, which counts the number of jobs, adding in those workers with more than one job, automatically raising the employment numbers by including multiple job-holders. It uses the latter survey to report jobless rates.
Thus, both these factors contribute to a distorted unemployment rate, which, if corrected, would raise the true rate even higher than 23.2 percent. On top of this, the jobless rate excludes workers on welfare who would seek jobs if they had childcare and young workers who cannot find jobs and therefore join the military, the so-called economic draft. Once in the armed forces, they’re dropped from the unemployment rolls.
And because of racism in hiring, black and Latino workers, historically the last hired and first fired, suffer as much as double the jobless rates of white workers.
Unemployment is built into capitalism. The system has never existed without it, except when it drafts millions into its war machine, as it did in the U.S. with 14 million in World War II, thereby “ending” the Great Depression’s mass unemployment. In fact, its economists denote five percent unemployment as “full employment.”
The only way to end this mass suffering is to destroy the system that profits from it, which uses the army of the unemployed to threaten those with jobs, to lower the wages of the working class overall. The answer is a system run by and for our class, without bosses and profits, in which everyone contributes to the society as a whole — universal employment. That’s communism.