CHICAGO, March 8 — A multiracial group of 30 workers gathered here to celebrate International Women’s Day. The purpose of the event was three-fold: to give a presentation and speeches concerning the history and importance of the holiday; to be social with friends and comrades; and to formally invite those present to May Day in Brooklyn and raise some of the funds for transportation.
After everyone got settled and ate their fill of some delicious international cuisine, the presentations began. A new comrade, originally from Michoacan, Mexico read aloud in Spanish a letter she had written to CHALLENGE recently. It highlighted her satisfaction with finding an international communist party, committed to the working class and the destruction of capitalism. Coming from a region of Mexico suffering from poverty and drug cartel/police violence, she expressed that she knew firsthand the importance of fighting back.
Next, a slide presentation was given by another PL member which provided history of women-led struggles in the former Soviet Union, revolutionary China, and Cuba. It showed the massive social, political and economic advancements that can be made when sexist and patriarchal capitalist ideology is rejected and workers of all genders are allowed to contribute to many different types of labor.
Both presentations generated important conversation and criticisms. It was pointed out that while the slideshow explained the importance of women filling roles traditionally held only by men, it didn’t go far enough to recognize the immense significance of domestic labor (child-rearing, cooking, cleaning, and so much more) and why it is best when those tasks are equally shared among all genders.
The comrade explained that men also suffer because of sexism because without performing the activities of raising a child, male workers don’t reach full human potential.
The event was a success. The local Financial Committee was able to raise some money for May Day, and a number of friends committed to taking part in the celebration. I was very happy to have learned a great deal more about International Women’s Day, and even happier to have spent the evening with other workers involved in the fight to destroy the sexist and racist society in which we currently suffer, and replace it with one that will value all labor which moves humanity forward.
Red Nurse

PARIS, March 18 — Nearly a quarter million workers marched in 140 rallies across France — 60,000 here and 42,000 alone in Marseilles — under slogans like “Frozen wages, job cuts, enough!” They were protesting the “Responsibility Pact” (read: Profitability Pact) engineered by Socialist president François Hollande who appeared to give a virtual blank check to French bosses. Hollande’s “Pact” would reduce employers’ contributions to social security and place fewer restraints on corporations, including lowering their taxes in the billions.
In 2013, the 16 multinationals listed on the Paris stock exchange made profits of  € 28 billion (USD $40 billion) while receiving a tax credit of  € 1.72 billion (USD $2.4 billion).
The newspaper Le Canard enchainé reported that Hollande wants to finance the “Pact” by cutting another  €10 billion (USD $14 billion) from the government budget, meaning cutting public services and giving the money saved to French bosses.
The demonstrations appeared to be aimed at arousing people to turn out in the coming municipal elections. But for workers to seek solutions to the problems created by capitalism in the system’s electoral process is a losing proposition. The winning alternative would be to destroy that system along with its bosses’ elections and create a worker-run society, communism.
Recent electoral victories of LePen’s fascist National Front and attacks on workers’ standard of living show the need for a communist party to organize the revolution.

In a recent conversation, a friend asked about the life of workers in the Ukraine. In brief, workers in Ukraine, like those in U.S. cities and around the world, are suffering from massive assaults from the imperialists of the world. But given the current war over Ukraine between the interests of U.S./European imperialists and Russian imperialists, it’s important to understand that workers’ interests lie with the workers of the world, that we cannot take sides with any imperialist power. U.S. calls for “democracy” are justifications for increasing the exploitation and oppression of the world’s working class.
In 1993, a strike wave hit Europe. Airline workers in France, steel workers in Germany, civil servants in Great Britain struck against wage cuts and privatization. So did tens of thousands of coal miners in Ukraine, who were joined by workers at large factories in the industrial centers of eastern Ukraine who were facing price increases and a rapid decline in living standards as a result of Ukraine’s independence. The strikes in Ukraine were eventually settled when the government promised pay raises.
But, as with workers in the rest of the world, capitalists in Ukraine were not conceding much to the working class. Instead they instituted an attack in a new form — a banker-led devaluation of Ukrainian currency that undercut wages and increased privatization of production.
In 1993, Viktor Yushchenko (who later became president in 2004) was appointed head of the newly formed Bank of Ukraine. He was a main architect of a 1994 agreement between Ukraine and the IMF (i.e., U.S. and European capitalism). As a result of this agreement,  the price of bread increased overnight by 300 percent, electricity prices went up 600 percent, and transportation prices soared by 900 percent.
Ukrainian grain production was also under assault. The World Bank imposed a first phase of trade liberalization which lifted tariffs on imported grain. As cheap (and U.S. government-subsidized) wheat flooded Ukraine, its farmers, once the major grain producers of Europe, were forced into bankruptcy.
By 2003, Ukrainian per capita income was rising, only to come under attack during the “Orange Revolution” of 2004. Funded by U.S. agencies such as the National Endowment for Democracy and multi-billionaire George Soros’s Open Society Institute, the Orange Revolution began another phase of the U.S. effort to reorient Ukraine under U.S. imperialism and away from Russia. The U.S. favorites in this period were Yulia Tymoschenko, who had made a fortune skimming profits from the sale of Russian natural gas in Ukraine and the U.S.-trained banker Yushchenko.
The Orange Revolution completely undermined the wages of workers who earn some of the lowest wages in the world. According to the German Economic Institute, labor costs in Ukraine are at €2.50 per hour, well below the average of €3.17 in China, €6.46 in Poland, and €21.88 in Spain. An hour of labor in Germany costs €35.66 (one euro = 1.38 U.S. dollar).
The economy and workers’ living standards were further hit with rising oil and gas prices in 2006–08, and then by the global economic crisis of 2008–10. What kept workers alive in this period were continuing (though ever smaller) subsidies of commodities such as natural gas, essential for home heating. These subsidies were paid for by government borrowing. Ukraine, like Greece among others, was in debt to the international bankers.
In 2010, voters, angry at their losses, rejected the Orange Revolution politicians for Viktor Yanukovych, a politician more closely associated with the social welfare system of pre-1993. But pressed by international finance capital to repay Ukraine’s international debt, Yanokovich, like those before him, began negotiations for closer ties to the European Union and the U.S. The deal he negotiated called for massive austerity, like that instituted in Greece. The subsidies that allowed Ukraine’s workers to heat their homes, pensions and other forms of social spending were to be eliminated. In November, 2013, fearing he could not sell this deal to his political base, Yanukovych accepted a temporary loan from Russian imperialists.
Ukraine has some of the largest reserves of coal and iron ore in Europe, and is still a major producer and exporter of iron ore (to China and India) and steel (competing with Germany, France, Russia and others). The privatization of these industries was rapidly accelerated under Yanukovych. Privatization has led to the closing down of steel plants that need modernization, and of many mines. Coal production has fallen by two thirds since 1991, as imported natural gas replaces coal in plants producing electricity. The result has been a situation in eastern Ukraine where many mine workers work in illegal mines often run by criminal networks that offer no protections to workers. That is what capitalism has wrought in the Ukraine.

Many workers believe that feminism, a militant fight by women with allies among some men for women’s rights, is the way to defeat sexism and the discrimination against women both by individual men and society at large.
Feminist movements have, indeed, fought for reforms in the workforce so that women workers would be paid more and face less gender-based discrimination and harassment on the job.
However, while these achievements are important, the majority of working-class women, especially black and Latina women, who are triply oppressed by sex, class and race, have not benefited much from these gains. For instance, in 2001, women’s median annual paychecks were only 78 cents for every $1.00 earned by men.
For black, Latina, and immigrant women, the gap is even wider. In comparison to men’s dollar, black women earn only 69 cents and Latina women, just 59 cents.
Feminism cannot defeat sexism. Like nationalism, it has been used by the ruling class to keep workers, male and female, from uniting against our common enemy — capitalism.
Like black nationalists who view white supremacy as the primary obstacle to liberation, feminists believe patriarchy is the leading cause of women’s oppression. This is due, in part, to the fact that most of the violence perpetrated against women in society is by men. Ninety to ninety-five percent of all sexual assaults and serious domestic violence cases in the U.S. are committed by men. Men make up ninety-nine percent of the people in jail for rape. Men are also the victims of violence committed by other men.
The capitalists would like us to believe that this aggressive behavior is a reflection of man’s nature. On the contrary, male violence depicts the role that masculinity plays in the society as defined by capitalist culture: telling men to be tough, invulnerable and to assert power and gain respect through violence. The capitalists use this as a way to keep working-class men fighting their brothers and sisters in order to maintain an illusion of male privilege and power, while the rulers maintain true power over the entire working class.
Frederick Engels argued in his classic work Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State that sexual inequality as we know it today did not exist before the advent of private property. In pre-class societies, although there was a division of labor, the work that women did was equally valued. At times, the jobs were even interchangeable between the men and the women, as they were in the native Iroquoian Seneca tribes in North America. The work was complementary, not hierarchical.
Conversely, in class societies, whatever became designated as women’s work was devalued. “Women’s work” was no longer seen as a special kind of work, but rather, as a certain grade of work (Charlette Perkins, The Home, Its Work and Influence). As a result, capitalists are able to pay women the lowest wages while reaping huge profits. Bosses maintain their power by indoctrinating the workers with sexist ideology through media, religion, schools and other outlets. They propagate the myth that sexism is an innate human trait, when in reality, it is a learned behavior.
The rulers use identity politics, such as nationalism and feminism to their advantage. It emphasizes the differences between us, encourages division, and keeps workers from organizing around their similarities to overthrow their oppressor. This is the case with feminism, as women work to liberate themselves from the grips of sexist oppression, while viewing other forms of oppression as separate from their own and excluding the class struggle from the diagnosis.
While there are some feminists who do consider class in their analysis, such as Gloria Jean Watkins who goes by the pen name bell hooks, the analysis is weak. It does not speak of eradicating the class system but rather ensuring that women, irrespective of class, have better lives, which they consider possible through reforms.
“All over this nation individual feminists with class power who support a revolutionary vision of social change share resources and use our power to aid reforms that will improve the lives of women irrespective of class.” (Feminism is for Everybody by bell hooks).
In other words, those who make it to the top of the “ladder of success” should share with those who are at the bottom. But as Assata Shakur says in her autobiography, “Anytime you’re talking about a ladder, you’re talking about a top and a bottom, an upper class and a lower class, a rich class and a poor class.”
Feminism doesn’t want to remove the ladder; only make room for more women to climb it. Communism, on the other hand, seeks to smash it.
And, we will smash all aspects of sexism as it plays out on a systemic level as well as its appearance in our personal relationships. However, for us to root out sexism entirely from our lives and our society, we must reckon with the primary contradiction of capitalism: workers cannot be fully paid for the value of their labor.
The fight against sexism cannot be fought outside of class lines. With the abolishment of class, and with fierce struggle,  sexism will slowly wither away in all of its manifestations. We struggle with ourselves, our comrades, and friends to eliminate sexist beliefs and practices on an individual level. Primarily, our fight against sexism must be at the point of ideological and material production: in schools and in all sectors of labor, including unpaid work.