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 Working Women’s Oppression

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, the women of St. Petersburg began and led the February revolution in 1917.

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.  

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 that “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” (in a 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. 

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 have made the greatest advances for women in the Soviet Union, 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 and white, must embrace communism as the only weapon against sexism.

“The Forgotten Space” is a poetic, visually stunning, and unabashedly anti-capitalist documentary about the global transport system. The film opens aboard a massive cargo container ship carrying products from low-wage manufacturing and farming centers to major ports in Europe and the United States. 

The seas are the pathways over which 100,000 ships, manned by 1.5 million seamen, deliver materials and goods worth trillions of dollars to a web of manufacturers (like Foxconn in China), importers (like Walmart and Apple), and banks and financiers on Wall Street and elsewhere. “The Forgotten Space” interviews the normally invisible people who make and transport the goods, rather than the billionaires who get both the credit and the profits.

The film depicts how the entire transport system of capitalism relies on cheap labor: factory workers in China; Korean and Indonesian workers who service the cargo ships; low-paid truck drivers at the huge port in Los Angeles. 

As economist Minqi Li explains, capitalism relentlessly seeks to lower production costs by cutting wages and benefits and also by demanding lower taxes and minimal environmental regulations, giving it freedom to pollute the oceans. 

The cargo container — a standardized metal box that can be moved from ship to train or truck — was developed by U.S. shippers who were eager to cut the number of dockworkers required to load cargo. Millions of containers now travel the globe’s oceans, a watery conveyor belt that moves 90 percent of the world’s cargo. Once they reach their destinations, trains and trucks bring their contents to stores. 

Meanwhile, farms in Holland are uprooted to make room for the tracks the railroads run on, while the entire village of Doel is demolished to expand the port of Antwerp, Belgium. Nothing appears to stand in the way of global capitalism as it moves factories abroad and shunts industrial workers to the unemployment lines or to stock shelves at retail stores.

Yet Minqi Li argues that something does stand in the way. The workers of China are now demanding higher wages and benefits, with a record number of strikes and job actions. Li asks, What happens to capitalism when it runs out of workers it can super-exploit? 

His comments have a certain deterministic ring, as though capitalism will somehow fall apart when wages rise globally. Yet the film — which the filmmakers declared to be “openly Marxist” — concludes by suggesting, “The lowly crew must seize the helm.” 

Indeed, only when the working class destroys capitalism with a communist revolution, and takes over the global economy, can it begin to plan a society that treats people humanely.

MUMBAI, INDIA, February 28 — Millions of workers in eleven major unions and 5,000 smaller ones went on a 24-hour general strike in one of the largest walkouts in the country’s history. They were demanding protection against soaring prices of vital commodities, more jobs, an end to privatization and to government anti-labor policies and a rise in the minimum wage.

The strike was virtually total in transportation in Kerala state, with buses, taxis and rickshaws off the roads. Striking banking workers halted all financial transactions in the states of Punjab, Haryana and Chandigarh. In Mumbai, the country’s financial center, the shutdown in banking was complete.

While the bosses and government were attacking even a one-day strike, it remains to be seen if workers will begin to realize that they need an extended walkout to get any real results. While the ruling classes always refer to India as the world’s “largest democracy,” the mass poverty and unemployment that exists here exposes the hypocrisy of that claim. Real solutions to workers’ problems here will only come when the working class takes power, led by a revolutionary communist party.

NEW YORK CITY, February 16 — “How do you spell racist? DOE!”

A young comrade led over 500 people in a series of such anti-racist chants as billionaire Bloomberg’s Panel for Educational Policy (PEP) used their state power and had their Department of Education (DOE) close 33 largely black and Latino schools for “underperformance.”

PLP members’ exposure of capitalism as the real underperformer was well-received among co-workers there, as well as among passers-by who took over 300 leaflets containing the above headline.

NYC teacher union mis-leader Mike Mulgrew led a rally outside, trying to “boycott” the sharp struggle inside where angry masses had gathered in the high school auditorium. His effort to lead folks away from the panel meeting flopped. He made a lackluster cameo appearance once the defeat of his boss-serving ploy became apparent to all.

Comrade Indicts Profit System

Only PL had students actively leading chants. At one point, the crowd demanded to “let the students speak.” Then our young comrade took center stage to give the only speech that named capitalism as the culprit. We met this young leader several years ago and she has been schooled in the fight against racist school closures. We need more youth like her.

The manipulation by Bloomberg and his henchmen emerged when black families appeared to speak up in favor of their charter schools which they see as a slight improvement over the abject failures passing for institutions of learning citywide. This set-up pitted them against other black and Latino families whose children overwhelmingly attend the public schools slated for closing. Rather than fighting each other, all working-class families must unite against the rulers who are destroying any opportunity for their children to make their way in this rotten society.

The purpose of the bosses’ school system is to reproduce the racist class structure of U.S. society. The main function the bosses have for all teachers — public and charter — is to assist in this massive and ongoing “sorting” of human beings to keep the social pyramid of capitalism intact. From K to 12 and beyond we are expected to inculcate each generation with patriotism and passivity.  

Charter schools, with the federal government behind them, are spreading like a cancer, functionally breaking the presence of unions in education, a way to make them weaker than ever. These Charter Schools are just another source of profit on the backs of the public sector. These attacks, with all their attendant dislocation and chaos, are focused on black and Latino working-class communities.

The assault on teachers, students and parents reflects the heightened state of siege in which the rulers have placed the workers since the demise of the old communist movement. Workers’ revolution is not on the agenda and the bosses are taking full advantage. For years, the bosses have been “measuring” and “analyzing” the performance and productivity of the working class.

For example, the bosses’ managers want to convince workers making $8.50 an hour at the local Kmart that they’re “accountable” for stocking the shelves as fast as they can so the company can prosper “for the benefit of the team.” Kmart bosses making six- and seven-figure salaries use the word “team” to motivate and drive workers making minimum wage. Many workers see through this.   

‘Toe the Line or Be Fired’

For factory workers, discipline is tied to getting the worker to speed up production or be terminated. For teachers, this means using standardized tests — which teach nothing — and the new Danielson Framework for Teaching to develop a fascist monitoring tool. If teachers don’t toe this line, they, too, are fired.

Ruling-class attacks on teachers directly attack students. The rulers’ ideas of success for our children are minimum-wage jobs, mass racist unemployment or the “choice” of a “job” in the military to fight in their imperialist oil wars killing other workers. Throughout the country the majority of schools being closed are in black and Latino communities. The rulers are trying to further segregate our children in order to continue to exploit and profit off all working-class people. 

Capitalism does not offer solutions to the racist education our children are experiencing. The young comrade who pointed to capitalism as the main culprit deserves much more than the non-existent “good old days” of public education the liberals are advocating. She, like young people worldwide, deserves a communist future, without bosses and profits. Today it felt like we brought that future little bit closer to fruition. Join PLP and fight for it.