By Tiffany McCulley
When we look at the world around us, it is so easy to feel despair. Open fascism is on the rise, the right to bodily autonomy is being ripped from the folks it affects the most. These attacks are led by members of both major parties and funded by the super-rich who profit off our oppression. Our trans community’s rights are constantly under attack, and Black trans women are being murdered at alarming rates without consequence. Social programs are being defunded to increase funding for imperialist war. Our school system is held ransom by charter school companies only interested in profits instead of nurturing the brilliance of our children.
Women everywhere are disproportionately affected by the oppression and violence of capitalist society. Capitalism is a boot on our backs, demanding every ounce of our time, our energy, our resources, and our unquestioning obedience to its illegitimate authority. Working women are pushed to the edge. We are feeling the pressure all around us.
We need to know what is at the root of these oppressions and injustices. We need to say its name: capitalism. The capitalist class has always imposed the policy of “divide and rule” on grounds of race, sexual orientation, gender, nationality, and whatever else they can find in order to exploit the working class. Capitalism lays the foundation for the unequal economic and social relationship between the labor of men and women. We once lived in societies where all genders and sexualities were equal. Only when societies became about power and control, about private property, did this change. The ruling class began dividing us and controlling us because they knew we outnumbered them. Today, capitalism is the great divider, and our greatest weapon against capitalism is revolutionary unity.
There are women all over the globe fighting back: working women in Palestine, Puerto Rico, Spain, Pakistan, India, Philippines, Uganda, South Africa, just to name a few. Our sisters across the globe are engaging in militant fights against gender-based violence, unequal pay, discrimination in the workplace, criminalization of sex workers, education access, reproductive rights, and more. In India, women formed a human chain hundreds of miles long with millions of women coming together in resistance. In Puerto Rico, women led the protests that brought the resignation of their governor. Closer to home, indigenous women and Two Spirit people have been at the heart of the struggle against the oil pipelines. Chicago teachers and school staff are striking. Working women are not taking the bullshit anymore. We’re uniting to say, “Hands Off! Hands off our bodies, our paychecks, our lands!”
We are building a working women’s movement. We are clear who our enemy is, and we know that the only way forward is together, united in revolutionary struggle. We are not free while any other woman is unfree. There is strength in numbers and a mass movement of revolutionary working-class women would be a force to be reckoned with.
Are you ready to demand the world we deserve? Then come fight with us; come build with us. In March of 2020, we will be honoring International Working Women’s Day with militant protest and action, and we need you to be a part of it.