As Revolutionary Socialists, Militant Left and our international organisation the CWI recognise the socialist, radical origins of International Women’s Day this March 8th, with its roots in the 1917 rebellion of women textile workers in Petrograd – the spark that lit the flame of the 1917 Russian Revolution causing a chain reaction of worker’s walkouts demanding “Bread and Peace”
As second and third wave Feminism brought us ‘female faces in high places’, e.g. Margaret Thatcher, Hilary Clinton, Mary Harney, Giorgia Meloni, Angela Merkel, et al, experience has taught us that bourgeois feminism has done nothing to liberate working class women and lgbtq+ people from their economic and social fetters. We have seen from the Trump administration that hard-won rights like abortion access are always a hair’s breadth from attack by far-right actors who have begun to swing government rhetoric behind them.
We further recognise in Ireland and internationally the special persecution and exploitation of working class women and lgbtq+ people – gender pay gap, restrictions on birth control, gender-based violence and the persecution of sexual and gender minorities. This persecution exists in the context of, and is fostered by, a deeply unequal and unjust social and economic system. The siren voices of bourgeois feminism and their kindred spirits on the left will tell us that gender is the major dividing line in society; this is untrue, the major division remains social class.
The road to liberation is not through the unity of women of all classes – rather through the unity of all workers in fighting against our shared exploitation.
In place of breaking the bourgeois glass ceiling, we should be smashing the concrete floor.