Proletarians of All Countries, Unite!

8th OF MARCH, WOMEN’S DAY:
BREAK THE CHAINS! UNCHAIN THE FURY OF WOMEN AS A POWERFUL FORCE FOR THE REVOLUTION!

“The women’s world is divided, just as is the world of men, into two camps; the interests and aspirations of one group of women bring it close to the bourgeois class, while the other group has close connections with the proletariat, and its claims for liberation encompass a full solution to the woman question. Thus although both camps follow the general slogan of the “liberation of women”, their aims and interests are different. Each of the groups unconsciously takes its starting point from the interests of its own class, which gives a specific class colouring to the targets and tasks it sets itself. […]
For the majority of women of the proletariat, equal rights with men would mean only an equal share in inequality, but for the “chosen few”, for the bourgeois women, it would indeed open doors to new and unprecedented rights and privileges that until now have been enjoyed by men of the bourgeois class alone. But each new concession won by the bourgeois woman would give her yet another weapon for the exploitation of her younger sister and would go on increasing the division between the women of the two opposite social camps. Their interests would be more sharply in conflict, their aspirations more obviously in contradiction.”

(Alexandra Kollontai – The Social Basis of the Woman Question, 1909)

“A true people’s women’s movement can only be built and developed from the position of the working class, from Marxism, and as part of the people’s movement on which the emancipation of women depends”

(Communist Party of Peru – Marxism, Mariátegui and the Women’s Movement)

On this occasion of Women’s Day we salute all the female communists and revolutionaries of the world; heroines of the proletariat and the people who give their lives in the armed struggles and people’s wars as leaders and combatants in the struggle to the death against imperialism and this whole patriarchal system; in Peru, in India, in Turkey, in the Philippines and other places. Likewise, we salute the masses of women who are now mobilizing all over the world in struggles for their rights and daily demands, against the rapes and against all the oppression of women that continues to be a part of this capitalist system of exploitation and oppression.

It is the duty of the communists – the Marxists-Leninists-Maoists – to recognize the current struggles of women as an expression and a part of the revolutionary situation in uneven development in the world. We reject those revisionist positions that discard the women’s struggles in general, putting forward that the problem of the oppression of women will supposedly be solved “automatically” with the revolution, and that therefore the women’s organizations and mobilizations would not be necessary. We uphold and apply the correct position of our Party, that a popular women’s movement is necessary, which mobilizes the women of all the classes of the people for their demands – under the leadership of the proletariat and serving the conquest of power through the people’s war.

The massive women’s mobilizations of last year – like the marches in Mexico, in Turkey, in Sudan, in Spain and other places against the violence towards women, or the marches for women’s rights and against the “austerity” imposed by imperialism in Greece and other countries – in spite of their spontaneous character and the lack of proletarian leadership, are just struggles against the old order and express precisely the “fury of women” which we must “unchain as a powerful force for the revolution”. This is the duty of the proletarian feminists.

Imperialism, reaction and revisionism systematically try to contain, manipulate and use the women’s struggle to derail the class struggle. The role of bourgeois feminism is to turn the women’s struggle into a defense of “Western democracy”, to embellish imperialism and to paint the picture of this system of exploitation and oppression as the guardian of the supposed “freedom of women”; which is to say in reality the “freedom” of the “free market”; the freedom for a handful of bourgeois or petty-bourgeois women to make their careers within the imperialist system as exploiters or faithful lackeys of the ruling classes. It is a bourgeois feminism that today on world level puts forward the legalization and normalization of prostitution; that shamelessly participates in imperialism’s racist propaganda against the Arab peoples and the other oppressed peoples, and even defends the genocidal wars of imperialism in the name of this feminism. It confirms what the Communist Party of Peru has stated, that the mobilization of women is “a necessary and fruitful mobilization from the working class viewpoint and in the service of the masses of the people, but which promoted by and for the benefit of the exploiting classes, acts as an element which divides and fetters the people's struggle.”

We already know that imperialism is applying its politics of setting masses against masses, using national, religious or cultural contradictions to divide the masses and prevent them from uniting against imperialism; and it is not strange that they want to use the women’s struggle in the same way. Against this we uphold proletarian feminism, the only feminism that truly struggles for the destruction of this whole patriarchal system of exploitation and oppression; the emancipation of all the women of the people and not just the “freedom” of the women of the bourgeoisie and some of their petty-bourgeois lackeys.

LONG LIVE PROLETARIAN FEMINISM!
LONG LIVE WOMEN’S DAY!
CRUSH IMPERIALISM AND PATRIARCHY WITH PEOPLE’S WAR!

Peru People’s Movement
March 8th 2020