[We publish here the English translation of a fantastic text from our comrades in Balance y Avante, which talks about the history of and lessons from what is known to us as International Working Women’s Day. The Spanish original is available here.
For further reading on this topic we recommend an article we wrote 7 years ago which can be read here.]
Celebrations are part of the fetishistic nature of capitalist society, their commemorative value hidden by the spectacle that serves as a catalyst for promoting the conversion of every aspect of social life into commodities. International Women’s Day is a clear example of this when analysed historically.
March 8 was originally established by the Socialist International Women’s Conference in 1910, as a commemoration of the proletarian struggle carried out by the women of our class. On that same day in 1917, several demonstrations were held by Russian women workers. They marched for bread, as food rations had been cut in half, but at the same time, they marched against the war and against the Tsar. As a result, they spontaneously went on strike and quickly gained the support of metal workers, who were followed by other industries. In a short time, the number of strikers numbered in the tens of thousands. This large mass of workers first achieved the fall of the monarchy, but they did not stop there: they formed assemblies and engaged in violent clashes with the police. It was the beginning of dual power in Russia, and the foundations of the proletarian dictatorship were spreading wherever a new council (or soviet) began to replace the previous state, formerly monarchical, now a provisional government, the latter with the support of Russian feminists, who encouraged the continuation of the Great War and the participation of women in it, through organisations such as the ‘All-Russian League for Women’s Equality’. This situation, which we have described, is what we know as the February Revolution (then 23 February, now 8 March), which paved the way for the fall of the Russian state at the hands of the proletariat in October (then 25 October, now 7 November).
In June 1921, at the Second International Conference of Communist Women held in Moscow under the auspices of the Third International, the date was formally adopted as ‘International Working Women’s Day’. Feminism, conciliatory, identity-based and reformist by nature, through bourgeois institutions (officially the UN in 1977) renamed it ‘International Day for Women’s Rights’, which over the years has become the even more abstract name of ‘International Women’s Day’, thus emptying it of any revolutionary content and declaring it a commemoration of the assimilation of ‘women’ (an indeterminate entity, without class or party) by democracy and the state.
The real lesson of 8 March lies in the fact that the proletariat, in its unity, by sweeping away the separation between economic and political struggle, creating its class organisations – such as the Communist Party and workers’ councils – in the process, is the only subject with the emancipatory power to abolish all social divisions, including the separation between women and men. In this real revolutionary process, the tasks that had previously been considered ‘domestic’ ceased to be part of so-called ‘private’ life, as the education of children was socialised and collective laundries and canteens were created, to give a few examples (some of these measures have now been taken up by capital, in the opposite sense, almost everywhere on the planet). Likewise, from the struggle against the police during this period, we learn that communist women, like men, must fight alongside their class comrades for their own safety, creating autonomous self-defence groups, independent of political parties, bourgeois organisations and their governments.
All oppression in the society of the market is exercised by capital, with gender violence being a specific form of this oppression. It is not ‘man’ (again that abstract, indeterminate figure) who mistreats, harasses, and murders out of his abstract will: social determinations (which in capital are ideologically inverted from their materiality) act through real subjects, in this case ‘man’. But if ‘women’, oppressed by ‘men’, have to free themselves from them, we enter into a game of dichotomies where everyone has to free themselves from everyone else, and capital remains intact amid the confusion and the lack of emancipatory potential offered by these struggles: men versus women, parents versus children, cis people versus trans people, oppressor nations versus oppressed nations, legal wage earners versus wage earners in the black economy, etc. Intersectionality is thus reduced to an ideology of confusion: the important thing is to count oppressions, not to articulate action around a unified programme for overcoming the totality of capital, since this totality is not even understood, but rather reduced to just another facet of ‘modernity’, in which the ‘class struggle’ is just one more struggle.
Thus, a feminist approach would abstract from the material determinations mentioned above, or, among ‘socialist’ or ‘Marxist’ feminism, accept this analysis in words and then subordinate proletarian women to partial struggles within the framework of bourgeois legality with the excuse that ‘you have to start somewhere’, embracing any of the confusing logics mentioned above.
Without first building independence from our class, independence completely stripped of any ideological form of capital and the decadent and moribund bourgeois society, proletarian women will not achieve radical emancipation. The only society in which women will be free from domestic work, sexism, the objectification and commodification of their bodies, institutional hypocrisy and the exploitation of their suffering is a society where there is no sexual division of labour, no family and no division between civil society and political society; and therefore, the abolition of sex by moving from the subject-individual to the subject-human species. In other words, the only way to emancipate ‘women’, like the proletariat, is for them to cease to be so. We must recover our proletarian historical thread, even if we have to start with this celebration degenerated by interclass bourgeois romanticism.
Proletarian women! You have no common interest with a female ruler or a female factory owner, do not be deceived. It is essential to condemn and attack feminism, whether it be that of the left or that of the right wing of capital (remember Mussolini’s support for the suffrage movement), which actively omits the struggle against capitalism as a general social relationship (with the misogyny, sexism and gender oppression that emanate from it), because it needs sexual division and the family as much as trade unionism needs wage labour.
Communists must fight to spread the communist perspective, the only one that can stop class violence and the ideological forms that still sustain sexual violence. Instead of demanding equal pay, communists represent the overthrow of wage labour. Instead of demanding equality within capitalism, we are its abolition.
Balance y Avante
8 March 2026
League of Internationalist Communists 