What is International Working Women’s Day?

International Working Women’s Day (IWWD) is a holiday celebrated every year on March 8th. IWWD has its origins in National Women’s Day (NWD); the first Women’s day event which was held on February 23rd, 1909 in New York City. This event, organized by working women, spoke to large crowds of workers about the struggle against capitalism and to demand women be given the right to vote. It was put on by the Socialist Party of America and the idea for it was coined by Theresa Malkiel, socialist activist, worker, and organizer who was an outspoken critic of male chauvinism within socialist spaces and of white supremacist attitudes in the Socialist Party of America. IWWD carried an even more special significance to the women workers of NYC in the years following due to the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. This workplace fire was caused due to neglectful management of the factory by the capitalists who owned it; the fire killed 146 workers, most of whom were young immigrant women. NWD, although progressive, did not have a revolutionary character as its focus was to mobilize people towards reforms (such as the right to vote, better wages, better working hours, etc). IWWD, which we celebrate today (as opposed to celebrating NWD, or “International Women’s Day”), was founded by German revolutionary, Clara Zetkin. This holiday is dedicated to the working women of the world and their fight against the unique oppression they face. As Lenin said “under capitalism, the female half of the human race is doubly oppressed” as workers and as women.

Meanwhile in Europe, International Socialist Women’s Conferences had been held since 1907. For the 1910 conference the European socialists, inspired by the American NWD, chose the date of March 18th for IWWD. And on March 18th, 1911 the first IWWD celebrations were held in Europe, on the fortieth anniversary of the Paris Commune (the world’s first socialist experiment). Women marched in hundreds of demonstrations throughout Europe carrying red flags, and banners that honored the women martyrs of the Paris Commune in a wonderful display of heroism and internationalism. Demonstrating in Europe and America during this time was no easy feat, the police repression these women experienced was immense but they still took to the streets to agitate women for socialism and to demand the right to vote.

On March 8th (February 23rd in the Russian calendar), 1917, women textile workers in Petrograd, Russia protested on IWWD against the imperialist war being waged – World War One. The working women demanded Bread and Peace, and these calls echoed throughout the city while male metallurgical workers joined their demonstration. This women-led revolt sparked the February Revolution which paved the way for the October Revolution, ushering in socialist rule in Russia. The February revolution led to Tsar (emperor) Nicholas the Second resigning, ending the nearly two hundred year despotic reign of the Russian Empire. IWWD was officially declared March 8th in 1917 by Alexandra Kollontai and Vladimir Lenin, the date was changed from the original February 23rd to honor the revolutionary women of Petrograd who dared to revolt in the face of immense repression.

Why International?

In our solidarity, we understand that no one is free until everyone is free. Clara Zetkin and the International Socialist Women’s Conferences were internationally focused for a reason. The women’s struggle is international, and revolution must be waged on a global scale to emancipate women the world over. As internationalists, we understand that each individual revolution is merely a part of the larger world revolution to usher in socialism.

This principle means that when our sisters in the global south are conducting tireless, backbreaking labor to aid the capitalist ghouls of the imperialist countries, it does not matter how comfortable the lives of women in these countries have become – we cannot cease fighting for the emancipation of all. International Working Women’s day is international as we understand that the liberation of all women goes hand in hand with the aim of socialism and thus must prevail over the imperialist framework from which we are taught to view feminism. We must mobilize ourselves against the oppressive actions of imperialist countries as these parasites subjugate women across the globe. To be an internationalist is to realize that every movement serves the worldwide revolutionary struggle, and that to serve the international movement we must develop a revolutionary movement in the countries we reside in.

Why Working?

International Working Women’s Day was founded through the efforts of working women as they left their places of work (factories, fields, and the home) and entered the streets. Throughout history, working women have been some of the first people to unite under revolutionary principles, being fundamental to the ignition of the February, and later October revolution in Russia. The term “working” is not, however, exclusionary to women who cannot work due to disability, age, etc. Instead, it serves two primary purposes. The first purpose being to honor the working women who have been at the forefront of revolutionary movements. The second purpose being to draw attention to women’s oppression being rooted in class, and mobilize women to combat this shared oppression. Women are represented in all classes, to echo the words of famous Peruvian socialist José Carlos Mariátegui, we acknowledge that “Women, like men, are reactionaries, centrists or revolutionaries, therefore they cannot all fight the same battle side by side. In today’s situation, class differentiates the individual more than sex.” The oppression of women only began from the rotten seed of hatred which exists at the core of class society. Class society is reliant on the development of hatred amongst the people. When the people’s energies are wasted struggling with another, we don’t realize that our struggle should be against the capitalist imperialist system itself. This false assertion of anger is present when US workers direct their anger towards immigrants, when white workers direct their anger towards black workers, and similarly when the anger of women and men is directed at another as opposed to at the socioeconomic system which oppresses us both. It is important for women to recognize class as being the root of our oppression, and to not be lost in the isolated idea that patriarchy is the foundation of women’s oppression, when it is in fact class society that creates patriarchy. Patriarchy is the oppression of women based on sex and it is maintained by exploitative class societies (all class societies besides socialism). The Revolutionary Student Union (RSU) puts extra emphasis on the working aspect of the holiday, as in recent times opportunists who do not want to see the emancipation of women try to steal this holiday from working women and strip it of it’s revolutionary roots by removing the word ‘working‘. “International Women’s Day” was created in a reactionary effort to dilute the revolutionary history of International Working Women’s Day. Bourgeois women fixate on “International Women’s Day” so they can steal the aesthetic of women’s liberation and sanitize the socialist politics that come with IWWD. The existence of bourgeois women is maintained by the exploitation of working class women. Throughout history, there have always been privileged women who were able to rise in the ranks of class society and develop the ability to exploit working women (female empresses, queens, slave owners, and today female business owners and politicians).

The fact that there are patriarchal values which exist even to the detriment of bourgeois women doesn’t negate the fact that class is the root of oppression rather than patriarchy. Instead, it is representative of the ideals of patriarchy arising from capitalism, and the inability of women to escape the failures of capitalism (which necessitates the subjugation of women) even when they have reached the same capacity to exploit as men have. And further, it doesn’t undermine the truth that these women are exploiters and are therefore incapable of engaging in the revolutionary struggle with the non-bourgeois women of the world (non-bourgeois women constitute over 85% of American society  and a far greater percentage of the global population). It is senseless to believe that these women are engaged in the same struggle. In the later words of Indian revolutionary Anuradha Ghandy, “Not understanding women’s oppression as linked to the wider exploitative socioeconomic and political structure, to (capitalist) imperialism, [feminists] have sought solutions within the imperialist system itself. These solutions have at best benefited a section of middle class women but left the vast mass of oppressed and exploited women far from liberation.” The use of IWWD by bourgeois women is based on the false claim that capitalist women and working class women share a common struggle.

The Sanitization of IWWD

What started as a socialist holiday to honor working women was co-opted in the 1970s by people who negated class as the root of oppression and therefore focused only on reform as a method to women’s emancipation, or rather wished to reach economic equality with men. This view that women’s emancipation is gained through economic equality to men under capitalism necessitates the exploitation of working women and men in order to reach this superficial  “equality”. Women do not need the false bourgeois promise of  “equality” which is sustained through the exploitation of workers internationally. Women instead need liberation, which can only arise through socialist revolution.

These distorters of the women’s struggle only advocate for tiny reforms and symbolic gestures such as more billionaire women and more representation of women in bourgeois politics. These reformists center the rights of women in imperialist countries and ignore the rights of women in oppressed countries. IWWD mobilized working women against capitalism, making the idea of women’s liberation a more accepted view. Decades after IWWD’s founding it’s socialist roots became diluted. The idea of “women’s liberation” has become so popularized and diluted that even regressive bourgeois women have adopted it. “Women’s liberation,” however, is a meaningless concept to the bourgeois women whose existence is reliant on capitalism (the system which necessitates oppression of women). The exploiting class of women pretend that IWWD is a day of celebrating ALL women as opposed to a day for working women to unite against the capitalist system.​​​​​​ In order for bourgeois women to maintain their power, they adopt pseudo-progressive views to maintain the illusion that they can connect to the masses, and that they can understand the proletariat’s plight of the value of their labor being exploited by the ruling class. When these capitalist women hide behind this façade of progressivism, the working class can become complacent with small concessions and remain unaware of their exploitation. 

The bourgeois focus of the holiday is to defend the right of rich white women to exploit the working class like their male counterparts, abandoning its working class roots and the struggle of working women internationally. Thus “International Women’s Day” was recognized as an official holiday by the United Nations in 1975, making the calculated decision to remove the suffix of “Working” in order to isolate the fast-developing feminist movement from any revolutionary potential. Wealthy women foster false camaraderie by celebrating International Women’s Day with working class women on the basis of their “shared” oppression as women, only to further their ongoing exploitation of the proletariat. Bourgeois women pretend to be radical and symbols of female empowerment. We can see this farcical​​​​​​​ female empowerment with celebrities such as Taylor Swift, who co-opts feminist rhetoric to promote her music even as her merchandise is made off of the blood, sweat, and tears of working women from around the world. Politicians such as Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris attempt the same co-optation by promoting the idea that more women politicians will lead to the emancipation of women. This is a completely false idea, created by the bourgeoisie as a flimsy attempt to quell the rightful anger that women have against this system.

Class character is THE fundamental aspect we have to recognize with IWWD. If we cannot acknowledge the root of women’s oppression, then we cannot understand how women need to be liberated (that is, through socialist revolution). The need for our liberation exists in the fact that we constitute half of humanity, yet throughout history we have been greatly subjugated by the ruling class. Women who ignore class as the root of our oppression, are not able to understand the need for women’s liberation and fall into the tendency to believe women just need to celebrate our unity as women, as opposed to our class based unity against capitalism. IWWD was only co-opted due to the bourgeoisie’s unrelenting fear of the socialist-led women’s movement. To counter the socialist women’s movement, the bourgeoisie in capitalist-imperialist countries bolstered the bourgeois women’s movement by diluting the true meaning of IWWD and constructing a sanitized “International Women’s Day” detached from its original radical history and intentions. 

Not only do bourgeois women profit off of IWWD, corporations currently capitalize off of the holiday as well, using it as an opportunity to produce merchandise targeted towards women. This merchandise, however, is manufactured through the exploited labor of women across the world. A prime example of this being the company that produces Barbie, Mattel, whose “feminist” Barbies’ rely on the exploited labor of women internationally. We can also see this corporate pandering in McDonald’s changing its M arch to a W arch, KFC replacing Colonel Sanders with his wife, Claudia Sanders, and one of the most hypocritical of them all: in 2017, State Street, an American bank, unveiled a statue titled “Fearless Girl” near Wall Street with a plaque engraved with the words, “Know the power of women in leadership.” That same year State Street had to pay 5 million dollars to settle charges of discrimination since they paid their Black women executives less than their white executives. These are just some of the ever-growing list of marketing strategies employed by corporate executives who seek to maximize profit.

Why Do We Celebrate IWWD?

The modern sanitized “International Women’s Day” is far from the original IWWD’s intentions. IWWD was a socialist, working class, and fighting holiday that served to mobilize women against capitalism. The original IWWD was so radical that the German government banned posters for IWWD and demonstrations throughout Europe were met with police violence and mass imprisonment. We celebrate IWWD to uphold the fighting spirit of working women and to acknowledge that only through socialism can women’s liberation be realized. We stand firmly against all corporate and opportunist distortions of March 8th, we uphold it as a shining light that inspires women all around the world to fight back against the oppression we face! When working women revolt, the ruling class trembles in fear. This is why on IWWD we also celebrate individual revolutionary women such as Clara Zetkin, Alexandra Kollontai, Rosa Luxemburg, Jiang Qing, Anuradha Ghandy, Augusta de la Torre (Comrade Norah), and many, many others. These valiant heroines of the struggle to emancipate humanity through socialist revolution must be celebrated.

Celebrate International Working Women’s Day!

It IS our duty as a revolutionaries and progressives to demarcate against reformist distortions of International Working Women’s Day by holding our own IWWD events. Especially in the ever-decaying environment of capitalist-imperialism the US finds itself in with the recent overturning of Roe V. Wade and numerous other attacks on women’s legal rights. RSU reaffirms the call for greater women’s participation in the revolutionary movement and we call upon all progressive organizations struggling for revolutionary change to participate in celebrating the combative holiday of IWWD with the utmost enthusiasm.

The following is a list of IWWD events being hosted by RSU (alongside other organizations).

Seattle: March for IWWD, 4-6pm (PST), March 8th, meet at Olga Park

New York City: IWWD Teach-in, 1pm (EST) March 10th, Marcus Garvey Park in Harlem. Madison St and 121st St Entrance

Charlotte: IWWD Celebration, 2pm (EST), March 9th, Marshall Park

Houston: IWWD Teach-in, 4:30-6pm (CST), University of Houston MD Anderson Library Room 221G, March 8th

Mississauga, Ontario: IWWD Teach-in over Zoom, 2:50-3:40pm (EST), March 6th

All the information pertaining these events can be found on these chapters respective Instagram pages.

For a Proletarian Women’s Movement!

Unleash the Fury of Women as a Mighty Force for Proletarian Revolution!

LONG LIVE INTERNATIONAL WORKING WOMEN’S DAY!