Women’s Liberation is a Class Issue.

International Working Women’s Day (IWWD) did not begin as a marketing opportunity or a celebration of individual female ‘empowerment’. It was a working-class, communist initiative, born out of the struggle of women workers for political power, economic independence and liberation from exploitation. Its origins lie in socialist organising and in the understanding that women’s oppression is rooted in class society.

The official IWD 2026 website focuses its attention on gender rather than female emancipation. Its motto is ‘give to gain’. It seems to this writer that all working-class women do is give and it is time we got some of the gain! That this day dedicated to women’s emancipation has been hollowed out and repackaged by the capitalist class, the ruling class, tells us nothing about women’s progress, but a great deal about capitalism’s capacity to absorb and neutralise radical ideas – and capitalism considers women’s equality to be just that – radical!

Forget blaming patriarchal power structures, a glass ceiling, biological weakness, all men, or whatever other ridiculous notions have been employed to divert us away from the truth: the source of women’s oppression and repression is class society. As long as the capitalist social system exists, women’s subordination and exploitation will continue.

As Mao Tse Tung said in 1949 after the Chinese workers defeated their class enemy and secured their freedom, “women hold up half the sky”. What he meant by this, and what Lenin and Stalin also said, is that no revolution can be won, no freedom can be achieved without working-class women’s participation on the side of the working class. It is we who have the power to swing events in our favour, which is why it is women who are continually kept divided, isolated and busy, working for the State on a lacklustre wage, and working for the family for nothing. No time or energy after that to partake in revolutionary work.

But participate we must! The truth is that women have much to gain from revolution, but it’s also true that extra pressures within a capitalist society make it harder for us to think about this process and to be involved. Yet we must be so, because our example more than any other, sets the tone for the next generation.

A busy political mother, like my mum was, is not the norm in our society, and she will certainly be made to feel guilty for her involvement and consequent ‘neglect’ of household duties. But there is much to be gained by the children of such an example. Everything their mum does, that my mum did, doesn’t have to conform to what is seen on the TV. The reality for such kids is that mothers can have an independent existence and a purpose in life outside of the home and the family; that there are some things that matter more than the immediate family unit. Political mothers beget politically conscious children and we need to build working-class consciousness if we are to overthrow our ruling class and win our freedom.

So this International Working Women’s Day, I invite you to reflect on what you now know of our western world and the corrupt forces that shape it. What we are witnessing today: the illegal invasion of benign nations, murder and kidnap of sovereign leaders, mass murder of women and children via indiscriminate bombing and intentional targeting, ruthless sanctions that cause undue suffering to millions of families, paedophilia, rape, organ harvesting and our own crippling economic sanctions in the form of austerity. None of this is new. These actions are not because of Donald Trump or Israel or rich white men generally! These are the customary characteristics of capitalism and have been happening for centuries – one of the outputs of which is women’s oppression! The reason they are so obvious now is that capitalism has reached its final stage: monopoly capitalism, or imperialism, and the elite, the capitalist class, the ruling class in its desperation to maintain its dominant position, is finally revealing its true face to us all.

Many of the assumptions we were raised with – about power, justice, war and inequality no longer hold up to scrutiny, to the reality of our experience. Again and again, history has shown us that the people dismissed by the exploiting class as evil, authoritarian, unrealistic, marginal or out of step – like anti-imperialists, like communists, like us – have been the ones who understood the world best and who acted most selflessly. The world view expressed by scientific socialists, by Marxist-Leninists may often seem uncomfortable or unfamiliar – not because we are wrong, but because what we say challenges the assumptions our friends and colleagues have been propagandised into holding. Now that everyone certainly knows that our rulers, politicians and media have lied all along, isn’t it time to reassess everything that has worked so tirelessly to fill our heads with?

Capitalist society and its controlled corporate media works hard to narrow the horizons of what we believe to be possible but when their narrative loosens like it has, a clearer picture of the world begins to emerge that suggests those we thought were our enemies are actually our comrades, and what we thought was impossible really might be within our grasp.

Today, the growing number of cracks in the capitalist façade are bringing glimmers of such possibilities to many more people, and we must all take the opportunity to bring into question everything we’ve been taught to accept as gospel truth about human nature. It is simply not true that humans are naturally unkind, greedy or out for themselves. Human nature is exactly the opposite but capitalist culture moulds our minds to be self-seeking and encourages us to think individually rather than as the collective social animals we naturally are.

It’s time to go beyond the trite sentiments that capitalist leaders proffer about women’s equality and examine whether their words are matched by their deeds, by their material action. We know from our own experience, from our material reality, that they are not! In the Soviet Union under socialism, women were drawn into education, industry, science and political life on an unprecedented scale, supported by state childcare, dining and laundry facilities, and maternity protections, as well as by legal equality embedded in the constitution. This is undisputed. Equality for women has been achieved and it was socialism that facilitated it.

International Working Women’s Day was not conceived as a token celebration but as a reminder that women must be in the ranks of the builders of socialism. Our liberation will only be achieved when society itself is transformed. Today, International Women’s Day (note how they dropped the ‘working’ bit) exposes a sharp contrast. Under socialism, women’s equality is understood as a question of power, production and social organisation. Under liberal and conservative capitalism, it is reduced to slogans, symbolism and individual successes.
The lesson we want you all to take away from IWWD 2026 is not simply that we should ‘celebrate women’, but that we should realise which social system is actually capable of making our demand for equality into a reality. In every age and in every land, women’s fight for equality has been bound to the fight against exploitation — the fight for socialism. History has proved that socialism makes women free — and that when women are free, humanity itself triumphs.
To join the fight for your emancipation and that of your daughters and granddaughters, get in touch.