The following statement was circulated by the Central Committee of the Revolutionary Communist Organisation for International Working Women’s Day, 2026.
For over one hundred years, March 8th has been a day of struggle for working women around the world. Born of the titanic class struggles at the turn of the century, International Working Women’s Day was first organised by the International Socialist Women’s Conference in 1910. But it was in 1917, when working women unleashed the power of the working class and brought down the Tsarist autocracy, that International Working Women’s Day was made immortal. Today, it serves as a day to honour the courage and dedication of working women in the struggle for their emancipation.
In every country, women languish under capitalist-patriarchal exploitation. This is felt most acutely int the peripheral countries where women work in the lowest paying industries, make up the poorest layers of the peasantry, and are crushed beneath the traditional family system of exploitation. When women try to escape family life, they find themselves trapped in its mirror image: sexual exploitation and state violence. Women bear the double burden of wage labour and domestic work, and are caught between capitalist exploitation in the factory, and the burden of raising children in the home.
The imperialist system is in crisis, and the boot of capitalist domination is stamping down on working women. As the world economy teeters on the brink of collapse from the conflagration raging across the Middle East, it is vital that Communists understand that we are on the precipice of unprecedented class conflict. Today, women’s freedom is used to justify wars of imperialist plunder. But this cover died a blood-soaked death in a schoolhouse in Minab, Iran. What freedom does American imperialism bring to the corpses of young girls?
The attacks against women are not limited just to Iran, as across the world the hard-fought gains of the 20th century come under attack. Driven forth by the crisis in capitalist civilisation, the ruling class struggle constantly to raise productivity, trying to find somewhere new to squeeze. When faced with these attacks, working women should not be fooled by the slogans of the reactionaries – whose alternative to workplace exploitation is the shackles of “Kitchen, Children, Church”. The family, like the nation, is a refuge of the scoundrel.
For decades, the bourgeois feminists have argued that women’s freedom will be the natural product of social progress, realised in first one country and then another. Today, the myth of social progress is dead. It does not do to parade around its rotting corpse. There is a single road to genuine women’s liberation: international proletarian revolution.
Today, there are two chief tasks facing working women. Firstly, working women must organise to defend their hard won rights and conditions from attack by an increasingly reactionary capitalist world order. Secondly, we must link the struggles of working women to the struggles against imperialism, and to link the desire for peace to the need to fight for socialism.
Most of all, working women need a party that represents their interests, and the interests of the entire working class and the oppressed, against the interests of the capitalist class and their state. We call on working class fighters and those who desire women’s liberation to unite behind a revolutionary program and fight for a united communist party.
Such a revolutionary program must put forward the essential minimum demands needed to place women on the road to their emancipation, including reproductive autonomy, wages for housework, universal childcare, state funded laundromats, house cleaning services, and canteens, equal work for equal pay, and a jobs program aimed at lifting women out of the informal economy.
On this and every International Working Women’s Day, we emblazon upon our banners:
Working Women of the World, Unite! For Democracy, Freedom, and Socialism!
PARTISAN! 
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