We document this translation of the call for the 8th of March by the Red Women's Committees of Hamburg and Vienna.
Proletarians of all countries, unite!
To the streets on the 8th of March!
Fight Patriarchy and Imperialism!
We, the Red Women's Committees of Hamburg and Vienna, call all revolutionary and progressive forces, activists of the women's movement, women in general and working class women in particular, to a powerful celebration of the 8th of March, the International Women's Day. We want this years 8th of March to set a mark by showing the growing revolutionary women's movement on the rise. The 8th of march is a special day of struggle, a day on which women all over the world rise their voices against patriarchy and show their dedication to fight for their emancipation on the streets. It is an urgent necessity for the development of the communist movement and the revolutionary movement in general to smash every position of viewing the oppression of women as a political “secondary contradiction” or viewing every feminism as “petty bourgeois”. The women of the working class suffer a double oppression, the oppression as part of the proletariat is joined by the oppression of patriarchy. The women of the working class are not only exploited by wage slavery, but also by slavery through patriarchy. A communist and revolutionary politics is only worth its name when it's the expression of the interests of the most oppressed and exploited, accordingly no communist and revolutionary power can negate the special role and meaning of the mobilisation, politicisation and organisation of women, especially working class women, without unmasking themselves as charlatans. Those in the “left scene” that reduce the fight against patriarchy to a fight against “sexism” haven't understood anything of the position of Marxism and they think it is enough to use rules of conduct that state, that as long as men don't watch porn or hit on women, everything is in order and woman is “equal”, they are indeed the defendants of patriarchy, its apologists inside the revolutionary movement.
Serving the development of the struggling class-conscious women's movement, it is necessary to draw the dividing line among bourgeois, petty bourgeois and proletarian feminism, to strengthen the latter and encourage working class women to take their role in the first line of class war.
We will not be divided: bourgeois feminism is imperialist chauvinism!
The imperialists, i.e. the ruling in the FRG and Austria, use the so called “refugee crisis” to practice a cynical double politics: on the one hand they try to further divide the working class and use the foreign workers to further push back the native workers, in short, to intensify the exploitation of the working class altogether and in parts to establish a fascist mass movement on this ground. In this wicked game they use all means, especially the bourgeois feminism in the last period. The “scandal” because of new years eve in Cologne, unleashed by the state institutions of the FRG, and the following outcry inside the bourgeois and petty bourgeois camp, suggests that the patriarchy is a particular “problem” of men of the third world. In the “enlightened” countries FRG and Austria woman is “equal”. The assaults ought to be a “cultural problem” etcetera, in the end nothing else as the “clash of cultures” that the yankee-imperialists propagated in the beginning of the 1990s as “justification” for their imperialist aggression against the Arab people. We revolutionary women as proletarian feminists condemn this hideous attempt to agitate the women's masses against other parts of the oppressed masses. The existence of semi-feudal ultra-reactionary positions and attitudes within the absolute majority of migrants of the third world is not a secret for us and it equates the semi-colonial, semi-feudal condition of their countries of origin. In no way this is a justification to spread imperialist chauvinism. Men of the third world are full of patriarchal ideology, the same as men of imperialist countries. To denounce one and portray him as pervert rapist and the other one as civilized do-gooder, simply means serving the imperialist aggression and nothing else than bourgeois feminism. The imperialist nations are the one that hold the nations in the third world in slavery, they suck out their blood through the bureaucratic capitalism and keep them subjugated in semi-feudal and semi-colonial conditions and that's enough to reject every right of moral judgement of the imperialist nations concerning the population there. We fight for the unity of the oppressed and will not be divided and therefore we don't have anything in common with the bourgeois feminism.
Fight Idealism: it is not enough that the woman takes the gun, the goal has to be communism, so that we can reach emancipation!
The origin of the oppression of woman lies in the class society, in private property and can disappear only together with private property, i.e. in communism. Accordingly, the fight for true emancipation of woman is linked inseparable with the fight for communism. The oppression of woman results material cause, the whole patriarchal crap with all its expressions, be it religious, cultural, social, etcetera are no thing fallen from heaven but have a material base. The contrary is claimed by petty bourgeois and bourgeois feminism, for them the problem is mainly of ideological and cultural character; no matter what word-spinning linguistic finesse they use to cover it up, for these people the problem is that men “are evil” - what's nothing less than Idealism. As long as this Idealism is only a base for debates of lifestyle, it is relatively harmless. But when it is dominating the struggling movements, its effect gets devastating.
In human society a revolution is not the transition from one form of government to another, a revolution is a violent act whereby one class overturns the dictatorship of another and establishes its own. To talk about a “woman revolution” within the class society is pure Idealism “at best”, a fraud otherwise. In the current human panorama, humans are divided by class more than sex. Not all women can fight together. The true struggle for liberation can only be fought out by daughters of the people together with the proletariat and under the leadership of its vanguard, that applies to every revolution and every country. This gets more clearly, when we remember that we are in the era of imperialism and the proletarian revolution and the bourgeoisie is incompetent to execute the tasks of democratic revolution. Idealists can talk about a “revolution” in the current world, that is not led by the proletariat, Marxists can't.
Despite the great heroism and the admirable readiness to make sacrifices at which women today take the guns and fight, to enforce own structures, this won't lead to anything else as an evolution of forms of patriarchal oppression, as long it is not part of a true democratic or socialistic revolution, which both are only possible under the leadership of the proletariat, that takes concrete form in the communist party.
Proletarian feminism is a line of demarcation between Revisionism and Marxism and thereby a weapon in the struggle for the reconstitution of the Communist Parties.
The Revisionism destroyed the Communist Parties in Europe without exception. The Communists are fighting to reconstitute their parties, to initiate the reconstruction, to initiate the highest form of class struggle, as part and in service of the proletarian world revolution. The working class women have a special impulse to serve this task on every level, because without Communism we cannot liberate ourselves of the double oppression. Without a true Communist Party it's impossible to develop the struggle en route to emancipation. As revolutionary women we have twice the reason to fight for the reconstruction of the Communist Party.
We need Communist Parties of a new type, marxist-leninist-maoist parties, that militarise themselves through action and apply the peoples war in every country on the concrete conditions of the revolution. Such parties recognise the proletarian feminism as part of the ideology of the proletariat, the Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, mainly Maoism. Such parties measure their success for a major part of how far they generate female activists, fighters and militants and cadres and leaders amongst them, that aren't there for decoration but to tackle their responsibility for the whole development of the revolutionary movement. Such parties aren't conscience relievers of petty bourgeois or gang identifications of facebook-heroes, that fancy themselves as chief over their tribe. Such parties are fighting squads of the international proletariat; one detachment, the vanguard, of the class.
Without the emancipation of woman, the emancipation of humanity won't be. Without the struggle of class-conscious women we won't have revolution. Without female communists in formation, the Communist Parties won't reconstitute as such. The “question of women's rights” is not a minor matter. The role of woman in the revolution is a crucial in the struggle for Communism. In this spirit:
To the streets on the 8th of March!
Let's fight patriarchy and imperialism!
Down with bourgeois feminism and imperialistic chauvinism!
Proletarian feminism for Communism!
Red Women's Committee Hamburg Red Women's Committee Vienna
February 2016
