Like thousands of years of class struggle, the history of International Working Women’s Day shows us the importance of struggle and that we win when we persist. All the gains achieved by the working class and laborers, and of course the women and LGBTI+ people within it, have emerged through struggle. The history of March 8, International Working Women’s Day, where we have turned every place we have been for more than a hundred years into a field of struggle, also shows us this. Those who created and kept March 8 alive have also given us the right to rebel against the system that does not allow us a life other than slavery and obedience!
Once again, we raise our fight for equality and freedom in solidarity with working women of all sexual orientations and gender identities around the world! As the subjects of the women’s movement around the world, we are inspired by each other, we are growing from each other, we are tightening our ranks with an internationalist perspective in the struggle against the imperialist-capitalist system, patriarchy, fascism, chauvinism and all forms of reactionism! This is a perspective that confirms that systems of exploitation and oppression can only be eliminated through the struggle for communism, and that this struggle requires the unification of the broadest masses of working and oppressed people.
March 8 was designated International Women’s Day by the International Socialist Conference in 1910 on the initiative of Clara Zetkin, the German communist leader who stood up to the Nazis in Hitler’s Reichstag. In a speech three years later, Alexandra Kollontai asked the following questions: “What is ‘Women’s Day’? Is it really necessary? Is it not a concession to the women of the bourgeois class, feminists and suffragettes? Doesn’t it undermine the unity of the labor movement?” Kollontai said that life itself had already given a clear and effective answer to these questions, describing March 8 as “a link in the long and solid chain of the proletarian women’s movement.”
This year, March 8, International Working Women’s Day, which is a link in this long and strong chain, is celebrated at a time when the smell of gunpowder and blood envelops the whole world, when the imperialists are preparing for a bigger and more comprehensive war, risking the deaths of millions of people in order to divide the world again; genocide and massacres are broadcast on television screens; the ecological order is disrupted by the plundering of nature; millions of people have left their birthplaces and become immigrants-refugees due to poverty, wars and “natural” disasters; and peoples are under the cage with war economy and oppressive-fascist laws. This picture can be changed not by burying our heads in the sand and waiting for “things to calm down”, but by developing the anti-imperialist struggle and uniting the peoples of the world to oppose the imperialist war. To do this, the working women of the world must step forward. Because as Comrade Stalin said; “There has not been a single great movement of the oppressed in history in which working women have not played a role. The working women, the most oppressed of the oppressed, have never and could never stay away from the great march of liberation.”
The AKP-MHP government and the so-called bourgeois opposition are enemies of working women!
Throughout its 25-year rule, the AKP government, which has managed to stay in power by raising the bar of fascism step by step, deepening poverty, making the rich richer and the poor poorer, is the enemy of the oppressed poor working people, women and LGBTI+ people. The AKP government, which abolished the Istanbul Convention and made Law No. 6284 a subject of discussion, deepened hatred against LGBTI + people and targeted their organization, made life on the street, at home, at school, at work precarious intertwined with violence, and all fascist order parties from MHP to Deva, from Iyip to Saadet, from CHP, which is tried to be brought to us as leftist, are in the same position and line against the working people.
In the February 6 earthquakes, while the people were waiting for help by listening to the cries for help of their relatives, some of these fascist parties were asleep, some were after propaganda, some were after show. It was the people themselves and their revolutionary, democratic organizations and women’s institutions that rushed to heal the wounds of the people. While the mines swallowed the workers like a black hole, while the workers were crushed under the wheels of exploitation of the bosses, while the nature was plundered and the lands, trees, water, rivers of the peasants were usurped by the capital, as we see today in the preliminary days of the local elections, all parties are fighting for rent. The noise of those who play games with our lives over the dilemma of “Kemalism or Sharia?” every day of the week cannot drown out the rumbling of our stomachs! The voices of the deputies who fight loudly in the parliament and think they deserve their salaries have no effect on the fact that we send our children to bed hungry! Choosing the lesser of two evils and expecting hope from this garbage does not stop the violence against us; it does not prevent harassment, rape and murder!
Let us meet all the propaganda and shows, threats and promises, beautiful words and curses of the bourgeois fascist system with the same determination of resistance and struggle. Because they lie! They lie right in front of our eyes! The only response these representatives of capital, these parasitic exploiters deserve is our unity, solidarity and organized struggle. The struggle of working women from Agrobay to Özak tells us all this. The freedom fighters who put their lives on the line against fascism with guns in their hands and fight anthems on their tongues show us the way to real liberation. Militant women’s struggles all over the world are reaching out their hands and hearts to us. The struggle against the threat of imperialist war, poverty, fascism, racism and the patriarchal system calls us.
Long live March 8th!
Long live international women’s solidarity!
Long live our women’s organization against imperialism, fascism, chauvinism, patriarchy, heterosexism and all forms of reactionism!
Equal pay for equal work!
Long live our Party TKP-ML and KKB!
Communist Party of Turkey-Marxist Leninist
Communist Women’s Union
March 2024