Unofficial translation by Signalfire

We are very happy to publish the joint leaflet and poster of the Red Women’s Committees of Vienna and Hamburg for 8 March 2016!

Proletarians of all countries, unite!

Towards March 8th! Fight patriarchy and imperialism!

We, the Red Women’s Committees of Hamburg and Vienna, call on all revolutionary and progressive forces, activists of the women’s movement, women in general and in particular all women workers to a powerful celebration of March 8th, International Women’s Day. We want March 8th this year to be a symbol indicative of the advance of the growing revolutionary women’s movement. March 8th is a special day of struggle, a day on which women around the world raise their voices against patriarchy and display their will for emancipation on the streets. It is an urgent necessity for the development of the communist movement and the revolutionary movement in general, that every viewpoint which sees the oppression of women as a “side issue” or any feminism as “petty bourgeois” be smashed. The women of the working class suffer a double oppression, their oppression as part of the proletariat and their oppression under the patriarchy.

The working-class women are exploited not only by wage slavery, but also by the their slavery under the patriarchy. A communist and revolutionary politics is worth its name only so long as it is an expression of the interests of the most oppressed and exploited, accordingly, no communist and revolutionary force can negate the special role and importance of the mobilization, politicization and organization of women, especially the women workers, without unmasking themselves as impostors. Those in the “left-wing scene” who reduce the struggle against patriarchy to a fight against “sexism” and who believe that it is sufficient to have codes of conduct, which say that as long as men do not watch pornography or beat women, everything is fine and woman have “equal rights” have understood nothing from the standpoint of Marxism and are in fact defenders of patriarchy, its apologists in the revolutionary movement.

Serving the development of a fighting class-conscious women’s movement, it is necessary to draw the lines of demarcation between bourgeois, petty-bourgeois and proletarian feminism in order to strengthen the latter and to encourage women workers to take up their position in the front ranks of the class struggle.

We cannot allow ourselves to be divided: bourgeois feminism is imperialist chauvinism!

The imperialists, the rulers in Germany and Austria use the so-called “refugee crisis” to carry out a cynical double policy: on the one hand they try to continue to divide the working class and to use the foreign workers to push the local workers further down, in short to to intensify the exploitation of the working class as a whole and to create partly on this basis a fascist mass movement.

In this wicked game they have used all means in recent time and especially bourgeois feminism. The New Years Eve “scandal” in Cologne unleashed by the FRG state authorities and the following outcry in the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois camp, suggested that patriarchy was a “problem” of the men of the Third World in particular. In the “enlightened” countries of Germany and Austria woman are “equal”. The attacks were a “cultural issue” etc., in the end nothing more than the “clash of civilizations” which the Yankee imperialists have touted as “justification” for imperialist aggression against the Arab peoples since the early 1990s.

We revolutionary women condemned as proletarian feminists this vile attempt to drive the masses of women against other parts of the oppressed masses. The presence of semi-feudal reactionary viewpoints and attitudes among the absolute majority of immigrants from the Third World is no secret for us and it corresponds to the semi-colonial and semi-feudal state of their countries of origin. But this is in no case a justification for spreading imperialist chauvinism. The men of the Third World are full of patriarchal ideology, just like the men of the imperialist countries. To denounce the one and present them as perverted rapists and portray the other as civilized do gooders, only serves imperialist aggression and is nothing more than bourgeois feminism. The imperialist nations are those that hold the nations of the third world in slavery, they suck their blood through bureaucratic capitalism and keep them subjugated in semi-feudal and semi-colonial conditions and that is enough to deprive the imperialist nations of every right to moral judgment of the population there. We fight for the unity of the oppressed and nothing can divide us and therefore we have nothing in common with bourgeois feminism.

Fight idealism: it is not enough for women to pick up the gun, the objective must be communism in order to win emancipation!

The origin of the oppression of women is in class society, private property and it can disappear only with private property, that is, communism. Accordingly, the struggle for the true emancipation of women is inextricably linked to the struggle for communism. Oppression of women is by material causes, the entirety of patriarchal garbage with all its expressions, whether religious, cultural, social, etc., is not something heaven-sent, but has a material basis. The opposite claim of petty-bourgeois and bourgeois feminism, that the problem has a ideological and cultural nature; the problem for these people, regardless of the linguistic finesse they may use is that men are “evil”-which is nothing but idealism. As long as this idealism is only a source of lifestyle discussions, it is relatively harmless. But when it dominates a combatant movement its effect is devastating.

In human society, a revolution is not a change from one form of government to another, a revolution is an act of violence by which one class overthrows the dictatorship of another and builds its own. To speak about a “Women’s Revolution” in class society is to speak in the “best case” with pure idealism, otherwise it is a scam. In the current human panorama class separates people more than sex. Women cannot all fight together. The true struggle for liberation can be waged by the daughters of the people only with the proletariat and under the leadership of its vanguard this applies to any form of revolution and every country. This becomes even clearer when we remember that we are in the era of imperialism and proletarian revolution and the bourgeoisie is incapable of performing the tasks of the democratic revolution. Idealists can speak of a “revolution” today which is not led by the proletariat, Marxists cannot.

Despite the great heroism and admirable sacrifice with which women now pick up guns and struggle to impose their own structures, it is for no other cause than an evolution of the forms of patriarchal oppression, unless they are part of a real democratic or socialist revolution and both are only possible under the leadership of the proletariat embodied in a Communist Party.

Proletarian feminism is a line of demarcation between revisionism and Marxism and as such it is a weapon in the struggle for the reconstitution of the Communist Parties

Revisionism has without exception destroyed the Communist Parties in Europe. The Communists are struggling to reconstitute their parties to initiate their reconstruction, in order to set in motion the highest form of the class struggle, as part of and in service to the world proletarian revolution. Women workers have a special urge to carry out this task at every level; because with communism we free ourselves from double oppression. Without a true Communist Party, it is impossible to develop the struggle in the direction of emancipation. As revolutionary women we have twice the motive to fight for the reconstitution of the Communist Party.

We need Communist Parties of a new type, Marxist-Leninist-Maoist parties which militarize through actions and apply people’s war in every country on the base of the concrete conditions of the revolution. Such parties understand proletarian feminism as a part of the ideology of the proletariat, of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, principally Maoism. Such parties measure their achievements to an important extent by their bringing forth of woman activists, fighters and militants and among these female cadres and leaders who are not there for decoration, but to take responsibility for the overall development of the revolutionary movement. Such parties do not exist to lighten the conscience of the petty bourgeois or to be gang identifiers of Facebook heroes who fancy themselves as chiefs over their clan. Such parties are combat detachments of the international proletariat; the advance detachment of the class.

Without the emancipation of women, there will be no emancipation of humanity. Without the struggle of the class-conscious women there will be no revolution. Without women communists in their formation, the Communist parties cannot be authentically reconstituted. The “woman question” is not a minor matter. The role of women in revolution is a crucial point in the struggle for communism. In this spirit:

Towards March 8!

Fight patriarchy and imperialism!

Down with bourgeois feminism and imperialist chauvinism!

Proletarian feminism for communism!

Red Women’s Committee Hamburg | Red Women’s Committee Vienna

February 2016