By International Socialist League
- As of 2015, the women’s movement, and to a lesser extent the LGBTI + movement, lead a new wave of struggles to defend gender rights, demand their effective enforcement and achieve their expansion, in a very progressive process.
- Said wave, while showing strong inequalities in its degree of intensity between the different continents and even between different countries in a same region, acquires a practically international extension.
- As an expression of the general social and political polarization, there is an intense dispute around gender. The women´s and LGBTI + rise faces the offensive by various capitalist governments that are actively supported by political and religious fundamentalism.
- In addition, as a political phenomenon of global scope, an extreme right is emerging, among whose central flags is the attack against what they call “gender ideologies.”
- At the same time, in state and para-state actions of repression, we confirm an increase in sexual violence against women and LGBT + people.
- In 2020 and 2021, the conquest of the right to abortion in Argentina, Thailand, South Korea and New South Wales (Australia) contrasts with the decline of this right in Texas (US) and the advances against the LGBTI + community in Poland, Hungary and other Eastern European countries. The greatest example of the current misogynistic offensive is the new Taliban government in Afghanistan, which cruelly discriminates against women in work, education and other areas of life.
- Likewise, the coronavirus pandemic intensified the structural inequalities of the capitalist system. In this context, poverty and unemployment grew, affecting women to a greater extent, as did the burden of unpaid home care tasks and the levels of sexist violence.
- Just as today more than 70% of the world’s poor are women and girls, the pandemic put in the vanguard the health sector, which has a high female composition, same as in education, whose workers have been the protagonists of fierce struggles in many countries for your labor and salary rights.
- In many countries, the women’s and LGBTI + movements are organized in assemblies or other coordination spaces of groups and activists, with a broad and multi-class character. This requires combining unity of action with a political struggle from a class perspective, in a tough and permanent battle against mistaken positions and enemies of the revolutionary left.
- In the vanguard of this wave of struggles, a vigorous activism appears, especially youths, in schools, universities, workplaces and poor neighborhoods, open to the ideas of the left and revolutionary Marxism, which is an important source for recruiting new militants to our national sections and our international league.
- ● On the other hand, the most prominent global event within this wave is the International Women´s and LGBTI + Strike of March 8. Assuming the distinctive method of struggle of the working class, this strike has been carried out every year since 2017 with massive mobilizations and other actions in some 80 countries around the world.
Our Political Intervention
- For revolutionary socialists, it is decisive to participate without sectarianism in the women´s and LGBTI + movement with a double purpose: to promote the mobilization of the masses and to strengthen our own construction, always fighting for the leadership against enemy tendencies.
- In this task, we struggle politically against bourgeois feminist currents, reformists and opportunist neo-reformists, who encourage class conciliation, and also against autonomist groups and so-called radical feminism, which consider men an enemy, raise mistaken identity politics and thus fragment the struggles. These sectors, which emerged from the postmodernism of the 1990s, by covering up the class division, end up benefiting the capitalist order.
- This political battle requires proposing a transition program that, based on the specific needs regarding gender rights in each country, aims to link these vindictive struggles to a class based and revolutionary strategy to confront the government, the regime and the capitalist system.
- As part of this comprehensive policy, it is necessary to explain to the labor and youth vanguard of the women´s and LGBTI + movement, the intrinsic relationship between gender oppression and class exploitation.
International Campaign
- Launch an international campaign until March 8, 2022 against all forms of capitalist oppression and exploitation, with the slogan “Women workers for equality and socialism”. On March 8, our sections will participate in marches or actions in each country, carrying flags or banners with said slogan.
- Sections will organize agitation and propaganda activities: flyers, posters, talks, debates, seminars, use of social networks and other initiatives, aimed especially at student and working class youth.
- According to the reality of each country, the main slogan may be combined with other specific demands: legal abortion, equal pay, free childcare, against sexist violence, secular state, sex education, not raising the retirement age, etc.
- All sections of the ISL will dedicate a special space on their web pages and publications to promote and disseminate the campaign.
- The leaderships of the national sections and international coordination will follow the development of the campaign.
