End women’s oppression worldwide – fight for socialist change
Committee for a Workers’ International statement
Looking around the world on International Women’s Day 2025 it would seem that women’s rights are under attack in almost every part of the globe.
Poverty, inequality, war and environmental destruction are the multiple consequences of a global capitalist system in profound crisis. These crises affect all working-class and poor people internationally. But because of pre-existing gender inequality, women suffer particular hardship and oppression.
The figures are horrific. Globally one in ten women are living in extreme poverty, at a time that the wealth of the world’s billionaires has grown by $2 trillion in just one year. Around 300,000 women worldwide die in pregnancy and childbirth every year. At least one in three – 763 million women – will experience physical and/or sexual violence at least once in their lifetime.
The suffering is at its most extreme in the ‘Global South’. In the genocidal destruction of Gaza, women have been disproportionately the victims of Israeli bombs. While in the often ‘forgotten’ brutal conflicts in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, rape and sexual violence are deployed as a weapon of war on a mass scale. In Afghanistan, not only have the Taliban denied women the right to work and to have an education, even their voices have been silenced in public places.
In the more economically developed capitalist countries, the consequences of the 2007-08 ‘Great Recession’ are still being felt as governments of all persuasions continue with austerity policies – attempting to make the working class pay the price for the crisis of the capitalist system they defend. And because women still do the bulk of childcare and unpaid domestic work, in most cases alongside working for a wage, cuts to public services and benefits have a detrimental effect on the jobs they can do, the hours they can work, the wages they can earn, and their standard of living in retirement.
At the same time, economic crisis and the absence of a working-class political alternative have fuelled the rise of right-wing populism in many countries, in particular the recent return of Donald Trump to the presidency in the US, raising fears of a further backlash against women’s rights.
Yet this is only one side of what is happening around the world. International Women’s Day was launched on 8 March 1911 by socialist women as a day of protest and to celebrate the struggles of working-class women against economic exploitation and oppression. And in the last few years, from Latin America to Bangladesh, from Spain to India, from Iran to Sri Lanka, there have been numerous examples internationally of women, youth, and working-class and poor people protesting, striking and rising up against poverty, inequality, oppression and corruption.
Election of Trump
Donald Trump’s second victory, and the increase in support for right-wing populism elsewhere, has understandably provoked fear amongst women, immigrants, LGBTQ+ people and minorities. Emboldened by victory, Trump and his cohorts have launched a right-wing offensive, and now there is an urgent need to organise resistance to attacks on all oppressed groups, as well as the attacks on workers’ rights and living standards that are already under way and are likely to increase.
However, it would be wrong to think that Trump’s election was primarily driven by a swing to the right in US society or a backsliding in social attitudes on women’s rights. While a minority of those who voted for Trump may hold misogynist ideas and be attracted by the rhetoric that men are losing out because women’s rights have ‘gone too far’, the reality is that 80% cited the economy as the main reason Trump got their vote.
The benefits of the much-vaunted economic growth in the US (actually weak by historical standards) have not ‘trickled down’ to working-class Americans whose wages are on average the same as they were fifty years ago. Rather it has stayed with the super-rich minority whose wealth has multiplied.
Joe Biden and the Democrats are associated with sky-high prices and a devastating cost-of-living crisis. The hope amongst most of the minority of the US electorate who voted for Trump, including women, is that he will put more money in their pockets and make them financially better off. With capitalism in crisis that is not going to happen. On the contrary, his economic policies could increase inflation and even provoke a global recession.
At the same time as the US presidential elections were taking place, people in ten states were voting in referendums on defending abortion rights. In eight of those referendums a majority voted in favour, including in Trump-voting states. Over 60% of the US population support abortion in some or most cases. This helps to explain why Trump has so far refused to back the demand from anti-abortionists for a national ban on abortion rather than leaving the decision to individual states, as has been the case since the overturning of Roe v Wade by the Supreme Court in 2022.
Fighting back
The stormy events in South Korea have given a glimpse of what can happen if authoritarian populists attempt to overstep the mark. Suspended President Yoon Suk Yeol was elected in 2022 on a right-wing populist programme, which, in an attempt to win over a layer of discontented young Korean men, attacked feminism and women’s rights, and threatened to close down the gender equality ministry. When, in December 2024, Yoon declared martial law he was defeated by mass protests, in which young women and men were united – together with the trade unions who called a general strike – in opposition to Yoon’s authoritarian move.
It’s true that the demonstrations at the time of Trump’s inauguration this year were only a faint echo of those of 2017 when four to five million took to the streets on Women’s Marches across the US – at the time the biggest protests in the US since the Vietnam war. However, the different response this time is not surprising. The self-appointed leaders of the movement failed to build on the collective strength of the protests, linking up with other oppressed groups and, most importantly, workers beginning to organise in the workplaces. Instead they mischannelled the energy and anger on the streets into electoral campaigning for the Democrats, who have manifestly failed women both economically and on the question of abortion rights, including when they held the presidency and had a majority in Congress.
Given the attacks that Trump has already begun against immigrants, oppressed groups and workers, and the inevitable dashing of the hopes that working-class living standards will rise, future struggles are inevitable on multiple fronts. The question of building a workers’ party, armed with a socialist programme, that can unite together those struggles and offer a political alternative to the two big-business parties will become a growing feature in the US, as it will in other countries where the populist right appears to be on the rise.
Defending women’s rights
The 2017 Women’s March in the US was part of a global wave of protests by women in many different countries in the wake of the Great Recession – a reaction against all forms of inequality and injustice, alongside the danger that right-wing populist ideas pose to women’s rights. These movements succeeded in raising awareness of gender violence, sexual harassment, sexism and misogyny as well as winning some important legal changes, especially on the question of abortion, most notably in Latin America and Ireland.
However, these protests also revealed the limitations of women’s movements which confine themselves to fighting for legal change and changing attitudes without a broader programme and strategy for fundamental economic, social and political change.
The hard-won legal right to abortion in Argentina is now under threat from the right-wing populist president Javier Milei. In other countries it is not right-wing populist ideology but austerity and cuts to health and other vital services that endanger reproductive rights and women’s safety. While social attitudes towards violence against women have progressed in many countries and legal reforms have been won, this is being undermined by lack of funding for sexual assault services, refuges, housing etc.
Gender violence and abuse, sexual harassment, sexism, misogyny, denial of reproductive rights, gender discrimination and inequality flow from outdated ideas of male control over women’s reproduction, sexuality, and behaviour that have their roots in the development of the first class-based societies thousands of years ago. But they are maintained and reproduced by capitalism, which as a system has exploited pre-existing gender inequality and the ideology and structures that underpin it, including the family, for its own economic interests – in the workplaces and in society more widely.
So any programme to defend and extend women’s rights and end oppression must go beyond campaigning to change behaviour, attitudes and the law, linking this to a struggle for the economic resources that are absolutely necessary to enable women, and working-class women in particular, to exercise their rights in practice, and for an end to a capitalist system that has inequalities of power and wealth sewn into its very fabric.
Centrality of the working class
As long as capitalism exists, the specific gender oppression that women face is likely to be a feature of future struggles, whatever form they take. It can even be a trigger for broader movements in society as we saw in Iran in 2022, after the killing of Mahsa Amini by the ‘morality police’ over ‘improper’ wearing of the veil.
However, the force which has the power to achieve the systemic change necessary to end all oppression and exploitation is the organised working class of all genders. Not only does the working class have an economic interest in doing so – because the profits of the capitalist class come from the exploitation of workers in the workplace – but, most importantly, it has the potential collective power to disrupt the creation of those profits and the capitalist profit system as a whole.
In several countries there has been a recent upturn in strikes and workplace struggles, triggered in particular by the cost-of-living crisis, such as the strike wave in Britain, but also, in the US, around the right to organise. As women’s participation in the workforce has increased over the last few decades in many parts of the globe, they have also been to the fore in many of the strikes that have taken place. And historically when working-class women have moved into struggle on economic issues that affect the working class as a whole, they have also campaigned for the trade unions and the workers’ movement to take up the issues that affect them specifically as women. The struggle to transform the trade unions into fighting, democratic organisations is therefore an essential part of the struggle against women’s oppression.
The important role that the unions can play was highlighted recently in India. The horrific rape and murder of a trainee doctor at a hospital in West Bengal in September last year provoked widescale protests. Female and male doctors in the state took strike action which then spread throughout the country, demanding justice and better security in hospitals to keep female workers safe.
Socialist change
This is just one of the many global struggles by women and the working class as a whole that we are marking on International Women’s Day. Capitalist crisis and its accompanying poverty, inequality, wars and climate catastrophe are sowing the seeds for future struggles on a mass scale. But as the recent uprisings in Bangladesh, Syria, Chile and other countries have shown, it’s not enough to replace one capitalist regime with another. The entire capitalist system needs to be overthrown to cut off the root of the problems faced by workers, the poor and oppressed groups internationally.
This requires the building of mass parties, based on the organised working class, with a programme of demands that can unite the struggles of the working-class and oppressed groups, and point a way forward at every step of those struggles towards the fundamental systemic and structural change that is needed.
Six years after the first International Women’s Day was declared, working women in Russia sparked the revolution that, under the guidance of the Bolshevik party, was to overthrow capitalism and feudalism in that country.
The Stalinist counter-revolution, flowing from the economic underdevelopment of Russia and its isolation, prevented the building of a genuine socialist society, based on workers’ democracy and internationalism. Many of the gains that women had won in the early days of the revolution were rolled back. But their legacy lives on.
If in 1917 a workers’ government in a desperately poor, mainly peasant country could introduce equal pay, maternity rights and the legal right to abortion, legalise homosexuality, and provide public nurseries and restaurants, imagine what would be possible today if the huge wealth and resources internationally were taken out of the hands of the capitalist minority who control them and were publicly owned and democratically planned to meet need not profit. The lives of working-class people, and women in particular, would be dramatically transformed. And in a system in which all unequal power relations were ended and the profit motive removed, the way would be cleared for the elimination of women’s oppression, as well as all other forms of oppression, war and conflict.
This is what the Committee for a Workers’ International is fighting for in all the many countries around the world in which we are organised. Join us in that fight for a better world.
