International Women’s Day 2023
Unleash the Fury of Women as a Mighty Force for Revolution!
Over the last several years, literally millions of women across the planet have been rising up in spectacular eruptions of rebellion. Women have clogged streets, marched in big cities and small villages and seized the public square, demonstrating their outrage at all the ways women everywhere are degraded, abused and treated as lesser beings because they were born female in a world of male domination.
The longing of women to be free of oppressive traditions that weigh so heavily, wasting lives, breaking bodies and suffocating spirits has burst out from underneath this weight in red hot fury and the even more surprising feelings of joy.
In Latin America, masses of women marched on presidential palaces protesting the epidemic of femicide. A song was born in Oaxaca, Mexico, crying out for the women who have been disappeared—trafficked or killed with the words: “Let the state and the skies tremble, Let the judges and judicial officers tremble, Today we take away our calm, They planted fear in us, we grew wings.”
Mexico City: Demonstrators against gender violence covered the National Palace in fake blood with the message: "Femicide State," in Spanish, February 14, 2020. Photo: AP
In London, a year after an especially brutal rape, police attacked the women who came out to demonstrate, telling them they should have stayed home and carry rape alarms when going out. When these pigs were exposed for passing around pictures and messages about beating and raping, women demonstrators returned to the Charing Cross police station to throw thousands of rape alarms at the police.
In Poland, women paraded into Catholic cathedrals disrupting church services and plastering the doors with hangers as a symbol and reminder that when abortion is illegal, women die. Their actions were an expression of the widespread outrage that the Church had used its authority to support the fascist Law and Justice ruling political party in exchange for their revoking the right to abortion, which had been legal, available and increasingly liberalized since the 1930s.
Women dressed as handmaids protesting in a cathedral in Lodz, Poland in October 2020.
Last winter into the spring in this country, Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights (RU4AR) called for a mass movement to prevent the U.S. Supreme Court from overturning Roe v. Wade, which established the constitutional right to abortion established in 1973. RU4AR spread the Latin American green wave to North America, raising the righteous demands: “Abortion on Demand and Without Apology” and “Forced Motherhood Is Female Enslavement.” Tens of thousands responded, mainly youth, taking to the streets across the country. RU4AR went up against the refusal of the Democratic Party and the official women's movement who instead were making plans for after the right to abortion was taken away.
Protests fighting for abortion rights.
Since September, an uprising has spread throughout Iran in response to the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Jina Amini, beaten to death by the regime’s morality police for the crime of not correctly wearing her hijab (a compulsory head covering). The people of Iran, casting away their fear, filled the streets and flaunted the Islamic Republic's Sharia (religious fundamentalist) laws. Young women bravely walked the streets with their hair hanging freely, took part in joyous public dancing, cut their hair and burned their hijabs in public acts of defiance. Women and men have braved brutality, imprisonment and now the public execution of protesters. If this continues, or ebbs only to burst out again, there is no denying the power and significance of the women of Iran rising and calling for an end to the Islamic regime. The regime has lost legitimacy among millions.
Iranian women without hijabs dance around a bonfire in Bandar Abbas, Hormozgan province, September 22, 2022. Photo: via twitter @Shayan86
We Don't Have to Live This Way—When We Have a Chance for Something Much Better!
The oppression of women has been woven through thousands of years of patriarchal traditions deeply entrenched and carried forward in all societies that have been ruled by exploiting classes. But a scientific truth is also this... We are living in an extraordinary time in human history when it is possible to finally move beyond all this—beyond the denial of women's full humanity.
This is a time of rapid economic changes, of imperialist globalization with the large-scale employment of women that has undermined the traditional family and gender roles built into the functioning of the capitalist system. Women's place is no longer literally at home when over 50 percent of women worldwide now work outside of it. These changes have given women limited but real independence and exposure to the wider world, opening a sense of possibility. The traditional family and traditional gender roles have been key stabilizing and cohering factors in all oppressive and exploitive societies. Around the world we have seen a vicious backlash and revenge from the governments, institutions and all those who feel threatened by women becoming even more independent. Sexual assault, rape, violence, and hostility towards women are escalating. The fascist Republicans are moving forcefully in their march towards theocracy to outlaw abortion, birth control, and LGBTQ rights, with even divorce in their sights. This has been accompanied by escalating violence against women and differently gendered people.
This clash taking place across the planet over whether women and society are going to be dragged back or moved forward is acutely posed. Bob Avakian, looking at these trends in their beginning stages, wrote nearly 40 years ago:
It is not conceivable that all this will find any resolution other than in the most radical terms… The question to be determined is: will it be a radical reactionary or radical revolutionary resolution—will it mean the reinforcing of those chains of enslavement or the shattering of the most decisive links in those chains and opening up the possibility of realizing the complete elimination of all forms of such enslavement.
In his seminal work for this time in this country, Something Terrible, Or Something Truly Emancipating: Profound Crisis, Deepening Divisions, The Looming Possibility Of Civil War—And the Revolution That Is Urgently Needed, Bob Avakian has expanded these acutely posed stakes to incorporate the whole direction of American society, with the ruling class and the country as a whole irreconcilably divided. There is no going back to some idyllic past that never existed in a country founded on slavery, genocide, and patriarchy. The fabric of and the normal way this country has been ruled, and the way of life that people have become accustomed to, is increasing being ripped apart. And the degradation and oppression and ability of women to be full human beings is a harbinger and central factor in whether the chains of oppression will become tightened like a noose, or shattered and cast off.
A year ago in the U.S., women had the constitutional right to abortion. Today they don’t. Losing the right to abortion is a big tear in the social fabric of this country. There will be more. This, a terrible, monstrously oppressive future, is the direction that things are headed. Unless… unless… a movement for an actual revolution is built and organized, aiming for a radically new, far better society that will open the potential for the liberation of women and the emancipation of all humanity.
Deep questions increasingly confront millions: Why is this happening? Does it have to be this way? Is there another way the world could be? This is where International Women’s Day 2023 comes in as one key part in preparing for revolution. This is a moment to put before all that there is a way out of the madness. There is leadership for this in Bob Avakian. There is organization in the Revolution Club. There is guidance every week on our website revcom.us and in our weekly YouTube show: The RNL—Revolution, Nothing Less!—Show.
This International Women's Day—if you've ever wondered if something better is possible—make it your mission to learn about and be a part of this revolution. Join us in putting this liberating Revolution on the Map. Unleash the Fury of Women as a Mighty Force for Revolution.
Here is how you can be part of putting THIS revolution on the Map this International Women's Day 2023.
- Organize or join with manifestations of celebration and fury on March 8 and spread the revolution. Get a friend and hold a sign, hang a banner, organize a theatrical flash mob, do a bold action. DM @TheRevcoms
- Find a planned manifestation of celebration and fury nearest you.
- Watch, spread, and help fund The RNL Show which will be covering this and continuing to bring you the BA Interviews.
- Get people together in your house, in your neighborhood, on your campus, in your city to watch Up Close and Personal with Bob Avakian: Heart and Soul & Hard-Core for Revolution.
