01 March 2014 /International Bulletin / Issue 137

On 8th March milions of women will take to the streets all over the world to fight for their rights. In Turkey, Northern Kurdistan and Rojava as well as thousands of working women will rebel against their oppression, just as they do every day of the year in their everyday struggle against the ruling patriarchy.

The capitalist system delivers more than enough reasons for the women's rebellion.  Sexism and callomania, violence and rape, prostitution and forced marriage, honour killings and bad pay, religion and marriage are only a few of them. Furthermore the growing oppressive measures of the fascist AKP -Regime, that tries to cut any liberties of women and to rule their lives as well as the living in the colonial occupied Northern Kurdistan and the ongoing attacks on the life of women  in Rojava carried out by islamistic murder gangs. The bestial attitude towards the women participating in the revolutionary and patriotic-kurdish movement in the fascist regime's war against these movements is the cruelest of crimes.

To our party, the MLCP, the famous phrase of Alexandra Kollontai 'No women's liberation without socialism, no socialism without women's liberation!' is a guiding principle. According to this it organizes its work within the working and kurdish women. It is an inevitable fact that women will never be completely equal to men within the bounds of capitalism, just as socialism without true equality of men and women is simply unthinkable.

At the 4^th Congress of our party the question of the struggle for women's liberation took a central position and the congress  made important decisions upon this topic. Therefore we declared in our programme: 'Socialism, which lays the social foundations of the liberation of the oppressed gender, develops also as a women's revolution.' and 'During the period of socialism, a stubborn, complex and long lasting struggle goes on between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, between the capitalist road and the socialist road and between the patriarchy and the women's liberation in all spheres of life.'

Here we have to consider two important aspects:

1. There can't and mustn't be a postponement of the struggle for women's liberation to the time following the revolution, to an undefined point in the future. Being comunists we have to stand up for women's rights in present time. We have to spread our socialist perspective to the women's fights and to refute feminist and reformist postions. The women's revolution needs to begin here and now to triumph in socialism.

2. The struggle for women's liberation is not only women's duty. It's the shared struggle of progressive, revolutionary and comunist women and men on the way towards socialist revolution, towards the liberation of mankind.

Today we can see the prominent position women take in  the struggles everywhere, may it be in revolutionary, democratic or national movements. May it be in the 'Arab Spring', in the 'June-Taksim-Uprising' or in Rojava, where the women will hail  the 8^th March this year in the liberated areas, in which new laws for the protection of women have been established. Everywhere thousands of women stand upon the barricades to fight for their liberation.

We as Marxists-Leninists take it as our general and continuous task to  express the demands of working women and female workers, to enlighten them and call them to struggle. We will find, try out and develop special ways, methods and instruments, which take account of particular oppression of women in this system, to organize them as one half of the revolutionary army. In contrast to the feminist-reformist and many even progressive forces, we fight to make the slogan 'Each day is 8^th March' come true and to reflect this in our relations, our organisations and the orientation of our struggle.