International Women’s Day Statement of the IWL-FI – March 8, 2026

For an internationalist, class-conscious, anticapitalist March 8th and solidarity among peoples

This March 8th—International Working Women’s Day—we raise our voices as part of the global working class against the imperialist capitalist system that is responsible for producing exploitation and oppression on a global scale.

Capitalism is not just a regime of exploitation of the workforce. It sustains itself by fomenting sexism and all forms of oppression to divide our class, intensify super-exploitation, and preserve the privileges of a parasitic minority. The oppression of women is not an archaic remnant or a moral deviation: it is part of the very functioning of the system.

Job insecurity, double shifts, unemployment, low wages, and informality are the result of the system’s architecture. Austerity measures, relocations, company closures, and layoffs due to economic crisis and the incorporation of new technologies into production affect us disproportionately because we are a precarious and disposable workforce.

The increase in femicides, domestic violence, harassment at work, the commodification of bodies, and widespread impunity shows that, in the logic of profit, the lives of working women are worth less than market stability. We are overburdened with tasks of social reproduction when states cut rights and services such as health and education, where the workforce is predominantly female; we are overexploited in the workplace; we are abused in our homes and neighborhoods; and when we respond, we face an institutional apparatus that protects the powerful.

Along with this, capitalism also means the destruction of nature. Women suffer especially from the environmental catastrophe that is deepening in step with the capitalist crisis, despite the promises of governments all over the world to address it. We are the first to suffer from disease, unemployment, and social violence that intensifies with environmental collapse, and that is why we are also at the forefront of resistance against environmental destruction.

The crisis of the world order and imperialist rearmament

The global capitalist crisis and crisis of the world order, which is concentrated in the dispute between the United States as the hegemonic imperialist power and China as an emerging imperialist power, is also expressed in an unprecedented drive for rearmament and an arms race by all the imperialist powers.

This already constitutes a threat to the peoples of the world by itself, but the increase in military spending is also being carried out by dismantling already meager public services, which are fundamental for the working class as a whole, but whose destruction has a special impact on us women.

The far right and the imperialist offensive

This scenario is aggravated by the advance of the far right throughout the world, an expression of a reactionary surge in the face of capitalist crisis. Openly authoritarian governments attack the basic democratic rights of women and all oppressed people. In the United States, the Trump administration epitomizes this offensive: it combines misogyny, racism, and xenophobia with attacks on labor rights; it attacks abortion rights and the self-determination of transgender people; and it makes immigrants a permanent target of persecution and political blackmail.

The escalation against Venezuela, Iran, and the so-called “peace” plan for Palestine reveal the real content of this policy: to reinforce imperialist domination, deny the self-determination of peoples, and deepen wars, blockades, and occupations, as in Gaza and the Donbas (Ukraine), which are transformed into concentration camps, brutally targeting the working class, especially women and children.
Mass deportations, militarization, and the closure of borders and detention centers, both in the United States and in Europe, reveal a capitalism that openly resorts to state violence to discipline entire peoples and expand exploitation.

The class collaborationist governments and their false alternatives

But the far right is not advancing alone. Bourgeois governments that present themselves as “progressive” or “democratic” are not a strategic alternative. They administer the same social order, preserve private ownership of the major means of production, guarantee payments to bankers, and maintain agreements with or between imperialist powers. They implement fiscal adjustments, cut social policies, and make public services precarious while talking about equality.

For working women, this means fewer daycare centers, fewer protections against violence, greater domestic overload, and more economic dependence. These governments celebrate symbolic dates while keeping intact the structures that produce femicide, hunger, and unemployment. When the political crisis deepens, their priority is to contain popular mobilization and preserve the stability of the regime. Class collaboration does not defeat the far right, but rather paves the way for its strengthening.

Power, trafficking, and impunity: from sexual exploitation to elite networks

Nor can we ignore the direct role of elites in the global sex exploitation industry. The scandal involving Jeffrey Epstein exposed to the world a network connecting tycoons, politicians, and high-ranking imperialist representatives in schemes of trafficking and abuse of girls and women. This was not an isolated case, but the visible tip of a mechanism rooted in the structure of capitalist power.

International trafficking of women and children, forced prostitution, and private circuits of sexual exploitation move billions and operate under the protection of states and institutions. The impunity surrounding these cases reflects a judicial system that protects those at the top and selectively punishes those at the bottom. For working-class and poor women—especially migrants, Black women, and young women in precarious situations—this structure means constant vulnerability, economic coercion, and ongoing violence. Capital turns our bodies into commodities, either as cheap labor or as direct objects of profit in the industry of violence.

Against the illusions of bourgeois feminism and feminist separatism

Faced with this reality, proposals proliferate that promise emancipation without breaking with the system. Institutional feminist currents and corporate inclusion policies attempt to reduce inequality to a question of representation. They advocate for more women in government and on corporate boards, but do not question the class character of these structures. They celebrate the individual advancement of a few while the majority continues to be subjected to super-exploitation.

Other currents shift the focus of the struggle to an abstract opposition between men and women, deepening the fragmentation of the working class and obscuring the antagonism between exploiters and exploited. We do not deny the need for the autonomous organization of working women to confront sexism within and outside our own ranks. On the contrary, it is essential. But it must be anchored in class independence and a socialist perspective, not in adaptation to the regime or in replacing the struggle against capital with fragmented disputes based on personal identity.

Women’s liberation will not come from integration into this system or from the humanization of its institutions. It will come from destroying the material bases of oppression: private ownership of the major means of production, the bourgeois state, and imperialist domination.

Class independence and socialist revolution

We reaffirm: there is no progressive solution that maintains this system of functioning. The emancipation of working women will be the work of the independent mobilization of the working class, the building of its own organizations, and the conscious struggle for a revolutionary transformation of society.

We call on women workers, peasants, migrants, racialized women, precarious youth, and unemployed women to strengthen their unions, movements, and revolutionary parties; to demand that the struggle against sexism be organically linked to the general struggle against capital; to confront both the far right and the governments that administer the same policies with different rhetoric.

We defend a program that attacks the material bases of oppression: we want jobs with rights and decent wages; reduction of the workday without reduction in wages; socialization of domestic work through quality public services; effective combating of violence against women with resources under social control; unrestricted right to legal and safe abortion; full rights for migrants and LGBTQI+ people; breaking with imperialism and the payment of debts that bleed the people dry.

No conquest will be stable as long as economic and political power remains in the hands of the bourgeoisie. We link every immediate demand to the strategic perspective of overthrowing capitalism and building a socialist society based on the democratic planning of the economy under the control of the working class.

This March 8, we reaffirm its internationalist character, and that is why we send our class solidarity to all women who are fighting. To the Ukrainian women workers who are fighting Putin’s invasion not just on the front lines and in the rearguard, but are also fighting the sexism and anti-worker measures of their government. To the Palestinian women in their heroic resistance against Zionist genocide and Trump’s false peace plan. To the Iranian women who are confronting the oppressive regime of the ayatollahs and imperialist military attacks. To the women workers in Cuba and Venezuela who repudiate the blackmail, threats, and intervention of the United States while remaining on the front lines in defense of democratic rights and dignified living conditions for their people.

If oppression is global, our resistance must be too. From factories to schools, from the ghettos and favelas to the countryside, we raise the same banner: class independence, solidarity among peoples, and socialist revolution.

We don’t want to merely survive in this system. We want to defeat it.

Long live March 8!
Long live internationalism!
Long live the struggle of working women!
Down with capitalism and imperialism!
For socialism and liberation!

First published here in Spanish by the IWL-FI