Today is March 8th, a day dedicated to all the women across the world to honor the courage and struggle they have been doing for decades despite immense social obligation & restrictions.
Women's day, a day observed for equal rights & women's suffrage.
"Wake Up Women"
Wake up women, kindle like the blazing flame;
Breaking through all obstacles
Rise with bright red signs on your forehead
Wake up mothers, daughters, sisters, wives
Bring the dazzle of lightening behind dark cloud
Come as ever victorious, ever vibrant
8th March is International Working Women's Day – instituted initially not as a day to celebrate, but as a day for militancy and action. Now many liberal institutions and feminist organizations recognize International Women's Day, but few acknowledge its roots or its historical significance.
It was, in fact, comrade Clara Zetkin at the second International Conference of Women Socialists in 1910 in Copenhagen who suggested that March 8 become International Working Women's Day, and it was intended as a day to mobilize working-class women against capitalism.
This is exactly the purpose it served ninety years ago today, when a mass demonstration of Petrograd women, led by a group of striking women textile workers, marched on the municipal Duma demanding bread. They called on their husbands and brothers to join them, and on International Women's Day (February 23rd by the old Russian calendar), 90,000 workers were on strike, demanding bread, an end to war, and down with the tsar and police. The great Russian revolution had begun.
Eleanor Roosevelt never joined the Spanish workers fighting imperialism and capitalism (as the west had "non-intervention treaties); Hillary Clinton never stood with Afghan women when Bill starved them and their children with sanctions; Michelle Obama is not standing with the women her husband is exploiting in sweatshops and murdering with drones. While bourgeois women lived and live in mansions, working women lived and live in squalor. The working women of the world have no interest in common with the bourgeois women of the world. The danger of identity politics is that it takes focus and struggle away from the fundamental contradiction in the world of capital vs labor, reflected in the working class versus the capitalist class.
Identity politics, by blurring the class lines, is a form of populism that unites fundamental enemies; they make women workers and their exploiters the same, which is not the case. Identity politics play
into the hands of our enemies by making us lose sight of the fact that our enemies are our enemies; it identifies tendencies of capitalism as fundamental (it situates particular effects of the struggle between capital and labor – such as racism, sexism, homophobia – as the central struggle;
it defines capitalism as a system of oppression that we need to fix, rather than a mode of production based on the struggle between labor and capital to be destroyed). Our job is to ensure that our enemies do not recuperate the historical context of our struggles and to struggle based on our class interests by this historic day.
"With rise in number of educated women in our country(India),
there will be many reforms in wild behavior of our people. People's conduct will improve.
Their behavior on the basis of fortune will cease... Superstitions and misbelieves will be eradicated."
-POET KAZI NAZRUL ISLAM
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