En Passant

International Women’s Day has a revolutionary history.

German communist Clara Zetkin put the proposal to hold a day of international solidarity among and with working women to an International Conference of Socialist Women.  The day itself was seen as championing the on-going struggle for better working, social and political conditions for women, in particular the vote.

As a consequence in March 1911 workers (men and women) in various European countries rallied to really begin the international day.

On 23 February 1917 (8 March in the modern calender) women garment workers in St Petersburg struck for bread and peace and in doing so sparked the conflagration that bought down the Czar four days later and saw the working class take power 8 months later.

Today in Australia IWD is a celebration of the rise of women to the top of bourgeois society as well as recognition that women still have a long way to go to be liberated. 

Indeed much thinking now seems to conflate these two distinct ideas so that the day has become one where liberation is seen as becoming a boss or manager.  The glass ceiling argument for example will get a run, little recognising that working class men don’t run factories or departments either.

IWD doesn’t differentiate any more between the head of Pacific Brands (on her $1.8 million salary) and the 1850 mainly migrant women on a pittance she has sacked.

The idea that these sacked Pacific Brand women have more in common with their boss because she is woman than with working class men is criminal and absurd.  The bourgeoisie and those women who have positions of power in bourgeois society celebrate the day precisely to paper over the class differences. 

We are not ‘all in this together’.  Ruling class women have a material interest in the present exploitative system continuing. Working class women have a material interest in overthrowing that system.

Women’s wages in Australia for comparable work are about 80 per cent of men’s.  A comprehensive paid maternity leave scheme (which the 1910 Socialist Conference supported) is still a pipe dream in Australia.

Indeed the bankers of Wall Street seem to have destroyed any chance of achieving even the pathetic scheme Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard mooted a few months ago.  The global financial crisis apparently means the scheme won’t go ahead.

Rudd ‘Labor’ has $35 billion for submarines but not even half a billion for a paid maternity leave scheme.  If we could turn babies into bombs then under Rudd and Gillard we’d have a scheme immediately.

Pacific Brands shows that women workers and women bosses have nothing in common. What better way to reclaim IWD than for Pacific Brands workers to demonstrate for their jobs and occupy their workplaces on 8 March this year? 

And for female and male workers around Australia to support them.

Like women garment workers in Russia in 1917 we have a world to win.