Statement and Call for Solidarity On International Women’s Day 2013 by the International League of Peoples’ Struggle – Canada

As we raise our fists on International Women’s Day, we stand in solidarity with women around the world struggling for genuine liberation.

Over 100 years ago, The International Working Women’s Conference suggested March 8 to celebrate and unite the resistance efforts of working women around the globe. That day is now known to be International Women’s Day. This year on March 8th we call on all people to remember and celebrate the roles working women play in advancing the struggle against imperialism, capitalism, colonial occupation and patriarchy.

Working class women are among the most oppressed sectors of society, but they are also one of the most resilient. Organizing against imperialist aggression, capitalist exploitation and patriarchal values, world wide working class women, peasant women and other toiling women struggle for just and living wages, safe working and adequate living conditions, and ultimately an end to capitalist super-exploitation.

From Turtle Island, Palestine, the Philippines and Tamil Eelam, women are confronted by sexist violence that is rooted in capitalism, occupation, imperialism and patriarchy. During the past 20-years in Canada over 600 Indigenous women have been murdered or gone missing. These deaths and disappearances have gone unpunished and unexplained by the Canadian state whose policies result in femicide against Indigenous women to further facilitate the theft of ancestral land. The Live-in Caregiver Program (LCP) of the Canadian state has turned Filipina women into a captive workforce, where the violence and exploitation of employers is undocumented or erased. Rape has been used historically as a tool of imperialist occupation and war, as too many Tamil and Palestinian women can attest.

While working class and marginalized women bear the brunt of capitalist exploitation and imperialist aggression, women have never been idle. And on March 8th, 2013 we encourage everyone to rally in solidarity with women’s liberation struggles around the world.

As brothers and sisters united against imperialist and colonial aggression, we will not bend before the exploitation and violence. We will fight, we will struggle and we will continue resisting until women’s liberation is achieved. Women’s liberation is tied to the liberation of the oppressed classes and peoples and cannot be realized until the capitalist patriarchal system that thrives on gender, class, and racial inequalities is smashed.

ILPS Canada calls for an end to the economic exploitation of women, an end to sexual violence against women, an end to colonial occupation and imperialist aggression!