LONG LIVE INTERNATIONAL WORKING WOMEN’S DAY 2026

Editorial Board

March 8 marks International Working Women’s Day (IWWD), a holiday we observe with the utmost enthusiasm, revolutionary jubilation, and pride. It is a holiday first christened by the women of our class and shared with the whole world over a century ago. It was Comrade Clara Zetkin who declared a “Working Women’s Day” to the Second International in 1910, and it was the great Lenin who made it an official holiday of the Soviet Union on March 8, 1922.

Like all advances won by our class, this holiday emerged in a period of profound adversity—at the cusp of an imperialist world war in which millions of working people would be sent to their deaths at the behest of their bourgeois rulers. This International Working Women’s Day is no different. Today, the sharpening contradictions and intensifying collusion and contention between the imperialist powers are once again pushing humanity toward the jaws of another world war, driven by the quest to redivide the world among themselves for the domination of the oppressed nations.

US imperialism is mired in wars across the world today. In an attempt to shore up its threatened global position, it instead drowns in a sea of armed masses. This is seen first and foremost today in the Middle East, where it has begun yet another war of aggression to protect its position in the region, especially its military outpost Israel. While it seeks to project strength, its web of bases have instead turned into bastions of weakness in the face of missile and drone fire from Iran and anti-imperialist forces in the region. Under the guise of protecting the Iranian people from state repression, the US and Israel slaughter schoolgirls through bombings of schools and hospitals.

In Latin America, US imperialism wages a campaign of encirclement and piracy. The Trump administration kills fishermen off the coast of Venezuela and steals oil; they kidnap Venezuela’s president and first lady, telling the new government to follow its orders or be killed. They threaten Mexico, Colombia, and Panama with war, and in recent days carry out attacks on Ecuador alongside its lackey government. US imperialism circles around Cuba like a vulture, starving its population through an intensifying blockade to realize the decades-old plot of overthrowing its government.

At home, the imperialist state is increasingly militarizing domestic police forces, vastly expanding surveillance, and granting itself carte blanche to label political dissidents as “domestic terrorists” or “antifa” and strip them of democratic rights.

The rapid development of artificial intelligence threatens mass layoffs, and as a resurgent labor movement begins to take shape—part of a broader spontaneous rebellion of the masses—the old bourgeois state has launched a campaign of terror against foreign-born workers. Through mass raids, detentions, and deportations, the state seeks to discipline through terror and intimidate a sizable and important section of the proletariat at a moment of growing unrest.

The contradictions of capitalism are most sharply concentrated in the oppression of women. Over 70% of the US’s poor are women and children, and women make up nearly 60% of the lowest-paid workers in the country. The struggle of the woman worker is the struggle of the proletariat in its most concentrated form, bearing the double burden of exploitation as a proletarian and chauvinist oppression as women.

The Department of Labor undertook a concerted effort to strip basic labor protections from entire sectors dominated by women through a thoroughly reactionary reinterpretation of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) to exclude vast numbers of domestic workers. Echoing the race and sex-based exclusions of the New Deal—when agricultural and domestic workers, then and now largely Black and Latina women, were deliberately left out—this effort sought to redefine employment relationships for home care workers, nannies, and cleaners. By promoting the “independent contractor” model and narrowing the definition of “employer,” the policy aimed to eliminate federal guarantees of minimum wage and overtime pay. This was a gift to the capitalist class, intensifying the exploitation of a workforce that is over 90% female and disproportionately Black, Latina, and foreign-born.

Rolling back FLSA protections seeks to undo hard-won conquests of the mid-20th-century labor movement. For proletarian women, this means longer hours, lower wages, and no legal protection against abuse or wage theft, all while attempting to sustain families on starvation pay.

This is further exemplified in the slashing of over one trillion dollars in social services such as Medicaid and SNAP. These cuts plunder the working class and deepen its exploitation by the imperialist class, further immiserating working women and their families.

Funding for contraception and abortion services have been systematically assailed. In the three years since the rescinding of Roe v. Wade, prosecutors have filed more than 400 cases charging individuals with crimes related to pregnancy, pregnancy loss, and birth. Three-quarters of these cases originate in Arkansas and Oklahoma alone, and over 75% of those charged are poor women.

This domestic offensive is inseparable from the broader militarization championed by US imperialists for the plundering of the oppressed nations and armed confrontation with rival imperialist powers. The $901 billion military budget was funded through the systematic looting of social programs that sustain working women and children. Every bomb dropped and every drone deployed is paid for by stolen school lunches, denied medical care, and gutted childcare programs. Imperialist war abroad and class war at home are two sides of the same coin. The same state that invades oppressed nations to secure markets and resources pits its rabid forces against workers in the US to discipline a rebellious workforce.

Yet history teaches us that intensified oppression produces resistance. The very women targeted by these policies are central to the renewed upsurge of the labor movement. We see this in teachers and nurses strikes, carried out and led overwhelmingly by women; in organizing drives at Amazon warehouses and Starbucks cafes, where young women play leading roles; in tenant struggles against predatory landlords; and in the formation of rapid-response networks to resist ICE raids.

These struggles are heroic and necessary, embraced by the proletariat and all progressive sections of the masses. Yet they remain fragmented, preventing the full realization of their revolutionary potential.

Only the Communist Party, reconstituted as a militarized Marxist-Leninist-Maoist party, is capable of uniting these struggles to realize this revolutionary potential. The task before us revolutionaries is to Learn from Chairman Gonzalo, Unite Under Maoism so that mass work can begin in earnest among the class and unite these fragmented struggles. Unity among the advanced detachment of the class is necessary to unite the rest of the class under its leadership.

To celebrate International Working Women’s Day is not to engage in empty ritual, but to recommit ourselves to the task of reconstitution. It is to fight for immediate demands without losing sight of the conquest of power and the overthrow of the imperialist bourgeoisie that necessitate this oppression. The emancipation of working women is impossible without proletarian power, and proletarian power is impossible without the leading role of revolutionary women.

The miserable system of women’s oppression was incarnated with the division of human beings between exploiter and exploited, and the ability to give birth was distorted from a thing of reverence into a chain and shackle. Women’s oppression has transformed over the epochs but has never been eliminated, and today the lower status of women ensures lower wages for men and women among the toiling classes.

Communists and revolutionaries inscribe upon their banners: unleash the fury of women as a force for proletarian revolution, because only the proletariat and its tireless march toward luminous communism can abolish inequality between the sexes in essence.

Photo: Women workers strike in New York City in 1912.

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