Guest Editorial

March 8th
International Women's Day

Dear comrades:

We are pleased to send you our greetings and our best wishes for your activities on this important event.

For our Party this is an important event on which to forge stronger links between all those struggling for the liberation of women around the world. It is a day with a proud history for the socialist movement - a history of internationalism, solidarity and struggle.

It was in the 1910 International Conference of Socialist Working Women held in Copenhagen that the German Marxist leader Clara Zetkin first raised the idea of organizing an International Working Women's Day to mark the important victories of women workers in the United States and to provide a focus for all women around the world to organize public actions in order to win the right to vote. That conference broke vital new ground for the world socialist movement with its decision that every year, in every country, they should march under the slogan: "The vote for women will unite our strength in the struggle for socialism."

The sparking of the February Revolution in Russia by women defying the law to march in Petrograd on the International Women's Day in 1917, demanding bread and an end to war, vindicated the decision that women must be mobilized in the struggle for socialism, and that it is in their interest as the oppressed sex to do so constantly. Those early marches marked the beginning of women's central role in leading the struggle for socialism.

The first IWD rally was held in Australia in 1928, also organized by the communist women through their Militant Women's Movement. It demanded an eight-hour day, equal pay for equal work, paid annual leave and a living wage for the unemployed.

These demands in Australia have yet to be met for the overwhelming majority of women, and under the current neo-liberal offensive by Australia's capitalist rulers, they are becoming further out of reach for most women.

For the moment the women's liberation movement in our country is, after a decade of cooperation and demobilization by social democracy, followed by the assault of neo-liberalism, small, disorganized and easily diverted by the latest fads in feminism. However, the DSP and Resistance are working consistently among women students, trade unionists and all other campaigners, and through our newspaper "Green Left Weekly" and our public forums and classes, to rebuild a broad, campaigning women's liberation movement that can not only repel the escalating attacks on the mass of Australian women, but, through making alliances with other oppressed people in struggle, play the central role that it must in rebuilding a mass working class movement in Australia.

Our aim now is to revive the great tradition on the International Women's Day: a day of political struggle for women's liberation and for socialism, for without women's liberation there can be no socialism and without socialism women cannot be liberated.

In that common, worldwide struggle for an end to all oppression, we extend our solidarity to all of your comrades and campaigns.

Comradely

Lisa Macdonald
Democratic Socialist Political Party

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