Today is International WORKING Women's Day, not a celebration of women who manage empires, enforce borders, or bomb other women's children. It was born on picket lines, in factories, in the streets, out of the organized rage of working women.
We center all working women, including those whose unpaid labor in the home keeps this whole system running, because seizing the means of production means accounting for every form of labor.
We carry this day with militancy in our ideology, our politics, and our organizing, until abusers and ruling classes alike are afraid of the justice of the communist woman.
That is the legacy we carry. That is the fight we continue.
As fascism continues to grow in the U.S. it is easy to desire for things to "go back to normal" and place the blame on Trump, but what does "normal" mean to an empire? Endless wars, genocides, children in cages, imprisoned slave labor, sex trafficking, all the atrocities happening now, but out of sight and out of mind? We are stuck in the ratchet effect where Republicans march us towards fascism while Democrats help them and brutally crush all organizing movements.
Fascism is a symptom of capitalism in decay, a last push to preserve the rule of the capitalist class, via unchecked violence, propaganda, and criminalization of dissent. These have been tools used by big business elites and their comprador government representatives long before Trump was elected. Women, children, and men from oppressed nations have experienced imperialist violence, displacement, colonization, and control from the beginning of their relationship to the US. Even without Trump in office, the system would still be as brutal and murderous as it is now, through neocolonial and militaristic control of nations. As their power expands and consolidates, the US currently survives off of the destabilization of sovereign nations and despair of forced migration, exploiting nationally oppressed women to gain profit and power.
Conditions of Migrant Women and Children in Detention - Dilley, TX
What are some of the hurdles working class and poor women are facing today? The current regime has increased the normalcy of kidnapping people including children and pregnant women and sending them to rot in detention centers under the guise of an "immigration crackdown against violent illegal aliens". These terrorist tactics leave women afraid to leave their homes for work and send their kids to school - causing huge economic strife and anxiety. Unfortunately, their hundreds of stories and locations we could speak on, but lets take a moment to focus on the Dilley Detention Center in Texas.
Dilley has been in the headlines recently due to the the kidnapping and detention of a 5 year old child known as Liam "Conejo" Ramos in January 2026. This spotlight as well as numerous interviews with children and women being detained there helped get out to the public the disgusting, cruel, and unsanitary conditions, including lack of medical care, unsafe food and water, and poor quality education. It should be noted that conditions were so horrid that dozens of the detained children staged a demonstration where shouts of "Libertad!" (Spanish for Freedom) could be heard. With story after story of the cruelty and harm people are facing in these holding cells, imagine all the unreported events that have taken place! Including allegations of sexual abuse against ICE employees by detained women - many noting that the employees threatened them with deportation. Many of these women were taken while working and many children used as bait to lure working class parents out, only to be kidnapped along side their parents - with some not even able to stay together upon entering ice facilities. These families deserve better! Unlike the horrendous name this fascist regime likes to give them, "aliens" they are humans and deserve dignity and respect and to be given the right - like any other family - to work and contribute in their communities and not be terrorized!
The Origins of Migration: Destabilization of the Homeland
Let's take a look at why this section of the working class ends up outside of their countries of origin. The World Migration Report from 2024 shows that leading causes of migrants globally are due to reasons such as conflict, natural disaster, seeking education and economic opportunity on top of gender based factors such as inequitable legal systems/social norms/ideologies. Lets take a moment to really think about what this means. Who started these conflicts and for what reasons? How are these "natural" disasters created? Why do they have to leave to seek out education and economic opportunity? What is behind these gender based factors these women are running from? History tells us time and time again that these policies and systems are not born out of a vacuum but born out of imperialist and colonial conquest. Let's make sure to be even more clear: In most cases - U.S. imperialism and western colonial forces have created these devastating conditions! Hiding behind themes of "bringing democracies to an uncivilized third world" and instilling strategic regime change to benefit the western powers instead of the people that work the actual land. No more! Working women all over the world
The World Migration Report names the leading causes driving migrants from their homes as conflict, climate disaster, lack of economic opportunity, and gender-based persecution. These conditions do not appear out of nowhere. They are the predictable result of imperialism, capitalism in its highest stage, which requires the constant extraction of labor, land, and resources from the Global South to feed the Western ruling class's profits. U.S. imperialism manufactures the conditions that force people to flee, then criminalizes the migration that follows.
Many of these women are Indigenous to Turtle Island itself, their ancestors having been here long before any borders were drawn. Now the descendants of conquistadors, settler colonizers, and Nazis enforce those borders on stolen land. The same system that destroys the homeland polices the escape route. That is not a coincidence. That is the point.
Venezuelan Women Say: Sovereignty Is Not Terrorism
Who decides what counts as war and what counts as terror? Only U.S.-backed conflicts get the benefit of the doubt. Meanwhile, women and children in the Global South die under sanctions, blockades, and bombs, and we call it "just the way it is."
The U.S. invokes the "war on drugs" to justify threatening Venezuela while remaining the world's largest consumer and importer of those same drugs. Now decades-old WikiLeaks documents revealed U.S. collusion with the very cartels it claims to fight. The pretext is old. The agenda is oil, land, and power.
Internationalist solidarity is our instrument. Venezuelan women are on the front lines, sustaining life, sustaining community, sustaining resistance. Their struggle is the anti-imperialist feminist struggle. The defense of Venezuela is the defense of all of Latin America.
Iranian Women Hold Up the World
Iranian women do 4x more unpaid labor than men, spending 21% of their time on unpaid domestic and care work compared to just 5% for men. Many more work as unpaid laborers in farms, carpet workshops, and handicrafts, labor that never even shows up in official statistics. Iranian women are already carrying an economy under some of the most far-reaching sanctions on their backs, uncompensated, while the U.S. performs feminism for the cameras, bombs girls in their classrooms, and dismantles abortion rights at home.
On February 28, 2026, a U.S.-Israeli strike hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls' elementary school in Minab, southern Iran, in broad daylight, while it was packed with young pupils between the ages of 7 and 12. Over 165 girls were killed and nearly 100 more wounded. UNESCO called it a grave violation of humanitarian law. The UN Secretary-General condemned it. The U.S. continues its violent onslaught of Iranians.
Amidst liberal calls for "nuance" and condemning both the U.S. and Iranian governments, we call for nothing less than the full and enthusiastic support of nationally oppressed peoples' right to defend themselves. The primary contradiction in Iran is not between its government and its people, but of the U.S. imperialists who seek to destabilize, massacre, and exploit the resources of the Iranian masses. Class liberation is not possible without national liberation, for the Iranian working class cannot exist if the Iranian nation is destroyed.
Congolese Women Sustain Life Under Siege
Women make up nearly half of the Democratic Republic of Congo's labor force, with 80% working in agriculture, feeding families through decades of unending conflict. And that conflict has never been accidental.
In 1961, the CIA assassinated Patrice Lumumba, the Congo's first democratically elected prime minister and communist, who dared imagine the Congo's wealth belonging to its own people. The U.S. has been punishing the Congo for that dream ever since. Today, U.S. corporations profit from minerals extracted from conflict zones where rape is used as a weapon of war, while the U.S. government performs outrage by sanctioning Rwanda with one hand and sending it $150 million in aid with the other. Don't let the propaganda confuse you. The coltan in your phone and the cobalt in your laptop are extracted from lands soaked in Congolese blood.
Yet, Congolese women keep organizing, building healthcare networks, sustaining grassroots organizations under siege and corporate extraction. Their resistance is internationalist feminist struggle in action.
They Want You Exhausted, Not Revolutionary
Capitalism is exhausting. Living in the U.S. is exhausting. And when you are exhausted, escape sounds good. The trad wife aesthetic sells you a fantasy of rest, beauty, and being taken care of. The influencer pipeline sells you the dream of being your own boss. The sex trade is glamorized as empowerment. All of it is the same offer: sell yourself instead of organizing with your comrades.
This is by design. They want you focused on male and ruling class approval, on being chosen, on individual survival. They do not want you asking who owns the land, the warehouse, the factory, the hospital, or the prison. Your home. They do not want you to be revolutionary. They want you to be decorative and dependent.
The trad wife life is not a refuge. She is the most economically vulnerable woman in the room, one divorce away from nothing, in states where pregnant women cannot even file for divorce at all.
Gender-based violence in the imperial core does not only happen in dark alleys. It is encoded in law. Abortion rights stripped away. Trans people legislated out of existence (or so they want). Domestic violence protections quietly rolled back. And a prison system where a significant number of women serving time for violent crimes are there because they defended themselves.
Marriage under capitalism has always been a form of property relations. Archaic laws still on the books in states across the country treat women as dependents, as vessels, as assets. Financial abuse is not incidental to these arrangements. It is the point.
Our liberation cannot be defined by the ruling class, by patriarchal approval, or by how successfully we sell ourselves. It is defined by the freedom of our most marginalized sisters and queer comrades.
As we say, when they are free, we are free. Not before.
Build the Resistance Where You Are
The leftist movement in the U.S. has always had a women problem. Too much of our organizing has treated women's work as secondary, as support, as background. That is not an accident. That is by design. We correct it by showing up differently.
Stop waiting for the right crowd. Move beyond your friend groups. If you are not sure where to start, find the organizations already doing the work in your community and plug in. Then go further. Talk to the women and gender-oppressed people you already share a building, a block, a neighborhood with. Learn their most pressing problems. Figure out what you share, what you need, and who your real enemies are, from the small bosses to the ruling class and their politician lapdogs.
Organizing is where we get to dream our biggest dreams for one another. Get creative. Get brave, together.
Study, Train, Lead
As you organize, invite the people you meet to go deeper. Our predecessors and comrades currently engaged in people's wars have left us a roadmap. Reading groups build bonds, bridge languages, meet people where they are, and turn individual knowledge into collective power.
ARALING AKTIBISTA (ARAK) — Filipino revolutionary study course on organizing, revolutionary attitude, and how to take ideas from the people, develop them, and bring them back as a plan for action.
MLM BASIC COURSE — Accessible introduction to Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and the history of the international communist movement.
Leaders are trained and built up. Every one of us is a potential leader, organizer, and fighter. IWWD was born out of communist organizing. That has been scrubbed from the holiday on purpose, because communism has a track record of actually defeating capitalist imperialism. Reclaim the roots.
WE CAN WIN! AND WINNING STARTS WITH YOU!
Continue the Fighting Legacy of International Working Women's Day!