Date: Fri, 21 Mar 1997 23:33:32 -0500
Subject: M-G: Women Hold Half of the Sky!


[Editor's Note: Below is a statement of the Committee for a
Revolutionary Communist Party in Australia, GPO Box 474D, Melbourne VIC
3001, Australia.]
	
      INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY 1997
          It is Right to Rebel!

Celebrated by the oppressed around the world, March 8th -International
Women's Day is a holiday that came out of the struggle of women.  In
particular, the struggle of thousands of thousands of immigrant women
who were clothing industry workers in New York, USA, who provided the
inspiration for the demand that there be a special day to celebrate the
struggle of women.

In 1908 women began to stage walk-outs and strikes at various sewing
factories, against the slave wages and harsh working conditions they
endured. In spite of many arrests and heavy fines, in spite of brutal
beatings by police and hired thugs, the women, many of them teenagers,
continued to fight.  Middle and upper class women inspired by the
strikers came out to the pickets to give their support and were arrested
too.

After months of small shop actions the women escalated the struggle by
calling for a tradewide general strike.  Over the objection of the union
leadership, the mass meeting of November 22, 1909 resounded with cheers
of approval for the general strike resolution.

The strike lasted for months and ignited strikes in other areas.  Though
the strike itself was only partially successful in terms of changing
work conditions, the women's struggle did challenge the thinking on what
"uneducated" immigrant women could do and filled many many woman and
other workers and oppressed people with a strong sense of pride and
strength.

In 1910 the anniversary of these demonstrations, March 8th, was declared
International Women's Day by an international conference of
revolutionaries and communists.  The great leader of the Russian
Bolsheviks and the October 1917 Revolution, V.I. Lenin, was among those
who voted at this conference to celebrate the tradition of International
Women's Day.

Despite the determined efforts of the imperialists and their running
dogs to snuff out the red sparks of International Women's Day with
picnics, dinner parties and the wet blanket of parliamentary cretinism
-March 8th has been celebrated across the world by class-conscious women
and men as a day of struggle. And as a day when we commemorate the
revolutionary legacy of the great proletarian feminist fighters like
Chiang Ching who struggled all her adult life to keep China on the
revolutionary road.

In this International Women's Day we raise our voices in rebel chorus:  
ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!!!

Learn from our revolutionary sisters in Peru who are waging an heroic
People's War: Women's liberation is only possible through the abolition
of class society.  Our enemy is not so much this or that reactionary,
politician. The parliaments simply administer the system with the backup
of the ruling class's power. Refuse the politics of bourgeois cruelty
unleashed upon the people from the corridors of power in Canberra.
Prepare the ground for revolution in Australia as part of our role and
duty to advance the cause of proletarian internationalism and world
revolution.

============================================================Published by The New Flag, a magazine at the service of the oppressed.
The New Flag
30-08 Broadway, Suite 159
Queens, NY 11106, USA
E-Mail:lquispe-AT-nyxfer.blythe.org
Read the PCP Web Page (documents in English/Spanish and soon in French
and Italian.
http://www.blythe.org/peru-pcp
============================================================



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