For feminists, socialists, revolutionaries and anticapitalists, this day gives us the opportunity to celebrate our living memory, that like the memory of all resistance and struggle, teaches us its history and looks towards the future. On this day we acknowledge the risks and the work of other women that made this day a date to commemorate the struggle for the rights of working women.
This struggle has brought to light the confrontation with a patriarchal State that, despite proclaiming itself as the guarantor of our rights, degrades women through violence and the control of our bodies. This State transforms us into a fundamental piece to guarantee the sustainability of a mode of production based on appropriation, theft and unlimited accumulation by using us as sexual objects, as commodities, as domestic servants and as objects for human reproduction.
Through a sort of progressive politics put forward by conferences and State institutions we are told that egalitarian liberalism certifies a politics of gender that will bring justice for women. These politics include discussions on sensibility, workshops on gender, new masculinities and budgets to implement projects of empowerment. Nevertheless, it is the State that allows and looks the other way in the face of institutional violence against women. In this sense the state is an accomplice to femicides; to a gender pay gap that keeps growing; to a glass ceiling that won’t break. The state is an accomplice when we are harassed in the street; when we are followed and abused; when the media objectify us and when double standards and morality continue to naturalize violence towards us.
Nevertheless, on this day we don’t only acknowledge the work that remains to be done or the debts owed to us. On this day we also acknowledge and remember our history, the history of women that have opened paths for us to deepen and to broaden. On this day we conmemorate the lives of women like Olympe de Gouges, Simone de Beauvoir, Clara Zetkin, Rosa Luxemburg, Alexandra Kollontai, Flora Tristán, Alaide Foppa, Rosario Castellanos, Elvira Carrillo Puerto, Laureana Wright, Comandanta Ramona, Irinea Buendía, Berta Cáceres and the lives of others and our lives as well. On this day we recognize that we have debated and organized in all kinds of spaces. On this day we raise our voices demanding higher wages; to demand jobs with dignity; safety in the streets; our place on government; rights over our bodies; the decriminalization of our decisions; access to sexual and reproductive rights; self-determination for our communities and a life free of violence.
We are certain that we must wage and that we will wage this struggle. To do this we will walk together, because every democratic, civil and political right conquered has been conquered through collaborative decision making and alliances from where we organize and defend ourselves.
We demand a national Gender Violence Alert!
Enough of patriarchal misogyny!
Enough of precarious work!
Self-defense and feminist organizing to combat machista violence!
Let’s build broad organizations of women and feminists!
Mexico City march 2016.
PRT