This weekend working people in Britain and throughout the rest of the world paused to mark the struggle for equal rights and the ending of all discrimination against women that is re-affirmed every year on 8th March International Women’s Day.

International Women’s Day was launched by the United Nations in those heady days of 1977.

Back in the 1970s the imperialists were on the defensive. The Israelis got a bloody nose from the Arabs in the October war of 1973. Then, for the first and only time, the Arabs and the OPEC oil cartel used their oil wealth to screw concessions from the imperialists. In 1974 the pro-Western Emperor of Ethiopia was overthrown, the Portuguese empire collapsed, and Yasser Arafat addressed the United Nations General Assembly in an epic call for Palestinian rights.

The Americans were kicked out of Vietnam soon after. It was a decade of optimism and liberation, and the holiday was widely celebrated throughout the Global South as well as Cuba, the Soviet Union, People’s China and the people’s republics of Eastern Europe. It was also celebrated in the West as mass movements and trade unions took up the call for equality and women’s rights in the USA and Western Europe.

In the people’s democracies and other parts of the Global South the day is still genuinely celebrated to mark the end of feudal concepts and the emancipation of women, whom Chairman Mao famously said “hold up half the sky”. But it barely goes beyond the inevitable commercialisation used to sell goods to the ‘women’s market’ in the imperialist heartlands these days. Trade union bureaucrats and mainstream bourgeois politicians all pay lip-service to its aims, but they rarely go beyond their usual attempts to woo the ‘women’s vote’ while women’s issues are reduced to the ‘woke’ demands of the middle-strata gurus who serve the ruling class in the mass media.

They’ll elevate the problems of petty-bourgeois women in breaking through the ‘glass ceiling’ of bourgeois society while routinely ignoring the problems of inequality, homelessness, unemployment, domestic violence, drink and drugs that hit working class women the hardest.

Many of the issues affecting women naturally also impact on men and the fight for equality for women is a crucial part of the class struggle. Inequalities sow divisions in the class when unity and solidarity are most needed.

The emancipation of women can only be achieved under socialism.

Or as Lenin put it: “It is precisely the Soviet system, and the Soviet system only, that secures democracy. This is clearly demonstrated by the position of the working class and the poor peasants. It is clearly demonstrated by the position of women…the working women’s movement has for its objective the fight for the economic and social, and not merely formal, equality of woman. The main task is to draw the women into socially productive labour, extricate them from ‘domestic slavery’, free them of their stultifying and humiliating resignation to the perpetual and exclusive atmosphere of the kitchen and nursery.”