THE Communist Party’s theme for International Women’s Day is “Women’s Work: Women’s Super-exploitation — Wages, Prices & Profits.” 

Contrast this with the “official” IWD 2023 theme, which under the aegis of corporate capitalism, now thinks it owns our day. 

Each year this anonymous organisation consisting only of a website and in partnership this year with John Deere (the agriculture and construction company) invents a new theme which is suited to commercial interests. 

This year the deceptively innocuous theme is #EmbraceEquity — a theme which reflects the interests of the monopoly capitalist companies that are listed as sponsors. Nothing could be further than the true aim and socialist origin of IWD.

“Equity” is the new business buzz word now advanced to replace “equality.” According to the diversity mantra embraced by corporate capitalism, the two words are very different and even incompatible. 

Business has now ditched a collective equal rights and opportunities agenda in favour of a seemingly much kinder individually tailored approach. 

Founded on the diversity paradigm, equity and inclusion (DE&I) have now been added to the mix. DE&I is embraced by business, including rogue employers like Royal Mail. 

CWU members will laugh all the way to the picket line when they read that their employer who plans to sack 10,000 workers has a diversity policy which states that Royal Mail’s view that diversity is “a strategy to promote values, behaviours and working practices which recognise and value the difference between people, releasing their potential, enhancing performance and delivering improved services to customers.” 

They let the cat out of the bag when they go on to state that: “Diversity is not the same as ‘equal opportunities’… Diversity focuses on understanding and influencing workplace attitudes and culture. It’s about identifying and developing individual skills, contributions and potential… getting diversity ‘right’ offers huge business opportunities.”

So, let’s reject capitalism’s #EmbraceEquity theme for IWD and highlight the real issues facing women workers. 

Neither equity nor equality is the experience of women workers worldwide. The reality for women workers in every capitalist country is that their super-exploitation is integral to the maintenance of the capitalist system. 

Women are exploited as workers, but are doubly exploited due to their oppression in class society. Women’s role in social production is combined with their role in domestic reproduction. 

These two issues are connected, resulting in the root cause of women’s inequality founded upon the contradictions between the social nature of production and the private nature of reproduction, ie the conflicting demands of paid labour and family responsibilities (still seen in practice and theory as the primary function of women of whatever their marital status). 

Family formation and women’s role within it impacts significantly on the type and nature of women’s employment and the lack of social provision not only prevents choice but ensures the perpetuation of job segregation with consequential limitations on promotion prospects and equal pay. 

Women do 60 per cent more unpaid (ie domestic) work than men — accounting for an average of 26 hours per week (Labour Force Survey 2016). 

Job segregation is a main cause of the pay gap. In every occupational group reported in the New Earnings Survey, women earned less on average than men, even where they made up more than half the workforce. 

The inevitable consequence is that the conflict between women’s two roles results in low-paid, precarious or part-time work in a narrow range of “women’s jobs,” prime among them being clerical work, shop work, sewing and textile work, caring, cleaning and catering work. 

In other words, although women are 50 per cent or more of the labour force in most capitalist countries, including Britain, their paid work is an offshoot of their role within the family and their working day has to fit around their domestic responsibilities.  

The international dimension to this is underpinned by British imperialism’s past and the neocolonialist present. All of the sectors in all global supply chains are characterised by occupational segregation, where women are primarily low-skilled workers at the bottom of supply chains, with few opportunities to work in higher-paid jobs. 

We can use the textile and garment global supply chain as an example. Women represent over three-quarters of workers in the textile and garment sector, with higher levels in former colonies. 

The UN International Labour Organisation acknowledges this and recognises women’s double burden: “In this sector women are paid less than men, have fewer opportunities for advancement, suffer workplace violence, harassment and discrimination, as well as lack voice and influence at decision-making levels. 

“At home, women also bear the burden of unpaid care work which affects their opportunities.”

It would be tempting to mark IWD as a day to celebrate women’s victories. That would be a mistake because working-class women cannot chalk up many victories. 

Some have argued that women have made great progress in the 21st century, and thus they question whether it is necessary to continue the debate on women’s inequality. 

Compared to previous centuries when women were the property of men and had no rights at all, it is clear that women’s status in many countries has improved juridically. 

However, apart from the right to vote and own property, equality for women as it now exists is based, by an unseen process of co-option, on the successes of a favoured few; for working-class women little has altered. 

Despite the fact that women now account for over half the workforce, job segregation, precarious work and the gender pay gap persist, underpinned by the myth of the “family wage” and compounded by the lack of affordable childcare. 

Austerity politics, having undermined public services, has led to the feminisation of poverty. In the home, up to one in 10 women experience domestic violence each year; one in four will experience this type of abuse at some point in their lifetime. An incident of domestic violence takes place in Britain every six to 20 seconds. 

For us IWD is celebratory only because we rejoice in every struggle to end the rotten system which exploits and oppresses us. Let this day be a call to arms to expose the evidence of women’s super-exploitation worldwide and the cultural coercion underpinning it. 

The struggle for socialism and the liberation of women go hand in hand — this is the real message of IWD!