The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted all parts of society and has thrown hundreds of millions out of work globally. However, a closer look reveals that women have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic. Women workers play a key role in health care, child care, elder care, and teaching while experiencing low wages, insecure employment, and domestic and sexual violence—all of which have been exacerbated by the pandemic.

The pandemic and the economic catastrophe it has triggered are threatening to roll back decades of gains in terms of women’s liberation. Capitalism in crisis can offer only counter-reforms. To end oppression, we need socialism.

The following was written by a comrade whose sister tragically became a victim of femicide, which has become a plague on Mexican society. The comrade demands justice for her sister, and every other victim of the rotten capitalist system, which has violence against women written into its DNA. Not one more woman murdered! Justice for Sara Abigail and all victims of femicide!

Every day, 10 women are murdered on average in Mexico. Yet open violence is only the tip of the iceberg. Mexican women face constant harassment, discrimination and humiliation at home, in the workplace, and in the streets. Women in general, and working-class women in particular, bear the brunt of the crisis of Mexican capitalism and the process of social decomposition that accompanies it. Pent-up anger at this state of affairs has now come to surface as International Women’s Day saw unprecedented mobilisations, followed by a women’s strike that paralysed the

On 8 March, an epoch-making march filled the streets of Chile to mark International Working Women’s Day. According to the organisers, around 2 million marched in Santiago alone, and the national figure was around 3.5 million people.

On 9 March, comrades of the IMT participated in marches and strikes in commemoration of the International Working Women’s Day in Argentina, participating in the mobilisations in Buenos Aires and Rosario. In both places, the marches were massive, in Rosario alone, more than 50,000 people gathered, including women, men and youth; a mix of political parties; feminist groups and unions, who marched to the Monument to the Flag.

The following statement was issued by the Revolutionary Women’s League (Liga de Mujeres Revolucionarias) prior to the Women’s Day protest and strike of 8-9 March in Mexico, which have brought hundreds of thousands of women onto the streets in protest against violence and for women’s rights.

The history of Bolshevism from the very early days right up to the Russian revolution contains a wealth of lessons on how it is the class struggle that provides the final answer to the women’s question. In this article Marie Frederiksen looks at the approach of the Bolshevik Party to the women’s question from its early days, right through to the revolution and after taking power. Originally published 8 March 2017.

The rise of femicides and violence against women in Mexico is evidence of a sick, oppressive system that must be transformed, root and stem, through class struggle.

The following is a speech by Marie Frederiksen (editor of the Danish Marxist journal Revolution) on the Comintern and the women's struggle, delivered at the International Marxist Tendency's 2019 Word School in Italy. 

This article was first published in German by the comrades of Der Funke, the IMT in Austria. Here we provide an English translation on this important question of Queer Theory. Is it compatible with Marxism? Can there be such a thing as “Queer Marxism”? Yola Kipcak in Vienna replies in the negative, and explains why.

Today is 50 years since the Stonewall riots of 28 June 1969, which marked the beginning of the modern LGBT rights movement. Following other revolutionary events of the 1960s, the riots – described as the “hairpin drop heard ‘round the world” by the New York Mattachine newsletter – marked a shift amongst LGBT people away from individualised, small-scale activism and towards mass protest and demonstrations.

On 28 June 1969, a riot just outside the Stonewall Inn bar, located on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village, New York City, marked a turning point in the fight for the emancipation of LGBTQ people. That night, the bar was raided by the police, which was all too common at the time with gay bars. But this time, gay people didn’t let the police walk over them. They stood up to the NYPD in an unprecedented weekend of rioting. This courageous act transformed the movement and led to thousands of LGBTQ people coming “out of the closet, into the streets!” It is important to revisit these events and draw the main lessons for today.

To mark International Working Women's Day - 8th March - we publish a talk from the 2018 Revolution Festival, where Ellen Morton and Fiona Lali of the Marxist Student Federation discuss the modern struggles taking place internationally against women's oppression.

In February 1918, the UK Representation of the People Act was brought in, giving the right to vote to women with property over the age of 30. In November of the same year, women in the UK were allowed to stand for parliament for the first time. In December, women voted for the first time in a British general election.

This document, after a thorough discussion at all levels of the International Marxist Tendency over the past year, was approved unanimously by the IMT World Congress held at the end of July 2018 with the original title Marxist Theory and The Struggle Against Alien Class Ideas. Its aim is to draw a line between Marxism and a set of idealistic and postmodernist alien class ideas, which have affected for some time a layer of activists in academic circles and are also being used in a reactionary manner within the international workers' movement.

50 years ago, women at the Dagenham Ford Factory began a strike that became a turning point in the fight for equality. It was not the first such strike, and it would certainly not be the last. However, by standing up against bosses, union officials, and even other workers, they would send a message that has stood the test of time and inspires still.

On Friday 25 May, Ireland went to the polls to decide whether to repeal the 8th amendment of the constitution, which denied women the right to abortion as long as the unborn fetus had a heartbeat. Under these laws, which are part of the legacy of the Catholic Church’s domination of Ireland, abortion was illegal, even under the horrific circumstances of rape, incest or fetal abnormalities. The repeal of the 8th amendment is an epoch-making slap in the face against the Catholic Church and the establishment in the Republic.

We reproduce here a letter that Harry Whyte (a British Communist Party member) wrote to Stalin in May 1934, in which Whyte posed the question: “can a homosexual be considered someone worthy of membership in the Communist Party?”.

We publish here in English an oft-quoted text, The Sexual Revolution in Russia, by Dr. Grigory Batkis, published in German in 1925 as a contribution to the proceedings of the World League for Sexual Reform. Unable to locate an English language edition, we found a copy of the German original and had it translated by our German and Austrian comrades of the IMT.