8 March 2008!! Celebrating International Women's Day?

If 8 March - International Women's Day - is not to remain simply an annual recurrence, we must smash these chains by means of ever-stronger solidarity and class consciousness, in the knowledge that the liberation of women will never be complete until all of humanity is free from its oppressors, from tyrants, churches, States and bosses. In the knowledge that the freedom of all comes through the freedom of women. [ Italiano]

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8 March 2008!!
Celebrating International Women's Day?

But women are still the worst hit by poverty, violence and war

On 8 March 2008

Women are paid on average 20% less than their male colleagues in similar jobs. Their double helping of work - inside and outside the home - limits women's access to extra pay linked to productivity, incentives and overtime, that represents an increasing part of today's wages. Creating incentives for wage systems which are linked to productivity only leads to increased impoverishment for women. And it is simply hypocrisy when governments and trade union bureaucracies announce their intentions to deal with the question of women.

On 8 March 2008

Even today, our male-dominated, fascist and findamentalist culture, together with the hypocrisy of that secularist element of society that is still riddled with authoritarianism and sexism, all come together to continue the oppression of women. It is the vilest sort of oppression, masked by tolerance and do-gooders, because it still ends up denying equal dignity and roles for women. It dorwns in the silence of the family the most vicious violence from physical exploitation to psychological slavery in the name of the happy family that sees women, mothers and daughters transformed into silent servants on whose shoulders rests the responsibility for looking after the housework and who must always be ready and willing, with a smile on their faces.

More and more women are dying in their family homes, the victims of private violence by men who mistake love for property rights and transform is into all-too-often tolerated violence. Violence in the home kills more people every year than cancer or road accidents.

On 8 March 2008

There is no shortage of sycophantic politicians genuflecting at the feet of priests and popes, questioning the wisdom of women's self-determination in the name of some natural" life that is sacred from the very moment of its inception. Not only do these holier-than-thou gentlemen have no qualms at all about sending troops off to massacre innocent civilians in the name of a war of "civilization", they continue to demonstrate the most high-handed contempt for women's health. They force women to face the difficulty and expense of having to go abroad to a more civilized country if they want to have fertility treatment in order to have children, and they are dying for the chance to force women to have children even if they do not feel able to carry through their pregnancy to the end.

Limiting women's self-determination not only endangers the health of hundreds of women, it also denies their right to choose when to become mothers. It is yet another attempt to impose one cultural and social model on everyone - the prelude to the wider plan for repression that they intend to subject us.

On 8 March 2008

The State and the Church are asking women to have more children to re-populate Italy. This demographic policy is obviously directed only at Italian women, seeing as how our immigrant women already have too many... Yet despite all the increasingly fascistic propaganda, there is no social assistance, there are no creches, there is no work and what work can be found offers starvation wages.

On 8 March 2008 we remember those women factory workers who died in the flames of their workshop, and in their memory we continue to denounce and fight to free women from the chains they are held in by this male-dominated, patriarchal and clerical society.

If 8 March - International Women's Day - is not to remain simply an annual recurrence, we must smash these chains by means of ever-stronger solidarity and class consciousness, in the knowledge that the liberation of women will never be complete until all of humanity is free from its oppressors, from tyrants, churches, States and bosses. In the knowledge that the freedom of all comes through the freedom of women.

Federazione dei Comunisti Anarchici

Ethics & Gender Policies Commission

7 March 2008