It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Today marks the 100th Anniversary of International Women's Day one of two Internationalist Workers Holidays begun in the United States. And it is one that recognized women as workers, that as workers women's needs and rights are key to all our struggles hence the term Bread and Roses.
Women have led all revolutions through out modern history beginning as far back as the 14th Century with bread riots. Bread riots would become a revolutionary phenomena through out the next several hundred years in England and Europe.
Women began the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919 by shutting down the phone exchange.
Women began the Winnipeg general sympathetic strike. At 7:00 a.m. on the morning of Thursday, May 15, 1919, five hundred telephone operators punched out at the end of their shifts. No other workers came in to replace them. Ninety percent of these operators were women, so women represented the vast majority of the first group of workers to begin the city-wide sympathetic strike in support of the already striking metal and building trades workers. At 11:00 a.m., the official starting point of the strike, workers began to pour out from shops, factories and offices to meet at Portage and Main. Streetcars dropped off their passengers and by noon all cars were in their barns. Workers left rail yards, restaurants and theatres. Firemen left their stations. Ninety-four of ninety-six unions answered the strike call. Only the police and typographers stayed on their jobs. Within the first twenty-four hours of the strike call, more than 25,000 workers had walked away from their positions. One-half of them were not members of any trade union. By the end of May 15, Winnipeg was virtually shut down.
Again it would be mass demonstrations of women against the Shah of Iran that would lead to the ill fated Iranian revolution.
March is Women's History Month, March 8 is International Women's Day (IWD), and March 5 is the birthday of the revolutionary Polish theorist and leader of the 1919 German Revolution, Rosa Luxemburg. It was Rosa Luxemburg's close friend and comrade, Clara Zetkin, who proposed an International Women's Day (IWD) to the Second International, first celebrated in 1911.
Clara Zetkin, secretary of the International Socialist Women's Organization (ISWO), proposed this date during a conference in Copenhagen because it was the anniversary of a 1908 women workers' demonstration at Rutgers Square on Manhattan's Lower East Side that demanded the right to vote and the creation of a needle trades union.
The demonstration was so successful that the ISWO decided to emulate it and March 8 became the day that millions of women and men around the world celebrated the struggle for women's equality.
Actually, International Women's Day is one of two working class holidays "born in the USA." The other is May Day, which commemorates Chicago's Haymarket martyrs in the struggle for an eight-hour day.
“Agitation and propaganda work among women, their awakening and revolutionisation, is regarded as an incidental matter, as an affair which only concerns women comrades. They alone are reproached because work in that direction does not proceed more quickly and more vigorously. That is wrong, quite wrong! Real separatism and as the French say, feminism à la rebours, feminism upside down! What is at the basis of the incorrect attitude of our national sections? In the final analysis it is nothing but an under-estimation of woman and her work. Yes, indeed! Unfortunately it is still true to say of many of our comrades, ‘scratch a communist and find a philistine’. 0f course, you must scratch the sensitive spot, their mentality as regards women. Could there be a more damning proof of this than the calm acquiescence of men who see how women grow worn out In petty, monotonous household work, their strength and time dissipated and wasted, their minds growing narrow and stale, their hearts beating slowly, their will weakened! Of course, I am not speaking of the ladies of the bourgeoisie who shove on to servants the responsibility for all household work, including the care of children. What I am saying applies to the overwhelming majority of women, to the wives of workers and to those who stand all day in a factory.
“So few men – even among the proletariat – realise how much effort and trouble they could save women, even quite do away with, if they were to lend a hand in ‘women’s work’. But no, that is contrary to the ‘rights and dignity of a man’. They want their peace and comfort. The home life of the woman is a daily sacrifice to a thousand unimportant trivialities. The old master right of the man still lives in secret. His slave takes her revenge, also secretly. The backwardness of women, their lack of understanding for the revolutionary ideals of the man decrease his joy and determination in fighting. They are like little worms which, unseen, slowly but surely, rot and corrode. I know the life of the worker, and not only from books. Our communist work among the women, our political work, embraces a great deal of educational work among men. We must root out the old ‘master’ idea to its last and smallest root, in the Party and among the masses. That is one of our political tasks, just as is the urgently necessary task of forming a staff of men and women comrades, well trained in theory and practice, to carry on Party activity among working women.”
As we go marching, marching, in the beauty of the day, A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill lofts gray, Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses, For the people hear us singing: Bread and Roses! Bread and Roses!
As we go marching, marching, we battle too for men, For they are women's children, and we mother them again. Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes; Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses.
As we go marching, marching, unnumbered women dead Go crying through our singing their ancient call for bread. Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew. Yes, it is bread we fight for, but we fight for roses too.
As we go marching, marching, we bring the greater days, The rising of the women means the rising of the race. No more the drudge and idler, ten that toil where one reposes, But a sharing of life's glories: Bread and roses, bread and roses.
Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes; hearts starve as well as bodies; bread and roses, bread and roses
“Zetkin, along with Rosa Luxemburg, was among those who understood that the development of capitalism had not made either the task of social reform or international relations more peaceful.”
German socialist Clara Zetkin founded International Women’s Day to acknowledge working women’s contribution to the struggle against capitalism. It’s no wonder that German socialist, Clara Zetkin’s legacy has been erased by the corporate sponsorship of #IWD – it’s all too relevant, as Katherine Connelly explains
There are many reasons to draw inspiration from Clara Zetkin (1857-1933). She dedicated her whole life to fighting for socialism no matter what the considerable personal costs. Shortly after joining the Social Democratic Party in the 1870s, which was swiftly banned by the German authorities, she was forced into an exile that lasted ten years. Whilst in exile, her husband died leaving her with two young children.
Zetkin’s own life ended in exile after she was forced to flee Germany again, this time from the Nazis. She broke that exile briefly in August 1932 when she claimed her right to open the Reichstag, as its oldest elected member. Seventy-five years old, nearly blind and in very poor health, she had to be helped to the tribune past uniformed Nazi thugs who had threatened to attack her.
Literally facing down the Nazis, she called for working-class unity against fascism. She ended her speech by voicing her wish that she would soon open the first government of German workers’ councils. It was an extraordinary final act of courage and defiance. Zetkin died less than a year later.
Revolutionary Zetkin
Born in 1857, Zetkin belonged to a generation of German socialists who had known Friedrich Engels in the last years of his life and been able to interpret the work of Marx and Engels for an emerging younger generation.
There were sharp debates between these socialists about how to apply Marxism to the problems of the early twentieth century. Leading figures in the SPD, Karl Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein argued that the changing nature of capitalism and imperialism made redundant Marx and Engels’ revolutionary conclusions – perhaps the contradictions of old could be overcome piecemeal and peacefully?
Zetkin, along with her close friend Rosa Luxemburg, was among those who understood that the development of capitalism had not made either the task of social reform or international relations more peaceful. Instead, the contradictions of competitive capitalism were deepening, making the world a more dangerous place, and could only be positively overcome through the revolutionary action of the expanding and increasingly international working class.
Their revolutionary perspective was, tragically, vindicated in 1914 with the outbreak of the First World War, driven by the competition of rival, imperialist nations. The SDP leadership, which had rejected revolutionary socialism in favour of changing the system from the inside, capitulated into supporting that system and voting for war credits.
Zetkin and Luxemburg, however, campaigned against the war, for which both were taken into custody. They also began to create new organisations, independent of the SPD, which resulted in the German Communist Party.
In 1919, after a failed communist uprising in Berlin, Rosa Luxemburg was murdered by the proto-fascist Freikorps. Against the repression of the counter-revolution and rising antisemitism, Zetkin defended the memory of Luxemburg, who was Jewish, and the importance of her ideas.
Zetkin on women’s liberation
Alongside Zetkin’s commitment to building an effective revolutionary left that was anti-imperialist, anti-militarist and anti-fascist, she was one of the most important socialist theorists of women’s liberation. International Women’s Day originated from the 1910 International Socialist Women’s Conference, which met in Copenhagen ahead of the left’s Second International. The Day was proposed by Luise Zietz, a member of the Unskilled Factory Workers’ Union and the SPD, and seconded by Zetkin.
What happened in Copenhagen in 1910 was the result of years of thinking, writing and organising by Zetkin on the questions of women’s oppression and liberation. Zetkin was challenging assumptions on the left that questions about women’s rights were somehow subordinate to the struggle for socialism, as well as the dominant view among contemporary feminists that women’s emancipation was separate from socialism.
Once again, Zetkin drew on the legacy of Marx and Engels who in their last years had become increasingly interested in questions about the historical origins of women’s oppression at a time when women were becoming more central, as workers, to capitalist production. Like Marx and Engels, Zetkin explored how the economic organisation of society affected women. She understood that in a class-divided society, women were going to be affected differently.
The rise of capitalist society had excluded women who belonged to the capitalist and upper classes from the public sphere. Confined to an idealised domestic sphere, with a profitable marriage and continuation of the family line (in property) upheld as their ultimate aims in life, these women wanted to expand their horizons and compete with men in the professional world. Their male counterparts were, in the majority, excluding them from that world, and so it made sense to these women to organise separately, as women against men.
Zetkin did not dispute that their aims were ‘completely justified’. But she did not accept that this minority of women represented the interests of all women, nor that their narrow aims for equal inclusion within a class-divided society could realise emancipation. Once they achieved their own inclusion, Zetkin predicted, wealthy women’s language of egalitarianism would swiftly be replaced as they fulfilled the functions of the offices they had so longed to join. Today’s female CEOs and Tory ministers surely prove Zetkin right.
By contrast with wealthy women, for working-class and poor women, the rise of capitalist society had not resulted in confinement to the private sphere. On the contrary, the old patriarchal system of production, where families laboured together in ‘cottage industries’ under the control of the father, were replaced with individual family members having to compete with each other in the labour market.
And women’s subordinate social status meant that working women could be subject to greater levels of exploitation through even lower pay than male workers. Therefore, for working women, the problem was not that their male peers were excluding them from ‘free competition’. The problem was the entire economic organisation of society which pitted workers against each other in a race to the bottom.
It was therefore in the interests of working-class women and men to reject those divisions by uniting in resistance to exploitation and oppression. For revolutionaries, this meant overthrowing women’s oppression had to be seen in this context: not as an abstract ‘principle, but in the interests of the proletarian [working] class.’
Anything less was to concede the ground to those who believed that women’s oppression could be solved by a bit of tinkering with, or greater ‘inclusion’, into an inherently exploitative system. Consistent with her approach to capitalism and imperialism, Zetkin’s approach to women’s emancipation was informed by the need for revolutionary change.
Zetkin today
Today, almost all big, globalised corporations manage to genuflect annually before #IWD and utter some unintelligible slogan that commits them to change precisely nothing. And none of these slogans will be ones that, as Lindsey German pointed out, working-class women are today raising in an urgent fight against inequality through widespread strike action. But these strikers are the women who stand in the real tradition of International Women’s Day.
This article was originally published by Counterfirehere.
Kate Connelly is a writer and historian. She led school student strikes in the anti-war movement in 2003, co-ordinated the Emily Wilding Davison Memorial Campaign in 2013 and wrote the acclaimed biography, ‘Sylvia Pankhurst: Suffragette, Socialist and Scourge of Empire‘
Kate is speaking at our event Clara Zetkin – Socialist fighter against fascism, women’s oppression & war on April 9 at 18.30. Register and full info here.
The socialist history of International Women's Day
Submitted by SJW on 10 March, 2020 - Author: Kelly Rogers
International Women’s Day has its roots in some of the most significant moments of our movement’s history. It is our task to remember this history and to turn International Women's Day into a day of strikes and struggle once more.
It was at the second International Conference of Socialist Women, held in Copenhagen in 1910, that the idea of an International Women’s Day was first formally agreed. German delegates Luise Zietz and Clara Zetkin brought the proposal in front of a hundred women delegates, from seventeen countries. The resolution read:
“In agreement with the class-conscious political and trade union organizations of the proletariat of their respective countries, socialist women of all nationalities have to organize a special Women’s Day (Frauentag), which must, above all, promote the propaganda of female suffrage. This demand must be discussed in connection with the whole woman’s question, according to the socialist conception” (emphasis mine).
These delegates had aspirations much grander than simply winning universal female suffrage. They sought the triumph of socialism: the liberation of workers from drudgery and wage slavery, and the liberation of women from the shackles of domestic slavery.
The first official International Women’s Day was celebrated on March 19 1911, a date chosen to celebrate the 1848 Revolution in Berlin. In Germany, more than a million women, mostly (but not exclusively ) organised in the SPD and the unions, took to the streets. They put on dozens of public assemblies, over 40 in Berlin alone, to discuss the issues they were facing in their day-to-day lives and prospects for the women’s movement.
That same year, workers in the United States chose March 8 for their Women’s Day. It was a significant date: In 1857, garment workers in New York City had struck and staged a demonstration against inhumane conditions and low pay. Fast forward to March 8 1908, and again 15,000 women garment workers, many of them Jewish immigrants, went on strike and marched through New York’s Lower East Side to demand higher pay, shorter working hours, voting rights and an end to child labour. ‘Bread and Roses’ became the slogan of the garment workers’ struggle: they didn’t merely seek money enough to eat, but fulfilling and enriched lives worth living.
From 1914 it became common practice to celebrate International Women’s Day on March 8. A famous poster depicting a woman dressed in black and waving a red flag (which Workers’ Liberty has adopted for its logo) marked the occasion in Germany. It was considered so dangerous in the run up to the First World War that police prohibited it from being posted or distributed publicly. The day turned into a mass action against war and imperialism.
Three years later, March 8 1917 (in the Gregorian calendar), IWD witnessed the explosion of the February Revolution in Russia. In spite of opposition from Bolshevik men, working class women in Petrograd turned International Women’s Day into a day of mass demonstrations for “bread and peace” - demanding the end to World War One, to food shortages and to tsarism. They marched from factory to factory calling their fellow workers onto the streets and engaging in violent clashes with police and troops. Trostky wrote in The History of the Russian Revolution:
“A great role is played by women workers in relationship between workers and soldiers. They go up to the cordons more boldly than men, take hold of the rifles, beseech, almost command: “Put down your bayonets – join us.” The soldiers are excited, ashamed, exchange anxious glances, waver; someone makes up his mind first, and the bayonets rise guiltily above the shoulders of the advancing crowd.”
Not only did these women workers spark the beginning of the Russian Revolution, they were the motor that drove it forward. 7 days later Tsar Nicholas II abdicated.
It’s International Women’s Day, and I am conflicted. I feel both elation at the opportunity to share the work and ideas of groundbreaking women throughout the centuries and thoroughly depressed that we still need a ‘day’ to remind the world that women exist, that our creative expression matters, that our intellectual endeavours are valid, and that the emotional labour we often give freely in service to our communities is valuable.
I also write this as Freedom’s new Culture Editor. It is both an honour to be working at Britain’s oldest anarchist publication and a responsibility. I’m not here to write fluff pieces. I aim to focus on the behaviour of those in power while envisaging ways in which to dismantle this power through curating thoughtful, cultural responses; the Romantic in me seeks to nourish our anarchic hearts with truth and beauty.
Speaking truth to the power of the patriarchy is unimaginably difficult, even as I live a life of relative privilege. In the past, I’ve experienced deep levels of discomfort at writing one small truth because there’s the worry that I’ll be branded a troublemaker, a man hater, a difficult woman to work with. All of which heightens my respect for those women across global history who’ve had to fight like lions for the barest modicum of political and/or cultural change.
To quote Emma Goldman, The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause as, for instance, the black man’s right to his body, or woman’s right to her soul.
Today, I asked someone who naturally uses poetic imagery in their conversation why they don’t write poetry, and they replied, Poetry doesn’t kill fascists.
But it does, I returned; Poetry darns holes in our tattered imaginations, forces difficult dialogue with the Self, and encourages a deep empathy for all living beings. How is this radical approach not the most beautiful way to end fascism? Afterwards, I wish I’d remembered to cite the great Audre Lorde in the opening lines of her poem, Power:
The difference between poetry and rhetoric is being ready to kill yourself instead of your children.
Poetry asks us to take a deep-dive into the psyche, to kill the ego and emerge bare-naked and battered from the assault. In this way it also kills fascist ideology because the two are, in my mind, mutually exclusive. Audre Lorde, black woman, feminist, poet, lesbian, and activist understood this, as well as the horrors that rhetoric can unleash, and then managed to distil the entire philosophy down to just four lines of pure genius.
Having said that, Ezra Pound was a great poet and a fascist, which also proves that there’s no singular solution to some people being absolute cunts.
Is fascism the biggest threat to women today? I’m not sure. Perhaps I would argue that the sheer volume of men and women who have internalised that particularly noxious mix of capitalism and patriarchy is our biggest enemy. Especially when it manifests as gossiping about, or competing with, women in place of empathy and support.
But if that is our weakness, then our strength is the inordinate number of women (and people across the gender spectrum) who are recognising this toxicity and actively taking steps to disconnect from those elements of our culture, instead endeavouring to lift up our sisters wherever and whenever possible. There’s a great, and hilarious, example on Instagram from The Speech Professor calling out the ridiculous expectations some men have of women.
Poetry, language, film, music, and art continue to be beautiful tools for disseminating ideas that then rage across our collective psychological landscapes like La Niña.
Take the viral Barbie speech by America Ferrara that begins:
It is literally impossible to be a woman. You are so beautiful and so smart, and it kills me that you don’t think you’re good enough. Like, we have to always be extraordinary, but somehow we’re always doing it wrong.
Hands up, how many of you cried during this speech? I did.
So many innovative and creative women make up the rockface of our herstory, and I wonder how many of them we inadvertently clamber over or use for a leg up without fully recognising their contribution to the artistic landscape we now inhabit.
I’m currently reading The Gentrification of The Mind by Sarah Schulman, an outstanding memoir on AIDS, queer culture, downtown arts movements, and innovative people from history being erased by the gentrification not only of place but of the collective memory. It’s got me thinking about the many women who create vibrant, inspiring lives during their time on earth who are no longer recognised or who’ve been side-lined, ignored in life and death by a gentrification process that doesn’t recognise idiosyncratic women even as it absorbs their singular brilliance. But that’s how the diminishment process works. Writes Schulman.
What halts this erasure of women’s words, activism, art, and herstories are the people who recognise our pioneering women in their lifetimes and continue to celebrate them after death; who work to vividly portray the dynamic, intelligent, multifaceted woman without reducing her to the caricature of a jumble of red lipsticks or oversized cardigans or cats or plethora of lovers.
We’re more than that, better than that, and anybody saying otherwise should have the world’s population to contend with—at least they would in my utopia.
I’ve been handed some recommendations from Freedom Bookshop, firstly for a book that has now landed on my To Be Read list: Anarchafeminist by Chiara Bottici. Reading the blurb, I’m already taken by the author’s intersectional and anti-speciesism approach. At the bottom of this article, you can find a further list of recommended books from the bookshop that you should be able to get your hands on in-store, and below that, an eclectic (but not exhaustive) list of books by women that have spoken to me over the years.
I’ll finish with a poem by the great anarchist poet Voltairine de Cleyre, writing in memory of pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft:
Mary Wollstonecraft
The dust of a hundred years Is on thy breast, And thy day and thy night of tears Are centurine rest. Thou to whom joy was dumb, Life a broken rhyme, Lo, thy smiling time is come, And our weeping time. Thou who hadst sponge and myrrh And a bitter cross, Smile, for the day is here That we know our loss; — Loss of thine undone deed, Thy unfinished song, Th’ unspoken word for our need, Th’ unrighted wrong; Smile, for we weep, we weep, For the unsoothed pain, The unbound wound burned deep, That we might gain. Mother of sorrowful eyes In the dead old days, Mother of many sighs, Of pain-shod ways; Mother of resolute feet Through all the thorns, Mother soul-strong, soul-sweet, — Lo, after storms Have broken and beat thy dust For a hundred years, Thy memory is made just, And the just man hears. Thy children kneel and repeat: “Though dust be dust, Though sod and coffin and sheet And moth and rust Have folded and moulded and pressed, Yet they cannot kill; In the heart of the world at rest She liveth still.”
• Means & Ends by Zoe Baker • Radical Intimacy by Sophie K Rosa • Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer • The Feminist & the Sex Offender by Eric R Meiners and Judith Levine • Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman • Surmounting the Barricades: Women in the Paris Commune by Carolyn Eichner • In Defence of Witches by Mona Chollet • Labour of Love by Moira Weigel • Feminism Against Family by Sophie Lewis • Wages for Housework by Louise Toupin • Revolting Prostitutes by Molly Smith & Juno Mac • Regretting Motherhood by Orna Donath • Innocent Subjects by Terese Jonsson
Also anything by Judith Butler, Angela Davis, Ruth Kinna, Bell Hooks, or Audre Lorde.
Editor’s eclectic recommends:
• Flights by Olga Tokarczuk • Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard • Oneness Vs the one percent by Vandana Shiva • What it Means When a Man Falls From the Sky by Lesley Nneka Arimha • Mama Amazonica by Pascale Petit • The Vegetarian by Han Kang • The Dispossessed by Ursula K le Guin • Frankenstein by Mary Shelley • Problems by Jade Sharma • The World Keeps Ending and The World goes On by Franni Choi • Deep Listening, a composer’s sound practice by Pauline Oliveros • The Last Samurai by Helen de Witt • Women Who Run With The Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés • Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy • Three Women by Lisa Taddeo • Parable of the Sower by Octavia E Butler • Adrienne Rich by Selected Poems 1950 – 2012 • The Book of Phoenix by Nnedi Okorafor • Remains of a Future City by Zoë Skoulding • Fleabag original script by Phoebe Waller-Bridge • A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit • Vengeance is Mine, Marie Ndiaye • The Veiled Woman, Anaïs Nin
Also anything by Margaret Atwood and Toni Morrison.
The economic system that currently governs the territory dominated by the Chilean State and practically all Western states, is capitalism. Capitalism, in simple words, was based on the fact that trade and industry (means of production) are organized and controlled by their owners, that is: entrepreneurs.
In order for capitalism to take root and endure over time as a political-economic system, it needed a patriarchal social structure, the latter being understood as the social organization in which the authority of the male is exercised from the family, leading to all practices of domination. Therefore, it would be difficult to propose a radical emancipatory change without ending with the total destruction of capitalism and patriarchy.
Patriarchal authoritarian oppressive structures have (de)formed virtually all the relationships we have with each other and with ourselves. Another human is no longer another individual equivalent to me with whom we could help each other and develop integrally, now the relationship between humans is subject to what position they occupy within the social hierarchy.
On the other hand, the relationship with other non-human beings is contingent on the economic benefit that it could give me, transforming it into a consumer product. And finally, the vision that patriarchy has created of ourselves is limited and circumscribed to imposed canons or standards, whether aesthetic, gender, etc.
Obtaining the necessary tools to destroy the logics of domination, which makes us reproduce and perpetuate in various ways the need to dominate and to be dominated, is the task of all of us who are committed to seeing this reality burn…
Visualizing that patriarchal capitalism brings wealth to a few at the expense of the lives of many others could lead to the identification and targeting of the beneficiaries of this system of terror.
Against Patriarchy, in order to achieve the foundations of the negating paths of anarchy.
There’s a dark side to your girl power T-shirt – and it’s directly hurting women
I like wearing my feminism on my sleeve, and fashion trends would suggest that I’m not alone. But this International Women’s Day, try shouting your feminism from the non-exploitative rooftops Bethany Dawson@bethanymrd
International Women's Day is a wonderful opportunity to reflect upon the intersectional experiences of women, to celebrate the achievements of gender-equality movements, and to acknowledge the continued changes that need to be made. In short, it is a delightful day to look at the past, present, and future journey of feminism.
As with many internationally celebrated events, this day has been grabbed as an opportunity for big businesses to capitalise upon. With shiny pin badges and empowering slogans emblazoned across £5 t-shirts, one can proudly advocate for gender equality while sparing some change.
However, the production line involved in creating such garments extend far beyond the high street stores that proudly scream “Girl Power”.
In a world of fast-fashion, where clothing is produced at an unsustainable speed using unsustainable methods, in order to meet the breakneck pace of supply-and-demand, many high-street stores employ the labour of people in low wage economies.
As Bobbie Santa Maria of the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre points out: “Global brands are quick to use female empowerment when marketing their products. But when they exert relentless pressure to get more products for less money, it’s women workers who pay the price.”
The garment production industry is built upon a workforce comprising approximately 80 per cent women. These women face conditions where low wages, gender-based-violence, and horrific working conditions are rife. Such mistreatment is not concentrated in one country, one continent, or to one employer. The Breaking the Silence report by the Fair Wear Foundation highlights that in Uganda, 90 per cent of women surveyed had been sexually harassed at work by their male seniors. In Cambodia, nearly one in three female garment factory workers reported experiencing sexually harassing behaviour in the workplace in the 12 months prior to the study and in Indonesia, 85 per cent of women garment workers were concerned about sexual harassment.
While stitching feminist slogans onto your shirts, these women are constantly in danger.
Data from the 2019 Tailored Wage Report from the Clean Clothes Campaign, shows that zero workers within Asia, Africa, Central America or Eastern Europe were paid enough to live with dignity. The assessment found that 31 out of 32 global leaders in the fashion industry can not prove they pay their workers a living wage. Gucci was the only name proving they pay 25 per cent of their workers enough money to live on.
31 popular retailers, including H&M, New Look, Missguided, and Asos, could provide no evidence of paying any worker in their supply chain a living wage. No retailer could prove they pay 100 per cent of the workers in their supply chain a Living Wage.
Companies are not tied to this unethical form of production; they are able to pick and choose whether or not to exploit workers from low-wage economies, and they are choosing to keep these workers in poverty, in danger. To provide workers with a living wage they would have to increase the retail price of the garments. Pleasingly, data shows that even a 100 per cent wage increase would only raise retail prices between about 2 and 6 per cent, so it could be relatively seamless for companies to support their workers. However, it is apparent that this choice is not being made.
I like wearing my feminism on my sleeve, and fashion trends would suggest that I’m not alone. However, undermining one’s activism, and exploiting the women you’re trying to protect, in the name of a cheap top is not the way to expand the feminist rhetoric. Boycotting companies and their fake empowerment is a way forward and does not necessarily mean that you cannot wear fun, funky, feminist clothing. One option is upcycling clothes you already own with responsibly sourced badges and patches or purchasing items such as this t-shirt by Shado, which supports the Alliance for Choice foundation.
International Womens’ Day is an opportunity to celebrate feminism, and to acknowledge the intersectional and multifaceted experiences of women across the world. An effortless way to stand in solidarity with women facing horrific exploitation in the name of fast fashion, is to not buy into its shiny charms. Feminism can be practiced in several ways. You can wear your politics on a t-shirt, make your own badges, or create your own slogans. You can employ grassroots activism and join organisations such as Womens’ Strike Assembly. You can donate to and support charities supporting the intersectional experiences of women. You can boycott corporations existing upon the exploitation of women: a shirt expressing one’s desire to empower women is pointless if it is disempowering a number of workers. Shout your feminism from the non-exploitative rooftops, buy ethically sourced clothes, and – wherever possible – do not support the vast number of corporations which exist upon the exploitation of women.
As we go marching, marching, in the beauty of the day, A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill lofts gray, Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses, For the people hear us singing: Bread and Roses! Bread and Roses!
As we go marching, marching, we battle too for men, For they are women's children, and we mother them again. Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes; Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses.
As we go marching, marching, unnumbered women dead Go crying through our singing their ancient call for bread. Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew. Yes, it is bread we fight for, but we fight for roses too.
As we go marching, marching, we bring the greater days, The rising of the women means the rising of the race. No more the drudge and idler, ten that toil where one reposes, But a sharing of life's glories: Bread and roses, bread and roses.
Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes; hearts starve as well as bodies; bread and roses, bread and roses
Today marks the 100th Anniversary of International Women's Day one of two Internationalist Workers Holidays begun in the United States. And it is one that recognized women as workers, that as workers women's needs and rights are key to all our struggles hence the term Bread and Roses.
Women have led all revolutions through out modern history beginning as far back as the 14th Century with bread riots. Bread riots would become a revolutionary phenomena through out the next several hundred years in England and Europe.
Women began the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919 by shutting down the phone exchange.
Women began the Winnipeg general sympathetic strike. At 7:00 a.m. on the morning of Thursday, May 15, 1919, five hundred telephone operators punched out at the end of their shifts. No other workers came in to replace them. Ninety percent of these operators were women, so women represented the vast majority of the first group of workers to begin the city-wide sympathetic strike in support of the already striking metal and building trades workers. At 11:00 a.m., the official starting point of the strike, workers began to pour out from shops, factories and offices to meet at Portage and Main. Streetcars dropped off their passengers and by noon all cars were in their barns. Workers left rail yards, restaurants and theatres. Firemen left their stations. Ninety-four of ninety-six unions answered the strike call. Only the police and typographers stayed on their jobs. Within the first twenty-four hours of the strike call, more than 25,000 workers had walked away from their positions. One-half of them were not members of any trade union. By the end of May 15, Winnipeg was virtually shut down.
Again it would be mass demonstrations of women against the Shah of Iran that would lead to the ill fated Iranian revolution.
March is Women's History Month, March 8 is International Women's Day (IWD), and March 5 is the birthday of the revolutionary Polish theorist and leader of the 1919 German Revolution, Rosa Luxemburg. It was Rosa Luxemburg's close friend and comrade, Clara Zetkin, who proposed an International Women's Day (IWD) to the Second International, first celebrated in 1911.
Clara Zetkin, secretary of the International Socialist Women's Organization (ISWO), proposed this date during a conference in Copenhagen because it was the anniversary of a 1908 women workers' demonstration at Rutgers Square on Manhattan's Lower East Side that demanded the right to vote and the creation of a needle trades union.
The demonstration was so successful that the ISWO decided to emulate it and March 8 became the day that millions of women and men around the world celebrated the struggle for women's equality.
Actually, International Women's Day is one of two working class holidays "born in the USA." The other is May Day, which commemorates Chicago's Haymarket martyrs in the struggle for an eight-hour day.
“Agitation and propaganda work among women, their awakening and revolutionisation, is regarded as an incidental matter, as an affair which only concerns women comrades. They alone are reproached because work in that direction does not proceed more quickly and more vigorously. That is wrong, quite wrong! Real separatism and as the French say, feminism à la rebours, feminism upside down! What is at the basis of the incorrect attitude of our national sections? In the final analysis it is nothing but an under-estimation of woman and her work. Yes, indeed! Unfortunately it is still true to say of many of our comrades, ‘scratch a communist and find a philistine’. 0f course, you must scratch the sensitive spot, their mentality as regards women. Could there be a more damning proof of this than the calm acquiescence of men who see how women grow worn out In petty, monotonous household work, their strength and time dissipated and wasted, their minds growing narrow and stale, their hearts beating slowly, their will weakened! Of course, I am not speaking of the ladies of the bourgeoisie who shove on to servants the responsibility for all household work, including the care of children. What I am saying applies to the overwhelming majority of women, to the wives of workers and to those who stand all day in a factory.
“So few men – even among the proletariat – realise how much effort and trouble they could save women, even quite do away with, if they were to lend a hand in ‘women’s work’. But no, that is contrary to the ‘rights and dignity of a man’. They want their peace and comfort. The home life of the woman is a daily sacrifice to a thousand unimportant trivialities. The old master right of the man still lives in secret. His slave takes her revenge, also secretly. The backwardness of women, their lack of understanding for the revolutionary ideals of the man decrease his joy and determination in fighting. They are like little worms which, unseen, slowly but surely, rot and corrode. I know the life of the worker, and not only from books. Our communist work among the women, our political work, embraces a great deal of educational work among men. We must root out the old ‘master’ idea to its last and smallest root, in the Party and among the masses. That is one of our political tasks, just as is the urgently necessary task of forming a staff of men and women comrades, well trained in theory and practice, to carry on Party activity among working women.”
Protesters across Europe marked International Women’s Day on Sunday by taking part in marches and demonstrations that underscored efforts to combat discrimination and accelerate the drive for gender parity.
Crowds gathered in the streets across Europe on Sunday to mark international women's day with demands for ending inequality and gender-based violence.
Women protested against violence, for better access to gender-specific health care, equal pay and other issues in which they don't get the same treatment as men.
Roughly 20,000 people attended a march for International Women’s Day in Berlin. German news agency dpa reported Sunday that the crowd was double the amount police had expected. Speakers at the event decried violence against women in Germany, as well as gender discrimination. In Barcelona, an attendance of over 22,000 was also recorded.
Officially recognised by the United Nations in 1977, International Women’s Day is commemorated in different ways and to varying degrees in places around the world. Protests are often political — and at times violent — rooted in women’s efforts to improve their rights as workers.
2026 will mark the 115th year of International Women's Day. This years' theme is “Give to Gain,” with a focus on fundraising for organisations focused on women's issues and less tangible forms of giving such as teaching peers, celebrating women and “challenging discrimination.” Women worldwide hold 64% of the legal rights that men have, according to United Nations data.
International Women’s Day is a global celebration — and a call to action — marked by demonstrations, mostly of women, around the world, ranging from combative protests to charity runs. Some celebrate the economic, social and political achievements of women, while others urge governments to guarantee equal pay, access to health care, justice for victims of gender-based violence and education for girls.
It is an official holiday in more than 20 countries, including Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, Ukraine, Russia and Cuba, the only one in the Americas. In the United States, March is celebrated as Women’s History Month.
Call to action in times of conflict
From Brussels to Madrid, many are also raising awareness this year for women's rights issues in the context of a world increasingly afflicted by conflict.
Protesters expressed solidarity with women affected by war in Ukraine, Iran, Gaza and elsewhere. According to the United Nations, women in conflict-affected areas are disproportionately affected by gender-based violence.
Thousands of people came out in cities across Spain on Sunday to denounce violence against women and the war in the Middle East sparked by US-Israeli strikes.
Demonstrations took place in Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Seville, Granada, Bilbao, and San Sebastian, among other cities.
"No to war" and "Anti-fascist feminists against imperialist war" were among the slogans written on signs at the protests.
Madrid also saw separate demonstrations for transgender rights and for the legalisation and regulation of prostitution.
"It is within our power to stop the war, to stop the barbarity, and to win rights. We proclaim ourselves in defence of peace, in defence of the Iranian people, in defence of Iranian women," Yolanda Diaz, second vice president, told the press at the rally.
Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has drawn the ire of the US administration after he refused the use of Spain's military bases for strikes against Iran, which he called an "extraordinary mistake" and "not in accordance with international law."
US President Donald Trump lashed out at Sanchez's government, threatening to sever all trade with the EU and NATO member, which he called "a loser."
France marks International Women's Day amid concern over rise of far right
Some 100 organisations have called on people across France to take to the streets on Sunday to defend women's rights, warning that the rise of the far right threatens hard-won freedoms.
Issued on: 08/03/2026 - RFI
A protestor holds a sign reading "More than ever, nothing is certain" during a rally on International Women's Day in Paris, 2025. AFP - MARTIN BUREAU
People are urged to join marches in some 150 towns – including Paris, Bordeaux, Lille and Marseille as well as smaller places such as Saint-Malo – to mark International Women’s Day.
In Paris, the main procession will set off at 2pm from Stalingrad in the north-east of the city and head towards Place de la République via Gare du Nord.
"The far right means a rollback of rights for everyone – and particularly for women," said Anne Leclerc of the National Collective for Women's Rights (CNDF). "You only have to look at what is happening in the United States under Donald Trump – it's a laboratory."
Since returning to the White House last year, the US president has introduced measures restricting abortion rights and dismantled anti-discrimination policies.
"When conservatism rises, the first rights to come under attack are those of women and those linked to sexuality," said Sarah Durocher of the Mouvement français pour le planning familial (French family planning organisation).
"We're on alert" in France, she warned, with associations reporting growing difficulties in accessing abortion services due to a lack of funding and the closure of some local clinics.
“When conservatism rises, the first rights to come under attack are those of women and those linked to sexuality,” added Durocher.
“We’re on alert,” she said. “Associations are reporting growing difficulties in accessing abortion services because of a lack of funding and the closure of some local clinics.” Violence against women
Recent official data found deadly violence by current or former partners increased in 2024, with more than three femicides or attempted femicides every day.
France has unveiled a framework bill with 53 measures aimed at curbing violence against women, but campaigners say stronger action is needed.
They are demanding an annual budget of 3 billion euros and a broader law covering prevention, education, support for victims and punishment for perpetrators.
“Our legislation is incomplete and lacks a coherent thread,” said Suzy Rojtman of the National Collective for Women’s Rights. “It is time to shift up a gear and finally show a genuine political will to tackle this violence.”
Pay gap concerns
The marches will also highlight the gender pay gap as France prepares to transpose a European Union directive on pay transparency into national law.
The marches will also highlight the gender pay gap, with the deadline approaching for France to transpose into law the EU directive on pay transparency. According to France's national statistics institute INSEE, women in the private sector earned on average 21.8 percent less than men in 2024 – a gap largely attributed to part-time working patterns and lower-paid professions predominantly held by women.
The gap is largely linked to part-time work and lower-paid professions that are more often held by women.
The Nemesis collective, a far-right women’s identitarian group, has said it will hold a separate rally in the west of Paris after some march organisers tried to have the group barred.
Organisers accused the group of “hijacking” feminism “for racist ends”.
Leclerc said Nemesis holding a separate rally was “a relief”.
“Our demonstrations promote values that they do not share,” she said.
Last year, organisers said 120,000 people took part in the Paris march and 250,000 across France. Police figures put the turnout in the capital at 47,000, nearly double the previous year’s count.
(with AFP)
European leaders react to International Women's Day
Copyright Copyright 2026 The Associated Press. All rights reserved
Figures including Ursula von der Leyen, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Pedro Sánchez and Giorgia Meloni praised women’s contributions and called for continued progress on equality.
Strength, equality and responsibility. These were the three concepts that resonated between European leaders on the 8 March, also known as International Women's Day.
As world conflicts try to steal the headlines, heads of state took to social media to celebrate this day, and remind us of the importance it holds.
The president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, tribute to girls and women everywhere who continue to fight oppression, calling on them to find the power within themselves and never back down.
Another call to action was made by Ukrainian president Vlodymyr Zelenskyy, who called on women to defend their country and thanked them for the strength they bring to the battlefield and day to day life.
Although they still face obstacles, more than 70,000 women served in Ukraine’s military in 2025, a 20% increase compared with 2022, including over 5,500 deployed directly on the front line, according to Ukraine’s Defence Ministry.
Spain's leader Pedro Sánchez posted a video saying his government will "not let hate substitute rights," and that the feminism movement must keep moving forward despite the banalisation of gender-based violence and online harassment.
Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni took to the web to tell that the "8 March reminds us all of a responsibility that applies not just to one day, but every day: to continue building an Italy in which no woman has to choose between freedom, work, family, and personal fulfilment."
Other high profile European figures, such as the president of the European Council, António costa, and the general-secretary of the UN, António Guterres, reminded the world that "equality benefits everyone" and that "investing in women and girls is one of the surest ways to make the world a better place."
On International Women’s Day, Lynne Segal surveys over sixty years of thinking and activity and draws some lessons for the way forward.
Early on, International Women’s Day always had ties to socialism. The Socialist Party of America declared the first National Woman’s Day on 28th February 1909; the following year the German Marxist Clara Zetkin called for a day to celebrate women at the International Conference of Working Women, which took place on 19th March 1911.Finally, in the footsteps of women in Russia striking for “bread and peace”, 8th March, 1917, Women’s Day shifted, and has remained on that day, with women’s protests that year helping to ignite the Russian Revolution later that year.
These celebrations all occurred during the decades of first–wave feminism, between the late 19th and early 20th century. In Britain, the Suffragettes, headed up by the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), launched numerous rallies and resistance demanding women’s rights to vote, work, and hold public office. Their bravery is applauded today, despite the violence of some of their activism, including bombings and arson attacks on property. Women’s franchise was brought in line with men’s rights in 1928, after which feminism would begin to fade from the political scene in the conservative mid-century.
Hence, when second-wave feminism burst onto the scene at the close of the 1960s, it seemed to appear out of the blue, with its sudden energy and high hopes eager to change the world higher. I was part of that wave, after arriving as a single mother in Britian in 1970. Like other women I had already imbibed the rebellious spirit of the late 1960s, with talk of sexual liberation and equality for all, but with pervasive sexism, even misogyny also prevalent.
By the 1970s, it was the newly emerging feminists of second wave liberation who would prove the buoyant heirs of Sixties radicalism, soon with new demands on every front: better lives for mothers, more childcare provision and men’s sharing of domestic tasks; better training, job opportunities and equal treatment for women at work. We called for an end to rape and violence against women, along with an overall cultural shift to dignify and celebrate the strength and autonomy of women everywhere. We read Simone de Beauvoir’s TheSecond Sex, on the age-old cultural subordination of women, soon highlighted and expanded in the powerful writing of newly minted feminists.
From the USA, Shulamit Firestone, Adrienne Rich, Grace Paley, Barbara Ehrenreich, Ursula Le Guin and grassroots activists were inspiring the women’s groups at home and elsewhere, variously emphasising the importance of solidarity, collectivity and the creativity and significance of women working for a better world for all.
In the UK, it was Juliet Mitchell, Sheila Rowbotham and many others sharing their thoughts on the need for emancipation from male dominance, at that time usually hoping to align women with broader socialist goals. Meanwhile, black feminists such as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Audre Lord and Angela Davis, along with Amrit Wilson, Margaret Busby, and others such as the Brixton Black Women’s group began to be widely read and influential in shifting most progressive political outlooks.
However, a decade later, as the right came to power first in Britain under Thatcher in 1979, then Reagan in the USA the following year, we began to see a retreat from the widespread hopes of Seventies feminism. This accompanied greater emphasis on women’s difference from men with the growth of “cultural feminism”, less interested in issues of equality and power while applauding women’s distinct feminine traits of nurturing and eco-consciousness, as exemplified in the writing of radical feminists such as Susan Griffin, from the USA. Feminism in the 1980s also included women’s growing peace activism, exemplified at Greenham Common, where women camped out for over a decade opposing the US nuclear missiles installed there. Some Black and Asian women’s groups also flourished in the 1980s, including The Southall Black Sisters.
For those who think in terms of waves of feminism, a “third wave” was seen as emerging in the 1990s, with renewed emphasis on exploring women’s extensive diversity, whether as black, working class, third world, Islamic, queer, or other distinct identities and difference. Greater theoretical abstraction was now appearing in feminist theorizing, most prominently, if aways controversially, in the writing of the US philosopher Judith Butler, deploying post-structuralist reflections on language and meaning in her book Gender Trouble. Butlercomplicated all forms of identity politics, stressing instead the culturally inflected ways we come to enact our expected identities, leaving them contingent rather than fixed, but always open to subversive performances or resistance.
However, while feminist thinking became more influential in parts of academia, a more distorted and dismissive view of movement feminism was evident in the media, presenting it as dull and obsolete. As Angela McRobbie and others noted, glamorous media images of professional women were being widely promoted by the close of the twentieth century, with programs celebrating women’s new freedoms, concerned only with the struggle for success and excitement plus the pursuit of ‘Mr Right’, as in Sex and the City or Friends in the 1990s.
Some feminists began studying this new form of media-promoted ‘aspirational feminism’, especially evident once powerful figures, such as Hilary Clinton, Teresa May or Michelle Obama proclaimed themselves feminist, from the heart of the neoliberal order, while urging more women to aspire to be winners in a capitalist world. The iconic figurehead was Facebook’s one and only female chief, Sheryl Sandberg, producing what she called “a sort of feminist manifesto” in her bestselling Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead in 2013, with its celebration of ‘top girls’ and regret over most women’s supposed lack of ambition.
What this strange new brand of feminism worked to disguise was a reality where life was getting tougher for so many women, becoming even more precarious and underpaid in jobs now essential for their survival, while having less time to care, even for their own dependents, given harsh welfare cuts, worsening especially from 2010. Before her tragically early death, the young British journalist Dawn Foster wrote Lean Out, rightly accusing Sandberg of encouraging women’s “complicity in the economic structures that perpetuate inequality”.
So where are we now, almost six decades on from those hopes of women’s liberation? There is no doubt that today more women have a stronger voice, some with access to significant power, with apparently more choices than ever.
Yet, just as firmly we also see the very opposite in the lives of other women. This stems from the rising individualism and above all the significantly greater inequality we have seen over recent decades of near total subservience to neoliberal market logics, attentive only to profits, with more women, young, and especially old, living in poverty, worsening over the last 15 years. Moreover, the ubiquitous cultural landscape of sexism and belittlement of women we condemned, with women judged by their looks, has far from disappeared. We don’t need to witness Epstein’s world, or the continuing rise in rape figures, to be reminded of that.
Hence, goals feminists fought for and seemed to win, beginning with a new appreciation of and support for mothers and the work of caring have disappeared. We find real misery experienced by many mothers today, many simply unable to cope with the extra burdens placed on them. This connects with women, often working long hours in paid work, having little time to care – affecting not only mothers, but those caring for the sick, disabled or fragile elderly.
Women still shoulder more of the responsibilities for caring, as I discussed in my last book Lean on Me: A Politics of Radical Care. So far, with some exceptions at municipal level, Starmer’s Labour Party has done little to address this, while threatening rights to protest. In our ultra-competitive era, earlier ideas of collectivity and shared caring, so important for Seventies feminists, have almost – but not quite – disappeared. Today, women’s poverty still exceeds that of men, especially in single-parent households and the old. Shockingly, women’s life expectancy overall has dropped three years over the last decade.
More positively, there is greater concern with green issues today, as articulated by feminist economists here such as Ann Pettifor or Sue Himmelweit, along with the growth of the Green Party – attracting many women. Many feminists are also actively opposing racism and cruelty towards migrants, evident in the work of feminist human rights and anti-racist activists, along with the legacies of Black Lives Matter. Confronting the rise of the right, including both Trump and Netanyahu, we have the forceful speech and writing of iconic figures such as Sara Roy in India, the Canadian writer Naomi Klein, or Judith Butler from the USA. Indeed, as Butler shows, the right’s attacks on women’s equality and what they call ‘gender ideology’ is what fuels populist reactionary rhetoric generally.
Feminist activists might well feel undermined today, confronting the ongoing kleptocratic behaviour of the few billionaires now dominating global markets, plus the continuation of reckless military violence on several fronts, including Israel’s genocidal violence in Gaza. Yet feminist resilience remains, in some ways taking us back to those women who created Women’s Day over a century ago.
The lessons we must retain are the importance of inclusiveness and alliance in the face of conservative political backlash. Everything is to be gained by recognizing women’s rich diversity, alongside men’s, and working together for a more caring, peaceful, egalitarian and greener world. Nothing is to be gained by divisiveness or targeting distinct groups of people as ‘the problem’. Feminism needs an inclusive agenda, including trans women, while insisting that women’s interests remain at the heart of all our politics.
Lynne Segal is the author of several books. Her latest, Lean on Me: A Politics of Radical Care, is published by Verso.
To celebrate International Women’s Day 2026, Bryn Griffiths, Labour Hub’s presenter of the Labour Left Podcast celebrates the outstanding contribution that the socialist feminist guests have made to the show over the last few years.
The title of this article is taken from Professor Lynne Segal’s book of the same name Making Trouble: Life and Politics, a title that definitely captures the contributions of the shows women guests.
Beyond the Fragments
In addition to making trouble Lynne Segal is best known for her socialist feminist classic Beyond the Fragments: Feminism and the Making of Socialism, co-authored with Sheila Rowbotham and Hilary Wainwright.
Back in 1980, young socialist feminists instructed me, as a new student at Sussex University, to read this seminal book and it made a huge impression upon me. Lynne and I returned to the book on the podcast. The book has so much to offer today as we grapple with intersectionality and the different forms of socialist organisation we will need if we are going to avoid the many pitfalls of ‘top-down’ Leninism. I am not a supporter of Your Party but those that have taken the plunge would do well to have a listen to Lynne on the podcast and read Beyond the Fragments. The challenges socialists face when we are trying to pull the threads of different struggles together are far from new.
The authors of Beyond the Fragments (pictured l-r) Hilary Wainright, Sheila Rowbotham, Lynne Segal and conference organiser Rachel Collet at an event to mark the forty-fifth anniversary of the book’s publication.
Class Heroes
Regular listeners to the Labour Left Podcast will know that each show ends by giving the guest the daunting task of identifying the class hero who has most influenced their politics. To balance up our hall of fame I invited Lynne to nominate four women to rebalance the over generous representation of our male heroes. On International Women’s Day every one of Lynne’s nominations deserves our close attention.
Lynne nominated her Beyond the Fragments co-author Sheila Rowbotham and referred us to her book Daring to Hope: My Life in the 1970s. Moving across the Atlantic, Lynne nominated her late friend Barbara Ehrenreich who was a prominent figure in the Democratic Socialists of America. In 1976 she wrote a must read classic piece for International Women’s Day entitled What is Socialist Feminism? Lynne brought us up to date with Naomi Klein the Canadian author, social activist, and filmmaker known for her political analyses, support of eco-feminism and organized labour, and criticism of corporate globalization, fascism and capitalism. Finally, Lynne added Francesca Albanese the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories. There can be no woman alive today more deserving of our recognition on International Women’s Day 2026 than Francesca Albanese. As an activist within Britain’s Jewish Bloc on all our big pro-Palestinian protests, Lynne holds Albanese’s work close to her heart.
Palestine
Palestine is of course the issue of our age and Rachel Shabi’s podcast appearance brought a unique perspective to the issue because of her Jewish Iraqi background. Rachel became known to many of us for her work with Jeremy Corbyn and Momentum during Labour’s antisemitism crisis. In the face of an avalanche of unfair attacks from supporters of the Israeli Government, the left did not always get it right. Rachel’s appearance on the Labour Left Podcast remains invaluable for those that want to understand The Truth Behind Antisemitism and how we can fight it. Since her podcast appearance, Rachel has been a consistent supporter of the Palestinian people and she has helped us all navigate the complex territory of how we stand with the Palestinian people whilst being clear in our opposition to antisemitism. Rachel wrote an extremely helpful piece The Mamdani masterclass on antisemitism.
Rachel Shabi ended her appearance on the Labour Left Podcast by nominating Ella Shohat, a fellow Iraqi Jew and supporter of the Palestinian people, as her class hero.
Colonialism
Professor Corinne Fowler appeared on the Labour Left Podcastto discuss her book Our Island Stories: Ten Walks through Rural Britain and its Hidden History of Empire. Back in 2019, Corinne was seconded to the National Trust to lay the foundations for a new training and interpretation programme about our country houses’ colonial connections. As part of her secondment, she co-authored an academic report for the National Trust which brought together much of the existing academic and peer-appraised writing on the Trust’s properties’ many links to colonialism.
To say that the populist right weren’t quite ready to embrace the filling of the gaps in our history doesn’t quite capture the moment. The ‘war on woke’ warriors kicked off to defend their history from above and make sure that everybody else’s history remained silent.
Boiling Farage’s Blood
Nigel Farage talked of the “trashing of our nation” and the Daily Telegraph responded to the peer-appraised, academic report by announcing that the National Trust was “at war with the past.” As if that wasn’t enough, the unfortunately named Tory Common Sense Group declared the ‘Battle of Britain’. Have a listen to Corinne’s appearance on the Labour Left Podcast and find out for yourself why she boils Nigel Farage’s blood!
Corinne Fowler ended her appearance on the podcast by adding Bharti Parmar who accompanied Corrine on her walk to discover cotton’s colonial politics.
Corrine Fowler nominates Bharti Parmar to the Labour Left Podcast class heroes hall of fame.
Back in 2023, the first ever guest on the Labour Left Podcast was Liz Davies KC. Liz came to prominence back in the 1980s as a Labour councillor as the Chair of Islington Council’s brand-new Women’s Committee. I’ll leave it to Finola Brophy Liz’s former Head of Women’s Unit to describe Liz’s ground-breaking socialist feminist role:
“Liz Davies was a fantastic Women’s Committee Chair, always strategic, supportive and passionate about women’s equality and all equality issues. Liz was the champion of cutting-edge multi-agency domestic violence work training the police, producing a domestic violence handbook; creating women’s action plans for each service with achievable targets, producing and circulating the Islington Women’s Information Handbook listing hundreds of organizations standing up for the Women’s Equality Unit. A big issue reflected lesbian and gay families and the production of materials for schools. I also remember the wonderful celebration of International Women’s Day that took place every March.”
Blair Goes Ballistic
Listen to Liz’s appearance on the Labour Left Podcastto find out what she did to make Tony Blair “go ballistic” and why one of her fellow Labour National Executive Committee members saw fit to call her a “cancer”.
Liz Davies, the very first Labour Left Podcast guest, pictured with Jeremy Corbyn MP in happier times when they were both in the Labour Party speaking at a Labour Briefing fringe meeting in the 1990s. Photo: Bryn Griffiths.
Following Liz Davies’s appearance on the Labour Left Podcast,,two of her women successors on Labour’s National Executive Rachel Garnham and Hilary Schan, made their appearances.
Racism
Bell Ribeiro-Addy MP made her Labour Left Podcast appearance in the immediate aftermath of her short-lived 2025 bid for the post of the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party. She entered Parliament in 2019 as the Corbyn period drew to a close, alongside numerous other new excellent socialists such as Nadia Whittome, Apsana Begum and Kim Johnson.
Before becoming an MP in her own right, she was the Chief of Staff to Diane Abbott, Britain’s first Black MP and the Mother of the House. She cut her political teeth as the Black Students Officer of the National Union of Students, fighting racism and seeking to implement the NUS policy of no platform for fascists. Anti-racism is at the centre of Bell’s intersectional feminism.
Bell Ribeiro-Addy MP
Democracy
I wanted Rachel Garnham to appear on the Labour Left Podcast so we could discuss her role as the Chair of the ever-important Campaign for Labour Party Democracy (CLPD). The episode is an education for those who want to understand the decades-long struggle for members’ democratic rights that has occurred in the party since the CLPD’s creation in 1973.
Hilary Schan made her appearance on the Labour Left Podcast while she was still the Chair of Momentum. Hilary explained how Worthing Labour Party had delivered a political earthquake and seized control of the council for Labour. It’s a story which ended with the effective destruction of the local Party as the very architects of the Party’s success were excluded from the possibility of parliamentary selection.
Finally, a big mention to Rachel Godfrey Wood my socialist sister and the National Organiser of Momentum who appeared on the show in the run-up to Labour’s General Election victory in 2024. The podcast took place in a period when McSweeney’s Labour Together’sfactional brutality was at its zenith. Hilary Schan, our former Chair, had recently left the Labour Party but the podcast was not all doom and gloom: we ended by mapping out a positive socialist case for staying within Labour. The Labour right was behaving more factionally than ever before, so we needed to get organised. Voting Labour to get rid of the Tories was the start but we think you need to do much more than that. I still hope you will be convinced by Rachel’s case for Momentum. The task of influencing the Labour Government’s direction and fighting the highly factional Labour right is a task which is too big to face alone – so click here to join Momentum .
It’s been an honour to interview this stellar list of socialist feminist women. Talking to them has never failed to broaden my political understanding of the tasks that lie ahead for the left in our country. On International Women’s Day 2026, I urge you to explore the back catalogue, listen to our wonderful socialist sisters and learn!
Postscript
The vicious factional behaviour of people like Morgan McSweeney and his shadowy Labour Together has led many thousands of Labour members to leave the party and a number of my Labour Left Podcast guests have unfortunately been among them. I have huge respect for all the women guests who have appeared on the show but personally I remain firmly within Labour to contest the political territory which exists in a Party which has twelve trade unions affiliated to it. My job, as I see it, is to save the Labour Party from people like Labour Together and Peter Mandelson so Labour can defeat Nigel Farage’s Reform at the next General Election in 2029.
You can watch the podcast on YouTube, Apple Podcasts here, Audible here, Substack here and listen to it on Spotify here. You can even ask Alexa to play the Labour Left Podcast. If your favourite podcast site isn’t listed, just search for the Labour Left Podcast and it should be there.
Bryn Griffithsis an activist in Colchester Labour Party and North Essex World Transformed. He is the Vice-Chair of Momentum and sits on the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy’s Executive.BrynhostsLabour Hub’s spin off – the Labour Left Podcast.
