March 8, 2006: International Women’s Day Greetings to all organizations in the world with which we have friendly ties

Dear friends and comrades,

On behalf of the Central Committee of the MLPD, I would like to extend my sincere and militant greetings for International Women’s Day 2006.

With Angela Merkel, we have had the first female chancellor in Germany for three months. Even if the bourgeois mass media are trying to let her appear in a good light – the policies of her government as the service provider for the international supermonopolies prove to be extremely hostile to the masses of people and to women.

In foreign policy she is promoting massive preparations for a war against Iran along with the US Imperialists. In domestic policies, she is promoting the dismantling of bourgeois-democratic rights and liberties. The consequences of continuously rising mass unemployment and underemployment are being rigorously passed on to the masses. With the privatization of the health care system and large parts of public service, the private, single families – and that means women in particular – are being burdened down more and more.

However, on the basis of rising gainful employment, working women have gained new self-confidence. Tens of thousands of nurses, nursury school teachers, female metal workers are participating in great trade-union strikes against the attempts to raise working hours and for higher wages.

said Mao Tsetung.

This is the spirit in which our party does everything in its power to encourage girls and women to take their self-emancipation into their own hands. We promote the development of a broad, ueberparteilich (above party lines), militant women’s movement, which can be an essential binding link between the working-class movement and the broad masses of people. Organizing oneself affords conscious self-change on the part of women and girls. They have to free themselves from the chains of bourgeois morals and traditions and with their vain attempts to come to terms within their families individually with the burdens of the crisis. We help women to understand the social causes of their personal tests of endurance and to organize themselves in struggle. That also makes it necessary for them to come to terms with the influence of petty-bourgeois feminism, which rejects the struggle along with men.

We systematically promote the insight that only the revolutionary overthrow of every rule based on exploitatioin and that the building of a socialist society will create the foundation for the real liberation of women. And oppositely, we know that without the struggle for the liberation of women, there can be no liberated society.

We are encouraged by the antiimperialist and revolutionary struggles of the international working class, the peoples and especially of the women in the entire world, too. We are learning a lot from them.

We are also looking forward to hearing about your activities and the struggles on International Women’s Day and will inform people here about them.

With revolutionary greetings,

 
Anna Bartholomé

Speaker for women’s policy of the CC of the MLPD