March 8th - International Day for the struggle of working women

ARGENTINA 

Our right to legal, safe and free abortion is only conquered in the streets

Let's not allow the empty-handed government of A. Fernandez and the
Puppet Parliament steal our fight!

General strike on 3/9 for legal, safe and free abortion,
paid by the state and the employers, and for all our demands!

Down with the social agreement between the union and "picketeer" (unemployed groups) bureaucracy, and the government and employers!

 Out with imperialism and the IMF!

 

From its beginnings, along the last century, March 8 was an internationalist struggle of exploited against exploiters, of the workers against imperialism and their oppressive regimes. Thus, from textile workers struggling to stop dying in strenuous and endless days of exploitation in the US, to textile workers that began the Russian revolution in February 1918, March 8 emerged as a day of struggle against capitalist exploitation by one of the most oppressed and postponed sectors of the working class in this rotten system, the working women.

Today, in the XXI century, we suffer the same conditions of slavery as in the XX century. The exploiters have been especially cruel with the exploited women, as we see in Syria, with hundreds of thousands of companions being slaughtered, raped in refugee camps and repressed with their children on the borders of imperialist Europe. In Bolivia, the fascist government of Añez that massacred poor workers and peasants in Senkata imposes a brutal persecution against the women in "polleras" (ample skirts, typically used by poor, mixed blood or native ethnicity women, NT.). Meanwhile, the Piñera government in Chile with its murderous pacos (policemen) represses, tortures, maims, imprisons and rapes women who fight in the front line of the mass uprising.
Nothing different happens in Argentina. The Peronista government of Alberto Fernández has just agreed to the IMF to pay for the foreign debt, which means tying the nation even more to imperialism and deepening our hardships. Working women are one of the sectors that suffer the most from the current attack against the entire labor movement, with layoffs and unemployment, super-exploitation, wage inequality, triple exploitation at work, in raising our children, caring for the elder and doing domestic chores (unpaid work), along with enduring peso devaluation and galloping inflation that eats our poverty wages. In addition, femicides continue to multiply and we continue to die from clandestine abortion.

Now, Fernández says he will send a bill to legalize abortion. But like everything that this government of false promises and empty hands does, its announcement hides a real trap against our just claim to stop dying from clandestine abortions.

 

Fernández's "1,000-day plan", agreed with the Pope, is a vile fraud against our right to decide on our bodies

Fernández's announcement of the abortion legalization project was accompanied by the sponsorship of the so-called “1,000-day Plan” to “give protection” to women from day 1 of their pregnancy until the child turns 2 years old. The “integral care” proposed by Fernández is to surround pregnant women with groups of doctors, psychologists, specialists, etc. to convince them to continue with their pregnancy, that is, not to abort, as the Pope and the Church like. This in exchange for promises of miserable pockets of food or hunger subsidies, when they do not even guarantee us daycare centers, impose on us living with wages that are not enough to reach even 10 days of each month, etc.
We are facing a huge trap agreed with the Vatican. They will use this "Plan of the 1,000 days" as a mechanism of coercion against us, with the whole apparatus of the state exercising terror against our right to freely decide on our bodies, of which everyone is talking about. Cynics! With this policy of interference from the state and the Church, they seek to settle our demand for free abortion.

But there is more. If in spite of this coercion, we decided to abort the same, we would be at the mercy of the “ready-for-fire-or-implosion” hospitals, totally decadent, collapsed, without inputs or infrastructure, since 70% of women are not working registered or have social services. And Fernández, while still paying the debt to the IMF, maintains the public health budget drowning and moreover, a plan to attack it. Thus, the right to free and quality abortion for all will not be guaranteed either, because the ones from below will have to pay for or do it in the worst conditions, risking our lives.

Under these conditions, what A. Fernández's project will ultimately boil down to is the “decriminalization” of abortion, which is not at all for which we have been fighting for a long time.

 

Let no one steal our fight or what we conquered in the streets!

If today Fernández, and even the Church, talks about abortion, it is not because the bosses' parties want to give us some concession, but because they were and are afraid of LOSING EVERYTHING.
We, with immense struggles in the streets, with international strikes on March 8, making the bosses’ Parliament shake, together with the entire working class in December 2017, we have proven the enormous forces we possess and that we were going for everything. Here nobody graciously grants us anything. We have shown that there are plenty of conditions to achieve everything, because we have taken them where they, the bosses, their politicians and the Church do not want to go.

Today, those who for years forced us to die in hiding, want to use our demand to cover up that in the meantime, in a Social Agreement with the union and "picketeer" bureaucracy, all IMF plans will be implemented that will deepen our conditions of misery and slavery. They promise that they will give us something... in order to get everything out from us.
Not to mention that the government's bill will undergo multiple modifications in the Congress, and the voted law will end up leaving only bits of our true claim. We know that in Parliament they will seek to take out a law in their image and likeness, introducing, for example, the clause of “conscientious objection” at the request of the Church, that is, that every doctor or institution can appeal to this resource to refuse making an abortion.

We can't allow it! Negotiating our demands by discussing A. Fernández's law is to sell out the struggle of the women's movement for years. Our rights are not negotiable. Our fight is not for sale. There is nothing to discuss. The only thing that the puppet Parliament can do is making our claim law: "Legal, safe and free abortion!"
And so that we can really perform safe and quality abortions, we want to triple the public health budget. And we want sex education, though one of quality, with the tripling of the educational budget; we want that the ESI (Integral Sex Education for schools of all levels) to be dictated by the best health professionals.

To achieve that, it is necessary to attack the property and profits of the capitalists. In hospitals that fall apart, our lives are in danger. Not a single peso to the IMF! We want the separation of the Church from the State, enough of subsidies to the Church, and the expropriation of all its goods, estates and establishments without compensation.

This will not be resolved on a “cross-cutting front” with the politicians of the bourgeoisie, as unfortunately the FIT-U currents proclaim (see box). We saw this movie in 2018, when the bourgeoisie used our demand to re-legitimize their mass-hated institutions -with which they deepened the attack on the exploited, and ended up robbing us in the Senate of what we had conquered in the streets.
For our demands to come true, the front and unity we need is with the working class. The union bureaucracy, today in the "social agreement" with the government refuses to take our claims. They are the guarantors that women are triply oppressed and exploited; they are the guarantors of the conditions of misery and hunger of the working class and particularly of the working women.

We, the hardworking and exploited women, have to take our struggle and our demands so that they are taken by the firm hands of the entire labor movement. By means of our struggle organizations, we must be the ones leading the fight to defeat the sexist and strikebreaking trade union bureaucracy and its "social agreement" with the government, and drag the entire labor movement into combat.
We must advance to the General Strike this 3/9 and resume the path of December 18 and 19, 2017, when we faced that den of bandit parliamentarians with tons of stones. This will make sure that nobody steals what we get on the streets again!

 

The road to conquer legal, safe and free abortion and all our demands is... the General Strike!

The Kirchnerista leadership of the feminist movement wants to take us to the feet of Fernandez and the friends of the Church’s bill; they want us to wait passively for them to grant us our demands. We can't allow it!

Next 3/9 we must take to the streets and paralyze the whole country with the general strike to fight for all our just demands and be the outpost of the working class as a whole against the Fernández government and its hunger and misery plans at the service of the IMF. We have plenty of reasons!

We do not negotiate anything: we want legal, safe and free abortion, paid by the state and the bosses, in every hospital, health company and the best clinic!

Enough of triple exploitation! Equal pay for equal work, and benefits for working women! A salary for a son! A salary for domestic work! We want quality nurseries, dining rooms and laundries guaranteed by the state and employers!

Down with the collective bargaining signed by the union bureaucracy! We want a single national collective bargaining to win a minimum wage, according to the cost of a family basket and with a "trigger" clause that indexes it month by month according to the inflation index. We want decent work, the reinstatement of all the dismissed and the distribution of the working hours without salary reduction so that all the unemployed workers enter to produce. Expropriation without compensation of any factory that closes, or suspends/dismisses workers!

To stop femicides: For surveillance and self-defense committees by neighborhood, factory and establishment! In order to decide when, how and with whom to live: Decent and free housing for working women and families!

There is plenty of money to finance all our demands! Not a dollar to the external debt! Out with the IMF!
We must expropriate without compensation the bourgeois groups that have sent millions of dollars abroad! Expropriation without compensation of the land and capital of the landowner oligarchy and industrial crops monopolies! Expropriation without compensation and under workers' control of all transnationals and their banks that conduct fabulous business plunging the people into hunger!

Down with all the court cases against the companions persecuted for abortion! Acquittal of Higui!

Freedom to all the imprisoned for fighting! Workers' and popular courts to judge the murderers of our martyrs of yesterday and today!

We cannot allow them to submit our demands to the government and the bosses' politicians.

For a feminist movement independent of the State, the Church and the bosses' politicians!

Against the UN, bourgeois feminism and social-imperialist currents that want to transform a day of struggle of the working class and the international strike in a commemorative and class collaboration day, we the revolutionaries pose again: Let no one steal our fight! March 8th belongs to the working women who fight side by side with their fellow workers, being the vanguard in the most advanced class struggles at world level!

A single class a single fight!
Open the road to the working women!