We Need Socialist Feminist Resistance
It feels like society is being dragged backwards. The footprint of escalating wars seems to cover more of the world every day. A girls school in Minab, Iran was one of the first targets of Trump and Netanyahu’s deadly new war in the Middle East where an estimated 175 people — most of them young girls — were killed. The brutal escalation in Iran is one element of the reactionary offensive taking place globally, with the authoritarian Donald Trump at the helm.
Across the world the bosses and their political servants sacrifice lives and our future on the altar of profits and warmongering. Disgustingly, they then try to sell these lies by claiming that they are acting to protect “the nation’s” women and children from whichever internal or external “enemies” they’ve chosen to scapegoat. While the right wing and ruling classes globally have pushed a return to so-called traditional gender roles and put forward racist tropes about protecting women from “foreign men,” Epstein and his circle of ultra-wealthy elites, whose membership extends into the heart of the capitalist establishment, have been exposed for their role in an extensive and despicable sex trafficking ring. Their rotten hypocrisy has been put on full display.
The future peddled to women over past decades, one of constant capitalist “progress” and increasing equality, is being revealed as the lie that it always was. But this dystopian future is not being accepted without a fight. War, deportations, and attacks on women’s, LGBTQ+ and democratic rights are being answered with working class struggle.
This is not the first International Women’s Day taking place in the shadow of war; 8 March has its roots in the struggle against imperialist war where working women rose up against World War I. The monumental struggles that have come before should be a source of strength to draw on, because now more than ever there is a need to build a socialist feminist struggle to take down this system which poses an existential threat to all workers and oppressed people.
Rising Militarism and War
Trump’s second term has dynamited world relations and turbocharged the reactionary turn of capitalism with catastrophic consequences for workers, poor and oppressed people. On every continent, governments are ramping up spending on military budgets, and in country after country this comes at the expense of investment in healthcare, housing, education, social services, and other basic needs. This is also true on a global scale as Trump’s elimination of USAID is estimated to have resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths. It is women who are the hardest hit by these types of cuts.
This year has continued the trend of widening wars and conflicts with devastating results. Despite Trump’s apparent intentions for a repeat of his Venezuela maneuver, the war in Iran has quickly and dramatically escalated, spilling into the wider Middle East and killing over 1,300 people and rising every day. Trump and Netanyahu are attempting to remodel the Middle East to their liking, but this is a very dangerous game which is already spiraling out of their control. Trump’s farcical “Board of Peace” in Gaza is no source of peace or stability in the region, but rather a harbinger of more death and oppression.
The offensive in Latin America continues as Cuba faces starvation while the hawks in Trump’s cabinet salivate at the prospect of its collapse. The war in Ukraine rages on seemingly fading into the background, despite the hundreds of thousands of casualties which continue to rise. In Sudan and Congo, earth-shattering wars with particularly harrowing impacts on women continue, despite only passing mentions in the capitalist media.
Inter-imperialist conflict is the order of the day, and women’s oppression is magnified in times of war, including through sexual violence. According to the 2025 UN Secretary-General’s report on Women, Peace and Security, conflict-related sexual violence increased by 87% in two years and civilian casualties among women and children quadrupled compared to the previous two-year period. The fight against war is a socialist feminist struggle, and the demand to end all imperialist wars must be made loud and clear at all demonstrations for International Women’s Day this year.
The Anti-Feminist Offensive
The ruling classes beat the drums of war and their offensives aren’t isolated to the battlefields. They also turn toward advancing reactionary ideology and carry out attacks on women’s and LGBTQ+ people’s rights and standard of living. The gains of movements of the past decades are under attack with a reassertion of “traditional” gender roles, the nuclear family, and overtly sexist and racist ideas. This is paired with the undermining of living standards and attempts to drive women back into the home or into low paid, precarious work. Nearly a half a million women dropped out of the workforce in the US in 2025, hardly a testament to capitalist progress in the richest country in the history of the world.
These right-wing ideas, while being pushed by the capitalist class from above, are having very real impacts on working class people and attitudes. There is a widening political gender divide and a dangerous rise of anti-feminist ideas among young men in particular. A survey of 29 countries found that Gen Z males were twice as likely as baby boomers to believe wives should obey their husbands. In China, the CCP regime has continued to push anti-feminist ideas as falling birthrates pose an existential crisis. Working class women and queer people are facing an onslaught of attacks on our bodies. Sexist ideas that were once marginalized to dark corners of the internet are now being normalized as they’re spouted from the mouths of heads of governments around the world.
Epstein and a Sick System
The release of some of the Epstein files has been a shocking exposure of the total depravity of the capitalist system. At a time when the legitimacy of capitalist institutions is extremely low in the eyes of working-class people this only adds fuel to the fire. While the political establishment, and especially Trump, have gone to great lengths to try to shove this under the rug, the impact will be enduring. Many of the figures implicated in the Epstein files have made their political careers from all sorts of disgusting proclamations about protecting women and girls from immigrant men and trans people. Their blatant hypocrisy lays bare the total bankruptcy of their divide and rule tactics.
Despite the depth and breadth of this ring of abuse and trafficking, there has been near total impunity for those who were involved or covered this up, but no real justice for the over 1,000 women and girls who were victimized by Epstein and those around him. Epstein was a deplorable individual, but what this situation has shown so clearly is that this vile behavior is fostered under capitalism.
Nearly 1 in 3 women worldwide have experienced partner or sexual violence in their life. Sexual violence and abuse are not isolated to the ruling elites. Capitalism breeds sexist abuse and violence. The need for an organized socialist feminist struggle against violence and abuse in all its forms, and the system that creates it, could not be more dire.
Working-Class Resistance
The past year has not only been dominated by reaction, but has also seen steps forward in working class resistance, with women playing central roles in many of these struggles. The US saw the largest ever protests in history against abuser-in-chief Donald Trump. Since International Women’s Day in 2025, a series of “Gen Z” revolts against corruption, inequality, and authoritarianism have also shaken and in some cases taken down governments across the neo-colonial world. Tens of thousands of school students in Germany organized school strikes against the government’s introduction of conscription. Young women have been on the front lines of these movements.
In the weeks prior to the bombing of Iran, there were hugely courageous protests taking place against the regime, with students coming out on campuses in spite of the shocking levels of repression that had already been carried out earlier in the year. Despite Trump’s cynical claims that the war is meant to aid the Iranian people, it was the bombing campaign that snuffed out this struggle. Of course these protests come in the not so distant shadow of the heroic Woman, Life, Freedom movement that shook the regime to its core in 2022. There are many lessons that can be taken today from this multi-ethnic, multi-gender movement that took up feminist demands as well as taking on the reactionary, fundamentalist dictatorship as a whole.
The Russian Revolution started on International Women’s Day, with the demand for peace at the forefront. In Iran in 1979, March 8 marked the beginning of several days of protests against the mullahs’ hijacking of the revolution. The Iranian slogan ‘Women Life Freedom’ and the movement that continues to carry its flame must not allow themselves to be hijacked once again, by the Shah’s son or by an imperialist and warmonger like Trump. To demonstrate on International Women’s Day is to show solidarity and support to all who fight for justice, both here at home and in the world.
Internationally, the working class has recently entered struggle in its own right in a more decisive way with the rediscovery of the political strike. In opposition to the genocide in Gaza and the kidnapping of the aid flotilla carrying anti-war activists including Greta Thunberg, the Italian working class went on a historic general strike. In the Twin Cities (Minneapolis and Saint Paul) in the United States, Trump’s terror against immigrants and the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by ICE agents, sparked a citywide general strike, the most substantial political strike action in decades. These actions point the way forward to the type of struggle needed to push back the right wing and their offensive against women and the working class as a whole.
The Feminist Movement We Need
The world today calls out for a mass fightback against the oppressive, reactionary offensive by the right wing. The past five years have seen a counter-revolution against #MeToo, an avalanche of attacks on trans rights, and in many countries the undermining of or in some cases full overturn of abortion rights. Despite this serious chipping away at the victories won in the past, massive anger and potential for radicalization still exists, though this anger is not reflected in organized feminist struggle in the streets in most countries today. We can’t afford to let our movement be driven underground or crushed.
A key question is what type of feminist movement is needed? It needs to be built from the ground up in the streets, school hallways, and in breakrooms at work. It can’t depend on the capitalist parties or institutions to act or wait on someone else to save us; women need to get organized and fight back with working class methods like mass meetings, protests, civil disobedience, walkouts and strikes. In a world of accelerating war and nationalism, the movement must be anti-imperialist and internationalist. The capitalist system is built on the oppression of women and has patriarchal violence and domination in its DNA. This system can’t be tweaked or reformed, it needs to be fundamentally changed. So a feminist movement that can take on the actual root of gender oppression must be socialist and revolutionary.
History has shown that the right wing and its warmongering can be pushed back, but we need to get organized. International Socialist Alternative will be out in the streets for International Women’s Day in countries around the world, join us!
International Socialist Alternative Demands:
- Push back the right wing’s anti-feminist offensive with mass struggle in the streets. Make March 8th a day of mass protests against war, the far right, and sexist violence and abuse!
- International workers’ action to shut down the imperialist war machine! For an immediate end to the war in Iran, the occupation in Palestine, and all imperialist wars across the globe.
- Money for public services, not for war and racist deportations! Access to food, clean water, decent jobs, high-quality housing, free education, healthcare and childcare should be guaranteed to all no matter where you’re born.
- Justice for Epstein survivors and all victims of abuse. Investigate and convict all those implicated in the Epstein files, and build mass struggle in schools, workplaces and communities against all sexist violence and abuse!
- Fight for free, accessible, and legal abortion and other reproductive care! All those who choose to should have the right to have children and the ability to raise them without the threat of poverty or violence.
- Stop the attacks on trans rights! For the right to self-identify, protection against discrimination, and free gender affirming care.
- For a militant and democratic labor movement to fight back against the cost of living crisis and for safe working conditions.
- Defend the rights of immigrants and refugees! Fight for an end to capitalist policies that lead to economic devastation, climate disaster, violence and war that drive working class and poor people from their home countries.
- Build new mass left parties to push back the far right! We need a political alternative to capitalist parties which serve the interests of the bosses, not the working class.
- For a democratically controlled, planned economy, organized in the interests of working people and the planet not the billionaire elites. Fight for socialist world that can lay the basis for the elimination of oppression and exploitation for good!
