Putting the international into International Women's Day

By Jackie Lynch (Melbourne)

This year, IWD rallies across Australia are raising demands around people's struggles in many other countries. From calls for war reparations for East Timor to demanding that the Australian government scraps its racist refugee laws, the common theme is solidarity.

For feminists, giving international solidarity is a recognition that for so long as there is injustice, for so long as masses of people are oppressed and exploited, we must continue to resist. This is a feminism which aims for much more than making lives of relatively privileged women in the First World more comfortable, and which doesn't simply celebrate the achievements of the women who've made it. This is a feminism that aims to change the world, because only then will women's liberation be assured.

Women around the globe are under attack.

In Australia, women's wages and working conditions are deteriorating as governments assault trade unions and roll back public funding for education, health care, child-care, welfare and specialised services for women. Meanwhile, women in the Third World are struggling for basic democratic rights in countries such as Afghanistan and Burma, and for workers' rights and human rights in countries such as Indonesia and Thailand.

In Australia, the value of unpaid work (housework, child minding, cooking, etc.) is equivalent to around 62% of the gross domestic product. Women do around 70% of all unpaid work in Australia. Around the world, work in the home accounts for the equivalent of $16 trillion per annum. Women do $11 trillion worth of this work. In fact, women do around two-thirds of the world's work, paid and unpaid.

In Australia, women make up 93% of sole parent payment beneficiaries and still earn only around 76% of the male wage. Meanwhile, Third World women fair even worse, bearing the brunt of general underdevelopment and government austerity drives to service debts to the imperialist nations.

In Australia, abortion is still on all states' criminal codes. Internationally, the World Health Organisation estimates that, every year, 20 million women undergo unsafe abortions, and 200,000 of them die as a result, the majority in the Third World.

In Australia, forced sterilisation has been used against indigenous women for decades. In the Third World, the reproductive choices and rights of women have been systematically abused through population control programs directed by the IMF and the World Bank. In East Timor alone, around 95,000 women were targeted by such a program; 80% of them were forcibly sterilised.

For so long as capitalist corporations can super-exploit working people in the poor countries, the rights and conditions of workers in the advanced capitalist countries remain under threat. Similarly, for so long as Third World women's rights are sacrificed to the needs of dictatorial regimes or national debt repayments, it is easier for capitalists and their governments in the First World to roll back hard-won equal pay laws, reproductive rights, women's services, etc.

Because capitalist exploitation and oppression is international, our strategies and solutions must also be international. Sharing common ground through our oppression as women, this unity, if drawn in action against our oppression, is also our strength.

Feminists in Australia can learn much from past and present struggles of women in the Third World. Whether it is the successful struggle of women in East Timor for independence, or the Cuban women's 40 years of experience in building a revolutionary, non-sexist, socialist society, the inspiration and lessons we can draw can only strengthen our struggle for justice in Australia.

But more than that, solidarity movements in First World countries make a real difference. The "Free East Timor" campaign in Australia, for example, not only forced a turnaround in Australian government policy, it has also assisted in the rebuilding of Timor.

From the massive resistance to the United States' and Australia's war against Vietnam to the international campaign to end apartheid in South Africa, international solidarity has changed the world.

The oppression of women is a cornerstone of the brutal and unjust capitalist system that dominates the world today. To change that world, all women must be liberated, and to liberate all women, the world must be changed. United we stand, divided we fall!