Recently we have been witnessing street protests against femicides in many countries. We know that these movements are disconnected from materialist analysis, that they are under the yoke of capital and therefore cannot bring a meaningful solution to this problem, which today, as throughout their history, claims the lives of almost 90,000 women every year. Although our stance as a party on this issue is "The emancipation of women is possible only with the emancipation of the working class!", we also underline that in order to end the deaths of working women who have lost their lives in femicides, all workers, regardless of gender, must struggle together at all stages of eliminating patriarchy, from today to communism. The struggle against femicides and against the oppression of working women under capital in general is therefore an irreplaceable part of the movement.

In the first place, it is necessary to analyze the material foundations of the problem and to contribute to the transformation of women into vanguard workers in areas of struggle, from education to social solidarity organizations to emergency hotlines by improving the disadvantaged social conditions of women in the unions.

Patriarchal men cannot make a revolution on their own. The world revolution is a stage that we as humanity can reach by transforming workers of all races and genders in struggle as a class and implementing this agenda of organic transformative communism espoused by our party. Class conflict, not gender conflict!

One of the consequences of patriarchy was that men, having violently overthrown the primitive communist social order and established their own power, massacred women, the compassionate wardens of matriarchy. With the murder of the mother, which was a grave sin in the primitive communist societies of the past, the murder of women specifically because of their gender by the men closest to them began. Throughout history, countless women have been murdered by their husbands, partners and family members, or by other men they did not even know. The reasons men gave as justification for murder were nothing more than a woman’s desire to express herself as a human being and to make decisions about her own body and life.

According to the UN Global Survey on Women, approximately 89,000 women were murdered worldwide in 2022. While overall murder rates fell, femicides continued to rise from 2021 to 2022. Some 48,800 of 2022’s femicides were committed by partners or family members of women. Many of the women who are not murdered are forced to sleep in fear under the same roof as their future killers. According to available data, more than a quarter of women between the ages of 15 and 49 worldwide have been physically or sexually assaulted. Unable to feel safe on the streets or even in their own homes, women suffer from stress-related pain and physical illnesses as well as mental illnesses: Depression is 50% higher in women than in men and post-traumatic stress disorder is twice as common in women.

The overwhelming majority of these murders happen to working class women, especially women from countries at the bottom of the hierarchy of capitalist countries. They throw the workers of the countries they exploit and impoverish in front of their own imperialist capital groups in need of cheap labor, and in conditions where it is getting harder and harder to put bread on the table, workers who lack class consciousness, who are at the point of going into debt, let alone having money to spend on education, travel, health, sports, become vulnerable to provocation and prone to bloodshed. Then, as Engels pointed out, at home the woman becomes the worker, and the exploited man is rewarded with dominating her by being part of the patriarchal hierarchy headed by the men in power. For this reason, they see in themselves the right to take the lives of women, and they do not hesitate to encourage each other in their closed circles. The bourgeoisie protects murderers with laws and connivance, while the community of men, with its environment that supports sexual and physical violence, prepares the way for patriarchy to grow stronger and spread like a cancer among the class.

In these days when we are being dragged towards a large-scale global war, women are again being offered as an incentive to the soldiers of predominantly male armies, as has happened many times in history, but this time without explicitly naming them as trophies. The propaganda tools of the bourgeoisie and the effects of an expanding capital on the working class and the gender question manifest themselves, as in similar cases in history, in men being encouraged to become soldiers and women being pushed to bear children and participate in the workforce as cheap labor.

In the patriarchal order, however, institutions concerned with preventing violence against women demand funding from other similar institutions and research organizations, and call on legislators and the rulers of the state under the dictates of the bourgeoisie.

In the last twenty years the number of women’s organizations has increased, but the number of femicides has not decreased. With the exception of a slight decline in Europe, gender-based murders of women continue to rise around the world. Less patriarchal treatment is being sold to the rest of the world as an attainable dream, a privilege enjoyed by the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie and perhaps a small group of workers of average income in Europe and a very small part of North America. The working class sees this dream entering every country with weapons, war plans and corporations, pushing the women of the world to exhaust all their labor in male-dominated parliaments to help the murderer get a year or two more in prison. Every day, while working class women wait at the courthouse gates, 243 more women are murdered around the world.

Economic crises and wars will lead to the murder of many more women if we don’t fight and eliminate them. Overall, 80% of murder victims are men and 20% women, and men are more often killed outside and women at home. Both men and women are mostly killed by men. It is patriarchal and capitalist propaganda that makes men so harmful to their environment and leads them defeated and desperate into an existence of obsessions. These poisonous ideas have taken over the working class even more as conditions have worsened. As long as workers do not see ending the war and the poverty created by the war economy as the main goal, and as long as gender, racial and religious conflicts continue within the class, femicides and patriarchal violence will not end.

Women should urgently come together with LGBT workers and heterosexual working men in the unions who are willing to work with them on violence against women to solve their problems and meet regularly to discuss how to lead the women’s struggle in the unions. In the fight we will wage together with the methods of the class, not the deceptive class collaborationist methods of bourgeois feminism, working class men will eventually be able to walk shoulder to shoulder with women.

When the struggle is big enough, attempted femicide will no longer be dared. We need to change the understanding of protest that mourns individual murders and focuses only on making noise by organizing massive strikes against both harsh living conditions and in the defense of women. That is why the class must not fall for bourgeois divisiveness based on gender, race and religion in order to overthrow capitalism that leaves women helpless and doomed in the hands of men and turns men into murderers. Those who turn us against each other are the ones who gain the most from this.

As the International Communist Party, we know that the liberation of women, like all other groups oppressed directly and indirectly under capital, can only come through communism, that is, through the liberation of the working class.

But we communists have never cast ourselves as mere observers of history, and it is therefore vital for the final victory of the working class to seize every opportunity to reduce or eliminate the victimization of proletarian humanity, to drive the movement towards its final goal. The important point here is that, unlike bourgeois organizations, we do not ignore the material reality of capital and class conflict, i.e. the material reality of history, from the dominance of the patriarchal system to the emergence of the social role of "womanhood" and from there to the current femicides.