Message of solidarity to a public meeting in Nairobi (Kenya) on 31.7.2020

By Almedina Gunić, International Women’s Secretary of the Revolutionary Communist International Tendency (RCIT), 30 July 2020, www.thecommunists.net

Dear comrades, dear sisters and brothers,

The Revolutionary Communist International Tendency (RCIT) sends you the warmest greetings for the Pan African Women's Day. We congratulate you for organizing such an event as it is urgent to raise awareness and to organize resistance against women’s oppression.

Working women in Africa – like their sisters on other continents – suffer from brutal super-exploitation and oppression. This is true both for women employed in agriculture (the vast majority of African working women) as well as those employed as wage earners. Imperialist monopolies and Great Powers like the U.S., China and the EU are dominating the continent with the help of the African comprador bourgeoisie. Their reckless looting of Africa has also devastating consequences for the soil as well as for climate.

Furthermore, the ruling class has recently intensified the oppression of the popular masses by imposing a brutal Lockdown regime which incarnates the masses in their homes for most of the time. Women suffer particularly strong from the consequences of the reactionary Lockdown regime as it has resulted in a dramatic increase of domestic violence.

These authoritarian attacks on democratic rights are hypercritically justified with the COVID-19 crisis. In reality the ruling class exploits this pandemic as a cover for the expansion of the anti-people bonapartist state apparatus.

However, women are not only victims of capitalist insanity; they are also a key force in the struggles for democracy and social justice! In Africa and all over the world we see women taking a leading role in the ongoing mass protests. This has been visible not only in the recent demonstrations in Nairobi but also in the mass protests of the Black Lives Matter movement in the U.S., in France as well as other countries.

We call all revolutionary sisters to unite and to advance the struggle for the annihilation of women’s oppression, the imperialist exploitation of the African people and of global social injustice. Together we shall fight for the overthrow of global capitalism and the construction of a socialist society. This is what the RCIT is fighting for together with our comrades from the Revolutionary Socialist League!

Long live the socialist struggle for women’s liberation!

Aluta continua!