“International Women’s Day” (IWD) is a Communist holiday. Despite my extensive knowledge of communist history, I didn’t know this until I saw a post on the Tumblr blog of Mehreen Kasana, a Pakistani-born radical feminist who lives in New York:
This time when you celebrate International Women’s Day, make it a point to remember that it started off as International Working Women’s Day until the bourgeoisie hijacked it and removed its class component to present a false and unified ‘sisterhood’ so that women were discouraged from participating in the struggle against upper class hegemony.
Thank you for the tip, Ms. Kasana! It’s amazing the things the bourgeoisie can learn by reading feminist Tumblr blogs. So I checked Wikipedia, and sure enough, it’s true: The first International Women’s Day was organized in 1909 by the Socialist Party of America, and this anti-capitalist holiday played a pivotal role in history:
In 1917 demonstrations marking International Women’s Day in Saint Petersburg on the last Sunday in February (which fell on March 8 on the Gregorian calendar) initiated the February Revolution. Women in Saint Petersburg went on strike that day for “Bread and Peace” — demanding the end of World War I, an end to Russian food shortages, and the end of czarism. [Bolshevik revolutionary] Leon Trotsky wrote, “23 February (8th March) was International Woman’s Day and meetings and actions were foreseen. But we did not imagine that this ‘Women’s Day’ would inaugurate the revolution. Revolutionary actions were foreseen but without date. But in morning, despite the orders to the contrary, textile workers left their work in several factories and sent delegates to ask for support of the strike … which led to mass strike … all went out into the streets.”
Following the October Revolution, the Bolshevik Alexandra Kollontai and Vladimir Lenin made it an official holiday in the Soviet Union … On May 8th, 1965 by the decree of the USSR Presidium of the Supreme Soviet International Women’s Day was declared a non-working day in the USSR “in commemoration of the outstanding merits of Soviet women in communistic construction, in the defense of their Fatherland during the Great Patriotic War, in their heroism and selflessness at the front and in the rear, and also marking the great contribution of women to strengthening friendship between peoples, and the struggle for peace. But still, women’s day must be celebrated as are other holidays.”
From its official adoption in Russia following the Soviet Revolution in 1917 the holiday was predominantly celebrated in communist and socialist countries.
You can read more of that history here (PDF).
America won the Cold War, but the deadly totalitarian ideology of the Soviet Union — the “Evil Empire” as Ronald Reagan famously called it — has been resurrected in the name of feminism.
Laurie Penny’s book quoted Alexandra Kollontai, the Bolshevik commissar who helped make IWD a holiday in the Soviet Union! Let’s quote the commissar, eh?
“The communist economy does away with the family. In the period of the dictatorship of the proletariat . . . the family loses its significance as an economic unit. The external economic functions of the family disappear . . .
“Once the family has been stripped of its economic functions and its responsibilities towards the younger generation and is no longer central to the existence of the woman, it has ceased to be a family.”
— Alexandra Kollontai, 1921
This, my friends, is the ideology celebrated on the communist holiday International Women’s Day. The more you know about feminism, the more you recognize its familiar totalitarian agenda.
http://theothermccain.com/2015/03/09/international-womens-day-communist-history-feminism/
Living in Anglo-America 