Dear feminist comrades,

This International Working Women’s Day (IWWD), we pledge to remember and reclaim the revolutionary roots of March 8. We reaffirm that the struggle for women’s rights against heteropatriarchal oppression and misogyny cannot be separated from our 500-year history of resistance in the Global South against racial capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism. 

South Feminist Futures calls upon you to join us in dedicating the eight weeks between March 8 and May 1 to strike, protest, memorialise, salute, and show solidarity to all working women and people fighting to end imperialism, colonialism, racial exploitation, oppression, occupation, and domination. 

We remember and salute the women freedom fighters of Haiti whose revolt broke the chains of slavery worldwide; the factory women of Russia who called for Bread and Roses to end food shortages and war; the Aba market women, farmers, traders, and mothers of Nigeria who rose up against British colonial tax policies and the corruption of local compradors; and the Madres y Abuelas of Plaza de Mayo who battled the Argentine genocidal dictatorship.

Today, we salute the Women’s Response Rooms in Sudan, providing mutual aid and community care in the face of criminal international humanitarian neglect; Palestinian women farmers and cooperatives baking bread, saving seeds, and keeping the harvest alive while surrounded by rubble, in refusal of Zionist policies of starvation in Gaza and the West Bank; and all the women on the frontlines resisting the continued horrors of occupation, colonialism, imperialism, Zionism, and fascism — in Palestine, Kashmir, Western Sahara, West Papua, and Kanaky.

Heteropatriarchy, capitalism and imperialism are kept afloat by the relentless extraction, devaluation, criminalisation and erasure of women’s labour. It is this labour – unpaid, underpaid, and undervalued – that sustains life and humanity; that cleans homes, workplaces and streets; that keeps communities fed and nourished; that tends to children, the elderly and the sick; that fuels our movements and resistance; that keeps our cultures, nature and histories alive; that creates, imagines, builds knowledge and never gives up.

On this day, we anchor our rage. We have borne witness to three years of genocide in Palestine. We are seeing the brazen mockery of multilateralism and the decimation of international law by imperial gangsterism — in Venezuela, Cuba, Lebanon and Iran — aimed at smashing all resistance to plunder, exploitation and colonial expansion across the Global South, thinly disguised as imperial, civilisational feminism discourse about “rescuing women.”

We reiterate the working class foundations of International Working Women’s Day. Our struggle for liberation is a class struggle: against the theft of our labour, land, resources and time. We honour March 8 by mobilising as workers against imperial capitalism, with the power to strike, refuse, mobilise, and sustain alternative pathways of survival. Feminism severed from struggles against occupation, racial capitalism and all systems of oppression is not only hollow, but a weapon to render our lives disposable in the Global South. 

South Feminist Futures calls upon all our comrades to dedicate the eight weeks from March 8 to May 1 to: 

1. Memorialise our struggle for self-determination and liberation!  

  • Salute, honour, remember and reclaim the struggles of working women and people against exploitation and for self-determination and liberation. 
  • Share stories and commemorate the struggles of working women and people from your countries and regions.

2. Strike and protest: join the mobilisations! 

  • Don’t work, don’t spend. Join the global 8M women’s strike on March 8 and the international workers’ strikes against war, genocide, imperialism and capitalist exploitation on May 1.
  • Organise to  mobilise our feminist potentia-power, and strengthen the transnational, intersectional, radical, antiracist, antipatriarchal, anticapitalist international feminist movement of the Global South.

3. Show solidarity!

  • Support and amplify local mutual aid and sustenance efforts in Lebanon, Palestine, Sudan and across the Global South to survive war and precarity.
  • Join the Palestinian call for BDS: boycott, divest and sanction all products of Zionist occupation.

A luta continua, 

In power, love, solidarity and joy, 

South Feminist Futures