Received and translated on 21.03.17:
When we realize the authoritarian and patriarchal nature of present-day society, we understand genders as impositions through which individuals are forced to play certain roles within the network of domination.
Certainly, this society continues to impose on those who are born as ‘women’ an inferior position to those born as ‘men’. This is why every March 8, when the ‘International Women’s Day’ is commemorated, many people, mostly women, take to the streets to express their discontent at this situation of inequality.
The most well-known historical commemoration of March 8 are the events that occurred on that day in 1908, when 146 women workers at a cotton factory in New York were burned to death in a fire caused by the bosses after the workers refused to end their sit-in protest against low wages and the infamous work conditions that they were suffering under.
It was in 1910, during an International Conference of Socialist Women, that it was proposed that March 8 be commemorated as International Women’s Day, in honor of those who carried out the first actions of women workers organizing against capitalist exploitation.
However, as has happened with other dates that have an origin linked to the conflict with the dominators, March 8 has mainly been transformed into a citizen parade where the victimistic discourses of the majority of the demonstrators combine with government attempts to make the ‘struggle for women’ an element of consensus with the rest of the population.
And so, like other commemorative milestones, March 8 has been coopted by capitalist democracies to limit questioning of the politcal / economic system and to silence the historical struggle against the exploiters and their tactics of extermination and social control.
As anti-authoritarians, we refuse to make this date a day of pacification and consensus with the state and leftist reformism, since we reject all forms of power and all impositions from the dominant sectors in our lives, preferring instead to spread the revolt against the social order and to question our own individual behaviors in order to position ourselves at war against the system of domination, its methods of control and the limits they generate in our daily lives.
Our struggle is for Total Liberation, and in it we fight against any person who tries to impose their will and power, regardless of whether this person is ‘man’ or ‘woman’, rich or poor, white or black etc. Likewise, our affinity is with with every individual who wants to break the chains of authority, regardless of their sex, race or species.
Because in this struggle we are not victims!
Because we fight against all forms of authority.
Spread anarchic action and anti-patriarchal tension everywhere!
Anarchists against the pacification of our lives
March 2017
translated by insurrectionnewsworldwide.com
in spanish
