March 8 is a day of struggle and solidarity for working women!
Just as the male-dominated capitalist system corrupts all human values, it also seeks to reduce March 8, International Working Women’s Day, to a day when gifts are bought for women and consumption is promoted. On the one hand they seek profit; on the other they seek to sever women from their own history of struggle.
March 8 is the day when, in 1857 in New York, 40,000 women textile workers went on strike demanding better working conditions, and 129 women workers lost their lives when the police bloodily suppressed the strike. In memory of the 129 women workers killed, on Clara Zetkin’s proposal, the Second International declared March 8 International Working Women’s Day in 1910.
March 8 Is the Day of Women Who Do Not Bow to Exploitation and Oppression!
Against oppression, double exploitation, repression, harassment, rape and femicide, we take our hearts into our hands and raise our fists to the sky.
Knowing that all the gains we enjoy today were won through the struggles of women before us, we walk the same path as them.
Walking the path opened by Clara Zetkin, Rosa Luxemburg, Ulrike Meinhoff, Rachel Corrie, Alexandr Kollontai, Nadya Krupskaya, Guerrilla Tanya, the Mirabel Sisters, Sabahat Karataş and Sakine Cansız, we take to the squares with the unifying power of resistance, struggle and action.
We Sling Stones at Oppression, Break Their Shields, and Fearlessly Open Our Arms to Defy the TOMA Water Cannons!
On the evening of March 8 at 19.30, the action we carried out as Kaldıraç and AKA-DER, starting from İstiklal Avenue, continued in front of the police barricade erected at the entrance to Taksim Square. Our march joined the action EKA (Emekçi Kadınlar) had begun at 19.00 that evening in front of the police barricade. Our actions also overlapped with the Istanbul Feminist Collective’s night march, which began in front of Galatasaray High School.
While women from Kaldıraç, AKA-DER and EKA continued their actions in front of the police barricade, a friend who said she represented the Istanbul Feminist Collective first accused our organizations, which have the right to organize their own actions in Taksim, of “sabotaging the night march.” Then the crowds of the three actions joined and began challenging the police barricade, and the same woman moved to have the revolutionary organizations’ flags lowered. From the moment the three actions effectively joined, women from Kaldıraç, AKA-DER and EKA confronted the police on the front line.
Toward the end of the action, the Istanbul Feminist Collective’s night march action committee told participants that “Kaldıraç had provoked and sabotaged the action.” In our view, those who led chants of “Kaldıraç out” instead of “Police out” in front of the police barricade, and issued statements with lies that we inflicted violence on women at the action, understand neither comradeship in struggle nor the force that should actually be targeted and fought.
Those who attempted to attack our comrades at the end of the combined actions with statements such as “Other women out, provocateurs” should know this:
Yes, we are other women! We are Kurdish, Alevi, Laz, Pomak, Circassian, Georgian, Manav, Pontic, Bosniak, Arab, Syriac, Yazidi, Kızılbaş, Greek and Albanian women who struggle so that peoples ignored and humiliated for years can speak their own languages, and who shout at the top of our lungs that the mother tongue is the door to the heart.
Yes, we are other women! We are Kaldıraç women who cry out at every action that we will hold accountable the killers of our sister who took her own life in Adana because she could not keep her children warm.
Yes, we are provocateurs! We are those who carry into our actions the pain in the eyes of Ali İsmail’s mother, whose son they beat to death with sticks, and those who keep Fadime Ayvalıtaş in our hearts.
Yes, we are other women! We are the anger of women who fled the imperialists’ collaborator networks of massacre and rape in Syria, sought refuge with their babies in the lands where we live, and beg to avoid hunger.
Yes, we are provocateurs! We carry the anguish of our sisters raped by occupying forces in Iraq, Bosnia, Afghanistan and Syria, who chose death rather than give birth to their rapists’ children.
Yes, we provocateurs think of the women, men, LGBTI people and children they have murdered whenever a police barricade appears before us. And wherever we see a state, we cannot help shouting “Murderer State!”
The bourgeoisie, its state, its police and its soldiers have blood on their hands. A red sun will rise from the horizon of this sea of blood!
Every Day Is March 8, Every Day Is Struggle!
KALDIRAÇ, AKA-DER
March 8, 2014