Foreword from the Editorial Board of La Obrera
The editors of La Obrera have chosen to republish this article, printed nearly a century ago in the Communist Party USA’s women’s publication, The Working Woman, as an example of the best period of working-class organization of women that used to exist in the United States. The Working Woman first appeared in 1929, the beginning of the Third Period of the Communist International, which marked the best years of the Communist Party USA’s work. This was the beginning of a period of great capitalist crisis, marked by the Great Depression, and a decade later, by the Second World War.
Our conditions today echo the situation of the working class described in the article: a worsening capitalist crisis marked by speed-ups, wage-cuts, intensification of labor, police and military terror, and a “bitter war of repression.” This is all too familiar to the American proletariat today, whose wages are shredded by inflation, who are terrorized by ICE raids, kidnappings and street executions, who are subjected to lethal speed-ups at work that have killed numerous workers.
We see imperialists vying, not just for financial control of countries, but open political control, too, as in the case of Venezuela. The workers today see, now more clearly than ever, that the so-called “international courts” and the United Nations, who are perfectly happy to allow the genocide of Palestine by the Zionist state, who cover up imperialist proxy wars andwar preparations, are hollow institutions meant to fool them. We see the imperialist US bourgeoisie preparing to mobilize the American workers to support its imperialist invasions and the coming inter-imperialist world war by pushing nationalist and imperialist propaganda in the capitalist monopoly press and social media harder than ever before.
In response, working women are called to meet the capitalist imperialist offensive by preparing for a bitter struggle, by “[rousing] the masses of the working women to a realization of the impending danger and a determination to fight it.”
Against the pessimism of the capitalists and their running dogs, the working women in every country, side by side with the other members of their class, will rise like a mighty fire that will burn downthe abusive, predatory and chauvinist organizations of the imperialists. Women workers are always in the front ranks of the bitter and bloody class struggle, showing their proletarian sibling the way forward to the great future of communism, when all people will be united in the international working class.
Editor’s note: The scan referenced to transcribe the following text was made using a damaged copy. Some parts of the pages on which this article was printed are missing. Where partial or whole words from the text are absent, we have done our best to fill in the most likely word. Entire missing words are indicated in [brackets]. Larger portions of text are simply marked (missing). Partial words are not marked. The original scan can be viewed on the Marxists Internet Archive at marxists.org.
The Working Woman, Vol. 1, No. 2. May 1929
May Day Call to the Working Women of America
May Day, 1929, finds the working class of America deep in the throes of a great struggle with the forces of capitalist imperialism. Millions of workers are walking the streets without a job, with starvation staring them in the face. Millions are slaving their lives away in mines, mills and workshops. Toiling under the lash of the capitalist speed-up, the workers of America and all other capitalist countries are driven beyond endurance in the race of their bosses to capture the world market. Wage-cuts, lengthening of hours, intensification of labor, the open-shop drive of the bosses to smash every attempt to organize and strike, police terror against militant workers, so the employers are conducting a bitter war of repression against the working class, which today in America is taking up the struggle against capitalist rationalization.
Women workers are in the forefront of these struggles of the working class in America. Today in the Southern textile strike as in New Bedford and Passaic they are fighting in the front ranks, braving police brutality and soldiers’ bayonets, enduring starvation rather than the slavery of the mills, struggling against the speed-up and capitalist rationalization. The needle trades workers are building a new militant union in the face of the attacks of the bosses allied with the police and the right wing bureaucracy. The women millinery workers have resisted the efforts of their corrupt officials to destroy their union. Everywhere in the mines and factory districts the women of the working class are fighting side by side with the men workers against the open shop drive and capitalist reaction.
Today on May Day, 1929, the great imperialist powers are rapidly mobilizing for another great war. War preparations are being carried on on a gigantic scale in all capitalist countries, feverish construction of new air fleets are greater navies, manufacture of munitions of war on an unprecedented scale, propaganda of nationalism and imperialism through every channel of capitalist influence, the schools, the churches, press, movies, radio.
While they are preparing for war the capitalist powers seek to delude the masses with gestures of peace. Peace pacts, arbitration treaties, leagues of nations, world courts, disarmament conferences, pacifist congresses, are heaped on each other in an effort to throw a smoke screen over the imperialist war preparations.
The great powers of the capitalist world are preparing for the inevitable conflict for world domination. They are at each other’s throats in the struggle for profits, for colonies, for markets, for mastery of the sea, for financial control and exploitation of all countries. At the same time they stand together waiting to spring upon Soviet Russia and attempt to destroy the first Workers’ Republic.
The imperialist war plans are maturing rapidly. The new American empire has thrown aside the mask. Wall Street only and brazenly dictates to Washington and the world. Morgan, Lamont, Morrow, Young, and all of the house of Morgan, represent Wall Street and Washington all over the world today, in China, in Japan, Mexico and Europe, and extend the rule of the mailed fist and the Yankee dollar in every corner of the world.
May Day, 1929, sends out a call especially to the women of the working class, to millions of toiling women, slaving for a mere pittance in the factories and workshops of America, borne down by poverty and drudgery in the home. Working women are the worst sufferers under capitalist imperialism. They are the cheap and easy subjects of exploitation in capitalist mass production with its speed-up, low wages and long [days]. They toil the longest hours for the [lowest pay]. They work in the greatest numbers in the (missing—textile?) industry and others especially subject to capitalist rationalization. They are being drawn [into] the heavy industry to replace men workers. [And] in time of war they are forced to man the factories and produce the munitions and materials of war.
Mothers as well as workers, the working women in America today along with the (missing …) in the hideous slums that capitalism gives the [working] class for a home, must see them driven [from] the factories and conscripted for capitalist [wars]. The women of the working class suffer as mothers as well as workers from the hideous exploitation of capitalism, the high cost of living, starvation wages, and from war, the inevitable accompaniment of capitalist imperialism.
The imperialists today are trying to delude the women workers with false hopes of peace. Through the schools, the churches, and the pacifist women’s organizations they try to make working women believe that peace is possible and that the capitalist world is striving for peace. This hollow sham must be exposed by working women. They must organize for a bitter and determined struggle against the war danger, must penetrate the workshops and the homes with the message of the class struggle, must rouse the masses of the working women to a realization of the impending danger and a determination to fight it.
Working women must organize, must build the new unions, must build nuclei in the factories and plants manufacturing war material, must prepare for the moment when they are called to man the factories in war-time, must prepare side by side with the men workers to crush the hideous capitalist system under its own war machine, and build a new workers’ society free from war and exploitation.
On May Day, 1929, working women must rally to the banner of the Communist International, the world organization of the working class, which is the only force able to meet and fight against world imperialism and world war. American working women! Join the Communist International, born out of the last world war to organize the working class against the next world war. Join its American section, the Communist Party of the U.S.A., leader in all the struggles of the workers and of working women.
Fight together with the men and women workers of other countries against the international attack upon the working class, against the speed-up and long hours, against low wages and the high cost of living, against the strike-breaking and union-smashing schemes of the employers, against the white terror and the imperialist war preparations. Fight against the misleaders of labor, against the leaders of the A. F. of L. and the Women’s Trade Union League, against the Socialist Party, all of which, like their ilk in other countries, are the enemies and betrayers of the revolutionary labor movement.
Working women of America! On May Day, 1929, stand shoulder to shoulder with the toiling masses of women workers in all other capitalist countries, with the women of the colonial lands Nicaragua, Mexico, China crushed under the heel of Yankee imperialism, in a common struggle against capitalist imperialism.
March side by side with the working women of the Soviet Union, your victorious sisters, who have freed themselves from the yoke of capitalism through their glorious revolution and are building a new workers’ society. Working women! Defend the Soviet Union! Defend the working women and children of Soviet Russia from the war plots of the imperialists.
[Forward], March! on May Day! [Down your] tools! Come out of the factories! Show [your] strength and fighting spirit!
For the emancipation of the working class!
For the destruction of the capitalist system, its exploitation, and its wars!
Long live the Soviet Union!
[Long live] the union of the workers and peasants (missing) all over the world!
COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE U.S.A.,
NATIONAL WOMEN’S DEPARTMENT.
(missing – possibly Juliet Stuart) Poyntz, Secretary.
La Obrera 