To Our Sisters In Sweatshops of America

We are women from Iran and Afghanistan who refuse to accept our assigned place at the bottom of society as semi slave workers, compassions, housewives, and intellectuals. We along with comrades here in Los Angeles will hold a march on the occasion of  March 8 the International Women’s Day to declare that we will fight for liberation of women in Iran and Afghanistan and world over till we achieve it. We invite you to join us so that we can build a beautiful internationalist march—women from Mexico, China, Korea, Thailand, Iran, Afghanistan, Armenia, Iraq, proto Rico, Palestine, India,….

Let us all carry the red flag as a sign that we are all are of the same nation: nation of fighters for liberation of humanity.

To introduce ourselves to you it is best to explain our political line in this fight. This is especially important because the US government is waging wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and is occupying those countries and is threatening to make a war against Iran. We are against this brutal war and want it to be stopped quickly. The present election in the US is strengthening the war moves. We also warn against any other kind of US interventions in Iran -- things such as coups or so called velvet “revolutions”.

Many of us belong to the revolutionary generation in Iran who fought against the regime of the Shah and toppled it in 1979. But that revolution failed and the power was seized by a group of reactionary religious fundamentalists. They drowned revolutionaries in blood by police suppression campaigns and prison and torture and finally consolidated a reactionary state in Iran.

This regime pushed back women into a semi slave situation.  They passed an elaborate Islamic Punitive Laws against women through their Islamic parliament and legalized women’s slave situation. According to these Laws male relatives of women are allowed to kill them without being punished by law if those women enter into sexual relations outside Islamic marriage law. Yes, indeed it is horrific to subject 35 million Iranian women to such situation! The younger militants of our organization grew up fighting against this reactionary Islamic fundamentalist regime.

Today, at a time that the US government is threatening to devastate Iran with a war like the ones in Afghanistan and Iraq, some people call upon us to unite with the Islamic regime in order to resist against the US! And there are some people who call us to unite with the US in order to get rid of this medieval regime! Does any real woman think this is a choice? We categorically refuse these choices. They are not choices for liberation. They are choices for guaranteeing enslavement of women for many generations to come. Instead we fight tooth and nail to forge a “third pole” which is a revolutionary front against both US imperialism and its war as well as against the reactionary Islamic Republic of Iran. A lot of people think women can not do it and instead they should beg their liberation from powers that be. But we think women are exactly the ones who can do it! Deep oppression turns them into formidable fighters.  

Come on sisters! Let us hook up together and march on the International Women’s Day to declare that women of the world will fight for a world without imperialism and reaction; for a new world without exploitation and race and sex and class oppression.

March 8 Women’s Organization (Iran-Afghanistan)

March  2008