March 8th is not a holiday. It is a day on which we collectively make visible what is otherwise normalized, relativized, or individualized. Worldwide, one in three women and one in three girls experience physical or sexual violence in their lifetime. Queer, trans, agender, and non-binary people are particularly affected. In Germany, a woman was killed by her (ex-)partner almost every third day in 2025.
Violence against women and TINA (No Alternative To Women) people is rooted in material conditions. It arises where dependencies are produced-be it through housing as a commodity, poorly paid wage labor, or unpaid, invisible care work. Many women and TINA people remain in abusive relationships because they cannot afford to leave. The capitalist system needs the heteronormative nuclear family as a site of unpaid reproductive labor and to stabilize private property. It needs sexualized bodies, emotional availability as a resource, and competition instead of solidarity. The capitalist state creates the material and ideological conditions under which patriarchal violence-even femicide-becomes possible.
In neoliberalism, corporations adorn themselves with feminist slogans while exploiting workers. "Girlboss" feminism celebrates women in leadership positions, while BIPOC women and TINA (No Alternative) people continue to hold the lowest-paid and most precarious jobs.
Representation is celebrated as if the gender of the boss makes any difference. Instead of addressing the root causes of violence and domination, liberal feminists demand harsher punishments and more police-appealing to the supposedly failing state and merely desiring reforms to its racist, patriarchal institutions and structures.
The feminist struggle must not be a matter of symbolic politics, but must demand real, material change. This means, among other things: socializing housing, collectivizing care work, reducing working hours with full wage compensation, self-organized protective structures instead of police, solidarity networks instead of isolation, and direct democracy in workplaces and neighborhoods instead of representative politics. The feminist revolution is a long-term process of building power from below, in the form of feminist strikes that systematically paralyze production and reproduction.
We must organize rent struggles and squatting to truly remove housing from commodification. Self-organization in care, education, and retail is necessary because patriarchal exploitation is particularly visible there. We need autonomous safe spaces and collectively addressing patriarchal violence. Organized political education that systematically analyzes and names violence is essential. We need a practice that truly embodies feminist solidarity.
In these times of war, patriarchal violence emerges not as a side effect, but as an integral part of the logic of war. Around 676 million women and girls currently live in military combat zones, a historic high. Systematic, gender-based violence is not accidental, but rather a strategy: Sexualized violence is deliberately used to humiliate, destroy, and control communities. Violence against trans people, non-binary individuals, or A-gender people is far less documented, but its brutality is equally likely.
(TW: Mention of sexual violence)
In Sudan, comrades report mass rapes, gang rapes, and sexual slavery by militias as part of ethno-political violence, while protective and support structures collapse.
Gender-based forms of violence are also documented in Ukraine, Palestine, Rojava, and Iran. The logic is similar: Armed groups instrumentalize nationalist notions of masculinity to break communities, symbolically degrade "enemy" bodies, and enforce patriarchal dominance, especially where state order is fragile.
War is thus an expression of imperialist power struggles in which cis men are privileged as fighters and protectors, while women and TINA (No Alternative) people are systematically made vulnerable. Patriarchy and militarism are mutually reinforcing: where social order collapses, male dominance is often enforced with extreme brutality to regain control over territories, resources, and bodies.
This violence is structured in both racist and colonial ways. Which lives are considered worthy of protection is determined by global power relations: violence in colonial regions is normalized or dehumanized, while in Europe it is scandalized. Imperialism continues to operate in militarization, the production of enemy images, and the devaluation of certain bodies. The feminist struggle must therefore consider patriarchy, militarism, racism, and colonialism together.
As anarchists, we will consequently not only condemn symptoms or demand abstract peace. We want to attack the logic of war itself and understand patriarchal violence as a structural, system-maintaining element, and create conditions under which war, patriarchy, and capitalism cannot be reproduced!
On March 8, we mourn all those murdered in the feminist struggle. We believe the survivors and name the perpetrators as well as the structures that protect them. We fight for all whose lives are constantly threatened: for queer people who are attacked, for BIPOC women and TINA people without papers, for all whose bodies are used as battlegrounds for patriarchal violence. This day is not a marketing event or an appeal to the powerful. It is a day of struggle. Liberation will not be granted to us; we must fight for it collectively. There is no equality within exploitation.
For a world without domination, capitalism, and patriarchal ideology. For a life of dignity. For the anarcha-feminist revolution!
https://www.dieplattform.org/2026/03/08/erklaerung-zum-8-maerz-2026/#more-3543
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Link: (en) Germany, Dia Platform: Out to the Feminist International Day of Struggle! -- 99 femicides in 2025! (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]
Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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