 And women are hit particularly hard by this crisis and also by capitalism in general. One example of that in the UK, as a result of the capitalist crisis, the government has introduced austerity measures, and these fall really particularly hard on women. Since 2010, 86% of cuts to the public sector and to services are onto jobs and services which are dominated by women. Universal credit is another example of an austerity measure that hits women particularly hard. And all of these kind of things also highlight the blatant hypocrisy of the Tory MPs who claim to stand up in the interests of all women while cutting services which fall particularly hard on women and just make working class women's lives much much more difficult. In terms of capitalism in general, women also suffer from even worse pay and conditions than men. Despite equal pay legislation which has been in place since the 1970s, equal pay still is not anywhere to be seen. A report in May this year in the UK found that 75% of companies pay men significantly more than women and the average female wage is 10% less than the male wage. And actually next week in Glasgow there's a strike in the Glasgow Council over this issue of equal pay. So that's still something which has not been solved. Above all of the general conditions of capitalism and the worse and how this impacts women even more extremely in some cases, women also have to contend with things like sexual harassment both in the workplace and just in the streets, epidemic of domestic violence and as well the burden of household labour which is really essential for capitalism to function that women do unpaid work in terms of cooking and cleaning, looking after children. And recent statistics said over two thirds of household work is carried out by women. And this not only is a burden but also affects the ability of women to participate in politics and in wider society because of the time and the effort used doing this kind of labour for no kind of money. So as a result it's kind of unsurprising that millions of women all around the world are starting to stand up and fight against the discrimination and the impression that we face on a daily basis. Fiona will be talking about the recent struggle for abortion rights in Ireland but there's also been fights for abortion rights more globally happening over the past few years as well. A few months ago there was a big movement in Argentina as they were trying to pass a law through the court but the government voted against it so that was I guess unsuccessful. In Poland in 2016 there was the Black Monday movement so the government was trying to put into place an even more restrictive abortion law and over 5 million women went on strike on Black Monday and they all dressed in black and that was a really successful movement and it stopped that law being passed basically. Another really important thing that's been going on in terms of like women's struggle is in Spain and Hwana will be speaking about that later on so I won't go too much into it. In the USA as another example you've seen huge mobilisations against Trump. The women's march in 2017 was a big protest and was actually the biggest protest in US history since the Vietnam War so this is obviously an issue a lot of young people are coming into and getting radicalised through. Over one million men and women took part in the march in Washington DC on women and over 7 million took part worldwide and we've also seen when Trump came to the UK a lot of the protest against him so obviously mixed but a lot of people were attending those to try and oppose his position on women. We also have the Me Too movement which I guess started in the States and has kind of spread a lot more against sexual harassment and assault and in 2017 there was also a wave of movements against domestic violence in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Bolivia and Mexico. And in terms of these movements they're all mixed in terms of who's involved. There's some liberal feminists, there's some bourgeois feminists, petty bourgeois feminists but I think the important thing is there's also a lot of young men and young women who are looking for radical change in society that are involved in these movements and that's kind of one of the reasons why it's important for Marxists to be involved in them as well. And more and more as these movements and the women's struggle is forcing people to draw radical conclusions to kind of see, it's becoming more and more clear how women's oppression is upheld by the state, is upheld by the establishment and is upheld fundamentally by capitalism and that is radicalising people and making it more and more clear the need to overthrow capitalism for women to ever actually live without oppression. A few kind of examples of this, one is the Laminada court case in Spain which I guess Juana will probably speak a little bit more about, but in terms of this like forcing people to draw more radical conclusions, in this case it was an extremely light sentences for like a horrific case of gang rape and that brought to light the reactionary nature of the court and the state and the role that that plays in upholding women's oppression and it got a lot of young people to start to question the legitimacy of that institution and to see the need, well if women are actually to be free from oppression, they need to sweep institutions like that away. Another example I guess in the states would be the election of Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court despite evidence and allegations of sexual assault, despite all that he still got admitted and that has made people start to question the legitimacy of the so-called democratic institutions that control our lives and is forcing people to draw radical conclusions and to see how women's oppression is not just something you know separate, it's something that's upheld by the state and upheld by capitalism. So yeah I would say it's clear over the past few years there's been a surge in the women's struggle around the world and we're going to hear about some cases of that in a second, but I think it's important as Marxists, we're obviously firmly opposed to all forms of oppression and we show this in deeds and in words and we need to be involved in the fight for you know the right to abortion, the right to equal pay, you know fights for free child care, socialised kind of domestic labour and basically against all forms that oppression takes but at the same time we need to reject and criticise you know the liberal feminists and the bourgeois feminists who you know believe in the idea that change could somehow be brought about by like measures like more female bosses or like tweaks to bore us while law and we need to criticise this and show how it does not work. It's clear really that women's liberation can only be fully achieved through the overthrow of capitalism and while it's important to fight you know for reforms and fight against the day-to-day manifestations of women's oppression everywhere we see it, we also need to highlight the role that state, the state and that capitalism play in maintaining this oppression and I would say the fight for women's liberation is the fight against capitalism and we need to push these movements to not just fight against the manifestations of women's oppression but to also fight against the root cause and to get you know young women and young men involved and wanting to put an end you know to women's oppression to get them to also join the struggle against capitalism and for revolution and get these movements to be linked in with the struggle against capitalism and truly bringing it into women's oppression and once and for all. So thanks. Okay yeah so I'm gonna speak about the recent referendum for abortion in Ireland which won by a landslide which has finally given women access to legal and safe abortions and this success although far too delayed for many women is a significant development for the class struggle in Ireland and this is because of the effects that moments like this can have on the development of class consciousness and I don't think that we can really understate how significant this referendum was and that's because the right to abortion has for a really long time been like represented as simply an ideological debate between right and wrong or sin from a religious point of view but it wasn't an abstract debate between right and wrong where the right side has just won this time but we would point out that it's a reflection of the balance of class forces in Ireland today and so up until this point in Ireland like in the UK the abortion law has been governed by the Offences Against the Persons Act in 1861 so section 58 criminalised any woman who had an abortion and section 59 criminalised anyone who helped a woman get an abortion too and the kind of strong hold of the Catholic Church within Ireland has prevented any real concessions to this act for a really long time. There has definitely characterised so much of the oppression that women in Ireland has suffered and there's a lot of cases that we could point to to talk about this but I'm not really going to go into that because I don't have the time but just to make the point that obviously Ireland's link with the church and that position on abortion unsurprisingly has meant a history of hardship and pain for women and so women who did have babies despite the fact they were denied the right to abortion. If they had children outside of marriage they were very much shunned from society and you know targeted as fallen women and they were often locked up in institutions like the Magdalene Laundries where their babies might even have been taken away from them or sometimes they were then forced to work in these institutions and the church actually made millions off the labour of these women in really horrible conditions and they were very much punished for any kind of sexual activity or anything that was you know defined as immoral by the church and women were very much kind of stripped of their possessions, their dignity, even their names and lots of cases and subjected to a lot of mental, physical and sexual torture and millions of women and lots of people died in these institutions to the point that lots of mass graves have been discovered since in 1993 for example there was a huge mass grave discovered of a couple of hundred bodies of not only just women but also children amongst that and so the point I'm trying to make here is that all of this kind of filth that really underpins the Catholic Church has been brought to light in Ireland and the church is a very powerful pillar of the establishment especially in Ireland and so that kind of authority has been severely knocked and there are lots of examples which kind of illustrate the church's waning influence for example in 1979 when John Paul II visited the Pope weekly mass attendance at that time in Ireland was kind of around 80% and he did a kind of massive mass in Dublin and 1.2 million people came out to see him today however in Ireland mass attendance is more it hovers around 35% and there have been significant changes also in 2015 obviously that same-sex marriage was legalized so it is a much different situation in Ireland now especially for the current Pope Francis who visited Ireland earlier in August and he definitely did not receive the same welcome that John Paul II had not that long ago and he spent a lot of his time actually trying to apologize if you will for the horrors that have been unveiled and the scandals that have been unveiled by the Catholic Church and he kind of he did address it as a grave scandal and try to you know make very weak statements on the church's failure in confronting it and you know owning up to the victims but this obviously doesn't mean anything for a lot of people and whilst he was doing his kind of big mass in Dublin there were thousands of people in another part of the city that were protesting that and they were protesting and you know fighting for the rights fighting for the justice of all these victims of the church historically and so these like revelations of priests molesting and raping in many cases young children have been brought to the forefront and despite the church's efforts to kind of cover up a lot of these allegations what this really represents is the complete loss of any kind of moral authority that the church might have once had in Ireland I think and consequently actually in this referendum the church was a little less prominent than it would have been previously because of this kind of abject failure to actually provide anything for people in Ireland in comparison to maybe the 2015 same sex marriage campaigns where the church was a bit more prominent although obviously the church is against abortion in this referendum they were slightly less prominent because they really just don't have the right to speak on a lot of these matters anymore and in the lead up to this referendum women you know began to share their stories and the lengths that a lot of them have gone to in order to have an abortion and not only were these you know physically harmful and dangerous and some of the stories kind of include women sitting in baths of like scorching hot water and whiskey really kind of graphic horrible things but there's also the emotional trauma that has stayed with women for a really long time there's the distress there's the guilt and the shame that was really put on them by the church and also obviously there's the financial burden it's estimated that more than 150,000 women in Ireland have had to travel outside of Ireland since about 1983 in order to gain access to abortion services and since the 8th amendment went into effect in 1983 which is what the referendum has been about and repealing and most interestingly a lot of these kind of confessions of this of all the stuff that a lot of women had to go through has come from the older generation of women and I think this is significant because the people who don't want abortion in Ireland that side of their campaign really relied on the rural vote if you will there was this idea that the older generation the rural areas might secure it for them but this is wrong these are the women that suffered the most oppression at the hands of the church and they know more than anyone the lengths that the church has gone to to kind of vilify women and put them on a kind of second class basis and so it's important to mention that the struggle for abortion is fundamentally a class question and it isn't merely a question of men controlling women but it is about the ruling class and their contempt for the working class as a whole. Richer, bourgeois women obviously will have had access to abortion in the past when necessary if they needed they could go to a private hospital and get things done quietly but working-class women obviously don't have access to this and so the legal right to abortion really is a cornerstone for the struggle to end the oppression of women in actual material terms because without that it leaves women because it gives women control over their reproductive destiny and without that they would be left to the mercy of their nature and working-class women are therefore oppressed on two levels once as workers like everyone else but also as women and we know how but also as women and so we can see the attitude that the ruling class displays towards women and the point to make as well is that many women can't afford to have children which makes abortion not really a choice at all it's more of a coercion and that women are forced to do due to their class and liberal feminism I find kind of overwhelmingly emphasizes the right for women to choose it's all about women having the right to choose what they want to do with their life but we would make the point that civil rights aren't abstract in general they're kind of freely available for everyone but they're completely connected to the material conditions of those who who access them and how they go about and live their lives so when the ruling class and the church vilify women who want to choose abortion we have to make the point that there is no true right to choose in a society where no one has the right to a job or the right to housing or the right to healthcare and if we fought for a society where there was affordable housing and fully paid maternity leave and childcare and good jobs we could eliminate the need for a lot of abortions in the first place it's not something that women are happy to go about doing but it's a coercion due to their class position and Trotsky actually commenting on the cynicism of the Stalinists in revolution portrayed he said on this subject even the optimistic Pravda is sometimes compelled to make a bitter confession that the birth of a child is for many women a serious menace to their position and it's just for this reason that the revolutionary power gave women the right to abortion which in conditions of one and family distress is one of her most important civil, political and cultural rights and this is you know a demonstration of how the fight for true choice where abortion is actually free it goes hand in hand with the fight for socialism and another point to be made here is that the Bolsheviks did this right over a hundred years ago they were the first country Russia was the first country to legalize abortion for women and this measure you know brought an end to a lot of suffering that women have to go through therefore you know the fight for the full material liberation of women is overwhelmingly linked with the overthrow of capitalism and also I just want to make the point that this vote is a manifestation this referendum is a manifestation of a wider mood around the women's question like Ellen was talking about before in society beyond just Ireland as we know that thanks again against the old order against the establishment and the status quo and it's developing internationally and last October obviously we've we've seen mass mobilizations against violence against women in Argentina and Bolivia and Mexico and lots of different places in Poland and this is something that obviously we support you know as Marxists we fight for the greatest possible unity of the working class and which is why we must support the political right for women to have control over their bodies and to free women to be a part of political activity and to be a part of the class struggle because that's the only way we're going to have we're going to actually achieve socialism in the first place and you know if the labor movement doesn't take aim at that as an immediate struggle we can't hope for the working class to change society and we also want to support all of these things in a combined way and make the point that you know just this now right to abortion isn't the end of the matter because it doesn't fundamentally change attitudes towards women in society we know that we have to fundamentally change society in order to change attitudes right and under capitalism these reforms can be taken away anyway it doesn't cost the capitalist class that much to grant the right to abortion in a kind of in a certain way it's not expensive but rather what it does cost is authority in Ireland and what it has cost them is the authority of the Catholic Church and I think this is significant because the situation in Ireland like everywhere else where these women's movements are developing goes beyond just the question of abortion as the economic crisis deepens this kind of revolutionary mood this revolt against the establishment is going to spread to wider struggles and so they've made this concession here right they've made the concession of kind of giving up the authority the moral authority of the church which is maybe okay in the short term but I think in the long term this will have a serious effect because the church is such a fundamental part of the ruling class particularly in Ireland and it could and knocking that pillar of the establishment out could be quite severe and also this referendum is important because it gives the working class confidence in their ability to change society and we have to emphasise there is the working class who've done this and who have achieved this right for women you know every right the women have has been won by struggle and not through epiphanies on the sides of judges who have suddenly kind of changed their minds or their attitudes and the huge strike in Spain earlier this year which I'm sure will be discussed you know saw millions of working class men and women fighting together against depression because we know that the state is incapable of acting on this on themselves there's a lot we could say about the hypocrisy of the Irish ruling class on this matter even now those in power who are now champion championing sorry the yes vote were themselves pro life you know not that long ago that they're happy to switch on their fundamental principles where it suits them and so the main point here is that we're not going to overcome women's oppression through changing attitudes and we can't locate the problem or the solution for all forms of gender violence in our moral values and we need to fundamentally change class society in order to change those values and these are basic democratic rights that are being presented as a moral choice because it enables those in power to create division and pretend that it's a question of individual sin or individual choice on the sides of the women because theoretically there's no reason why women should be becoming pregnant when they don't want to be right we have the knowledge and the resources in society and to prevent this in the first place so there's another point here to be made about the scientific use of contraception and you know proper genuine sexual education for young people free of religious hypocrisy and that's the only way we'll actually begin to create a kind of civilized attitude between men and women and for the freedom and for the freedom and equality of the female sex and I just want to kind of end by talking a bit about what Lenin discusses and what is to be done and this need and this point of kind of uniting political struggles together with the need forever for revolution which Ellen's kind of also spoken about how women's liberation is obviously linked with the need for socialism because we can link democratic political struggles of women with an international movement because they're not isolated struggles and the point we made here is that uniting struggles doesn't mean eroding them into each other right it just means making them bigger and better and giving them a much more profound impact because it's hugely significant that people are confident in their ability to take on these institutions at a time when capitalism is in crisis capitalism is in crisis therefore it's it's relying on these institutions like the church even more so than it might normally need to and this is why we need to unite these struggles with the labor movement and build on this mood to strike serious blows against all pillars of the establishment and I think it's interesting that we've entered a period where feminism is kind of no longer an ugly word I think in the past feminism was perhaps associated with slightly more radical movements but now it's kind of celebrated and openly embraced by by the ruling class Justin Trudeau, Theresa May, all these people and declare themselves openly to be feminists and on the side of women yet the right to abortion is still illegal in Northern Ireland Northern Irish women don't have this right and Theresa May has completely fudged this issue and when questioned on it she simply says it's an issue for storming to deal with and it's not and it's not you know she doesn't have the power to kind of interfere and you know she's doing this to protect her interest right the Tories are in a coalition with the DUP which is an incredibly reactionary right-wing party in Northern Ireland that are against abortion and so obviously doesn't want to come out in favour of it because she doesn't actually care she cares about defending her class and her class's interests but she doesn't care about genuinely defending the rights of women and so we can have no confidence in anyone other than the working class to bring an end to all forms of women's oppression and the hypocrisy of the ruling class with the case of Theresa May is clear and this is where the importance of internationalism is you know if we want to see that this right for abortion is actually materialised for women in Northern Ireland and also throughout the world you know we have to fight our own class struggle in the UK and fight to bring down the Tory government and ultimately fight to bring about a socialist society where these rights would be much easy sorry I've just lost my trade of thought and we want to bring about a socialist society where women's liberation could actually be materialised