The Fascist International Against Women: a Feminist Analysis of Women Under Far-Right Rule

A Manifesto on Class Struggle, Intersectionality, and Revolutionary Feminism in the Age of Reaction

I. Introduction: The Global Offensive Against Women’s Liberation

We write in February 2026 amid an unprecedented global assault on women’s rights orchestrated by an international network of far-right governments, reactionary movements, and capitalist elites. From Washington to Budapest, from Buenos Aires to Rome, from the detention camps of the U.S.-Mexico border to the rubble of Gaza, women face a coordinated backlash designed to reverse decades of feminist struggle and reimpose patriarchal control over our bodies, our labour, and our lives.

This is not a coincidence. It is a strategy. The global far right—what we might call the “Fascist International”—shares a coherent ideological framework that weaponises “traditional values,” Christian nationalism, and demographic panic to justify rolling back women’s autonomy, criminalising reproductive healthcare, gutting social services, and terrorising LGBTQ+ people. From Viktor Orbán’s Hungary to Javier Milei’s Argentina, from Giorgia Meloni’s Italy to Donald Trump’s second administration, these governments collaborate, learn from each other, and amplify each other’s tactics.

This manifesto is written from the perspective of feminism—a revolutionary analysis that refuses to separate women’s liberation from the overthrow of capitalism. We understand that patriarchy, racism, imperialism, and class exploitation are not parallel systems of oppression but interlocking mechanisms that serve capital accumulation.

The same corporations profiting from ICE detention contracts benefit from Israeli weapons sales to Gaza. The same neoliberal austerity gutting domestic violence services in Britain enriches the billionaire class. The same imperialist powers that preach ‘women’s rights’ abroad enforce brutal reproductive control at home.

Our feminism is internationalist, anti-capitalist, and revolutionary. We reject liberal feminism’s dead-end of representation without power—having more female CEOs or right-wing female prime ministers does nothing for working-class women. We fight instead for a society where women’s liberation is achieved through the collective power of the working class to expropriate capital, abolish borders, and build democratic socialism.

This manifesto documents the current war against women under far-right rule across the globe, analyses its class character, and calls for organised, militant, international resistance. It is both a chronicle of atrocity and a blueprint for revolution.

II. The United States: Trump’s Deportation State and the War on Reproductive Freedom

A. ICE as Capitalist State Terror

The second Trump administration has transformed Immigration and Customs Enforcement into an apparatus of mass terror specifically targeting women, pregnant people, and children. This is not an aberration—it is capitalism’s immigration policy functioning exactly as designed to create a terrified, super-exploited underclass of migrant workers whose precarity serves capital’s profit margins (Detention Watch Network, 2026; Human Rights Watch, 2025).

Since Trump’s inauguration in January 2025, ICE detention has exploded by 75%, from 40,000 to a record 73,000 people by January 2026. The administration has allocated $45 billion for detention infrastructure—more than many countries spend on healthcare. ICE now operates over 100 additional facilities compared to early 2025, including hastily-constructed tent camps where thousands endure conditions Human Rights Watch (2025) describes as “cruel, inhuman, and degrading.”

These are not “detention centres.” They are concentration camps designed to profit private prison corporations like GEO Group and CoreCivic, which donate millions to politicians whilst extracting billions from taxpayers to warehouse human beings. This is the marriage of white supremacy and capitalism—turning racism into revenue whilst disciplining the entire working class through fear (Gonzalez O’Brien et al., 2019).

The gendered violence of this system is systematic. Despite statutory mandates to release pregnant women, ICE has violated this policy thousands of times since January 2025. The ACLU (2025) documented at least 14 cases of pregnant women mistreated in detention facilities between January and July 2025 alone—forced to sleep on cell floors, denied prenatal care, shackled during transport even whilst in labour, and left to miscarry alone in cells without medical attention.

Consider the testimony of Angie Rodriguez, a Colombian immigrant detained after a routine ICE check-in. Unable to eat the inedible food provided and denied adequate nutrition, she miscarried whilst in custody. Prison guards delayed medical care for hours. Consider Antonia Aguilar Maldonado, an El Salvadoran mother of two, arrested and detained for nearly a month despite still nursing her infant son. These are not isolated incidents—they are the policy. They represent state-sanctioned reproductive violence designed to terrorise migrant women and punish them for crossing borders in search of safety (ACLU, 2025).

2025 was the deadliest year in ICE detention history, with more deaths than the previous four years combined. Amnesty International’s (2025) December 2025 investigation of Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz” and Krome detention centres documented systematic human rights violations: overflowing toilets, 24-hour lighting designed to prevent sleep, deliberate medical neglect, prolonged solitary confinement, and routine violence by guards. A January 2026 leaked video from a Baltimore ICE facility showed overcrowded, unsanitary conditions where detainees sleep on concrete floors whilst rats crawl over them—conditions that would be prosecuted as criminal if inflicted on animals.

The class character of immigration enforcement is transparent. Despite the Trump administration’s claims to target “the worst of the worst,” as of November 2025, 73.6% of ICE detainees had no criminal conviction whatsoever. Of those with convictions, most were for minor offences like traffic violations. Only 5% of recent detainees had committed violent crimes (TRAC Immigration, 2025). This is not about public safety—it is about terrorising the working class and maintaining a permanent underclass of workers too frightened to demand their rights.

ICE workplace raids now target farms, construction sites, meatpacking plants, and factories—precisely where capital depends on super-exploited migrant labour. These workers, disproportionately women, toil for poverty wages in dangerous conditions with no legal protections. When they organise for better conditions or speak out against sexual harassment, ICE appears. When survivors of domestic violence seek help from authorities, ICE detains them. This creates a permanent underclass of workers too terrified to demand their rights, benefiting bosses whilst dividing the working class along racial and national lines (Detention Watch Network, 2026).

The detention system functions as a deportation machine: for every person released from ICE detention by November 2025, fourteen were deported directly from custody (TRAC Immigration, 2025). People are stripped of their right to bond hearings, denied meaningful access to lawyers, transferred across the country to prevent family contact, and psychologically pressured to abandon their legal cases. This is not justice—it is assembly-line expulsion designed to terrorise entire communities into silence and submission.

The reproductive violence embedded in this system cannot be overstated. Pregnant women in ICE custody cannot access abortion care, even in cases of rape, medical emergency, or unwanted pregnancy. Combined with the Supreme Court’s 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade and Project 2025/2026’s agenda to ban abortion nationwide, ICE detention becomes a mechanism for forced childbearing. This is state-enforced pregnancy. Women detained whilst fleeing domestic violence are denied the healthcare they need. Women who crossed borders seeking safety are punished with forced pregnancy and medical neglect (ACLU, 2025).

This connects directly to capitalism’s structural need to control women’s reproductive capacity—to maintain a reserve army of labour, to enforce patriarchal family structures that provide unpaid domestic labour, and to discipline women who step outside prescribed roles. The denial of reproductive autonomy is not a cultural relic but an economic imperative of capital accumulation (Federici, 2004).

Even children are weaponised. In October 2025, ICE began transferring unaccompanied minors to adult detention facilities upon turning 18, violating a 2021 court order requiring the least restrictive setting. The January 2026 detention of Adrian Conejo Arias and his five-year-old son Liam in Minnesota—captured in a viral photograph showing the terrified child clinging to his father whilst surrounded by armed agents—exemplifies how children are used as weapons of psychological warfare against their parents. Only rapid judicial intervention forced their release by February 3, 2026 (Detention Watch Network, 2026).

This deliberate cruelty serves a clear purpose: to deter migration by making the cost so unbearable that even those fleeing death will think twice. It is psychological warfare against the global working class, designed to prevent the international solidarity that threatens capital’s ability to pit workers against each other.

B. Project 2025/2026: Blueprint for Forced Motherhood

Whilst ICE terrorises migrant women, Project 2025/2026—the Heritage Foundation’s 900-page blueprint for far-right governance—threatens all women’s reproductive autonomy. Despite Trump’s campaign denials, his administration has implemented this agenda with ruthless efficiency. By January 2026, the Guttmacher Institute (2026) documented that virtually every major component of Project 2025/2026 had been enacted or was in progress.

Project 2025/2026 calls for a nationwide abortion ban enforced through the antiquated 1873 Comstock Act, which prohibits mailing “obscene” materials—a category they interpret to include abortion medication. The administration has already restricted access to mifepristone and misoprostol by mail, weaponising postal regulations to deny healthcare. They are embedding “foetal personhood” across federal agencies, laying the groundwork to criminalise abortion at conception. They have gutted Title IX protections against sex discrimination, defunded equity programmes, and eliminated the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights’ ability to enforce gender equality (National Women’s Law Centre, 2025).

The Trump administration has reinstated and expanded the global gag rule, cutting funding to international NGOs that provide abortion services, information, or advocacy—even with their own funds. They abruptly terminated all funding to UNFPA in February 2025, stripping critical reproductive healthcare from millions of women worldwide. They have systematically purged government websites containing sexual and reproductive health information, replacing evidence-based guidelines with anti-choice propaganda (Guttmacher Institute, 2026).

On day one of his second term, Trump issued an executive order mandating that the federal government recognise only “an individual’s immutable biological classification as either male or female”—a direct attack on transgender, gender nonconforming, and intersex people that also threatens all women by enforcing rigid gender categories. Within a week, he banned transgender individuals from serving in the military and ordered the termination of all diversity, equity, and inclusion programmes across the federal government, using “anti-woke” rhetoric to justify gutting civil rights protections (National Partnership for Women & Families, 2025).

This agenda explicitly seeks to impose a hierarchical, patriarchal vision of society centred on the “traditional family”—defined as a married heterosexual couple with fixed gender roles. As the National Women’s Law Centre (2025) analysis reveals, Project 2025/2026 is “designed to rebuild a country where women, queer people, trans people, and anyone outside their ‘ideal family’ have fewer rights.”

Yet this backlash also reveals capitalism’s crisis. The ruling class attacks women’s rights precisely because women’s liberation threatens the entire system. When women refuse to perform unpaid domestic labour, when we organise in workplaces, when we reject male authority and compulsory heterosexuality—capitalism’s foundations shake. The reproductive labour that sustains the workforce, the gender hierarchy that divides workers, the family structure that privatises care—all become unstable (Vogel, 2013).

III. Italy: Giorgia Meloni’s ‘Abusive Feminism’ and the Far-Right Appropriation of Women’s Rights

Italy under Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni exemplifies what scholars call “abusive feminism”—the use of feminist language and symbols by authoritarian or illiberal regimes to legitimise anti-democratic or oppressive practices (Farris, 2017). Meloni, Italy’s first female prime minister and leader of the far-right Fratelli d’Italia party (Brothers of Italy, with roots in Mussolini’s fascist movement), invokes her womanhood whilst dismantling protections for women and LGBTQ+ people.

Meloni’s strategy is sophisticated. She selectively champions certain “women’s rights”—particularly opposition to sexual violence by immigrant men—whilst attacking the structural conditions that enable women’s liberation. Recent scholarship reveals how Meloni weaponises women’s rights discourse to justify nationalist and anti-immigration positions, perpetuating orientalised representations of Muslim migrants grounded in the same colonial logic that justifies white supremacy (Korolczuk & Graff, 2018).

Her positioning as “the Christian mother of the homeland” is not incidental—it is central to her political project. She insists on being called “il Presidente del Consiglio” (the masculine form) rather than “la presidente,” claiming power has no gender. Yet this linguistic choice symbolises her refusal to imagine power in a female form, to challenge patriarchal hierarchies rather than simply occupy a position within them.

Under Meloni’s government, Italy has seen contradictory developments. In November 2025, parliament unanimously approved a law creating the specific crime of femicide punishable by life in prison—a response to the 2023 murder of 22-year-old Giulia Cecchettin by her ex-boyfriend, which galvanised mass protests. Meloni claimed credit, stating “we have doubled funding for anti-violence centres and shelters” (The Guardian, 2025).

Yet the same government has systematically undermined feminist progress. In November 2025, Italy’s Senate delayed until February 2026 a vote on legislation introducing consent into sexual violence law—a bill that had received unanimous approval in the Chamber of Deputies just one week earlier. The postponement occurred on International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, revealing the government’s priorities. When questioned, Meloni claimed the law “must be done right, not in haste,” despite having supported fast-tracking other legislation (Politico, 2025).

In August 2025, Meloni’s government proposed restricting access to gender-affirming care for people under 18. Her administration has pursued a repressive migration control model, including detaining people in Albania pending deportation and obstructing humanitarian rescues at sea. By September 2025, the government had detained rescue ships 34 times since February 2023, keeping vessels away from vital rescue operations for 700 cumulative days. Meanwhile, Interior Ministry reports show femicides continue unabated: 60 women murdered in the first seven months of 2025, with increasing percentages killed by partners or ex-partners (Human Rights Watch, 2025).

Meloni’s government has refused to ratify the Istanbul Convention on preventing and combating violence against women, claiming it promotes “gender ideology.” This follows a pattern across far-right Europe: Hungary also refused ratification on identical grounds. The rejection reveals how “protecting women” serves as cover for enforcing traditional gender roles and heteronormative family structures (Council of Europe, 2024).

Perhaps most tellingly, Meloni renamed the long-standing Ministry for Equal Opportunity to the Ministry for the Family, Birth Rate, and Equal Opportunities upon her election. This semantic shift signals her priority: women valued primarily as reproducers of the nation. She has framed continuing bans on comprehensive sex education as preventing ‘woke gender theory’ in schools, whilst opposition groups argue this keeps Italy grounded in its patriarchal past. Far-right MPs have resisted mandating emotional and relationship education that could prevent violence, preferring optional courses (The Local Italy, 2025).

Italy’s birth rate continues its 16-year decline, reaching 1.13 in the first seven months of 2025. Meloni blames women, claiming at a 2023 conference that too many young women are “pressured to focus on their careers first.” She pushes legislation criminalising surrogacy and allowing anti-abortion activists access to clinics. Official figures show some Italian women earn up to 40% less than men in the same jobs, yet Meloni’s “family-friendly” policies focus on incentivising childbirth rather than challenging workplace inequality (Eurostat, 2025).

From a Trotskyist perspective, Meloni’s “feminism” is revealed as bourgeois nationalism wrapped in pink packaging. She offers descriptive representation—a woman in power—whilst implementing policies that harm working-class women, migrant women, and LGBTQ+ people. Her selective defence of “Italian women” against “foreign threats” divides the working class along racial lines, preventing the international solidarity necessary to challenge capital. Her rhetoric about traditional families masks the capitalist need for unpaid domestic labour and the reproduction of the workforce through women’s bodies.

IV. Argentina: Javier Milei’s War on Feminism and the Dismantling of Rights

In Argentina, self-proclaimed “anarcho-capitalist” President Javier Milei has launched the most aggressive assault on women’s rights in Latin America. Since taking office in December 2023, Milei—who calls feminism “ridiculous” and abortion “aggravated homicide”—has systematically dismantled a decade of feminist gains won through militant grassroots struggle (UN CEDAW, 2025).

Argentina had been a beacon of feminist progress in Latin America. The 2015 Ni Una Menos (Not One Less) movement, sparked by the femicide of 14-year-old Chiara Páez, mobilised hundreds of thousands to demand an end to gender-based violence. In 2019, the government created the Ministry for Women, Gender, and Diversity to eradicate violence and strengthen rights for women and gender-diverse people. In 2020, Argentina legalised abortion within the first 14 weeks of pregnancy, free of charge—a victory celebrated across the continent (Sutton & Borland, 2018).

Milei has methodically destroyed this infrastructure. His first act was abolishing the Ministry of Women, Gender, and Diversity, transferring its functions to the Ministry of Human Capital before shuttering even that remnant in June 2024. What had been an independent ministry became a pared-down undersecretariat, then disappeared entirely. Argentina now lacks a national state department dedicated to gender policy for the first time since 1992 (UN CEDAW, 2025).

The consequences are catastrophic. According to a December 2025 UN CEDAW review, Argentina has implemented an 89% cut since 2024 in funding to combat gender-based violence. The 144 Line—a crisis hotline assisting women and LGBTQ+ people experiencing violence—remains operational but faces crippling budget cuts threatening staff reductions precisely when calls have surged. Of the 105 Centres for Access to Justice operating in 2023, only 30 remained open by September 2025 (UN CEDAW, 2025).

Funding for Comprehensive Sexual Education (ESI) was eliminated in the 2025 budget. The ENIA Plan, credited with significantly reducing teenage pregnancy, has been dismantled. The national government has stepped back from purchasing and distributing contraceptives and abortion medication to provinces, contributing to shortages of misoprostol and interruptions in condom provision during 2025. The proposed 2026 national budget would eliminate nearly 90% of remaining resources for violence prevention, sexual and reproductive health, and sexuality education (Amnesty International, 2025).

Milei’s rhetoric has been brutally misogynistic. He has publicly attacked female artists and journalists who support women’s rights, leading to torrents of online abuse, including doxing and death threats. His Justice Minister, Mariano Cúneo Libarona, announced plans to remove femicide from Argentina’s Penal Code, claiming it violates “equality before the law.”

At the January 2025 World Economic Forum in Davos, Milei declared: “We have even got to the point of normalising the fact that in many supposedly civilised countries, if you kill a woman, it is called femicide, and this carries more serious punishment than if you kill a man simply based on the sex of the victim—legally making a woman’s life worth more than that of a man” (World Economic Forum, 2025).

This is a deliberate misunderstanding—or deliberate lie. Femicide laws recognise gender-based violence as an aggravating factor, acknowledging that women are killed because they are women, as punishment for transgressing patriarchal expectations. Milei’s Security Minister Patricia Bullrich shockingly attributed the rise in femicides to ‘excesses of feminism,’ shifting blame from perpetrators to victims and normalising gender-based violence (The Guardian, 2025).

Yet femicides continue at alarming rates. According to the Feminist Observatory Ni Una Menos, 247 femicides were recorded in 2025. In October 2025 alone, there were 29 femicides, including transfemicides. Restraining orders and other safeguards prove ineffective. Under Milei, lethal violence against women “remains at critical levels” according to CEDAW, pointing to “structural shortcomings” in protection systems (UN CEDAW, 2025).

Milei’s party, La Libertad Avanza, presented a draft bill in February 2024 to recriminalise abortion, outlining that women who terminate pregnancies and those who perform them would face prison sentences. Healthcare professionals performing abortions would be struck off the medical register. The bill aims to repeal Law 27610, which provides the right to safe, legal abortion. Whilst the bill has not passed, its introduction signals Milei’s intent (Amnesty International, 2025).

In February 2025, Milei issued Decree 62/2025, imposing serious restrictions on the right to gender identity for trans and non-binary people, particularly youth. Decree 61/2025 violates the dignity of trans people deprived of liberty. These attacks came days after hundreds of thousands marched across Argentina, rejecting Milei’s Davos statements slandering LGBTQ+ and feminist movements. CEDAW documented a 70% rise in reported hate crimes against LGBTQ+ people in the first half of 2025, citing official rhetoric that ‘pathologises’ sexual and gender diversity (UN CEDAW, 2025).

For Indigenous women, the situation is even more dire. Moira Millán, a Mapuche weichafe (warrior), wrote in June 2025: “Since your inauguration as governor, and that of Javier Milei as president, racist, gendered, ageist, and other forms of hatred have become state policy. Money which should be allocated to health, education, and food is instead being spent on bullets against the Mapuche people, and in particular, against women.” In early 2025, the Argentine Gendarmerie raided Millán’s home with 100 troops, kicking down doors and destroying property. Her territory remains under surveillance, and she receives regular death threats (Millán, 2025).

Milei’s austerity measures have devastated working-class Argentinians. According to official data, 31.6% of the population experienced poverty in June 2025, down from 54.8% in June 2024—but this masks rising inequality. As of June 2025, 6.9% lived in extreme poverty, unable to meet basic food needs, and 45.4% of children under 14 lived in poverty. The share of informal workers lacking social security increased to 37.7%, with 1.1 million unemployed (INDEC, 2025).

From a Trotskyist perspective, Milei’s assault on women reveals the class character of far-right “libertarianism.” His “chainsaw cuts” to social spending disproportionately harm women, who depend more heavily on public services for healthcare, childcare, and protection from violence. His attacks on feminism serve capital by destroying the infrastructure that enables women to work outside the home, pushing them back into unpaid domestic labour. His Indigenous land grabs serve extractive industries seeking to exploit Patagonia’s resources. The same capitalist class that profits from austerity benefits from women’s re-subordination to patriarchal control.

Yet Argentine women continue resisting. On International Women’s Day 2025, thousands marched in Buenos Aires demanding an end to Milei’s “chainsaw cuts.” The National Federation of University Teachers staged a one-day strike. Grassroots movements organise despite brutal repression. As one marcher told reporters: “What are you left with as a citizen to confront these strong policies against women, members of the LGBTQ collective, and retirees? We have to take to the streets, and with joy. Many difficult things leave you stuck at home, but then what happens is that someone finds hope, the possibility that another way is possible” (Télam, 2025).

V. El Salvador: Bukele’s Total Abortion Ban, State Terror, and the U.S. Deportation Pipeline

El Salvador under President Nayib Bukele represents a crystalline example of how far-right authoritarianism, state terror, and U.S. imperial interests converge to wage war on women. Since taking power in 2019, Bukele—who positions himself as Trump’s “unconditional ally” and the “world’s coolest dictator”—has systematically dismantled feminist gains, criminalised reproductive healthcare, imprisoned women for miscarriages, and built what Human Rights Watch calls a “prison system of terror” that now houses deported migrants from the United States (Freedom House, 2025; Human Rights Watch, 2026).

From a Trotskyist feminist perspective, El Salvador reveals how capitalism’s crisis drives authoritarianism that depends on controlling women’s bodies, crushing feminist organising, and partnering with imperial powers to profit from human warehousing. Bukele’s regime shows that the “Fascist International” is not merely ideological—it involves material collaboration, with the U.S. paying El Salvador $6 million to imprison deportees in conditions amounting to torture, whilst Bukele uses state violence to enforce total reproductive control over Salvadoran women (Context by TRF, 2025).

A. The World’s Strictest Abortion Ban: Imprisoning Women for Obstetric Emergencies

El Salvador has enforced a total abortion ban since 1998, criminalising abortion under all circumstances, including rape, incest, foetal abnormalities incompatible with life, or threats to the pregnant person’s life. The 1999 constitutional amendment recognising “life from the moment of conception” transformed every pregnancy into potential evidence of a crime (Safe2Choose, 2025).

The consequences are catastrophic. Since 1998, at least 181 women have been prosecuted and imprisoned for obstetric emergencies—miscarriages, stillbirths, ectopic pregnancies, and other medical complications. Women face sentences ranging from 2 to 50 years for what doctors classify as medical emergencies, not crimes. Hospitals function as surveillance sites where medical staff are legally required to report suspected abortions or face prosecution themselves (Center for Reproductive Rights, 2025; Democracy Now!, 2025).

The case of Manuela exemplifies this brutality. In 2008, this 33-year-old woman with limited economic resources experienced an obstetric emergency and pregnancy loss. Hospital staff failed to provide timely treatment, instead verbally abusing her and accusing her of abortion. Police shackled her to the stretcher and interrogated her without legal representation. She was convicted of aggravated homicide and sentenced to 30 years. Two years into her imprisonment, Manuela died of cancer after receiving inadequate medical diagnosis and treatment, leaving her two children orphaned (Center for Reproductive Rights, 2021).

In November 2021, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights found El Salvador responsible for Manuela’s death, ruling that the country’s total ban on abortion creates “discrimination and gender violence” that disproportionately impacts poor women and leads to the criminalisation of obstetric emergencies. The Court ordered El Salvador to ban the criminalisation of women for obstetric emergencies, reform doctor-patient confidentiality laws to prevent medical personnel from denouncing women, remove automatic detention provisions, and guarantee full healthcare access (Center for Reproductive Rights, 2025).

Yet under Bukele, compliance remains nonexistent. In December 2024, the Inter-American Court ruled again in the case of Beatriz, a woman denied an abortion in 2013 despite her life-threatening lupus and a foetus with anencephaly, certain not to survive. The Court condemned El Salvador’s “obstetric violence” and failure to protect health and human rights. Whilst the last imprisoned woman was released in December 2023, 11 similar cases remain pending, and the underlying law criminalising abortion persists unchanged (Worldcrunch, 2025).

The class character of this criminalisation is transparent. As Congresswoman Norma Torres observes, “Most of these imprisoned women are poor, living in rural areas, and have little to no education. They are the ones who are wrongfully targeted, vilified, and publicly shamed.” One survivor estimated that “90% of the women who are in prison in El Salvador are in prison for this” (Torres, n.d.; Democracy Now!, 2025). This is reproductive violence as class warfare—using state power to terrorise poor women into compulsory childbearing whilst wealthy women access abortion abroad.

B. The War on “Gender Ideology”: Dismantling Feminist Infrastructure

Bukele has waged a systematic war on what he calls “gender ideology”—a term encompassing feminism, LGBTQ+ rights, comprehensive sex education, and any challenge to patriarchal norms. This attack mirrors the global far-right playbook deployed from Hungary to Argentina, revealing coordinated transnational strategies (Peoples Dispatch, 2025).

In June 2019, Bukele eliminated the Secretariat for Social Inclusion, responsible for gender and sexual diversity issues. The Salvadoran Institute for the Development of Women (ISDEMU), once tasked with directing all gender policies, saw its budget slashed by nearly 50% in just two years—from $12 million annually in 2023 to $7 million in 2025. In December 2024, ISDEMU laid off more than 100 employees. Commemorations of International Women’s Day, Pride, and the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women were banned, with the Presidential House messaging gender unit heads to do nothing—no social media posts, no events, no public communication (Truthdig, 2025; Heinrich Böll Stiftung, 2025a).

In February 2024, Bukele banned the teaching of “gender ideology” in public schools. Transgender women are now legally required to identify as “very high-risk men”—a dehumanising classification that renders them targets for state and societal violence. The legislature ignores a 2022 Supreme Court order to create legal gender recognition procedures, effectively erasing trans people from legal existence. El Salvador does not allow same-sex marriage and lacks comprehensive anti-LGBT discrimination legislation. CEDAW documented a 70% rise in reported hate crimes against LGBTQ+ people in the first half of 2025, citing official rhetoric that “pathologises” sexual and gender diversity (Freedom House, 2025; Human Rights Watch, 2026).

The May 2025 Foreign Agents Law imposes a 30% tax on social organisations and requires them to register with a government agency that decides whether they can operate. Feminist activists predict this will force most organisations to cease operations by the end of 2025. As one activist told researchers: “We believe our organisation will only be able to operate until the end of 2025, meaning that many women human rights defenders will lose their jobs” (Heinrich Böll Stiftung, 2025b).

Feminist organisations face systematic persecution. Before the November 2024 march commemorating the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, two organisations identified police surveillance outside their offices. Keyla Cáceres, a feminist activist, faced police harassment before and after the march. Unknown men in vehicles shouted at her that she had “self-censored” during a radio interview about gender-based violence. She subsequently lost her job when police agents guarded her workplace perimeter. Ruth López, a human rights attorney critical of Bukele, was arrested in May 2025 and remains detained (Heinrich Böll Stiftung, 2025b).

Yet resistance persists. On 28 June 2025, thousands marched in San Salvador for Pride, with the march stretching over 20 city blocks—one of the largest demonstrations of 2025 alongside International Women’s Day. As activist Valentina Vigil declared whilst marching in a crown and sash reading “Miss Trans Pride”: feminist and LGBTQ+ movements have become “the face of resistance” in El Salvador (Peoples Dispatch, 2025).

C. The State of Emergency: Mass Incarceration and Women’s Invisible Labour

Since March 2022, Bukele has ruled under a perpetual “state of exception” that suspends constitutional rights, now entering its fourth year. This emergency regime has resulted in over 90,000 arrests—many arbitrary—and at least 454 deaths in custody, including four babies imprisoned with their mothers and 11 people ordered released by courts (Freedom House, 2025; Human Rights Watch, 2026; Women’s Media Centre, 2025).

An underappreciated consequence is the gendered impact on women whose lives are overturned when loved ones are imprisoned without trial. Women bear the financial and emotional costs of mass incarceration. As one researcher notes: “It is the women, ignored by this government, who are financing Bukele’s security policies” through unpaid care labour, sending money and supplies to imprisoned relatives, raising children alone, and navigating bureaucracies to locate disappeared family members (Women’s Media Centre, 2025).

One woman, Jacqueline, was herself arrested and imprisoned on 21 September 2021, as was her son. Both experienced the terror of detention without charges. The emotional toll is devastating—women’s hands shake, voices tremble, bodies shrink in chairs when recounting their experiences. They carry bags of documents as evidence, desperately trying to prove their loved ones’ innocence in a system designed to presume guilt (Peoples Dispatch, 2025).

Whilst Bukele claims El Salvador is now “the safest country in the Western Hemisphere,” with homicide rates at historic lows and 85% approval ratings as of June 2025, the reality for women tells a different story. Data from the women’s rights organisation ORMUSA show that rates of sexual violence have increased since the state of exception was declared. Women fear the police and army patrolling their neighbourhoods with impunity. The violence has not disappeared—it has been redistributed and intensified against women (The Loop, 2025; Freedom House, 2025).

As researchers Julia Zulver and Anne Ruelle observe: “The State of Exception has triggered new insecurities, and worsened old ones. Through women’s experiences as activists, mothers, and incarcerated people, our research reveals a counter-narrative to the purported successes of the ‘Bukele model.’ The damage is no longer collateral. Rather, it has become central to understanding the story behind the propaganda that sells mass incarceration as a straightforward and effective solution to violence” (The Loop, 2025).

D. CECOT and the U.S. Deportation Pipeline: Imperialism’s Prison for Rent

The Terrorism Confinement Centre (CECOT) is the physical manifestation of Bukele’s authoritarian vision and the material connection between his regime and U.S. imperialism. Opened in February 2023, this mega-prison can hold 40,000 inmates in eight cell blocks. Each of the 256 cells houses an average of 156 inmates in 0.6 square metres of space per person—below international standards. Cells are windowless with metal bunks, no mattresses, two toilets without privacy, and 24-hour artificial lighting. Cameras and armed guards are constantly present. There is no outdoor recreation, no family visits, no rehabilitation. As one deportee testified: “When you get there, you already know you’re in hell. You don’t need anyone to tell you” (CBC News, 2025; Britannica, 2025).

In February 2025, during U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s visit, Bukele offered to accept “dangerous American criminals” and incarcerate them at CECOT “in exchange for a fee.” Rubio praised this as “the most unprecedented and extraordinary migratory agreement anywhere in the world.” Trump took him up on it immediately (CNN, 2025).

In March 2025, the Trump administration invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798—a rarely-used wartime law previously invoked only during the War of 1812 and both World Wars—to deport 300 alleged gang members to CECOT. The U.S. paid El Salvador $6 million to hold these prisoners for one year. Despite a federal judge’s order to stop the deportations, the administration proceeded anyway. By April, 238 alleged Tren de Aragua members and 23 alleged MS-13 members had been deported to CECOT without trial (Britannica, 2025; Context by TRF, 2025).

The Trump-Bukele alliance reveals the imperial logic of borders and deportation. The U.S. uses El Salvador as a dumping ground for people it deems undesirable, paying Bukele to warehouse them in torturous conditions. Bukele gains financial resources and burnishes his strongman image. Both benefit from the spectacle of cruelty—Trump demonstrates “tough” immigration enforcement to his base, Bukele demonstrates “security” to Salvadorans. The humans caught in this machine are rendered disposable.

Crucially, many deportees had no criminal records. At least 48.8% of Venezuelans deported on the March flights had no criminal history in the United States. At least 62 had fled Maduro’s repression in Venezuela and had pending asylum cases. Department of Homeland Security agents lied to them about where they were being sent and refused their requests to contact families (Senator Welch, 2025; Human Rights Watch, 2025).

A December 2025 Human Rights Watch and Cristosal investigation documented systematic torture in CECOT. Every former detainee interviewed reported being subjected to serious physical and psychological abuse on a near-daily basis throughout their detention. People were beaten from the moment they arrived and throughout their time in detention. Guards and riot police beat them in hallways and in solitary confinement cells in a section known as “the Island.” They beat them during daily cell searches for allegedly violating prison rules like speaking loudly or showering at the wrong time. They beat them for requesting medical treatment. Three people reported sexual violence (Senator Welch, 2025).

Human Rights Watch concluded: “These cases of torture and ill-treatment were not isolated incidents by rogue guards but rather systematic violations that took place repeatedly. These beatings and other abuses appear to be part of a practice designed to subjugate, humiliate, and discipline detainees through the imposition of grave physical and psychological suffering” (Senator Welch, 2025).

The Venezuelan deportees were eventually repatriated in July 2025 following a prisoner swap involving El Salvador, the U.S., and Venezuela. But Trump has indicated plans for similar flights and even floated the possibility of sending U.S. citizens to CECOT—legally impossible but revealing of authoritarian ambitions. At their April 2025 meeting, Trump told Bukele he should “build about five more places” like CECOT. Guatemala, Costa Rica, and Chile have announced plans to build CECOT-inspired prisons (Britannica, 2025; CNN, 2025).

E. Authoritarianism, Imperialism, and Women’s Oppression

El Salvador under Bukele reveals several crucial dynamics of contemporary capitalism’s crisis:

First, far-right authoritarianism depends on controlling women’s reproductive capacity. The total abortion ban serves multiple functions: it enforces compulsory motherhood, disciplines women who transgress patriarchal expectations, maintains a reserve army of labour through forced childbearing, and demonstrates state power over life and death. The criminalisation of obstetric emergencies is not a bug but a feature—it terrorises all women into compliance whilst specifically targeting poor women who cannot access abortion abroad.

Second, the war on “gender ideology” serves capital by destroying infrastructure that enables women’s independence. When ISDEMU is defunded, when feminist organisations are taxed into non-existence, and when comprehensive sex education is banned, women lose resources to resist patriarchal control. The resulting re-privatisation of social reproduction—women forced back into unpaid domestic labour, into economic dependence on men, into traditional family structures—benefits capital by extracting free reproductive labour whilst cutting public spending.

Third, mass incarceration is gendered warfare against the working class. Whilst men are imprisoned, women perform the unpaid labour of maintaining imprisoned relatives—sending money, supplies, and emotional support. As one researcher observes, women are “financing Bukele’s security policies” through this invisible work. Meanwhile, the same state that claims to provide “security” presides over increasing sexual violence against women. The carceral state does not protect women—it intensifies violence against us whilst forcing us to subsidise imprisonment through our labour.

Fourth, the Trump-Bukele deportation deal exemplifies how imperialism and local authoritarianism collaborate for mutual benefit. The U.S. externalises the “problem” of unwanted migrants whilst maintaining the spectacle of border enforcement. Bukele receives payment and international legitimation for his prison state. The same corporations (GEO Group, CoreCivic) that profit from ICE detention in the U.S. benefit from this arrangement. Borders serve capital by creating hierarchies of exploitability—some workers can be super-exploited within U.S. borders, others can be disappeared into Salvadoran dungeons. Either way, capital profits from human warehousing.

Fifth, Bukele’s popularity despite brutal repression reveals how capitalism in crisis turns to authoritarian “solutions.” When neoliberalism fails to deliver security or prosperity, the far right offers a bargain: accept the erosion of rights in exchange for the promise of order. This bargain disproportionately harms women, LGBTQ+ people, and the poor—those whose rights are sacrificed for the “security” of the more privileged. Yet the violence does not disappear; it is redistributed and intensified against those least able to defend themselves.

Sixth, El Salvador demonstrates that the “Fascist International” operates through material networks, not just shared ideology. Trump and Bukele collaborate to build a hemisphere-wide system of border enforcement and mass incarceration that profits both regimes. The deportation contract is not symbolic—it is a $6 million transaction that materially links U.S. imperialism to Salvadoran authoritarianism. Women pay the price on both sides: migrant women terrorised by ICE in the U.S., Salvadoran women imprisoned for miscarriages, and women everywhere forced into unpaid care labour to sustain this system.

Yet resistance continues. Salvadoran feminist and LGBTQ+ movements remain “the face of resistance” despite systematic persecution. International solidarity is essential—not through supporting U.S. intervention (which created the conditions for this crisis through decades of military aid, economic exploitation, and deportation of gang members) but through building transnational working-class movements. The Inter-American Court rulings on Manuela and Beatriz show that international legal pressure can force change, though implementation requires political will that Bukele refuses to provide.

The task for revolutionary feminists is clear: expose these connections, build international solidarity with Salvadoran women’s movements, oppose both U.S. deportation policies and Bukele’s authoritarianism as two sides of the same imperialist coin, and fight for a world where borders are abolished, abortion is accessible, prisons are dismantled, and women are free from state violence. Only the overthrow of capitalism and imperialism—through organised working-class struggle led by the most oppressed—can guarantee lasting liberation.

El Salvador under Bukele is not an aberration but a logical endpoint of capitalism in crisis: authoritarian control over women’s bodies, destruction of feminist infrastructure, mass incarceration subsidised by women’s unpaid labour, and material collaboration between imperial and local elites to profit from human suffering. The same dynamics operate from ICE cages in the United States to CECOT cells in El Salvador—borders, prisons, and reproductive control functioning together to maintain capitalist class rule whilst women bear the cost.

VI. Hungary: Viktor Orbán’s Demographic Nationalism and the Instrumentalisation of Women

Hungary under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán represents perhaps the clearest European example of how far-right authoritarianism instrumentalises women’s bodies for nationalist demographic projects. Since 2010, Orbán has systematically undermined judicial independence, cracked down on independent media and civil society, demonised migrants and asylum seekers, discriminated against LGBTQ+ people, and undercut women’s rights—all whilst ruling increasingly by decree through perpetual states of emergency (Freedom House, 2025).

Orbán’s approach to gender is explicit: “Demographics stands or falls [on women].” His government has implemented “family-friendly policies” designed to increase the birth rate of ethnic Hungarians to prevent the need for immigration. Women who bear four or more children never pay income tax again. The more children a family has, the less income tax they pay. These incentives explicitly aim to turn women into reproducers of the nation—what feminist scholars call “wombs of the nation,” echoing Nazi Germany’s eugenicist policies (Grzebalska & Pető, 2018).

This demographic panic is rooted in white nationalist “great replacement” theory, claiming European civilisation faces extinction due to immigration from Muslim-majority countries. Orbán’s draconian measures against migrants and refugees flow directly from this ideology. His refusal to ratify the Istanbul Convention on violence against women was justified by claims it promotes “gender ideology” and would protect migrant women—an unacceptable outcome for a government committed to ethnic purity (Council of Europe, 2020).

In April 2025, Hungary’s parliament rushed through constitutional amendments without public debate that represent an escalation in Orbán’s authoritarian drive. The amendments banned public LGBTQ+ events, including Budapest Pride, although local authorities and record crowds defied the restrictions. The amendments also enabled authorities to ‘suspend’ Hungarian citizenship for non-EU dual citizens deemed threats to ‘public order’ or ‘national security’—a provision critics fear will target journalists, activists, and opposition politicians (Human Rights Watch, 2025).

Women’s political representation in Hungary is amongst the lowest in the EU. Between 2012 and 2015, only 9.7% of MPs were female. Orbán’s third government (2014-2018) had zero female ministers. When asked in 2015 why his government had no female members, Orbán replied that women “could not stand the stress that comes along with participating in Hungarian politics.” In 2017, when questioned about the unexpected withdrawal of Hungary’s female ambassador to the United States, he dismissively said he does not deal with “women’s issues” (Kováts & Põim, 2015).

Yet Orbán promotes an archaic vision where “women should stay at home as homemakers whilst men go to work and provide for their families.” In 2022, Hungary’s economic watchdog—close to the government—released a report arguing that “education is becoming too feminine” and that this endangers the economy. The report claimed “an increase in female graduates could make women less likely to marry and have children,” explicitly framing women’s education as threatening to national demographic goals (Hungarian Economic Development Centre, 2022).

Hungary has not ratified the Istanbul Convention, leaving systematic gaps in protection for survivors of domestic violence. Despite government claims of tripling care system capacity, advocates report that women repeatedly seeking help for abuse find authorities take no action. In June 2025, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Hungary breached the European Convention when authorities forcibly separated a Roma mother from her newborn without justification in 2014—illustrating how racism compounds gender oppression (European Court of Human Rights, 2025).

Since 2010, no governmental funding has been available to support civil society organisations working on gender equality and women’s rights. The Thematic Working Group on Women’s Rights, which includes 20 CSOs, exists in a highly formal capacity with limited actual influence. The Department of Adoption and Women’s Policy has distributed no funds to NGOs in the past five years (Kováts & Põim, 2015).

Orbán’s Constitution, which came into force in 2012, states that “the life of the foetus must be protected from the moment of conception.” Whilst abortion remains legal (legalised after World War II), Orbán publicly supports anti-abortion organisations and in 2017 opened the World Congress of Families conference in Budapest—a U.S.-based coalition promoting Christian right values globally and virulently opposing abortion (World Congress of Families, 2017).

Orbán’s Hungary reveals how far-right nationalism requires control over women’s reproductive capacity. The nation-state, a political form serving capitalist class interests, demands the biological reproduction of a racially-defined “people.” Women’s bodies become contested territory in demographic warfare. Tax incentives for childbearing function as bribes to extract reproductive labour whilst positioning motherhood as women’s primary social contribution. This is not “pro-family”—it is pro-natalist eugenics serving capital’s need for an ethnically homogeneous, ideologically compliant workforce.

VI. Palestine: Gender-Based Genocide in Gaza and Imperial Complicity

The catastrophe in Gaza continues into 2026 as a textbook case of imperialist genocide with profoundly gendered dimensions. Women and children comprise 70% of over 34,000 Palestinians killed since October 2023. This is not war—it is deliberate extermination subsidised by U.S. weapons and British diplomatic cover, carried out by a settler-colonial state enforcing apartheid (UN OCHA, 2025).

Nearly one million women and girls have been displaced, with entire neighbourhoods reduced to rubble and basic infrastructure systematically destroyed. UN experts have condemned this “continued and systematic onslaught,” documenting horrific accounts of sexual violence, torture, and mass graves. Rates of gender-based violence have skyrocketed, with many women reporting sexual assault and abuse by Israeli forces. Four in five Gazans face hunger or starvation due to the blockade that functions as a weapon of collective punishment (UN Women, 2025).

Displaced women in overcrowded shelters lack privacy, sanitation, and safety. Many avoid eating or drinking to limit exposure to unsanitary conditions—a survival strategy that causes severe health consequences. With hospitals overwhelmed or destroyed, pregnant women struggle to access critical medical care. The resultant trauma—physical, psychological, intergenerational—is immense. Mothers grapple with the loss of children, widows bear the weight of sole responsibility for surviving family members, and girls face interrupted education and increased vulnerability to trafficking and exploitation (Brighton Sisters Salon, 2025).

Yet humanitarian aid reaches Gaza at a trickle—only 0.9% of emergency funds reach women’s organisations. This is not incompetence; it is policy. The same Western powers that instrumentalise ‘women’s rights’ to justify wars in Afghanistan and Iraq arm the Israeli military to the teeth. The same governments that claim to support feminism provide diplomatic cover for a genocidal assault where women and children are the primary victims (UN OCHA, 2025).

From an internationalist perspective, Palestinian women’s resistance is inseparable from the global anti-imperialist struggle. We reject both Zionist settler-colonialism—which uses gender discourse to portray itself as “the only democracy in the Middle East” whilst enforcing apartheid—and reactionary Islamism, which oppresses women in the name of resistance. We stand instead with secular, democratic, and socialist forces fighting for a free Palestine as part of a socialist federation of the Middle East.

The connections between struggles are material, not metaphorical. The same corporations profiting from weapons sold to Israel benefit from ICE detention contracts in the United States. The same imperialist powers that fund Israel’s military enforce borders that kill migrants. The same capitalist system that requires permanent war for profit requires the oppression of women to maintain its workforce through unpaid reproductive labour (Klein, 2007).

VII. Afghanistan, Sudan, United Kingdom, and Mexico: Additional Fronts in the Global War on Women

A. Afghanistan: Taliban Gender Apartheid

Afghanistan remains what Human Rights Watch calls “the world’s most serious women’s rights crisis.” Since the Taliban’s return to power—facilitated by U.S. imperialism’s chaotic withdrawal after twenty years of failed occupation—1.4 million girls have been banned from secondary and higher education. Women have been virtually erased from public life: barred from most employment, forced to cover their faces, forbidden from travelling without male guardians.

The Taliban’s 2023 ban on the sale has potentially fatal consequences in a country where an Afghan woman dies from pregnancy or childbirth complications every two hours. This “social femicide”—the deliberate erasure of women from society—serves reactionary religious fundamentalism whilst enriching Taliban leaders through opium trade and international aid skimming (Human Rights Watch, 2025; UNESCO, 2025).

B. Sudan: Conflict and Displacement

Sudan’s ongoing civil war has created catastrophic conditions for women. Gender-based violence increased two-fold in 2025, with over 30% of Sudanese women reporting experiencing such violence in the past year. An estimated 1.2 million women and girls need critical humanitarian assistance. The International Service for Human Rights documents ethnicity-based attacks deliberately targeting women—killed, beaten, and abducted with alarming frequency. Nearly 930,000 Sudanese refugees in Chad, 90% of them women and children, strain already scarce resources. This crisis emerges from the 2019 revolution’s failure to establish working-class power, creating a vacuum filled by competing military factions (UN Women, 2025; ISHR, 2024).

C. United Kingdom: Austerity’s Gendered Violence

Beneath Britain’s liberal democratic facade lies systematic neglect, leaving women isolated and voiceless. Nearly one in four women has experienced domestic abuse, yet austerity measures have cut funding to domestic violence refuges by 24%. For migrant and ethnic minority women, bureaucratic barriers and deportation fears discourage reporting abuse. The new Labour government under Keir Starmer hints at reforms but refuses to challenge the capitalist framework, creating gender inequality. True liberation requires dismantling the class system, abolishing immigration controls, and building a society where women’s safety is guaranteed through economic equality, not austerity-starved charity (Women’s Budget Group, 2024; Office for National Statistics, 2024).

D. Mexico: Progress Without Protection

Mexico embodies the contradiction of ‘progress without protection.’ Despite legal reforms and increased female political representation, hundreds of women are murdered each year in one of the world’s highest femicide rates. The justice system chronically fails to hold perpetrators accountable. This reflects capitalism’s inability to deliver genuine equality—legal equality means nothing without economic power. Mexican women’s situation is inseparable from NAFTA-era neoliberalism, drug war militarisation, and maquiladora super-exploitation. Young women working in border factories for poverty wages are particularly vulnerable to violence that the capitalist class profits from (Women’s Voices Now, 2024; Statista, 2025).

VIII. Theoretical Analysis: The Fascist International and Capitalism’s Crisis

The assaults on women’s rights documented in this manifesto are not isolated national phenomena but manifestations of a global far-right offensive coordinated across borders. What we witness is the emergence of a “Fascist International”—not a formal organisation but a transnational network of far-right governments, parties, think tanks, and movements that share ideological frameworks, tactical approaches, and material support.

This network connects Trump’s Heritage Foundation to Orbán’s Budapest demographic conferences, Meloni’s Christian nationalism to Milei’s anti-feminist diatribes. They meet at forums like the World Economic Forum and the World Congress of Families. They learn from each other’s policy successes—Orbán’s demographic incentives inspire similar proposals elsewhere, Trump’s ‘gender ideology’ executive orders echo Hungarian and Italian rhetoric, Milei’s ministry abolitions provide a template for dismantling feminist infrastructure (Blee & Creasap, 2010).

The shared ideological framework centres on several key elements:

First, demographic panic rooted in white nationalist “great replacement” theory. Whether framed as concern about “European civilisation,” “Christian values,” or “Western culture,” this ideology positions women’s bodies as battlegrounds for racial reproduction. Women who refuse childbearing, who prioritise careers or education, who access abortion or contraception—these women threaten the nation’s demographic future and must be disciplined back into reproductive service.

Second, attacks on “gender ideology” as a flexible signifier encompassing feminism, LGBTQ+ rights, comprehensive sex education, and any challenge to traditional gender roles. This language, developed in Catholic anti-feminist organising in the 1990s and refined across Europe and Latin America, allows far-right forces to unite religious fundamentalists, mainstream conservatives, and neo-fascists around opposition to progressive gender norms (Korolczuk & Graff, 2018).

Third, instrumentalisation of “women’s rights” discourse for racist and nationalist ends. Meloni defends “Italian women” from migrant men. Trump claims to protect “women’s sports” from trans athletes. Orbán refuses to ratify the Istanbul Convention because it would protect migrant women. This selective feminism divides women along racial and national lines, preventing the international solidarity necessary to challenge capital (Farris, 2017).

Fourth, austerity as gendered warfare. From Argentina to Britain, far-right governments slash social spending that women depend on—healthcare, childcare, domestic violence services, and reproductive healthcare. These cuts push women back into unpaid domestic labour, re-privatising the costs of social reproduction that capitalism requires but refuses to fund (Fraser, 2016).

But why now? Why this coordinated global offensive? The answer lies in capitalism’s structural crisis. Facing declining profit rates, climate catastrophe, rising working-class resistance, and the exhaustion of neoliberalism’s capacity to manage contradictions, the global ruling class turns to authoritarianism and scapegoating. Women become convenient targets because women’s liberation genuinely threatens capitalism’s foundations.

Capitalism requires women’s unpaid domestic labour—the cooking, cleaning, childcare, and eldercare that reproduces the workforce daily and generationally. When women refuse this labour, demand wages for it, or reduce it through smaller families and collective childcare, capitalism faces a crisis of social reproduction. When women organise in workplaces, they challenge the gender wage gap and occupational segregation that allow capital to pay women less for the same work. When women access abortion and contraception, they gain control over the timing and frequency of childbearing, disrupting capital’s need for a reserve army of labour (Federici, 2004; Vogel, 2013).

The far-right backlash attempts to restore patriarchal control as a mechanism of class rule. By forcing women back into traditional gender roles, capital secures unpaid reproductive labour. By attacking LGBTQ+ people and comprehensive sex education, it enforces heteronormative families as privatised units of social reproduction. By weaponising ‘protection’ of women against racialised men, it divides the working class and legitimises borders, deportations, and imperial wars.

This analysis reveals why liberal feminism is inadequate. Representation without redistribution of power and wealth accomplishes nothing. Having female presidents, CEOs, or generals within capitalism does not change the situation for working-class women. Meloni, as prime minister, implements policies as anti-woman as any male fascist. Kamala Harris, as vice president, oversaw ICE deportations. Margaret Thatcher pioneered neoliberal austerity that devastated women. Female empowerment within capitalism is often seen as bourgeois women joining the ruling class in exploiting working-class women (Arruzza et al., 2019).

IX. A Revolutionary Programme for Women’s Liberation

Against this global offensive, we propose a revolutionary programme rooted in working-class struggle and internationalist solidarity. This programme recognises that women’s liberation is impossible under capitalism and that reform is insufficient. We need revolution.

1. Abolish ICE and all immigration controls. Open borders for workers, closed borders for capital. Full citizenship rights for all migrants. End detention and deportation. Immigration controls serve only to divide the global working class and create vulnerable populations that capital super-exploits. The same workers detained by ICE harvest our food, clean our offices, and care for our children—they are our class siblings, not our enemies.

2. Unconditional right to free abortion and comprehensive reproductive healthcare. Socialise childcare, eldercare, and domestic work. End the privatisation of social reproduction that forces women to perform unpaid labour. Establish 24-hour public childcare centres staffed by well-paid workers. Provide free, accessible contraception and abortion on demand. Guarantee prenatal and postnatal care. Make reproductive healthcare a right, not a commodity.

3. Economic equality through expropriation of the capitalist class. Equal pay is enforced through workers’ control of the industry. Guaranteed living wage, housing, healthcare, and education. End the gender wage gap by abolishing private ownership of productive property. When workers collectively own and democratically manage workplaces, gender discrimination becomes untenable. Guarantee economic security independent of family status—no woman should be trapped in abusive relationships due to economic dependence.

4. End imperialist wars and occupations. U.S./UK out of the Middle East. Self-determination for Palestine through socialist revolution. Solidarity with women fighting the Taliban, but no support for Western military intervention that only replaces one form of oppression with another. Recognise that the same imperialist powers bombing Gaza enforce borders that kill migrants. International solidarity means opposing our own governments’ wars.

5. Dismantle the police and prison system. Community-based, democratically-controlled safety organisations. Full decriminalisation of sex work, drugs, and survival crimes. The carceral state disproportionately harms women of colour, trans women, and poor women. Police are enforcers of patriarchal control—they arrest sex workers, ignore domestic violence, and terrorise survivors. Prisons separate mothers from children and subject women to sexual violence. Abolish this system and build community accountability based on transformative justice.

6. Workers’ power through democratic councils. Replace capitalist states with workers’ governments based on workplace and community assemblies. Direct democracy where delegates are recallable and paid workers’ wages. Democratic planning of the economy to meet human needs, not profit. This is the only framework where women’s liberation becomes possible—when working women collectively hold power.

7. Build a new, revolutionary International. Coordinate global working-class struggle across borders. Support women’s and workers’ movements from Sudan to Mexico to Afghanistan. Learn from historical examples like the Russian Revolution of 1917, where women‘s liberation made unprecedented advances (legalised abortion, divorce on demand, socialised childcare) before Stalinist counter-revolution reversed gains. Build on these lessons to achieve lasting liberation (Goldman, 1923).

This programme recognises that women’s liberation and workers’ liberation are inseparable. The same system that requires women’s unpaid domestic labour to reproduce the workforce also requires the exploitation of all workers for profit. The same borders that separate migrant women from their families separate workers globally to enable super-exploitation. The same police that terrorise sex workers also break strikes and occupy colonised communities.

We fight for a world where women’s bodies are not battlegrounds for demographic wars, where reproductive labour is valued and socialised, where care work is collective and compensated, where no woman is forced into motherhood or prevented from it, where gender is not a prison but a site of self-determination, and where the violence of patriarchy, capitalism, and imperialism is abolished.

X. From Despair to Revolutionary Action

As we mark International Women’s Day 2026 in March, we stand at a crossroads. One path leads deeper into fascist reaction, forced motherhood, state violence, and intensified exploitation. The other leads to revolutionary transformation through organised, militant, international working-class struggle.

The far right is powerful, well-funded, and coordinated across borders. But so are we. Women workers comprise half the global workforce. When we strike, production stops. When we organise our workplaces, we threaten capital’s control over labour. When we refuse unpaid domestic work, we create crises of social reproduction. When we build international solidarity across borders, we undermine nationalism’s divide-and-conquer strategy. When we connect feminist struggle to anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movements, we become a revolutionary force capable of transforming society.

We honour those fighting daily: the pregnant woman resisting deportation from an ICE cage, the Gazan mother protecting her children amid genocide, the Afghan teacher running secret classes, the Sudanese activist documenting atrocities, the British survivor demanding support, the Mexican feminist marching against femicide, the Argentine woman organising despite Milei’s repression, the Hungarian activist defying Orbán’s authoritarianism, the Italian feminist challenging Meloni’s ‘abusive feminism.’

These struggles are not separate. They are fronts in a global class war where capitalism weaponises gender, race, and nationality to divide and conquer. Our internationalism recognises that liberation anywhere requires liberation everywhere. We cannot free Palestinian women whilst accepting the imprisonment of migrant women in ICE cages. We cannot fight Milei’s femicide whilst supporting U.S. weapons sales that kill women in Gaza. We cannot demand reproductive justice at home whilst supporting imperialist wars abroad.

We draw inspiration from revolutionary women throughout history: Alexandra Kollontai organising Bolshevik women workers, Rosa Luxemburg challenging both capitalism and reformism, Angela Davis linking Black liberation to women’s liberation to class struggle, and the Combahee River Collective articulating that the liberation of all oppressed people requires the destruction of capitalism. These revolutionary women understood what liberal feminists deny: that women’s liberation requires overthrowing the system, not managing it more equitably (Davis, 1983; Kollontai, 1977; Luxemburg, 1906).

The task before us is clear: organise. Build revolutionary organisations rooted in workplaces and communities. Connect immediate struggles—against ICE raids, for abortion access, for domestic violence services, against femicide—to the broader fight to overthrow capitalism. Foster international solidarity that crosses borders as easily as capital does. Develop women’s leadership whilst building mixed-gender organisations committed to women’s liberation. Create structures of mutual aid and collective care. Study revolutionary theory and history. Train militants who can lead in moments of uprising.

We reject despair. Yes, the ruling class is powerful. Yes, fascist reaction is on the march. Yes, women face unprecedented attacks globally. But despair is a luxury we cannot afford. Despair is complicity with oppression. Despair accepts that the world as it is must be the world as it always will be.

We choose defiance. We choose struggle. We choose solidarity. We choose revolution.

The future is not written by the oppressors. It is written by those who fight. And we will fight—in ICE detention centres and on factory floors, in the streets of Buenos Aires and the rubble of Gaza, in the secret schools of Kabul and the occupied territories of Sudan, in the austerity-ravaged communities of Britain and the maquiladoras of Mexico, in the authoritarian capitals of Budapest and Rome and Washington.

We will fight until every woman is free from violence, exploitation, and oppression. Until every child has food, shelter, healthcare, and education. Until borders are abolished and migrants are welcome. Until reproductive autonomy is guaranteed. Until care work is collective and compensated. Until gender is liberation, not limitation. Until capitalism is overthrown and replaced with democratic socialism, where human need, not profit, guides production.

Let our manifesto be a declaration of war against capitalist patriarchy and a commitment to build a socialist world where women’s liberation is not a dream but a reality. Let it echo in detention camps and boardrooms, in refugee camps and presidential palaces, in sweatshops and university lecture halls.

The future belongs to those who fight for it. And we will fight until we win.

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