The first Congress of El Party will take place at a complex moment for Europe and the world. Now, let us briefly remember the most important aspects:

• Not only the neoliberal and capitalist globalisation devours and invades the earth, oppressing women and men, male and female, old people and children on the economic and social level, but it even invades the life of each individual and attacks the nature’s resources, lays the foundations for new clashing contradictions, which hammer in deeply the gender relationships on each level, outlining again bearishly the rights’ maps and women’s freedom, favouring the coming back of women to “naturalness” of housework and private sphere, avoiding that new ways of approaching one another, dialogue, comparison among different cultures are experimented with, and this starting from women;
• Globalisation is nowadays the most important cause of the greatest inequality among countries, populations, human beings, classes, also inside the same country. Therefore, it needs a global market and a world divided in dominant and dominated people, therefore, it needs the preventive and constituent (?) war, which is the context, in which our political action is now collocated as El Party. This context,   intermingling the modern inheritance and the restoration of contemporaneousness,   is the one to change deeply-rooted models and behavioural patterns in the traditional gender relationships on the specific ground of war and armed forces;
• Europe, prisoner of strong powers and banks, finds itself between an economic and political dependence on the USA and a kind of claim to autonomy, which, however, does not appear in the construction of an alternative society. It also fluctuates between the defence of a very little welfare and a social devastation, required really by the strong powers. Flexibility and precariousness become the constitutive elements of Europe, registered also in the constitutional Treaty;
• Europe arms itself more and more physically, ideologically and mentally in order to defend itself especially against migrant men and women, who come from the countries, colonized and sacked by the European states along the centuries;
• In this armed Europe, security means defence against migrants by way of a real closure, which appears also in some repressive laws. There is a real army of policemen against the landing of migrants; in the south of Italy there are built real places of detention and seclusion of men and women, who did not commit any offences;
• The European economy is founded also on selling guns to all countries of the world and on making sophisticated guns, encouraged also by the constitutional Treaty.

Then, there is another Europe, the Eastern one, where an unbridled and wild capitalism has replaced the systems of the real socialism; in this part of the continent, Western Europe is looked at as an area, which exports marketing under the pretext of exporting democracy and human rights.
We must turn over this situation, fighting in the regional movements and in the European movement against precariousness and flexibility for a good reception and citizenship of residence for migrant people, for disarmament.
We women want to be the protagonists of this path with our gender point of view and with a common practice against the planet’s destruction, for a social Europe, which accords also with women working, against guns, nationalisms and fundamentalisms in the East as well as in the West, against racism, anti-Semitism and sexism, against the discrimination against other sexual orientations, against the violence and oppression of women that may also appear like an emancipationist cover-up.
This is our project, which must be carried out through an autonomous feminist action.

We want el-fem to constitute as a European feminist political subject , founded on our relationships and on sharing project. We think that women, who share this project, should be able to enrol in el-fem, also if they are not enrolled in any member-party of the European Left Party.

El-fem is opened to relations with all the women of El Party, of the women’s movement and associations that are part of social forums.
We propose that El Party recognizes our network in its statute and in its practice (financing and involving women in all actions), overcoming the patriarchal character, that is also in the male tradition of European and Western left.
We want to underline that, together with the women of East Europe, we want to work out a strong and profound criticism of Stalinism and real socialism, a criticism that, without cancelling our history, can open our eyes to a real cultural and theoretic rebuilding of the Left and of communism: a rebuilding, which can be also a criticism of power and of real socialism as state’s Power.

In this connection, we think that the patriarchate – as ancient form of the gender domination – finds in capitalism a social, cultural, political representation; but, in the same way, we think that communism and the Left have not tried to get out of patriarchate; on the contrary, they always talked of man ’s freedom, which – as we know – does not include women’s freedom.
We underline strongly: The gender’s contradiction is not subordinated to the class contradiction. In contradistinction to the patriarchical principle of a hierarchy of different forms of social contradictions, it is necessary to point out the concrete interactions and mutual interrelationships among them.

Women’s movements and feminist theories point out the problem of the patriarchate’s presence in the left, and meet strong opposition not only among men but also among many women, who trust politically in men, making, in this way, their sexual difference politically in-significant. But, if we want to knock down the present situation, it is necessary to eradicate patriarchate also on the Left. It is time to do it.

Over the last decade, women have been continually involved in political struggles against the social and ideological impact of neoliberal policies. On the streets, at workplaces, in new social organisations, women have been one of the most important subjects involved in the redefinition of political conflict in the new frame of neoliberal globalisation.

In these political processes, a new generation of women has been breaking new ground, pointing out the contradiction between the public discourse of neoliberal institutions, arguing for gender equality, and their actual effects, resulting in a persistence of gender discrimination in work, social rights and political representation. Hand in hand with the historical experience of XXth century feminism, we, women, have conquered political voice. It is a major change that cannot be ignored for the new century. And it implies also political redefinition in the organisational and representational culture of Left political parties.   

We want to stay in El-Party as women and to cross it critically with our different point of view.
We engage to put forward concrete work’s proposals and to expand our el-fem. At the same time, we think that El-Party must engage on every aspect – as its constitutive engagement - in order to overcome, not only formally but in culture and in practices, the unisexual and patriarchal character of its organizations, also through ways of self-education for men and women.