is a member of the editorial collective at Viewpoint Magazine and an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York and a feminist and socialist activist. She is the author of the author of Dangerous Liaisons: The Marriages and Divorces of Marxism and Feminism.
In the surreal, suspended atmosphere characterizing our current predicament, it would be easy to focus our attention only on the catastrophe unfolding in front of our eyes. But this strange, anxious time we are experiencing is also filled with struggles, acts of solidarity, and processes of class composition and self-organization.
With six million people on strike in Spain, general strikes or work stoppages called by labor organizations in Italy, Argentina, and Chile, mass demonstrations in a number of countries including Turkey and Mexico, and a significant growth of mobilizations in the UK, Belgium, and Germany, this March 8 has demonstrated the expansive dynamic of the new feminist movement.
With six million people on strike in Spain, general strikes or work stoppages called by labor organizations in Italy, Argentina, and Chile, mass demonstrations in a number of countries including Turkey and Mexico, and a significant growth of mobilizations in the UK, Belgium and Germany, this March 8 has demonstrated the expansive dynamic of the new feminist movement.
On October 23, thousands of Glasgow cleaning workers kicked off the union demonstration for equal pay organized by Public Services International, Unison, and GMB with a minute’s silence, in memory of the women workers who died before being able to see the day when their work would be finally granted the same dignity and value as the work of their… Read more →
Last December Viewpoint hosted a roundtable discussion on Steve Wright’s seminal history of Italian workerism, Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism.
When feminist activists and intellectuals published a collective statement calling for a feminism for the 99% and for a day of action in solidarity with the International Women’s Strike in 2017, the response was heart-lifting: after only two weeks, and after countless hours of frantic collective work, a national network of grassroots groups, informal collectives, national feminist and labor organizations… Read more →
The kind of feminism we seek is already emerging internationally, in struggles across the globe: from the women’s strike in Poland against the abortion ban to the women’s strikes and marches in Latin America against male violence; from the massive women’s demonstration of the last November in Italy to the protests and the women’s strike in defense of reproductive rights in South Korea and Ireland.
Specifying the relationship between the logical and historical dimensions of capitalism is one of the most controversial problems in Marxist theory, and one about which I am very uncertain. Can we claim that gender oppression is a necessary feature of capitalism and, if so, at what level of abstraction can we make that claim?
I. Patriarchy and/or Capitalism: Reopening the Debate It is standard to find references to “patriarchy” and “patriarchal relations” in feminist texts, tracts, or documents. 1 Patriarchy is often used to show how gender oppression and inequality are not sporadic or exceptional occurrences. On the contrary, these are issues that traverse all of society, and are fundamentally reproduced through mechanisms that cannot… Read more →
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