What is novel about the current moment is the confluence of two processes: on the one hand, the diffusion of feminism among a new generation of women, especially borne of confrontations with gendered violence. A second process concerns the decolonization of (neo)liberal feminism, which began with the impact of the Zapatista movement and the uprising of 1994.
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.
In order to ensure autonomy from parts of the movement more reluctant to this recomposition, working-class layers need to increase their capacity to raise a massive movement, and to draw inspiration from and coordinate with movements abroad. With such an internationalist inspiration, and given the unprecedented opportunity that Macron’s presidency is giving to France’s working class to build new solidarities, the women’s movement has the chance to inject anti-capitalist and internationalist perspectives into the struggle, as decisive contributions to the processes of subjectivation that are already in motion.
We see the womxn’s strikes as an expression of this broader motion: they address class issues as well as issues of gender violence and racism. They make it possible to bridge the gap between struggles against economic exploitation and sexualized violence, which have been tackled separately for far too long.
We are calling for Feminism for the 99% contingents in the upcoming Women’s Marches of January 19. This past year has confirmed that corporate feminism, that is afraid to challenge the prerogatives of capitalism, has no solution to the crisis that women and LGBTQIA communities are facing globally. In the US in particular, growing income and racial inequality, rising Islamophobia… Read more →
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 →
The contempt implied by the Argentine Senate’s rejection of the bill to legalize abortion rewrites – and makes us remember – a scene that we know well: the domestic scene, where all our effort seems to become invisible, almost as if it didn’t exist, as if it didn’t count. Thus the Parliament sought to repeat what, for centuries, the patriarchy… Read more →
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