READINGS point 1 women’s seminar July 2021
READINGS point 1 women’s seminar July 2021
1) Presentation of the topic “What do we mean by the strategic role of the autonomous women’s movement as a political subject, how is this expressed in its action?” 2) Extracts of 1979 resolution Socialist Revolution and the Struggle for Women’s Liberation 3) Audre Lorde "Age, Race, class and sex: women redefining difference” from Sister Outsider. 4) https://www.colorado.edu/odece/sites/default/files/attached-files/rba09-sb4converted_8.pdf 5) Veronica Gago, chapter 6 “The Feminist International” from Feminist International: How to Change Everything (Verso 2020) 6) Feminism for the 99%, Thesis 2 (separate pdf)
Presentation: What do we understand by the strategic role of the autonomous women's movement as a political subject, how is it expressed in its action?
In defending an autonomous women's movement, we understand the movement as self-organized, meaning that it determines its own agenda, priorities, and forms of action and of organisation. At the same time it is not separated from the class struggle or the needs of the working class. On the contrary, the big majority of women belongs to the class.
The latest wave of the feminist movement in has taken up the challenge of playing a leading role in the building of a global anticapitalist, antiracist, postcolonial (or anti-imperialist) ecologist alternative. We can say that is a global – though loosely structured - political subject of strategic importance in building the unity of the oppressed and exploited.
We understand that the struggle for the liberation of women will not only happen through revolution, as we live in a structurally macho, racist and lgbtqifobic system. That is why we need an autonomous women's movement whose priority is the emancipation of all women and will fight before during and after the revolution for those rights, focusing on the ensuring they are obtained by all women especially the most oppressed and exploited.
We will only achieve our emancipation if no woman is left behind. One of the ways of ensuring this is through Intersectionality, understanding that although we are all women, we are different and have our specificities and different levels of oppression.
The women's movement today faces different issues that can hinder its development (which will also be developed in other discussions during the seminar).
1. Some sectors – as a way of making the movement more inclusive for all those who do not claim to be men (non-binary, trans, intersex) – end up focusing on the struggle for deconstruction of binarism as their main objective. Do they risk overlooking the main material and immaterial forms of oppression and exploitation for the huge majority of women? How can we be inclusive but avoid erasing the role of women as a political subject?
2. Liberal and/or institutional feminism, detached from the class struggle, risks leading women to focus on demands that reproduce class and other inequalities between women. We have to challenge that with our demands and methods of struggle, for example the women‘s strike.
3. Another problem facing the autonomous women's movement is its renewal. - How can we make more women aware of the importance of prioritizing the feminist struggle? And to understand that the emancipation of women is not guaranteed and that it depends on our movement and our actions. - In many countries the movement includes a large vanguard of young and radical feminists, that has developed its own means of expression (language) and forms of action, which poses the problem of how to link with a broader layer of women and their organizations.
Socialist Revolution and the Struggle for Women’s Liberation (1979)
https://fourth.international/en/world-congresses/535/50
Our Perspective 2 l. While the victorious proletarian revolution can create the material foundations for the socialization of domestic labor and lay the basis for the complete economic and social equality of women, this socialist reconstruction of society, placing all human relations on a new foundation, will not be accomplished immediately or automatically. During the period of transition to socialism the fight to eradicate all forms of oppression inherited from class society will continue. For example, the social division of labor into feminine and masculine tasks must be eliminated in all spheres of activity from daily life to the factories. Decisions will have to be made concerning the allocation of scarce resources. An economic plan that reflects the social needs of women, and provides for the most rapid possible socialization of domestic tasks, will have to be developed. The continuing autonomous organization of women will be a precondition for democratically arriving at the correct economic and social decisions. Thus even after the revolution the independent women’s liberation movement will play an indispensable role in assuring the ability of the working class as a whole, male and female, to carry this process through to a successful conclusion.
Our Methods of Struggle 2. By the women’s movement we mean all the women who organize themselves at one level or another to struggle against the oppression imposed on them by this society: women’s liberation groups, consciousness-raising groups, neighborhood groups, student groups, groups organized at workplaces, trade-union commissions, organizations of women of oppressed nationalities, lesbian-feminist groups, action coalitions around specific demands. The women’s movement is characterized by its heterogeneity, its penetration into all layers of society, and the fact that it is not tied to any particular political organization, even though various currents are active within it. Moreover, some groups and action coalitions, though led and sustained by women, are open to men as well, such as the National Organization for Women in the United States and the National Abortion Campaign in Britain. While most women’s groups initially developed outside the mass organizations of the working class, the deepening radicalization has led more and more working-class women to find ways to organize themselves within their class organizations. In Spain, large numbers of women joined the COs (Workers’ Commissions) and brought life to their women’s committees. In France, thousands of women now participate in trade-union commissions as well as Family Planning organizations and women’s groups. In Bolivia, miners’ wives have formed housewives’ committees affiliated to the COB (Bolivian Workers Federation).
But all these are forms of the turbulent and still largely unstructured reality called the independent or autonomous women’s movement.
By independent or autonomous we do not mean independent of the class struggle or the needs of the working class. On the contrary, only by fusing the objectives and demands of the women’s movement with the struggle of the working class will the necessary forces be assembled to achieve women’s goals.
By independent or autonomous we mean that the movement is organized and led by women; that it takes the fight for women’s rights and needs as its first priority, refusing to subordinate that fight to any other interests; that it is not subordinate to the decisions or policy needs of any political tendency or any other social group; that it is willing to carry through the fight by whatever means and together with whatever forces prove necessary.
Clearly, not every group within the movement measures up to those criteria fully or equally, but such is the character of the independent women’s liberation movement we seek to build.
Our Methods of Struggle 4. The forms through which we work can vary greatly depending on the concrete circumstances in which our organizations find themselves. Our tactics are dictated by our strategic aim, which is to educate and lead in action forces much broader than ourselves, especially the decisive forces of the working class, to help build a mass women’s liberation movement, to strengthen a class-struggle wing of the women’s movement, and to recruit the best cadre to the revolutionary party.
Roots 6. b. As the feminist movement has developed in the advanced capitalist countries, women of the oppressed nationa1ities have begun to play an increasingly prominent role. As oppressed nationalities, as women, and frequently as superexploited workers, these women suffer a double and often triple oppression. Their objective place in society means they are in a position to play a strategically important role in the working class and among its allies.
Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference Audre Lorde Paper delivered at the Copeland Colloquium, Amerst College, April 1980 Reproduced in: Sister Outsider Crossing Press, California 1984
Much of Western European history conditions us to see human differences in simplistic opposition to each other: dominant/subordinate, good/bad, up/down, superior/inferior. In a society where the good is defined in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, there must always be some group of people who, through systematized oppression, can be made to feel surplus, to occupy the place of the dehumanized inferior. Within this society, that group is made up of Black and Third World people, working-class people, older people, and women.
As a forty-nine-year-old Black lesbian feminist socialist mother of two, including one boy, and a member of an interracial couple, I usually find myself a part of some group defined as other, deviant, inferior, or just plain wrong. Traditionally, in American society, it is the members of oppressed, objectified groups who are expected to stretch out and bridge the gap between the actualities of our lives and the consciousness of our oppressor. For in order to survive, those of us for whom oppres¬sion is as American as apple pie have always had to be watchers, to become familiar with the language and manners of the oppressor, even sometimes adopting them for some illusion of protection. Whenever the need for some pretense of communication arises, those who profit from our oppression call upon us to share our knowledge with them. In other words, it is the responsibility of the oppressed to teach the oppressors their mistakes. I am responsible for educating teachers who dismiss my children's culture in school. Black and Third World people are expected to educate white people as to our humanity. Women are expected to educate men. Lesbians and gay men are expected to educate the heterosexual world. The oppressors maintain their position and evade responsibility for their own actions. There is a constant drain of energy which might be better used in redefining ourselves and devising realistic scenarios for altering the present and constructing the future.
Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people. As members of such an economy, we have all been programmed to respond to the human differences between us with fear and loathing and to handle that difference in one of three ways: ignore it, and if that is not possible, copy it if we think it is dominant, or destroy it if we think it is subordinate. But we have no patterns for relating across our human differences as equals. As a result, those differences have been misnamed and misused in the service of separation and confusion.
Certainly there are very real differences between us of race, age, and sex. But it is not those differences between us that are separating us. It is rather our refusal to recognize those differences, and to examine the distortions which result from our misnaming them and their effects upon human behavior and expectation.
Racism, the belief in the inherent superiority of one race over all others and thereby the right to dominance. Sexism, the belief in the inherent superiority of one sex over the other and thereby the rightto dominance. Ageism. Heterosexism. Elitism. Classism.
It is a lifetime pursuit for each one of us to extract these distortions from our living at the same time as we recognize, reclaim, and define those differences upon which they are imposed. For we have all been raised in a society where those distortions were endemic within our living. Too often, we pour the energy needed for recognizing and exploring difference into pretending those differences are insurmountable barriers, or that they do not exist at all. This results in a voluntary isolation, or false and treacherous connections. Either way, we do not develop tools for using human difference as a springboard for creative change within our lives. We speak not of human difference, but of human deviance.
Somewhere, on the edge of consciousness, there is what I call a mythical norm, which each one of us within our hearts knows "that is not me." In America, this norm is usually defined as white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, Christian, and financially secure. It is with this mythical norm that the trappings of power reside within this society. Those of us who stand outside that power often identify one way in which we are different, and we assume that to be the primary cause of all oppression, forgetting other distortions around difference, some of which we ourselves may be practising. By and large within the women's movement today, white women focus upon their oppression as women and ignore differences of race, sexual preference, class, and age. There is a pretense to a homogeneity of experience covered by the word sisterhood that does not in fact exist.
Unacknowledged class differences rob women of each others' energy and creative insight. Recently a women's magazine collective made the decision for one issue to print only prose, saying poetry was a less "rigorous" or "serious" art form. Yet even the form our creativity takes is often a class issue. Of all the art forms, poetry is the most economical. It is the one which is the most secret, which requires the least physical labor, the least material, and the one which can be done between shifts, in the hospital pantry, on the subway, and on scraps of surplus paper. Over the last few years, writing a novel on tight finances, I came to appreciate the enormous differences in the material demands between poetry and prose. As we reclaim our literature, poetry has been the major voice of poor, working class, and Colored women. A room of one's own may be a necessity for writing prose, but so are reams of paper, a typewriter, and plenty of time. The actual requirements to produce the visual arts also help determine, along class lines, whose art is whose. In this day of inflated prices for material, who are our sculptors, our painters, our photographers? When we speak of a broadly based women's culture, we need to be aware of the effect of class and economic differences on the supplies available for producing art.
As we move toward creating a society within which we can each flourish, ageism is another distortion of relationship which interferes without vision. By ignoring the past, we are encouraged to repeat its mistakes. The "generation gap" is an important social tool for any repressive society. If the younger members of a community view the older members as contemptible or suspect or excess, they will never be able to join hands and examine the living memories of the community, nor ask the all important question, "Why?" This gives rise to a historical amnesia that keeps us working to invent the wheel every time we have to go to the store for bread.
We find ourselves having to repeat and relearn the same old lessons over and over that our mothers did because we do not pass on what we have learned, or because we are unable to listen. For instance, how many times has this all been said before? For another, who would have believed that once again our daughters are allowing their bodies to be hampered and purgatoried by girdles and high heels and hobble skirts?
Ignoring the differences of race between women and the implications of those differences presents the most serious threat to the mobilization of women's joint power.
As white women ignore their built-in privilege of whiteness and define woman in terms of their own experience alone, then women of Color become "other," the outsider whose experience and tradition is too "alien" to comprehend. An example of this is the signal absence of the experience of women of Color as a resource for women's studies courses. The literature of women of Color is seldom included in women's literature courses and almost never in other literature courses, nor in women's studies as a whole. All too often, the excuse given is that the literatures of women of Color can only be taught by Colored women, or that they are too difficult to understand, or that classes cannot “get into” them because they come out of experiences that are “too different.” I have heard this argument presented by white women of otherwise quite clear intelligence, women who seem to have no trouble at all teaching and reviewing work that comes out of the vastly different experiences of Shakespeare, Moliere, Dostoyefsky, and Aristophanes. Surely there must be some other explanation.
This is a very complex question, but I believe one of the reasons white women have such difficulty reading Black women's work is because of their reluctance to see Black women as women and different from themselves. To examine Black women's literature effectively requires that we be seen as whole people in our actual complexities — as individuals, as women, as human — rather than as one of those problematic but familiar stereotypes provided in this society in place of genunine images of Black women. And I believe this holds true for the literatures of other women of Color who are not Black.The literatures of all women of Color recreate the textures of our lives, and many white women are heavily invested in ignoring the real differences. For as long as any difference between us means one of us must be inferior, then the recognition of any difference must be fraught with guilt. To allow women of Color to step out of stereotypes is too guilt provoking, for it threatens the complacency of those women who view oppression only in terms of sex.
Refusing to recognize difference makes it impossible to see the different problems and pitfalls facing us as women.
Thus, in a patriarchal power system where whiteskin privilege is a major prop, the entrapments used to neutralize Black women and white women are not the same. For example, it is easy for Black women to be used by the power structure against Black men, not because they are men, but because they are Black. Therefore, for Black women, it is necessary at all times to separate the needs of the oppressor from our own legitimate conflicts within our communities. This same problem does not exist for white women. Black women and men have shared racist oppression and still share it, although in different ways. Out of that shared oppression we have developed joint defenses and joint vulnerabilities to each other that are not duplicated in the white community, with the exception of the relationship between Jewish women and Jewish men.
On the other hand, white women face the pitfall of being seduced into joining the oppressor under the pretense of sharing power. This possibility does not exist in the same way for women of Color. The tokenism that is sometimes extended to us is not an invitation to join power; our racial "otherness" is a visible reality that makes that quite clear. For white women there is a wider range of pretended choices and rewards for identifying with patriarchal power and its tools.
Today, with the defeat of ERA, the tightening economy, and increased conservatism, it is easier once again for white women to believe the dangerous fantasy that if you are good enough, pretty enough, sweet enough, quiet enough, teach the children to behave, hate the right people, and marry the right men, then you will be allowed to co-exist with patriarchy in relative peace, at least until a man needs your job or the neighborhood rapist happens along. And true, unless one lives and loves in the trenches it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless.
But Black women and our children know the fabric of our lives is stitched with violence and with hatred, that there is no rest. We do not deal with it only on the picket lines, or in dark midnight alleys, or in the places where we dare to verbalize our resistance. For us, increasingly, violence weaves through the daily tissues of our living — in the supermarket, in the classroom, in the elevator, in the clinic and the schoolyard, from the plumber, the baker, the saleswoman, the bus driver, the bank teller, the waitress who does not serve us.
Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you, we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs upon the reasons they are dying.
The threat of difference has been no less blinding to people of Color. Those of us who are Black must see that the reality of our lives and our struggle does not make us immune to the errors of ignoring and misnaming difference. Within Black communities where racism is a living reality, differences among us often seem dangerous and suspect. The need for unity is often misnamed as a need for homogeneity, and a Black feminist vision mistaken for betrayal of our common interests as a people. Because of the continuous battle against racial erasure that Black women and Black men share, some Black women still refuse to recognize that we are also oppressed as women, and that sexual hostility against Black women is practiced not only by the white racist society, but implemented within our Black communities as well. It is a disease striking the heart of Black nationhood, and silence will not make it disappear. Exacerbated by racism and the pressures of powerlessness, violence against Black women and children often becomes a standard within our communities, one by which manliness can be measured. But these woman-hating acts are rarely discussed as crimes against Black women.
As a group, women of Color are the lowest paid wage earners in america. We are the primary targets of abortion and sterilization abuse, here and abroad. In certain parts of Africa, small girls are still being sewed shut between their legs to keep them docile and for men's pleasure. This is known as female circumcision, and it is not a cultural affair as the late Jomo Kenyatta in¬sisted, it is a crime against Black women.
Black women's literature is full of the pain of frequent assault, not only by a racist patriarchy, but also by Black men. Yet the necessity for and history of shared battle have made us, Black women, particularly vulnerable to the false accusation that anti-sexist is anti-Black. Meanwhile, womanhating as a recourse of the powerless is sapping strength from Black communities, and our very lives. Rape is on the increase, reported and unreported, and rape is not aggressive sexuality, it is sexualized aggression. As Kalamu ya Salaam, a Black male writer points out, "As long as male domination exists, rape will exist. Only women revolting and men made conscious of their responsibility to fight sexism can collectively stop rape."
Differences between ourselves as Black women are also being misnamed and used to separate us from one another. As a Black lesbian feminist comfortable with the many different ingredients of my identity, and a woman committed to racial and sexual freedom from oppression, I find I am constantly being encouraged to pluck out some one aspect of myself and present this as the meaningful whole, eclipsing or denying the other parts of self. But this is a destructive and fragmenting way to live. My fullest concentration of energy is available to me only when I integrate all the parts of who I am, openly, allowing power from particular sources of my living to flow back and forth freely through all my different selves, without the restrictions of externally imposed definition. Only then can I bring myself and my energies as a whole to the service of those strug¬gles which I embrace as part of my living.
A fear of lesbians, or of being accused of being a lesbian, has led many Black women into testifying against themselves. It has led some of us into destructive alliances, and others into despair and isolation. In the white women's communities, heterosexism is sometimes a result of identifying with the white patriarchy, a rejection of that interdependence between women-identified women which allows the self to be, rather than to be used in the service of men. Sometimes it reflects a die-hard belief in the protective coloration of heterosexual relationships, sometimes a self-hate which all women have to fight against, taught us from birth.
Although elements of these attitudes exist for all women, there are particular resonances of heterosexism and homophobia among Black women. Despite the fact that woman-bonding has a long and honorable history in the African and African american communities, and despite the knowledge and accomplishments of many strong and creative women-identified Black women in the political, social and cultural fields, heterosexual Black women often tend to ignore or discount the existence and work of Black lesbians. Part of this attitude has come from an understandable terror of Black male attack within the close confines of Black society, where the punishment for any female self-assertion is still to be accused of being a lesbian and therefore unworthy of the attention or support of the scarce Black male. But part of this need to misname and ignore Black lesbians comes from a very real fear that openly women-identified Black women who are no longer dependent upon men for their self-definition may well reorder our whole concept of social relationships.
Black women who once insisted that lesbianism was a white woman's problem now insist that Black lesbians are a threat to Black nationhood, are consorting with the enemy, are basically un-Black. These accusations, coming from the very women to whom we look for deep and real understanding, have served to keep many Black lesbians in hiding, caught between the racism of white women and the homophobia of their sisters. Often, their work has been ignored, trivialized, or misnamed, as with the work of Angelina Grimke, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Lorraine Hansberry. Yet women-bonded women have always been some part of the power of Black communities, from our unmarried aunts to the amazons of Dahomey.
And it is certainly not Black lesbians who are assaulting women and raping children and grandmothers on the streets of our communities.
Across this country, as in Boston during the spring of 1979 following the unsolved murders of twelve Black women, Black lesbians are spearheading movements against violence against Black women.
What are the particular details within each of our lives that can be scrutinized and altered to help bring about change? How do we redefine difference for all women? It is not our differences which separate women, but our reluctance to recognize those differences and to deal effectively with the distortions which have resulted from the ignoring and misnaming of those differences.
As a tool of social control, women have been encouraged to recognize only one area of human difference as legitimate, those differences which exist between women and men. And we have learned to deal across those differences with the urgency of all oppressed subordinates. All of us have had to learn to live or work or coexist with men, from our fathers on. We have recognized and negotiated these differences, even when this recognition only continued the old dominant/subordinate mode of human relationship; where the oppressed must recognize the masters' difference in order to survive.
But our future survival is predicated upon our ability to relate within equality. As women, we must root out internalized patterns of oppression within ourselves if we are to move beyond the most superficial aspects of social change. Now we must recognize differences among women who are our equals, neither inferior nor superior, and devise ways to use each others' difference to enrich our visions and our joint struggles. The future of our earth may depend upon the ability of all women to identify and develop new definitions of power and new patterns of relating across difference. The old definitions have not served us, nor the earth that supports us. The old patterns, no matter how cleverly rearranged to imitate progress, still condemn us to cosmetically altered repetitions of the same old exchanges, the same old guilt, hatred, recrimination, lamentation, and suspicion.
For we have, built into all of us, old blueprints of expectation and response, old structures of oppression, and these must be altered at the same time as we alter the living conditions which are a result of those structures. For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.
As Paulo Freire shows so well in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations which we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us, and which knows only the oppressors' tactics, the oppressors' relationships.
Change means growth, and growth can be painful. But we sharpen self-definition by exposing the self in work and struggle together with those whom we define as different from ourselves, although sharing the same goals. For Black and white, old and young, lesbian and heterosexual women alike, this can mean new paths to our survival.
We have chosen each other and the edge of each others battles the war is the same if we lose someday women's blood will congeal upon a dead planet if we win there is no telling we seek beyond history for a new and more possible meeting.
Feminist International How to Change Everything
Chapter 6 The Feminist International
I’ll begin this chapter by highlighting one of the most important innovations of the feminist movement in recent years: one that has not only become a genuinely global phenomenon, but also emerged from the global South. It has strong roots in Latin America—a region known to some by the Guna Indigenous people’s term, Abya Yala—and it runs through multiple layers of history and struggle, connected to countless movements and organizations. Building from its Latin American roots, it has nurtured an internationalism—one that disrupts the scales, scope, and forms of coordination of a movement that nevertheless continues to expand, without losing its strength and anchor.
As an internationalism that challenges both the geographic imagination and the organizational imagination, it is infused with transborder alliances and does not have a centralized structure, or a party organization coordinating everything from some commanding heights. It is an internationalism that allows the current feminist movement to be projected onto the mass scale; an internationalism that finds inspiration in the autonomous struggles of Rojava and communitarian struggles in Guatemala, in the struggles of Chilean students and favela dwellers in Brazil, of campesinas in Paraguay and Afro-Colombian women. It is an internationalism that demonstrates the strength of Latin American migrant women in the United States and that feeds off the politicization of the domestic territory that they carry out with their movements, both literal and figurative.
It is an internationalism that requires alliances in every possible place: with strawberry-picking day laborers, Moroccan women working during harvest times in Andalusia, and the peasant unions and activist collectives of the towns and cities;[1] between women laid off from textile factories and students fighting against education cuts; between Indigenous women in rebellion and community organizers in each neighborhood of the urban peripheries. Therefore, what characterizes this feminist movement is that it is able to take root and territorialize itself in concrete struggles, and to produce links starting from those specific struggles.
It is internationalism as such because it is made up of alliances that defy the limits of nation-state geometry; because it challenges an abstract notion of class (in which shared “interests” are assumed a priori) or the people (in which an amalgam of homogeneous national affection is taken as a given).
We are talking about an already-existing internationalism. It is not something left for the future, to be designed and constructed as an evolutionary step for the movement of tomorrow. We proved its concrete working existence when we launched the third international strike in 2019: it is organized in each place, and the regional, global, plurinational fabric emerges from there. It also means that the very meaning of internationalism expands and is now interwoven with the plurinational question, which is a demand raised by different Indigenous movements in Latin America in order to go beyond the framework of the colonial nation-state and recognize the multiple nations that comprise any territory.
The internationalist dimension is also a method. As much was clear in the “plurinational” gathering of women, lesbians, trans people, and travestis in the Patagonian city of Trelew in 2018. A method was practiced in that gathering that connected struggles against mega-mining and other neo-extractivist enterprises that expropriate communal lands in Argentina to a regional map of struggles: against the militarization of the favelas in Brazil and repression in Nicaragua; against land grabs by transnational corporations using agro-toxins; against the advance of the church’s moralization of our lives; and against the generalized impoverishment caused by austerity measures. The perspective of transborder feminism includes an analysis of the counteroffensive—a wide range of reactionary responses to the massive feminist rebellion—that complicates and exceeds the framework of the nation-state because it focuses on varied transnational institutions, such as the Vatican and media conglomerates, along with other transnational corporations that push free trade agreements, the advance of drug trafficking, state and para-state militarization, and the Women 20 (W20), a thematic group of the G20 that seeks to translate women’s issues into a neoliberal frame.
How is internationalism expressed in the feminist movement? The internationalist dimension does not require struggles to become abstract and lose their specificity in the effort to coordinate a common feminist program, but builds a program based on that specificity. The internationalist dimension is not guaranteed by a hierarchical structure and therefore is not implemented from the top down. The internationalism that we are practicing qualifies each struggle: it makes them richer and more complex without having to abandon their rootedness in concrete situations; it makes them more cosmopolitan, without paying the price of abstraction. It broadens our political imagination at the same time that it creates a practical ubiquity; it is that feeling when we shout, “We are everywhere!”
The movement’s ubiquity is its true strength. That ubiquity imprints an organizational dynamic on each particular space that has repercussions in others, ranging in scale from small meetings of five people to massive protests, from neighborhood assemblies with varying attendance to temporary collectives that come together for a specific action. The international, now tied together with the plurinational, becomes an adjective: it does not describe the state, but rather the encounter of different struggles. Therefore, it is not a progressive “integration” of demands, but a dynamic that is expanded in the organization of the international strikes; it is not merely a serialization of distinct struggles, a growing list of various identities, or a purely rhetorical gesture; rather, it is a constellation of struggles that empower each other as they are woven together to take on a new, expansive shape.
In this sense, the organization of the strike has asserted a politics of place, without succumbing to “localism.” The movement is amplified through its dense connections to various conflicts and experiences, and it uses the strike as an occasion to hold meetings in places and neighborhoods and with people that often fall outside the boundaries of our struggle. It is an internationalism constructed from the territories in struggle. That is what, I insist, allows this internationalism to also expand toward the plurinational dimension as a key element of an anti-racist and anti-colonial politics. From the point of view of the March 8 date, it seems like an intermittent internationalism. However, to the extent that it is not only restricted to that date, it continues to be cultivated as multiple links. The effect, as Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar charts, is “synchronous reverberation,” a “seismic effect.”[2] We have felt it: the earth trembles.
Therefore, the strike in 2020 is feminist, is international, and is plurinational; it brings together denominations, spatialities, and locations that turn this ubiquity into a truly heterogeneous and common composition. The current feminist internationalism does not have a structure; it has bodies and body-territories involved in concrete conflicts, arrayed across a differentiated terrain.
Territories of Internationalism
What are the territories of internationalism? I would like to highlight three of its privileged territories and show how their transnational dimension is a new element revealed by feminist struggles.
Consider, first, domestic territories. Historically enclosed between four walls, today they are spaces of practical internationalism where global care chains are assembled, where reproductive labor is negotiated, and where the costs of austerity and the lack of public infrastructure are felt most acutely. The domestic “scene” thus becomes a territory of forced internationalism.[3] This is due in part to the migrant composition of domestic workers in most households, because they use their transnational experience to weave networks and alliances that make internationalism into a force of denunciation, connection, and struggle. For example, compañeras from the Territorio Doméstico collective, made up of migrant domestic workers in Madrid, explain how they perform an “international catwalk” as a parade-performance and tool for public intervention. In those performance-interventions, they use costumes to represent figures such as “the transnational migrant,” “the undocumented,” and “the octopus” (the woman who needs eight hands to get all her work done). Thus, they highlight the conditions that weigh on the bodies of the international “models” who clean hotels, care for children, and inhabit the precarity of existing with a nonlegal residential status, while doubling as care workers in their country of origin, at a distance and in the home where they work, and, at the same time, organizing with other women to demand housing.[4]
Taking that forced internationalism as a point of departure and analysis of their own concrete situation, they propose “the work of finding each other” with other compañeras that, in turn, comprises a practical internationalism. We have seen the same thing in Argentina with the denunciation made by domestic workers in the gated communities of the Nordelta district. They were told that they smelled bad, that they talked too much. They were forbidden from traveling with their bosses or property owners, who did not want to share seats with them in the vans going to and from the gated communities, the only way that these women had of getting to their workplaces. Yet they do want those workers to clean for miserable wages and to silently suffer abuse. Like Territorio Doméstico, however, the women refused to remain silent. They forcefully intervened in the feminist assembly, insisting that their situation be taken into account in the strike call and organization. This domestic rebellion demonstrates how racism, classism, and patriarchy are articulated and become the basis for a public complaint and mobilization. Thus, the Feminist International emerges today, first of all, from what has historically been considered the most enclosed and confined place; it arises from domestic territories in revolt.
Second, let us consider Indigenous and communitarian territories. Long expropriated and considered as closed, even “backwards” economies, they are today spaces of borderless alliances, of communitarian embodiment, challenging extractive mega-projects and the new owners of the land who are in charge of agribusiness. A global diagram of capital’s extractive dynamics emerges from those struggles where alliances, movements, and networks resist and reject these neocolonial advances. Thus, they vindicate resources (from land to water to knowledges about health) as common, while also updating the anti-colonial memories of internationalism. Thus, this Indigenous and communitarian feminism takes up anti-racism and anti-colonial practices, making them into a concrete component, a practical element, that structures the conflict.
Third, let us turn to the territories of precarization: from popular economies to migrant platform workers. Long considered to be “non-organized” sectors, today they are sites of experimentation with new union dynamics, as well as encampments and occupations of workshops and factories. Via virtual platforms, creative demands and complaints explicate the ways sexual abuse, discrimination against migrants, and exploitation always go hand in hand. In the United States, women working in restaurants—mostly migrants or daughters of migrants—explain that since the majority of one’s wage generally comes from tips, sexual harassment is often understood as a condition of earning a good tip—and therefore a necessary part of earning a wage. Women who clean hotels and offices at night have also organized to confront the rapes to which they are subjected, under threat of having their immigration status reported to authorities.
In Argentina, trade unionism is being reinvented within labor dynamics that are directly connected to global platform capitalism and its modes of financial extractivism. These new forms include the Union of Workers of the Popular Economy (UTEP),[5] as well as the Association of Platform Personnel (APP), the first union in the region bringing together workers from digital transportation and delivery platforms such as Uber, Glovo, and Rappi. The jobs with the least recognition are the most exploited by the global structure, now condensed into algorithms. But they are also ones that demonstrate the brutality of that apparently “immaterial” valorization.
In turn, the three territories discussed above are interlinked in multiple ways. They are neither watertight compartments nor disconnected spaces. It is precisely their connection—through the broadening of demands, the growth of new language, and the threading together of geographies—that requires each space to be ever more expansive in how it enunciates problems, complaints, and conflicts, as well as strategies, alliances, and ways to accumulate common strength. Knowing that we are interconnected, with shared clues and hypotheses, weaving together resistances and inventions here and there, creates that “aquatic geography” of the strike (to use Rosa Luxemburg’s term again), composed of rhythms, tributaries, velocities, and flows.
We Are Everywhere
I want to emphasize two points in relation to this internationalist form. First, that it is able to create an analysis that establishes new parameters and measures for thinking, visibilizing, and feeling different forms of oppression, based on collectively taking up this political word that combines very diverse scales. Second, that the feminist movement is notable for its ability to produce ubiquity without homogeneity. In other words, it has invented a way of being everywhere, without needing to become coherent under some ideological command or the orders of some hierarchical authority.
Both characteristics open up classic questions: What type of accumulation of forces does this internationalism achieve? How is its strength translated and expressed? What organizational horizon does it open up? Perhaps it is useful to displace the very image of linear accumulation, but without falling into a simplified notion of spontaneity or of a logic of events that melt into air. Expansion and complexification are the characteristics of a feminist program in construction.
Contemporary internationalism is expressed not as attachment to a representative structure but as the situated force of each struggle with a tremendous capacity to reverberate elsewhere. This ability to transform itself into a concrete presence in each conflict is what gives rise to its novel potencia. Unlike a process of universalization, which needs to make the concrete conditions of a situation abstract in order to make it fit and conform to a homogeneous parameter that provides recognition, the capacity of that international plane appears as the expansion of the horizon of possible connections and as immediate force in concrete struggles. Thus, this feminist internationalism that we are deploying has a body before it has a structure. It is that body, which is experienced as a common body, that allows for the generation of ubiquity through connection, without requiring a unitary synthesis. `
Ubiquity: the capacity to be in many places at once. In the weeks leading up to the strike, compañeras from across Spain assembled a “road map,” made up of dozens of actions across the country, that highlighted “a thousand” reasons for going on strike, including assemblies and large events and culminating in a “spider operation” in the Madrid subway, inspired by an action in Buenos Aires in 2018. Meanwhile, Ni Una Menos protests took place in Mexico. Thousands of women, lesbians, trans people, and travestis denounced femicide as a state crime, along with the constant threat of kidnapping attempts that have occurred in the subway, to which the state’s only response has been more police. It was also in Mexico that we saw a long series of protests and strikes by women working in the maquilas of Tamaulipas. In the southeast of the country, Zapatista women released a letter explaining why they would not hold the Encuentro de Mujeres que Luchan in their territory on March 8, 2019, denouncing the military threat that lies behind the new government’s touristic and neo-extractivist mega-projects, and instead delayed the gathering. This three-part scene, again, summarizes the stage initiated by the organizational horizon of the international strike: an interconnection of struggles and, based on that interconnection, an affirmation of the ways precarization and labor abuse are inseparable from femicides or from the exploitation of territory by transnational corporations.
Meanwhile, in Italy, compañeras from Non Una Di Meno launched the “countdown” to the international feminist strike with a series of posters that narrate scenes that substantiate the motive to strike: abusive bosses, ex-husbands who do not pay child support, and the use of welfare to manage poverty instead of enabling self-determination. Chile’s March 8 (8M) mobilization and coordinating body have continued to grow, following tremendous mobilizations in May 2019 for non-sexist education and the massive Encuentro Plurinacional de las que Luchan (Plurinational meeting of women in struggle) in December 2018, which was repeated during the January 2020 social uprising. Participants also carried out an operation in the subway, renaming each station from below with names taken from feminist history. Meanwhile in Brazil, compañeras in the northeast declared that fascism would not be allowed to pass, and Black feminists marched for justice for Marielle Franco and all those women who sustain the popular and favela economies against the criminalization of their work. In Bolivia, the #Bloqueo8M (8M Blockade) was prepared, denouncing the femicides that started off the year, but also accompanying women’s resistance in the Tariquía Reserve, in Tarija, who blockaded the operations of Petrobras. Assemblies were carried out in Uruguay, organized by a coordinating body bringing together a wide range of feminist collectives and organizations and that was increasingly nourished by regional networks. In Ecuador, the strike and uprising were debated as tools with multiple histories of struggle, while in Colombia and Peru weekly meetings were held with 8M as their horizon.
Finally, another one of the strengths of feminist internationalism is its ability to produce a common diagnosis of the forms of counterinsurgency that seek to weaken and divide us (I will come back to this issue in the following chapter)—a diagnosis they are able to make in real time, rather than at the speed of academic publishing. It is the same advance that we see in several countries at once, with similar tactics and the shared aim of fragmenting the movement. One issue is clear: the counteroffensive seeks to attack the subversive potencia of the transversal and diverse anti-biological-determinist and anti-racist alliances that are created through the international and plurinational organization of the feminist strikes.
The Logic of Connectivity
One experience that can be considered a clear precedent for this new form of internationalism is the Zapatista uprising. It is no coincidence that an encuentro was also convened in Chiapas on March 8, 2018, demonstrating Zapatismo’s ability to form part of new internationalist resonances. Nevertheless, I will also try to point to some of the differences between earlier forms of internationalism and that being woven by the feminist movement today.
How has this expansive transnational form arisen from the feminism movement? As I have discussed throughout this book, the strike formula has been crucial for producing a diagnosis of violence that is able to overcome the moment of victimization, which is imposed on us as the only available reaction in the face of sexist violence, and femicide in particular. The strike is no longer representative only of a Eurocentric history of a white, male, waged working class; rather—like at other moments in history—it has become a way of highlighting other forms of blockade, sabotage, subtraction, and, also, connection with the historically denied element of feminized bodies: reproductive, communitarian, and migrant labor.
From the “general strike” of Black slaves depicted by W.E.B. Du Bois against the slave system of the plantations in the US South,[6] to the tenants’ strike in Buenos Aires in 1907, the strikes of the rural workers during the “rebellion in Patagonia” of the 1920s, and the mythical strike of women in Iceland in 1975, to, more recently, the hunger strike of Central American migrants in the caravan on its way to the United States (coeval with teachers’ strikes in several states of that country), and the peasant strike in India, we can reconstruct landmarks on an internationalist map of the strike that dislocates it from its traditional canon: namely, its composition as exclusively waged workers, with the factory scene as its central space.
In fact, we can historicize the role of reproduction and women’s leadership in diverse forms of the strike to multiply the strike “from within” its own history.[7] But now there is a radicalization of the history of the strike, because the feminist strike has broken out of that history concentrated on the factory space and has opened up a new time. Over the past four years, the feminist strike has shifted to the terrain of reproduction, in order to make those tasks visible and even to propose abstaining from them. The feminist strike also identifies the spaces of production in an unprecedented way, because they are understood on the basis of their necessary connections and assemblages with reproductive tasks. In this way, the strike is not only the extension of an analytic of work that seeks to “laborize” tasks of care, affect, and social reproduction, but a perspective that emerges from those labors that reclassifies the notion of work in a general sense. To put it differently: the strike does not seek the recognition and incorporation of certain kinds of reproductive labor as a type of “work,” in the prevailing ideologies of capitalist labor. Rather, its aim is to rethink the nature of labor itself.
This means that it broadens recognition of the sites of value production and that it highlights the reproductive dimension as key to a reconceptualization of what is historically considered work. To be more concrete: the free, non-recognized, fragile, intermittent—and, at the same time, permanent—dimension of reproductive labor today serves to explicate the components that make precarization into a transversal process. The forms of intensive exploitation of affective infrastructures, and, in turn, of the extensive lengthening of the working day in domestic spaces, reveal new forms of migrant labor and new hierarchies in service work. The superposition of tasks and the demand for availability—both primary subjective impositions of parenting—then allow us to understand the requirements of service jobs.
Therefore, the feminist strike has allowed for a rethinking, reclassification, and relaunch of another meaning of the general strike. The general strike becomes truly general when it becomes feminist—because, for the first time, it reaches all spaces, tasks, and forms of work. Therefore, it manages to embed itself in specific territories without leaving anything out, and, through that process, it produces generality. It covers every corner of unpaid and unrecognized work. At the same time, it affirms them as spaces that produce value, connecting them in their subordinated relation to other forms of labor. Thus, it makes visible the chain of efforts that trace a continuum between the household, the job, the street, and the community. In the face of attempts to confine feminism (to a particular sector, demand, or minoritarian politics), a demonstration that the strike is general because it is feminist is both a victory and historical vindication. It is a victory because we say that if we stop, we stop the world. It is to finally prove that there is no production without reproduction. And it is vindication with respect to the forms of the strike where the “general” was a synonym for a dominant partiality: waged, male, unionized, national labor that systematically excluded work not recognized by the wage (and its patriarchal order).
The feminist general strike reflects what we have learned through these years of assembling international strikes, taking the existential and labor multiplicity of our time into the organization of insurrection itself. Multiplicity is not dispersion, but a way of making the heterogeneity of tasks that we carry out correspond to the mandates that we disobey when we strike. The strike becomes general, and therefore becomes real and effective, only when it is broadened. That is why the strike is general only because it is feminist.
There is an intimate connection between generality and internationalism. With the feminist strike, we again broaden the strike: we make it leap over borders, we invent new geographies for it. We redefine the places themselves where work is done and value produced. The feminist mapping redefines the spatiality of labor, what we understand by the work “place,” which is no more or less than the site where value is produced. That practice of reshaping spaces also outlines the new internationalism.
Let’s go to the map. Women in Poland went on strike against the criminalization of abortion on October 3, 2016. Just sixteen days later, in Argentina, a strike wave launched with a strike, on October 19, in response to the femicide of Lucía Pérez. The action immediately ceased to be national and, in only one week, spread to twenty-two countries, including the United States, France, Spain, Mexico, Guatemala, Chile, and Uruguay, among others.
With the strike, we take charge of a global cartography that produces proximity from a new perspective. It consists of politicizing violence against women by displacing the status of victimhood. The strike enables an internationalist connection precisely because it creates a common horizon, a concrete action that situates us as political protagonists against the systematic attempt to reduce our pains to the position of a victim to be repaired by the state.
The strike also enables a new kind of internationalism because is starts from a research question in each life and each territory, opening up new forms of knowing by weaving together different knowledges from a multiplicity of concrete bodies and experiences. What does it mean to strike in each territory? What form does the strike take in each working and living situation? What are we striking against? Who recognizes that we strike? What hidden bosses are we striking from? It is these embodied and territorially embedded processes of investigation that produce new subjects, new practical understandings, and new internationalist and plurinational alliances.
On November 25, 2016, mobilizations expanded to more than fifty countries, politicizing the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women in a new way. On that date, Ni Una Menos launched a text titled #LaInternacional Feminista (#FeministInternational), while the Non Una Di Meno movement simultaneously appeared publicly in Italy. At each one of the demonstrations around the world, there was a resounding call for an International Women’s Strike on March 8, 2017, revitalizing a date laden with memories of workers’ struggle.
There are two critical moments to the construction of this new internationalism: resonance and coordination. The first moment I refer to as one of resonance, due to its effect of diffusion, of echoes that have repercussions and that produce, as sound effects, amplifications of the body itself. The idea of resonance condenses an idea-force that could serve as a slogan, even if it does not seek to summarize an ideological consistency. It is the ability to open a shared meaning based on affect. But it is not an affect in the passive sense: the “affected by,” as they tend to name those who suffer from catastrophes or the collateral effects of some phenomenon. Affection has to do with a capacity to be moved, not simply the reception of an effect.
The potencia of the resonance of the strike, as a process, has to do with the capacity to connect at a distance and with the mobilization of meanings instigated by the circulation of images, slogans, actions, and gestures. The strike, as it is broadened, opens up new spaces of enunciation, which are constantly being reinvented. But that capacity for resonance has to do with the subjective displacement that I have been talking about: a concrete action that enacts, puts in practice, the abandonment of the position of the victim; and at the same time it is taken up as an investigation-question in each place, asking what it means to strike in each territory.
After these resonances have sounded, the feminist movement develops a second moment: that of a coordination, a combination of virtual and material spaces of encounter between bodies, inaugurating circuits and reusing other already-existing ones. Networks form between groups in different countries, which begin calling themselves Ni Una Menos. There are exchanges of texts and action proposals, virtual meetings to coordinate global interventions on key dates, meetings between different activists traveling from one place to another.
Resonance and coordination weave together clues for feminisms’ collective investigation; they mark differences and divergences; they accumulate a common language produced through practices.
From Solidarity to the New Intersectionality
What is new about the Feminist International? To put it briefly, the images that are evoked by the word “international” usually have to do with the formation the First International Workingmen’s Association, and later, after its rupture, the Third International. Proletarian organization in Europe was the central axis of a project of class organization that had the capacity for coordinated action. The development of the strike as an instrument of struggle was one of its initiatives. The coronation of the Russian Revolution “successfully” condensed the revolutionary aspiration that was achieved by those initiatives but, as is well known, it also geographically defied Marx’s predictions about revolution by taking place outside of Europe (a revolution against Capital, as Gramsci called it).
In the 1960s and ’70s, a powerful Third Worldist internationalism woven by decolonization struggles, guerrilla organizations, and diverse insurrectionist movements sought to usher in another epochal shift, though this time one whose force originated from the global South. The amplifications of the revolutionary effects of that internationalism allowed it to overflow European and white confines, as well as to open up to issues not limited by a narrow sense of “class.” Decades later, the Zapatista uprising, which began publicly on January 1, 1994, enabled us to talk about an international (“intergalactic,” as they described it) network again. Due to its connection to a cycle of Indigenous struggles on the continent, as well as its capacity to interpellate struggles from around the world, the Zapatista struggle has been capable of denouncing injustices and providing new ways of thinking about how to weave together different forms of resistance. At the turn of the new century, the so-called anti-globalization movement also propelled a counterproposal to capital’s global dimension, connecting struggles that were organized precisely against the organization of capital, and its calendar of gatherings.
As historian David Roediger indicates, the basic principle launched by Marx for the workers’ international was “solidarity,” even if such a concept did not figure into Marx’s theoretical project, where the problem of “unity” was solved in advance by the homogenizing logic of capital.[8] Solidarity appears as the weapon against the permanent division of the working class practiced by capital, Roediger says, citing the works of the economist Michael Lebowitz. Therefore, workers’ unity becomes a central problem when capital needs to produce and exploit “difference.”
Some might say that a politics of solidarity is much simpler to cultivate among those who perceive themselves as similar, as opposed to those who see themselves as different, because they are constantly forced to differentiate themselves. Since it is their uniqueness that gives them value as workers in the precarious labor market, solidarity would be more difficult to cultivate there. There is, however, a mode of solidarity that does not appeal to similarity so much as to difference—but in a way that understands difference as “exteriority,” something inherently foreign to our own experience. We often hear formulas of solidarity with different struggles that nevertheless leave us in a “safe” position, maintaining distance as evidence that we are in solidarity with something that is not “ours,” thus reproducing a paternalistic or savior logic. Internationalism instead asks us to think about how to produce connections between trajectories, experiences, and struggles that unfold in different places. The question is how to produce a common plane without homogenizing differences and without falling into a paternalistic logic.
How can an accumulation of forces be synthesized? The notion of intersectionality, as it has been elaborated in the feminist movement, allows us to think about a logic of connection that globally maps, against the grain, capital’s landings based on the imbrication of different forms of oppression. Even if the concept was systematized by civil rights advocate and lawyer Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989,[9] to me it seems important to emphasize another political genealogy of its emergence, as scholar-activist Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor indicates in How We Get Free.[10] There, she traces the concept to the practice of the Combahee River Collective (1974–80), even though they did not use the term. The collective’s 1977 manifesto attained mythical status, Taylor observes, because it marked one of the first attempts to articulate “the analysis that animates the meaning of intersectionality, the idea that multiple oppressions reinforce each other to create new categories of suffering.”[11] This way of drawing connections between different forms of oppression and showing how they overlap and act “simultaneously,” she continues, was a fundamental political intervention by Black lesbians in the feminist movement, and served to generalize an analysis that would open up an entire mode of political radicalization to a new generation of Black feminists. Intersectionality thus becomes the key for understanding oppressions of sex, race, and class not as a sum of variables, but precisely on the basis of their mutual effects. The introduction of difference into the analysis of oppression thus achieves a particular political projection: it is capable of unraveling differences without thereby ceasing to problematize the convergence of struggles. Black feminism, in that sense, has been pioneering in its re-proposal of another idea of totality, one that starts from difference, and thus reconnects liberation from oppression to a liberation that is projected onto everyone.
In this sense, forms of transversal struggle put intersectionality into practice as a political and methodological principle, enacting a principle of composition and translation for new forms of transnational solidarity.
After the first International Women’s Strike in 2017, Selma James—a North American feminist activist, and cofounder of the International Wages for Housework Campaign in the 1970s, stated that “Not one women less, we want ourselves alive” functioned as the feminist equivalent of “Black lives matter” in the United States, along with the feminist slogan “All women count.”[12] I am interested in emphasizing how these connections prosper, forging links among us on the basis of our perspectives on struggles, and doing so in a way that goes beyond simple linguistic equivalences. Intersectionality is the promise of feminism in action, Angela Davis tells us, “against the pernicious powers of state violence.” It is an “inclusive and intersectional” feminism” that “calls on us all to unite against racism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, misogyny, capitalist exploitation,” she said in her speech at the January 2017 Women’s March in Washington, DC.
These different territories of feminist internationalism show that feminism becomes more inclusive as it takes up a critical anti-capitalist practice. From there, we can hear a multiplicity of voices and weave that practical internationalism that already exists in the here and now.
Excursus: Neoliberalism and Internationalism
An analysis of neoliberalism has been a central feature of contemporary feminisms and therefore constitutes a crucial element of their internationalism. This is the case, first, because that analysis is a concrete interpretive key for identifying conflicts that were not previously understood as such, and mapping their connections. Second, it allows us to debate and challenge the ways neoliberalism translates and manages conflicts, through multiculturalism or subordinated inclusion that pacifies struggles. In Latin America, this also leads to a reconceptualization of the so-called progressive or populist governments of the last two decades and their relation to neoliberalism. Lastly, it enables a diagnosis of the conservative reaction that has been unleashed against feminism’s transnational force.
I want to focus on the work of two theorists from the United States—Wendy Brown and Nancy Fraser—because their interventions are simultaneously philosophical, political, and epistemological, and because they raise the question of the definition of neoliberalism and link it to questions of feminism. I will attempt to outline a dialogue between them, based on the Latin American debate and, in particular, from the perspective that is enabled by mobilizations and struggles on this continent, in order to frame a critique of populism from a feminist viewpoint. My underlying hypothesis is that feminist struggles present an anti-neoliberal perspective capable of going beyond populist political articulation.
In her book Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, Brown questions that notion of neoliberalism that seems to contain everything.[13] She does so by deepening “the antagonism between citizenship and neoliberalism” and by critiquing the model of neoliberal governance, which she understands as a process of the “de-democratization of democracy.” In her argument, neoliberalism restricts democratic spaces not only at the macro-structural level but also on the plane of the organization of social relations; competition thus becomes the norm for any type of relation. She describes this process as an economization of social life that alters the very nature of what we call politics, reinforcing the contrast between the figures of Homo economicus and Homo politicus. In this sense, she deviates from Michel Foucault, one of the original theorists of neoliberalism’s subjective effects. For him, neoliberalism is not a total economization of society that closes off the political, but a new way of understanding the political that expands the idea of government and broadens the idea of the economy, beyond an economistic sense.
Brown, by contrast, emphasizes that in neoliberalism, citizenship is not only a set of rights, but also a sort of ceaseless activism in which we are obligated to participate in order to make ourselves valuable. The penetration of neoliberal rationality into modern institutions such as citizenship blurs the very concept of democracy, from Brown’s point of view, who claims that “there are no citizens” in Foucault’s genealogies. While her critique of neoliberalism as the neutralization of conflict is important, and her analysis very sharp, it remains within a politicist framework: it is based on a formalist definition of what is considered “political,” leaving out other important fields and struggles that we would consider of a political nature.[14] The ability to analyze neoliberalism as governmentality is again restricted by her postulation of neoliberal reason as synonymous with the disappearance of politics. Therefore, the distinction between economy and politics (one foundational to capitalism) is recreated in a way that preserves an “autonomy of the political” as a field that is now colonized and must be defended. From a clearly Arendtian perspective, the “realm of rule” is the privileged space for the democratic deployment of Homo politicus.
Following this line of argumentation, Brown’s explanation of Donald Trump’s 2016 electoral victory—which she dubs as an “apocalyptic populism”—would be the consummation of neoliberalism’s hijacking of the political. She writes:
If this reproach to politics is one important strand of neoliberalism’s assault on democracy, equally important to generating support for plutocratic authoritarianism is what I call neoliberalism’s economization of everything, including democratic values, institutions, expectations and knowledge. The meaning and practice of democracy cannot be submitted to market semiotics and survive. Freedom becomes reduced to advancing in markets, keeping what one gets, hence legitimating growing inequality and indifference to all social effects. Exclusion is legitimate as strengthening competitiveness, secrecy rather than transparency or accountability is good business sense.[15]
For Brown, what is hollowed out by the economization of life is citizenship as a form of “popular sovereignty.” The privatization of public goods and higher education contributes to weakening democratic culture, while the notion of “social justice” is consolidated as that which restricts private freedoms. In summary, “together, the open neoliberal disparagement of politics; the assault on democratic institutions, values and imaginaries; the neoliberal attack on public goods, public life, social justice and an educated citizenry generate a novel anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian, libertarian, authoritarian political formation.” In Brown’s perspective, that economized form of politics produces a type of subjectivity that is opposed to the stability and security of citizens: “This formation now burns on the fuel of … fear and anxiety, sliding socioeconomic status and rancorous wounded whiteness.” Fear, anxiety, precarity, and “rancorous whiteness” are the affects that are liberated when the confines of citizenship do not produce or regulate democratic subjectivity. Thus, for Brown the equation looks like this: freedoms are increased to the extent that politics is reduced, while pernicious energies are freed to the extent that there is no citizen contention. The result is a politics that, in Trump’s case, is not anti-state but rather the business management of the state.
There are three problems with the understanding of “the political” proposed by this vision. On one hand, I think that the right-wing vote, considered in very broad terms, cannot be simplified as plainly anti-democratic spirit. Here I am thinking not only of Trump’s victory, but also the so-called turn to the right in Latin America. This “turn to the right,” since it coincided with Trump’s victory, has driven a similar search for explanations about such a shift in electoral preferences. In other words, a simple analogy is made between Trump’s victory following Barack Obama and Mauricio Macri’s win after Néstor Kirchner. However, we can complicate this analysis. If it is not an abrupt turn to the right by the masses, what is it? I consider it, instead, a form of “realism” with respect to the nondemocratic element of (liberal and progressive) democracy, which right-wing governments, using the words of the vernacular right, “make sincere” through a cynicism that accepts the status quo as a given. With this I want to say that there is a double idealization of democracy at work in Brown’s argument (which is the source of her politicism). This is the case, first, because it erases the violence that gave birth to neoliberalism, both in its origins (the coup d’états and state terrorism in Latin America, as well as the racism legitimized by democracy) and in its prolongation by post-dictatorship democracies in diverse but constitutive ways. Second, a conception of democracy as the reign of rule, accompanied by its projection onto citizens, prevents us from seeing its repressive violence in terms of the ways social conflicts are structured today. These conflicts perceive that understanding politics as a field of rules is a dis-cursive privilege of the elites with the freedom to assume that those rules do not function for everyone, as was made explicit by the Movement for Black Lives and the murders of poor youth in Latin American metropoles.[16]
This type of analysis returns to the unilaterally reactionary psyches of the masses, based on an understanding of the “psychic” energies that these regimes mobilize (taking up lines of Frankfurt School analysis on the “authoritarian personality”) and that point to the “apocalyptic” nature of populism in the North American case. Populism, then, returns to the side of the nonrational, since its drift can only be explained in terms of an unconscious neoliberal desire expressed by the masses. As a counterpoint, I do believe we need to think about that psychic and affective dimension, because there is an unavoidable materiality to it. But I believe that it is more productive to do so in terms of feelings that are direct qualities—again, “realistic” qualities—of contemporary labor power, as the Italian philosopher Paolo Virno has long argued, rather than mere degradation in the face of the breakdown of citizen habitus.[17]
The discussions around the political defeat of progressive governments in Latin America involve a series of issues related to the political subjectivity expressed at the polls. These are summarized by the bewilderment expressed by those progressive forces when the people who they claimed to favor and benefit “betrayed” them at the ballot boxes. In other words, why do the poor “vote against their interests”? Ernesto Laclau’s theory has been among the most widely used for this form of narrating defeat, in a way that reinforces an understanding of the heterogeneity of “the people” in terms of lack, and thus requiring a totalizing articulation from above.[18]
However, I want to return to the question of the materiality of psychic energies, since their discussion in the contemporary moment brings us to one of the Frankfurt School’s major themes: mass consumption. This was a fundamental element of progressive governments’ programs in the region, based on increasing access to consumer goods, particularly among the popular classes. But there was a particular feature to it: it is consumption that is already “detached” from its connection with employment, meaning that debt is what makes it possible. Progressive populism cannot be understood without recognizing the articulation that it produced between neoliberalism and neo-developmentalism under the command of finance (as I discussed in Chapter 4).
Lastly, I think that the critique of neoliberalism is weakened when neoliberalism is considered nonpolitical. Under this idea of politics, the properly political moments of neoliberalism are denied, and, in particular, the immediately political efficacy of “operations of capital” remain unrecognized.[19] The arduous political work of constructing norms and spatiality, as well as of producing subjectivity, is occluded from our analysis. Again, it is not economics versus politics, but rather the politicization of every action that makes it possible to sustain capitalist valorization. In relation to this, it seems fundamental to think about political practices capable of questioning neoliberalism without considering it the nadir of politics. If there is something challenging and complex about neoliberalism, it is that its constitution is already directly political and, as such, can be understood as a battlefield. If Brown highlights the apocalyptic features of Trump’s populism and its perverse continuity with the undemocratic character of neoliberalism, Nancy Fraser speaks of Trump’s victory as an “electoral mutiny” against neo-liberal hegemony, or more specifically as a “revolt against global finance.”[20] She also located Brexit, Bernie Sanders’s campaign, the popularity of the National Front in France, and the rejection of Matteo Renzi’s reforms in Italy within this narrative. In these diverse events, she saw the same will to reject “financialized capitalism.” This reading is tied to her analysis of the contemporary crisis as one of “progressive neoliberalism.” As she wrote in her article on the conjuncture at the beginning of 2017:
In its U.S. form, progressive neoliberalism is an alliance of mainstream currents of new social movements (feminism, anti-racism, multiculturalism, and LGBTQ rights), on the one side, and high-end “symbolic” and service-based business sectors (Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood), on the other. In this alliance, progressive forces are effectively joined with the forces of cognitive capitalism, especially financialization. However unwittingly, the former lends their charisma to the latter. Ideals like diversity and “empowerment,” which could in principle serve different ends, now gloss policies that have devastated manufacturing and what were once middle-class lives.
This argument was already present in her essay “Contradictions of Capital and Care,” where she argued that the mainstream imagination of gender equality both was premised on and reinforced a liberal individualism in which the privatization and commodification of social protection was capable of imbibing a “feminist aura.”[21] Such a feminism entails the presentation of reproductive tasks as simply obstacles to women’s individual professional careers, but also as tasks that neoliberalism, fortunately, frees us from via new markets for waged reproductive labor. A certain sort of feminist emancipation takes on a reactionary character, Fraser argues, by reformulating the division between reproduction and production. Thus, it normalizes the field where today many of the deepest contradictions of capital are found. In this sense, “progressive neoliberalism” would be the counterrevolution to the feminist hypotheses of the 1970s. Now it seems that emancipation is produced because we are pushed into the labor market, establishing the model of the “two-income household” as a perverse metabolization of the feminist critique of the family wage. Of course, this situation is sustained by an ever more classist and racist hierarchicalization of the global division of labor, in which poor migrant women from the South fill the “care gap” of women in the North, who are dedicated to their careers.
From this perspective, “progressive neoliberalism” is the response to a series of struggles against the disciplining hegemony of waged, masculine labor. Those struggles converged in social movements that politicized and challenged sexist and racist hierarchies. The strength of neoliberalism, understood as reaction and counterrevolution, would be to convert those struggles into a sort of multicultural cosmetics for policies of austerity, unemployment, and social disinvestment, while managing to express them in the language of minority rights. Melinda Cooper, in this sense, warns of the risk in Fraser’s argument: “In her most recent work, Fraser accuses second-wave feminism of having colluded with neoliberalism in its efforts to destroy the family wage. ‘Was it mere coincidence that second-wave feminism and neoliberalism prospered in tandem? Or was there some perverse, subterranean, elective affinity between them?’”[22] The suspicion that Cooper raises in regard to Fraser’s questions is important for building a critique that does not rely on nostalgia or the restoration of the family (even if in more egalitarian ways) in the name of a lost security.
The passage from hard neoliberalism (that of Thatcher or Reagan) to a more progressive one (that of Blair or Obama) involved the defeat of multiple struggles, which had varying levels of intensity. Their intensity can be measured in relation to the radicality of the response: this functions as a political and methodological principle for understanding neoliberal rationality, starting from revolt. The dilemma lies in ensuring that this reading does not turn into a rationalization of an always-anticipated defeat. In other words, the question is how not to assume—through an a priori logic that is ratified as an a posteriori analytic—neoliberalism’s capacity to metabolize and neutralize all practices and critiques, thus guaranteeing its success in advance.
This power of capital, which we could also name as the immanentization of capital’s logic of capture, is what is accounted for by Gilles Delueze and Félix Guattari’s notion of the axiomatic of capital.[23] This notion makes explicit the tension between a flexibility and versatility of capture and exploitation by capital, on one hand, and, on the other, the necessity of distinguishing between operations through which that machine of capture subsumes social relations and interventions that also resist and overflow the diagram of captureexploitation.
Finally, one last point of debate with Fraser: the moment of articulation. For Fraser, the type of “articulation” that this progressive neoliberalism carries out is superficial and counterproductive: “Progressive neoliberalism,” she writes, “superficially articulates immigrants, people of color, Muslims, LGTBIQ as the ‘we’ and turns the white man into a ‘them.’ This is a horrible way of dividing us, a form that only benefits capital.” According to Fraser, it is precisely this “superficial” articulation that Sanders tried to contest: “For Sanders, the idea was to mix an anti-racist, anti-sexist and pro-immigrant ‘recognition policy’ alongside a ‘distributive’ anti–Wall Street policy in favor of the working-class.” What I want to challenge is Fraser’s consideration that Laclau’s populism proposes a different type of articulation. In her words, “I feel much closer to someone like Ernesto Laclau, who saw populism as a logic that could be articulated in many different ways.” I want to debate this notion precisely by taking seriously a problem that Fraser herself raises in thinking about the radical left: how an “effective critique of financialization” is combined with an “anti-racist, anti-sexist, and anti-hierarchical vision of emancipation.”
There are two points to make here. First, Laclau’s notion of “populist reason” disregards any “destituent” effect originating from the social dynamic “from below” that is not inscribed in “demands” that are acceptable to the political system,[24] discrediting any force of overflow that makes it necessary to rethink (as frequently happens) the game of the political institution in terms of the common-multiple.[25] Second, progressive populisms abrogate any effective critique of financialization. In both dimensions, once again, a division and hierarchization are at work between the so-called social and political, where the instance of representation of the political system functions as a moment of “truth” for struggles that supposedly do not achieve their own political agency and thus are permanently infantilized.
Contending with Fraser’s reference to populist articulation is fundamental today if we are to understand the types of assumptions that are in tension within the collective formulation of the call for a “feminism for the 99 percent” made in the United States.[26] On the one hand, this formulation is very interesting because it directly opposes corporate (“lean-in”) feminism; on the other hand, two lines are problematically inscribed within it: a populist articulation and an intersectionality of struggles. This premise opens up a discussion about the political practice itself through which a feminism of the majority is produced.
If there is a possibility of rethinking the category of “popular sovereignty” (to take up Brown’s term), it is indeed within the feminist register: that is, to make the distinction between “the popular” and “populism.” From this point of view, we can also interpret the tension that inheres in a “feminism for the 99 percent,” as Fraser discusses.[27]
The mass feminism practiced and theorized in Argentina fundamentally differs from a populism based on an abstract notion of the people. It does so, first, because it does not suggest an equivalence between political desire and personal leadership condensed in a presidential figure (the condensation of Laclau’s theory). Second, our movement takes responsibility for changing the material living conditions of the majorities, where the dynamics of dispossession and financialization have transversally upset the thresholds of violence in social relations. Third, it distinguishes itself by creating space for political composition based on a feminist diagnosis of the crisis, simultaneously projecting a practical internationalism and thus defying the methodological nationalism of populism. And lastly, this mass feminism concretely generates a new sovereign dynamic (not confined to the rhetoric of the nation-state), forming and sustaining new spaces for the production of political decisions and creating the conditions to make those decisions operative.
I am speaking of an assembly-based dynamic that turned the international feminist strike into a process and converted that collective action into a common plane and organizational horizon. The dynamic of the assembly was maintained between the 2017 and 2018 strikes, not only as a preparatory and organizational apparatus with a predetermined goal, but also as a mode of mapping social conflict (layoffs and Mapuche land struggles, to name a few) and of reactivating the democratic, everyday practices of organizations (unions; political, educational, and cultural organizations; etc.) that produce new images of anti-neoliberal popular sovereignty in practice. These are intermittent and fragile sovereign forms, yet they are persistent and capable of producing new forms of power from below. This dynamic puts a body—a body that is extensive, a body-territory—to the question asked by high philosophy today: What does political action mean in conditions of extreme neoliberalism?
Like the formulation of “feminism for the 99 percent,” the “feminism of the masses” confirms that the feminism that is emerging is newly expansive. On this point, the mobilizations in Argentina—including the growth in organization from one strike to another, in relation to the internationalist web in which the movement unfolds—brings together the relation between the mass scale and vectors of minoritarian struggles in a new way. By this I mean that we have enacted a shift from the neoliberal language of recognition of minorities, to now submerge the vectors (and not the identities) of struggles that were long qualified as minoritarian, accounting for the protagonism of their “difference” on a mass scale.
Now, this massiveness foregrounds the question of the transversalityof political composition, that which makes its anti-neoliberal character effective. Here there is not naivete, nor is there restitution of the depoliticized character of the “social” as an infantilized stage of political representation. Massiveness, then, is inscribed in a popular horizon, and even a popular-community horizon, because it is what allows feminism to connect with social conflict (as opposed to its populist abstraction), and because it allows us to understand the web of violence that enables neoliberalism to persist.
Notes 1 Pastora Filigrana, “Anti-Racist Feminism or Barbarism: Moroccan Women Seasonal Strawberry Workers,” South Atlantic Quarterly 119:3 (July 2020). 2 Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar, “Women’s Struggle against All Violence in Mexico: Gathering Fragments to Find Meaning,” Liz Mason-Deese, trans. South Atlantic Quarterly 117:3 (July 2018), 670–81. 3 I used this image in my book Neoliberalism from Below (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017) to account for the multinational composition of the delegates in a slum in the city of Buenos Aires. Here, with different nuance, it is displaced to the domestic “interior” that ceases to be such. 4 For more on Territorio Doméstico, see Susana Draper and Rafaela Pimental, “Making the Network That Sustains Us Visible,” Viewpoint Magazine, February 6, 2020, viewpointmag.com. 5 The UTEP, a union that includes the Confederation of Popular Economy Workers (CTEP) as well as other organizations representing sectors of the popular economy, was launched in the end of 2019. 6 W.E.B. Du Bois, “The General Strike,” in Black Reconstruction: An Essay toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1935). 7 Cristina Vega, “Del otro lado de la huelga del 8M: Visualizando la interrupción social desde el feminismo,” Sin permiso, February 15, 2018, sinpermiso.info. 8 David Roediger, Class, Race, and Marxism (London and New York: Verso, 2017), 170. 9 Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989, 139–67. 10 Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, ed., How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017). 11 Ibid., 4 12 See Geraldina Colotti, “Lo sguardo di Selma James,” Il manifesto, March 27, 2017, ilmanifesto.it. 13 Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone, 2015). 14 As I argued in Neoliberalism from Below (204), in politicist perspectives, questions of gender and reproduction “function as the internalized outside of the polis: its dark economy.” The marginalization of these realms leads to an understanding of the political that reinforces a separation of spheres and fails to recognize the politicization of life. 15 Wendy Brown, “Apocalyptic Populism,” Eurozine, August 30, 2017, eurozine.com. 16 Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016). 17 See Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life, Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, and Andrea Casson, trans. (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004). 18 I develop this argument further in Neoliberalism from Below. 19 Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, The Politics of Operations: Excavating Contemporary Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019). 20 Nancy Fraser, “The End of Progressive Neoliberalism,” Dissent, January 2, 2017, dissentmagazine.org. 21 Nancy Fraser, “Contradictions of Capital and Care,” New Left Review SII, 100 (2016). 22 Melinda Cooper, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (New York: Zone, 2017), 12. 23 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Brian Massumi, trans. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 24 To just quote one of Laclau’s opinions that demonstrates the hierarchy of articulation: “The demands of indigenous people were not responded to promptly, but neither are they central to the structuring of politics.” Cited in “La real izquierda es el Kirchnerismo,” Página12, October 2, 2011, pagina12.com.ar. 25 By the “common-multiple,” I refer to the productive capacity of the social beyond the position of the demand that Laclau seems to require from the populist dynamic of democracy he theorizes. 26 Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser, Feminism for the 99 Percent: A Manifesto (London and New York: Verso Books, 2019). 27 Nancy Fraser, “What Is Feminism for the 99 Percent?,” March 3, 2017, La Izquierdo Diario (YouTube channel), youtube.com. 7