Feminism for the 99%

A Manifesto

Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, Nancy Fraser

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781788734448
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

Unaffordable housing, poverty wages, healthcare, climate change, border policing; not the issues you ordinarily hear feminists talking about. But don't these issues impact the vast majority of women globally? Taking as its inspiration the new wave of feminist militancy that has erupted globally, this Manifesto makes a simple but powerful case: Feminism shouldn't start - or stop - with seeing women represented at the top of society. It must start with those at the bottom, and fight for the world they deserve. And that means targeting capitalism. Feminism must be anti-capitalist, eco-socialist and anti-racist. This is a manifesto for the 99%.

A Manifesto

A fork in the road

In the spring of 2018, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg told the world that we “would be a lot better off if half of all countries and companies were run by women and half of all homes were run by men,” and that “we shouldn’t be satisfied until we reach that goal.” A leading exponent of corporate feminism, Sandberg had already made a name (and a buck) for herself by urging women managers to “lean in” at the company boardroom. As former chief of staff to US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers—the man who deregulated Wall Street—she had no qualms about counseling women that success won through toughness in the business world was the royal road to gender equality.

That same spring, a militant feminist strike shut down Spain. Joined by more than 5 million marchers, organizers of the twenty-four-hour huelga feminista called for “a society free of sexist oppression, exploitation and violence … for rebellion and a struggle against the alliance of the patriarchy and capitalism that wants us to be obedient, submissive and quiet.” As the sun set over Madrid and Barcelona, the feminist strikers announced to the world, “On March 8 we cross our arms, interrupt[ing] all productive and reproductive activity,” declaring they would not “accept worse working conditions, nor being paid less than men for the same work.”

These two voices represent opposing paths for the feminist movement. On the one hand, Sandberg and her ilk see feminism as a handmaiden of capitalism. They want a world where the task of managing exploitation in the workplace and oppression in the social whole is shared equally by ruling-class men and women. This is a remarkable vision of equal opportunity domination: one that asks ordinary people, in the name of feminism, to be grateful that it is a woman, not a man, who busts their union, orders a drone to kill their parent, or locks their child in a cage at the border. In sharp contrast to Sandberg’s liberal feminism, the organizers of the huelga feminista insist on ending capitalism: the system that generates the boss, produces national borders, and manufactures the drones that guard them.

Faced with these two visions of feminism, we find ourselves at a fork in the road, and our choice bears extraordinary consequences for humankind. One path leads to a scorched planet where human life is immiserated to the point of unrecognizability, if indeed it remains possible at all. The other points to the sort of world that has always figured centrally in humanity’s most exalted dreams: a just world whose wealth and natural resources are shared by all, and where equality and freedom are premises, not aspirations.

The contrast could not be starker. But what makes the choice pressing for us now is the absence of any viable middle way. We owe the dearth of alternatives to neoliberalism: that exceptionally predatory, financialized form of capitalism that has held sway across the globe for the last forty years. Having poisoned the atmosphere, mocked every pretense of democratic rule, stretched our social capacities to their breaking point, and worsened living conditions generally for the vast majority, this iteration of capitalism has raised the stakes for every social struggle, transforming sober efforts to win modest reforms into pitched battles for survival. Under such conditions, the time for fence-sitting is past, and feminists must take a stand: Will we continue to pursue “equal opportunity domination” while the planet burns? Or will we reimagine gender justice in an anticapitalist form—one that leads beyond the present crisis to a new society?

This manifesto is a brief for the second path, a course we deem both necessary and feasible. An anticapitalist feminism has become thinkable today, in part because the credibility of political elites is collapsing worldwide. The casualties include not only the center-left and center-right parties that promoted neoliberalism—now despised remnants of their former selves—but also their Sandberg-style corporate feminist allies, whose “progressive” veneer has lost its shine. Liberal feminism met its waterloo in the US presidential election of 2016, when the much-ballyhooed candidacy of Hillary Clinton failed to excite women voters. And for good reason: Clinton personified the deepening disconnect between elite women’s ascension to high office and improvements in the lives of the vast majority.

Clinton’s defeat is our wake-up call. Exposing the bankruptcy of liberal feminism, it has created an opening for a challenge to it from the left. In the vacuum produced by liberalism’s decline, we have a chance to build another feminism: a feminism with a different definition of what counts as a feminist issue, a different class orientation, and a different ethos—one that is radical and transformative.

This manifesto is our effort to promote that “other” feminism. We write not to sketch an imagined utopia, but to mark out the road that must be traveled to reach a just society. We aim to explain why feminists should choose the road of feminist strikes, why we must unite with other anticapitalist and antisystemic movements, and why our movement must become a feminism for the 99 percent. Only in this way—by connecting with anti-racists, environmentalists, and labor and migrant rights activists—can feminism rise to the challenge of our times. By decisively rejecting “lean in” dogma and the feminism of the 1 percent, our feminism can become a beacon of hope for everyone else.

What gives us the courage to embark on this project now is the new wave of militant feminist activism. This is not the corporate feminism that has proved so disastrous for working women and is now hemorrhaging credibility; nor is it the “microcredit feminism” that claims to “empower” women of the global South by lending them tiny sums of money. Rather, what give us hope are the international feminist and women’s strikes of 2017 and 2018. It is these strikes, and the increasingly coordinated movements that are developing around them, that first inspired—and now embody—a feminism for the 99 percent.

Thesis 1: A new feminist wave
is reinventing the strike.

The recent feminist strike movement began in Poland in October of 2016, when more than 100,000 women staged walkouts and marches to oppose the country’s ban on abortion. By the end of the month, an upwelling of radical refusal had already crossed the ocean to Argentina, where striking women met the heinous murder of Lucía Pérez with the militant cry: “Ni una menos.” Soon it spread to Italy, Spain, Brazil, Turkey, Peru, the United States, Mexico, Chile, and dozens of other countries. From its origins in the streets, the movement then surged through workplaces and schools, eventually engulfing the high-flying worlds of show business, media, and politics. For the last two years, its slogans have resonated powerfully across the globe: #NosotrasParamos, #WeStrike, #VivasNosQueremos, #NiUnaMenos, #TimesUp, #Feminism4the99. At first a ripple, then a wave, it has become a massive tide: a new global feminist movement that may gain sufficient force to disrupt existing alliances and redraw the political map.

What had been a series of nationally based actions became a transnational movement on March 8, 2017, when organizers around the globe decided to strike together. With this bold stroke, they re-politicized International Women’s Day. Brushing aside the tacky baubles of depoliticization—brunches, mimosas, and Hallmark cards—the strikers have revived the day’s all-but-forgotten historical roots in working-class and socialist feminism. Their actions evoke the spirit of early twentieth century working class women’s mobilization—paradigmatically the strikes and mass demonstrations led mostly by immigrant and Jewish women in the United States, which inspired US socialists to organize the first National Women’s Day and German socialists Luise Zietz and Clara Zetkin to call for an International Working Women’s Day.

Re-animating that militant spirit, the feminist strikes of today are reclaiming our roots in historic struggles for workers’ rights and social justice. Uniting women separated by oceans, mountains, and continents, as well as by borders, barbed wire fences, and walls, they give new meaning to the slogan “Solidarity is our weapon.” Breaking through the isolation of domestic and symbolic walls, the strikes demonstrate the enormous political potential of women’s power: the power of those whose paid and unpaid work sustains the world.

But that is not all: this burgeoning movement has invented new ways to strike and infused the strike form itself with a new kind of politics. By coupling the withdrawal of labor with marches, demon-strations, small business closures, blockades, and boycotts, the movement is replenishing the repertoire of strike actions, once large but dramatically shrunk by a decades-long neoliberal offensive. At the same time, this new wave is democratizing strikes and expanding their scope—above all, by broadening the very idea of what counts as “labor.” Refusing to limit that category to waged work, women’s strike activism is also withdrawing housework, sex, and smiles. By making visible the indispensable role played by gendered, unpaid work in capitalist society, it draws attention to activities from which capital benefits, but for which it does not pay. And with respect to paid work, too, the strikers take an expansive view of what counts as a labor issue. Far from focusing only on wages and hours, they are also targeting sexual harassment and assault, barriers to reproductive justice, and curbs on the right to strike.

As a result, the new feminist wave has the potential to overcome the stubborn and divisive opposition between “identity politics” and “class politics.” Disclosing the unity of “workplace” and “private life,” it refuses to limit its struggles to those spaces. And by redefining what counts as “work” and who counts as a “worker,” it rejects capitalism’s structural undervaluation of women’s labor—both paid and unpaid. All told, women’s strike feminism anticipates the possibility of a new, unprecedented phase of class struggle: feminist, internationalist, environmentalist, and anti-racist.

This intervention is perfectly timed. Women’s strike militancy has erupted at a moment when once-powerful trade unions, centered in manufacturing, have been severely weakened. To reinvigorate class struggle, activists have turned to another arena: the neoliberal assault on health care, education, pensions, and housing. In targeting this other prong of capital’s four-decade attack on working-and middle-class living conditions, they have trained their sights on the labor and services that are needed to sustain human beings and social communities. It is here, in the sphere of “social reproduction,” that we now find many of the most militant strikes and fightbacks. From the strike wave of teachers in the United States to the struggle against water privatizatio...