https://socialistaction.org/2019/04/09/feminists-lead-in-the-global-class-struggle/
Feminists lead in the global class struggle
/ 14 hours ago
April 2019 Mar 8 Madrid (Fernando Alvarado-EFE)
Over 350,000 marched in Madrid on International Women’s Day, March 8.
(Fernando Alvarado / EFE)
By CHRISTINE MARIE
“We are the feminist, trans feminist, anti-racist, antifascist tide that
will take over Verona, opening up liberating spaces which were born from
the global power of the International Women Strike!” So concludes the
call for action that put 30,000 feminists and their allies on the
streets on March 31 to protest a meeting of the World Congress of
Families (WCF), a virulently anti-LGBTQI and anti-abortion organization.
The WCF promotes the “traditionalist identity” named as the ideal by
illiberal European regimes such as Poland, Hungary, and Russia, as well
as admiring right-wing political parties across Europe and large
evangelical groups in the U.S.
Verona was chosen as the site of this year’s WCF conference due to the
national electoral victory, in combination with the 5 Star Movement, of
Matteo Salvini’s far-right Northern League (now called simply the League
Party) in 2018 and an ordinance won by Verona’s hard-right mayor,
Federico Sboarina, that made the city a “pro-life” town and required
women seeking an abortion to consult with anti-abortion advisors
offering financial assistance for pregnancy.
World Conference of Families
Salvini, Italy’s Interior Minister, was the featured speaker of the WCF
conference. He was joined on the platform by Minister for Family and
Disability Lorenzo Fontana and Minister of Education Marco Bussetti.
Until a few days before the event, when outrage forced a retreat, it was
built with the endorsement of the regional government. A hard-right
program of opposing immigration, and pushing higher European birth
rates, while opposing reproductive rights, same-sex marriage, and gender
fluidity marked the day. The Italian fascist group Forza Nuova set up a
full calendar of regional marches and rallies in support of the
conference, reminding Italians that Verona had been a fascist stronghold
during the time of Mussolini.
The head of Arcigay, Italy’s oldest mainstream gay rights organization,
noted that this was the first time that the WCF conference has been held
outside of the socially conservative former Soviet states and in the
heart of Western Europe. Arrayed against the assembly and parades of
both the electoral and fascist right, Trans-Feminist Verona and the
Italian affiliate of the International Women’s Strike known as Non una
di meno (Not One Less, not one more woman killed) drew from the strength
of the national March 8 International Women’s Day strike to take a stand
against the normalization of hard-right “traditionalist” thought and
against the plan to abolish or weaken abortion, divorce and family law,
and the social institutions to which victims of sexual, gender,
homophobic, and transphobic violence have turned.
In particular, they mobilized against the League’s Pillon law, which
would roll back Italian codes on divorce to the Dark Ages, changing the
rules on child custody, domestic violence, and child economic support in
the event of divorce.
International Women’s Strike
On March 8, 2019, Non una di meno put hundreds of thousands of women in
motion amidst collaborative national 24-hour shutdowns of bus, metro,
tram, and train networks, airport ground operations, and municipal
offices and schools in Rome.
In Milan, the transport unions issued demands that included a stop to
male violence against women, gender discrimination and precarious
employment; privatization in the welfare sector, the right to free and
accessible public services, universal and unconditional earnings at home
and at work, with equal pay, and a policy of shared support for
maternity and paternity leave.
They began organizing three years ago after witnessing the 2016 strike
of Polish women in defense of abortion rights and watching the Ni una
menos movement in Argentina use the organizing tool of national and
local assemblies to call a “women’s strike” in October 2016, in response
to the murder of 16-year-old Lucía Pérez, who was raped and impaled in
the coastal city of Mar del Plata. Ni una menos spread quickly to other
cities in Argentina and soon to Brazil, Chile, Bolivia, Paraguay, El
Salvador, Mexico, Turkey, and Spain.
In 2017, the International Women’s Strike, or Paro Internacional de
Mujeres network, began to link these struggles in a more formal way and
set March 8, International Women’s Day as a global day of action for
women fighting not only against sexual violence, for reproductive
justice, and an end to discrimination, but against all the
anti-working-class attacks on the social wage and the neoliberal
restructuring of employment that hit women and gender non-conforming
people the hardest.
The development of the IWS, from the global South to the south of
Europe, before its expansion to more than 50 countries, is no accident.
It reflects resistance in the places facing the most brutal of the
impacts of the global capitalist crisis—the austerity demands placed on
indebted nations, and the cutbacks and extreme pro-business measures
implemented by local elites responding to the bidding of the IMF and
other lenders.
In 2019, the outpouring globally on this date exceeded that of previous
years. In the Spanish state, alone, at least 6 million respected the
national call for a general strike, and demonstrations numbered 350,000
in Madrid, 250,000 in Barcelona, and 200,000 in Zaragoza. Julia Cámara,
who toured the U.S. in February, described the organizing as involving
linked networks of immigrant women; North African, Middle Eastern, and
Central American refugees; caucuses of women in the unions; unorganized
women fighting the stresses of precarious work; and young women
struggling around sexual violence.
All were together to restore not only desperately needed social
provisioning such as housing, health care, education, and dignity for
women, cis and trans, under attack due to the economic crisis and lack
of a sufficient response from more traditional workingclass
organizations and parties.
Some insight into the process by which feminist activists and young
working women are radicalizing, developing a systemic critique of the
political order, and discovering themselves as agents of change for the
whole working class can be gleaned from the many calls and documents put
out by various assemblies for the International Women’s Day marches.
In Argentina, the movement, while founded in response to a sexual
murder, rejects carceral feminism (calling on the police), arguing that
sexual violence is inextricably bound to the economic violence of the
state, and refuses to ally with a criminal justice system that defends
profits through racialized policing and jailing. In opposition to all
the attacks on Argentine labor law and payment of the debt to those
banks by President Mauricio Macri, they proclaim: “In this strike we
collect the history of all the historic strikes of the feminist movement
and make it our own, because we are in the front row against the
reactionary right, the neoliberal plans, and the interference of the
imperialist governments.”
In Buenos Aires, the March 8 action began with a militant but
disciplined face-off between the police and the organized women workers
of Coca Cola, Hospital Posadas, the occupied MadyGraf print shop, and
other work sites. The assembly also had to debate the place of bourgeois
electoralism in the struggle, with supporters of former president
Cristina Fernández de Kirchner trying to assert leadership and finally
withdrawing financial support for the strike sound system and stage. A
vigorous intervention by trans-critical feminists hoping to exclude
trans women was defeated, and the document supported a fully inclusive
movement.
Toward a feminist international
On the eve of March 8, an international group of signatories from the
IWS movements in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Spain, Italy, and the U.S.
published “Beyond March 8: Toward a New Feminist International” on the
site of Verso Books. “The new feminist wave,” they wrote, “is the first
line of defense to the rise of the far-right. Today, women are leading
the resistance to reactionary governments in a number of countries.”
The term “Feminist International,” coined by the Argentinian movement,
they say, is meant to evoke the new sense of urgency attached to
international solidarity and transnational meetings to coordinate, share
practical experiences, and deepen analysis. On April 6, Swiss activists
are sponsoring a meeting of international feminist speakers from the
U.S., South Africa, India, Tunisia, and Belgium to build for a June 14
women’s strike in Geneva and to discuss the way forward for true
international coordination.
The response to the calls of the women of the world for a new feminist
movement that can go beyond fighting for equality under the law to the
struggle for a real systemic transformation of society is much more of a
leap in the U.S. than in Europe. This is due to the weakness of the
labor movement, the dominance of many social movements by the Democratic
Party, and the generally lower level of the class struggle. The
perspective of the International Women’s Strike movement, however, is
the perspective of revolutionary socialists, who can bring the
experience of the global movement to radicalizing working women and
students in many ways, rooting the expansion of their political
imaginations in internationalism, and laying the base for a future of
class struggle feminism.
Socialist Action encourages its supporters to support tours of IWS
internationals, plan forums, hold educationals, and to begin to help
form coalitions or assemblies to plan activity on March 8, 2020. Many
Socialist Action branches, in collaboration with the International
Women’s Strike, will also be organizing reading groups on the new IWS
text, “Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto,” by Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi
Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser. Please join us.
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April 9, 2019 in Women's Liberation.
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