Socialist Feminist Strategy Today (original) (raw)

Women have entered the global political stage in an astonishing array of movements. Sparked by the current capitalist war on the working class as well as the ongoing struggle around patriarchal relations, these movements provide an important arena for socialist-feminist politics. Today, unlike the past, feminist ideas are part of many anti-capitalist movements, although bringing those ideas to the centre of anti-capitalist politics is still an uphill struggle. In this essay we discuss how socialist feminist activists are shaping demands and campaigns, how they organize on the ground, how they build the leadership of working-class, indigenous and rural women, how they work within mixed gender groups and movements. In order to do justice to the diversity of socialist-feminist strategies, we posed a set of questions to socialist-feminist scholars and activists engaged in different struggles. This essay is based on their insights. As a group, they are diverse in terms of age and political generation, social location and nationality. Susan Dirr and Giselda Gutierrez are activists in the Occupy movement in Chicago and Houston, respectively, and Esther Vivas is an activist in Spain’s Indignado movement, as well as a journalist and sociologist. Martha Ojeda, a former maquiladora worker, has been Executive Director of the Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras since 1996. Rosemary Hennessy, a theorist of Marxism and sexuality, also writes on gender and labour struggles in northern Mexico. Eleni Varikas is a political theorist based in Paris and connected to researchers and activists in Greece. Valentine Moghadam is an expert on women in the Middle East and on Transnational Feminist Networks (TFNs) that provide crucial support and solidarity in struggles against capitalism and patriarchy worldwide. With their collaboration, we have drawn a picture of socialist-feminist strategy that leaps from place to place and hardly presents a comprehensive view. Still, these instances of struggle reveal key aspects of contemporary socialist-feminist organizing.