Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto

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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. Rowbotham, Sheila, Lynne Segal, and Hilary Wainwright. 2013. Beyond the Fragments: Feminism and the Making of Socialism. Brecon: Merlin Press Limited. 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 “micro- credit 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. Feminism for the 99 percent calls on all radical movements to join together in a common anticapitalist insurgency.

Angela Davis Criticizes "Mainstream Feminism" / Bourgeois Feminism, 8 January 2018, archived from the original on 18 March 2018 , retrieved 24 October 2018 a treatise for an intersectional, socialist feminism that centers collective power over power for just a few Jezebel Unlike in mathematics, an addition in politics can sometimes result in subtraction. This can be seen not only in Sanders’ campaign but also in Argentina, where, under the auspices of the Vatican, a large part of the progressive, center-left and center-right opposition has united in a “Front for All” against President Macri’s right-wing government. In both cases, as in many other countries, this is an attempt to subordinate the feminist movement to petty bourgeois or bourgeois political parties (including even imperialist parties or religious ones!), parties that will strive to maintain the capitalist system, against and despite the interests of women. [4]

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Feminism for the 99% refuses to seek or provide for a middle ground that would merely feed into the systemic causes it wishes to free itself from. It avoids centrist compromises and rejects the notion that the two seemingly opposing viewpoints of conservativism and liberalism, which in actuality serve and seek to maintain the same status quo, are the only options. Instead it poses the questions we need to ask about the kind of world we want to build such as, “Where will we draw the line delimiting economy from society, society from nature, production from reproduction, and work from family? How will we use the social surplus we collectively produce? And who, exactly, will decide these matters?” Feminists for the 99 percent do not operate in isolation from other movements of resistance and rebellion. We do not separate ourselves from battles against climate change or exploitation in the work- place; nor do we stand aloof from struggles against institutional racism and dispossession. Those struggles are our struggles, part and parcel of the struggle to dismantle capitalism, without which there can be no end to gender and sexual oppression. The upshot is clear: feminism for the 99 percent must join forces with other anticapitalist movements across the globe—with environmentalist, anti- racist, anti-imperialist, and LGBTQ+ movements and labor unions. We must ally, above all, with left-wing, anticapitalist currents of those movements that also champion the 99 percent. Tithi Bhattacharya, another key signatory of the feminism for the 99% manifesto, has expanded on social reproduction theory within the context of gender, providing a marxist analysis of gender disparate divisions of labor as an integral part of the capitalist mode of production. [7] Specifically, Bhattacharya suggests that the unpaid acts of childbirth, child-rearing, and domestic duties are themselves acts of productive labor, acted within an as exploitative context consistent with marxist labor theory. [7] A key point, is that these acts are disparately the role of women. [7] Rejecting the zero-sum framework capitalism constructs for us, feminism for the 99 percent aims to unite existing and future movements into a broad-based global insurgency. Armed with a vision that is at once feminist, anti-racist, and anticapitalist, we pledge to play a major role in shaping our future.” (p. 57) A criticism of liberal/corporate feminism

The division between these two forms of control is an illusion; there is no division at all, as both work fundamentally together. This becomes particularly clear when we look at what the manifesto calls “social reproduction,” where Arruzza, Bhattacharya, and Fraser point out that while capitalism did not come up with misogyny and sexism — tale as old as time, etc. — all on its own, it did create “new, distinctively ‘modern’ forms of sexism, underpinned by new institutional structures.” Key to these modern forms of oppression, the manifesto explains, is the separation of “the making of people from the making of profit.” The task of creating and sustaining the people who make up society is relegated to women and treated as an afterthought to the true goal of making profit, even though people-making sustains not only biological life but the act of production itself. While largely a feminist issue, the organization of social reproduction is a system enfolded with racism and classism that can only be resolved by discerning the interdependency of domination.

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This manifesto describes the myriad of ways that neoliberal capitalism invades our everyday lives: through gender, sexuality, healthcare, and even the environment, to scratch the surface. At the same time, it highlights capitalism’s insistence on a regulatory divide for the sake of the ‘health’ of the economy, which is always prioritized over the health of the people who participate and generate that economy. In our opinion, the “reinvention of the strike” mentioned in the manifesto does not mean that all feminist actions, whatever they may be, can be called strikes. Nor does it mean calling for a withdrawal of labor while “broadening the very idea of what counts as ‘labor,’” where the authors confusingly mix the withdrawal of housework with that of “sex and smiles.” As Lorna Finlayson points out regarding the limitations of this type of strike, For this reason, we believe that any feminism that claims to be anti-capitalist needs to fight the sectoral, bureaucratic leaderships of the workers’ movement that maintain an arbitrary separation between the economic demands of wage earners and the democratic demands of the broader masses—this separation is beneficial to capitalism. But it also means fighting the (equally bureaucratic and sectoral) leaderships of the social movements that, denying the social power of the concentrated sectors of the working class in the struggle against capitalism, try to subjugate these democratic struggles to a limited reformist perspective, which in the context of the crisis is becoming increasingly utopian. But how do we propose to set such a transformation in motion? To accomplish radical changes, the manifesto proposes: “Feminism for the 99% aims to unite existing and future movements into a broad-based global insurgency.” The manifesto reflects many telltale signs of our epoch, marked as it is by the revitalization of feminism and the women’s movement. Global protests by women function, in turn, as a channel for expressing the growing social discontent experienced in capitalist society.

Historically, this movement has been concerned not only with the exploitation bound up in paid labour but also with domestic inequalities: with thinking about both those things together, often through what is called “social reproduction”. This concept helps identify how the economy has historically depended on the free labour of housework and child-rearing to sustain itself. Looking at social reproduction in its broadest sense – at the role of housewives, nannies, maids, cleaners, grandparents, au pairs – also means that left feminism always necessarily needs to be international and anti-racist, as only too often it is badly paid migrant women who do most of the “dirty work”. The authors support the use of strikes as a means of action, referring in particular to the international women’s strike of March 8 and other various transnational feminist movements like the ones from Latin America. For more than a decade, Nancy Fraser's thought has helped to reframe the agenda of critical theory. Etienne Balibar As a first step, we propose to help build an international strike against male violence and in defense of reproductive rights on 8 March. In this, we join with feminist groups from around 30 countries who have called for such a strike.

Kennedy, Elizabeth Lapovsky (2008). "Socialist Feminism: What Difference Did It Make to the History of Women's Studies?". Feminist Studies. 34 (3): 497–525. JSTOR 20459218. While right-wing movements seek to regain fabricated ‘traditionalist’ notions of femininity, sexuality, and nationalism, restricting the rights of those who do not conform, liberal left-wingers or ‘progressivists’ equally attempt to curtail the efforts of feminists, anti-racists, and environmentalists by employing legitimate rhetoric and grievances towards merely diversifying hierarchies rather than abolishing them. Feminism for the 99% rejects both of these paths because both are in service of the neoliberal capitalist system we have found ourselves in; it is this system itself that they “intend to identify, and confront head on, [as] the real source of crisis and misery.” The authors make the point that this movement has been “democratizing strikes and expanding their scope” and that “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.” When a highly bureaucratised trade union apparatus has been suppressing workers’ interests , agency and struggle, the emergence of any challenge to that is a necessary lifeblood in the working-class struggle. As a living example of this, in the Spanish state, there was huge pressure exerted from below on the official trade union movement to row in behind the 8 March International Women’s Day general strike. The women’s marches of 21 January have shown that in the United States, too, a new feminist movement may be in the making. It is important not to lose momentum.

The feminism in Feminism for the 99% does not go unquestioned. The issue, the manifesto states, is that mainstream media “equates feminism, as such, with liberal feminism.” Far from being a movement of solidarity, liberal feminism has worked to disseminate the values of neoliberal capitalism: at the expense of women, especially women of color and migrant women, while posturing as a feminism that empowers women to ‘lean in.’ The kind of “viciously predatory form of capitalism we inhabit today,” the manifesto explains, will simply keep draining natural, mental, and physical resources without replenishment, masquerading as a free market that rewards individual responsibility as though individual responsibility arises in a vacuum. But people have to do the work of making other people into people: this obvious truism, in the hands of Feminism for the 99%, becomes a furious call to action for the rights of mothers. In other words, anti-capitalist feminism is a feminism of and for the working class, that is, of and for the social subject that capitalism places in a strategic position for its functioning (and from which that class can form alliances). Otherwise, anti-capitalist feminism will end up dissolving in a movement that is powerless to transcend the horizon of reforms. Of course, to realize the objectively revolutionary potential of the most concentrated sectors of the working class, they must achieve an effective and conscious will to lead all sectors (even of other classes) that are also oppressed by capital. We have no interest in breaking the glass ceiling while leaving the majority to clean up the shards.” (p. 13) Who are the 99%?a b c d e f g "Beyond Lean-In: For a Feminism of the 99% and a Militant International Strike on March 8 - Viewpoint Magazine". Viewpoint Magazine. 3 February 2017. Archived from the original on 25 August 2018 . Retrieved 24 October 2018. Feminism for the 99% is fighting against injustices and inequalities intrinsic to the neoliberal economic system. It argues that feminism should be in solidarity with other struggles, especially anti-capitalist, anti-racist and ecological ones.