feminism

From women’s strikes to a new class movement: The third feminist wave
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By Cinzia Arruzza

April 26, 2019 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Viewpoint Magazine — On October 23, thousands of Glasgow cleaning workers kicked off the union demonstration for equal pay organized by Public Services International, Unison, and GMB with a minute’s silence, in memory of the women workers who died before being able to see the day when their work would be finally granted the same dignity and value as the work of their male colleagues. In this act there was full awareness of a long history of great and small humiliations, of invisible, unacknowledged, or underpaid work, of countless instances of injustice and petty abuses, as well as of the enormity of the challenge faced by the women’s strike. Equal pay: a reasonable, almost trivial goal, and yet so difficult to achieve, to such an extent that the World Economic Forum has calculated that – based on current trends and data – it will take at least 217 years to finally bridge the wage gap between women and men globally. (Granting that the world will still be habitable in 217 years…)

Linking class and gender theory
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Reviewed by Pip Hinman

Social Reproduction Theory
Edited by Tithi Bhattacharya
Pluto Press $45

December 7, 2018 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal — The rise of #MeToo, the anti-rape culture movement in India, the US women's strike and the pro-choice movements that have rocked Ireland and Argentina reveal that a new generation of feminist activists — some of whom may not have heard of “second-wave feminism” nor read the debates — is now organising for change.

They are fighting back because their hopes and aspirations for a better, more equal life are being thwarted. They experience oppression as women and as workers. They may not all identify as feminist (thanks to liberal feminism), but they are fighters against women’s oppression nonetheless.

These are some of the people Tithi Bhattacharya hopes to reach with Social Reproduction Theory, a collection of essays that focus on developing and linking class and gender theory.

The dawn of our liberation: The early days of the International Communist Women’s Movement
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By Daria Dyakonova
‘If women’s liberation is unthinkable without communism,
then communism is unthinkable without women’s liberation.’ — Inessa Armand[1]
October 13, 2018 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from John Riddell's Marxist Essays and Commentaries — On July 30, [1920] in the evening, slender columns of women workers wearing red kerchiefs and holding banners make their way to the Bolshoi Theater from remote districts and outskirts of Moscow. The slogans on the banners run: ‘Through the dictatorship of the proletariat in all countries to the full emancipation of women.’
What’s next for #MeToo? The McDonald’s strikes have an answer.
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Equality with a vengence: The over-incarceration of women
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Argentina: They are afraid of us
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The fight for the right to abortion spreads in Latin America despite politicians
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When feminism sets the political agenda
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Abandoned by the state: How the police fail survivors of sexual assault
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By Marienna Pope-Weidemann June 29, 2018 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Red Pepper — A study released today revealed that one in five festival goers have been subject to sexual harassment there, with the figure rising to 43% of women under 40. Campaigners say the report should be a wake-up call for the industry to “start treating sexual violence as seriously as other crimes.” The sinister extent of rape culture in this country remains widely unseen – especially where it extends to the state itself. Much of the rhetoric around tackling sexual violence focuses on encouraging women to come forward and report their assaulters to the police – to treat it as a crime, and use the formal mechanisms of police and state to deliver justice. But those mechanisms have perennially failed survivors of sexual assault.
'If we stop, the world stops': Behind the millions-strong women’s strike that shook the Spanish state
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It was always #MeToo: Korea’s fight against sexual violence
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Women, nature, and capital in the Industrial Revolution
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By John Bellamy Foster and Brett ClarkJanuary 30, 2018 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Monthly Review — The remarkable rise in recent years of “social reproduction theory” within the Marxist and revolutionary feminist traditions, identified with the studies of such figures as Johanna Brenner, Heather Brown, Paresh Chattopadhyay, Silvia Federici, Susan Ferguson, Leopoldina Fortunati, Nancy Fraser, Frigga Haug, David McNally, Maria Mies, Ariel Salleh, Lise Vogel, and Judith Whitehead—to name just a few—has significantly altered how we look at Karl Marx’s (and Frederick Engels’s) treatment of women and work in nineteenth-century Britain.[1] Three conclusions with respect to Marx’s analysis are now so well established by contemporary scholarship that they can be regarded as definitive facts: (1) Marx made an extensive, detailed examination of the exploitation of women as wage slaves within capitalist industry, in ways that were crucial to his overall critique of capital; (2) his assessment of women’s working conditions was seriously deficient with regard to housework or reproductive labor;[2] and (3) central to Marx’s (and Engels’s) outlook in the mid-nineteenth century was the severe crisis and threatened “dissolution” of the working-class family—to which the capitalist state in the late nineteenth century was compelled to respond with an ideology of protection, forcing women in large part back into the home.[3]