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• Sexual politics

  Logic or History? The Political Stakes of Marxist-Feminist Theory

  5 July 2015, by Cinzia Arruzza

  When I first started writing this series of remarks in Italian (“Riflessioni degeneri”), subsequently collected into a single piece for the English version Remarks on Gender, my aim was twofold. The first was to make a complex debate – one that has unfolded over the course of several decades – accessible to a public of activists and people interested in gender, race, and class politics. The second was to contribute toward reopening this crucial debate about how we should conceptualize the structural relationship between gender oppression and capitalism.

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• Gender and Capitalism

  Capitalism and Gender Oppression

  10 June 2015, by Johanna Oksala

  Feminist theorists today are increasingly returning to the insight that capitalism must constitute the critical frame for understanding contemporary forms of gender oppression. Investigating the relationship between feminism and capitalism raises a host of difficult questions, however, which Cinzia Arruzza faces head on in her lucid essay Remarks on Gender. She gives an illuminative roadmap of the terrain in which this issue was debated in the 1970s and 1980s by laying out three different theses on how capitalism and gender oppression are related: dual or triple systems theory, indifferent capitalism, and the unitary thesis. She begins by assessing carefully the problems of the first two positions and concludes by defending the third, the unitary thesis: in capitalist societies, a patriarchal system that would be autonomous and distinct from capitalism no longer exists. Instead of treating gender and sexual oppression as separate forms of domination, a unitary Marxist-feminist theory must incorporate them in the total framework of capitalist accumulation.

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• Gender and Capitalism

  The Intersectional Conundrum and the Nation-State

  10 June 2015, by Sara R. Farris

  It is not an easy task to reconstruct succinctly the main problematics that have traversed Marxist feminism in the last 40 years, without risking simplifications or serious omissions, or without producing a mere summary that avoids critically engaging with the subjects that it raises. And yet, I believe Arruzza’s text “Remarks on Gender” accomplishes the task very well: her reconstruction of the key theses on the relationship between patriarchy and capitalism proposed by different currents within socialist and Marxist feminism from the 1970s onwards is not only lucid and informative, but also extremely clear and accessible. Furthermore, her partisan critique of the different positions on the table, alongside an indication of the most promising questions for debate, give us – as feminists who locate ourselves in the Marxist tradition(s) – a great opportunity to begin and/or deepen a much needed discussion and exchange. A new generation of Marxist feminists has emerged in the last years; it begins to question, re-articulate, expand and criticise the theorizations and disputes it has inherited from previous generations.

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• Gender and Capitalism

  Closing the Conceptual Gap

  10 June 2015, by FTC Manning

  This text raises the question of a unified theory of social relations. Cinzia Arruzza’s essay “Remarks on Gender” reminds us of the debates, left dormant for decades, around creating a unified theory of capital. However, Arruzza’s path toward that unification is one that abdicates the possibility of locating gender and race as part of the abstract, logical, or “essential mechanisms” of capitalism, opting instead to incorporate these pervasive relations as aspects of capitalism’s historical and concrete unfolding.

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• Patriarchy, family, feminism

  Hunter-gatherers: gender equality, a key factor in human evolution?

  5 June 2015, by Jean Batou

  The social organization of humanity before the advent of agriculture tells us a lot about the context in which our species evolved over tens of thousands of years. It is in fact distinguished from that of primates by a more intense collaboration between individuals, which allows the development of a "cumulative culture." Researchers have just shown why gender equality may explain this propensity to associate a higher number of individuals coming from different groups (M. Dyble et al., "Sex equality can explain the unique social structure of hunter-gatherer bands ", Science, 15 May 2015).

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• European History

  Inside the European Cataclysm

  4 June 2015, by Enzo Traverso

  Writing on a century of violence since the Great War, as World War I was once called, could easily turn into a gallery of horrors or an awful, monotonous succession of wars and genocide, from the battle of Verdun to Baghdad, from the Armenian to the Rwanda genocide, passing through Auschwitz and the Gulag.

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• Feminism and Intersectionality

  Is Feminism about ’Women’? A Critical View on Intersectionality from India

  18 May 2015, by Nivedita Menon

  Feminism requires us to recognise that "women" is neither a stable nor a homogeneous category. Does intersectionality as a universal framework help us to capture this complexity? This paper argues that it does not. It addresses this question through the intricacies of the terrain that feminist politics must negotiate, using the Indian experience to set up conversations with feminist debates and experiences globally. Feminism is heterogeneous and internally differentiated. We need to pay attention to challenges to the stability of given identities— including those of "individual" and "woman." These challenges constitute the radically subversive moments that are likely to be most productive for feminism in the 21st century.

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• Environment

  The biodiversity crisis and the environmentalist left

  13 May 2015, by Alan Thornett

  In this presentation I want to advance four propositions that may be controversial:

  • That biodiversity is the planet’s most valuable resource. It is also its most abused and threatened.

  • That the biodiversity collapse we are witnessing today—the greatest mass extinction of species for 65 million years—is the most fundamental aspect of the whole environmental crisis.

  • That most left environmentalists—including Marxist and socialist environmentalists—have failed to adequately recognise or address it.

  • That this represents a serious failing in the overall approach of the left, including the Marxist left, to the environmental crisis.

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• Ecosocialism

  Environment: The foundations of revolutionary eco-socialism

  3 May 2015, by Daniel Tanuro

  The concept of eco-socialism is based on a double paradoxical note: the solution to the “ecological crisis” due to the capitalist mode of production necessitates a response of a socialist type, whilst the environmental balance sheet of “actually existing socialism” is catastrophic. I will briefly develop these two elements and then present some foundations of an eco-socialist aggiornamento as it is conceived inside the “International Eco-socialist Network”. I hope to bring forward evidence that eco-socialism is something more than a new label on an old bottle: a necessary alternative adapted to the challenges of our times.

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• Intellectuals and the “The New Cold War”: from the Tragedy to the Farce of Choice

  20 April 2015, by Ilya Budraitskis

  Observers speak of the “New Cold War” as a self-evident and incontrovertible reality. Already in the spring, the new contours of international politics, demarcated by sanctions and mutual rhetorical incursions, were fully recognized by the broadest segments of the public in Russia, Europe and the United States—including those who were very far from decision-making processes—as a return to the familiar and frightening principles of the second half of the twentieth century.

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