Feminism

The term postmodernism has entered into common currency with a rapidity that modernism, “after” which it is named, never achieved: it has a trendy contemporaneity but is little understood. Partly through its description of reality as a series of images, or “simulacra” in Baudrillard’s word, it has attained popular cultural status in the media, especially television, as well as modish respectability in the academy, across Europe and North America.

As a protest space created by men and women, 15-M has repeated the mistake of its predecessors, fearing that feminism would divide the movement, instead of strengthening it. 15-M has not developed tools for recognising the patriarchal logic to be found at its heart, and transforming them from a feminist perspective. The result has been to render violence invisible and to silence women’s voices.

The re-emergence of feminism in the 1970s, itself the product of a whole generation of militants imbued with Marxism - at least in Europe - contributed to the development of two types of currents: those advocating a pure and simple rejection of Marxism, others the surpassing of Marxism through some methodology supposed to be better suited to the new subject matter. This paradoxical phenomenon can be explained by factors both internal and external to Marxism.

“The purpose of this report is to look at the challenges to and criticisms of traditional political organizational forms, primarily those made by the women’s movement but also by other social movements, and consider whether they are well-founded or not.”