It was not long ago that Poland’s name echoed throughout the whole civilized world, that its fate stirred every soul and provoked excitement in every heart. Lately one no longer hears very much about Poland – since Poland is a capitalist country. Do we now want to know what became of the old rebel, where historic destiny steered it?
Luxemburg, The Industrial Development of Poland
Several days ago, at the end of March, the conservative party Kukiz15, the ruling party of Mr. Kaczynski, Prawo i Sprawiedliwosc (PiS), the Polish Prime Minister, Mrs. Beata Szydlo, the national council of bishops, and the majority of MPs declared their support for banning abortion completely.
Reproducing Injustice
30 May 2016, byThe battle for reproductive rights is a global battle. In March, the United States Supreme Court heard a landmark case over the future of women’s access to safe and legal abortions in Texas. In Poland, a proposed law by the country’s right-wing Law and Justice Party would effectively outlaw abortion. And while abortions have been legal in India since the seventies, Indian women’s control over their own bodies remains abbreviated.
The Sweatshop Feminists
18 May 2016, byGlobal elites have appropriated feminist language to justify brutal exploitation and neoliberal development.
Thoughts on the Left and its position towards women
29 April 2016, byI was supposed to write about class liberation and its relationship with social liberation, but I found it more critical, at this point, to write about the relationship between the Left and the issues of women, from a personal perspective connected with my own experiences.
The programs of neoliberal feminism
8 January 2016, byNeoliberalism isn’t just harmful economics. Here is a look at its gender side.
Academics and a few journalists have been writing about neoliberal feminism for some time. But most of them discuss it theoretically. Few recognize how neoliberal assumptions saturate specific proposals for advancing women, or how these proposals do not actually address women’s inequality, especially the inequality multiplied by race and class. At best these proposals are feeble in relation to most women’s problems, and they may even be part of the problem.
Logic or History? The Political Stakes of Marxist-Feminist Theory
5 July 2015, byWhen 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.
Capitalism and Gender Oppression
10 June 2015, byFeminist 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.
Is Feminism about ’Women’? A Critical View on Intersectionality from India
18 May 2015, byFeminism 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.
40 years on: the struggle for abortion rights
9 February 2015, byOn 17 January 2015 thousands of people demonstrated in Paris and other cities in France to commemorate the fortieth anniversay of the law legalising abortion in France for the first time, but also to denounce the inadequacies in its application, and to highlight other forms of women’s inequality. On this occasion the monthly journal of the NPA l’Anticapitaliste la Revue published this article retracing the struggle for the right to abortion in France.
Irish state reduces women to vessels
9 February 2015, byThe repression of women by the Irish state has been exposed yet again by the case of a clinically dead woman being kept alive in order to continue a pregnancy. The responsibility of the state for this woman’s situation was summed up in the claim by doctors that they were unable to accede to her family’s request that life support be switched off for “constitutional reasons”. In this case the legal imperative to preserve the life of the unborn raised the prospect of a woman’s body being maintained for up to twenty weeks despite there being no possibility of a live, never mind healthy birth.
