Feminism

The starting point of this study is a paradox: among social, institutional and political actors, peasant and family farming are gradually becoming established as legitimate and credible alternatives to an agro-productivist model that has ’run out of steam’. [1] They address both environmental and food-related challenges, are sustainable and successful in agro-economic terms, contribute to social change and operate on a human scale. This is one side of the coin.

George Souvlis and Ankica Čakardić of Salvage spoke to Cinzia Arruzza, one of the organizers of the call for the International Women’s Strike in the US, about why she came to be an activists, her views on the women’s strike, and more broadly her political views.

This interview with David McNally and Sue Ferguson was published in October 2015, on the occasion of the publication of a new version of Lise Vogel’s Marxism and the Oppression of Women, for which they wrote a new Introduction.

Johanna Brenner: I grew up in a staunchly liberal family and remained politically liberal until I joined the movement against the Vietnam war, where I was introduced to anti-imperialist politics and then Marxism and “third-camp” socialism. In the late 60’s I was part of the student left that turned toward organizing the working-class. I was a student at UCLA. We organized student support for a teamster wildcat strike and we had a group called the Student Worker Action Committee that published a newspaper, Picket Line, where we covered different worker and community struggles in Los Angeles. I was rather slow to embrace feminism, but in the 1970’s I got involved with a socialist-feminist group called CARASA (Coalition for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse) which began in New York City. Some friends and comrades formed a Los Angeles branch of CARASA and we were able to connect to radical women of color doing community organizing around sterilization abuse in LA. From that point on, I have been deeply immersed in Marxist-feminist theory and politics.

Zakia Salime is associate professor in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University. This tribute is to Fatema Mernissi: mentor, insightful teacher, organic intellectual, incisive feminist, powerful voice, charismatic presence, craftswoman, generous host, and friend. It appeared on Jadaliyya and is reprinted here with the permission of the author and Jadaliyya.

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.

The 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.

Global elites have appropriated feminist language to justify brutal exploitation and neoliberal development.

I 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.

Neoliberalism 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.