Eight ways to strengthen feminist struggles

Opinion • Silvia Federici in collaboration with Verónica Gago • June 16, 2023 • Leer en castellano

The crisis capitalism is producing in the lives of millions of people is accelerating, at the same time as a renewed cycle of feminist mobilization and other struggles based on the subversion of daily life is underway.

There are many pressing issues to address and debate. 

The political prospects and current horizons of feminist struggles must be discussed, and we must work to elaborate a feminist analysis of ‘capital’s plan’, of new forms of exploitation and imperialism, and of the most effective forms of resistance toward the construction of a new social reality. 

In what follows, we will set out some proposals we hope can serve to open a discussion and collective conversation about these issues.

I   

Feminist struggles and feminist politics are not only aimed at improving the living conditions of women and those who dissent from heteronormativity. They aim to change the world. 

There can be no substantial change in the lives of our communities without profound social transformation. As women, we are the fundamental subject that makes the reproduction of life possible. In capitalist society, we make the reproduction of the labor force and the reproduction of the workers possible. 

Within the feminist movement there is general agreement that social reproduction is the foundation of our terrain of struggle, our perspectives and our analysis.

We thus affirm that feminisms in struggle must have an analysis of all aspects of social life, which we can achieve through the expansion and connection among many very diverse struggles. We can and must intervene in any issue, in all issues. 

There is no social change, perspective or issue that does not involve the reproduction of life. The reproduction of life is the starting point for our interpretations of the world, and in the creation of our strategies.

II

It is essential to present a comprehensive vision of capital's plan: we must be able to understand the ways in which capitalism is advancing, its forms of exploitation and extraction, its imperialist wars, and its inter-capitalist struggles.

What is capital's plan today? 

Deciphering this plan allows us to understand how it intervenes in specific policies and how it responds to the concrete struggles we are participating in.

An example of this is the struggle against extractivism, which is a struggle against policies that destroy life. Extractivism must be considered an anti-systemic struggle, as it is a fundamental pillar of the advance of capitalism. 

In addition to denouncing and fighting against the destruction wrought by extractivism does in particular places, we must understand this monstrous system of ruination as a whole.

III

We must create a methodology and set out a comprehensive vision that can bring the struggles that are unfolding into dialogue—struggles in defense of bodies, struggles in defense of territories, struggles against debt and against ecological destruction, among others—and broaden the horizons of them all. 

Any struggle, however small, can and must manifest the reasons and the objectives for which we are fighting, and what we want to build. From there we can unite with comrades from other parts of the world and elaborate a common program.

We need to create a shared understanding of what capital is doing and what we want to achieve with our struggles, so that we can produce a more comprehensive perspective from which to orient ourselves. 

What is the International Monetary Fund (IMF) doing and planning now? How are its decisions going against various struggles for justice? In what direction are the investments—or lack of investments—of international capital going? And what is the impact of those investments on social reproduction?  

With answers to these questions at hand, when we propose and organize actions, we will do so with a comprehensive view of what is taking place globally.

IV

There are three issues that are intimately connected in the overall plan of capital: war, crisis and debt. 

We live in a social order in which millions are in debt and unable to pay. The crises of capital and war are permanent.  

That is why today the international feminist movement must elaborate a feminist theory of war. We need to define what we mean by war and how war is framed in the order of capital. 

We must demonstrate that beyond classical wars of armed confrontation and weapons, there is another war, that the economy is also a war, and that debt is a form of war. 

In the US, the interest rate continues to rise, it has gone up ten times since 2022, and this increases all debts, both in the USA and in all the 'indebted' nations. The decision to raise interest rates must be understood as a declaration of war. 

With each increase in the interest rate, the share of wealth extracted by finance capital increases. This leads to the destruction of economies, of lives, and of countries. 

Exploitation, impoverishment and war are inextricably connected. 

If we are going to look, for example, at the wars that have devastated Africa, we find that they always begin with a process of structural impoverishment caused by austerity programs. 

In Sudan, as previously in Rwanda, at the beginning there was an IMF intervention; that is, a financial war. 

The same is happening today in Argentina. 

The imposition of austerity programs creates a terrain where social conflicts become more acute. 

Young people are recruited for their armies (regular and irregular) through the co-optation and capture of informal economies and because of the poverty wages in the formal labor market. 

What is happening in Bukele's El Salvador—with massive jails populated by young people and the simultaneous celebration of a bitcoin economy—appears as the punitive-financial utopia proposed for Latin America.

Through these financial and economic wars, but also through the repressive apparatus of state forces and paramilitarism, a whole process of social destructuring begins. 

Young people emigrate, and many of those who remain are recruited by formal and informal armies that are destroying their nations.

It almost seems like the US government and the European Community have a guide to how countries can be destroyed. They have already applied these methods in several countries: Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Sudan, which is being destroyed now.

It is important to see that the discourse of war is multidimensional. We cannot separate acts of armed war from the acts of finance. Finance is war.

V

The feminist movement has a privileged position from which to understand and analyze this because we are approaching it from the territories and from the the terrain of social reproduction. 

At the economic level, whether it is about finance or weapons, wars most affect women, because women are the ones who must take care of the reproduction of life, of children, of sick or wounded people, of food, of survival. 

War or no war, people need to eat, drink, and clothe themselves, and to continue to be born. It is women who ensure that life, in spite of everything, continues.

The enormous price of the destruction of life and the conditions that sustain reproduction is paid by women. Every war is a war of destruction of the possibilities of life. That is why there is so much despair.

War is part of the daily economy of capital, especially in times of crisis. 

What we have seen is a brutal increase in funding for war and the militarization of life. The US has incredibly deep pockets when it comes to funding wars.  

During the 2023 fiscal year, US the national defense budget is $816.7 billion. And it looks likely that Germany will send three billion euros to keep buying weapons for Ukraine. Biden has added another two billion to the $6.4 billion already earmarked to send arms to Ukraine. There is no longer talk of millions of dollars, now we are talking about billions. 

Germany is the country with the most influence in Europe. Today, there is a discussion similar to that of Rosa Luxemburg's time, over a century ago, about the resources destined for war.

VI

Capitalism is in crisis, and sustains itself through plunder and destruction. 

It might remind us of Joseph Shumpeter's idea of the need for "creative destruction," "creative" because it eliminates the dead, useless parts of capital.  

Capital modernizes itself and purges what no longer serves it through war, by which it also creates new conditions of accumulation and suppresses resistance. As Maurizio Lazzarato proposes, we are living in a moment of "destructive destruction." 

We think the situation of permanent war is one of the causes of the low birth rate in multiple countries. The collapse of the birth rate may be understood as one way in which women have rejected war. 

In Germany and Italy, birth rates fell below zero after the end of World War II. Women refused to produce soldiers for war, and refused to work days and nights so that their sons would be sent to war to die. 

However, it is clear that the collapse of the birth rate also stems from a desire not to give birth in conditions of misery, and out of a desire to make other life plans. 

In Argentina, a recent report reported a drop in the birth rate—and especially in teenage pregnancy—over the last five years. The newspapers labeled it a birth crisis. But the feminist reading is that this is happening due to the decriminalization of abortion and the debates on sex education, in which it is affirmed that motherhood should emerge from a free choice, not as an obligation.

Women who refuse to give birth are also part of this struggle. If our countries are in a state of constant impoverishment or war‚—armed or financial—the refusal to procreate must be understood differently.

VII

The consequences of wars are many, wars destroy communities, lives, and hopes for the future.

In USA, the police are militarized, both in terms of weapons and tactics. 

Men returning from war bring all the violence they have experienced at war into homes and neighborhoods. 

The widespread use of weapons of war in the US today is a major problem that is at the root of continued carnage. It is important to understand that war has become part of our daily lives. It is a war that has different faces, that is waged at different levels and in different ways, but that we need to recognize as a fundamental problem.

VIII

We’ll close on the theme of self-defense. We can think, for example, of the people in Cherán, México, who have created a community guard. How do we organize women's guards or self defense organizations?

There are experiences of cooperatives of women cab drivers in different countries that organize safe transport. Mutual support groups are created in times of crisis, their creation was intensified during the pandemic. We look after each other constantly through close and trusting bonds that function as a real infrastructure to allow escape and refuge in the face of violence in the homes. But much more is needed. 

A feminist perspective must include self-defense. Physical elimination is always capital's response to struggles. 

Thinking about and planning forms of self-defense is especially important to an abolitionist feminist perspective. If we support the abolition of the police, we must also build alternatives.

The dispute over how to understand and deal with violence in the territories is central. The ultra-right is intervening directly there. 

When social reproduction is systematically attacked and insecurity and violence become generalized, ‘security’ through policing is positioned as a solution to civil war unleashed against those who have the least. 

The creation of alternatives in the form of feminist self-defense is a crucial strategy.