Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto

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Faced with these two visions of feminism, we find ourselves at a fork in the road, and our choice bears extraordinary consequences for humankind. One path leads to a scorched planet where human life is immiserated to the point of unrecognizability, if indeed it remains possible at all. The other points to the sort of world that has always figured centrally in humanity’s most exalted dreams: a just world whose wealth and natural resources are shared by all, and where equality and freedom are premises, not aspirations. This form of feminism is fundamentally different to that which encourages women to simply “lean in” and climb the corporate ladder – while leaving the economic dynamics that underpin that corporate ladder untouched. There is now widespread dissatisfaction with the “girlboss” model of feminism. A slew of recent memes and articles have pronounced the “ end of the girlboss” and declared that the “ girlboss is leaving the building”, criticising its glossy individualism for being unrealistic, infantilising and exploitative. a b c d e f g "Beyond Lean-In: For a Feminism of the 99% and a Militant International Strike on March 8 - Viewpoint Magazine". Viewpoint Magazine. 3 February 2017. Archived from the original on 25 August 2018 . Retrieved 24 October 2018. Clinton’s defeat is our wake-up call. Exposing the bankruptcy of liberal feminism, it has created an opening for a challenge to it from the left. In the vacuum produced by liberalism’s decline, we have a chance to build another feminism: a feminism with a different definition of what counts as a feminist issue, a different class orientation, and a different ethos—one that is radical and transformative.

The authors support the use of strikes as a means of action, referring in particular to the international women’s strike of March 8 and other various transnational feminist movements like the ones from Latin America. The division between these two forms of control is an illusion; there is no division at all, as both work fundamentally together. This becomes particularly clear when we look at what the manifesto calls “social reproduction,” where Arruzza, Bhattacharya, and Fraser point out that while capitalism did not come up with misogyny and sexism — tale as old as time, etc. — all on its own, it did create “new, distinctively ‘modern’ forms of sexism, underpinned by new institutional structures.” Key to these modern forms of oppression, the manifesto explains, is the separation of “the making of people from the making of profit.” The task of creating and sustaining the people who make up society is relegated to women and treated as an afterthought to the true goal of making profit, even though people-making sustains not only biological life but the act of production itself. While largely a feminist issue, the organization of social reproduction is a system enfolded with racism and classism that can only be resolved by discerning the interdependency of domination. That is all. The text does not say anything else on the subject. This leads us to think that the authors have unlimited faith in the power of social movements—as if it were unnecessary to prepare for a confrontation with the capitalist state (which is not mentioned in the manifesto), a state that not only has a monopoly on violence but also has many mechanisms for co-opting and assimilating oppositional movements. This is not a minor question: While some conceptualize social changes as the result of administering state resources or parliamentary work (i.e., reforms), others idealize the social question and disdain political struggle. Unfortunately, whenever radical and transformational social movements rejected struggle in the political arena, they allowed reactionary and reformist sectors to monopolize this space. The metaphor of the “99%” is based on the atomization and fragmentation of the exploited classes and the oppressed sectors during the decades of the neoliberal offensive. It is, however, also important to mention that the capitalist restoration not only changed the physiognomy of the class of wage earners, but also vastly expanded wage labor across the globe. a b c d " "What is social reproduction theory?": Tithi Bhattacharya" (in European Spanish). 17 October 2017 . Retrieved 24 October 2018.

Struggle is both an opportunity and a school. It can transform those who participate in it, challenging our prior understandings of ourselves and reshaping our views of the world. Struggle can deepen our comprehension of our own oppression—what causes it, who benefits, and what must be done to overcome it. And further, it can prompt us to reinterpret our interests, reframe our hopes, and expand our sense of what is possible. Finally, the experience of struggle can also induce us to rethink who should count as an ally and who as an enemy. It can broaden the circle of solidarity among the oppressed and sharpen our antagonism to our oppressors. The kind of “viciously predatory form of capitalism we inhabit today,” the manifesto explains, will simply keep draining natural, mental, and physical resources without replenishment, masquerading as a free market that rewards individual responsibility as though individual responsibility arises in a vacuum. But people have to do the work of making other people into people: this obvious truism, in the hands of Feminism for the 99%, becomes a furious call to action for the rights of mothers. Feminism for the 99% refuses to seek or provide for a middle ground that would merely feed into the systemic causes it wishes to free itself from. It avoids centrist compromises and rejects the notion that the two seemingly opposing viewpoints of conservativism and liberalism, which in actuality serve and seek to maintain the same status quo, are the only options. Instead it poses the questions we need to ask about the kind of world we want to build such as, “Where will we draw the line delimiting economy from society, society from nature, production from reproduction, and work from family? How will we use the social surplus we collectively produce? And who, exactly, will decide these matters?” Clinton’s defeat is our wake-up call. Exposing the bankruptcy of liberal feminism, it represents a historic opening for a challenge from the left. In the current vacuum of liberal hegemony, we have the chance to build another feminism and to re-define what counts as a feminist issue, developing a different class orientation and a radical-transformative ethos. We write not to sketch an imagined utopia, but to clarify the road that must be travelled to reach a just society. We aim to explain why feminists should choose the road of the feminist strikes, unite with other anti-capitalist and anti-systemic movements and become a ‘feminism for the 99 per cent’ . What gives us hope for this project now are the stirrings of a new global wave, with the international feminist strikes of 2017–18 and the increasingly coordinated movements that are developing around them. As a first step, we set out eleven theses on the present conjuncture and the bases for a radical, new, anti-capitalist feminist movement.

Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser ... have collaborated and written what is effectively a prospective programme for the global women's movement, a feminist manifesto for the 99%. Socialism Today Arruzza, Cinzia, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser. 2019. Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto. London: Verso.

While right-wing movements seek to regain fabricated ‘traditionalist’ notions of femininity, sexuality, and nationalism, restricting the rights of those who do not conform, liberal left-wingers or ‘progressivists’ equally attempt to curtail the efforts of feminists, anti-racists, and environmentalists by employing legitimate rhetoric and grievances towards merely diversifying hierarchies rather than abolishing them. Feminism for the 99% rejects both of these paths because both are in service of the neoliberal capitalist system we have found ourselves in; it is this system itself that they “intend to identify, and confront head on, [as] the real source of crisis and misery.” Tithi Bhattacharya, another key signatory of the feminism for the 99% manifesto, has expanded on social reproduction theory within the context of gender, providing a marxist analysis of gender disparate divisions of labor as an integral part of the capitalist mode of production. [7] Specifically, Bhattacharya suggests that the unpaid acts of childbirth, child-rearing, and domestic duties are themselves acts of productive labor, acted within an as exploitative context consistent with marxist labor theory. [7] A key point, is that these acts are disparately the role of women. [7] In part what is striking and heartening about Enola Holmes 2 is the ease and vigour with which a left feminist plotline is made central to the film. A significant slice of feminist history from the left is brought to life, made sense of and cheered on. It resonates with the different but connected politics of the present, when roles historically designated as “women’s work” remain undervalued and underpaid, and when many on the right seem only too keen to return to a moment before the welfare state and labour regulation. But how do we propose to set such a transformation in motion? To accomplish radical changes, the manifesto proposes: “Feminism for the 99% aims to unite existing and future movements into a broad-based global insurgency.” In Feminism for the 99%, Arruzza, Bhattacharya, and Fraser set out to present a working-class women’s alternative to Sandberg’s corporate feminism and “equal opportunity domination” for a select few women in power. The authors write, “We aim to explain why feminists should choose the road of feminist strikes, why we must unite with other anticapitalist and antisystemic movements, and why our movement must become a feminism for the 99%.” Woven throughout the book, the authors outline their vision for a movement based on the understanding that true equality for

a] timely, fiery manifesto ... Arruzza, Bhattacharya, and Fraser herald the arrival of a new internationalist, anticapitalist feminist movement ... The feminism they describe is universalist and collaborative, in solidarity with antiracist, queer, environmental, migrant, and labor rights movements also endangered by capitalism. Publishers Weekly We disagree in the first place because the authors’ theoretical conception leads them to assert that all sectors of the working class are “equally central” to confronting the capitalist system. From this, they conclude that “class struggle includes struggles over social reproduction,” citing struggles for housing, public transport and free education, among others. Moreover, they maintain that these struggles “now form the leading edge of projects with the potential to alter society, root and branch.” We believe that these changes in the composition of the class that represents a majority of society (at least socially, if not in absolute numbers) are expressed by the feminist movement’s adoption of the term “strike,” the workers’ traditional method of struggle. Even though most feminist organizations do not use it, [6] the strike slogan is a tool for feminism—a multi-class and still mostly urban movement, in which enlightened sectors of the petty bourgeoisie exercise political and ideological hegemony—to enter into a new dialogue with ever-larger sectors of working women.Historically, this movement has been concerned not only with the exploitation bound up in paid labour but also with domestic inequalities: with thinking about both those things together, often through what is called “social reproduction”. This concept helps identify how the economy has historically depended on the free labour of housework and child-rearing to sustain itself. Looking at social reproduction in its broadest sense – at the role of housewives, nannies, maids, cleaners, grandparents, au pairs – also means that left feminism always necessarily needs to be international and anti-racist, as only too often it is badly paid migrant women who do most of the “dirty work”. The title of the book refers to the slogan “We are the 99%” from the 2011 “Occupy Wall Street” protests against capitalist, that highlighted the strong inequalities between the elite (the 1%) and the rest of the population (the 99%). The 1% stands for the richest women who benefit from liberal feminism, at the expense of the majority of women, the 99%, for whom the authors’ feminism is fighting. They show particular solidarity with women are also oppressed by other power systems apart from the gender one: racialized women, poor women, lesbian women, transgender women, Indigenous women, disabled women, migrant women, etc. Therefore, the manifesto clearly calls for the convergence of struggles. This organic crisis has called the hegemony of neoliberal ideology into question, revealing that a tiny minority is living in the most obscene wealth by pushing ever-larger numbers of human beings into misery. In 2011, the 15-M movement in the Spanish State (with its slogan “we are not commodities in the hands of politicians and bankers”) and then the Occupy Wall Street movement (which said “we are the 99%, you are the 1%”) were the first political expressions of a generation that had to confront the fact that it would be worse off than its parents. This manifesto describes the myriad of ways that neoliberal capitalism invades our everyday lives: through gender, sexuality, healthcare, and even the environment, to scratch the surface. At the same time, it highlights capitalism’s insistence on a regulatory divide for the sake of the ‘health’ of the economy, which is always prioritized over the health of the people who participate and generate that economy.