Subjects Archives: Feminism

They can be a force for change, explains Rachel Thain-Gray

In her landmark Caliban and the Witch, Marxist scholar Silvia Federici argues that witch hunts were an organized campaign of mass murder of women–particularly low-class women, midwives, or “wise women”–who defied the increasing implementation of a patriarchal, authoritarian order under a rapidly developing capitalist state.

Berlin, alone among Germany’s 16 states, has declared International Women’s Day a paid holiday, compensating for the fact that the city-state has fewer religious holidays than all the others. A third of the city was once part of the (East) German Democratic Republic, which always marked the day; that may also have contributed to the decision. This was its first year.

CONSIDERING HIS WORK as a whole, Marx had little to say directly about women’s oppression or the relationship between patriarchy and capitalism.(1) And some of what he had to say was, well, misguided. Yet Marxist feminists have drawn on his thought to create a distinctive approach to understanding these issues.(2)

Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib are under attack for who they are–as Muslim Arab-American women, and as progressive critics of U.S. foreign policy not only in Palestine but throughout the Middle East and in Latin America as well.

A remarkable figure amid a revolutionary ferment, Rosa Luxemburg lit the way for generations to come. Sally Campbell recalls her legacy, and we reprint Luxemburg’s final article, written the day before she died in January 1919.

In 1972 feminists from Italy, England, and the United States convened in Padova, Italy, for a two-day conference. Associated with the extra-parliamentary left, anti-colonial struggles, and alternatives to the communist party, these activists composed a declaration for action, the “Statement of the International Feminist Collective.”

Inequalities are immanent to capitalism. Capitalist modes of production are maintained through the reproduction of inequalities.

A new report on women’s human rights in Venezuela reveals the uneven advances of the Bolivarian Process in this area.

As the word intersectionality falls from the lips of Hillary Clinton and increasingly is normalized and sanitized, we should be clear about its radical moorings.

In the face of the deep crises of capitalism, with all the safety valves unscrewed so that each crisis is merely an intensification of the previous one; with crises increasingly affecting the everyday lives and living conditions making planning more precarious for an increasing number of women left alone with a double burden to carry, I sent out a call to the Marxists among the feminists whom I had known from the movement of the 1970s, from meetings, trips, visiting professorships, to jointly deliberate the situation.

In the West, since at least the myth of Gaea, the earth has been seen as something feminine. For ecofeminists, the linkage has had profound, and malign, consequences for our treatment both of nature and of women.

Council staff make history with biggest strike over equal pay.

GROUP of men claiming to be supporters of far-right Brazilian presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro carried out a sickening physical attack on an opposition supporter this week, carving a swastika into her stomach with a knife.

In this episode, we speak with Emma Caterine (@emmacaterineDSA), a law graduate and writer with more than a decade of experience working within economic justice, feminist, LGBTQ, and racial justice movements. We talk Democratic Socialists of America, MMT, the advantages of a federal jobs guarantee over a universal basic income, the place for sex work in a jobs guarantee program.

Key to social reproduction theory (SRT) is an understanding of the ‘production of goods and services and the production of life are part of one integrated process’, or in other words: acknowledging that race and gender oppression occur capitalistically.

50 years ago Women’s Liberation protested the Miss America Pageant and threw.

Frederick Engels’ book The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (hereafter The Origin) was published in 1884. In it he argued that early humans had lived in non-hierarchical societies in which women were not oppressed.

While a rich and engaging tradition of feminist approaches to international law has emerged over the past few decades, it has shown a marked tendency to sideline the long and multifaceted tradition of feminist historical-materialist thought.

In this post, Miriam Bak McKenna, argues that Federici’s work offers a rich resource for redressing the conspicuous absence of a gendered perspective within academic scholarship on materialist approaches to international law.