Subjects Archives: Feminism

I was 24 years old in 1970, when I read Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex, a year younger than she was when she wrote the book. The book catapulted me from the limitations of the Left organization of which I was a member into the world of Women’s Liberation. There was no going back once I saw and felt the chauvinism of the Left, how women’s issues were  seen as tangential to the more important priorities of “real” radical politics, rather than seeing feminism as “central and directly radical in itself.”

The Washington, DC Public Charter School Board oversees some 120 public charter schools in the nation’s capitol, serving more than 43,000 students. And one member of that school board, John Goldman, is an MRA with clear white supremacist leanings. He has admitted to having an alter ego, “Jack Murphy,” under which he posted to websites and participated in debates.

Nicos Poulantzas Institute presents Angela Davis for the Eleventh Annual Nicos Poulantzas Memorial Lecture.

Long before the present resurrection of this emboldened feminist movement (forcing people to frantically Google the term), I sensed it coming as the teacher advisor of my high school’s feminist club, the Feminist Eagles.

Colin Barker of Manchester rs21 introduced a panel discussion to launch the book Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression at the recent Historical Materialism conference in London . We reproduce Colin’s presentation here.

Just a week ago, Colombian social leaders denouncing the murder of another one showed up to the press conference with masks covering their faces in order to avoid risking to lose their own lives—such is the danger of defending human rights in Colombia.

Liz Payne reviews The Woman Worker by Nadezhda K Krupskaya.

In this short video, Tithi Bhattacharya, editor of ‘Social Reproduction Theory’ (Pluto, 2017), discusses ‘SRT’, and the question of who produces the worker under capitalism?

Following is the text of a talk delivered by the author on Nov. 4 at the “The Solution is Socialism” educational conference in Connecticut. The conference was hosted by the Youth for Socialist Action chapter at Central Connecticut State University, where the sessions were held.

It’s been one hell of a week and I have to be honest, I am really angry. Four times this week, I have been told that women are not oppressed under Capitalism in Advanced Capitalist Economies; this has come from the mouths of three men (one of whom is supposedly on the hard left) and one time by a young woman.

Caliban and the Witch is a reminder that it is the task of feminists and Marxists alike to demand that the sphere of reproduction and continuing forms of colonialism be seen as key sources of value for capitalism and therefore as key sites of struggle against it.

Diana Lozado was 21 when she left her home city of Nieva and fled into the jungle to fight with the FARC. She had always been fascinated by the guerrilla movement and its fight against inequality in the countryside, and Lozado wanted to be part of it.

It has often been claimed that the radical documentary practice of the 1970s attended to class politics to the exclusion of gender. This was one of the core arguments for a staged practice of photography.

There was only once, in the final year of my PhD, that my supervisor and I butted heads. I had just submitted my fourth chapter for her review and, because I was living in another city at the time, she sent me an email saying we needed to speak on the phone urgently.

The recent “burqa bans” in Austria and Quebec appear to be troubling legal manifestations of the rising tide of Islamaphobia in Europe and North America.

It’s high time that we replace the narrow rational economic man within our models with a more objective understanding of human nature by incorporating the ‘feminine’ characteristics of humanism, connectedness, and intuition.

Stuart Jeffries on the Frankfurt School’s absence of women and the points of contact between the thinkers associated with the Institute für Sozialforschung and theorists of feminism.

Venezuela announced Thursday the creation of a national day to celebrate socialist feminism, while activists are continuing to push for greater women’s rights.

Without understanding the particular plight of trans women, only a blunted and partial view of gender is possible. And without a systemic view of gender, political solutions to that plight will be equally limited.

Class is primary—not in the sense of more important, but in the sense of being the limit, the foundation, the point where profit is extracted and the point where it can be challenged. The centrality of class is tactical, not moral.