[Video] Feminist Perspectives on Anti-Capitalist Politics

Women from different geographies have long seen the oppression of women as inseparable from capitalist exploitation. While emerging from various historical contexts, many Black, indigenous, Third World and Marxist feminists have built their theories and practice on the interconnected nature of multiple oppressions, weaving together a critique of capitalism, racism, colonialism, and patriarchy, and arguing that any struggle for gender justice must necessarily address the other systems of oppression.

Thus, Black feminists were articulating the interconnections between race, gender and class long before the term intersectionality was coined and entered popular discourse. Marxist feminists have emphasized the importance of the gendered and racialized labour of social reproduction, reclaiming it as a legitimate arena for anticapitalist struggle. Indigenous and peasant women across the world have been on the forefront of the struggles against dispossession and ecological plunder, even as they have challenged their oppression as women within their own communities. The Kurdish women’s movement over the last four decades has similarly attempted to theorize the interlocking of capitalism, nation-state and patriarchy while engaging in the struggle for liberation both as women and as members of a colonized people. They have developed a conceptual framework called jineoloji to reimagine revolutionary theory and praxis.

Drawing on various traditions of radical feminist thought and action, this panel will explore feminist perspectives on capitalism and anti-capitalist struggles. How can we benefit from a feminist perspective in the current moment of deepening ecological, economic, and political crises, aggravated and laid bare by the pandemic? How can a feminist perspective inform anti-systemic struggles and visions of alternative forms of social organization that would transcend capitalism and all other systems of oppression? Who are the protagonists of current anticapitalist struggles? Does a feminist perspective point us to a new internationalism?