1. Evaluate whether a social justice is redundant or different form the modern theories of justice (e.g. Rawls Dworkin and Nozick)2. Contrast Crenshaw and Collins takes on intersectional theory 3. Explain the dilemma that falser defines for bivalent identities below are the sources that you can find some answers from it. please do not plagirisim
feminism_for_the_99.pdf
collins_intersecting_oppressions.pdf
crenshaw_demarginalizing_the_intersection_of_race_and_sex__a_black_feminis.pdf
Unformatted Attachment Preview
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ESTO
;:.iii
POLITICS / FEMINISM “,,:::
$12.95/ £7.99/ $17.50CAN
THIS IS
AMANIFESTO
FOR THE 99
PERCENT
Unaffordable housing, poverty wages, inadequate healthcare, border policing, climate
change-these are not what you ordinarily
hear feminists talking about. But aren’t they
the biggest issues for the vast majority of
women around the globe?
Taking as its inspiration the new wave of feminist militancy that has erupted globally, this
manifesto makes a simple but powerful case:
feminism shouldn’t start-or stop-with the
drive to have women represented at the top
of their professions. It must focus on those
at the bottom, and fight for the world they
deserve. And that means targeting capitalism.
Feminism must be anticapitalist, eco-socialist
and anti racist.
Feminism for
the 99 Percent
Feminism for
the 99 Percent
A Manifesto
Cinzia Arruzza
Tithi Bhattacharya
Nancy Fraser
VERSO
London • New York
For the Combahee River Collective,
who envisioned the path early on
and for the Polish and Argentine feminist strikers,
who are breaking new ground today
First published by Verso 2019
© Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, Nancy Fraser 2019
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
1 3 5 79 10 8 642
Verso
UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F OEG
US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 10lD, Brooklyn, NY 11201
versobooks.com
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN-13: 978·1-78873-442-4
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-444-8 (UK EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-445-5 (US EBK)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publicarion Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Typeset in Sabon by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CRO 4YY
Contents
Feminism for the 99 Percent: A Manifesto
Postface
1
59
A Manifesto
A fork in the road
In the spring of 2018, Facebook COO Sheryl
Sandberg told the world that we “would be a lot
better off if half of all countries and companies
were run by women and half of all homes were
run by men,” and that “we shouldn’t be satisfied
until we reach that goal.” A leading exponent of
corporate feminism, Sandberg had already made
a name (and a buck) for herself by urging women
managers to “lean in” at the company boardroom. As former chief of staff to US Treasury
Secretary Larry Summers-the man who deregulated Wall Street-she had no qualms about counseling women that success won through toughness
in the business world was the royal road to gender
equality.
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FEMINISM FOR THE 99 PERCENT
That same spring, a militant feminist strike shut
down Spain. Joined by more than 5 million marchers, organizers of the twenty-four-hour huelga
feminista called for “a society free of sexist oppression, exploitation and violence … for rebellion and
a struggle against the alliance of the patriarchy and
capitalism that wants us to be obedient, submissive
and quiet.” As the sun set over Madrid and
Barcelona, the feminist strikers announced to the
world, “On March 8 we cross our arms,
interrupt[ing] all productive and reproductive
activity,” declaring they would not “accept worse
working conditions, nor being paid less than men
for the same work.”
These two voices represent opposing paths for
the feminist movement. On the one hand, Sandberg
and her ilk see feminism as a handmaiden of
capitalism. They want a world where the task of
managing exploitation in the workplace and
oppression in the social whole is shared equally by
ruling-class men and women. This is a remarkable
vision of equal opportunity domination: one that
asks ordinary people, in the name of feminism, to
be grateful that it is a woman, not a man, who busts
their union, orders a drone to kill their parent, or
locks their child in a cage at the border. In sharp
contrast to Sandberg’s liberal feminism, the
organizers of the huelga feminista insist on ending
A Manifesto
capitalism: the system that generates the boss,
produces national borders, and manufactures the
drones that guard them.
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.
The contrast could not be starker. But what
makes the choice pressing for us now is the absence
of any viable middle way. We owe the dearth of
alternatives to neoliberalism: that exceptionally
predatory, financialized form of capitalism that
has held sway across the globe for the last forty
~·ears. Having poisoned the atmosphere, mocked
every pretense of democratic rule, stretched our
social capacities to their breaking point, and
worsened living conditions generally for the vast
majority, this iteration of capitalism has raised the
stakes for every social struggle, transforming sober
efforts to win modest reforms into pitched battles
for survival. Under such conditions, the time for
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FEMINISM FOR THE 99 PERCENT
fence-sitting is past, and feminists must take a
stand: Will we continue to pursue “equal
opportunity domination” while the planet burns?
Or will we reimagine gender justice in an
anticapitalist form~ne that leads beyond the
present crisis to a new society?
This manifesto is a brief for the second path, a
course we deem both necessary and feasible. An
anticapitalist feminism has become thinkable today,
in part because the credibility of political elites is
collapsing worldwide. The casualties include not
only the center-left and center-right parties that
promoted neoliberalism-now despised remnants
of their former selves-but also their Sandbergstyle corporate feminist allies, whose “progressive”
veneer has lost its shine. Liberal feminism met its
waterloo in the US presidential election of 2016,
when the much-ballyhooed candidacy of Hillary
Clinton failed to excite women voters. And for
good reason: Clinton personified the deepening
disconnect between elite women’s ascension to high
office and improvements in the lives of the vast
majority.
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
A Manifesto
feminism with a different definition of what counts
as a feminist issue, a different class orientation,
and a different ethos~ne that is radical and
transformative.
This manifesto is our effort to promote that
“other” feminism. We write not to sketch an imagined utopia, but to mark out the road that must be
traveled to reach a just society. We aim to explain
why feminists should choose the road of feminist
strikes, why we must unite with other anticapitalist
and anti systemic movements, and why our
movement must become a feminism for the 99
percent. Only in this way-by connecting with antiracists, environmentalists, and labor and migrant
rights activists–can feminism rise to the challenge
of our times. By decisively rejecting” lean in” dogma
and the feminism of the 1 percent, our feminism
can become a beacon of hope for everyone else.
What gives us the courage to embark on this
project now is the new wave of militant feminist
activism. This is not the corporate feminism that
has proved so disastrous for working women and is
now hemorrhaging credibility; nor is it the “microcredit feminism” that claims to “empower” women
of the global South by lending them tiny sums of
money. Rather, what give us hope are the international feminist and women’s strikes of 2017 and
2018. It is these strikes, and the increasingly
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FEMINISM FOR THE 99 PERCENT
coordinated movements that are developing around
them, that first inspired-and now embody-a
feminism for the 99 percent.
Thesis 1: A new feminist wave
is reinventing the strike.
The recent feminist strike movement began in Poland
in October of 2016, when more than 100,000 women
staged walkouts and marches to oppose the country’s
ban on abortion. By the end of the month, an upwelling
of radical refusal had already crossed the ocean to
Argentina, where striking women met the heinous
murder of Luda Perez with the militant cry: “Ni una
menos.” Soon it spread to Italy, Spain, Brazil, Turkey,
Peru, the United States, Mexico, Chile, and dozens of
other countries. From its origins in the streets, the
movement then surged through workplaces and
schools, eventually engulfing the high-flying worlds of
show business, media, and politics. For the last two
years, its slogans have resonated powerfully across
the
globe:
#NosotrasParamos,
#WeStrike,
#VivasNosQueremos, #NiUnaMenos, #TimesUp,
#Feminism4the99. At first a ripple, then a wave, it has
become a massive tide: a new global feminist
movement that may gain sufficient force to disrupt
existing alliances and redraw the political map.
A Manifesto
What had been a series of nationally based actions
became a transnational movement on March 8,2017,
when organizers around the globe decided to strike
together. With this bold stroke, they re-politicized
International Women’s Day. Brushing aside the tacky
baubles of depoliticization-brunches, mimosas, and
Hallmark cards-the strikers have revived the day’s
all-but-forgotten historical roots in working-class and
socialist feminism. Their actions evoke the spirit of
early twentieth century working class women’s mobilization-paradigmatically the strikes and mass
demonstrations led mostly by immigrant and Jewish
women in the United States, which inspired US socialists to organize the first National Women’s Day and
German socialists Luise Zietz and Clara Zetkin to call
for an International Working Women’s Day.
Re-animating that militant spirit, the feminist
strikes of today are reclaiming our roots in historic
struggles for workers’ rights and social justice.
Uniting women separated by oceans, mountains,
and continents, as well as by borders, barbed wire
fences, and walls, they give new meaning to the
slogan “Solidarity is our weapon.” Breaking
through the isolation of domestic and symbolic
walls, the strikes demonstrate the enormous political potential of women’s power: the power of those
whose paid and unpaid work sustains the world.
But that is not all: this burgeoning movement has
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FEMINISM FOR THE 99 PERCENT
invented new ways to strike and infused the strike
form itself with a new kind of politics. By coupling
the withdrawal of labor with marches, demon-strations, small business closures, blockades, and
boycotts, the movement is replenishing the repertoire
of strike actions, once large but dramatically shrunk
by a decades-long neoliberal offensive. At the same
time, this new wave is democratizing strikes and
expanding their scope-above all, by broadening the
very idea of what counts as “labor.” Refusing to
limit that category to waged work, women’s strike
activism is also withdrawing housework, sex, and
smiles. By making visible the indispensable role
played by gendered, unpaid work in capitalist society, it draws attention to activities from which capital benefits, but for which it does not pay. And with
respect to paid work, too, the strikers take an expansive view of what counts as a labor issue. Far from
focusing only on wages and hours, they are also
targeting sexual harassment and assault, barriers to
reproductive justice, and curbs on the right to strike.
As a result, the new feminist wave has the potential to overcome the stubborn and divisive opposition between “identity politics” and “class politics.” Disclosing the unity of “workplace” and
“private life,” it refuses to limit its struggles to those
spaces. And by redefining what counts as “work”
and who counts as a “worker,” it rejects
A Manifesto
capitalism’s structural undervaluation of women’s
labor-both paid and unpaid. All told, women’s
strike feminism anticipates the possibility of a new,
unprecedented phase of class struggle: feminist,
internationalist, environmentalist, and anti-racist.
This intervention is perfectly timed. Women’s
strike militancy has erupted at a moment when
once-powerful trade unions, centered in manufacturing, have been severely weakened. To reinvigorate class struggle, activists have turned to another
arena: the neoliberal assault on health care, education, pensions, and housing. In targeting this other
prong of capital’s four-decade attack on workingand middle-class living conditions, they have
trained their sights on the labor and services that
are needed to sustain human beings and social
communities. It is here, in the sphere of “social
reproduction,” that we now find many of the most
militant strikes and fightbacks. From the strike
wave of teachers in the United States to the struggle
against water privatization in Ireland to the strikes
of Dalit sanitation workers in India-all led and
powered by women-workers are revolting against
capital’s assault on social reproduction. Although
not formally affiliated with the International
Women’s Strike movement, these strikes have much
in common with it. They, too, valorize the work
that is necessary to reproduce our lives, while
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FEMINISM FOR THE 99 PERCENT
opposing its exploitation; and they, too, combine
wage and workplace demands with demands for
increased public spending on social services.
In countries such as Argentina, Spain, and Italy,
moreover, women’s strike feminism has attracted
broad support from forces opposing austerity. Not
only women and gender-nonconforming people,
but also men have joined the movement’s massive
demonstrations against the de funding of schools,
health care, housing, transport, and environmental
protections. Through their opposition to finance
capital’s assault on these “public goods,” feminist
strikes are thus becoming the catalyst and model
for broad-based efforts to defend our communities.
All told, the new wave of militant feminist
activism is rediscovering the idea of the impossible,
demanding both bread and roses: the bread that
decades of neoliberalism have taken from our
tables, but also the beauty that nourishes our spirit
through the exhilaration of rebellion.
Thesis 2: Liberal feminism is
bankrupt. It’s time to get over it.
The mainstream media continues to equate feminism, as such, with liberal feminism. But
far from providing the solution, liberal feminism is
A Manifesto
part of the problem. Centered in the global North
among the professional-managerial stratum, it is
focused on “leaning-in” and “cracking the glass
ceiling.” Dedicated to enabling a smattering of
privileged women to climb the corporate ladder
and the ranks of the military, it propounds a
market-centered view of equality that dovetails
perfectly with the prevailing corporate enthusiasm
for “diversity.” Although it condemns “discrimination” and advocates “freedom of choice,” liberal
feminism steadfastly refuses to address the socioeconomic constraints that make freedom and empowerment impossible for the large majority of women.
Its real aim is not equality, but meritocracy. Rather
than seeking to abolish social hierarchy, it aims to
“diversify” it, “empowering” “talented” women to
rise to the top. In treating women simply as an
“underrepresented group,” its proponents seek to
ensure that a few privileged souls can attain positions and pay on a par with the men of their own
class. By definition, the principal beneficiaries are
those who already possess considerable social,
cultural, and economic advantages. Everyone else
remains stuck in the basement.
Fully compatible with ballooning inequality,
liberal feminism outsources oppression. It permits
professional-managerial women to lean in precisely
by enabling them to lean on the poorly paid migrant
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FEMINISM FOR THE 99 PERCENT
women to whom they subcontract their caregiving
and housework. Insensitive to class and race, it
links our cause with elitism and individualism.
Projecting feminism as a “stand-alone” movement,
it associates us with policies that harm the majority
and cuts us off from struggles that oppose those
policies. In short, liberal feminism gives feminism a
bad name.
Liberal feminism’s ethos converges not only with
corporate mores but also with supposedly “transgressive” currents of neoliberal culture. Its love
affair with individual advancement equally permeates the world of social-media celebrity, which also
confuses feminism with the ascent of individual
women. In that world, “feminism” risks becoming
a trending hashtag and a vehicle of self-promotion,
deployed less to liberate the many than to elevate
the few.
In general, then, liberal feminism supplies the
perfect alibi for neoliberalism. Cloaking regressive
policies in an aura of emancipation, it enables the
forces supporting global capital to portray themselves as “progressive.” Allied with global finance
in the United States, while providing cover for
Islamophobia in Europe, this is the feminism of the
female power-holders: the corporate gurus who
preach “lean in,” the femocrats who push structural adjustment and microcredit on the global
A Manifesto
South, and the professional politicians in pant suits
who collect six-figure fees for speeches to Wall
Street.
Our answer to lean-in feminism is kick-back
feminism. We have no interest in breaking the glass
ceiling while leaving the vast majority to clean up
the shards. Far from celebrating women CEOs who
occupy corner offices, we want to get rid of CEOs
and corner offices.
Thesis 3: We need an anticapitalist
feminism-a feminism for the 99 percent.
The feminism we have in mind recognizes that it
must respond to a crisis of epochal proportions:
plummeting living standards and looming ecological disaster; rampaging wars and intensified dispossession; mass migrations met with barbed wire;
emboldened racism and xenophobia; and the reversal of hard-won rights-both social and political.
We aspire to meet these challenges. Eschewing
half-measures, the feminism we envision aims to
tackle the capitalist roots of metastasizing barbarism. Refusing to sacrifice the well-being of the
many in order to protect the freedom of the few, it
champions the needs and rights of the many-of
poor and working-class women, of racialized and
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migrant women, of queer, trans, and disabled
women, of women encouraged to see themselves as
“middle class” even as capital exploits them. But
that is not all. This feminism does not limit itself to
“women’s issues” as they are traditionally defined.
Standing for all who are exploited, dominated, and
oppressed, it aims to become a source of hope for
the whole of humanity. That is why we call it a
feminism for the 99 percent.
Inspired by the new wave of women’s strikes,
feminism for the 99 percent is emerging from the
crucible of practical experience, as informed by
theoretical reflection. As neoliberalism reshapes
gender oppression before our eyes, we see that the
only way that women and gender non-conforming
people can actualize the rights they have on paper
or might still win is by transforming the underlying
social system that hollows out rights. By itself, legal
abortion does little for poor and working-class
women who have neither the means to pay for it
nor access to clinics that provide it. Rather, reproductive justice requires free, universal, not-forprofit health care, as well as the end of racist,
eugenicist practices in the medical profession.
Likewise for poor and working-class women, wage
equality can mean only equality in misery unless it
comes with jobs that pay a generous living wage,
with substantive, actionable labor rights, an …
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