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Patriarchy

Abolitionist Feminism

With her 2011 book The Problem with Work, political theorist Kathi Weeks helped kickstart a theoretical renaissance of work-critical socialist feminism. Now she’s back with a new volume blending that critique of labor with prison and family abolitionism. Weeks takes the work of Shulamith Firestone, Donna Haraway, and Angela Davis as her starting point for a consideration of what it means to be an abolitionist today. Abolition Archives, Feminist Futures is an argument for the importance of Marxist feminism, and a call for structural thinking and collective action in the face of so much pressure to think and act on an individual scale.

A Valentine From Revolutionary Alexandra Kollontai

In Sexual Relations and the Class Struggle, the Soviet revolutionary Alexandra Kollontai wrote: “Throughout the long journey of human history, you probably won’t find a time when the problems of sex have occupied such a central place in the life of society.” These were opening lines, written 105 years ago, to a message of undying love for the working class. In this pamphlet, Kollontai sketched out how capitalism perverts our relationships. It restricts the deep personal connections that we long for. To truly change our hearts, she said, we need to change the system. And we change it in the passion and solidarity of class struggle.

Hundreds Of Thousands Commemorate International Women’s Day

Women took to the streets of cities across the globe on Saturday to mark International Women’s Day. Protests and rallies were held in major capitals as activists called for an end to inequality and gender-based violence, among many other demands. Thousands marched in the European capital, Brussels to warn against what organisers of the rally called a “worrying regression” in women’s rights. The rise of the right, and in some cases, far-right, across European countries has led many activists to worry that women’s rights may be under threat. “With the rise of the far right everywhere in Europe there could really be a backlash on the rights (of women and minorities),” said Quentin Poucard, a French protester participating in the Brussels rally.

Weaving A Feminist Movement

Artist Indu Antony was enjoying conversation over chai at a women’s center in Bengaluru, India, when an angry man walked in. He tore a piece of art off the wall, took a lighter from his pocket, and set it on fire. Antony’s companions recognized the man as a local official in a right-wing political party; they scampered away. “This is a center that is attacking men,” the official fumed. It was three in the afternoon, and Antony smelled a day’s worth of drink on his breath. ​“You cannot burn our stories,” Antony shot back. The man’s eyes flared; he was not used to being challenged.  The two went back and forth, debating the community center she had founded: Is something created for women inherently against men?

Intentional Community And Capitalism

Capitalism isn’t just an economic system we live inside. It is a culture that lives inside of us. It influences our psychology, how we design our communities, how we relate to each other, the kind of culture we create, and what’s possible for us to do together. Capitalism is one of the most harmful aspects of mainstream society and is deeply entwined with white supremacy, patriarchy, colonialism, and imperialism. Societies, including micro-societies like intentional communities (ICs), are a mixture of structures and culture, and economies are a key aspect with implications for both.

All Black Feminisms Ain’t Created Equal

My initial introduction to radical feminist politics was through convoluted, often antagonistic online discourses, where past works of radical feminists are engaged, discussed, and ultimately flattened. Audre Lorde has always been among the most popularly referenced Black feminists cited online, for example, but always for her gender critical analysis (which could be used as fodder in heated discourse) and never for her anti-imperialist analysis. It’s much easier for one to gain attention and retweets through cherrypicking her words on gender and sexuality, but much less popular to dive into her works on the imperialist U.S. invasion of her homeland Grenada whose revolution emphasized the role of women in society, for example.

For Women At UPS, Fighting The Bosses Means Fighting The Patriarchy

UPS is a male-dominated corporation, both on the corporate side and on the union/worker side. And like across all institutions of our society, there are structural obstacles, challenges, prejudices, issues that women uniquely face at UPS. You could say the same thing about non-white and particularly Black UPSers, as well as LGBTQ+ UPSers. There is a long history of women organizing at UPS that we can’t fully cover here. I’ll throw some links in the show notes that you should definitely check out. That includes the group UPSurge. Yes, UPSurge, which was a largely women-led militant group in 1970s pushing for a fair contract at UPS, members of which eventually merged into the movement we all know Teamsters for a Democratic Union.

Immigrant Women Workers Fighting To Close Disney’s Gender Pay Gap

Workers with the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) Local 631 say a major pay gap exists at Disney World that leaves workers in traditionally feminized jobs, such as costume-making, earning significantly less than workers in traditionally masculinized jobs with comparable skills levels, such as stagehand labor. The union — which represents the skilled crafts people who work behind the scenes in Disney World entertainment, from costume workers to cosmetologists to stage technicians — is demanding in bargaining that Disney close this gender pay gap by raising wages in traditionally feminized jobs to bring them in alignment with comparatively skilled but traditionally male-dominated jobs.

Individual And Collective Steps Towards A Post-Patriarchal Life

When we are in the grip of patriarchal systems and conditioning, our vision is stunted and replaced, all too often, with the belief inculcated in us that there is no alternative or that what we have is the best option even if it’s flawed. In defiance of this, we can embrace the radical possibility of shifting from the patriarchal social order built on scarcity, separation, and powerlessness to living, again, in alignment with life’s flow. I offer, here, a feminist vision of a global maternal gift economy and describe pathways to moving towards it from exactly where we currently are, both collectively and individually.

The Many Burdens Of Women’s Work

My younger sister, 18, is in her first year of college studying marine navigation. She sees herself travelling the world one day, the captain of a cruise ship or similarly large vessel. Already, she has faced overt and repeated sexism, from her male peers. Both my sister and her female roommate have found themselves subjected to sexist jokes and unwanted sexual advances from those who do not appear to understand the meaning of the word "no." They have been told by a female teacher that for the two per cent of women in the industry, sexual assault is an inevitability. My mother, an airline captain, has been counselling her on how to make it in an industry where women are not easily accepted. A great deal of her advice hinges on keeping the peace with male colleagues; knowing what to let slide, when to confront colleagues directly about their behaviour, and when to report them.

Women Lead, Resist And Thrive – Even In The Midst Of Crises

The past decade, particularly 2020 with the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, has shone a light on the full extent of existing inequalities in the world. Ahead of this International Women’s Day, we would like to draw attention to ways that women – whether Indigenous, rural workers or those enduring an occupation – resist and mobilise in the face of multiple, long-term crises. Existing patriarchal systems, structural inequalities and discriminatory laws have long stalled meaningful progress towards gender equality and women’s rights. For women living in crises such as conflicts, facing recurrent environmental disasters and cyclical financial shocks, the Covid-19 pandemic has come as an additional blow, severely impacting their right to adequate food. Conflict is a key and persistent driver of food system breakdown: more than half of undernourished people live in countries experiencing conflict. Extreme weather, economic shocks and climate change are also prevalent drivers of food crises and greatly affect food systems.

Patriarchy And The Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has made it agonizingly clear that the systems under which we are living were already broken. The pandemic has only exacerbated the crisis of the capitalist system and removed any illusions about this reality. However, the impact of the crisis has not been uniform. The neoliberal capitalist model, which survives and profits by exploiting the vulnerable, again fell back on its same old ways. As a result, it has been the workers, the migrants, the women, and others, whose unpaid and underpaid labor serves as the basis for capitalists to profit, who have suffered the most. In this conversation with Renata Porto Bugni from the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, we discuss the study done by the organization...

Why Women Will Prove More Vulnerable Than Men In This Pandemic Moment Of Economic Crisis

Before I found myself “sheltering in place,” this article was to be about women’s actions around the world to mark March 8th, International Women’s Day. From Pakistan to Chile, women in their millions filled the streets, demanding that we be able to control our bodies and our lives. Women came out in Iraq and Kyrgyzstan, Turkey and Peru, the Philippines and Malaysia. In some places, they risked beatings by masked men. In others, they demanded an end to femicide -- the millennia-old reality that women in this world are murdered daily simply because they are women. This year’s celebrations were especially militant. It’s been 45 years since the United Nations declared 1975 the International Women’s Year and sponsored its first international conference on women in Mexico City. Similar conferences followed at five-year intervals, culminating in a 1995 Beijing conference, producing a platform that has in many ways guided international feminism ever since.

#Mexico: “We Don’t Give Up and Don’t Give In” Call For Collective Action

As a “Women’s” working group of the CIG, we would like to remember the words of Comandanta Yesica at the end of her closing speech at the Second International Gathering of Women who Struggle held at the caracol “Torbellino de nuestras palabras” in the Zapatista mountains in resistance and rebellion, on December 29, 2019: “One last thing before we finish and close this Second International Gathering of Women who Struggle. It’s regarding time. We know that no matter the day, week, month or year, there will be a woman somewhere in the world who is afraid, attacked, disappeared or killed. We have said before that for women who fight there is no time to rest. Therefore for those of you listening, reading  or watching us, we want to propose a collective action here.

Second Zapatista Gathering Of Women Who Struggle

We dreamed “that the patriarchy burned” and that it was possible to inhabit spaces free of cruelty. For a long time, we graffitied it, theorized it, protested for it, and proposed it. We then came to shout this dream in a territory free of femicides. Here we cried it and wailed it. Here we sang it, danced it, cared for it in this valley of organization and work. From December 26 – 29, 2019, the Zapatista women sheltered us in their collective and rebellious lap to clothe us in dignity inside the seedbed carrying the name of Commander Ramona, who died 14 years ago. Walking in her footprints, in those of Susana and of all the founding mothers of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, we arrived at this gathering that never should have been.
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Keep independent media alive. 

Due to the attacks on our fiscal sponsor, we were unable to raise funds online for nearly two years.  As the bills pile up, your help is needed now to cover the monthly costs of operating Popular Resistance.

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