Silvia Federici: For an International Feminist Movement Against Capitalist Patriarchy
Social science professor Silvia Federici spoke at the People’s Platform Europe for an international feminist movement against capitalist patriarchy and its ongoing war on social reproduction. The complete title of her speech is “For an International Feminist Movement Against Capitalist Patriarchy and its Ongoing War on Social Reproduction”. Below an exerpt:
Capitalism was born with genocide, was born with colonisation, enslavement and witch hunts. It has been a violent patriarchal system throughout its history. Ithas led to two World Wars that have killed millions of people. Since the end of the Second World War, there has been a kind of compromise that has led to some negotiation and recognition of people’s rights, the process of recolonisation. Now all that has been erased, we are entering a new phase of capitalist patriarchy. I think it is really important to think about what that means.
This is the context in which I want to speak: what kind of struggle, what kind of movement we need. First of all, it’s important to understand that what I said many times in recent years, is what we’re seeing now, in Palestine, Sudan or Congo, in a way, is an extreme manifestation of a process that has been growing, preparing, advancing since the end of the 1970s. Since the beginning of the great cou terrevolution. Counter-revolution against the movement of the 1960s, against decolonisation, against the feminist movement, against the anti-war movement. So, we have a whole process since the 70s, culminating in the debt crisis, structural adjustment, the imposition of conditionalities on many countries of the world, which has torn apart the social fabric of the countries, condemning many people to migration and forcing mass expulsions of people from their land. So, it is very important now to see that the extreme violence, the genocidal violence, the plans of annihilation that we have seen unfold, continue to this day. Especially, but not only, in the case of Palestine. Also beyond Palestine. It is not isolated, it is not an extreme exceptional case. […]
In this context, the question of movement is very important to see that demonstrations and the creation of international networks are fundamental. But at the same time, we also have to rethink what are the mechanisms on a daily basis that actually feed this system, that allow the capitalist system to reproduce itself. We have to learn to disable capitalism, not only by confronting it in the streets and in mass demonstrations. But also in terms of changing the organisation of social reproduction. Because it is precisely in the process of structuring social reproduction, which depends on conflicts, on hierarchies, on division, on the devaluation of an entire population, that we are in this situation today, and here the feminist movement has a very important place.
And here, I think, the feminist movement has a very important place. But we should speak of particular parts of the feminist movement because there are different types of feminism.
There are many feminisms, and there is a feminism that is really contrary, neoliberal, state-sponsored feminism, that is contrary to what I am saying. Feminism in Latin America, for example, is a popular feminism, rooted in mass struggle, a feminism that is really seen as a fundamental ground of struggle on the terrain of reproduction, which touches every aspect of life. Reproduction is food, agriculture, sexual relations, health, education, cultural production.
In a sense, it is potentially a movement that can create common ground between different movements, showing the continuity, for example, between economic crisis, impoverishment, dispossession and the ecological devastation of the planet. And in this sense it can really create networks. The kind of networks that we began to see in the 1990s with the antiglobalization movement, which I think were very powerful and continue to remain a kind of example of what could be a kind of struggle and circulation of experiences.
And of course, the working class movement. I think that unfortunately particularly in the United States since the end of WWII we are seeing a labor movement that has given up, that has accepted State policies, that has collaborated with imperial politics, with colonisation, and has abdicated the power of making decisions regarding what is to be produced, what is the form of production. It has accepted to limited its negotiations to the question of pay and pensions. As important as they are, the working class movement has abdicated from deciding to not produce bombs or toxic materials that will destroy nature and lives of people. I think we are in need of a new labor movement with a comprehensive vision in the same way as we need a feminist movement that has a comprehensive vision. […]
We need to reexamine and restructure, in the community, forms of reproduction that are more autonomous. That are de-linking from the capitalist system. This is now something that is extremely necessary and I thing it is one of the conditions to be able to revert this onslaught that we are witnessing today. […]
I think we are really in need of movements that are acting on several fronts. Acting on the fronts of communal organization of social reproduction and the creation of new forms of solidarity, the creation of new forms of commoning of reproductive work that enable people to gain the strenght to confront the State. And at the same time are acting for the creation of international networks whereby we can join our efforts with those across the world that are now being made the object of this incredible violence that unfolds everywhere.
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