What would a feminism from the bottom up look like - would it look like this thread? Would it look like this? Why would it need to be bottom up at all?
In short
Fork in the road
Faced with these two visions of feminism, we find ourselves at a fork in the road. One path leads to a scorched planet where human life is immiserated, if it remains possible at all. The other points to the sort of world that has always figured in humanity’s dreams: one whose wealth and natural resources are shared by all, where equality and freedom are premises, not aspirations. What makes the choice so pressing is the disappearance of any middle way, due to the predatory form of financialized neoliberal capitalism that has held sway for the last forty years—raising the stakes for every social struggle and turning efforts to win modest reforms into pitched battles for survival. In these conditions feminists, like everyone else, must take a stand. Will we continue to pursue ‘equal-opportunity domination’ while the planet burns? Or will we reimagine gender justice in an anti-capitalist form, which leads beyond the present carnage to a new society?
Our Manifesto is a brief for the second path. What makes an anti-capitalist feminism thinkable today is the political dimension of the present crisis: the erosion of elite credibility throughout the world, affecting not only the centrist neoliberal parties but also their Sandberg-style corporate-feminist allies. This was the feminism that foundered in the us presidential election of 2016, when the ‘historic’ candidacy of Hillary Clinton failed to elicit the enthusiasm of women voters. For good reason: Clinton personified the 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 represents a historic opening for a challenge from the left. In the current vacuum of liberal hegemony, we have the chance to build another feminism and to re-define what counts as a feminist issue, developing a different class orientation and a radical-transformative ethos. We write not to sketch an imagined utopia, but to clarify the road that must be travelled to reach a just society. We aim to explain why feminists should choose the road of the feminist strikes, unite with other anti-capitalist and anti-systemic movements and become a ‘feminism for the 99 per cent’. What gives us hope for this project now are the stirrings of a new global wave, with the international feminist strikes of 2017–18 and the increasingly coordinated movements that are developing around them. As a first step, we set out eleven theses on the present conjuncture and the bases for a radical, new, anti-capitalist feminist movement.
In full