International Women's Day 2019

8M Manifesto: we become more when we are united. Together we are more.

Every March 8th we honour the women’s alliance to struggle for our conquered rights. In the past, It was because of many women fighting together that we succeeded and got some of the rights we have today. A long genealogy of activists, suffragettes and unionist women has fought before us. Among them, those who brought the Second Spanish Republic (an alternative to the Monarchy that was abruptly ended by the Civil War in 1936 and the consequent fascist regime), those who fought in the Spanish civil war, those who stood up against colonialism and those who took part in the anti-imperialist struggles.However, we know it is not enough yet: there is still a lot to do so we keep fighting!

Sorority is our weapon, and the massive response of the feminist movement what keeps up moving us forward. The 8th of March is our day. It is an international and revolutionary day, with a clear political message.Today, 8th of March, all the women of the world are invited to join the FEMINIST STRIKE.

Our identities are plural: we are diverse. We live in rural and urban settings, we work both in the labour market and at home. We are gipsies, migrants, racialized. We are all ages old and we are lesbians, trans, bisexual, intersexual, queer, heterosexual… We are even those who aren’t here today: we are the murdered women, we are the imprisoned. We are ALL THE WOMEN. Together we stop the world today and we scream out loud: ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!To all the violence inflicted upon us!....

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How does the feminist movement gather strength? One week away from the launch of the first massive assembly in Buenos Aires, in the generous facilities of the Mutual Sentimiento, the international strike is organised once again in each place and from there emerges the regional, global, multinational net.

This internationalist dimension qualifies each individual situation: it makes it richer and more complex without taking away its roots; it makes it more cosmopolitan, without paying the price of abstraction. It expands our political imagination at the same time that it creates a practical ubiquity: that feeling that you get when screaming “we’re everywhere!”. This is how the organising of the strike unfolds a politics of place: the movement is amplified by a connection of conflicts and experiences, making the strike an excuse for unity in each place. This is an internationalism from the territories in struggle.

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Meanwhile, the NiUnaMenos demonstrations continue in Mexico. Thousands of women, lesbians and trans condemn the femicide as a state crime and the situation of constant threat under the abduction attempts on the underground and where the only solution offered was more police. But in Mexico we also see a great sequence of protests and strikes by the workers in the maquilas of Tamaulipas. In the southeast, the Zapatista women have just launched a letter explaining why this 8M they will not have an event in their territory, exposing the military threat behind the advance of touristic and neoextractivist megaprojects of the new government. In this triple scene we see condensed this scene put into motion by the international strike: to connect struggles and from that connection affirm how the struggles against precarity and employment abuse can’t be separated from the femicides and harassments and also from the forms of exploitation of territory in the hands of the trasnational companies.

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Meanwhile, the 8M coordination in Chile won’t stop growing, after the massive mobilisations in May for a non-sexist education and against sexual abuse in academia and the massive international meeting of women in struggle in December. They scream “the feminist strike is on!”, to point out how to build from below and continue walking like that. Meanwhile, in Brazil comrades from the northeast say that fascism will not pass and black feminism is getting ready to march for justice for Marielle Franco and everyone who sustains popular and favela economies against the criminalisation of their lives. Meanwhile, in Bolivia they are preparing for the #Bloqueo8M denouncing femicides starting this year but also by the side of the resistance of women on the Tariquía reserve, in Tarija, which are blocking the works of PETROBRAS. Meanwhile, the assemblies in Uruguay have already started, with a coordination of feminisms nurtured by growing networks. Meanwhile, in Ecuador they debate strikes and uprisings as tools in the multiple histories of struggles. Meanwhile, in Colombia and Peru meetings are held weekly with the 8M horizon, this talisman-date which unites us because before anything we start to see and recognise each other.

Meanwhile, in Italy, comrades from NonUnaDiMeno have launched a “regressive count” for the international feminist strike with a series of posters which also narrate the scenes which justify the strike. Against the lack maintenance payments from ex-husbands, because of the abuse from bosses, but also against the use of state welfare as a way to deal with poverty instead of the possibility of self-determination.

Around the World Are Striking.

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What’s even more inspiring than these storied origins is that women throughout the world — especially in Latin America and Europe — are observing International Women’s Day by going on strike today.

In Argentina, Spain, and Italy, the major unions are holding general strikes, under pressure from rank-and-file women workers, showing that “it can be called from below,” says Cinzia Arruzza, a Marxist feminist philosophy professor at the New School and one of the organizers of International Women’s Strike USA.

Central de Trabajadores de la Argentina – Autonoma and Central de los Trabajadores have called for a strike; how it will be carried out will be decided in each workplace. There will also be a series of mass assemblies in Argentinian cities during the strike, each of which is expected to draw thousands of participants. In Argentina, as in Spain, the slogan is “Non Una di Meno.”

Spain’s Confederación General del Trabajo (CGT), Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT) and the teachers’ union of the Confederación Sindical de Comisiones Obreras (CC OO) have called for a 24-hour general strike; Unión Sindical Obrera (USO) has called for a two-hour strike. Millions of women went on strike in Spain last year.

A number of radical Italian unions have called for a general strike, among them the Unione Sindacale de Base (USB). But rank and filers, shop stewards, workplace assemblies, and leaders of locals of the major confederations, especially the Italian General Confederation of Labor (CGIL), are now also demanding that their unions support the strike. Last year, the IWD strike affected air, rail, and road transport across Italy, as well as public transit.

In Belgium and Greece, women are participating in the international strike for the first time. Belgium’s Fédération Générale du Travail de Belgique

(FGTB), Confédération des Syndicats Chrétiens (CSC) and Centrale Nationale des Employés (CNE) strongly support the strike. In Greece, citing the impact of austerity on women, as well as unequal pay, public sector workers have called walkouts in Thessaloniki, and Chania (on Crete), as well as Athens, where some 30 unions are involved. (In Greece as Spain, Argentina and Italy, unions are embracing the action because of pressure from rank-and-file women workers.)

Major French unions like Confédération Générale du Travail  (CGT), National Student Union of France (student union), Union Nationale Lycéenne (UNL), and UNL-GL are supporting the strike, which will start at 3:40pm, the time when French women normally start working “for free” if we consider the gender wage gap. International Women’s Day strikes in Iceland and elsewhere have followed this logic in the past, and it’s a powerful way to dramatize the issue of unequal pay.....

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Iruñea, Basque C.

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Beyond March 8th: Toward a Feminist International

For the third consecutive year the new transnational feminist wave has called for a day of global mobilization on 8 March: legal strikes from waged work – like the five million strikers of 8 March, 2018 in Spain and the hundreds of thousands the same year in Argentine and Italy; wildcat strikes for women with no labor rights and protections, strikes from care and unpaid work; students’ strikes, but also boycotts, marches, and street blockades. For the third consecutive year women and queer people around the globe are mobilizing against femicides and all forms of gender violence, for bodily self-determination and access to safe and free abortion, for equal pay for equal work, for a liberated sexuality, but also against walls and borders, mass incarceration, racism, Islamophobia, and anti-Semitism, the dispossession of indigenous communities, and the destruction of ecosystems and climate change. For the third consecutive year, the feminist movement is giving us hope and a vision for a better future in a crumbling world. The new transnational feminist movement is shaped by the South, not only in a geographical sense, also in a political sense, and is nurtured by each region in conflict. This is the reason why it is anti-colonial, anti-racist and anti-capitalist.

We are living in a moment of general crisis. This crisis is by no means just economic; it is also political and ecological. What is at stake in this crisis is our future and our lives. Reactionary political forces are growing and presenting themselves as the solution to this crisis. From the USA to Argentina, from Brazil to India, Italy, and Poland, far-right governments and political parties erect walls and border fences, attack LGBTQ+ rights and freedoms, deny women their bodily autonomy and promote rape culture, all in the name of a return to “traditional values” and of the promise of protecting the interests of majority ethnicity families. Their answer to the neoliberal crisis is not to address its root causes, but to target the most oppressed and exploited among us.

The new feminist wave is the first line of defense to the rise of the far-right. Today, women are leading the resistance to reactionary governments in a number of countries.

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In the face of a global crisis of historic dimensions, women and LGBTQ+ people are rising to the challenge and staging a global response. After the upcoming 8 March, the time has come for taking our movement a step further and calling for transnational meetings and assemblies of the movements: for becoming the emergency brake capable of stopping the capitalist train running at full speed, and hurtling all humanity and the planet we live in, toward barbarism.

Nuria Alabao (Journalist and Writer, Spain)
Cinzia Arruzza (Co-author of Feminism for the 99%. A Manifesto)
Monica Benicio (Human rights activist and Marielle Franco’s widow, Brazil)
Tithi Bhattacharya (Co-author of Feminism for the 99%. A Manifesto)
Julia Cámara (Coordinadora estatal del 8 de marzo, Spain)
Jupiara Castro (Núcleo de Consciência Negra, Brazil)
Lucia Cavallero (Ni Una Menos, Argentina)
Veronica Cruz Sanchez (Human rights activist, Mexico)
Angela Y. Davis (Founder of Critical Resistance, US)
Marta Dillon (Ni Una Menos, Argentina)
Zillah Eisenstein (International Women’s Strike, US)
Luna Follegati (Philosopher and activist, Chile)
Nancy Fraser (Co-author of Feminism for the 99%. A Manifesto)
Verónica Gago (Ni Una Menos, Argentina)
Sonia Guajajara (Articulação dos Povos Indígenas do Brasil)
Kavita Krishnan (All India Progressive Women’s Association)
Andrea Medina Rosas (Lawyer and activist, Mexico)
Morgane Merteuil (feminist activist, France)
Tatiana Montella (Non Una di Meno, Italy)
Justa Montero (Asamblea feminista de Madrid, Spain)
Antonia Pellegrino (Writer and activist, Brazil)
Enrica Rigo (Non Una di Meno, Italy)
Paola Rudan (Non Una di Meno, Italy)
Amelinha Teles (União de Mulheres de São Paulo, Brazil)

Argentina’s Popular Feminism

Entering the final year of his four-year term, Argentina’s president Mauricio Macri leaves behind him a legacy of austerity and repressive policies that have thrown the South American country into a social, economic, and political tailspin. Argentina is a country of considerable wealth, and yet an ever-greater numbers of its citizens — 33 percent by recent estimates — live below the poverty line. The attack on basic public services like health care and education, made worse by IMF-imposed adjustment plans, has directly impacted the quality of life for the country’s general population.

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Patriarchy and Capitalism

In an otherwise gloomy scenario, the country’s feminist and women’s movement marches forward. The sheer scale of the movement — expressed impressively in recent years through massive street demonstrations — is especially evident by the way in which its demands and slogans have seeped into the very fabric of Argentinean society. Feminism has become a regular talking point in the media, but also in every imaginable layer of society: educational institutions, trade unions, cultural spaces, and the family are all permeated by the feminist agenda.

It’s in this precise sense that we can speak of “advances,” by gauging the movement’s growing capacity to address society as a whole and unsettle a deep-seated patriarchal common sense. These same advances are set within a national historical framework, complementing the longstanding capacity of the Argentine people to mobilize, remain vigilant against injustices, and demonstrate the necessary organizational strength to link together political struggles.

Part of the organizational capacity of the feminist movement has been the handiwork of the National Women’s Gathering, an event now in its thirty-fourth year that acts to centralize and put different feminist practices in dialogue. Just as well, one could mention the feminist movement and its intersection with the nation’s powerful human rights organizations, or the student movement and its historical connection to the workers’ movement. This past year saw massive mobilizations by trade unions and workers, and recent years have witnessed the emergence of the formidable Confederation of Popular Economy Workers, a trade-union movement composed of workers of the informal economy (recyclers, textile workers, rural laborers, among others). That is to say, the Argentinean feminist movement has been cultivated in a specific national context, in a country with the highest levels of trade-union membership of any Latin American nation....

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