Feminist Perspectives on Anticapitalist Politics

Women from different geographies have long seen the oppression of women as inseparable from capitalist exploitation. While emerging from various historical contexts, many Black, indigenous, Third World and Marxist feminists have built their theories and practice on the interconnected nature of multiple oppressions, weaving together a critique of capitalism, racism, colonialism, and patriarchy, and arguing that any struggle for gender justice must necessarily address the other systems of oppression.

Thus, Black feminists were articulating the interconnections between race, gender and class long before the term intersectionality was coined and entered popular discourse. Marxist feminists have emphasized the importance of the gendered and racialized labour of social reproduction, reclaiming it as a legitimate arena for anticapitalist struggle. Indigenous and peasant women across the world have been on the forefront of the struggles against dispossession and ecological plunder, even as they have challenged their oppression as women within their own communities. The Kurdish women’s movement over the last four decades has similarly attempted to theorize the interlocking of capitalism, nation-state and patriarchy while engaging in the struggle for liberation both as women and as members of a colonized people. They have developed a conceptual framework called jineoloji to reimagine revolutionary theory and praxis.

Drawing on various traditions of radical feminist thought and action, this panel will explore feminist perspectives on capitalism and anti-capitalist struggles. How can we benefit from a feminist perspective in the current moment of deepening ecological, economic, and political crises, aggravated and laid bare by the pandemic? How can a feminist perspective inform anti-systemic struggles and visions of alternative forms of social organization that would transcend capitalism and all other systems of oppression? Who are the protagonists of current anticapitalist struggles? Does a feminist perspective point us to a new internationalism?

To discuss these and other questions, join our distinguished panelists Silvia Federici and Joy James in conversation with Sarah Marcha of the Andrea Wolf Institute of Jineolojî Academy in Rojava on May 13 at 12PM EST / 7PM Rojava. The panel will be livestreamed on the Youtube channel of the University of Rojava here: https://youtu.be/nj10R0ohSow

Panelists:

Silvia Federici is Professor Emerita at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York, and a scholar, teacher and activist from the radical autonomist feminist Marxist tradition. In the 1970s, she was a cofounder of the International Feminist Collective, and an organiser of the International Wages for Housework Campaign. In the 1990s, after a period of teaching at the University of Port Harcourt in Nigeria, she was a cofounder of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa, as well as the Anti–Death Penalty project of the US-based Radical Philosophy Association. Through all these years she has written books and essays on philosophy and feminist theory, women’s history, education and culture, and more recently the worldwide struggle against capitalist globalization and a feminist reconstruction of the commons.

Joy James is the F.C. Oakley Professor of Humanities at Williams College, where she teaches in Political Science, Africana Studies, Women and Gender Studies, and American Studies. She is the author of many books including Seeking the Beloved Community: A Feminist Race Reader, Shadowboxing: Representations of Black Feminist Politics and Resisting State Violence: Radicalism, Gender and Race in U.S. Culture. Her edited books include The New Abolitionists: (Neo)Slave Narratives and Contemporary Prison Writings, Imprisoned Intellectuals, States of Confinement, The Black Feminist Reader, and The Angela Y. Davis Reader.

Discussant: Sarah Marcha is a member of the Andrea Wolf Institute of Jineolojî Academy in Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (Rojava).

Moderator: Ozlem Goner is an Associate Professor at the College of Staten Island and the Graduate Center of City University of New York and a steering committee member of the Emergency Committee for Rojava. She is the author of Turkish National Identity and Its Outsiders: Memories of State Violence in Dersim published by Routledge in 2017.

You can attend on the event on their YouTube link.