International Women's Day/March/Strike

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Produced by: 
KBOO
Air date: 
Mon, 03/04/2019 - 9:00am to 10:00am

 

Friday, March 8th is International Women’s Day.  As faithful Mole listeners may recall, the holiday has its origins in class struggle and socialist politics of the early twentieth century

In New York, “in 1908, 15,000 women garment workers, the majority of them immigrants, marched through the heart of Manhattan to demand better pay, shorter work hours and suffrage. A year later, women immigrant textile workers were on strike against the ... sweatshops where they were forced to work, facing down police violence and repression by the owners.

[In 1910,] Inspired by the struggle of the women workers, German socialist Clara Zetkin called on attendees at the International Conference of Working Women ...to organize an International Working Women’s Day. Women delegates from over 17 countries voted unanimously to pass the motion.

In 1917, thousands of Russian women, workers and wives of soldiers, took to the streets on March 8th to demand peace and bread, and started the uprising that would overturn the Tsarist regime....”

International Women’s Day has been recognized by the United Nations since 1975.   But in 2017, feminist organizers called for a return to the radical roots of the day and for international solidarity against neoliberalism. They called for a Women’s Strike, with an anticapitalist vision that rejects the ‘lean-in,’ liberal feminism of the bosses, and demands a feminism for the 99%.  Their Platform calls for “an end to gender violence; reproductive justice for all; labor rights; a welfare system providing universal healthcare, education, and access to benefits; anti-racist and anti-imperialist feminism; and environmental justice for all.”

This Friday in Portland we are all invited to strike near the end of the conventional working day.  At 4pm in Pioneer Courthouse Square,  speakers will talk about women’s leadership in labor and political struggles around the world.  At 5 pm participants will march to Salmon Street Springs—the  fountain at the intersection of Naito Parkway and Southwest Salmon in Waterfront Park.  

To clarify, the Women’s Strike is not the Women’s March.  The US Women’s March has usually been held in January since 2017,  which saw a massive protest against Trump, with a lot of pink hats.

This year, in several cities around the US, the January March was cancelled,  because of concerns about racism and charges of anti-Semitism, as well as hostility toward some of the organizers’ pro-Palestinian political positions.  In Portland, The Women’s March was rescheduled to March 3rd after objections that the original January date conflicted with Don’t Shoot Portland’s traditional Reclaim MLK Day March.  The Portland Women’s March disaffiliated from the national group, but remained an officially-permitted event with corporate sponsorship. Its stated mission is to “harness the political and organizational power of diverse womxn (and our communities) to create transformative social change.”

But the International Women’s Strike US has a more specific political vision, protesting “not just against Trump and his misogynist policies, but also against the conditions that produced Trump, namely the decades long economic inequality, criminalization and policing, racial and sexual violence, and imperial wars abroad.”

Their platform is elaborated in the Women’s Strike Manifesto,  written by three of the US organizers: Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser, and published by Verso Books. It’s titled “Feminism for the 99%,” and is available from the Multnomah County library.

It makes the case that “Feminism shouldn't start—or stop—with seeing women represented at the top of society. It must start with those at the bottom, and fight for the world they deserve. And that means targeting capitalism.”

Arruzza, Bhattacharya, and Fraser argue that neoliberal capitalism has caused global economic, social, political, and environmental crisis, and that to create a more stable, equitable, and humane world, we need a feminism that centers the women most marginalized, silenced, and harmed by neoliberalism-- "working women, women of color, Native women, disabled women, immigrant women, Muslim women, lesbian, queer and trans women."  Central to their argument is the importance of Social Reproduction.  The work of making and maintaining human beings and human social life is overwhelmingly performed by women and devalued under capitalism.

In the excerpt from the Manifesto published late last year in New Left Review, they argue that

We are living through a crisis of society as a whole—and its root cause is capitalism.... Gender oppression in capitalist societies is rooted in the subordination of social reproduction to production for profit. We want to turn things right-side up....  Gender violence takes many forms, all of them entangled with capitalist social relations.... Capitalism was born amid racist and colonial violence, [and capital has been destroying the earth]....Capitalism is incompatible with real democracy and peace.

Instead, they call for an anti-racist, anti-imperialist, eco-socialist feminist internationalism that works to bridge feminist, labor, and other movements, calling for building a common, anti-capitalist insurgency.

Describing their motives in calling for the 2017 women’s strike, organizers explained that they wanted, First, to “bring back the idea of the impossible.”

“In the early 20th century women in general, and textile workers in particular, were considered impossible to organize.”  Yet the women striking in 1908 and 1909 in New York “apprehended the impossible.”  

And we need the impossible today.  We need to think beyond what Mark Fisher called “Capitalist Realism,” the idea that, as Margaret Thatcher said of capitalism, there is no alternative.  It’s time to demand the impossible, to make the alternative, the other world that’s necessary.

Second, strike organizers wanted “the demand for bread to be reunited with the demand for roses.”

The labor organizer, Rose Schneiderman, [used] the phrase “bread and roses” in 1912 while organizing against sweatshops in the wake of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.

“What the woman who labors wants” she said, “is the right to live, not simply exist … the right to life, and the sun and music and art … The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too.”

Decades of neoliberalism have not just taken the bread from the tables of working women and families but also taken away the infrastructures that sustain life, the roses.

Hospitals and schools have closed while prisons and police have multiplied. . . . The fight for wages cannot be separated from the means that sustain life.

The history of women self-organizing and fighting for economic and political rights has been erased from memory in the United States, [and needs to be reclaimed.]

And this tradition of women’s radical labor struggles is being revived. As the Strike organizers note in this year’s call,

2018 was a year of formidable strike actions, organized from below, and led by women. From the teachers in West Virginia and Arizona [and Oakland] to the hotel workers in the Marriott and Hilton chains, successful strikes of women have shaken our labor movement and delivered the goods. At the same time, we recognize that rallies, picket lines, teach-ins, and forums will be first steps to reclaiming March 8 as day for working women in many areas of the country.

Join us Friday at 4 in Portland’s Pioneer Courthouse Square to help build the movement that will win us not just bread, but also roses.

 

 

 

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