Introduction
“Normality was the problem” was the Chilean slogan, which was revealed as an important interpretative key in the midst of the popular and feminist revolt against neoliberalism in 2019. Some months later, the slogan, in a wider use, traveled to different contexts and also was used as a reference to think about the “suspension” of activities caused by the pandemic, especially in the first months of 2020.
The global emergency brake that the pandemic has activated seems to have produced the simulacrum of a “strike”. After the enormous international feminist strike in Latin America and beyond on March 8, this inversion of the strike, of everything being stopped at the global level, is still striking. At the same time, in opposition to that idea of a suspension, real estate and financial capital never took a break.
Using the feminist strike as a counterpoint to the pandemic’s various suspensions is not simply conspiratorial. It illustrates what a transborder feminist movement has been raising albeit in reverse. I want then to first indicate what I think are the most important elements of the feminist strike - its political alliances and programmatic drive – to later ask how the pandemic has intervened in those same elements and what it means to rethink our modes of intervention, protest, social reproduction, and strike today. We must also take into account that the time of the pandemic has still been filled with calls to strike: by renters, by Amazon workers, by health care workers, by domestic workers, by students. And the even fresher images that have gone viral of the general strike in South Korea and the debates about a diffuse mode of the refusal of work faced with the conditions of extreme precarity and risk that are also expressed through modes of strike in different places.
The “normality” of capitalism is in crisis and at the same time it is attempting to produce a more conservative-patriarchal and extractivist new order. So, the feminist strike, its theoretical innovation and the current crisis function as a triangle of issues to deploy to understand in what sense feminist struggles play a role in the current diagnosis and political action in systemic terms.
The strike as a lens
Rosa Luxemburg (1906/1925), fascinated with the mass strike during the 1905 Russian Revolution and its implications for the international labour struggle, says that each strike has its corresponding form of political thought. That phrase seems to me like an irresistible invitation. On the one hand, she studies a combination of elements: “so very many important economic, political and social, general and local, material and psychical, factors react upon one another in such a way that no single act can be arranged and resolved as if it were a mathematical problem” (p. 38). It is that rhythm and multiplication of elements that make Luxemburg think that the strike is a living body.
On the other hand, Luxemburg (1906/1925, p. 32) describes its expansion, and an aquatic landscape appears:
It flows now like a broad billow over the whole kingdom, and now divides into a gigantic network of narrow streams; now it bubbles forth from under the ground like a fresh spring and now is completely lost under the earth.
She is accounting for a multiplicity of actions to conclude that “all these run through one another, run side by side, cross one another, flow in and over one another—it is a ceaselessly moving, changing sea of phenomena” (p. 32).
More precisely than in terms of waves, we use the term tide to think about the dynamic of feminist “overflow”. This tide has shaken up the geographies and ways of doing feminism, of naming the rebellion here and there, and of determining what practices of disobedience matter and count as such. In this sense, the feminist strike since 2016 has struck everywhere, including the modes building genealogies, with a radical anticolonial imprint.
I use those powerful images by Rosa Luxemburg to characterize the feminist strike as a process and not as an isolated event. March 8, 2021, was the fifth consecutive year of the international feminist strike, nourishing a process that has become increasingly complex over time, a process that requires sustaining transversal coordination each time and marks a decisive event in the history of the recent cycle of mass feminism at the national and transnational level.
The feminist strike, since 2016, produced a historic political innovation: it took a tool from the labour movement and used it to protest against sexist violence. With that move, it demonstrated the systematic connection between economic, colonial, and gendered violence against certain bodies. It explained, through an act of rebellion, why you could strike against femicides and, at the same time, against the looting of land and resources from territories, against heterocispatriarchal mandates, and against precarious work, thus challenging neoliberalism in the household and on the streets.
The strike becomes a specific device for politicizing violence against women, lesbian, trans and travesties because it connects it to the violence of contemporary capitalist accumulation. In this sense, the strike produces a global map: it makes visible transborder circuits and the organic relations between accumulation and violence and how it is articulated in the triangle between capital, patriarchy, and colonialism which becomes increasingly clear in the extractive orientation of neoliberal capital.
That is why it had such a rapid repercussion: it made sense in many different places, weaving a transnational connection that only continued to grow. Named first as the international strike of women, trans people, and transvestites; later as the international plurinational feminist strike and even feminist general strike. The strike thus produced a qualitative leap in organization: it transformed the mobilization against femicides into an anti-neoliberal movement, linking and politicizing, in a novel way, resistance to the multiple forms of violence against certain body-territories.
The strike, as it was appropriated and reinvented by the feminist movement centred the issue of labour by approaching it in a new way. First, because it overflowed the borders of those who are recognized as workers. Thus, it became a strategy for making visible and valorising those labour trajectories that usually remain unrecognized: domestic workers, precarious workers, migrant workers, those who combine multiple jobs to be able to put together an income, popular economy workers with state benefits that are not enough to cover their basic needs, the unemployed, the retired, agricultural workers, women unionists, students, sex workers, among others.
I am very interested in how the feminist strike provides a class content to the demands, through a research question about what does strike means in each situation. And also how this is part of a process of a mass feminism, which is an important characteristic of the movement that, at least over the last five years, seems to have given feminism a new impetus. This dimension has to do with the capacity to generate mobilizations with unprecedented force that capable of occupying streets, plazas, cities, simultaneously in different places in the world. The mass or majoritarian dimension affirms a revolutionary dimension because it effectively confirms a capacity “to affect” that is not reduced to small groups. Then, the fact that feminism plays a key role in the political images of massiveness indicates a revolutionary component due to its force of interpellation, its capacity to produce an experience of subjectivation for new generations, and its organizational formula that enables coordination across a large scale.
But also because this massive dynamic is a filigree of actions, calls, discussions, assemblies, coordination. In this back-and-forth, the relationship between the mass level and vectors of minoritarian struggles is conjugated in a new way. The minoritarian – understood as a political composition that disregards subjects of revolution that were historically considered legitimate – takes on a mass scale as a vector of radicalization within this transfeminist tide. This is also elaborated based on issues that tend to be neglected or ignored when majority is only conceived in numerical, quantitative terms or by its homogeneous force. This massive feminism becomes a way of affecting grassroots organization, confronting the machinery of violence and injustice in everyday practices.
The feminist definition of neoliberal violence
I think that the feminist strike allows us to see the connection between forms of labor exploitation and extractivism. Today, the feminist critique of extractivist looting recomposes and deepens this critical archive, investigating the ways it is linked to violence against certain bodies and territories. The feminist strike weaves connections between women’s leading role in popular economies (where they are as criminalized as they are hyper-exploited) and in conflicts over the use of urban space, and the extractivist megaprojects that are encroaching on indigenous and community territories, accompanied by violence against the women leading those movements in defence of their territories.
By linking both dynamics—literal extractivism exerted over raw materials and the extractivism of finance, carried out especially against populations that are considered to be “excluded”—we can bridge the forms of exploitation that are renewed through a mapping of the heterogeneity of labour in a feminist register.
So, what is it that becomes massive in this collective experience of showing up with our bodies on the streets? I would say that one of the elements is the specific characterization of neoliberal violence, which, in turn, can be understood as a key element of the feminist movement’s internationalism.
This characterization of neoliberal violence occurs in a concrete form, based on everyday experiences of dispossession, precaritisation, and exploitation that allow for understand how these forms of violence operate in direct connection with sexist violence. I see this as a reading of the totality of these violences, a systematic reading, which, at the same time, is comprehensible from the position of everyday life.
This comprehension is corporeal, it is situated, and, at the same time, collective without being abstract. This also allows it to give strength to a way of rejecting, of saying enough, the philanthropic and paternalistic modes that have been used to try to solve the problem of precarity by imposing conservative and reactionary forms of subjectivation fuelled by fear.
This encourages feminist initiatives to define themselves as anti-neoliberal, not only as an ideological affirmation, but based on a concrete practice of identifying the frontiers where the battle against capital’s advance takes place. That is, it shapes the confrontation against the privatization of pensions, against household debt, against cuts to public services, against wage cuts, etc. in relation to the way in which violence against certain bodies marked by their gender and race is co-produced. This not only provides concrete content to the anti-neoliberalism of feminist initiatives, but it also challenges the neoliberal vulgate itself, in which competition is considered an anthropological mutation and, therefore, there is no outside to the omnipresent governmentality.
It is precisely the intersection and concatenation of these conflicts that weaves together that systematic perspective to the point of (as we see today in Chile) debating the constitutionalising of neoliberalism, the normality that corresponds with and that, in Latin America, has its origins in the military dictatorships.
That is why feminisms from the south of the planet are those that also enabling a displacement of the Euro-Atlantic narratives with which neoliberalism tends to be conceptualized. In our region, we have been watching neoliberal mutate for over four decades, which allows us to analyse several things. On one hand, we can point to neoliberalism’s very origins in terms of violence, associated with the dictatorships and forms of neoliberal constitutionalizing. On the other hand, it allows us to understand later mutations from the point of view of the struggles that challenged it. This enables a reading of its strategies against the grain, that is, postulating that what is subverted by struggles is that which determines the orientation of its mutation.
Speaking of the polymorphic, versatile character and combinational capacity of neoliberalism shows that neoliberal governmentality refers to a political rationality that cannot be reduced to the apparatus of government and that disputes subjectivities as a strategic space for the production of government.
If today neoliberalism needs to ally with reactionary conservative forces – from white supremacy to religious fundamentalisms, from the colonial unconscious to the most unchecked financial dispossession – it is because the destabilization of patriarchal and racist authorities puts the accumulation of capital itself at risk. Right there feminisms exhibit their capacity to revive antagonism and conflict, because they attack the structure of subordination and exploitation in a sensitive and strategic area: precisely where neoliberalism is articulated with reactionary forces in the order of the family, sexuality, merits for social subsidies, unpaid labour, anti-migrant legislation, etc.
Reading the counteroffensive
Without thinking in an accumulative linear sequence, and even less in terms of progressive achievements, it is still necessary to highlight the force of this new cycle of feminist struggles. As it redefines subjects of struggle, forms of action, changes in sensibilities and corporalities in play, and scales of transnational coordination.
The counteroffensive in the name of the attack against “gender ideology” in the region -which is no longer limited to the region- that has been unleashed in recent years can be understood in relation to a response to the way in which the conflictivity that feminisms brought to light ties together patriarchal, colonial, and capitalist violence. I wrote about this with the formula Confinement, debt, and biology: to express the neoliberal-conservative alliance.
Now, neoliberalism needs to ally itself with reactionary conservative forces because the destabilization of patriarchal authorities puts capital accumulation itself at risk. We could put it like this: capital is extremely aware of its need for articulation with colonialism and patriarchy in order to reproduce itself as a relation of obedience. Once the factory and the heteropatriarchal family no longer manage to maintain discipline, but specially once securitized control is defied by feminist forms of managing interdependence in eras of existential precarity, the counteroffensive intensifies. And we very clearly see why neoliberalism and conservativism share strategic objectives of normalization.
Since the feminist movement politicizes the crisis of social reproduction in a new and radical way—as a crisis that is in turn civilizational and a crisis of the patriarchal structure of society—the fascist impulse that is launched to counter-act it proposes economies of obedience to channel the crisis. Whether by religious fundamentalisms or the paranoid construction of a new internal enemy, what we are witnessing is the attempt to terrorize the forces of destabilization rooted in a feminism that has crossed borders.
We see this clearly in the ways the economic counteroffensive is also a economic and moralizing counteroffensive. It draws its strength from accelerated impoverishment that expands through the financialization of family economies, in which the poorest sectors (and now, not only those sectors) go into debt to pay for food and medicine and to finance payment for basic services through instalment plans with exorbitant interest rates.
The problem of reproduction
Because the feminist strike recognizes territorial, domestic, reproductive, and migrant labor, it broadens the very notion of the working class, from below. In Argentina, it starts from the recognition that 40 percent of the workers in our country are involved in diverse modes of the so-called informal economy, vindicated in some experiences as popular economy.
We could take this further and say that the strike opens up a whole program for political research. What do we call labour from the perspective of the living and working experiences of women, lesbians, trans people and travesties? When the feminist movement faces the question of what it means to go on strike from reproductive labour, we are, in a practical way, mapping the multiplicity of tasks we take on, the intensive and extensive working days that are not paid, or are badly paid, or are remunerated in a way that always expresses the hierarchy of the sexual division of labour. Some of those tasks have gone almost unrecognized as work; others have been called names that only belittle them.
It situates the great importance of what makes social reproduction possible, demonstrating its strategic character, which is, at the same time, constantly hidden and constantly privatized. Therefore, we can evoke Luxemburg (1906/1925, p. 8) again: the strike is not a “purely technical” weapon that can be “decreed” or “prohibited” at will. To the contrary, by including, highlighting, and valorising the distinct terrains of exploitation and extraction of value by capital in its current phase of accumulation, the strike as blockade, challenge, and an act of contempt allows us to account for the conditions in which struggles and resistances today are reinventing a rebellious politics. Therefore, the use of the strike proposed by the movement of women, trans people, lesbians, and travesties expresses and disseminates a change in the composition of labouring classes, overflowing its classifications and hierarchies—namely, those that are so well synthesized by the patriarchy of the wage. And it does so from the register of a practical feminism, rooted in concrete struggles.
The feminist strike refers to production and its inevitable link with reproduction and makes explicit why certain tasks correspond to a determined sexual division of labour and why capital accumulation is impossible without gender mandates. In this sense, it is simultaneously a labour strike and an existential strike: it shows the areas in which life and work become mixed and lose their distinction.
In several senses, we could say that the exercise of the strike also systematizes a series of scenes of “refusals” of isolated, free or badly paid, domestic work, associated with gender mandates, also showing how the production of value in that sphere is being “super exploited” today (to use Maria Mies category that resonates with Latin American debates about the dependent insertion of our region).
Financialization of everyday life creates novel ways to (re)organize production and reproduction. But to understand how debt extracts value from domestic economies, non-salaried economies, and historically non-productive economies in Latin America, we must see financial devices as true mechanisms of both the extraction of value and the moralization of unfulfilled gender mandates—that is, of a certain articulation between reproduction and production.
I use the concept “financial extractivism” because it enables us to connect debt with political-ecological struggles against neo-extractivist projects, thereby revealing the linkages between debt, dispossession, and exploitation. By adding this financial dimension to our struggles, we can better map flows of debt and modes of exploitation in the dynamic, versatile and apparently “invisible” forms in which neoliberal mutation is rooted.
In other words, I would like to add a feminist reading of financialization that characterizes it as a colonization of social reproduction. The expansion of the financial system is a (violent) response to a specific sequence of struggles, on the one hand, and a dynamic of containment that organizes a certain experience of the current crisis, on the other hand. Massive indebtedness is thus accompanied by new forms of discipline and (eventually) criminalization.
Under contemporary neoliberalism, violence operates as the main productive force, Federici argues. It opens new spaces of valorisation for capital via invasion and conquest, via the colonization of concrete bodies and territories. This is particularly the case in informal, popular and feminized economies, where indebtedness serves as one of the privileged devices for invading not-yet-financialized territories, for experimenting with new forms of control, and for affecting the moralization and criminalization of subaltern sectors.
We must understand debt also as a privileged device in the “laundering” – “blanqueamiento,” not coincidentally a racist term – of illicit flows and, therefore, in the connection between legal and illegal economies as a way of increasing direct violence upon certain territories. Here again, neo-extractivist projects play a fundamental role—first in the dispossession and then in the financialization of subaltern economies. As I understand it, these features also show why the collective subjectivation deployed by feminist revolts today—in their popular, indigenous, village, dissident, queer, black and other compositions and territorialities—is a key component in the battle against neoliberalism’s power of limitless mutation (the seemingly infinite utopia of financialization).
The household as a laboratory of capital
What happened during the pandemic? Our investigation of the pandemic begins to show how the proliferation of private debts in the economic crisis exploits domestic and community work and territories, and, at the same time, allows us to draw a map the political dilemmas of the current moment (Cavallero and Gago 2022). Unpaid debts for rents and utilities, including electricity, water, gas, and internet access, grew at an accelerated rate during the first months of the quarantine. In working-class neighbourhoods, where the impact of the health emergency and reduced incomes has been felt most strongly, debts for internet connectivity—that is, paying for data usage to sustain public school distance learning—grew considerably, absorbing a large part of the emergency social subsidies.
The situation is paradoxical in its drama: an increase in care work, in addition to the intensification of unremunerated labour that includes the education of children inside the home, generates more debt. The unacknowledged work in households translates into income inequality that, at the same time, becomes the motor of indebtedness. It is this situation of obligatory and recurrent indebtedness, moreover, that produces a direct relation to the growth of illegal economies, including informal employment without benefits or protections for those already in vulnerable situations. Here, domestic debt also appears in its most political guise: as a means of metabolizing the effects of economic adjustment, which forces people to supplement already insufficient incomes in order to consume increasingly products whose prices are increasingly dollarized (food, medicine, rent).
Feminists have politicized domestic space for a long time. We have said that value is produced there, that the care that sustains life there is historically rendered invisible and necessary, that enclosure within four walls is a political order imposed by patriarchal hierarchies. We are seeing a transformation of capital that seeks to take advantage of this crisis by hyper-exploiting domestic space. The imperative to telework, from home schooling to the home office, is maximizing the demand for productivity from that home-factory that functions behind closed doors, seven days a week, with no limits to the working day.
So, it seems that we are facing a restructuring of class relations that takes the sphere of reproduction as its main stage.
We can point out that the tasks made visible and vindicated by the feminist strike are at the centre of the pandemic of "essential labour". It includes that world of work generally associated with images of the “sub- merged,” on the border between the legal and the criminalized, that ranges from informal markets to self-managed enterprises, as well as jobs that are sometimes recognized with the euphemism of “volunteer work,” because they involve an intensive care component, or because they are perceived as only being intermittent and spontaneous community solidarity, with a largely feminized and migrant composition. From community health clinics to trash pick-up, from soup kitchens to day-care, community labour, performed by social movements and grassroots organizations, has come to substitute for that which has been successively privatized, looted, and defunded.
It is a complex twist that leads to the recognition of these tasks through their baptism as “essential.” To a large degree, it has been done by codifying them in a register of self-sacrifice, heroism, and gender mandates. Thus, this forecloses the feminist recognition of that work, which was achieved through these years of mobilization, debate, and organization, which was capable precisely of disobeying the family-based mandates associated with those tasks, of reclaiming rights and wages for doing them, and of attributing a political value of self-management to them.
A strong paradox is condensed in essential work: it names a renaturalisation of those tasks and the bodies dedicated to them, who now receive applause but not sufficient remuneration; valued but re-instated in a quasi-philanthropic imaginary (with church support). This produces a strange pirouette: they speak of labour, but by classifying it as essential, it seems to stop being labour. Its value is recognized, but it seems to be of a fundamentally symbolic and emergency value.
We can see the historical manoeuvre of naturalizing reproductive labour (as a political neutralization) practiced on a large scale and over a variety of jobs linked to social reproduction, only now in broad daylight and not only as enclosure in the household sphere. Meanwhile, at the same time, there is a “return” to the home in the form of expanded tele-work (I’ll come back to this below).
In that sense, a categorization as essential work seeks to legitimize the hyper-exploitation of certain tasks carried out in the spatiality of domestic territories—ranging from education to health care, including all types of care labour, agro-ecological production, and telephone service. However, we can also identify the inscription of an accumulation of struggles: Would it have been possible for essentialness to be explicitly linked to reproductive tasks without the prior politicization of care that feminist movements have put on the agenda at a mass scale in recent years? It is not a coincidence that two of the slogans proposed by feminist movements today find a renewed repercussion: “jobs must sustain life or they shouldn’t exist” and “our lives over their profit”.
The intrusion of new financial technology (fintech) into the most precarious homes is also one of the most salient features of this pandemic and it allows us to hypothesize that it is pushing a new wave of household indebtedness. This occurs at the same time that domestic spatiality is being powerfully reconfigured, as we analysed above. In that sense, our hypothesis is that the intersection between financial inclusion and the household at this exceptional moment exhibits three processes simultaneously. First, a greater need for and exploitation of domestic work (now defined as essential work) both at home and in community territories. Second, the demonstration that the violence required to financialize decisive areas of social reproduction uses the pandemic as a privileged accelerator (linking gender-based violence to financial violence). And finally, the dispute over the intensification of financial extractivism as the management of increasingly extreme poverty.
Programmatic agenda: political alliances and challenges
It is important to continue expanding our imagination of what it means to strike: how can we remove ourselves from the constant extraction of financial and real estate rents? We know that the sectors that have profited the most from the pandemic are those that extract rents from the sphere of social reproduction: food, medication, and housing, all mediated by logistics and intellectual property patents. How do we stop them, and confront them? What type of political alliances does this require?
On raising these questions, we can say that today some key axes of feminist debate include:
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A critique of the financial form of contemporary capitalism, as an abstract synthesis of its counteroffensive in alliance with colonial patriarchal conservatisms
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Renewed dynamics of extractivism in the midst of the ecological collapse, that are inscribed in and accelerate against certain bodies and territories.
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The super exploitation of labour through intensive forms of precarity, both aggravated by and made hyper-visible in the pandemic.
The question is about the articulation of the systemic planes to which these diagnoses lead us and the situated forms of conflicts. In turn, this brings us to the multiplication of the scales of intervention: what is the connection between changes that require intervening in institutions, in the legal and legislative regimes, in regional regulations, and the practices of direct, appropriate, open dispute put forth by struggles?
Feminist unionism is a type of alliance that has allowed for broadening the strike by weaving alliances between feminism and unionism. But feminism unionism also exceeds the unions. It is a way of organizing demands and claims, that takes seriously how feminism has broadened the concept of work and focusing in on social reproduction. Feminist diagnoses of the pauperization of the conditions of waged, domestic, migrant working conditions, under accelerated processes of precaritisation, are even more true in the pandemic, both because they expand the notion of labour and because propose union strategies for intervening in that expansion. Demonstrating the multiplication of working days within one single day, the exhaustion involved in putting one’s body on the line in the crisis, simultaneous tele-work with school work and childcare in the home, all the juggling required to make ends meet with incomes that become smaller in line with the rate of inflation, the replacement of the state’s responsibilities by overly exhausted networks whose resources are never enough, expands the field of struggles, it points to free labour, disputes recognition and resources that include, while also going beyond, the wage.
The question is how to keep building a unionism that overflows the framework of the demand of waged workers, to take the agility and astuteness of demand-based struggle to the terrains of social reproduction: housing, health care, education, care, neighbourhood security.
Therefore, there is an urgent need to expand initiatives that materially confront the capacity to extract rents, and that incorporate the conditions of labour’s reproduction—from health care to housing, including pensions and services rates to access connectivity—into the labour struggle. It is a conception of labour that is at stake here, of who produces value and what modes of life deserve to be assisted, cared, and paid for, and also where the resources will come from if we aim for a global reorganization of the world of work.
It is a question-horizon that emerges because when we go on strike we also produce the time for political invention.
References
Cavallero, L. and Gago, V. (2022). La casa como laboratorio del capital: finanzas, vivienda y trabajo esencial [The house as a laboratory of capital: finances, living and essential work]. Realidad Económica, 347, May. IADE. https://ojs.iade.org.ar/index.php/re/article/download/201/162
Cavallero, Lucía y Gago, Verónica (2021): A feminist reading of debt. Pluto Press.
Federici, S. (2011). Calibán y la bruja. Mujeres, cuerpo y acumulación originaria [Caliban and the witch: Women, the body and primitive accumulation]. Tinta limón.
Federici, S. (2018). El patriarcado del salario [Patriarchy of the wage]. Tinta limón.
Gago, V. (2020). Feminist international. How to change everything. Verso.
Luxemburg, R. (1925). The mass strike, the political party and the trade unions (P. Lavin, Trans.). Marxist Educational Society of Detroit. (Original work published 1906). https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1906/mass-strike/
Mies, M. (2019). Patriarcado y acumulación a escala mundial [Patriarchy and accumulation on a world scale]. (L. M. Deese, Trans.). Traficantes de sueños.
