We need a feminism for the 99%.

That's
why women will strike this year
On 8 March, we will go on strike against gender violence – against the men who
commit violence and against the system that protects them

Thousands participate in demonstrations on Women’s Day on 8 March 2017

in New York City. Photograph: E McGregor/Pacific/Barcroft

Linda Martín Alcoff, Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, Rosa Clemente, Angela
Davis, Zillah Eisenstein, Liza Featherstone, Nancy Fraser, Barbara
Smith, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Sat 27 Jan 2018 12.00 GMTLast modified on Sat 27 Jan 2018 12.06 GMT

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Last year on 8 March we, women of every kind, marched, stopped work and
took over the streets in fifty countries across the world. In the United States we
rallied, marched, left the dishes to the men, in all the major cities of this country
and countless smaller ones. We shut down three school districts to prove to the
world, once again, that while we sustain society we also have the power to shut it
down.

8 March is coming again and things have gotten worse for us as women in this
country.

In the one year of the Trump administration we have not only been pelted with
verbal abuse and misogynistic threats in the guise of official statements, the
Trump regime has put in place policies that will continue such attacks on us in
deeply institutional ways.

#Metoo has not just exposed individual rapists and misogynists, it's ripped
apart the structures that enable them

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act guts exemptions that benefit low-wage workers, the
vast majority of whom are women. It has plans to savage Medicaid and
Medicare, the only two programs left in this cruel neoliberal landscape that
support the elderly and the poor, the sick and the disabled, family planning and
children – and hence women, who do most of the care work. And while the act
denies health care to immigrant children, it introduces college savings for
“unborn children”, a chilling way to establish by legal fiat the “rights” of the
“unborn child” thereby assaulting our fundamental right to make decisions
about our own bodies.

But that is not the whole story.

With these multiple warfronts opened against us, we have not cowered. We too
have fought back.

When last fall women with public visibility and access to international media
decided to break the silence about harassment and sexual violence, the
floodgates were finally opened and a stream of public denunciations inundated
the web. The #Metoo, #UsToo and #TimesUp campaigns made visible what
most women already knew: whether in the workplace or at home, in the streets
or in the fields, in prisons or in Ice detention centers, gender violence with its
differential racist impact haunts women’s everyday life.

What has also become clear is that public silence about something we have
always known, endured and fought back against, does not exist simply because
we are afraid or ashamed to speak up: the silence is enforced. It is imposed by
Congressional laws that make women go through nearly a year of mandatory
counseling and mediation, if they dare to make an official complaint. It is
affected by the criminal justice system that routinely dismisses women’s reports
using additional layers of intimidation and violence. On university campuses,
willing administrators find clever “legal” means to protect the institution and
the perpetrator while throwing women to the wolves. The racist foundations of
these legal procedures demand further resolve.

#Metoo, #UsToo and #TimesUp have not just exposed individual rapists and
misogynists, they have ripped apart the veil that hides the institutions and
structures that enable them.

Racialized gender violence is international as must be the campaign against it.

US imperialism, militarism and settler colonialism foster misogyny throughout
the world. It is no coincidence that Harvey Weinstein, in his long years of trying
to silence and terrorize women, used the security firm, Black Cube, which is
made up of former agents of Mossad and other Israeli intelligence agencies. We
know that the same state that sends money to Israel to brutalize the Palestinian
Ahed Tamimi and her family also funds the jails in which African American
women like Sandra Bland and others have died.

The vast majority of us do not speak out because we lack collective power in our
workplace.

So, on 8 March we will go on strike against gender violence – against the men
who commit violence and against the system that protects them.

We believe that it was no accident that it was our sisters with social standing
that first made visible what we all knew. Their ability to do so was stronger than
our low wage sister, so often of color, who cleans rooms in that fancy Chicago
hotel or the sister who picks fruits in the Californian fields
The vast majority of us do not speak out because we lack collective power in our
workplace, and are denied social supports such as free health care, outside of it.
The job, with its low wage, with its bullying manager and abusive boss, with its
long hours, becomes the one thing we fear losing, for it is the only means for
providing food for our families and providing care for our sick and infirm.

We do not keep our mouths shut. We are forced to keep our mouths shut by
capitalism.

So, on 8 March we will speak out, personally, against the individual abusers who
tried to ruin our lives, and we will speak out, collectively, against the economic
insecurity that prevents us from speaking out.

Thousands to return to the streets for anniversary of Women's March

We will strike because we want to expose our personal abusers. And we will
strike because we need social welfare provisions and living wage jobs to feed our
families as well as the right to unionize, should we be fired for standing up
against their abuse.

So, on 8 March we will strike against mass incarceration, police violence and
border controls, against white supremacy and the beating drums of US
imperialist wars, against poverty and the hidden structural violence that closes
our schools and our hospitals, poisons our water and food and denies us
reproductive justice.

And we will strike for labor rights, equal rights for all immigrants, equal pay and
a living wage, because sexual violence in the workplace is allowed to fester when
we lack these means of collective defence.

8 March 2018 will be a day of feminism for the 99%: a day of mobilization of
black and brown women, cis and bi, lesbian and trans women workers, of the
poor and the low waged, of unpaid caregivers, of sex workers and migrants.

On 8 March #WeStrike.

Linda Alcoff, Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, Rosa Clemente, Angela

Davis, Zillah Eisenstein, Liza Featherstone, Nancy Fraser, Barbara Smith,
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

De: https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/27/we-need-a-feminism-for-the-
99-thats-why-women-will-strike-this-year

Em: 20180127