If we sustain the distinction – as we try to throughout this book – between “politics” (understood as the battle for power) and the experiences in which processes of the production of sociability or values are at stake, we can distinguish then between the political militant (who founds their discourse on a certain set of certainties) and the militant researcher (who organizes their perspective on the basis of critical questions concerning these certainties).
If, at the beginning of the pandemic we asked if we were facing a restructuring of class relations within the domestic sphere, that attempted to make households into a laboratory for capital, today we have many more elements to map that dispute. Exercising the feminist strike again, here and across the world, enables us to carry out a confrontation on that plane.
The October uprising in Chile is an example of what we would call a generalized passage from private malaise to collective revolt, a moment in which those sufferings that had been lived in domestic confinement, with guilt and loneliness, are brought out into public space, and understood as socially and politically produced, awakening a will to struggle as well as a mutual recognition between those who share experiences, feelings, fears, and common hopes.
Now there are compañeras who can speak, who can give a talk, who can talk about care work, about global care chains…This has emerged through our everyday practice. In Territorio Doméstico, we are all equals, we all have different knowledges and we share them, giving each other strength and supporting one another.
As we have seen written on the walls these days, “they will never again have the comfort of our silence,” because we are not willing to back to occupying that place of private silence, of silent submission. In that sense the broken glass, of real estate or the metrobus, etc. do not have, in any way, the same value as our lives. The meaning that we are putting up for debate here is the value of life.
The feminist movement, especially as connected to popular feminism and popular economies, thus shows that we cannot delegate to capital – through the tool of the wage – recognition of who are workers. That is why we say, “All Women Are Workers” (#TrabajadorasSomosTodas). Now, that statement does not operate as a blanket that covers up and homogenizes an abstract class identity, but rather it functions because it reveals the multiplicity of what labor means from a feminist point of view, with all of its hierarchies and all of its struggles.
Dispatches from the emerging feminist international.
What will it take to move from #MeToo to #WeStrike? As the Latin American movements have shown, it is in the practice of this politics in feminine that a new collective subjectivity is born. It is not our experiences of violence that define who we are, but our struggle against violence that defines a collective we.
There was thus a transversality to the political composition of the strike (unions, grassroots territorial organizations, queer collectives, student groups, health centers, migrant collectives, self-organized individuals, etc.). There was also an intersectionality of problematics that were able to make a concrete critique of renewed forms of capitalist exploitation, through their focus on labor.
Overcoming the fragmentation imposed by the state and so-called “international agendas” has been very complicated. Thus we must turn our differences into the harmony of diverse women who launch their voices in varied scales, in a pluralized choreography that nurtures and does not separate: “Together and strong, always feminists.”
Viewpoint Magazine