042: Strike Feminism

<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">What would it mean if our society prioritized social reproduction above production for profit? Our racist, cis-heteropatriarchal, capitalist dystopia is a world turned upside-down—where the essential work that creates & sustains life is assigned to women and subordinated to the making of profit. Instead of aiming to undue this perversion, mainstream feminism of the past decade has prioritized a “Lean In” strategy, advocating “equal opportunity domination” as the ultimate horizon of gender equality. According to this liberal-feminist doctrine, what the world needs is not the abolition of social hierarchy, but simply a more diverse representation to maintain seats of power that already enshrine and expand inequality. Thankfully, this bankrupt approach has been counter-punched by a new wave of feminist strikes emerging in recent years, including ones in Spain, Poland and the #RedForEd strikes in the U.S. that swept across the country in the months after Trump’s election. In the powerful and accessible book</span> <strong><em>Feminism for the</em></strong> <strong><em>99%: A Manifesto</em></strong><span style="font-weight: 400;">, Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser articulate an urgent anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-imperialist, and eco-socialist vision of a feminism informed by the International Women’s Strike Movement. So in this episode, Matt & Jesse celebrate this new, more radical, more intersectional feminist vision for the 21st century—by exploring this indispensable text that is a brief, focused clarification of key issues in our shared emancipatory struggle. While it may seem like an outdated term, “the personal is the political”—a key rallying cry of 60’s Student Movements and Second-Wave Feminists—is a zeitgeist phrase that is ever worthy of being rescued in our Age of Climate Despair. The essential truth of this maxim is increasingly evidenced in women’s lives, and especially for single mothers and women of color who represent the majority of Americ