Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto

At every level and in every region, financialized capitalism brings major new waves of racialized expropriation.

By decisively rejecting “lean in” dogma and the feminism of the 1 percent, our feminism can become a beacon of hope for everyone else.

This is a remarkable vision of equal opportunity domination: one that asks ordinary people, in the name of feminism, to be grateful that it is a woman, not a man, who busts their union, orders a drone to kill their parent, or locks their child in a cage at the border.

In reality, class solidarity is best advanced by reciprocal recognition of the relevant differences among us—our disparate structural situations, experiences, and sufferings; our specific needs, desires, and demands; and the varied organizational forms through which we can best achieve them.

A feminism that is truly anti-racist and anti-imperialist must also be anticapitalist.

As neoliberalism demands more hours of waged work per household and less state support for social welfare, it squeezes families, communities, and (above all) women to the breaking point.

Fully compatible with ballooning inequality, liberal feminism outsources oppression. It permits professional-managerial women to lean in precisely by enabling them to lean on the poorly paid migrant women to whom they subcontract their caregiving and housework.

Contra fashionable ideologies of “multiplicity,” the various oppressions we suffer do not form an inchoate, contingent plurality. Although each has its own distinctive forms and characteristics, all are rooted in, and reinforced by, one and the same social system. It is by naming that system as capitalism, and by joining together to fight against i

Refusing to limit that category to waged work, women’s strike activism is also withdrawing housework, sex, and smiles. By making visible the indispensable role played by gendered, unpaid work in capitalist society, it draws attention to activities from which capital benefits, but for which it does not pay.