The massive women's strikes and marches, which have taken place all over the world in recent years, have incited new forms of social movements. The immense scale of women’s mobilisations, with their constitutive class, antiracist and LGBT+ dimensions, were developed in response to post-crisis measures that exacerbated the lives of many, tightening restrictions on reproductive rights, as well as leading to the rise of the far and populist right. These struggles have opened up space for reflection on and the reorganization of left feminist politics.

Author: Maja Solar

The feminist summer school of 2018, held at the beginning of October in Belgrade, provided this much-needed space and the opportunity to theorise concepts, exchange different experiences of organising and of the peculiarities of local contexts, address common goals and develop strategies that can further weaken structures of exploitation and oppression. Organised by the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung Feminist project-group and Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung Southeast Europe, with the title FEMINIST CLASS POLITICS - EXCHANGING THEORY AND PRACTICE, this school gathered ninety participants from Spain, Greece, Ukraine, Russia, the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Serbia, Albania, Germany, Northern Ireland, Belgium, Latin America and the United States.

The first day was reserved for discussing the feminist class perspective. Unlike old leftist approaches emphasizing the ambit of production, wage labour and putting class analysis first, the new feminist class approach considers the wider framework of the capitalist structure: the sphere of reproduction and unwaged, subsistence, caregiving & other forms of labour, which are not typically capitalist in nature, but which are necessary for undergirding capitalism as well as gender and other relations of domination/oppression that are co-constitutive aspects of capitalist relations. Thus, from this perspective, domination is expressed intersectionally, i.e. through class, gender, race, sexuality, (dis)ability and other stratifications. If we do not consider the aspect of race, for example, we cannot explain why in Brazil black women are murdered at a rate 71% higher than white women, or why black women do not receive anaesthetic treatments when needed because of the stereotyped assumption that they are tough and resilient (a racist form of obstetric violence). This intersectional approach seeks to link identity and class politics, as was further elaborated in the school workshops that ran as parallel groups.

The day dedicated to the topic of labour continued with debates on the recently published studies within the series entitled Austerity, Gender Inequality and Feminism after the Crisis. So far, eight studies have been conducted on the following countries: Greece, Spain, Ireland, Ukraine, Russia, Germany, Croatia and Lithuania. Other publications are still pending but there is a possibility that the series will include research on other countries as well. Notwithstanding the different regional contexts and post-crisis reforms, public services in all countries have been increasingly scaled back and deflected to the private sector, which is churning out profits. Although austerity measures have negatively affected the subordinated classes and radically transformed the lives of the majority of the population, they have been particularly damaging to women and other underprivileged groups, and have generated a crisis of care. Therefore, the regime of austerity has gendered, racialised, sexual orientation-, age-, ethnic- and ability-based aspects. Bearing these in mind, some of the crucial issues relating to organising women in activist practices were discussed, such as: what would be the left feminist approach to organising women into trade unions; how can we organise the unorganised (such as female precarious and part-time workers, migrant workers, care workers, migrant live-in caregivers, domestic workers etc.), how can we increase the impact of the feminist strike at the international level, and consolidate disconnected forms of revolt into more coherent, unified and lasting organisations? At the end of the second day of the school, a public debate entitled «The Leftist Feminization of Politics» was held in the Center for Cultural Decontamination.

On the third day of the school, the participants discussed the most relevant practices and actions relating to reproductive justice. These included fighting violence against women, struggles over abortion rights, care work, emancipatory family politics, and queer organizing beyond identity politics. Developed in the 1990s by black feminists, the concept of reproductive justice extended rights beyond the framework of individual choice, addressing questions of access (to abortion, contraception, pregnancy care etc.), and the material basis of social inequalities in general. Therefore, the perspective of reproductive justice broadens the battlefield enough to encompass various social justice struggles.

Besides the lectures and workshops, the summer feminist school also included a very important dimension of self-care, so that those attending the school could take part in afternoon training sessions on self-health, self-defence, safe sex for women or poetry slams.
Some of the questions and dilemmas that came up at this school have been fleshed out and it seems that the common ground for manifold oppressions and exploitations has emerged: regardless of how much these forms differ, they are inextricably entwined with capitalism. Therefore, the task remains to tie more political struggles (against the rising right and neo-fascist politics) and more economic struggles (over unemployment, wages and better working conditions) to all the various social reproduction struggles (over food, housing, socialised child care services and public schools, socialised care for the elderly and infirm, abortions free of charge, available health care services, free sexual preferences, affordable and ecological transportation, public libraries, parks and other places of entertainment, sports and recreational facilities, degrowth struggles over clear water, land, natural resources, and so on) under the left feminist banner.