International Grassroots Feminism
It All Started When…
. . . an international grassroots feminist movement began to organize domestic workers—bringing super-exploited isolated individual women out of homes and into the streets.
We All Need Organizations; These are Mine
Berkeley/Oakland Women’s Union
Association of Women in Architecture
California Women in Environmental Design
Grassroots Global Justice Alliance
National Domestic Workers Alliance
California Domestic Workers Alliance
Hand in Hand: Domestic Employers Network
Throughout, I have maintained my conviction—perhaps obsession—that it is essential to the Left to analyze the role of patriarchy in the development of modes of production and reproduction, especially under imperialism—this is, imperialist patriarchy. I am influenced always by the studies of academic socialist-feminists and the international movements of grassroots feminisms—Grassroots Global Justice Alliance’s Feminist Organizing Schools in partnership with the World March of Women. I am looking at the objective conditions of imperialist patriarchy, the global struggles of resistance to its horrors, and the invention of its alternatives. All readings of the objective conditions of twenty-first century capitalist reveal the giant underbelly of feminized super-exploitation. Why does it seem so clear to me? Imperialism, colonialism, national oppression, racial subjugation all exist as integrated with the expropriation of womens’ bodies and super-exploitation of invisible feminized labor. Do we understand that imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism? Built on a foundation of the expropriation of nature and super-exploitation and genocide against colonial peoples by the U.S. and Europe, there is no corner of the planet that does not reveal, upon study, the absolute necessity for imperialism of continuing to steal low-wage and no wage invisibilized reproductive labor. We only need see the economic theft of women trekking every day in search of water to provide for their communities. It is not invisible. It is intentionally invisibilized.
