Feminism for the 99% by Cinzia Arruzza & Tithi Bhattacharya & Nancy Fraser

Author:Cinzia Arruzza & Tithi Bhattacharya & Nancy Fraser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

Thesis 9: Fighting to reverse capital’s

destruction of the earth, feminism for

the 99 percent is eco-socialist.

Today’s crisis of capitalism is also an ecological crisis. Capitalism has always sought to bolster its profits by commandeering natural resources, which it treats as free and infinite, and which it often steals outright. Structurally primed to appropriate nature without any regard for replenishment, capitalism periodically destabilizes its own ecological conditions of possibility—whether by exhausting the soil and depleting mineral wealth, or by poisoning the water and air.

While today’s ecological crisis is not the first in capitalism’s history, it is surely the most global and pressing yet. The climate change now threatening the planet is a direct outgrowth of capital’s historic resort to fossilized energy in order to power its signature mass-production industrial factories. It was not “humanity” in general but capital that extracted carbonized deposits formed over hundreds of millions of years beneath the crust of the earth; and it was capital that consumed them in the blink of an eye with total disregard for replenishment or the impacts of pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. Subsequent shifts, first from coal to oil, and then to fracking and natural gas, have only ramped up carbon emissions, while disproportionately offloading the “externalities” onto poor communities, often communities of color, in the global North and the global South.

If today’s ecological crisis is directly tied to capitalism, it also reproduces and worsens women’s oppression. Women occupy the front lines of the present ecological crisis, making up 80 percent of climate refugees. In the global South, they constitute the vast majority of the rural workforce, even as they also bear responsibility for the lion’s share of social-reproductive labor. Because of their key role in providing food, clothing, and shelter for their families, women play an outsized part in coping with drought, pollution, and the overexploitation of land. Likewise, poor women of color in the global North are disproportionately vulnerable. Subject to environmental racism, they constitute the backbone of communities subject to flooding and lead poisoning.

Women are also at the forefront of struggles against the growing ecological catastrophe. Decades ago in the United States, the militant leftwing group Women Strike for Peace agitated against atomic weapons that had deposited Strontium-90 in our bones. Today, women spearhead the Water Protectors’ fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline in the United States. In Peru, they powered Máxima Acuña’s successful battle against the US mining giant Newmont. In North India, Garhwali women are fighting against the construction of three hydroelectric dams. Across the globe women lead myriad struggles against the privatization of water and seed, and for the preservation of biodiversity and sustainable farming.

In all these cases, women model new, integrated forms of struggle that challenge the tendency of mainstream environmentalists to frame the defense of “nature” and the material well-being of human communities as mutually antithetical. In their refusal to separate ecological issues from those of social reproduction, these women-led movements represent a powerful anti-corporate and anti-capitalist alternative to “green capitalist” projects that do

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.