The embarrassing confusion of the "women’s strike"

“On March 8th, International Women’s Day, women and our allies will act together creatively to withdraw from the corporations that harm us and find ways to support the businesses, organizations and communities that sustain us,” declares the Women’s March website, profiling its “Day Without a Woman.” Further questions, according to the March’s Twitter feed, include the following: “Do businesses support our communities, or do they drain our communities? Do they strive for gender equity or do they support the policies and leaders that perpetuate oppression? Do they align with a sustainable environment or do they profit off destruction and steal the futures of our children?”

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Well! That’s strange. This seems like a standard, vague list of clichéd left-wing hobbyhorses, not a principled protest engaging current policy problems. Don’t worry, friends: Surely further research and reading will clarify things.

Well, okay, maybe not. Along with an end to “male violence” and, predictably, “a defense of reproductive rights” — in other words, abortion — “we also need to target the ongoing neoliberal attack on social provision and labor rights,” feminist organizers Linda Martín Alcoff, Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, Nancy Fraser, Barbara Ransby, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Rasmea Yousef Odeh, and Angela Davis declare in the Guardian.

Lest anyone be confused, strike leaders go on to call for an “anti-capitalist” feminism. “Decades of neoliberalism has not just taken the bread from the tables of working women and families,” Cinzia Arruza and Tithi Bhattacharya add, also in the Guardian, “but also taken away all infrastructures that sustain life, the roses.”

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