Monthly Archives: August 2015

Schedule for the CES in Malmö

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This weekend, Första Linjen published the preliminary schedule for the conference.

The two events with our participation are:

Sat. 19th, 14:00-15:30, together with Feminist Fightback (England)

Fighting for Reproductive Justice – a review on feminist strategies and right-wing attacks

On this panel, activists from GB, Sweden and Germany will talk about the current situation regarding religious and state attacks on our reproduction. Focusing on access to abortion as a barometer of broader capitalist tendencies we will talk about how we can understand the increased level of anti-feminist mobilisations and discuss various feminist strategies in how we should respond.
Even though our actions mainly take place in Europe, we also plan to weave in some information on Latin American struggles.

Sun 20th, 13:30-15:00

Gender and Capitalism – an inevitable love? On the necessity of connecting feminist (and) anticapitalist struggles

After a short input on how we see the correlations of gender and capitalism, we want to split into smaller groups to read texts wich display different approaches to this topic. We would then love to discuss the necessity of connecting feminist and anticapitalist struggles as well as ideas on how those struggles and practices could look like across Europe, worldwide and on a daily basis.

Info stall with cocktails

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This saturday during the Hechtfest (festival of the Hechtviertel), we’re having a stall with cocktails (non-alcoholic and alcoholic) and lots of information at the az conni from 4pm. It’s a solidarity stall for our protest in Annaberg-Buchholz and we want to use the money to pay parts of the upcoming legal costs and lawyers’ fees. The police accuses a group of activists of having violated the assembly law by presenting a banner 50m away from the fundementalists’ march. We’re also looking forward to chatting with you!

Connection European Struggles

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We are excited to share the call for the CES conference in Sweden, which is organized by Första Linjen. We will also contribute to it – our workshop will be announced soon.

Conference 18-20 september 2015

In 2014 the first Connecting European Struggles conference was held in Lund, Sweden and gathered participants from multiple European countries in order to discuss, connect and mobilize around crisis politics. Now we are calling for the 2015 conference, this time in Malmö, which we hope will build on the previous one and be bigger, better and broader.

For the 2015 conference we have decided to highlight gender issues and feminism in crisis, a perspective that has mostly been lacking in many radical analysis and perspectives on our current situation. Continue reading →

Labour of Love? – Searching for Feminist Answers to the Crisis of Reproduction

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When it grew up, capitalism fell in love with unequal gender relations. Their relationship is somehow complicated, but flexible, and all in all it seems to be a strong and long lasting one. Still today production and reproduction are organized along gender categories, the production of economic value has its precondition in mostly unwaged ‘female’ reproductive work. (Without childcare, cleaning, shopping, cooking, sex, emotional support a.o. reproducing labour force, it wouldn’t be there.)

In the last decades many european feminists have thought it would be a key step in emancipation for women* to go to work (in sense of waged jobs). But as we can see now, when this is partly realized, in most cases women* work in the low-paid care sector, an ‘extension’ of housework in commodified form. And still, whichever job they have, domestic work seems to remain their task.
The result is an unmanageable overload. Some economically better-situated women* hire other (often immigrant) women* to do ‘their’ housework or childcare, frequently low-paid and under bad conditions of never-ending working days and personal dependency.
In times of crisis and austerity politics, when ‘welfare’ is out back into private homes, the whole precarious situation aggravates – we can speak of a crisis of reproduction.

What could be strategies concerning gender and work? What kind of struggles are going on in the different countries, what are the experiences or outcomes? How can low-waged care workers, how can unwaged reproductive workers organize? What could ‘working conditions’, ‘union’ or ‘strike’ mean referring to private households? How to relate to the state, should we call for public services or/and organize them on our own? What is the role of feminism in all this?

Therefor it could be inspiring to look back to the 70s’ ‘Wages For Housework’ campaign. We will read and discuss the short text ‘Wages Against Housework’ by Silvia Federici and its implications for today. What has changed, what hasn’t? How to take this discussion and our practices further?

Thursday: 5pm, Megali Panagia
at the Beyond Europe Camp in Greece