Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto
By Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya and Nancy Fraser
Folio, Lahore
ISBN: 978-9697834105
85pp.

To attempt a feminist manifesto for our times — one that is internationalist in its scope, cognisant of the polarised political landscape that we are living through and can mobilise action on ground — is a daunting task. But that is precisely what three feminists, Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya and Nancy Fraser, deliver in Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto.

Bhattacharya is a Marxist feminist, Arruzza’s interests lie in studying the complex relationship between feminism and socialism and Fraser is well known for her critique of liberal feminism. Collectively, they take the reader through a succinctly argued and passionately expressed declaration that sets forth a road map for the feminist struggle ahead.

Where they trace the inspiration for the project to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s The Communist Manifesto of 1848, the authors of Feminism for the 99% firmly locate this endeavour within the current disenchantment with the political landscape, where one struggles for air between reactionary populism and progressive neoliberalism.

The world we now inhabit is one that is far more globalised, faced with newer, and perhaps deeper, contestations around religion, sexuality and ecology. In addition, and perhaps most importantly, the manifesto is written with an awareness of how earlier feminisms and other social justice struggles may have been co-opted and coerced by an increasingly adaptive, pernicious capitalism.

Three feminists attempt to define an inclusive new manifesto that attempts to address the failures of earlier iterations of feminism, especially with regards to class, race and systemic violence

This articulation of feminism becomes all the more relevant today as we see Kamala Harris’s ascension to the corridors of powers in the United States and the clamour around the shattering of the proverbial glass ceiling. Ironically, the book begins with a reference to Harris’s friend Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer at Facebook and a liberal feminist whose vision of equality is women in boardrooms and as heads of homes, countries and corporations. A vision, that the manifesto reminds us, “asks ordinary people, in the name of feminism, to be grateful that it is a woman, not a man, who busts their union, orders a drone to kill their parent, or locks their child in a cage at a border.”

Instead, the authors ask us to build a feminism that mobilises collectively against predatory capitalism, “the system that generates the boss, produces national borders, and manufactures the drones that guards them.” Harris is unlikely to do so and the manifesto serves as a timely reminder of that.

Decades of neoliberalism have reduced wages, diminished labour rights, disastrously impacted the environment and depleted energies that sustain people and families. In separating the “making of people from the making of profit”, capitalism assigns the first job — social reproduction — to women and subordinates it to the production of profit. Social reproduction comprises activities that create and sustain life, supplying the social, material and cultural capital essential for any capitalist undertaking. The manifesto recognises the sexism at the heart of the capitalist project. In doing so, the manifesto includes those who do not receive wages (or worth) in return for their endless life-sustaining work, into the global working class.

The manifesto divides itself into 11 primary theses, each argument presenting a core facet that a feminism of the future, responding to the needs of the 99 percent, must embrace. The first thesis is protest, or the “reinvention of the strike”, as key to disrupting the existing status quo. It locates social reproduction as the site where we find many of these militant hotspots: teachers in the US, water privatisation in Ireland and Dalit sanitation workers in India. Here, closer to home, the recent sit-in in Islamabad by Lady Health Workers demanding better working conditions from the state serves as an example of the power of women’s mobilisation.

The three authors stress the failure of liberal feminism to deliver for women, its stubborn inability to address class and race, and warn future feminists against the turn to what it calls “femocratic approaches.”

An example of this is micro loans, which increase women’s financial dependence on creditors and strengthen gendered inequalities and processes of capital accumulation. The manifesto stresses the need for collective struggle, as opposed to a separatist agenda, one that sees itself as anti-capitalist and stands for not just women, but all those exploited and oppressed.

It calls for a recognition of the multiple crises that face society at this juncture — of economy, ecology and politics. Feminism of the 99 percent is unequivocally anti-racist as well as being anti-imperialist, and places eco-socialism at its centre, recognising that women are disproportionately affected by climate change.

Gender violence is an issue critical to Pakistan, abetted by a grossly inadequate criminal justice system and patriarchal norms that shame the victim — norms further mirrored by state and political officials. The manifesto reminds us that gender violence, be it in the home or in spaces designated as public, is but an “instrumentalisation of gendered assault as a technique of control” deeply rooted in capitalist societies.

The roots of vulnerability to this violence are tied to women’s economic, political and racial/ethnic vulnerabilities. Violence in the home and in the workplace rests on a division of labour that restricts a woman’s access to paid work, leaving her with limited ability to leave an abusive relationship, or stand up to abuse or exploitation in the work space. Violence on women’s bodies is weaponised during communal strife and times of armed conflict by the state or non-state actors.

A less visible debate, especially within the South Asian context, is the inadequacy of the feminist response to gender violence. In Pakistan, much like the rest of the world, the demand has been for criminalisation and punishment of the abuser and an end to impunity for violence against women. The manifesto cautions us that this demand assumes “that laws, police and courts maintain sufficient autonomy from the capitalist power structure to counter its deep-seated tendency to generate gender violence.”

Simply put, laws are not enough — a lesson that we in Pakistan are learning in the wake of anti-violence laws that came into effect 2006 onwards. Misogynist criminal justice systems further exploit women and, more importantly, an inordinate focus on laws and criminalising violence does not help women who have nowhere to go after they leave an abusive home or workplace. Violence must be recognised as a systemic condition under capitalism where women’s subordination is tied to the “gendered organisation of work and the dynamics of capital accumulation.”

Are there disconnects and silences within a manifesto that is written in the global North, even though its field of inquiry includes the South? Do attempts at universalising struggles nearly always fall short? The answer to that must always be in the affirmative, for anything else would compromise the truth. And yet, Feminism for the 99% serves as an important proclamation of the broad parameters to which feminists in the global South must pay heed and further nuance within our realities for the uphill struggle that lies ahead.

The reviewer is a feminist practitioner and author of Dying to Serve: Militarism, Affect and the Politics of Sacrifice in the Pakistan Army

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, December 6th, 2020