Inside the Mass Feminist General Strike in Spain

Filed under: Anarchist Movement, Anti-Patriarchy, Featured, International Coverage, Interviews, Labor, Radio & Podcast, Radio/Podcast

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In this episode of the It’s Going Down podcast, we talked again with a member of the CNT (National Confederation of Labor), a combative anarcho-syndicalist union in Spain, about the recent feminist general strike on March 8th, which took place on Internationalist Women’s Day and was “intended to highlight sexual discrimination, domestic violence and the wage gap.”

As one text on the strike wrote:

As a “feminist strike”, the goal was never simply to close down “production”, but to close down “everything”: production and consumption, service provision, transportation, etc.; to disrupt the multitude of diverse activities that are reserved to women (and through which they are defined and oppressed as “women”) that assure the re-production of the social relations of capitalism; to end the violence directed against women, the violence that secures the oppression and exploitation of patriarchy (in spain, while 1,000 women have been murdered in the last 14 years, more often than not at the hands of men they know, they carry twice the burden of unpaid domestic work, and when paid, earn on average 30% less than men). (Kaosenlared.net 08/03/2018))  What was, and remains, thus ultimately at stake are the overlapping (practical, institutional and corporal-conceptual) binaries and borders that order the male-centred, hierarchical sex-gendered world that capitalism rests upon and creates.

As our guest explains, the strike itself brought upwards of 5 million into the streets, and put the combative ‘red and black’ anarchist unions front and center, while the institutionalized socialist and communist trade unions were seen to be the bureaucratic institutions that they where.

Throughout our conversation, we talk about what went into organizing the strike, the role that anarchists and anarchist labor unions played, and the connection between the strike and other movements.

More Info: Article on Autonomies

This post was written by It's Going Down