This is a translation of a text published by Chilean feminists. It was first published on Vamos hacia la vida.
Workers burn down or blow up their factories, demanding severance pay instead of fighting to maintain their jobs. Students occupy universities, but against rather than in the name of the demands for which they are supposedly fighting. Women break with movements in which they already form a majority, since those movements cannot but fail to represent them. And everywhere, the unemployed, the youth, and the undocumented join and overwhelm the struggles of a privileged minority of workers, making the limited nature of the latter’s demands at once obvious and impossible to sustain. — Maya González y Jeanne Neton (Endnotes), Communization and the abolition of gender.
The rise of social democracy to state management has filled various sectors of the social movement with confusion, and they have become delusional about the future government, subordinating themselves to its agenda and timing: unfortunately, an important sector of feminism hasn’t been exempted from it. Many have full confidence that the state’s institutionality that actually exists will bring us the radical transformations we urgently need, not only as oppressed and doubly exploited women, but also as a human species. A large part of it has staked everything on the system’s own instances of democratic participation, from elections, through the Constitutional Convention, to the very administration of the state — as if the state was not essentially patriarchal! Thus, a large part of the powerful feminist movement is moving in the interests of the state and capital, abandoning self-organisation, autonomy and independence, so necessary to advance our historical demands, which have been trivialised and ridiculed by Boric when he publicly stated a few days ago that “his government will be feminist”: a perfect oxymoron.
Women, feminists and anti-capitalists, should aim to abolish the root of our condition of exploitation, oppression and slavery: there can be no end to the miseries experienced by women, or anyone else, under this commodified reproductive system that deepens the patriarchal order and makes us more and more precarious. Therefore, the anti-patriarchal struggle is inseparable from the anti-capitalist struggle: only by denying what we are forced to be and do, will we be truly free.
Destroying the fictitious division between public and private, which serves the separation of life and the naturalisation of a supposed inferiority of women — and other non-male identities — is essential to our liberation. We do not want “equity”, nor do we want positions of command in the administration of this rotten society, we want to put an end to an existence subjected to the time and the logic of production and money, according to our gender and for the benefit of the state/capital.
The state will not solve patriarchal violence, because the state is organised patriarchal violence. It is for this reason that we invite you to fight and build in everyday life — the place where social life is reproduced — those links and relationships that will break and overcome the divisions that mutilate us: asking the state to do so, as well as delegating our activity, relegating us to the background — as has always been the case — is nonsense.
Down with Patriarchy, Capital and the State!
