Call to the International Women's Strike – March 8, 2018

Abstract

As women of the world, we find ourselves in a process of existential revolution. On March 8, 2017, we united to show our force: we staged the first international women's strike, in a transnational, multilingual, intersectional, and heterogeneous articulation, in which fifty-five countries participated. We began to forge a new internationalism. We constituted ourselves as unexpected revolutionary subjects at a global level, and we questioned all forms of exploitation, racism, and cruelty from the perspective of a feminist ethics that has at its center a politics of life and not one of sacrifice. For us, all bodies and all existences count. We seek to realize here and now the world in which we want to live.

We say, Ni una menos (Not one woman less), in a slogan of transversality that combines the music of previous revolutions and the tenacity of feminist struggles. We began circulating a form of power that disseminates as a virus, and it grows in the centers of political and social organization, opening spaces of democratization and breaking with discourses of impotence. It disrupts the domestic space as confinement; it alters union discussions; it activates resistances in the sphere of production and popular economies; it radicalizes fights against extractivism and plunder; it breaks apart the industries of spectacle; it permeates artistic languages; and it contests finance's control over our daily lives. It explodes in our protests and in our beds. Nothing is separate from the feminist revolution. The tide flows and ebbs, finds channels below the earth, and emerges as a tremor that adds new force to our struggle.

We strike because the tide drives us and because our own rebellions nourish the tide.

We strike and stop the world to denaturalize violence and all forms of exploitation. We strike against the cruelty that takes our bodies as the spoils of conquest. We strike against racism and the appropriation of our bodies and our territories. We strike to defend our lives and our autonomy. We strike to invent our own time, one in which our desire can create another way of living on earth. Our strike is not just an event; it is a process of social transformation and of the historical accumulation of rebellious forces that do not allow themselves to be corseted in the rules of formal democracy. Our movement breaks through what now exists, crosses borders, languages, identities, and scales to construct new geographies that are not those of capital and its financial movements.

Against the sexual and racial division of work; against the government of finance over lives; against the production of disposable bodies and lives; against the puritanism through which they attempt to neutralize our experiments; against the neoliberal appropriations of our demands; against the “purple” marketing of transnational companies; against machista imaginaries and practices in the media; against the punitivism (or policy of penalties for penalties' sake) that attempts to discipline and moralize in our name; against the repression, criminalization and demonization of our struggles: we strike.

The strike is a tool that we reinvent to dismantle the scheme of violence against us. The strike allows us to create a map of the new colonial and imperial forms deployed against our economies and our territories. The strike asks us to investigate and activate resistances and disobediences, the production of alternate forms of life, and rebellious bodies.

We organize—women, lesbians, trans people, feminized bodies of the world—to propagate our virus of defiance. We organize ourselves in a demonstration of force and with a collective shout for March 8, 2018: women strike:

¡Ni Una Menos, Vivas Nos Queremos! (Not One Woman Less! We Want to Stay Alive!)