Once again, the office of the Observatory on Debt and Globalisation will be closed on Wednesday 8th March for the feminist General Strike and the workers will take part in the different mobilisations that have announced.
2023 began with struggles and organising against the systemic violence suffered by women and dissident identities in Catalonia and elsewhere. These are struggles against gender violence, wars, austerity and cuts, extractivism on our bodies and territories.
This diversity of struggles is a response to the worsening impacts of intersecting systemic crises: care, social, economic, climatic and ecological crises. In short, crises of social reproduction resulting from the capitalist, neo-colonial and cisheteropatriarchal system, which affect all women and dissident identities, albeit in an unequal and combined way, being the women from the global South, migrant and racialised women and working class women, among others, the most vulnerable.
Inequalities continue to grow, and women and dissident identities continue to be at the centre of these systemic violences. Violence against women and LGBTIQphobic, far from goign down, remains one of the ailments of this modern society. In addition, the rise of the far right and its conservative discourses moves the debate on women’s sexual and reproductive rights and dissident identities to the right, questioning rights that we have achieved after years of struggle and slowing down the progress towards the achievement of other collective rights. In this sense, it is important to recognize that despite the regulatory advances of recent months within the framework of the Spanish State, there is still a long way to go for these rights to be recognized for all.
Social, care and economic violence takes the form of violations of basic rights and inequalities in access to energy, water, housing, food, health, education and/or care. Both the institutional proposal for post-pandemic economic “recovery” and the NextGeneration funds, as well as the reform of the EU economic governance framework, suggest that investments in the modernisation of industry and its supposedly green and digital transition will be prioritised, leaving aside investments in socially necessary sectors. Everything points to a return to a new wave of austerity and further cuts in labour rights, social budgets, public services and support for EU proposals.
This violence is also extractivist, over our bodies and our sexual and reproductive rights, as well as over the commons, fertile soil, water and ecosystems as a whole, exacerbating the climate and ecological emergency. Violence, in short, that does not allow life, neither in a dignified sense, nor in a literal sense, nor human life, nor that of ecosystems, as a consequence of a biocidal system focused on profit and economic benefit concentrated in the hands of a few.
Given all this points, the need to confront it from feminisms and anti-racist and LGBTIQ+ struggles is more evident than ever. We call for the construction of ecofeminist transitions, in which social reproduction and the care of human and non-human lives are a right and a responsibility shared by all.
For all these reasons, we the ODG join the actions of the Feminist Strike, to demonstrate once again that if women and LGBTIQ+ women stop, the world stops. We return to flood the streets with feminist struggle and make it anti-racist and for LGBTIQ+ liberation. And we join the 13 demands of the Manifesto of the Assembly 8M, which are:
For the repeal of the law on foreigners.
Against wars
Against gender-based violence
For the right to one’s own body
For the right to exist and to be outside the cisheteronorma
Against ableism
For decent working conditions
For decent pensions
In defence of public services and against privatisation
For a feminist, quality, public, Catalan and secular education.
In defence of the right to decent housing
In defence of environmentalism
Against repression