An ecofeminist toolkit to fight against corporate power

New publication by Libros en Acción, OMAL and ODG. By researcher Julia Martí with illustrations by Maite Mentxaka, now available online in Catalan, Spanish, English and Basque.

Faced with the inaction and lack of ambition of governments in relation to the climate crisis, as well as the growing inequality and enrichment of large fortunes and the expansion of neo-colonial green capitalism, we need practical, grounded ecofeminist proposals that confront those primarily responsible for the ecosocial crisis we are living through: transnational corporations and all their partners (or, in other words, corporate power).

In this context, Libros en Acción, the Observatorio de Multinacionales en América Latina (OMAL) and the Debt Observatory in Globalisation, have published online the Ecofeminist Toolkit to fight against corporate power with the aim of reclaiming the numerous alternatives and successful experiences of resistance that exist around the world.

We believe that learning about the multiple struggles against transnational corporations, supporting them and replicating them, can be a first step towards recognising our strengths and thinking about other possible utopias. Furthermore, the ecofeminist perspective allows us to bring to light those dimensions that are normally invisible. For this reason, we recover the power of the expression “territory-body-land” proposed by Latin American community feminism to make visible the fact that aggressions on territory always have an impact on bodies, and we combine this idea with the proposal of feminist economics on the “capital-life conflict”.

In the Ecofeminist Toolkit, we set out five paths in which various proposals for strategies, demands and alternatives are woven together:

1. Attacking economic power, bursting the financial bubble
2. Ending corporate impunity
3. Dismantling the state-corporate machine
4. Pulling the plug on transnational corporations
5. Defending the body-territory from patriarchal capitalist violence

This Manual does not intend to provide answers or ready-made recipes, but rather to offer examples designed as a toolbox that can be used for collective debate and reflection. Moreover, all the reflections are the result of a collective process that was woven from different collectives and territories (in Latin America and Europe) in spaces of virtual and face-to-face debate between the springs of 2021 and 2022.