The Italian Anarchist Federation writes on why it will be mobilising for the global strike initiative on March 8th, amid an atmosphere of reaction which has been driving repressive reforms.

The Italian Anarchist Federation supports the general feminist strike that will mark March 8th in many countries of the world.

Rather than being any mere ritual and done out of purely testimonial logic, the strike is a necessary moment of rupture to reinforce and highlight the struggle against all forms of discrimination, against all forms of domination that would subject our lives and our bodies.

Today more than ever, reactionary forces are raging against those who claim freedom and self-determination through initiatives and political measures under the banner of sexism and “defending the family” — the actions of a patriarchal culture rooted and constantly renewed through its roots in and benefit to the logics of exploitation.

Wage differences for the same job, unemployment, underemployment, precariousness, cuts in social spending. The social war strongly attacks women by reducing their economic autonomy and exalting the role of the family as the best method of survival. A family that rests on the consolidation of traditional roles, on sexist morality, on hierarchy, on the subordination of women. A family that, the chronicles and the statistics offer us merciless testimony, is the first place of violence. This is the traditional family that is so dear to priests, fascists and all those who want to impose, as well as poverty, even total control of lives and choices.

The family is the fortress around which these forces continually re-found a hierarchical and exclusive social and political order. On the left, as on the right, from those who would like it extended to homosexual couples to those who want it modeled on the “sacred” family. “An institution that is a guarantee of stability for governments.

Familial sexism is the common denominator of many measures and interventions undertaken by the Italian government: from the citizenship income welfare scheme, and similar schemes, which operate on a family basis, to the budget laws applied to rural families; from the review of maternity leave, to the Pillon Bill to fight divorce; from the disinvestment on anti-violence centers to the closure of the consultors, to attacks on abortion.

Measures and processes that, in large part, the previous governments have anticipated and initiated and which now, with the current government, are being expressed in particularly reactionary and repressive terms. Now more than ever it is necessary to develop a lucid and attentive debate that tackles the issues of the question and individuals, in addition to the articulations of oppression and the strategies that make it possible to overcome them, even the contradictions that patriarchal culture can nurture in the sphere of our relations.

Today more than ever it is necessary to support the struggles and the self-managed experiences that want to counteract the sexist policies and affirm the practices of freedom.

For these reasons, as anarchists, we will be present in the streets of the eighth of March.

8th March Working Group of the Italian Anarchist Federation

This article is an edited machine translation of an essay which originally appeared in Umanita Nova

Pic from Women’s Strike Assembly (UK)