Interview by Cinzia Arruzza Tithi Bhattacharya

On August 8 the Argentine Senate, by a narrow margin, voted down the Law of Voluntary Pregnancy Interruption (IVE), which would have legalized abortion in the country. The Catholic Church rejoiced, having led a ruthless campaign against safe and legal abortion for women. Several political operatives, from bourgeois politicians to trade union leaders, had caved in to this intense anti-abortion rhetoric. This for two reasons: one, their general capitulation to the ideology of “family values” upheld by both neoliberal forces and the Church; two, because they were terrified of a new social force that had arisen in response to neoliberal predation and was now decisively shaping the political terrain: the feminist movement.

The Argentinian feminist wave galvanized around the Ni Una Menos (“not one less”) movement, which arose in 2015 to protest the murder of fourteen-year-old Chiara Páez. The movement began as a struggle against femicide but rapidly radicalized, expanding the ambit of “violence” as an analytical category to include the multifarious assaults of capitalism on the lives of poor and working women and gender non-conforming people. It was the political breadth and activity of Ni Una Menos and of the Polish feminist movement that provided the inspiration for the International Women’s Strike.

Here, we bring together Argentinian feminists who played a leading role in shaping Ni Una Menos and the International Women’s Strike. We do this at a moment of danger for feminist organizing in the United States. While anti-abortion lawmakers are also on the march here, they are being buttressed by anti-labor laws, laws attacking social provisioning, and unprecedented levels of violence against immigrants and Muslims.

This is a particular political conjuncture where feminism, if it is to become a threat once more to misogyny and misogynists, cannot confine itself to what liberal politics classifies as “women’s issues.” If feminism is to provide an alternative to capitalist violence it must be an anticapitalist feminism. In recent times, Argentinian feminists have in their concrete struggles given form to an insurgent, anticapitalist feminism, which we can learn from, and hopefully, replicate.