This collective document is the result of the assembly spaces of collective convergence, where voices of feminist networks, organisations, and collectives have been articulated from different parts of the world and carried out virtually in June and November 2020 within the framework of the World Social Forum of Transformative Economies.
In these long months of the pandemic, inequalities have been accentuated and violence has deepened, at the same time that it has become a pretext for an escalation of forms of fascism and social surveillance. Faced with these foes, we are committed to building alternatives and strategies for a world in crisis (health, financial, humanitarian, and care) and moving towards an economy for life, where solidarity and care are at the center:
– It is our understanding that gender violence is an expression of the deep crisis of patriarchy and masculinities, but it is also related to a political world of exclusion.
– The territorialisation of feminist struggles is central to strengthening community ties and grassroots collective construction. In this sense, micropolitical action allows us to articulate all these dimensions in a constructive struggle.
– In the context of a deep ecological crisis, it is urgent to articulate our struggles with the anti-extractivist movements for climate justice.
– It is necessary to strengthen anti-racist struggles (“where there’s racism, there is no democracy”). The struggles for democracy and against religious, economic, and political fascisms are also proposed as common vectors.
– We need to change the model and build, from an ecofeminist perspective, a non-patriarchal system, where we can have sovereignty over our bodies and territories.
– We want to dismantle the narrative of the hegemony of the “new normal” because for women and sexual dissidents, the current macroeconomic system feeds the power of big capital, and the accumulation by dispossession of resources, rights, and freedoms.
– We dispute the neoliberal perspective of market supremacy, which asserts that social investment is an expense, that it is not important and not good for development, and rapid and effective growth. Now more than ever–in the context of a health crisis–programs and public policies for health, education, housing, work, and care, among others, need to be strengthened, such as emergencies for the coming period.
– The right to habitat: the pandemic highlighted the housing crisis and the situation in which women, migrants, and LGBTQ + people were already living on the streets.
– In the ‘life before’ we denounced the matrix of women’s work overload and sexist violence that characterise this system and that today are accentuated. Confinement in homes has meant a reconcentration in these often-precarious spaces of traditional and new presences and tasks. The usual care now overlaps with the virtual transfer from school to home, with ‘teleworking’, among others. This scheme, which will continue with some nuance in the next stage, far from progress, represents a setback in the already limited forms of organisation of care.
– The importance of community care work. It is necessary to recognise and redistribute the care work that sustains life and reproduction.
– Finances and monetary resources must be redistributed based on care, in this sense we recognize the need for a model change.
– Fight for the right of women and pregnant people to decide about their bodies and the right to legal, safe, and free abortion.
Therefore, we propose a series of elements for the creation of an Urgent Agenda to build together as well as the need for a paradigm shift in action, that strategies are thought from the base, the local, from the communities themselves, and generate revolutions situated towards the global. This agenda must include the defense of the rights of women and LGBTI+ people, in articulation with the struggles to protect the land, the environment and food sovereignty. It must be against extractivism and it should join other transformative movements and economies in the world:
– Continue articulating the forces of feminism, from a perspective of transformation, building an internationalist assembly with other movements.
– Another education for our relationships, that feeds on the knowledge of indigenous peoples and peasant experiences, that thinks of other forms based on popular education as a methodological strategy to question power relations based on our stories, desires, and experiences.
– Construction and strengthening of public health and universal protection systems against the commercialisation of health systems.
– Articulate the struggles for the rights of paid household workers and care workers. Claim the inclusion of care work in the calculation of a country’s GDP.
– Repudiation of real-estate speculation on urban and non-urban territories.
– The issue of the debt of States and people, especially women, such as the financialisation of life.
– Development of a solidarity, social, feminist, and ecological economy program.
– Food de-commodification is key in the daily eco-feminist struggle that is committed to the defense of life from a perspective of sovereignty, solidarity interdependence, and sustainability.
– Fight for digital sovereignty.
– Depatriarchalisation of power relations, both in the public space/sphere and within our networks and organisations.
– The need to address the training of women in public settings, given the various political violences that are being seen in each of our local settings.
– Breaking with the productive/reproductive binomial and incorporating and making the reproductive sphere visible in discourses and economic practices.
In addition, from feminisms articulated in an internationalist mode, from the Confluence Assembly we stand in solidarity and denounce:
– We denounce xenophobic and discriminatory policies against migrants, refugees, and their families, which nevertheless contribute to international development and the society where they live. The search for more foreign investment is giving rise to trade agreements that promote globalisation and capital flows, while the mobility of people in the world is criminalised and questioned. States and international organisations (High Commissioner for Human Rights, IOM, UNHCR) have to recognise migration as a human right, with the freedom of transit in territories at the national, regional, and global levels.
– Denounce the militarisation of territories and forced displacement; the systematic repression that extends to indigenous communities and the criminalisation of defenders of territories in resistance to the advance of extractivist models.
– We celebrate the mobilisations of youth in defense of democracy in Peru, Guatemala, Chile, and many others. We stand in solidarity with the Kurdistan Women’s Movement, which is building a women-based economy.
– We denounce the authoritarian escalation in Latin America, the advance of anti-rights and neo-conservative movements, and the threat posed to the world by the fascist, racist, misogynistic, LGBT-phobic, and far-right government of Bolsonaro in Brazil. Its attacks against democracy, rights, the environment, women, the black population, indigenous peoples, and their territories. It is imperative to stop the Bolsonaro-Mourão government, which is promoting the devastation of the Amazon and the intangible heritage of its peoples.
We fight for alternatives to the climate, care, financial, and civilising crisis. We call for common construction together with the rest of the transformative economies movements to:
– Continue meeting, connecting, and activating the processes of confluence, deepening in the construction from the sustainability of life.
– Continue building other world-spaces towards the commemoration of the 20 years of the World Social Forum in January 2021.
– Continue to deepen the analyses and proposals of feminist economies, in a transition that has to be made from the collective, including the ecology of knowledge.
From resistance, to collective creation!
For an Economy for life, and not at the expense of life.
Feminist Confluence of Transformative Economies
Signatory organisations and networks
AMUMRA – Asociación Civil de Derechos Humanos Mujeres Unidas Migrantes y Refugiadas en Argentina.
Área ecofeminismo de Taller Ecologista Rosario, Argentina.
Articulación Feminista Marcosur.
Asociación Vientos del Sur, Argentina
ATTAC Francia.
Centro de Promocion de la Mujer Gregoria APaza, Bolivia.
CISCSA, Córdoba, Argentina.
Colectiva Colibrí, Argentina.
Cooperativa d’habitatge “Cirerers”, Catalunya.
“Eje feminismos y economías solidarias” del Centro de formación y documentación en procesos autogestionarios, Uruguay.
Enda Colombia.
Espacio de Géneros de la Ruess (Red Universitaria de Economía Social y Solidaria), Argentina.
Fundación La Base Fondo de Microcréditos Solidarios (Argentina).
LaCoordi – Comerç Just i Finances Ètiques – Catalunya.
No Tan Distintas, Argentina.
Movimiento Manuela Ramos, Perú.
Pura Praxis Colectiva de teatro de las oprimidas – Red Magdalena Internacional
REAS Red de Redes, estado español.
Rede Ciranda, Brasil.
Red de feministas del sur-global DAWN.
Red Ecofeminista, España.
Red Mujeres del Mundo, Quartiers du Monde, International.
Red Latinoamericana de Mujeres Transformando la Economía (REMTE)
REPEM Colombia.
Ruda Colectiva Feminista, Ecuador.
Rukia Cornelius (individual feminist in South Africa).
SET (Scuola Economia Trasformativa) dell’Università per la Pace delle Marche – Italia.
Sos Corpo – Instituto Feminista pra Democracia – Recife / Brasil.
Union Syndicale Solidaires de Francia.
Valeria Mutuberría Lazarini – Cooperativista – Argentina.
WoMin African Alliance.
Xarxa d’Economia Solidària de Catalunya.
Adhesion and support
Centre, Nigeria.
Isabel María Casimiro, Eduardo Mondlane University, Maputo, Mozambique.
Laura Gomez, Oxfam Colombia.
Shayisfuba feminist collective (South Africa).
South Feminist Futures.
Som del Barri, Associació de desenvolupament local, Serveis al territori i a les persones.
Otro Tiempo, España.
Oxfam South Africa.