Nancy Fraser

And for good reason: Clinton personified the deepening disconnect between elite women’s ascension to high office and improvements in the lives of the vast majority.

Breaking through the isolation of domestic and symbolic walls, the strikes demonstrate the enormous political potential of women’s power: the power of those whose paid and unpaid work sustains the world.

All told, women’s strike feminism anticipates the possibility of a new, unprecedented phase of class struggle: feminist, internationalist, environmentalist, and anti-racist.

Although it condemns “discrimination” and advocates “freedom of choice,” liberal feminism steadfastly refuses to address the socioeconomic constraints that make freedom and empowerment impossible for the large majority of women. Its real aim is not equality, but meritocracy. Rather than seeking to abolish social hierarchy, it aims to “diversify” it, “empowering” “talented” women to rise to the top.

Fully compatible with ballooning inequality, liberal feminism outsources oppression. It permits professional-managerial women to lean in precisely by enabling them to lean on the poorly paid migrant women to whom they subcontract their caregiving and housework.

In fact, the criminal justice system disproportionately targets poor and working-class men of color, including migrants, while leaving their white-collar professional counterparts free to rape and batter; it also leaves women to pick up the pieces: traveling long distances to visit incarcerated sons and husbands, providing for their households alone, and dealing with the legal and bureaucratic fallout of imprisonment. Likewise, anti-trafficking campaigns and laws against “sexual slavery” are frequently used to deport migrant women while their rapists and profiteers remain at large. At the same time, the carceral response overlooks the importance of exit options for survivors. Laws criminalizing marital rape or workplace assault won’t help women with nowhere else to go, nor those with no way to get there. Under such conditions, no feminist with even a shred of sensitivity to class and race can endorse a carceral response to gender violence.

What must be reinvented, then, is the relation of production to reproduction, of private to public power, of human society to nonhuman nature. If this sounds like a tall order, it’s our best hope. Only by thinking big can we give ourselves a fighting chance to vanquish cannibal capitalism’s relentless drive to eat us whole.

And in this new world, where money is a primary medium of power, the fact of its being unpaid or underpaid seals the matter: those who do this work are structurally subordinate to those who earn cash wages in “production,” even as their “reproductive” work also supplies necessary preconditions for wage labor.

Truth be told, it’s a rare type of crisis, in which multiple bouts of gluttony have converged. What we face, thanks to decades of financialization, is not “only” a crisis of rampaging inequality and low-waged precarious work; nor “merely” one of care or social reproduction; nor “just” a crisis of migration and racialized violence. Neither is it “simply” an ecological crisis in which a heating planet disgorges lethal plagues, nor “only” a political crisis featuring hollowed-out infrastructure, ramped-up militarism, and a proliferation of strongmen. Oh no, it’s something worse: a general crisis of the entire societal order in which all those calamities converge, exacerbating one another and threatening to swallow us whole.