strategies to organize women against imperialism (Jayawardena 1986; Mohanty 2003). In India during the 1900s, women like Kumari Kumudini Mitra advocated revolutionary terrorism against British colonial occupation (Bhattacharya and Sen 2003). These struggles solidified into anti‐imperialist fights that sought more than the end of colonialism, but the end of global economic expansion on the backs of workers across the world. In Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Asia, anti‐imperialist women organized rural women alongside informal women workers in cities to join the struggle against capitalism (Chakravartty 2011). They fought for reforms such as universal human rights, against Euro‐American, white supremacist assumptions about differential humanness. They sought leadership by rural women for a renewed revolutionary movement that joined women and men around the world at the forefront of anti‐capitalism (Armstrong 2016).
The anticolonial women's movement developed a praxis that linked imperial wars overseas, particularly in Asia and Africa in the early to mid‐twentieth century, directly to the women of imperial countries. Women like Cai Chang, a founding member of the All China Women's Federation in 1948, and Baya Allouchiche of the Algerian Women's Union pushed for a praxis of anti‐imperialist relationality (Wang 2017). In the mid‐twentieth century, the anticolonial praxis against imperialism sought global campaigns of socialist feminists and all other women that supported armed resistance to occupation as well as direct action to stop colonial militarism. Socialist feminists from colonized and newly independent nations as well as the socialist states of the USSR and East Europe sought to use the United Nations to confront women's commitment to peace in the face of colonial occupation and wars of aggression against liberation movements (Antrobus 2004; Jain 2005; Pietila and Vickers 1990).
Gendered Capitalism and the Global Division of Labor
As colonized nations gained political independence, new forms of imperialist control emerged alongside bare aggression. Loan agreements between newly independent countries and former colonizing countries to build infrastructure and national production carried hidden demands set by the G7 nations of the Global North. These loan coda demanded “structural adjustments” of governments that prioritized debt repayment over every other priority: democracy, social programs, and wealth redistribution. National ownership of key industries and protection for emerging national economies disappeared under the weight of loan conditions and loan default demands. Socialist feminist scholars of capitalist development critiqued the ubiquity of “development” to mean capitalist development using neoclassical assumptions of individual choice and the hidden hand of the market (Barker and Feiner 2004). They also emphasized the importance of structures of land privatization from the colonial period onwards to the current gendered division of labor. Beneria and Sen wrote that “the close connection between processes of accumulation and changes in women's work and forms of their subordination” mark the current period of capitalist expansion (Beneria and Sen 1981, p. 288). Methodologically, Marxist feminist scholarship interrogated the unit of the family when measuring the effects of capitalist development projects. As one example, the official poverty line as a measure of need erases the deeply gendered lived effects of scarcity by women, men, girls, and boys in a family (Kabeer 1994).
Marxist feminists in Asia, Latin America, and Mexico detailed the new forms of global production that broke factory labor into its smallest, least skilled parts. This tailorization of work across the world was made possible by communication, technological, and transportation innovations (Ong 1987). These disarticulated methods of production directly pitted women workers against each other from across the globe, since factories could move their operations the instant workers organized in one location (Elson and Pearson 1981). These methods in the labor‐intensive production of commodities from technology to garment industries spread across service labor, such as phone call centers and nannies, and the intellectual labor of computer programming (Bannerji 2001). Scholars of the gendered global chain of production analyzed how gendered ideologies shaped imperialist appropriation of wealth as workers around the world more fiercely competed against each other for the lowest wages and worst working conditions with little protection from the nation‐state (Parrenas 2008). These capitalist relations of gender also, in Cynthia Enloe's terms made women a cheap and docile global workforce through state, legal, and physical coercion (Enloe 2007). Global capitalist processes relied on women for their workforce; particularly women pushed into the stream of migrants moving from rural locations to the cities and towns built for factories.
Gendered ideologies of paid work produced feminized relations of production that structure paid work for all workers (Candelario 2007; Ho 2009; Kang 2010). Feminized relations of production do not refer simply to the increase in paid women workers, but also to the increasing atomization of all workers through migration, home‐based work, and work's precarity (Wright 2006). The distinction between paid and unpaid work becomes increasingly blurred, so that “capital increasingly calls upon the affects, activities, and conditions associated with women's reproductive labor in all forms of work” (Berg 2014, p. 164; Morini 2007). Debt in its material and ethical forms becomes the primary motivation for work (Joseph 2014). Overt coercion and increased brutality define the current phase of capitalism, marking a return to the racialized and gendered techniques of primitive accumulation of forced and unfree labor, genocide, and theft of land, resources, and intellectual property (Dunbar‐Ortiz 2015; Sassen 2014). Endemic femicide marks the overt misogyny of this turn, what Rita Segato calls “a pedagogy of cruelty” (Segato 2014, p. 345).
In the current period, both Marxist feminist and socialist feminist scholarship does not merely condemn late capitalism, but seeks to understand how the increased global relationality of women workers fostered new subjects to demand revolutionary and reformist change (Mies 2014; Wichterich 2000). Neoliberalism rendered the workplace a fragile place to build solidarity and the power of worker collectivities and unions ebbed as a result. New formations of worker solidarity movements based in neighborhoods and non‐governmental organizations that included workers' rights alongside civic activism provided some oxygen for social changes (Beckham Mendez 2005; Ngai 2005). Direct money transfer and microcredit schemes promised to upend the repressive relations of patriarchy through progressive finance practices that targeted women as beneficiaries. However, many socialist feminists who champion state support for marginalized people detailed the structural limitations of atomized and usually privatized solutions such as microcredit schemes that deepened rather than undermined working people's reliance on finance capital (Karim 2011). Similarly, non‐governmental organizing addressed neither repressive governmentality nor economic redistribution while further coopted grassroots women's movements (Beckham Mendez 2005; INCITE! 2007).
Marxist feminists detailed the new politics of imperialism that produced new markets from untapped sources, stripped resources from the earth, and reconfigured social relations to meet its needs. They provide sharp analyses of how, as Marx described this process in capitalism, all that is solid melts into air. The political dead end of many socialist and Marxist feminist critiques of neoliberalism was twofold: women were victims, though certainly not passive ones; and the conditions of feminized, precarious work prevented a consolidated opposition to emerge (Eisenstein 2004; Fraser 2013). Who, then, were the leaders Marxist feminists were waiting for?
Social Reproduction, Imperialism, and Revolutionary Subjects
As neoliberalism solidified its global hegemony in the twenty‐first century, Marxist feminist debates frame revolutionary struggles from women returning to the commons, in revolutionary collective forms of land‐based survival. The Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico and the Landless Workers Movement in Brazil have developed Marxist feminist critiques of global capitalism (Desmarais 2007; Zapatista Women of the Caracol of the Tzotz Choj Zone 2018). They combine older reproductive forms of subsistence farming and home‐based production of basic goods, without patriarchal gender relations. In Argentina, worker‐collectives revived stagnant factories with profit‐sharing and worker‐based ownership of the means of production rather than consolidation of wealth into the hands of a few. As theories of praxis, these examples of solidarity economies address two interconnected sites of struggle. First, they combat imperialism through their refusal to
