The following text emerged through collective discussions between diverse political organizations, in the preparation of the workshop “Women's Democratic Confederalism: Women Weaving the Future” as part of the Peoples’ Platform Europe, held in February 2025 in Vienna.
We, the Network Women Weaving the Future, were among the co-organizers of the Peoples' Platform Europe. Together with different feminist and autonomous women's organizations and collectives, we organized our own workshop during the gathering, in addition to participating in the overall organization of the Peoples' Platform.
Our collectively organized workshop brought together around 130 participants from 55 organizations and collectives. The discussions held deepened the groundwork for our activities across Europe. The following text is a summary of the discussions we held before the gathering in Vienna. It was produced with the input of different groups, and circulated with participants of the Peoples' Platform Europe before the event.
Discussion Paper
The past century has witnessed significant breakthroughs and victories in the fight for women’s liberation. Across Europe and beyond, collective political movements have achieved advances in legal rights, education, work, and representation. Yet, the patriarchal capitalist system remains largely intact. Oppression, injustice, and inequality continue to shape the lives of people in societies rooted in power and hierarchy. The world is still deeply entrenched in patriarchal norms, colonialism, and capitalist exploitation̶and Europe is no exception. Quite the opposite is true.
In response to this reality, we, the organizing group of the workshop Women Weaving the Future, have decided to write and share this text with you. It is an attempt to analyze the dominant patriarchal and capitalist system in Europe today and to underline the urgent need for anti-systemic resistance that dismantles power structures holistically, in defense of life.
Of course, we don’t claim that this text provides a complete analysis of patriarchy in Europe or fully represents the voices, experiences, and struggles of all women, feminists, queer groups, collectives, and organizations across the continent. Instead, it reflects the result of nearly four months of fortnightly (and later more frequent) online discussions among us̶a group of organized women of different ages, from different countries and political experiences in Europe. As active members of struggles, collectives, movements, etc. within Europe, our collective perspectives come from our political organizing work.
Trying to weave all these perspectives into one text has been no small challenge. And yet, while diverse, our group is still largely (though not entirely) composed of women who hold certain privileges̶ for example, in terms of race, class background, or freedom of mobility̶thus reflecting a partial gaze on power and resistance of women in Europe. From the outset, we aimed to invite women from all oppressed groups and less visible struggles in Europe, both to our online discussions and to the workshop in Vienna. We’ve done our best within the limits of our time and resources. Still, it is not enough, and we know that the path toward building truly transversal alliances among women in Europe is a long one.
So, we offer this text as a starting proposal - first step toward building a common ground for analysis. It’s an invitation to begin a dialogue that will go far beyond these words, with the hope of discussing and rewriting it collectively in the future.
The many faces of patriarchy in Europe – a total assault on society and life
Patriarchy is one of the oldest and most deeply established systems of power and violence in collective human history. Its complex origins stretch back thousands of years. It has shaped the lives and the social, political, and economic conditions of peoples around the world. It is intertwined with other systems and structures of power, domination, and hierarchy - entangled with capitalism and the 20 state. As a system, patriarchy manifests itself in different ways in different contexts. It normalizes violence and exploitation, shaping societal mentality through culture, laws, and ideologies. It is woven into the fabric of everyday life: from the family to global state policies.
In Europe, the ideology of liberalism has become rooted in people’s minds and institutions over centuries. We can describe it as a framework that heavily relies on state power. Liberalism is the ideological foundation of the world system of states. Born in the European Enlightenment era, liberalism aligns with capitalist principles as it promotes the accumulation of wealth through private property and market-based competition. Its definition of progress and development is Eurocentric and secularist and has evolved historically with industrialism and colonization. Although liberalism champions speak of free speech, equality, and the rule of law, its capitalist essence preserves social and economic hierarchies, disguising the racial and gendered forms of exploitation at the heart of capitalism. Capitalism, and the liberal world system that it has helped establish, after all, is based on centuries of accumulation through slavery, colonialism, and imperialism. These methods of oppression were first felt also against the bodies, time, and labor of women - particularly of those who did not conform to the dominant system - through feminicide, erasure, and subjugation in all areas of life.
Today, patriarchy has many faces, both in Europe and around the world. On one hand, there is what could be described as “liberal” patriarchy, in which some women and queer people are integrated into the dominant system while the general patriarchal organization of life remains upheld. They are even incorporated into historically masculine institutions like the military, gaining some rights while seemingly f ighting to defend liberal worldviews globally. This shift often leads to blurred lines between left and right under liberal ideology. At times, even right wing politics expand to include minority rights; however, these policies are unstable and can be reversed at any point. Less subtle are the many forms of overt violence and injustice perpetuated by patriarchal power ‒ from domestic abuse and violence against those who refuse to conform, to foreign policies that destroy the lives of women, the colonized, and the poor around the world. Feminicide, rape culture, and everyday sexism express themselves daily in every realm of life, mutilating our sense of self and our relations in society.
In Europe, struggles for women’s rights, equality, and representation undeniably achieved milestones over the last century. At the same time, this did not lead to a dismantling of the patriarchal capitalist system. Instead, we find ourselves stuck and fragmented. Issues such as gender identity, the gender pay gap, and gender-based discrimination are important and meaningful sites of struggle. However, the focus on symptoms can sometimes take over in struggles, at the cost of developing more radical perspectives to abolish systems of oppression at the root. While specific issues are undoubtedly important, they are often treated in isolation, without being integrated into a more holistic analysis and approach. The existence of legal protections is not enough to address deep-rooted systemic issues.
Moreover, in the context of Europe, a center of capitalist modernity, women’s struggles cannot be confined to the issues and causes that affect women within the borders of Europe considering the historic and present role of European colonialism and imperialism in making the current world system, including the role of patriarchy within it. Numerous women’s liberation struggles have inspired the world and shaped international solidarity in Europe. Still, mainstream feminist spaces continue to be exclusionary towards racialized and poorer communities, especially Black and migrant women, despite the interrelation between sexism, racism, and class. Eurocentricism and colonial mentalities prevail in analysis and practice, even among radical and revolutionary groups, despite the ease of communication and access to information in today’s world. As such, internationalism must be a key component of women’s struggles located in Europe. Patriarchy also manifests itself in left organizations and movements. Women’s experiences of violence, harassment, and discrimination are often silenced and not believed. This further reveals the need for autonomous organizing as an organizational principle and strategy for building consciousness and overcoming patriarchal mindsets.
These and other issues highlight the need for a more comprehensive, critical approach to patriarchy and the capitalist system. It is important to insist on revolutionary and autonomous perspectives to transcend fragmented and reactive struggles and address broader structures of power and oppression.
Fascism and the new faces of the right
Across Europe, the rise of fascism and right-wing government policies and movements impact women immensely. Renewed and more and more aggressive waves of nationalism, especially in the aftermath of the so-called "refugee crisis," reveal the new faces of the right in Europe. In practice, the right is increasingly becoming the central position, and it is imposing itself as the main agenda-setter that others are forced to react to.
It is not surprising that women are increasingly among the faces of the new right, with people like Alice Weidel or Giorgia Meloni being prominent figures in legitimizing patriarchal values and norms. In a way, women are rewarded for preaching patriarchal values. The privileges they gain from functioning within the dominant system and embodying a form of extreme individualism often lead them to abandon other women and actively undermine the broader struggles for women’s liberation. This can be seen as an ongoing process of conservative and right-wing forces to co-opt women and women-related causes in their political and cultural agendas. The discourses espoused by the right furthermore serve to advance a regression in women’s rights and autonomy over their body, for example the right to abortion. They impose essentialist definitions onto people and their bodies and identities, with particular hostility against queer, trans, and gender non-conforming people.
Further, the right frame demographic changes due to migration as a biological threat to white European existence, positioning women's bodies as central to this ideological battle. An example of this is the right’s discourse around violence against women, which often ends up blaming migrant communities or perceived “cultural” threats resulting from a move away from tradition. This way, they can, on one side, pretend to care about women's issues while on the other side, continuе their fight for the white, Christian, heteronormative family ideal.
As an extension of the same politic, there are calls from liberal, conservative, and right-wing sides to increase policing, surveillance, security, and scrutiny around racialized and migrant people due to threats they allegedly pose. In reality, these policies reproduce racism and Islamophobia. Meanwhile, they also grow the profits of the military and security sector: many companies involved in developing cutting-edge military technology (including also constructing the detention infrastructure that sustains the European border regime. These, in turn, are sites in which migrant and refugee women, often accompanied by children, experience terrible conditions in the aftermath and during ongoing traumas of displacement.
We also live in a world in which mass communication dominates and shapes our perception of reality. We experience an overflow of information in a time in which more and more people in society are addicted to their smartphones. The monopoly of big tech companies, including social media platforms (e.g. Facebook, X, Instagram, TikTok, etc.), means that we live in a world in which algorithms direct our knowledge and consciousness. These algorithms create echo chambers that repeatedly present only one side of reality to any given individual, which generates disconnection and polarization - we can deeply experience that in social life, in the fragmentation and polarization within and between our societies, peoples, and struggles.
Inner-migrant dynamics
When speaking about racialized forms of violence and injustice in the context of Europe and how they affect women, we must consider inner-migrant power dynamics. Gendered forms of racism within migrant communities result from intersecting racism and sexism, where internal hierarchies based on race, ethnicity, and religion further marginalize specific groups of women (e.g. lighter-skinned or non-Muslim migrants experience different treatment compared to Black, darker-skinned or Muslim women; Kurdish women in Turkish-dominated communities or women from minoritized faith communities like Êzidîs or Alevis face added discrimination from others from the same region; women migrating from Eastern or Southern Europe to western metropoles or women with precarious legal statuses are particularly vulnerable to exploitation, etc.). Black women continue to experience extreme forms of racism, discrimination and exploitation both from white European and migrant communities.
State policies, such as headscarf bans or increased surveillance, exacerbate these divisions. The state enforces broad stereotypes of certain groups as “dangerous”, which deepens racial and gender hierarchies. Such increased policing and oversight disproportionately affect marginalized women, limiting their autonomy within both their surveillance drones, AI-powered weapons, etc.) are communities and society at large. This state paternalism, including liberal approaches, relies on control and surveillance rather than addressing the root causes of discrimination. At the same time, these struggles and dynamics within and between migrant/diaspora communities could also create fruitful ground for the re-creation of different international identities, including those based on internationalism. Creating divisions between women is a key tactic of antidemocratic politics: if we are alone, we can more easily be assimilated, instrumentalized, attacked. Our strength is precisely in the social character of our identities and ties, and in building unity in diversity.
Youth: relationship to identity, culture and land
Identity and culture are an enormous ideological battlefield today. Young people, their bodies and lives, are often at the center of this. Rising militarism within societies, the online popularity of toxic, misogynistic figures espousing a form of dominant masculinity, and imposition of traditional gender roles impacts the self-perception of young men and their relationships to themselves and to others. Meanwhile, especially in the past few decades, youth, have increasingly been migrating from rural areas to urban centers, which creates further wedges between society and land and further removes people from subsistence economies. Youth, especially from non-EU countries , migrate or aspire to migrate to Western Europe, trading in the community life with friends and family at home for the prospect of better living conditions, which usually translates to hard labor, social isolation, and exclusion. This is another example of the extraction of manual and intellectual labor from the periphery to the center of power in Europe.
For many young women in Europe living in smaller urban and rural areas, patriarchy is a daily reality that they have to accept as normal and live by. The idea that patriarchy in Europe manifests mostly beneath the surfaces is removed from reality - patriarchy is alive and dictates the living conditions of women very explicitly all over the continent. Meanwhile, those with the privileges to adopt more cosmpolitan lifestyles and views of themselves, seemingly free from the 'burden' of roots, can sometimes have illusions about the ways in which they are affected by patriarchal structures, due to the supposed freedom they perceive to enjoy.
Due to one's 20s and 30s being the common age to have children and form one’s own traditional family unit, this phase is often full of major life decisions, and with that, contradictions. However, latest when entering domains of work or relationships, families, state bureaucracies, etc. do women quickly realize the extent to which the system is still based on the discrimination and exploitation of women especially through free or cheap care work, on the patriarchal division of labor, and on the willingness of women to carry the maintenance of society. Young migrant women furthermore face assimilation, as they are confronted with multiple, sometimes contradicting sets of societal expectations. Confronted with all sorts of pressures and socio-economic uncertainty, even active women become depoliticized or take less radical life decisions in their 30s.
The patriarchal capitalist system in our lives – and the non-solutions it offers
Patriarchal violence, including feminicide, continues to be a major factor affecting our lives and power relations in society. As a form of social control and domination, violence is used to keep women in their place - whether at home, in our movements, or in the broader society. While the state claims to be the main institution to protect women from violence, it often appropriates the struggle against violence, and neither can it tackle the root causes nor does it offer sustainable solutions. Its punitive responses, instead bring about the opposite: prisons, surveillance, racial profiling, and borders, they all aim to enforce their order and suppress our voices, existences, lives, and politics.
As individuals and organizations that are part of society, we see the mirrors of this existing patriarchal violence. From male dominance, division, and competition among women, the exploitation of trust to betrayal and abuse. The patriarchal system is so deeply ingrained in us that all of us can be deceived sometimes and need to learn how to face mistreatment the hard way. Unfortunately, we still struggle to find the right ways of dealing with the aftermath of violence. Too often we aim for justice and transformative processes but fail in the face of reality and the lack of supportive systems. Within feminist circles, there are more and more voices demanding policing, stricter sentences, and longer prison time to respond to and prevent violence against women. More police and stricter courts mainly enforce hegemonic power as racism and Islamophobia and deepen the structural oppressive system that these institutions are based on. They cannot be expected to bring about the necessary fundamental cultural and ideological shifts to overcome the deeply-rooted mentalities behind violent patriarchy. They cannot eradicate feminicide and rape culture.
Gender and class are inseparably interwoven. Economic exploitation and patriarchal structures reveal themselves, especially in domestic and care work. Confined largely to the realm of reproductive labor - work that is often unpaid - women have become a foundational yet invisible force in sustaining capitalist economies. The capitalist market and system rely on this unpaid labor, exploiting women’s roles within households and communities, in cities and rural areas. In addition to unpaid reproductive labor, women ‒ especially migrant women - are incorporated into the workforce as cheap labor, particularly in sectors like caregiving and low-wage industries. This undervalued work that we give our time, heart and effort to is what keeps the capitalist economy running. Women also face the double burden of work - doing both paid labor and the unpaid care work that families rely on. Many of us work part-time or in jobs with no security. This reality also means that many of us have no or only limited time, resources, and capacity to participate in organizing - yet we are fighting for a better life in many ways that are often invisibilized. This leads us to the question of connecting organized and informal struggles. How can women’s organized struggles and organizations more genuinely and seriously center the informal struggles woven into our daily lives?
At the same time, not all of us experience these struggles in the same way. Class and race divisions result in different realities and conditions for poor and racialized women. Some women are more privileged and can climb the ‘social ladder’, nevertheless are often expected to do unpaid care work. The exploitation of migrant women is a clear example of how patriarchal capitalism thrives on racial and class inequalities. We could see this challenge while mobilizing for this very platform: many of those who could not afford to come were migrant or racialized women - whilst we aim to bring people together, we face limits of material capacity and can’t meet all needs despite our support efforts. Class dynamics also deepen social and economic divides, producing feelings of shame in us, especially among working-class people, migrants, and the poor. Naturally, material conditions impact people’s consciousness. Due to material struggles, the very people who would benefit the most from fights for change are often too busy or exhausted to do so. This creates a vicious cycle of disempowerment.
What would it mean to overcome the patriarchal capitalist system? This question is inseparable from the role of women in society. While the socialization of women as a collectively oppressed group has been constructed over time through power, domination, and hierarchy, it is also rooted in a long history of women as caretakers and nurturers as well as social and economic leaders in families and communities, as well as many other diverse and subversive realities beyond tradition. But women’s multiple roles in making society have been severely attacked over centuries of patriarchal subjugation by violence, societal disempowerment, confinement into the private sphere, and the exploitation of women’s labor. On this base, the division of wealth along capitalist profit interests, violence, and the commodification of life are deeply interconnected. Our perspectives must be able to simultaneously analyze women’s (diverse, changing, and dynamic) roles in society and the organization of work and care. We need to find ways in which our societies can organize to overcome these contradictions.
In a world fragmented by patriarchy and capitalism - systems that isolate and atomize individuals - it is the communal spirit that must be revived. Women can actively lead this revival and rebuild communal society. They can be at the forefront of pushing back the family-state pressure on women to take the double burden of working for the market and family. If societies were built to value care and community over profit, women would not have to be forced to work both in the nuclear family and the capitalist market in exploitative ways. Women need to claim their active and diverse spaces in a self-empowered society that manages to control its resources and distributes them according to the needs of the communities. For that, we must transform the oppressive and coercive conditions that have historically shaped women’s role in society and reformulate the terms and means of sustaining the life and well-being of people and living creatures.
Capitalist modernity’s answers to the question “How to live?”
We see, feel, and experience how under capitalist modernity, the idea of a good life is commodified and brought together with deep patriarchal beliefs. Some of the most important aspects of life̶health, education, friendship, family, connection, and community - are targeted and repurposed. Neoliberal policies further shrink the spaces for our peoples to regenerate and flourish outside capitalist and patriarchal relations. There is an absence of autonomous and radical spaces that could offer space for meaning, care, community, imagination, and alternative building.
The world of health, for example, is dominated by consumerism. Women’s bodies and well-being are specifically targeted within this. Generally, there is a powerful push within mainstream culture, especially through social media, to focus on individual well being and empowerment. This emphasis on "choice" feminism, often distracts from the need for collective struggle. Instead of encouraging women to come together and organize from within society, we see that the focus lies on personal empowerment, individualistic self-care, and personal boundary setting. This promotes a view of feminism that centers on individual success and choices rather than collective responsibility and care in order to challenge and transform societal power structures. More and more people are becoming aware of mental health issues for example. But mainstream discussions often overlook the broader socio economic factors, the decay of social relations, and spiritual meanings that contribute to making people “sick” in a capitalist world. People become more knowledgeable about symptoms but lose sight of the root causes. Especially the beauty industry is feeding into this culture which heavily targets the younger women among us and turns the natural process of aging into something to be avoided at all costs. In the name of choice feminism, we are confronted with unrealistic standards, which create insecurities and competition among us women. In some ways, this is a reversal of old feminist struggles to fight the ideological and physical colonization of women’s bodies. The truth is, yes, we need to heal our bodies, minds, souls, and our communities - but those answers will not allow that. We need to find our own, self-determined ways to heal as part of struggle, community, and life!
Struggling within or against the system? Defending our struggles
Today, women’s struggles for liberation are more visible and connected than ever before. Beyond borders, women organize themselves at the local, regional, and global levels to tangibly change their own lives and conditions, and with that, the lives of many others. At the same time, they are being integrated and assimilated into capitalist modernity's institutions, which co-opt, pacify, and depoliticize their demands. Feminist ideals, developed over long periods of time in collective struggles, are made to align with consumer culture and state interests. In this way, women’s struggles are recognized but in ways that maintain the status quo. It is important to resist the assimilation of women’s struggles, by insisting on the transformative potential of radical anti-system politics and principles. Understanding the dynamics that have emerged in the 21st century is crucial to defend our movements.
Fragmentation
Borders do not only divide the relations between people and land. They also fragment our struggles by limiting the scope of our activism and political causes. They force communities to mainly address the system/problems/issues within one nation-state at a time. Given the interconnectedness of such systems of power in our lives, it is important to advance transnational and internationalist perspectives, share struggles, and develop analysis across borders. This is especially the case concerning migrant and racialized women, who are among the most exploited both within and outside the EU. Caught up in daily news cycles and concerned with immediate environments, we often react incoherently to events without taking the time to analyze deeper, structural forces like class exploitation, colonialism, and imperialism beyond our immediate contexts. We need to analyze the deep structures that lie behind politics and events and their continuities while staying grounded in local struggles.
Beyond physical borders, social justice struggles, including feminist groups, are often fragmented due to an overemphasis on ideological or cultural differences. In recent years, this has resulted in divisions that led to multiple demonstrations taking place on the same day (for example November 25th 25 or March 8th). There are major differences when it comes to organizational principles like women’s autonomy. Moreover, ideological disagreements on important topics like transgender liberation and sex work, have become occasions for feminist groups to publicly attack and completely turn away from each other in deeply divisive ways instead of seeking direct dialogue and mutual transformation.
Another factor driving fragmentation is the confinement of feminist (and other progressive) debates to bourgeois/elite circles. For example, the academic liberal way of debating social problems is extremely inaccessible and offers no concrete solutions. There is a massive gap between academic discourse and lived experiences. This inevitably leads to a divorce between theory and practice. Too often, theoretical feminist discussions and studies leave out the thoughts and lives of those directly impacted by oppression. The appropriation and emptying of concepts and frameworks that historically emerged from political struggles turn subversive ideas and theories into material for abstract discourse detached from society and disconnected from real-world issues.
Assimilation and co-optation
In recent years, terms like “feminism,” “women’s and LGBTQI+ rights,” and “queer liberation” gained visibility. This visibility is an outcome of a long history of social struggle against systems of oppression, led by marginalized groups. However, shifts in mainstream discourse are also state interventions that seek to pacify movements demanding radical change. From a revolutionary perspective, we need to critically and self-critically examine these developments.
Today, states in Europe, especially those promoting themselves as global upholders of liberal democracy, and champions of equality and human rights, cannot ignore social inequalities. However, rather than being a genuine goal, equality is often only talked about and represented at the aesthetic level by institutions of power. The very idea of equality is being distorted in this way. Despite progress on some fronts in the realm of rights, the actual material conditions of the masses of people have not immensely changed. People’s situation even worsens in many ways. There is a clear difference between representation and bureaucratic equality vs. meaningful material transformation and justice.
Women’s liberation is absorbed into the dominant capitalist and patriarchal system in part through terms like “representation” and “inclusion”. This essentially liberal notion of change is based on individual empowerment within an oppressive system. In this way, institutions can “look” as though they have changed due to the new faces they display on the outside, without having to change their operation, function, structure, etc. For example, minor adjustments to recruitment policies might be presented as concrete change, but these are often superficial and symbolic rather than transformative. Letting a few individuals from historically oppressed groups enter positions of power does not alter the conditions faced by the vast majority of oppressed people.
Not only is representation insufficient to address the root causes of injustice; but it is also part of a larger, dangerous trend: through purple or pink-washing, progressive agendas can be put in the service of statist, patriarchal, and even fascist agendas. The boldest example of this is the propaganda around the diversification of militaries and violent border security institutions like Frontex (in part based on the UN’s Women, Peace, and Security framework). Europe is furthermore at the forefront of promoting the concept of “feminist foreign policy”, which often masks the underlying patriarchal and capitalist forces that drive global war and militarism. Liberal feminist perspectives on war and conflict generally tend to focus on gender inequality, overlooking the role of imperialism, capitalism, and class exploitation in the war industry. In any case, even if they appear to promote diversity, institutions of power continue to perpetuate violence and oppression around the world ‒ and, of course, women are among those most affected by war. European women are thus made complicit in global oppression and domination.
Dependency
Our social movements frequently become pacified or controlled through various methods of state and corporate power. This includes repression measures like criminalization, surveillance, and police violence, but also softer factors such as co-optation into liberal or reformist mentalities or forms through NGO-ization and dependency on funding.
The mainstream “change” economy that emerged over the past decades, which revolves around states, political parties, or billionaire-funded NGOs, created a system of dependency in the social justice world. While external funding can tactically help and empower local groups at times, this comes at the cost of being tied to external agendas, which often necessarily influence the politics put forward. Causes like gender equality and women’s economic empowerment are among the most prominent causes in the NGO sector, a world shaped by bureaucracy, corporate money, and government lobbying, which is separated from real people and their communities. NGOs are also neo-colonial soft power tools of European states in the Global South, where they create dependencies among the most oppressed in the name of women’s empowerment, thereby sidelining revolutionary political movements struggling for decolonization and sovereignty.
Material realities and organizational problems are linked. As people are forced to operate in the capitalist economy, it becomes difficult to build long term organizations inside society. Socio-economic issues prevent many from political organizing to begin with. Already active people, too, often struggle as they face economic problems in their personal lives. Women disproportionately do care work and additionally face traditional expectations.
Moreover, how resources are distributed among individuals and institutions shapes the dominant discourse on the reality of social problems and solutions. The voices of those most affected by inequality are often silenced. Some circles or classes have more access to resources than others and those who want to gain access are expected to ideologically and politically assimilate. This generates one-sided perspectives. It can appear as though a majority holds a certain opinion when in reality the most vulnerable people cannot fully engage or bring in their perspectives or are denied participation in the discussion.
Erasure
Struggles and movements are also pacified and marginalized through the systematic erasure of radical social struggle histories and collective political memory. Paternalistic state policies, liberal discourses, and capitalist ideas of empowerment and progress distort the history of society and social struggles. Struggling forces are limited in archiving their own histories and achievements, due to repression and organizational problems. In the age of social media, which promotes the “influencer” model of politics especially among youth, trajectories of political progress are further confused. Individual profiles and mainstream political groups are in the public spotlight as those who bring change, while organized struggles are stigmatized or invisibilized due to direct criminalization or indirect marginalization.
Collective political memories and legacies of decades - in fact, centuries and millennia - of women’s struggles in Europe, including migrant women’s struggles, exist everywhere around us, despite attempts to eradicate them from our hearts and minds. It is not just patriarchal history-writing that invisibilizes. The work of previous generations has been undermined or destroyed in Europe in the context of hostility to communism/socialism in the Cold War era. As a result, in some ways, the demands and claims of feminist theory and practice have even gone backward. Today, too, the attention and platform given to liberal feminists in mainstream public and governance spaces stands in contrast to the repression faced by radical, anti-systemic movements.
This erasure creates a perception that working within the dominant system is the only path to victory. It leads to the surrender to mainstream agendas due to a lack of belief in one’s own autonomous strength. It is therefore important to emphasize any progress made is not due to the benevolence of liberalism or state interventions but an outcome of grassroots struggles and the radical and autonomous answers that people collectively developed.
When it seems like an impossible task to self organize and change society in radical ways, people and movements turn to the state for solutions. This appears like an efficient compromise sometimes, but, ultimately, our ability to fight is appropriated or destroyed this way. Entering institutions to try and change them from within ultimately incorporates our efforts into the capitalist system. Radical politics must be able to adapt and be creative in the face of conservative or right-wing politics, but without losing principle and aim.
As movements that seek to build autonomy and demand revolutionary transformations in all spheres of life, we must remain radical and refuse to soften 27 our tone in hopes of attracting more people from the political right (as liberal parties do right now). Feminist groups and institutions need to keep a radical perspective on struggle and actively reflect that in their politics but without losing touch with society. We cannot rely on the state for the change we imagine and deserve̶true progress will come from below, from the people who continue to fight and defend life through autonomy, self-organization, and revolutionary struggle.
Opportunities amid Chaos
Despite attacks from multiple directions, there are many reasons to seize the current moment in history and insist on radical alternatives. While we must remain vigilant and concerned about assaults and dangers, there are ongoing developments that offer themselves as opportunities in the present.
Geopolitical events in recent years revealed and exposed the true faces behind the liberal masks of European states. As militarist and imperialist policies proliferate, as seen in European governments’ stance in the context of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, sections of society are becoming increasingly more alienated from the European liberal democratic promise. Despite attempts to portray their policies as legitimate and popular, European states face much dissent and rejection inside society. People are unhappy with the economy, are unwilling to become cannon fodder in future wars, and are extremely distrustful of politicians and governments. Across the ideological spectrum, there is a sentiment that Europe is becoming increasingly more authoritarian, that freedom of expression is being restricted, and that society’s will is being usurped for larger interests.
Meanwhile, there have been several grassroots mobilizations in European society in recent years. Across Europe, as in other parts of the world, there has been an outpouring of protest and resistance in the streets, workplaces, and schools. Youth and student movements, anti-war direct-action groups, environmental struggles, and workers’ and women’s strikes have emerged and grown. Although many of these remain short-lived and fragmented, they also led to the increased visibility of women’s resistance, since women actively participate in all social movements, and increasingly, with feminist perspectives. These developments lead to the emergence of new solidarities and transnational and internationalist alliances on different issues. Additionally, technological tools like social media open opportunities for political education, exchange of ideological perspectives, and mobilization across borders.
With the erosion of ‘beneficial’ state functions (cuts to social services, benefits, healthcare, education, arts, and culture, etc.), including the crumbling of the welfare state in different countries, chances emerge to develop alternative solutions based on self-organization inside society. From the failure of political party politics to the loss of legitimacy of international institutions, the crisis in mainstream politics is a chance to push the idea that politics cannot be monopolized by statist institutions. Rather, politics is everywhere. Although right-wing forces have resources and often count on the state and its oppressive mechanisms, they are not very stable, due to internal corruption and incoherence. It is important for left forces to come out of defense mode, expose contradictions within the right, and launch counterattacks. With organization and commitment, we must be the people who turn the tide. Women can and do play active roles in embodying and organizing these alternatives, as their struggles weave all spheres of life together.
In a time of rising fascism, self-organization is our greatest self-defense ‒ from the homes to the streets, from refugee to student camps. To that end, we need strong collective ideological perspectives to resist assimilation into capitalist modernity and base our organization inside society, without financial or political dependency on the systems of oppression. As women located in Europe, we must fight the wars and oppression of the states that act in our name around the world. Against the imperialist feminisms that Europe exports to further its interests and to profit from war and exploitation globally, we can revive ancient and current societal cultures of rebellion and resistance, and build new alliances from below by acknowledging our different conditions and experiences without letting these become tools to divide us from our strategic battles.
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