Frigga Haug (right) [Institute of Critical Theory, Berlin] in discussion with Catherine Hoskins [Coventry University, UK]Since the 1970s, a sizeable fraction of the feminist movement has striven to bring together in one coherent body of thought the Marxist critique of capitalist exploitation and our home-grown feminist critique of male power. 'Socialist feminism'. Propelling this analysis into activism, has seen ups and downs in the ensuing forty years, a wavy graph line that parallels the fluctuating fortunes of trade unionism, left parties and anti-capitalist movements.
An international three-day conference on Marxist-Feminism took place in Berlin last weekend, designed to boost the upward slant of that hesitant graph line. Enabled by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, which hosted the event in its spacious premises in formerly Communist east Berlin, the event drew together contributors from across Europe but also from far afield - India, Australia, Turkey, Latin America, the USA, Canada and elsewhere. The invited speakers, many of whom knew each other as hardy survivors from an earlier phase of the women's movement, were astonished to find themselves now in a crowd of five hundred participants, mainly young and mainly resident in Germany, seemingly attracted by a potential renewal of left feminism. What's more, as the conference progressed, many of this audience joined energetically in the debate and seemed hungry for a productive outcome, for ideas that could energize and guide a movement of deep social change.
Ece Kocabicak, a researcher at Lancaster University, UK, who spoke on 'patriarchal appropriation' in Turkey todayThe conference saw the launch of two new books. One was Der im Gehen erkundete Weg: Marxismus-Feminismus (Making the Road as We Walk It: Marxism-Feminism) by Frigga Haug, who has also devoted many years to editing a multi-volume dictionary of Marxist-Feminist concepts, the Historisch-Kritisches Wörterbuch des Feminismus, similarly published by the Institute for Critical Theory, Berlin. The second publication launched at the conference was a collection of essays on Marxist 'key words' as reworked and used today by feminists. Titled simply Marxism and Feminism and published by Zed Books, London, it was edited by Shahrzad Mojab of the University of Toronto, Frigga Haug's principal partner in conceptualizing the conference.
