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The domestic sphere, rural and community-based labour, the work of indigenous peoples, and precarious, working-class, migrant, and street labour have typically been excluded from the concept of what ‘work’ is. As such, they have also been excluded from trade unionism – subordinated and rendered invisible by an understanding of work as white, male, waged labour. We seek to challenge and interrogate this concept and organise around the feminist question, ‘what are you on strike from?’ In doing so we break the lines drawn between the labours of production and reproduction and envisage new relationships between trade unionism and the community.

In recent years, the transnational feminist movement has taken up the struggle against debt. Our message has been shouted out and scrawled on walls: ‘We shall be alive, liberated, and debt-free!’ ‘Women against debt!’ ‘They owe us a life!’ ‘We don’t owe; we won’t pay!’ We aim to map and document the struggles against financial extractivism across different territories and identify connections between them – from gentrification in the peripheries of Buenos Aires, to the fight against evictions in Madrid, via the plundering of public services, and public and private indebtedness.

We have lived through over a decade of fighting for emancipation and mobilising – in international feminist waves, trans-transversal self-determination, indigenous uprisings and popular uprisings, movements seeking to overthrow authorities such as the long Arab Spring, the occupation of public squares in protest, Black Lives Matter, and more. Now we are experiencing a time of counter-revolution characterised by military rearmament, rampant extractivism, and the restoration of patriarchy. Ever more parts of the planet are being turned into sacrifice zones, laboratories for securitised governance and necropolitics, with ever more populations treated as disposable. This logic of permanent warfare compels us to thrash about in the dark, deafened by the thunder of real and metaphorical bombs. But it is precisely at times like this that we must find spaces for reflection and analysis. We aim to map – at a transnational level – the manifestations of this counter-offensive. We develop conceptual frameworks and analyses of the alliance between neoliberalism and supremacist and patriarchal forces. Through doing so, we seek to find a way out of this horror and affirm the power of life as well as our capacity to create and sustain other worlds.

Ni una menos – not one [woman] less – was the cry that shook our communities over a decade ago, sparking a new wave of feminism on a global scale. The politicisation of patriarchal violence against women and gender-nonconforming people has gone hand in hand with a rise in awareness of how this form of violence intersects with others rooted in economic and colonial structures. We are committed to a form of transformative justice that neither reinforces the state’s punitive logic nor fuels the already colossal prison industry. This justice should be grounded in a commitment to listening to those with first-hand experience of the lethal effects of the criminalisation of poverty. We seek to explore forms of redress and support which work together to dismantle the patriarchal and racist matrix of domination and break the cycle of violence.

In feminist and grassroots struggles, care work and the day-to-day sustenance of life have been at the forefront – not only as a means of survival in times of crisis, but also as a practice of connection and alliance, a source of resistance against extractivist dynamics, and as a logic that stands in opposition to that of the accumulation of profit. There comes a moment in which exploitation – and the struggle against it – is revealed not to be contained solely to the realm of waged labour but also, and above all, in social reproduction (society itself) as well as in natural and human ecosystems. In this moment of realisation, the scope of the struggle widens to encompass previously invisible spheres.

Within a system that expels, indebts and dispossesses, migration is both a physical and symbolic area in which placing life at the centre is increasingly imperative. Migrants, racialised people, and trans people, as integral parts of global care networks, bear the weight of entire economies on their shoulders. Survival strategies are being constantly constructed amid precarisation and structural violence. Capitalism – which displaces entire communities from their territories and erects internal borders that categorise us – surveils whilst simultaneously criminalising and dehumanising those who migrate.

At La Laboratoria, we confront this system by politicising borders: we highlight them, disobey them and turn them into opportunities for new horizons.

In what ways can we bring together feminist thinking and practices to address the global challenges posed by war, global supply chains, borderisation, climate change and the resurgence of patriarchy? What kind of situated alliances do we need to achieve this? We see internationalism as a pragmatic approach to answering these questions. It deepens our feminist interpretation of the current landscape from a local and translocal standpoint. It produces dynamic analyses, shares analytical frameworks, stimulates conversations and promotes the exchange of knowledge and practices from the grassroots up. This creates a virtuous cycle that strengthens the networks of cooperation between feminist individuals and collectives who have a global outlook combined with a deeply rooted connection to their local areas.

If patriarchy is a system of ownership and hierarchy, then childhood is one of its most coveted territories. In the face of the current patriarchal resurgence, which appropriates the word ‘family’ and presents itself as the protector of children while upholding the very order that harms them, it is crucial for feminists to contest this domain and not surrender motherhood to the enemy. We are concerned with motherhoods in plural, not as a destiny or moral pedestal, but as a collective force in conflict with power. Examples include the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, the ‘searching mothers’ – women activists searching for their missing loved ones, mothers on the periphery struggling with precarity, mothers facing institutional racism and the ‘protective mothers’ – women struggling to save and shield their children from paternal sexual abuse. These experiences transform care into an act of resistance, politicise the defence of life and compel us to consider which children get protected and which ones are left to fend for themselves. They also prompt us to reflect on what forms of justice, listening, and redress that we need to build.