Source: World March of Women
The 24 Hours of Feminist Solidarity of the World March of Women Against the Power and Impunity of Transnational Corporations begins today, April 24 2020, in New Caledonia.
On every April 24th we are committed to unite around the world to denounce the actions of transnational corporations that exploit and destroy women’s lives.
24 hours of Feminist Solidarity Against Transnational Corporations
Comrades, sisters around the world!
Feminist and in solidarity greetings in this special and unique time of our lives, marked by distance and isolation between us, and between us and the people we love. If human care and warmth has always been important elements in life, today we have the distance between us as a condition to protect and keep our lives. This makes us ask: how do women, their families and their communities survive this pandemic of coronavirus, so patriarchal, capitalist and racist? How long will we remain conditioned to this reality? Until when will we continue to be conditioned to this reality? And what are the changes that are urgently needed to transform our societies and overcome this system that causes death, disease and war?
In this context of social isolation in many territories we are building the 24 Hours of Feminist Action and Solidarity against the Power and Impunity of Transnational Corporations in the framework of the 5th International Action of the World March of Women. We do not know when or how this situation will end, but we understand that this is a very important moment to broaden our political analysis and strengthen our construction as an international feminist movement, advancing our alternatives to this system.
On April 24th we have a commitment to unite online around the world to denounce the impact of transnational corporations that exploit and destroy women’s lives, having in our memory the thousands of women who have died or been injured in the collapse of the Rana Plaza building in Bangladesh, in 2013. To this day, the victims and their families have had no justice and corporations continue to exploit people and natural resources for more profit and power.
Transnational corporations today accumulate more resources than many countries. They concentrate more and more wealth and power and, as part of their activities, destroy nature, dispossess and expel people from the places where they have always lived. The large economic groups concentrate all the benefits generated from the extraction of raw materials to the production and distribution of goods and services. The power of business continues to be legitimized by the extreme right-wing forces in power that reinforce authoritarianism and violence against people in the territories around the world. The crisis of the coronavirus is demonstrating the impact of social and economic inequalities on people’s lives, and it will intensify in the near future.
On this 24th of April, in our 24 hours of solidarity action, we reaffirm our resistance and confrontation with the transnationals, who are the protagonists of racist and patriarchal capitalism! We reaffirm our struggle for a life without violence, in all its patriarchal, racist and colonialist dimensions, against women! We repudiate the aggression and spoliation of territories, bodies and communities, human trafficking, sexual exploitation and feminicide.
We say no to debt, to frontiers and walls, which attack and condemn large contingents of people, expelling them from their territories and denying them the basic rights to housing, food and to demonstrate, while encouraging all kinds of war. We reject wars, economic sanctions and blockades, militarization and transnational armies, tools of terror, rape and systematic assassination of social fighters.
We march to transform the society! – In the 24 hours of Feminist Solidarity we will make visible the alternatives that we are already building: in the neighborhoods, in the schools, in the fields, in the streets and in the networks… In the construction of the solidarity economy, agro-ecology, food sovereignty, popular communication and the organized movement itself, made up of women who sustain the economy and who, precisely for this reason, need to radically transform it. Our feminist alternatives are a way of presenting, through concrete practices, the possibilities of transformation. Our alternatives serve to change the world and the lives of women in the same movement.
The economy cannot be separated from politics, health and life. – In these moments of crisis, feminist economy offer us guidance: it places the sustainability of life at the center of our practices of resistance and our proposals for transformation. We are facing the coronavirus pandemic and the authoritarianism of many governments, and we have set ourselves the challenge of mobilizing while maintaining the necessary distance for prevention.
We resist to live, we march to transform!
