Giorgio Agamben hat in seiner jüngsten Intervention die Maßnahmen gegen die Covid-19-Pandemie als Ausübung einer Biopolitik des “Ausnahmezustands” charakterisiert. Er hat damit eine wichtige Debatte darüber angestoßen, wie wir heute Biopolitik begreifen.
Alex, you are actively involved with the platform »Keine Mehr« (Not One Less), whose aim is to bring the femicide debate to Germany. Why are you using the term femicide instead of talking about individual murders of women?
Femicide, or feminicide, is the killing of women and girls because of their gender. Every femicide involves the killing of a woman, but not every killing of a woman is a femicide. So it is not simply about differentiating between female and male victims.
Instead, the term is intended to make certain murders of women visible as a form of hate crime and to draw attention to the social context. On the one hand, this means understanding femicide as an extreme expression of unequal gender relations and a male desire to dominate. Numerous studies and reports have shown that the risk for women to be exposed to violence rises particularly when traditional gender arrangements are shifting – especially during and after a separation or divorce.
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A year before #MeToo erupted in the United States, women in Argentina were fighting against an epidemic of violence against women in which, on average, one woman was killed every thirty hours. At noon on October 19, 2016, thousands of women all over the country walked out of their jobs and stopped doing unpaid housework, as well as carrying out the emotional work required of political organizing. The strike was Argentinian women’s response to the growing number of femicides in the country, and specifically to the brutal murder of the young Lucía Pérez. But in their call to strike, they connected the many forms of violence that women experience in an economic system based on their oppression and exploitation:
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Recent years have seen a global wave of feminist protests. In the US, the Women’s Marches brought hundreds of thousands to the streets, while #MeToo raised public awareness for sexual violence. In Poland, Ireland and Argentina similar numbers protested against restrictions on reproductive rights and the 8th of March mobilized masses from Berlin to Buenos Aires and from Istanbul to New Delhi. In Spain, around 5 million people participated in a feminist general strike. These protests appear as the only successful transnational social movement of our times that is challenging right-wing populism as well as authoritarian neoliberalism. At the same time, right-wing parties and movements are gaining momentum, attacking the achievements of the women’s and LGBTIQ movements. They portray feminist issues as elitist and as a threat to allegedly ›natural‹ gender roles and ways of life. On the one hand, they build on existing racist and sexist attitudes and intensify them. On the other hand, they successfully articulate widespread discontents with social inequality and lack of democracy in the age of neoliberalism, presenting themselves as the voice of the ›common people‹.
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The question of class rests at the center of a left-Marxist project. Nonetheless, ‘class’ has not really played a role in recent stratecig debates and political praxises. The reasons are manyfold: since the 1970s, social democracy has abandoned the question of class in favor of models that assume a diversity of social strata; distancing themselves from an understanding of class reduced to male industrial labor, new social movements have turned to questions of modes of living, gender relations, the post-colonial legacy and ecology; and the ‘end of socialism’ has also done its part. At the same time, social antagonisms have intensified in Western industrial countries, and the gap between the poor and the rich is greater than ever as a consequence of a financialised capitalism in crisis and declining profit rates. The latter are being ‘compensated’ for by means of flexibilization, downward pressure on wages, and the destruction of public infrastructure, carried out on the backs of the majority of the population. Most recently, the successes on the right – from BREXIT through the Front National and AfD up to the election of Donald Trump in the USA have, in a strange way, put the question of class back on the agenda: the mostly legitimate anger on the part of those who feel they are being held back by this system and aren’t being represented has in many places been expressed by a rightward turn.
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The 2007 founding of Die Linke, or the Left Party, in Germany marked a crack in the social-democratic hegemony that characterizes Germany’s trade unions. This hegemony had been eroding since the 1990s, but in the wake of mass protests against the “Agenda 2010” reforms, fractions of the trade unions finally broke with the neoliberalized Social Democratic Party (SPD) to participate in the founding of Die Linke.[1] The party has thus far been able to fill the gap it created and establish itself as a strong minority wing within the trade unions. At the same time, it faces the challenge of extending its support to unionized wage earners and expanding its “use value” within the struggles for better living and working conditions.[2]
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