The Case for Prefigurative Feminist Organizing

Abstract

In 1979, president Jimmy Carter appointed economist Paul A. Volcker chairman of the Board of Governors of the United States (US) Federal Reserve System. Volcker was tasked with tackling inflation issues—seen as essential to the growth of the US and world economies—consequently ushering in policies that would reverberate around the world for decades. Volcker was not alone in the pursuit of radically modifying the monetary policy, as changes in economies were occurring elsewhere. China began to liberalize its economy toward more market-friendly positions, the United Kingdom (UK) began to battle its own working class through the suppression of union labor—as well as tackle its own issues of inflation—and the election of US president Ronald Reagan in 1980 emboldened Volcker’s ideas through policies that attacked organized labor, deregulated industry, and entitled global financiers (Harvey, 2005). These Western policies and ideas were eventually calcified through the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in 1991 and the declaration of the so-called “end of history” (Fukuyama, 1992). The term that has come to describe this phenomenon of policies that deregulate industry, attack organized labor, social welfare, and empower financiers is neoliberalism. Neoliberalism may be conceptualized as a set of economic policies and ideas that espouse the rule of the “free”market, cutting and/or privatizing public social services, deregulating existing markets, and eliminating the concepts of community and the global public good (Martinez & Garcia, 1996). Since the late 1970s, neoliberalism has been the cornerstone of the global economic system, and the repercussions of its policies have not gone unnoticed. According to Harvey (2005), neoliberal policies have engendered and exacerbated social and economic inequalities, wealth concentration, privatization, social, political, economic, and environmental crises, as well as the “commodification of everything” (p. 165). Social movements and community organization practices that have occurred within this period have been marked as uniquely resistant to these policies through their targeting of global economic systems via various localized lenses such as race, sexuality, diagnosis, and gender (Shepard, 2002). Despite more feminist community organization practicemethods being highlighted in recent decades (East, 2000; Ewig & Ferree, 2013; Gutierrez & Lewis, 1994; Hyde, 1996, 2000; Mizarhi & Greenawalt, 2017; Mizrahi, n.d.; Shepard,