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Feminist Next System Literature Review

Swasti Miller

Swasti Mitter is an international consultant on information and communication technologies (ICT) and gender. She was Chair of Gender and Technology at the University of Brighton, Brighton (UK) and Deputy Director of the United Nations University Institute for New Technologies, Maastricht (The Netherlands). She has been a Visiting Fellow at the Science Policy Research Institute of the University of Sussex, Brighton (UK), and at the Center for Women’s Studies at University of California, Los Angeles (USA). She has published widely on women and technology, and has advised major UN agencies and the World Bank.

Section on “Alternative Economic Strategies”

Need a revaluation of the instruments as well as the goals of economic planning
Alternative strategies – experiments with municipal socialism under the labor-controlled Greater London Council between 1981-1998
Participatory socialism brought together women, ethnic minorities, and other new social forces. Fresh vision of economic renewal: the plan was to work toward the restricting of labor rather than restructuring of capital
The state wasn’t the center of power. Was successful to a degree but it definitely mobilized support from the general public on a scale that challenged the right’s total belief in free market mechanisms and invigoration of international capital.
The abolition of the GLC by the central govt. in March 1986 was a tribute to its success.
Grassroots organizations of women workers, such as homeworking campaign groups in the UK, can be used to bring about changes to the structure of the market as well as accepted social relations of production. But only with a global approach that links these local groups to vulnerable workers and supply chains worldwide.
Nation-states are unable to counteract supranational powers of global corporations so there must be a visibly transnational approach to economic planning.
A transnational socialist program of recovery would involve linking the labor movement across Europe
Trade union-led left strategies have been legitimately rejected by women and people of color as “manifestos written by white male activists, reflecting the traditions of the male-dominated labor movement.”
It is imperative that in an alternative economic strategy, the household be seen as a focal point and domestic work be seen to play a vital role
Feminist labor movements, working at the grassroots levels—organizing homeworkers, flex-workers, and workers in the underground economy—can be at the heart of building a new system.
The Lega delle Cooperative of Rome, Italian Feminists have submitted a blueprint of grassroots socialism:
Modernized version of the old practice whereby a housing cooperative would be regarded as being not only the group of people living in the same building, but also as the place where the services needed by these people are organized? And would it not be possible to encourage members of the producers’ cooperatives to create ways of channeling company profits to benefit the community?
Could consumers’ cooperatives not come to an agreement with social service cooperatives to allow their members to have privileged rates for specific services? This would stimulate new experiments in the areas of social services, which would then be assured a stable market w/in the cooperative circuit. And women would benefit from this, since they would once again find an effective channel for voicing their collective needs: they would have a new—though at the same time a very old—weapon in their battle for emancipation and freedom.

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