Kaleidoscopic Resistances to Contemporary Capitalism: Gender, Labor, and Dispossession

Abstract

Writing the introduction to this special issue fills us with joy. It is a sign of the imminent arrival of that culmination which crystallizes, on paper, the work of many years. The collective synthesis of interdisciplinary connections, transborder reflections, and rebellious bodies with critical perspectives. Those of us who edited this dossier met while sharing spaces dedicated to studying the relationship between capital and labor, amidst master's and doctoral theses. We shared academic conferences and also days of struggle. We devoted hours to debate and collective work that led to this point of arrival where we advocate for a kaleidoscopic view of capitalism in the 21st century.

Abya Yala (Latin America) is experiencing a multifaceted crisis that combines the intensification of extractivism with the advance of "new right-wing" forces, reforms that mark setbacks in social rights with the precarization of lives, income crises, and massive indebtedness, new forms of dispossession through terror, and the advance of organized crime.

The various forms of precarization of lives are rooted in an extractivist matrix of exploitation and dispossession that is constantly being updated and intensified. And it resists. This resistance to forms of dispossession and various forms of exploitation can be traced throughout the continent and the world. In this dossier, each of the texts illustrates how these processes are taking place in specific territories and bodies.

We invoke the idea of the kaleidoscope because it is a device that allows for the creation of different geometric figures through the play of colors, lights, and shadows. It produces images at a given moment that then disappear and reappear transformed as it is used. Based on this metaphor, we think of capitalism as a totality simultaneously constituted by economic, political, social, cultural, environmental, emotional, and subjective relationships that can produce different images through the rotation of the theoretical and methodological "cylinder," depending on the historical moment, bodies, and territory. Each text in this dossier can be seen as a proposal to play with the kaleidoscope. Together, they constitute a contribution to feminist studies that have long been turning that cylinder to expand the classic Marxist critique of capitalism, extending the boundaries for its apprehension, and thus expanding the horizons for its transformation.