Europe

Women’s Collective Action Limitations (Tilly, 1981)

1946-1989, Authority, Consciousness Raising, Date, Defining the Enemy, Disruptive Spaces, Patriarchy, Queer, Strike, Subjectives of Refusal, Tactics of Disruption, The Home, The Workplace, Urban Spaces, Women, Workers

Louise A. Tilly’s ” Paths of Proletarianization: organization of Production, Sexual Division of Labor, and Women’s Collective Action”, was published in 1981 as a study of working-class women’s role in industrializing France. Her specific evidence is damning. Her core argument is relatively simple, but fairly radical, explaining that womens failure to organize was not because of their “inherent passivity”, but based on the conditions of their home and work lives.

Tilly pulls examples from the full range of French industrial life, weaving threads of household and workplace life for women. At home, women were invisible in strikes because their reproductive labor within their households was not seen as instrumental to society’s functioning, while it is the core. Male heads of the household were the ones meant to protest, not women. In the northern textile mills, young, single women were least likely to strike. Not because they were content or satisfied, because they were economically vulnerable because of their brief employment, they were excluded from unions and subject to familial pressure that competed with ideas of class solidarity. Employers knew this, when Roubais weavers made demands bosses simply refused and replaced the strikers instead.

This was countered by wives of miners, who formed strikes in the hundreds, blocked roads, and organized food supplies; their activism was dependent on their structural position. Their economic dependence on a husband’s wage made a strike presented as a crisis, with women uniting to launch protests and come together.

Throughout this source, it becomes apparent that women’s ability to unionize and spark meaningful change, to uplift their social and class status, is dependent on their structured association, access to deployable resources, and enough autonomy from household demands to act independently. Tilly’s incorporation of various historical examples of female-led uprisings provides evidence of women’s ability to disrupt social structures, provided the conditions align. Women did not fail to disrupt because of inherent timidity but because industrialization (as one example) was designed around a division of labor that systematically denied them the conditions necessary to show up.

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Women’s Day Off ( Iceland, 1975)

1946-1989, Authority, Consciousness Raising, Date, Defining the Enemy, Disruptive Spaces, Patriarchy, Subjectives of Refusal, Tactics of Disruption, The Home, The Workplace, Urban Spaces, Women, Workers

The Women’s Day Off on October 24, 1975 was a monumental moment in Icelandic (women’s) history. The Committee for the Women’s Day Off was founded in June 1975. In March 1976, the Committee gave their Private Papers to the Women’s History Archive along with what was left from their fundraising efforts. Below is an example off the material kept at the archives, a handout from 1975.

95% of Iceland’s women did not go to work. They didn’t cook or clean or look after children. They gathered in town squares and visible public spaces around the nation, with around 25,000 in Reykjavík alone. The collective argument was that the women did work. paid and unpaid, but invisible from the infrastructure that held Icelandic society together, and never acknowledged by society. They called it Kvennafrí. Women’s Day Off. The newspapers called it the Long Friday. By the end of it, the country had a pretty good sense of what women were actually worth.

Women in office and retail work earned roughly 73 percent of what their male counterparts made. Women in manual labor earned 30,000 króna less per month than male workers doing equivalent jobs. Women working on farms — doing the same physical labor as their husbands — were assigned an official annual wage valuation of 175,000 króna, less than a member of parliament earned in a single month. And in industries like fish processing, women and men sometimes worked side by side at the same table doing the same tasks, separated only by their placement in different, lower-paid wage categories.

Beneath this was a structural problem; women were summoned when convenient, and dismissed when not, while being consistently undervalued in all negotiations and bargaining agreements around wages and overtime pay. Women occupied the bottom of every tier of the tiered wage system. Ultimately, sausages, an easily made food, were made available hurriedly and distributed by men around the nation, often referred to as a running joke. The speeches of the rally ranged across unpaid domestic work, wages, international solidarity, and disarmament. They insisted the goal was not to push men aside but to achieve equality and to solve societal problems together. Facts and figures backed their argument, emphasizing how different the world will be when women govern it alongside men, rather than under them.

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On the Genealogy of Morals-First Essay

1840-1945, Authority, Consciousness Raising, Defining the Enemy, History, History/Theory, Tactics of Disruption, Theory, Uncategorized

“In this theory, the origin of the concept ‘Good’ was mistakenly identified, and thus sought in vain, for the judgment ‘Good’ did not originate among those to whom goodness was shown! Rather, it has been the ‘good men’ themselves, that is, the noble, the powerful, those of high degree, the high-minded, who have felt that they themselves were good, and that their actions were good…”

Frederich Nietzsche

The first essay of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals destabilizes common assumptions of morality and “goodness” by exposing their social and historical construction rather than their assumed eternal truth. Today, we call compassion, empathy, and selflessness “good”, but where did these notions come from? Nietzsche describes the reality of these definitions of good as being rooted in the historical context of powerless or lower-class individuals revaluing the traits of their oppressors as “evil” (traits like pride, strength, or greed fall into this definition). Similarly, they elevated their conditions of weakness as “good.” Throughout the first essay, Nietzsche deeply analyzes the linguistic and historical roots of these definitions. This genealogical approach and tracing of historical uses of these terms disrupts the reader’s moral certainty through the assertion that our deeply rooted values and ethical convictions stem from reactive emotion rather than from any objective, factual, or concrete foundation. Ultimately, Nietzsche does not only critique morality, but exposes the unstable rooting of “good” and “evil”, revealing the traditional idea of “goodness” as disguised resentment rather than its more common positive interpretation and usage. Nietzsche urges readers to critically engage and understand the limitations of language in encompassing hierarchies and values, leaving the reader to question their own moral judgment and if the gravitational pull of power, history, and self-interest is escapable.

The Jungle- Upton Sinclair (1906)

1840-1945, Authority, Consciousness Raising, Date, Defining the Enemy, Disruptive Spaces, Students, Subjectives of Refusal, Tactics of Disruption, The Bourgeoisie, The Workplace, Workers

“The hands of these men would be criss-crossed with cuts, until you could no longer pretend to count them or to trace them. They would have no nails,—they had worn them off pulling hides; their knuckles were swollen so that their fingers spread out like a fan. There were men who worked in the cooking rooms, in the midst of steam and sickening odors, by artificial light; in these rooms the germs of tuberculosis might live for two years, but the supply was renewed every hour.”

Upton Sinclair

As seen in the above quote, the conditions of work during the Industrial Revolution were not only gruesome and unclean but also exploitative and inhumane. The book reveals how working-class life under unchecked capitalism is already disrupted; the real disruption or disobedience is not the strikes, protests, or publications but the violence hidden beneath the appearance of normal economic systems. The Jungle demonstrates how capitalism disrupts the most basic aspects of life: eating, housing, family, love, and, importantly, safety. The book describes how the system is designed to constantly undercut working-class people, making survival the only mindset. It is revealed how industrial society manufactures precarity, turning every day of these workers’ lives into a living hell. Jurgis and his family arrive believing in the promise of steady work and upward mobility, but that promise collapses through a series of everyday shocks—wage cuts, layoffs, injuries, death from preventable disease, and fraudulent contracts. Child labor, sexual exploitation, and the erosion of humanity and dignity disrupt the boundaries between safety and danger, as well as childhood and adulthood. Children are forced to trade playing, exploring, and learning for dangerous, meticulous work to assist their families. The disruption lies within the realization that millions of people live and work in catastrophic conditions while others live comfortably, calling it order or survival of the fittest. The normal functioning of a capitalist system is inherently disruptive, restricting access to basic needs through the constant need to work even during times of physical or mental barriers/harm.

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Alison Murray’s “Debt-Bondage and Trafficking: Don’t Believe the Hype” (1998)

1990-2010, Date, Defining the Enemy, Imperialism, Subjectives of Refusal, Women, Workers

Murray describes how sex workers challenged dominant feminist, governmental, and media narratives about trafficking and exploitation. The anti-trafficking campaigns of the 1990s shifted public discourse by framing prostitution almost exclusively through sensationalized stories of slavery, coercion, and victimhood, but this assertion was countered by sex workers’ own political organizing, especially at the 1995 Beijing UN Conference. By asserting their agency, contesting inflated statistics, and demanding recognition of sex work as labor, sex workers unsettled abolitionist feminism and exposed how moral panic, racism, and restrictive immigration laws intensified exploitation rather than alleviating it. This conflict fractured feminist alliances, weakened the credibility of abolitionist campaigns, and forced international institutions to confront the limits of universal claims about women’s oppression, reshaping debates on migration, labor, and women’s rights in a globalized economy.

“Blanket statements about prostitution and the exploitation of women are propaganda from a

political agenda which seeks to control the way people think and behave.”

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Natalie Zemon Davis’ “Iroquois Women, European Women” (1973)

Uncategorized

Davis shows that Indigenous women resisted traditional European gender roles by maintaining forms of authority and autonomy that sharply contrasted with French patriarchal norms. European observers expected women to be submissive, economically dependent, and excluded from decision-making, yet Iroquois women controlled agriculture, household resources, and kinship through matrilineal and matrilocal systems. Senior women exercised influence within the longhouse, could initiate divorce, retained custody of children, and had decisive power over daily economic life—practices that undermined European assumptions about male dominance within the family. Even when exposed to Christianity, some Indigenous women adapted the new religion to expand their public voice, preaching, teaching, and leading prayer despite missionaries’ insistence on female obedience. Rather than passively accepting European gender ideals, Iroquois women reshaped colonial encounters to preserve their authority.

“If a man wanted a courteous excuse not to do something he could say without fear of embarrassment ‘that his wife did not wish it.’”

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Angela Davis’ “Racism, Birth Control and Reproductive Rights” (1981)

1946-1989, Black, Date, Defining the Enemy, Patriarchy, Subjectives of Refusal, White Supremacy, Women

Angela Davis explains in her essay how the history of reproductive control over Black women reveals the limitations of liberal and feminist frameworks. Davis presents birth control as a subject entangled with racism, eugenics, and population control, particularly in relation to poor and Black communities. She shows how institutions that claimed to advance women’s freedom, such as public health systems, welfare policies, and mainstream feminist movements, simultaneously relied on the regulation of Black women’s reproduction while denying them reproductive autonomy. Black women emerge as a disruptive figure within these systems, as their lived experiences challenge the assumption that reproductive rights are universally emancipatory. By centering practices of coerced sterilization and racially targeted population control, Davis disrupts dominant narratives of progress and individual choice, exposing the contradictions and exclusions that structure prevailing social and political conceptions of reproductive freedom.

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Surrounding the Spanish Parliament: Occupy Congress & The M15 Movements

2011-Present, Authority, Blockade/Barricade, Defining the Enemy, Disruptive Spaces, Institutions, Occupation, Subjectives of Refusal, Tactics of Disruption, The Workplace, Uncategorized, Urban Spaces, Workers

The Occupy movements in Spain escalated quickly due to the deep economic crisis the country faced. protestors physically surrounded the national parliament, confronting the government about the widening gap between the general population of Spanish citizens and the elected officials in Congress. This occupation was incredibly disruptive as it halted the normal flow of political life and forced politicians to acknowledge and visibly see the public withdrawing their trust and faith. Over 1,400 police officers quickly became involved, and the scene escalated with dozens of arrests, rubber bullets, and baton charges, intensifying the situation drastically. Protestors in this occupation were charged with treason and crimes against the nation, even though they were surrounding rather than occupying the government offices. Protesters were organized by M15, which was incredibly efficient and effective at organizing creative protests and demonstrations within banks and parliament. In this video, Maria Carrion reports live from Madrid on the increased anger of Spaniards as they’re driven to hunger and poverty due to the bank repossessing their homes, while the tenants still have to pay the debt, while homeless. These protestors disrupted the political order of the nation and exposed the crisis and tension between the public and the austerity-driven state.

Occupation of St. Paul’s Cathedral (London)

2011-Present, Blockade/Barricade, Disruptive Spaces, Institutions, Occupation, Subjectives of Refusal, Tactics of Disruption, Urban Spaces, Workers

“Mr. Cottam said that incidents of urination and defecation on the land outside the cathedral had continued. This was harmful to the life of the cathedral. Employees were now often engaged in cleaning up after these incidents, which, said Mr. Cottam, are “detrimental to the operation of the cathedral as a place of worship…” Graffiti was still appearing on the cathedral. Disruption to services was also continuing.”

Mr. Justice Lindblom

The Occupy encampment at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London was immensely disruptive. The camps and people involved transformed this religious & public gathering place into grounds for protest, disrupting the daily lives of those attending worship, tourists, employees, and pedestrians. The camp created significant issues with noise, sanitation, and safety. Many problems arose from urination and defecation on and around the cathedral, as well as many noise complaints from persistent noise–disrupting religious services and daily operations. The conditions here damaged the calm historic setting of the cathedral and discouraged visitors and religious people from entering, causing a notable drop in attendance and revenue for St. Paul’s.

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Manifesto of Female Revolt (Rivolta Femminile) (1970)

1946-1989, Defining the Enemy, Patriarchy, Subjectives of Refusal, Women

The Manifesto of Rivolta Femminile disrupted societal norms in Italy by openly rejecting the foundations of the country’s patriarchal social order during a time when rigid gender roles remained largely unquestioned. It describes marriage, motherhood, and women’s unpaid domestic labor as instruments used to suppress women. The manifesto challenges not only the domestic sphere but also the moral authority of the Church and the political agenda of the male-dominated Left, including Marxist ideals, and it calls for the dismantling of established political movements that had previously expected feminist demands to be absorbed into broader class-based struggles.

“Liberation for woman does not mean accepting the life man leads, because it is unlivable; on the contrary, it means expressing her own sense of existence.”

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First International Conference of Socialist Women (1907) and Second International Conference of Socialist Women (1910)

1840-1945, Defining the Enemy, Patriarchy, Subjectives of Refusal, The Bourgeoisie, Women, Workers

The First (1907) and Second (1910) International Conferences of Socialist Women manifestos directly challenged the political, economic, and gender structures that existed during these times. Instead of seeking incremental reforms or aligning with the ideals of mainstream middle-class feminism, they redefine women’s liberation as inseparable from a working-class revolution. They reject “bourgeois” feminist agendas that ignored the material realities of laboring women. They demanded universal suffrage as a tool of class struggle, declared capitalism to be the root of women’s exploitation, and insisted that women enter unions, strikes, and political organizations. These manifestos disrupted both traditional gender norms and the preexisting economic order. Their creation of international coordination further unsettles national boundaries and portrays women as a global political force. Through asserting that true emancipation requires fundamental restructuring of society, not mere reform, these documents articulate a bold and disruptive display of feminist politics that threatened the stability of existing power systems.

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Theses on the Philosophy of History – Walter Benjamin (1940)

Time Interrupted

Classic text by Walter Benjamin, Marxist Jewish-German philosopher loosely affiliated with the Frankfurt School. Written in 1940 shortly before Benjamin committed suicide at the Franco-Spanish border fleeing Nazi invasion.

In the text, Benjamin critiques the idea social progress and lays forth a revolutionary temporality that connects past and present struggles allowing for their mutual recognition and redemption.

Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.

[He] grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one…blasting open the continuum of history…Thus he establishes a conception of the present as the ‘time of the now’ which is shot through with chips of Messianic time.

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