World March of Women International Declaration

24 Hours of Feminist Action around the World
World March of Women International Declaration

Today, on the 10th December 2012, we, the activists of the World March of Women, shall carry out actions within our communities between midday and 1pm. Starting in New Caledonia and across the globe until reaching Seattle, we will be mobilised during 24 hours, to demonstrate our awareness towards what is happening in the world, the attacks perpetrated on women's rights, and to make our acts of resistance as well as our alternatives known.

Eight years ago, during our International Meeting in Kigali, Rwanda, in 2004, we approved our Women's Global Charter for Humanity after a long process of collective construction. At that moment, we asserted that: “We women have been marching a long time to denounce and demand an end to the oppression of women and to the domination, exploitation, egotism and unbridled quest for profit which breeds injustice, war, conquest and violence… We are building a world in which equality, freedom, solidarity, justice, and peace are its driving forces. A world which, through our own strength, we are able to create.”

Today, in 2012, our efforts to find other ways to organise our lives that overcome patriarchy, capitalism, racism and lesbophobia have become even more relevant as we face the systemic crises and the false solutions promoted for them. The economic crisis is worsening the problem of unemployment, which is being met with austerity measures and cuts to social policies. The only response given to the environmental crisis and climate change is the privatisation of nature. The impacts of the care-work fall largely on women’s shoulders crisis, as they remain responsible for, and burdened with, caring for the most basic needs we all have. These false solutions are imposed by corporations and financial technocrats who have captured the political arena, as well as by the criminalisation of social struggles, and the increase of militarisation. They strengthen themselves through the promotion of conservatism, an increase in attacks by different religious fundamentalists, the increase in all types of violence against women, as well as through the control and commodification of our bodies, and the weakening of our rights and of the progress that we women have made.

The Filipino poet Joe Barrios summarises it best: to be a woman is to live in a constant state of war.

We women weave the very fabric of our lives against the backdrop of permanent crisis. We build alternatives for the production and preparation of food, for care-giving, in the solidarity economy, in community radios and in many other mediums of communication within our social movements, and in popular celebrations exempt from sexism and discrimination. We develop counter-hegemonic practices which join with our alternatives built on people's power, which recover our grandmother's memories as well as that of many other feminist activists, which re-establish harmony between humans and the environment, which invite us to debate what a life worth living is.

We propose building another world where exploitation, oppression, intolerance and exclusion no longer exist, and where integrity, diversity and the rights and freedoms of all are respected.

Together we carry out a common action on the 10th December, as we strengthen resistance in our respective countries and throughout the world:

We march
We organise and resist

We march
And we rebel

We march
And we build other ways of life

We march
And we unite

We march
We acknowledge each other and decide

We march
We speak and shout

We march
And we create an alternative economy

We march
We dance and sing

We march
And we take to the streets

We march
We remember, and discover ourselves

We march
And from our roots upwards, we are

We march
And freely live our sexuality

We march
And reaffirm feminism as the space for the real solutions we seek

We march
We struggle,
We march and build lives which are worth living

We will remain united until all of us are free!
Women in resistance, 10th December 2012