FOREWORD

With its ups and downs, the global feminist wave continues its course: it occupies streets and squares, arouses consciences, and shakes old patriarchal power structures. In several countries, Juntas y a la Izquierda* has been intervening in this rising tide of women and the LGBTI+ community with an anti-capitalist and socialist strategy. In the heat of our participation in the struggles and their debates, we develop political answers to contribute to this transformative movement. 

In the spirit of developing and exchanging ideas, our political current published Mujeres en Revolución, la nueva ola feminista (Women in Revolution, the new world feminist wave) in 2017; In 2018 we advanced with the publication of La rebellion de las disidencias (The LGBTI+ Rebellion), and at the beginning of 2019, we contributed to the anti-clerical struggle with Iglesia y Estado, asuntos separados (Church and State, separate issues). The success of the first two books has already led us to publish a second edition of each. 

In this case, with Feminism in Debate: Reform or Revolution?, we take up old debates that the feminist tide has reopened, as well as new and complex questions raised by today´s reality. Of the debates that are making a comeback, we address the relationship between patriarchy and state, the border between reformist currents and revolutionary feminism, as well as the construction of the latter. In turn, with respect to the new debates, we include abortion as a right that is currently in dispute, the religious-political fundamentalist crusade, the validity or not of punitivism in the face of sexist violence, the dilemmas of surrogacy, housework and prostitution or sex work, identity politics and intersectionality and the challenges of the LGBTI+ movement. 

Although the elaboration of this work expresses our militancy as a collective, the direct production of this text was in charge of Jeanette Cisneros, Carolina Dome, Andrea Lanzette, Lorena Perdomo Moreno, Flor Salgueiro Carral and Pablo Vasco. With the certainty that it will be of interest to readers, and with the joy and pride of being an active part of the battle to defeat this crisis-ridden capitalist and patriarchal system, we place it at your disposal. 

1. Krader, Lawrence; Los apuntes etnológicos de Karl Marx, Ed. Siglo XXI de España and Ed. Pablo Iglesias, Madrid 1988, p. 43

2. Native peoples of the North American Northeast, whose confederation includes six tribes or nations: Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca and Tuscarora. Each tribe consisted of 8 to 14 clans or gens, which included several families descended from the maternal line. They could not marry within the maternal clan (exogamy). There was divorce by common agreement and they practiced abortion to control the birth rate. Property was communal, and so was the economy, based on agriculture, hunting and gathering. Each of the 50 clans chose its chief in assemblies of men and women. Although the chiefs made up a central council, every decision had to be approved by at least two thirds of the council of old women. Today the Iroquois total about 120,000 people in the US and Canada, 40,000 of them with no miscegenation.

3. Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Preface to the fourth edition, 1891.

5. Idem

6.  The existence of matrilineality (social organization through maternal lineage) or matrilocality (the couple resides with the woman's family) does not necessarily imply matriarchy (feminine rule).