2020 8M Strike: Nine Labels and a Sunday Against It

2020 8M Strike: Nine Labels and a Sunday Against It

The 2020 feminist strike is not announced as a strike. It is announced as plurinational, anti-racist, transgenerational, dissident, transfeminist, lesbofeminist, inclusive, anti-prison, and internationalist. Nine labels on a single line, signed by the 8M Feminist Coordinator for March 8 and 9. And a calendar detail no one chose: March 8, 2020, falls on a Sunday, the day when, by definition, almost no one works.

What Each Label Means

The string of adjectives is the first thing that catches the eye, and also the first to be debated. Transgenerational is the term causing the most confusion: the call itself does not develop it, and some openly ask what it adds to the mobilization. The most common reading among critics is that it piles up causes unrelated to the labor market—anti-racism, dissidence, prison abolition—under the umbrella of a strike that, on paper, should be about wages, hours, and care.

The most repeated diagnosis is that the more labels, the more it divides the base it seeks to mobilize. This is not a new objection: it is the classic tension between broadening the framework and diluting the demand. With nine labels, the call covers many people but does not specifically appeal to anyone.

8M Falls on Sunday: The Strike That Cannot Be Done

Here lies the material problem. A general strike is a stoppage of productive activity; if the designated day is a Sunday, there is no activity to stop, and the gesture remains a declaration of intent. Hence the recurring suggestion to move the stoppage to Monday, March 9, a day on which the call also extends, and to which much of the debate clings with irony: the calendar, guilty of everything.

The coincidence with a Sunday holiday does not invalidate the demonstration, but it does empty the strike part of its content. It is the type of detail a serious organizer would check before publishing the poster.

Anti-Prison, But with More People in Prison

The adjective that exposes the most inconsistencies is anti-prison. The circulating argument is of elementary logic: if the star demand of the day is to toughen sentences and expand the number of convicts, penal abolitionism remains on the banner. A nine-word slogan declaring itself anti-system while the bulk of the mobilization asks precisely for more system. It is debated less whether it is contradictory than whether the contradiction matters to anyone.

Family Support Is Waning

The most uncomfortable data does not come from the opposition, but from those who attended the first editions. In 2018, the first 8M strike, many families got involved: some demonstrated with their mother and their 93-year-old grandmother in a village of barely 100 inhabitants, and some lost part of their salary by supporting the stoppage. This capital of domestic sympathy is now what is being burned. The repeated testimony is of women who do not plan to attend this year, tired of a direction they no longer recognize as their own.

The Other Flank and Background Noise

Part of the conversation does not discuss the strike, but its institutional framework: it is argued that a call of this type relies on public structures and that its cost is paid by the taxpayer without going through any parliamentary debate. In parallel, the episode of graffiti against the leader of VOX appears, which he himself took to the judicial arena: according to the messages collected in the matter, the denounced association defines itself as a non-mixed anti-capitalist feminist assembly, and the case would have fallen to a judge. These are facts that at the time of the discussion remained unresolved.

And at the end of the period, almost as an afterthought, someone asks if we remember when ELbichito was under control. There were still days to know what was coming.

What to Expect

The call will arrive in March, will have uneven trinc-up, and Sunday will rob it of measurable muscle. If family support cools at the rate indicated by the testimonies, the next edition will have less base and more poster. That said, predicting the size of a feminist strike a year in advance is as close to guessing as it gets, and this text is not going to do it.