Introduction

For the past decade or so, following the 2008 global economic recession, concerns with wealth and income inequality have become a mainstream issue in many policy-making arenas. According to the latest World Inequality Report (Chancel et al. 2021), income and wealth inequalities within countries have increased to the point that global contemporary inequalities are at similar levels to where they were at the peak of Western imperialism. Thomas Piketty's focus on wealth, and in particular the top 1 per cent of income earners, has ensured that talk about the 1 per cent is entrenched in public debate (Piketty 2014). The necessity of tackling inequality has been made even more urgent because of the Covid-19 pandemic and the multiple crises it has unleashed, throwing into sharp relief not only income or wealth inequality but, crucially, also gender, race and class inequalities. The intensification of several inequalities throughout the era of neoliberalism threatens to roll back many hard-won gains towards social and economic justice and has given rise to a renewal of social protest and other forms of civic engagement.

Prior to the most recent global crises many scholars had long traced social movements and highlighted the social, political and economic injustices created by persistent structural inequalities of income and wealth, gender, race and class. Feminists have struggled to foreground gender inequalities in economics and in political economy, and have often taken issue with mainstream thinkers who have traditionally considered the economy neutral and void of conflict, and with Marxist thinkers, who saw it as being structured on the lines of class conflict alone (see Folbre 1986 for a critique). For many feminists, gender inequality cannot be seen in isolation from mainstream economic issues. Marxist feminist traditions have long studied the interplay of gender and class; Black feminisms have centred the critical importance of race with Angela Davis’ Women, Race and Class, first published over 40 years ago (Davis 1981), which is emblematic of this. Current feminist scholarship and activism draw on these lines of engagement and extend them into the context of globalized and financialized capitalism.