“ We have stores full of food, but outside, there are people who are hungry and begging for money. So, there must be something wrong in the mechanism. So let me give you a definition of capitalism. A lot of people think capitalism is free market, it’s free choice, it’s individualism – No. Capitalism is production for profit in private hands.”
KAISA EKIS EKMAN
ABOUT KAJSA EKIS EKMAN.
Kajsa Ekman is a Swedish award-winning author and journalist writing on women's rights, geopolitics, economics and capitalist crisis. She is the founder and editor in chief of Parabol magazine. She writes for the culture section of the Swedish major daily Aftonbladet and is a columnist at the Norwegian newspaper Klassekampen.
Kajsa Ekis Ekman is born 1980 in Stockholm and has authored four books. Her book Being and Being Bought – Prostitution, Surrogacy and the Split Self (Spinifex, 2013) has been published in five languages. It depicts how the two industries of prostitution and surrogacy that both commodify women have grown over the past decades. It also describes how both industries are normalized by an unholy alliance between the neoliberal right and the postmodern left, which itself celebrates reification as an ideal.
Skulden- eurokrisen sedd från Aten (Leopard, 2013 and Kedros, 2014) describes how the eurocrisis affected the Greek economy. It combines an analysis of the imbalances inherent in the euro system, with a depiction of the troika years in Greece – from the aganaktismenoi of Syntagma Square to the general strike, up until the Syriza takeover.The book won her the award Swedish-Greek of the Year 2014.
Texter 1998-2015 (ETC Förlag) is a collection of essays written between 1998 and 2015 on Swedish politics, Palestine, Latin America, China and other topics.
On The Meaning of Sex (Spinifex, 2022) discusses gender identity theory and its implications for women, children and homosexuals. It discusses the rise in applicants for sex reassignment surgery, consequences of treatments and self-ID laws. It also analyzes the shift from queer to trans politics. It moreover analyzes from a feminist and Marxist perspecive what happens when the word ”woman” is fragmented, meant to mean its exact opposite, made taboo or obsolete. Without the word woman, what is the women's movement?
Ekman was awarded the Sara Lidman Prize in 2015 and the Lenin Prize in 2020.
She has given more than a thousand lectures nationally and internationally, including Sydney Festival of Dangerous Ideas, the European Parliament, Parliament of France, Chamber of Deputees in Mexico, Serbian Woman's Festival, Moulin Rouge in Paris, Massachusetts Turn Off the Red Light Campaign, Congress of Sexual Education in Havanna,Cuba, Universidad Complutense de Madrid and Universidad de Alicante. She lectures in Swedish, English, Spanish and French.
Her Ted Talk “Everybody Talks About Capitalism, But What Is It?” has been viewed 268 000 times.
Ekman has been active in the climate movement, the solidarity movement for Greece and Palestine, and was on Ship to Gaza 2015.