Interview by Randy Lowens

Randy: We’re interviewing bell hooks, author of Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center; Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations and numerous other titles. You’re known to be a prolific author: do you have a personal favorite? Is there any one title that someone unfamiliar with your work should read first?

hooks: My work is so eclectic; it spans such a broad spectrum. I guess if you look at my children’s books, I like Be Boy Buzz the best. If you look at the love books, I like All About Love the best. If you look at the theory books, Where We Stand: Class Matters is one of my favorites. It’s a good thing not to have to choose one. I think part of Western metaphysical dualism is, we’re always being asked to choose one over the other. I’m lucky. I think it’s good that I have a body of work that addresses different things in different ways.

Randy: You don’t capitalize your name? Why is that?

hooks: When the feminist movement was at its zenith in the late 60’s and early 70’s, there was a lot of moving away from the idea of the person. It was: let’s talk about the ideas behind the work, and the people matter less. It was kind of a gimmicky thing, but lots of feminist women were doing it. Many of us took the names of our female ancestors—bell hooks is my maternal great grandmother—to honor them and debunk the notion that we were these unique, exceptional women. We wanted to say, actually, we were the products of the women who’d gone before us.

Randy: The books of yours I’m most familiar with—the two I cited—are a work of political theory and, the other, a work of cultural criticism. Do you see those as distinctly different? Is there any clear line between the cultural and the political?

hooks: I would say one difference with the political writings, whether about feminism or class, is that the intent is to change how people think of a certain political reality; whereas with cultural criticism, the goal is to illuminate something that is already there. For example, the contemporary movie Crash I thought was a very weak statement about race and class. That was already there in the film. What I did in having a conversation about it was illuminate why it was a weak analysis of race and class. “It’s people; we’re all racist.” That’s just another bullshit way of people not wanting to name the power and institutionalized strength of white supremacy. We all may have prejudices, but we’re not all part of a system that reinforces, reinvents and reaffirms itself every day of our lives, systemically.

Randy: You mentioned your children’s books. I think last time we spoke, you were preparing to publish a book, Happy to be Nappy?

hooks: Happy to be Nappy was my first children’s book. I think when we saw each other I was in the production of Grump Groan Growl which was about anger.

Randy: I read that one to my daughter, by the way.

hooks: Oh yeah?

Randy: Do you have anything to say about the distinction? Are these books in any way political? We have a political audience.

hooks: They absolutely are. Both books were written to counter racism, patriarchy or both. Especially Be Boy Buzz was written to say, “We don’t really live in a culture that loves boys or loves children, and we don’t encourage boys to be whole.” I wanted to write a non-patriarchal book that would proclaim the love of boys.

Randy: (Pause) Some of my questions are written kind of wordy. (Laughter)

hooks: You shouldn’t worry about that.

Randy: You’re known, especially within our circles, for popularizing intersectional theory as opposed to reductionisms. Can you say a little bit about how intersectional theory plays out in practice? That is to say, your typical class reductionist at least has a priority; a Black Nationalist has something to prioritize. How do you practice intersectionalism?

hooks: Intersectionality allow us to focus on what is most important at a given point in time. I used to say to people, if you’re in a domestic situation where the man is violent, patriarchy and male domination—even though you understand it intersectionally—you focus, you highlight that dimension of it, if that’s what is needed to change the situation. I think that, again, if we move away from either/or thinking, and if we think, okay, every day of my life that I walk out of my house I am a combination of race, gender, class, sexual preference and religion or what have you, what gets foregrounded? I think it’s crazy for us to think that people don’t understand what’s being foregrounded in their lives at a given point in time. Like right now, for many Americans, class is being foregrounded like never before because of the economic situation. It doesn’t mean that race doesn’t matter, or gender doesn’t matter, but it means that right now in many people’s lives, in the lives of my own family members, people are losing jobs, insurance. I was teasing my brother that he was penniless, homeless, jobless. Right now in his life, racism isn’t the central highlighting force: it’s the world of work and economics. It doesn’t mean that he isn’t influenced by racism, but when he wakes up in the morning the thing that’s driving his world is really issues of class, economics and power as they articulate themselves. I guess I wish we could talk about: what does it mean to have a politics of intersectionality that also privileges what form of domination is most oppressing us at a given moment in time.

Randy: I’m reminded of Murray Bookchin and the analogy of society to ecology. Were you at all influenced by that?

hooks: No.

Randy: Do you have any opinions of the modern day anarchist movement, globally or here in the USA? It’s almost nonexistent here in the South.

hooks: Sadly, anarchy has gotten such a bad name. We don’t really see much evidence of it because people associate it with reckless abandon, which we both know it’s not. I think we have to talk about educating the people for critical consciousness about what anarchy is. I would also say that, in practice, many more Americans are anarchists than would ever use that term.

Randy: It’s clear from your books that you oppose capitalism. Do you think capitalism can be reformed, or must it be overthrown? Do you consider yourself a revolutionary in that sense?

hooks: I see myself, in terms of the question of capitalism, as I would support democratic socialism over a capitalist system, because any approach… or participatory economics, which is another great model that people like Michael Albert are putting out there… any system that encourages us to think about interdependency, and to be able to use the world’s resources in a wiser way, for the good of the whole, would be better for the world than capitalism. Capitalism is fucking up the planet, we know that. But let’s say, imperialism and capitalism together… I mean let’s face it, war in its essence is another form of capitalism. Wars make people rich—and they make a lot of people poor, and they take a lot of people’s lives away from them. We know that so much of the war that is happening is the attempt of one group to snatch the resources of another group.

Randy: Competitive economics taken to its logical extreme.

hooks: Exactly.

Randy: I was taken to task by a feminist anarchist for taking the liberty of referring to you be your first name. The criticism was: had you been a male I wouldn’t have been so quick to have done that.

hooks: I think this is the kind of trivial personal stuff people focus on that has very little meaning. I don’t think it matters. To me, I think if someone read my work, they’d know I don’t have issues around how I’m identified. Even when people capitalize my name, I don’t freak out, even though that would not be my choice. I’m not attached to it, and in that sense I think we have to choose, what are the issues that really matter? We have to trust that. You have to trust that if you are calling my name in a way that is offensive to me, I’m going to share it with you. But you also have to know what your feelings are behind calling me “bell.” I think we are obsessed in the U.S. with the personal, in ways that blind us to more important issues of life. I just think if we could take all the obsession with the personal (inaudible), and personal judgment and have people be concerned about the environment, what a different world we would live in. Or race… ending racism. It’s like, I was talking about Cornell West once, and somebody was saying to me, “Cornell is not a preacher; he’s not ordained”—and another preacher friend of mine said, “I don’t know about the importance of his being ordained. I saw him give a sermon. Lots of people joined the church and that would seem to be what being a preacher is all about.” We have to look at the substance of something rather than the shadow. Is it more important that you, as a white male, read my work and learn from it, or what you call me? I think it’s more important that you read my work, reflect on it, and allow it to transform your life and your thinking in some way. Now I do get a little pissed at people who write me and want me to do things, and spell my name wrong.

Randy: I have read, from someone else, that your work is influenced by postmodernism. Is that true? Do you have an opinion about the end of history, in particular?

hooks: No. If anything I think postmodernism has the least impact on my work. My work is mostly influenced by the concrete circumstances of our daily lives. To the extent that we live in a postmodern world and it shapes the concrete circumstances of our daily lives, I would say postmodernism affects my work or influences my work. But in general, I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about postmodernism.

Randy: The final question that I wrote down, I think we’ve already touched on to a certain degree. Some political groups say they are against classism, and that often sounds to me like they’re saying they avoid prejudice on the basis of class, but don’t oppose structural capitalism. I think you’ve already talked about the personal versus the systemic aspects of…

hooks: One of the things my work Where We Stand: Class Matters tried to do was say, “We’re a country that would rather talk about race than class.” I think what’s so amazing about this historical moment is that it is bringing class to the fore and we have to think about the nature of work and hierarchy. When I think about the auto-industry and how it was one of the industries that brought all of these black men from the South to Michigan and other places to make more money than they could ever make in the cotton fields or the agricultural world of the South… what’s happening now is all of that is closing down, and we know that it’s going to reopen in Southern places, focusing on Mexican and other migrant workers to come and work cheaply and get none of the benefits. All of this stuff is amazing in terms of forcing people in this society to think more openly about class and about the intersectionalities.

The whole thing with Joe the Plumber—and then to find out that so much about Joe the Plumber was just fake—was the use of class (of white supremacy and class) to awaken old prejudices, to allow for a denial of the true impact of intersectionalities and class. The white worker who has been displaced at General Motors has more in common with the displaced black worker than those larger white CEO’s, and those Wall Street people who are determining their fate… whose thievery and greed is determining their fate.

It’s interesting to look at all the aspects where everyday Americans, many of whom are not college educated, are thinking deeply now about our economic structure. See the way credit cards have exploited the working class and the working poor? I think it’s going to be an interesting next ten years for the United States. For people like me, what is important and vital is to keep that education for critical consciousness around intersectionalities, so that people are able to not focus on one thing and blame one group, but be able to look holistically at the way intersectionality informs all of us: whiteness, gender, sexual preferences, etc. Only then can we have a realistic handle on the political and cultural world we live within.

Randy: That’s all of my questions. Do you have anything to say to our audience, off the cuff?

hooks: Dare to look at the intersectionalities. Dare to be holistic. Part of the heart of anarchy is, dare to go against the grain of the conventional ways of thinking about our realities. Anarchists have always gone against the grain, and that’s been a place of hope.

This interview originally appeared in Northeastern Anarchist #15 in 2011. Randy Lowens, the pen name of Don Jennings, who passed away March 8, 2012, in Richmond, Kentucky. #RestInPower Randy was a supporter of NEFAC (North Eastern Federation of Anarchist Communists).

SOURCE: https://blackrosefed.org/intersectionalism-bell-hooks-interview/

The post How Do You Practice Intersectionalism? An Interview with bell hooks appeared first on Void Network.

Interview for New York Times by Jessica Bennett, contributing editor in Opinion, where she writes about gender, politics and personalities.

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The first thing I did when reading Judith Butler’s new book, “Who’s Afraid of Gender?”, was to look up the word “phantasm,” which appears 41 times in the introduction alone. (It means illusion; the “phantasm of gender,” a threat rooted in fear and fantasy.)

The second thing I did was have a good chuckle about the title, because the answer to the question of who is afraid of gender was … well, I am? Even for someone who’s written on gender and feminism for more than a decade and who once carried the title of this newspaper’s “gender editor,” to talk about gender today can feel so fraught, so politicized, so caught in a war of words that debate, or even conversation, seems impossible.

I am perhaps the intended reader of Butler’s book, in which the notoriously esoteric philosopher turned pop celebrity dismantles how gender has been constructed as a threat throughout the modern world — to national security in Russia; to civilization, according to the Vatican; to the American traditional family; to protecting children from pedophilia and grooming, according to some conservatives. In a single word, “gender” holds the power to seemingly drive people mad with fear.

Butler’s latest comes more than three decades after their first and most famous book, “Gender Trouble,” brought the idea of “gender as performance” into the mainstream. As it turns out, Butler — who has written 15 books since — never intended to return to the subject, even as a culture war raged. But then the political became personal: Butler was physically attacked in 2017 while speaking in Brazil, and burned in effigy by protesters who shouted, “Take your ideology to hell.”

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity

Did you ever think you’d see a world in which your ideas would be so widespread — and so fraught?

When I wrote “Gender Trouble,” I was a lecturer. I was teaching five classes, trying to work on this book I thought no one would read. Still, I knew I wasn’t just speaking for myself; there were other people who were strong feminists but also lesbian or gay or trying to figure out gender in ways that weren’t always welcome. But today, the people who are afraid of my ideas are the people who don’t read me. In other words, I don’t think it’s my ideas that they’re afraid of. They’ve come up with something else — a kind of fantasy of what I believe or who I am.

And of course it’s not just my views that are being caricatured, but gender more broadly — gender studies, policies that focus on gender, gender discrimination, gender and health care, anything with “gender” in it is a kind of terrifying prospect, at least for some.

So … who is afraid of gender?

It’s funny, I have a friend, a queer theorist. I told him the book’s name and he said, “Everyone! Everyone’s afraid of gender!”

What’s clear to me is that there is a set of strange fantasies about what gender is — how destructive it is, and how frightening it is — that a number of forces have been circulating: Viktor Orban, Vladimir Putin, Giorgia Meloni, Rishi Sunak, Jair Bolsonaro, Javier Milei, and of course Ron DeSantis, Donald Trump and lots of parents and communities in states like Oklahoma and Texas and Wyoming, who are seeking to pass legislation that bans the teaching of gender or reference to gender in books.

Obviously, those folks are very frightened of gender. They imbue it with power that I actually don’t think it has. But so are feminists who call themselves “gender critical,” or who are trans-exclusionary, or who have taken explicit positions against trans politics.

Can you describe what prompted you to return to this subject?

I was going to Brazil for a conference on the future of democracy. And I was told in advance that there were petitions against me speaking, and that they decided to focus on me because I’m the “papisa,” the female pope, of gender. I’m not quite sure how I got to have that distinction, but apparently I did. I got to the venue early, and I could hear the crowds outside. They’d built a kind of monstrous picture of me with horns, which I took to be overtly antisemitic — with red eyes and kind of a demonic look — with a bikini on. Like, why the bikini?

But in any case, I was burned in effigy. And that freaked me out. And then, when my partner and I were leaving, at the airport, we were attacked: Some woman came at me with a big trolley and she was screaming about pedophilia. I could not understand why.

You thank the young man who threw his body between you and the attacker, taking blows. Was this the first time you’d heard that “pedophilia” association?

I had given a talk on Jewish philosophy, and somebody in the back said, “Hands off our children!” I thought, What? I figured out later that the way that the anti-gender ideology movement works is to say: If you break down the taboo against homosexuality, if you allow gay and lesbian marriage, if you allow sex reassignment, then you’ve departed from all the laws of nature that keep the laws of morality in tact — which means it’s a Pandora’s box; the whole panoply of perversions will emerge.

As I was preparing to interview you, I received a news alert about the “Don’t Say Gay” settlement in Florida, which says that schools cannot teach about L.G.B.T.Q. topics from kindergarten through the 8th grade, but clarifies that discussing them is allowed. You write that words have become “tacitly figured as recruiters and molesters,” which is behind the effort to remove this type of language from the classroom.

Teaching gender, or critical race theory, or even ethnic studies, is regularly characterized as forms of “indoctrination.” So for instance, that woman who was accusing me of supporting pedophilia, suggests that my work or my teaching would be an effort at “seduction” or “grooming.”

In my experience of teaching, people are arguing with each other all the time. There’s so much conflict. It’s chaotic. There are many things going on — but indoctrination is not one of them.

What about the warping of language on the left?

My version of feminist, queer, trans-affirmative politics is not about policing. I don’t think we should become the police. I’m afraid of the police. But I think a lot of people feel that the world is out of control, and one place where they can exercise some control is language. And it seems like moral discourse comes in then: Call me this. Use this term. We agree to use this language. What I like most about what young people are doing — and it’s not just the young, but everybody’s young now, according to me — is the experimentation. I love the experimentation. Like, let’s come up with new language. Let’s play. Let’s see what language makes us feel better about our lives. But I think we need to have a little more compassion for the adjustment process.

I want to talk for a moment about categories. You have occupied many — butch, queer, woman, nonbinary — yet you’ve also said you’re suspicious of them.

At the time that I wrote “Gender Trouble,” I called for a world in which we might think about genders being proliferated beyond the usual binary of man and woman. What would that look like? What would it be? So when people started talking about being “nonbinary,” I thought, well, I am that. I was trying to occupy that space of being between existing categories.

Do you still believe that gender is “performance?”

After “Gender Trouble” was published, there were some from the trans community who had problems with it. And I saw that my approach, what came to be called a “queer approach”— which was somewhat ironic toward categories — for some people, that’s not OK. They need their categories, they need them to be right, and for them gender is not constructed or performed.

Not everybody wants mobility. And I think I’ve taken that into account now.

But at the same time, for me, performativity is enacting who we are, both our social formation and what we’ve done with that social formation. I mean, my gestures: I didn’t make them up out of thin air — there’s a history of Jewish people who do this. I am inside of something, socially, culturally constructed. At the same time, I find my own way in it. And it’s always been my contention that we’re both formed and we form ourselves, and that’s a living paradox.

How do you define gender today?

Oh, goodness. I have, I suppose, revised my theory of gender — but that’s not the point of this book. I do make the point that “gender identity” is not all of what we mean by gender: It’s one thing that belongs to a cluster of things. Gender is also a framework — a very important framework — in law, in politics, for thinking about how inequality gets instituted in the world.

This is your first book with a nonacademic press. Was that a conscious decision?

Oh, yeah. I wanted to reach people.

It’s funny because many of your ideas do reach people, albeit in internet-era sound bites. I’m thinking about, for instance, of “gender is a drag” T-shirts or “Judith Butler explained with cats.” It strikes me that a lot of people who claim to have read you have actually just read the Instagram caption of you.

Well, I don’t blame them for not reading that book. It was tough. And some of those sentences are truly unforgivable. Hopefully I didn’t do that in “Who’s Afraid of Gender?”

I feel like I’m more in touch with people who are mobilizing on the ground at the global level than I have been before. And that pleases me.

______

Jessica Bennett is a contributing editor in the Opinion section of The Times. She teaches journalism at New York University and is the author of “Feminist Fight Club” and “This Is 18.” More about Jessica Bennett

The post Judith Butler Thinks You’re Overreacting – Interview appeared first on Void Network.

These panics aren’t new—my generation was accused of abandoning feminism in favor of Girls Gone Wild — but they do take on unique iterations as the political and cultural landscapes shift. And it’s valuable, I think, to keep redefining what we even mean by the term, to suss out where and what the stakes are, and to interrogate to whom we’re looking for answers. 

Too often, I see these questions addressed in silos. Most of the takes I reference above come from culture writers who have a strong handle on policy, or from policy/politics people who have a decent handle on culture. The radical Lefties are tweeting or zine-ing or Signal-ing their ideas, and often get left out of the larger feminist conversation. The academics are doing their obscure thing in journals that less than a dozen people will read. I consider myself to be adept in three of these realms – the academic, the radical, and the cultural, with a begrudgingly decent handle on what’s going on in mainstream politics. And since I teach Feminist Studies, I am thinking about these questions constantly, from a variety of angles. 

I don’t have answers, but I do have thoughts. And the first is that, of course, feminism is not a monolith. Hand-wringing essays about the state of feminism first need to clarify which tendency of feminist thought, movement, or identity they mean. 

When I teach Feminist Studies, we spend 15 weeks with writers who mostly disagree with each other, other than on the fact that sex and gender are positionalities that deserve attention. We go through an overview of the “waves”: the first wave feminism was about Voting Rights for women, and this was parallel to the fight against slavery (some suffragettes were also abolitionists; many were not). Second wave feminism covers a lot of disparate views from roughly the 1960s-1980s, and involved attention to women and work (middle-class white women wanted access to the white-collar workforce, women of color were like, ‘hey we’ve been working in your homes, we have different demands when it comes to work!’). The second wave also coincided with the Black Power, anti-Vietnam War, and gay liberation movements; some feminists overlapped in these circles, many did not. It is in this period, beginning roughly in the late 1970s, when the Sex Wars began—this is the name given to the debates that split feminists on questions of pornography, kink, sex work, and other sexual practices. Third wave feminism also contained many different facets: on one end there was the (largely, though not exclusively white) riot grrrrl movement of radical punks fighting rape culture through zines and sex positivity, as well as more radical ideas surrounding transformative justice emerging from women of color organizing in anti-racist spaces; on the other end there was the beginning seeds of Girl Boss Feminism, and generally attention to “choice” and “empowerment” (e.g. Sex and the City, Ally McBeal, Girls Gone Wild, etc.).

Fourth wave is often described as “third wave, but on the internet,” and also with more attention to intersectionality. We are, arguably, in a fifth wave, which is an extension of the fourth wave, but in a post-Trump, post-#MeToo, post-George Floyd, pandemic world. (Importantly: I always begin my feminist waves lesson by naming that thinking and culture-building around sex and gender existed pre-colonization in more expansive ways, and that the waves are a decidedly Western, academic snapshot of gender and sexual liberation.) 

It is extremely important to reiterate that most versions of feminism that we have today do not have actually radical aims, even if the people involved are discursively critical of systems like capitalism and white supremacy. It is unsurprising to me how quickly and easily feminism has been co-opted because it’s not inherently interested in interrogating the root causes of systems of domination, especially if we continue to place its origin in a voting movement that occurred in the midst of chattel slavery and not long after violent colonial displacement. In addition, a lot of people think feminism is whatever ‘feminist nonprofits’ are up to, and nonprofits are counter-revolutionary forces that inevitably squash structural change. 

Columnist Michelle Goldberg — decidedly a liberal, but also someone informed about radical feminist movement history — names something true: “much of feminism right now fits into two broad categories: discourse and NGOs,” she writes. In an interview with Ezra Klein, she bemoans, to her credit, that if someone asked where they could go to get involved with feminist organizing, she’d tell them to write a check to NARAL. In that same interview, Klein asks her what else, other than reproductive justice, does ‘feminism’ (even if it is only a label) care about? Goldberg goes on to talk about thinking more expansively about reproductive justice — from domestic workers issues to SNAP benefits, and also talks about the relationship between feminism and trans justice. 

But historically and contemporarily there are feminist movements that (or at least feminist thinkers who) are committed to radical liberation. Angela Davis and Elaine Brown insisted on bringing feminist analysis to the Black Power movement; the Combahee River Collective did the same in their socialist organizations. Women, trans and queer people have always been a part of anti-capitalist and anti-state organizing—and women, trans, and queer people (especially of color) have always been harmed by capitalism and the state — and it is their lived experiences that give us a feminism with teeth. The Black, Brown, and Indigenous feminists, anarcha-feminists, and Marxist feminists are still doing feminist work today, but it is often in movement spaces that aren’t seen as explicitly feminist (like Marxist, anarchist, or Indigenous organizations). Or, they are not ‘organizing’ in a coherent way, and are instead practicing survival in a way that Saidiya Hartman describes as “waywardness.”  

So there is the feminism of the NYT and NPR policy analysts who focus on #MeToo, Roe and Dobbs, representational politics in media government, “transgender issues”; there is the feminism of the radical Leftists who are invested, from different angles, in similar things (fighting rape culture, ensuring safe abortions for everyone, abolishing the government and cultivating community skills in people of all genders, fighting for gender liberation beyond the binary, and, I would add: attention to sex work and sexual liberation, though there are very disparate views on what liberated sexuality means). In this more ‘political’ sense of things, there are wins and losses and a lack of clarity on who is doing what for what ends. 

And then there is the terrain of culture, which is what Marxist scholar and organizer Stuart Hall argued was a worthwhile “site of struggle.” Culture—a nebulous concept, but what I’ll limit here to popular culture in the form of movies, TV, internet, and, as Goldberg shorthands, ‘discourse’ — is before and after and in between what happens in the streets, in organizing spaces, and in government meetings. 

And so it is worth considering: what does girl culture have to do with feminism and, for those of us invested in it, with liberation? Should we take ‘girl dinner’ and Barbie as seriously as we take Roe and MeToo? I think, if nothing else, we should consider how they are in conversation, without falling into binary panic/defense modes. 

In one of my favorite responses to the Cristo piece — the one cited above which spends the bulk of its argument on the idea that girly culture signals the desire of women to exist in a time “before feminism”— Claire Fallon and Emma Gray write: 

“While in theory girlhood precedes the adult concerns of feminism, in reality, these concerns often intrude into the lives of girls, many of whom must negotiate sex and sexual identity, enter and navigate the workforce, access abortion care, and deal with misogyny that limits their lives from the moment of their birth. Many of us began to work out our own feminist politics as children, and associate the aesthetics of girlhood strongly with our first forays into questioning the patriarchal structures around us. Girlhood offers certain comfortable, universal markers, but not all girls are the same, even if they’re wearing the same color and going to the same concert. One girl may live in near-total political ignorance; another may develop a sharp socialist feminist critique of the world she is growing up in; yet another may go down a reactionary path.” 

These particularities are key to how we continue to move forward with building movements, political theory, and engaging with the various tangles of the discursive. How do we grapple with cultural forces that may encourage problematic consumption habits while also acknowledging that fashion, music, movies, and other products we engage for pleasure don’t necessarily imply that we are dupes of patriarchy and capitalism? 

Some of the most righteously dedicated anti-capitalist, anti-state activists I know are girly, bimbo-leaning sex workers. A young woman who runs a popular Taylor Swift fan account was imprisoned for refusing to join the Israeli military. Queer femmes have long been wearing floofy dresses to the riot. The idea that “girliness” precludes a commitment to liberation is a view that is not only narrow about gender, but also about justice. A popular feminist writer, for example, called for the stigmatization of glitter (with important evidence that it’s very bad for the planet), saying that the ultimate goal would be federal legislation, and urged us to call our state reps. What limited imagination it shows to anchor our ire in cultural pleasures and to reify that the state—an entity that enacts violence on people at home and abroad everyday— is our best solution. I am not saying we shouldn’t interrogate our consumption habits — we absolutely should, and I was actually convinced to never consider a glitter purchase again — but I am invested in a much more expansive political project than attacking expressions of femininity and bolstering legislative representatives. 

I learned cultural criticism via British Cultural Studies, in which people like Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams turned to media, subculture, and popular culture to wrestle with what it meant for radical change. These folks celebrate the possibility of resistant media— even if it was at risk of cooptation, they argued it was still evidence of counter-hegemony. Which is to say, they believed that consumers had agency — “there are no masses, only ways of seeing masses,” said Williams— who could live with contradiction (feminists reading romance novels was an early articulated example of this) and still be, for example, down for revolution. In contrast, the Frankfurt School, led by theorists like Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer, insisted that popular culture was a propagandistic distraction from revolutionary struggle. In short, as Douglas Kellner explains, “British cultural studies would valorize resistant moments in media culture and audience interpretations and use of media artifacts, while the Frankfurt school tended, with some exceptions, to see mass culture as a homogeneous and potent form of ideological domination.” 

I have always been a cheerleader for a BCS approach to culture, probably because I was raised on movies and television, and my love of media has not kept me from spending the last 20 years in anarchist and other radical organizing spaces. Similarly, my relationship to girliness has really only strengthened my commitment to radical politics. I wrote a whole book about how my femme gender is completely intertwined with my working-class upbringing, and so then also my commitment to anti-capitalism. When I giggle at ‘girl dinner’ memes, or feel influenced by bow trends I am, maybe, treading close to the edge of ironic misogyny and toxic consumerism. But I am also having fun. And then I am switching over to the Signal thread to strategize with my comrades about how to ensure we protect our space from nazis. 

So where does this leave us with feminism? I think Cristo is right that “feminism is a bit adrift,” and that, as she notes: 

“It doesn’t help that the major touchstones of the past several years — MeToo, Donald Trump, COVID, Dobbs — are fucking miserable, and the cultural objects that accompanied them have tended to be correspondingly somber or pedantic. We’ve seen an explosion of rape-revenge plots, and cynical, emaciated protagonists dissociating through their lives.” 

Indeed, the cultural tone of ‘feminist’ media has been, for many years, dour— the most buzzy films of the past few years that focused on women’s lives included the dismal Promising Young Woman, Women Talking, She Said, and on television, Euphoria. But for Cristo, the turn to levity and ‘girlishness’ in this year’s buzzy media like Barbie—and I’d add Bottoms, and Poor Things—is a problem. She insists the turn to girlhood is “an opting out.” Instead, it seems, she’s arguing for serious grown-up feminists to stay the course with the miserable, in every facet of our lives. 

Can we unpack the cultural phenomena that, on their surface, appear to be an opting out — from bows to Barbie, from Taylor to tradwives — and discern what is legitimately reactionary, and wrestle with the stakes from there? And rather than determining the stakes from a liberal concern about what it means for the next election, the kind of feminism I care about can be a tool to reflect on what it might mean for more radical visions of the future. 

I don’t know how much value there is in feminism as a coherent movement anymore—not when so many marginalized genders feel isolated from the focus on ‘women’ (see TERFs), not when so much of the thinking is funneled through nonprofits who treat their feminist workers like garbage, not when it remains overwhelmingly white, not when it often does more to harm than help sex workers (see SWERFs), not when it too often colludes with the state rather than envisioning ways of being outside and against it. But we also can’t deny attention to the ways in which capitalism and white supremacy interact uniquely with sex, sexuality, and gender. 

I’d like to turn to another artifact of culture as a potential offering. In Shiva Baby, the debut film from Emma Seligman, the queer Zoomer who went on to bring us Bottoms, Danielle (Rachel Sennott) reminds us, hilariously and perfectly, what feminism really is and ought to be. In a very common ‘what kind of job are you going to get with a feminist studies degree’ conversation, Danielle responds stressfully:

It’s a lens! Patriarchy shapes our lives as foundationally as capitalism, colonialism, and white supremacy, but it has been too easy for feminist movements to turn gender into an additive identity rather than an affront to power systems. 

There’s been a lot of pushback against nuance lately, and for important reason: there is no need for nuance in genocide. But that’s not a good blanket strategy for wrestling with the complexity of most of our contemporary ills. Which is not to say taking a clear stance against capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy is in need of nuance, but that addressing the unique particularities of how harm impacts us in distinct ways — based on gender, sexuality, geographic location, and so on — would benefit from an analytical framework. For me, that means looking to theorists—the formal kind and the organic kind— who articulate ways of seeing the world with attention to power and oppression at the intersection (or even more helpfully, the assemblage) of gender, race, class, and so on. I value a feminist lens, but importantly a feminist lens that is also always-already anti-capitalist, anti-state, and anti-white supremacy. And then I consider what that lens can offer to whatever unique situation I’m unpacking in its very particular context. 

My hope for feminism is that it can be a tool like this, a lens we can use to assess harm, and, an aid to the plurality of overlapping revolutionary struggles—as well as a tool for survival and care in everyday life. And a part of this care, this process of reclamation, certainly needs to involve a revisitation and transformation of the period in our lives when we first learned about the deadly reality of patriarchy: girlhood.

_________

Raechel Anne Jolie (she/they) is a writer and educator based in Cleveland, Ohio. She holds a PhD in Critical Media Studies, with a minor in Feminist & Critical Sexuality Studies from the University of Minnestoa. Her writing has appeared in The Baffler, Bitch, Teen Vogue, In These Times, among other publications. Rust Belt Femme is their first memoir and received recognition in NPR’s Favorite Books of 2020, was a finalist in the Heartland Bookseller’s Award, and was the winner of the Independent Publisher Book Award in LGBTQ Nonfiction.

SOURCE: radical love letters

https://raechelannejolie.substack.com/p/girl-culture-panic-and-the-failures

The post Girl Culture Panic & the Failures of Feminism- Raechel Anne Jolie appeared first on Void Network.

Last Tuesday evening, Mahsa (Zina) Amini, a 22-year-old ethnic Kurd from the western city of Saqez in the Kurdistan province, was detained outside a metro station in Tehran by Iran’s notorious morality police.

Mahsa Amini was travelling with her family from Iran’s western province of Kurdistan to the capital, Tehran, to visit relatives when she was reportedly arrested for failing to meet the country’s strict rules on women’s dress, ie, not wearing the hijab and her trousers “correctly” and was brutally beaten in a police van, according to witnesses.

The news comes weeks after Iran’s hardline president, Ebrahim Raisi, called for stricter enforcement of the country’s mandatory dress code, which has required all women to wear the hijab head-covering.

According to Hrana, an Iranian human rights organisation, Amini’s family were told during her arrest that she would be released after a “re-education session”. But Amini was in a coma her family said, adding that they were told by hospital staff that she was brain dead.

She was accused of improperly wearing her hijab in a country which strictly enforces the compulsory covering of women’s hair and bodies. According to witnesses, she was beaten while inside a police van that took her to a detention center. Amini died on Friday in the hospital after spending three days in a coma. 

Police in Tehran immediately denied responsibility for her murder and said she suffered “sudden heart failure” while waiting with other women at the facility to be “educated.” Amini’s arrest and death rapidly set off protests across the country, initially starting outside the hospital where she died and spreading to other provinces. Throughout social media, she has already become a symbol for the struggle against the compulsory hijab and police across the world. 

While Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi called Amini’s family to express his condolences, he’s mostly dealt with the crisis — one of the biggest of his first year in office so far — by brutally repressing the Iranians who have taken to the streets. The repression has particularly targeted the Kurdish regions that have gone on general strike in protest against the killing of Mahsa. At least 10 major cities have been shut down since Monday despite intense police repression. 

Hundreds of brave Kurdish women protesting the mandatory hijab took off their scarves during Amini’s funeral and waved it in the air while chanting slogans in Kurdish and Farsi: “Death to the dictator!”; “Killing for the scarf, how long will it be?”; and “Woman, Life, Freedom.” Security forces later shot some of the protesters and attacked many with tear gas, injuring at least 30. 

Elsewhere in Iran, security forces have cut off internet access and attacked and arrested protestors, beating people indiscriminately in the streets and targeting activists in the women’s movement. Like in previous struggles, the student movement has been at the forefront of organizing mobilizations, with major protests breaking out in campuses across the country despite the presence of repressive forces and potentially severe consequences for students.

In a joint statement, fourteen student organizations from schools including Amirkabir University, Tarbiat Modares University, and Allameh Tabataba’i University called for a “dissolution of the Guidance Patrol and Morality Police as one of the most important institutions of repression post-revolution” in Iran. 

The protests have not only led to a deeper questioning of the police, but also a deeper questioning of the regime among broader sectors of society. At protests, demonstrators are using anti-regime slogans such as “Death to Khamenei!” referring to regime supreme leader Ali Khamenei. Other slogans included “Death to the dictator!” and “No fear! We’re all together!” Importantly, some protesters are condemning the brutal authoritarian rule of both the U.S.-backed Shah’s regime, which lasted from 1941 until the 1979 revolution, and the current Islamic regime against the monarchist perspective of some Iranians who advocate for a return to Iran’s monarchy through the son of the late Shah. 

The Iranian diaspora, which is estimated to include at least six million Iranians around the world, has also been active in organizing protests against Amini’s atrocious murders, particularly in Europe, Toronto, and New York. 

Iran’s Deepening Fault Lines 

Mahsa Amini’s shocking murder and resulting social unrest are creating a difficult political backdrop for Raisi who is set to speak at the UN general assembly in New York on Wednesday. 

Beyond quelling the popular discontent, Raisi faces an erosion of legitimacy of Iran’s regime which has strong theocratic features. This political crisis is also marked by a widening of the rift between the two wings that have come to dominate Iranian politics: the “reformists” and the more conservative “hardliners.” Thus far, pro-reform figures like former President Mohammad Khatami have questioned the regime’s response to Amini’s death. Former lawmaker Ali Motahari also wrote that he feared that the incident could portray the Iranian government internationally as an entity like the Taliban in Afghanistan. 

Other reformists have gone further to release statements against mandatory hijab and the morality police. Reformist lawmaker Parvaneh Salahshouri, the leader of the Women’s Faction in Parliament, wrote against the compulsory hijab in 2018 and, as recently as August 2, 21 prominent reformists had also denounced mandatory hijab laws. 

Recent reports on the frail and ailing health of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, have also opened up questions about political uncertainty and even deeper factional divisions, as Khamenei’s death would open up a power struggle over his successor. 

The deepening crisis of the Iranian regime cannot be seen outside of the dissolution of the Iranian nuclear deal, which had provided temporary relief from some sanctions — a strategic aim of both wings of the regime. The imposition of Trump’s “maximum pressure” sanctions, which Biden is continuing, have plunged the country into an unprecedented economic crisis, primarily affecting the workers and poorest sectors of Iranian society, who expressed their rage at the economic situation during two important waves of class struggle in 2018 and 2019. 

Since then, the regime has responded to the unstable situation by expressing its more bonapartist features and relying heavily on its repressive apparatus to crackdown on any discontent. In addition to the increased repression, last year’s presidential elections underscored the undemocratic aspects of the Iranian “republic” in which the 12-person Guardian Council responsible for approving candidates for elections essentially blocked the nomination of anyone who can possibly challenge Raisi as a way to effectively secure the election of the hardliner.

These tendencies toward bonapartism are undoubtedly linked to the growing political influence of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), a powerful security force and internal police which by some measures controls two thirds of Iran’s GDP and is increasingly competing with the clergy for power. Their historic role can be traced back to helping to consolidate the Islamic regime during the Iranian counterrevolution and the functioning of the IRGC expanded greatly in the political crisis set off by the aftermath of the 2009 elections which they played an important role in suppressing. 

In recent months, the increased persecution of prominent political activists in Iran, especially women like Leila Hosseinzadeh and Sepideh Rashno, has put a spotlight on the rigid discipline of the reactionary regime which beyond the oppression of women (Iran is one of the world’s top executioners of women) and the brutal punishment of the queer community as the recent death sentences of queer activists, Zahra Seddiqi Hamedani and Elham Choubdar show, also extends to the denial of basic democratic rights like the recognition of independent trade unions. 

Developing Tendencies toward Crisis and Class Struggle 

Since the beginning of 2022, the social atmosphere in the country has also been marked by  waves of protests and strikes, mostly targeting water shortages and the growing cost of living crisis exacerbated by the war in Ukraine. As Red Flag recently reported, the Iranian economy is facing a serious crisis: 

The currency hit its lowest value ever in June and annual inflation is sitting at 41.5 percent and climbing, according to figures from the Statistical Center of Iran. The price of essential foodstuffs has increased by 90.2 percent, and household expenditures have tripled, while real wages continue to decline.

The effects of crippling maximum pressure sanctions, coupled with the seemingly comatose nuclear deal, has led the regime to impose austerity as a way to make workers pay for the crisis that is crushing them. Already, Raisi has introduced a slew measures like cuts to wheat subsidies and an elimination of pharmaceutical subsidies. As a result, there has been a thirteen-fold increase in the price of bread, and bread riots quickly emerged in the southern province of Khuzestan, which is home to a large Arab minority and a frequent flashpoint of struggle due to environmental problems in the region and the presence of the militant sugarcane workers of the Haft Tappeh union. 

Within the workers’ movement, teachers have also led struggles related to the cost-of-living crisis and have spearheaded a series of nationwide strikes, rallies and occupations, including huge demonstrations across the country on May Day this past year as part of the Coordinating Council of Teachers’ Trade Unions. On a political scale, new Marxist organizations (largely operating underground) like the “Labour Organised Action Committee” (LOAC) are emerging among the student and workers’ movements as revolutionary socialist ideas re-emerge among the Iranian vanguard which has been involved in the recent waves of struggles from the mass uprising in 2019 to the oil workers’ strike in 2021. 

From Fury to Freedom 

The social explosions emerging in Iran have the potential to build threads of continuity with the historic struggle of the Iranian masses against their oppressive regimes and the threat of imperialism. In order for the mobilizations that are emerging against women’s oppression to advance in a way that responds to the interests of the oppressed and exploited in Iran, it’s important to tie the struggle against Iran’s particularly undemocratic and patriarchal regime with a struggle against the capitalist system that sustains the bourgeois mullahs. 

In that sense, the convergence of the burgeoning women’s movement with Iran’s combative working class that has emerged as an important actor in recent struggles can play an important role in pushing these struggles forward. Let us not forget that the Iranian revolution was set off by the Shah’s violent suppression of protests and authoritarian rule. It was the oil workers’ strike in response to this repression that set off a general strike that brought the Shah’s regime to its knees. The oil workers in Iran today have the potential to wield their strategic power in a similar way.

And the Iranian revolution was not only a revolution against the Shah’s regime but a revolution against the imperialist forces that benefited from his rule. These lessons are important today, as imperialist countries like the U.S. and France denounce the murder of Mahsa Amini as a way to conceal their own interests. These are the so-called “democratic” countries whose police also brutally murder women, whose regimes deny the right to abortion, and impose racist hijab bans limiting a woman’s autonomy from another angle. These are the countries that impose maximum pressure sanctions that inflict suffering on Iranian workers everyday. 

Against the Iranian ruling class and foriegn powers, the involvement of the left can be decisive in fighting back independently against these oppressive attacks. After all, it was Marxist women who organized the first massive protests against compulsory veiling during International Women’s Day in 1979. 

The international Left and feminist movements around the world should also take up the banner of the Iranian women, youth, and workers in struggle, in the spirit of the George Floyd protests which spread globally. The problems we face as a class go beyond our borders and can only be resolved internationally.

_________

Source: https://www.leftvoice.org/say-her-name-protests-erupt-across-iran-after-police-murder-of-mahsa-amini/

written by

Maryam Alaniz

Maryam Alaniz is a socialist journalist, activist, and PhD student living in NYC. She is an editor for the international section of Left Voice. Follow her on Twitter: @MaryamAlaniz

The post Iran on Flames after Morality Police murder of Mahsa Amini- Videos and Reports appeared first on Void Network.

____

There are three basic freedoms: freedom to say NO; freedom to move away; and freedom to change what does not work.

Individual freedom requires social support. To say NO, you need others to respect your choice and not force you to obey. To move freely, you need others to support your movement and not erect walls and roadblocks. To change what does not work, you need others who are affected to accept the change.

Basically, freedom is a social relationship, where me having my freedom depends on you having yours. A system is required to secure this social arrangement.

Systems shape us

We create systems in order to make things happen. A system has three elements: a purpose or goal; a set of rules, policies, and procedures designed to achieve the goal; and relationships that are shaped by applying the rules, policies, and procedures.

The systems we create are not separate from us; they organize us. Consider competitive sports. There is a goal (to win). There are rules of the game and penalties for violating them. And there are participants, whose behavior and relationships are shaped by the game.

The goal of the capitalist system is to extract capital from human labor. Achieving that goal requires a system with rules, penalties, and social relationships that all support the goal.

This three-part essay examines how the capitalist system robs us of all three basic freedoms; what blocks us from claiming our freedom; and how we can create a social system that supports freedom for all.

Part 1. My Body Is Not Your Capital-Producing Machine – Or Is It?

It is commonly believed that we have little control over our work lives, but that life outside of work – family and social relationships – is ours to shape.

In reality, time outside of work is largely consumed with two things: replacing the energy we put out on the job so we can work again the next day, and raising the next generation of workers to replace the current one. Production depends on this reproduction of the worker.

The tight connection between production and reproduction is difficult to see because they are organized differently. Production is organized socially, with billions of workers linked in global chains of manufacture and distribution. Reproduction is organized privately, with individuals and families expected to replenish and reproduce themselves with no outside support.

Employers benefit from privatized reproduction. They can hire workers to produce while avoiding the cost of replacing them, even though their business depends on it. According to the Canadian Federation of Independent Business,

Paid maternity leave is a totally ridiculous kind of demand to expect employers to pay. Those who want to have babies should pay for them.

Because production and reproduction are differently organized, it seems they exist in two different spheres: an economic sphere of work shaped by capitalism, where one has little control; and a personal sphere of friendship and family, not shaped by capitalism, where one is presumed to have total control.

In reality, work and life-outside-of-work are parts of a single capitalist system. Despite the relentless message that we make our own lives and ‘there is always a choice,’ it is impossible to have a personal life that is separate from, or exists outside of, the capitalist system. Lack of freedom on the job requires a lack of freedom outside it.

The more authorities restrict reproduction and individual behavior, the more the myth of two spheres breaks down to reveal only one sphere, capitalism, that dominates every aspect of life.

You cannot refuse, and you cannot leave

The goal of capitalist production is to produce capital. Capital is profit that is invested to extract more profit. Profit comes from paying workers less than the value of what they produce. The lower the wages, the higher the profit.

Jeff Bezos rakes in billions of dollars in profit by paying workers far less than the value of their work. He then uses this profit to purchase other businesses that enable him to exploit even more workers and make even more profit. Bezos is accumulating capital. The more capital he accumulates, the greater his power over society.

No one freely chooses to work all their life to produce capital to make others rich. The worker must be robbed of the freedom to say no, to leave, or to change the system. To maintain this social arrangement everyone, including the worker, must do their part.

Employers rely on the State to ensure the conditions for capital accumulation. As Braverman explained in Labor and Monopoly Capital,

In the most elementary sense, the State is guarantor of the conditions, the social relations, of capitalism, and the protector of the ever-more unequal distribution of property which this system brings about.

The State gives employers the legal authority to dictate the conditions of employment. Unionized workers can modify some of these conditions, but they have no legal right to challenge the nature of the work or how it is organized, to determine staffing levels, or to curb executive pay. All major work-related decisions fall under management rights. The State uses the legal system, the police, and the military to enforce those rights.

States allow employers to use, abuse, and discard workers as the cost of doing business. When hazardous working conditions cause sickness, injury, and death, the State sides with the employer. Workers’ claims for compensation are minimized or denied, fines levied against companies are too small to change anything, and no employer ever goes to jail for killing a worker.

States use legislation and monetary policy to prevent workers’ demands from cutting into profits. The legal minimum wage sets the bar so low that the average worker must go into debt to pay for basic essentials.

The only option for those who cannot work or refuse to do so is appeal to the State for support. Such support is notoriously difficult to get and kept miserably low to deter all but the most desperate. Ontario makes it easier to access euthanasia than to access social support.

States restrict travel in order to block workers from escaping to a better situation. Around the world, millions of people are incarcerated for the ‘crime’ of crossing a border in search of a better life.

Border restrictions trap workers in low-waged areas. Employers are free to move production in and out of these low-waged areas, giving them leverage to lower the pay of workers in higher-waged areas.

States use immigration controls to manage the size and composition of the workforce to benefit employers. Lower unemployment increases the pressure to raise wages, and importing more workers lowers that pressure. Denying equal rights to newcomers enables employers to underpay and overwork them, exerting a downward pressure on the pay and conditions of all workers.

All these measures ensure that, no matter how hard they labor or how much they protest, the worker is blocked from escaping their assigned role as a capital-producing machine.

What personal life?

The concept of ‘personal life’ ignores how much our lives are restricted outside work.

The modern family is a State-regulated institution. Laws dictate who can marry and who cannot, who is a family member and who is not, and how many unrelated people may live in a dwelling. Laws enforce gender norms, restrict access to contraception and abortion, and determine at what age a person may engage in adult activities.

One cannot leave a family at will. The State can forcibly return runaway youngsters to their families, place them in alternate families, or confine them in detention centers. Spouses who want to leave their marriages and parents seeking relief from childcare duties can be held financially responsible for ‘dependents.’

The State defines what it means to be a fit parent and can remove children from those it declares unfit. The State decides if families separated by national borders will be reunited or remain apart, and whether family members will be deported.

State laws compel young people to attend school, whether they want to or not, and parents are expected to enforce this law. In Jacksonville, Florida,

if a child has more than five unexcused absences [from school] in a calendar month or 15 unexcused absences in a 90-day period, parents can be arrested, charged with a misdemeanor, and face up to 60 days in jail.

Not free to be me

Organizing reproduction in family units demands distinct gender roles; men are cast as the primary producers, and women as the primary care-givers. Someone has to care for the young, sick, and infirm, and it’s typically the lower-paid woman who is paid less precisely because of her care-taking duties.

A family system based on reproducing couples allows no room for gender fluidity or for being intersex or trans. Those who do not conform to their socially assigned gender role risk punishment in the legal system or treatment in the medical system. As long as reproduction is rooted in the family, we cannot escape the pressure of binary gender roles and all the oppression they generate.

Capitalism favors standardized production, where large numbers of identical objects can be quickly produced with less labor and more profit. To produce uniform outcomes, the worker must make the same moves over and over again. This assembly-line model has been adopted in every industry, including hospitals and schools. As one principal instructed his teachers,

When I stand in the hallway, I should be able to hear all fourth grades saying the same thing. Do not deviate from the scripted program and do not fall behind in the pacing plan.

The demand for uniformity dominates every area of life. To maximize profit, the capitalist class engineer plants and animals to eliminate variation, reduce workers to the status of interchangeable cogs in a machine, and convince people of all nations to desire the same things and behave in the same ways.

Shut up and conform

Questioning makes progress possible; it invites us to examine what we are doing and why, and to consider different options. Capitalism makes questioning policies or those who make them a serious offense, even treasonous. We cannot speak freely or share vital information. The relentless persecution of whistle-blowers Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, and Steven Donziger serves as a general warning not to question authority or hold it accountable.

A system that demands conformity cannot tolerate dissent or diversity. In the past, people who thought, felt, or behaved differently were considered interesting, odd, eccentric, colorful, or characters. Today, such people risk being labeled ‘mentally ill,’ forcibly drugged, and confined to a psychiatric institution, possibly indefinitely.

The social power of modern psychiatry cannot be explained on the basis of its scientific validity or clinical effectiveness, both of which are highly contested. Its influence comes from its usefulness to the capitalist system.

Since slavery days, the State has partnered with medicine and psychiatry to enforce conformity and obedience. Today, the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) catalogs unacceptable behavior in every area of life, with unacceptable behavior meaning protesting how things are, or disturbing others with your protest.

Being trapped in an oppressive social system is so painful that many people break down, lash out, use drugs, escape into fantasy, and so on. Mass misery cannot be acknowledged without bringing the entire capitalist system into question. Instead, modern medical systems practice damage control, where the sick and injured are patched up and returned to the same situations that harmed them.

Controlling fertility

States control reproduction to manage the size and composition of the workforce; minimize the cost of social support; and enforce social control. What the pregnant person wants or does not want is not considered.

To lower the birth rate, China imposed a limit of one child per family in 1980. Violators could be punished with fines, job loss, forced abortions, and loss of access to social services. As the birth rate fell, the one-child policy was replaced with a two-child policy in 2016, followed by a three-child policy in 2021.

To raise the birth rate, Nazi Germany outlawed all forms of birth control, including abortion, with stiff penalties for violators. ‘German-blooded’ women with large families were awarded the Mother’s Cross: bronze for up to five children; silver for six or seven; and gold for eight or more.

To increase the enslaved labor force in the US, Black women and girls were forcibly impregnated and compelled to bear their rapists’ children. When importing enslaved people was outlawed in 1808, forced reproduction became even more important to the slave economy.

Planters advertised for [Black women] as they did for breeding cows or mares, in farm magazines and catalogues. They shared tips with one another on how to get maximum value out of their breeders. They sold or lent enslaved men as studs and were known to lock teenage boys and girls together to mate in a kind of bullpen. They propagated new slaves themselves, and allowed their sons to [do so].

To minimize the cost of social support and reduce the risk of rebellion, States sterilize those they consider ‘surplus’ or socially unfit, including Black, Indigenous, imprisoned, addicted, disabled, and poor people.

During the Great Depression, the International Congress of Eugenics met in New York City to discuss the mass sterilization of unemployed workers. One speaker declared,

A major portion of this vast army of unemployed are social inadequates, and in many cases mental defectives, who might have been spared the misery they are now facing if they had never been born.

The US-funded program to sterilize Puerto Rican women had two goals: to reduce the number of poor people on the island; and to promote the migration of women workers to New York, which would be easier if they had no children.

Between the 1930s and the 1970s, approximately one-third of the female population of Puerto Rico was sterilized, making it highest rate of sterilization in the world.

In the US today, 31 states plus Washington, DC, legally allow the forced sterilization of people with disabilities

Forced birth

When the US Supreme Court abolished the legal right to abortion, it shattered the belief that our bodies belong to us, and that life-outside-of-work is ours to shape.

When states coerce and force women, girls and people with the capacity for pregnancy to remain pregnant against their will, they create human chattel and incubators of them. By doing so, state lawmakers force their bodies into the service of state interests.

States typically prioritize the welfare of the fetus over that of the parent. Prospective parents are bombarded with advice on how to produce a healthy child and can be penalized for behaviors that risk fetal health. In the US today, a miscarriage can get you charged with manslaughter or murder. In El Salvador, a women was sentenced to 50 years in prison after a stillbirth.

Protecting the pregnant person is not a priority. There are no public warnings that pregnancy can cause severe pain, traumatic injury, hemorrhage, sepsis, sterility, disability, and death.

Women in the US are 14 times more likely to die by carrying a pregnancy to term than by having an abortion. In Mississippi, a Black woman is 118 times as likely to die from carrying a pregnancy to term than from an abortion. The United States is the most dangerous place in the industrialized world to give birth, ranking 55th overall in the world.

Because staying pregnant is more dangerous than having an abortion, a complete abortion ban in the US would increase the number of pregnancy-related deaths by an estimated 21 percent overall, and 33 percent for Black women. These figures do not include the rise in deaths from unsafe abortions.

The Supreme Court refused to consider these matters. Justice Alito wrote,

We do not pretend to know how our political system or society will respond to today’s decision overruling Roe and Casey. And even if we could foresee what will happen, we would have no authority to let that knowledge influence our decision.

It seems counter-productive for capitalism to restrict abortion. Women need to control their fertility so they can work outside the home. Denying this control has a devastating impact on their earning potential, as well as disrupting industries that depend on female labor.

The capitalist class are not united on all things. For some sections, social control is the highest priority. They rightly fear that people who are free to choose in any area of life will push for freedom on the job. To prevent that, they claim the right to dictate what people can and cannot do, and use the State to impose their beliefs on society.

Authoritarian

A tiny elite can only rule a large majority by robbing them of the choice to live any other way. By definition, such rule is authoritarian.

As the gap grows between the wealthy capitalist class and the impoverished working class, the risk of rebellion rises. To maintain social control, governments all over the world are becoming more authoritarian. Two recent US examples include the Trump insurrection and the proliferation of forced-birth laws.

In Canada, a seemingly liberal government has adopted an unprecedented number of Secret Orders-in-Council that are never published and cannot be accessed by Parliament or the public. Secret decision-making enables elites to enact policies that ordinary people would reject, such as exporting billions of dollars in weaponry to the US and Saudi Arabia. A genuine democracy has no need for secret policies.

Technological advances make it easier to enforce authoritarian control. A 2011 report warned,

Within the next few years, it will be technically possible and financially feasible for authoritarian governments to record nearly everything that is said or done within their borders – every phone conversation, electronic message, social media interaction, the movements of nearly every person and vehicle, and video from every street corner.

Fear of majority rebellion has spurred increased funding for police and expanded police powers.

The budgets of modern police departments are staggeringly high and ever increasing, with no parallel in history, producing incarceration rates unseen around the world. If police and prisons made us safe, we would have the safest society in world history — but the opposite is true.

That is how afraid of us they are.

Fed Up

Having suffered through a lethal pandemic, most people are working harder and longer for less, while profits and executive pay soar. Inflation is rapidly rising, yet the modest demand that wages at least match inflation is rejected as excessive and inflationary. Corporate profiteers get no such criticism, even though fatter profits account for more than 50 percent of increased prices.

A US report found, “markups and profits skyrocketed in 2021 to their highest recorded level since the 1950s.” The average price markup was 72 percent higher than a company’s costs, pushing net profits to the highest value on record. The authors conclude,

Since markups are unusually and suddenly so high, there is room for reversing them with little economic harm and likely societal benefit, including lower prices and less inequality.

They must have missed the capitalist memo that profits are sacred and workers are expendable.

Instead of forcing corporations to lower prices or raise wages, officials are jacking up interest rates on loans and mortgages. This has the effect of undercutting wages, driving workers deeper into debt, and making it more difficult to pay for essentials, such as food, housing, and medical care.

Understandably, confidence in capitalist institutions is falling. Only 36 percent of Americans think the US system of government is sound, and only 13 percent of Americans are satisfied with how things are going in the US.

When the majority lose faith that the existing system can solve their problems, they look for alternatives. One result is a global resurgence of working-class rebellion with millions of people protesting their suffering and demanding fundamental social change.

__________

Written by Susan Rosenthal

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Source: https://susanrosenthal.com/capitalism/my-body-is-not-your-capital-producing-machine-or-is-it/

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