Under the Banner of King Death: telling the story of piracy from below

The graphic novel is an adaptation of historian Marcus Rediker’s Villains of All Nations

Reviews & Culture
Dave Clinch
Tuesday 05 March 2024

SOCIALIST WORKER

Issue 2894

Under the Banner of King Death gives a visual perspective on the history of piracy

A new book—Under the Banner of King Death—is from the team that produced Prophet Against Slavery about the life of the abolitionist Benjamin Lay.

It is an adaptation of Villains of All Nations by distinguished professor of history Marcus Rediker, which examines the period 1660 to 1720, known as the “Golden Age” of piracy.

Set in graphic novel form, the book brings a visual perspective to our history “from below”.

The graphic novel is increasingly being used by educators who understand that students are more receptive to what could be termed “visual literature”.

The authors raise the profile of predominantly ordinary working sailors from diverse backgrounds, “poor men from the lowest social class”, as Rediker notes in the foreword.

David Lester’s unique, exquisite and meticulously researched illustrations elevate the lives of the pirates of this period. These figures are John Gwin, an African American fugitive from slavery in South Carolina.

Ruben Dekker an ordinary seafarer from Amsterdam and Mark Reed, an American woman “Mary”, who dressed in male clothing.




Aboard The Night Rambler decisions are made by voting on equal shares of the spoils from “prize” ships.

The captain only had control of going into action against another ship. Sailors were effectively living in an embryonic social democracy.

The book portrays the “London elite”, horrified by the threat to their profits, employing a ruthless sea-captain, William Snelgrave, to find, kill or arrest the pirates.

In an informative afterword, essay historian Paul Buhle explores ‘the images of pirates through centuries of readers from Robert Louis Stevenson to the portrayals in DC comics and Hollywood films.

He shows how Rediker’s research has brought about a fundamental reinterpretation of the lives of these courageous “villains of all nations”.

People from a myriad of ethnic backgrounds created a system of work and reward which benefited all, despite constant threat of bloody ruling class revenge.

It is a beautifully presented sometimes moving visual narrative for young readers and adults alike. Our history—from below. Under the Banner of King Death—Pirates of the Atlantic A graphic novel by David Lester with Marcus Rediker and Paul Buhle 

Under the Banner of King Death: Pirates of the Atlantic, A Graphic Novel

by David Lester and Marcus Rediker

Illustrated by David Lester

Afterword by Paul Buhle

Foreword by Marcus Rediker


Paperback
136 pages / July 2023 / 9781804293492

Under the Banner of King Death: Pirates of the Atlantic, A Graphic Novel | Verso Books

A graphic exploration of action, resistance, and radicalism among eighteenth-century pirates

Under the Banner of King Death is a tale of mutiny, bloody battle, and social revolution, bringing to life an itinerant community of outsiders behind today’s legends. This graphic novel breaks new ground in our understanding of piracy and pirate culture, giving us real reasons to love the rebellious and stouthearted marauders of the seas.

At the pinnacle of the Golden Age of Atlantic piracy, three unlikely companions are sold into servitude on a merchant ship and thrust into a voyage of rebellion. They are John Gwin, an African American fugitive from bondage in South Carolina; Ruben Dekker, a common seaman from Amsterdam; and Mark (a.k.a. Mary) Reed, an American woman who dresses as a man.

When the crew turn to mutiny, they and the freed slaves establish democracy aboard The Night Rambler. This new dispensation provides radical social benefits, all based on the documented practices of real pirate ships of the era: democratic decision-making, a social security net, health and disability insurance, and an equal distribution of spoils taken from prize ships. But before long the London elites enlist a war-hungry captain to take down The Night Rambler in a war that pitches high society against high-seas freebooters.

Adapted from the scholarship and research of celebrated historian Marcus Rediker, Under the Banner of King Death is an inspiring story of the oppressed steering a course against adversity and injustice.

SEE

Marcus Rediker – Historian | Writer | Teacher | Activist

Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia Hardcover

 – January 24, 2023
by David Graeber (Author)

The final posthumous work by the coauthor of the major New York Times bestseller The Dawn of Everything.

Pirates have long lived in the realm of romance and fantasy, symbolizing risk, lawlessness, and radical visions of freedom. But at the root of this mythology is a rich history of pirate societies―vibrant, imaginative experiments in self-governance and alternative social formations at the edges of the European empire.

In graduate school, David Graeber conducted ethnographic field research in Madagascar for his doctoral thesis on the island’s politics and history of slavery and magic. During this time, he encountered the Zana-Malata, an ethnic group of mixed descendants of the many pirates who settled on the island at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia, Graeber’s final posthumous book, is the outgrowth of this early research and the culmination of ideas that he developed in his classic, bestselling works Debt and The Dawn of Everything (written with the archaeologist David Wengrow). In this lively, incisive exploration, Graeber considers how the protodemocratic, even libertarian practices of the Zana-Malata came to shape the Enlightenment project, which for toolong has been defined as distinctly European. He illuminates the non-European origins of what we consider to be “Western” thought and endeavors to recover forgotten forms of social and political order that gesture toward new, hopeful possibilities for the future.

From the Publisher

Editorial Reviews

Review

"The real story of antiauthoritarianism, gendered economics and direct democracy behind a legendary 18th-century pirate province . . . [Pirate Enlightenment] advances Graeber’s mission: to destabilize our idea of what’s possible and show that humans can, and often do, create egalitarian worlds built on points of consensus instead of the sharp end of a cutlass."
―Sam Dean, Los Angeles Times

"David Graeber was a highly original thinker and a wonderful writer. Most of all he was someone who sought out challenging problems and set about trying to solve them."
―Peter Frankopan, New York Times Book Review

"Pirate Enlightenment pluralizes and globalizes our understanding of whose ideas and actions are considered impactful and whose vision shapes the world, a framing that still resonates in contemporary times . . . In his academic writing and political commitments, David Graeber exemplified an ethos of action and conversation . . . As anthropologists have noted, gifts are inalienable―they contain within them something of the giver. Graeber's final book is certainly such a gift." ―Jatin Dua, Science

"One of the most creative books ever published on the history of piracy . . . [Graeber] successfully pairs two kinds of history from below: maritime and Indigenous. This is a highly unusual combination and a winning one. He treats ordinary people, especially women, as thinkers, creators, and makers of history. His theory and methods are as democratic and egalitarian as the culture he seeks to illuminate." ―Marcus Rediker, The Nation

"A tour de force of anthropological scholarship and an important addition to Malagasy history . . . Certain to be controversial, but all the more important for that."
―Kirkus

“Pirates captured the imagination of writers and readers centuries ago, and David Graeber reveals why. He has produced one of the most fascinating, original, and altogether brilliant books ever written about these unruly outlaws.”
―Marcus Rediker, author of Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age

“A characteristically radical re-reading of history that places the social and political experiments of pirates at the heart of the European Enlightenment. A brilliant companion volume to the best-selling Dawn of Everything.”
―Amitav Ghosh

“Daring, carefully speculative, and intellectually ambitious: all qualities that we had come to expect of the late David Graeber. Pirate Enlightenment is a splendid example of Graeber’s transformative and convincing case that the Enlightenment was a cosmopolitan and plebian concoction, fabricated far from the European centers of Enlightenment thought.”
―James C. Scott

“Radical, magical and enchanting: a true history of a people’s Enlightenment, led by Malagasy women and egalitarian pirates at a crossroads of the world, a land of battle, foment, booty, whose inhabitants liked nothing better than pranking outsiders to spread outlandish tales of their lives.”
―Cory Doctorow, author of Chokepoint Capitalism and Walkaway

“In The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber urged historically minded scholars to consider the ways that human beings have continually pursued three basic freedoms, including the freedom to create new forms of social relations. In this book, he provides a fascinating example of the transformative potential of this proposition. Showing how rumored 18th century ‘pirate kingdoms’ established in Madagascar can be understood from the perspective of the local Malagasy population, Graeber gives us a glimpse of people, men and women, taking control of the society in which they lived, making new forms of sociality. He links this historical exploration to a second theme of the previous work, the fact that European political philosophers in the 17th and 18th century were responding to ideas coming from outside Europe, providing them inspiration to image freedoms they had not previously experienced. Pirate Enlightenment is, as the author writes, a provocation―but also an inspiration; and a great piece of story-telling.” ―Rosemary A. Joyce, Interim Director of Global, International, and Area Studies, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley

About the Author

David Graeber was a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics. He is the author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years and Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, among many others books, and coauthor with David Wengrow of the New York Times bestseller The Dawn of Everything. An iconic thinker and a renowned activist, his early efforts in Zuccotti Park made Occupy Wall Street an era-defining movement. He died on September 2, 2020.

Socialists have a better plan for how to run society

The Socialist Workers Party statement of principles, discusses the need for democratic planning

Barricade, the Paris Commune, May, 1871 by André Devambez

Socialism is about ordinary people taking back control of the economy. It is built on the assumption that working people can make the decisions needed to run the economy.

Economists present capitalism as a “pure” market model. They claim that consumer choices dictate the flow of goods and the success or failure of firms—without any planning.

Apparently these choices force the markets to meet our needs. But we don’t make or break the fortunes of companies by constantly changing what we buy. And the market doesn’t meet our needs. Firms produce things that nobody really needs and are a planet-destroying waste.

At the same time they produce other things that we do need but don’t get—because we don’t have the money to buy them. The market allocates resources and values things very badly.

In a democratically planned economy, decisions about the use of resources would be made on the basis of discussion by those directly affected.

While you can’t really vote on whether a surgeon should cut to the left or the right, you can decide how many hospitals, how many surgeons society trains and so on.

Or take housing. In one way there is no housing crisis, no shortage of housing but a shortage of housing people can afford. So as a start requisition empty properties, the mansions and second and third homes of the rich.

But a permanent solution involves planning. Use the census to estimate the housing needs of the population and establish a public house-building programme, employing thousands to build slightly more houses than are needed.

Then make the provision of a decent residence for every group or individual a basic right, in the same way that everyone has a right to healthcare or education.

Capitalist markets are planned. But from supply chains to where to put roads there is incompetent planning.

Capitalist planning is done by a minority to keep their power and wealth. Democratic planning is crucial to moving beyond the market economy.

We have to dismantle the enormous parasitic financial sector. You can’t have democratic planning and let hedge funds continue. We have to put the population at large in control of money.

A democratically planned economy would be based on the principle that the decisions are taken by those directly affected.

This would require a massive decentralisation of power—something that is an essential part of the revolutionary process to get rid of capitalism. This would be a world away from the tightly controlled bureaucracy that ran society inside of Stalinist regimes in eastern Europe.

As far as possible decisions would be taken at the local level by workplace and neighbourhood assemblies, or by the councils of delegates elected by those assemblies.

Karl Marx’s insight during the Paris Commune of 1871 was that these forms of organisation would develop before the new society was created in the process of fighting the old society. The same methods of self-organisation that would be the basis of a self-managing society are needed today by the exploited and oppressed to resist and, ultimately, to overthrow capital.

A socialist society comes out of the real struggles of people and gives economic democracy to the mass of people. It’s about people deciding how society should be organised.

In a socialist society firms producing the same thing could cooperate. This would cut down on the waste of competition. It would also generate solutions to problems faster.

In a post-capitalist society, shorn of managers, advertising and all the other nonsense of capitalism, the creativity of millions will be unleashed. The possibilities for people to make themselves anew, as Marx put it, are immense.

But if we are to have democratic planning, we also need democratic control of the world’s resources, as well as the workplaces, factories and farms. This means social ownership of the means of production—socialism.

This is the third in a series of columns that discuss What We Stand For, the Socialist Workers Party statement of principles, printed every week in Socialist Worker (see page 18). For the full series go to tinyurl.com/WWSF2024

UK

‘Common Sense Minister’ blasted out of touch after tirade against 4-day week

The Tory MP has been taken apart after deeming support for a 4-day week 'socialist madness’

Hannah Davenport 

5 March, 2024 
Left Foot Forward News 

People have found it hard to see the common sense in Esther McVey’s recent attack on the four-day week, as Britain’s unofficially designation ‘common sense tsar’ has been taken apart for blasting support for the scheme as “socialist madness”.

In an opinion piece for the Express, Esther McVey attempted to demonise trade unions which she accused of “calling the shots over Labour” and took aim at the PCS union representing civil servants over its calls for a four-day working week.

She wrote that the “last thing the country needs” is a return to the “bad old days of union dominance with a weak Labour leader appeasing them”. Ironic given the current state of affairs 14 years of a Conservative government has left the country in.

The 4 Day Week Campaign organisation wrote a scathing response to McVey, blasting the MP for Tatton as out of touch with public opinion, whilst also thanking her for showing how many people actually want a four-day week through the responses to the article.

“Sometimes you can judge the success of an idea by the kind of person who rejects it,” the organisation wrote on X.

“The 4-day week is a non-partisan innovation with support from across the political spectrum. Two-thirds of the public support a govt-backed trial. Esther, you’re out of touch!”

A large majority of the public (65%) support the government exploring the introduction of a 4-day working week with no loss of pay for workers, the most recent survey found.

Furthermore, following the world’s biggest ever four-day working week trial, most of the UK companies who took part made the policy permanent, with the majority of organisations finding the scheme had a positive impact.

1933

SNP MP Stewart McDonald asked why Tory MPs were so “tone deaf” to “basic stuff like this”.

“A defence manufacturing business in my own constituency switched to a four-day week to combat bigger firms poaching staff. The result? Greater retention, job satisfaction and productivity up. Why are the Tories so tone deaf to basic stuff like this?” he wrote on X.

While a historian highlighted on X: “One of the biggest historical successes of the labour movement is winning time for workers to rest and recreate. The same arguments against the 4 day week were used to justify the 6 day week and the 60 hour week.”

Express readers also took to the comments section to highlight some discrepancies they had with McVeys claims in the article, versus the reality of affairs.

One reader wrote: “This government has collapsed living standards so much that many cannot afford to live working 5 days per week.”

Another commented: “McVey thinks her job as an MP is writing articles for the Express and chatting on the sofa on GB News.”

McVey used to host a weekly show on GB News with her husband, also a Tory MP.

Others countered her claim that the 4-day week would burn taxpayers money, by drawing attention to a £8,750 claim the MP made for a personal photographer in 2019, paid for by the taxpayer.

(Image credit: Wikimedia)


Hannah Davenport is news reporter at Left Foot Forward, focusing on trade unions and environmental issues

 

Clara Zetkin & the socialist origins of International Women’s Day 

8th March 2024International, international womens day, Peace, socialism, SolidarityLeave a Commenton Clara Zetkin & the socialist origins of International Women’s Day 

“Zetkin, along with Rosa Luxemburg, was among those who understood that the development of capitalism had not made either the task of social reform or international relations more peaceful.”

German socialist Clara Zetkin founded International Women’s Day to acknowledge working women’s contribution to the struggle against capitalism. It’s no wonder that German socialist, Clara Zetkin’s legacy has been erased by the corporate sponsorship of #IWD – it’s all too relevant, as Katherine Connelly explains

There are many reasons to draw inspiration from Clara Zetkin (1857-1933). She dedicated her whole life to fighting for socialism no matter what the considerable personal costs. Shortly after joining the Social Democratic Party in the 1870s, which was swiftly banned by the German authorities, she was forced into an exile that lasted ten years. Whilst in exile, her husband died leaving her with two young children.

Zetkin’s own life ended in exile after she was forced to flee Germany again, this time from the Nazis. She broke that exile briefly in August 1932 when she claimed her right to open the Reichstag, as its oldest elected member. Seventy-five years old, nearly blind and in very poor health, she had to be helped to the tribune past uniformed Nazi thugs who had threatened to attack her.

Literally facing down the Nazis, she called for working-class unity against fascism. She ended her speech by voicing her wish that she would soon open the first government of German workers’ councils. It was an extraordinary final act of courage and defiance. Zetkin died less than a year later.

Revolutionary Zetkin

Born in 1857, Zetkin belonged to a generation of German socialists who had known Friedrich Engels in the last years of his life and been able to interpret the work of Marx and Engels for an emerging younger generation.

There were sharp debates between these socialists about how to apply Marxism to the problems of the early twentieth century. Leading figures in the SPD, Karl Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein argued that the changing nature of capitalism and imperialism made redundant Marx and Engels’ revolutionary conclusions – perhaps the contradictions of old could be overcome piecemeal and peacefully? 

Zetkin, along with her close friend Rosa Luxemburg, was among those who understood that the development of capitalism had not made either the task of social reform or international relations more peaceful. Instead, the contradictions of competitive capitalism were deepening, making the world a more dangerous place, and could only be positively overcome through the revolutionary action of the expanding and increasingly international working class.

Their revolutionary perspective was, tragically, vindicated in 1914 with the outbreak of the First World War, driven by the competition of rival, imperialist nations. The SDP leadership, which had rejected revolutionary socialism in favour of changing the system from the inside, capitulated into supporting that system and voting for war credits.

Zetkin and Luxemburg, however, campaigned against the war, for which both were taken into custody. They also began to create new organisations, independent of the SPD, which resulted in the German Communist Party.

In 1919, after a failed communist uprising in Berlin, Rosa Luxemburg was murdered by the proto-fascist Freikorps. Against the repression of the counter-revolution and rising antisemitism, Zetkin defended the memory of Luxemburg, who was Jewish, and the importance of her ideas.

Zetkin on women’s liberation  

Alongside Zetkin’s commitment to building an effective revolutionary left that was anti-imperialist, anti-militarist and anti-fascist, she was one of the most important socialist theorists of women’s liberation. International Women’s Day originated from the 1910 International Socialist Women’s Conference, which met in Copenhagen ahead of the left’s Second International. The Day was proposed by Luise Zietz, a member of the Unskilled Factory Workers’ Union and the SPD, and seconded by Zetkin. 

What happened in Copenhagen in 1910 was the result of years of thinking, writing and organising by Zetkin on the questions of women’s oppression and liberation. Zetkin was challenging assumptions on the left that questions about women’s rights were somehow subordinate to the struggle for socialism, as well as the dominant view among contemporary feminists that women’s emancipation was separate from socialism.

Once again, Zetkin drew on the legacy of Marx and Engels who in their last years had become increasingly interested in questions about the historical origins of women’s oppression at a time when women were becoming more central, as workers, to capitalist production. Like Marx and Engels, Zetkin explored how the economic organisation of society affected women. She understood that in a class-divided society, women were going to be affected differently.

The rise of capitalist society had excluded women who belonged to the capitalist and upper classes from the public sphere. Confined to an idealised domestic sphere, with a profitable marriage and continuation of the family line (in property) upheld as their ultimate aims in life, these women wanted to expand their horizons and compete with men in the professional world. Their male counterparts were, in the majority, excluding them from that world, and so it made sense to these women to organise separately, as women against men.

Zetkin did not dispute that their aims were ‘completely justified’. But she did not accept that this minority of women represented the interests of all women, nor that their narrow aims for equal inclusion within a class-divided society could realise emancipation. Once they achieved their own inclusion, Zetkin predicted, wealthy women’s language of egalitarianism would swiftly be replaced as they fulfilled the functions of the offices they had so longed to join. Today’s female CEOs and Tory ministers surely prove Zetkin right.

By contrast with wealthy women, for working-class and poor women, the rise of capitalist society had not resulted in confinement to the private sphere. On the contrary, the old patriarchal system of production, where families laboured together in ‘cottage industries’ under the control of the father, were replaced with individual family members having to compete with each other in the labour market.

And women’s subordinate social status meant that working women could be subject to greater levels of exploitation through even lower pay than male workers. Therefore, for working women, the problem was not that their male peers were excluding them from ‘free competition’. The problem was the entire economic organisation of society which pitted workers against each other in a race to the bottom.

It was therefore in the interests of working-class women and men to reject those divisions by uniting in resistance to exploitation and oppression. For revolutionaries, this meant overthrowing women’s oppression had to be seen in this context: not as an abstract ‘principle, but in the interests of the proletarian [working] class.’

Anything less was to concede the ground to those who believed that women’s oppression could be solved by a bit of tinkering with, or greater ‘inclusion’, into an inherently exploitative system. Consistent with her approach to capitalism and imperialism, Zetkin’s approach to women’s emancipation was informed by the need for revolutionary change.

Zetkin today

Today, almost all big, globalised corporations manage to genuflect annually before #IWD and utter some unintelligible slogan that commits them to change precisely nothing. And none of these slogans will be ones that, as Lindsey German pointed out, working-class women are today raising in an urgent fight against inequality through widespread strike action. But these strikers are the women who stand in the real tradition of International Women’s Day.

---

• This article was originally published by Counterfire here.
• Kate Connelly is a writer and historian. She led school student strikes in the anti-war movement in 2003, co-ordinated the Emily Wilding Davison Memorial Campaign in 2013 and wrote the acclaimed biography, ‘Sylvia Pankhurst: Suffragette, Socialist and Scourge of Empire‘
• Kate is speaking at our event Clara Zetkin – Socialist fighter against fascism, women’s oppression & war on April 9 at 18.30. Register and full info here.

The socialist history of International Women's Day

Submitted by SJW on 10 March, 2020 - Author: Kelly Rogers



International Women’s Day has its roots in some of the most significant moments of our movement’s history. It is our task to remember this history and to turn International Women's Day into a day of strikes and struggle once more.

It was at the second International Conference of Socialist Women, held in Copenhagen in 1910, that the idea of an International Women’s Day was first formally agreed. German delegates Luise Zietz and Clara Zetkin brought the proposal in front of a hundred women delegates, from seventeen countries. The resolution read:

“In agreement with the class-conscious political and trade union organizations of the proletariat of their respective countries, socialist women of all nationalities have to organize a special Women’s Day (Frauentag), which must, above all, promote the propaganda of female suffrage. This demand must be discussed in connection with the whole woman’s question, according to the socialist conception” (emphasis mine).

These delegates had aspirations much grander than simply winning universal female suffrage. They sought the triumph of socialism: the liberation of workers from drudgery and wage slavery, and the liberation of women from the shackles of domestic slavery.

The first official International Women’s Day was celebrated on March 19 1911, a date chosen to celebrate the 1848 Revolution in Berlin. In Germany, more than a million women, mostly (but not exclusively ) organised in the SPD and the unions, took to the streets. They put on dozens of public assemblies, over 40 in Berlin alone, to discuss the issues they were facing in their day-to-day lives and prospects for the women’s movement.

That same year, workers in the United States chose March 8 for their Women’s Day. It was a significant date: In 1857, garment workers in New York City had struck and staged a demonstration against inhumane conditions and low pay. Fast forward to March 8 1908, and again 15,000 women garment workers, many of them Jewish immigrants, went on strike and marched through New York’s Lower East Side to demand higher pay, shorter working hours, voting rights and an end to child labour. ‘Bread and Roses’ became the slogan of the garment workers’ struggle: they didn’t merely seek money enough to eat, but fulfilling and enriched lives worth living.

From 1914 it became common practice to celebrate International Women’s Day on March 8. A famous poster depicting a woman dressed in black and waving a red flag (which Workers’ Liberty has adopted for its logo) marked the occasion in Germany. It was considered so dangerous in the run up to the First World War that police prohibited it from being posted or distributed publicly. The day turned into a mass action against war and imperialism.

Three years later, March 8 1917 (in the Gregorian calendar), IWD witnessed the explosion of the February Revolution in Russia. In spite of opposition from Bolshevik men, working class women in Petrograd turned International Women’s Day into a day of mass demonstrations for “bread and peace” - demanding the end to World War One, to food shortages and to tsarism. They marched from factory to factory calling their fellow workers onto the streets and engaging in violent clashes with police and troops. Trostky wrote in The History of the Russian Revolution:

“A great role is played by women workers in relationship between workers and soldiers. They go up to the cordons more boldly than men, take hold of the rifles, beseech, almost command: “Put down your bayonets – join us.” The soldiers are excited, ashamed, exchange anxious glances, waver; someone makes up his mind first, and the bayonets rise guiltily above the shoulders of the advancing crowd.”

Not only did these women workers spark the beginning of the Russian Revolution, they were the motor that drove it forward. 7 days later Tsar Nicholas II abdicated.

SOME THOUGHTS ON INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY

MAR

08

2024

1comments

By thecollective

From Freedom News UK

It’s International Women’s Day, and I am conflicted. I feel both elation at the opportunity to share the work and ideas of groundbreaking women throughout the centuries and thoroughly depressed that we still need a ‘day’ to remind the world that women exist, that our creative expression matters, that our intellectual endeavours are valid, and that the emotional labour we often give freely in service to our communities is valuable.

I also write this as Freedom’s new Culture Editor. It is both an honour to be working at Britain’s oldest anarchist publication and a responsibility. I’m not here to write fluff pieces. I aim to focus on the behaviour of those in power while envisaging ways in which to dismantle this power through curating thoughtful, cultural responses; the Romantic in me seeks to nourish our anarchic hearts with truth and beauty.

Speaking truth to the power of the patriarchy is unimaginably difficult, even as I live a life of relative privilege. In the past, I’ve experienced deep levels of discomfort at writing one small truth because there’s the worry that I’ll be branded a troublemaker, a man hater, a difficult woman to work with. All of which heightens my respect for those women across global history who’ve had to fight like lions for the barest modicum of political and/or cultural change. 

To quote Emma Goldman, The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause as, for instance, the black man’s right to his body, or woman’s right to her soul. 

Today, I asked someone who naturally uses poetic imagery in their conversation why they don’t write poetry, and they replied, Poetry doesn’t kill fascists. 

But it does, I returned; Poetry darns holes in our tattered imaginations, forces difficult dialogue with the Self, and encourages a deep empathy for all living beings. How is this radical approach not the most beautiful way to end fascism? Afterwards, I wish I’d remembered to cite the great Audre Lorde in the opening lines of her poem, Power:

The difference between poetry and rhetoric
is being ready to kill
yourself
instead of your children.

Poetry asks us to take a deep-dive into the psyche, to kill the ego and emerge bare-naked and battered from the assault. In this way it also kills fascist ideology because the two are, in my mind, mutually exclusive. Audre Lorde, black woman, feminist, poet, lesbian, and activist understood this, as well as the horrors that rhetoric can unleash, and then managed to distil the entire philosophy down to just four lines of pure genius. 

Having said that, Ezra Pound was a great poet and a fascist, which also proves that there’s no singular solution to some people being absolute cunts. 

Is fascism the biggest threat to women today? I’m not sure. Perhaps I would argue that the sheer volume of men and women who have internalised that particularly noxious mix of capitalism and patriarchy is our biggest enemy. Especially when it manifests as gossiping about, or competing with, women in place of empathy and support.

But if that is our weakness, then our strength is the inordinate number of women (and people across the gender spectrum) who are recognising this toxicity and actively taking steps to disconnect from those elements of our culture, instead endeavouring to lift up our sisters wherever and whenever possible. There’s a great, and hilarious, example on Instagram from The Speech Professor calling out the ridiculous expectations some men have of women.

Poetry, language, film, music, and art continue to be beautiful tools for disseminating ideas that then rage across our collective psychological landscapes like La Niña. 

Take the viral Barbie speech by America Ferrara that begins: 

It is literally impossible to be a woman. You are so beautiful and so smart, and it kills me that you don’t think you’re good enough. Like, we have to always be extraordinary, but somehow we’re always doing it wrong. 

Hands up, how many of you cried during this speech? I did.

So many innovative and creative women make up the rockface of our herstory, and I wonder how many of them we inadvertently clamber over or use for a leg up without fully recognising their contribution to the artistic landscape we now inhabit. 

I’m currently reading The Gentrification of The Mind by Sarah Schulman, an outstanding memoir on AIDS, queer culture, downtown arts movements, and innovative people from history being erased by the gentrification not only of place but of the collective memory. It’s got me thinking about the many women who create vibrant, inspiring lives during their time on earth who are no longer recognised or who’ve been side-lined, ignored in life and death by a gentrification process that doesn’t recognise idiosyncratic women even as it absorbs their singular brilliance. But that’s how the diminishment process works. Writes Schulman. 

What halts this erasure of women’s words, activism, art, and herstories are the people who recognise our pioneering women in their lifetimes and continue to celebrate them after death; who work to vividly portray the dynamic, intelligent, multifaceted woman without reducing her to the caricature of a jumble of red lipsticks or oversized cardigans or cats or plethora of lovers. 

We’re more than that, better than that, and anybody saying otherwise should have the world’s population to contend with—at least they would in my utopia. 

I’ve been handed some recommendations from Freedom Bookshop, firstly for a book that has now landed on my To Be Read list: Anarchafeminist by Chiara Bottici. Reading the blurb, I’m already taken by the author’s intersectional and anti-speciesism approach. At the bottom of this article, you can find a further list of recommended books from the bookshop that you should be able to get your hands on in-store, and below that, an eclectic (but not exhaustive) list of books by women that have spoken to me over the years.

I’ll finish with a poem by the great anarchist poet Voltairine de Cleyre, writing in memory of pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft:

Mary Wollstonecraft

The dust of a hundred years 
Is on thy breast, 
And thy day and thy night of tears 
Are centurine rest. 
Thou to whom joy was dumb, 
Life a broken rhyme, 
Lo, thy smiling time is come, 
And our weeping time. 
Thou who hadst sponge and myrrh 
And a bitter cross, 
Smile, for the day is here 
That we know our loss; — 
Loss of thine undone deed, 
Thy unfinished song, 
Th’ unspoken word for our need, 
Th’ unrighted wrong; 
Smile, for we weep, we weep, 
For the unsoothed pain, 
The unbound wound burned deep, 
That we might gain. 
Mother of sorrowful eyes 
In the dead old days, 
Mother of many sighs, 
Of pain-shod ways; 
Mother of resolute feet 
Through all the thorns, 
Mother soul-strong, soul-sweet, — 
Lo, after storms 
Have broken and beat thy dust 
For a hundred years, 
Thy memory is made just, 
And the just man hears. 
Thy children kneel and repeat: 
“Though dust be dust, 
Though sod and coffin and sheet 
And moth and rust 
Have folded and moulded and pressed, 
Yet they cannot kill; 
In the heart of the world at rest 
She liveth still.” 

Philadelphia, 27th April 1893
Taken from Collected Poems, The Anarchist Library.

Freedom Bookshop recommends: 

• Means & Ends by Zoe Baker
• Radical Intimacy by Sophie K Rosa
• Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
• The Feminist & the Sex Offender by Eric R Meiners and Judith Levine
• Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman
• Surmounting the Barricades: Women in the Paris Commune by Carolyn Eichner
• In Defence of Witches by Mona Chollet
• Labour of Love by Moira Weigel
• Feminism Against Family by Sophie Lewis
• Wages for Housework by Louise Toupin
• Revolting Prostitutes by Molly Smith & Juno Mac 
• Regretting Motherhood by Orna Donath
• Innocent Subjects by Terese Jonsson

Also anything by Judith Butler, Angela Davis, Ruth Kinna, Bell Hooks, or Audre Lorde. 

Editor’s eclectic recommends:

• Flights by Olga Tokarczuk
• Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard
• Oneness Vs the one percent by Vandana Shiva
• What it Means When a Man Falls From the Sky by Lesley Nneka Arimha
• Mama Amazonica by Pascale Petit
• The Vegetarian by Han Kang
• The Dispossessed by Ursula K le Guin
• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
• Problems by Jade Sharma
• The World Keeps Ending and The World goes On by Franni Choi
• Deep Listening, a composer’s sound practice by Pauline Oliveros
• The Last Samurai by Helen de Witt
• Women Who Run With The Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés
• Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy
• Three Women by Lisa Taddeo
• Parable of the Sower by Octavia E Butler
• Adrienne Rich by Selected Poems 1950 – 2012
• The Book of Phoenix by Nnedi Okorafor
• Remains of a Future City by Zoë Skoulding
• Fleabag original script by Phoebe Waller-Bridge
• A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit
• Vengeance is Mine, Marie Ndiaye
• The Veiled Woman, Anaïs Nin

Also anything by Margaret Atwood and Toni Morrison.

~ Sophie McKeand

AGAINST PATRIARCHY, IN ORDER TO ACHIEVE THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE NEGATING PATHS OF ANARCHY

MAR

07

2024

0comments

By thecollective

Via Abolition Media

By: Mónica Caballero

The economic system that currently governs the territory dominated by the Chilean State and practically all Western states, is capitalism. Capitalism, in simple words, was based on the fact that trade and industry (means of production) are organized and controlled by their owners, that is: entrepreneurs.

In order for capitalism to take root and endure over time as a political-economic system, it needed a patriarchal social structure, the latter being understood as the social organization in which the authority of the male is exercised from the family, leading to all practices of domination. Therefore, it would be difficult to propose a radical emancipatory change without ending with the total destruction of capitalism and patriarchy.

Patriarchal authoritarian oppressive structures have (de)formed virtually all the relationships we have with each other and with ourselves. Another human is no longer another individual equivalent to me with whom we could help each other and develop integrally, now the relationship between humans is subject to what position they occupy within the social hierarchy.

On the other hand, the relationship with other non-human beings is contingent on the economic benefit that it could give me, transforming it into a consumer product. And finally, the vision that patriarchy has created of ourselves is limited and circumscribed to imposed canons or standards, whether aesthetic, gender, etc.

Obtaining the necessary tools to destroy the logics of domination, which makes us reproduce and perpetuate in various ways the need to dominate and to be dominated, is the task of all of us who are committed to seeing this reality burn…

Visualizing that patriarchal capitalism brings wealth to a few at the expense of the lives of many others could lead to the identification and targeting of the beneficiaries of this system of terror.

Against Patriarchy, in order to achieve the foundations of the negating paths of anarchy.

Mónica Caballero Sepúlveda

Anarchist prisoner

San Miguel prison

Written in the context of March 8, 2024.

Source: LA ZARZAMORA

International Women’s Day: Britain’s increasing gender pay inequality revealed in new reports

Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead Yesterday

At the current rate of progress, it will take 43 years to close the gender pay gap in Britain.

Separate bodies of research have unveiled alarming findings about gender pay inequality in the UK.

A study by the Living Wage Foundation found that women are facing a ‘pay penalty’, earning only 90p compared to an equally qualified man earning a £1. Almost 2.2 million women earn less than the real Living Wage, compared to almost 1.5 million men.

The study, which was based on Office for National Statistics data, also found that six in ten low paid jobs are held by women, who are around twice as likely as male workers to report having no money left once essentials have been paid for. The proportion and number of women working in lower paid jobs in 2023 had increased from the previous year. In 2022, just over 2 million jobs held by women were paid less than the real Living Wage.

The gender pay disparity is even more pronounced in part-time jobs. Part-time jobs paid below the real Living Wage are twice as likely to be filled by women than men. Around 1.4m low-paid part-time jobs are held by women, compared to 656,000 jobs filled by men.

The real Living Wage is the only wage in the UK to be based on the cost of living. It is currently set at £12 per hour across the UK and £13.15 in London. It is voluntarily paid by more than 14,000 businesses who believe their staff deserve to be paid enough to meet everyday essentials.

The Living Wage Foundation campaigns to persuade employers to pay the real Living Wage. Its research looked at regional gender pay disparities. It found that the East Midlands is home to the largest gender difference within low paid jobs, where two in ten jobs held by women are low paid, compared to one in ten jobs held by men.

‘Pay penalty’

PwC’s Women in Work Index, which assesses progress made towards achieving gender equality at work across 33 OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries, showed similar findings. The gender pay gap in Britain has extended to 14.5 percent, marking a fall in ranking in the Index from 13th position to 17th. This was the largest annual fall of rankings experienced by any OECD country this year. The report shows that women are facing a ‘pay penalty’, earning only 90p compared to an equally qualified man earning £1.

The report also finds that the UK’s gender pay gap has widened by 0.2 percentage points, making it higher than the OECD average and more than half the other countries assessed on the Index.

It warns that at the current rate of progress, it will take 43 years to close the gender pay gap in Britain. The report also looked at regional discrepancies and found that the West Midlands was the worst performing region for pay inequality, followed by the East Midlands.

‘Disheartening’

Sheila Flavell CBE, Chief Operating Officer for FDM Group, described the findings of the Index as ‘disheartening.’

“It is disheartening to see the gender pay gap widening across industry and highlights that many businesses across all sectors are falling behind the curve when it comes to fair and equal pay.”

Ian Elliott, Chief People Officer at PwC UK, said: “Our analysis is a timely reminder that employers have to look at all the factors that contribute to pay gaps. Alongside transparent and robust gender pay gap reporting, it’s also vital that health and wellbeing resources are accessible and the workplace is an empowering place for employees experiencing the menopause and other health conditions.

“Moreover, it’s crucial that working parents are properly supported – championing flexible and hybrid working, alongside progressive parental leave policies, is key.”

Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead is a contributing editor to Left Foot Forward