LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment

Sunday, May 16, 2021

No Choice but to Be Essential: Expanding Dimensions of Precarity During COVID-19

Lola Loustaunau

2021, Sociological Perspectives

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Under COVID-19, low-wage service sector workers found themselves as essential workers vulnerable to intensified precarity. Based on in-depth interviews with a sample of 52 low-wage service workers interviewed first in Summer 2019 and then in the last two weeks of April 2020, we argue that COVID-19 has created new and heightened dimensions of precarity for low-wage workers. They experience (1) moments of what we call precarious stability, in which an increase in hours and predictable schedules is accompanied by unpredictability in the tasks workers are assigned, (2) increased threats to bodily integrity, and (3) experiences of fear and anxiety as background conditions of work and intensified emotional labor. The impacts of COVID-19 on workers' lives warrant an expanded conceptualization of precarity that captures the dynamic and shifting nature of precarious stability and must incorporate workers' limited control over their bodily integrity and emotions as core components of precarious working conditions.

https://www.academia.edu/47309904/No_Choice_but_to_Be_Essential_Expanding_Dimensions_of_Precarity_During_COVID_19

Essential work, disposable workers

Lola Loustaunau

2021, Labor Education and Research Center

0 Views22 Pages

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This report provides a close picture of food processing workers' experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic both at their worksites and in their attempts to access direct assistance. Based on interviews with immigrants and refugee workers in this key industry living and working in rural Washington, this report finds that there was a slow response to establish safety protocols and the ongoing variations in practices have meant that workers continue to experience varying degrees of exposure and risk. Shifting governmental guidelines and technological and language barriers also contributed to challenges accessing direct assistance and relief. Finally, workers expressed a lack of policies that attend to the medium and long term financial, emotional, and physical well-being consequences of working in sites of some of the biggest COVID-19 outbreaks in the United States.

https://www.academia.edu/47476577/Essential_work_disposable_workers

Appraisal of Coronavirus on Global Economy

Abdulfatai A B D U L L A H I AKANMU

2020, Alqalam journal

175 Views15 Pages

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International Relations,

Background and objective: This study examines the major challenges of Global economic growth and economic development in all across the globe before coronal virus and how the global actors affect some part of third world countries since feudalism jettisoned as mode of production to the adoption of capitalism that stands as historical background of global economy. It also looks how capitalism was later pioneered to imperialism, slave-trade, colonialism, and neo-colonialism in the global south and some part of global north. Methods: The historical background of corona virus, its negative effects and its way-out to the global economy are also examined in the paper. The secondary source of data adopts as methodology which is qualitative in nature in order to fill knowledge gap in the nature of global economy and impact of corona virus (covid-19) in both Northern and Southern part of the world. Results: This study recommends both Southern and Northern to adjust for one another without imperialism. We also appeal to all global South to adopt solidarity in socio-political economics and military coalition/alliance.

https://www.academia.edu/43105009/Appraisal_of_Coronavirus_on_Global_Economy

Rise of Liberal Socialism to reshape the Coronomics

Man B Bk, PhD

174 Views12 Pages

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Development Economics

The global economy has been locked-down due to the Covid-19 pandemic almost for four months. Some countries have formally imposed the lockdown and in some countries, people keep themselves in self-isolation, a precautionary measure. Most international flights have been shut down and production and trading businesses are no more in operation. The human-being came back to its humane character from the robotized behavior. Till May 6, the death toll reached 264,837 predominantly in developed countries led by the USA. Although the virus transmission is worldwide the severity of its outbreak is relatively higher in developed countries which favor and practice the liberal economy. It has reversed the world economy creating the greatest recession around the globe since 1930s. The pandemic that the world has been suffering is the fundamental but there are multiple devastating effects on human lives and livelihoods. The health pandemic is tending towards a severe hunger epidemic. There are some countries suffering from multiple epidemics. Capitalism has generated massive wealth for some, but it has devastated the planet and has failed to improve human well-being. So, the emergence of a new system that balances economic mobility and human flourishing is sought. The concept of ‘Protective Liberalism’ can be a replacement to libertarianism as the socio-economic policy for ‘Liberal Socialism’. It can also be coined as ‘Social Capitalism’ that reshapes ‘Coronomics’ in an egalitarian manner.

https://www.academia.edu/42987011/Rise_of_Liberal_Socialism_to_reshape_the_Coronomics

Reordering Capitalism: A New Economic World Order post-Covid-19

TRT World Research Centre

Mustafa Metin Başbay

2020, TRT World Research Centre

115 Views14 Pages

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While the world economy is bracing for a profound crisis due to the coronavirus pandemic, an important discussion has started on how the pandemic may transform the world economic order in its aftermath. This paper argues that the pandemic may lead to a major paradigm shift in economic thinking. In times of crisis, governments necessarily claim more control and responsibility over the socio-economic order. Residuals of such government activism are likely to remain as will the impact of the pandemic on the economy. More interventionist, proactive governments may replace the minimalist, neoliberal governments that have dominated the post-1980 world. In many ways, this represents restoring the welfare state and a return to the post-war Keynesian consensus in policymaking. Another likely consequence is a retreat from the hyper-globalisation of the recent decades. In the context of developing countries, this implies that developmentalism and industrialisation policies may once again become the norm.

https://www.academia.edu/42733778/Reordering_Capitalism_A_New_Economic_World_Order_post_Covid_19

The Covid-19 Pandemic: A Global Outlook

Tarek Cherkaoui

Michael Arnold

Mustafa Metin Başbay

2020, TRT World Research Centre

405 Views116 Pages

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Health Economics,

Global Health,

Public Health Policy,

Turkey,

Neoliberalism

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'The Covid-19 Pandemic: A Global Outlook' is a collection of essays discussing the short and long-term political, social and economic consequences of the pandemic.

https://www.academia.edu/43116054/The_Covid_19_Pandemic_A_Global_Outlook

'Survival' as a Societal Value: Biopolitics in Times of Corona

Tanzeem Ahmed

2020, International Journal of Research and Analytical Reviews (IJRAR)

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The outbreak of the novel corona virus, namely COVID-19, and its ensuing haunting is not simply pushing us towards a world with lesser population but towards a world with renewed ideologies, novel population management apparatuses and reinvigorated enemy lenses. In other words, COVID-19 is not merely claiming lives; its emergence is reshaping the lives of the ones that it has spared and when the war against it shall end, in its wake, humanity could very well be markedly more divorced and disassociated from one another from prior to its outbreak. Panic has gripped most of the world as countries have shut down their nations and borders. In the absence of a vaccine and any guaranteed treatment, the world has easily warmed up to the idea of abandoning most of the cherished societal (or liberal) values - such as those of liberty or free movement and the like – in order to uphold just the value of ‘survival’.

https://www.academia.edu/43127851/Survival_as_a_Societal_Value_Biopolitics_in_Times_of_Corona

Digital contact tracing for the Covid-19 epidemic: a business and human rights perspective

Theodora A Christou

Maria Pia Sacco

Anurag Bana

2020, International Bar Association

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This report looks at COVID-19 pandemic responses, focusing on the contact tracing apps from a business and human rights perspective. It sets out the human rights criteria when either interfering with the private life of individuals under the ordinary limitations, and also when states choose to derogate having declared a state of emergency. The key tests remain the same: legality, necessity, and proportionality.Several contact tracing technology models are analysed, before proposing a governance approach based on human rights diligence. Authors: Maria Pia Sacco, Senior Legal Advisor, IBA Legal Policy and Research Unit; Dr Theodora A Christou, CCLS, School of Law, Queen Mary University of London; Anurag Bana, Senior Legal Advisor, IBA Legal Policy and Research Unit

https://www.academia.edu/43254460/Digital_contact_tracing_for_the_Covid_19_epidemic_a_business_and_human_rights_perspective

Labour conflicts over health and safety in the Italian Covid19 crisis

Lorenzo Cini

Riccardo Emilio Chesta

Arianna Tassinari

2020, Interface

11 Pages

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The Covid19 pandemic is thus reigniting and giving new urgency to an old debate among unions, worker organizations and social movements regarding the centrality of health as a public good. This could bring to new alliances among unions, grassroot worker groups, health activists, and expert organizations for new mobilizations claiming the universal right to public healthcare and health at work, and highlighting the necessary connections between the two.

https://www.academia.edu/43144097/Labour_conflicts_over_health_and_safety_in_the_Italian_Covid19_crisis

Biden faces an angry rift in his own party over Israeli-Palestinian conflict
Analysis by Zachary B. Wolf, CNN 6 hrs ago

So much attention has been focused on the rift in the GOP over former President Donald Trump's antidemocratic lies about the 2020 election.

© Alex Wong/Getty Images North America/Getty Images WASHINGTON, DC - MAY 13: U.S. President Joe Biden delivers remarks on the COVID-19 response and vaccination program in the Rose Garden of the White House on May 13, 2021 in Washington, DC. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced today that fully vaccinated people will no longer need to wear masks or socially distance for indoor and outdoor activities in most settings. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

But Democrats have their own brewing disagreement over how the US should react to violence between Israelis and Palestinians, leading Democrats to question President Joe Biden's commitment to human rights and demanding he do more to pressure Israel.

It's an awkward public fight for a party that has made its commitment to social and racial justice a main part of its platform. As the US comes to grips with its own history of racism in new ways and adopts the Black Lives Matter movement in a mainstream way, liberals want to apply similar notions of justice to foreign policy, where an increasing number see apartheid in Israel's approach to the Palestinians.

Vocal liberals have criticized the White House for placating Israel and ignoring human rights as violence mounts, as well as loudly criticizing Biden for not openly opposing Israel's planned evictions of Palestinian families from a neighborhood in East Jerusalem.

Biden spoke to leaders on both sides of the conflict Saturday, suggesting deep engagement on the issue by the President. He raised concerns about the safety of journalists after an Israeli airstrike razed a building in Gaza that housed the offices of the Associated Press.

But liberals want more than engagement, they want him to call out Israel.

Instead, Biden has, publicly at least, stayed deferential.

"One of the things that I have seen thus far is that there has not been a significant overreaction," the President said at the White House last week.

Israeli airstrikes have killed more than 130 people and injured at least 1,000 others in Gaza alone, the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza said. Rioting and mob violence between Arabs and Jews marred cities and towns throughout Israel.

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin spoke with Israeli Minister of Defense Benny Gantz Saturday. "I reaffirmed Israel's right to defend itself and condemned Hamas' deliberate targeting of Israeli civilians," Austin said on Twitter.

Liberals are fuming

After Biden on Wednesday uttered the often-repeated mantra that Israel has a right to defend itself, liberals lashed out on the floor of the US House of Representatives.

"Do Palestinians have a right to survive?" asked New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a fiery speech on Thursday. The progressive Democrat continued to speak out on Twitter this weekend, writing, "If the Biden admin can't stand up to an ally, who can it stand up to? How can they credibly claim to stand for human rights?"

Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib responded on Saturday to the attack on the building housing international media. "Israel targeting media sources is so the world can't see Israel's war crimes led by the apartheid-in-chief Netanyahu," she tweeted, referring to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat who serves on the Foreign Relations Committee, has said the planned evictions violate international laws and all but questioned the administration's commitment to human rights.

"If the Biden Administration puts the rule of law and human rights at the heart of its foreign policy, this is not a moment for tepid statements," he tweeted earlier this month, linking to comments from the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent who lost the Democratic presidential nomination to Biden, wrote an op-ed in the New York Times on Friday entitled, "The U.S. Must Stop Being an Apologist for the Netanyahu Government."

The nation's largest Muslim civil rights group, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, joined a boycott of a virtual White House Eid celebration scheduled to take place Sunday.

"We cannot in good conscience celebrate Eid with the Biden Administration while it literally aids, abets and justifies the Israeli apartheid government's indiscriminate bombing of innocent men, women and children in Gaza," CAIR said in a statement that warned Biden he risks damaging his relationship with American Muslims.

Muslim rights groups had hailed Biden in the first days of his presidency for ending the Trump administration's ban on travel from predominantly Muslim countries.

In a statement Friday casting forward to the White House's celebration of Eid, the Muslim religious festival, Biden tempered his comments from earlier in the week.

"Palestinians -- including in Gaza -- and Israelis equally deserve to live in dignity, safety and security," he said, recognizing Palestinians without criticizing Israel.

Liberal Democrats have long opposed US policy toward Israel and progressives have become more vocal calling for new tactics, like demanding policy changes in exchange for the large amounts of military aid the US provides.

"By continuing to provide military aid without restriction, we provide no incentive for Israel to adjust course," Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren said in April, in remarks to the liberal pro-Israel group J Street.

Sanders went further in the New York Times on Friday.

"In the Middle East, where we provide nearly $4 billion a year in aid to Israel, we can no longer be apologists for the right-wing Netanyahu government and its undemocratic and racist behavior. We must change course and adopt an evenhanded approach, one that upholds and strengthens international law regarding the protection of civilians, as well as existing U.S. law holding that the provision of U.S. military aid must not enable human rights abuses."

Not being Trump is not enough

Biden's approach, while it leaves much for fellow Democrats to criticize, is a far cry from Trump's all-in for Israel approach, which he used to his political advantage with Christian voters.

Trump moved the US embassy to Jerusalem, a controversial move that angered Palestinians. Biden chose not to move the embassy back.

Netanyahu, who at the same time as this flareup has also been unable to form a new government and may see yet another general election as his best chance of staying in power, was a booster of Trump's Middle East policy and a chief international critic of the Iran nuclear deal, which Trump ended and Biden is trying to resurrect.

Simply not being Trump represents a policy change in itself.

"We need to end this conflict," Rep. Eric Swalwell, a California Democrat, told CNN Saturday, talking about the current violence. "Thank God we have a responsible president now in the United States, who I think can press upon the Israeli leader the need to do that."

Sanders used the same language he might use to describe Trump to describe Netanyahu.

"Over more than a decade of his right-wing rule in Israel, Mr. Netanyahu has cultivated an increasingly intolerant and authoritarian type of racist nationalism," Sanders wrote, although he also criticized the Palestinian Authority as "corrupt and ineffective."

"With a new president, the United States now has the opportunity to develop a new approach to the world — one based on justice and democracy," Sanders wrote.

Love Unimpeded: The Dialectic of Sex Revisited

KRISTIN GROGAN

The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution
Shulamith Firestone
Verso
2015
¬£9.99
240 pages
ISBN: 9781784780524

As the 1960s drew to a close, a new group of radical feminists burst onto the New York political scene. Calling themselves the Redstockings and infusing the intellectual traditions of their forebears—the eighteenth-century Blue Stocking Society—with revolutionary energy, the group set out to shake up the public conversation around women’s rights. Aiming to develop female class consciousness and to overturn the status of women as an oppressed class, the Redstockings disrupted abortion hearings, hosted their own speak-outs, and protested against the Miss America Pageant. One of the group’s founding members was Shulamith Firestone, whose blazing case for feminist revolution, The Dialectic of Sex, would be released in 1970. Firestone was twenty-five.

The 1970s kicked into gear and radical feminists led the charge. Like Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics and Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, also published in 1970, The Dialectic of Sex became a bestseller (it could be found on the shelves of drugstores and supermarkets in the early years of that decade). But its release was met with a degree of ire that its cohort never quite attracted. In the forty-five years since she penned her manifesto, Firestone has remained a largely marginalised figure. Republished by Verso last month, The Dialectic of Sex is still infrequently taught and little studied. Part of this is due to Firestone’s disappearance from public intellectual life—she lived with schizophrenia until her death in 2012, and her only other publication was a book of short stories, Airless Spaces. But this neglect is also, I suspect, due to the extraordinarily incendiary nature of Firestone’s ideas. She had no interest in integrating women into the system that has subjugated them. Only the complete annihilation of that system would be enough, and in its place something wholly new and immeasurably better could emerge.

The Dialectic of Sex is a call to arms. Women, Firestone declares, are an oppressed sex class. They have been constantly and systematically exploited to the benefit of the male ruling class. Biology is the root of women’s oppression: nature “produced the fundamental inequality” by imposing the full responsibility of reproduction on only half the population. This originary biological inequality was then consolidated and institutionalized in the interests of men.

Such a state of oppression requires radical change. Where the elimination of economic classes would involve the proletariat seizing control of the means of production, in a feminist revolution, the female underclass must seize control of the means of reproduction in order to escape biological oppression and to eliminate sexual classes. The goal is “not only the full restoration to women of ownership of their own bodies, but also their (temporary) seizure of control of human fertility.” In the new society that would emerge, artificial reproduction would be so advanced that children could be born to both sexes equally (or independent from either sex); the biological family and the dependence of children on the mother would give way to a communal style of cohabitation and childrearing; and cybernetics would eliminate the division of labour—or indeed, would dissolve the necessity of labour altogether. This combination of economic, political, and biological freedom was what Firestone called “cybernetic communism.”

Throughout the two hundred pages of The Dialectic of Sex, Firestone articulates a sweeping vision of cybernetic communism. Firestone’s is a formidable intelligence and a blistering, eclectic method; she is at once a radical feminist, a socialist theorist, a cultural critic, a champion of children’s rights, and an ecologist. Her style is excoriating and ambitious; her tone flits between witty and wrathful. She has the enviable ability to strip a theory or phenomenon of all authority with a casual remark: Marx and Engels, from whom she borrows her analytic method, “knew next to nothing” about women’s experiences; pregnancy is “barbaric”; romantic love is a “holocaust”; chivalry, she explains in an offhand footnote, serves mainly “to keep women from awareness of their lower-class condition.” Firestone’s “dream action” for the Women’s Liberation Movement is “a smile boycott, at which declaration women would instantly abandon their ‘pleasing’ smiles, henceforth smiling only when something pleased them.”

The Dialectic of Sex leaves few issues in political and cultural history untouched. Each chapter deals with a vast problem—psychoanalysis, childhood, race, love, culture, technology—all culminating in a design for an entirely new society based on polymorphic sexuality. It is the book’s final section, on reproduction and workplace technology, that is best remembered. Firestone envisages a society in which technology would free women from “the tyranny of reproduction,” and childrearing would be diffused throughout a community. Cybernation—by which Firestone means “the full takeover of machines of increasingly complex functions”—would radically restructure the economy and make alienated wage labour redundant. Firestone’s “technofeminism” channels a sort of medievalism—she idealises a pre-capitalist mode of production based on apprenticeship as a way of restoring pleasure to labour and creating work that is pursued mainly for personal enjoyment. Like so many revolutionaries before her, Firestone looks to the past in order to reimagine the future.

The Dialectic of Sex is often lauded for its uncanny prescience. Firestone foresees the Internet in the form of large “computer banks” of knowledge (“why store facts in one’s head when computer banks could supply comprehensive information instantaneously?”) But elsewhere her technological revolution has failed to come to fruition. Nina Power points out that instead of the collectivization of contraception that Firestone envisaged, contraceptive choices today are decided by the individual woman, and not by women as a sex class. The collectivity that Firestone imagined has given its seat to intense individualization.

Today women have a heavy price to pay to manage their bodies. In the United Kingdom, tampons are taxed more than jaffa cakes. Meanwhile Kimberley Clark—a corporation that produces sanitary items—boasted sales of $4.7 billion and an operating profit of $748 million in the first quarter of 2015 alone. The same corporation has come under fire in the past for their poor environmental record and exorbitant executive salaries. The responsibility for contraception is still placed largely on women rather than men, and it is frequently economically burdensome. A copper IUD costs roughly forty US cents to manufacture, but in the United States they can fetch up to $1000. And then there is the Republican backlash against abortion rights in the United States, or the case of 31-year-old Savita Halappanavar who died in 2012 after being refused an abortion in Galway. If you need further convincing that women today are socially, politically, and economically exploited on the basis of their biology, I suggest you read this, this, this, this, this, this, this, and this.

In the worst of these cases, women’s lives are put at risk—or cast-off altogether—in the interests of maintaining control over their bodies. In the best, women are required to pay in order to be functional human beings and productive workers for roughly one week in every month. Far from being overcome, biological oppression has become a money-spinner on an enormous scale: women continue to struggle, and someone continues to profit. But I am not convinced that this disjunction between Firestone’s vision and our lived reality should move us to bemoan her inaccuracy or discount her call to arms. If anything, we should become very, very angry, and we should channel that wrath into action—for the persecution of women today makes Firestone’s demand for radical change all the more essential.

While Firestone is best remembered as a prophet of technological insurgency, I find myself most compelled by her ideas about human love, her careful working through of its present inadequacy and her vision for its future transmutation. Love has never been understood, she asserts, despite the fact that it is “the pivot of women’s oppression.” Love distinguishes sex subjugation from other forms of oppression—for women in heterosexual relationships have an intense and intimate connection to their male oppressors. Love itself is not at fault. For Firestone, the unequal balance of power between the sex classes has corrupted, complicated, and hindered love. It is women’s love for men that distracts and limits them, and allows men to be the parasitical architects of world culture, sustained by the emotional strength of women. And love means fundamentally different things to the sexes: for men, intimate relationships involve idealising a member of the subordinate sex class in order to nullify her class inferiority and to stomach being associated with her. For women, love amounts to little more than patronage, and they are consumed by a need for male approval in order to raise them from their class subordination. This corrupted, distorted love is the destructive union of two deficient egos belonging to members of unequal classes.

In a fragment written at the end of the eighteenth century, Hegel articulated a vision of a truly equal love:

True union, or love proper, exists only between living beings who are alike in power and thus in one another’s eyes living beings from every point of view; in no respect is either dead for the other […] Love neither restricts nor is restricted; it is not finite at all […] love is a sensing of something living.

Hegel figures equality as an encounter with life itself: only the equal status of two united individuals permits them to see one another as fully alive. Firestone’s vision of a love that unites two equivalent people reminds me of Hegel’s words. For Firestone, the initial basis of love is “curious admiration,” and a desire for “the self-possession, the integrated unity, of the other and a wish to become part of this Self.” Love weds admiration with desire, and a wish to incorporate fully another’s particularities:

Love is the final opening up to […] the other. […] Love is the height of selfishness: the self attempts to enrich itself through the absorption of another being. Love is being psychically wide-open to another. It is a situation of total emotional vulnerability. Therefore it must be not only the incorporation of the other, but an exchange of selves. […] Love between two equals would be an enrichment, each enlarging himself through the other: instead of being one, locked in the cell of himself with only his own experience and view, he could participate in the existence of another – an extra window on the world.

This is love not altruistic and blind, but selfish and clear-sighted. Only the destruction of the economic, political, and social inequalities that divide the sexes will produce individuals of such equal standing that this form of love can sprout. For this meeting of minds is important as a means towards collectivity; it remains essential as an antidote to solipsistic isolation. “Lovers,” Firestone concludes, “are temporarily freed from the burden of isolation that every individual bears.”

Equally significant—and perhaps even more so—is Firestone’s vision of a reordering of love and sexuality. Her designs for the destruction of the patriarchal nuclear family would create a situation in which “all relationships would be based on love alone, uncorrupted by dependencies and resulting class inequalities. Enduring relationships between people of widely divergent ages would become common.” Love, she recognizes, takes many different forms. So too does desire. “Why,” she asks, “has all joy and excitement been concentrated, driven into one narrow, difficult-to-find alley of human experience, and all the rest laid to waste?” Why is sexual affection privileged above the many other ways of loving? And why have all our erotic needs been channelled into just one form of physical contact? While our sexual desires are curtailed and the twin cults of eroticism and romanticism feed us a steady diet of dross—dead-eyed models who set the standard for attractiveness, increasingly trite romantic comedies, dissatisfying and desensitizing porn—it is still the case that erotic energy is essential, enriching, and intensely human. Its tight control leaves us physically and emotionally alienated, places a lid on our desires, and cripples our capacity to meet one another as equals.

There is much to object to in Firestone’s manifesto. I cannot quite get on board, for example, with her campaign for the total elimination of childhood—perhaps my allergy to that suggestion is a nostalgic or sentimental flaw on my own part—nor with her argument that the variety of bonds, relations, and connections that will arise in a communal society will somehow be “naturally” better than the connection between a mother and her child, and I cannot help but remain suspicious of arguments that brush aside the ways that technology can become the handmaiden of capitalist coercion. These solutions feel inadequate to me; I am not convinced that Firestone’s blanket erasure of our reproductive functions really comes to terms with the things that make women so dangerous and so feared. Still, the book’s dialectic of rage and love is insistent and indispensable. Firestone’s answer to women’s intolerable oppression is to redistribute love—”there’s plenty go around,” she reminds us, “it increases with use”—and to nurture it until it touches and electrifies every aspect of human life. Such a proposition is revolutionary indeed.

Kristin Grogan is is a first year DPhil candidate in English literature at Exeter College, Oxford. Her dissertation is on the relationship of labour and poetry in modernist poetry and poetics. She is ORbits Editor at the Oxonian Review.

June, 2015 • Issue 28.4 • Philosophy • Politics & Society

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