Statue unveiled at the site where Sojourner Truth gave her 1851 ‘Ain’t I a Woman?’ speech

A pillar at one entrance of the Sojourner Truth Legacy Plaza depicts the Universalist Stone Church that once sat on the grounds of the United Way of Summit and Medina in Akron, Ohio on Wednesday, May 29, 2024. Hundreds gathered in an Ohio city Wednesday to unveil the plaza and statue dedicated to women's rights pioneer Sojourner Truth at the very spot she gave a speech now known as "Ain't I a Woman?" 173 years earlier. (AP Photo/Patrick Orsagos)

By Patrick Orsagos, The Associated Press

Posted May 30, 2024 11:42:23 AM.

 

Last Updated May 30, 2024 01:56:56 PM.

AKRON, Ohio (AP) — Hundreds gathered in an Ohio city on Wednesday to unveil a plaza and statue dedicated to abolitionist Sojourner Truth at the very spot where the women’s rights pioneer gave an iconic 1851 speech now known as “Ain’t I a Woman?”

Truth, a formerly enslaved person, delivered the speech to a crowd gathered at the Universalist Old Stone Church in Akron for the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention. In the speech, Truth drew upon the hardships she faced while she was enslaved and asked the audience why her humanity and the humanity of other enslaved African Americans was not seen in the same light as white Americans.

Though the church no longer exists, the Sojourner Truth Legacy Plaza and the United Way of Summit and Medina Counties now stand in its place.

Towanda Mullins, chairperson of the Sojourner Truth Project-Akron, said the plaza will honor a piece of the country’s past and help to shape its future.

“It’s going to remind others to be the first one to speak up, to speak up for all, not just for some,” she said.

Before taking the name Sojourner Truth, Isabella Bomfree was born into slavery in or around 1797 in the Hudson Valley. She walked away from the home of her final owner in 1826 with her infant daughter after he reneged on a promise to free her. She went to work for the Van Wagenen family, and took their surname.

Truth is believed to be the first Black woman to successfully sue white men to get her son released from slavery, though it’s possible there were other cases researchers are unaware of.

The statue, created by artist and Akron native Woodrow Nash, shows Truth standing tall, holding a book. The monument sits on top of an impala lily, the national flower of Ghana, where Truth’s father traced his heritage.

“It was an opportunity to embed within the design of the memorial to uplift the overlooked contribution of Black women civic leaders that have sojourned in Truth’s footsteps,” said Brent Leggs, executive director of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund and senior vice president at the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

Large, stone pillars stand guard around the plaza with words like “faith” and “activism” engraved at the top, with a quote from Truth below it.

One of Truth’s quotes on a pillar reads, “I will not allow my life’s light to be determined by the darkness around me.”

Dion Harris, the landscape architect who designed the plaza said he wanted to use natural materials from the northeast Ohio area that would have been used to construct the former church, including sandstone and stone.

“I wanted to show the industrial side of Akron,” Harris said. “I wanted to show every side of her and capture some of the time of the 1850s when she came.”

Akron’s statue and plaza isn’t the only place Truth is honored. A bronze statue depicting her and women’s rights pioneers Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony was unveiled in New York’s Central Park in 2020, becoming the park’s first monument honoring historical heroines. Another statue of Truth was unveiled in Angola, Indiana, in 2021, at the same place she gave a speech in June 1861, according to the city’s website.

The African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund opened the plaza. The project was funded by the Knight Foundation, United Way of Summit and Medina, the Sojourner Truth Project-Akron and the Akron Community Foundation, according to a release.

“This is not an African American story. This is an American story. History at its best for all people,” Mullins said.

___

This story has been corrected to show that Brent Leggs is a senior vice president at the National Trust for Historic Preservation, not the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund.

Patrick Orsagos, The Associated Press

Sojourner raised herself to her full height.

"Look at me! Look at my arm." She bared her right arm and flexed her powerful muscles. "I have plowed, I have planted and I have gathered into barns. And no man could head me. And ain't I a woman? I could work as much, and eat as much as man - when I could get it - and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have borne children and seen most of them sold into slavery, and when I cried out with a mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me. And ain't I a woman?

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Whose Family Values? 

ACTUAL CULTURAL MARXISM




Feminism, Intersectionality, and Marxism


Josefina L. Martínez

July 11, 2023

Debates on gender, race, and class: How can the working class become hegemonic in struggles against oppression?


Intersectionality is a word that is frequently used in academia, among feminist activists, and in social movements. “Class, race and gender” are, as Terry Eagleton pointed out, the “contemporary holy trinity.”1 There is a lot of discourse about intersectionality, but the definition of the term is often unclear. Is it a theory or an empirical description? Does it operate in the realm of individual subjectivity or does it analyze systems of domination? And finally, what does it say about the causes of intersecting oppressions and, above all, about the paths toward emancipation?

Although reflections on the relationship between gender, race, and class had long existed in Marxist debates and among the left, the concept of intersectionality was defined for the first time as such in a 1989 article by Black lawyer and feminist Kimberlé Crenshaw2 that aimed to answer these questions in the context of U.S. anti-discrimination law. That origin undoubtedly marked the concept, as we will see later. However, its most important precedent is in the work of Black feminists of the 1970s, such as those of the Combahee River Collective, who offered an “intersectional” critique of liberation movements in the context of Second Wave feminism and the political radicalization of the time.

In this article, I briefly summarize the historical background of the concept, its first formulations, how it shifted with the rise of postmodernism, and the ongoing debate on the concept within today’s social movements. I also critically contrast the theories of intersectionality with Marxism.
1. The Combahee River Collective and Black Feminists

The Combahee River Collective Statement, published in 1977, took its name as a tribute to the brave military actions led by former slave and abolitionist Harriet Tubman in 1863, which led 750 enslaved people to liberation through enemy fire. She was the only woman to run an army operation during the U.S. Civil War.

Black feminists in the 1970s saw themselves as part of a historical tradition of Black women’s struggles dating back to the 19th century. In her book Women, Race and Class,3, Angela Davis referred to their role in the U.S. abolitionist movement. Sojourner Truth’s speech at the Ohio Women’s Convention for women’s suffrage in 1851 went down in history. One man had argued that women couldn’t vote because they were the “weaker sex,” to which Sojourner Truth gave a powerful response:


I have ploughed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man — when I could get it — and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery … And ain’t I a woman?

Her response was a rebuttal of the patriarchal narrative that constructed “femininity” based on the idea that women are weak, “naturally” inferior beings incapable of exercising political citizenship. But it also challenged the many white suffragettes who neglected the demands of Black and working women.

In the mid-1970s, a number of Black women, having had negative experiences in the white feminist movement and in organizations for Black liberation, decided to revive that tradition and form their own militant groups. With the publication of the Combahee River Collective Statement, Black feminists simultaneously questioned white feminism, the Black movement, and the bourgeois Black feminism of the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO).

Their starting point was the shared experience of simultaneous oppressions rooted in the trilogy of class, race, and gender, to which they added sexual oppression. From there, they aimed their critique against the feminist movement that was hegemonized by radical feminism. This current of feminism interpreted social contradictions through the opposition between “sexual classes”4 and prioritized one system of domination — the patriarchy — over all others5. While questioning the preeminence of sexual or gender oppression over that of race and class, Black feminists also debated against the openly separatist tendencies that promoted a “war of the sexes,” which had gained strength in the feminist movement of the late 1970s. The Black feminists defined this type of feminism as a movement guided by the interests of white, middle-class women. They also maintained that any kind of biological determination of identity could lead to reactionary positions.


Although we are feminists and Lesbians, we feel solidarity with progressive Black men and do not advocate the fractionalization that white women who are separatists demand.

In her book Feminism Is for Everybody, Black feminist bell hooks argues that, in those years, “utopian visions of sisterhood” and the ahistorical definition of patriarchy were challenged by debates around race and class. Taking stock of this period, she asserts that “white women who had attempted to organize the movement around the banner of common oppression evoking the notion that women constituted a sexual class/caste were the most reluctant to acknowledge differences among women.” She also highlights the debate with the separatist currents within the movement:


They portrayed all men as the enemy in order to represent all women as victims. This focus on men deflected attention from the class privilege of individual feminist activists as well as their desire to increase their class power.6

The Combahee River Collective Statement characterized the struggle for the emancipation of Black women and Black people as inseparable from the struggle against the capitalist system. That is why its authors explicitly supported the fight for socialism:


We realize that the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy. We are socialists because we believe that work must be organized for the collective benefit of those who do the work and create the products … We are not convinced, however, that a socialist revolution that is not also a feminist and anti-racist revolution will guarantee our liberation.

In relation to Marxism, they asserted a fundamental agreement with Marx’s theory regarding “specific economic relations,” but they believed that the analysis had to be “extended further in order for us to understand our specific economic situation as Black women.” It should be noted that although they expressed the need for a socialist revolution, the practical tasks they proposed as a group were limited above all to self-awareness workshops and the struggle for the specific rights of Black women in their neighborhoods.

The notion of identity politics appears in the Statement as a response to the specific way in which Black women experience oppression. Recognition of one’s own identity is considered necessary for converging, a posteriori, with other liberation movements. There is tension between the constitution of a differentiated identity and convergence with other oppressed people to fight against a system that combines forms of economic, sexual, and racial domination.

A few years later, however, as the social, political, and ideological context drastically changed with the rise of neoliberalism and postmodernism, the concept of intersectionality would take on new meaning. With the radical transformation of society no longer on the horizon, the moment for collective action tended to dissipate, and differentiated “identities” and the demand for policies of recognition within capitalist society began to increase.
2. Intersectionality as a Category of Discrimination

Kimberlé Crenshaw first defined the concept of intersectionality in 1989. She highlighted that the separate treatment of race and gender discriminations as “mutually exclusive categories of experience and analysis” had problematic consequences for legal doctrine, feminist theory, and anti-racist politics. She thus proposed that a contrast should be drawn between “the multidimensionality of Black women’s experience [and] the single-axis analysis that distorts these experiences.”

She pointed out that any conceptualization based on a single axis of discrimination (whether it be race, gender, sexuality, or class) erases Black women from identification and the possibility of ending discrimination, limiting the analysis to the experiences of privileged members of each group. Racial discrimination tends to be viewed from the perspective of Black people with gender or class privileges, while with gender discrimination the focus is on white women with economic resources. Since “the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which Black women are subordinated.”

In her analysis, Crenshaw examines how several lawsuits brought by Black women were simply dismissed by the judiciary. In one case, DeGraffenreid v. General Motors, five women sued the multinational, alleging employment discrimination because as Black women they were denied promotions to better positions. The court dismissed the lawsuit, claiming that it was not possible to establish the existence of discrimination because they were “Black women,” as they did not constitute a group subject to special discrimination. Instead, the court agreed to an investigation of whether racial or gender segregation had occurred, but “not a combination of both.” Finally, it determined that since GM had hired women – white women – there was no gender discrimination involved. And since the company had also hired Black people – Black men – there was no racial discrimination involved either.

The Black women’s lawsuit was unsuccessful. The court claimed that its admission would open up a “Pandora’s box.”

Crenshaw points out that the objective of intersectionality is to recognize that Black women may experience discrimination that has complex forms, which the single-axis conceptual framework fails to address. In the late 1980s, the concept of intersectionality emerged as a category for addressing the complexity of experiences of “discrimination,” with the aim of establishing new case law that would allow “diversity policies” to be regulated by the state.

Later, U.S. sociologist and scholar of Black feminism Patricia Hill Collins defined intersectionality as “being constructed within an historically specific matrix of domination characterized by intersecting oppressions.”7 In her view, intersectionality defines a “social justice” project that seeks a convergence or coalitions with other “social justice projects.”

The concept of intersectionality was subsequently developed by many other Black, Latina, and Asian feminist intellectuals within the expanding framework of “Women Studies” in academia. Intersectionality became a buzzword at conferences and symposia, and in research departments. NGOs were created to develop intersectional studies in the fields of economics, law, sociology, culture, and public policy. Other vectors of oppression were added to the trilogy of gender, race, and class, such as sexuality, nationality, age, and functional diversity. But while this increased the visibility of the specific oppression faced by multiple groups and communities, it paradoxically developed in a climate of resignation to capitalist social structures, which had come to be perceived as impossible to challenge.
3. Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Multiple Differences

The rise of intersectionality studies in academia coincided with the beginning of a new historical phase that completely transformed the intellectual and political climate under neoliberalism. The period of “Bourgeois Restoration”8 or neoliberal boom saw generalized attacks on workers’ gains worldwide, with privatization and deregulation policies running rampant given the defection of the trade union and political leaderships of the working class. This led to an increase in the internal fragmentation of the working class and a huge loss of class subjectivity.

In this new context, the radicalism of the Black feminists and socialists of the Combahee River Collective gave way to a formulation of intersectionality in the framework of an increased fragmentation of subjects, from a postmodern perspective. The idea of ​​intersectionality became more akin to that of “diversity” and “identity politics.” Such a formulation shifts the focus from the collective to the individual, from the material to the subjective, in a process of “culturalization” of the relations of domination. It generalizes the idea that the struggle of oppressed groups fundamentally involves acquiring self-awareness of their own identity — a “situated knowledge” — to ensure that privileged groups (men, white women, heterosexual women, etc.) “deconstruct” their privileges and recognize diversity. In the framework of the postmodern “cultural shift,” identities are presented as exclusively constructed in discourse, so the possibilities of resisting are restricted to the establishment of a counter-narrative.

This perspective, however, cannot be applied to class exploitation: Can we expect those who own the means of production — bankers and capitalists — to “deconstruct” their power through self-reflection? In reality, the proposition is also useless as a strategy for ending racism, heterosexism, and sexism, unless these “axes of domination” are considered to be separate entities that operate exclusively in the cultural or ideological sphere, rather than being intertwined with the material and structural relations of capitalism.

Conversely, the multiplication of an increasingly extensive series of oppressed identities, without considering the possibility of radically transforming the capitalist social relations on which these oppressions are based, gave rise to practices of “ghettoization” and separation in activism. Pratibha Parmar warned of this problem in her work:


There has been an emphasis on accumulating a collection of oppressed identities which in turn have given rise to hierarchy of oppression. Such scaling has not only been destructive, but divisive and immobilising. … [M]any women have retreated into ghettoised “lifestyle politics” and find themselves unable to move beyond personal and individual experience.9

As the counterpart to this impotence, the capitalist system appropriated the explosion of “diversity” as a market of identities, which it could assimilate as long as they did not challenge the social system as a whole. Terry Eagleton noted with regard to postmodernism:


One would be forced to claim that [given] its single most enduring achievement, the fact that it has helped to place questions of sexuality, gender and ethnicity so firmly on the political agenda, that it is impossible to imagine them being erased without an almighty struggle was nothing more than a substitute for more classical forms of radical politics which dealt in class, state, ideology, revolution, material modes of production.10

In a footnote, however, Eagleton clarified that it had not been postmodern intellectuals who had placed those issues on the political agenda, but the previous action of social movements through struggles in the 1960s and 1970s. Once that wave of political radicalization was defeated, the visibility of issues of race, gender and sexuality grew, while class became increasingly invisible (to the point that some authors have written about the disappearance of the working class as such).
4. The Retreat from Class Politics

In the class/race/gender trilogy, class tended to be diluted, or became just another identity, as if it were a category of social stratification (by income) or type of occupation. Citing Collins, Marta E. Giménez11 notes that one of the characteristic elements of intersectionality theories is the assumption that “in order to theorise these connections it is necessary ‘to support a working hypothesis of equivalency between oppressions’,” but that this leads to the elimination of the specificity of class relations.

Against this view, it is necessary to point out that race, gender, and class are not directly comparable categories. This does not mean that we must establish a hierarchy of grievances, or determine which is most important to people’s subjective experience; the goal is to achieve a greater understanding of the relationship between oppression and exploitation in capitalist society.

For example, class, race, and gender operate very differently in relation to “equality” and “difference.” Historically, the bourgeoisie has tried to camouflage class “social differences” as much as possible behind an “egalitarian” ideology of “free contract.” But it uses racism and sexism to establish “differences” that are attributed to biological or “natural” conditions to justify inequality in the distribution of resources and access to rights and to defend the persistence of a certain division of labor or, simply put, the enslavement of millions of people, dehumanizing them.

From an emancipatory perspective, the objective is to ensure that no difference in skin color, birthplace, biological sex, or sexual choice can be used as a basis for oppression, grievances, or inequality, while recognizing diversity and promoting the development of the creative potential of all individuals within the framework of social cooperation. But in the case of class differences, the aim is to eliminate them completely, as such. Through its struggle against capitalist social relations, the working class seeks to eliminate the private ownership of the means of production, which entails the elimination of the bourgeoisie as a class and the possibility of ending all class society.

What structures capitalist society is the social difference between the owners of the means of production and those who are forced to sell their labor power in exchange for wages, beyond all attempts to render this contradiction invisible. Patriarchal relations — which emerged thousands of years before capitalism — and racism are not ahistorical entities, but have taken on new forms and a specific social content in the framework of capitalist social relations.

Capitalism uses patriarchal prejudices to establish an unprecedented differentiation between the “public” and the “private,” between the sphere of production and the sphere of the home, where women sustain — through invisible work — a large part of the tasks of social reproduction of the labor power needed for the reproduction of capital. Institutions such as the family, marriage, and heterosexual normativity, reformulated under new social relations, socialize and naturalize this role for women. The multiple manifestations of gender oppression and the painful grievances that they imply for millions of women through violence and femicide are not “reducible” to class relations, but they cannot be explained without connecting the categories of oppression and exploitation.

Racism was used to provide an ideological justification for enslaving millions of human beings, while at the same time the Enlightenment elevated the ideas of “freedom,” “equality,” and “fraternity” as a basis for the “rights of man.” Racism accompanied and reinforced the massive colonialist endeavors of imperialist states, as well as internal genocides such that carried out in the United States against indigenous peoples. Since the U.S. Civil War and the abolition of slavery, racism has continued to be used to exclude of a large part of the country’s population, which is treated as “second-class citizens” and “second-class workers.” This promotes internal division within the U.S. working class. In turn, as Black feminists have pointed out, racial oppression and gender oppression are masterfully combined to maximize capitalist profits: it is a fact that there is a larger wage gap for Black and Latina women workers in the United States, just as there is disproportionate institutional and police violence against Black youth. It is also used to support racist and xenophobic policies against migrants in Europe, where they are treated as second-class workers and lack basic social and democratic rights.
5. Marxism and Intersectionality

In Capital, Marx wrote, “Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.” In an earlier work, he and Friedrich Engels had pointed out that “social progress, changes of historical periods, take place in direct proportion to the progress of women towards freedom; and the decline of a social order occurs in proportion to the reduction of women’s freedom”, paraphrasing the utopian socialist Fourier. In The Condition of the Working Class in England, Engels had specifically analyzed the reality of working women who were entering the sphere of capitalist production in large numbers and experiencing the twofold grievances of oppression and exploitation. In The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Engels continued the incomplete ethnological studies carried out by his friend to develop an analysis of the family institution in history and the oppression of women.

Revolutionary Marxism has analyzed the relationship between exploitation and oppression in other ways as well. For example, Marx and Engels maintained that the English proletariat could not be free if its rights were based on the oppression of Irish workers. Later, Lenin argued that a people that oppresses another people cannot be free, and defended the right to national self-determination as well as the fight against colonial oppression.

In her critique of intersectionality theories, Lise Vogel correctly argues that socialist feminists of the 1960s and 1970s had already highlighted the intersection between patriarchy, racism, and capitalism before the term intersectionality became popular. It is important to note, however, that a long tradition of socialist feminist thought had developed long before that period, from Flora Tristán to Engels and Clara Zetkin, the Russian revolutionaries, and many others. This led to important international socialist women’s conferences and programs and organizations of peasant and working women. The Transitional Program written by Leon Trotsky and adopted by the Fourth International in 1938, includes among its slogans the need to “Open the road to the Woman Worker! Open the Road to the Youth!” and to seek “support among the most exploited layers of the working class.”

Intersectionality theorists often criticize Marxism for what they consider to be “class reductionism.” But defending the centrality of a “class analysis” does not mean limiting it to the activity of unions in wage struggles. That is a corporatist, economist, or narrowly syndicalist perspective of class. It is true that the 20th-century practices of many of the Stalinized Communist parties, as well as the trade union bureaucracies, were based on these narrow corporate politics, thus deepening the divide between “class politics” and the struggle of movements against oppression. But only by falsely equating Stalinism with Marxism is it possible to assert that Marxism has not considered the “intersection” of class exploitation with gender oppression, racism, colonial oppression, and heterosexism.

A class analysis aims to reveal the relationships that structure capitalist society, based not only on the generalized expropriation of surplus value for the accumulation of capital, but also on the appropriation of women’s reproductive work in the home, as well as on the concentration of capital in large monopolies, the expansion of financial capital, and the competition between imperialist states that lead to global wars and plunder. It also examines how capital uses and establishes “differences,” fueling racist, misogynistic, and xenophobic ideologies to maximize exploitation and provoke divisions within the ranks of the working class. This class analysis, far from expressing an “economic reductionist” view, includes the interaction of political and social elements and allows a deeper understanding of the connection between class relations and racism, patriarchy, and heterosexism.

At the same time, it recognizes that if the working class — which in the 21st century is more diverse, racialized, and feminized than ever before — manages to overcome its internal divisions and fragmentation, it has the unique capacity to destroy capitalism and place the entire economy, industry, transport and communications system under its control as the basis for organizing a new society of free producers. The retreat from “class politics” actually means abandoning the struggle against the capitalist system, without which it is impossible to put an end to the terrible injustices caused by exploitation and oppression based on race, gender or sexuality.

Since the capitalist crisis of 2008, with the emergence of new resistance movements against neoliberal policies, some sectors of feminist activists, anti-racist, and the youth movements have been defending the idea of “intersectionality” in a new sense to form coalitions among various oppressed groups. The women’s movement that organized the March 8, 2018, strikes in the Spanish State, for example, has itself as an “anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-fascist” movement. This was undoubtedly a very important step forward toward the convergence of struggles and a countertrend to the logic of fragmentation. However, the sum or “intersection” of resistance movements is insufficient if they are not connected with a common strategy to defeat capitalism, without which it is impossible to end racism or patriarchal oppression.

It is not about counterposing “movements” or “identities” to an abstract and genderless working class. Never before in history has the working class been so diverse in terms of gender and race. Women already make up 50 percent of the working class, and of that Black, Latin, and Asian women are the majority. The key to a hegemonic strategy, then, is to return to the centrality of class politics that decisively incorporates the fight against all oppression based on gender, race, and sexuality. This means seeking to unite what capitalism divides, strengthening the internal unity of the working class, as well as adopting a policy of alliances with movements that fight against specific oppression. This perspective, along with the fight to expropriate the expropriators, is the only one that will allow progress toward a truly free society.

First published in Spanish on February 24, 2019, in Contrapunto.

Translation by Marisela Trevin


Notes

Notes↑1 Terry Eagleton, Against the Grain: Essays 1975–1985 (London, UK: Verso, 1986).
↑2 Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics,” in Feminist Legal Theory: Readings in Law and Gender, ed. by Katharine T. Bartlett and Rosanne Kennedy (New York, NY: Routledge, 1991).
↑3 Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York, NY: Knopf, 1981).
↑4 Whether in terms of the radical feminism of Shulamith Firestone in a 1970 essay or the materialist feminism of Cristine Delphy from 1980. See Shulamith Firestone, “The Dialectic of Sex,” in Radical Feminism: A Documentary Reader, ed. by Barbara A. Crow (New York, NY, New York University Press, 2000); Christine Delphy, “The Main Enemy,” Feminist Issues 1, no. 1 (1980): 23–40.
↑5 As formulated by Kate Millet in Sexual Politics: A Surprising Examination of Society’s Most Arbitrary Folly (New York: Doubleday, 1970).
↑6 bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000).
↑7 Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment (New York, NY: Routledge, 1990), 127.
↑8 Emilio Albamonte and Matías Maiello, “At the Limits of the ‘Bourgeois Restoration,’” Left Voice, December 24, 2019. First published in Spanish in 2011.
↑9 Pratibha Parmar, “Black Feminism: The Politics of Articulation,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. by Jonathan Rutherford (London, UK: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990), 107.
↑10 Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 1996), 22.
↑11 Marta E. Giménez, Marx, Women, and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Marxist Feminist Essays: (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill Publishers, 2019.


Josefina L. Martínez
Josefina is a historian from Madrid and an editor of our sister site in the Spanish State, IzquierdaDiario.es.

OPINION

Op-Ed: American history is a parade of horrors — and also heroes

John Brown, an evangelical militia leader who was hanged for trying to arm enslaved people for an uprising, is depicted in a detail from the mural “Tragic Prelude” by John Steuart Curry.
(Photo Researchers / Getty Images)

BY STEPHANIE COONTZ

AUG. 14, 2022 3 AM PT

As a historian in the age of the 1619 Project and the debates over “critical race theory,” I find many of the audiences I address fall into one of two camps. Some celebrate American exceptionalism and resist dwelling on horrors like slavery or settler colonialism. Others primarily see a centuries-long saga of white supremacism and oppression.

The shameful institution of slavery must loom large in any honest account of American history. But so should the struggle of both Black and white abolitionists to end that institution. Recognizing those who fought from the very beginning to extend the ideal of equality beyond white men is essential to understanding the American story. We shouldn’t be afraid of schoolchildren learning why our nation needed those heroic reformers.

And yet, since January, legislators in more than half the states have introduced bills forbidding schools from teaching that America’s founding documents had anything to do with defending slavery or from discussing any other “divisive concepts.” Typical is the wording of the Florida and South Dakota bills, which prohibit use of material that makes anyone “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress” on account of “actions committed in the past by other members of the same race, color, sex, or national origin.”

This is a new twist on old efforts by political demagogues to stoke white racial anxieties. Over the past 100 years we have heard that “they” are coming to rape “our” wives and daughters, take “our” jobs, waste “our” tax money, steal “our” wallets, and murder us at random. Now, it appears, they’re coming to hurt our feelings!

Sojourner Truth was born into slavery and became an icon of equality, fighting for women’s rights as well as racial justice.
(National Portrait Gallery)

But although studying the history of slavery and settler colonialism ought to be disturbing, it doesn’t have to be demoralizing. We need to tell the full story of slavery because without doing so there is no way to understand the heroism of those who fought for equal rights. The only people who should feel “discomfort” in learning American history are individuals who refuse to build upon the efforts of those early visionaries. A case in point is the difference between today’s White evangelical leaders and their forbears, who actually did believe that Black Lives Matter.

In the era when our nation was founded, it truly was revolutionary to claim that all human beings had the right to be treated humanely and equally. For most of history the morality of slavery was never questioned. People resisted being enslaved, but they did not condemn the existence of slavery. And because people believed it was perfectly acceptable to kill or enslave those they conquered, they felt little need to claim their victims were inherently inferior. Subordination was the way of the world, with citizens subject to kings, wives to husbands and slaves to masters.

Profit, not racism, was the primary impetus for the expansion of the African slave trade and the establishment of an African labor force in the Americas. But racism gradually became the primary defense of slavery.

Slave owners responded to an emerging global market by combining the ruthlessly impersonal profit calculations of mass production with the cruel intimidation required to extract maximum effort on exhausting tasks while forestalling resistance by enslaved people, who vastly outnumbered overseers and owners.

But at the same time, the rise of capitalism and the overthrow of autocratic rulers challenged traditional justifications of social hierarchy. More and more people asserted that “the whole human race is born equal.” Some would go on, for the first time in history, to build a movement to abolish slavery, not merely to emancipate an individual or a specific group.

When American revolutionaries claimed an “inalienable” right to liberty without demanding an end to slavery, many people pointed out the contradiction. In 1774, an anonymous “Son of Africa” challenged the rebel colonists to “pull the beam out of thine own eyes.” Caesar Sarter, who was once enslaved, urged the revolutionaries to liberate all slaves as “the first step” toward freeing themselves.

Some white Americans rose to the challenge. Vermont abolished slavery in 1777, giving Black men the vote. In 1781, two Massachusetts slaves, Elizabeth Freeman and Quok Walker, sued their masters for freedom. Both managed to convince white jurists that slavery violated the state’s constitution, which stated that “all men are born free and equal.” Anti-slavery sentiment became widespread during and after the American Revolution.
But there was an ironic backlash. Once revolutionaries articulated mankind’s right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” those who supported — or just tolerated — the subjugation of other human beings were put on the defensive.

Very few people like to admit it when we put selfish interests ahead of moral convictions. Patrick Henry, the famous orator who supposedly once declared “Give me liberty, or give me death,” strikes me as an exception that reveals something important about the psychology that helped create American racism.

In 1773, a Quaker abolitionist sent Henry an antislavery pamphlet. When I first began reading Henry’s answer, I thought the pamphlet had done its trick. In line after line, he describes slavery as an “Abominable Practice … a Principle as repugnant to humanity as it is inconsistent with the Bible and destructive to Liberty.”

So I was shocked when Henry goes on to admit that he himself owns slaves and has no intention of freeing them, due to the “general inconvenience of living without them.” He labels his conduct “culpable,” saying “I will not, I cannot justify it.” At his death in 1799, he still owned 67 slaves, whom he bequeathed to his wife and sons.

Very few people can live with that level of cognitive dissonance. Racism offered one way to resolve it.

In the late 18th century, and especially in the first half of the 19th, a sustained campaign was launched to explain away the contradiction between the rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence and the reality of a Constitution that tolerated slavery. Black people, Indians and other non-European groups began to be described as less than fully human, incapable of exercising the responsibilities of liberty.

So even as abolitionism gained momentum, racist invective, which historian Van Gosse notes had been “episodic prior to the 1810s,” became far more common and considerably more vicious. In the South, free Black people faced increasing restrictions. Violent riots against them flared up in the North, reaching a high point in 1863, when demonstrators against the Civil War draft vented their fury on Black neighborhoods.

But to my mind these terrible trends make the resistance to such behavior by a courageous minority of Americans all the more inspiring. And resistance there was. Two recent books, “The Slave’s Cause” by Manisha Sinha and “Standard-Bearers of Equality” by Paul J. Polgar, describe how a “radical, interracial movement” consistently advocated for racial equality from the 18th century onward, gaining support even as racism hardened and slaveholders pushed their interests more aggressively.

Frederick Douglass inspired an interracial coalition for abolition and equality.
(Library of Congress)

Black social reformers like Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth and Sarah Parker Remond rallied huge followings of white and Black Americans in support of racial equality. By the 1840s, legislators in Massachusetts, Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire were routinely defying racially-exclusionary federal regulations. In the free states, interracial crowds spontaneously formed to rescue men and women caught up by slave catchers. The 1840s and 1850s saw interracial rescues in nearly every free state, with dramatically large turnouts in Chicago, Syracuse, Detroit and Buffalo. When a fugitive captured in Boston in 1854 was returned to slavery, 50,000 protesters lined the streets shouting “Shame! Shame!”

Then the war itself turned many skeptical white Northerners into strong supporters of abolition and equality. Union soldiers’ diaries and letters show this transformation occurring as young Northern men saw slavery up close, while fighting alongside Black comrades.

Legislators who worry that schoolchildren who learn an unexpurgated version of history will “denigrate” our founders are probably right to fear that youths who discover Patrick Henry’s choice of convenience over conscience will be unimpressed by his “liberty or death” oratory. But there are plenty of other heroes — Black, brown and white — to take his place. In fact, many young white people will find some groups of their ancestors more worthy of admiration than their modern-day counterparts.

During the first half of the 19th century, for example, many white evangelicals were ardent abolitionists who would have been horrified by the recent migration of prominent white evangelicals into the camp of white Christian nationalism.

Jonathan Blanchard, founder of Wheaton College, the pre-eminent Christian evangelical college in America, spent a year in Pennsylvania working as a full-time “agitator” for the American Anti-Slavery Society. He called slave-holding “a social sin” that could be addressed only by immediate abolition.

And then, of course, there was John Brown, the devout Reformed Evangelical whose militia battled slavery proponents in the Kansas territory and who led an attack on a federal armory in Virginia in 1859 in an attempt to arm slaves for an uprising. He was tried for insurrection and hanged. Yet his stand against slavery inspired later Union troops to march into battle singing “John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave, but his soul goes marching on.”

Evangelical abolitionists opposed other injustices as well. In 1838 several white Baptist and Methodist preachers not only protested the forced relocation of the Cherokees but also marched with them along the Trail of Tears. Others joined the Liberty Party, which opposed the war with Mexico and condemned the exploitation of Native Americans and Chinese, Mexican and Irish laborers. Many evangelicals were early supporters of female equality.

If our histories refuse to acknowledge the extent and brutality of the injustices that accompanied our nation’s founding, how can we or our children honor the idealism and courage of those who struggled to implement and enlarge the revolutionary demands for equal rights? And if we don’t understand the way people’s belief systems can change, how can we hope to build on the best parts of our heritage and rise above the worst? That’s why an unflinching account of American history can actually give us hope for the future.

Stephanie Coontz, a professor emerita of history at Evergreen State College in Washington, is the author of the forthcoming book “For Better AND Worse: The Problematic Past and Uncertain Future of Marriage.” This piece is adapted from the essay “Why Learning the History of Slavery in America Doesn’t Have to Be Depressing.”

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IWD 

Women and the Social Reproduction of Capitalism

E. W. PLAWIUK

"proletarii, propertyless citizens whose service to the State was to raise children (proles).”Classical Antiquity; Rome, Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, Verso Press 1974

The issue facing women working at home or in capitalist society is the matter of unwaged servitude versus wage-slavery. The social reproduction of capitalist society is found both in the workplace and the home.

"It is not a question of wages or prices; these are but the reflections of the social relations of capitalism." K. Marx

As Marx states it is not an issue of wages but of the relationship we have to the means of production, wages reflect the minimal share of profit from the social reproduction of value. To that end all relationships are matters of capitalist relations of production.

So the stay at home mother is reproducing the capitalist relationship in the home, and reproducing the proletariat.

"That the abolition of individual economy is inseparable from the abolition of the family is self-evident. " Karl Marx, The German Ideology

The capitalist relationship of the home was structured in the 19th century with the development of the nuclear family. The rise of the ‘modern woman’, and the middle class values of the family were created in this era (which saw the emergence of homemaker magazines dedicated to women’s morality) as the extended family was replaced with the nuclear family. What is often overlooked in this era is that those advocates of the stay at home mother were well off and had servants, nannies or governesses to raise children, the whole age of ‘Upstairs Downstairs’.

The 'woman' in the household was allowed leisure time to persue reforming society because servants, usually Irish immigrant women, did her work. This also applied to the skilled tradesman and his family. They too employed servants to work in the home. This was true right up until the 1920's in North America and the UK. The creation of modern etiquette manuals and homemaker ideology was crafted by these middle class women, who of course were speaking to their own class of women, not to the servants in the household.

The early wave of 19th century feminism that fought for women’s rights, the abolition of slavery also coincided with the movement for temperance and for moral virtue. They blamed drink for working class men’s violence, and fallen women- prostitutes-- who for the most part were unemployed Irish serving girls---for the degradation of the moral virtues of womanhood. The reformers and their feminist agenda were the well off wives of the labour aristocracy and the small business owners.

This class conflict can be seen in the controversy raised when the black former slave Sojourner Truth made her famous speech; And Ain't I A Woman, to the 1851 Women's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio.

Sojourner raised herself to her full height.
"Look at me! Look at my arm." She bared her right arm and flexed her powerful muscles. "I have plowed, I have planted and I have gathered into barns. And no man could head me. And ain't I a woman? I could work as much, and eat as much as man - when I could get it - and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have borne children and seen most of them sold into slavery, and when I cried out with a mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me. And ain't I a woman?"

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Whose Family Values?

Women and the Social Reproduction of Capitalism

"proletarii, propertyless citizens whose service to the State was to raise children (proles).”
Classical Antiquity; Rome, Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, Verso Press 1974

The issue facing women working at home or in capitalist society is the matter of unwaged servitude versus wage-slavery. The social reproduction of capitalist society is found both in the workplace and the home.

"It is not a question of wages or prices; these are but the reflections of the social relations of capitalism." K. Marx

As Marx states it is not an issue of wages but of the relationship we have to the means of production, wages reflect the minimal share of profit from the social reproduction of value. To that end all relationships are matters of capitalist relations of production.

So the stay at home mother is reproducing the capitalist relationship in the home, and reproducing the proletariat.

"That the abolition of individual economy is inseparable from the abolition of the family is self-evident. " Karl Marx, The German Ideology

The capitalist relationship of the home was structured in the 19th century with the development of the nuclear family. The rise of the ‘modern woman’, and the middle class values of the family were created in this era (which saw the emergence of homemaker magazines dedicated to women’s morality) as the extended family was replaced with the nuclear family. What is often overlooked in this era is that those advocates of the stay at home mother were well off and had servants, nannies or governesses to raise children, the whole age of ‘Upstairs Downstairs’.

The 'woman' in the household was allowed leisure time to persue reforming society because servants, usually Irish immigrant women, did her work. This also applied to the skilled tradesman and his family. They too employed servants to work in the home. This was true right up until the 1920's in North America and the UK. The creation of modern etiquette manuals and homemaker ideology was crafted by these middle class women, who of course were speaking to their own class of women, not to the servants in the household.

The early wave of 19th century feminism that fought for women’s rights, the abolition of slavery also coincided with the movement for temperance and for moral virtue. They blamed drink for working class men’s violence, and fallen women- prostitutes-- who for the most part were unemployed Irish serving girls---for the degradation of the moral virtues of womanhood. The reformers and their feminist agenda were the well off wives of the labour aristocracy and the small business owners.

This class conflict can be seen in the controversy raised when the black former slave Sojourner Truth made her famous speech; And Ain't I A Woman, to the 1851 Women's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio.

Sojourner raised herself to her full height.

"Look at me! Look at my arm." She bared her right arm and flexed her powerful muscles. "I have plowed, I have planted and I have gathered into barns. And no man could head me. And ain't I a woman? I could work as much, and eat as much as man - when I could get it - and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have borne children and seen most of them sold into slavery, and when I cried out with a mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me. And ain't I a woman?"

The impact of this black woman on the predominately white middle class convention shocked much of the audience. Just as Yoko Ono would be in the 1970's when she wrote the equally controversial song; Woman is the Nigger of the world. And of course in today’s hip-hop and rap vernacular we still hear women devalued as 'ho' and 'bitch'.

Woman and her work is devalued because it is not seen as producing surplus value, but rather seen as the reproduction of the world we live in. In other words she produces and reproduces 'use value' in Marxist terms. She is the proletarii producing the proles of capitalism.

Women’s work outside the home socially reproduces her work in the home. Teacher, nurse, nun, seamstress, waitress, cook, daycare worker, laundress, janitor, chauffeur, home-care worker, model, prostitute, stripper, etc. are reflections of work in the home in capitalist society. Women workers are subjected to the division of labour of the home in the work they do in capitalist society.

Even the medical challenges of biological reproduction, cloning, artificial insemination and fertility drugs, birth control reflect this division of labour of women’s work of actual biological reproduction from one of sexuality into capitalist commodification. Capitalism cannot function without the social reproduction of women’s work, waged or unwaged.

The Living Wage campaign dovetails with the need to argue for Wages for Housework, an issue whose time has come. We need a social wage that constitutes both the living wage and wages for housework. This wage includes full benefits including pensions, medical, dental, etc. for all proletarians waged or unwaged.

Wages were once upon a time tied to the ability of a skilled craftsman to support the basics of life for his family. Today all the proletarians in the family work, father, mother, even children. The capitalist system of wage slavery has once again been reproduced not in the ‘satanic mills’ of the first wave of industrialization, but in the very society we live in. It is not uncommon for us to work for minimum wages in two or three jobs. And these jobs are also where we socialize, the mall, or consume, i.e. Macdonald’s.

Like the middle-class women of the 19th century, who had time to raise her family thanks to nannies and servants, today that same professional class returns to the bosom of the nuclear family, as stay at home moms. Only because they and their husbands are professionals earning incomes that can support both of them. and of course can afford the indentured servitude of a live in nanny.

It is they who promote the ideal of the family values of the stay at home mom, and call for tax credits for this voluntary bourgeois vocation. Of course these same stay at home moms of the professional classes also have maids, and nannies (indentured servants from the Philippines instead of Ireland). They see little need for socialized daycare, or for a living wage for the proletarian family whether it be a single mother family, a heterosexual or lesbian family. And like their moralist predecessors they couch their version of the bourgeois nuclear family in terms of Christian family values.

The World’s Largest Workplace: Social Reproduction and Wages for Housework by PJ Lilley & Jeff Shantz, discusses this movement which began in the 1970's and was a source of much controversy. Many feminists of the time decried the idea of recognizing woman’s work in the home as waged labour, instead advocating for the abolition of housework. All housework should be shared, women and men should work outside the home and the work of the home should be shared. Unfortunately the ideal did not match reality. Women still to this day do the housework while men do not. Even now that woman are liberated to find work in society, no longer relegated to being the little woman at home, when she returns from her job, the job at home is still waiting.

"Women's full-time participation in the labor market drops off dramatically with the second child," says Rebecca L. Upton, an anthropologist at the U-M Center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life.
"While most paid professional women return to the work force full-time after the birth of their first child, over 50 percent change to part-time work or take a leave of absence after the birth of the second.
"A second child also profoundly affects a couple's relationship to each other, with even the most equalitarian men and women assuming more traditional gender roles," says Upton, who is presenting a paper titled "The Next One Changes Everything: Having a Second Child in the American Middle-Class Family."

Wages for Housework was a Marxist-Feminist analysis, written by written by Selma James and Maria Rosa Dellacosta, of this division of labour applied to women as unwaged work. It declared women were proletarians, and that their struggles were key elements in the class struggle, especially in the working class communities where we live and reproduce the social relationships of capitalism and patriarchy.

DellaCosta was part of the workers and womens autonomist movement in Italy, which called for the social strike the refusal to pay rent or utilities, during the economic crisis in Italy in 1971.

As she says now;

"The work I produced from the early 1970s and part of the 1980s is probably fairly well-known and readily available in print. The material emerged from a collective debate with other women focussing on the analysis of reproductive labour and the question of the struggle for wage/income, starting with wages for housework. These days, given the pervasiveness and destructiveness of this most recent phase of accumulation, I feel that a commitment revolving exclusively round the wage/income and the reduction of labour time is inadequate unless it is pursued in step with a series of other issues which I will try to highlight.
In fact, I think that, from various viewpoints, the problem of human reproduction is indissolubly linked to issues - above all, land - raised by the indigenous movements. Women continue to be primarily responsible for human reproduction in all regions of the planet, and the problem of their condition cannot ignore the horizons that these issues outline, whether in families of the advanced areas or the village communities of the 'developing' countries." The Native In Us, the Earth We Belong To

Selma James was the wife of CLR James the Trinadian born Marxist. And like Raya Dunesevkeya (CLR James former political collaborator) Selma contributed to recognizing that proletarian struggle is the struggle not only of the industrialized working class but also of women and of those exploited by race (recognizing their proletarian relationship under capitalism as slaves or indentured servants). See her seminal work on this: Sex, Race and Class. And like Della Costa, Selma James is still active with Wages For Housework campaigns internationally see her Global Women’s Strike web site which also advocates for migrant women and open migration against the migration of global capital.

Babies and Bosses: OECD Recommendations to Help Families Balance Work and Family Life states: the recent OECD report exposed English Canada's failure to develop a cohesive program of childcare, unlike Quebec, that is not just babysitting services. In comparison with other OECD countries, capitalism in Canada fails to pay for the social reproduction of itself, relying on increasing its profitability not only off the surplus value of its workers, but the expense of the family being a further economic burden on these workers.

“Declining fertility rates are a concern in most countries, particularly in Japan, where birth rates are dropping as more people put jobs before childbearing. In Switzerland, as many as 40% of women at age 40 with university degrees are childless. Strong economies and manageable pensions systems depend on both higher fertility rates and higher employment rates. Many governments are investing in family-friendly policies which have societal benefits for the next generation. Support for working mothers will reduce the poverty which impacts negatively on child development and support for pre-school care outside the home can better prepare children for formal schooling. Pay gaps still affect the relative earnings of men and women. Even in families where both parents work, men typically earn 33-66% more than women, so it is usually mothers who take time off to look after children. In most countries, fathers work more than men without children while mothers spend less time in paid employment than other women. “

The National Child Poverty 2004 report from Campaign 2000, shows an increase in child poverty amongst working families, reveals the need for a comprehensive social wage campaign.

The child poverty rate in Canada is up for the first time since 1996. After five consecutive years of decline, the child poverty rate increased to 15.6% in 2002, which means 1,065,000 children, or nearly 1 in 6 children in Canada, live in low-income families. Fifteen years after Parliament's unanimous all-party declaration to end child poverty, Campaign 2000's 2004 Report Card on Child and Family Poverty in Canada reveals that governments are failing to take sufficient action to reduce child poverty and low-wage labour markets are letting parents down.

Pay equity continues to be ordered by the courts in Canada and continues to be challenged by the state at all levels,forcing unions to fight again and again to see it implemented in the workplace. Even the capitalist state enjoys the fruit of the feminization of poverty, which it supposedly opposes in policy. The wage differential between women workers and men, will continue as long as women’s work is seen as an extension of their housework.

Campaign 2000 calls for a federal provincial commission on a Living Wage that wage would be a minimum of $10 per hour. Something the IWW Edmonton Branch has been one of the most outspoken advocates for, in the Alberta or Canadian labour movement.


What is really needed a social wage; Wages for Housework and a Living Wage, of at least $10 per hour including benefits and transferable pensions for waged and unwaged workers. We need business to carry this expense, and to provide on the job daycare facilities as well as paying for the daycare costs of their workers who may use public daycare facilities.

The failure in Alberta, and across English Canada, to provide a comprehensive day care and early childhood program, unlike Quebec, reveals the failure of state-sanctioned tax credits.

These tax credits have not created a social day care program, but have been pocketed by the well off professional class and used to promote family values; that is mothers should stay at home as if having to work was a choice. The cost of childcare the creation of and support of ‘proles’ is a cost being born by working families not by the capitalist system which needs its wage slaves.

"The tax system is now being drawn into the emerging debate in Canada over how to address women's tightening double bind of paid and unpaid work, generating a rash of recent proposals, discussed infra, to give tax relief for caregiving work provided within families. I argue that these proposals are not well designed to improve women's economic equality. While a higher visibility for women's unpaid labour is welcome, the tax reforms being suggested do little more than legitimate the reprivatization of social welfare costs onto families." TAXING THE MARKET CITIZEN: FISCAL POLICY AND INEQUALITY IN AN AGE OF PRIVATIZATION

The need for such a social wage highlights the failure of the capitalist state in Canada to deal with the real costs of social reproduction of the proletariat and its value in creating capitalism. Instead at the behest of business the state issues tax credits to taxpayers, giving back in effect personal taxes, while business pockets their profits and gives their CEO’s record bonuses and wage increases. The capitalists and not taxpayers or the state must pay the social wage with benefits.

A social wage reveals the contradictions of the capitalist value that women’s work is social reproduction for use value rather than a reproduction for surplus value. As such it is seen as a cost of doing business that cuts into the rate of profit.

The proletariat reproduces themselves for the benefit of wage slavery under capitalism and creates the surplus value that is the very source of capitalism. A social wage is a direct assault on the rate of profit capitalists enjoy, and they will fight hard to oppose it, as they have done over minimum wages and reductions in the hours of work.

Women have always controlled their own bodies, regardless of the patriarchy, abortion and birth control, are some of the most ancient of women’s mysteries and social practices. Patriarchy recoils at the thought of women controlling their own sexuality and the reproduction of the human race. It devalues their work of social reproduction, in order to cover up it’s irrational religious fears about women’s and natures domination of “man’s” (God’s) world.

Capitalism on the other hand values this social reproduction but as a commodity, one which is now being removed from the destiny of biology and being transformed by the development of industrialized biotechnology. In her work the Dialectics of Sex, Shulamith Firestone, discusses the attempts by capitalist patriarchy to control women’s reproduction with the introduction of the technology of reproduction; that is cloning, fertility drugs, etc. The ideal, of capitalist patriarchy would be reproduction without women, Firestone asserts. Again her work is from the 1970's, and was well ahead of its time, and while it is somewhat dated it rings the clarion bell over the issues of biotechnology, nanotechnology, and the efforts to commodify women’s sexuality outside of the womb.

A woman’s right to choose, her right to control sexual reproduction, the ultimate source of social reproduction, remains the key issue in the struggle for women’s liberation. It was when Emma Goldman fought for birth control information to be freely available last century and tragically remains so today. It continues to be challenged by religious patriarch’s as a moral issue. And now it is being challenged by industrialized medicine with its attempts to create life outside of the womb through cloning, and by its attempts to create life in the womb with fertility medicine. The latter uses women as wombs for multiple births. While the moralists deny a woman’s right to abortion and birth control, the medical patriarchs view her as a ‘subject’ for their experimentations.

Whilhem Reich’s work the Sexual Revolution is a critique of the psychic plague that capitalist patriarchy creates in all of us. His assertion is that the very nature of authoritarianism and domination is reproduced under capitalism by the nuclear family under the domination of the father.

Why does society repress sexuality? Freud's answer is that it is the sine qua
non of civilized life. Reich replies that sexual repression's chief social
function is to secure the existing class structure. The criticism which is
curtailed by such repression is criticism of today's society, just as the
rebellion which is inhibited is rebellion against the status quo.Closely
following Marx, Reich declares, "Every social order creates those character
forms which it needs for its preservation. In class society, the ruling cass
secures its position with the aid of education and the institution of the
family, by making its ideology the ruling ideology of all members of the
society." To this Reich adds the following "it is not merely a matter of
imposing ideologies, attitudes and concepts....Rather it is a matter of a
deep-reaching process in each new generation, of the formation of a psychic
structure which corresponds to the existing social order in all strata of the
population." Bertell Ollman, Social and Sexual Revolution: from Marx to Reich and Back

It is our socially constructed roles as men that determine our participation in the social reproduction of patriarchy and capitalism. The sex economy of capitalism is the social reproduction of familial slavery. The slave owner cannot conceive of the slave, the ‘other’ as being anything but a ‘slave’, and the slave who cannot conceive of any other relationship and sees the ‘master’ as natural, always present, all powerful, godlike-the benefactor, the giver of life and death, (Hegel).

Capitalism cannot conceive of any other relationship than the monogamous family, and even those patriarchal religions, sects and cults of which allow for polygamy, remain merely multiple monogamous family units, many wives one husband. It is the very nature of the family that is the source of women’s oppression. It is why the challenges to the family are a key element in revolutionary struggle, and why the reactionary ideologues of patriarchy are united to promote their “Family Values”. It is major battle in the class war to challenge the ruling classes and its family values. (See my; What’s Love Got To Do With It? )

And yet the left has failed to rise to this challenge. Steeped in social democratic ettiquette, the left has not challenged the right wing fundamentalists or the ideology of capitalism and its Family Values. We have a long history of alternatives to bourgoise family values, and yet the silence on the left is deafening. It is time that we recognize, as the right wing has, that the battle lines have been drawn in the class war and that war is not just about the shop floor but the family as well.

“The modern family contains in germ not only slavery (servitus), but also serfdom, since from the beginning it is related to agricultural services. It contains in miniature all the contradictions, which later extend throughout society and its state. Such a form of family shows the transition of the pairing family to monogamy. In order to make certain of the wife's fidelity and therefore of the paternity of the children, she is delivered over unconditionally into the power of the husband; if he kills her, he is only exercising his rights. “ Karl Marx

Capitalist patriarchy will not be defeated by men flagellating themselves for being 'bad'. DeSade and Masoch already tried that, but hey if you like that sort of thing.....go ahead punish yourself..(see Sacher Masoch an Interpretation by Gilles Deleuze, Faber 1971).

3.1 SACHER-MASOCH and DE SADE - Immanence vs Transcendence
In his 1967 monograph on the writer LEOPOLD VON SACHER-MASOCH, Masochism: An Interpretation of Coldness and Cruelty, DELEUZE works on the rehabilitation of the clinical phenomenon of 'masochism' and against its conceptional link to 'sadism' understood as equivalancy ever since KRAFFT-EBING'S and FREUD'S analysis. In order to do this DELEUZE compares the literary work of SACHER-MASOCH (especially Venus in Furs) and the work of the MARQUIS DE SADE.
DELEUZE shows here that the idea of a possible transformation of the sadistic drive into the masochistic drive is grounded in the Freudo-Lacanian assumption of gaining pleasure by lack, which can either be achieved by receiving pain - in the case of the masochist - or by giving pain - in the case of the sadist. Against this model DELEUZE exemplifies the originarity of the masochist, who obviates the need for transcendence by infinitely suspending the (sexual) climax.
The activities of the masochist are 'political acts'. Unlike the sadist of DE SADE, who wants the world to be regulated by universal institutionalization of punishment and prostitution, the masochist is in agreement with his domina, that the 'treatments' are not to be totalized. Thus, attaining of pleasure is not - as in the case of DE SADE - the application of an idea to the world, but, in contrast to this the prevention of the transgression of the material toward an idealistic principle. Hence the desire of the masochist is immanent to pleasure and not the consequence of a preceding transcendent lack.
Immanence and Deterritorialization: The Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari by Stephan Günzel

“I’m a bad boy mommy” is a patriarchal response to women’s power of social reproduction and a lack of recognition of that power by inverting it to one of dependency. The result of this patriarchal dependency on women “knowing their place” creates in men fear, hatred and ultimately violence when “their” property, “doesn’t know it's place”. Ultimately this response is both sadistic and masochistic, it is the schizophrenic nature of capitalism that reduces women and children to chattel property; “she is delivered over unconditionally into the power of the husband.” These are the so called "Family Values" of patriarchy, that the bourgoise family and its religious proponents are advocating as immutable, eternal, and natural. It is the old axiom; There is No Aleternative (TINA), but as we all know there are alternatives.

"Deleuze and Guattari argue that capitalism is a schizophrenic system. Because it is interested only in the individual and his profit it must subvert or deterritorialize all territorial groupings such as the church, the family, the group, indeed any social arrangement. But at the same time, since capitalism requires social groupings in order to function, it must allow for reterritorializations, new social groupings, new forms of the state, the family, or the group. These events happen at the same time. The life of any culture is always both collapsing and being restructured" Deleuze and Guattari: An introduction

It’s not about being bad men it’s about valuing social reproduction as important. That means we value child raising and home/house work as important. And even if as men we share less in the housework, it is a matter of finally recognizing it as work and that it is a division of labour, which makes women proletarians!

Women’s struggles are the class struggle. Women’s struggles historically have always been the spark that has lit the fires of revolutionary social change.

Proletarians of the World Unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains, is the banner and the watchword of the women’s movement for liberation. And their liberation is the liberation of all of us.

“The repression of sexuality has social and economic origins not biological ones. Sexual repressiveness appeared at the beginning of class society and the institution of private property and patriarchy….In modern times, such repression remains indispensable in order to safeguard the two essential institutions of society; monogamous marriage and the family. It constitutes one of the means of economic enslavement. The sexual revolution is only possible
through social revolution.” Daniel Guerin, Homage to Wilhelm Reich

A class-struggle program based on women’s liberation

Social Wage Campaign being a living wage for women working outside of the home, who are usually the worst paid, and wages for housework for those at home.

Daycare; public daycare centres open to all, not private home based babysitting services, daycare centres in the work place, both programs paid for directly from the profits of business, not their after tax profits.

Publicly Available Abortion Services: After the supreme court decision that women in Canada have the right to abortion, the campaign for a woman’s right to choose, packed up. Unfortunately as I have shown in my article: “A Woman’s Right to Choose? Choose What?”, that decision left the politicians federally and provincially off the hook. Dr. Morgentaler’s method of safe effective abortion has not been adopted in hospitals, nor does Medicare cover his services. In effect abortion services are a medical service that is privatized in Canada and still restricted to hospitals which voluntarily choose to provide these services. In some provinces these services are not covered at all. A public campaign to provide full access to the Morgentaler method paid for by Medicare is a very real campaign against the privatization of medical services as well as a campaign for a woman’s right to choose.

Campaign To End Slavery; “Indentured servitude” is just another term for slavery. In Canada Nannies and Farm-workers are covered by federal and provincial labour legislation that allows them to be exploited by their employers. While some progress has been made in Ontario in getting union recognition for exploited farm-workers, usually male, such has NOT been the case with Nannies. A campaign to change the law and to recognize Nannies as workers, including their right to freely organize into unions. This campaign also needs to address the rights of immigrant women and women refugees fleeing patriarchal relationships or regimes.

Lesbian Mothers Rights: Lesbian women have been discriminated against in adoption rights, and campaigns to defend these rights again challenge the monogamous bourgeois family.


Sex Workers Union: Whether strippers, prostitutes, escorts, porn actors, etc. women workers in thus unregulated industry face the dual oppression of being exploited by owners and customers, and their banishment by society at large. The exploitation of children and young adults as well as immigrant women is allowed to exist due to this free market. Laws against prostitution need to be abolished and the regulation of this industry be under workers control through a sex workers union.

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