Vicious attacks on women often accompany economic upheavals
Archive for category: #Feminism
The Cibcom Collective take aim at domestic realism, arguing that feminist planning of the domestic economy is necessary to the communist project. This is a translation of an article originally published in Jacobin América Latina.
3D model of Xiong´an, China infrastructure prototype designed by Vicente Guallart
For Black women today and for all their working-class sisters, the notion that the burden of housework and child care can be shifted from their shoulders to the society contains one of the radical secrets of women’s liberation. Child care should be socialized, meal preparation should be socialized, housework should be industrialized—and all these services should be readily accessible to working-class people.1
I
Most socialist, anarchist, and radical feminists of the 20th century believed that the definitive suppression of what we now call patriarchy was inseparable from overcoming the private or individualized domestic economy. Today, however, these debates have disappeared from the political map. Helen Ester, drawing on Dolores Hayden and making original use of Mark Fisher’s well-known concept, calls this situation domestic realism. The spatial design of the isolated household in which domestic chores are, in theory, the responsibility of either the adults in the nuclear family or their maids, has become so accepted and commonplace that no one seems able to imagine that we could live any other way.2
Of course, this lack of radicalism is not a problem exclusive to feminism. The socialist tendency is generally in low spirits. Until recently, no one on the left seemed to take seriously anything other than trying to save the remains of a zombie social democracy.3 It is only in recent years that we have witnessed a wave of research on the possibility of a socialist planning of the economy that overcomes the mistakes of the last century.4 Markets, money, and property, despite decades of media and academic propaganda bombardment, are once again being questioned.
The intention of this brief article is to try to convey the potentialities that these new debates have for the feminist cause, as well as to revive deeper research on this subject. Cybercommunism suggests that planned economies could give rise to alternative ways of organizing social reproduction, the domestic sphere, and care. After a brief review of the history of similar initiatives, we will try to explain how this can be done. But first, we provide a brief introduction on the continuing relevance of these questions.
II
Why would we want to change the way our homes work? Socialist feminism has long been demystifying our homes and explaining that, in addition to filial love, they contain explicit and implicit hierarchies and dynamics of domination.
Capitalism’s main sources of wealth are ecosystems and the sale and purchase of labor power. But the latter does not appear out of nowhere like mushrooms.5 It needs protection, food, attention, and education, i.e. care, in order to develop and recover. These tasks are partly performed today by schools and other institutions, but above all by the private family, which has historically been characterized by a sexual division of labor in which women (mothers, grandmothers, sisters, etc.) were in charge of care and men worked to bring home income.6 After the experience of World War II and the entry of women into the world of work, this structure was disrupted but retained its essential form: in addition to their new jobs, women have continued to carry domestic responsibilities, giving rise to the phenomenon of the double burden. They come home from work and begin to cook meals, do the laundry, take care of the rest of the family, clean, and so on. All these activities are undervalued and made invisible. They are rarely given credit, but everyone notices when they are absent.7
This situation is bearable for high and middle-income earners, since they can pay for private caregivers, nursing homes, day-care centers, etc., but is relatively untenable for working-class families, where mothers and grandmothers struggle to carry everything forward. The cultural campaigns of the left and other legislative initiatives that equalize maternity and paternity leave have helped to co-implicate men in these tasks, but do not guarantee an effective equitable distribution, and what is worse, they leave intact the problems that individual domestic economies generate at the social level.
What various theorists have rightly called the care crisis is a worldwide social problem that generates incalculable suffering among the population,8 and should be among the top issues for communists to address. The private household economy is an extremely inefficient institution in the use of time and resources, incapable of adapting to the demographic restructuring that is taking place. The plummeting birth rate, linked to the vital difficulties in achieving job stability, has led to a generalized aging of the population. Mothers and fathers combine double care hours and increasingly low-paid work schedules that result in chronic stress and intermittent neglect of those in need of care. Unable to afford private care services, children and the elderly suffer forced loneliness with serious psychological consequences. The case of the elderly is particularly worrying, as the deterioration of public pensions makes their situation even more dire.9
As we stated at the start of the article, this situation has been denounced by the most radicalized sectors of feminism for more than a century. Authors as disparate in time and space as Aleksandra Kolontái -although she did not consider herself a “feminist”-, Shulamith Firestone or Savvina Chowdhury have theorized on the need to organize the domestic sphere communally; to socialize care.10 While this would not wipe away the rest of the problems feminism addresses, it would make its cultural campaigns much easier and more effective.
III
Despite today’s limited historical memory, the fact is that there have been multiple attempts to socialize the domestic. As will be seen, they have all been linked to experiences of socialist planning in which the reconfiguration of urban planning and interior architecture has played a key role.
In the 19th century, different Owenist and Fourierist successors of what is now known as utopian socialism designed housing models in which they experimented with different ways of managing housework. Dolores Hayden’s The Grand Domestic Revolution, which recounts the specific U.S. experience with such initiatives, is one of the best works on this topic.11 In her book, Hayden recounts how the “materialist feminists” of this period are the first to propose that the spatial transformation of the home would give rise to a much more equitable and sophisticated type of housing, technologically and aesthetically, than the typical Victorian bourgeois dwelling. The well-equipped laundries and kitchens of hotels and other commercial spaces exemplified for them the possibility of optimizing their work, so they promoted the formation of communities of between fifty and five hundred people in apartment blocks, large hostels, and rural estates.
Plan of the second floor of the common dwelling built by the Oneida Community, Kenwood, New York, 1861-1878.
In these new cooperative enterprises, called phalansteries by the Fourierists, domestic chores were usually rotated, and the members who worked outside the community environment were entitled to part of their salaries. There were somewhere between 2000 and 3000 communes of this style in the USA.12 Many of them had a religious orientation and still do, while other communes can be attributed to either the hippie movement or were something like “nests” for workers’ cooperatives. In fact, the attempt to create micro-islands of emancipation survives today in the form of so-called “ecovillages,” in which participants attempt to use the so-called low tech for these purposes.13 However, the main problem with these approaches is that they lack a broad socio-political projection and err on the side of being the personal life plan of a few activists. Working women would have to wait for the less idealized but more effective experience of “actually existing socialism” to see large-scale initiatives where integral economic planning was directed towards alleviating the double burden.
(a) Oneida Community Mansion, New York. (b) Amana Colonies, Iowa. (c) Hancock Shaker Community, Massachusetts. (d) Twin Oaks Community, Virginia.
In the early Soviet Union, and largely due to the influence of the Zhenotdel (Department of Women Workers and Peasant Women) led by Aleksandra Kolontai and Inessa Armand, women’s liberation would take center stage in Bolshevik politics. To this end, they envisioned a society in which soup kitchens, kindergartens, and public laundries would replace women’s unpaid work in the home. As Wendy Goldman details in Women, State and Revolution, the women of the Zhenotdel set out to reform society through laws that sometimes clashed with material reality, especially with the traditional structures of the Soviet peasantry as, for example, new divorce laws designed for city life did not adequately address the status of peasant property in common.14
One of the most striking ideas of the time, promoted by Kolontai, was the socialization of care for the young and, in particular, for orphans left behind by the war, known as besprizornost. Kolontai saw the socialization of care as part of her program to constitute a higher form of family, and these orphanages seemed indicated to be the first step. Despite the destruction of the war and the lack of resources, numerous care centers were built, where up to a quarter of a million orphans were sheltered (albeit in far from ideal conditions). With the advent of the New Economic Policy in 1922, many of these centers would be closed due to lack of funds and then their real impact would be seen: without these centers, many mothers could not care for their children and work at the same time. Married women stayed at home, reintroducing dependence on their husbands’ wages. And many single mothers or war widows would be forced to abandon their children to the streets because they could not combine domestic and work duties.
In 1930, the Zhenotdel would be abolished, as the feminist question was (erroneously) categorized as solved by considering that the elimination of private property, combined with the new institutions of the state, had solved the problems faced by women. Although women’s rights would suffer another setback with the entry into force of the family code in 1936, Soviet “welfare state” measures, later extended to other socialist bloc countries, would ease women’s lives and enable their incorporation into the workplace by alleviating the double burden. However, as Kristen Ghodsee writes in Second World, Second Sex, sexist ideas would not go away, or be culturally challenged. Women were still expected to do the housework in socialist countries, and the feminist question would be of little importance in almost all the bloc countries except Bulgaria, where there was a mass women’s organization that was relatively independent of the communist party and published a newspaper discussing women’s concerns.15
In parallel, the People’s Republic of China pursued its own path. During the first Maoist period, the collectivization of social reproduction was taken to extremes that were not replicated in other countries, especially in the agricultural communes. One of the objectives of commune construction was the liberation of women from domestic work, and to this end, many of the tasks performed by women, such as education, childcare, and food preparation and distribution, became communal. This last measure was made possible by the opening of around 2.6 million communal dining halls, where people could generally come and eat whatever they wanted. This utopian experiment did not survive long, and sadly the canteens are now known as a cause of the famine of 1958-9. This is mainly because food distribution was centralized in the hands of few people, and faulty implementation and management combined with poor harvests in an already poor and starving country exacerbated the bad situation that existed during the Great Leap Forward. Despite Mao’s insistence, the communal kitchens would be dismantled in the early 1960s.16
A dining room of the popular communes.
However, many institutions which alleviate the burden of social reproduction, mostly borne by women, from this period would survive to later days. During the Cultural Revolution, a second utopian period would give renewed impetus to collectivist measures, expanding public health care in a country where it was practically nonexistent, although the major focus of this period was to break down the cultural barriers that tied women to domestic work and prevented them from performing many jobs. To this end, measures were taken such as enacting maternity and opening many schools.17 With the reforms of Deng Xiaoping many of these gains would be reversed at the end of the seventies.18
Workers preparing food at a Chinese commune.
IV
Even though the aforementioned experiences represented notable advances in the situation of women, they presented serious limitations and drawbacks. The utopians’ islands of socialism experimented with forms of integral economic planning from which much can be learned, but they fell into the oblivion of their own isolation. The USSR’s efforts to develop public services for women were commendable, and while they made life much easier for women than for their Western counterparts, they did not ensure an effective sharing of domestic tasks. The agricultural communes of Maoist China tried to attack the root of these problems in a much more radical way, but in their attempt they overreached and generated forms of life that were perhaps too intrusive and not compatible with the demands of privacy which we today understand as basic.
Nevertheless, intermediate paths aim to bring the best of both worlds. In 1993, Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell published Towards a New Socialism, a systematic work in which they set out the technical and institutional foundations of a socialist planning of the economy updated by the new digital technologies.19 In chapter 12, entitled “The Commune,” they argue that cyber-socialism and feminism could converge in the revolutionary struggle because of the possibilities that the planned economy offers for the massive proliferation of urban communes. What are these urban communes and why should they be of interest to the feminist cause?
Urban communes are architectural structures that combine the socialization of household chores through dining rooms, laundries, nurseries, and communal cleaning services, etc. with apartments and individual rooms in which families and their members have all the privacy they need. There are several potentialities within them.
In the first place, by assigning tasks to a small group of people, professionalizing them or rotating them among the members of the community, we ensure a mortal blow to the sexual division of labor, which discriminates against women. In other words, by guaranteeing that most of the tasks such as cleaning and cooking are carried out by communal agents who meet the community’s criteria, we ensure that this work does not end up falling to our mothers and grandmothers.
Second, we enjoy the benefits of economies of scale. It is much more efficient in terms of time and resources for one person to cook for a hundred people than for each of those hundred to cook for themselves. Also, large scales allow for the application of scientific and technological criteria more easily. By socializing the menu, for example, we can ensure that the members of the commune have access to a balanced diet, as well as invest in better facilities that they could not afford individually. It may seem that this would reduce everyone’s freedom of choice, but the key to this is that each urban commune would decide for itself how to implement public recommendations for sanitation and usability. Going back to the cooking example, there are hundreds of thousands of possible recipes that could be valid and there is no reason not to offer several options on the same day.
Children and the elderly would benefit from the communal space even with the falling birth rate, since, by optimizing the management of tasks, more time would be available to care for them, and what is more important: by generating communal spaces for leisure and supervision, we ensure a full social net, from the cradle to the grave, of the entire neighborhood, thus developing much closer relationships.
It is possible that, even after having explained the above, one thinks that urban communes will be apartments in which three or four families live in overcrowded conditions. To get an idea of what this would imply, it might be interesting to recall the experience of Red Vienna between 1919 and 1934, despite all its limitations.
Karl-Marx Hof seen from above.
In Principles of Communism, Friedrich Engels argued that the proletarian revolution should have among its priorities the “construction, on public lands, of great palaces as communal dwellings for associated groups of citizens engaged in both industry and agriculture and combining in their way of life the advantages of urban and rural conditions while avoiding the one-sidedness and drawbacks of each.”20 The government of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party did not succeed in abolishing the distinction between town and country, but it built the closest thing to workers’ palaces that ever existed; palaces for women workers would be more correct. Huge buildings such as the Karl-Marx-Hof house some 1300 individual dwellings which have access to communal services ranging from laundries and toilets to pharmacies.21 In all of these, “the utmost attention is paid to common services, to the liberation of women from domestic slavery.”22
3D plan of the Karl-Marx Hof.
An indication of the potential that these institutions have for the care crisis is that they are still on the horizon of initiatives such as feminist urbanism,23 which aims to generate these community spaces even within the bourgeois state. But in the context of market economies, where only monetarily profitable initiatives are rewarded, it finds only limitations. It seems no coincidence that the only places where similar projects are being carried out are Venezuela and, particularly, today’s China, where the public sector continues to have considerable weight in the economy.24 The new capsule neighborhoods in regions such as Xiong’an bear striking similarities to the above.25 On the other hand, the recent “Integrated Community Development Plan” aims to encourage regional administrations to promote the consolidation of integrated communities based on the existing urban fabric. The idea is to develop strategically located communal services within a ten-minute walking distance that are affordable and allow for communal living.26
Prototype plan of a neighborhood in the new urban area of Xiong’an.
Nevertheless, an essential caveat of feminist urbanism must be emphasized: as authors such as Liisa Horelli explain, the socialization of reproductive work does not automatically dissolve the sexual division of labor. Therefore, cultural campaigns are necessary to prevent communal care services from being performed mainly by women, as well as to make them visible and dignified.27
V
In short, we are talking about an extremely sensitive subject that requires reflection on very intimate aspects of the social psychology of our world. When these alternatives and their history are discussed today, it is common to observe a certain suspicion that leads to rejecting them outright as soon as one becomes aware of any of their problems. However, it is necessary to emphasize something that is indisputable: even though these proposals were far from perfect, the situation of women worsened -very much- when they were absent. Therefore, it seems reasonable to reflect on how we could learn from their successes, while trying not to repeat their mistakes.
Urban communes should not be taken as the definitive solution to the problems mentioned, but as an attempt to reopen the debate on these issues and combat domestic realism. If socialism intends to return to being a mass movement it must find ways to radicalize the current social movements among which feminism cannot be ignored. To do this effectively, the discourse cannot be framed as a mere attack on the limits of a hegemonic feminism, but as the need to remember what revolution, economic planning and true democracy have to offer to half the world’s population.
We need a socialist and feminist urbanism. Socialist, insofar as it is capable of mobilizing time and resources in a planned manner for multidimensional objectives that go beyond profitability, but also productivity,28 and feminist, insofar as it is conscious of and committed to effectively overcoming the sexual division of labor in the communal spaces generated.
The post Socializing Care: Against Domestic Realism appeared first on Cosmonaut.
“Why don’t you guys do something?” Those were the eternal words of Storme DeLarverie as the pigs hauled her away in shackles, bloodied but unbowed, after she threw the first punch of the Stonewall Uprising. I feel like I’m screaming this to my people all the time lately and I still can’t seem to inspire More
The post The Time for Queer Revolution Is Now appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
Sophie Lewis, Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation, (New York: Verso Books, 2022).
By Veronica L.
When I was twenty-two, my then girlfriend and I put out a zine about polyamory. We were newly anarchists, newly dating, and excited about zines. This Is About More Than Who We Fuck became a manifesto of sorts, at least for me. I was raised by a second-wave feminist and found anarchism, queerness, and polyamory all at the same time after leaving home to go to university. The way I saw it then, having revolutionary politics was equally about collective organizing and personal lifestyle choices. We lived our anarchist, feminist, queer, insurrectionary lives through fighting the cops at the G20 in Toronto just as much as through sleeping with all our friends and ending up in complicated collective living situations with our dates. A lot of us were pretty alienated from our parents by our politics and life choices (including many of us being geographically far from where we’d grown up) and felt like all we had was each other. We were mostly white, mostly middle class, mostly university-educated, and mostly working minimum wage jobs in the service industry.
I’m now thirty-five, but I stand behind what I wrote in those zines. I’m not saying that because I went back and read them all. I’m saying it because I still feel committed to the politics and practices that were their spirit. I still live in the collective house where those zines got drafted, I still have the poster version of “Against the Couple Form” from the LIES Journal up on my wall, and I’ve still never tried monogamy. I may be less sure what a “revolutionary way of doing relationships” is—and more likely to cringe than nod along at polyamory being described that way—but I’m every bit as dedicated to the lifelong project of trying to figure a way out of the heteropatriarchal mess I was born into.
Needless to say, I was excited when Abolish the Family came out.1 I had followed Lewis’s writing for years, and I was looking forward to their take on something I’d been thinking about for a long time. Maybe Lewis had the secret to what a revolutionary feminist strategy should be and how to build up a world that was more nourishing than the subcultures and scenes I’d been living in for the last fifteen years (let alone the culture I was in for the twenty years before that).
That was an admittedly heavy expectation for such a short book. Lewis isn’t trying to give us strategy. They’re more focused on analysis—and it is an analysis that I, for the most part, agree with. The family—as a structure, as a way of relating to each other, as a thing that both makes us care about some people way more than others and allows us to stop caring about what happens to other people—is generally scary and violent more than it is caring and liberatory. Family is a hard concept to define. It looks different in different communities, and yet there are some core characteristics that seem to defy community differences. Lots of those core characteristics are because of the current global reach of capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy. If we’re trying to take down those three leviathans, it would behoove us to take down the ways they have tentacled into our most intimate and caring relationships, the ways they have structured who we even care about.
If this sounds vague, perhaps a focus on the why of family abolition will clarify things. Abolition as a framework is very tied to the struggle against slavery and has been used as a lens most effectively to connect the struggle against prisons and policing to the struggle against slavery. It has also been adopted by certain feminists who advocate for the abolition of sex work (“prostitution” as they would have it), an irony that was not lost on me while I was reading this book. For those unaware of this position, it often directly or indirectly involves arguing for more policing of sex workers, insists that sex work is inherently more exploitative than any other type of job under capitalism, and implicitly claims that sex work is also more oppressive than the couple form, marriage, or compulsory heterosexuality. Neither Lewis nor I are talking about sex work abolition.
From what I understand, the struggle to abolish slavery and its connection to the struggle to abolish prisons and policing are much more specific struggles than the struggle to abolish the family. Part of why I think this is true is that chattel slavery was abolished without the abolition of capitalism or the state. I think the same thing could happen with prisons and police. Because the family as a concept is much more sprawling and vague than prisons and police, it is unclear to me if we could abolish the family without abolishing capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. If we were talking about more specific things like the institution of marriage, legal parental rights over children, or inheritance laws, the abolition lens would be clearer—but, in the end, abolish the family is a slogan that can be hung onto various specific struggles while remaining pretty vague on its own.
What are these more specific struggles? For Lewis, family abolition seems to involve the abolition of gender, or gender roles, or the fight for liberated masculinities, feminities, and androgenies, plus children’s liberation, plus redistributing/communalizing reproductive labour (or sometimes “care”), plus revolutionizing currently existing forms of sexual relations in favour of liberated, egalitarian sexualities and sexual relationships, all while radically reshaping our understandings of kinship. If this is what Lewis is trying to argue, I am not totally convinced that lumping all these struggles together makes things clearer. We need to sort out the different strategies involved in the different struggles that make up family abolition, and it seems worth it to me to be more specific while we’re doing it.
More specificity would also have been useful around the term “collective.” Lewis wants us to be “striving toward a regime of cohabitation, collective eating, leisure, eldercare, and childrearing.”2 What is meant by collective here? Presumably we don’t mean more restaurants, or state-run childcare and eldercare (like the government-run CHSLDs where thousands of elders in Quebec have died since the start of the pandemic)? The Israeli kibbutz movement and state communist experiments also have examples of experiments in collective childrearing, but they aren’t examples to uncritically emulate. This collectivity question also opens the door to the much thornier “who are we” question that Butch Lee pushed white women in particular to deal with in The Military Strategy of Women and Children.3 While Lewis is clear on wanting to include all families in their analysis, perhaps those of us thinking about the how of the fight against the family should be taking our own social positions into account from the get-go.
Another way for Lewis to be more specific would have been to lay out what has changed in the family since the 1980s. One of the things I appreciate about the communist tradition Lewis draws from is historical and materialist analysis, but this is pretty absent from Abolish the Family. In the book, the family reads as a somewhat timeless concept, the core of it unaltered by historical change. What would it look like to argue for family abolition while talking about dropping marriage rates, rising divorce rates, changing cultures around domestic violence and abuse, rising numbers of women in prison alongside increasing numbers of women working outside the home, and the tidal wave of state attacks on trans children that have used the language of “parents rights”? How do we understand the growing fragmentation that has led to, as Dilar Dirik says, a situation where “feminicide is taking place on an unprecedented scale at the same time as gender equality has become a daily agenda item for institutions that reproduce power and violence on a global scale”?4 Lewis references M.E. O’Brien’s Endnotes piece “To Abolish the Family,” which tries to make this connection, but it would have been good to bring a few of O’Brien’s arguments into this new manifesto, too.5
So we need more analysis of the role the family plays in the present and how that is different from the role it played in the 1980s because we can’t just repeat the movements of the ’70s and ’80s. Liberal feminism and queer assimilation have changed the political landscape. In 2023, those taking up the mantle of radical lesbian feminism are often TERFs who are organizing with the far right. Hotshot intersectional feminists on the internet want you to “pay women”—i.e. send some funds to their personal Venmo. Pride is a corporate event, more welcoming to cops and banks than the runaways and hustlers who built it. There are fancy non-profits pushing policy to protect chosen family and the polyamorists have their own series on Showtime. The terrain we fight on can be very confusing. So many of the struggles we have inherited have been stripped of their revolutionary potential, often by directing us to make individual choices instead of building collective power. More engagement with what the family even means in our present moment might help us find a way forward.
Towards the end of the book, Lewis does give us some criteria for what counts as family abolition. First, family abolitionist struggles are at core collective strategies, not individual choices. Second, family abolition is deeply connected to “a practice of planetary revolution” and, thus, any truly revolutionary strategy must contend with family abolition (and, arguably, vice versa).6 And finally, though at its core collective, family abolitionist struggles understand that we are all part of different collectivities all at once and so, in the most direct gesture towards a specific struggle, Lewis writes, “fighting the family regime might thus look like several different things: prising the state’s boot off the neck of a ‘legal’ family of ‘aliens,’ for instance, and at the same time offering solidarity to a queer kid in that same family, should she need it, against her parents.”7 Not as clear as it could be, but something to work with. Asking further questions like “what distinguishes a family abolitionist defense of migrant families from a non-family-abolitionist one?” could help us find more direction here.
So I have a bit of beef with Lewis’s theoretical framework, though overall I agree with the basic principles. However, I also found one of the historical examples particularly wanting. Lewis’s engagement with Indigenous theory on the family was generally light and they made a glib comment about the Seneca leader and prophet Handsome Lake, in a way that betrays a lack of engagement. Lewis writes that Handsome Lake “precipitated what has been called the ‘Iroquois’s own version of Salem’ in 1803,” citing Lillian Faderman, a Jewish lesbian whose book on womanhood throughout American history is too wide-ranging to give Handsome Lake much more than a passing glance.8 For those who don’t know, Handsome Lake remains an incredibly important (though definitely also controversial) political and spiritual leader for a large section of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (what the Iroquois call themselves). He is identified with Seneca national resurgence in the wake of the disastrous (for the Confederacy) 1776 revolution.
Claiming that Handsome Lake precipitated Salem-esque levels of witch hunting in Haudenosaunee territory is not an accurate historical comparison. The author of one of the books that Lillian Faderman is citing, Matthew Dennis, a white historian at the University of Oregon, writes in a footnote that “There is much that we will never know about the Handsome Lake-era witch hunts, and conclusions about their scope and nature must remain tentative. Precisely how many were accused, how many were executed, which lineages, clans, and villages were most heavily represented, how many were women and how many were men—answers to these questions may ultimately be unanswerable.”9 Given that the Salem witch hunts are invoked as a symbol of the persecution of women, this seems like a central point in making the comparison fall apart.
In fact, settlers focused on the Handsome Lake-era witch hunts should understand the issues of Indigenous sovereignty at stake. Haudenosaunee historian Alyssa Mt. Pleasant cites one of the most reported upon (in settler newspapers) instances of potential witch hunting at the Buffalo Creek reservation in 1821, when a man named Tommy-Jemmy killed a woman named Kautauqua, both of whom were Haudenosaunee.10 Tommy-Jemmy was subsequently arrested by New York State, imprisoned, and put on trial. As present-day scholars Mt. Pleasant and Dennis, as well as Haudenosaunee witnesses at the trial—including famous orator Red Jacket—all agree, this ought to be understood as a site of contestation of Haudenosaunee sovereignty by the colonial state. In fact, the original comparison to Salem comes from Red Jacket’s statements during the trial where he is making, not a historical point, but is fending off the enormous settler reaction to the situation that sought to use settler outrage about witch hunting as cover for land grabs and political control over Seneca territory.11 To be fair to Lewis, the comment seems to be meant to temper what I imagine to be a majority white audience’s slide towards pure romanticization of matriarchal Indigenous cultures, but I wish they could have found a better way to do that.
There was also something lacking in Lewis’ contemporary examples. Their timeline stops in 1985 and starts up again in 2015. Lewis writes, “There was a thirty-year lull in family-abolitionism between 1985 and 2015.”12 The resurgence, it seems, began with the 2015 publication of “Kinderkommunismus: A Feminist Analysis of the 21st-Century Family and a Communist Proposal for Its Abolition” in a now-defunct online magazine.13 While I appreciate Lewis laying out contemporary examples of family abolition, I think there was less of a lull than they claim.
I would trace some of the lineage of family abolition through the politics of sex negativity and critique of the couple form, which saw a resurgence with the publication of the first LIES Journal and the article “The Ethical Prude,” both of which were published in 2012. Other traces of family abolition can be found in the radical queer tendencies advocated by Dean Spade14 and Bash Back, a group that existed from about 2007–2011. These overlapping but varied tendencies kept a version of family abolition alive pre-2015. I’d add that the subculture I was welcomed into in my early twenties also kept the flame going: the remnants of the anti-globalization era anarchist movement that recognized the importance of extending our revolutionary politics to our whole lives certainly felt like a form of family abolition to me, despite its shortcomings.
These oversights in lineage do not erase the fact that the publication of Abolish the Family is very needed. In a context where some of the left is reacting to right-wing pro–family discourse by pumping out their own version, Lewis’s book is refreshing. While anarchism’s time as a default tendency for radical youth seems to have ended (for now), I hope that the history of those thirty years of struggle on the terrain of gender and for children’s liberation and new forms of care and kinship will not be lost. At the end of the day, I’m an organizer and not a theorist, so what I want are more proposals for what the positive vision of family abolition looks like and how we get there. Here’s hoping Lewis writes a sequel.
Veronica L. was raised in a white Catholic community in a super-segregated Rust Belt city in the usa. Her mom was active in the women’s liberation movement in the ’80s and raised her to be a feminist. It took moving away from home for her to find revolutionary anarchism, queer politics, and the surrounding subcultures that remain central to her life today. She was one of the contributors to Antifascism Against Machismo, published by Kersplebedeb in 2023. She lives in Montreal.
Works Referenced
Dennis, Matthew. Seneca Possessed: Indians, Witchcraft, and Power in the Early American Republic. Baltimore, MD: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010.
Dirik, Dilar. The Kurdish Women’s Movement the Kurdish Women’s Movement: History, Theory, Practice. London, England: Pluto Press, 2022.
Faderman, Lillian. Woman: The American History of an Idea. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2022.
Griffiths, K.D. and JJ Gleeson. “Kinderkommunismus: A Feminist Analysis of the 21st-Century Family and a Communist Proposal for Its Abolition.” Ritual Mag, 2015.
Lee, Butch. The Military Strategy of Women and Children. Montreal: Kersplebedeb, 2003.
Lewis, Sophie. Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation. New York: Verso Books, 2022.
LIES Journal, Volume 1 (2012) and Volume 2 (2015).
Millbank, Lisa. “The Ethical Prude: Imagining An Authentic Sex-Negative Feminism.” Rad Trans Fem (blog), 2012.
Mt. Pleasant, Alyssa. “After the Whirlwind: Maintaining a Haudenosaunee Place at Buffalo Creek, 1780-1825.” PhD diss. Cornell University, 2007.
O’Brien, M.E. “To Abolish the Family: The Working-Class Family and Gender Liberation in Capitalist Development.” Endnotes 5 (2019).
Spade, Dean. “For Lovers and Fighters.” In We Don’t Need Another Wave: Dispatches from the Next Generation of Feminists, edited by Melody Berger, 28–39. Seattle: Seal Press, 2006.
This Is About More Than Who We Fuck, issue #1 and issue #2. Issue #3 never made it to the internet.
Notes
1Sophie Lewis, Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation, (New York: Verso Books, 2022)
2Lewis, 18.
3Butch Lee, The Military Strategy of Women and Children (Montreal: Kersplebedeb, 2003).
4Dilar Dirik, The Kurdish Women’s Movement: History, Theory, Practice, (London: Pluto Press, 2022), 316.
5M.E. O’Brien, “To Abolish the Family: The Working-Class Family and Gender Liberation in Capitalist Development,” Endnotes 5 (2019).
6Lewis, 77.
7Lewis, 88.
8Lewis, 42. Lillian Faderman, Woman: The American History of an Idea (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022).
9Dennis, 257, footnote 31, emphasis added.
10Alyssa Mt. Pleasant, “After the Whirlwind: Maintaining a Haudenosaunee Place at Buffalo Creek, 1780-1825,” (PhD diss., Cornell University, 2007), 120.
11Dennis, 3–4.
12Lewis, 71.
13KD Griffiths and JJ Gleeson, “Kinderkommunismus: A Feminist Analysis of the 21st-Century Family and a Communist Proposal for Its Abolition,” Ritual Mag, 2015, available at https://archive.org/details/gleeson-kinderkommunismus.
14 Dean Spade, “For Lovers and Fighters,” in We Don’t Need Another Wave: Dispatches from the Next Generation of Feminists, ed. Melody Berger (Seattle: Seal Press, 2006), https://www.deanspade.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/ForLoversFightersDSpade.pdf.
Excitingly, a growing number of labor unions recognize they have a huge stake in defending the full array of reproductive rights.
When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned abortion rights in June 2022, the nation erupted in fury. Grassroots groups like the National Mobilization for Reproductive Justice (NMRJ), Chicago for Abortion Rights (CFAR), MARRCH (Madison Abortion and Reproductive Rights Coalition for Healthcare), and Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights rapidly hit the streets.
Then came a full-court press to vote Republicans out of office. In the fall elections, initiatives protecting abortion rights and politicians seen as pro-choice did well. Clearly people in the U.S. want reproductive health care, so what is going on in the battle today?
Labor on the move
The National Mobilization, initiated in 2021 by Radical Women, and other grassroots groups continue to organize, educate and agitate. They are reaching out to a wide array of communities in order to build a multi-front fightback.
Excitingly, a growing number of labor unions recognize they have a huge stake in defending the full array of reproductive rights. All workers need the ability to control childbearing. Plus, the extremists harassing women and others who can give birth also target immigrants, people of color, and LGBTQ+ youth — among labor’s most vibrant sectors. The link with organized workers is key because they have the power to mobilize. In this way, the battle for reproductive justice could ignite a union-led movement against right-wing offensives on many fronts.
Steps in this direction are being accomplished by National Mobilization for Reproductive Justice, which is gathering signers on an open letter that urges AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler to call an emergency labor conference on reproductive justice.
In the first few weeks, over 140 labor organizations and individuals signed the letter. These include Alphabet Workers Union; American Federation of State, City and Municipal Employees Local 88; International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Locals 46 and 520; Minnesota Nurses Union; Office & Professional Employees International Union Local 8; Washington Federation of State Employees Local 304; Organized Workers for Labor Solidarity, plus signers from Illinois, South Carolina, Texas, Pennsylvania, New York, California and beyond.
MARRCH is also building union support in Wisconsin. An SEIU (Service Employees International Union) activist with the coalition coordinated “Why Abortion Rights Are Worker Rights,” a webinar sponsored by the local union federation on March 8.
Chicago for Abortion Rights also has strong labor ties. In 2022, they fielded a contingent in Chicago’s May Day march for labor and immigrant rights. The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) has carried its banner in the coalition’s marches. CTU and National Nurses United endorsed and spoke at the “October 8 National Day of Action for Abortion and Full Reproductive Rights” which CFAR led.
Momentum builders
The National Mobilization for Reproductive Justice along with MARRCH and CFAR bring together a broad range of communities. This January, the Mobilization’s Phoenix associate hooked up with drag performers who were protesting anti-trans bills, making a powerful joint statement for bodily autonomy.
New York disability activist Kendra Scalia states, “The Mobilization offers opportunities for the most marginalized communities to coalesce around and raise our voices against contemporary atrocities such as forced sterilization. Only a broad set of demands, like those elevated by the Mobilization, has the power to unite a mass movement.” (See demands at reprojusticenow.org.)
Well known for leading dynamic protests in numerous cities on the day of the SCOTUS decision, NMRJ was again in the streets for the 50th anniversary of Roe v. Wade Jan. 22, 2023. Members led or participated in high-spirited rallies in Seattle, New York City, Phoenix, Portland, Oregon, and Madison, Wisconsin. San Francisco marchers countered the annual anti-abortion “Walk for Life” on Jan. 21.
MARRCH organized a massive rally on Jan. 22 that filled the capitol rotunda to protest the complete loss of legal abortion in the state. CFAR aided the action and sent people and assistance to its neighboring state. The Women’s March co-sponsored and publicized the event as its national action, which helped draw wide participation.
Also on the streets in January was Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights, a mass organization of the Revolutionary Communist Party, which has faced off with pro-lifers in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere. Depending on the city, Rise Up may coordinate with others, but in general they do not engage in coalition building. They also tend to focus on the single demand for abortion rather than a broader approach, earning them a reputation for transphobia.
Meanwhile, big-name feminist groups like Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice America, and the National Organization for Women are largely absent from the fight except for collecting donations. More visible is the Women’s March, though it clings to the failed strategy of top-down organizing and relying on the Democratic Party to save reproductive rights. Women’s March has not built local chapters, so its petition campaign to state legislators to reverse abortion bans doesn’t have much strength behind it. Women’s March has called for a boycott of Walgreens, which announced it will not fill prescriptions for the abortion drug mifepristone in 20 states. The petition is handy online organizing, but overall, these liberal NGOs are too tame in the face of the right’s determined assault on abortion.
Collective power
Only a combative mass movement can back down the white supremacist, queer-hating misogynists — and pressure politicians to act.
NMRJ coordinator Helen Gilbert urges everyone who cares about human rights to join the fight and find ways for grassroots groups to collaborate with each other. She asks unions, union members, community groups, anti-fascist forces, and feminists to add their names to the call for an AFL-CIO emergency conference at tinyurl.com/letter2aflcio.
Building a powerful worker-led resistance is what the National Mobilization for Reproductive Justice is working toward. Get involved!
The post Family Abolition appeared first on Spectre Journal.
For the first time ever, women CEOs now make up more than 10 percent of Fortune 500 leaders. But that’s hardly a reason to celebrate. On every indicator, white men still dominate the upper rungs of the economy, while women — particularly women of color — continue to be overrepresented in low-paying jobs. And even when women do break through the glass ceiling, they’re still part of a system…
Sometimes it is hard to know who is worse: the Christian white nationalist neofascists who keep pushing the nation further right or the hollow and passive resistance of the fake-opposition Weimar Democrats who keep accommodating the ever more mainstreamed far right. But we don’t have to choose. The fascisation of US politics and policy reflects, More
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It’s no wonder that German socialist, Clara Zetkin’s legacy has been erased by the corporate sponsorship of #IWD, argues Katherine Connelly
As the uprising enters its sixth month, Iran is plunging further into a deep economic and social crisis. But the struggle against the regime continues.
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Iran