Archive for category: #feminism

Insurgent Supremacists: The U.S. Far Right’s Challenge to State and Empire

By Matthew N Lyons | Tuesday, July 19, 2022

How do we assert reproductive autonomy when far rightists are on the offensive and liberals have failed to stop them?

As we noted two months ago, the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision repealing Roe v. Wade marks a historic victory for the Christian right and specifically its fascist, theocratic wing. Defending access to abortion is an antifascist struggle, but that doesn’t mean the focus should be only, or even primarily, on combating the far right. What’s needed is a struggle on two fronts: against the various forces of the authoritarian right but also against their centrist enablers—the politicians and institutions that have long claimed to be defending abortion access while weakening opposition to the far right and giving ground to it step by step by step. These are different kinds of struggle and they call for different approaches.

This is what three way fight politics is all about: a recognition that the fascistic far right is interconnected with but distinct from the oppressive status quo, and combating them both requires interconnected but distinct strategies.

In the wake of Roe’s repeal, I’ve seen several excellent essays that use this kind of two-front framework to guide liberatory strategy. I’d like to focus here on three of these essays, to highlight what they share and also how their different perspectives broaden and enrich an ongoing discussion that’s vitally needed.

Elise Hendrick, in “Some thoughts about how the struggle for abortion rights and bodily autonomy should be waged (and can be won),” identifies abortion rights as central to a larger struggle for bodily autonomy, criticizes the Democratic Party and its adherents for giving us “forty years of retreat,” and advocates a militant strategy that targets the key pressure points of profitability and governability.
Noah Zazanis, in “On Our Own Terms: Class Struggle for Abortion and Transition,” argues that “Right-wing offensives against abortion, transition, and queer sociality aim to enforce the bourgeois family by any means necessary,” and calls for a labor-based struggle that challenges the constraints imposed by established non-governmental institutions (NGOs).
CrimethInc.’s “To Defend Abortion Access, Take the Offensive” advocates a carefully tailored approach to militant direct action in order to exert leverage where it can be most effective—on liberal politicians.

Reading these essays, I see three overarching themes—three key things that each of them calls on us to do: highlight interconnections between different groups or rights under attack, confront liberal NGOs and the Democratic Party, and develop a clear and militant strategy. Let’s look at each of these themes in turn.

Highlight interconnections

Both Elise Hendrick and Noah Zazanis frame access to abortion as a key form of bodily autonomy, and both specifically emphasize connections between criminalizing abortion and criminalizing trans people as two prongs of a larger right-wing strategy. Zazanis writes, “The surface logic of parental consent laws [for getting an abortion] is similar to the logic barring childhood transition: abortion is a serious, irreversible medical procedure for which youth under 18 are too young to give informed consent.” Hendrick denounces a recent New York Times column that tries to stake out a position that’s pro-abortion rights yet trans-exclusionary as a blatant example of divide-and-rule tactics.

Zazanis also emphasizes the ties between defending bodily autonomy and building a strong working class:

“Our fights for healthcare, and against criminalization, are inseparable from the labor rights of healthcare workers, and of the nonprofit workers doing unpaid overtime in the wake of the Dobbs ruling. More than ever, we must build strong, independent unions willing to defend workers who refuse to enforce these bans… It is no coincidence that the workers on the frontline of criminalization are in fields dominated by women, fields where queer workers are overrepresented and underpaid.”

Hendrick and CrimethInc. both highlight a further connection: between the fight for abortion access and the fight against police violence and repression. CrimethInc. urges abortion rights advocates to learn from the George Floyd uprising and writes, “Yes, there are fundamental differences between the movement for reproductive freedom and the movement for Black lives—but those who will be most impacted by the criminalization of abortion overlap considerably with those who are most impacted by racist policing.” Hendrick calls out implications for movement security, noting that criminalization of abortion means “the full weight of the surveillance state is coming down on millions of people who have previously been largely exempt from it…. That means making clear the importance of not talking to the police, not coordinating with police, protecting our identities, and…not posting unedited video of people doing illegal things on social media.”

In summary, drawing the connections between anti-oppression struggles helps us to understand the right’s larger agenda, build and strengthen coalitions, make our movements smarter, and honor the multiple and complex ways that people are affected by institutional violence.

Confront NGOs and the Democrats

All three of our featured essays sharply criticize the Democratic Party’s role as supposed defender of abortion access. Zazanis notes that “For decades, Democratic leadership has treated abortion as a cudgel for electoral gains” (and more recently has done the same with so-called “LGBT issues”). Hendrick adds that this approach has repeatedly meant whitewashing the shameful anti-abortion positions of some Democratic candidates, such as Hillary Clinton’s 2016 running mate Tim Kaine. CrimethInc. describes the effect of such opportunism as “the workings of the political ratchet, in which Republicans continuously push state institutions towards more oppressive agendas while Democrats continuously give ground, keeping those who are suffering invested in the state itself in hopes that it might one day be reformed.” As I’ve argued elsewhere, this dynamic doesn’t result from Democratic leaders’ subjective “weakness”—it reflects the party’s structural role as a vehicle to divert liberatory initiatives into support for an oppressive, capitalist order.

Zazanis and Hendrick are similarly critical of liberal NGOs for being structurally and financially tied to a “respectability politics” that weakens—or simply betrays—liberatory struggle. Hendrick warns that “Liberal non-profits will try to narrow the focus of this movement, to divide bodily autonomy into specific niches… and channel our energy and our anger into avenues that don’t make the ruling class nervous. They will resist any attempt to defy these laws and the cops who enforce them outright, and they will try to prevent any kind of solidarity and cross-pollination” between political struggles. Zazanis gets more specific, calling out Reproaction for trying to police the boundaries of acceptable “direct action” and Planned Parenthood, the Guttmacher Institute, and the National Center for Transgender Equality for union-busting and abusive management practices. Even smaller, more independent NGOs engaged in vitally important support for self-managed medication abortion have “effectively ignored the question of who runs the clinics and how they operate, or how to defy those who seek to close them.”

Hendrick sums up part of the lesson with regard to both NGOs and the Democratic Party: “Only by maintaining our independence from these institutions can we exert the sort of pressure that is necessary in order to force them to do the right thing.”

Develop clear, militant strategy

To varying degrees, all three essays offer suggestions on what’s needed to protect abortion access and bodily autonomy more broadly. Zazanis advocates breaking with respectability politics, recognizing that effective direct action “makes oppressors feel victimized,” and forming independent networks both to help criminalized people survive and to lay a foundation for more comprehensive institutional change in the future.

Hendrick elaborates on Zazanis’s point about direct action:

“If we want the ruling class to even consider restoring our right to bodily autonomy, we need to put the hurt on them. We need an or else.

“Historically, the movements that have extracted meaningful concessions from unwilling ruling classes have been those that attack the two major pressure points of capitalist society: profitability, which is the point of the entire system, and governability, which calls the system’s very existence into question.”

As reference points, she cites two recent large-scale militant initiatives: in Poland in 2016, mass protests and a strike (an attack on profitability) that forced the government to walk back a proposed total abortion ban, and in the U.S. in 2020, widespread militant attacks on both police stations and big box retail stores (governability and profitability) following the police murder of George Floyd. Hendrick argues that calls to abolish the police have not succeeded because they threaten capitalist society on a deep level, but that U.S. capitalists are not committed to banning abortion and would restore abortion access “if we make it clear that they can’t afford not to.”

CrimethInc., too, argues for a militant approach, but they are particularly concerned with how militancy is targeted:

“if your goal is to exert leverage, you have to identify a group you can actually exert leverage on—a group that is likely to change course as a consequence of your intervention…. You have to make sure that the target of your efforts has a choice—then make them an offer they can’t refuse.”

They cite two counter-examples. On one hand, many abortion rights proponents have joined public rallies that help to boost participants’ morale but have no specific target. On the other, a number of anonymous groups, operating under the name Jane’s Revenge, have vandalized anti-abortion “crisis pregnancy centers.” The latter actions “may inspire people to take action on their own, but do not offer a participatory space in which to build collective momentum.” In addition, although the vandalism actions have a specific focus, “in targeting anti-abortion centers, they are taking on the most intransigent opponents of abortion…” CrimethInc. continues, “If it is possible to exert leverage on anyone who is complicit in criminalizing abortion, it is probably not far-right religious cult members, but their centrist accomplices”—in other words, liberal and moderate politicians who could be persuaded to defend abortion access if the cost of not doing so is high enough.

Here, too, the movement against racist police violence offers a useful reference point:

“At the high point of the George Floyd uprising, when millions of people had ceased to accept the legitimacy of the police and were acting accordingly, we saw terrified liberals like the mayor of Minneapolis suddenly take the demands of the movement very seriously, promising to take steps towards police abolition… Later, when the politicians had reestablished control, they betrayed those promises—showing that our effectiveness hinges on keeping our social movements lively and strong, not on winning concessions.”

Exerting leverage in this way is very different from allying with liberals against the far right, or with, say, the federal government against state governments. As CrimethInc. puts it, “compelling one [state] institution to limit the power of another can be strategic, provided it does not contribute to legitimizing any of the institutions involved. It must be clear to everyone that the power that drives social change derives from grassroots organizing, not from state institutions…”

Concluding thoughts

How do we go about asserting reproductive autonomy in the face of a major defeat, when far rightists are on the offensive and the forces of liberal respectability have failed to stop them? The three essays I’ve examined here grapple with this question in related ways. That doesn’t mean that their authors necessarily agree on every point, but it’s striking to me how much their arguments complement each other, and I do think the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. At the least, there’s a lot here that can inform and inspire further discussion and strategizing.

I started this discussion by invoking three way fight politics as a framework for strategy. None of the three essays uses that terminology, but at least two of them make points closely related to it. CrimethInc. notes that the far right are not defenders of the established order but rather advocates of social change (increased repression and oppression) and have used sustained pressure campaigns and a range of tactics, including bombings and murder, to bring it about. Hendrick emphasizes that those who advocate banning abortion are “a minority of bigots who are useful to capital, but far from essential to it,” and it is precisely this gap that opens strategic space for advocates of liberatory politics. These three essays insist that we have choices beyond surrendering to fascism on one hand and subordinating radical possibility to liberal holding actions on the other.

Photo credits

1. By Frypie, 10 May 2022 (CC BY-SA 4.0), via Wikimedia Commons. Image has been cropped.
2. By Matt Hrkac, 9 July 2022 (CC BY 2.0), via Wikimedia Commons.

Back to Matthew N. Lyon’s Author Page

The post Strategies to defend abortion access: three essays appeared first on PM Press.

ROME, ITALY - 2022/09/26: Giorgia Meloni is seen during a press conference. Giorgia Meloni, leader of the far-right and national-conservative party Fratelli d'Italia (Brothers of Italy), commented on the party's victory at the Italian elections, held on 25 September 2022, at Parco Principi Hotel in Rome. (Photo by Valeria Ferraro/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Giorgia Meloni, leader of Fratelli d’Italia, or Brothers of Italy, party during a press conference in Rome on Sept. 26, 2022.

Photo: Valeria Ferraro/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

Early this month, Hillary Clinton made some embarrassing comments about the then-forthcoming election of Giorgia Meloni as Italy’s first woman prime minister. “The election of the first woman prime minister in a country always represents a break with the past, and that is certainly a good thing,” the former secretary of state said.

Clinton has been rightly pilloried. After all, she was talking about the leader of the fascist Brothers of Italy party, the most extreme right-wing party to govern Italy since Benito Mussolini’s dictatorship.

Meloni claimed victory in Sunday night’s general election with considerable ease, leading a far-right coalition that now holds a significant majority in both Italy’s houses of parliament.

White supremacy has always relied on active enforcement by white women.

Whatever “break” from the past having a woman leader signals, “Meloni would also represent continuity with Italy’s darkest episode,” historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat noted in The Atlantic. And the continuance is very real: The Brothers of Italy’s direct forebears, the neofascist Italian Social Movement, was formed by supporters of Il Duce after World War II.

The idea that a woman leader “opens doors” for other women, as Clinton suggested, is of course laughable. That’s especially true when that leader is a fascist keen to stop abortions and do away with employment quotas that favor women — quite literally shuttering women in the nuclear home — while locking out immigrant women from Italy’s body politic all together.

The media got this right much of the time, giving prominent billing to Meloni’s far-right nationalism, but numerous English-language headlines focused solely on her being Italy’s first woman prime minister.

It’s tempting to say that her position as a woman leader should be considered irrelevant, given her and her party’s vile anti-immigrant, nationalist, racist, anti-LQBTQ+ politics. But ignoring her womanhood misses some crucial points about her political ideology.

Being a woman — a white woman, that is — is not in conflict with Meloni’s fascism. White supremacy has always relied on active enforcement by white women, particularly when it comes to upholding racist, pro-natalist narratives.

Italy may never have had a woman prime minister, but white women in leadership roles within the forces of reaction is hardly a new phenomenon. Consider Phyllis Schlafly, the paleoconservative, anti-abortion leader of the anti-Equal Rights Act campaign in the 1970s, who made much of her role as a traditional wife and urged other women to stay in the home.

The fact that Schlafly was herself a powerful conservative activist was no threat to her political vision; the same is true for the rabidly traditionalist Meloni. A fascist society is also a society of rigid class structure; a woman leader is no impediment to keeping working-class women in their place.

Meloni, like her less polished far-right counterparts in the U.S. Congress — Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene, among others — weaponizes her role as woman and mother to police the boundaries of womanhood and reproduction. She has framed her poisonous anti-immigrant positions as a defense of Italian (white) women’s safety, conjuring well-worn tropes of migrants “importing” sexual violence.

Her party’s white supremacist platform is explicitly pro-natalist, seeking to bolster the low birth rate of native Italians as a bulwark to “ethnic substitution,” or what fascists here call the “great replacement.” Meloni’s far-right coalition is expected to usher in more stringent abortion restrictions nationwide. Abortions, which have been legalized in Italy since 1978, are already difficult to access in many areas, especially where Brothers of Italy has locally governed.

Meanwhile, in line with the typical allocation of resources in Herrenvolk democracies, Meloni’s social welfare proposals are aimed specifically at Italian families, while excluding immigrants and those outside the bounds of the straight, cis family. Meloni is thus continuing the legacy of what Ben-Ghiat called Mussolini’s “natalist obsession.”

It’s no accident, and certainly no surprise, that Meloni paired her deeply reactionary reproductive politics with attacks on Italy’s LGBTQ+ communities. Like Republicans in the U.S., Italy’s first woman prime minister is a fervid enforcer of traditional gender roles. Brothers of Italy, alongside other far-right parties, last year voted down a bill that would have made violence against queer and trans people a hate crime.

Meloni has consistently denounced “gender ideology” — a term used with increasing frequency by anti-trans ideologues who deny the fact that neither gender nor sex function as strict binaries. “Yes to natural families, no to the LGBT lobby,” Meloni said earlier this summer. “Yes to sexual identity, no to gender ideology. Yes to the culture of life, no to the abyss of death,” she added, while campaigning on a platform that will endanger the lives of immigrants and Italian minorities.

For those who would like to defend women’s reproductive freedoms but not support trans rights, Meloni, like the U.S. far right, offers another reminder that these issues must not be disentangled. Attacking gender-divergent people is as much a centerpiece of fascism as is pro-natalism. And, as with the Brothers of Italy’s entire program, it’s no less fascist when a woman says it.

The post It’s a Girl (Fascist)! appeared first on The Intercept.

A grassroots movement in Dane County WI, just won immediate protections for abortion rights – in direct defiance of Wisconsin’s 173 year-old abortion ban and the state’s GOP-dominated government. The abortion sanctuary legislation, which the Dane County Board passed 29-5-1 on September 22, came out of a campaign led by Socialist Alternative. This victory came […]

Upon check-in at the almost $200 per night Hilton hotel, the convention displayed in the lobby beautifully painted “protest signs” that read “My Body, My Choice,” “El lugar de la mujer es en la resistencia (women’s place is in the resistance)” and “The whole damn system is wrong.” Images highlighted Black and Latinx women in particular, with radical imagery invoking the Black Panthers and indigenous women in struggle.

The conference was sponsored by the usual suspects — including the Women’s March, the National Organization of Women, and Planned Parenthood, as well as Emily’s List, Vote Run and Lead, Black Feminist Future, and more. It was also co-sponsored by corporations like Ben and Jerry’s, The Body Shop, and Mara Hoffman.

The Women’s March Convention was named “Summer of Rage,” which didn’t really fit. Yes, participants are furious at the stripping of our basic right to an abortion. But on one hand, the summer is basically over, and the Women’s March has organized essentially nothing all summer. On the other hand, the rage expressed by participants was being funneled to the most tepid solution: vote for the Democrats. It is a “solution” that has been tried over and over, and failed to protect reproductive rights over and over — so much so that Roe v. Wade was overturned while the Democrats held both the Congress and the Presidency.

The Women’s March Conference was a lot like the fancy Hilton Hotel we stayed at — the “radical” protest signs thinly veiled the real class content of the event. This was an event that served the capitalists and the Democratic Party.

The Political Context

It is important to situate this conference in its political context. A few months ago, it seemed nearly certain the Democrats would be trounced in the midterms. Inflation is at a 40-year high. Biden has broken nearly all of his election promises. And the Democrats have done absolutely nothing to protect abortion rights. Faith in institutions plummeted after the Supreme Court decision, and it seemed the whole system was headed for a crisis.

The Women’s March, Planned Parenthood, and the like refused to use their millions of dollars to build a real movement or even a major national protest for reproductive rights.

The referendum in Kansas, where nearly two thirds of voters supported keeping abortion legal, showed the path forward for the Democrats towards the midterms. They would use abortion, once again, to mobilize people to the polls. This maneuver comes while they are very literally spending millions of dollars to promote the most vile anti-abortion, anti-queer, anti-woman Republicans, giving them a platform and airtime and allowing them to promote their vile ideas, in hopes of gaining an easy 2022 Democratic victory.

It is in this context that the Women’s March held their conference — a conference that helps serve as a political tool for the Democratic Party.

Power to the Polls

Participants came from all over the country, mostly driven by anger and horror at the overthrowing of Roe and a fear of the far right. Participants who were isolated in small, right wing towns talked about being afraid of losing their jobs due to their political views. They also talked about moments of bravery — putting a rainbow flag up in a classroom, or on their porch, despite fear of the stigma. People talked about organizing protests against the overturning of Roe, even in very small towns, which put them in contact with the Women’s March. The will to fight in the folks who attended the Women’s March Conference was palpable; mentions of anger and rage got huge cheers from the audience. These are folks with whom we want to be in dialogue, in struggle, and in the streets.

The problem with the conference was with the political solutions being put forward by the leaders, not with the participants.

Long-time Democratic Party politician Sheila Jackson Lee, known for helping making Juneteenth a national holiday, as well as being the lead sponsor of the 2021 Violence Against Women Act, spoke at the conference and was lauded by the Women’s March. However, Lee is far from a leftist. In fact, she is in favor of more border security and against even a guest worker program. Yet, in her speech she spoke about the need to stand for “all women,” including immigrant women.

Throughout the conference, radical rhetoric thinly veiled the lack of radical solutions. At one panel, the speakers explained “Poor people are going to get poorer [as a result of the overturning of Roe]. We gotta start at race, class and gender and move from there.”

But on that very same panel, a panelist said, “The worst thing we got out there against us is not our opposition. It’s people who are with us and are starting to feel apathetic or like there is nothing they can do within this system.” Yes… the real problem are those of us who want nothing to do with this system that has denied us our basic rights over and over again.

Panelists went on to say, “We have a strong story of victory that is bigger and bolder than our story of loss. Y’all almost forgot that in 2018, we took back the U.S. House. Y’all almost forgot that a Black South Asian woman took the White House in 2020… Y’all almost forgot that Katanji Brown Jackson is on the Supreme Court.” The fact that Black women are in the highest posts of society, including the undemocratic Supreme Court and the Vice Presidency, is the direct result of the Black Lives Matter movement and of the ongoing struggle fo Black Lives. But having Black faces in high places has done nothing to protect abortion rights, for instance, and It has done nothing to address the exorbitantly high maternal mortality rate among Black women in particular.

The panel ended with participants being asked to make a vow: “I will volunteer for reproductive justice candidates this November.”

Even the decorations and swag highlighted voting as a strategy.

Without a doubt, newly activated people were at this conference. But the message to them was clear: you want to fight for your rights, you’d better head to the polls. There is no alternative. In fact, if you don’t get on board, you are part of the problem.

The Women’s March will be organizing a weekend of protest on October 7-9. But those protests are nothing but “get out the vote” rallies, which take place the weekend before voter registration ends. They aren’t mobilizations to build our power and strength in the streets; they are mobilizations to move people to the polls.

This is no surprise. After all, that was the slogan of the 2018 Women’s March — taking the millions of people who mobilized against Trump and funneling that rage into the midterms. And although the Democrats took the House, and even though the Democrats hold the House, the Senate, and the Presidency today, the right to an abortion was still taken away. This feminist movement has tried voting, and it clearly doesn’t work.

Liberal Intersectionality of the Non Profit Industrial Complex

The form of “intersectionality” promoted by non-profits conveniently forgets that we live in a capitalist system that profits from all forms of oppression. While rhetorically they claim to unite our struggles, in reality they’ve kept these struggles separate in the streets; the unity of our struggles is manifested for them at the polls and in the Democratic Party.

A feminism that wants to grasp our problems at the root should understand that all systems of oppression are currently inscribed within capitalism — and capitalism is a system that profits from all of our oppression. It’s a system that can only run due to the exploitation of workers — with the most exploited sectors being workers who are Black, brown, and from the global South — for the profit of the very few. Working class women, especially working class women of color, are especially oppressed and especially exploited in this system: the Black women who work in UPS warehouses without air conditioning, the Mexican maquila workers, and the domestic workers who send money to their children back home every month.

At the same time, the multi-racial and multi-gender working class is in a unique position to shut down the economy in service of our demands as workers and oppressed people because we make everything run. This may be a limit of intersectionality as a framework: even its left iterations focus on the sources of oppression and miss the strategic position of the working class in capitalism. But this conference was not a leftist iteration of intersectionality: it was liberalism that brushes over the existence of capitalism and glorifies exploitative bosses. There is no such thing as liberatory capitalism. It’s impossible to even imagine our liberation within a system of private property and exploitation, in which the bosses profit from the unpaid labor in the home overwhelmingly done by women and profit from our low wage labor in the workplace.

A feminism that grasps our problem at the root understands that corporations have no place in our movement — including “progressive” corporations like Ben and Jerry’s that actually union bust, whose CEO makes over 17 times what a worker makes and supports the Zionist state of Israel.

But it’s not just corporations that are exploiters; nonprofits are a pillar of the exploitative capitalist system. At the conference, I met a young Black woman who was fired in a process of attempting to unionize her workplace, a non-profit that co-sponsored the event. “I know how much the CEO makes… and it’s a lot,” she said to me, “Everyone who was trying to unionize has left. We’ve been pushed out.” In the end, the liberal intersectionality of the Women’s March, as well as the countless non-profits who spoke and co-sponsored the conference, is merely a cover for the oppressive capitalist system.

I met another young person who put her finger on the problem: “If the higher-ups at these nonprofits make bank from addressing our oppression, it’s not really in their interest to solve the problem, is it?”

And this is the crux of the issue. The radical movements for women’s liberation and queer liberation of the 60’s and 70’s have been moved into non-profits and defanged. While progressive rhetoric and discussions of liberation remain, these same non-profits play an essential role in maintaining the movement entirely subservient to the capitalists — in the Democratic Party, but also in “progressive” corporations.

The Way Forward

While the Women’s March conference was supposed to be about “empowering women,” the message being peddled was exactly the opposite. These people pretend to be the champions of women, but they do not trust women to fight for their own interests. The message is that the power is not with us — it’s with politicians that do not represent or support us.

The Women’s March wants to take a whole generation of new activists from all over the country to the polls, fostering illusions in the Democratic Party and in a system that has been created to exploit workers, where Black and brown workers are the most hyper-exploited. They use the imagery and the language of transgressive movements of the 60’s and 70’s, movements that were defanged by the non-profit industrial complex and the Democratic Party in the neoliberal era.

We needed a summer of rage. But we didn’t get that. Planned Parenthood, Women’s March, and the other groups that co-sponsored the meeting had no interest in organizing one. They were interested in all that rage being bottled up and directed at the right moment.

Now they want that rage to be directed to the polls to vote for the Democrats. And that was what the Women’s March conference was primarily about.

There will be protests on the weekend of October 7 called by the Women’s March. And despite the serious limitations of the Women’s March, we as socialists should participate.

We want people to be in the streets. We want to be in dialogue with all of those folks who want to fight back– all those thousands of But we should be clear that we have very different goals from the Women’s March. While they try to push our power to the polls, we want to build an independent power; we want to build power in the streets and in our workplaces.

The post A Socialist Take on the Women’s March Convention appeared first on Left Voice.

Tyler Bradway, Elizabeth Freeman

Conservatives are developing legislation around “the basic social building block of the family.” The right to kinship in whatever form it takes is on the line.

The post What Constitutes a Family? Don’t Ask Conservatives. appeared first on The Nation.

By Johanna Isaacson

A decade ago, I sat in a large seminar classroom in which feminist luminary Kathi Weeks presented her life changing book, The Problem With Work. In a discussion that followed her talk she was confronted with the utopianism, i.e. “impossibility,” of the anti-work horizon she had mapped out. To this she responded succinctly, “The future is not for us.”

This may seem a bleak prospect to some, even a sign of political resignation. But Weeks’ intent was just the opposite. For her, this negation was a recognition that our life-long conditioning to imagine only moderate change and limited possibility is not objectively true. Just because we have been trained to deny radical hope doesn’t mean utopian transformation can’t happen.

While many fear this horizon of the unknown and unimaginable, Sophie Lewis bravely dares to approach it in all of her brilliant, groundbreaking writing, and her new book Abolish the Family again passionately and playfully brings us along for the wild ride. The book draws from the ideas and projects of wide-ranging thinkers to support Lewis’s case, but in the least stodgy style imaginable. Holding true to her utopian project, Lewis crafts “a manifesto for care and liberation”—the book’s subtitle—in wave after wave of exuberant and militant prose.

Lewis begins by compassionately addressing the reader’s almost certain reservations at the concept of family abolition, recognizing that even those of us with ambivalent or terrible experiences of domestic life can’t imagine care or relationality at all without evoking the family. She invites us to recognize that if “to love a person is to struggle for their autonomy as well as for their immersion in care…” then the family, insofar as under capitalism it is a means to privatize care, may actually hinder and limit the amount of love available to all. Our desperate attachment to this “disciplinary, scarcity-based trauma-machine” is likely to obscure more hopeful and inclusive social forms on the horizon.

Psychologically, it makes sense to cling to the family’s “organized poverty” that at least seems solid and tangible, when any alternative prospect is as-yet formless, and yet capitalism relies on these fears to discipline us into patterns of austerity and labor that perpetuate the worst aspects of the family. This means that families who reject a child’s queerness or difference may insist that their progeny conform in the name of “natural” love, that the family’s chauvinistic, competitive pedagogical function as a “microcosm of the nation state” can go unquestioned, that those who don’t submit to these rules can be left to die. Recognizing this mafia-like self-perpetuating toxicity of the family form can open spaces of inchoate experimentation with new, liberatory, collective forms of social organization. Indeed, Lewis recognizes these seeds in daring forms of mutual aid that eschew “property love,” a term she borrows from Alexandra Kollontai, and rather model comradeliness and de-privatized care.

Lewis goes on to respectfully address critiques that see family abolition as an overly broad and sweeping concept. Surely, it is only the heterosexist, patriarchal nuclear family that should be abolished, while the extended and chosen families historically formed by POC and queer communities should be preserved. Lewis offers sympathy to this criticism and admits that she has deliberated on this point herself. In the end, though, she feels drawn to non-white and queer theorists who make more radical demands in relation to the family. Through engaging with the work of Hortense Spillers, Tiffany Lethabo King, Jennifer Nash, Hazel Carby, Paul Gilroy, Kathi Weeks, Kay Lindsey, Lola Olufemi, and Annie Olaloku-Teriba she asks us to consider that the family form targeted by the concept of family abolition is always structured by white, settler, heterosexual, patriarchal values and is always a means of forcing people into the enclosure of privatized care. “The family is a shield that human beings have taken up, quite rightly, to survive a war,” she claims. But “if we cannot countenance ever putting down that shield, perhaps we have forgotten that the war does not have to go on forever.” In the quest to imagine a life beyond the battleground, Lewis looks to models of marooning and undercommoning that originate in communities of color before or in reaction to the pillaging, family-centric, culture of settler capitalism.

In the balance, Lewis’s manifesto is less interested in berating those with investments in the family than in exploring possibilities we dare not to dream of. In that spirit Lewis offers “a potted history of Family Abolitionism” in which she explores contestatory visions of social organization by a range of leftist, feminist thinkers such as Charles Fourier, nineteenth century Indigenous and maroon communities, Marx and Engels, Alexandra Kollontai, Shulamith Firestone, gay and lesbian and children’s liberation movements, and wages for housework and welfare rights activists. Through these disparate movements she conjures hopeful strains of decolonial reinvention, mothering outside of motherhood, and work refusal, while recognizing the hopes that these projects offered were constrained by capitalist violence. Lewis locates herself in a current wave of twenty-first century trans Marxism that dares to speculate about the “architectures, challenges, timelines, infrastructures, and affects of family abolition.”

Continuing this project of radical hope, the chapter “Comrades Against Kinship” outlines some of these emergent concepts at the heart of trans Marxism. Looking to public collective encampments that rise up among the unhoused and protesters, Lewis imagines “cradles of possibility, relief, and reciprocity in the desert.” Here and throughout, Abolish the Family serves as a companion piece with the recent fascinating speculative fiction publication by M.E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi, Everything for Everyone. In different registers both texts imagine expanding forms of social organization that arise from the “protest kitchen” and other intimate collective projects.

Tracing the origin of the word abolition to the German term Aufhebung, Lewis reminds us that she is not advocating a wiping away of the family form but an as-yet-unknown combination of “lifting up, destroying, preserving, and radically transforming, all at once.” The family form is not without a “latent utopian kernel” that is aspirational towards “reciprocal care, interdependence, and belonging.” But to realize this abundance we must first seek the family’s abolition, claims Lewis. Only then can we resurrect these generative qualities from “a casket labeled ‘exclusivity,’ ‘chauvinism,’ ‘race,’ ‘property,’ ‘heredity,’ ‘identity,’ ‘competition.’” Even Lewis, whose passionate and hopeful quest for this resurrection and renewal seems boundless, can’t imagine how to “desire it fully.” And yet she urges us, with her, to reject the idea that this this not-fully-knowable horizon of family abolition should be a source of dread, and instead look towards future transformation with utopian anticipation.

Author bio: Johanna Isaacson writes academic and popular pieces on feminism, horror and politics. She is a founding editor of Blind Field Journal. Her book Stepford Daughters: Tools for Feminists in Contemporary Horror is forthcoming from Common Notions Press. She is the author of The Ballerina and the Bull (2016) from Repeater Books, has published widely in academic and popular journals, including, with Annie McClanahan, the entry for “Marxism and Horror” in The Sage Handbook of Marxism (2022).

By Jenny Brown
Convergence Magazine

Public defiance of bans on abortion and contraception helped bring them down.

You can read Part 2 of this article here.

Anticipating the overturn of Roe v. Wade, lots of people are quietly gearing up to provide abortions outside the medical and legal system, generally with abortion pills. The technology is new, but underground abortions are not. Millions of women had illegal procedures in the century when abortion was illegal all over the U.S., between 1873 and 1973. The Guttmacher institute estimates that between 200,000 and 1.2 million abortions were performed each year in the 1950s and ‘60s.

But a century of underground lawbreaking didn’t change the law. Only public action did that, including publicly breaking contraception and abortion laws in order to change them. This history suggests some risky but potentially powerful strategies for us to use now.

Secret vs. public

Secret provision of abortion may carry legal risks for all involved, but it has immediate rewards. An abortion instantly gives someone a measure of control over their life, a big feminist effect for something so simple. Abortion patients may even join the movement through contact with underground efforts. In the early 1970s, Jane, the now-famous underground abortion service in Chicago, provided women’s liberation literature along with respectful care during 11,000 safe abortion procedures.

In 1963, Carol Giardina saw so many classmates drop out due to pregnancy that she started an abortion referral service out of her dorm at the University of Florida. Giardina recalled that she did referrals “without much thought of the politics of it until 1968 when the politics of it were made clear to me in the Women’s Liberation Movement. I continued the referrals, but began fighting publicly for abortion and women’s liberation.”

As Giardina suggests, it was only when feminist organizers made abortion a public, political issue that they were able to force the power structure to make abortion legal. First, they had to make the hidden public. After discovering in consciousness-raising meetings that many of them had had illegal abortions—and that everyone was terrified they’d need one—women’s liberationists made their discoveries about their oppression public, recruiting millions. They invaded abortion reform hearings to give their own testimony, conducted speak-outs detailing their illegal abortions, and filed lawsuits on behalf of women affected by the abortion laws. They swept away tepid reforms with their demand for repeal of all abortion laws. Their grassroots theory leadership and mass action made abortion legal in New York State by 1970, a model followed by the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade three years later.

Among the many strategies the movement used was publicly breaking the laws to change them. Their civil disobedience followed the example of the birth control movement, which at the time was still fighting to free up contraceptive distribution everywhere, and to legalize it in a few holdout states. In Connecticut, doctors were prohibited from providing contraceptives to their patients, so in 1961 Estelle Griswold opened a clinic in New Haven to do just that. The police shut it down, but her case went to the Supreme Court and established the right to contraception for the married in Griswold v Connecticut (1965).

Acts of civil disobedience by birth control campaigner Bill Baird secured this right for the unmarried. Baird was arrested when he handed out packages of contraceptive foam and condoms to unmarried college students at a talk at Boston University in 1967. In Eisenstadt v Baird (1972), the Supreme Court struck down the Massachusetts law.

Army of Three

Starting in 1962 in northern California, pioneering abortion campaigner Patricia Maginnis, who died last year at 93, relentlessly distributed referral lists of abortion providers in Mexico, Sweden and Japan. This violated state and local laws. Her goal was not service but arrest, prosecution, and overturning the law. Maginnis and two comrades she recruited through her activities, Rowena Gurner and Lana Clarke Phelan, were known as the “Army of Three.” A San Francisco arrest for “unlawfully advertising abortion” got rid of that local statute. Escalating, they advertised and taught do-it-yourself abortion classes in 1966 and 1967, always inviting the police. After many tries, Maginnis and Gurner were finally arrested mid-class. Their case eventually overturned the California code that muzzled speech on abortion.

Following Army of Three techniques, pioneers in the Women’s Health Movement, led by Carol Downer and Lorraine Rothman, toured the country teaching classes in menstrual extraction. Rather than enduring a period with several days of bleeding, women learned to use a device of Rothman’s design on each other which suctioned out the menstrual blood. If you happened to be pregnant, this could provide an early abortion. Teaching the system was not without legal risk. At one point Downer was arrested and put on trial for practicing medicine without a license for treating someone’s vaginal yeast infection with yogurt. Downer beat the charges in a widely-publicized trial that established some legal space for women’s self-help clinics.

Putting pressure on the laws

The 1950s and ’60s saw a police crackdown on doctors who performed abortions. Dozens of skilled practitioners were arrested or had their licenses revoked, and many were jailed. A few brave doctors practiced openly, challenging the laws. Dr. Milan Vuitch, a Yugoslavian immigrant unconcerned with the approval of the medical establishment, was arrested twice and exonerated twice. After these hassles, he decided to do abortions openly in Washington D.C., broadly interpreting the health exception in the D.C. law. Arrested a third time, he managed to get the law overturned, effectively legalizing abortion in D.C. in 1969.

Referrals were the typical way non-doctors broke the law. In 1966, Margaret Sanger’s biographer, Lawrence Lader, published Abortion, a pioneering history of the practice for which he interviewed doctors who gave abortions clandestinely. Women were soon asking Lader for the doctors’ phone numbers, which he provided. At a press event for his book, he let slip that he was providing this service, and soon he was spending half his workdays fielding urgent inquiries and maintaining doctor lists. Lader went on to co-found the National Association for Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL) with Betty Friedan and others, and wrote Abortion II, an important 1973 history of the movement.

Radical clergy, led by Reverend Howard Moody at Judson Memorial Church in New York announced on the front page of the New York Times in 1967 that ministers and rabbis would provide abortion referrals to anyone who needed them as the Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion. “Mr. Moody acknowledged that the project involves ‘some legal risk,’” the Times noted, “but he added: ‘We are not willing to admit that it is illegal.’” The service eventually grew to 3,000 clergy in 40 cities. They tended to refer across state lines, and also to Puerto Rico and England, hoping this would slow down prosecutors.

Nonetheless, in 1969 Cleveland minister Robert Hare was indicted for aiding and abetting a criminal abortion in Massachusetts; he was eventually exonerated. In 1970, Rabbi Max Ticktin, director of Hillel at the University of Chicago, was arrested and his case became a student rallying point. The indictment came from Michigan where furor over the case strengthened demands for Michigan to repeal its law entirely.

By the early 1970s, feminist groups at most colleges were providing abortion referrals. The school newspaper at the University of Florida published a referral list in 1972. When the printer refused to print that page, staff inserted the list in every copy. University administrators kicked the paper off campus for this crime. To this day, the Independent Florida Alligator has no official ties to the university.

In Chicago, the Jane abortion service became public involuntarily, when a police raid led to seven arrests in 1972. Each woman was charged with 11 counts of abortion and conspiracy to commit abortion, a possible 110 years each. Despite the arrests, the service continued to provide abortions until Roe made it possible to open abortion clinics in Chicago. Their charges were dropped after the Roe decision.

Featured image: #ShoutYourAbortion brought the #AbortionPillsForever message to the streets of Jackson, MS in early 2022. A QR code on the back of the truck led to ShareAbortionPill.Info, a site with more info about the pills. The action recalled Estelle Griswold’s 1961 arrest for providing contraception to married couples. Her case went all the way to the Supreme Court and helped end bans on contraception.

Birth Strike: The Hidden Fight over Women’s Work

The post Breaking the Law to Win Abortion Rights (Part1) appeared first on PM Press.

This article was originally published on Waging Nonviolence.

“Vote them out. Vote them out,” activists chanted outside of lawmakers’ offices in West Virginia’s capital in late July, as senators considered a bill that would outlaw abortion in West Virginia. One activist held a sign labeled “Don’t Tread on Me” below a rattlesnake wrapped around itself, forming a uterus. Another had a white, pink and blue striped sign, the colors of the transgender flag, stating, “Abortion is not just a women’s issue.”

The West Virginia Republican Party failed to pass an abortion ban during a July special session called by Gov. Jim Justice, in part because of activist efforts in the state legislature. Reproductive justice activists made themselves heard by testifying during a public hearing and protesting at the capital for over 11 hours.

Activists are adamant that their actions, which included speaking at a public hearing, emailing legislators, organizing sit-ins, and packing and protesting at the capital have delayed the vote, leaving abortion legal for an anticipated few weeks.

“I don’t care what anyone says. If we weren’t here, this wouldn’t have happened. Do not tell me protest and emails to legislators do not work. I just saw it,” tweeted Jamie Miller, an abortion escort and executive assistant at ACLU-WV.

**Southern Abortion Rights After the Roe Reversal**

The legal landscape of abortion rights in West Virginia has been changing rapidly since the reversal of Roe v. Wade in late June. Immediately after the Supreme Court’s opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson became public, the only West Virginia clinic offering abortion procedures halted services because it was uncertain if the state’s on-the-books abortion ban had automatically gone into effect.

After the reversal of Roe, over half of the country either immediately initiated their on-the-books trigger bans and pre-Roe abortion bans, or otherwise began enforcing other hostile limitations on individuals’ access to abortion.

The elimination of the federal protection to abortion procedures led to an immediate nationwide mourning. “There’s this gut-wrenching feeling of like ‘I no longer fully have control over my body and what my choices are if I decide to have children or not,” said Rebecca Kamp, a nonbinary reproductive justice activist who lives in Martinsburg, West Virginia. “We keep us safe, the government does not.”

While most media attention has focused on protests in urban areas like New York and Washington, D.C., those most effected by the fall of Roe reside in states in the Midwest, Appalachia and the South. Black women and queer people of color in the South, in particular, will disproportionately suffer from the financial and health risks associated with abortion bans.

If West Virginia had passed the abortion ban bill, it would have been the first state to do so. However, since the stalling of the bill on August 5, Indiana became the first post-Roe to sign legislation into law that will ban most abortion in the state.

Despite that, reproductive justice organizers refuse to give up. According to Peregrine Lloyd, a queer activist in Huntington, West Virginia. “There’s grit, there’s hope, there’s righteous anger. Some people are hopeless one day and the next they’re proclaiming their solemn duty to fight for the rest of their lives.”

Why National Groups Shouldn’t Write West Virginia Off

Reproductive justice activists like Ixya Vega, a community organizer at Planned Parenthood of South Atlantic West Virginia, feels like national reproductive justice groups see West Virginia as a lost cause. “I’m convinced national organizations … leave their regional groups out to dry, but like West Virginia is worth fighting for,” Vega tweeted. “We are worthy of attention that highlights great work and us trying.”

This community power building is reflected in the work of Holler Health Justice, or HHJ, a West Virginia reproductive justice and harm reduction organization that builds power in Appalachia with communities most disproportionately affected by health inequities, including BIPOC, LGBTQIA+ folk, those in rural areas and those with low income. HHJ has continued to offer abortion funding, practical support and free emergency contraception, despite the continually changing legal landscape in West Virginia.

“It’s the Appalachian way,” Lloyd said, describing the Appalachian organizing model reproductive justice activists have used to respond to this crisis. “It’s more word-of-mouth, people coming together on a low-key basis and just trying to build community informally.”

Packing the Capital to Fight an Abortion Ban

Activists packed the capital in Charlestown in late July for the #BansOffOurBodies rally to voice their dissent at a public hearing hosted by the House. Speakers who were pro-abortion allegedly had their mics cut and received shorter speaking time than those who were anti-abortion. Activists, including Women’s Health Center Director Katie Quinonez, were escorted out of chambers for shouting their abortion stories.

Zac Morton, a minister serving the First Presbyterian church in Morgantown called for national attention to the number of activists who spoke at the hearing. “Hey national organizers,” Morton said, “I hope you’re paying attention to how many West Virginians have turned up to speak out in opposition to the #AbortionBan being proposed during this special session. It’s at least two to one.”

Appalachian Abortion Access as a Queer Issue

Banning abortion is a queer issue and will disproportionately effect queer and trans people. West Virginia has the highest percentage of trans youth in the county, and transgender people in West Virginia have historically experienced obstacles when accessing health care in general.

Reproductive justice activists who protested at the capital in late July were conscious that abortion is not just a women’s issue, but will affect trans men, nonbinary people and other queer folks.

Many of those who protested at the capital also identify as queer themselves and faced discrimination by lawmakers when sharing their abortion stories at the public hearing.

Ash Orr, a trans Appalachian organizer and policy outreach coordinator who uses they/he pronouns, was repeatedly misgendered by a moderator during the public hearing, despite sharing their pronouns and writing their pronouns on the sign up sheet next to his name. Orr had their mic cut off and was escorted off the floor. Delegates allegedly laughed at them and called him an “abomination.”

Orr’s statement, which included their experience as a childhood rape victim and abortion patient, was later shared fully on the Senate floor by Sen. Shelley Moore Capoto. Orr emailed Sen. Mike Azinger after their full statement was shared, writing that “Given your statements on the floor, it is evident that you neither care for children or adults who are the victims of rape.” Azinger responded via email four hours later, saying, “The arrogance of some people: Why do you assume I know about your pathetic statement Capito read on the floor? You were born a female and always — always — will be a female. And you are the one who does not care about the victims of rape: If they get pregnant, you want them to kill their baby, which they’ll live with for the rest of their life.”

Despite the egregious treatment Orr received from West Virginia’s legislature, they refuse to stop fighting for reproductive justice. “For the rest of my days,” Orr tweeted, “I will never stop fighting for my community, for Queer joy, for bodily autonomy, or for better days. I am exhausted, but I’m still standing.”

Support Grows for a Ballot Initiative

Activists’ success in stalling the passage of an abortion ban — and their adamant dedication to abortion rights in West Virginia — have led Democratic lawmakers to suggest that abortion rights should be voted on via a ballot measure. Despite Senate Minority Leader Stephen Baldwin’s statement that the right to an abortion should be voted on by West Virginians themselves, the governor is adamant that this should be decided by the legislature and the attorney general.

While a ballot measure in Kansas earlier this month was rejected, leading activists in West Virginia to potentially support a similar initiative, other activists are reminded of West Virginians voting in 2018, by a slim majority, to approve a constitutional amendment stating “nothing in this Constitution secures or protects a right to abortion.”

While abortion rights are still in limbo, they remain legal in West Virginia for the time being. At the same time, activists are working to raise funds to support the state’s only abortion clinic, which continues to provide abortion care to West Virginians.

Bia Lacombe is a community organizer in the council office of Kshama Sawant. Last month, thousands of local activists and young people in Seattle won a landmark victory in the abortion rights struggle — led by the office of socialist City Councilmember Kshama Sawant, we succeeded in our fight to make Seattle the first abortion […]

Camille Rudney is an activist and a clinical social worker based in Richmond, Virginia. They became involved in abortion struggles after being arrested in 2012 for protesting Virginia’s restrictive abortion bill that required women seeking abortions to undergo a transvaginal ultrasound as well as other stringent regulations that would severely affect abortion providers. Camille’s arrest […]

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