Читать книгу Abolitionist Socialist Feminism - Zillah Eisenstein - Страница 8

A FEW FOUNDATIONAL QUERIES

why socialism?

Everyone deserves to live without the fear of hunger and homelessness and illness and unemployment and disability. The profit motive destroys humanity. A start toward socialism would be a universal livable wage and health care for all.

why feminism?

Because neither sex nor gender should determine one’s life choices. And because misogyny, the hatred of women, and heteropatriarchy, the structural support for women’s inequality, continually seek to control and regulate women’s bodies. My use of the term women always is inclusive of trans, gender-variant, queer, nonbinary identities. It is a specifically universal embrace.

Feminism must create access and freedom for all of our sexual and reproductive bodies. Reform, as in women’s rights, is still threaded and structured through racist heteropatriarchy. So in the spirit of writer Mab Segrest, queer all this as well.

why abolitionism?

Chattel slavery has only been reformed, and personhood and civil and human rights remain unfulfilled. White supremacy must be completely uprooted from the structuring law, prisons, and the racist division of labor. Abolition is the totality needed to end the outrageous abuse and obscene everyday punishment of U.S. Blacks and other people of color, trans, queer, and straight alike. Abolition must abolish and not simply reform. Abolitionism is often used today to refer to the robust movement to end the prison system. My usage extends to the structural totality of misogynist racism wherever it thrives.

Why am I still forced to be making this case after all the years of antiracist, antimisogynist critiques of capitalist racist heteropatriarchy? Why is this still the question? Why haven’t progressive thinkers and activists of all stripes changed more? Why does the left fail to recognize that the personal is political, that there is a politics to sex, that sexualized racism is foundational to class?

Is it this exclusiveness of radical and revolutionary history that explains why there has never been a successful socialist revolution? Is that the reason why revolutions have merely chosen to reform parts of the nexus of power and oppression and exploitation? Is it that socialism needs more heart and body, more abolitionist socialist feminisms?

We—those wishing for revolutionary change—need to move forward. If we remain mired in the old, we will just repeat it.

the challenges that follow

What do you do when socialism is not enough?

You make it antiracist and feminist.

What do you do when feminism is not enough?

You make it socialist and antiracist.

What do you do when antiracism is not enough?

You make it socialist and feminist.

And then what do you do?

You make sure this abolitionist socialist feminism is fully inclusive, most especially of gays and trans and disabled people.

We may be living in a moment of what physicists call “singularity.” In political terms, this means that whatever came before has sunk into a metaphorical black hole, making the past indiscernible and the present incomprehensible/untranslatable. I remember thinking this when the election was handed over to George Bush in 2000. It was unprecedented and an early warning sign of what was to come in 2016.

I don’t think anyone can get ahead of history and know future possibilities, but I do think you can constrain history and hold it back if you do not have new ways of seeing. State actors believe they are supposed to mystify the power structure, not expose it. It is important to recognize that this so-called protective capacity has shifted. The tension is between an effective state that obfuscates what it is and Trump, who reveals too much: We have a Klan president of sorts, who is also a sexual predator as well as a capitalist apologist. What is happening with this new chaotic exposure? Some might say that fascism has become completely transparent.

I am reminded of what the South African artist William Kentridge writes about post-apartheid South Africa. He says that one of the strangest things is that little has changed. Children in poor rural schools still get a miserable education and the main beneficiaries of the end of apartheid remain white South Africans. Yet he says that his compromised society nurtures and nourishes his work. This makes him suspicious of certainty, valuing instead the provisionality of the moment. Because of the world he lives in, he values doubt. So do I. It keeps me curious and open.

Why is misogyny so seldom named as a structural system of sexual power? And why must I continually return to the misogynist structure of racism and capitalism? Why does misogyny remain silenced and unnamed, an open secret in this moment? It is visibly invisible and naturalized and normalized as such. Is it this that gives patriarchy its incredible resilience, a suppleness that stymies a full-throttle assault?

What is it about capitalism that sucks all of the air out of a buoyant racial and sexual and gender critique? After all, it seems apparent that in this moment we need to target the entirety: capitalist heteropatriarchal racism.

Why and how is patriarchal privilege ignored, naturalized, and normalized into a shattering silence? Why are rape and sexual violence not seen as part of the structural privilege underpinning capitalism and racism? How does this silence allow sexual violence to be the glue of racist patriarchal oppression?

Why does class so regularly trump (so to speak) race and gender? Why, when inequality is recognized, is it seen as fundamentally economic and class defined—especially when people of color and white women of the working class remain disproportionately poor and sexually violated?

Why today is white supremacy, even when it is acknowledged, simply reformed but not abolished? Why does queerness remain the elephant in the room when doing antiracist work?

Why are the issues bifurcated? Race or class? Sex or race? Class or sex? Why not ask how they relate and combine with each other? Why do progressives not wonder more about how multiple interlocking power structures operate simultaneously?

Why, although sexual violence is pervasive to the systems of militarism, capitalism, imperialism, and racism, is it not viewed as being as essential to oppression as capitalism?

How can activists face this urgent moment with defiance and turn our resistance/s and reform actions into revolutionary acts?

Why is it not understood that the most revolutionary and necessary politics for today is a queer abolitionist socialist feminism?

So much has changed. So little has changed. Everything has changed. Not enough has changed. Each is true. What to do?