Why Do We Oppress Women?

By Wonder Louis

Since the dawn of civilization, women have been treated as second-class citizens. This condition pervades every stage of history and virtually every culture and region. Under capitalism, the phenomenon of gender inequality is observable through tangible acts of oppression such as unequal pay, fewer educational opportunities, domestic violence, and more. However, these observable acts are not exclusive to capitalism, as they were prevalent in different modes of production. To understand capitalist gender inequality specifically, we must examine the social relation and position that women hold under capitalism. 

Marxist analysis reveals that, just as capitalism divides bosses and workers, it treats men and women differently based on their relationship to production. The sexual division of labor both in and outside the household is caused by and produces gender inequality in all aspects of life. As Marxism informs us, the base of society is its economic system. In our current order, everything flows from capitalism and the asymmetric social relations it demands. 

Under capitalism, people — especially women — lose their humanity and become commodities. Workers  must sell the only commodity the bank can’t take from them, their labor, to not just accumulate wealth but survive. Granted, most female labor falls outside the commodity market and is instead directly consumed. But women are also often reduced to their exchange value. Sex trafficking and dowries are examples.

The view that capitalism encourages gender inequality is hardly universal.  Some argue that capitalism promotes female wellbeing through technological advancements in women’s health. Others claim capitalism must encourage gender equality because women are supposedly worse off in “traditional… non-capitalist societies.” These cultures are usually quite religious. People believe that their women are worse off because they suffer from lower life expectancy, poverty, and stricter gender oppression. Capitalism allegedly improves these maladies via constant and rapid technological innovation. It is the best system for social innovation, its proponents say. No other structural arrangement better facilitates social mobility or individual rights.

Whatever capitalists say, the fact remains: gender inequality exists under capitalism, and we must change that. This can occur in a number of ways. But lasting, fundamental change requires targeting the structure of the economy and superstructure of society. By altering these two elements of social life, women can defeat gender oppression once and for all.

Addressing the economy calls for more affirmative action. These policies can ensure minorities receive equal occupational and educational opportunities. Affirmative action has helped many women access institutions they wouldn’t have been able to otherwise. In 1995, for example, female employment increased by  15% at jobs with affirmative action requirements compared to 2 percent at jobs without. 

The second task is changing traditional gender culture. We can do this through education — namely, by introducing egalitarian concepts to children at a young age.  Curricula should teach how harmful sexist and gender stereotypes are. Educators should be prepared to call out and challenge misogyny whenever it arises in the classroom.   

Capitalism is driven by the accumulation of wealth and capital. It lays waste to all other values — chief among them, gender equality. Under capitalism, women face financial  and cultural oppression, physical violence, and lower living standards than men. To combat these inequities, women need fair treatment in the workforce, especially equal pay, and in society as a whole, free from misogynist norms.  

Wonder Louis is an aspiring historian and political theorist. Holding a Bachelor of Arts in History, Wonder aims to promote revolutionary thought and educate the masses on all forms of social inequality.

All Black Feminisms Ain't Created Equal

[Pictured: At an event in late April, 1979, Barbara Smith, with megaphone, protests nine murders of black women that took place in the first months of the year. Photograph by Ellen Shub / Courtesy the Estate of Ellen Shub]

By Erica Caines

Republished from Hood Communist.

My initial introduction to radical feminist politics was through convoluted, often antagonistic online discourses, where past works of radical feminists are engaged, discussed, and ultimately flattened. Audre Lorde has always been among the most popularly referenced Black feminists cited online, for example, but always for her gender critical analysis (which could be used as fodder in heated discourse) and never for her anti-imperialist analysis. It’s much easier for one to gain attention and retweets through cherrypicking her words on gender and sexuality, but much less popular to dive into her works on the imperialist U.S. invasion of her homeland Grenada whose revolution emphasized the role of women in society, for example. Only through study and organizing did I begin to distinguish between the social media driven “cannon” of  Black feminism, and the realized concept of revolutionary feminisms.

Revolutionary African feminism (oftentimes used interchangeably with radical Black feminism) is understood as a feminist ideology that seeks to fundamentally transform and decolonize societal structures, and eliminate all forms of patriarchy and gender-based oppression. Through a material structural analysis, consciousness-raising, and collective action, it emphasizes the need for systemic change by examining the ways that power structures, social institutions, and cultural norms perpetuate gender-based oppression.

Learning of the concept of “two colonialisms” pushed forward as both idea and praxis by the women of the PAIGC (African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde) changed how I began to understand an approach to feminism that approached gender equality on the basis of its broader anti-colonial and revolutionary goals. This was not simply the inclusion of women in the protracted armed struggle for independence from Portuguese colonial forces, but a true decolonial process of understanding how colonialism managed to dupe both African men and women, and how intimately linked the struggle against patriarchy was to the struggle against imperialism. African men and women were tied together in a dialectic relationship, which enhanced the need for proper strategy and cooperation among the two. In other words, the revolution in Guinea Bissau required not just an emphasis on developing a new man, but a new woman as well. Their struggle could not afford to be waged on the basis of “men vs. women”, but instead, everyone against the reactionary colonial culture of the past, toward the development of a Revolutionary African Personality. Bissaun revolutionary Teodora Gomes summed it up best when she said “You cannot isolate the liberation of women in circumstances such as ours because there is one goal for our society— which is to transform it step by step.”

However, revolutionary feminist ideals in the West have been largely co-opted and assimilated into mainstream liberal frameworks, losing their transformative potential. Radical liberal (rad-lib) Black feminism has diluted many core principles and objectives of revolutionary feminism, such as notions of bodily autonomy and gender equality. While revolutionary African feminism seeks to challenge and dismantle structural inequities and power dynamics, when it is liberalized, priorities shift to individualistic perspectives and experiences, focusing on personal empowerment rather than addressing broader systemic issues. This shift has undermined the collective action and solidarity necessary for achieving meaningful social change and liberation, effectively de-politicizing a once revolutionary and collective ideology. By emphasizing personal choices and empowerment without critically examining the broader socio-political context, rad-lib Black feminism has diverted attention away from structural inequalities and systemic injustices while convincing millions that their personal experiences are the systemic issues themselves, and therefore that an examination of personal experiences suffices for an analysis of structural issues of capitalism. Moreover, it has shifted discourse away from deep examination of the colonial-capitalist state itself as an entity responsible for perpetuating patriarchy.

This shift and co-optation, of course, can be traced back to the negative impacts neoliberal capitalism has had on African social movements within the U.S in general, but revolutionary feminism, specifically. Neoliberalism’s focus on individual success and self-advancement through engagement in the capitalist market and consumption, centers personal gain over collective liberation, diluting the collective goals and transformative potential of revolutionary African feminism. Neoliberal capitalism exacerbates the oppressive systems that revolutionary feminism seeks to dismantle, including economic exploitation, endless privatization, and state abandonment. At the same time, neoliberal capitalism encourages a class of African women to lean into exclusionary approaches, like failure to consider class, which perpetuates inequalities and reinforces power imbalances. It is important to critically examine and challenge the negative impacts of neoliberal capitalism on revolutionary African feminisms which made this co-option of the ideology possible, seamless even.

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While it is true that rad-lib Black feminism overlooks the specific challenges faced within and by colonized communities, it has unfairly been attributed to the framework of ‘intersectionality’. It is important to note that the negative impacts associated with intersectionality do not stem from the framework itself, but rather from misapplications of it as exemplified with the “oppression olympics” style misinterpretation of it. Intersectionality has provided a valuable framework for understanding and addressing systemic discrimination specifically within legal systems, pushing for more inclusive and just legal frameworks and practices, but has somehow also been made a one-size-fits-all framework because it recognizes how different forms of discrimination and oppression intersect and overlap.

As such, the framework has been flattened to mere identity reductionism, the essentializing of identities, which  reduces individuals to a set of fixed characteristics or experiences. By reducing identities to a singular focus, such as gender alone, rad-lib Black feminism has failed to fully address the unique struggles and experiences of colonized women. Additionally, without the clarity and larger context of being situated within a revolutionary ideology, rad-lib feminism often weaponizes the framework of intersectionality to uncritically engage in gender-essentialism.

Furthermore, in the midst of neoliberal austerity policies, which African women bear the brunt of due to privatization and reduced investments in public services and social safety nets, rad-lib feminism has proven wholly inadequate. The systemic barriers, upheld by neoliberalism, undermine the goals of revolutionary African feminisms by hindering efforts to address the root causes of structural inequalities that impact the lives of African women. Rad-lib Black feminism has become increasingly regressive, inadvertently focusing narrowly on notions of sexual liberation, the “girl boss”, etc., and not anything that would shift the material conditions of African working women (i.e. access to healthcare, education, affordable housing, and social safety nets).

Rad-lib Black feminism has defanged a principled movement of revolutionary African feminisms by co-opting the language and militant imagery of individuals like Assata Shakur, while ignoring their larger objectives. This is made abundantly clear when observing the practices of decolonial feminisms across the Third World inspired by the practices of Revolutionary African feminisms. The Fundación Entre Mujeres (FEM) in Esteli, Nicaragua explores the relationship between feminism and agroecology, women, and seeds to develop a specific bottom-up approach to empower women of the peasant class as Campinsinas Feministas (distinct from working class). Inspired by the revolutionary decolonial feminism practiced on the continent (like with the women of the PAIGC), the FEM places an emphasis on what they understand to be “Managua feminism” (mainstream rad-lib) vs the feminism that they practice. The women are clear about the radical alteration of power relations necessary, promoting the articulation of women in the community through local committees and agroecological networks, communication, community, and environmental defenders. 

In an interview with Stephanie Urdang, author of the book Fighting Two Colonialisms, Teodora Gomes says:

“The struggle for the liberation of women has to be done in different ways. First of all, women must fight together with men against colonialism and all systems of exploitation. Secondly, and this is one of the most fundamental points, every woman must convince herself that she can be free and that she has to be free. And that she is able to do all things that men do in social and political life. And thirdly, women must fight in order to convince men that she has naturally the same rights as he has. But she must understand that the fundamental problem is not the contradiction between women and men, but it is the system in which we are all living.”

Taking on labels like ‘feminism’ is not a matter of rigidity, but clarity. Radical ideology requires challenging and transforming structures of power that perpetuate inequality, including colonial legacies and imperialist practices. How we identify politically is meant to provide important insights and tools for understanding and addressing the complex, intersecting forms of oppression that impact African women and all colonized people.

Erica Caines is a poet, writer and organizer in Baltimore and the DMV. She is an organizing committee member of the anti war coalition, the Black Alliance For Peace as well as an outreach member of the Black centered Ujima People’s Progress Party. Caines founded Liberation Through Reading in 2017 as a way to provide Black children with books that represent them and created the extension, a book club entitled Liberation Through Reading BC, to strengthen political education online and in our communities.

On the Concept of "Time Poverty"

[Photo credit: Marisa9 / iStock / Getty Images Plus]

By Rugveda Sawant

“In capitalist society spare time is acquired for one class by converting the whole life-time of the masses into labour-time.”

-Karl Marx

There is a considerable amount of literature on “time-poverty” concocted by researchers and policy-makers. The term is used to denote lack of time an individual experiences to devote to personal and social activities which ends up negatively impacting their well-being.

Apart from the already established definition of the term, a fresh deconstruction of it may lead one to observe that if poverty is understood as a lack of (financial) resources, time-poverty may be understood as a lack of (financial) resources to purchase time rather than lack of time itself. The worker who does not own any means of production and has nothing but his labour-power to sell in order to sustain himself, must do so by lending it out for a certain duration of time to the capitalist who purchases it in order to extract surplus value. However, it becomes important to note that what is being sold and purchased here is not time, but labour-power. Time is not a commodity- it can be a measure of value but has no value in itself; it cannot be produced or purchased. Defining “time-poverty” as “lack of time” helps mask this simple contradiction; we are stuck with a term that fails to delineate the exact relationship between time and poverty, leading to the proposal of flawed solutions for a legitimate issue.

Even though a more liberal understanding is that people, no matter what their financial status, can experience “time-poverty”, a more sophisticated argument observes that it is an issue more relevant to and persistent amongst the income-poor. [1] To avoid ambiguity, let us replace “poor” with the working class and “rich” with the capitalist class. The working class earns its money through ‘wages’ while the capitalist class earns it through ‘profits’. The following illustration by Engels will help us understand how ‘wages’ and ‘profits’ are earned:

“The capitalist takes the labourer into his workshop or factory, where all the articles required for the work can be found – raw materials, auxiliary materials (coal, dyestuffs, etc.), tools, and machines. Here, the worker begins to work. His daily wages are, as above, 3 shillings, and it makes no difference whether he earns them as day-wages or piece-wages. We again assume that in 12 hours the worker adds by his labour a new value of 6 shillings to the value of the raw materials consumed, which new value the capitalist realizes by the sale of the finished piece of work. Out of this new value, he pays the worker his 3 shillings, and the remaining 3 shillings he keeps for himself. If, now, the labourer creates in 12 hours a value of 6 shillings, in 6 hours he creates a value of 3 shillings. Consequently, after working 6 hours for the capitalist, the labourer has returned to him the equivalent of the 3 shillings received as wages. After 6 hours’ work, both are quits, neither one owing a penny to the other.

“Hold on there!” now cries out the capitalist. “I have hired the labourer for a whole day, for 12 hours. But 6 hours are only half-a-day. So work along lively there until the other 6 hours are at an end – only then will we be even.” And, in fact, the labourer has to submit to the conditions of the contract upon which he entered of “his own free will", and according to which he bound himself to work 12 whole hours for a product of labour which cost only 6 hours’ labour.

Similarly with piece-wages. Let us suppose that in 12 hours our worker makes 12 commodities. Each of these costs a shilling in raw materials and wear-and-tear, and is sold for 2.5 shillings. On our former assumption, the capitalist gives the labourer .25 of a shilling for each piece, which makes a total of 3 shillings for 12 pieces. To earn this, the worker requires 12 hours. The capitalist receives 30 shillings for the 12 pieces; deducting 24 shillings for raw materials and wear-and-tear, there remains 6 shillings, of which he pays 3 shillings in wages and pockets the remaining 3. Just as before! Here, also, the worker labours 6 hours for himself – i.e., to replace his wages (half-an-hour in each of the 12 hours), and 6 hours for the capitalist.” (Frederick Engels, Wage Labour and Capital, 1891)

Profits are earned by appropriating unpaid labour of the working class. Profit constitutes the amount of time that the worker has spent in producing value that does not belong to him. The magnitude of profits can be increased by increasing intensity of labour, productiveness of the labour or by increasing the length of the working day. But no matter how these three variables shift, (relative) wages and profits remain in inverse proportion to each other. [2] Lower the wages, more the profit. More the labour-time that remains unpaid, more the capitalist gains. Once this is clear, one can start to see how “lack of time” that one class of the society faces is a gain for the other. The issue of “lack of time” devoid of class analysis leads to vague rhetorics [3] and empty solutions. All sincere critique must elucidate how the “lack of time” that the “poor” face and which affects their “well-being” is an inevitability under capitalist production. [4]

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It is argued that women are the most “time-poor” since they are ones who usually perform domestic and household work which (widely) remains unrecognized and unpaid. The burden of performing these tasks leaves them with very little time for themselves. Recognition, remuneration and provision of alternative arrangements of such work will lead to diminution of the time deficit that women face. Researchers by employing the methodology of time-use surveys have made proclamations like “rich women work harder than poor men”. [5] Such statements are as contrived as the terms “rich” and “poor” are abstruse. Women unarguably are burdened with domestic and household work, which to a very large extent remains gendered. However the premise that it is “unpaid” is false. Even though this work may not be remunerated directly, it is accounted for in the wages earned by the worker:

“The manufacturer who calculates his cost of production and, in accordance with it, the price of the product, takes into account the wear and tear of the instruments of labour…In the same manner, the cost of production of simple labour-power must include the cost of propagation, by means of which the race of workers is enabled to multiply itself, and to replace worn-out workers with new ones. The wear and tear of the worker, therefore, is calculated in the same manner as the wear and tear of the machine.

Thus, the cost of production of simple labour-power amounts to the cost of the existence and propagation of the worker. The price of this cost of existence and propagation constitutes wages. The wages thus determined are called the minimum of wages. This minimum wage, like the determination of the price of commodities in general by cost of production, does not hold good for the single individual, but only for the race. Individual workers, indeed, millions of workers, do not receive enough to be able to exist and to propagate themselves; but the wages of the whole working class adjust themselves, within the limits of their fluctuations, to this minimum.”  (Karl Marx, Wage Labour and Capital, 1847) 

Therefore, even if household and domestic work was to be paid for separately, it would lead to a relative decrease in wages, not leading to any sort of substantive improvement in the life of the working class. The gendered nature of the oppressive burden of household work can be understood as an effect of the patriarchal system but the cause of it lies in the exploitative nature of class relations under capitalism. The patriarchal system itself, at the outset, is a result of the historical division of labour within a class society. The condition of women being domestic slaves to their husbands will not be made better, in any real sense, by demanding for household work to be remunerated.[6] According to the calculations of the capitalist, it is already recognised and paid for in the wages of the worker. As explained above, the impoverished status of the working class is directly linked to the prosperity of the capitalist. Therefore, any demands for alternative arrangement or socialisation of domestic work that might emancipate women from their current state of slavery and proposals about providing free goods and services via public policy, remain incompatible with and a utopia under the capitalist mode of production.

The burden of “unpaid work” that leads individuals to face a “lack of time” is a legit issue. However, it cannot be understood in isolation from the process of production of which it is a part. Marx writes:

“All the slave’s labour appears as unpaid labour. In wage labour, on the contrary, even surplus-labour, or unpaid labour, appears as paid. There the property-relation conceals the labour of the slave for himself; here the money-relation conceals the unrequited labour of the wage labourer.” (Karl Marx, Vol 1., Capital, 1887)

It is this very phenomenon that can so easily lead one to think of household work (domestic slavery of women) as unpaid while overlooking the exploitative nature of class relations within the capitalist mode of production. The concept of “time-poverty“, which wrongly posits time as a commodity, furthers the concealment of the worker’s unpaid labour. The worker appears to be selling his time and not the value creating source that is his labour-power. It becomes easier then, for the price of this “time” to be detached from and determined independently of the value created by him. Terms like “time-poverty” when undisguised reveal themselves as nothing but plain, old poverty. Averse to the dilution and deviation that this term begets, one must not lose sight of the fact that the fight for personal and leisure time is inextricably tied with the fight for socialism.

Notes

[1] “...time-poverty among the better off accounts for very little of the total, and that genuine time poverty is more than a qualitative loss resulting from individual choices. Rather, most people who are time-poor are also income-poor and suffer from other (often multiple) deprivations.” Ghosh, “Time Poverty and the Poverty of Economics,” 2.

[2] “The share of (profit) increases in the same proportion in which the share of labour (wages) falls, and vice versa. Profit rises in the same degree in which wages fall; it falls in the same degree in which wages rise.” Marx, Wage Labour and Capital, 37.

[3] “Though it is difficult to say how much leisure or free time a person needs, one can say that a person who does not get enough leisure is under time stress.” Hirway, Understanding Poverty, 28.

[4] “Capitalist production, therefore, of itself reproduces the separation between labour-power and the means of labour. It thereby reproduces and perpetuates the condition for exploiting the labourer. It incessantly forces him to sell his labour-power in order to live, and enables the capitalist to purchase labour-power in order that he may enrich himself.” Marx, Vol. 1. Capital, 406.

[5] Ultra-poor women rank at the bottom in terms of burden of total work. They spend 32.74 per cent of their total time (53.42 hours) on work. They are followed by non-poor women (and not by ultra-poor men) who spend 31.66 per cent of their time (53.18 hours) on work. That is, rich women work much harder than ultra-poor men in terms of the time put into work. Hirway, Understanding Poverty, 35. Also quoted by Jayati Ghosh in “Time poverty and the poverty of economics” with an addition that “This partly reflects the lack of paid work for poor men as well as the greater burden of unpaid work borne by women in their own households.”

[6] “Payment for the housewife’s “reproductive labour” in the house, i.e. for domestic slavery, in addition to keeping the working family’s standard of living the same, and consequently the level of the housewife’s freedom on the same level as before, is something that would serve to perpetuate the idea of the housewife as the beast of burden that bears on her back all the social pressure exerted on working-class homes (including psychological and physical abuse). It would keep her away from social life, imprisoned within the four walls of her house, making her numb with chores that mangle her body and dull her mind.” Rey, Is housework an “unpaid” job?

Who Are "The People"?

[Pictured: Waiting several hours to vote has become commonplace in the United States]

By Nathaniel Ibrahim

Republished in modified form from The Specter.

If democracy is government by the people, then perhaps the first and most important question to ask is: Who are the people? When the United States was founded, the answer was brutally simple: white men of property. This class, of course, comprised only a minority of colonial America. But confining rights and representation to an elite subset was hardly unique in the history of “democratic” governance. Women were excluded from republics as far back as Athens in 500 BC. Similarly, in the early United States, slavery and “democracy” coexisted.

Of course, the United States is different now. It formally abolished chattel slavery and many women, as well as people of color, can now vote and hold office. Yet the American electoral system still blocks, by law, countless marginalized people from having a say in government.

Over 5 million Americans, for example, are legally disenfranchised due to felony convictions. That’s almost 2% of the voting-age population. And the majority of these disenfranchised people have already finished their sentences.

There are also millions of Americans who are disenfranchised by virtue of where they live. Residents of Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, and the Virgin Islands have no representation in Congress and cannot vote in presidential elections. Those living in Washington DC also have no congressional representation. Hence why their license plates read “Taxation without representation.” Under the most general definition of “democracy” — citizens governing themselves through elected leaders — America isn’t fully democratic.

But even those officially granted the right to vote may lack the ability to exercise it. After the 15th Amendment granted black men voting rights, various methods of suppression arose to limit expansion of the franchise. Decades of political struggle combating this culminated in the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Among other things, it required nine states with especially discriminatory pasts to obtain federal approval before altering their election laws.

In 2013, however, the Supreme Court nullified this key part of the Voting Rights Act. Shortly thereafter, huge purges of voter rolls commenced and are still ongoing. Election officials purge millions each election cycle, a deeply disturbing trend even absent any particular political motivations.

It’s hard not to see this as yet another example of white supremacy in the political system. Felony disenfranchisement affects blacks at more than four times the rate of whites. In potentially decisive swing states like Florida and Virginia, more than 20% of black adults are disenfranchised. 

Disenfranchisement also cuts along class lines. The five aforementioned territories, for example, all have average incomes below that of the poorest state. And their lack of representation worsens existing material deprivation.

Take Guam, for instance. Its people disproportionately fight and die in American wars. Meanwhile, they receive far less money per capita from the Department of Veterans Affairs than any state. American Samoa finds itself similarly deprived. The federal government does virtually nothing for Samoans. In fact, they aren’t even granted full citizenship. Incredibly, though, American Samoans still legally owe “allegiance to the United States.”

That American Samoans aren’t citizens may strike some as sufficient reason for their disenfranchisement. But this is misguided. More people are currently living outside their country of origin, mostly by necessity, than ever before. In the United States alone, there are roughly 22 million non-citizens of voting age. These people live under the American government, fund it with their taxes, and participate in its capitalist economy and culture. It makes little sense to say that they do not deserve a say in how those systems run.

Enfranchising non-citizens is both moral and feasible. Until the 1920s, non-citizens in the United States enjoyed voting rights. They could participate in state, local, and even federal elections. Even today, a number of cities allow non-citizens to vote in municipal races. And countries other than the United States let non-citizens cast ballots in certain elections.

Of course, expanding the franchise is far from a panacea. If all Americans were instantly granted full voting rights, that might change a lot. But the United States would still be a bourgeois republic. And so long as capital runs the show, the rest of us will be left subject to its insatiable lust for profits. That means systematic disempowerment of the majority, both politically and economically.

In this key sense, the dictatorship of capital under which we live is fundamentally undemocratic. Fully realizing the promise of democracy therefore requires moving away from capitalism and toward collective ownership of society’s productive resources. In a word, socialism.

Nevertheless, the facts of disenfranchisement in America are quite illustrative. More specifically, they reveal a key insight regarding political disengagement. It’s no surprise that many Americans don’t feel represented by the political system. Millions of them literally aren’t. They are systematically denied a say in huge decisions that affect their daily lives. And this, of course, disproportionately impacts low-income people and folks of color. Clearly, the United States still privileges the rights of the white and wealthy at the expense of those who aren’t. Racism remains as American as apple pie.

Capitalism and the “Feminization of Poverty”: A Marxist Perspective on Ending Women’s Oppression

By Radhika Miller

Republished from Liberation School.

Sexism is so endemic today that it can be difficult to imagine a society that does not degrade and devalue women. Modern capitalist society is a form of class society, and in today’s capitalist society women face sexism everywhere we turn — within our own homes and personal relationships, in school and in our professional careers, even as we walk down the street.

But this is not the way things always have been and, despite its prevalence in today’s society, the oppression of women is not a part of human nature. Sexism is not natural, which means we can eliminate it.

The oppression of women is rooted in a hierarchical system that values men over women, a system organized around patriarchal norms but that is much broader than patriarchy, in which the oppression of people is not based simply on sex but on class.

Class society the root of women’s oppression

For the vast majority of human history, society was organized around communal groups, and women were not specially oppressed. It was the emergence of class society that formed the foundation for patriarchal norms and the oppression of women.

Class society is the organization of society based on economic exploitation. People are separated into two classes with opposing interests: one is the group of people who own the means of production, who use this ownership of resources and productive forces to accumulate wealth unto themselves — the ruling class; the other class is the group of people who do not own the means of production, but who, through their labor, in fact produce the wealth of society — the laborers. The ruling class exploits the laboring class in order to amass wealth.

Feudalism and capitalism are two examples of class society. In a feudal society, serfs and peasants worked the land, but they did not own the land, and they did not keep the full value of what they produced. Much of the fruits of their labor were handed over to the lords, the landowners that were members of the ruling class that became rich off the land. In a capitalist society, workers produce goods and provide services, but they do not own factories and corporations. The capitalists who own the factories, banks and corporations, members of the ruling class, become rich by paying workers less than the value of the goods produced and lining their pockets with the difference — the profits.

Communal society

If we think of all of human history as one year, or 365 days, the duration of class society and patriarchy would be only five days — less than one week. For the vast majority of our existence, we lived in communal societies. In those societies, women and men performed different work, but all people were valued for their contributions to the survival of the group.

For thousands of years, humanity struggled together for survival in the face of scarcity and deprivation. There were no social classes based upon wealth or power, and no individuals or families amassed wealth; everything was owned by the communities as a whole. Each task was critical to survival and considered a communal responsibility. Hunting, gathering, building homes, child rearing and caring for elders — each of these tasks was valued as critical and was accomplished by members of the group working together rather than by individuals or individual familial units. An individual’s value to society was not based on their gender but rather on their ability to contribute to each of these critical tasks, tasks which may have been performed by different genders but were held in high esteem regardless.

In “The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State,” Frederick Engels outlined the material reasons for why people lived communally:

A division of the tribe or of the gens into different classes was equally impossible. And that brings us to the examination of the economic basis of these conditions. The population is extremely sparse; it is dense only at the tribe’s place of settlement, around which lie in a wide circle first the hunting grounds and then the protective belt of neutral forest, which separates the tribe from others. The division of labor is purely primitive, between the sexes only. The man fights in the wars, goes hunting and fishing, procures the raw materials of food and the tools necessary for doing so. The woman looks after the house and the preparation of food and clothing, cooks, weaves, sews. They are each master in their own sphere: the man in the forest, the woman in the house. Each is owner of the instruments which he or she makes and uses: the man of the weapons, the hunting and fishing implements, the woman of the household gear. The housekeeping is communal among several and often many families. What is made and used in common is common property — the house, the garden, the long-boat.

Society at this stage was matrilineal: women, the organizers of food, shelter and child rearing, were the center of life. The lineage of any person was traced through the mother’s line. Children were not the sole responsibility of the biological mother and/or father but rather were linked by kinship to what we now refer to as extended family.

Class society produces inequality

As Engels explained, inequality emerged for the first time only after millennia of this communal, shared existence. With the emergence of surplus, wealth, and class society came the emergence of patriarchal society and the oppression of women. Over time, as the development of the tools and methods of production produced a surplus, one sector of society, primarily men as the primary hunters and organizers of animal husbandry, could hoard and accumulate wealth as private property.¹ Before the advent of private property, there was no special power or privileges associated with this type of labor. As explained above, all types of labor were valued as critical to survival of the community.

As the capacity to produce continued to grow beyond the minimum for survival, the social and productive relations of matrilineal pre-class societies weakened.

Mother-right was overturned, and men came to control the wealth and resources, using organized violence and redefined family institutions in the form of monogamous marriage to maintain their new position in society.

Engels describes the magnitude of this historical development:

The overthrow of mother-right was the world historical defeat of the female sex. The man took command in the home also; the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude, she became the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for the production of children. This degraded position of the woman, especially conspicuous among the Greeks of the heroic and still more of the classical age, has gradually been palliated and glossed over, and sometimes clothed in a milder form; in no sense has it been abolished.

The origins of violence against women and the denial of women’s right to control reproduction can be traced to this development. The overthrow of mother-right resulted in women essentially becoming the property of men. Female sexuality, once freely expressed, was now severely restricted in order to assure the “legitimate” line of descent from father to son for the purposes of inheritance. This was, in turn, tied to the emergence of class society itself, initially on the basis of slavery through warfare.

Engels explained:

The increase of production in all branches — cattle-raising, agriculture, domestic handicrafts — gave human labor-power the capacity to produce a larger product than was necessary for its maintenance. At the same time, it increased the daily amount of work to be done by each member of the gens, household community or single family. It was now desirable to bring in new labor forces. War provided them; prisoners of war were turned into slaves. With its increase of the productivity of labor, and therefore of wealth, and its extension of the field of production, the first great social division of labor was bound, in the general historical conditions prevailing, to bring slavery in its train. From the first great social division of labor arose the first great cleavage of society into two classes: masters and slaves, exploiters and exploited.

Previously, the victors in war either killed or adopted those they defeated into their own tribes to contribute critical tasks of survival, but now, they enslaved the losers in order drive production and create wealth. Slavery was an early form of class society. The development of productive forces and advent of private property set into motion: (1) the emergence of the male-controlled family; (2) the emergence of class society itself. These are closely related, and in the modern form of capitalism, inextricable.²

Women’s oppression in capitalist society

Women’s oppression has changed over time as economic exploitation has changed. Slavery, feudalism and capitalism all demonstrate the exploitation of people in class society. The oppression of women under capitalism manifests in a myriad of ways.

Capitalism is a class society driven by the generation of profits. The capitalist class owns the means of production. This includes the factories and resources required to produce material goods, which run the gamut from shoes to houses. Resources include the means to access fuels, like oil, and even necessities like water. Capitalist production requires the employment of both male and female laborers. Since its inception, working-class women have been drawn out of the isolated atmosphere of the home and into collective production. Some of the first factory workers were women.

And since its inception, capitalism has generated profits by exploiting and undervaluing women in the workplace to a greater degree than men. This directly affects economic status, both by underpaying women and by excluding them from higher paying positions — relegating them to “gendered” positions that are typically service-oriented and lower-paying.

In the United States, women work longer hours and make less money than men. Even though equal pay for equal work has been federal law since 1963, when compared to men with similar education, skills and experience, women earn less than 76 cents to the dollar. For women of color, this is closer to 50 cents. In fact, the average 25-year-old working woman will lose almost $500,000 due to unequal pay during her lifetime as a worker. Yet, she will pay the same for rent, food, utilities and services as her male counterpart. In addition, she is likely to pay more for necessities like health care and more likely to lose money when she is sick. In the United States, among working women earning less than $40,000 per year, up to half are without basic benefits, including secure, affordable health insurance, prescription drug coverage, pension or retirement benefits, or paid sick leave.

This inequality allows capitalism to thrive. Lower pay for a sector of workers — women — plays two critical roles: (1) This directly translates to greater profits because capitalists keep more of the value of the good or service by not paying as much to workers. (2) It also creates a division within the working class, pitting women and men against each other in the workplace because the availability of cheaper labor by women is a bargaining chip that allows capitalists to pay men less as well.

Beyond being underpaid in the workplace, women carry out a great amount of unpaid labor in capitalist society. This is because work like childcare, preparing food in the household and other similar work that was greatly valued in pre-communal society is not assigned a monetary value in capitalist society. Moreover, this work has been de-socialized. Often referred to as “the second shift,” what used to be a communal responsibility has become the onus of individual women to complete on top of the work they perform for pay outside the home. Of course, these tasks are no less necessary to survival to the workforce, regardless of gender. As critical tasks performed at no cost to the capitalists, this unpaid labor — the exploitation of women — is a great source of profit in capitalist society.

All of this makes women more likely to be poor. In 1978, professor Diana Pearce used the term “feminization of poverty” to describe trends in the standard of living in the United States. The fact that women perform unpaid labor, are more likely to perform lower-paying jobs, and that even when performing the same job are paid less means that under capitalism, women will always be poorer than their male counterparts simply because they are women. In the United States, almost 60 percent of adults with an income of less than half the poverty line are women. Black and Latina women have a much higher poverty rate than white women (generally two to three times as high).

In addition, the violence against women we see in today’s capitalist society is a vestige of women’s historic status as property — a status that emerged with and is inextricably tied to class society. Rather than a random or individual crime, violence against women is a symptom of women’s subordinate position in modern class society. The sheer magnitude of violence against women around the world, including in the most advanced capitalist societies speaks to this. In the United States, every two minutes a women is sexually assaulted and every six minutes one is raped. This amounts to about 200,000 victims per year, with 17 percent of women having survived a complete or attempted rape. Domestic violence is the greatest form of injury to women in the United States, more than all other causes combined.

Moreover, the emergence of “global capitalism” has meant that all of these manifestations of women’s oppression are being incorporated into business practices and imperialist military strategies worldwide.

Globally, women earn about 50 percent of what men earn and are the majority of the 1.5 billion people who survive on a dollar or less a day. In transnational sweatshops doing business under free-trade agreements like NAFTA, young women working for slave wages are routinely abused at work. Since 1993, more than 1,000 women and girls have been killed in Juarez, Mexico. Most were workers in the “maquiladora” factories in the free-trade zone in the U.S.-Mexico border. Around the world, one in three women has been beaten, forced into sex or abused in her lifetime.

Despite militant struggle and the many hard-fought gains of the women’s liberation movement, oppression continues on a broad scale, and every gain faces the threat of being rolled back. In the United States, one of every two women experience sexual harassment at school or work; homicide is the leading cause of death for pregnant women; women’s health care rights, including reproductive rights, are increasingly under attack; and although abortion is legal, there are no abortion providers in 83 percent of U.S. counties. Critical programs like childcare, housing, education and health care are constantly under attack, if not outright denied or zeroed out.

In cases of violence against women, the police and the courts find every excuse to avoid punishing the perpetrator. Every stage is a struggle: to have it recorded as a crime, to force an investigation, to force a prosecution, to force a trial, to win a conviction. Even when a woman wins at all of these stages, her subjugation by society remains ever apparent. That is what happened in the recent and notorious Stanford rape case, in which, despite his conviction by a jury for raping an unconscious woman and a request by prosecutors for six years, Judge Aaron Persky sentenced Brock Allen Turner to only six months in jail. Persky’s reason: a prison sentence would have a severe impact on Turner, and he would not be a danger to others.

Under capitalism, feminists fight for — and can win — important rights and equality under the law. But capitalism relies on the subordination of sectors of the working class, including women. Without a state and society determined to enforce equal rights, and determined to deem the subordination of women and violence against women unacceptable — in the eyes of society and in the demonstrated enforcement of law — women will remain oppressed. This is exactly why a woman becoming president of the United States does not signal the liberation of women. The state she would lead is a capitalist state. It is a state constructed to uphold, what is necessary to uphold capitalism — exploitation, inequality and oppression — not to eliminate them. This is exactly why the full liberation of women is not possible within the capitalist system.

Socialism lays the basis for women’s liberation

Socialism lays the basis for two necessary steps toward women’s liberation: (1) removing the inextricable motivation for women’s oppression — the need to exploit workers in order to generate profits; and (2) building a society and state committed to combatting oppression, and not just recognizing but also enforcing the equality of all workers.

In regards to this Sarah Sloan noted at a Party for Socialism and Liberation conference in 2014:

Socialist revolutions have not happened in rich societies but in the poorest parts of the world. At the time of the Russian Revolution in 1917, the Russian economy was one-twelfth the size of the U.S. economy. By eliminating the profits for a tiny handful of capitalists, even a poor country like the Soviet Union, managed by the 1930s, to provide every worker with the right to a job and the right to free health care.

By 1960, the Soviet Union had emerged as the second-biggest economy in the world. There was no unemployment and there was a right to housing — to pay no more than 6 percent of your income for rent. Evictions were illegal because there were no landlords. It was your housing.

Women had a right to free childcare and one year’s paid maternity leave, and they had the right to put their child in child care facilities at no cost. Women in the Soviet Union had the right to retire at 55 years of age at half pay. And remember, they had free health care, so retirement didn’t mean being plunged into poverty. They had a month’s paid vacation.

It doesn’t mean that there were no problems in the Soviet Union, or that we agree with all the policies of different leaderships. But the Soviet Union proved, just as Cuba proves today, that when you take the wealth out of the hands of the capitalists, it can be used to meet people’s needs.

Socialist Cuba has made enormous strides in combatting women’s oppression since its revolution in 1959, which was declared socialist in 1961. And, as women leaders there often state, there is still much work to be done to achieve full equality.

In 1966, Fidel Castro spoke at the fifth national plenum of the Cuban Women’s Federation. Aware of the challenges that face a new socialist society after the overthrow of the ruling class, he described the fight against women’s oppression as a revolution within the socialist revolution. The vestiges of capitalist society’s special oppression of people based on race and gender cannot be simply swept away with a revolution. The revolution begins the work of undoing those vestiges.

However, there is no comparison between the capitalist society of the United States and the socialist one of Cuba. Cuban women are guaranteed housing, health care, education and employment. Men and women are guaranteed parental leave for up to one year. Reproductive rights, abortion and birth control, for example, are legal and provided for by the national health care system. These are just a few examples but they are illustrative.

The United States has no guaranteed paid parental leave. Reproductive rights are constantly under attack. Housing, education, health care and employment are not considered rights.

We fight for reforms and struggle for full liberation through socialism

What, then, is women’s liberation? The term evokes images of women leading marches, rallies, strikes and hunger strikes to demand the right to vote, to demand safe working conditions, to demand equal pay, the right to abortion and reproductive freedom; women standing together to demand an end to sexism and against sexual assault. It is marked by militant struggle in the face of extreme repression and by victories in the recognition of rights and changes in societal attitudes. The women’s liberation movement militantly struggles for equal rights and status for women.

As revolutionary feminists, we must embrace the militancy of the women’s liberation movement and carry it forward. We must remain strong and unwavering in our demand for equal rights. It is critical to fight for as many rights recognized by law, for as many legal reforms, for as many changes in society thought and action as possible. All of this eases the oppression faced by women.

As socialists, we also understand that while militant struggle can win important rights in capitalist society, the women’s liberation struggle reaches beyond the goal of equal rights. It is telling that after centuries of struggle, women still do not have equal rights under the law. What is even more telling is the other component of the struggle — that capitalist society continues to subject women to patriarchal norms; that in capitalist society, women remain oppressed.

When a society is built upon exploitation, as capitalism is, equality is contradictory to the system. This is the very reason why — even in the face of militant struggle — women do not have equal rights, and why even the rights we do have are rarely enforced and continuously threatened and eroded by legislatures and courts, instruments of the capitalist ruling class. Capitalism relies on social constructs, such as race and gender, to support the exploitation of groups of people that is necessary to generate profits froms the labor of workers. By reclaiming political power from the capitalists, we attack the root of all bigotry and inequality based on these social constructs. In doing so, we lay the basis for the full liberation of women and all oppressed people.

Endnotes

1. Women also participated in hunting, but men were the primary hunters and controllers of the process of the domestication of animals.

2. The emergence of class society not only led to the oppression of women, it is also the root of LGBTQ oppression and bigotry. Maintaining the concentration of wealth in the upper class requires children who can inherit that wealth — same-sex relationships became valueless, although they naturally have continued. As is the oppression of women, the oppression of LGBTQ people is inextricably tied to today’s capitalist society.

Tackling the US Left's Class Reductionism

(Photo Credit: Hilary Swift/The New York Times)

By Yanis Iqbal

Beginning from May 2020, the unending violence of USA’s racial capitalism was brought to the fore as a Black-led movement flowed through the bloodstained paving stones of clamorous streets. The wretched masses of America united in their call for an end to police brutality and the existing apparatuses of exploitative rule. However, these protests - instead of culminating in a significant change in the dynamics of power - rewarded the revolting people with Joe Biden - a dyed-in-the-wool bourgeoisie politician who once opposed de-segregation, called on police to shoot Black Lives Matter demonstrators in the leg, rejected the smallest of concessions to the working class, vehemently supported imperialist wars and refused to commit to even the minimal reforms of the Green New Deal.

Biden’s victory in the presidential election was a direct expression of what Antonio Gramsci called a “time of monsters” - a moment in which we are fully aware of the future direction of societal forces but it is blocked at a particular point. In the American context, the corridors leading to historical metabolization were shut off on the level of formal politics, not on the stage of grassroots mobilization. In the streets, things were moving forward by leaps and bounds - a continuous subjective churning was taking place within the helical relations of domination. In spite of these explosive potentialities, Biden succeeded in initiating a process of ideological mutilation, which included the co-optation of demands from below, the forming of new political coalitions, paying lip service to the goals of leading figures of the underclass, all done while keeping intact the hegemony of the status quoist forces.

While many factors account for the defeat of the American rebellion, the strategic errors committed by the country’s Left stick out for their obdurateness toward the complex reality of oppression. Many sectors of the country’s socialist camp promoted class reductionism, remaining insensitive to the racial roots of the then ongoing Black Lives Matter movement. Their exclusive emphasis on Bernie Sanders and Medicare for All reduced systemic racism to a merely economic issue. Electoral exigencies overrode the creation of robust bases of social resistance. The uncritical subsumption of racism under an ahistorical banner of class proved unsuccessful in carrying forward the militant momentum of an explicit mutiny against the structural cruelty of racist capitalism.

Black Self-Assertion

Frantz Fanon was a thinker who forcefully shed light on the aporias of class reductionism, arguing in favor a radical project of Black advancement. The moorings for this vibrant model of praxis were provided by G.W.F Hegel. In a famous passage of “Phenomenology of Spirit”, Hegel had written about the progression of human beings from merely self-conscious entities that are motivated by need to consume material goods into social beings who engage in recognition. The achievement of an independent self-consciousness is seen not only as an inter-subjective process, driven by a desire for recognition by the other, but also as a fundamentally conflictual one: each consciousness aspires to assert its self-certainty, initially, through the exclusion and elimination of all that is other; each thus seeks the death of the other, putting at the same time its own life at stake.

This struggle to the death can lead either to the obliteration of one consciousness (or both), whereby the process of mutual recognition will never be complete, or to one consciousness submitting to the other in the face of fear of imminent death, thus becoming the slave. The other becomes the master, the victor of the struggle. The master nevertheless depends on the slave - not only for the fulfillment of material needs, but also for his/her recognition as an independent being. His self-sufficiency is hence only apparent. The slave, by contrast, becomes aware of himself as an independent self-consciousness by means of the transformative, fear-driven labor in the natural and material world.

For Fanon, racialized colonial subjects are not in a position to sign up to the Hegelian vision of political struggle as a reciprocal structure of recognition and interdependency when colonization has denied their humanity. Race is a process in which the unity of the world and self becomes mediated by a racialized objectification of the subject. Therefore, according to Fanon, race is a form of alienation. For Hegel, the slave’s existence is an expression of the objective reality or power of the master. The master is recognized and the slave lives in a state of non-recognition. Similarly, for Fanon the alienated racial subject exists as an expression of the objective reality of whiteness. Racial existence, then, is a negation of the human character of racialized people; it is a profound state of derealization. The process of racial objectification, according to Fanon, turns people into things, identified by their skin, racial or ethnic features, as well as culture.

Hence, racialized people first need to overcome ontological denial and, in so doing, forge the basis for a positive political grouping. Thus, Fanon rejects the static Hegelian notion of the master-slave relationship - one forged among ontologically equal adversaries - and instead posits that the slave is always-already marked as less-than-being. The slave, according to Fanon, transcends that racial othering by vehemently rejecting it through what George-Ciccariello Maher - in his book “Decolonizing Dialectics” - calls “combative self-assertion” that enables the slave to reject “her self-alienation,” to “turn away from the master” and to force the master to “turn toward the slave”. The slave’s action re-starts dialectical motion and forces the master and the slave to contend with each other.

“For the racialized subject,” Maher writes, “self-consciousness as human requires counter-violence against ontological force. In a historical situation marked by the denial of reciprocity and condemnation to nonbeing, that reciprocity can only result from the combative self-assertion of identity”. In fact, it is precisely this violence that “operates toward the decolonization of being”. In this way, Fanon decolonized Hegel’s approach from the “sub-ontological realm to which the racialized are condemned,” gesturing toward the pre-dialectical and counter-ontological violence that dialectical opposition requires. Ontological self-assertion needed to identify with negritude, which, however imperfect and empirically imprecise, provided the necessary mythical mechanism through which the dialectic of subjectivity could operate. In the words of Fanon, “to make myself known” meant “to assert myself as a BLACK MAN”.

Fanon conceived of the black subject emerging in the active negation of the social relations of white supremacy. Since blackness is the objective condition of its existence in a white supremacist society, the black subject thereby establishes its own identity on this basis by inverting its objectification, effectively making the conditions of its existence subject to its own power. The existential substance of racialized people now becomes real and actual in the world by changing it to fit its own needs. In the struggle, the black subject establishes independent self-consciousness, and begins to exist as a being for itself with a liberatory aim. The self-determination of the black subject - through the forceful affirmation of black history - establishes, for the first time, the basis for mutual recognition. Blackness has now established itself, not as moral plea for admission into the liberal and idealistic world of equality, but as a material, immanent fact. Blackness remakes the world in its own image.

Here, it is important to note the two distinct but interrelated facets of Fanon’s perspective on black assertion. On the one hand, he frames the identitarian dimension of anti-colonial struggle as a social symptom of colonial alienation, on the very level of its problematic status from the perspective of more evolved forms of postcolonial consciousness. On the other hand, Fanon advances an absolute claim in favour of the black colonized subject’s right to the expression of his symptomatic alienation. In other words, Fanon wishes to underline the historical, psychological and political necessity of what he nevertheless viewed in unambiguous fashion as a defensive, repressive and narcissistic phase of anti-colonial consciousness during which the native subject constructs - out of nothing - the self-image that was simply impossible to develop in the racial context of the colonial administration.

The Fanon-Sartre Debate

The debate between Jean Paul Sartre and Fanon on the relations between class and race stand out for their continuing relevance. Sartre wrote one of the definitive commentaries on the Negritude movement for a French audience in the preface to Leopold Senghor’s important Negritude anthology, “Black Orpheus”. There Sartre argued that blackness is the “negative moment” in an overall “transition” of the non-white toward integration into the proletariat -  a “weak stage of a dialogical progression,” passed over and left for dead as swiftly as it came to life. Fanon’s reply - in “Black Skin, White Masks” - was fiercely critical of Sartre:

“For once that born Hegelian had forgotten that consciousness has to lose itself in the night of the absolute, the only condition to attain to consciousness of self. In opposition to rationalism, he summoned up the negative side, but he forgot that this negativity draws its worth from an almost substantive absoluteness. A consciousness committed to experience is ignorant, has to be ignorant, of the essences and the determinations of its being”.

Fanon firmly upheld the view that racially based identity claims on the part of non-European subjects in colonized situations carried an irreducible, cathartic importance. Sartre fails to account for this dialectic of experience through the detached intellectualization of black consciousness. “[W]hen I tried,” Fanon writes, “on the level of ideas and intellectual activity, to reclaim my negritude, it was snatched away from me”. Sartre’s narrative of decolonization did not incorporate the properly experiential dimension of black subjectivity. With the European working class lying unconscious in the stupor of post-WWII capitalism, Sartre imagines revolutionary consciousness, in the manner of the Hegelian Spirit, manifesting itself in the anti-colonial resistance of Africa and the Caribbean. This new proletarian spirit descends from the heights of abstract dialectical theory to make use of the concrete culture of negritude as a vehicle for the reactivation of a universal anti-capitalist project.

Sartre’s dialectic of abstract universalism has a disheartening effect on the colonized subjects. By passively inserting black rebellion within a pre-determined dialectic, he robs it of all agency. As Fanon states:

“[I]t is not I who make a meaning for myself, but it is the meaning that was already there, pre-existing, waiting for me. It is not out of my bad nigger’s misery, my bad nigger’s teeth, my bad nigger’s hunger that I will shape a torch with which to burn down the world, but it is the torch that was already there, waiting for that turn of history. In terms of consciousness, the black consciousness is held out as an absolute density, as filled with itself, a stage preceding any invasion, any abolition of the ego by desire. Jean-Paul Sartre, in this work, has destroyed black zeal… The dialectic that brings necessity into the foundation of my freedom drives me out of myself. It shatters my unreflected position. Still in terms of consciousness, black consciousness is immanent in its own eyes. I am not a potentiality of something; I am wholly what I am. I do not have to look for the universal. No probability has any place inside me. My Negro consciousness does not hold itself out as a lack. It is.”

“Black zeal” is a mythical self-discovery which by necessity refuses all explanation. After all, how precisely does one adopt an identity which is dismissed ahead of time as transitory? The Sartrean subject never gets “lost” in the negative. Sartrean consciousness remains in full possession of itself. And therefore, it can have no knowledge of itself - or the other. History, society, and corporeality recede from view and what remains is a timeless and abstract ontology. Contrary to this view, Hegel remarked: consciousness “wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself...nothing is known which does not fall within experience or (as it is also expressed) which is not felt to be true”. The truth that emerges from black consciousness is possible only via a phenomenological reassembly of the self. That is why Fanon continues to push forward: “I defined myself as an absolute intensity of beginning… My cry grew more violent: I am a Negro, I am a Negro, I am a Negro”.

Fanon does not quickly pass over human suffering in the pursuit of the universal, but attends to suffering, creating space for the communication of bodily and emotional pain. In Sartre’s hands, this dialectical negation explicitly lacks positive content and, consequently, any objectivity. The rupture with racism brings forward its own content - a re-woven fabric of daily existence and new ways of organizing social life - which challenges white supremacist society. Therefore, with Sartre, the negativity expressed by this rupture is a critique of existing reality, but does not generate new conditions - a new reality - based on its own self-active negation of white supremacist social relations. In his quest to brush aside the unmediated, affect-laden, passionate dimension of the native subject of colonialism’s sensuous, lived experience, Sartre short-circuits the dialectic through an intangible leap - ignoring the necessity of slow and patient labor.

He becomes a condescending adult speaking to a child: “You’ll change, my boy; I was like that too when I was young…you’ll see, it will all pass”. In effect, the non-white is subsumed into a pre-existing, white reality. Sartre, Fanon argues, is forced to conclude that the proletariat already exists universally. Yet, Fanon states that a universal proletariat does not exist. Instead, the proletariat is always racialized; the universal which Sartre emphasizes must be built upon the foundations of mutual recognition. However, establishing the conditions of mutual recognition depends upon the dislodgment of racial alienation and establishment of the claims of a non-white humanity. Sartre misses the point that such a process unfolds within the racial relation: black existence can only become the grounds of disalienation to the extent that the specifically black subject becomes conscious of itself and the white recognizes the absoluteness of those who exist as non-white.

To summarize, though Fanon does endorse Sartre’s notion of the overcoming of negritude, he still wants to underline the necessity of re-articulating the dialectic in terms of the experiential point of view of the Black subalterns.  In more general terms, the path to the universal - a world of mutual recognitions - proceeds through the particular struggles of those battling racial discrimination. While race is undoubtedly a form of alienation which needs to be abolished, one can’t subsumes the concrete, for-itself activity of black existence into a universal proletariat. We always have to keep in mind the rich process of the self-abolition of race, which develops as a series of negations. The American Left needs to valorize black consciousness, to claim it as an integral part of the emancipatory experience of revolutionary socialism, but without overlooking its basic nature as a byproduct of racial capitalism.

Capitalism and Identity: A Review of Ashley J. Bohrer’s 'Marxism and Intersectionality'

By Carlos Garrido

In her 2020 text Marxism and Intersectionality: Race, Gender, Class and Sexuality under Contemporary Capitalism, Ashley J. Bohrer sets out to demystify the erroneous conception that the traditions of Marxism and Intersectionality are incompatible. In finding that in academia the interactions between these two traditions have been “grounded more in caricature than in close reading,” Bohrer sets out to expose and correct what she calls the “synecdochal straw person fallacy” present in the way each tradition has interacted with the other (AB, 14, 20). In noting that both traditions represent active ways of “reading, understanding, thinking, and dreaming beyond the deep structures of exploitation and oppression that frame our world,” her starting point is historical, i.e., she begins by outlining the historical precursors of the intersectional tradition (AB, 21). In doing so, she situates the origins of intersectional thought in spaces inseparably linked to communist and socialist activism, organizations, and parties. Nonetheless, it is important to note before we continue that her goal is not to ‘synthesize’ the two traditions, or to subsume the one under the other, but to articulate a ‘both-and’ approach, in which the conditions for the possibility of “theoretical coalitions between perspectives, in which the strengths of each perspective are preserved” arises (AB, 23).

Bohrer sets the groundwork for her project by situating the historical unity of the intersectional tradition and socialism. She begins by examining the 19th century thinkers Maria Stewart, Sojourner Truth, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett. Bohrer argues that these three central foremothers of the intersectional tradition had concerns not limited to the dynamics of race and gender, i.e., the three understood that concerns of “labor, class, capitalism, and political economy” were inseparable from concerns of race and gender (AB, 35). In Stewart she demonstrates the presence of an early (1830s) notion of surplus value at hand in the analysis of enslaved black women’s work, who she saw as performing the labor that allowed for the profits of the owner. In Truth she examines her lucid development of the structural role reproductive labor played for capitalism, and more specifically, how the exploitation of this reproductive labor takes a variety of forms according to race. Lastly, in Wells-Barnett she examines how her groundbreaking work on lynching not only demystifies the narrative of the black male rapist, but postulates that “lynching was predominantly a tool of economic control,” used to keep the black community economically subordinated to white capitalist (AB, 40).

Bohrer proceeds to examine the three key intersectional forerunners of the first half of the 20th century: Louise Thompson Patterson, Claudia Jones, and W.E.B. Du Bois, all which were at some point members of the Communist Party. In Patterson we see the development of the concept of ‘triple exploitation’ used to describe the unique position black working-class women have under capitalism, placing them in a context in which they are exploited as workers, women, and blacks. Influenced by Patterson’s notion of ‘triple-exploitation’ and the Marxist-Leninist concept of ‘superexploitation,’ Claudia Jones refurnishes and expands on both – reconceptualizing the former as ‘triple-oppression,’ and redefining the latter to account for the uniquely exploitative position black women occupy under capitalism. In postulating black women’s position as ‘superexploited,’ Jones considers black women, not the white industrial proletariat, the “most revolutionary segment of the working class” (AB, 50). Lastly, in Du Bois we see expressed a profound understanding that race, class, and gender are tied with “simultaneous significance” to the structural contradictions of capitalism (AB, 51). This simultaneous significance of the three requires an individual and systematic understanding of oppression to be fully comprehended.

Bohrer closes out her historical contextualization by looking at the last half of the 20th century. She begins by looking at the three approaches to thinking about the relations of class, race, and gender that arise in the 1960s-80s. These three are: double and triple jeopardy, standpoint theory, and sexist racism. Bohrer argues that although these three played a great role in the development of the intersectional tradition, they are still “distinct from a full theory of intersectionality,” for they contain, in different ways, the reifying, homogenizing, and essentializing ways of thinking of race, class, and gender that intersectionality attempts to move beyond (AB, 35). Bohrer then examines the anti-capitalist critiques present in the intersectional thought of the Combahee River Collective, Patricia Hill Collins, Angela Davis, bell hooks, and Audre Lorde. In the Combahee River Collective, we see the inclusion of class, race, gender, and sexuality as interlocking systems of oppression that “permeate all moments of capitalist exploitation” (AB, 74). The same sentiment, conceptualized in various ways, permeates throughout the work of Collins (matrix of domination), Davis, hooks (white supremacist capitalist patriarchy), and Lorde (white male heterosexual capitalism).

Having contextualized the historical unfolding of the intersectional tradition, Bohrer moves on to examine what she considers to be the best forms of intersectionality, i.e., the ones that do not leave class behind, and the best forms of Marxism, i.e., the ones that do not consider race, sex, and other forms of oppression secondary and epiphenomenal to class-based exploitation. Beyond this, she also examines the disputes each side has with the other, and how these end up being largely based on synecdochal straw person fallacies.

Bohrer begins by attempting to lay out as refined a definition as possible to the question ‘what is intersectionality?’. To get to the refined, Bohrer starts with the general, stating that broadly “intersectionality is a term that brings together a variety of positions on the relationships between modes of oppression and identity in the contemporary world” (AB, 81). From here, Bohrer goes on to postulate five definitions of intersectionality as presented by some of its key theorists: Kimberlé Crenshaw, Leslie McCall, Patricia Hill Collins, Ange-Marie Hancock, and Vivian May. By showing there is disputes between intersectional thinkers on how intersectionality should be thought of, Bohrer breaks the conceptions of intersectionality as a homogenous theoretical approach, and demonstrates that there is plurality, disputes, and discussion actively happening within the tradition. Nonetheless, she marks six central postulates of intersectional thinking that permeate in most intersectional theorists. These are: 1- anti single axis thinking – the various forms of oppression are enmeshed within each other and inseparable; 2- anti ranking oppressions – no one oppression is any more important than another, i.e., being constructed relationally, you cannot solve one without solving the others; 3- Think of oppression in multiple registers – structurally, individually, representationally, etc.; 4- Identity is politically and theoretically important – identity is never pure, it is always “multi-pronged, group-based, historically-constituted, and heterogenous;” 5- Inextricable link of theory and practice – activism and the theoretical are linked; and 6- Power is described and attacked – intersectionality is not neutral, it is both “descriptive and normative,” it describes and critiques power (AB, 93, 95).

Having laid out the plurality of approaches, and also the unifying central postulates of intersectionality, Bohrer proceeds to examine the ways in which some Marxist theorists distort and fallaciously critique intersectionality. I will here lay what I take to be the six (out of eight) most important and frequent critiques of intersectionality, and the responses Bohrer gives to each. The first critique argues that intersectionality is individualistic, and thus, in line with the ethos of capitalism. But, as we saw in the previous postulates, identity for the intersectional theorist is group based and historically constructed. The second critique reduces intersectionality to postmodernism and poststructuralism. In doing so, Bohrer references Sirma Bilge in arguing that what is taking place is the “whitening of intersectionality,” i.e., a framework originated and guided by black women is subsumed under a white man predominated field (AB, 107). The third critique postulates intersectionality as liberal multiculturalism, falling within the logic of neoliberalism. Bohrer argues that although intersectional discourse is whitewashed and misused by neoliberal representationalism, intersectional theorists are ardent critics of this and fight to sustain the radical ethos of intersectionality. The fourth critique argues that intersectionality does not sufficiently account for issues of class. Bohrer contends, through Linda Alcoff, that in order to properly understand class, one must understand it enmeshed in race, sex, and gender. The fifth critique argues that intersectional theorists fail to account for the historical causes of that which they describe and critique. Bohrer responds that the intersectional theorists do account for the historical causes of the matrices of domination, but that instead of attributing the cause to one thing, they take a multi-dimensional approach. The last critique we will examine states that intersectionality multiplies identities and makes it harder for solidarity to arise. Bohrer’s response to this is that we must refrain from thinking of solidarity as the lowest common denominator of sameness, solidarity must be thought of as the building of coalitions of difference, united by a sameness in interest, not identity.

Bohrer now embarks on repeating with Marxism what she just did with intersectionality. She begins by devoting her time to demonstrating that what she calls the reductive ‘orthodox story’ of Marxism, which postulates Marxism “as a fundamentally class-oriented, economically-reductionist, teleological theory of waged factory labor,” is not the only form of Marxism (AB, 124). Bohrer approaches this task by postulating seven assumptions the ‘orthodox story’ makes, and then responds to each in a way that demonstrates how Marx, Engels, and queer, feminist, anti-racist, and anti-imperialist Marxists have addressed these questions free of the reductive assumptions of the ‘orthodox story.’ Some of these non-reductive approaches include: 1- looking beyond waged labor to examine the labor that is structurally necessary but unpaid; 2- looking at how the division of labor is racialized and sexualized; 3- examining the necessary role violence and oppression attendant in colonialism, land expropriation, and slavery played in the development of capitalism, not just as a function, but as an integral structural part of the system; 4- looking at the non-homogeneity of capitalism, i.e., examining how it can take different forms; and 5- looking at the politico-social apparatuses developed to reinforce these practices.

Building on the non-reductive forms of Marxism she just espoused, Bohrer now embarks on the task of showing how many critiques of Marxism coming from the intersectional tradition, like the Marxist critique of intersectionality previously examined, are based largely on misunderstandings or understandings limited to the reductive ‘orthodox story.’ Concretely, Bohrer examines four common criticisms of Marxism from intersectional theorist:

1-“Marxism is economically reductive”…; 2-“it necessarily treats all other forms of oppression as mere epiphenomena of the ‘true’ oppression of class”; 3-“Marxism is inherently a male, Eurocentric form of analysis that can therefore never speak to the oppression of women, people of color, and people from the Global South”; 4-“a Marxist understanding of exploitation is founded on the binary opposition of capitalist and proletarian, making it incapable of thinking through the complex and nuanced organizations of exploitation and oppression” (AB, 159).     

Bohrer argues these critiques are largely limited in scope to the ‘orthodox story’ of Marxism which she has already established is merely one form out of many in the Marxist tradition. These intersectional critiques of Marxism become unwarranted when the form of Marxism examined is of the non-reductive type she appraised in chapter three.

The theoretically novel portion of her text begins by her looking at the relationship between exploitation and oppression. She argues that instead of reducing one onto the other, like has been done by the intersectional and Marxist traditions in the past, we must conceive of the two as having an ‘elective affinity,’ i.e., a “kind of consonance or amenability.” (AB, 200) This means, she argues, that we must think of the two as ‘equiprimordial’, i.e., related to each other as “equally fundamental, equally deep-rooted, and equally anchoring of the contemporary world” (AB, 199). In order to fully understand a phenomenon in capitalism we must understand how exploitation and oppression “feed off and play into one another as mutually reinforcing and co-constituting aspects of the organization of capitalist society” (AB, 201). Beyond this, she argues that “a full understanding of how class functions under capitalism requires understanding how exploitation and oppression function equiprimordially” (Ibid.). Therefore, four central points must be understood to capture capitalism non-reductively: “1) capitalism cannot be reduced to exploitation alone; 2) capitalism cannot be reduced to class alone; 3) class cannot be reduced to exploitation alone; 4) race, gender, sexuality cannot be reduced to oppression alone” (AB, 204).

Although the equiprimordial lens Bohrer introduces for thinking of the relationship between oppression and exploitation may be helpful, the development of the concept is stifled by her limited understanding of the notion of class in Marx’s work. Bohrer argues that instead of limiting class to being constituted only through exploitation, like in Marx, thinking of class equiprimordially allows us to see it constituted through exploitation and oppression. To expand on her point Bohrer references Rita Mae Brown who states that, “Class is much more than Marx’s definition of relationship to the means of production. Class involves your behavior, your basic assumptions about life[…]how you are taught to behave, what you expect from yourself and from others, your concept of a future, how you understand problems and solve them, how you think, feel, act…” (AB, 202). Although Marx never provides an explicit systematic study of class, for when he attempts the task in Ch. 52 of Capital Vol 3 the manuscript breaks off after a few paragraphs, we can nonetheless see his conception of class throughout his political works. Examining how Marx deals with class in his 18th Brumaire on Louis Bonaparte shows the previous sentiment from Brown and Bohrer to be problematic. In relation to the French peasantry, he states that,

Insofar as millions of families live under conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests, and their culture from those of the other classes, and put them in hostile opposition to the latter, they form a class.[i]

This constitutes a notion of class that although influenced, is not reducible to the group’s relation to the means of production. It would seem then, that Marx’s notion of class is fundamentally relational in two ways, first as a relation a group bears to the means of production, and second as the relation a group’s mode of life and culture bears to another. Thus, unlike Bohrer states, already in Marx’s conception of class, when understood fully and not synecdochally, class can already be constituted through exploitation and oppression.

Bohrer also develops what she refers to as the ‘dialectics of difference’ present in both traditions as the way of understanding capitalism as a “structure and a logic” (AB, 208). In demonstrating how both traditions show capitalism developing contradictions in the real world, Bohrer’s first move is rejecting the reductive Aristotelean binary logic that finds contradiction to designate falsehood and which attributes normative statuses of ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ to the polarities. Instead, Bohrer argues that in both traditions the world is understood dialectically, i.e., in a way in which the plurality of the ‘middle’ that binary logic excludes is included, and in a way in which the polarities of the binary are taken to be in a dynamic tension, not a static opposition. Dialectics of difference does not ignore or flatten polarities and contradictions but engages with them and resists through the inclusion of the excluded middle. This dialectic has nothing to do with the simplified and progressivist triad (thesis-antithesis-greater synthesis) present in popular conception. Instead of the beaten down reductive triad, Bohrer concludes by offering three metaphors for modeling dialectics: Collins’ matrix, the Frankfurt school’s constellation, and the prism metaphor. These three metaphors, to be effective, must be used together as “overlapping on one another” (AB, 229).

Having examined the descriptive potential of a non-reductive dialectic, Bohrer proceeds to espouse its prescriptive implications, i.e., “how do we organize from these contradictions?

how do we put the dialectic of difference into transformative practice?” (Ibid.) Bohrer begins by postulating that we must develop a theoretical framework that accounts for the intergroup differentiation logic of capitalist incommensurability (the inconsistent logics of racialization: logic of elimination – natives, logic of exclusion – blacks, and the logic of inclusion – latino/a) and that accounts for the intragroup homogenization logic of capitalist commensurability. Her response is a redefinition of how we conceive of solidarity. Solidarity must not be understood as the lowest common denominator of identity sameness, but as based on coalitions of difference and incommensurability united by mutual interest in transcending a system in which life is suppressed and molded in and by structures of exploitation and oppression. These coalitions, she argues, are to be built from the structural interconnectedness that capitalism already provides. It is, therefore, solidarity based on unity, not uniformity. As she states:

Capitalism thus links us together, in a tie that binds us, often painfully, in relation to one another. This moment of relation is the true ground of solidarity. Solidarity does not require the erasing our differences or the rooting of our political projects in the moments that our interests are aligned. Solidarity is thus the name for affirming the differences that exploitation and oppression produce within and between us; it is also the name for recognizing that every time I fight against anyone’s oppression or exploitation, I fight against my own, I fight against everyone’s (AB, 259).

Notes

[i] Marx, Karl. “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” In The Communist Manifesto and Other Writings. (Barnes and Nobles Classics, 2005), p. 159.

The Desire To Get Back To Normal Post-COVID-19 Ignores Black Girls

(Mike Siegel/The Seattle Times)

By Chetachukwu Agwoeme and Christopher M. Wright

In the past year, we have dealt with a global pandemic as well as the violent murders of Black people at the hands of law enforcement. In response to the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade and countless others, activists, and organizers have rallied people to the streets to protest for justice and awareness to the terrorism Black people face in America, and ultimately a call to defund the police. As a result of these protests, there are calls to adopt an ideology of anti-racism. For example, there have been posts of Black squares in “solidarity” with Black Lives on social media, as well as a surge of corporations suddenly advocating for “Black Lives Matter.” Although institutions, including schools, have pledged a commitment to anti-racism, things have not fundamentally changed, specifically for Black girls.

Black girls — who have experienced multiple forms of vanishment, violence, and utter disregard in schools — are now having to face another form of harm in the school building, COVID-19. This crusade to “get back to normal” ignores yet again how harmful our “normal” has been for Black girls in schools. As Black men, we believe it is important to focus on Black girls, because of the multiple forms of violence they face due to their intersecting identities that are overlooked with a “race first” analysis of Blackness.

The desire to get back to normal not only shows how Black girls’ experiences are ignored in what is considered “normal”, but also reveals a lack of attention on how COVID-19 has impacted the Black community. According to the CDC, Black people are 1.1x more likely to catch the virus, 2.9x more likely to be hospitalized by it, and 1.9x more likely to die from it.

The vaccine rollout has also worked to expose inequities in public health. The Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) found that in every state in the U.S., Black people are getting vaccinated at rates significantly lower than their white counterparts. The lack of access to the vaccine while schools continue to open presents larger realities of public apathy for Black people by school policy makers. Protection and safety for Black children are not being considered when reopening schools because it was never considered prior to the virus. Therefore, “getting back to normal” as a process means to resume the physical and spiritual violence in the lived experiences of Black girls in schools.

In January of 2021, a Black girl was tased in a high school in Florida by a school resource officer (SRO) in the attempt to break up a fight. In the same week, another Black girl was body slammed head first into the concrete by a school resource officer in a separate Florida school. These examples of violence against Black girls by SROs are unfortunately not new. In 2015, a SRO body slammed a 16-year-old Black girl in a South Carolina high school for refusing to leave the classroom after being accused of classroom disruption by her teacher. In 2019, a 16-year-old Black girl in Chicago was pushed and dragged down a set of stairs by police officers before being punched and shocked with a stun gun multiple times by officers because the girl was accused of being disruptive by her teacher. These instances of violence that have happened pre-and post COVID-19, are not only assaults on the bodies of Black girls, but on their spirits.

Spirit Murdering, a term coined by legal scholar Patricia Williams and expanded to the field of education by Bettina Love, refers to the complete denial of inclusion, protection, safety, nurturance, and acceptance —all things a person needs to be human and to be educated—due to systemic forms of racism undergirded by antiblackness. In schools, SROs participate in the systemic, institutionalized, anti-black state-sanctioned violence that damages the souls of Black girls. With SROs as part of the school environment, this extends the prison state, leaving Black students vulnerable to state sanctioned violence under the guise of student safety. SROs are law enforcement officers who are often not trained to work in school contexts. Because of this unfamiliar environment, SROs force the school environment to adapt to the needs of law enforcement, thus opening a learning space to security cameras, metal detectors, and drug-sniffing dogs.

The forms of violence Black girls face in schools are unique because of the intersecting oppressions they face due to their race and gender. In Monique Morris’s “Pushout,” she found Black girls were punished for displays of Black girlhood and overall agency. Things such as falling asleep, standing up for themselves, asking questions, wearing natural hair, wearing “revealing” clothing, and in some cases engaging in traditional teenage angst resulted in their punishment. When Black girls display behaviors typical of all youth, it is viewed as threatening or disruptive by teachers because of the lack of understanding of Blackness or Black girlhood.

Blacks girls get framed as “loud,” “ghetto,” and “thirsty for attention” by teachers and fellow peers, which trivializes the violences they face in schools, thus positioning Black girls as the problem. When framed as “problems,” Black girls are then adultified. The adultification of Black girls is a form of dehumanization rooted in anti-blackness, intentionally meant to rob them from their girlhood — often leaving them unprotected. When robbed of this crucial milestone of growth, Black girls are vulnerable and unequipped to deal with adult forms of punishment at such a young age.

Overall, we need to be critical during this moment of transition, and ask ourselves what are the non-negotiables that must be attended to in order for us to send our Black girls back into schools? What is “antiracist” about getting back to normal? What does this mean when “under normal circumstances” Black girls experience violence in their schools by SROs, teachers, and fellow students? As we’ve mentioned, schools were already enclosures of anti-blackness through their punitive policies and practices. Is the desire to get back to normal worth the sacrifice of Black girls’ safety? This moment is one for deep reflection, reimagining, and organizing around these questions so that we can chart a path of resistance for Black students and their education. With a path toward resistance against this desire for normalcy, we must center Black girls who are often invisible and ignored. While the rest of the world is looking to rebuild the world they knew, Black people must continue to resist the violence that necessitates this rebuilding.

Chetachukwu U. Agwoeme, MA is a PhD student at the University of Pittsburgh studying Urban Education. Chetachukwu’s scholarship is dedicated to interrogating our current practices around school safety in regards to Black students. Ideally, he wants to change schools (which have been sites of suffering for most minoritized students) to places where students learn how to free themselves and free each other. He holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Maryland, College Park respectively.

Christopher M. Wright is a PhD student in the Urban Education program at The University of Pittsburgh. His research centers Black spaces as geographic sights of political struggle and worldmaking. He engages patterns of Black displacement and Black organized struggle. Chris holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from The University of Oklahoma.

The Black Struggle, the Communist Movement, and the Role of Black Women: An Interview with Dr. CBS

By Chris Dilworth

Republished from Liberation School.

This first Liberation School Interview with Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly focuses on the historical and contemporary links between the Black and Communist strug...

Editor’s note: The editorial collective is excited to release the first in our new series of Liberation School Interviews. Through video and text, these interviews with leading militant scholars, organizers, and activists, discuss their research and activities, concepts and approaches, and more. This doesn’t imply that the PSL endorses or shares every viewpoint or idea expressed; it means that we think they can provide us and others in the movement with new ideas, concepts, reference points, histories, approaches, contexts, and more.

This first Liberation School Interview is with Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly and focuses on the historical and contemporary links between the Black and Communist struggles, the ways anti-communism and white supremacy reinforce one another, and why we must resist both. We get Dr. CBS’s thoughts on the relationship between capitalism, race, and gender, focusing on the contributions of Black women communists to various struggles.

About Dr. CBS

Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly, or Dr. CBS. She is a critical Black Studies scholar of political theory, political economy, and intellectual history. Her research primarily focuses on transnational entanglements of U.S. racial capitalism, anticommunism, and antiblack structural racism. Together with Gerald Horne, she co-authored W.E.B. Du Bois: A Life in American History (ABC-CLIO, 2019). She is currently working on a book titled Black Scare/Red Scare: Antiblackness, Anticommunism, and the Rise of Capitalism in the United States. She also has a forthcoming book, co-edited with Jodi Dean, titled Organize, Fight, Win: Three Decades of Political Writing by Black Women Communists (Verso, 2022)

Dr. CBS is a member of the Coordinating Committee and the Co-Lead of the Research and Political Education Team for the Black Alliance for Peace. She is also the host of the podcast “The Last Dope Intellectual,” which is part of the Black Power Media Network.

She’s interviewed by PSL Indianapolis member Chris Dilworth.

Paywall or Open Book?: Power Dynamics in Academia and Higher Education

By Marcus Kahn

Academic spheres have a reputation among progressive and radical groups as being out-of-touch and disconnected from grassroots activist efforts. There is a long and troubling history of exclusion and deference to power leading right up to the present that lends weight to this perspective. Academic culture is deeply entrenched within networks of institutional decision-making power and is structured in ways that reinforce interlinking brands of elitism (classist, patriarchal, nationalist, ableist, and racist), despite optimistic rhetoric to the contrary. There are obvious systemic flaws in the U.S. higher education system, from the racial and socioeconomic inequities that selectively distribute resources and access, to the ways in which prestigious universities are implicated in the reproduction, growth, and maintenance of concentrated power. These sharp divisions rely upon the impermeability of academic spheres and the public’s inability to access knowledge and participate in knowledge production. By breaking down the physical, digital, and cognitive walls that keep knowledge contained, and opening doors for the public to participate in the closely guarded world of ‘intellectuals’, academic work can start to disentangle and detach from the constraints on perspective and action that limit its social relevance and reinforce social division, and take concrete steps towards the transformative deconstruction of existing power systems.

Barriers to Entry

The National Center for Education Statistics noted that in the U.S., “Of all full-time faculty in degree-granting postsecondary institutions in fall 2018, some 40 percent were White males; 35 percent were White females; 7 percent were Asian/Pacific Islander males; 5 percent were Asian/Pacific Islander females; and 3 percent each were Black males, Black females, Hispanic males, and Hispanic females.” Furthermore, “among full-time professors, 53 percent were White males, 27 percent were White females, 8 percent were Asian/Pacific Islander males, and 3 percent were Asian/Pacific Islander females. Black males, Black females, and Hispanic males each accounted for 2 percent of full-time professors.”

To enter into academic discussion, individuals need to ascend through a series of clear-cut stages. Attaining a PhD is a prerequisite for participation in academic discourse, which takes an investment of time and money most cannot afford. Of course, to get a PhD you need to have at least a bachelor’s or master’s degree. Huge segments of the population are effectively filtered out at each successive stage based off of the closely intertwined pressures surrounding wealth, gender, ability, nationality, and race, or else face the prospect of a completely unsustainable lifestyle.

Academic discourse tends to exist in its own world apart from the general public, filtering only indirectly into public awareness. Noam Chomsky cites the work of an early 20th century ‘pioneer’ in the field of communications often referred to as the ‘father of public relations’, Edward Bernays. Bernays distinguished the ‘bewildered herd’ (the public) from a ‘specialized class’ who understands their needs and the ways to provide for them. This viewpoint may not always be articulated as explicitly as it was by Bernays but emblemizes common attitudes within ‘intellectual’ circles.

Needlessly complex language and highly theoretical content can further serve to ostracize people who don’t devote their time to deciphering dense and convoluted academic texts. Chomsky has suggested that for the most part, core concepts and arguments in the social sciences can be conveyed at a high school level. The supposed complexity and impenetrability of social issues serves to exclude the majority of the population that isn’t highly versed in academic jargon, so that ‘laymen’ are unable to participate in the discussion of issues that pertain directly to their lives. This separation ultimately serves to disempower the public in determining its own affairs, since elites can justify their decisions and leadership roles through claimed ‘expertise’.

Institutional Interlocking

Academic research and higher education often conform to and serve the interests of dominant configurations of power. To take a few symbolic examples, Stanford was founded by a proto-Bezos, construction at UC Berkeley was funded by William Randolph Hearst, Princeton’s policy school is named after Woodrow Wilson, and Harvard’s political science school is named after John F. Kennedy. Academic institutions interlock with other dominant institutions in the public and private sectors, maintaining a mutualistic relationship which limits the ability of researchers and educators to examine institutional power with critical clarity and work towards meaningful social transformation.

Centers of concentrated power directly impact the research objectives of even the most seemingly ‘objective’ or value-free sciences. Highly technical fields such as physics, engineering, and computer science require intensive years-long training in university education systems. Major consulting firms, financial institutions, multinational corporations, and government agencies recruit talent from what essentially serves as a farm system to fill institutional ranks. Curriculum and the dominant intellectual culture that guides it are heavily instrumentalist, preparing students to enter uncritically into institutional roles with the ‘correct’ skills and mindset, so that by the time an engineer is developing ICBMs or an economist is assessing trade policy they have learned not to question or resist the ultimate impact of their work.

Research questions are often determined by the needs of these interlinked institutions, and research efforts within universities have consistently and directly informed the development of high-octane tools of oppression. Scientists trained and employed in U.S. universities have played critical roles in developing military and communications technology, as resources are continuously re-devoted to the pursuit of institutional objectives. Fields such as political science, history, economics, communications, and sociology are far from immune to the distorting effects of power on the trajectory of research and pedagogy. In the Science of Coercion, Christopher Simpson investigates the parallel development of communications research and government efforts to fine-tune methods of psychological warfare. Simpson maintains that “the U.S. government’s psychological warfare programs between 1945 and 1960 played either direct or indirect roles in several of the most important initiatives in mass communication research of the period.” He identifies a “positive feedback cycle” of funding, prestige, and participation that “tends to confine intellectual innovation to established formats.”

Breaking Down Silos

Library Genesis, an open-access online repository of books, published a Letter of Solidarity in 2015 that reads, “This is the time to recognize that the very existence of our massive knowledge commons is an act of collective civil disobedience.” This sentiment reflects the critical role of knowledge distribution and knowledge production in effecting transformative social change. Opening access to education and knowledge is a vital aspect of participatory public spheres in a democratic society. The artificial scarcity of instruction and resources is a means of enabling and exacerbating preexisting social divisions in a society that purports to provide equal opportunity, but ultimately filters out marginalized groups from attaining not only wealth and prestige, but also knowledge and participation in knowledge production. To continue quoting LibGen, “We have the means and methods to make knowledge accessible to everyone, with no economic barrier to access and a much lower cost to society.” In their critique of limited access, LibGen further argues that the current system “devalues us, authors, editors, and readers alike. It parasites on our labor, it thwarts our service to the public, it denies us access.” With these points in mind, there are very direct ways to increase public access to academia to the benefit of both academics and the public.

1.      Universal access to higher education

2.      Aggressive affirmative action in both admissions and faculty hiring processes

3.      Open-access digitized libraries like LibGen

4.      Lowering paywalls on academic journals and databases

5.      Recording and uploading all lectures onto the Internet

6.      Public participation in review and publication of articles and books

7.      Reducing technical language when unnecessary or simultaneously publishing parallel versions for public consumption

It’s no secret that higher education is artificially expensive and highly exclusive. This seemingly a priori late-stage capitalist reality is even more apparent in an era of skyrocketing college debt and overpriced digital education. Paywalls serve to reinforce barriers to entry and maintain the rigid stratigraphy of a society that can easily afford to distribute knowledge. The profit-driven world of academic publishing works in tandem with academic institutions that thrive on exclusion. Yet the focused and systematic pursuit of knowledge is critical to our collective well-being, and the resources of universities and publishers can be redirected to the benefit of the population. In order to advance transformative change, we need to enable knowledge redistribution, and take pragmatic steps towards enhancing the discourse between academics and the public, rather than allowing the public to remain the passive object of inquiry. Academic work can be invaluable or profoundly harmful depending on the interests driving research and pedagogy. At its worst, academia has unabashedly and effectively served elites. Increasing public access and participation can help flatten intersectional social hierarchies and transform how the public goes about solving its most pressing problems.