Women, Capitalism, and the Ongoing Attacks On Bodily Autonomy and Reproductive Rights

By Karina Garcia

This article was originally published in the Autumn 2019 issue of Breaking the Chains magazine, titled “Not a Moral Issue.”

Thirteen years ago, a speaker at a meeting, addressing the right-wing attacks on women’s rights in the context of the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, emphasized how important it was to elect pro-choice Democrats. The speaker gave no further explanation to the attacks.

At the time, the right-wing was attacking the ACA because it would expand abortion and contraception access. A couple years after it became law, the Supreme Court had already restricted access to birth control to “respect the religious beliefs” of corporations vis-a-vis reactionary owners. And to pass the ACA, the Democrats gladly compromised on reproductive rights. Obamacare ultimately continued to deny federal funds for abortion coverage and required that every state offer at least one insurance plan that did not cover abortions.

At the meeting, a young socialist woman spoke from the floor and criticized the speaker for not raising the “systematic” explanation. She said that capitalism was behind these patriarchal policies. She said that the bosses—the capitalists—want to restrict birth control and abortion because they want the working class to produce more workers and thereby drive down wages. On top of that, they want to pay less in healthcare costs to cover their employees. I remember nodding in the moment that indeed there must be a deeper cause. I knew capitalism as a system was implicated. What she was saying had a logic to it. But when I went home it started to make a lot less sense.

Do the capitalists really need more workers? Millions of people are unemployed as it is and they are incarcerating the “surplus” population. Is it really possible that the capitalists would conspire in this way to restrict abortion rights, but none of them would ever slip up and admit it? Why is it that some Democrats support abortion rights then? They too represent the capitalist class’s interests. It can’t just be about forcing women to produce more workers.

And as for costs and profits, the Affordable Care Act was going to make insurance companies, the healthcare sector, and the banks mega-profits with or without abortion coverage, so why try to tank the bill on that basis? It wasn’t really only about profit either.

She was right that the attack was “systematic” and that these sexist policies are linked to capitalism, but there seemed to be more to the answer than she’d presented. I dove into the Marxist and historical writing about the anti-abortion movement because I wanted to understand this and be able to explain it—for myself and others.

The Marxist approach to women’s oppression and liberation is often misunderstood or mischaracterized. In university settings it is portrayed as “economic determinism” or “reductionism” — asserting that Marxists reduce every issue to economics. In a way, that’s what the socialist speaking from the floor was doing in that meeting. But that’s not an accurate description of the Marxist method.

It is true that Marxists emphasize the importance of the economic system, in that the mode of production plays a critical role in shaping the economic system and the structures of society. Marxists start by looking at how a society produces and reproduces itself and the norms, laws and relationships under which production and reproduction take place. That is what “economics” really means anyway. At its base, every society is engaged in producing and reproducing.

The ideas, laws, formal institutions, religions that justify, strengthen, and stabilize those underlying processes and relations at the base of production and reproduction is what Marx called the superstructure.

The capitalist mode of production and the family

So for instance, under capitalism, there are some people who own the means of production (land, factories, technology, etc.), while others go to work every day and work on those means of production. They generate profits that go back to the owners. That exploitation is at the base of society. But that arrangement would not last a single day if it was not backed up by the laws, the courts and the police—which protect the owners and landlords—and by the schools, media, politicians, and religious institutions that have taught us since day one that this is the normal and perfectly natural way of things.

The capitalist mode of production developed historically out of previous modes of production, including slavery and feudalism. Capitalism represented a major change in the dominant form of property and labor and many other things changed as a result of that. Racism and white supremacy are part and parcel of the foundation of modern capitalism. In the case of the United States, colonial dispossession and racialized chattel slavery are the foundations for the accumulation of wealth within the capitalist mode of production.

Capitalism did not simply erase the pre-existing world and start with a blank slate. Patriarchy has existed since the dawn of class society and is part of the fabric of the capitalist system. In pre-class society, before private ownership of property there was a much more diverse set of family arrangements and women generally played a leadership role for the community as a whole.

After those pre-class modes of production were overthrown, and eventually the forms of social and family organization alongside them, women were held in a subordinate position and male supremacy became the law. For thousands of years, women’s basic conditions and status were confined to the home. Law, custom, and ideology held women to a dependent status and entirely subject to the whims of the leading male in the family. Housework and child rearing, in addition to ongoing work in the fields (in the case of agricultural societies), were delineated as “women’s work.” This was a central element to modes of production based on private property.

In the United States, today, the capitalist mode of production has changed in many ways, as has the shape and detail of the superstructure. Yet core historic features persist. While women can enter the wage workforce and women can legally own property and have independent political and civil rights, the basic unit of what has been called social reproduction is the nuclear family. In that family, women carry out the vast majority of the labor in the household, in child rearing, and in elder care. Because this family form has been carried over in its essential characteristics, all the values, traditions, and cultural norms that developed to explain and justify male supremacy have been largely carried over, too.

While capitalism has broken down many of the economic relationships that were at the heart of a nuclear family, the family has not been abolished or collapsed entirely. The family unit has changed, but the precarious existence of workers under capitalism makes it necessary for most workers to have a family to survive. One income is not enough. Take, for example, the conditions of so many LGBTQ youth who have been rejected by their families. To not have a family is, in these instances, to be subjected to the worst forms of deprivation, homelessness, and brutality that capitalism has to offer.

For the purposes of the capitalist system, the family unit is highly valuable—especially as it relates to the reproduction and caring for the next generation of workers. Lisa Vogel highlights this in her social reproduction theory [1]. Others have taken it in different directions, highlighting the other forms of labor that are often unpaid or underpaid, but are nonetheless essential for reproducing a workforce that is healthy and stable enough to continue to come into work.

Reactionary worldview explains economic shifts

How does this relate to the attacks on women’s rights and attacks on women’s growing assertiveness in challenging sexual violence and sexist rhetoric? These don’t present themselves as issues of the basic functioning of the mode of production. They can appear distinct and separate, so people fighting for women’s rights on these fronts might not see the linkage to capitalism. And yet more and more activists are talking about systemic patriarchy. The Party for Socialism and Liberation banners, “The whole system is sexist! Fight for socialism!” have been very popular in these movements.

Here we are talking about struggles in the world of politics and culture, the superstructure [2]. They appear as fights within capitalism—in the sense that you should be able to fight for and achieve full abortion rights and other reproductive services under capitalism. In some countries that already exists. You should be able to reduce sexual harassment or violence or eliminate it altogether under capitalism. At least, in theory, it is not pivotal to the mode of production.

But if that is the case, why are those gains so hard to win? Why do socialists insist a revolution would be necessary to really achieve them? It’s because the domination of women remains a pillar of the U.S. capitalist class’s form of rule.

Abortion access became a major political issue starting in the late 1970s as a cornerstone of an emerging reactionary trend. A reactionary is someone who says that things were better in society before they changed. “Make America Great Again” is a true reactionary slogan. It implies we should return to the past. Big sections of the ruling class turn to a reactionary agenda when they feel that their social control is slipping in the face of a powerful social movement, or when capitalism itself has destabilized the economy and when life seems more uncertain for big sections of the population.

In the late 1970s, both were happening in the United States. The mass uprisings of the 1960s and early 70s with the struggles for women’s liberation, Black liberation, LGBTQ liberation, and the anti-war movement were powerful challenges to the U.S. capitalist status quo. The Vietnamese anti-colonial resistance defeated U.S. imperialism, dealing it a major blow while imperialism was engaged in constant heated confrontation with the socialist bloc.

The U.S. economy also went into a period of recession during which layoffs and unemployment increased, consumer spending decreased. Capitalist recessions are cyclical and occur regularly because of overproduction. From 1979 to 1984, approximately 11.5 million workers either lost their jobs or shifted to lower-paying service jobs. Most of the jobs that were lost were in manufacturing industries such as steel, auto, mining, electronics, and more.

The reactionaries have a very powerful appeal and socialists should understand how it works. They say essentially, “Your life used to be better, right? You’re feeling less sure about your future right? Well, that’s understandable because look at how much has changed. We’ve lost our way. And now we’re going to hell in a hand-basket unless we turn back.” Then they link that to whatever issue, whether it be abortion, sex education, gay rights, and so on. The reactionaries sometimes blame the “weak” government, which has bent to pressure and refused to defend “our values, while at other times attacking the government for being “too big.”

Another example is how the economic ravaging of whole Black communities is laid at the feet of Black women for “having too many children out of wedlock,” or at the feet of “absent” Black males. This reactionary worldview builds upon the extreme racist character of the U.S. capitalist system along with thousands of years of ingrained cultural indoctrination that with a “strong” family—that is with men and women in their “proper place”—everything will be fine.

This sort of reactionary worldview offers an all-purpose explanation for general problems or unsettling changes. Politicians then conveniently avoid discussion of the actual causes of social and economic distress, i.e., capitalist instability. It furthermore coincides with and makes use of the explanations being cultivated in conservative religious institutions, which tend to focus on going back to a more moral time, and theorize the problems of modern society as a reflection of an absence of godliness and values. So these ideas and theories are already circulating and can easily be picked up on by a politician who wants to present himself as a champion of “family values” while not actually doing anything to change families’ material conditions.

And so the “New Right,” ascending in the Republican Party in the late 1970s, started to really focus on abortion in the 1980s and 1990s. Abortion rights were identified as a weak spot for the women’s movement because it had been secured in the Supreme Court in Roe v Wade, not via legislation. There was existing opposition on religious grounds that they could mobilize, and there were big parts of the country where abortion rights had become law but the movement was weak.

Evangelical mega-churches and televangelists were entering politics in a big way—most famously in the “Moral Majority”—and eventually became significant power-brokers that handpicked and groomed elected representatives. They delivered considerable resources and a captive audience to enterprising politicians, as long as they took on their issues and their framing. The whole Moral Majority movement became a target base of support for hard-right capitalists who personally did not care much about abortion or other moral issues, but who wanted to turn back government regulations, social spending, and the power of labor unions. Over time, this relationship produced a major pipeline of campaign funds and airtime.

In short, abortion became a preferred electoral issue, quickly moving from local and state to federal politics. Right-wing politicians could portray pro-choice Democrats as ‘baby killers’ and link them to the “decline of the family.” It is not so much that these issues in and of themselves threaten capitalists profits, but that they offered a way for one sector of the capitalist class—leaning on the powerful institutions of the superstructure in their areas to consolidate political legitimacy—to distract constituents from social and economic concerns that the politicians have no desire to address.

It became a central political strategy for the conservative right. The Republican Party used to be considered just the “pro-business” and “law-and-order” party. Some were actually liberal on “social issues.” But as the party moved further to the right, that has changed.

In the United States, where money controls so much of politics, the agenda is set by the highest bidder. With the near obliteration of campaign finance laws, this has become more overt. A few billionaires could say, “These are my political interests, these are my priorities and I’m gonna throw my money around only to those who take on my agenda and my interests.” When Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote that “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, they meant that ruling-class ideas were dominant because the ruling class “has the means of material production at its disposal” and therefore “has control at the same time over the means of mental production” [3]. Today ruling-class ideas become dominant because of the direct and explicit intervention of the most powerful capitalists and their politicians. In the absence of a fight-back movement, the reactionary obsessions of some really rich men can set the tone of politics, and actually can determine major issues for hundreds of millions of working-class women in the United States and worldwide.

The anti-abortion billionaires are not spending their money because it will help their immediate profits. If anything, they are spending significant parts of their fortunes on these right-wing causes. That is where capitalism comes back in at the systematic level. It is not as a conspiracy for profits, but as a form of political rule based on disciplining and intimidating one section of poor and working people, distracting and confusing others, and finally winning over and satisfying other layers.

True rights attainable only with a new mode of production

No mode of production based on extreme inequality and exploitation would be able to last long if it did not have ruling institutions, political systems, ideas, traditions, and so on, that protected and rationalized those economic processes. The ruling class does not just get to extract wealth; it also has to find stable ways to rule.

Forms of patriarchy operate powerfully at the base of capitalism, in how the system produces and reproduces itself on a daily basis. It also is a cornerstone at this superstructural level, and in particular, as a central element of the reactionary agenda. So how could patriarchy be ended under capitalism if it is so embedded at every level of the capitalist system? It is impossible.

Socialism, by contrast, eliminates the economic dependence on the family unit. Simply by changing who controls and owns the vast means of production, every person can now be guaranteed housing, food, healthcare, childcare, retirement, and other human needs as guaranteed rights. The gender pay gap and undervaluing of “women’s work” could essentially be overturned overnight. A government in the hands of class-conscious workers would also remove from power the lackeys of the billionaire bigots, and instead launch bold initiatives to advance women’s equality and liberation in the world of culture, ideology, education and politics.

This would be an ongoing process, of course, but it would be fundamentally different from the battle for women’s rights under capitalism. In the present, we fight for rights inside a system that reproduces patriarchal economic relationships daily, and under a ruling class that defaults to a reactionary agenda as a way to protect its exploitative rule. That is why “smashing the patriarchy” often feels so impossible. Under socialism, by contrast, the battle will be to win an egalitarian superstructure that will harmonize with a new economic system based on meeting the needs of all.

References

[1]See Dickinson, Hannah. (2019). “Social reproduction: A theoretical framework with organizing potential.”Breaking the Chains4, no. 1.Also availablehere.
[2] Ford, Derek. (2021). “The base-superstructure: A model for analysis and action.”Liberation School, November 22. Availablehere.
[3] Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. (1964/1978). “The German ideology: Part I,” in R.C. Tucker (Ed.),The Marx-Engels reader, 2nd ed.(New York: W.W. Norton & Company), 172.

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.

The Reproductive Rallying Cry

By Audrey Elberger, Nathaniel Ibrahim, Simon Moncke, and Juan Gonzalez Valdivieso

Republished in modified form from The Specter.

On June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court overturned 50 years of precedent via a 6-3 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. The ruling established that states can restrict abortion as they please and without limits. The case Dobbs overturned, Roe v. Wade, constitutionally protected abortion rights through the first trimester with limitations in the second and third trimesters based on maternal or fetal health.

Planned Parenthood v. Casey later overturned this framework in favor of a viability analysis. That opened the door for states to implement abortion restrictions in the first trimester. So, even when abortion was a “right,” it really wasn’t.

Following the Dobbs decision, many online articles alerted people to “safe havens”: areas where abortion access remained protected. But these articles seldom acknowledged the fact that many lack the resources to visit safe havens. Since women, minorities, and the poor are disproportionately under-resourced, abortion access is indeed a race, class, and gender issue.

That the Supreme Court is openly hostile to the needs of these marginalized communities should come as no surprise. The institution was designed to safeguard elite interests while insulating itself from public opinion. This rift between the people and their government sharply narrows the range of political possibilities. Questions such as whether the state ought to guarantee material security for all are forever left off the agenda.

Perhaps that would change if enough Supreme Court justices had working-class interests. But the selection process makes this incredibly implausible. These days, Court appointees ascend almost exclusively from a consolidated legal class of Ivy League graduates. Currently, only one of nine justices — Christo-fascist Amy Coney Barrett — didn’t graduate from Harvard or Yale. But she still went to Notre Dame: a prestigious private institution with an endowment exceeding $20 billion.

The elite background of jurists is reflected in the Court’s penchant to side with the monied, reactionary, and powerful. It’s also reflected in which cases they even choose to hear. The Supreme Court, after all, carefully selects its cases. They receive around 10,000 petitions each year but typically only approve about 80 of them. That means cases relevant to working people are almost always sidelined.

This raises the question of how to amplify working-class interests. While the American political landscape is bleak, there are nonetheless proven strategies at our disposal. By implementing them, we can send a powerful message that our demands around reproductive rights must be met.

Throughout the United States, there are abortion funds accepting donations. Many of them use that money to help low-income people pay for otherwise unaffordable reproductive care. Abortion funds often work in conjunction with healthcare centers to fund not only operations themselves but also transportation and childcare. The National Network of Abortion Funds provides an incredibly thorough database of abortion funds listed by state.

Beyond fundraising, we can also wage the fight for reproductive rights in the streets. Direct action like protests, rallies, and teach-ins are being held by organizations across the United States. These groups may be fully geared toward the issue of reproductive health, as is the case with Planned Parenthood and Reproductive Freedom for All. Or they may be fighting for abortion rights within a larger anti-capitalist movement. Examples include the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and its young wing YDSA, among other anti-capitalist parties and organizations within the United States.

Within this broader anti-capitalist milieu, the struggle for reproductive justice exemplifies why labor organizing should lie at the base of all other grassroots efforts. Under an oppressive, capitalist, forcefully evangelical society, the individual sits powerless, unable to alter the institutions that uphold the status quo. However, by exploiting society’s unwavering reliance on endless growth, individuals can join forces with fellow workers to collectively withhold their labor until more desirable conditions are secured. While fundraising and direct action are indispensable, organizing workplaces is perhaps the best bulwark against elite capture of powerful institutions. What happened in the Republic of Ireland roughly a decade ago shows this.

For years, the island nation known for its social conservatism banned abortion in nearly all cases. In 2012, however, Irish activists organized a march for choice. Ireland soon saw massive demonstrations which attracted international attention. Even the United Nations began calling on Ireland to change its abortion laws. But the Irish government didn’t cave to this pressure. That’s when labor organizers turned to more radical measures.

On International Women’s Day 2017, thousands of women went on strike demanding better abortion laws. They managed to shut down the capital city of Dublin for four hours. This action put the Irish government on notice. The following year, they held a referendum on abortion rights with two-thirds voting to expand access.

Abortion rights in Argentina have a similar history. As in Ireland, the Catholic Church is a dominant force in Argentinian politics and has helped curtail reproductive freedom for decades. In 2016, however, women workers staged a mass strike. That was followed by huge demonstrations for abortion rights as part of a protest movement called “The Green Wave.” The Argentinian Congress finally legalized abortion in 2020.

Given these facts, us fighting for abortion rights must ask ourselves: Is my workplace unionized? If so, how can I join the union? If not, how do I start that conversation? The sooner unionizing efforts get underway in every workplace, the sooner the working-class and oppressed peoples can leverage their collective power in the name of a more just society.

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.

Assata Shakur: The making of a revolutionary woman

By Rachel Domond

Republished from Liberation School.

In commemorating Black August, we commemorate the struggle of those who have fought before us and faced violent repercussions from the state. We uplift the revolutionary history of the Black working class and its fundamental position in forging and leading the struggle for liberation for all. And we recommit ourselves to the struggle for Black Liberation and for the freedom of all political prisoners.

When I think of political prisoners, and when I think of those who have relentlessly committed themselves to Black Liberation, I always think of Assata Shakur.

From Assata’s story, we are able to learn what it means to be motivated by a deep love for the people and the struggle for freedom—and what it means to embody a determined and unbreakable spirit in the face of crackdowns and government repression designed to stifle and destroy the movement. Account after account from Assata’s comrades and fellow revolutionaries describe Assata as a light, a positive spirit who remained disciplined and committed to the struggle despite incredible hardships.

‘I wanted a name that had something to do with struggle’

Born JoAnne Byron, and married as JoAnne Chesimard, Assata Shakur changed her name in order to fully identify with the revolutionary struggles of her African heritage, and to honor her comrade Zayd Malik Shakur, who was murdered by state forces in 1971. She writes in her autobiography:

“I decided on Assata Olugbala Shakur. Assata means ‘She who struggles,’ Olugbala means ‘Love for the people,’ and i took the name Shakur out of respect for Zayd and Zayd’s family. Shakur means “the thankful” [1].

Just as she was not born Assata, Shakur was not born a revolutionary. There is much to learn from her political development, and from the making of Assata into a revolutionary.

Born in Queens, NY, Assata Shakur was raised by her school teacher mother, her grandparents, and her aunt Evelyn A. Williams, a civil rights worker. From an early age, Assata’s family struggled financially, forcing her to run away frequently, often staying with strangers and working for short periods of time. After earning her GED, Assata went on to community college, and later The City College of New York, where she began her involvement in political activism. She participated in sit-ins, civil rights protests, and activism against the Vietnam War, first getting arrested with a hundred others after chaining herself to a building in protest of a lack of Black faculty and Black studies programs at the age of 20.

Coming of age in the 1960s and 70s, conditions were ripe with struggle on all fronts—from the Stonewall Rebellion to the Women’s Rights Movement to the Civil Rights and Black Power movements—conditions to politicize. After college, Assata moved to Oakland, CA, where she joined the Black Panther Party, participating in defense programs for the Black community. Some years later, she returned to NYC to lead the BPP in Harlem, coordinating programs like the famous Free Breakfast for Children program.

Assata studied the movements of oppressed and colonized people across the globe, and understood the common thread, as she elaborates on in her autobiography: that to rid the world of exploitation meant we must rid the world of capitalism. As she wrote about her radicalization:

“There was not a single liberation movement in Africa that was not fighting for socialism. In fact, there was not a single liberation movement in the whole world that was fighting for capitalism. The whole thing boiled down to a simple equation: anything that has any kind of value is made, mined, grown, produced, and processed by working people. So why shouldn’t working people collectively own that wealth? Why shouldn’t working people own and control their own resources? Capitalism meant that rich businessmen owned the wealth, while socialism meant that the people who made the wealth owned it” [2].

Assata knew that the internalized narrative that we, as oppressed peoples, and particularly Black people, just had to “make it” or “climb the ladder” could not and cannot be the basis of our total liberation as a people, because “anytime you’re talking about a ladder, you’re talking about a top and a bottom, an upper class and a lower class, a rich class and a poor class,” and “as long as you’ve got a system with a top and a bottom, Black people are always going to wind up at the bottom” [3].

Assata knew we cannot elect or reform our way to freedom. She teaches us that in order to win our freedom, we would need to fight in the same way people across the globe have fought throughout history—through a socialist revolution. A revolution in which the power is held in the hands of the majority, the workers who create the wealth of society, in order to create a world in which the needs and well-being of the people are planned for and prioritized.

Assata Shakur: Guilty of fighting for freedom

COINTELPRO, the government counterintelligence program of the 60s and beyond, was created with the intention to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit and otherwise neutralize” Black nationalist and Black liberation organizations and their leaders [4]. It is now absolutely clear from FBI documents that since at least 1971, the FBI, in cooperation with the state and local law enforcement, conducted a campaign to specifically criminalize, defame, harass and intimidate Assata Shakur. The U.S. government saw Assata’s dedication to the cause and leadership within the Black sovereignty movement as a threat to the internal security of the United States.

In 1971, Assata and her two comrades Sundiata Acoli and Zayd Shakur were pulled over by state troopers for a faulty tail light. The state troopers quickly escalated the situation, likely because they knew exactly who they were pulling over, drawing their guns and pointing. With her hands up, Assata was shot in the stomach. A shootout ensued, and the night ended with Assata’s comrade Zayd Shakur and one of the state troopers dead.

While forensic evidence backed up her account, Assata Shakur was sentenced to life plus 33 years in prison for the murder of a police officer, a crime she didn’t commit. Her trial and conviction were a result of the government conspiracy to destroy Black freedom fighters and the movement for liberation from capitalism. Along with her comrade Sundiata Acoli, Assata was thrown into prison—a men’s prison—where she faced, according to her attorney, the worst conditions that a woman prisoner had ever faced in the history of New Jersey. To this day, Acoli remains a political prisoner. The next time he’s eligible for parole he’ll be 94 years old.

Assata’s revolutionary spirit was not broken. She ultimately escaped from prison, and today lives in exile under the protection of socialist Cuba. The government crackdown on Assata Shakur and others who struggle for liberation makes clear one of the hardest lessons necessary for revolutionaries to learn: the revolutionary struggle must be scientific, rather than emotional. This does not mean decisions can’t be influenced by love or anger; Assata and others were guided by a deep love for the people. Rather, our struggle must be based on the objective conditions, rooted in analysis of the historical and contemporary contexts.

Assata taught me, Assata taught we

Assata learned that no one has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to their oppressor; she learned that our oppressors are never going to give us the education needed to overthrow them. She learned that socialism isn’t just a white man’s concoction, because she studied the works of African revolutionaries and the goals of African liberation movements, as well as those of other colonized places. She learned that socialism was not an evil ideal designed to strip us of our freedoms, as we are told; because Assata knew that under capitalism, we don’t have any freedoms but to starve, to be homeless, or to be thrown in jail for being poor. Assata teaches us all that socialism can and will be achieved when the oppressed peoples of the world join together in struggle for a future free of exploitation.

This Black August, we are challenged to honor, learn from and continue the work of those who have struggled before us. In order to win, as Assata taught us, we must understand the role of discipline, the role of organization, and the need to stay in the streets to demand and fight for the society we want to see. As Assata herself said

“It is our duty to fight for our freedom.
It is our duty to win.
We must love each other and support each other.
We have nothing to lose but our chains” [5].

References

[1] Shakur, Assata. (1987/2001).Assata: An autobiography(New York: Lawrence & Hill), 186.
[2] Ibid., 190. For other related excerpts in her autobiography curated by the blogInvent the Future, see Liberation Staff. (2016). Assata Shakur on capitalism, socialism and anti-communism,Liberation News,16 January. Availablehere.
[3] Shakur,Assata, 190.
[4] Flint, Taylor G. (2013). How the FBI conspired to destroy the Black Panther Party,In These Times, 04 December. Availablehere.
[5] Shakur,Assata, 52.

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.

Disturbing The Peace: UN Peacekeepers and Sexual Abuse (Part 3: Echoes of Despair)

By Devon Bowers

This is part three of a multi-part series. Read Part One here. Read Part Two here.

Author’s Note: This article and series focuses on sexual abuse and assault, with some graphic descriptions of such acts. Reader discretion is advised.

From the tail end of the 20th century and into the new millennium, United Nations have deployed all over the world, to war torn, strife ridden nations with the goal of lessening the violence so peaceful, political solutions could be pursued. Yet, from the very first deployment, UN forces have engaged in heinous, stomach-churning acts of degeneracy which primarily young girls and women have been abused and raped. The situation was actively made worse by the UN itself as it left victims with no recourse and in several instances actively worked to obscure the fact that any abuse had taken place at all.

The events from 1991 in Cambodia, twisting and turning in places such as Bosnia, East Timor, and Haiti, still cast a shadow over UN operations even today.

South Sudan

In 2011, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 1996, under which UN forces would be deployed in order to aid in the creation of a peaceful environment so that the new nation would be able to begin to establish itself politically and economically. Another resolution, Resolution 2155, was later adopted as a coup attempt threw the nation into ethnic strife,[1] with UN troops being tasked with protecting civilian, monitoring human rights violations, and creating safe conditions so humanitarian aid could be delivered.[2]

Early on there were notes made of the difficulties UNMISS was facing regarding training on sexual abuse. A 2013 independent study noted that there were “significant gaps in the induction and refresher training”[3] that occurred between missions, with some not ever receiving the training at all, primarily due to lack of and imperfect communication between the Conduct and Discipline Team and the Integrated Mission Training Center on a local level, whose duty it was to provide said training.

Commanders also proved to be a problem as some of them pushed back against the zero-tolerance policy, choosing to zero in on the “aggressive behavior of women who solicit their troops”[4] instead of the conduct of the soldiers themselves and even requested ‘flexibility’ on the issue of prostitution, despite it being in direct violation of the zero-tolerance rule.

What made the situation worse, as well, was the lack of UN peacekeepers actually conducting their duties. The Star reported in July 2016 that South Sudanese government soldiers had raped dozens of women outside a UN camp and that there was a “reluctance by UN peacekeepers to protect civilians. At least one assault occurred as peacekeepers watched.

On July 17, two armed soldiers in uniform dragged away a woman who was less than a few hundred meters from the UN camp’s western gate while armed peacekeepers on foot, in an armored vehicle and in a watchtower looked on. One witness estimated that 30 peacekeepers from Nepalese and Chinese battalions saw the incident. “They were seeing it. Everyone was seeing it,” he said. “The woman was seriously screaming, quarrelling and crying also, but there was no help. She was crying for help.”[5]

While the peacekeepers themselves weren’t engaging in abuse, it could be argued that they abetted the situation by standing by and doing nothing. This also potentially brings up the question: How often were peacekeepers shirking their duties to the point that national soldiers felt bold enough to rape women near UN camps, much less in front of them?

The following year it seemed that the situation was changing in that the UN was taking a firm stance regarding UNMISS soldiers, stating that there would “be no second chances” for any UN personnel found guilty of sexual abuse and preventing and responding to such cases were a “top priority.”[6] Yet this stance eventually wavered as in the following years. In 2018, Nepalese peacekeepers faced allegation of raping a South Sudanese child. In all, a UN commission investigated sexual abuse allegations by UNMISS soldiers, with 18 peacekeepers being registered in the UN Sexual Exploitation and Abuse Database.[7]

The UN remains in South Sudan to this day.

Mali

In the context of the fourth Tuareg rebellion in Mali[8], UN troops were dispatched to deal with the ongoing violence there beginning in April 2013. While there wasn’t much reporting on the actions of UN peacekeepers in Mali, unfortunately abuse did still take place.

Only months after the mission began did abuse begin to be reported on. BBC reported in September 2013 that four UN peacekeepers were accused of sexually assaulting a Malian woman, with several Malians alleging that multiple women were raped, yet due to the soldiers being from Chad, the UN urged the Chadian government to investigate and discipline the men.[9] The organization was already dropping the ball arguably as it was known for quite some time that nations rarely if ever hold their soldiers accountable.

Central African Republic

In 2014 the UN had taken over operations in the Central African Republic from the African Union[10] force in a country that was dealing with an active civil war.[11]

By 2015, problems were already starting. There was a case here two girls under 16 said they had been forced to exchange sex for food, starting back in 2014.[12] Several months later it was revealed that during a house search, a UN peacekeeper dragged the girl out of the bathroom she was hiding in and raped her.[13]

Sangaris Forces

The Guardian had reported that six pre-teen children told UN staff that they had been sexually abused in exchange food from December 2013 to June 2014 by French soldiers.[14] However, this was a situation where the French troops weren’t under UN control, yet they knew that such acts were ongoing. It was taken so seriously that the Secretary-General even went so far as to set up an independent panel to probe the matter.[15]

The panel was headed by Marie Deschamps, a former Justice on the Canadian Supreme Court, Hassan B. Jallow, a former Minister of Justice and Attorney General in Gambia, and Yasmin Sooka, who had been on the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and a member of the United Nations Report of the Secretary-General's Panel of Experts on Accountability in Sri Lanka to investigate war crimes in the final stages of the Sri Lankan Civil War.

The abuse was committed by French soldiers, known as the Sangaris Forces for “Operation Sangaris,” not by soldiers under the UN’s command.  Still, the organization’s human rights mandate required them to “carry out the interrelated obligations of investigating the allegations; reporting on the allegations internally and, where appropriate, publicly; and following up on the allegations to prevent further abuses and to ensure that perpetrators are held accountable.”[16] The UN had a legal framework in which action could be taken.

A total of six discussions were conducted in which victims of sexual abuse were interviewed. Like so many other soldiers, the French would generally lure victims in with food, with one 9-year-old interviewee saying that

a French soldier working at the check point called him, gave him an individual combat food ration and showed him a pornographic video on his cell phone. The child stated that the soldier then opened his trousers, showing him his erect penis, and asked him to suck his “bangala” (penis). The child told the [Human Rights Officer] that they were seen by another child, who alerted some local delinquents. As a mob was forming, the soldier told the child to run away but the child was caught and beaten. [17]

On several levels, there was a failure of leadership on the part of the UN as they didn’t conduct any further investigation beyond initial interviews and in fact, UN officials assumed that due to the Sangaris forces not being under UN command, the UN “had a limited obligation to respond” to these allegations and because the situation was “politically sensitive” [18] there should be no further exposure than necessary.

In May 2014, the Human Rights and Justice Section (HRJS) was asked by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights to compile a report on African Union soldiers that were supposed to be put under UN control, as many such individuals had been previously accused of serious human rights violations. In this report HRJS also included information of the actions of the Sangaris Forces. Such information should have triggered an emergency report, however, HRJS encouraged the Special Representative of the Secretary-General not divulge the situation. Worse, the HRJS “took no further steps to intervene to stop the violations or to hold the perpetrators accountable.”[19] (emphasis added) So the Section knew that children were being raped and yet did nothing to stop it, effectively becoming complicit in what occurred.

Later, near the end of June 2014, the Human Rights Officer submitted the Sangaris Notes to the head of the HRJS, which, rather than preparing a report and then sending it up to the Special Representative or the High Commissioner’s Office, muddied the waters by putting the information “in a broader report that included a number of allegations of serious human rights abuses—such as killings and torture—by other international troops.”[20] In addition to this, the July 2014 draft report was never finalized or submitted, with the head of HRJS arguing that the Sangrais Notes had already been handed over to the French government, thus there was no further need for involvement.

The Panel

[inferred] from this decision that the purpose of preparing the 17 July 2014 report was to disguise the Allegations so that France was not singled out, and to generate as little attention as possible on the abuses. Unfortunately, this strategy was effective and the report, including the Allegations they contained, went largely ignored. […] The decision of the head of HRJS not to finalize the 17 July 2014 report was a failure of his obligation to follow up not only on the Allegations described in the Sangaris Notes, but also on the other violations of human rights and international criminal law set out in the draft report.[21]

The Central African Republic desk also failed in its duties as between May and June 2014, they received at least five notifications of the allegations against the French, but “took no further steps either to follow up with HRJS or with the [Special Representative for the Secretary-General]”[22] beyond vague wording in a human rights development update.

After the Human Rights Officer took her leave, the HRJS halted the investigation and UNICEF didn’t seek out any additional children despite that four of the children interviewed identified other victims, the children acknowledging that it was public information that French troops would trade sex for food, and indications from the interviews that the abuse was planned and coordinated, among several other flags that should have been cause for alarm. This helps to illuminate the fact that even if serious reforms were made, it doesn’t matter if there is failure at the local level to report on such abuse.

Thankfully, there was a whistleblower in the form of Anders Kompass who leaked “a confidential report documenting the sexual abuse of children by French and African peacekeepers”[23] to the French government. In response, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Prince Zeid Raad al-Hussein of Jordan, asked the Office of Internal Oversight Services to “open an investigation into the matter on the grounds that Kompass ‘had placed the victims of sexual abuse at risk by including their names in the report he provided to the French government’ and that he did so in order to obtain a promotion.”[24] While he was suspended for a time, Kompass was later reinstated.

The French ended their mission in the CAR in October 2016.[25] The following year, the French court system refused to bring charges against the soldiers accused of sexually abusing children, with spokeswoman for the Paris prosecutor’s office, Agnès Thibault-Lecuivre, saying that “the case was particularly difficult because it was based solely on the children’s accounts, without independent evidence” and that there was the problem of identifying people.[26]

Worse, though, was that more evidence of abuse would be uncovered. In March 2016, the Deputy Special Representative of the Secretary-General and a delegation from MINUSCA met with local leaders, where four girls accused the Sangaris force of forcing them to have sex with a dog.

[They] were tied up and undressed inside a camp by a military commander from the Sangaris force and forced to have sex with a dog. Each girl was then given 5000 Central African Francs (approx. $9 USD). The three girls interviewed sought basic medical treatment. The fourth girl later died of an unknown disease. One of the survivors said that she was called “the Sangaris’ dog” by people in the community.[27]

The UN never contested the claims.[28]

There was a separate case that had similarities to UN abuse in the Ivory Coast, where it was found that peacekeepers were paying girls “as little as 50 cents in exchange for sex” and that there was an entire prostitution ring these peacekeepers utilized that “was run by boys and young men who offered up girls ‘for anywhere from 50 cents to three dollars.”[29] Once again, there is the utilization of children as tools to abuse other children.

In early 2016, Human Rights Watch documented a total of eight sexual abuse cases. One of the cases was a gang rape, where a woman was visiting a Republic of Congo troop base, seeking assistance when armed peacekeepers forced her into a bush a raped her. “I didn’t want to have sex with them, but when I went to visit their base, they took me into the bush,” she said. “There were three of them on me. They were armed. They said if I resisted, they would kill me. They took me one by one.”[30] Another involved a 14 year old girl, who was attacked as she was walking by a UN base. She told HRW that the peacekeepers “pulled me into the tall grass and one held my arms while the other one pinned down my legs and raped me.”[31] She began to scream, causing both soldiers to run away before she could be raped a second time.

As time wore on, more abuses from the past came to light,[32] however, the biggest shock came in 2017, revolving around an entire battalion.

The issue involved about 650 Congolese soldiers whose “alleged indiscipline, poor leadership, repeated involvement in sexual exploitation and abuse cases, and overall threadbare competence”[33] was creating major headaches for the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres. The UN mission filed an official assessment of the unit, known as COGBAT 3, which found that 120 personnel from CONGO Batt 2 and 1 from CONGO Batt 3 were repatriated to [their] home country on SEA cases.”[34] In a memo to the UN peacekeeping military advisor, Lieutenant General Carlos Humberto Loitey, the force commander of the mission, LTG Balla Kieta, lamented that “the situation has deteriorated to the point that the battalion is no longer trustable because of poor leadership, lack of discipline, and operational deficiencies.”[35] Despite having discipline break down in an entire battalion to the point that it was being discussed at the highest levels, not to mention the effect it was having on the local populace, all that came of it was that the UN had shared the evaluation with the Congolese government and the situation was being followed up on.

Bombshells continued to drop with the Code Blue campaign accusing the UN of mishandling sexual abuse cases, based on leaked case files which revealed that out of 14 cases that the UN was investigated in 2016, there were eight such cases in which the victims weren’t even interviewed, which could have resulted in cases being thrown out before they were thoroughly investigated.[36] In that same vein, when the UN dispatched investigators to look into rapes and sexual abuse done by Burundian and Gabonese peacekeepers, more than half of the 130 allegations would end up being dismissed. An internal UN report was uncovered in 2019 which found a laundry list of problems with the investigations, “– from the Burundians discrediting their testimony to the UN failing to ask crucial follow-up questions that could have corroborated their accounts.” More specifically the report found that:

• UNICEF failed to take accurate victim testimonies and waited weeks before informing the UN’s investigatory and oversight body of the allegations.

• The UN failed to provide basic security for investigators.

• The atmosphere for women and girls making the allegations was described as “threatening”, with one investigator reportedly asking a woman about her alleged perpetrator: “Did you love him?”

• The system of DNA collection and storage allowed samples to decay – specimens that could have identified alleged perpetrators.[37]

To make matters worse, Ben Swanson, the OIOS director who ordered and oversaw the report, attempted to sway The New Humanitarian from publishing an article on the matter saying that it was a draft report, it was “potentially damaging as written,” and even had the gall to argue that the results of the investigations were “quite good”[38] while utterly failing to discuss why most cases were dismissed or why so many cases involving Gabon soldiers were pending four years later.

There were major structural problems with the investigation, the largest one being that the Burundians were allowed to conduct them, a massive conflict of interest, which led them to be “more concerned with discrediting witnesses than taking their testimonies,” with interviews being described as “interrogatory” and involving “questions and comments described as “humiliating,” “irrelevant,” and “incongruous.”[39] Due to the lack of concern with the investigators, they failed to ask crucial follow-up questions which would have led to greater information awareness and a more detailed investigation, it resulted in a Burundian peacekeeper who had allegedly raped a women being cleared. The interviews were so plagued with problems that “they would have serious implications for any subsequent legal proceedings.”[40]

In spite all of this, the United Nations remains in the Central African Republic to this day.

Solutions?

Among all of this discussion, what has yet to be addressed is the idea of solutions. Though it would be easy to point to the UN and simply argue that the organization as a whole simply need to actually enforce its own rules, something that does need to occur, there needs to be an examination as to why it is so difficult to bring peacekeepers to justice and how victims can be taken care of.

First, what should be examined is the specifics of soldiers that are under UN command. Peacekeeping troops are loaned to the UN from troop-contributing countries and while they serve under UN command, their home countries are responsible for disciplining them based on a Memorandum of Agreement between the two entities. From there, the UN organizes a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with the government of the country the soldiers are to be deployed to where the host nation “waives jurisdiction over peacekeepers for violations of host-nation law,” this results in a situation where troops have “de facto immunity from prosecution there.”[41] On paper, soldiers have immunity when working in an official capacity, but in reality, they are immune from local law.

TCCs refuse to exercise their legal authority and thus many peacekeepers commit horrid acts and go about their way. Even when TCCs do want to prosecute their soldiers, investigations are done so poorly and conducted in such a manner that doesn’t apply to their respective law, with evidence be inadmissible in court or so lacking that it wouldn’t sustain a conviction, that the case can easily be thrown out.[42]

It should be noted that the application of immunity can be waived. Within the SOFAs lie a clause which expounds upon the privileges and immunities for peacekeepers, with the general rule being that “basic privileges and immunities of a [UN] peacekeeping operation flow from the Convention of the Privileges and Immunities of the [UN],”[43] with the Convention specifying that such immunity only applies when soldiers are acting in official capacities.

For example, the SOFA dealing with the UN Mission in East Timor granted military personnel “immunity from Indonesian criminal and civil jurisdiction, and local criminal and civil jurisdiction,” however, due to the operation being considered an organ of the UN, peacekeepers fell “under the Convention on Privileges and Immunities, which means that immunities should still be able to be waived by the Secretary-General for any offences committed.”[44]

Thus, if peacekeepers do engage in crimes such as rape, forced prostitution, sexual abuse, and the like, the UN can actually waive that immunity due to such actions being outside of official duties. Therefore, there should be pressure on the UN to utilize its power to waive the immunity of peacekeepers accused of sexual abuse.

So, the question arises: If a peacekeeper can’t be punished by the laws of their respective country, can they be punished by international law?

Generally speaking, the International Criminal Court (ICC), deals with crimes that occur before and during conflicts, so for UN peacekeepers to be brought up on charges for sexual abuse by the ICC would not only be “a historic exercise of judicial authority,”[45] but also would send a message globally that peacekeepers engaging in sexual abuse would be bought to justice.

Renee Vezina, of the Ave Maria School of Law argues that there is some merit to this idea as the Rome Statute focuses on human rights violations or crimes against humanity, “which includes rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization, or any other form of sexual violence of comparable gravity.”[46] This legal standing was already around since 1998 with “prosecution of individuals at the international level on the crime of rape” in the “International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, when Jean Paul Akayesu was convicted for crimes against humanity for his encouragement of the rape of Tutsi women,”[47] which was upheld in the Appeals Chamber.

There are some serious challenges to use of the ICC, however. Its statute gives it jurisdiction on crimes against humanity, genocide, and war crimes, yet, each of these has its own definition that would limit the prosecutor’s options. Take the aforementioned idea of charging accused UN peacekeepers with crimes against humanity. That term “involves the commission of an attack that is inhumane in nature, causing great suffering, or serious injury to body, or to mental or physical health. The act must be committed as part of a widespread [“an attack directed against a multiplicity of victims”] or systematic attack [an attack carried out pursuant to a preconceived policy or plan”] against members of a civilian population.”[48] A second limitation is that the specific act “must be carried out ‘pursuant to or in furtherance of a State or organizational policy to commit such attack,”[49] meaning that the crimes engaged in must be done in pursuit of a large policy.

Furthermore, the ICC acts in a complementary nature to national courts, only taking jurisdiction of cases if national courts don’t do so first or if they are unwilling/unable to prosecute, due to a breakdown in its judicial system, for example. To this end, Article 18 of the Rome Statute requires that the prosecutor of the ICC must notify all states parties and states with jurisdiction over the case before beginning an ICC investigation and cannot begin an investigation on his own initiative without first receiving the approval of a chamber of three judges.

At this stage, it would be open to states that are party to the statute to insist that they will investigate allegations against their own nationals themselves. Should this national be a peacekeeper (for example a South African peacekeeper alleged to be guilty of an ICC crime in the DRC), in such a situation the ICC must then suspend its investigation.[50]

Thus, the Court’s hands are tied if the court of troop contributing nations decided to take up the case, even if that national court lets the alleged abuser off the hook.

There may be a way of balancing the powers of a national court with the powers of the ICC in the form of a hybrid court, a court that can prosecute international crimes. A hybrid court is such because “both the institutional apparatus and the applicable law consist of a blend of the international and the domestic,” with foreign and domestic judges sitting side by side with cases being “prosecuted and defended by teams of local lawyers working with those from other countries.”[51] Such a system was used to some effect in Kosovo and in East Timor.[52]

With regards to addressing the pain of victims, there is the idea of a truth and reconciliation commission, which “have been used in Latin America, Central and Eastern Europe, and parts of Africa” and are focused primarily on “the right to truth and a victim-centered approach.”[53] This isn’t enough to address the abuses of UN peacekeepers, but it would provide a start where information could be brough to light, accountability has the potential to take place, and victims can confront their abusers in the open.

These ideas won’t solve the past outright, but it could change future UN peacekeeping operations. May be the echoes of despair would finally cease.

Notes

[1] Sudarsan Raghavan, “Divisions in South Sudan’s liberation movement fuel war,” Washington Post, December 27, 2013 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/africa/divisions-in-south-sudans-liberation-movement-fuel-war/2013/12/27/71347da2-6f31-11e3-a5d0-6f31cd74f760_story.html)

[2] United Nations, Security Council, Resolution 2155, S/Res/2155, March 27, 2014 (https://www.un.org/en/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=S/RES/2155(2014))

[3] Thelma Awori, Catherine Lutz, Paban J. Thapa, Final Report: Expert Mission to Evaluate Risks to SEA Prevention Efforts  in MINUSTAH, UNMIL, MONUSCO, and UNMISS, https://web.archive.org/web/20150709034934/http://www.aidsfreeworld.org/Newsroom/Press-Releases/2015/~/media/Files/Peacekeeping/2013%20Expert%20Team%20Report%20FINAL.pdf (November 3, 2013), pg 8

[4] Ibid, pg 18

[5] Jason Pantikin, “Dozens of women raped by South Sudan soldiers near UN camp: witnesses,” The Star, July 27, 2016 (https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2016/07/27/dozens-of-women-raped-by-south-sudan-soldiers-near-un-camp-witnesses.html)

[6] United Nations Permanent Mission, UNMISS: 'No second chances' for sexual exploitation and abuse, https://www.un.int/news/unmiss-no-second-chances-sexual-exploitation-and-abuse (October 3, 2017)

[7] UN News, South Sudan: ‘Outraged’ UN experts say ongoing widespread human rights violations may amount to war crimes, February 20, 2019 (https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/02/1033181)

[8] Devon Bowers, Rebellion, Resources, and Refugees: The Conflict in Mali, http://www.whataboutpeace.com/2013/02/rebellion-resources-and-refugees.html (February 28, 2013)

[9] BBC, UN's Minusma troops 'sexually assaulted Mali woman', https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-24272839 (September 26, 2013)

[10] David Smith, “UN takes over peacekeeping in Central African Republic,” The Guardian, September 16, 2014 (https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2014/sep/16/un-peacekeeping-central-african-republic)

[11] Thierry Vircoulon, Failure Has Many Fathers: The Coup in Central African Republic, Relief Web, https://reliefweb.int/report/central-african-republic/failure-has-many-fathers-coup-central-african-republic (March 28, 2013)

[12] France 24, UN peacekeepers accused in new child sex abuse claims, June 24, 2015 (https://www.france24.com/en/20150624-un-peacekeepers-accused-new-child-sex-abuse-claims-car)

[13] Amnesty International, CAR: UN troops implicated in rape of girl and indiscriminate killings must be investigated, August 11, 2015 (https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2015/08/car-un-troops-implicated-in-rape-of-girl-and-indiscriminate-killings-must-be-investigated/)

[14] France 24, UN to probe ‘disturbing’ handling of CAR child sex abuse claims, June 6, 2015 (https://www.france24.com/en/20150603-un-independent%20-investigation-child-sex-abuse-car-peacekeepers-france)

[15] United Nations Secretary-General, Statement Attributable to the Secretary-General on allegations of sexual abuse in the Central African Republic, https://www.un.org/sg/en/content/sg/statement/2015-06-03/statement-attributable-secretary-general-allegations-sexual-abuse (June 3, 2015)

[16] Marie Deschamps, Hassan B. Jallow, Yasmin Sooka, Taking Action on Sexual Exploitation and Abuse by Peacekeepers: Report of an Independent Review on Sexual Exploitation and Abuse by International Peacekeeping Forces in the Central African Republic, https://web.archive.org/web/20151217183752/https://www.un.org/News/dh/infocus/centafricrepub/Independent-Review-Report.pdf (December 17, 2015), pg 28

[17] Ibid, pg 17

[18] Ibid, pg 28

[19] Ibid, pg 33

[20] Ibid, pg 34

[21] Ibid, pg 35

[22] Ibid

[23] Colum Lynch, The U.N. Official Who Blew the Lid off Central African Republic Sex Scandal Vindicated, Foreign Policy, https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/12/17/the-u-n-official-who-blew-the-lid-on-central-african-republic-sex-scandal-vindicated/ (December 17, 2015)

[24] Government Accountability Project, Foreign Policy: UN Drops Leak Investigation Into Human Rights Official In C.A.R. Sex Scandal, https://whistleblower.org/in-the-news/foreign-policy-un-drops-leak-investigation-human-rights-official-car-sex-scandal/ (January 19, 2016)

[25] BBC, France ends Sangaris military operation in CAR, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-37823047 (October 31, 2016)

[26] Benoît Morenne, “No Charges in Sexual Abuse Case Involving French Peacekeepers,” New York Times, January 6, 2017 (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/06/world/africa/french-peacekeepers-un-sexual-abuse-case-central-african-republic.html)

[27] Code Blue, Shocking New Reports of Peacekeeper Sexual Abuse in the Central African Republic, March 30, 2016 (http://www.codebluecampaign.com/press-releases/2016/3/30)

[28] Samuel Oakford, “French Peacekeepers Allegedly Tied Up Girls and Forced Them Into Bestiality,” Vice, March 31, 2016 (https://www.vice.com/en/article/a398za/french-peacekeepers-allegedly-tied-up-girls-and-forced-them-to-have-sex-with-dogs)

[29] Kevin Sieff, “U.N. says some of its peacekeepers were paying 13-year-olds for sex,” Washington Post, January 11, 2016 (https://web.archive.org/web/20160112032806/https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/africa/un-says-some-of-its-peacekeepers-were-paying-13-year-olds-for-sex/2016/01/11/504e48a8-b493-11e5-8abc-d09392edc612_story.html)

[30] Human Rights Watch, Central African Republic: Rape by Peacekeepers, https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/02/04/central-african-republic-rape-peacekeepers (February 4, 2016)

[31] Ibid

[32] Sandra Laville, “UN inquiry into CAR abuse claims identifies 41 troops as suspects,” The Guardian, December 5, 2016 (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/05/un-inquiry-into-car-abuse-claims-identifies-41-troops-as-suspects)

[33] George Russell, “Peacekeeper battalion in Central African Republic challenges UN 'war' on sexual abuse,” Fox News, https://www.foxnews.com/world/peacekeeper-battalion-in-central-african-republic-challenges-un-war-on-sexual-abuse (June 9, 2017)

[34] United Nations, Mission Field Headquarters In Mission Operational Readiness Assessment of COGBAT 3, (https://static1.squarespace.com/static/514a0127e4b04d7440e8045d/t/593704a2579fb37a23567889/1496777906180/MINUSCA+ORA.pdf), pg 8

[35] United Nations, MINUSCA- Lack of Professionalism in the Congolese Contingent, May 12, 2017 (https://static1.squarespace.com/static/514a0127e4b04d7440e8045d/t/593704c246c3c490c3ee0b24/1496777924587/CAR+memo.pdf)

[36] Krista Larson, “Group: UN mishandling Central African Republic abuse claims,” Associated Press, September 14, 2017 (https://apnews.com/article/e292fc4299f741629661fd67754050ef)

[37] Paisley Dodds, Phillip Klenfield, “Blunders in Central African Republic sex abuse probe detailed in internal UN review,” The New Humanitarian, October 31, 2019 (https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/investigations/2019/10/31/Central-African-Republic-sex-abuse-probe-internal-UN-review)

[38] Ibid

[39] Ibid

[40] Ibid

[41] Keith J. Allred, “Peacekeepers and Prostitutes: How Deployed Forces Fuel the Demand for Trafficked Women and New Hope for Stopping It,” Armed Forces & Society 33:1 (October 2006), pg 9

[42] Ibid, pg 10

[43] Renee Vezina, “Combating Impunity in Haiti: Why the ICC Should Prosecute Sexual Abuse by UN Peacekeepers,” Ave Maria International Law Journal 1:2 (2012), pg 450

[44] Melanie O’Brien, Overcoming boys-will-be-boys syndrome: Is prosecution of peacekeepers in the International Criminal Court for trafficking, sexual slavery and related crimes against women a possibility? Lund University Publications, http://lup.lub.lu.se/student-papers/record/1554856 (2004), pgs 39

[45] Vezina, pg 446

[46] Ibid

[47] Ibid

[48] Stephen Pete, Max Du Plessis, “Who Guards The Guards,” African Security Review 13:4 (2004), pg 10

[49] Ibid

[50] Ibid, pg 13

[51] Laura A. Dickinson, “The Promise of Hybrid Courts,” The American Journal of International Law 97:2 (April 2003), pg 295

[52] Rosa Freedman, “Unaccountable: A New Approach to Peacekeepers and Sexual Abuse,” The European Journal of International Law 29:3 (2018), pg 978

[53] Ibid, pg 980