A curious symptom of the resistance to theory on the Anglo-American left is a fixation on the Enlightenment. The striking paradox of this fixation is the anti-intellectual appropriation of a trend of European philosophy, which is credited with introducing the now inviolable standards of secularism, republicanism, rights, freedoms, and equality.
Our social conditions place demands upon our struggles. They force us to change what it means to strike, requiring that such a practice orient itself to structures of care, to sex and domestic work, to global chains of capitalist, state, and intimate violence. A feminist practice adequate to our times can only be an anti-capitalist feminism.
Domestic workers’ activism is not merely a sectoral struggle, but a strike against the gendered division of labor and a fight for bodily autonomy – both are indispensable parts of a broader struggle to undermine capital’s capacity for exploitation.
Tags: Inquiry
In 1941 in Cindy Walker’s native Texas, the sexual encounter described by her song “Cherokee Maiden” was not only frowned on, it was illegal. Texas had been the first state in the union to pass a law officially barring miscegenation.
The strike allows us to find each other, and to together constitute a new collective subject, bringing our bodies together in a common action and shared territory. Just as women’s labor takes many forms, so does the women’s strike: a work stoppage, a walkout, a march, a picket, a blockade, a shopping boycott, collectively refusing gender roles.
Where elites bumble and jockey, possibilities arise. That is why in the radical uncertainty of our moment, the Left needs to strategize and organize for a revolutionary break. If we’re not prepared with a revolutionary scenario of our own, the struggles of elites may swallow us up.
It is the theme of dissolving margins, and the many ways in which Ferrante grapples with it, that makes the Neapolitan novels a testament to the borderline experience between true and false, as categories of both the personal and the political.
The Women’s March in the United States on January 21 is part of a cycle that demonstrates a new form of feminism: the overlapping movements of women, trans people, and migrants refuse to remain subjected to the empire of new forms of capitalist exploitation.
Leadership can serve as a privileged prism to revisit, in this theoretical homage to the work of Cedric J. Robinson, his own encounter with C.L.R. James’s work.
It remains to be seen what kind of politics can be built on the foundation of the notion of racial capitalism. To determine what organizational and practical activity can be derived from this analysis, we should turn to the comparison we have in front of us: the work of the communists of the early 20th century, who began with the now widely discredited and ridiculed Black Belt thesis.
Viewpoint Magazine