Abolitionist Socialist Feminism. Zillah Eisenstein
trans and disabled people.
We may be living in a moment of what physicists call “singularity.” In political terms, this means that whatever came before has sunk into a metaphorical black hole, making the past indiscernible and the present incomprehensible/untranslatable. I remember thinking this when the election was handed over to George Bush in 2000. It was unprecedented and an early warning sign of what was to come in 2016.
I don’t think anyone can get ahead of history and know future possibilities, but I do think you can constrain history and hold it back if you do not have new ways of seeing. State actors believe they are supposed to mystify the power structure, not expose it. It is important to recognize that this so-called protective capacity has shifted. The tension is between an effective state that obfuscates what it is and Trump, who reveals too much: We have a Klan president of sorts, who is also a sexual predator as well as a capitalist apologist. What is happening with this new chaotic exposure? Some might say that fascism has become completely transparent.
I am reminded of what the South African artist William Kentridge writes about post-apartheid South Africa. He says that one of the strangest things is that little has changed. Children in poor rural schools still get a miserable education and the main beneficiaries of the end of apartheid remain white South Africans. Yet he says that his compromised society nurtures and nourishes his work. This makes him suspicious of certainty, valuing instead the provisionality of the moment. Because of the world he lives in, he values doubt. So do I. It keeps me curious and open.
Why is misogyny so seldom named as a structural system of sexual power? And why must I continually return to the misogynist structure of racism and capitalism? Why does misogyny remain silenced and unnamed, an open secret in this moment? It is visibly invisible and naturalized and normalized as such. Is it this that gives patriarchy its incredible resilience, a suppleness that stymies a full-throttle assault?
What is it about capitalism that sucks all of the air out of a buoyant racial and sexual and gender critique? After all, it seems apparent that in this moment we need to target the entirety: capitalist heteropatriarchal racism.
Why and how is patriarchal privilege ignored, naturalized, and normalized into a shattering silence? Why are rape and sexual violence not seen as part of the structural privilege underpinning capitalism and racism? How does this silence allow sexual violence to be the glue of racist patriarchal oppression?
Why does class so regularly trump (so to speak) race and gender? Why, when inequality is recognized, is it seen as fundamentally economic and class defined—especially when people of color and white women of the working class remain disproportionately poor and sexually violated?
Why today is white supremacy, even when it is acknowledged, simply reformed but not abolished? Why does queerness remain the elephant in the room when doing antiracist work?
Why are the issues bifurcated? Race or class? Sex or race? Class or sex? Why not ask how they relate and combine with each other? Why do progressives not wonder more about how multiple interlocking power structures operate simultaneously?
Why, although sexual violence is pervasive to the systems of militarism, capitalism, imperialism, and racism, is it not viewed as being as essential to oppression as capitalism?
How can activists face this urgent moment with defiance and turn our resistance/s and reform actions into revolutionary acts?
Why is it not understood that the most revolutionary and necessary politics for today is a queer abolitionist socialist feminism?
So much has changed. So little has changed. Everything has changed. Not enough has changed. Each is true. What to do?
I. AN INTRO OF SORTS
This writing for this moment is structured as a conversation with you—wherever you are located with your own political consciousness—and myself. I will try to find and expose everything I am thinking so that I build a trust with you. I hope that you will read this and it will help you feel courageously defiant and hopeful. Even if you are not sure about the probability of success, you know that the unbearable suffering in this country and the pain across the planet must be ended. And maybe my offering, my deeply felt intellectual political polemic, will allow you and us to expunge the hate, the exploitation, and cruelty that floods communities across this nation.
I am a white woman who benefits from a structural system of white supremacy and privilege but also suffers its misogynist roots/routes. My imaginings of an abolitionist socialist feminism then demand the uprooting of white supremacy along with an assault on the patriarchal structure that supports both. I will sometimes use misogynoir, the term coined by feminist writer Paula Moya, to express this intimate connection between race and gender. And I will continually look for my own complicity in these punishing oppressions.
As I write, I am thinking about my sister friends of color and my love and debt to them. It is this debt, in part, that pushes me to write in these fraught times and say to them that many white people do and can turn against their own privilege, can and do love you even if Trump and his cohorts are working hard to convince you otherwise.
I also write to white women across class divides to say that you should take a stand to abolish the exploitation and hatred that plagues this country and the globe. White antiracist women, and the men they bring with them, young and old, trans and nonbinary, gay, disabled and not, have to become a part of this uprising. Immigrants, people of color, Blacks, LatinX, South Asians are already rising.
My optimism is key to my argument. So, also, is my belief that people are able to change themselves. And that we must catch up with the possibilities that are unraveling today rather than let them pass us by because we do not see the urgency. The massive political and weather calamities displacing and killing millions of us give us no other choice.
I offer my queries as a guide for action and not for simple pondering. Our actions, while forming tenuous connections, will offer new answers yet unknown. I loop through related thoughts and sometimes repeat them so they can be seen in their repetitive formation; I wind and rewind in order to see how race and sex and gender and class protect and expose each other.
I ask you to see my method as illustrative of the incompleteness of political history. In a sense, I mimic the ever-present nature of white misogynist privilege by calling attention to it again and again. Structural inequities recur repeatedly in slightly differing fashion, and not enough critical theory puts this in the bold, allowing us to see the nature of the problems more clearly. If I keep returning to naming the problem, I do so to make sure we are readying to see and act. If you get annoyed with this method, think about how the millions suffering oppression feel daily.
My method asks all of us, but especially white people, especially antiracist white women, to open both our eyes and our minds and our language to see deeper into the structures of racist, sexist, and class power. Listen especially carefully to women of color who most often know and have experienced more of the oppression. Most often, the more power you have, the less you know of oppression, the less you see and feel it.
Be ready to engage and risk yourself. Stop wondering if you are comfortable with change and instead change yourself to wonder how to create fairer and more just lives for the most injured. I am sure of nothing other than it is time.
a bit of intro to me
My political history, like most people’s, is deeply personal. Our lives are defined by the contexts we inhabit—by the stories we hear and have absorbed and tell—alongside the happenings that are so often not of our own making. I am writing from different coalitional sites that are shifting and changing. My own history pushes me hard to see through to revolutionary actions and alliances for these times.
I grew up in a communist household with my three beloved sisters, Sarah, Giah, and Julia. The civil rights movement defined our lives. Saturday mornings we regularly arose to the call from our parents that it was time to get up and demonstrate. We would get dressed, have breakfast, and leave to join the picket line at places like Woolworth’s, where lunch counters were still segregated.
My