Abolitionist Socialist Feminism. Zillah Eisenstein
bitches. Yet the NFL is mired in numerous allegations of domestic abuse by its players, and the physical brutality of the sport with its horrific head injuries is hardly a location of people’s liberation. Nevertheless, there are important sites of resistance from within.
How can these reform movements become revolutionary? Is it possible that because the problem of racist heteropatriarchal capitalism is interlocking, assaults aimed at a single site can disarm and weaken the entire foundation? There may not be a woman president at present, but there are many women leading the resistance in its many forms. Much of the radicalization surrounding electoral politics can morph into unknowable achievements, as demonstrated in the 2018 midterm elections.
If focusing on a part may destabilize the whole, this may mean that the relationship between reform and revolution is redefined as more of an integral process rather than separate and in contradiction. If there is not a single mode of production to attack, but multiple sites that protect the interlocking structure of racist capitalist patriarchy, do reformist politics become a revolutionary possibility? Contemplate with me the demands for single-payer health care, an end to racist policing, and full access to abortion, contraception, and reproductive justice, and imagine how they might help move along the revolutionary process that has already begun.
New questions that need to guide the work are: Is capital so malleable that it is able to absorb modernized systems of gendered racism? Is misogyny so malleable that it can still oppress most women while allowing others to hold positions of power? Can white supremacist capitalist patriarchy withstand substantial racial redefinition and still deliver the necessary exploitative systems? Can white supremacy have Black men and women ruling? The massively popular film Black Panther comes to mind. Can Blacks rule a Wakanda in the real world? Can Black women warriors bring the peace that we wish for or will the powers that be regroup to prevent such a world?
Capitalism needs more than an update. It needs more than a modernization that would bring multiple and diverse people to positions of power. Rather, it needs every kind of reform leading to and demanding revolution.
Because the problem abolitionists face is complex and multiple, questions that center on capitalism and sideline its white privilege and misogyny are, more than ever, insufficient. The predator-in-chief has made clear for all to see that misogyny (he will grab our pussies if he wants to) and whiteness (his base is white and he will throw everyone else under the bus) are key to saving capitalism.
Just maybe, global capitalist greed is undermining its golden rule. Instead of protecting and occluding the racist heteropatriarchal underbelly of capitalism, Trump upends it by exposing the usually well-kept secret that capital couldn’t do much of what it does if it didn’t use patriarchy and its deep roots/routes of modernized settler colonialism and chattel slavery to garner its profits.
So it is no surprise that Trump claims to defend white working-class men and promises them their jobs back. But it continues to amaze me that this is never described as identity politics. The putdown of identity politics is usually reserved for people of color and white women. Only those who criticize the racist, sexist, heterogendered, able-bodied, unfair structuring of citizenship and political life are categorized as indulging in identity politics.
But those of us critiquing the system are paving a new path. Audre Lorde pointed to the master’s tools and the master’s house, suggesting that they cannot resolve our dilemmas. Rosa Luxemburg understood that revolution cannot be bounded by limited imagination. Let some of us in the resistance call out the failed two-party system. Let many wonder about a third party if they must. Let some call for an end to nationalism and US exceptionalism and the wars necessitated by it. Let others demand an end to climate catastrophe and the destruction of the planet. Let still others imagine a whole new structural apparatus for communities living in a borderless global world.
Following Audre and Rosa, abolitionists need to dream beyond what feels like possibility. We need to mobilize our different movements of many distinct voices into a risk-taking set of coordinated actions. It is for those of us, especially privileged white people, to listen carefully and put our bodies on the line wherever they are needed, between the police and their militarized actions, and alongside our brothers and sisters of color in everyday life.
So feminists need to be and can be simultaneously diverse and unified and multipronged in our visions. Alicia Garza of Black Lives Matter says that the time to act is now, so embrace whoever is ready in this moment. Those of us who are antiracist can unite for the planet and our bodies against Trumpism and its cabal of violators and predators. S/exploitation is key to this system and must be destroyed along with its racial practice of domi/nation.
There are new possibilities to resist, as global capital has demanded the mobility of labor, threading many sites of colonial power, from Europe to the United States, creating a new majority/minority white status. Whiteness is exposed as a minority global characteristic more readily than before, now that the once predominantly white United States struggles to live its supremacist lie at home. And now that countries like France and Germany can no longer spin their white majority standing as one and the same with supremacy. White people have always been a minority in Africa, Asia, and South America. This will soon also be true in the United States and Europe, although as the white apartheid rule in South Africa showed, minorities can and do seize power.
It is essential to know and recognize that the right-wing nationalist, fascist, xenophobic, misogynistic takeover—by Trump, Modi, Putin, Erdogan, Assad, Duterte, and Bolsonaro—is global. Or as Priya Gopal, who writes about colonial and postcolonial literature, says, if the United States had been paying attention in 2014, it would have begun to worry when Modi, a known fascist, won the presidency of India, a country with one-sixth of the world’s population. When Trump spoke at the UN, declaring his policy of America First, and encouraging other nations to follow the same tack by making their own nations the priority, none of this would seem to make any sense for global capital. So beware.
It should be no surprise that women of color, especially Black women, voted against Trump in overwhelming numbers. Yet too many white women, across all class lines, did not. It remains to be seen whether the tenuous yet promissory stance and status of white women can be mobilized for abolitionist feminism. There is no way for this to happen without politicizing the racist misogyny of Trump and all these other right-wing regimes.
“We,” the big we, need to find our unity while recognizing our fabulous differences. Black Woman’s Blueprint asks us to do this. They mobilized women of color for the Women’s March by calling forth a specified agenda that included the needs of all women across class and racial lines. Former congressperson Luis Gutierrez did this when he said he would walk in the Women’s March with his wife and daughter because he cared about every slight to every human right.
This political moment can mobilize a new collaboration and a new solidarity that initiates a new revolutionary movement. We, the resistance, must be inside and outside, focus on both the legal and extralegal, be uncompromising and compromising and supportive and embracing of each other. Difference and conflict must be acknowledged and not feared in order for this new movement to grow.
Voices of critique from women of color are opportunities, not condemnations. At moments, demands will be specific and singular. Other times demands will be inclusive. Often the politics will have to be vague and unknown and unsettling.
No one fully knows how or why Trump won. No one really knows exactly who this elusive white working class is that voted for him. Or why the Democrats undermined Bernie Sanders and chose Hillary Clinton. Nor do we know exactly how the new working classes of women of color across the planet will become the new revolutionary hope. But Ai Jen Poo of the National Domestic Workers Alliance is already hard at work on this: working toward a Domestic Workers Bill of Rights and building liaisons between women workers across the economy.
This moment calls for women of color to go forth and lead the next revolutionary movement. Remember to use what was incredible about your foremother’s brilliance and make it better. I am with you, listening and collaborating as more than ally, as an abolitionist sister comrade, freedom fighter, in this struggle to finally upend white supremacy’s gendered and capitalist abuse. When we are doing the work together,