Abolitionist Socialist Feminism. Zillah Eisenstein

      A FEW FOUNDATIONAL QUERIES

       why socialism?

      Everyone deserves to live without the fear of hunger and homelessness and illness and unemployment and disability. The profit motive destroys humanity. A start toward socialism would be a universal livable wage and health care for all.

       why feminism?

      Because neither sex nor gender should determine one’s life choices. And because misogyny, the hatred of women, and heteropatriarchy, the structural support for women’s inequality, continually seek to control and regulate women’s bodies. My use of the term women always is inclusive of trans, gender-variant, queer, nonbinary identities. It is a specifically universal embrace.

      Feminism must create access and freedom for all of our sexual and reproductive bodies. Reform, as in women’s rights, is still threaded and structured through racist heteropatriarchy. So in the spirit of writer Mab Segrest, queer all this as well.

       why abolitionism?

      Chattel slavery has only been reformed, and personhood and civil and human rights remain unfulfilled. White supremacy must be completely uprooted from the structuring law, prisons, and the racist division of labor. Abolition is the totality needed to end the outrageous abuse and obscene everyday punishment of U.S. Blacks and other people of color, trans, queer, and straight alike. Abolition must abolish and not simply reform. Abolitionism is often used today to refer to the robust movement to end the prison system. My usage extends to the structural totality of misogynist racism wherever it thrives.

      Why am I still forced to be making this case after all the years of antiracist, antimisogynist critiques of capitalist racist heteropatriarchy? Why is this still the question? Why haven’t progressive thinkers and activists of all stripes changed more? Why does the left fail to recognize that the personal is political, that there is a politics to sex, that sexualized racism is foundational to class?

      Is it this exclusiveness of radical and revolutionary history that explains why there has never been a successful socialist revolution? Is that the reason why revolutions have merely chosen to reform parts of the nexus of power and oppression and exploitation? Is it that socialism needs more heart and body, more abolitionist socialist feminisms?

      We—those wishing for revolutionary change—need to move forward. If we remain mired in the old, we will just repeat it.

       the challenges that follow

       What do you do when socialism is not enough?

      You make it antiracist and feminist.

       What do you do when feminism is not enough?

      You make it socialist and antiracist.

       What do you do when antiracism is not enough?

      You make it socialist and feminist.

       And then what do you do?

      You make sure this abolitionist socialist feminism is fully inclusive, most especially