ABOLITIONIST SOCIALIST FEMINISM
ABOLITIONIST SOCIALIST FEMINISM
Radicalizing the Next Revolution
ZILLAH EISENSTEIN
MONTHLY REVIEW PRESS
New York
Copyright © 2019 by Zillah Eisenstein
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
available from the publisher.
ISBN cloth: 978-1-58367-762-9
Typeset in Minion Pro and Bliss
MONTHLY REVIEW PRESS, NEW YORK
5 4 3 2 1
For the murdered children of Hiroshima, Syria, Yemen, Palestine and the captured, caged, and homeless children in the U.S.
CONTENTS
V. WHY SOCIALIST FEMINISM IS NOT ENOUGH
VI. WHY ANTIRACISM IS NEVER ENOUGH
VII. THE WHITE MIND AND ITS INJUSTICES
VIII. AND THEN THERE WAS THE 2016 ELECTION
IX. WHEN THE CRITIQUE OF CAPITAL(ISM) IS NOT ENOUGH
X. WHEN THE POPE’S PONTIFICATIONS ARE NOT ENOUGH
XI. THE PROLETARIAT IS NOT WHITE MEN
XII. THE CHAOS OF TRUMP’S WHITE-SUPREMACIST MISOGYNY
XIII. REVOLUTIONIZING #METOO, #TIMESUP, #USTOO, #SEXUALSPRING
XV. ON BUILDING REVOLUTIONARY CONNECTORS
XVI. CREATING REVOLUTIONARY POSSIBILITIES
… the old is dying and the new cannot be born.
— ANTONIO GRAMSCI
We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe.
— FRANTZ FANON
When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.
—AUDRE LORDE
Today is always yesterday.
— SCRATCHED ON A WALL IN SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL
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
