As the consumer-oriented liberalism of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs gave way to the technological authoritarianism of Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, this strange foundation paved the way for “neoreaction,” or, in a distorted echo of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s rationalist vision, the “Dark Enlightenment.”
If we want to speak of a working-class party, we need to begin from the working class as it exists, not as we would like it to be. Yet what considers itself a blueprint will not and cannot concern itself primarily with a concrete analysis of class composition. The organizational questions it can address are only those posed from above, while those raised from below go unacknowledged.
To strike is to challenge and block the forms of producing and reproducing life in homes, in neighborhoods, in workplaces. It is to connect violence against women with the specific political nature of the current forms of exploitation of the production and reproduction of life. The strike was the key that enabled us to unite those two things.
It’s only by acknowledging the roots of identity politics in the emancipatory movements of the past that we can begin the collective work of formulating a positive alternative.
I would like to briefly return to what might be the central problem of political subjectivity, where Marxist thought encountered its limit and ultimately hit an impasse: the party-form and its conflictual relationship with another “form,” that of the “women’s movement” and, consequently, feminism.
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.
Viewpoint Magazine