Separate from feminism because like feminism has a long history of focusing on the ideas and interests of bourgeois women, and ignoring or pathologizing working class women’s needs and so like a lot of women (rightly) associate it with stuff that does no good for them and also it would be nice to be able to find each other without ending up in a sea of bougie bullshit. Femmunism? Lady’s Class War? gyno-communism? Ladyism?
egalitarianism?
lmao holy shit imagine having this much of a fundamental misunderstanding of what liberatory movements are supposed to be. instead of concieving of a movement for the rights of women that concentrates on the struggles of working-class women implicitly or explicitly excluded from other forms of advocacy…just say the problem’s already fixed! Egalitarianism, that’s it!
the struggles of working-class women
which are?
Racialized misogyny, the expensiveness of reproductive care, the cost of hormones and operations like facial feminization surgery, the cost of things like clothes and makeup that are necessary for finding higher-paying jobs, a lack of maternity leave, there are many women’s issues that specifically impact working class women hardest. And yet you laugh about it.
The fact that we’re hypersexualized, and treated as a joke, the fact that our sexual and mothering practices are pathologized. Like misogyny is profoundly classed. Mainstream feminism is about female CEOs, and does nothing for rank and file women
Revolutionary feminism, Womens liberationist, marxist feminist, anarcha feminist, TIRF (trans inclusive radical feminist). these are what i tend to use
Nice, I also like red feminism (because I don’t identify as a Marxist or an anarchist, just a general commie) or maybe “Women’s power movement” or stealing the actually quite populist “girl power” and taking it from capitalist catch phrase to militant political organization
Concur in the entirety!
id be careful about using the word ‘power’ while defining ideology though, primarily to avoid co-opting terminology from the black power movement, but also because power is something that we ultimately need to fight against, not instrumentalise
I’m not sure what definition of power is the mainstream one, but the point with regards to black power is certaintlly essential. Power to me must be seized and used with regards to our oppresorsd. We must take power from those who harm us and derstroy them with it. If however for you power is some thing innate to oppresors then i would reframe the discourse around violence and destruction. We mmust use destroy power through collective solidairty of the oppresed. Hence even tho i am oppresed through being trans i can draw solidairt from my identity and fight against cis het normativity
“Blank power” as a construction has a history pre dating the black power movement.
Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country. — Vladimir Lenin
Labor power in Marxian analysis
Worker power in a lot of leftist discourse.
Actually this reminds me of an argument I saw about the raised fist symbol and how using it for stuff other than black power was cultural appropriation, when in fact the raised fist was already an IWW labor symbol by 1917 and what really bugs me about this is by denying the revolutionary leftist history of the “blank power” construction and the raised fist, you end up writing black people out of revolutionary leftist history when in fact black people were often crucially important leaders as well as making up a large portion of the US left, like radical leftists were key anti-racists, the IWW was founded by a group of leftists, including Lucy Parsons who was a woman of mixed Black and Native American ancestry. The IWW would get black members through the picket lines when segregated unions had strikes, in order to break them (because fuck segregated unions). Malcolm X was a leftist, Assata Shakur is a Marxist. Paul Robeson was a communist, and I could go on and on and on and like I think that there’s a fucked up tendency to think of these people only as heroes of black liberation, when in fact they should also be counted as major figures in terms of overall leftism. Jackie Ormes was blacklisted for attending communist meetings. Frantz Fanon was a key communist and anti-racist theorist.
And it’s like… it’s not like black power folks were taking symbols or language from a movement that had no history of black involvement or anti-racist struggle, in fact far left labor struggle in the states was usually heavily black and explicitly anti-racist, and like I think that the use of the raised fist and the term black power are intentional references to the language and iconography of class struggle because these are people who were and are intimately connected to and involved with class struggle.
I think there’s a weird thing going on where like people want to deny that the history of pretty much every social justice project has intimate links to the far left (so that liberal shitheads can make themselves feel good by valorizing Malcolm X while also utterly erasing huge parts of his politics and not acknowledging that their system is one that perpetuates white supremacy). I also think there’s a tendency among far leftists to see our history either as exclusively white, with black radicals in a sort of “to be consulted only on matters of racism and not to be given a voice on any other point of theory” auxilliary as if they had nothing else of importance to say (there is also a tendency to put leftist women in a “to be consulted only on matters of sexism and not to be given a voice on any other point of theory” auxilliary) whereas white dudes are allowed to talk about the position of the whole working class
IDK I guess I feel like this stuff is less leftists taking stuff from black movements and more white leftists not acknowledging the presence and important contributions of black leftists.
Also I tend to think of power in this sort of context not as power over other people, but as in having power over one’s own life and circumstances, not being powerless in the face of other greater powers looming over you.
Thoughts From The Peacock Angel 