I am not a child of the academy, in fact I have very little formal education. I am a highschool drop out, a sex worker, and yet I think in terms of theory my voice might be a valuable one. I think too much of our theory has been written by the academy, academics with supposedly altruistic aims, academics who pretend to listen to women like me, pretend to be there for us and publish articles about us but never by us. I am not here to be your plain speaking prop, a quote in a book you publish and profit from. I am not here to be your romanticized image of a proletarian, so quaintly, charmingly uneducated. I did not slog my way through Capital while working late nights to allow you to use me to fuel your elitist anti-intellectualism, your belief that proletarians should not be expected to read theory because we are not smart enough to do so, a belief which justifies your belief that you (college educated, NGO types) are necessary to working class organization and struggle.
I am a communist, but I do not trust charity. Charity is all too often more about the emotional needs of the giver than the material needs of the receiver. I am here out of self interest. I am here for my own liberation, a liberation I know will only come through the liberation of the entire working class, because if you do not destroy oppression root and branch, it will always grow back. I could jockey for position within systems of oppression, but I find that idea ultimately unsatisfactory. I do not want to get away with war crimes only to be pulled over by the fashion police. I could use the supposed “authenticity” (how I loathe that word) of my voice to make myself a career in speaking at conferences on the struggles of women like me (only while supervised by a nice properly educated academic of course). I could get myself lauded and studied and listened to by a rapt audience of supposedly well meaning bourgeoisie, and give myself a marvelous sense of self importance without doing anything, but I do not wish to be a performing seal.
I am unsatisfied with the current state of leftist feminist theory, most of which is writing by bourgeois women done during the 60s in a haze of drugs and woo woo nonsense. I have little patience for this. I am a proletarian woman. I do not have time for pontificating about the imagined witch-cults of medieval europe. I have no need of a matriarchal eden to call patriarchy unjust. I do not have the time or energy for a community garden. I have no wish to overturn the advances of modern agriculture, no wish to fight high per acre yields that result in lessening the problem of deforestation, and a reduced need for agricultural toil. All I have time for is revolution and that is what I am here for. I do not mean revolution in the sense it is so often used today, where revolution is what we call a minor advance in blender technology, I mean the motherfucking revolution. I am here for mass organization, strikes, and the overthrow of capital and the abolition of the state. I am here to demand an end to this period of leftism being dominated by a waffling, hesitating, anti-revolutionary academic current, and the start of a period of active class struggle.
I am tired of the tired old “not at this historical moment” cannard. There is no historical moment that will magically arrive and herald in the revolution unless we build that moment, unless we put in the work to build it. You are waiting rather than doing only because for you the situation is not a desperate one. This is not a system I can live in. This is not a system I can have children in. I am working myself to death trying to attain some scrap of security for me and mine, and it will never come, and so I write from a place of raw animal need. I write from the knowledge that without hope of revolution, I have no hope at all.
I am tired of being told that shit that isn’t going to help me is the revolution and I am deeply unsatisfied with the current state of leftist theory in general which seems to be a lot of pretty revolutionary rhetoric and no action. There is endless theorizing about what this or that minor aspect of this or that indicates within the framework of, through the eyes of… blah blah blah bloody blah and none of the fiery utile work done in the early 20th century, none of the crucial instructiveness of the writing that came out of black liberation in the 60s (really the only new left theory worth reading in my opinion, with black feminist writings of the time being some of the very best leftist feminist theory around). There is examination of capitalism, but this is no time for arm chair revolutionaries who would rather dissect minor points of theory than act. This refusal to act is as unsatisfactory to me as the bourgeois feminist obsession with whether the way we fuck is conducive to gender liberation.
The liberation of the working class and the liberation of women are dependent upon us building effective mass organizations and fighting back. We cannot ask. We must demand because our oppressors will never willingly relinquish their power.
So I am here to write something with a bit of fire. I am here to write for those of us who need the revolution to be soon, because we suffer and die waiting for that mythic historical moment to deliver us. So here we go.
Thoughts From The Peacock Angel 