thanks to @iridaniotter@hexbear.net for telling me abt this essay! its been posted on HB before, but not in a while.

read feminist theory you libs! uphold TC69 thought!

  • imogen_underscore [it/its, she/her]
    ·
    2 days ago

    this essay says a lot of stuff i'm sure we all agree with, so i would challenge people to bring up things it says that you don't fully agree with!

    • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]
      ·
      a day ago

      I feel like even though there isn't a whole lot I disagree with, there's a fundamental disagreement in framework that's lurking beneath the surface and despite the disagreement in framework, the text is "lucky" enough that the conclusions aren't something that I disagree with. But there's cracks. I'll use this as an example:

      In many cases like this, it’s elucidative to make an analogy. For this, let’s talk about bakers. When someone engages with the capitalist system by baking, they tend to form an identity around this baking. That is, having a career in which you bake creates the identity of baker. Similarly, when you engage with reproductive labor in particular ways, you create particular gender identities, both in the ways you conform with the gender that has been given to you and in the ways in which you reject the gender that has be given to you. In both cases, an element of the base is creating within you an identity. Which is to say, your identity stemming from your social position is superstructural.

      But this isn't true. In capitalist society, people actually have weak identities related to their occupation. The identity is stronger for labor aristocrats with stable careers, but for your average prole hopping between different gigs on top of various side hustles, how can an job identity possibly form if you have no job stability? And even with labor aristocrats, there's that dreaded phrase "wears many hats," which further erodes identity. In the end, it's because capitalists see workers as any other factory equipment, tools that are interchangeable. They want workers to be blank slate assembly line products that can be minimally modified to perform various tasks. They don't want specialists, but generalists that can molded for various ends like clay.

      The real mode of production that cultivated occupation identities was feudalism. If you came from a shoemaking family, your destiny in life was to make shoes for your feudal liege and teach your kids how to make shoes so your kids will continue the cycle making shoes for the feudal liege's kids. A peasant was supposed to know their place as a peasant and raise kids who will also know their place as peasants. Chinese text written during the Spring and Autumn Period went so far as to recommend quarantining people with similar occupations together so if you came from a shoemaking family, you not only were expected to be shoemaker but couldn't even leave the shoemaking part of town so that you'll pick up shoemaking skills faster.

      This is a nitpick that has nothing to do with the text, but the entire section no longer makes any sense since the rest of the section builds on the analogy:

      So will we force people to stop identifying with being a baker or being a woman?

      But most workers don't identify with their occupation in this way, so the question isn't very relevant.

      What happens to my identity as a baker once the capitalist system of careers which produced that identity is abolished? This is much more interesting of a question, anyway. Without the enforcement of labor characterized by capitalism, no longer is someone who bakes bread forced into staying within that career.

      Except there are plenty of workers who constantly switch jobs and live in precariously (ie the precariat, a term that I'm iffy about) as well as people who have multiple side gigs and hustles.

      Over time, the identity of being a baker will likely fade, tho there are many social factors which could allow it to persist, but it would lose its social and political significance. There is no need to enforce the abandonment of the identity of baker to do away with the career system which has produced it.

      I mean, it's already fading under capitalism and it has already lost most of its social and political significance. Having a surname Schumaker doesn't mean you make shoes. Starting a shoe-making business with the surname Schumaker doesn't make people go, "wow, this business definitely knows how to make shoes." I would say that capitalism has eroded real identities with deep roots and has replaced it with completely shallow commodifed pastiches of those identities.

      It looks like I'm bashing the work, but if you take out everything related to using baker as an analogy in that section, I don't find that section objectionable at all. This is what I mean when I say that their conclusions are reasonable, but the framework to get to those conclusions is not good imho.

      • macerated_baby_presidents [he/him]
        ·
        18 hours ago

        yeah the analogy here should be someone who identifies as "working class", which won't mean anything under communism. except we're trying to increase class consciousness so that the proletariat can win class struggle, so it would be a bad analogy

    • RaisedFistJoker [she/her]
      ·
      edit-2
      a day ago

      "We don’t find communism in plans for the future, but, rather, in a worker sabotaging his workplace, a wife who escapes from her abusive husband with her children, Naxalites engaging in guerrilla warfare against the Indian government, rioters rejecting the police to loot and burn their cities, etc. "

      This is not what communism means!

    • Hexboare [they/them]
      ·
      a day ago
      CW: SA

      Marriage is an economic contract between a man and a woman. Men and women are supposed to sign an agreement to be faithful and to stay together and violation of that is seen as a breach of contract and therefore bad.

      I think it's quite a bit more than a neutral economic contract - it's also often as a sexual contract, which is reflected in the long history of maritalremoved being lawful and a number of states still having special provisions around martialremoved. The breach of contract description is probably more accurate for men, but when you look at the different responses to women cheating (or the justification of men cheating, see above for bodily ownership of the woman dimensions), it's worse than that.

      In marriage, the man is expected to make money to support the woman and the woman is expected to clean up the home, take care of the children, cook, and shop.

      Increasing there is an expectation that women will continue to work and their professional careers (without a reduction in domestic labour)

      no gender (asexual people)

      Think they meant agender here, surely?

      Didn't finish it, will return and post again later

    • macerated_baby_presidents [he/him]
      ·
      edit-2
      2 days ago

      Comment with small things:

      This new system has a few characteristics which define it. Not all of them developed at once, but they’ve been imposed upon the whole world. They are as follows:

      [...]

      1. Marriage is an economic contract between a man and a woman. Men and women are supposed to sign an agreement to be faithful and to stay together and violation of that is seen as a breach of contract and therefore bad.

      2. Marriage is a personal choice done for love rather than a social choice done for necessity. Gone are marriages for alliances or arranged marriages, for the most part. Marriage is only a choice for the two who are getting married.

      Obviously there is some conflict between the ideas of economic marriage and love marriage. The system is in motion; the superstructure shifts focus from 3 to 4 as women become proletarianized. I would have liked to see some exploration.

      Since this third class is defined by its difference from those of the first two classes, it is named queer. Queer people are all those who relate differently to the division of reproductive labor assigned to them by patriarchy. Because of the different relations, queer people are inherently subversive to the class system as a whole and constitute the revolutionary class under patriarchy.

      if women are the oppressed class, doing reproductive labor without any control over it, why wouldn't women be the revolutionary class? this is like axiomatically saying that lumpens, not proles, will be the revolutionary class that brings about the abolition of the proletariat. some people think so but without an argument I'm not convinced

      People whose gender doesn’t match with the gendering of their biological features aren’t exactly new. Many previous systems had explicit classes for people like this, such as the Bugi gender system. These are multigendered systems and they have a space for those who aren’t willing to accept the gender assigned to their biology.

      Nitpick: we opened the piece by saying that gender is a superstructure and reproductive labor divisions are the base, and by explicitly repudiating people who think that sex is the material base of gender. So gender isn't "assigned to biology" in these multigendered systems, it's assigned to labor roles.

      Gender isn’t inherent, but it spreads by assigning us to a class and forcing us to say yes to that class. “Yes, I am a man. It is who I am and who I always have been. I cannot escape it or deny it. I am a man.” This is nothing but a lie we are forced to repeat. But by repeating it enough, we come to believe it. Gender becomes natural, inescapable, eternal. It ceases to be an imposed identity and becomes an eternal part of who we are.

      I don't think this is consistent with the idea of labor role as base and gender as superstructure. Gender can't spread via people internalizing the superstructure and identifying as a man or woman. In this framework gender must spread (or rather maintain itself) by people carrying out the role of gender. I think this section is inconsistent with the one on baking, which is better. People identify as "bakers" not because they think of themselves as a baker and then seek out jobs at a bakery, but because they are economically coerced into wage labor and they end up at a bakery. As the authors write, the superstructural identity of "baker" will wither away once baking is not a job. People really do think of themselves as having a gender. But some Brits think of themselves as "upper crust" and some Indians think of themselves as "Brahmins", and the way to class abolition is not people deciding not to identify as working-class anymore. It's a basal change caused by oppressed people engaging in class struggle and winning. The authors say things like "If everyone says “no” to gender, everyone ceases to accept it, then gender is lost. We find similar strategies among resistance to other class systems." We must be clear that saying "no" to gender has to mean more than just refusing to perform cisgender identity, it has to mean tearing down gendered division of reproductive labor. And if the authors agree, I wish they'd have written more about the specifics of what reproductive labor actually is and how the masses can fight male control of it.

      • EelBolshevikism [none/use name]
        ·
        edit-2
        a day ago

        Queer people do not carry out their social existence by leeching off the produced labor of the "prole" equivalent here (women), unlike actual lumpenproletariat. They are fundamentally more 'revolutionary' than the lumpenproletariat because no such option is available, beyond simply adopting the social roles of a man. Most queer people choose to live in entirely different novel family configurations which often still take on the labor of child rearing and sometimes even birth, which shows the fundamental difference between queer people and some sort of "gender lumpenproletariat" which would somehow leech off of women giving childbirth (they would have to be literal baby snatchers, arguably)

        • macerated_baby_presidents [he/him]
          ·
          18 hours ago

          My understanding of reproductive labor is limited, but it isn't just birth and childrearing, it's also stuff like housekeeping which enables wage laborers to work. Both expansion and maintenance of labor. Although queer people engage in that sort of thing (we all do to some extent) more than lumpen are economically productive, the reason I made the comparison is numbers. Lumpen are only a small fraction of society and capitalism tends to maintain a constant reserve army of labor, in contrast to the ever-increasing share of proletarians. Artisans would have been a less loaded example, a small class of laborers that doesn't have much power (except that nobody thinks artisans will lead the revolution). My problem is the authors don't really explain why the fraction of queer people might expand until they are doing enough reproductive labor to take the reins. They just handwave "gender's process of decay".

      • EelBolshevikism [none/use name]
        ·
        edit-2
        a day ago

        I actually disagree with both you and the article. I think people would still identify as bakers without needing to sell their labor or baking to live. It would just have a different, less desperate social context. Someone who really likes baking may still choose to identify with it, as people have identified with things they've liked since long before capital was a thing.

      • ZoomeristLeninist [comrade/them, she/her]
        hexagon
        M
        ·
        2 days ago

        gender forms its own base/superstructure that is informed by the base/superstructure of society at large. the base/superstructure of labor, gender, race, nationality, ability etc. are all informed by the capital mode of production that forms the base of society. women are part of the revolutionary class, the authors arent excluding them

        • macerated_baby_presidents [he/him]
          ·
          edit-2
          2 days ago

          It seems like the authors directly contradict that. There's the section I quoted, but they also just don't talk about anything that women will do as a gender class to tear down the gender class system. Some antifeminist communists pay lip service to feminism by saying "of course we're feminist, women are part of the revolutionary proletariat". As you pointed out, the "totality" stuff is pretty tacked on and the bulk of the specifics are about how gender accelerationism is going to bring about gender abolition.

    • ZoomeristLeninist [comrade/them, she/her]
      hexagon
      M
      ·
      edit-2
      2 days ago

      it brushes on intersectionality but not nearly enough. its important to remember that black people and indigenous people will play a role comparable to that of queer people and women in overthrowing capitalism. and that exploited nations will likely have more influence than in 1848 in the coming social upheaval. atp a modern 1848 is unavoidable, the republics of today are not fit to manage information capital in order to stabilize capitalism in the face of declining rates of profit (information capital is one of their big counter-tendencies for the falling rate of profit). capital either finds a new host in the form of a technocracy or corporate bureaucracy (the ultimate dream of fascists) or we overcome capital. the latter is only accomplished with billions of people united in abolishing capitalism. a lot of our effort should be dedicated to weaving together groups of diverse oppressed people

      edit: the social upheaval will also be caused by the republics leaning on their traditional methods of slowing the falling rate of profit: reducing wages, increasing unemployment, and expanding finance capital. these methods have been stretched so thin that a breaking point is inevitable. information capital offers capitalists a method for reducing constant capital and automating labor (automation also leads to declining rates of profit tho). info capital also has the benefit of giving capital much more control over the proletarians.

      edit 2: and ofc the wage reduction and enforced impoverishment via "unemployment" will be concentrated in the most exploited nations (the DR Congo and Bangladesh). the alternative of BRICS erodes the US imperial soft power; imperial hard power is threatened by China, Russia, and Iran; and the domestic government of the US is slowly caving in on itself. all class systems should be considered in a complete analysis of gender bc the goal of "Queer Power" is only possible through a transitional socialist state. its what has historically gotten us closest to communism. the USSR had a People's Commissariat for Nationalities, China with its gentle approach (especially compared to the US) in addressing gender and nationality, and Cuba adding queer rights to its Constitution. but all of those liberation movements coincide with the movement to end capital's control of labor.

      • HamManBad [he/him]
        ·
        2 days ago

        I hope it's not just an 1848 moment, that was famously a failure for the revolutionaries and led to decades of reactionary politics across Europe

        • ZoomeristLeninist [comrade/them, she/her]
          hexagon
          M
          ·
          2 days ago

          im saying it has the same (probably more) potential energy than 1848. but the imperial core prob couldnt form a vanguard party if it happened today.

    • macerated_baby_presidents [he/him]
      ·
      edit-2
      2 days ago

      Comment with broader things:

      I liked the piece and thought it was interesting. The section on sexual violence as enforcement mechanism for gender roles, analogous to state enforcement of capitalism, was interesting. I'd like to read more about the process of delegation: the bourgeois state designates a relatively small number of police officers, but a much larger fraction of men enforce patriarchy.

      Overall, my biggest problem is the unanswered question of, OK what do we actually do about gender? The authors say "People fight capitalism through a refusal to work, a general strike against it." But obviously we can't go straight from 0 to general strike. We organize in unions to make strikes possible; workers initially strike because they will win direct material benefits, which also benefit the whole class; we have communist organizations to provide a vanguard to the growing class movement, etc etc. So how do we get from 0 to men and women laying down their genders as lead by the gender abolitionist vanguard, or whatever? What would drive the masses of men and women to fight against basal gender roles and become part of the trans revolutionary class? (The authors provide parallel power of queer institutions, but a dictatorship of the X is so named because the X actually has primary power over society. Mutual aid groups are not a dictatorship of the proletariat.)

      • iridaniotter [she/her]M
        ·
        a day ago

        OK what do we actually do about gender?

        Well, let's look at a couple contradictions.

        The manifesto speaks of gender's material base being in the sexed division of reproductive labor. This has been falling apart steadily since the 19th century. Proletarianization and mechanization degenders labor, and the time needed for homemaking has greatly reduced due to industrialization. The two things that remain are birth & childcare. However, birth rates across the developed world are below replacement rate, so it would be accurate to say that patriarchy & capitalism have become a fetter on the continued development of humanity. However, the reproductive technologies necessary for feminism & communism are underdeveloped. Although sex is no longer necessary for reproduction, semen still is, and biology is gendered under patriarchy, so this is a potential issue. Additionally, uterus transplant technology is in its infancy, and people still need to bear children themselves. Of course, these limitations would be less important if humans didn't still die of old age. So, if you're a biologist, you can do your part in abolishing the regime of gender by advancing reproductive technology or curing aging somehow.

        The manifesto provides five characteristics of the modern patriarchal system. Number two is:

        These two genders are seen as identical to your biology and fixed from birth. While every gender system ties gender to biology, the modern system equates the two. Being a man in this system isn’t tied to having a penis, it is having a penis. And this gender is immutable. You can’t change it. If you’re born as a man, you’re seen as a man no matter what. There are no options or alternatives.

        Actually, the Gender Accelerationist Manifesto is a bit lacking in commentary on this aspect compared to Gender Acceleration: A Blackpaper. The issue with this conception of gender/sex that many gender accelerationists raise is that it's 1) obsolete 2) increasingly unviable. Really, HRT allows one to change their sex, because no one actually has Superman's X-ray vision. Industrial society has had the means to completely tear apart this biological conception of gender for nearly a century at this point. Simply mandate puberty choice and have teens pick the hormones they want. Of course, patriarchal society is incapable of doing this, but eventually it may be forced to. The Blackpaper states,

        Recent studies, most famously one in 2007 and one meta-analysis of 185 studies from a total of almost 43,000 men referenced in a recent GQ article, show two things. There is without a doubt a staggering decline in testosterone, so much so that within a generation humans may become completely infertile.

        Human reproduction is becoming a quaint, unnecessary and ultimately purely elective act, and further evidence suggests that sperm is rapidly decreasing not only in quantity but also in quality, positioning the drive towards reproduction, the utility of reproduction, and the ability to reproduce all on a slope of ruthless decline.

        There is also the fact that there's a secular decline in the age of puberty. In Denmark, it begins before the age of ten. Maybe people will finally start to be alarmed when the majority of girls are growing breasts at eight?

        If patriarchy and capitalism are still around in a couple decades, not only will sex be forcibly assigned at birth, it will have to be forcibly assigned again years later through exogenous sex hormones. Everyone will be on blockers, and the half of a child that each couple will be having will be conceived through reproductive technologies. At this point the whole biological justification will become a clear farce. Advocacy for universal puberty choice would probably become a serious issue rather than a fringe one held by a few hundred communists.

        • macerated_baby_presidents [he/him]
          ·
          18 hours ago

          Tech to change the biological basis of the birth component of reproductive labor is all well and good, but there's no (gender) class struggle there. It's like saying that we need Cybersyn planning tech to do communism or that we need green energy to fight climate change: maybe, but that tech will lie fallow unless the working class gets its shit together. If there's nothing the revolutionary queer gender class can actually do to accelerate gender it doesn't make much sense to say they're accelerationists. Rather they are waiting for material conditions to change. No fun.

        • Hexboare [they/them]
          ·
          edit-2
          a day ago

          However, birth rates across the developed world are below replacement rate, so it would be accurate to say that patriarchy & capitalism have become a fetter on the continued development of humanity

          I think this is actually one of the contradictions between capitalism and patriarchy - the need to redeploy women's labour in capitalism has weakened the impact of patriarchal control to have more children, particularly when the number of births and pregnancy required is so much less than in pre-industrial agricultural economics.

          The replacement rate is the number of births required to maintain a birth rate that existed when patriarchy was wholly ascendant and women had no reproductive autonomy.

          While it's quite expensive and difficult for single women and couples that can't birth children themselves, I think the falling rate has a lot to do with women not wanting to have kids or as many kids.

          Surely there's more than a few hundred posters here that agree with puberty choice.

          An alternative (bad) vision for the future is massive increases in surrogacy, exporting reproductive imperialism to developing and often non-White countries (with a premium on "white" poor women as exists today in Ukraine, at least before 2022).

          • iridaniotter [she/her]M
            ·
            edit-2
            a day ago

            I think this is actually one of the contradictions between capitalism and patriarchy

            Yes! Totally.

            Surely there's more than a few hundred posters here that agree with puberty choice.

            Oh, probably. People just never think about it as a possibility and it's never really brought up. Everyone's on the back foot just trying to defend puberty blockers for trans kids.