Miscellaneous Marxist Manifest@

To my awesome readers,

    Thank you for being a part of this semester as I have learned and grown in so many ways.  This is my final post for this class (though I will try to continue posting in my post-grad life as well!), and I hope it serves to tie together some thematic strings of these reflections.  Today's post is a little different, however.  It is a "Manifest@" - a profession of my beliefs and commitment to working toward achieving the change I want to see in the world.  I wrote the following (longer than usual) document in collaboration with Monzong Cha and Lauren Kramer.  Together we comprise the "Miscellaneous Marxists," which is a nickname we acquired during the course of this class because of our mutual focus on broader systems of oppression, even in micro-scale analyses.  I hope you enjoy and, more importantly, actively engage with what we've composed.

The Miscellaneous Marxists

"our own lived experience"

    We are the Miscellaneous Marxists, a group of students who believe that the way capitalism manifests itself in our world is inherently oppressive and contributes to every issue that we have encountered throughout this course.  We are “Miscellaneous” because we each come to this collective with our own lived experience, perspective, and passion.

    This is a “Manifest@” because language reflects culture, and we want to subvert the Western inclination toward linguistic androcentrism: the mistaken belief that the male stands for the whole. When we repeat androcentric phrases, we validate androcentrism.

"everyone is welcome"

However, the power of language can also be harnessed as a vehicle for profound social change; when we reject the lexicon of androcentrism and replace it with gender-inclusive language, we deny that ideology its power. We use the “@” symbol to replace androcentrism with gender-inclusive language; in feminist Spanish-speaking circles, people replace “a” and “o” with “@” for mixed-gender groups or people who have not self-identified as a man or woman. Our use of “@” symbolizes that anyone and everyone is welcome and necessary in our struggle.

    The purpose of this manifest@ is to declare what we believe, expose the problems that feminism must confront, and propose ways of enacting change.  We identify as revised radical Marxist anti-racist feminists, and we recognize that every liberation is tied up with every other liberation.

The Manifest@

1.  The biggest issues facing women today are structural in nature.  The oppression we experience is not only individual, but also systemic and institutional.  We reject liberal feminism, which preserves oppressive patriarchal structures, simply aiming to bring women “up” to the normalized status of (a certain type of) men in society, rather than challenging hierarchy itself.  We reject choice feminism, which posits that any “choice” a woman makes is a feminist choice because it refuses to acknowledge the constraints on women’s options and avoids the fact that the personal is political.

"inextricably interconnected"

2.  All systems of oppression are inextricably interconnected and cannot be treated as isolated phenomena.  These systems include racism, sexism, heterosexism, ableism, ageism, classism, cis-sexism, and every other way that a group of people are privileged or disempowered because of their identity.  These oppressive structures have infiltrated every facet of our lives, even the way we speak about them.

3. In the process of our liberation, we recognize, validate, and hold to be central, the voices and experiences of trans*, lesbian, bisexual, queer, genderqueer, intersex, asexual, and other marginalized groups and individuals within the feminist community.  Their issues are our issues regardless of whether or not we belong to those categories ourselves.

4. We must free ourselves of the oppressive ideologies that have pervaded our cultures and our own minds.  To do so, we must actively decolonize and decapitalize our minds, liberating ourselves of patterns of thought and action that perpetuate the systems we will eliminate.

"continually self-reflective"

5. Our liberation will necessitate constant intentionality.  We must be continually self-reflective so that we are conscious of the implications of all we do.  There must be purpose to each of our actions, and the action must match our values to the fullest extent.  We consider our means to be equally as important as our ends, which involves perpetually cultivating and practicing mindfulness.

"Education reform is essential to liberation"

6. Education reform is essential to liberation.  This begins with access. Education, including higher education, needs to be free for all and equipped to support all students. It is immoral and unacceptable to fund schools differently based on property tax revenues or student performance rates. We must equally distribute resources, including teachers, to each school to ensure that all students have at least comparable learning environments. In addition to access, we demand that the curriculum taught in the classroom and the way this curriculum is presented validates a variety of peoples and experiences, not just white male imperialist patriarchs.

"demolish the prison-industrial complex"

7. We must demolish the prison-industrial complex and the existence of privatized prisons.  The United States has the world’s highest incarceration rate.  The system of mass incarceration is a system of racial control that traps poor people of color in second-class status for a lifetime.  Policies that encourage racial profiling need to be eliminated because they contribute to the unjust mass incarceration of people of color, and in addition, they are not grounded in fact.  Ex-felons should not have their basic rights, especially the right to vote, taken away because of their status.  

8.  Everyone has the right to live comfortably without having to worry about meeting their basic needs.  The wealthiest U.S. households need to contribute their fair share to the benefit of the rest of the population. We must tax unearned income at the same rate as earned income and return to the taxation rates effective in 1953, in which the wealthiest portion of U.S. earners paid a top tax rate of 92%. In addition to altering taxation rates, we also must reconsider the way our tax dollars are utilized.  We must employ fair redistribution practices so that the lower-income members of our society are able to live the lives they deserve.

"Healthcare is a human right"

9. Healthcare is a human right. Everyone should receive high-quality and free care, which includes not only biomedical treatment, but also preventative and overall wellness care.  We unequivocally demand reproductive rights, including the right to contraception, safe, legal abortion, prenatal care, and postnatal care, regardless of age, gender, marital status, or any other factor.  We also believe that the production and distribution of a male contraceptive pill is of vital importance to the liberation of women.

10. Corporate media limits the audible spectrum of voices and conversations heard by the broader populace.  The mainstream media is increasingly and unacceptably implicated with economic and political elites, refusing to confront those same people who hold power.  Independent media breaks down the barriers to equal representation, opening access for marginalized people to speak for and accurately represent themselves.  Dominant media conglomerates must be broken up, and the number of channels and stations that are owned by corporations must be matched by those owned by independent collectives.

"prioritize demilitarization"

11. As a collective committed to nonviolence, we demand that our communities and our nation abide by the same principle. We prioritize demilitarization of the United States because the military industrial complex squanders resources, destroys peoples and the planet, and maintains exploitative imperialist colonial practices.  We demand to cut the military budget by at least 50% and redistribute that money to fund a federal jobs program; to close overseas bases and end the corporate natural resource-driven wars, attacks, and conflicts; and to teach non-violent conflict resolution and the value of consensus-based decision-making.

"enable us to create"

12. We demand election reform in order to enable us to create the society that we want. We must eliminate the two-party stranglehold and the Electoral College, abolish the Commission on Presidential Debates, introduce an Election Day national holiday and extend the voting period over a weekend, prohibit corporate funding of any candidate or party, and amend the constitution to ban corporate personhood.

13. These points are just the beginning of the large-scale revolution for which we stand.  We have extremely large goals, and we are conscious and proud of that fact. In order to make these changes happen, we are willing to take small steps to get there (if necessary).  We will be intentionally straightforward; we will not sugar-coat our stances and experiences. We refuse to skirt around issues that need to be dealt with openly and explicitly:  we are calling out the faults of our society, and we are calling on our society to change them.

"we are calling on our society to change"

Passionate Politics, Potential Futures

    Today in class we watched the first part of a documentary called Passionate Politics about the life and works of Charlotte Bunch, an feminist activist on the international level.  Charlotte Bunch is known for her work to include lesbian issues in the feminist movement, being a strong advocate for coalition-building among different social movements, and bringing the slogan "Women's Rights are Human Rights" to the main-stage of the feminist movement and other international movements (although that quote is often attributed to Hillary Rodham Clinton).  Though I certainly wouldn't claim to be near Bunch's level, I saw a lot of similarities between her story and my story.

    In the documentary, Bunch discusses being raised in an activist household, one whose motive for service was derived from their Methodist faith.  I wouldn't call my house an "activist household," but I was definitely raised with that same sense of justice and fairness based upon my family's morals, which were more often than not faith-based.

    Through her church she was introduced to the idea of global service, and she went to college planning to be a missionary.  In that respect, Bunch and I are the same.  I knew of global service from my church and my family, and I fully intended to pursue a missionary career in which I could combine ministry, medicine, and foreign travel.  Coming into St. Olaf College, I was on the Pre-Medicine track with Biology and Spanish majors.

    In college, Bunch was exposed to the Civil Rights movement, and she was slowly radicalized.  Beginning with pray-ins at segregated churches and leading towards speeches at major rallies, Bunch became a true activist.  It wasn't until she graduated, married, and entered the workforce and graduate programs that Bunch became aware of the dire need for the Feminist movement as well.  Though I'm certainly not immersed in a social environment like that of the 1960s, there have been several things that have slowly radicalized me as a college student.  From classes that I have taken to situations I have encountered (like those I talked about in "Making a Sustainable Movement"), my time at St. Olaf has transformed me into a woman who understands much more of the realities facing the world and what I can do about them.

    After pursuing her activism in the U.S., Charlotte Bunch took on the ever-precarious effort for an international feminism.  Pursuing her initial desire to travel the world, but with a much different lens of how service ought to be, Bunch became a leading force for creating a global feminism.  Bunch worked on a macro-scale, engaging the United Nations, and on a micro-level, developing relationships by listening and learning from others.

    Next year, as I have mentioned before, I am moving to Mexico City with Young Adults in Global Mission.  As I prepare for that experience, I am channeling the ELCA's model of service:  accompaniment, which is "walking together in solidarity that is characterized by mutuality and interdependence."  Hopefully a mindset of servanthood through accompaniment will allow me to go out into the world and, like Charlotte Bunch, develop relationships of solidarity, ones that will teach me what global feminism can really look like.

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A footnote:  This is my last regular blog post of the semester; there will be an upcoming "Manifesta," but this is it for normal posting.  I hope you have enjoyed it - I sure have!

Making a Sustainable Movement - is it Possible?

     Today's readings were a little bit too real for me right now.  We looked at Power in a Movement by Judith Stadtman Tucker, the same author I talked about in Market Logic Motherhood and founder of The Mother's Movement Online, and The Mother's Movement:  The Challenges of Coalition Building in the Twenty-First Century by Patrice Diquinzio, Associate Provost at Washington College and former professor of feminist philosophy.  These two articles detailed the way that social movements ought to be structured in order to be sustainable and effective.

     As a co-organizer in the recent "Enough! - The New Face of St. Olaf" movement on campus, the suggestions and shortcomings of these two articles were extremely relevant to my own life at this very moment.  As I stated in an article released in the Manitou Messenger yesterday, "Rather than simply talk about the issues, we culminated our event with a call to action, beginning the student-led organization that has evolved" into what it is today.  Unlike John Mayer, we are not "waiting on the world to change," but making the change happen.  As Tucker stated in her article, "I'm no longer satisfied with writing and talking ... I want to get the job done."  And that is exactly what we are trying to do.

     As I read the articles on activism, I couldn't help but compare our movement with the ideals outlined in the texts.  One of the first requirements that Tucker lays out is that we must think beyond ourselves.  As a group comprised of a wide variety of different people organizing around an even wider array of issues (racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, ableism, religious intolerance, sizeism, etc.), I think we pretty adequately fit that description.  The second requirement is balancing talk and action.  In our initial forum on March 11th and our open letter published online on Tumblr and Facebook and circulated around campus in print, we "talked" a lot.  Now we are trying to take the information we have presented and move toward "action" on our propositions for change.  Next Wednesday, May 1st, 2013 we are organizing a Solidarity Rally in the Quad to bring these issues up in public and show just how many people are affected, personally or indirectly, by discrimination and hatred at St. Olaf College.

     Tucker then talks about "building on-ramps to activism" as a means of sustaining a movement, stating that "multiple entry and exit points for first-time and seasoned activists" are essential to success.  This is one area of our movement that I think is struggling somewhat.  Although we would love to have more people engaged in the daily tasks of organizing, we haven't found an effective way of reaching out to new students and keeping them involved.  After our original meeting with 150 attendees, 102 of whom signed up to be a part of the movement.  But by the time we had finalized our open letter, only 20-some of us were regularly attending meetings.  Many other students continued to check in with those of us who were regular attendees, explaining that school, work, meetings, and other commitments kept them from being actively involved - all of which are totally valid reasons.  However, this analysis leaves me wondering how we can build as much flexibility (identified as essential by both Tucker and Diquinzio) as possible into our movement from here on out.

     Similarly, I find myself wondering about how well we have executed the coalition-building discussed by Diquinzio.  Though at the start we invited every single student organization and academic department to our presentation (I literally emailed every alias or contact person), we have proceeded largely on our own.  This has not been out of any separatist motive, but simply a function of how we proceeded.  As we wanted to keep the movement student-led, we did not pursue official recognition or faculty leadership.  In so doing, we kept our autonomy, but limited our resources.  As we move on in a more public way - the Solidarity Rally, supporting Carleton's similar efforts, meeting with administrators, etc - we can hopefully become a more interdependent, coalition-based movement.

Ultimately, I think our struggle to be the most effective, sustainable movement we can be comes down to the wise words of Maya Angelou:

Do the best you can until you know better.

Then when you know better, do better.

Enough! is doing the best that we can,
and as we know better we will do better.