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"

Market Logic Motherhood

(Forewarning, this blog is being written as I participate in a very intensive Discernment Interview Placement weekend, and thus might be shorter and less profound.  I also don't have a way to get my hand-drawn photo onto this post from the retreat center where I'm staying.  Nevertheless...)

As tiny as it may seem to some, something that really stuck out to me from today's reading of "From 'Choice' to Change: Rewriting the Script of Motherhood as Maternal Activism" by Judith Stadtman Tucker, the founder and editor of The Mother's Movement Online, was a relatively unimportant 10-word quote:

"imposing market logic onto the complex moral universe

of social reproduction"

In this sentence, Tucker is analyzing the "rhetoric of choice" - anything is feminist as long as you choose it - as a feminist rationale for stay-at-home-motherhood.  However, what struck me about this quote is that it is yet another way capitalist mentality has invaded our personal and interpersonal lives.  (Now that you know my a little better, this connection to capitalism probably doesn't surprise you too much.)

Yet again, we can see capitalism invading the very way that we think about families and parenthood (specifically motherhood), not just the way that we are forced to live them out due to work-life policies.  From our language ("Time is Money" - I spend time/money, save time/money, waste time/money, budget time/money, etc.) to our logic ("Cost-Benefit Analyses"), market mentalities have slipped into every crevice of our beings.  In Tucker's article she notes how we apply this market logic of weighing costs and benefits of choices to mother in certain ways, rather than challenging the fact that these decisions have to be 'weighed' at all!

What would parenting look like in the United States if we could conceive of it outside the confines of not only the capitalist demands of survival, but the capitalist mentality of the very way that we encounter life - our capitalist hermeneutic?

Precious Knowledge - Precarious Discourse

     Today I went to a screening of Precious Knowledge, the 2011 documentary by Eren McGinnis on the battle to save the Mexican-American Studies program in Tuscon High School.  This film chronicles the process through which racist political decision-makers were able to demonize  minority racial solidarity and dismantle one of the most successful elective programs in Arizona public schools.  What struck me about the story was how discourse played such an important role in the attack on and defense of the program.

     Despite never having visited the classes (Horne) or only having observed one class (Huppenthal), opponents to the program threw around words like "sedition," "resentment," "victim mentality," and even "communism" to describe the Mexican-American Studies program.  They called  the teachers "vehement anti-Americans" who conducted “propagandizing and brainwashing” in their classrooms.  Somehow these men and women convinced decision-makers that banning ethnic studies programs would promote "equality," "individualism," and other "American values."

     In an article for the LA Times, Rodriguez points out the irony in the conservatives' approach:  "the same Arizona Legislature that spearheaded a ruthless, racially charged campaign against illegal immigrants also banned K-12 ethnic studies classes on the grounds that they promoted hatred and division."  However, they did it - their ironic and contradictory rhetoric worked.  They successfully banned ethnic studies.  By utilizing pro-US, colorblind discourse, the opposition capitalized on white patriotism and manufactured its victory.

     This astounding use of discourse to dictate the future of the educational system jarred me.  How could such a successful program, with all the support, data, and experience behind it, be defeated by a series of ignorant appeals to ideology?  What other programs, even movements, have crumpled under the weight of words?  Which seemingly benign words dole out the hardest blows to the women's movement?

Freedom, Rugged Individualism, and Playing Catch-up

     The United States lags far behind the rest of the world in terms of family policy.  In Reshaping the Work-Family Debate: Why Men and Class Matter, Joan C. Williams calls our public policy “Family-Hostile” and advocates for five changes that would reconcile work and family tensions:

1. Short-term leaves
2. Good, affordable childcare
3. Regulation of work hours
4. Universal health coverage
5. A tax system that doesn't penalize dual-earner families

     Though I agree with her assertions and conclusions, I think that their implementation will likely take more than a few bills in congress and presidential signatures.  These changes will require altering U.S. ideology – the source and outcome of cultural discourse.  One ideological principle that needs to shift is our concept of “freedom.”  People in the U.S. often view freedom as a product of small government incapable of ‘interfering’ in their daily lives.  However, the assumption that government only complicates individual lives conveniently ignores all that the government makes possible.  For example, government produces and maintains the roads, bridges, sidewalks, and public transportation that allow us “freedom” of mobility.

     This disconnect arises because our concept of “freedom” relies on our belief in “rugged individualism” – the idea that people are self-made and ought to be self-reliant.  This view plays largely into all aspects of popular U.S. culture and discourse.  However, it is a false assumption.  For a variety of reasons, which can be summed up in the word privilege, people are not self-made.  Furthermore, no one is self-reliant.  That is a fallacy of Western rationality.  We, as humans, are profoundly interconnected.  Unless you have planted, grown, harvested, processed, and produced everything you have ever used, you have depended on other people.  No one lives in a vacuum; everyone depends on everyone else.  Why should public policy be any different?

     It is fine to hold “freedom” as an important value in our society.  In fact, I think it impossible to eliminate considering our cultural and national history, and I am not arguing that we do so.  However, in order for the United States to eradicate its toxic family policy and implement some of the programs that would allow positive change, we have to realize that government and interdependence enable, rather than oppose, “freedom.”

     If our nation can come to that realization, we might begin to understand that a federal program funding paid-time-off for its citizens (like programs enacted in every European and many other countries) can allow individuals true freedom:  freedom to choose whether or not they want children, freedom to care for their aging parents or sick relatives, freedom to take care of their families and themselves while giving under-employed individuals opportunities to work and gain experience.  The system we have is not working, and it is certainly not promoting tangible freedom for the vast majority of its constituents.  Systems of social support that honor, validate, and support families – those will provide true freedom for individuals in the United States.