How might feminism be reinvigorated to fully reverse our age of climate chaos and techno-feudalism? Will the next feminist wave be revolutionary enough to address the totality of capitalist cis-heteropatriarchal racism? Sitting on the knife’s edge between despair and hope, humanity picks up a silhouette manuscript of its own death, but which, if flipped over, reveals pages that illuminate a way back to the womb of a better future-possible. If we are going to build a just world for all of us, it must start from a politics that addresses the deep complexity of our collective wounds. So in this second episode in a trilogy on 21st Century Feminisms, Jesse & Matt discuss Zillah Eisenstein’s short book Abolitionist Socialist Feminism: Radicalizing the Next Revolution (2019). This idiosyncratic manifesto (of sorts) swings in synchronicity with the ethos of this podcast as a brief polemic frustrated with the fucked nature of a besotted world of never-ending injustice, while nonetheless stubbornly insisting on radical, anticapitalist and intersectional solutions. As such, Zillah’s voice swims very much in the form and feeling of conversational exchanges—a dialog with her past self and fellow feminists—yearning, groping and clutching onto new ways of thinking that drift into view. The text weaves in and out of many different dimensions at a rapid pace—with a frenetic, anxious energy and a morally righteous indignation—a splicing of many disparate references, experiences, and perspectives into a complex tapestry of exasperated fury. And rightly so. A long, long time ago, we should have already won The Golden Square, and be fluttering into the light of The Utopian Sphere; but alas, here we are instead: still trying to wrest ourselves from this locked, dismal future and leap into a spinning, dazzling and enchanting one. What we must continue to seek out—in the ongoing struggle for human liberation—is a politics that can confront the deep entanglements of compounded hierarchies limiting our collective potential. In order to claim the dignity we all deserve and to unleash the beauty of a shared utopian promise, our unfolding future demands the most radical feminism yet: to dismantle and shatter inequality itself and replace it with boundless love.
Mentioned In This Episode:
Previously on The Future Is A Mixtape: Episode 042: “Strike Feminism”
Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto by Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser. Published in 2019 by Verso Books.
Abolitionist Socialist Feminism: Radicalizing the Next Revolution by Zillah Eisenstein. Published in 2019 by Monthly Review Press.
About The Author:
Zillah Eisenstein’s Official Website
Zillah Eisenstein at Ithaca College
Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism. Edited by Zillah Eisenstein. Published in 1979 by Monthly Review Press.
The Combahee River Collective Statement
Keeanga-Yamhatta Taylor’s Article in The New Yorker on Barbara Smith and the Black Feminist Visionaries in the Combahee River Collective: “Until Black Women Are Free, None of Us Will Be Free”
How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective. Edited by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. Published in 2017 by Haymarket Books.
Women’s March: Feminism for the Now
Emily Wasek on the Reactive & Hidden Privileges of The Women’s March in Platform: “Your Brunch, Our Burden”
Farah Stockman in The New York Times: “Women’s March on Washington Opens Contentious Dialogues About Race”
Terry Nguyen in Vox: “How Brunch Became Political”
Matthew Barad in Medium: “Brunch, American Liberalism and Delusions of Mediocrity”
Raymond Arke in Open Secrets: “Politically-Active ‘Dark Money’ Groups Among Sponsors Funding 2019 Women’s March”
A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn. Published in 1980 by Harper & Row.
David Harvey on Under The Skin with Russell Brand “Marxism On The Rise - Can It Really Defeat Capitalism?”
Misogynoir – A Term Coined by Queer Black Feminist Moya Bailey [but Incorrectly Attributed in the Book to Paula Moya]
We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice by Mariame Kaba. Published in 2021 by Haymarket Books.
Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs in The New York Times: “Officers Should Have Stopped Restraining George Floyd Sooner, a Former Supervisor of Derek Chauvin’s Testified.”
Christy E. Lopez in The Washington Post: “George Floyd’s Death Could Have Been Prevented If We Had a Police Culture of Intervention”
Michael Albert, anarchist economist and former student of Noam Chomsky, author of Parecon: Life After Capitalism, describes the obsession with “diagramming the corpse” by saying if you stacked up all of the books criticizing capitalism, it would be to the moon and back; but if you talked about actual solutions, it would be a thin sliver of paper.
Kathleen Geiere and Curve Contributors in The Nation: “Does Feminism Have a Class Problem?”
Madeleine Schwartz in Dissent Magazine: “Kicking Back, Not Leaning In”
Lean-In Feminism is Nothing More Than Return to Second Wave Feminism without a Class Context as Explored in a Jacobin Interview with Kirsten Swinth: “Completing the Feminist Revolution”
Natalie Y. Moore in The Chicago Sun-Times: “Why Did 53% of White Women Vote for Trump? The Story of Phyllis Schlafly Tells Why”
The Laura Flanders Show: Laura Flanders Discusses Race, Gender and Socialism With Author Zillah Eisenstein
The Phantasm of Racism - ‘Capitalised on’ by Corporations During the 2020 Uprisings:
Rashad Robinson in The Guardian: “The Corporations Now Signaling Support for Black People Are Part of the Problem”
Tracy Jan, Jean McGregor, Renae Merle and Nitasha Tiku in The Washington Post: “As Big Corporations Say ‘Black Lives Matter,’ Their Track Records Raise Skepticism”
Eugene Y. Chan in The Conversation: “Why Companies Were so Quick to Endorse Black Lives Matter”
Will Meyer in Business Insider: “Many of the Same Companies That Say 'Black Lives Matter' Are Involved With the Systems That Continue to Oppress Black Americans.”
Tre Johnson in The Washington Post: “When Black People Are in Pain, White People Just Join Book Clubs”
Joshua H. Koritz in The Socialist Alternative: “Bessemer, AL: Black Lives Matter at Work”
Black Lives Matter Statement of Support on Union Drive in Bessemer, Alabama
Luke Savage in Jacobin: “Woke Capitalism Isn’t Your Friend”
Zillah Eisenstein in Feminist Wire: “An Alert: Capital is Intersectional; Radicalizing Piketty’s Inequality”
Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty. Published in 2013 by Harvard University Press.
The film: Capital in the Twenty-First Century directed by Justin Pemberton. Distributed in 2020 by Kino Lorber.
Romaric Godin in Jacobin: “How Thomas Piketty Ignores Class Struggle”
Frédéric Lordon in Le Monde Diplomatique: “Why Piketty Isn’t Marx”
Zillah Eisenstein in Feminist Wire: “The Pope and His ‘Patriarchy Problem,’ Again”
Diane Winston in The Los Angeles Times: “Pope Francis’ Woman Problem”
Kathleen Geier in Salon: “Pope Francis Is Not a Feminist: Why Catholicism's Liberal Icon Falls Far Short on Women's Issues”
Victoria Brownworth in Dame: “Women Are the Working Class”
Meagan Day in Jacobin: “How Class-Conscious Women Garment Workers Shaped the Movement for Women’s Suffrage”
Alex Rowell in Center for American Progress: “Who Makes Up the Working Class?”
Diana Boesch, Robin Bleiweis, and Areeba Haider in Center for American Progress: “Raising the Minimum Wage Would Be Transformative for Women”
Catalyst: “Women in the Workforce - Global: Quick Take”
Janell Fetterolf in Pew Research Center: “In Many Countries, at Least Four-in-Ten in the Labor Force Are Women.” {This Study Doesn’t Count the Massive Unpaid Labor for Social Reproduction.}
2013 Dhaka Garment Factory Collapse: A Wikipedia Description
Larisa Epatko in PBS: “5 Years After the World’s Largest Garment Factory Collapse, Is Safety in Bangladesh Any Better?”
Saurav Sarkar in Jacobin: “Never Forget the Rana Plaza Massacre”
Matt Paraphrasing a Notion Generated by Corey Robin: “Clarence Thomas is the greatest example of Afro-pessimism in the world.” For more, read Corey Robin’s Long Article in The New Yorker: “Clarence Thomas's Radical Vision of Race”
To Dig Deeper into This Idea, Read Corey Robin’s The Enigma of Clarence Thomas. Published in 2019 by Metropolitan Books.
How Boomers Betrayed Us: They told us that history was over and that nothing was possible anymore - everything happened in 1968. The apotheosis of this idea can be found in Francis Fukuyama’s infamous (and howlingly inaccurate) book, The End of History and the Last Man. Published in 2006 by Free Press.
George Monbiot in The Guardian: “Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems”
Robert Reich’s Inequality for All: The Movie & The Book That Inspired It: Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future. Published in 2013 by Vintage Books.
Tana Ganeva in Teen Vogue: “Black Panther Fred Hampton Created a "Rainbow Coalition" to Support Poor Americans”
The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther by Jeffrey Haas. Updated edition published in 2019 by Lawrence Hill Books.
Paul Waters-Smith in Current Affairs: “The Bernie Sanders Movement is Achieving Things We Thought Impossible”
Slavoj Zizek in RSA Animate YouTube Video: “First as Tragedy, Then as Farce.”
Rahila Gupta in Open Democracy: “The Personal Is Political: the Journey of a Feminist Slogan”
Jonathan Watts in The Guardian: “We Have 12 Years to Limit Climate Change Catastrophe, Warns UN” (October 8, 2018)