Socialist Feminist critique of democrat primary

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  • #47278
    Avatar photoZooey
    Moderator

    I tell you, this is what has been going through my mind the past 6 months. I don’t know how feminists don’t see this. It seems pretty obvious to me, but they are identifying with the symbolic nature of an elite woman president, a rare entity at the intersection of power and money to be sure, but therefore not representative of women generally.

    Feminism at the Polls

    #47279
    Avatar photozn
    Moderator

    . I don’t know how feminists don’t see this.

    Well partly that because there’s no such thing as A feminist, there are different feminISMs and they are debating this stuff…the existence of that debate just doesn’t make the mainstream. Your article is a good example of that very debate. The woman who wrote it is a feminist…just not a mainstream feminist. She identifies as a socialist feminist, hence the critique.

    …..

    #47295
    Avatar photoZooey
    Moderator

    . I don’t know how feminists don’t see this.

    Well partly that because there’s no such thing as A feminist, there are different feminISMs and they are debating this stuff…the existence of that debate just doesn’t make the mainstream. Your article is a good example of that very debate. The woman who wrote it is a feminist…just not a mainstream feminist. She identifies as a socialist feminist, hence the critique.

    …..

    Yeah, of course, but isn’t it strange that NOBODY ever said this with a mic turned on? Nobody offered a feminist critique of Hillary? Like I said, this just seemed so obvious to me, and yet I have heard one intelligent woman after another get all giddy about the prospect of a woman president with seemingly no regard for how her policy positions impact women. I have to admit, I did a bit of a spit take when Gloria Steinem endorsed Clinton. I know Susan Sarandon had harsh words for Hillary, but she didn’t frame those as feminist issues. Same with Sarah Silverman. Liza Featherstone is the first woman I’ve heard/read who has pointed out that social policy matters more to the status of women in society than the fact that glass ceilings are breaking.

    #47299
    Avatar photoBilly_T
    Participant

    Zooey,

    I don’t know the right word for this, as a shortcut. But it’s kind of a 1% “diversity” movement. It’s the absence of class critique, IMO, that makes this all so absurd.

    In essence, the deal with the ruling elite is this: “You diversify your ranks a bit, and we’ll run interference for you by making this the focus of debate” — instead of the fact that there shouldn’t be a 1% in the first place. Cuz, the women and minorities who end up being let into the club are rarely, ever going to work against that club once they’re there.

    Corey Robin puts it really well here

    The Clinton forces want nothing more than to make all of American politics — not just in this election but for the foreseeable future — into a battle between a racist, ethno-nationalist right and a multicultural, neoliberal center. Our job is to make politics into a struggle between a multicultural neoliberal center and a multicultural, multiracial socialist left.”

    I would add, and I think Robin takes this as a given: We also need to do battle with that racist, ethno-nationalist right. But the left needs to offer “the people” a concrete action plan so they don’t ever even want to join forces with the right.

    • This reply was modified 8 years, 5 months ago by Avatar photoBilly_T.
    #47301
    Avatar photoBilly_T
    Participant

    I’ve read a lot of his writing in book, essay and blog form, so I’m confident he takes that as a given. Saw this as another indication:

    (Bumped into all of this through an article in Salon, Socialism or barbarism: Only the left can defeat the rise of the radical right )

    https://www.facebook.com/corey.robin1

    Corey Robin
    13 hrs ·

    I’ve known Cornel West’s work and ideas since I took his African-American intellectual history course in college and had him as my senior thesis advisor (for a thesis on Freud and the Frankfurt School). That was before he really became Cornel West, but he was already on his way. I’ve heard him talk about — and I’ve read him on — the practice of prophetic criticism, based in love and a sense of the tragic, for over a quarter-century. But I don’t know that I ever really understood what he was talking about till these past few days, when I saw him put those ideas into action before the DNC platform committee. I’ve seen West speak at rallies, I’ve watched him get arrested, but I never really saw him confront actual power, face to face, and show just how much greater power his mode of moral witness can actually wield. West is one of those political actors in the old sense: you really have to see him in action — not read him, not read about him, not listen to him in a lecture, but see him, and hear him, in action — to understand what he’s talking about. He looks directly in the eye of power, and without flinching, and without hate, stares it down and speaks the truth. And somewhere, I have to believe, makes it feel, not ashamed, but afraid.

    • This reply was modified 8 years, 5 months ago by Avatar photoBilly_T.
    • This reply was modified 8 years, 5 months ago by Avatar photoBilly_T.
    • This reply was modified 8 years, 5 months ago by Avatar photoBilly_T.
    #47305
    Avatar photozn
    Moderator

    Yeah, of course, but isn’t it strange that NOBODY ever said this with a mic turned on? Nobody offered a feminist critique of Hillary?

    Yeah it’s said. Just not in places we’re used to looking.

    Remember, marginalization of left discourse.

    Well the dominant sources of left discourse tend not to let people in on socialist feminism. That’s a marginalized thing WITHIN a marginalized thing. But it’s out there. Just harder to find. You have to specifically look for it.

    ====
    —–

    Why This Socialist Feminist Is Not Voting for Hillary

    Socialist feminism assumes that redistribution is the best way to improve life for women. Clinton has demonstrated contempt for turning this project into policy.

    This article draws on material included in the collection, False Choices: The Faux Feminism of Hillary Clinton, edited by Liza Featherstone, which is forthcoming from Verso Books this spring and can be pre-ordered here.

    Liza Featherstone

    https://www.thenation.com/article/why-this-socialist-feminist-is-not-voting-for-hillary/

    Socialism, it turns out, can be a form of identity politics. Some feminists, including Suzanna Danuta Walters, brandish a “red-diaper baby” heritage or some other cultural or sentimental affinity to hint that supporting Hillary Clinton’s candidacy doesn’t just represent some corporate gloss on feminism; it’s a genuinely radical position.

    But no one who makes this argument can articulate what, beyond her identity as a woman, qualifies Clinton as a passable candidate for socialist feminists. That’s understandable because, in a primary against an independent socialist who has been attracting an astonishing level of grassroots support, there are no socialist-feminist reasons to support Hillary Clinton.

    Socialist feminism assumes that redistribution is the best way to begin improving life for the vast majority of women, both materially and socially. To take a none-too-radical example, in countries like Denmark and 
Sweden—which offer a broad range of social benefits provided through the state rather than acquired in desperation, as they so often are here, through marriage or a job—women can live more comfortably; raise healthier, more secure children; and sleep with whomever they please. Throughout her long career, Clinton has demonstrated contempt for turning this project into policy.

    As first lady of Arkansas, she led the efforts by her husband’s administration to weaken teachers’ unions and scapegoat teachers—most of them women, large numbers of them black—for problems in the education system, implementing performance measures and firings that set a punitive tone for education reform nationwide. Rather than trying to walk this back, Clinton recently said that as president, she would close any public school “that wasn’t doing a better than average job.” Fuzzy math aside, this suggests a regime of pressure on America’s mostly female teaching force—81 percent of elementary- and middle-school teachers are women—that would make her predecessors look like presidents of a giant homeschooling hippie collective. Hillary’s socialist-feminist boosters might want to ask themselves: What kind of socialist feminism supports undermining black women on the job while imposing austerity on the public sector? And lest you think Clinton’s financial hawkishness is reserved for K–12, she also opposes free college tuition, though the United States is the only country where students—57 percent of them women—are saddled with decades of debt as the price of attaining higher education. Defending this position, Clinton recently said that it was important for people seeking a college degree to have “skin in this game.”

    * * *

    It would be hard to imagine a bigger blow to the
 material well-being of poor women in America than President Bill Clinton’s move in 1996 to “end welfare as we know it” by signing the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. As first lady, Hillary wasn’t a mere spectator to this; within the White House, she advocated harsher policies like ending traditional welfare, even as others in the administration, like Labor Secretary Robert Reich, proposed alternatives. Clinton defended her preferred policies by demonizing mothers struggling to get by as “deadbeats” who were “sitting around the house doing nothing.” Rush Limbaugh couldn’t have said it better. Asked recently to comment on this legacy, Hillary declined. And while the last Clinton administration claimed that it would offset welfare reductions with pressure to raise wages (the majority of low-wage workers in this country are women), and while a growing movement is demanding a $15 minimum wage, Clinton has made it clear that $12 is just fine with her.

    Abroad, socialist feminists oppose imperial adventures because war makes life hell for the majority of women, tending to exacerbate whatever material inequalities already existed. Yet Clinton, as secretary of state, went so far as to claim that wars could help liberate women—for example, by making the Taliban respect human rights in Afghanistan. During her tenure as secretary of state, rape and femicide increased in Honduras, Iraq, and Libya, due to the interventionist policies that she nurtured and executed. In Honduras, she provided cover and backdoor encouragement to a coup against a democratically elected leader, which allowed reactionary forces to come to power and begin a phenomenally violent chapter in that country’s history, during which, according to Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, the murder of women has “skyrocketed.” Clinton has always supported the war in Iraq, both as New York senator and as secretary of state. She was, in the Obama administration, the most vocal advocate for intervention in Libya. Not only have many women died in the US attacks on civilians in those countries; the US presence has nourished the rise of religious extremists like ISIS, for whom femicide is a way of life.

    This year, there is an actually existing socialist-feminist candidate in the Democratic primary: Bernie Sanders.
    But surely, if nothing else, Clinton can be counted on as a staunch ally against the war on women at home? Not so. She has said that abortion should be safe, legal, and “rare”—a qualifier that contributes to the stigma against the procedure. Last summer, during the right-wing attacks on Planned Parenthood that would later inspire a deadly shooting at a Colorado Springs clinic, Clinton tried to split the difference, saying one week that she found the videos about Planned Parenthood’s supposed practices “disturbing,” and the following week clarifying that she supported the organization—a bold stance from someone who once said that “women’s rights are human rights.”

    In a normal election season, all of this would be reason to agitate, but not necessarily to work or vote against the candidate—after all, what’s the alternative? This year, however, there is an inspiring reason to vote against Hillary: an actually existing socialist-feminist candidate in the Democratic primary. I’m talking, of course, about Bernie Sanders. He’s no Marxist revolutionary—if you’re waiting for someone who will expropriate the expropriators, you’ll have to wait a little longer—but he has spent his life fighting, consistently and without apology, for social-democratic policies that would improve the lives of a majority of American women. In contrast to Clinton’s devotion to imposing shame and austerity on poor women and their kids, Sanders helped lead the Senate opposition to Republican efforts to cut the WIC program, which provides nutrition assistance for mothers, babies, and pregnant women—and he has said that, as president, he would expand it. Other prominent planks in his platform that should be of interest to feminists include free college tuition, single-payer healthcare, high-quality childcare for all Americans, and a $15 minimum wage. In contrast to Clinton’s waffling on Planned Parenthood, Sanders has said that he would increase federal funding to the organization; and as part of his single-payer plan, he would expand support for women’s reproductive-health services.

    Of course I’d like to see little girls—still besieged by the pressure to be pretty at the expense of being powerful—to be inspired by the image of a woman president, as they have been by the rise of the US Women’s World Cup team. But unless those girls are part of a small elite, most will never grow up to enjoy equality with men absent the kind of reforms that Sanders is advocating. A Clinton presidency would be symbolically uplifting, even as it slammed the door on the possibility of genuinely improving the lives of most of the world’s women.

    Clinton was honest about how deeply at odds with any democratic-socialist movement she is. “We’re not Denmark,” she said, praising the “opportunity” and “freedom” of American capitalism. With this bit of frankness, Clinton helpfully explained why no socialist—indeed, no non-millionaire—should support her. She is smart enough to know that women in the United States endure far more poverty, unemployment, and food insecurity than women in Denmark—yet she shamelessly made clear that she was happy to keep it that way.

    #47307
    Avatar photoBilly_T
    Participant

    Clinton was honest about how deeply at odds with any democratic-socialist movement she is. “We’re not Denmark,” she said, praising the “opportunity” and “freedom” of American capitalism. With this bit of frankness, Clinton helpfully explained why no socialist—indeed, no non-millionaire—should support her. She is smart enough to know that women in the United States endure far more poverty, unemployment, and food insecurity than women in Denmark—yet she shamelessly made clear that she was happy to keep it that way.

    Denmark has a much, much better system than ours, and its results in pretty much every quality of life metric show this. It’s not at all close.

    My own preference is to go beyond Denmark. Well beyond it. But if the choice is between our current system and theirs, there is no question which is head and shoulders better. They pretty much kick our butts every which way. And their people typically score highest in the world for happiness.

    When Hillary mocked the idea of being more like Denmark, I cringed. And when she said “capitalism built the middle class,” or something to that effect. No, it didn’t. It was anticapitalist agitation that did that. Reformist liberals got stuff passed. But without leftist agitation, they never would have bothered. Basically, we built a middle class despite capitalism, not because of it. The mechanics of capitalism itself lead to rich and poor, if left unchecked. Virtually no middle class, and most people very poor indeed.

    • This reply was modified 8 years, 5 months ago by Avatar photoBilly_T.
    #47318
    Avatar photoZooey
    Moderator

    I saw three clips of West at the platform committee, and I was very impressed. His explanation of why he was abstaining on the vote to approve the platform was just the way Robin described him. “He looks directly in the eye of power, and without flinching, and without hate, stares it down and speaks the truth.”

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