womenby

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:

[...]

3. 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.

4. 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.

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.

"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!

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

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.

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.)