“Abolitionist Socialist Feminism: Radicalizing the Next Revolution”, by Zillah Eisenstein, is an ambitious book for our perilous times (Monthly Review Press, 2019). The planet is burning, and the author makes her case for left social change as right wing politics spreads in the global North and South.
To this end, she knits together feminism, socialism and abolitionism. Now one of these subjects is worthy of book-length treatment. Eisenstein thinks internationally and through identities and politics, which is, in my view, a useful approach.
In any case, with the social system of capitalism offering less to more of us by the minute, there are, according to the author, increasing numbers of folks open to alternative ways of living and working. It is to them, the collective we of humanity writ large, that she writes. There is a definite audience for such bold ideas in 2019. I do not see that ending any time soon.
Stateside, we can see a tendency to reform the profit system among younger people welcoming democratic socialism with the presidential campaigns of Vermont Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders and election of Democratic NY Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Reform is a necessary though ultimately unsatisfactory step forward because the logic of the system to grow or die remains intact. On a finite planet in climate disruption from carbon emissions, endless growth is a suicide pact.
Eisenstein, a professor emerita at Ithaca College in NY, with decades of political action and thought behind her, shares liberating thoughts with readers as to possible routes out of the current crises. She is not an armchair revolutionary, who only imagines a future that helps rather than harms ordinary people seeking to live their lives in dignity. I get the sense from reading her book that she is an academic who walks the talk of confronting oppressions in and out of the academy.
For example, Eisenstein calls for an end to white supremacy, an ideology that flows from chattel enslavement and native displacement in the so-called New World. Centuries of white supremacy have served to boost class rule of the minority over the majority. She is a race traitor like the late Noel Ignatiev, author of “How the Irish Became White” (Routledge, 1995).
Meanwhile, the global working majority is increasingly female and nonwhite, an opportunity that Eisenstein views as potentially emancipatory, though there are no guarantees. Women play a central role in rearing the future workforce and caring for retired workers. Caring labor is a gift to capital, and places women in a vital place to fight for and win left social change.
Control over the female body is a struggle, Eisenstein writes. Fighting for the economic and reproductive rights of women can unite people of all backgrounds and genders across the many social divisions that divide us, according to her. This makes good sense to me.
In sum, Eisenstein’s book is a big contribution to the discussion of actions about battling the status quo. You might disagree with her on this or that point of resistance. Yet I give her kudos for thinking through a most difficult question. What do we do in the face of multiple crises to forge a way forward as people whose labor, in and out of the home, makes the world around us?
Seth Sandronsky lives and works in Sacramento. He is a journalist and member of the Pacific Media Workers Guild. Email sethsandronsky@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, December 15, 2019
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