Research

Names mentioned:

Venus Selenite, Dane Figueroa Edidi, b.binaohan, or Luna Merbruja

Quotes from this article:

But they're still a business, and as such its priority is sustaining itself and not the marginalized people that it claims, who may not claim it back. Which is how I feel after getting to know the radical bookstore.

What I want is to take note of the failure of the radical bookstore to meet oppressed people where they are, and to suggest that abolition calls for a deeper transformation that would turn places like Bluestockings from mouthpieces for institutional publishing into the accomplices that oppressed people require for the creation of revolutionary culture.

Who gives a shit if these zines aren't what their readers are contacting them about and looking for when they show up to the bookstore? No one knows that they want and need our work because it has hardly had a chance to exist -- but if it's put in front of them, they will value our work if they truly believe in any of the same things we do.

The Brooklyn Book Festival that's sponsoring this event with Bluestockings, by the way, is a massive recipient of funding from the Amazon Literary Partnership: that's hundreds of thousands of dollars across years of patronage. So that's Bluestockings putting itself in tension with Amazon workers for what? A bloodless corporate-sponsored trans literature?

It's also that the involvement of the former group in publishing will make them into collaborators with institutional violence. There's an interview where Torrey Peters talks about what a cool guy her editor boss Chris Jackson is over at One World, the publisher of Detransition, Baby -- he also happens to be the editor of a memoir by Eric Holder, the former Attorney General aka the architect for the legal justification of Obama's use of torture and drone strikes.

What does it mean for her editor to be a propagandist for the American imperial machine? And for a book that this very propagandist (or should we just call him a war criminal like Holder?) signed off on to be sitting on the shelves of a radical bookstore?

Let us step back and consider that this pattern where propagandists, rich monsters, and other friends of war criminals at corporate publishing houses are the same people who are now beginning to give book deals to (mostly white, mostly hyper educated) trans writers. In fact, those editors are the same people who usher forth many of the books that become the must-reads stocked by bookstores, radical or not. The same publishing infrastructure that creates legitimacy for war criminals also extracts profits from the marginalized writers (and their culture) it targets periodically as a trend.

It feels like every year I've been trying to figure out, "What is the relationship of the bookstore to the poor person?" Every year the answer comes back in a different form, dragging along different evidence, but the same result: it's an antagonistic relationship. With the radical bookstore, it's no different. It's still property and its allies against the propertyless.

People to go back to (strikethroughs are people I've already been reading):

Leftist critics of renown include A.S. Neill, John Holt, Paulo Freire, Paul Willis, Herbert Gintis, Ira Shor, Henry Giroux, Peter McLaren, Jacques Rancière and Noam Chomsky, just to name a few.

Phillip Jackson’s arguably tamer Life in Classrooms

John Taylor Gatto, 30-year veteran of public school teaching in New York

French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu: his ‘reproduction’ theory

Cornelius Castoriadis who combined both Marxist and psychoanalytic concepts in his extensive writings on ‘imaginary institutions’.

Quotes from this article:

Liberals and conservatives alike resemble Benjamin’s angel of history, their attention focused on what they perceive to be the present ‘rubble heap’ of education, colored by a nostalgia for a lost Paradise and by the yearning to ‘awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed’. As they back into the future, they often appear willfully blind to the concrete historical circumstances of those whose lives literally depend on schooling, and to the real obstacles to social justice that the least advantaged persistently face in becoming educated.

The inequities associated with highly variable funding schemes, teacher shortages or neighborhood segregation will not be solved by providing every parent with a voucher or ‘chartering’ urban districts. The claim that ‘privatization’ is the answer to the problems of our educational or political systems makes no historical or ethical sense.

In our view, quality schools should be public in the best sense of the word: free and available to all, everywhere, at the point of entrance; challenging and appealing to the intrinsic motivation to learn in all children; and entailing the cultivation of knowledge, dispositions and competences necessary for preparing young people to engage with the wider world. We therefore make no common cause with those seeking to undermine or replace public institutions or with critics who delight in reviling those whose task it is to teach and administer in public schools.

Indeed, narratives suggesting that the ‘sky is falling’ tend to be, in our view, grounded in fantasies about what public schools, or teaching and learning, are or could be, as much as they are grounded in the historical realities of public schools or the realities of so-called privatization. This contention is not unrelated to the observation that the liberal defense of public schools is most often undertaken by those with economic, social and racial privilege ‘on behalf’ of the variously disadvantaged, who may or may not share the same loyalty to these institutions.

The author of the story describes the academy movement as ‘the razing of state provision throughout the world. In the name of freedom, public assets are being forcibly removed from popular control and handed to unelected oligarchs’. In a related Guardian story, another author suggests that it is the teachers, students and parents that make a school what it is, not the authorities running it. Notable in the British context is the emphasis again on local ‘community’ control as an aspect of democracy, undone by the State and its corporate clients. Schools are depicted as public goods, not private commodities.

Is it not the least bit ironic that these people see individuals placed into ministries (without the permission or consultation of the public they claim to serve) as being "democratically selected?" People will decry corporate oligarchs, but they seem fine with those that were "voted in" (despite the fact that the election they were voted in from did not allow them to choose the best and most knowledgeable person for the Ministry of Education).

The liberal defense of real or imagined public schools, and its real or imagined heritage, is not limited to the Anglo-American context. The specific forms of this defense vary according to the particular histories of state-provided education in different localities, including the different purposes that citizens tend to believe are best or necessarily fulfilled by their public schools. Public schools in France and Japan are meant to instill loyalty to a shared French or Japanese culture, so as to produce citizens respectively loyal to France or Japan; American public schools are meant to provide individual opportunity for social and economic advancement, to be the engine of the fulfillment of the ‘American dream’; schools in most countries – from Singapore to South Africa – are believed to promote democratic citizenship, social cohesion, workers for the labor market and so on. But these defenses also usually partake of a familiar set of general propositions about what constitutes the public sphere generally, and why schools in particular ought to embody certain positive aspects of ‘publicness’. So in what does ‘publicness’ consist as this bears upon education?

Knight-Abowitz maintains that fair participation in shared governance is the first requirement for public schools, something we understand to mean that the issues entailed in decision-making should be accessible to the relevant public, whose informed preferences and opinions about how schools operate also should be taken under advisement. But Knight-Abowitz admits that representative and aggregative participation – the model in the United States of voting for the local school board, for instance – has been largely a failure with respect to engaging broad participation. A small percentage of voters turn out for such elections, and those who represent either majoritarian or special interests dominate school boards.

The structure that takes place in school boards also exists within private schools, so it's particularly interesting that people continually insist that these methods function (which rarely work anywhere and are often losing power, even if they manage to elect "progressive" people to them).

Private schools have "parent committees," and these things do very little because parents are not equipped (in terms of socialisation) to fight against schools... Even if that school is engaging in harmful behaviours that are hurting their own child. The entire structure, public or private, isn't as responsive as it claims to be.

These public institutions are also notoriously unresponsive to the ‘interference’ of the public, like parents. With the consolidation of school districts over the past century, leading to districts encompassing multiple communities and neighborhoods, the distance between school boards and their constituents has grown. Knight-Abowitz recommends a cure of deliberative democracy in which teachers, parents, older students and other community members are encouraged to create parallel governing structures. However attractive this remedy might appear, it would seem to depend, in the end, on fantasies about local communities and citizen organizations, and their possible relationships to totalizing bureaucracies like the public school system.

For the sake of legitimacy, public schools also must respect liberty and pluralism. At a minimum, respecting liberty entails accommodating a certain amount of choice with respect to parental and student preference; respecting pluralism, too, would require that schools be sufficiently diverse both in structure and organization in order to accommodate a range of interests and needs. But Knight-Abowitz admits that public schools do not and have not for the most part respected either. Conflicting demands between majority and minority values almost inevitably disadvantage minority students, despite laws that attempt to ensure freedom of expression and nondiscrimination.

Her remedy is a ‘bi-focal’ view of school governance through which competing demands might be negotiated. She suggests that the views of the local majority can sometimes be trumped through consideration of minority values, as well as through consideration of the law. But the ‘rights’ of minorities, in this view, must still be weighed against the preferences of the majority. In any case, the preferences of the majority – buttressed typically by politicians, school boards, school administrators and the national culture itself – always structure the everyday practices of public schooling. Neither ‘integration’ nor ‘value-neutral’ curricula have been sufficient to ensure consistent respect for the nonstandard persons who populate public school buildings: even when schools are almost completely segregated by race/ethnicity/class, the controlling mindset informing educational norms tends to be that of the dominant class, expressed through the structures and administration of schooling, even when the children of that class are permanently absent.

This pairs well, also, with the understanding that even "liberal-minded" or "progressive-minded" educators (or heads of schools) who still retain problematic understandings help perpetuate bigotries within schools.

For example, queermisic beliefs (particularly aimed at trans and non-binary individuals) can still perpetuate in a place that claims to be LGBTQIA+ supportive (because these spaces tend to lean heavily towards liberal understandings of queerness, which focus heavily on the cisgender LG side of things).

Similarly, there are certain bigotries that retain support within spaces that go overlooked by the head of school (or other teachers), especially when students are academically high achieving. This includes students who engage in misogyny, racism, etc but are seen as being "good people" because their grades and supposed effort in a course (two irrelevant factors) support them being "good students."

For Knight-Abowitz, equal opportunity is the third condition for the political legitimacy of public schools. The ideal is perhaps most commonly associated with public education and is meant to denote fair access to a level playing field on which all children, irrespective of ability or social standing, have a fair chance to receive an education sufficient for personal success and social advancement. But if that is the condition of legitimacy, the vast and persistent inequalities of opportunity and outcome in schools across the world might then indicate that public schools are not legitimate public institutions. Knight-Abowitz lays blame for the admittedly pervasive inequality on neoliberal policies that have decreased school funding and redistributive practices generally and on propaganda that maintains that poverty and discrimination are not more powerful than teachers in accounting for achievement. The preferred solution is an increase in tax revenues and higher investments in education, along with a return to active desegregation and anti-poverty government action. But even if one agrees with the critique of neoliberal divestment in public education, and agrees that government might take a more active role in relieving segregation and poverty, there is more than a little wistfulness in forgetting that before there was the ‘new poverty’ of neoliberalism there was an ‘old poverty’ and in most places even deeper, with more overt inequalities.

The fourth pillar of democracy in public schooling would be full attention to political education for democratic life. Knight-Abowitz suggests that this would entail both curricular attention, across disciplines, to the role of citizens in decision-making, and to the creation of ‘democratic schools’ in which students and teachers could actively practice democracy. The active promotion of democratic goals in curricula and pedagogy tends to run up against the problems of respecting liberty and plurality, but from the other direction. Many parents, teachers and students take school to be the place where individual goals of social and economic betterment can be pursued and are not motivated to give their time to ‘political education for democratic life’, which they tend not to see as promoting their own interests. The fantasy here is that ‘citizenship education’ – however valuable we might find it or however much we wish our own children would receive it – is not a central feature of most public schools. In fact, we would maintain that a very different kind of ‘citizenship education’ – one inclining toward materialism and consumerism – is very much part of the everyday life of schools and tends to lead to the very kind of disengagement in public life that those at the top of the field of education routinely lament.

Knight-Abowitz cites the professionalism of teachers as the fifth component for the political legitimacy of public schools, normally involving training and certification necessary for ensuring high quality standards among staff. But professionalism of teachers has an uncertain relationship with those ideal/imaginary aspects of public education that are democracy-promoting. Many teacher educators are ambivalent about promoting professionalism because it conflicts with other beliefs about who teachers are and what they (ought to) do. On the one hand, increased recognition of teachers as professionals seems to legitimate teacher education itself, to constitute an argument for better compensation, to increase the symbolic capital of teachers generally, and probably to increase the learning and development of students. Professionalization of teachers may also compete with the ‘expertise’ of local parents and community values, and potentially erodes the possibilities for democratic community organizing based on shared interests and status. Also, and perhaps more important, it is arguably difficult to sustain the identity between the ‘professional teacher’ (the expert, the technocrat) and the ‘caring teacher’ who acts as a parental surrogate. The demand for professionalism also conflicts with reluctance of citizens of education schools to recognize differences between teachers, to acknowledge the existence of a continuum of ability, motivation and competence among teachers, even among themselves, at the top of the hierarchy of teachers. But if the expertise of teacher educators does not ensure the professionalism of teachers in public schools, then the struggle for status within the Academy, always a losing proposition for the perennially marginalized ‘ed-school’, is further complicated.

I would also point out that there are a significant number of issues that arrived by requiring teacher certification. Some of which include nonsensical requirements within a hierarchy that should already recognise certain skills (e.g., literacy and numeracy tests that are required as part of someone's certification, despite the fact that the requirements to enter the program already infer the claimed "appropriate level" of literacy and numeracy); others include the fact that there is very little legitimate need for most school structures (and that being self-legitimising isn't a good enough reason to keep them), and the overwhelming majority of necessary skills could be handled through mentoring and community-based learning centers that promote and encourage self-directed learning (e.g., libraries in conjunction with print collectives and learning centers).

Everywhere there are enormous challenges in realizing the political legitimacy of public schools, and this is no secret to educational scholars and policy makers. Indeed, these phenomena are documented year after year in dozens of countries and appear in hundreds of publications, popular and academic, and the problems are usually the same that were present at the historical beginnings of public schooling.

This is particularly true if you read a lot of anarchist and socialist literature, as many of the same critiques that existed in the 1920s (for example) still exist today.

The systemic injustices of public schooling are what this professoriate routinely and unapologetically teaches its students about the history and theory of schooling. Nor should it be surprising to said professoriate that increased and more justly distributed funding, better teacher preparation and better teacher pay, progressive curricula and pedagogy, democratic governance, cultural inclusion, free lunch – all of which we would likewise embrace for our own children and those of others – have not generally made state-public schools less unsatisfactory than they are and have always been for a large proportion of the students who attend them.

For the record, better "inclusion" of disabled students has yet to significantly improve outcomes for disabled students. (This is largely because of how difficult the accommodations are to acquire when a student needs them; they also aren't provided for any of the disabled adults who require them.)

It also hasn't made schools safer for a whole host of people, nor has it fully enabled integration of all people into the same spaces (e.g., if the "liberal" or "progressive" people where I live truly cared about all people having equal access to education, Roma and disabled children would not be segregated into different schools... yet, they still are).

Despite what appears to be consensus about the shortcomings of public schools, those who declaim the ‘death of the public school’ appear not to have learned the lessons they themselves have preached and continue to advocate remedies that have been historically ineffective.

First, school systems are notoriously inefficient in distributing financial resources to those most in need of help. Second, extra funding may purchase specialized staff, new buildings, libraries and computer labs but still leave disadvantaged children alienated from learning if other resources are absent. Those resources will include things like strong leadership, positive school climate, appropriate discipline, nurturing teachers, a motivated peer group, involved parents, role modeling, career guidance and consensus on academic goals. Third, unequal resources, usually conceived exclusively as unequal financing, goes to the very fabric of public education, certainly in large countries where local control is paramount. But irrespective of the country or the specific context, it is a truism that local knowledge often is the best kind of knowledge for addressing the needs of local school children. Part and parcel of this favoring local control is to see ‘top-down’ approaches as anathema.

The distribution of funds has been interesting. Again, disability is one of the clearest ways to see how the "increased funding" doesn't necessarily lead to things like increased accessibility or appropriate accommodations. Not all disabled students require the same supports; this money is often provided with caveats explaining how it can be spent, and it often misses the supports that disabled students (and their families) state they need.

It also doesn't provide students who may suspect they have a developmental disability but not have "proof" in the form of a formal diagnosis (which also has a limited scope of recognition, as many children often go undiagnosed).

Inequalities, however, are not necessarily inequities.

The expansion of both the urban charter school movement in the United States and the academy school movement in the United Kingdom has at least in part been motivated by the insight that traditional state-public schools are not effective in leveraging increased resources to the benefit of the disadvantaged students they serve.

This is true. When the charter movement started, there were a number of progressives who saw them as an alternative that would actually function as ways to implement responsive learning environments.

But the whole thing has been co-opted (if not blatantly started by) right-wingers who wish to privatise everything.

Unfortunately, however, good teachers are not in abundance; indeed most countries struggle with a significant teacher shortfall, and even when there are enough teachers to go around, relatively few will be above average. And, typically, it is a truism that schools serving high concentrations of disadvantaged children are more likely to have teachers with less experience and fewer qualifications.

Mostly true, yes. But what exactly is a "good teacher?" And it's worth also recognising that having qualifications does not inherently make you a good teacher.

One way to change this is to offer better teachers strong financial incentives to work in schools with more challenging pupils.

"More challenging pupils" or children whose needs are going unmet within the school they're in?

On the other hand, in many circles to even broach criticisms of public school teachers is tantamount to launching a full-on assault against public education itself. Here, we encounter a myth about who or what the ‘public school teacher’ actually is, namely, an autonomous, student-centered agent. Contrary to this myth, teachers most often serve as agents of the state, and as such are entrusted with carrying out the aims of the state, which include using pre-selected course materials, administering standardized tests, advising for class placement and carrying out disciplinary procedures.

This is a criticism that I wish more people would be willing to broach. Conservatives are willing to engage in it, but they do so as a means to tear down learning institutions (regardless of what they are) that don't sit well with their traditionalist framework.

The left almost unanimously refuses to engage with it (except for anarchists and many socialists), refusing to recognise some of the key truths highlighted here.

Even those, like Darling-Hammond (2006, 2010), who champion teacher education (reform) and enhanced teacher agency, as the main levers to increasing public school success and legitimacy, are acutely aware of the perennial shortcomings of traditional teacher education. But the reforms that Darling-Hammond and others have managed to enact, built on intensive assessment and model of the professional, that is effective teacher tends to perpetuate the notion that teachers are and must be ‘in control’ of their own classes, while simultaneously subjecting teachers subject to the reformers’ hegemonic vision and regulatory schemes. This may signal a return to an underlying message of compliance that has been characteristic of teacher education for the past century, rather than the dawn of new era of ‘agency’.

As someone who often struggles in any school system to work in the ways I see fit (e.g., actually trying to be the socially-constructed "belief" of the teacher -- a caring person who acts as a mentor in student learning), the underlying message of compliance is spot on.

The reason I struggle is not because of how my choices reflect upon the class and classroom management; it's because I am frequently told that my methods are "unorthodox" and "unappreciated."

Even when students tell me all that they've learned through those methods, even when I build good rapport with students (and families).

Doing anything against the traditional model (or the "appropriately adjusted for modern times" traditional model) leads your colleague-peers to question you.

Each succeeding year’s academic scholarship testifies again to the lack of freedom and plurality, equal opportunity, shared participation, democracy and professionalism – to return to Knight-Abowitz’s list of legitimating factors – endemic to public schooling. One might submit that most scholarly careers in education have centered around documenting these daily features of public school life, where those who have documented the failures of public schools are the most keen to circle the wagons against any perceived threat to the institution of public schooling itself.

There are a couple specific education podcast hosts who I feel fit this description almost perfectly.

For instance, it could be the case that we simply have an instance of the insider-outsider dynamic, where it is perfectly acceptable to complain and criticize one’s own system but not for others to do the same.

Except...

There is something to this insider–outsider explanation, but it is questionable whether the analogies work quite so well in the case of public education. As we have argued, many of the criticisms of the public education system come not from outsiders but rather from those who are badly served by it. Indeed, many of the struggles to find alternatives to what ‘the local public school’ has to offer one’s own child have been launched by the marginalized and poor.

It could also be the case that one’s defense of the public school is motivated by the concern to reform rather than to relinquish it to the arbitrary machinations of the free market.

Except...

On the other hand, it is difficult to imagine the actors in any of these scenarios being opposed to alternatives to the services that they provide, let alone profound structural changes that may bring about an entirely different way of more effectively providing those services.

And a lot of teachers, administrators, and public school proponents are strongly against alternatives, claiming that any attempt to engaging in them is tantamount to destroying democracy.

The dominant model, as reformers willing to look inside as well as outside the system point out, is of course one encompassing legislation and massive investment from state governments, but also politicians, academics, teachers, administrators and social workers (to name but a few). And notice that all of these actors, to one degree or another, are dependent upon this leviathan of a system and hence are keenly (if unconsciously) invested in maintaining the status quo.

Again, our aim here is not to repudiate the idea of a public as this concerns important political ideals, or for that matter, essential features of the education system. Instead, we remind the reader that we are taking issue with the circle-the-wagons defense of ‘public education’ against any and all criticisms. Indeed, the knee jerk defense of ‘the public school’, and the concomitant fondness for what never was, engages in a strange kind of disavowal, a psychological rationalization that indefensibly reconciles what educational research has been saying for nearly 50 years with what needs to happen to begin to correct it. Taking always the ‘idealistic’ view (which again incidentally opposes the history and theory commonly taught in university education departments) in each case motivates liberal advocates of the public school to reject all manner of reform as a threat to ‘the public’. These views together represent a fantastical take on the ‘public sphere’ sharply at variance with more critical understandings. Moreover, to the extent that fanciful notions of this public are rhetorically invoked as cures for what ails us now, in our view these defenses merely exhibit bad faith, and as such approximate Baldwin’s (2010, p. 103) more general observation about modes of domination: ‘We have constructed a history which is a total lie, and have persuaded ourselves that it is true’.

Additionally, we surmised the possibility that in this blindness, there also was a kind of denial about how particularistic, non-inclusive, coercive and unequal public schools are. In other words, how is it that this knowledge of the real is so consistently eclipsed by appeals to an ideal, or an imagined essence?

But the fact is that most contemporary defenders of the public school do not seem so much interested in developing a normative theory of public education – where the distance between the ideal and the real can be explained sociologically, philosophically, economically or through some other disciplinary logic – as they do in simply promoting faith in a kind of transcendental, that is imaginary, institution.

This is something that I experience with so many people working in and around schools.

That is, an institutional actor imagines her world according to how the institution presents itself, historically, rather than according to how the institution actually functions, not to mention its effects on society, on its own agents and on its clients, or students or patients. To place this dynamic, as it relates to the individual, within a properly psychoanalytic framework, we might speak of the subject inclined to see herself in the reflection of the institution, so that in order to avoid narcissistic injury the institution must be imagined in such a way that the subject’s worth is preserved.

This definitely provides a better explanation for the kinds of interactions I've had with other teachers, some of whom acknowledge the issues of schools but then almost immediately dismiss them.

And with respect to the institution itself, representations of the public school as democratic, liberty-enhancing, equitable, participatory, democratic and professional – emanating from the broader field of public education itself – are imaginary inasmuch as they project what defenders of the public would like public schools (and their own academic bastions) to be, rather than what public schools in fact are.

These imaginary institutions are also self-representations, and the sense of the integrity of the self for those within the field of the public school depends on the ‘survival’ of this institution in its imagined form. In everyday terms, people tend to see themselves as mirror images of the institutions and organizations in which they have invested not just their time and energy, but their sense of identity.

And this is also a part of why I divested from the 'identity' of teacher (inasmuch as I could, beyond the requirement to have a 'job title').

Denizens of this educational field – professors and teachers, who of course themselves were once school-attending students – find themselves now in a situation Bourdieu called hysteresis, when dispositions are out of line with the field and with the ‘collective expectations’ of its normality. In situations of crisis or sudden change, especially those seen at the time of too-rapid movements in social space, agents often have difficulty holding together the dispositions associated with different states or stages, and some of them, often those who were best adapted to the previous state of the game, have difficulty in adjusting to the new established order.

Again, there are a few education podcasters who I can see this mirroring, but it's much larger than that.

But this also sounds identical to the kind of responses we've been seeing by so many officials, administrators, teachers, and families in response to schools during COVID. There is no attempt to adapt or change; it's all about maintaining the status quo, so this goes far beyond just the private/charter vs. public debate.

Quotes from this essay (also here):

Both genres have ancient lineages. Utopia goes back to Plato at least, and from the start it had a relationship to satire, an even more ancient form. Dystopia is very clearly a kind of satire. Archilochus, the first satirist, was said to be able to kill people with his curses. Possibly dystopias hope to kill the societies they depict.

By that definition, dystopias today seem mostly like the metaphorical lens of the science-fictional double action. They exist to express how this moment feels, focusing on fear as a cultural dominant. A realistic portrayal of a future that might really happen isn’t really part of the project—that lens of the science fiction machinery is missing. The Hunger Games trilogy is a good example of this; its depicted future is not plausible, not even logistically possible. That’s not what it’s trying to do. What it does very well is to portray the feeling of the present for young people today, heightened by exaggeration to a kind of dream or nightmare. To the extent this is typical, dystopias can be thought of as a kind of surrealism.

These days I tend to think of dystopias as being fashionable, perhaps lazy, maybe even complacent, because one pleasure of reading them is cozying into the feeling that however bad our present moment is, it’s nowhere near as bad as the ones these poor characters are suffering through. Vicarious thrill of comfort as we witness/imagine/experience the heroic struggles of our afflicted protagonists—rinse and repeat. Is this catharsis? Possibly more like indulgence, and creation of a sense of comparative safety. A kind of late-capitalist, advanced-nation schadenfreude about those unfortunate fictional citizens whose lives have been trashed by our own political inaction. If this is right, dystopia is part of our all-encompassing hopelessness.

Sometimes I feel like this. While I genuinely enjoy dystopian literature, I often come away with the feeling that it's far too often "at least my life isn't this bad." And we're also seeing this now, with regards to the use of dystopian literature as a way to express things that are happening.

The constant use of The Handmaid's Tale is infuriating. First because it's constantly non-disabled cis white women pulling the story to highlight what is being done to them now, having ignored the plight of all others: Black women, Latinas, GRT/Romani/Sinti women, Indigenous women, and so many others have had their bodies legislated in ways that cis white women never have and never considered. Trans and non-binary people have all had their access to relevant healthcare and reproductive needs restricted simply for who they are, while trans women in particular (and even butch cis women) have had their access to restrooms legislated. Disabled people (especially women) have had to deal with being sterilised and being told that they "shouldn't be selfish" and have children.

Every single group has had their body legislated and monitored to some extent, but now non-disabled cishet white women are finally on the receiving end... So they pull this singular tale as a "what has happened now," refusing to engage in the history they've ignored.

But for so long, while it should've acted as a warning, people saw it in the very way Robinson states: "At least my life isn't like that." While I don't blame the book for this, so many people refused to engage with it critically and most certainly turned towards complacency. In some ways, this is is mirrored:

On the other hand, there is a real feeling being expressed in them, a real sense of fear. Some speak of a “crisis of representation” in the world today, having to do with governments—that no one anywhere feels properly represented by their government, no matter which style of government it is. Dystopia is surely one expression of that feeling of detachment and helplessness. Since nothing seems to work now, why not blow things up and start over? This would imply that dystopia is some kind of call for revolutionary change. There may be something to that. At the least dystopia is saying, even if repetitiously and unimaginatively, and perhaps salaciously, Something’s wrong. Things are bad.

It’s important to remember that utopia and dystopia aren’t the only terms here. You need to use the Greimas rectangle and see that utopia has an opposite, dystopia, and also a contrary, the anti-utopia. For every concept there is both a not-concept and an anti-concept. So utopia is the idea that the political order could be run better. Dystopia is the not, being the idea that the political order could get worse. Anti-utopias are the anti, saying that the idea of utopia itself is wrong and bad, and that any attempt to try to make things better is sure to wind up making things worse, creating an intended or unintended totalitarian state, or some other such political disaster. 1984 and Brave New World are frequently cited examples of these positions. In 1984 the government is actively trying to make citizens miserable; in Brave New World, the government was first trying to make its citizens happy, but this backfired. As Jameson points out, it is important to oppose political attacks on the idea of utopia, as these are usually reactionary statements on the behalf of the currently powerful, those who enjoy a poorly-hidden utopia-for-the-few alongside a dystopia-for-the-many. This observation provides the fourth term of the Greimas rectangle, often mysterious, but in this case perfectly clear: one must be anti-anti-utopian.

The reference Greimas rectangle is the following:

Besides, it is realistic: things could be better. The energy flows on this planet, and humanity’s current technological expertise, are together such that it’s physically possible for us to construct a worldwide civilization—meaning a political order—that provides adequate food, water, shelter, clothing, education, and health care for all eight billion humans, while also protecting the livelihood of all the remaining mammals, birds, reptiles, insects, plants, and other life-forms that we share and co-create this biosphere with. Obviously there are complications, but these are just complications. They are not physical limitations we can’t overcome. So, granting the complications and difficulties, the task at hand is to imagine ways forward to that better place.

One of the things I appreciate the most are people who refuse to be anti-utopian. We need more people to recognise that utopia is possible; it's possible for things to get better. We cannot give in to the hopelessness.

Immediately many people will object that this is too hard, too implausible, contradictory to human nature, politically impossible, uneconomical, and so on. Yeah yeah. Here we see the shift from cruel optimism to stupid pessimism, or call it fashionable pessimism, or simply cynicism. It’s very easy to object to the utopian turn by invoking some poorly-defined but seemingly omnipresent reality principle. Well-off people do this all the time.

Quotes from this article:

Immediate note is that I hate the use of 'dumbing down' in place of 'simplifying'.

I think the obvious answer is that we can’t. We need to recognize that language in our society is used as a tool of control, and the trend towards smaller vocabularies, simpler syntax, and shorter attention spans is one of the most effective forms of disempowerment ever devised.

Language needs to be a locus for revolution; it is a necessary weapon for all social struggles. Our duty as middle-class activists is to use our education to make complex language accessible, rather than passing off everything not immediately accessed with ease by the majority as inherently inaccessible.

A prohibition on what is understood as elitist language also assumes that people from poorer backgrounds with fewer opportunities for quality education either cannot or do not want to learn. In reality, attaining a good education is seen as a form of empowerment in many poorer communities, yet few activists attempt to diffuse that education when communicating with less privileged people. By avoiding academic language and analysis outside of their own circles, privileged activists maintain a relationship of dependency, in which they act as gatekeepers to knowledge, forever necessary to translate law, scientific studies, political analysis, et cetera, into “plain language.”

I have mixed feelings on this, though I agree with the overall sentiment. There is a lot of condescension about who is capable of using certain kinds of language and structures. There is a lot of condescension about who knows what.

But there are also areas that do require this, such as science communication. This is perhaps an area that I think more people could turn to for an adequate understanding of how to incorporate jargon and so-called "plain language." This is largely because there is an intent of many scientists to speak over those they're conversing with and to assume they are universally correct (pretending that culture does not impact them and their "objective" reality), and it really is a problem.

This is also an issue with a lot of philosophy and political communicators, though I suspect it's largely to con their audience and perpetuate their grift. It's not so much about simplifying the language to be accessible because they prefer to "sound intelligent" and to confuse (much in the way that con artists use language), based on our stereotypes. I do think these differences need to be more apparent in these kinds of conversations.

The other assumption inherent in the criticism is the idea that certain types of language are inherently elitist. Larger vocabularies and more complex syntax are in fact very helpful tools, though people require more education to be able to use them. It is not the language, but this country’s capitalist, racist education system that is elitist. The job of educated activists is to make that education accessible, and hand that language over as a popular tool. We don’t want made-for-the-masses Orwellian newspeak, we want languages that are liberated and demystified.

Wouldn’t it be more effective to subvert education, and educate subversion? To expose and overcome the patriarchal norm that makes an intellectual crime of asking: “What does that mean?” We should use the forms of language we’re comfortable with, academic or otherwise, as long as we do it lucidly, in a way that invites learning and sharing of that knowledge. Those around us would be better off for it. Similarly, we can benefit from learning the different types of language that other people use. Recognize the variety of languages, but upset the economic, racial, and gendered hierarchy in which these languages have been placed.

Quotes from the named essay in Queering Anarchism:

Feminism has had an ongoing internal argument regarding minimizing or maximizing the meanings of the differences between men and women. Now we are seeing the influence on many anarchists and feminists of newer ideas about gender (e.g. queer theory) that question the idea of a concrete concept of “woman” and “man,” even “male” and “female.” Yet some radical or anarchist feminists and lesbians remain stubborn about questioning the usefulness of a category called “woman.”

The essay starts out this way, and I largely agree. I hesitate to say "anarchist feminists," but that is possibly because my own experience has largely been that they have been the most accepting of "gender transgressions" (along with the general trans community).

Yet, there is far too much reliance upon material of the past. We are constantly citing people who made these precise distinctions (because they were so prominent in their own history) and not reckoning with how that history impacts us today.

This is especially true in the general 'feminist movement'.

Meanwhile, identity politics have come under fire in anarchist circles, often characterizing identity-oriented projects as homogenous (represented only by each project’s most vocal proponents), and dismissing the importance of focusing on opposition to gender, sexuality, class, or racial oppressions. Yet that which is called identity politics often does involve essentialism, the idea that there are essential differences between two groups.

I have some questions here, but I'm not sure where to start. I don't inherently disagree (there have certainly been a lot of people "on the left" who've decried identity politics), but I've also been working in the past decade with people who understand identity-focused groups or spaces and the need for them. These people have traditionally been the people who were neglected by groups who "refused" to enable identity-focused groups or spaces and were forced to interact with a very white, very straight, very abled, or very cisgendered anarchist space.

In the case of feminism, those who most often get to speak for the “movement” are white with class privilege, and regularly marginalize the experiences of women of color and poor women, and exclude transgender/transsexual people when they organize around a universal concept of women. The standard radical feminist characterization of the way gender oppression (“patriarchy”) works legitimizes women’s exercise of domination (through capitalism or white supremacy, etc.), and makes men’s domination seem natural and inevitable.

This often happens, even when we start giving space to some elements of how oppressions work together (but simultaneously ignore or overlook others). As in, this happens even within marginalised communities, and it seems difficult to really expand upon that because some people tend to get too tied into wanting to discuss one element when we need to be recognising multiple.

For example, the "experience of women" will not ever be the same; this is something a lot of TERFs push, but it neglects that even women within the same "category" (however that's drawn) do in fact have different experiences of being women. It's strange that this isn't recognised because it would also make it even more clear that all women have different experiences, and we're only hearing from the smallest group of people who have the ability and privilege to take center stage. (Also something that wasn't really addressed in this piece: tokens.)

We’ve been made to believe that human subordination under the law is natural—that we need to be governed. The legitimacy of imposed government is also emphasized through the seemingly natural differences between people. The differences between people have been made significant so as to promote divisions based on domination and subordination. In doing so, those differences must be(come) clear-cut—a border must be drawn between the two, creating a dichotomy so there is no confusion about who is where in the hierarchy. This takes time, centuries even, to really harden our perception of human nature. It takes laws, but worse it takes discipline, primarily in the form of terror and violence, to pound a sense of hierarchy into us. > Despite the possibility that the state and capitalism may be able to function without these imposed borders, the borders must still be destroyed.

In reading this, I couldn't stop thinking about how this played out after Bacon's Rebellion, which cemented many of the race-focused laws in the US to further prevent white indentured servants (and other poor white folks) from empathising and fighting against the system with Black slaves.

To achieve liberation, we must reject the binary gender system, which divides us into two mutually exclusive categories. This gender system not only oppresses in the form of a hierarchy of categories, but also in terms of gender expression—holding up masculinity as superior and policing each person into their gender box. The significance of gender/sex differences must be exposed as a political construct, one which has been used to form a cross-class alliance among men, and to make heterosexuality and women’s roles and exploitation in (and outside) the home and family to seem natural.

Yes, but I also think this needs to extend in more ways. We need to reject binary systems and binary thought structures.

Much like I think this particular thought needs to extend to the children-adults dichotomy, especially as "women and children" tend to be the "protected" categories. We're seeing this how with absolutely horrifying surveillance tactics that are being put in place to supposedly do just that.

We can probably agree that gender stratum is an imposed social construct. We could take it further by questioning whether our concepts of the biological differences between female and male existed before hierarchy, and whether they at least have the same significance before Western culture interpreted the differences we understand today.

Statements like this require a lot more than the simple dichotomies given, even in terms of "Western culture." What we perceive today has not always been, and a lot of what has existed before (particularly in the 'classics' periods) was re-interpreted to fit the needs of people before us.

There's a lot of work to be done to unravel the harms that have been done in the name of using history as a means of control, and we need to understand that.

In discussing human nature, we need to be critical of the ways that certain concepts such as hierarchy, or a need for hierarchy, are made to seem natural.

Similar to the case of white people, when men participate in domination, they do themselves harm. While folks assigned male at birth who don’t comfortably fit into their assigned gender box are certainly affected by gender oppression, the ones who do conform (willingly or not) would also benefit from undermining the ways gender hierarchy has been naturalized through the socialization of boys and men. They can hardly be free, and the relationships they have with others cannot be fulfilling as long as emotions are suppressed, competitive masculinity has to be established, and inequality (if not abuse) must be maintained with women (and often children as well).

This essay is interesting but messy. But all of these points, yes.

In the sense that queer is unstable and destabilizing, it has much potential. Clearly the refusal to participate in privileging political relations would not be co-opted. We know that “LGBTQ” is co-opted just as feminism is, and therefore the potential lies in the ways in which queer is not co-optable. Where identity politics seeks inclusion for its respective group, it chooses participation in domination and reinforces binaries. Would a rejection of inclusion and participation be the antithesis of identity politics, even if it were a politics that focused on a specific group-based oppression?

Tangentially, one of the things that I feel is frustrating is how often people are willing to throw out the much more inclusive 'queer' in favour of a string of letters that all require people to figure out which letter they fit on (even though Q is queer).

And much of this is also partially a result of people saying that "queer is a slur" while simultaneously being okay with words like "lesbian" and "gay" (among others that have been reclaimed). In fact, I still see those thrown around far more often than 'queer'.

Quotes from this article:

There are many mysteries of the academy which would be appropriate objects of ethnographic analysis. One question that never ceases to intrigue me is tenure. How could a system ostensibly designed to give scholars the security to be able to say dangerous things have been transformed into a system so harrowing and psychologically destructive that, by the time scholars find themselves in a secure position, 99% of them have forgotten what it would even mean to have a dangerous idea? How is the magic effected, systematically, on the most intelligent and creative people our societies produce? Shouldn’t they of all people know better? There is a reason the works of Michel Foucault are so popular in US academia. We largely do this to ourselves. But for this very reason such questions will never be researched.

I should clarify the Yale socio-cultural anthropology department was, at that time, in an unhappy state. If they were known outside New Haven for anything, at that time, it was for their unique institutional culture, epitomized by the habit of some members of the senior faculty of writing lukewarm or even hostile letters of recommendation for their own graduate students—students who, I might note, were on average of a clearly higher intellectual calibre than the faculty, but lived in a climate of fear and intimidation as a result. (Needless to say it was the same clique who wrote the hostile letters who suddenly stopped speaking to me.) Matters were complicated by a grad student unionization drive that met with unrelenting hostility from this same dominant clique: union organizers had been screamed at, received abusive emails, been object of all sorts of false accusations, even been threatened with police; there were multiple outstanding student grievances and complaints against such behavior and even one pending NLRB case. At the same time the students themselves were deeply divided about the merits of the union. Junior faculty were caught in the middle. For my own part, I made the strategic decision to avoid internal Yale politics, and focus on larger targets (such as the IMF). In New Haven, I concentrated my efforts on teaching, and on mentoring and protecting my own students—who, I am proud to report, are almost all now pursuing successful academic careers.

When the time came in 2004 for the normally routine promotion to “Term Associate” (an untenured position that would lead in four years to tenure review), this same handful of senior faculty tried to deny me reappointment, despite uniformly positive external reviews (one by Laura Nader) and strong student evaluations (I had taught some of the most popular courses in the department’s history). They told the dean I had not done enough committee work—but when challenged were forced to admit they had not given me any. Informed they couldn’t simply fire me without warning, they solicited, and were granted, special permission to review my case again after a year—and this time, at their insistence and as far as I know in violation of all precedent, without external or student input.

1. There is a near total gulf between the way many (most?) anthropologists view situations in their field areas, where they tend to identify with the underdog, and in the academy, where they tend to instinctually take the side of structures of institutional authority. There is little doubt that most of my detractors would have come to exactly the opposite conclusion about what must have “really happened” in my case had I been a young scholar and political dissident in Indonesia or Mozambique who was dismissed from his job with no reason being given.

This is kind of hilarious as a point because that article by Colleen Morgan discussed how archaeologists (most frequently put in the anthropology department in the United States and sharing many of the same structures) are uniquely radical.

But this is the same reality that I also faced as an anthropology student. They seemed to side with the underdog but would always support institutional hierarchy when push came to shove; they're not that much different across academia, honestly. (Just that they feign support for the underdog first.)

3. It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of social class. I was told by one ally at Yale that my problem was that owing to my proletarian background and general comportment, I was considered “unclubbable.” That is, if one is not from a professional-managerial background, one can be accepted by one’s “betters,” but only if one makes it clear such acceptance is one’s highest life aspiration. Otherwise, ideas or actions that among the well-born would likely be treated as amusing peccadillos—such as an embrace of anti-authoritarian politics—will be considered to disqualify one from academic life entirely.

Many academics like the trappings of working class people (for example) but don't want to deal with us. That's just a fact.

7. Children of the professional-managerial classes, as Tom Frank recently pointed out, tend to lack any ethos of solidarity. Solidarity is largely a value among working class people, or among the otherwise marginalized or oppressed. Professional-managerials tend towards radical individualism, and for them, left politics becomes largely a matter of puritanical one-upmanship (“check your privilege!”), with the sense of responsibility to others largely displaced onto responsibility to abstractions, forms, processes, and institutions. Hence frequent comments from ostensible leftists that, in protesting my irregular dismissal, I was revealing an arrogant sense of entitlement by suggesting anthropology somehow owed me a job in the first place (I got similar reactions from some academic “leftists” when I was evicted from my lifelong family home at the instigation of Police Intelligence and Counter-Terrorism, after Occupy Wall Street. “Oh, so you think you have some kind of right to live in Manhattan?”) I find it telling, for instance, that of the few who did reach out in practical terms in the wake of my dismissal, and ask if there was anything they could do to help me find employment, the majority were African-American: i.e., people who came from a tradition of radicalism where people are keenly aware that sticking one’s neck out could have severe personal consequences, and that therefore, mutual support was necessary for survival. Many of elite background offered public moral support, but few if any offered me practical help of any kind.

Not at all surprising in any way at all. Similarly, the people who tried to help me after one of my schools decided not to renew my contract (after offering to me and then making a last minute decision because "the owner didn't sign it") were all locals who made significantly less money than me in the same place.

None of the other non-local teachers did anything other than offering me platitudes. I know who I stand with.

8. The (tacitly authoritarian) insistence on acting as if institutions could not possibly behave the way the anthropology department at Yale did in fact behave leads almost necessary to victim-blaming. As a result, bullying—which I have elsewhere defined as unprovoked attacks designed to produce a reaction which can be held out as retrospective justification for the attacks themselves—tends to be an effective strategy in academic contexts. Once my contract was not renewed, I was made aware that within the larger academic community, any objections I made to how I’d been treated would be themselves be held out as retroactive justification for the non-renewal of my contract. If I was accused of being a bad teacher or scholar, and I objected that my classes were popular and my work well regarded, this would show I was self-important, and hence a bad colleague, which would then be considered the likely real reason for my dismissal. If I suggested political or even personal bias on the part of any of those who opposed renewal of my contract, I would be seen as paranoid, and therefore as likely having been let go for that very reason… And so on.

There is, to an extent, a degree to which I identify with Graeber. Granted, he actually lost none of his status (and even grew in status) once he left the US. That's about where I stop, but I totally identify with his job loss.

But not everyone can have the same star power to escape similar situations. I don't blame him for this, but it is frustrating.

9. The truth or falsity of accusations is often treated as irrelevant. There seems a tacit rule not just of the academy but almost all aspects of professional-managerial life that if a superior plots to destroy an underling’s career, this is considered disagreeable behavior, certainly, but consequences are unlikely to follow. If the victim publicly states this happened, however, this is considered unforgivable and there will be severe consequences—whether or not the accusations are correct. Similarly if accusations are directed against an underling, even if they are proven false, the underling is usually assumed to have done something else to have earned the rancor of the accuser. So in a way the veracity of the accusations is again beside the point and making too much of a fuss about it is considered bizarre.

10. Prejudice in favor of institutional authority also allows authorities to easily get away with indirect forms of dishonesty aimed at falsifying the facts. To this day, most academics who have heard of my case appear convinced I was simply denied tenure, which of course makes my protests of political bias seem bizarre and self-serving, since most junior faculty are denied tenure at Yale. Almost no one knows that in fact it was a highly unusual non-tenure procedure where rules were changed for my case and my case only. Why? One reason is because Yale authorities kept making statements that implied, but did not quite state, that it was a tenure case. For instance when the New York Times ran an article about my dismissal, the author mentioned in passing it was not a tenure case, but also included a quote from an ally of the senior faculty which basically would have made no sense had it not been one (she said it was telling that I “personalized” the case rather than seeing it as being about Yale tenure policy). The ploy was effective and most of those who read the article appear to have been left with a false impression of what happened. But this was only possible because of their own bias: for all the leftist posturing, most American anthropologists, presented with a confusing Rorschach-like welter of evidence, appear to have decided it was more likely that an activist scholar had unreasonably politicized a routine academic decision, than that a notoriously conservative department could possibly have changed the rules to get rid of radical who was actively engaged in organising direct actions to disrupt trade summits and discomfiting the powerful in other actual, practical, ways.

Quotes from the article:

I lauded the anarchists for their absence from the struggle against gentrification and landlords, even as I heard about the squat evictions and the solidarity attacks that followed, even as I walked through the neighborhoods where a creative and hostile graffiti culture kept the developers at bay. I made tired jokes about vegan burritos, even as the food distribution centers and groups multiplied across the city without needing the direction of any central committee.

I used to treat organizing like a try-hard student treats a group project. Other radicals’ ideas, activity and efforts were only Good if they were useful to whatever campaign I was working on. My friends helped out here and there, but they lacked commitment to the organization and would fail to return to meetings after completing the project they helped with.

I'm glad this person reflected on this and understood why their perceptions were wrong because this is why we don't like organising with people/groups like this. If you don't understand us? If you don't take time to understand us? You're not going to get why we help when we do and why we drop when we're done; it's not a lack of commitment on our part, since it's a lack of recognition on yours.

By the time I had finally burned out of my organization and started hanging with my friends again, I had become so accustomed to organizational processes that it took me years to repair my relationships enough to begin to see and understand how anarchists organized. At first, the informality felt like a mess; I couldn’t keep track of who was doing what unless I was directly involved and needed to know. And that was difficult to adjust to, especially when I could see projects everywhere but still didn’t really know who might help me find a way in.

This is a difficulty for anarchists, too. If we move, we're looking for our new connections. It's why we often jump into established groups to see what they're up to and how we can help.

But it also shapes your attempts to integrate into community and how you view community. It's not just a bunch of people to preach at; it's people to get to know, to work with, and figure out how you can mutually build.

*> When I was a Leftist organizer, the movement that I imagined myself to

be building was always something exterior to my life — something that took place outside of myself, my friends and their projects, the spaces that we inhabit. But “the” movement isn’t elsewhere.*

This is something we want people to realise. If the movement is 'outside' of you, then are you really doing anything or building something worth having? Just because something doesn't impact you directly (e.g., a form of bigotry) doesn't mean that it's outside you because, even if we're individualised? We're a collective.

Anarchy, on the other hand, is a flawed and centerless constellation of relationships, which is to say anarchy is built on affinity, trust, and reciprocal knowledge. Pittsburgh anarchist scenes are just as fragmented as the Left. It is true that “we” do struggle to sustain coordination and momentum, beyond the intermediate term. Like every movement, anarchy waxes and wanes. I couldn’t care less. Any communist or anarchist who believes that revolt in the united settler-states actually depends on the strength of “the Left” is deluding themself. Revolt happens with or without us. So rather than waste my time obsessing over the strength of some organization or ideology’s influence in a given region, I’d rather learn more projectual approaches that might contribute to conflictuality. I know some of you reading this are studying this framework as well, and I look forward to discovering your projects, wherever they may incite or strike.

It’s about navigating social life & conflict with the intent to find accomplices through what we do, rather than what we say.

This world is ending. No global revolution is coming to save us. What worlds emerge is dependent on the particular trajectories the collapse will traverse in each region. Empire will survive in the places where workers still prioritize the needs of the techno-industrial economy – be it capitalist or communist – over the needs of the world they inhabit.

Quotes from this article:

First, I agree that anarchism has failed in the sense that there has been no worldwide anti-authoritarian revolution, or even a successful anti-authoritarian revolution in one country. Second, I agree that the anarchist movement has not been very impressive in developing its theory, and that its efforts to explain its defeats have not been fully convincing. Third, I agree that it is not possible to carry out an anti-authoritarian revolution in one country alone.

I'm not sure why people find these failures to be a problem within anarchism? We should expect to fail, especially when faced with such a great enemy. What we should do is actually address these failures.

For example, if an anti-authoritarian revolution is not possible to carry out in one country alone? Then perhaps we need to be better at global organising, which is atrocious and still harmed by people's misconceptions of others and the hierarchical superiority that some western anarchists see themselves as having.

These failures highlight problems to solve rather than highlighting how anarchism is entirely a failure.

... but let’s be clear about something: Marxism has also been a failure, and an abysmal one at that. There is today no international classless, stateless society that Marxism advocates and predicts, nor is there socialism (or even a dictatorship of the proletariat), even in one country. In my opinion, Marxists did lead a proletarian revolution in Russia in 1917, only to strangle it ruthlessly in the year or so afterward and to build in its place one of the most monstrous and violent state-dominated societies the world has ever seen. Is this any less of a failure than that of anarchism? If anything, it is more so: anarchism doesn’t have the blood of many tens of millions of people on its hands.

Marxism has been “successful” only if one fails to see, or willfully obscures, the fact that Marxism did not carry out anything like the socialist transformations they predicted, but bourgeois, that is, pro-capitalist ones which, whatever their achievements, resulted in the torture and murder of millions of people.

Of course, we can support bourgeois revolutions, just as we may support various bourgeois reforms under capitalism, but we should not dress up bourgeois revolutions in anti-authoritarian clothes. Nor should we transform ourselves into bourgeois revolutionaries just because bourgeois revolutions have been successful and anti-authoritarian ones have not.

Marxism’s attempts to understand itself, both as an ideology and in terms of its practical results, has been sadly deficient. Marxism has shown itself to be totally incapable of grasping what it has actually accomplished and what it really is. Marxist analysis of Communist revolutions and the societies they have created range from bald-faced apologetics to self-serving excuses, rarely getting close to a serious explanation. The best Marxism has been able to do are the state-capitalist analyses of the Communist system, such as those of Tony Cliff in Great Britain and Raya Dunayeskaya and C.L.R. James in the US. And neither of these, nor any of the other less insightful analysis, has even tried to address the responsibility of Marxism itself for this very system. Indeed, one of their chief aims is to SAVE Marxism from being judged by and rejected because of the gruesome regimes it has created. For a worldview that claims to be self-conscious, in contrast to the “false consciousness” that afflicts everyone else, this is not very impressive.

Beginning in 1918, no methods were too vile, too dishonest or ruthless, in the Communists’ campaign to slander, isolate and destroy every left-wing organization, tendency, and individual that dared even to criticize them, let alone actually oppose them. They had millions of dollars at their disposal which they used to finance newspapers, magazines and books, in fact, an enormous worldwide propaganda apparatus. They had an army of agents, not just diplomats and spies but world-famous intellectuals, who repeated every lie, no matter how absurd, and every slander, no matter how outrageous, about those labeled “anti-Soviet.” All left-wing critics and opponents of the Soviet Union and the particular policies it advocated at any given moment were denounced and, where this was feasible, killed, as counter-revolutionaries, fascists and agents of Hitler.

Most important for our purposes, virtually all of the political trends to the left of the Communists — anarchists, anarcho-syndicalists, left-wing socialist, Trotskyists — were either destroyed or politically marginalized.

Note the intent. There is a reason many people who fit into any of these categories are quick to point out red-brown alliances (which are a real thing); it's because we will end up, at best, marginalised and left to struggle and, at worst, dead. That's not hyperbole. This is literally part of "left unity," and the only people demanding it are those who have a modicum of power or could see themselves as having a modicum of power.

In February, 1936, a coalition of liberal and left-wing parties and organizations known as the Popular Front won the elections held under the newly-formed Spanish Republic. Claiming the need to resist the imminent “Sovietization” of Spain, a group of fascist generals under the leadership of Francisco Franco revolted in July and, from various parts of the country, began to march on Madrid to crush the republic. In response, workers and peasants throughout Spain rose up to resist them. They not only organized militias that put up a determined and largely effective resistance. They also seized factories, workshops, the means of transportation and communication in the cities, the land in the countryside, and ran out the capitalists and landlords, their allies and agents. Not least, they set up collectives and councils to manage what they had confiscated.

While the fascist forces were being financed and armed by Hitler and Mussolini, the Republican government was internationally isolated. The US was officially neutral, while England and France pursued a policy of appeasement, that is, giving Hitler whatever he wanted in the hopes that he would leave their countries (and their colonial empires) alone. The only country that offered to aid the Spanish Republic was the Soviet Union, but at a price. In exchange for military and other assistance Stalin insisted that the social revolution in Spain be rolled back and that the revolutionary struggle there be transformed into a traditional-style war between two bourgeois armies.

There were two interrelated reasons behind Stalin’s policy. First, consistent with his theory of “Socialism in One Country,” (that is, the defense of state capitalism in Russia), he wanted to convince Britain, France and the US to form an anti-Fascist alliance with the Soviet Union and was worried that the Revolutionary events in Spain would scare them off. Second, following from his theory of the two-stage revolution, he had decided that the objective conditions in Spain were not ripe for a socialist revolution, but only a bourgeois one.

But in Spain, most of the bourgeoisie had fled and/or had sided with Franco and most of the state apparatus had collapsed. As a result, Stalin’s policy meant bringing back the institutions, including the police and standing army, of the old regime, seizing the land and factories from the peasants and workers, smashing the revolutionary organizations they had built and imprisoning and murdering thousands of leaders and militants of those left-wing organizations that opposed his policies.

Robbed of the revolutionary conquests, forced to submit to the oppressive conditions of the old system, and shorn of many of their leaders, the workers and peasants became demoralized. In part as a result, the Republican forces, deprived of the mass participation in revolutionary enthusiasm of the workers and peasants and forced to wage a traditional military campaign, were defeated.

Undoubtedly, the militias left a lot to be desired militarily (and probably could have profited from an increase in discipline and the coordination of their forces). But the liquidation of these outfits and the replacement by a traditional army, based on a traditional military hierarchy and discipline, was inseparable from the liquidation of the revolutionary conquests and the resulting political demoralization of the workers and peasants.

And all this, including the execution of their political enemies, was inseparable from the Stalinists’ view that the Spanish Revolution was, and had to be, a bourgeois one. Believing in the inevitability of the bourgeois revolution in Spain, the Stalinists did everything in their power to make sure that this, and only this, kind of revolution occurred.

One of the main reasons the Stalinist were able to do what they did in Spain and elsewhere was the fact that millions of people, both in Spain and around the world, believed that the Soviet Union was socialist, a workers’ state, some other kind of progressive alternative to capitalism, or, at the very least, the only force capable of waging a consistent fight against fascism. In other words, millions believed that if the Russians did or said something, it must be right.

To raise people’s political consciousness, including their understanding of the nature of Marxism and all authoritarian ideologies and social structures, is one of the chief tasks of anarchists and anti-authoritarians in general. But we won’t be able to do this if we become attracted to and begin to promote authoritarian ideologies because they’ve been more successful or have more impressive theory. It seems to me that it is of the very nature of anti-authoritarianism to be on the losing side of popular struggles for liberation until humanity achieves the transformation we envision. This is something we should be proud of, not something we should sell for the chance to emulate authoritarian revolutionaries.

I think it's the principles that we should be proud of, for the record; that's how this reads to me. It's that we haven't given up our principles of anti-authoritarianism in lieu of a "successful" revolution that liberates a few but continues to oppress many.

Anarchists often argue, or seem to argue, that humanity has always been ready for anarchism but has been thwarted by the actions of Marxists and other authoritarians. This downplays human beings’ responsibility for our own conditions. If the state is bad, where does it come from? If capitalism and other class societies are brutal and oppressive, why do they arise and why do we put up with them? Why do so many people believe Marxism’s claim to be liberatory, despite all the evidence to the contrary? This is one area in which anarchist theory, it seems to me, needs to be developed.

I actually agree with this. There is a lot of space for theory to develop within the realm of anarchism, and we're seeing much of this flesh out in the recent decades, especially from anarchists who traditionally come from more marginalised backgrounds. It's important that we don't lose sight of the lessons we're learning or being taught.

The problem with this concept of the “objective conditions” is that it is very abstract and obscures the actual realities of the countries to which it refers. Economic and social conditions in all countries are very uneven. No country is uniformly advanced: nor is any country totally backward. This is this especially the case since the development of imperialism, which has brought about a tremendous intermingling of economic, social, political and ideological forms. As a result, most imperialized countries have been characterized, and are still characterized by complex combinations of conditions, ranging from extremely archaic to extraordinarily modern. It is therefore very difficult to determine which country is or isn’t ripe for a particular kind of revolution.

For example, at the turn of the century Russia was considered by most revolutionaries, and certainly by Marxists, to be a “backward” country (indeed, most Marxists looked to Marxism as a means to modernize the country, which is what happened). Yet, as Leon Trotsky and others observed, this characterization was simplistic and obscured the concrete nature of Russian reality. While it was true that the vast majority of the people in what was then the Russian Empire were peasants who lived under barbaric conditions and that the country was ruled by an absolute monarch, etc., the country also contains some of the world’s largest and most technologically advanced factories, in part as a result of imperialism. Because of such industry, the country also contained a small but highly concentrated working class which had a tremendous amount of power at its disposal if only it chose to use it.

Many of these views about Russia "being backwards" still persist when discussing the revolution that took place and Marxist views in history books; it actually seems like it could've been one of those things that was co-opted as a way to explain why "things went wrong." It's curious.

As a result of all this, it is incorrect simply to say that Russia lacked the objective conditions for a socialist revolution. This is especially so when one considers not merely the objective conditions but also the subjective conditions, that is, the consciousness of the popular classes. Throughout the centuries, the Russian peasants, “normally” quiescent, profoundly conservative and under the domination of religious and ancient superstitions, periodically rose up in vast, powerful upheavals. Although generally led by someone who claims to be the true Tsar, as opposed to the “pretender” who occupied the throne, these uprisings threatened, for a time, the social structure, indeed the very existence, of the entire country. Moreover, the working class, only recently come into existence, was extremely receptive to revolutionary ideas, not only Marxism, but anarchism and anarchist-like programs as well.

This latter bit is actually pretty obvious when you think of the number of people who lived in exile, regardless of it being voluntary or forced. There are a lot of Russian names in socialist and anarchist movements, and it should be pretty obvious why that was.

It’s always easy, after the fact, to say that something happened of necessity, that is, that it was inevitable that things happened as they did. This is especially true of social and historical developments. Once some particular social event has occurred, it’s relatively easy to come up with a theory that appears to explain it. But to develop a theory that can predict social developments is something else again. This is a major weakness of bourgeois sociology and its radical manifestation, Marxism.

The same consideration applies to revolutions, especially so when we are considering revolutionary defeats. Once a revolution has been smashed, it sounds convincing to say that this was inevitable. The person who says this, particularly if he blames the defeat on “objective conditions,” comes across as scientific. The revolution was defeated and science, which at this level is deterministic, comes up with explanations to explain why this happened. By the same token, those who argue that the defeat was not inevitable appear to have their heads in the clouds. In short, reality is hard to argue against.

It's the same views that seem to side line "What if we tried [thing that isn't status quo]?" attempts, including alternative schools and educational/learning spaces.

In Spain, as we saw, Stalin assumed that the country was not ready for a socialist revolution but only a bourgeois one. He therefore ordered his agents and followers to dismantle the socialist aspects of the revolution, that is, to limit the revolution to the so-called bourgeois stage. But since revolutions can’t be so neatly divided in two stages or any other way, the Stalinist efforts to limit the revolution led to the destruction of the entire revolution, including the bourgeois one.

Something very similar happened in China. In the 1920s, as part of his struggle against his opponents in the Russian Communist Party, Stalin adopted the slogan “Socialism in One Country.” As we discussed, this meant foregoing attempts to encourage socialist revolutions in other countries in order to appease the imperialist powers into leaving Russia (and its state capitalist system) alone. This slogan was integrally connected to Stalin’s theory of the two stage revolution.

Sometimes I wonder why it is that the people who tend to mention "Socialism in One Country" are the same few people mentioned earlier as getting destroyed and marginalised. I feel like I rarely see it from anyone else, even people critical of Stalinism (and especially people engaged in Stalinism under another name).

Having decided that the objective conditions in China did not exist for a socialist revolution, Stalin urged the Chinese Communist Party to maintain an alliance with the leader of the bourgeois nationalists, Chiang Kai-shek, at all costs, in order to carry out the revolution in China. This meant subordinating the struggle of the Chinese workers to the interests of the Chinese capitalists, whom Chiang represented. Despite these orders, the workers mounted a wave of increasingly militant, widespread and coordinated strikes. In 1926, Chiang carried out a coup in the southern city of Canton and began his “Northern Expedition” to root out the reactionary warlords who controlled much of southern China. As Chiang approached the port city of Shanghai in early 1927, the workers there rose up to liberate the city. They mounted two general strikes, took over the city and set up a provisional government in March, 1927.

Chiang halted outside the city and began negotiations with local landlords and capitalists and representatives of the imperialists to seize control of the city. Consistent with his strategy of not scaring off Chiang and the Chinese bourgeoisie, Stalin directed the Chinese Communists to order the Communist-controlled unions to offer no resistance to Chiang and to have the workers bury their arms. Trusting their leaders, the workers did so. When Chiang entered the city, his troops slaughtered over 20,000 workers. Among other things, this led to the elimination of the most revolutionary workers, destroyed the Communist Party in Shanghai and ultimately led to the peasant-based strategy championed by Mao.

All of this is really well detailed in Chuăng #1 (2019). It really makes someone wonder what would've happened had Stalin actually supported radical people. Where would we be now?

The crucial point to understand here is that if revolutionaries decide before the fact that the objective conditions in a given country mean that the revolution is there “of necessity” will be a bourgeois one, they will act to oppose those struggles that go beyond the bourgeois revolution. In more graphic terms, they will become the executioner’s of the most revolutionary workers and peasants and will in all likelihood destroy the revolution altogether.

After the defeat and slaughter of the Chinese workers in Shanghai, a section of the Chinese Communist Party and eventually the party as a whole gave up entirely on organizing the working class and instead focused on the peasantry. But the result was not a spontaneous peasant uprising of the sort that powered of the French, Russian and Spanish Revolutions. The peasants in China did not spontaneously rise up, slaughter the landlords, seize the land and work it under their own direction. The Chinese Communist certainly organized peasant armies, but it would be more accurate to describe these as armies of peasants. The peasants were organized into formations that were firmly controlled by the Communists from the top down through officers and party functionaries.

Moreover, throughout most of the struggle, these armies did not attack the landlords and let the peasants seize and manage the land as they saw fit. Quite the contrary, consistent with the theory of the two-stage revolution, the Chinese Communist strategy centered on maintaining united front of all patriotic Chinese, including Chiang Kai-shek, the capitalists and landlords, in a purely nationalist struggle against the Japanese, who invaded Manchuria in 1931 and attempted to conquer the rest of China several years later. In the areas they controlled, the Communists merely limited the extent to which the landlords exploited the peasants by lowering rents and interest rates. All spontaneous peasant movements were either absorbed into the Communist armies or ruthlessly suppressed as “bandits.”

Even after the Japanese were defeated and the Communists turned their full attention against Chiang, the Communist pursued a purely bourgeois program and maintained firm, bureaucratic control over the peasants. Consistent with this, when their armies surround the city, the Communists did not urge the workers to rise up, throw out the capitalists and take over the factories. Instead, the workers were urged to remain at work under the firm control of the capitalists, who continued to exploit them as before and were assured by the Communists that their ownership and control of the factories would not be infringed. In fact, Mao advocated lowering wage rates and lengthening working hours in order to increase production.

It was not until the 1950s, that is, after the Communists had defeated Chiang and consolidated their power, that they moved to introduce land reform and expropriate the capitalists. Even then, these processes were well controlled by the Communist Party; at no point were the workers encouraged to form autonomous factory committees or given control over the factories; nor were the peasants given full and autonomous control over the land. Meanwhile, the capitalists were compensated for their property and often hired as managers at generous salaries to run their former plants, while their children were guaranteed entry into Chinese colleges and universities.

How is any of this consistent with communism? (It's... not.)

Rather than being a model for anti-authoritarians, the Chinese Revolution reveals the logic of Marxists’ attitudes toward methods. Unlike anarchists, Marxists are generally not restrained by particular scruples about the methods they employ. This is especially the case when they have the power of the state at their disposal. Whatever they may claim, they have always acted as if all means, no matter how brutal, dishonest and disgusting, are justified in their struggle against capitalism. These methods become ipso facto progressive because, they believe, they represent the proletariat, socialism and the liberation of all humanity.

But in politics, particularly revolutionary politics, you are what you do. If you claim to be an anti-authoritarian but decide, for whatever reason (perhaps because the objective conditions are not right), to try to carry out a bourgeois revolution, you are no longer an anti-authoritarian: you are bourgeois, that is, an authoritarian, revolutionist.

It is of the very nature of an anti-authoritarian revolution to be a worldwide phenomenon. We are, in fact, speaking of a transformation of the human species. It either happens relatively rapidly or it won’t happen at all. If the people in any one country, even an economically “advanced” one, carry out an anti-authoritarian revolution and it remains isolated, it will be defeated. There remains nothing that anti-authoritarians can do about this but to pick up and start over. > Adopting authoritarian measures, such as a standing army based on traditional centralization, hierarchy and discipline, will not save the revolution but will destroy it from within.

This perspective is not as far-fetched as it may seem. It should be clear that human society as it is currently organized is rapidly undermining the conditions for its own existence; among other things, it is destroying the planet on which we live. Human beings will increasingly be confronted with the need to make a radical transformation in the way we treat each other and the Earth as a whole. These two questions are thoroughly interconnected: we must stop viewing other human beings and the Earth as a whole as tools to increase our own individual and/or group power. Do we carry out this transformation or do we all get destroyed?

Quotes from this essay:

And the more troubling question is: Who is going to clean up this mess? How did gay marriage become “the issue” in Maine and how did so many LGBTA folks get duped into making this campaign their top priority, emotionally, financially and otherwise, by the shallow rhetoric of equality?

This is something we still need to deal with. Even after federal marriage equality took place during the Obama administration, so many people (including liberals in the LGBTQIA+ community want to ignore that we still are not free. We did not get liberation because we could enter into a state-sanctioned structure that protected a few but not many, leaving so many people behind.

Gays and lesbians of all ages are obsessing over gay marriage as if it's going to cure AIDS, stop anti‐queer/anti‐trans violence, provide all uninsured queers with health care, and reform racist immigration policies. Unfortunately, marriage does little more than consolidate even more power in the hands of already privileged gay couples engaged in middle class hetero‐mimicry.

Two things:

1. This is still happening to some extent because people are really pushing this as the end-all-be-all of queer liberation, when it's not even liberating in the first place. And, as we've seen in other arenas, it's so fucking easy to smash them and have these rights removed with barely a fight (by the people who claim constantly to "do what's best" for us).

2. This kind of fight still happens in places where same-sex marriage is under attack or straight out banned. We still see people pushing for the most minimal of changes and obsessing over them to our detriment. It's infuriating.

Let’s be clear: The national gay marriage campaign is NOT a social justice movement. Gay marriage reinforces the for‐profit medical industrial complex by tying access to health care to employment and relational status. Gay marriage does not challenge patent laws that keep poor/working class poz folks from accessing life‐extending medications. Gay marriage reinforces the nuclear family as the primary support structure for youth even though nuclear families are largely responsible for queer teen homelessness, depression and suicide. Gay marriage does not challenge economic systems set up to champion people over property and profit. Gay marriage reinforces racist immigration laws by only allowing productive, “good”, soon‐to‐be‐wed, non‐citizens in while ignoring the rights of migrant workers. Gay marriage simply has nothing to do with social justice.

Note: 'Poz' is a reference to HIV+ people. (This is something I had to look up because it was not part of my vocabulary.)

Fucking hard agree, though. And this is still the case.

Comments on the sections: "An Opportunistic National Strategy" and "Following the Money"

This is a huge problem, and I don't think enough people saw through it as it was happening. This ties into issues with the Non-Profit Industrial Complex; they get to help set the stage as tools of governments, and that's a huge issue. Instead of focusing on all the problems above, which would've helped far more people (including queer people)? We got stuck on goddamned marriage equality and everything tied to belongings, wealth, and ownership.

I also feel like we haven't done enough to actually check into where the money is coming from and has gone; there are so many things I didn't know because they weren't happening in my community, and there wasn't a queer community for me to safely be a part of (where I lived).

And I'm starting to wonder how much of that lack of community was caused by same-sex marriage campaigns soaking up cash, spending it, and ignoring on-the-ground needs of people in a range of places.

In a state with a tanking economy, this kind of reckless spending on a single issue campaign that isn’t even a top priority for most LGBT folks is blatant and unrestrained classism at its worst.

Some suggest that gay marriage is part of a progress narrative and that it is a step in the right direction towards more expansive social justice issues. This largely ignores a critique of power. Once privilege is doled out to middle class gay couples, are they going to continue on to fight against racist immigration policies, for universal health care, for comprehensive queer/trans inclusive sex education, or to free queers unjustly imprisoned during rabidly homophobic sex‐abuse witch hunts? Doubtful is an overstatement. It's more likely they will be enjoying summer vacations at an expensive bed and breakfast in Ogunquit while the rest of us are still trying to access basic rights like health care and freedom of movement. Let’s be real: Privilege breeds complacency.

And this has absolutely happened middle-class and wealthier queer people, especially white queer people, have absolutely ducked out of any kind of push for change. They're largely fine with assimilating, as evidenced by constant battles like "Should cops be at Pride?" (No) or "It's okay if corporations are at Pride" (No). They got what little benefited them, and the rest of us can get fucked (globally).

There really is a hierarchy in queer spaces, and it's got to go.

If we are to imagine queer futures that don't replicate the same violence and oppression many of us experience on an everyday basis as queer and trans folks, we must challenge the middle class neo‐liberal war machine known as the national gay marriage campaign. We must fight the rhetoric of equality and inclusion in systems of domination like marriage and the military, and stop believing that our participation in those institutions is more important than questioning those institutions legitimacy all together. We need to call out the national marriage campaign as opportunistic and parasitic. We must challenge their money mongering tactics to assure our local, truly community based LGBT organizations aren’t left financially high and dry while offering the few essential services to the most marginalized of our community.

Quotes from this essay:

Marriage and love have nothing in common; they are as far apart as the poles; are, in fact, antagonistic to each other. No doubt some marriages have been the result of love. Not, however, because love could assert itself only in marriage; much rather is it because few people can completely outgrow a convention. There are to-day large numbers of men and women to whom marriage is naught but a farce, but who submit to it for the sake of public opinion. At any rate, while it is true that some marriages are based on love, and while it is equally true that in some cases love continues in married life, I maintain that it does so regardless of marriage, and not because of it.

I'd also venture to say that sometimes love can be harmed by marriage, as people may feel constrained by the social expectations of the institution. The very act of being married requires that a lot of people figure out their relationship to their potential spouse and how the state will view their relationship. There's a lot that is tied up in marriage, especially as the result of settler-colonialism.

I feel like this video by The Liberal Cook outlines a lot of the modern issues with state interference in relationships.

On the other hand, it is utterly false that love results from marriage.

The elements of 'settler-colonialism' are why I somewhat disagree with the paragraph this comes from. I don't think it's false; I don't think it's impossible. I do agree that, to some extent, it comes from the "adjustment to the inevitable."

Arranged marriages are not part of my culture, so this is not an area that I'm comfortable with speaking on and how this might be different today.

But I am confused by this: "... the spontaneity, the intensity, and beauty of love, without which the intimacy of marriage must prove degrading to both the woman and the man."

Why must love be spontaneous and intense? It's not even always beautiful, but I certainly don't understand why it must be spontaneous or intense. This certainly doesn't speak to the range of relationships or love that exist within the world.

Marriage is primarily an economic arrangement, an insurance pact. It differs from the ordinary life insurance agreement only in that it is more binding, more exacting. Its returns are insignificantly small compared with the investments. In taking out an insurance policy one pays for it in dollars and cents, always at liberty to discontinue payments. If, how ever, woman’s premium is a husband, she pays for it with her name, her privacy, her self-respect, her very life, “until death doth part.” Moreover, the marriage insurance condemns her to life-long dependency, to parasitism, to complete uselessness, individual as well as social. Man, too, pays his toll, but as his sphere is wider, marriage does not limit him as much as woman. He feels his chains more in an economic sense.

It's interesting in how some of these have changed (in places where 'names' were lost, we're now seeing an uptick in women keeping their names or hyphenating -- minor point), but there are aspects where these things haven't changed that much.

I'm also curious about "condemns her to complete uselessness." Which class of women was she speaking about? In 1911, a lot of lower-class women were working as maids and in textiles; they were doing piecework and taking care of families.

From infancy, almost, the average girl is told that marriage is her ultimate goal; therefore her training and education must be directed towards that end.

Again, this is an interesting point because of which communities still seem to have retained this messaging. Thinking back to my time growing up (with everyone assuming I was a girl), it was very clear to me that I should "get married" and "have children." These messages are still everywhere, even as we're saying that it's okay not to, but some communities receive them more frequently.

Though, this phenomenon seems to be slowly decreasing in urban areas.

It is safe to say that a large percentage of the unhappiness, misery, distress, and physical suffering of matrimony is due to the criminal ignorance in sex matters that is being extolled as a great virtue. Nor is it at all an exaggeration when I say that more than one home has been broken up because of this deplorable fact.

This feels like an interesting area to look into, and I may have to. But I do feel that a lot of relationships (especially within the Western context) have this issue. Sex is still somewhat difficult to discuss, as are needs within a relationship. It's difficult to talk about these things when you've been taught otherwise for so long.

If, on rare occasions young people allow themselves the luxury of romance they are taken in care by the elders, drilled and pounded until they become “sensible.”

Though the conversations about what is "sensible" have changed somewhat, this still happens! (Also threats. I got a lot of threats about what would happen if I ever "turned up pregnant," and I suspect that didn't help a single iota in my relationship to sex.)

The important and only God of practical American life: Can the man make a living? Can he support a wife? That is the only thing that justifies marriage.

Again, I think it's clear that we need to ask which class of women is Goldman talking about or to. It's not to say that poor people didn't enter into marriage for economic reasons in the early 1900s, but it was definitely more likely that families of wealth had to consider that.

It's much like now. Poor people who want to get married are less often considering the financial status of each other (unless, for whatever reason, it impacts their ability to live a better life -- such as how disabled people can sometimes lose their benefits when marrying someone) because they generally have a better understanding of precarity and its impacts.

Yet with all that, but a very small number of the vast army of women wage-workers look upon work as a permanent issue, in the same light as does man.

Aha, here we go. I'd love to see numbers on how women viewed work (permanence) in the early 1900s to compare across decades until now.

The woman considers her position as worker transitory, to be thrown aside for the first bidder. That is why it is infinitely harder to organize women than men. “Why should I join a union? I am going to get married, to have a home.” Has she not been taught from infancy to look upon that as her ultimate calling? She learns soon enough that the home, though not so large a prison as the factory, has more solid doors and bars. It has a keeper so faithful that naught can escape him. The most tragic part, however, is that the home no longer frees her from wage slavery; it only increases her task.

This bit is something that I'd actually like to explore more, especially considering unions initially did not want to include women (as well as non-white people, particularly Black people). If the union didn't want to let you in, your outlook on joining them might be negative because they excluded you.

Early unions that included women were often run by women. (Wikipedia overview.)

Silk Stockings and Socialism actually discusses the history of the textile unions, which was among the first to start organising women in large numbers (because other than the top jobs, like knitters, most of the workers were women and girls -- think of the Triangle Shirt Waist fire and how many girls and women died there).

It's amazing what happens when you spend time listening to and supporting people.

But the child, how is it to be protected, if not for marriage? After all, is not that the most important consideration? The sham, the hypocrisy of it! Marriage protecting the child, yet thousands of children destitute and homeless. Marriage protecting the child, yet orphan asylums and reformatories over crowded, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children keeping busy in rescuing the little victims from “loving” parents, to place them under more loving care, the Gerry Society. Oh, the mockery of it!

Children are actually an aspect of the nuclear family and marriage that I'd love to see discussed more because of how often they are entirely excluded (until someone needs to "protect" them from something). It really hurts their liberation from the whole system.

The defenders of authority dread the advent of a free motherhood, lest it will rob them of their prey. Who would fight wars? Who would create wealth? Who would make the policeman, the jailer, if woman were to refuse the indiscriminate breeding of children? The race, the race! shouts the king, the president, the capitalist, the priest. The race must be preserved, though woman be degraded to a mere machine, --- and the marriage institution is our only safety valve against the pernicious sex-awakening of woman.

I do think we need to go back to thinking about what the purpose of all the "birth rates are falling" news stories are. These questions asked are particularly poignant in that light.

Our pseudo-moralists have yet to learn the deep sense of responsibility toward the child, that love in freedom has awakened in the breast of woman. Rather would she forego forever the glory of motherhood than bring forth life in an atmosphere that breathes only destruction and death.

On a list of things that sound strikingly familiar over 100 years later.