Defection
How do you know when it's time to leave?
Sometimes, in movement spaces or in my personal life, after diagnosing the problems with the left wing of patriarchal civilization, a handful of sisters will ask me something to the tune of “well isn’t the male left better than nothing?” It’s an understandable question, one that every radical asks herself at one point or another. When i was younger we used to hear it after criticizing orgs for their revisionism. Now i mostly hear it about male dominated ML “parties” or anarchist mutual aid projects. Let me say once and for all, definitively, the answer is no.
This shouldn’t come as any surprise, the marriage between women and the patriarchal left has always been an abusive one. With the latest assault from the amerikkkan government scattering an already weakened radical left, more and more women are seeing the sinking ship for what it is. The problem is there’s no lifeboats as far as any of us can see, so rather than try and swim alone we delude ourselves into thinking that our ship is still sea worthy. So often we decide to drown for lack of better options.
To say that women are at a crossroads would be a profound understatement. Women are surrounded on all sides, every escape route blocked by pricks and pigs that we see as our friends and comrades. The feminist movement as it currently exists is defined by hetero-collaborationism. Every essay, book, podcast, and video coming out of what is supposed to be a movement for women’s liberation focuses a considerable amount of its time and space on men’s problems. In Sophie Lewis’ latest excretion, in Laura Bates’ extremely in-depth book Men Who Hate Women or in the actions of the newest outcropping of anti-imperialist/decolonial feminist collectives, deferring to men is step one for feminists in this era.
Whether we’re insisting that our boyfriends are progressive because they let us strap them (Lewis) or that men’s mental health issues are just as serious a result of patriarchy as rape (Bates) or that a truly anti-imperialist feminism must venerate right wing patriarchs who, by accident of historic process, oppose the same genocides that we oppose (the anti-imperialists), feminism in the 21st century has become a choice between which prick to cozy up with. Gone is any notion of self determination, gone is any analysis of the neocolonial classes of men, gone is liberation for the classes of women, for women as a people. So it shouldn’t be a shock that women don’t know where to go or what to do.
Why would a woman looking down the barrel of leftist patriarchy jump to our side? Most of what we do best is venerating men of one political stripe or another, usually depending on who we think is going to, savior-like, carry us to liberation. We can’t actually counter male violence, we refuse to even touch it, because once we pull that thread then the entire structure of patriarchal civilization will begin to unravel. And i mean touch in a real way, a “the weapon of criticism certainly cannot replace the criticism of weapons” kind of way (2). We may despise patriarchal civilization but we also depend on it, we were made by it, like how livestock are different from wild animals. With no alternatives it’s no shock that women stay with their sinking ships.
Let’s look at the landscape of leftist politics today. For decades the vanguard of revolutionary action in amerikkka was represented by the Black nation, particularly the New Afrikan liberation movement. What was once the driving force behind the Black Liberation Army and much of the prison support movement is now mostly represented by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM) in the south. MXGM has recently taken to working in coalition with the widely exposed and reviled rape cult the Party for Socialism and Liberation. Masculinist opportunism in the name of that parasitic unity we’ve been opposing for years.
The PSL has also welded itself inseparably to the Palestinian solidarity movement, taking advantage of that movement’s petty bourgeois diaspora-centered politics for their own self interest. Predators like the PSL use the Palestinian solidarity movement as cover. Any criticism of them is twisted into movement splitting wreckerism, a way for greedy women in the first world to take attention away from the holocaust happening in Gaza. Faced with the most public genocide in modern history it’s no surprise that women tolerate their own rape and abuse. After all, it could be worse, and stopping the genocide is job one, right?
Except that ignoring these problems is having paradigm shifting effects on the left already, even without active feminist intervention. Women are quitting the movement, big time, and not stepping into any active roles in any kind of feminist movement. With perhaps the sole exception of New York City, around the country the student movement against genocide in Palestine has collapsed. This is after the complete failure of the left to do anything with the 2020 George Floyd uprising other than funnel more young women into the decrepit male subculture that makes up the left in this country.
But these women aren’t founding or joining feminist groups, at least not yet. In part this is because the feminist movement is its own quagmire of counter-insurgency. Hurt women who are looking for answers, solutions, maybe even revenge, find only authors and movements who insist that our job as women is to forgive men their trespasses. Take for example the highly praised feminist author Sophie Lewis. Lewis is a prolific essayist and feminist radical, widely respected for her work on family abolition and colonial feminism. She also cannot seem to write an essay without wedging in her insistence that men are essential to the feminist project.
I’ve covered Lewis’ rightist critique of Andrea Dworkin at length in the past (1). Another of Lewis’ otherwise excellent pieces, “Terf Island,” is ruined at the last minute by a bizarre insistence that “‘the side of women’ does not exist. It never existed” and an assertion that “gender can be pleasurable for all.” I mostly think of this kind of word salad as the other side of the trans panic coin. Seeing trans women on the horizon, well meaning cis feminists freak the fuck out and start throwing anything they can grab overboard. This is its own kind of transmisogynistic reaction, a way to progressively refuse to consider trans women as women. Rather than actually getting her hands dirty and working out how women as a people (within which there are many classes) includes trans women, Sophie Lewis and her comrades give up the ghost. Now if only they would quit raking in that Verso money and get real jobs we could all mourn and move on.
But as the twitter meme says so plainly, “trans women are the women of women.” Our oppression takes on distinctly feminized and misogynistic shapes, even within queer communities or communities of women. This is essential to recognize because if we don’t know who and where we are we can’t possibly sketch out any kind of scientific map to our liberation. Lewis’ work, while once critically important, has come to confuse and muddle the issue of trans women’s liberation. While once she was building weapons we might have used, now she’s building them for our enemies, whether she likes it or not.
On the other side of the coin is Laura Bates, author of the devastatingly in-depth book Men Who Hate Women. Bates’ work is impressive, full of important data and research. Her work on the so-called manosphere is unprecedented and undoubtedly useful to revolutionary feminists and separatists. After all, we have to know our enemies. Bates unfortunately suffers from the same liberal delusion as Lewis does: that men’s issues are of equal serious concern to feminists as women’s.
Bates offers incisive and cutting analysis of the pro-rape movement in the united states (make no mistake, that’s what the manosphere is). Yet it seems every other paragraph is dedicated to acknowledging that men do face their own troubles. Some amount of this isn’t Bates’ fault, it’s the only way to write about women and to still be taken seriously by mainstream (read: patriarchal) society. Bates’ does it so frequently though, even giving lip service to the now completely non-existent male anti-sexism movement, that her work reads like a battered housewife desperately trying to prove she doesn’t hate men.
This kind of capitulation has never, ever worked. What does it matter if men have their own problems? That’s only our problem in as much as they take it out on women instead of actually addressing them. Does that lessen the impact of misogyny? Does it change the character of patriarchal civilization? No, and the herstoric necessity of women’s war and the complete overthrow of the classes of men remains regardless of how sad and empty their lives are.
This is why the women abandoning the left aren’t re-organizing into feminist collectives, because feminism has come to mean hetero-collaborationism. The saddest example of this comes from the most promising remnant of the last wave of leftist organization: the Palestine solidarity movement. The student intifada, as it’s sometimes called, was all anyone could talk about through 2024. While nothing compared to the 2020 uprising of the New Afrikan nation, the so-called student intifada was strong enough to give some people the false sense that the left wasn’t falling apart. Most notably, in the places where it took its most militant form, it was women who were leading the charge.
In instance after instance, collective after collective, in city after city, these decolonial or anti-imperialist feminists ran into the weaknesses of their own men. They largely abandoned them, finding themselves (unintentionally) in collectives with mostly other women. But revolutionary feminist consciousness still evades them. Rather than taking matters into their own hands, developing their own revolutionary perspectives, in case after case they replaced the first world patriarch with patriarchs from the third world. From Nasrallah to Xi Jinping, anyone who by accident of history opposed the zionist genocide in Gaza over the last couple years had their portrait hoisted into the air. All dialectical thinking goes out the window and these sisters resort to the same kind of black and white, undialectical thinking that plagues the left.
Right wing anti-imperialism has bitten us in the ass in the past. Left wing support for the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979 resulted in the ascension of a right wing theocratic dictatorship. Sure, that dictatorship opposes amerikkkan imperialism, but it also represses women so severely that women’s uprisings have long been the regime’s primary internal problem. The anti-imperialist response to these women’s uprisings? To dismiss them as CIA intervention and color revolution against some mythical axis of resistance.
What should we make of the all-male demonstrations against zionism in Yemen, the numerous male military leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah who have been killed in action against the so-called state of israel, the leftover Iraqi resistance still kicking around from 2003, or any number of neocolonial male guerrilla armies who we might share enemies with? We won’t be able to answer this question or any questions without abandoning patriarchal civilization. The world of male politics has no answers for us, only through women’s political-military theory and action can we begin to really see the playing field. Unfortunately for our right wing anti-imperialist sisters, we can’t escape cycles of ineffective rebellion without leaving Dick in the past.
What we do know from our own herstory is how to involve ourselves with the student movement, or not. In the 1960’s, amongst the settler nation, the student movement was an important figure of militant anti-imperialism in amerikkka. That movement’s momentum culminated in 1969 with the formation of the Weather Underground Organization, an armed struggle organization of white youth who believed in the revolutionary Black vanguard and the primacy of the struggle against the war in Vietnam. That was an important moment in his-story, something we should absolutely learn and take hints from, but it marks the last time students in amerikkka actually committed to anti-imperialism. Even today’s so-called student intifada is a flash in the pan compared to the role students played in the civil rights movement that became the aborted 60’s revolution.
No student movement since has been as heavy. Post 1968 Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy still has plenty to say about building a movement of students and workers, but none has ever materialized. After the 1960’s the political vanguard of settler radicals shifted from students to the women’s movement and gay liberation. They left dusty old Weather behind, its leading pricks too scared to involve themselves in anything too locally dangerous. Armed groups in the mid 70’s like the George Jackson Brigade and the United Freedom Front also believed in the Black revolutionary vanguard, as Weather did, but were made up of mostly ex-cons instead of ex-students (3).
Most importantly, as political prisoner Marilyn Buck laid out for us, white society is always willing to welcome its strays back into the fold. Radical white students, even the ones who became Weather cadre or went into the New Communist Movement, managed to affect no long term change and mostly went home to a career and a suburban home afterwards (with some very notable exceptions). It turns out it’s very, very hard to betray your class interests. We can keep pushing for people to do it but we shouldn’t be surprised when one wave of students melts away into another and the focus switches from revolution to business degrees.
When the so-called student intifada kicked off i asked a sister of mine if she thought this was going to be 1968 or 2003. Would this be a breakthrough in the movement, a new phase in revolutionary action, or another massive waste of energy to be subsumed by the Democrats in a few years. Some might think the jury is still out but i think the answer is clear for anyone willing to really look. For all the talk that revolutionaries have talked about bringing the war home, it’s the state who’s actually done it. Recently in Boston a young woman was picked up by ICE on the street and shipped out to a facility in Louisiana. Her crime? Criticizing israel in a student op-ed. Her deportation is illegal, but that’s not stopping anyone.
Similar stories are proliferating across the empire. A butch dyke political prisoner from the 2020 uprising is being deported to Chile for hir alleged crimes. A gay man from Venezuela was falsely accused of being a gang member and shipped to the new outsourced amerikkkan gulag in El Salvador. A conservative leader of the Palestinian student movement in NYC was kidnapped by ICE and immediately transported out of state. These are just three of many examples. At the same time, trans women as a class are shipped into men’s prisons and assaulted on the street with increasing regularity. And the feminist left can’t move a muscle to stop it.
Sure there are marches and rallies. The standard leftist rape cults mobilize to grab the attention of an increasingly terrified population. But nothing real, nothing to actually meet the state where it’s at. The amerikkkan government brought the war home and nobody was ready. Even supposed militants were caught off guard, expecting the settler state to don kids’ gloves that it had long discarded. So again i ask, why would women who were already overworked and abused by a left that couldn’t achieve one single thing jump back into that left’s arms now that the stakes are higher? Think of this in materialist terms, not moral civilian ones (4). From my small perspective here it just doesn’t make sense.
So what are radical women supposed to do in the midst of this sea change? Many of us have attempted to return to normal life. Others live as singular outlaws, long isolated from the movements that birthed them as revolutionaries but unable to reconcile with patriarchal civilization. We have to abandon that civilization, and not only that but we have to leave behind anyone unwilling to abandon it. Until we begin that trek we will have no sense of our current position. That’s why we’re so confused about right wing anti-imperialism and the male left, we have no politics or culture of our own. We’ve never had less of an idea of who we even are, much less what direction to go in.
Just because herstory demands women’s war doesn’t mean we’re in a good position to start it. War may be outside our doors but we’re still isolated from each other, scattered by the outward momentum of a movement that tore itself apart. Finding our sisters and leaving men’s world behind is the first step to rebuilding a real women’s movement. Only with the force of a separate women’s culture, territory, military, and politics can the internal contradictions of patriarchal civilization be highlighted and exploited. Until then we remain at Dick’s whim, unable to stand as amerikkka’s tectonic plates shift under our feet. Only by defecting from this settler empire, from neocolonial parasitism, from patriarchal civilization as a whole can we begin to decide who we will be.
A Shortage of Kitchen Knives, sarah harpy
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/df-jahrbucher/law-abs.htm
https://files.libcom.org/files/queer-fire-imposed.pdf
https://kersplebedeb.com/posts/kata/