Dear ones,
On International Women's Day I'm thinking of its socialist roots and I'm thinking about the category of "woman." The origin of the holiday is attributed to Clara Zetkin, a German communist, who proposed a day to recognize proletariat women across the globe regarding their unique experience of harm under capitalism, and to honor that - because of that material condition - they are equipped uniquely with revolutionary skills. Zetkin, as far as I've read, didn't have an essentialist view of gender, but rather saw it as a way to better understand how capitalism creates categories to exacerbate exploitation.
"The liberation struggle of the proletarian woman cannot be similar to the struggle that the bourgeois woman wages against the male of her class. On the contrary, it must be a joint struggle with the male of her class against the entire class of capitalists," she said in a speech in 1896. Zetkin is naming that working class women may have more in common with working class men than they do with bourgeois women, but also doesn’t try to erase differences between economically precarious men and women. (For context of her use of the binary here: in this period, colonization had been working to muffle any language for genders that existed beyond ‘male’ and ‘female’ and movements hadn’t yet gained traction to put things like trans, gender non-conforming, or nonbinary on the collective radar yet.)
It feels especially important to name that foundation today as we see the horrendous rhetoric, policy, and everyday violence directed towards trans and nonbinary people. International Women's Day isn't a day to celebrate a biologically determined sex (that doesn't exist!), but to pause at how global capitalism harms everyone and be explicit about how it does so in distinct ways. It gives us a framework that takes into account how the aggressive exploitation of feminized labor across the globe is one of the most powerful ways capitalism sustains itself. But that has almost nothing to do with body parts, and almost everything to do with predatory systems finding opportunities to divide and conquer.
I don't often claim "woman" for myself, as "femme" remains a much truer description of my gender. Still, I know that I benefit from being read as a cis woman, and I know that I face unique kinds of harm as a femme/woman. I know also that unique harm is something that is not relegated to cis women. So on International Women's Day, I'm celebrating women (which includes trans women, and we don't need to use an X) absolutely, but I'm also celebrating the resilience and persistence of all of my proletariat siblings who face unique harm: sex workers, gender "deviants", people experiencing addiction, people experiencing houselessness, all colonized people, all people of color, disabled folks, and all the other people who embody - in addition to being part of the working class - something else that capitalism deems undesirable.
Toward the end of the aforementioned speech, Zetkin admits to having at least some similarities to what we might call today “corporate feminism.” Think, for example, of a shared goal to eradicate sexual violence. But Zetkin clarifies her stance:
“The proletarian woman fights hand in hand with the man of her class against capitalist society. To be sure, she also agrees with the demands of the bourgeois women’s movement, but she regards the fulfillment of those demands simply as a means to enable that movement to enter the battle, equipped with the same weapons, alongside the proletariat.”
For Zetkin, the fight to end sexism is a way to get better conditions from which to fight the ruling class. On International Women's Day and always I am thinking of how an injury to one is an injury to all - how racism, sexism, ableism (etcetera) are related to the class struggle, because without multiply-marginalized people, the revolution is nothing. Without our multiply-marginalized comrades, new worldmaking will not only be boring, but it will be impossible.
May we be equipped with the same weapons to create the worlds we long for. May we celebrate women today as a reminder of our shared struggle and our shared dreams. And urgently, may we reject any rhetoric that suggests our trans siblings are a threat to our freedom as women; may we state loudly that actually they are integral to it.
love & solidarity,
raechel
A Note by way of PS: There are a lot of new folks here from my Baffler essay/review on Sarah Jaffe’s Work Won’t Love You Back. Thank you for joining this space! It’s going through some changes right now, which means 1) the newsletter is currently sporadic (but will be more regular in a few months), and varying in length (this one is shorter than usual); 2) the format may shift a bit. I hope you’ll stick around, but either way, thanks for taking an interest in my writing. I’m glad yr here! <3
Another PS, for those who have been here longer: Reading recs, etc. are coming back again soon! Stay tuned! Also coming back soon, in a TBD format, is my old advice column (if you’re not familiar, think a radical Dear Sugar). Please write to me if you have questions related to the personal and/or political! raechelannejolie@gmail.com. This is eventually gonna be a book and I’m stoked, so write me!!!