Search the archive.

(Kathryn – Independent Scholar of Disability Studies, Ria – Professor of Disability Studies at Liverpool Hope University, “Science Fiction, Disability, Disability Studies A Conversation,” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 14.4, 2020, pp. 387-401)

In 2014, the Science Fiction Research Association (SFRA)—the leading international organization for science fiction research—circulated the call for papers for its 2015 conference, entitled “The SF We Don’t (Usually) See: Suppressed Histories, Liminal Voices, Emerging Media.” The authors of the call rightly highlighted “racial, gendered, classed, and sexual hierarchies” as constituent factors in the development of the science fiction (SF) canon, inviting potential participants to explore the new possibilities offered when we “seek out those liminal voices that have been denied access to privileged outlets.” Suggested paper topics included feminist, queer, and non-Western SF; and women, “LGBTQIA individuals,” and “people of colour” were namechecked as examples of groups who have been, or might still be, marginalized as creators of SF, or in terms of representation within the genre. Nowhere in the call for papers was there any reference to disability. As scholars who had been working at the intersection of disability studies and science fiction studies for some years by 2014—and as scholars who had presented multiple disability-focused papers at SFRA and other major SF-focused conferences—our response to this omission was both frustration and a weary sense of déjà vu. We waited a few days, in the hope that someone in SFRA’s wide distribution list, or within the organization’s hierarchy, would notice the omission of disability and realize it was problematic; when there was no update evident, we raised the issue ourselves. The organization’s leadership acknowledged our concerns, and a later version of the conference call included “SF and ability/disability” on the list of suggested paper topics.1 Although it is easy to say that such exclusion might be an unintentional misstep (and this is certainly the response we consistently receive when we call out omissions), it is merely one in a long history of SF scholarship not seeing disability. There are many oversights and microaggressions we have witnessed or encountered in our workplaces, at conferences, and in the field’s scholarship, but writing about them in any specific detail feels unsafe and “unprofessional.” We recognize that this is ableism at work. In Kathryn’s experience, for example, any participation at conferences comes with her anxious requests for “special” accommodation on presentation times, which are not always respected. Although we certainly appreciate the difficulty of scheduling large, multi-track conferences, when organizers of genre conferences do not know how to effectively include disability studies and disabled presenters, it makes talking about disability in a sustained, critical way (that meaningfully intersects with feminist, queer, labour, and anti-racist conversations) that much more difficult. For readers of the Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies (JLCDS), these moments are likely to be scenes in a familiar story: disability, even when it is or should be at its most visible, is either ignored or quickly passed over in favour of other talking points that may be more comfortable for the critic. Over the last three decades, cultural disability studies has transformed from an emergent area of enquiry into a vibrant and thriving interdisciplinary field. Nonetheless, it remains a field engaged in an ongoing struggle for recognition and legitimation. In this context, what David Bolt terms critical avoidance is entirely to be expected: the avoidance of disability, and disability studies, by scholars who are engaging with texts and topics where disability is of manifest significance.2 We do not mean to suggest that the (undoubtedly well-intentioned) authors of conference calls or conference track organizers intentionally marginalize disability or disabled people. Nor do we suggest that that authors of CFPs and articles in SF and genre scholarship should always attempt to exhaustively list and interrogate the many types of persons or texts marginalized in SF creation and representation. Yet there are multiple ironies in the omission of disability in these contexts. In the theme chosen for the SFRA conference, the phrase “The SF We Don’t (Usually) See” is an allusion to the classic SF short story “The Women Men Don’t See” (1973) by James Tiptree Jr., the pen name of Alice Sheldon, a disabled woman. The irony of failing to acknowledge disabled people as one of SF’s marginalized groups while alluding to a story by a disabled writer is only one of a set of ironies in the omission of disability in the CFP, exemplifying a wider tendency to fail to “see” disability where it is undeniably present—in the story itself and in the genre’s wider history.3 While it might be tempting to accuse of us of nit-picking this one example, it is important to keep in mind that the work of recognizing the absence of disability is essential in the process of actually making the varied spaces of scholarship and conferences accessible. As Tanya Titchkosky reminds us, “making absence not-noticeable requires work, ordinary work, and sometimes a lot of it” (87). By pointing out such ordinary instances of exclusion and omission, we seek to encourage our fellow genre scholars to do better in their engagement with disability. Whether in CFPs, conference schedules, or journal articles, which words are used and which words are left out matter as: “[t]he many-sidedness of recognition resides in the complexity of and between every word. Words provide access to worlds. Words are the mediation of the relations between us and are able to remake these worlds” (Titchkosky 148).

(Chris, “Five Signs Your Story Is Ableist,” 7 April 2017, https://mythcreants.com/blog/five-signs-your-story-is-ableist/)

If you write ableist stories, you are contributing to the systemic oppression of people with disabilities or diseases. Of course, you probably don’t mean to make their lives worse, but good intentions won’t erase the damage your story does. and make positive changes. You can start purging ableism from your work by looking for these . 1. Characters’ Bodies Are Used for Jokes In the 2017 show , a henchman is introduced who has hooks for hands. He’s an amusing character who lightens otherwise threatening scenes with humor. Unfortunately, part of the henchmen’s comedic routine is his disability. Viewers are intended to laugh at his awkward attempts to grab doorknobs, make phone calls, and handle a deck of cards. Similarly, popular stories still think it’s acceptable to mock people for being heavy. In the Netflix series , the main character is a slim high schooler. His best friend Toby is heavy, and the writers constantly use Toby for fat shaming intended as humor. For instance, after the hero and Toby hop on their bikes to ride away from danger, they naturally find an alley so narrow that Toby gets stuck trying to escape. Must I explain that mocking people because of their bodies is demeaning and disrespectful? This kind of mockery not only has a direct psychological effect on the people with those conditions but also encourages real-life harassment. Even without direct shaming, using characters with similar bodies for comic relief over and over again spreads the message that they exist to entertain able-bodied people. We’ve created a cultural climate where people with short stature or obesity feel pressured to be funny. Never forget that physical activity isn’t possible for some disabled people, and high body fat can be caused by numerous diseases. Fat shaming supports ableism. And even if that weren’t true, fat shaming still wouldn’t be okay. How to Fix It Look for any place where you’re using slapstick humor and make sure that slapstick isn’t generated through a character’s disabilities or impairments. Then, make some of your protagonists heavy, and don’t make them funny. Give them and . That doesn’t mean characters with disabilities can’t make jokes or others can’t make jokes about them, but those jokes shouldn’t be both at their expense and because of their disability. 2. Disability Is a Great Tragedy In the 2009 movie , Jake Sully is driven by his desire to cure his disability. He’s a paraplegic and dreams of having freedom of movement. Because Mr. Evil Military Man promises that he’ll “get his legs back,” Jake is persuaded to be a double agent against the people he cares about. Everything turns out okay though, because Team Good can also remove his disability. Jake’s new avatar form is big, strong, and able-bodied, and it’s continually contrasted with his small and weak paraplegic body. And Jake isn’t the only hero driven to get rid of a disability. In the 2016 , the titular doctor is injured, resulting in shaky hands. He goes to the far side of the Earth in order to learn magic in hopes of putting his hands back the way they were. Heroes like Jake and Strange never actually adjust to their disability or accept it. For them, it is a sign of their inadequacy. The few disabled characters with unquestionably permanent impairments are usually designed to be objects of pity. Tiny Tim from is a classic example. He doesn’t have his own personality. He exists to be an innocent and tragic figure, more like a lost kitten than a human being. Just imagine for a second that you were a bit short, or slightly tall, or had some other uncommon physical trait – which you almost certainly have. You go to the movies, and the threat of becoming like you is motivating the heroes to take terrible risks. The one character who is already like you is constantly bemoaning their state, relying on the charity of others, and being pitied by everyone. Some protagonists – such as the main character of the 2016 – even choose to die rather than live as you live. That is the reality for many disabled people. They’re just people living normal lives, and they’re doing fine. They aren’t brave fighters, or sources of inspiration about the human spirit, or to be pitied. Turning their lives into a tragedy is an attack on their value as people. Don’t do it. How to Fix It There is a place for stories about people’s struggles with disabilities, but they are best left to those with direct experience. Otherwise, disabled characters should have similar struggles to able-bodied characters; . Instead of using the threat or continuance of a disability as a stake in your story, look for another way to motivate your protagonist. Maybe they lose their career not because they gain a disability but because their reputation is ruined. Maybe instead of a cure, they want the money to buy their way out of an unhealthy situation. Whatever you were using to make their disability meaningful can still be used, just without the disability. 3. Disabilities Miraculously Disappear When John Locke wakes up in the first episode of the TV series , he finds that, somehow, he doesn’t need his wheelchair anymore. In the Netflix Original , the series starts with a woman returning after a long disappearance. She was blind before, but now she can see. Time and time again, speculative fiction writers just can’t help converting disabled characters into able-bodied people. For your next trick, are you going to convert important characters of color into white people? In numerous shows from to , characters are given disabilities for an episode just to cure them before the finish. We see them grieving over how horrible it is to be disabled, but we rarely see them accept their disability and adapt to their new lifestyle. Of course, despite almost every disease being magically cured in Lost, the character with a heroin addiction is still an addict. If we admitted that addiction was a disease and not a personal failing, we wouldn’t be able to just throw addicts in jail anymore. Like other under-privileged groups, people who have disabilities get very little representation in our stories. So you might imagine how infuriating it is to watch the few disabled characters magically transform into able-bodied people. And in most cases, these characters have problems accepting their disability that are never addressed. What should be their character arc is completely abandoned in favor of just “fixing” them. How to Fix It Give some of your characters permanent disabilities. Start the story with them to their disability. It can give them occasional trouble, but it shouldn’t be the focus of their character. If one of your characters acquires a disability during the story, they should keep it. Show them adapting to their new lifestyle, and then move on. Don’t make getting rid of their disability a plot point of any kind. 4. Mental Illness Is Threatening The TV series stars an impressive lineup of villains that rotate between being out on the streets and inside the infamous Arkham Asylum. This happens even though none of the villains appear to have an actual mental illness. In the city of Gotham, villainy and mental illness are considered interchangeable. And the DC universe is far from alone in using mental illness to explain away villainy or its villains have. From American Psycho to The Ring to M. Night Shyamalan’s new atrocity Split, popular stories are teaching everyone that the mentally ill are violent and dangerous. Movie after movie, such as Twelve Monkeys, Gothika, and Shutter Island, feature protagonists who are packaged as neurotypical and then get stuck inside asylums. Once they’re inside, their fellow patients are just another part of the fear factor. Storytellers create a host of mentally ill characters just to put them on display in a fictional freak show. Then, despite showing how these asylums are full of rampant abuse, heroes who escape never wonder if they should free all of the genuinely ill patients who definitely aren’t getting better in there. The truth is that mentally ill people are much more likely to be physically abused by others – including the police – than they are to harm anyone else. Stereotypes associating mental illness with violence increase the chances that those with mental illnesses will become targets. Oh, and those asylums? Abuse still happens there. Unless you know what it’s like to live under the threat of being dragged away, locked up, and given shock therapy, think again before including scary asylums in your story. How to Fix It that link villainy with disability. Your villains can be weird or eccentric, but never frame them as “insane.” Watch out for body language or behaviors that would make them resemble people with a real condition. Then, provide some positive representation for mentally ill people. Give a protagonist a mental illnesses, but don’t use it to drive the plot. Just let it hinder them a little on the odd occasion. Mentally ill characters should have a specific medical condition that you have researched and are depicting accurately. 5. Characters Fake Having a Disability In , Professor Quirrell is a shy, polite man who has a stutter. Only at the end of the book do readers learn that Quirrell’s disability was just an act he put on to make himself look innocent. And Professor Quirrell is far from alone. The famous surprise villain of pretends to have a limp. In , Lionel Luther pretends to be blind. In , Spike pretends to need a wheelchair after he’s recovered. Then, twist! The disabled person doesn’t actually have a disability; they are an able-bodied antagonist. Sometimes heroes even get in on the fakery, as with in the Netflix TV series and Mei in the 2004 . Yeah, I get it, characters pretending to be disabled provides the story with . But first, keep in mind that this trick only works because of harmful stereotypes about disabled people. Audiences dismiss disabled characters as innocent and incapable of mischief, both of which are demeaning. This trope reinforces that pity stereotype by making the character able-bodied the moment they are revealed to be capable and possibly threatening. And when villains do have genuine disabilities, it’s usually done for some gruesome shock factor that is equally damaging. Able-bodied people continually dismiss real disabilities. They assume the disabled people they meet are just lazy or aren’t exerting enough willpower. It’s bad enough for people with clearly visible disabilities, much less the large number of people with disabilities that are invisible. You can’t tell by looking at a person whether they will need a wheelchair. Continually parading around characters that lie about having a disability makes audiences suspicious of real people with real medical conditions. How to Fix It Don’t let any of your characters lie about having a disability. They can lie about everything else, but the disability should be genuine. This goes beyond the technicalities – you could argue that Daredevil is actually blind, but he is clearly pretending to be more impaired than he is. It’s also important to remember that a character who lies about a disability is completely different from a character who sometimes needs assistance and sometimes doesn’t. In the Star Wars prequels, Yoda puts aside his cane, , and picks it back up again. It’s easy to conclude that he was using the force to assist his body and that he can’t do that all the time. Many real people can walk for short distances but not long ones or have symptoms that vary in intensity. By including characters who have intermittent symptoms and never sowing doubt about their truthfulness, you’ll help build a positive outlook in real life. Most of our popular stories have been created by able-bodied people with little regard to the messages they send about everyone else. Unfortunately, their bad habits are easily picked up by the rest of us. Defeating those harmful messages in your own work requires research, thought, and the willingness to re-examine the tropes you once admired.

The World Is a Mess. We Need Fully Automated Luxury Communism. Asteroid mining. Gene editing. Synthetic meat. We could provide for the needs of everyone, in style. It just takes some imagination. It starts with a burger. In 2008 a Dutch professor named Mark Post presented the proof of concept for what he called “cultured meat.” Five years later, in a London TV studio, Mr. Post and his colleagues ate a burger they had grown from animal cells in a laboratory. Secretly funded by Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google, the journey from petri dish to plate had cost $325,000 — making theirs the most expensive meal in history. Fortunately, the results were promising: Hanni Rützler, a nutrition scientist, concluded that the patty was “close to meat but not as juicy.” The next question was whether this breakthrough could be made cheaper. Much cheaper. The first “cultured beef” burgers are likely to enter the market next year, at approximately $50 each. But that won’t last long. Within a decade they will probably be more affordable than even the cheapest barbecue staples of today — all for a product that uses fewer resources, produces negligible greenhouse gases and, remarkably, requires no animals to die. It’s not just barbecues and burgers. Last year Just, a leader in cellular agriculture, cut a deal to start producing one of the world’s tastiest steaks, Wagyu. A company called Endless West, which also makes grapeless wine, has started to produce Glyph, the world’s first “molecular whiskey.” Luxury could be coming to all. The case of cultured food and drink, far from a curiosity, is a template for a better, freer and more affluent world, a world where we provide for the needs of everyone — in style. But how do we get there? To say the present era is one of crisis borders on cliché. It differs from the dystopias of George Orwell or Aldous Huxley, or hell in the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. It is unlike Europe during the Black Death or Central Asia as it faced the Mongols. And yet it is true: Ours is an age of crisis. We inhabit a world of low growth, low productivity and low wages, of climate breakdown and the collapse of democratic politics. A world where billions, mostly in the global south, live in poverty. A world defined by inequality. But the most pressing crisis of all, arguably, is an absence of collective imagination. It is as if humanity has been afflicted by a psychological complex, in which we believe the present world is stronger than our capacity to remake it — as if it were not our ancestors who created what stands before us now. As if the very essence of humanity, if there is such a thing, is not to constantly build new worlds. If we can move beyond such a failure, we will be able to see something wonderful. The plummeting cost of information and advances in technology are providing the ground for a collective future of freedom and luxury for all. Automation, robotics and machine learning will, as many august bodies, from the Bank of England to the White House, have predicted, substantially shrink the work force, creating widespread technological unemployment. But that’s only a problem if you think work — as a cashier, driver or construction worker — is something to be cherished. For many, work is drudgery. And automation could set us free from it. Gene editing and sequencing could revolutionize medical practice, moving it from reactive to predictive. Hereditary diseases could be eliminated, including Huntington’s disease, cystic fibrosis and sickle cell anemia, and cancer cured before it reaches Stage 1. Those technologies could allow us to keep pace with the health challenges presented by societal aging — by 2020 there will be more people over the age of 60 than under the age of 5 — and even to surpass them. What’s more, renewable energy, which has been experiencing steep annual falls in cost for half a century, could meet global energy needs and make possible the vital shift away from fossil fuels. More speculatively, asteroid mining — whose technical barriers are presently being surmounted — could provide us with not only more energy than we can ever imagine but also more iron, gold, platinum and nickel. Resource scarcity would be a thing of the past. The consequences are far-reaching and potentially transformative. For the crises that confront our world today — technological unemployment, global poverty, societal aging, climate change, resource scarcity — we can already glimpse the remedy. But there’s a catch. It’s called capitalism. It has created the newly emerging abundance, but it is unable to share round the fruits of technological development. A system where things are produced only for profit, capitalism seeks to ration resources to ensure returns. Just like today’s, companies of the future will form monopolies and seek rents. The result will be imposed scarcity — where there’s not enough food, health care or energy to go around. So we have to go beyond capitalism. Many will find this suggestion unwholesome. To them, the claim that capitalism will or should end is like saying a triangle doesn’t have three sides or that the law of gravity no longer applies while an apple falls from a tree. But for a better world, where everyone has the means to a good life on a habitable planet, it is an imperative. We can see the contours of something new, a society as distinct from our own as that of the 20th century from feudalism, or urban civilization from the life of the hunter-gatherer. It builds on technologies whose development has been accelerating for decades and that only now are set to undermine the key features of what we had previously taken for granted as the natural order of things. To grasp it, however, will require a new politics. One where technological change serves people, not profit. Where the pursuit of tangible policies — rapid decarbonization, full automation and socialized care — are preferred to present fantasies. This politics, which is utopian in horizon and everyday in application, has a name: Fully Automated Luxury Communism. Sounds good, doesn’t it?

Scholars’ geographical locations matter for a number of reasons to do with the politics of knowledge (some of which are discussed above), and they also matter because they can shape the types of research that is possible. While in some locations (e.g. in Hungary) it may be impossible to conduct feminist research in an academic institution at all, practical issues in other locations—such as the priorities and methodological biases of funding bodies, the relative permissiveness of risk assessment regimes, and the possibility of getting research access into military institutions—all shape what types of feminist research are possible. This likely plays out in different ways across Europe, but I offer a couple of examples from the UK here because, given that most scholars are located in the UK, this likely has the most significant impact on the field as a whole. The most immediate point here is that the concentration of scholars in the UK leads to an disproportionate focus in the literature on the UK military, but there are also more subtle factors at play. Many UK institutions have cautious travel risk assessment policies that somewhat simplistically (and influenced by a colonial mindset) divide the world into ‘low risk’ and ‘high risk,’ or even ‘hostile’ locations. Anecdotally, this may result in researchers being denied permission to carry out fieldwork in certain locations in a way that would not happen, for example, in Sweden, where universities do not seem to follow restrictive travel risk assessment regimes. Similarly, the quantity of scholarship that does exist on the British military perhaps masks the often difficult processes required to gain approval to conduct research with members of the institution itself, which particularly constrain research that is interpretive, critical, and/or feminist. The power and biases of military gatekeepers in the British context have doubtless prevented and/or reshaped feminist research that would otherwise have been conducted (Basham and Catignani 2021). It is not possible, of course, to conduct a review of literature not published and research 2 DISPARITIES AND DIVERSIFICATION … 25 not carried out. However, the point I want to make here is that it is not only intellectual interest that drives how feminist scholars in Europe select the focus of their research, it is also political economic realities and the constraints of requiring various forms of institutional permission. These realities shape the body of feminist literature on war and militarism that is produced across Europe in powerful, if usually unseen, ways.

Feminist strategies that neglect or consistently deplore state action cannot accomplish what women need – because individuals need collectives such as states to solve collective action problems and to move toward more just social arrangements. Strategies that rely heavily on women’s differences from men also cannot accomplish what women need – because women are like men in many ways relevant to individual and collective action. Despite these truths, social movements also need some strategies of action that work separately from and sometimes against the state. Moreover, strategies that accentuate the differences between oppressed and oppressing bring needed energy to a movement. The best overall strategy is, therefore, to realize that both states and difference theories are dangerous weapons, and proceed with caution.¶ In this important paper, Jane Jaquette sounds the alarm. She exposes the dangers of ignoring the state and the dangers of ‘difference feminism’. She also shows how these are linked. Although I will underscore the merits of anti-state activity and difference feminism, I agree that a feminist strategy that neglected or deplored state action would be weak indeed. So would a strategy that relied on women’s differences from men.¶ First, the merits of Jaquette’s argument.¶ One strand in feminist theory and practice greatly suspects the state. This suspicion can escalate into outright rejection, with potentially grave consequences for women.¶ The philosophical case for the state is relatively simple. Collective action¶ can improve human lives. Efficient collective action requires coercion. Instru- ments of collective action involving coercion can, paradoxically, increase human freedom. We are freer to do many things if we can bind ourselves with legally enforceable contracts. Rather than enforcing these contracts privately, it is more efficient and potentially more just to give a monopoly of legitimate violence to one entity, so long as that entity can reasonably claim to be more just than the alternatives. Humans have long struggled to devise relatively legitimate forms of coercion. The history of democracy is part of that struggle, although that history has nowhere produced national-level institutions that are highly legitimate. Despite their incapacity ever to be fully legitimate, however, we still need both states and international institutions to help solve collective action problems and to give scope to the human capacity for justice.¶ Regarding women, the practical case for the state, must be grounded in contemporary realities. In some states, such as Sweden, women do better, compared to men, than in the most egalitarian of known pre-state entities, such as the Kung!. Moreover, although the dangers of state power for women are great, it is not practical to contemplate returning to pre-state entities. Human beings seem to want the goods produced by more extensive forms of cooperation, including those that require legitimate coercion. Given that states will not disappear in the near future, what stance should we take toward them? My answer is: wary usage. State power will be used against women, just as other forms of power are used against women, unless we intervene. One response is to establish barriers, such as constitutional or internationally enforceable rights, to certain kinds of invasions by state power. Another is to make states more likely to act in the interests of women.¶ In the United States both theory and institutional practice carry suspicion of the state farther than in most countries, with some malign consequences. Ours has been a ‘liberalism of fear’ more than an Enlightenment liberalism that envisions a common good. Americans are wary of state power, encouraged in that wariness by powerful capitalist interests. Jaquette rightly warns against this. State power can serve both as a brake on the negative externalities of capitalism and as a positive force for material redistribution. Particularly when patriarchal power takes violent forms in the private sphere, state power can help women struggle against that violence as well as other non-state evils.¶ The question, then, is how far to carry wariness of state power and of theories of state universalism and impartiality. I believe we must both use state power and place bounds on. Because the state as a tool is dangerous and flawed, we need to use it with caution.¶ Jaquette faults contemporary feminist anti-state theorists not for wanting to abolish the state but for spending their energies on wariness rather than on how to use it for redistribution. How important one thinks this problem is depends on how one judges the current balance within feminist theory. Many feminist theorists – e.g. Susan Okin, Nancy Fraser, Iris Young – call for redistributive reforms requiring state power. Perhaps in Latin America, from¶ 356 International Feminist Journal of Politics –––––––––––––––––––––––––––¶ Downloaded by [Harvard Library] at 12:19 04 August 2014¶ which Jaquette takes her lead, theorists of the North are represented by anti- state theory. In that case, one must ask why these are the theorists Latin American feminists choose to read. Anti-state discourse may have informed radical practice in Latin America not because anti-state theory is dominant in the North but because activists in Latin America find that anti-state discourse meets their organizing needs. Anti-state discourse may reflect the reality of individuals working on the margins of states that either are relatively corrupt or, even more obviously than most, enforce the interests of dominant classes.¶ Jaquette also rightly warns of the dangers of valorizing action in civil society to the neglect of state action. However, we need evidence that the more women participate in NGOs the less they participate in the state. Without such evidence it seems equally plausible that the more women participate in NGOs the more they will acquire the skills and contacts required for involve- ment in state politics. Some individuals also will not be able to deal with the hierarchy, coercion and male dominance embedded in all states. They will need to work in social movements. Political activism usually sustains a division of labor, with the individuals who can best deal with established institutions doing just that and those who are most repelled by those institutions charting another course. The directions they take sometimes conflict with one another.¶ Women and feminists trying to achieve places in the state, whether as femocrats or politicians, face major barriers but also major attractions. I do not know how much we should worry that they will not be attracted to these jobs because of radical anti-state discourse. In the United States this does not seem to be a huge problem. In some countries, women who could be agents of feminist change turn down jobs in the state because those jobs are boring and unsatisfying. When these women speak of their frustrations, radical anti- state discourse appears to play a small or non-existent role.¶ In short, Jaquette is right that an established anti-state discourse within radical movements makes productive interaction with states less likely, but I am not sure that such discourse is created by feminist theory.¶ Jaquette also points to distortions produced by difference feminism. It is true that any stress on women’s differences reinforces the tendency of dominant groups such as white or middle-class women to interpret ‘women’s’ experiences primarily in light of their own experiences. In recent years, women of color have produced the greatest advances in feminist theory, forcing white feminists to look more closely at their hegemonically defined concepts of commonality; this work has given all feminists the tools to understand better differences within their groups and subgroups.¶ In addition, in most areas of presumed personality difference between men and women, the differences are extremely small. The currently definitive meta-analysis of studies on Carol Gilligan’s hypothesis shows that – at least in the United States, in the highly educated populations where she argues that differences should appear – only very small differences can be found.¶ –––––––––––––––––– Jane Mansbridge/Anti-statism and difference feminism 357¶ Downloaded by [Harvard Library] at 12:19 04 August 2014¶ Most studies do not show women taking a different approach to justice or behaving more cooperatively than men. Studies designed to elicit behavioral gender differences often generate practically none.¶ In-groups, we now know, exaggerate similarities within their group and their differences from other groups. The human brain makes these predictable cognitive and emotional mistakes in in-group/out-group differentiation. Recognizing this tendency, we should constantly struggle to take into account the fact that our social and first-order cognitive estimates of such differences are usually exaggerated. In the case of gender, all societies also engage in ‘gratuitous gendering’ – giving gendered meanings to nouns and patterns of action that do not functionally require that identification. These processes increase even more our perceptions of gender difference.¶ Today we have little idea what differences might or might not emerge between men and women in a non-oppressive society. It seems mistaken, therefore, to insist on difference rather than focusing on the effects of dominance.¶ Finally, as Jaquette warns, promising different political results based on the premise that women are different from men is dangerous. We are almost certain not to deliver on that promise, at least in the short run. The backlash after the US suffrage movement was undoubtedly caused in part by disillusion at the lack of change when women won the vote.¶ And yet, small differences that do appear between men and women can take on major symbolic significance, precisely because of our human tendency to exaggerate group differences. Although using that significance is danger- ous, not only because it exaggerates reality but also because it underlines the very stereotypes that have been used to keep women in their place, the existence of danger does not mean that we should forswear this tool – any more than for swearing the tool of state action. Just remember: when using a dangerous tool, take active precautions against its potential harms.¶ Difference arguments for electing women are not just arguments from ‘utility’, as Jaquette reports Marian Sawer’s point. For example, the fact that women are perceived as more honest than men can advance an attack on corruption by associating its female leaders with honesty. Using positive stereotypes of women in this way need not be degrading. Successful uses may even result in males adopting certain features of female symbolism to signify their own adherence to better standards.¶ In another example, among professional populations in the United States, women are somewhat more likely than men to adopt participatory, egalitarian styles of leadership. The difference probably derives from women’s relative powerlessness, which teaches skills of persuasion rather than command. In the US women’s movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, women used the gender differences they perceived in listening, interpreting body language and participatory style to create significant departures from the prevailing styles of left politics in organizations dominated by men. The message, ‘We do things differently’ is exhilarating. It prompts greater effort in trying to¶ 358 International Feminist Journal of Politics –––––––––––––––––––––––––––¶ Downloaded by [Harvard Library] at 12:19 04 August 2014¶ forge a new model, because the effort is associated not only with a different culture that can replace the old one but also with a different self and associated selves.¶ Turning from practical politics to political theory, concepts are also often gender-coded. Freedom and self-interest, for example, are often coded as male, community and altruism as female. It is not surprising, then, that when feminist theorists entered the field of theory, some explicitly supported certain values previously denigrated as female. Although the arguments made for these values might not be female, their proponrnts often were. Moreover, having been raised in a subculture that had been allocated cultural respon- sibility for these values, women had often thought about them more thor- oughly than men. Women had also usually experienced the denigration of these values first-hand.¶ In short, Jaquette is right that stressing women’s differences from men is fraught with danger. But values and practices that many cultures associate with women are often good in themselves, denigrated because of their association with women. Asserting the value of these ideals and practices from a stance as women often makes emotional, cognitive and political sense.¶ Importantly, Jaquette identifies a link between anti-state discourse and difference feminism. A number of anti-state theorists who are also strongly anti-essentialist would deny this identification. But in social movements themselves, the identification makes sense. The state is male; hence difference feminists should be anti-state. The state is instrumental, self-interested and hierarchical; women are communal, nurturing and participatory. To the degree that these associations are simply accepted as unchangeable truths, they compound the most problematic anti-state mistake.¶ I agree wholeheartedly with Jaquette’s fears in seeing no visible trend toward a renewed interest in the politics of economic justice, at least in the United States. In contrast to the creativity in the struggle against globalization, there has been an absence of ‘street-level’ activism against, for example, the revolutionary shift in tax burdens in the USA. More positively, the anti- sweatshop movement has had some good effects in raising consumer con- sciousness and bringing younger activists in touch with international labor movement organizing. As for the causes of the shift away from the politics of economic justice, I agree with Jaquette that it is related to the post-Cold War era and the temporary triumph of capitalism. I am not so sure that it has much to do either with activists’ anti-state discourse or with difference feminism.¶ This commentary has concentrated on the caveats to Jaquette’s thesis. I conclude by stressing again my fundamental agreement with her argument. Feminists have a ‘stake in a capable state’. It would be catastrophic to be so carried away by the theoretical virtues of civil society or by anti-state discourse as to deaden oneself to the practical need to work with the state to improve the lives of women.¶ Because ideas have influence, it is worth stressing Jaquette’s point that¶ –––––––––––––––––– Jane Mansbridge/Anti-statism and difference feminism 359¶ Downloaded by [Harvard Library] at 12:19 04 August 2014¶ ‘norms adopted internationally depend on states to implement them’; and only states can change the rules for women and other disadvantaged groups. The welfare state is a huge improvement over the arbitrary power of men in private families. Women’s groups must therefore work closely with govern- ments or remain on the fringe. Feminists will not only have to ‘learn to live with the state’. They should learn to work with the state. For those who do not already know this, Jaquette’s article is required reading.

Campaigns against female prostitution used slavery as a rhetorical device to characterize the condition of sex workers, and sex work features prominently in contemporary campaigns against “modern slavery”. In both types of campaigning, “the slave” is worked as a symbolic device to represent the abject condition of human beings objectified, controlled by violence or its threat, and stripped of agency and choice. The assumptions and generalizations about prostitution that inform this vision have been extensively critiqued. However, less attention has been paid to the fact that the analogy also rests on a very particular reading of “the slave” and a very partial appeal to histories of Atlantic World slavery. Histories of enslaved people's resistance and flight are entirely overlooked. The latter has recently prompted interest in fugitivity and marronage as analytic concepts, albeit concepts that are defined and deployed in different ways by different scholars and activists. This review asks whether and how they might potentially have theoretical purchase with regard to the contemporary experience (both positive and negative) of sex workers.

Introduction

If you have seen the word Latinx come across your feed or heard it being used in conversation, it is not a typo and it is not a mispronunciation. Using an “x” in place of the “a” or “o” makes the word gender neutral. For those of you that are familiar with the Spanish language, whether it be a person, place, or object, we know that many words in the Spanish language have been gendered. Latina is the feminine noun and Latino is the masculine noun. Individuals have begun to challenge the word because we have folks that are part of the Latina/o community, yet prefer not to be associated with masculine or feminine nouns. Latinx is a gender neutral term that is being used as a means of being more inclusive and moving away from the gendered term. It is pronounced “Lah-teen-ex”, and allows for the Spanish language to move beyond gender binaries. As student affairs professionals, we recognize that there is a movement to move towards gender neutral pronouns as we know that language is evolving, Latinx is a term that allows for our non-binary, genderqueer, gender fluid, and trans hermanos and hermanas to feel included.

We have seen already that scarcely anybody imagines that there are no intelligible patterns in history at all. It is rare to find someone who sees history as simply one shambolic heap of chaos, chance, accident and contingency, though Friedrich Nietzsche and his disciple Michel Foucault sail close to this view at times. Most people accept that there are chains of cause and effect in history, however complex or hard to fathom, and that this lends it some rough kind of pattern. It is hard to believe, for example, that various nations began to collect colonies at a certain historical point for reasons that had nothing whatsoever in common. African slaves were not transported to America for no reason at all. That fascism emerged at more or less the same time in various twentiethcentury nations was not just a copycat affair. People do not suddenly hurl themselves on open fires just for the hell of it. There is a remarkably uniform pattern across the globe of people pointedly not doing so. The question, surely, is not whether there are patterns in history, but whether there is one predominant pattern. You can believe the former without crediting the latter. Why not just a set of overlapping designs that never merge into a whole? How on earth could something as diverse as human history form a unified story? To contend that material interests have been the prime mover all the way from the cave dwellers to capitalism is a lot more plausible than believing that diet, altruism, Great Men, pole-vaulting or the conjunction of the planets has been. But it still seems too singular an answer to be satisfying. If it is satisfying to Marx, it is because he considers that history has been by no means as varied and colourful as it may appear. It has been a much more monotonous story than meets the eye. There is indeed a kind of unity to it; but it is not one that should yield us any pleasure, as the unity of Bleak House or High Noon might. For the most part, the threads that leash it together have been scarcity, hard labour, violence and exploitation. And though these things have taken very different forms, they have so far laid the foundation of every civilisation on record. It is this dull, mind-numbing recurrence that has lent human history a good deal more consistency than we might desire. There is indeed a grand narrative here, and more’s the pity. As Theodor Adorno observes, ‘‘The One and All that keeps rolling on to this day—with occasional breathing spells—would teleologically be the absolute of suffering.’’ The grand narrative of history is not one of Progress, Reason or Enlightenment. It is a melancholic tale which leads in Adorno’s words ‘‘from the slingshot to the atomic bomb.’’≥ It is possible to agree that violence, hard labour and exploitation bulk large in human history without accepting that they are the foundation of it. For Marxists, one reason why they are so fundamental is that they are bound up with our physical survival. They have been abiding features of the way we maintain our material existence. They are not just random events. We are not speaking of scattered acts of savagery or aggression. If there has been a certain necessity to these things, it is because they are built into the structures by which we produce and reproduce our material life. Even so, no Marxist imagines that these forces shape absolutely everything. If they did, then typhoid, ponytails, convulsive laughter, Sufism, the Saint Matthew Passion and painting your toenails an exotic purple would all be the reflex of economy forces. Any battle not fought for directly economic motives, or any work of art which is silent on the class struggle, would be inconceivable. Marx himself occasionally writes as though the political is simply the reflex of the economic. Yet he also often investigates the social, political or military motives behind historical events, without the faintest suggestion that these motives are just the surface manifestations of deeper economic ones. Material forces do sometimes leave their mark quite directly on politics, art and social life. But their influence is generally more long-term and subterranean than this. There are times when this influence is only very partial, and other times when it scarcely makes sense to speak in these terms at all. How is the capitalist mode of production the cause of my taste in neckties? In what sense does it determine hang-gliding or the twelve-bar blues? So there is no reductionism at work here. Politics, culture, science, ideas and social existence are not just economics in disguise, as some neuroscientists hold that the mind is just the brain in disguise. They have their own reality, evolve their own histories and operate by their own inner logic. They are not just the pale reflection of something else. They also powerfully shape the mode of production itself. The traffic between economic ‘‘base’’ and social ‘‘superstructure,’’ as we shall see later, is not just one way. So if we are not speaking here of some mechanistic determinism, what kind of claim is being made? Is it one so fuzzy and generalized as to be politically toothless? The claim is in the first place a negative one. It is that the way men and women people produce their material life sets limits to the kind of cultural, legal, political and social institutions they construct. The word ‘‘determine’’ literally means ‘‘to set limits to.’’ Modes of production do not dictate a specific kind of politics, culture or set of ideas. Capitalism was not the cause of John Locke’s philosophy or Jane Austen’s fiction. It is rather a context in which both can be illuminated. Nor do modes of production throw up only those ideas or institutions which serve their purposes. If this were true, then Marxism itself would be impossible. It would be a mystery where anarchist street theatre comes from, or how Tom Paine came to write one of the best-selling books of all time—the revolutionary Rights of Man—at the heart of the repressive police state that was the England of his day. Even so, we would be astonished to discover that English culture contained nothing but Tom Paines and anarchist theatre groups. Most novelists, scholars, advertisers, newspapers, teachers and television stations do not produce work that is dramatically subversive of the status quo. This is so glaringly obvious that it generally fails to strike us as significant. Marx’s point is simply that it is not an accident. And it is here that we can formulate the more positive aspect of his claim. Broadly speaking, the culture, law and politics of class-society are bound up with the interests of the dominant social classes. As Marx himself puts it in The German Ideology, ‘‘The class that is the ruling material force of society is at the same time the ruling intellectual force.’’ Most people, if they pause to think about it, would probably accept that the business of material production has loomed so large in human history, absorbed such boundless resources of time and energy, provoked such internecine conflicts, engrossed so many human beings from cradle to grave and confronted so many of them as a matter of life or death, that it would be amazing if it were not to leave its mark on a good many other aspects of our existence. Other social institutions find themselves inexorably dragged into its orbit. It bends politics, law, culture and ideas out of true by demanding that rather than just flourish as themselves, they spend much of their time legitimating the prevailing social order. Think of contemporary capitalism, in which the commodity form has left its grubby thumbprints on everything from sport to sexuality, from how best to swing oneself a front-row seat in heaven to the ear-shattering tones in which U.S. television reporters hope to seize the viewer’s attention for the sake of the advertisers. The most compelling confirmation of Marx’s theory of history is late capitalist society. There is a sense in which his case is becoming truer as time passes. It is capitalism, not Marxism, which is economically reductionist.

Scholars in the fields of critical ethnic, Black, and Native studies who welcome the charge of decolonization and abolition in the corporate university often labor to push back against and expose the limitations of the “epistemic turns” or “epistemic revolutions of Europe” that Sylvia Wynter so deftly tracks in her voluminous body of work. Scholars committed to the politics of Black abolitionist work and Native decolonization must often assume postures of suspicion—“misanthropy”—and sometimes must outright refuse Western thought’s arrogant universalist assumptions, commonsense tautologies, and professed reforms to the category of the human; due to these ways, they often experience a great deal of hostility and violence. When decolonial and Black abolitionist thought has to contend with Western or European continental theory, specifically its critical theories of progressive (liberal) social change, one often encounters an epistemic crisis or what scholar Frank Wilderson refers to as an antagonism. Forced to wrestle with antagonisms that often require Native/Indigenous and Black death, the scholar committed to decolonization and abolition in the university seminar space often has to refuse necropolitical epistemological systems, which structure white liberal humanist ways of thinking and imagining the world. This kind of labor and violent confrontation in the classroom on a repeated basis can transform one’s educational and professional experience into one rife with stress, anxiety, and unease. More specifically, I have watched graduate students of color experience this kind of stress, anxiety, and unease as they confront the pressure to “take up” more contemporary impulses within Western “critical theory” to move “beyond the human” or toward the posthuman. One task of this article is to attend to the ways that Black and Indigenous academics, as well as Black and Native studies scholars, are expected to perform a commitment to a Deleuzian brand of posthumanist and nonrepresentational theory as proof that they are critical and postmodern scholars and disciplinary formations. Lately, I have heard questions posed to Black and Native scholars and activists who theorize the work of movements like Black Lives Matter, Idle No More, and other work addressing Black and Indigenous death to explain what relationship this (survival- based) work has to “identity,” “the subject,” or “the human.” More specifically, the questions are posed as ones that assume that these movements reify one or all of the above categories. Additionally, the inquiries are accompanied by an expectation that the person(s) and the movements will disavow all claims to identity, subjecthood, and the desire for humanity. What kinds of hostilities, assumptions, and misrecognitions lurk in inquiries such as the following: “Is Black Lives Matter a humanist movement?”2 “Does BLM reify the notion and idea of the human?” “When will Native studies transcend or get beyond the subject or the human?”3 Because emerging scholars in the academy often contend with these hostile inquires in the seminar space, while teaching, at conferences and in other spaces of academe, a change in comportment, tone, affect, and ways of being in the academy also needs to accompany the modes of conceptual and theoretical resistance within Black and Native studies. This article is as interested in the postures, affective states (skepticism), and stubborn practices of insubordination such as refusal that frustrate forward movement and business-as-usual in the academy. Specifically, this article tracks how Native feminist refusal and Black feminist suspicion respond to Deleuzian theory. Native feminist politics of decolonial refusal and Black feminist abolitionist politics of skepticism informed by a misandry and misanthropic distrust of and animus toward the (over)representation of man/men as the human diverge from the polite, communicative acts of the public sphere, much like the politics of the “feminist killjoy.”4 Throughout this article, I deploy the term “feminist” both ambivalently and strategically to mark and distinguish the scholarly tradition created by Black and Native women, queer, trans, and other people marginalized within these respective communities and their anticolonial and abolitionist movements.5 Until a more useful and legible term emerges, I will use “feminist” to mark the practices of refusal and skepticism (misandry/misanthropy) as ones that largely exist outside more masculinist traditions within Indigenous/Native studies and Black studies. “Decolonial refusal” and “abolitionist skepticism” depart from the kinds of masculinist anticolonial traditions that attempt to reason Native/ Black man to White Man within humanist logic in at least two significant ways. First, neither participate in the communicative acts of the humanist public sphere from within the terms of the debate. Further, they do not play by the rules.6 Specifically, the Native and Black “feminist” politics discussed throughout launch a critique of both the logic of the discussion about the human and identity as well as the mode of communication. In fact, practices of refusal and skepticism interrupt and flout codes of civil and collegial discursive protocol to focus on and illumine the violence that structures the posthumanist discourse. Attending to the comportment, tone, and intensity of an engagement is just as important as focusing on its content. The particular manner in which Black and Native feminists push back against violence is important. The force, break with decorum, and style in which Black and Native feminists confront discursive violence can change the nature of future encounters. Given that Black women who confront the logics of “nonrepresentational theory” are really confronting genocide and the white, whimsical disavowal of Black and Native negation on the way to subjectlessness, it is understandable that there is an equally discordant response. Refusal and skepticism are modes of engagement that are uncooperative and force an impasse in a discursive exchange. This article tracks how traditions of “decolonial refusal” and “abolitionist skepticism” that emerge from Native/Indigenous and Black studies expose the limits and violence of contemporary nonidentitarian and nonrepresentational impulses within white “critical” theory. Further, this article asks whether Western forms of nonrepresentational (subjectless and nonidentitarian) theory can truly transcend the human through self-critique, self-abnegation, and masochism alone. External pressure, specifically the kind of pressure that “decolonial refusal” and “abolitionist skepticism” as forms of resistance that enact outright rejection of or view “posthumanist” attempts with a “hermeneutics of suspicion,”7 is needed in order to truly address the recurrent problem of the violence of the human in continental theory. While this article does not directly stake a claim in embracing or rejecting identity per se, it does take up the category of the human. Because the category of the human is modified by identity in ways that position certain people (white, male, able- bodied) within greater or lesser proximity to humanness, identity is already taken up in this discussion. Conversations about the human are very much tethered to conversations about identity. In the final section, the article will explore how Black and Native/Indigenous absorption into the category of the human would disfigure the category of the human beyond recognition. Further, I discuss “decolonial refusal” in relation to how Black scholars like Sylvia Wynter, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, and Amber Jamilla Musser work within a Black feminist tradition animated by a kind of skepticism or suspicion capable of ferreting out the trace of the white liberal human within (self-) professed subjectless, futureless, and nonrepresentational white theoretical traditions. In other words, in the work of Sylvia Wynter, one senses a general suspicion and deep distrust of the ability of Western theory— specifically its attempt at self-critique and self-correction in the name of justice for humanity— to revise its cognitive orders to work itself out of its current “closed system,” which reproduces exclusion and structural oppositions based on the negation of the other.9 Wynter’s study of decolonial theory and its elaboration of autopoiesis informs her understanding of how the human and its overrepresentation as man emerges. Recognizing that humans (of various genres) write themselves through a “self-perpetuating and self-referencing closed belief system” that often prevents them from seeing or noticing “the process of recursion,” Wynter works to expose these blind spots [shortcomings].10 Wynter understands that one of the limitations of Western liberal thought is that it cannot see itself in the process of writing itself. I observe a similar kind of cynicism about the way the academic left invokes “post humanism” in the work of Jackson and Musser. Musser in particular questions the capacity of queer theories to turn to sensations like masochism within the field of affect studies to overcome the subject. Further, Jackson’s and Musser’s work is skeptical that white transcendence can happen on its own terms or rely solely on its own processes of self-critique and self-correction. I read Jackson’s and Musser’s work as distrustful of the ability for “posthumanism” to be accountable to Black and Indigenous peoples or for affect theory on its own to not replicate and reinforce the subjugation of the other as it moves toward self-annihilation. Both the human and the post human are causes for suspicion within Black studies.

McLaren: Mitja, I like the way that you framed that question. The obviousness of conservative culture is precisely why it is so hidden from view. Much like those who controlled the paradis articificels of everyday life in the film, The Truman Show. I am struck each day by the manner in which predatory capitalism anticipates forgetfulness, nourishes social amnesia, smoothes the pillows of finality, and paves the world with a sense of inevitability and sameness. I am depressingly impressed by what a formidable opponent it has proven to be, how it fatally denies the full development of our human capacities, and inures us to the immutability of social life. In other words, it naturalizes us to the idea that capital is the best of all possible worlds, that it may not be perfect, but it certainly is preferable to socialism and communism. Many leftists have unwittingly become apologists for capitalist relations of domination because they are overburdened by the seeming inability of North Americans to imagine a world in which capital did not reign supreme. To address this situation, I have turned to critical pedagogy

Mitja: You are very much identified with the field of critical pedagogy. How would you define critical pedagogy? What is your position within this field today?

It can be argued that horizontalism is, in many ways, a product of the growing disaggregation and individuation of Western society; that it is a kind of free-market leftism: a politics jury-rigged out of the very culture it hopes to resist. For not only does it emphasize the agency of the individual, but it draws one of its central inspirations from a neoclassical image: that of the self-managing society—the polity that functions best when the state is absent from everyday decisions.

But one can also find in its anti-institutionalism an attempt to speak in today’s language for yesterday’s goals. If we must live in a society that neither trusts nor feels compelled by collectivist visions, then horizontalism offers us a leftism that attempts to be, at once, both individualist and egalitarian, anti-institutional and democratic, open to the possibilities of self-management and yet also concerned with the casualties born out of an age that has let capital manage itself for far too long. Horizontalism has absorbed the crisis of knowledge—what we often call “postmodernism”—and the crisis of collectivism—what we often call “neoliberalism.” But instead of seeking to return to some golden age before our current moment of fracture, it seeks—for better and worse—to find a way to make leftist politics conform to our current age of anti-foundationalism and institutionalism. As Graeber argued in the prescriptive last pages of his anthropological epic, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, “Capitalism has transformed the world in many ways that are clearly irreversible” and we therefore need to give up “the false choice between state and market that [has] so monopolized political ideology for the last centuries that it made it difficult to argue about anything else.” We need, in other words, to stop thinking like leftists.

“Anti-politics” is not a negative, but it is an ambiguous phenomenon. The rebellion against the political elites can find a variety of expressions, progressive and reactionary. If in the current conjuncture in Europe the radical right has benefited more than the radical left, this is a consequence of the factors mentioned above—the relatively low level of struggle and the subjective weaknesses of the radical and revolutionary left. What this has meant is that the response of the dominant European capitalisms to the crisis—recharged neoliberalism in the shape of austerity—has increased popular alienation with the political system and that this opening has been seized largely by populist racist parties that are trying to remake this system on their terms. This is very clearly the project being pursued by Marine Le Pen and Nigel Farage. Maybe we should set aside our point-scoring and reflect a moment about that: in two key European countries the radical right believe they are in a position to make hegemonic interventions. This is a situation that demands, not despair, but sober thinking and targeted action. But things don’t have to take this form. In Greece the long-term level of social struggles and the inherited strength of the radical left, and in the Spanish state the sustained scale of the mass movements since the early 2000s have realised other possibilities. Southern Ireland hasn’t seen anything so spectacular, but a recent history of powerful local campaigns around social issues (now metamorphosing into the national movement against water charges) has allowed the radical left to build up significant electoral bases. Even more striking is the Scottish case. The pain of austerity and the hatred of politicians are the same both sides of the border. But south of the Tweed the beneficiaries have been the little England bigots of UKIP. The Scottish referendum campaign, however, was dominated by the progressive case for independence. And this wasn’t just a matter of Alex Salmond of the Scottish National Party’s skilful appropriation of the mantle of social democracy from Labour. As Keir McKechnie showed in our last issue, the running in the Yes campaign was made by forces on the left putting an anti-neoliberal and anti-imperialist case for independence. The Union came closest to disaster when Salmond dropped his efforts to stress the continuities between a present and a future Scotland and reframed independence as the way to save the welfare state. Though a ruling class on panic stations managed to scare enough voters into the No camp to defeat independence, Scotland continues to vibrate politically to the rhythms of the Yes campaign. One form this takes, fascinatingly and bucking the “anti-politics” trend, is a huge influx of new members into the pro-independence parties. The Scottish referendum is particularly interesting because the level of class struggle is, if anything, lower north of the border than it is in England. It was the particular configuration of the political field—not just the SNP’s rebranding as a social-democratic party but also the ability of forces further to the left to influence mainstream debate—that made the difference. The sentiments elsewhere associated with “anti-politics” found expression within the political system. There is nothing more part of bourgeois constitutional politics than a referendum about whether an existing capitalist state should split into two separate ones. Yet what could have been an empty ritual (think of the 1979 devolution referendum whose result was nullified because of the low level of participation) became a lightning conductor of much larger social tensions that could lead to the renewal of the radical left in Scotland. This example suggests that the opposition Tad and Elizabeth establish between “struggles where ordinary people take action to change society in their own interests—including in relation to the state” (= social and therefore good) and “political activities that merely seek a change in the policies, personnel or form of the state” (= political and therefore bad) is false. The Scottish referendum was about a mere “change in the…form of the state” and therefore on the wrong side of this line. But what does this mean? That the revolutionary left should have abstained from it? Tad and Elizabeth are too dedicated followers of fashion on the radical left (witness their shy-making invocation of Bob Dylan to expose me as insufficiently down with the kids) to propose anything so unpopular. But if they accept some version of the analysis of the referendum campaign offered above then their counterposition of the social and the political collapses. This brings me to Tad’s and Elizabeth’s theoretical argument: “Under capitalism all politics is necessarily ‘capitalist politics’ precisely because ‘the political’ only exists as a separate—and alienated—sphere in modern, bourgeois society”.7 They claim authority for this from the writings of the young Marx in 1843 and 1844 where he criticises the state not as the resolution of the antagonisms of civil society (as Hegel believed), but as a specific form of the alienation of civil society. The significance of these texts—for example, the “Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State” and “On the Jewish Question”—have been widely appreciated by Marxists, starting with Galvano Della Volpe and his pupil Lucio Colletti. They represent a very important step in Marx’s development towards communism in which he comes to realise that the kind of democratic transformation he wants to see in Germany requires more than a new edition of the French Revolution: the roots of alienation lie, not in religion (as the Young Hegelians thought) or even in political absolutism, but in civil society, and overcoming its antagonisms requires transcending the distinction between civil society and the state, which represents a merely imaginary resolution of these antagonisms.8 So it is already in the mid-1840s that Marx sets as his objective the abolition of the state. But he does so prior to his first formulations of historical materialism and of his critique of political economy and to his identification of the proletariat as the agent of what at this stage he calls “human” (as opposed to merely “political”) emancipation. It is a symptom of the limitations of Marx’s analysis in the “Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State” that he seems to identify the dissolution of both civil society and the state with the introduction of universal male suffrage. This does not mean that in his “mature” writings Marx simply abandons his critique of the state as a form of alienation. Tad and Elizabeth partially quote his description of the Paris Commune of 1871 as “a Revolution against the State itself, this supernaturalist abortion of society, a resumption by the people for the people, of its own social life”.9 This critique of the state can be integrated into his theory of fetishism in Capital. In other words, the apparent autonomy of the state in capitalist society can be seen as one specific form of the fragmentation of social relations that results from the dominance of commodity exchange. There is no contradiction between subsuming the state under fetishism and understanding it as a form of class domination since the latter perspective is needed in order to identify the mechanisms that ensure that the state operates in the interests of capital.10 In any case, Marx’s critique of the state does not license the kind of counterposition of the political and the social advocated by Tad and Elizabeth. While reaffirming his critique of the state in the wake of the Paris Commune he was engaged in a bitter factional struggle with Mikhail Bakunin and his followers in the First International. At stake here was whether the workers’ movement should undertake political action. Marx and Engels, even though, like Bakunin, they sought the abolition of the state, thought that it should, while Bakunin opposed it. It was in the course of this struggle that Marx explained to Friedrich Bolte that: every movement in which the working class comes out as a class against the ruling classes and attempts to coerce them by pressure from without is a political movement. For instance, the attempt in a particular factory or even a particular trade, to force a shorter working day out of the individual capitalists by strikes, etc, is a purely economic movement. The movement to force through an eight-hour law, etc, however, is a political movement. And in this way, out of the separate economic movements of the workers there grows up everywhere a political movement, that is to say a movement of the class, with the object of achieving its interests in a general form, in a form possessing general, socially binding force… Where the working class is not yet far enough advanced in its organisation to undertake a decisive campaign against the collective power, ie, the political power of the ruling classes, it must at any rate be trained for this by continual agitation against, and a hostile attitude towards the policies of the ruling classes. Otherwise it will remain a plaything in their hands.11 So Marx believes that, short of the conquest of political power, workers can strengthen their organisations and increase their self-consciousness by putting demands on the state, “this supernaturalist abortion of society”. Was he confused? I don’t think so. The state as a specific fetishised form of capitalist social relations creates a certain field of struggle (the political) in which different classes seek to secure for themselves measures that possess “general, socially binding force”. This is part of what Marx is getting at when he calls the state the concentration of the antagonisms of capitalist society. It is inevitable that working class movements will engage in political struggles and this can serve to strengthen and develop them, though Marx stresses that there are dangers involved. The example that Tad and Elizabeth give of Podemos illustrates the point. They rightly (though quite uncontroversially) stress the significance of the 15 May movement and of Podemos as its political expression. But they go on to accuse a Podemos leader, Íñigo Errejón, of “subordinating social interests to the primacy of politics”.12 But it is very welcome for a mass movement such as 15-M to invade and seek to reshape the political field. This is an advance compared to the previously predominant position of rejecting any form of representative politics. Potentially the rebels of 15 May are starting to grapple with how to reshape society, which requires addressing the question of political power. The problem lies with the specific political project of the leadership of Podemos, a combination of radical reformist economic policies with forms of decision-making (eg online voting) that are apparently ultra-democratic but in fact vest the power of initiative in the hands of a narrow group in Madrid. But counterposing the social and political in the way Tad and Elizabeth do is of little use in contesting this project. The problem is not that politics is sullying the purity of the social movement—politics is always implicit in social struggles—but what kind of politics comes to predominate. In some ways Tad’s and Elizabeth’s position is a flashback to the early phases of anti-capitalist radicalisation—a fetishism of the social implied by what Daniel Bensaïd rather nicely called “a ‘social illusion’, by analogy with the ‘political illusion’ of those criticised by the young Marx for thinking ‘political’ emancipation through the achievement of civil rights was the last word in ‘human emancipation’”.13 The rational kernel in their argument is that many translations from the social to the political do founder in some version of reformism. But, as the Scottish case illustrates, the solution lies, not in abstention from the political, but in developing forms of political intervention that, as Marx suggests, undermine the hegemony of the ruling class and increase the self-consciousness and self-organisation of the exploited and oppressed. Tad and Elizabeth insist that they renounce neither intervention nor strategy, but their argument is conducted at so high a level of generality as to be of little use. This is a pity because the revolutionary left has to think and work hard to influence what are very powerful developments in the political field, and we can do with all the help we can get.

But Goldwater failed to realize that governmental indifference can harden hearts, and government action can create conditions that soften them. People's attitudes aren't static or untouchable. They are molded by the quality of interactions with others, and one of the great powers of government involves shaping those interactions-not determining them in any concrete sense, but defining the parameters within which people come to know each other and live together. Today, for example, most Americans don't believe women should be confined to the home raising children, or subjected to crude advances and sexist remarks by men. The women's-rights movement put pressure on the government, which in turn passed laws that helped change some of our beliefs about women. Similarly, the relative progress of the 1960s did not happen merely by using the blunt instruments of the law. Change emerged from the ways those laws, with grassroots pressure, created new patterns of interactions, and ultimately new habits. Neither Obama's election to the presidency nor my appointment as a Princeton professor would have happened were it not for these new patterns and habits.

None of this happens overnight. It takes time and increasing vigilance to protect and secure change. I was talking with a dose friend and he mentioned a basic fact: that we were only fifteen years removed from the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 when Ronald Reagan was elected president and Republicans began to dismantle the gains of the black freedom struggle. Civil rights legislation and the policies of the Great Society had just started to reshape our interactions when they started to be rolled back. We barely had a chance to imagine America anew-to pursue what full employment might look like, to let the abolition of the death penalty settle in, to question seriously the morality of putting people in prison cells, and to enact policies that would undo what the 1968 Kerner Commission described as "two Americas" before the attack on "big government" or, more precisely, the attack on racial equality was launched. The objective was to shrink the size of government ("to starve the beast") and to limit its domestic responsibilities to ensuring economic efficiency and national defense. Democrats eventually buckled, and this is the view of government, no matter who is in office, that we have today. It has become a kind of touchstone of faith among most Americans that government is wasteful and should be limited in its role-that it shouldn't intrude on our lives. Politicians aren't the only ones who hold this view. Many Americans do, too. Now we can't even imagine serious talk of things like full employment or the abolition of prisons.

So, looking at examples from southern Europe—solidarity networks in Greece, self-organization in Spain or Turkey—these seem to be very crucial for building social movements around everyday life and basic needs these days. Do you see this as a promising approach?

I think it is very promising, but there is a clear self-limitation in it, which is a problem for me. The self-limitation is the reluctance to take power at some point. Bookchin, in his last book, says that the problem with the anarchists is their denial of the significance of power and their inability to take it. Bookchin doesn’t go this far, but I think it is the refusal to see the state as a possible partner to radical transformation.

Unlike these rewritings, which reaffirm in a somewhat new language the system of wage labor with only minor internal reforms, materialist critique aims at ending class rule. It goes beyond description and explains the working of wage labor and the abstract structures that cannot be experienced directly but underwrite it. Materialist critiques unpacks the philosophical and theoretical arguments that provide concepts for legitimizing wage labor and marks the textual representations that make it seem a normal part of life. In short, instead of focusing on micropractices (prison, gender, education, war, literature, and so on) in local and regional terms, materialist critique relates these practices to the macrostructures of capitalism and provides the knowledges necessary to put an end to exploitation. At the center of these knowledges is class critique. Pedagogy of critique is a class critique of social relations and the knowledges they produce . Its subject is wage labor, not the body without organs . An exemplary lesson in pedagogy of critique is provided by Marx, who concludes chapter 6 of Capital, " The Buying and Selling of Labour-Power, " by addressing the sphere within which wages are exchanged for labor power and the way this exchange is represented in the legal, philosophical, and representational apparatuses of capitalism as equal . He provides knowledge of the structures of wage labor and the theoretical discourses that sustain it. I have quoted this passage before and will refer to it again and again. Here is the full version: We now know how the value paid by the purchaser to the possessor of this peculiar commodity, labour-power, is determined. The use-value which the former gets in exchange, manifests itself only in the actual usufruct, in the consumption of the labour-power. The money-owner buys everything necessary for this purpose, such as raw material, in the market, and pays for it at its full value . The consumption of labourpower is at one and the same time the production of commodities and of surplus-value. The consumption of labour-power is completed, as is the case of every other commodity, outside the limits of the market or the sphere of circulation. Accompanied by Mr. Moneybags and by the possessor of labour-power, we therefore take leave for a time of this noisy sphere, where everything takes place on the surface and in view of all men, and follow them both into the hidden abode of production, on whose threshold there stares us in the face "No admittance except on business . " Here we shall see, not only how capital produces, but how capital is produced. We shall at last force the secret of profit making. This sphere that we are deserting, within whose boundaries the sale and purchase of labour-power goes on, is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham. Freedom, because both buyer and seller of a commodity, say of labour-power, are constrained only by their own free will. They contract as free agents, and the agreement they come to, is but the form in which they give legal expression to their common will. Equality, because each enters into relation with the other, as with a simple owner of commodities, and they exchange equivalent for equivalent. Property, because each disposes only of what is his own. And Bentham, because each looks only to himself. The only force that brings them together and puts them in relation with each other, is the selfishness, the gain and the private interests of each. Each looks to himself only, and no one troubles himself about the rest, and just because they do so, do they all, in accordance with the pre-established harmony of things, or under the auspices of an all-shrewd providence, work together to their mutual advantage, for the common weal and in the interest of all. On leaving this sphere of simple circulation or of exchange of commodities, which furnishes the "Free-trader vulgaris" with his views and ideas, and with the standard by which he judges a society based on capital and wages, we think we can perceive a change in the physiognomy of our dramatis personae. He, who before was the money-owner, now strides in front as capitalist; the possessor of labour-power follows as his labourer. The one with an air of importance, smirking, intent on business; the other, timid and holding back, like one who is bringing his own hide to market and has nothing to expect but-a hiding. Materialist critique is fundamental to a transformative feminist politics. Through critique the subject develops historical knowledges of the social totality: she acquires, in other words, an understanding of how the existing social institutions (motherhood, child care, love, paternity, taxation, family, . . . and so on ) are part of the social relations of production, how they are located in exploitative relations of difference, and how they can be changed. Materialist critique, in other words, is that knowledge practice that historically situates the conditions of possibility of what empirically exists under capitalist relations of class difference-particularly the division of labor-and, more important, points to what is suppressed by the empirically existing: what could be, instead of what actually is. Critique indicates, in other words, that what exists is not necessarily real or true but only the actuality under wage labor. The role of critique in pedagogy is exactly this: the production of historical know ledges and class consciousness of the social relations, knowledges that mark the transformability of existing social arrangements and the possibility of a different social organization--one that is free from necessity. Quite simply then, the pedagogy of critique is a mode of social knowing that inquires into what is not said, into the silences and the suppressed or the missing, in order to unconceal operations of economic and political power underlying the myriad concrete details and seemingly disparate events and representations of our lives . It shows how apparently disconnected zones of culture are in fact linked by the highly differentiated and dispersed operation of the systematic, abstract logic of the exploitation of the division of labor that informs all the practices of culture and society. It reveals how seemingly unique concrete experiences are in fact the common effect of social relations of production in wage labor capitalism. In sum, materialist critique both disrupts that which represents itself as natural and thus as inevitable and explains how it is materially produced. Critique, in other words, enables us to explain how social differences, specifically gender, race, sexuality, and class, have been systematically produced and continue to operate within regimes of exploitation-namely, the international division of labor in global capitalism-so we can change them. It is the means for producing politically effective and transformative knowledges . The claim of affective pedagogy is that it sets the subject free by making available to her or him the unruly force of pleasure and the unrestrained flows of desire, thereby turning her or him into an oppositional subject who cuts through established representations and codings to find access to a deterritorialized subjectivity. But the radicality of this self, at its most volatile moment, is the radicality of the class politics of the ruling class, a class for whom the question of poverty no longer exists. The only question left for it, as I have already indicated, is the question of liberty as the freedom of desire. Yet this is a liberty acquired at the expense of the poverty of others. The pedagogy of critique engages these issues by situating itself not in the space of the self, not in the space of desire, not in the space of liberation, but in the revolutionary site of collectivity, need, and emancipation. The core of the pedagogy of critique is that education is not simply for enlightening the individual to see through the arbitrariness of signification and the violence of established representations . It recognizes that it is a historical practice and, as such, it is always part of the larger forces of production and relations of production. It understands that all pedagogies are, in one way or the other, aimed at producing an efficient labor force. Unlike the pedagogy of desire, the pedagogy of critique does not simply teach that knowledge is another name for power, nor does it marginalize knowledge as a detour of desire. It acknowledges the fissures in social practices-including its own-but it demonstrates that they are historical and not textual or epistemological. It, therefore, does not retreat into mysticism by declaring the task of teaching to be the teaching of the impossible and, in doing so, legitimate the way things are. Instead, the pedagogy of critique is a worldly teaching of the worldly.

The concept of social reproduction has been at the centre of materialist feminist debates and has helped to uncover the invisibilised tasks needed to maintain life, both daily and across generations, which are mostly performed by women and racial minorities (Federici 2020; Mitchell, Marston and Katz 2004). Social reproduction scholarship has complemented Marxist theory by highlighting the crucial role of reproductive work in producing the most fundamental element in capitalist production, labour power, and disentangling the gendered division of labour (Dalla Costa and James 1975). The relation between capital and social reproduction, though, is far from being linear. Whereas the process of capital accumulation is sustained by the appropriation of reproductive work, capitalism also erodes the conditions of social reproduction, incurring in a contradiction that is at the root of periodical crises of care (Fraser 2017). Federici (2020) has framed this contradiction as a ‘double character’ of reproductive work, which in capitalism, simultaneously reproduces life and labour power. This reformulation has an important political connotation, since placed in a different context, social reproduction could potentially contribute to “reconstruct the world as a space of nurturing, creativity, and care” (Federici 2020: xvii). Therefore, the struggle over reproductive work is crucial in creating the conditions for emancipatory forms of social organisation and advancing a post-capitalist transition. In this context, several authors have recently started speaking of reproductive (or reproduction) commons, which refer to the collectivisation of social reproduction, taking it away from the market and/or private spaces (Federici 2018). In the current situation, reproductive commons are easily co opted by capital and the state. Since the retreat of the welfare state in Western countries that brought about the neoliberal era (a process that has intensified after every economic crisis) many of the reproductive functions that the state covered have been transferred S. Ruiz Cayuela and M. García-Lamarca Geoforum 144 (2023) 103807 3 back to the private sphere, in what Ezquerra has characterised as a new enclosure of reproductive commons (2015). This housewifization process, as Mies (2014) has called it, is not the only possible outcome though. Occasionally, communities have come together and have been able to share the load of these reproductive tasks, reclaiming their own reproduction as a commons. In this way, reproductive commons have been able to undo three of the main impacts of enclosure: “the loss of community bonds, the separation of production and reproduction, and the invisibilisation … of reproductive work” (di Masso Tarditti et al. 2022: 12, own translation). However, reproductive commons do not aim to revert enclosure in order to recover a romanticised pre-capitalist past. As De Angelis (2017) has demonstrated, reproductive commons form the material basis that can make commoning a viable alternative to the market and the state. Therefore, reproductive commons play a key role in building commons autonomy and are central in igniting and sustaining a social revolution towards emancipatory post-capitalist futures. Whereas there is a growing interest in reproductive commons, the existing literature addresses them mostly from an abstract conceptual perspective. Among the scarce empirically based publications that we have been able to find, the topics of care work and food prevail (see for example the collection edited by Ezquerra et al. 2022). While these are certainly important, we situate our intervention as one connecting scholarship on social reproduction and housing commons to deepen understandings of reproductive commons. The role housing plays as a critical dimension of social reproduction has been explored from feminist perspectives underlining how mortgage debt under neoliberalism (re)privatises relations of social reproduction (Roberts 2013), or how debt more broadly intertwines the very infrastructure for life, labour, care and housing (Cavallero and Gago 2021). Marxist approaches emphasise tensions between housing as accumulation and housing as a form of social reproduction (Byrne 2020; Madden and Marcuse 2016). The role of social reproduction in housing struggles has more recently taken front and centre stage through analyses of rent strikes (Hughes and Wright 2018; Gonzalez-Guzm ´ an ´ and Ill-Raga 2023). Considering how housing arrangements affect our common senses and subjectivities, as evidenced by the close connection between the private household model and the hegemony of the nuclear family (Aramburu 2015; Lewis 2022), a growing literature on housing commons has generated very insightful debates. These include the role that squatting has played as a way to (re) appropriate urban space for decommodified social relations rather than speculation, a process embedded in practices of commoning (Di Feliciantonio 2017; García-Lamarca, 2015), and the contestation of migration governance and border policies (Montagna & Grazioli 2019). A range of publications have considered the production, management, financial and political mechanisms to remove and maintain housing outside market dynamics, as well as the challenges these noncommodified housing processes face (Huron 2015, 2018; Joubert and Hodkinson 2018; Larsen and Lund Hansen 2015; Miralles Buil 2020). Housing commons owned and operated by non-profit, independent housing associations in Denmark, for example, endure due to their engagement with, against and beyond the state (Vidal 2019). Ferreri and Vidal (2021) detail how public-cooperative policy mechanisms for housing commons have unfolded through collaboration and conflict and continuous political and social struggles. What role do critical approaches to reproduction play here? In the next section we turn our attention to the particularities that reproductive commons located in urban environments are facing.

Ramsey: It’s difficult to miss the Lacanian influence here. I’ve seen some within self-identified socialist or communist circles writing about your book in somewhat dismissive ways, focusing on the ‘Lacanese’ you employ as if it is does more to obfuscate than to illuminate. What do you see as the value of Lacan here for radical theory and for the communist movement in particular? Dean: The unconscious matters—we’ve been talking about desire and drive, both unconscious processes. Language matters. Understanding the subject matters. Psychoanalysis offers a theoretical apparatus that helps us think about these components of our thought and experience. It provides us with ways of addressing our attachments to dysfunction and self-hate, to perceived needs for guarantees and certainty, as well as to our ambivalence toward masters. But, to use an odd cliché I may have never used before, ‘the proof of the pudding is in the eating.’ If people don’t find Lacan/lacanese illuminating, it will be obfuscating. It’s that way with any specialized discourse or vocabulary. Maybe an example will help. In The Communist Horizon I use Lacan to suggest an idea of the party as situated at the overlap of two lacks, such as the people’s lack of knowledge of what they desire as well as the party’s own lack of knowledge, the fact that it can’t guarantee a particular future. Given these lacks, the role of the party is to keep the site at which they overlap open as the gap necessary for the collective desire for collectivity. The question is then whether this formulation helps us think of new or better ways to organize. Ramsey: Would it be fair to say then, building upon these “two lacks,” that the party you envision must be one that is able both to learn and to teach, and moreover to incite and sustain the collective desire to both learn and teach? Dean: Yes, particularly the latter insofar as sustaining desire requires cultivating a kind of relation or orientation to what is lacking. I sometimes wonder whether prior visions or versions of the communist party have overplayed its teaching role and then in a backlash against this overplaying ended up fetishizing some kind of authentic workers’ or people’s knowledge that the party has to learn. What if instead we recognize that the party is a collective and that collectives bring together people with different skills, experience, and knowledge? A communist party orients its collective toward the truth of communism. The primary task of the party is the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and establishment of communism. This is more than a pedagogy, to say the least. Ramsey: In the book you cite Marx’s famous communist motto (a phrase that precedes Marx as well) “from each according to ability, to each according to need,” writing that “this principle contains the urgency of the struggle for its own realization” (15). I often speak of the communist kernel of hope as inherent in the fact that among the needs of human beings is the need to satisfy others’ needs (and perhaps to be or to feel needed by those others as well). How does your reframing of communism from the standpoint of desire relate to the (more traditional?) framing of communism as oriented towards the satisfaction of need, and the development of human abilities? How do need and desire relate within your thinking here? Dean: Here’s the rub: we all know that people have needs. Even the worst capitalists know this. The political question concerns our relation to these needs. This is a matter of desire and will. Are needs to be addressed singularly or collectively? Desire, then, involves the politicization of needs. Ramsey: Often it seems to me that communists put forth our goals as a matter of what we will eliminate or abolish (“the 4 Alls” etc. “the gaps” or divisions that are inherent in class society, etc). Not so much in terms of what we want to cultivate or unleash. Often when we speak of what we strive to unleash or cultivate (“global human flourishing” etc.) it is depicted as something that will come after the elimination or overturning of various oppressive institutions, ideologies, state structures, class relations, etc. I’m not suggesting that it is wrong to say we want to eliminate A, B, and C, or that we want to abolish or overthrow X, Y, and Z. But it sometimes seems to me as if desire and the pursuit of what we “really want” is positioned somehow “on the other side” of this abolishing, overturning, eliminating, etc. – now being the time for “self-sacrificing struggle” and the repression of desire for the sake of the greater good, of the collectivity, of the revolution down the road. Desire here may become something we’ll only get back to on the “other side” of some kind of revolutionary break. Nothing against revolutionary breaks, and the openings they provide, of course. But your focus on communism as a matter of desire–”the collective desire for collective desiring”–seems to me notable and refreshing as a way to bring that future flourishing we communists often imagine into the present, but in a way that still propels us forward towards cultivating human liberation. It gives a positive lean to communist subjectivity, even if that subjectivity continues to be defined (as desire) by lack. Dean: I love the way you are putting this and will now have to use this! It’s nicely succinct and clear. Ramsey: It seems to me that often on the radical left, we speak of pursuing the “satisfaction of human needs.” Everyone getting enough food to eat, clean, water, shelter, etc. All crucial stuff, obviously. But this emphasis on the emancipated society as a state of satiety and “satisfaction” may give short shrift to the way that – on another level– communism and liberation is not only, or even primarily, about satisfying people’s immediate material needs (though this too), so much as it is about cultivating a hunger, or, as you would put it, a desire. A political desire. Dean: Sorry to keep interrupting but I like your expression ‘state of satiety and satisfaction’ and your evocation of a hunger — it reminds me of Benjamin’s critique of left melancholic hacks preoccupied with their digestion. Ramsey: Something I’m just starting to think about is what the difference is between conceiving of communist politics as a matter of satisfying human needs – and cultivating new needs – vs. a matter of desire. What do you see as the stakes of foregrounding communism as a matter of desire? Dean: The opening up of a gap so as to free us to envision new possibilities. You know how people tend to criticize the left for not having a vision, not having a goal, not having ideas? Well, this only makes sense for a left that has abandoned communism. Once we claim communism, then we insert ourselves into a logic of desire such that we have to think strategically as well as tactically, we have to start thinking in terms of what communism for us will look like and how we can get there.

The rise of racial capitalism also brought with it new gendered relations of power through an idealized distinction between so-called men's productive and women's social reproductive labors—a split that was never a reality for poor and racialized families (Glenn, 2012). Indeed, scholars have argued that capital accumulation was only possible through the invisibilized labor of women and enslaved people, in terms of both the biological reproduction of the labor force and in the everyday labor of social reproduction (scholars have called this an ongoing form of primitive accumulation) (Federici, 2014; Mies, 2014; Weinbaum, 2019). The latter half of the 20th century saw a hardening of capitalist logics, globally. During this period, structural adjustment programs, which were rolled out in response to the global debt crisis of the 1980s, destroyed the last vestiges of the commons and further devolved social reproduction to individuals and their families (Federici, 2014). In turn, much of the labor of social reproduction—the “the fleshy, messy, and indeterminate stuff of everyday life” (Katz, 2011, p. 711)—shifted more deeply onto 6 of 15 NEELY and LOPEZ under-paid, over-worked, and highly exploited care laborers as more and more women entered the workforce. Yet much of the mainstream scholarship on care and care ethics is Euro- or Western-centric (Green & Lawson, 2011; Raghuram, 2016), lacking an intersectional analysis (Hankivsky, 2014; Raghuram, 2019), and ignoring the long history of Black feminists attention to care. Black feminist care analysis has always been intersectional and accounted for racial capitalism. These scholars and activists recognize racial capitalism as the structure against which an ethic of care must be mobilized in order to exceed the care-less-ness of what Patricia Hill Collins (2002) calls the “matrix of domination.”3 Often grounded in othermothering and revolutionary mothering, Black feminist care ethics is rooted in the practices of women caring for children intergenerationally and across the community—a practice that stretches back to West Africa and to slavery. Othermothering is the revolutionary act of challenging western conceptions of family and care, enfolding it into social and political activism (Butler, 2019; James, 1993; McDonald, 1997). Black feminist care ethics begins from culture work, or “the entire way a community organizes to nurture itself and future generations” (Reagon, 1996, pp. 168, 170; see also; Barry & Grady, 2019). As an expression of culture work, othermothering is “the bridge work that requires confronting the very real barriers that oppression places in our way and also finding love and power by facing the barriers that divide us from each other across geopolitical divides” (Gumbs et al., 2016, pp. 5, 6). As such, it refuses the insistence on the gender binary, offering, instead, potentiality (Spillers, 2003) by defying neoliberal temporalities and individualization that are grounded in hetero-normative, patriarchal, white supremacist capitalism (Crawley, 2020). As Sosa-Provencio (2016) writes, “...caring is necessarily political, transformative, and rooted in the collective uplift of those struggling to overcome these forces of oppression in their daily lives” (p. 306). Care ethics is a politics of relationality and as such it is necessarily multi-scalar, moving beyond neoliberal capitalism's insistence on the atomized individual and family and a vision of care-as-protection. The global protests against anti-Black violence in the summer of 2020 and increasing interest in police abolition were a direct recrimination of the pervasiveness of the masculinist formation of care-as-protection. “Care,” in this frame, is violence. Abolition movements are a call to shift this framing toward building communities of care and support, toward a Black feminist vision of care (Okechukwu, 2021). Black feminists offer an approach to care that always recognizes the influence of racial capitalism. With this framing, care ethics pushes for an attention to “mutual vulnerability,” transformation, and mutual responsibility (Nash, 2018). For a feminist care ethics to fulfill its promise as a transformative ethos, it must center race, racism, and racial capitalism as the ground from which care and relationships emerge. As Christina Sharpe (2016) puts it, this care is bound up in “wake work,” where “care in the wake [is] a problem for thinking of and for Black non/being in the world...[it] is a work that insists and performs that thinking needs care (‘all thought is Black thought’) and that thinking and care need to stay in the wake” (p. 5). This wake work necessarily entails “multispecies assemblages” of care that move beyond the “the racial and colonial logics of the abstract universal anthropos” upon which the current ecological crisis is pinned (Davis et al., 2019, p. 3). This notion of the “Anthropocene,” scholars argue, flattens humanity to a singular monolith and fails to account for the uneven impacts of the climate crisis, and we would add, global pandemics. It also fails to consider whose labor and lives were, and still are, enrolled in these processes under violence, oppression, exploitation, and expropriation (Davis et al., 2019; see also H.; Davis & Todd, 2017; Karera, 2019; Pulido, 2018). Indeed, as Françoise Vergés argues (2017, p. 74), the Anthropocene and the politics of climate change rest on “the politics of nonraciality beneath which…lurk more sinister shadows of the racial everyday and persistent institutional and structural racisms—and racial capitalism.” As with PEH, this attention to non-human entanglements, especially in the context of racial capitalism, helps us understand why certain people (marginalized care givers who disproportionately have preexisting conditions) get sicker from COVID-19. When combined, the literature on PEH and racial capitalism helps to explain the pandemic in the context of anti-Blackness, while, as we turn to next, Black feminist work on care offers us a possible new way forward.

Our attitude to the past, our own and the past of others, is important. We need to learn what we did not witness and share what we have experienced, especially when the latter is traumatic or unrepresented. The French feminist philosopher, psychoanalyst and artist Bracha  argues that sharing the other’s trauma is a universal human disposition. Departing from the Lacanian tradition of the infant’s separation from the mother and subsequent entry into the Symbolic order via castration, Ettinger proposes an alternative: the notion of the matrixial border-linking, which she defines as an inherent ability to link to others, an ability every bit as universal as separation and castration. Matrixial border-linking enables the process of metramorphosis, a change that takes place in both me and the other, one that occurs ‘between being and absence, memory and oblivion, I and not-I, transgression and fading away’ (p. 201).

 links the properties of the matrixial to the seeking of connections with one’s generation. Discussing the autobiography of the Italian activist Louisa Passerini, she demonstrates that the activist’s remembrance of the past was not motivated by a desire to establish her own view of it, but by a desire to find out what she did not herself directly witness. The two senses of generation – connecting with one’s specific historical time and producing meaning in the present – proceed together. Today, asking ‘what is my generation?’ is vital. It seems to me that, in its matrixial incarnation, it is a valid reflexive project, one that locates the self by connecting past and present, encompassing knowing and lack of knowledge, sharing grey areas of memory, and opening up various temporalities. As this project departs from Freudian and Lacanian orthodoxy, it also allows us to disentangle femininity from the vocabulary of aphanisis and of speaking, as Jacqueline Rose () inevitably does, of the ‘withering and un-withering’ of womanliness (p. 87), which is the obvious effect of being restricted by a certain theoretical discourse.

We find two emerging strands of PEH particularly generative for thinking with the literature on racial capitalism and Black feminisms to understand COVID-19 in the context of anti-Blackness: PEH that attends to race and racial capitalism and PEH that attends to intergenerational health consequences. In a recent Progress Report on geographies of race and ethnicity, Laura Pulido (2017) argues for a more significant linking of literatures of environmental justice and racial capitalism. So doing, she argues that racial capitalism restructures the environment in ways that not only build from, but create racial difference, and further that these processes reshape bodies. She writes, “[Racial] capitalism is reproducing itself by restructuring humans on a cellular level” as “racially devalued bodies” become pollution “sinks” (Pulido, 2017, p. 529). Because people of color are deemed expendable, industry can pollute in the places in which they live, building profits out of their inhumanity. One of us, Neely (2021b), argues that racial capitalism in apartheid South Africa, which started from the position that Africans were inherently inferior, shaped everything from labor and employment patterns to nutritional science to health and infectious diseases and to the policies and NEELY and LOPEZ 3 of 15 programs to address them (see also, Wylie, 2001). The result is ongoing large racial disparities in morbidity and mortality and limited possibilities to address them. Barbour and Guthman (2018) take up the questions of racial capitalism in their examination of pregnant farmworker exposure to pesticides in a context where farmworker knowledge is devalued as bodies are harmed for profit. They write, “it is not only immigration policy and the precarious legal status of farmworkers that makes for their vulnerability to pesticide exposure, but the racist logics embedded in capitalism itself that renders certain bodies vulnerable and disposable” (Barbour & Guthman, 2018, p. 335). Drawing on Pulido and thinking through the epigenetic impacts of pesticides, they argue that industrial agriculture may offer an example of “how racial capitalism transforms bodies at the cellular level” (Barbour & Guthman, 2018, p. 337). Mansfield and Guthman also address questions of race and racism in their work on epigenetics. In critically interrogating the science, they argue that epigenetics offers a new way to pathologize difference—in the relationships between genes and the environment—which reifies existing racial inequality (Guthman & Mansfield, 2013, 2015; Mansfield & Guthman, 2015). In this work, they also examine the intergenerational imaginations and impacts of epigenetics through the long-term and multi-generational effects of environmental exposure. According to the science of epigenetics, the exposures of grandparents can effect grandchildren's genetic makeup even if those children never have the exposures their ancestors did, thus rendering the body temporally elastic. Mansfield and Guthman see epigenetics as a way to understand how histories of inequality manifest in bodies and shape differential health outcomes and health futures. They write, “Researchers are discovering biological pathways through which social stresses such as racial discrimination and joblessness are somatized....can be cumulative… [and] can be embodied. These observations are leading to new theorizations about biology and race such that biological difference—not reduced to genomics—can be an effect of social relations” (Guthman & Mansfield, 2013, p. 11). This approach is important because it recognizes the biological impact of the “histories that produce inequality in resource access and wealth in the construction of racial difference” (Lafferty, 2012). And this is important for understanding the uneven impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and how it relates to anti-Blackness through what are commonly known as pre-existing conditions like asthma, heart disease, and diabetes. The next section offers an in-depth examination of how racial disparities come to be in the first place through an analysis of the literature on racial capitalism, and why they matter to both individual bodies and society, especially in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic