Reading: Quiet Rumours (Dark Star Collective) / Social Democracy and Anarchism (Charlotte Wilson), A Woman Without a Country (Emma Goldman), The Tragedy of Woman's Emancipation (Emma Goldman), Make Your Own Tea (Alice Nutter) To contextualise: How Nonviolence Protects the State related tags: #HNvPtS
I have very little to say about either Charlotte Wilson's essay or the two Emma Goldman essays... They're interesting historical pieces, but I can't say that I get much from them at the moment that I haven't already had as a thought myself or recognised on my own.
Emma's first one is interesting for discussing citizenship and borders, though it appears to awkwardly handle countries.
It does strike me deeply that we never get anything other than Emma for anarcha-feminism, even from publishers who could help create systems that would support more diverse writing (and categorically never do).
Make Your Own Tea
In the early years of Class War, the attitude was that feminist demands did not go far enough. We said why call for equal pay? Equal rights under capitalism was putting out a begging bowl for equal gender exploitation and was spectacularly unambitious. Class War were calling not for equal pay packets but for the abolition of money. The feminist fixation with voting rights was another half measure. Why choose between two evils when there’s so much more to be had? Class War tried to support the principle of gender equality while disagreeing with the reformist tendencies of established feminism.
This is something that I find infuriating about so many “liberation” movements. Rather than actually think about any kind of alteration to the world we exist in, they always sit at the same places. Equal pay (equal exploitation), ability to vote (for a government that will never represent you)... In the case of queer liberation, the assimilationist cause for marriage (rather than the dismantling of marriage entirely).
Every single time, people push for the most mundane reforms rather than actually pushing for real changes...
This essay has some issues, but it is largely interesting and at least worth a skim.
So far, I don't think I've found this collection that interesting.