#transphobic’ the response is to look at the movement to identify the core ideological issues that are the wellspring of said transphobia

[theteaisaddictive]

radical feminism making a comeback (/derogatory) was not on my 2024 bingo card

[stairstab]

[EDIT: I wrote this a very long time ago, and I’d like to revisit it. I revised a lot of it and I’d appreciate if y’all took a moment to read it. I’ve added lots of paragraph breaks and font flourishes to allow for easier reading.]

On: Neoliberal Feminism and the Co-opting of the Struggle Under Capitalism

Note: I am drawing a dichotomy, for a moment, between ‘neoliberal feminism’, which represents capitalistic endeavors to co-opt and market a defanged, watered down version of feminism, and ‘marxist feminism’, which represents the historical revolutionary leftist movement to abolish both patriachy and wage slavery. 

The Marxist feminism I will discuss here will deal with the conglomerate, or as I like to call it, the hydra. By contrast, the neoliberal feminism I discuss here will view oppression in a more diluted, individualist sense and will market itself around ‘woke progressivism’ in an attempt to make money, create a cultivated identity, and/or general social capital. 

There is one subject that reveals the massive gap between mainstream feminist ideals and marxist ones, and that is: 

Ending the wage gap vs. ending wage slavery completely.

It is one of the most pervasive and widely discussed subjects regarding feminism today, and it so expertly shows the shallow, privileged lines of thought that go into neoliberal feminism. It is about getting what is yours, about being critical when it suits you, but not too critical. 

You can judge a makeup company for testing on animals or not using vegan or fair trade ingredients or for using a racist model in an ad and cause massive liberal outcry, but don’t you dare question the very foundation of the makeup industry. Don’t talk about how makeup is used to capitulate and objectify women, don’t talk about the effects that the industry has on womens body image and self esteem, don’t talk about how exploitative of an industry it is or how it relies on multiple different hierarchical power structures to even exist. 

So, when we see corporations using feminist/leftist imagery to appeal to liberal women, we aren’t seeing a shift in the overton window or a new horizon for progressivism, we are seeing the commodification of our struggles. 

When Cheerios has a multiracial family in their ad, they’re targeting a specific audience to buy their product. When McDonalds has a gay couple in their ad, they’re targeting a specific audience. It is the exact same as when their are elderly people or moms or athletes in a commercial. It is targeted advertising.

You are being convinced that buying a product is a revolutionary act. You are being manipulated into forming a cultivated identity around this product. 

It is Feminist(tm) sponsored by Sephora(c)!

We’ve learned to identify this useless form of feminism very easily, without having to view it in a very marxist way at all. We knew that Kendall Jenner handing a Pepsi to a cop was the dumbest shit we’ve ever seen. We know that appealing to our oppressors is just victim blaming horseshit, we know that corporations do not give a shit about civil rights and that they only do this shit to make money off of stupid neoliberals. But what happens when we go past what we know? How much deeper can we go into why this shit is stupid and doesn’t work? 

For starters, we need to realize something:

Companies will pat themselves on the back for basic human decency, when if you peeked behind the curtain, they are the orchestrators of our tribulation and we recieve scraps compared to what they have stolen.

(water bottle companies “sponsoring” Flint is one example)

When we apply a magnifying lens to basic feminist ideals, what should we find but a deep trench where we once saw a crack in the pavement. Take, for instance, abortion. In mainstream feminism, abortion is heralded as a tool of freedom that is necessary for true bodily autonomy. Perfectly agreeable. But let’s go deeper. How is the pro-choice movement funded? How is it affected by capitalism? By racism? How do poor and/or marginalized women get access to these abortions? What about the deep history of eugenics that’s tied to it? What would abortion care look like under Socialism and how would that be different to how it is now, under Capitalism? These are all questions we need to ask in order to look deeper into these problems.

We talk about the glass ceiling, we talk about the wage gap. We pay lip service to ideas like equality and justice and the destruction of conservatism and fascism. but thats as deep as it ever goes. And it’s another problem altogether that a lot of so-called feminists are barely left-leaning at all, and often converse with, empathize with, or even believe fascist ideals

(And by the way, this includes TERFs. anyone who looks past the curtain of transphobic reactionary ideology can see they hold no actually radical beliefs. They abuse hatred of neoliberal mainstream feminism to pull people into a just-as-shallow iteration of it with a spicy transphobic twist. They are neoliberal feminists in their own right, with superficial explanations for profound problems and a lack of actual materialist analysis.) 

Neoliberal feminism is the form of feminism that took hold in the mainstream because it poses very little actual threat to the status quo. 

The mainstream movement does everything it can to ignore and even actively avoid the very foundations of its cause. Much like how unions and other leftist institutions ousted the reds and pretended shallow reformation and centrist garbage was responsible for their great feats, feminism has cut any ties with any actually revolutionary ideas and is now pretending that twitter hashtags about pink lattes or commercials for Gay Rights or ANYTHING having to do with hillary clinton have changed or helped anything. and anyone who does manage to make feminist news with any sort of actual revolutionary ideas has those ideas hidden away or watered down. 

or, god forbid, made into merchandise.

we’ve become comfortable with critiquing certain aspects of neoliberal feminism, like the glorification of the “female drone operators”, but we need to fundamentally understand that nothing that comes from neoliberal feminism is worth putting weight behind. every aspect of it can be improved by changing its very core focus to the root causes of our struggles. 

capitalism being the most important one of them all, the one that binds us not by nation or creed, but by our subjugated position among the exploited masses and below the tyrannical hand of the bourgeoise. 

There are other heads to this hydra though, of course. Nationalism and xenophobia, white supremacy, historical negationism, patriarchy, etc. Any hierarchical structure is a friend to capitalism and that all of these structures are heavily weakened with the abolition of capitalism. Racism, ableism, transphobia and homophobia are all friends of capitalism. and you cannot diminish or destroy these things without eliminating the greatest generator of their power structure.

But there are other institutions that uphold cruelty and injustice. Emma Goldman once wrote:

“Religion, the dominion of the human mind; Property, the dominion of human needs; and Government, the dominion of human conduct, represent the stronghold of man's enslavement and all the horrors it entails.”

Here, she represents her own version of the hydra. Religion, property, and the government. They all work together, each a heel in our collective spines. She goes on to explain that religion (specifically Christianity in America) works to quell rebellion and skepticism, property is capitalism, and the government represents unjust law and the American governments monopoly on violence. Goldman knew that oppression is not just one beast, that it exists as a conglomerate of ideas that each work with hierarchy of power.

These are fundamental understandings that one cannot achieve within neoliberal ideas of feminism. Capitalism is not good in any capacity, it is not morally justifiable. Ayn Rand did not have ‘girl power’. Benevolent corporatism will not save us. Yes, you can criticize things within capitalism in a feminist context without criticizing capitalism itself, but it takes a certain amount of privilege, bigotry, and/or ignorance to do so. (And remember that ignorance is a weapon of oppression)

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TL;DR: more good could be done on a massive scale if we shifted our focus away from petty neoliberal feminist critiques of society and into more fundamentally widespread and damaging structures such as capitalism, which neoliberal feminism by definition either supports or ignores. 

Stop letting corporations co-opt our struggles. stop letting the privileged few speak for the marginalized many. stop treating the symptoms, and treat the cause. 

There is no true freedom for women under capitalism.