Rev Left Radio - Gender Abolition, Michel Foucault, and Marxism-Leninism

Episode Date: July 8, 2018

Alyson Escalante joins Brett to discuss gender nihilism, Marxist feminism, Judith Butler, Leninism, trans liberation, Foucault, social media discourse, and much more! Follow Alyson on Twitter @Alysonesque Read her work here: https://medium.com/@alysonescalante/how-we-talk-about-trans-inclusion-matters-75e1c6fce5dc Alyson's recommendations for further reading: Wittig - The Straight Mind and Other Essays   Federici - Caliban and the Witch   Jules Gleeson  - The Call For Abolition    Sylvia McCheyne - You Are More Oppressive Foucault - History of Sexuality   Foucault - Discipline and Punish   Butler - Undoing Gender   Butler - Precarious Life Althusser - Marxism and Humanism    Support Revolutionary Left Radio and get exclusive bonus content here: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio Follow us on Twitter @RevLeftRadio This podcast is officially affiliated with The Nebraska Left Coalition, the Nebraska IWW, and the Omaha GDC. Check out Nebraska IWW's new website here: https://www.nebraskaiww.org

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Five for equality Fight I guess the right to The fascist ideology To stick it in And turn it up loud Revolutionary Left Radio Starts now Hello, everyone

And welcome to Revolutionary Left Radio I'm your host and comrade Brett O'Shea And today we have on a special guest Allison to talk about gender, feminism, nihism, Marxism, Leninism And a lot more stuff So I'm really excited about this. Allison, would you like to introduce yourself

And say a bit about your background? Yeah, definitely. So my name is Allison. My background, I guess I, former grad student just recently dropped out of grad school, philosophy student, done a lot of studying philosophy, writing online, and doing some local organizing work in the town where the college I've been going to is located, mostly putting writings out there on the internet, trying to do theory work that bridges sort of more formal philosophical stuff with revolutionary politics and communist politics and trying to link those things together. cool yeah the way that we got connected was just through a mutual do you remember which which mutual friend of ours oh who was it i forget they know who they are they we'll retweet them when they admitted it was them definitely um but yeah so this is really cool because one of the things we like to do here is is give a platform to just comrades of all stripes and sometimes we have more academic you know actual professors on

but sometimes we just have regular working class people who have a lot to say and i think this is one of those really interesting conversations now i'm going to premise this entire conversation by saying up front that as many of you know i am a you know a white straight cis dude and so a lot of these concepts i'm still learning about and i'm still engaging with and so i do not want to pretend to be anything but a curious person trying to learn more and i think alison is a great person to have on to talk about a lot of these issues and hopefully segments of my audience will walk away from this episode, more educated and with a better understanding of some of these really, really critical issues that we're going to tackle in this episode. But before we get into all of that,

I know that you mentioned that you're a philosophy nerd as well as I am, and we've both had philosophy graduate school experience. So what is your background in philosophy, and in what ways did your interest and study of philosophy influence your politics? So I did a philosophy undergraduate. I got a bachelor's arts in philosophy and then did two years of philosophy grad school. So basically the last six years of my life have been dominated by philosophy and higher education. And before that, I got into philosophy in high school. One of the figures who were going to talk about later on, Judith Butler actually was really influential for me. When I was in high school, I remember picking up her work because people had sort of recommended it as an interesting

sort of, you know, text on trans issues and gender issues. And as a young trans woman, I was interested in that. and when I picked up Butler I realized I didn't understand any of it and that sort of I think sparked like me getting into philosophy more broadly and sort of realizing okay I have to go back and read sort of more classic philosophy to understand where all this is coming from so really since high school I've been really involved in reading philosophy and that's definitely what led me to you know get involved in it in college later on and eventually do some graduate school and I think for me philosophy is like very tied to my politics as well I got into Marx's

and later on Marxism, Leninism, through philosophy, through reading Marx in more academic contexts, actually, and then starting to get interested in Marx's sort of famous statement that philosophy should be about changing the world, not just interpreting it. And so for me, a lot of my interest now is in how we can link philosophy to actual revolutionary and radical politics. Absolutely. That's funny because I totally relate on that one quote being sort of impetus for me when I was in my graduate school in philosophy. It was one of those quotes that really stuck out to me. I did a lot of work on Marx in college and as an undergrad and as a graduate giving speeches and doing papers on Marx and Marxist theory, et cetera. But given the financial

situation I was in and my children, et cetera, I had to drop out of philosophy grad school. But I really think of Rev. Left Radio and our other show The Guatine is sort of an outgrowth of my interest in philosophy and a way of taking philosophy and being creative with how I engage with it outside of academia, but I'm absolutely sort of rooted in that same tradition as you are. So I think that's going to be, you know, cool to use as a jumping off point for this conversation. So I guess the first way to start this is that just to mention the fact that you came onto the radar of many people a few years ago when you wrote a post-left and nihilist text entitled Gender Nialism and anti-manifesto, which was published onlibcom.org.

You've since drifted away from post-left anarchism and nihilism, but before we dive into that journey, can you summarize kind of your main arguments in that piece, what you're trying to accomplish with that piece, et cetera? Yeah, definitely. So that piece, yeah, gender nihilism was sort of weird because I didn't expect it to take off as much as it did. And sort of, to my regret, I don't think it was as thorough with it as I would have been if I knew that it was kind of going to blow up and end up giving me a platform that I didn't expect I was

going to have. But it's an interesting thing that I was trying to do there, I think. And I was sort of writing it in this very specific context of late 2015, sort of the trans tipping point is happening. We're starting to get all this coverage of trans issues in the news. And also important in 2015 is we have the Supreme Court case that determines gay marriage is going to be nationally legal. And I think I was looking at those things and trying to figure out a little bit why even though these things are happening and we're gaining these representational sort of gains and this legitimization politically, a lot of LGBT people's lives are still filled with like massive amounts of oppression and subjugation on the basis of their gender and sexuality. So I think I was trying to think through what was happening there. And for me, what happened with those, uh, with trying to look at that is that I felt like the problem was sort of that a lot of queer and trans liberation rhetoric was built around trying to justify.

these stable identities that we have to say my gender is valid to or my sexuality is valid too and it's understandable and it can be represented and it can be grasped and made intelligible in that because it can be all of those things you have to respect it and you have to allow it to be included within liberal politics and for me I think what I saw was frustrating about that is that it was sort of playing into what I saw as sort of to use a buco term a like biopolitical goal of creating these sort of categories that make the world understandable to us and put people into boxes where they're understandable, they're manageable, they're controllable,

because they've been mapped and made intelligible. So part of the argument that I made is that a lot of the reason that I thought queer and trans activism in the U.S. wasn't proving to be really effective was that it had this obsession with identity. And in that article, I argued that what's important for us to do is sort of get past trying to focus on making our identity, is legitimate, but instead understanding that sort of all those attempts are playing a game which we can't necessarily win.

So this is sort of where the more nihilistic side of the argument in that article came out because I sort of argued that built into identity itself, there are inherent exclusions. So if I manage to convince people that trans identity should be respected, there's still a definition of what it means to be trans, and people who don't quite fit that definition will still be excluded. So as we create more categories to include people, we create more ways of excluding people at the same time. And I was sort of worried that that sort of political goal couldn't work out at all, and that in the process, we were sort of settling for making ourselves understandable and comprehensible in these ways that were hurting us. So in opposition to

that, I argued that what we should really do is sort of embracing nihilism and a negativity towards politics, and instead of demanding a positive political project where we'd be recognized as legitimate liberal subjects, we should just sort of engage in senseless and nihilistic lashing out against the things that we're making our lives hell as trans and queer people. So rather than sort of reforming gender and sexuality, I kind of argued that we should sort of just destroy and abolish the concept of gender and the concept of sexuality as sort of these flawed ideas of identity

that couldn't actually be progressive in the first place. And I guess that was kind of like the central argument that I was trying to get at in that piece. Yeah, and we're going to get into what you have come to reject or criticize in retrospect about that. But before we do, you mention Butler and Michelle Foucault. So for those who don't know, who were those two thinkers? And in what ways were they influential to that piece that you wrote? Sure.

So I guess I should talk about Foucault first because Butler is really impacted by Foucault. But Foucault is a French theorist and academic who most of the text that I was very influenced by with Foucault were written in the 1970s. And Foucault is sort of when people talk about post-structuralism and post-modernism, right? Which are these very debated words and that Foucault also distanced himself from. But he's sort of one of like the really classic examples that people will point to when they're talking about post-modernism, post-structuralism anyway. So for that essay especially, there's two books by Foucault that were really, really influential to me, which was the history of sexuality and discipline and punish. And these are both like really famous Foucault text.

because I don't know how much depth we want to go into them, but basically just where I was using them at least. In the history of sexuality, Foucault argues that sort of at the advent of capitalism, it wasn't so much that sexuality became repressed by Victorian social standards, but there was actually an obsession with sexuality and mapping it out and categorizing it and making these scientific taxonomies. And that really what that led to was more talking about sexuality, more categorization, more representation of previously tab.

sexualities, but none of that led to sort of broader social liberation necessarily. It actually led to new forms of institutionalization or understanding maybe perversion in more detail, right? And there was sort of this obsession with mapping these things out that didn't really go anywhere. And it's in that text that Foucault talks about biopower, which is this idea that I was very invested in in my own essay, you know, where he sort of talks about the way that what modern society and its obsession with power focuses on isn't the ability. Isn't the ability to kill people per se, as much as the ability to make them manageable political subjects by focusing on life and enabling life. And so Foucault, you know, he talks about this as an example

where he says in older times like the fetal era, if a king punished someone, you could see it as, you know, a sort of vengeance justification. But now when we execute somebody, it's to protect the life of others they would put in danger in the future. So this sort of insistence on mapping and understanding life and building taxonomies actually sort of leads to these more insidious forms of state power to a certain extent for Foucault. And I think I was really concerned with that in that text in particular. Sure.

Yeah, that's totally fascinating. And we're going to get into Foucault later in regards to what Marxists can learn from them and what parts of Foucault's philosophy are in tension with Marxism. But let's go on to Judith Butler and kind of do an introduction for her right now. Sure. So Judith Butler is definitely the other really big figure for me in that essay. Judith Butler is a faculty member at UC Berkeley in the rhetoric department, so she's still actively writing, probably like one of the most important American philosophers today. Her work is super influential, and a lot of people have had to interact with it.

And Butler, kind of in her work on gender, tends to build on Foucault and look at the way that gender isn't an inherent or innate thing that exists within us. So it's not like, as a trans woman, I was secretly a woman deep inside of me all along, but that gender is a set of performances. It's a set of behaviors and rituals that we repeat over and over again, and that those social performances and rituals make gender real in the world around us. We're constantly participating, or she says, doing gender every day. So for me, that was really important in that essay because I was trying to argue against the idea that our genders or sexualities are these inherent things that need recognition. and instead arguing that they are these potentially unintelligible, radical and maybe even silly things that we could do in ways that can never be pinned down precisely because they're not innate to us, but because they're performances that can be played with, that can be used in different ways. And that's sort of where I was drawing on Butler more heavily. She has, like, some more recent work that deals a lot with the war on terror and the way we talk about that that I'm actually very fond of.

And later on, when we discuss her some more, I'll probably get into why I think it's important for Marxists. But in that essay, I was really heavily drawing on her work about gender performativity and how she thinks gender isn't innate or inherent to us. There's a whole sort of segment in this piece dedicated to the concept of anti-humanism. Can you kind of briefly like inform people as to what anti-humanism is and kind of what role it played in this piece? Yeah. So I think for me, a lot of what I was focusing on in that section, that piece was anti-humanism construed really broadly as a rejection of an idea of inherent humanism. nature. So if, you know, there's sort of classical political humanism that's interested in defining what the human is, building politics which meet humans at whatever their supposed nature

is, and grant rights on the basis of being human and being recognizable as a human, I was really interested in pushing back against that and saying that humanism assumes sort of static, false identities that aren't really in existence. And what it means to be human is constantly in flux politically, is constantly changing. And what what it means to have an identity that that relates to the concept of human also is politically defined, right? Who counts as human in a given society is going to vary. It's going to change really radically. And I was sort of pushing back into the idea that that could get anything for us and that an idea of a static human nature could be liberatory.

And again, as I was doing throughout the article, I think, really saying we should leave room for flux and change and all these radical possibilities that sort of humanist politics maybe makes impossible. Sure. And that humanism versus anti-humanism debate is still alive and well in Marxist circles and on the left generally. Yeah. It's something that I'm constantly trying to learn about. So that section specifically kind of jumped out at me. But I'm going to encourage people to go read this just to kind of hear the arguments because I think they're interesting and engaging. And even if you disregard some of them, I think you'll come out of it, especially for people that don't have a lot of education on these topics. It's an interesting sort of jarring piece. But obviously you've walked away from those positions, a lot of them at least. So what about the piece do you reject or criticize in retrospect? And how has your position changed on the topic of gender and trans liberation since you've written that piece? Sure. So I guess first, what do I criticize in retrospect? Well, I mean a lot of things.

So it's kind of tricky. I'm just not a nihilist anymore to a certain extent. I'm not really invested in that kind of politics of hopelessness that sort of rejects organization in favor of individual and So to a large extent, I reject that stance. I think that the piece really almost has a really sadly anti-organizational focus to it, where it sort of condemns organizational politics. And in the process of trying to critique representation and identity as these categories, sort of throws out all organized politics in a way that I think is really frustrating in retrospect. And I think I was writing it from a place of frustration with organized politics, but maybe swung Like, not maybe, definitely swum too far in what I was critiquing there. So I think that there's an anti-political aspect to it that, in retrospect, I don't like. And sort of the other really big problem that I have with it, and I've written a little bit about this and a follow-up piece, is that I don't feel like it really theorizes what gender is very clearly. It just kind of takes it for granted that there's this thing called gender and that it's a system of mapping out identity on the basis of sexual difference.

but then it doesn't talk about that anymore, really. And that's like a really big frustration for me about the text. I think in my more recent work and in where I'm coming to you now from a more Marxist-Feminist perspective, I'm interested in how gender plays into divisions of labor, how gender plays into material economic factors about how life is structured. And the piece just really doesn't talk about that at all. So I don't think there's a very strong materialist component in how it thinks about gender. And those are sort of the two bigger things that I criticize in breakfast.

respect about the piece overall. Yeah. And what I like about that is the realization that we all are growing and developing and learning all the time. And there's, I always talk about this sort of facade of all of us being like, we've always been radicals and we've always had this level of understanding. But in reality, to go back and to be able to openly criticize, you know, past mistakes or, or pieces and ideas that you've had in the past and be able to be open and honest about what you, you know, have moved on from, I think is important for, especially new and upcoming leftists or radicals and revolutionaries who sometimes are intimidated by the idea that everybody knows more than them. But in reality, it's a process of learning. And I know

goddamn well that when I go back and look at some of my blog posts from 2011 or 2010, like it's extremely cringy at times. I'm trying. Like my intellect is trying to be born and trying to wrestle with topics. But at the same time, I make a lot of errors and mistakes. And it's always fascinating to go back and look at those. But having said all of the things that you kind of criticize in retrospect. Is there anything that you still find value in that piece? Anything that you're still happy with or that you still agree with? Yeah. So, I mean, I think there is a lot that I still agree with. I think that the general impulse of where I was coming from in that piece, which is sort of

a frustration with liberal identity politics, obsession with representation, and identity as sort of an uncontested category, I still really sympathize with. I think there is a sense in which we see more representation and more recognition of. trans and queer identity than we've seen before, and it hasn't really improved the lives for most trans and queer people of color and porn and trans queer people. And that's a really big frustration that I still see, and something that I think the piece was trying to get at is why hasn't all of this actually changed our lives that much? And so I think that the general impulse there is good. I still agree with the general call the piece makes for the abolition of gender. I think I mean that

in a really different sense than I meant it in that piece. When I talked about, it in gender nihilism, I mostly met the abolition of gender as in like abolishing the categorization system of gender and sort of the linguistic structure of gender, which is like a very butler way of thinking about it. And now when I talk about the abolition of gender, I think I mean abolishing the division of labor that comes from gender and the way that gender becomes a principle for structuring who does what kind of labor under patriarchy and creating reserve labor pools for capitalism to draw on by putting a lot of women into more domestic

work who can then be drawn on in instances of a crisis. So you can see like World War II for a big example of that. So I still agree with the gender abolition direction but now I think I have a more Marxist understanding of what that means and it's more granted or more grounded in a focus on materialism, economics, and

labor. Sure. And we're going to get into Leninism and Marxist feminism here in a second but before we leave this segment why do you think you were initially attracted to the post left and denialism and how do you think about these political formations and positions broadly today? I think there's a lot of attractive things about host leftism and Nileism, actually. For one, it's easy to look at the history of leftism and get really frustrated, right?

Like, there's been such a long history of struggle for socialism and for communism. And yet, if you look around the world today from most people, that doesn't look like a very hopeful thing. There's definitely Marxist Leninists who are more open to looking at some modern countries. as particularly good examples of socialism, but I think for many people in Blackmore broadly, they look around the world and say, I don't see a thriving example of socialism or communism around, and that frustrates them. And I think that's how I was looking at the world at the time. And I sort of was wondering, what is it that the sort of organizational mass politics have gotten us and hasn't really gotten us anywhere? I was also looking at liberal politics again and seeing frustrations about how liberal queer politics wasn't affecting the lives of the average queer or trans. person. And in response to that, I think that a better approach would have been to seriously investigate how labor plays into all of this, right? Like a really good answer to why is it that this liberal politics hasn't actually helped most people is that most trans and queer people aren't rich, right? Most of them exist within working class or precarious sort of working class

positions. So obviously that hasn't boiled down to them. But instead of doing that sort of of material investigation, I think instead I saw nihilism as a way of sort of lashing out and being cathartic in a sense and saying, well, if none of this has worked, at least we can just try to burn it all down, right? So I think there's a very emotionally charged appeal there and there's a certain like cathartic affect that's playing out in post-leftism and nihilism that was very attractive for me. And I think it's attractive for a whole lot of people. In terms of like, how do I think about those formations and positions today? The second part of the question, I think with frustration. Because for me now, I understand where that impulse is coming

from. Often when I'm interacting with people from those camps who I often have somewhat antagonistic interactions with, I do understand what they're coming from, right? I felt sort of what pushes that politics forward. But at the same time, I think that nihilism and some of post-leftism just sort of embraces defeatism when mass struggle is still possible. And there are actually really important and awesome successes in history and today that we can look at in order to figure out how we can be building socialism and communism now.

So I kind of look at them with like a little bit of frustration, but I want to try to say empathetic to what keeps people in those camps and keeps people motivated there. And I think I'm a little hopeful because I've seen a lot of people who are invested in those camps

gaining increased interest in Maoism recently, which is definitely not the camp that I'm in, but it is interesting to see them start to interact with Leninist and Marxist contacts through Maoism, which some of those people seem to start, you know, breeding at this point, which I think is kind of interesting. Sure, that's incredibly interesting. I'm not sure where that trajectory comes from, but, you know, certainly I'm very sympathetic

to the MLM camp, and I've had lots of episodes on it and on my other podcast. I've talked about it a lot. But, you know, you made me think of something, which is there are younger people coming up on social media, and some of us who are, you know, getting up there or have gone through a lot of political development and been through a lot of different phases. Sometimes I think, and maybe this is just, you know, fighting a fight I can't possibly win, but that the discourse on social media is so aggressive and so counterproductive to younger people learning that you sometimes see these younger people who are really confused politically,

still have a lot of liberal hangovers, trying to, like, they'll often lash out, and they'll do that sort of thing where they're like, you know, all tankies are red fascists or whatever. and a part of you wants to be like fuck you like that is that is you know anti-communist that is counter-revolutionary etc but a part of me thinks well it's hard to tell who who this person is behind this avatar and they they very well might be somebody in their teens or early 20s and all that they need perhaps is for one or two sympathetic people to reach out and to not attack them and to kind of you know tease them along or to help them along and develop them and have a conversation that's not barbed but i don't know how do you think about trying to reach

out to younger people coming up on social media or the way social media distorts this sort of development? It's kind of tricky. I mean, part of it, so I never was very active on Twitter until like the last two months or so. And now that I'm there, I think part of it is the format of Twitter as the place people have chosen to have political interactions is so frustrating. Because the character limit just necessarily sort of lends itself towards these more aggressive wide swinging interactions instead of, you know, nuanced critique, which is really, really frustrating and is I think one reason that I'm kind of sad that so much of the left has aggregated on Twitter as a place for these social media interactions to happen. But at the same

time, especially getting more involved on there, a lot of the people in these political camps where they're feeling more frustration, especially in post-leftism and nihilism, I've noticed a lot of other trans women. And I relate to that experience of like being a younger trans woman in those politics and feeling like such a level of social marginalization as a result of that. that I think lends itself there. And I know that, like, yeah, definitely for me, what eventually brought me out of that was having people who did reach out

and who said, I don't think you understand a lot of what you're critiquing. Here, try to read some more marks, try to read Lennon, try to see what these people are saying, and have some good faith conversations with the people who subscribe to their ideologies. So I definitely think it's important.

And it's something that social media just seems so badly equipped to give us the ability to do, I think. I've had so many better conversations in person with people from both of those camps than I've ever had on the internet because sort of just removing the anonymous aspect of it helps a lot. But I definitely think it's something that we need to try to work on because I know personally like, yeah, I made that movement. I jumped from that camp to being very much a Marcheus-Leninist now,

which is not a small jump to make because of the influence of people like that. Right. Yeah, exactly. I'm very, very sympathetic to that line of argument. And I know that, you know, the in real life conversations versus the social media conversations are often so different and you know people just like son of us we live in a cynical era so people shit on podcast just because it's like the new thing but in a lot of ways having these and i'm sympathetic with some of those critiques but having these long-form discussions with people from different camps and just it brings out the humanity you can hear the tone in people's voices

you can sort of that anonymity drops away and there's a real human connection there and i think that lends itself to kind of pushing back against some of this more extreme hyper-hymed hyper absurd sectarianism that we find on social media, which is largely performative because you're not only debating the person that you're talking to, but you're performing for everybody else watching. And that lends itself to distort the whole situation. But let's go ahead and move into Leninism and Marxist feminism. So we talked about where you've been. What was your theoretical journey to Marxism and Leninism? How did you get there? And what about it appeals to you? I guess for me, it's been a long one. Is this a way? So Marxism I've always found in

incredibly insightful. Even when I wrote gender nihilism and was still more invested in anarchist politics, I found Marx really useful and really interesting. And a lot of my interest in anti-humanism actually came from Marxists who are more on the Leninist side of things, you know, like Al-Husair, for example. It was super impactful for me on the anti-humanism sort of thing. So I was kind of interacting with Marxism already, but I don't think I was taking it very seriously. I had interacted with it. I had thought about it, but I wasn't really thinking about it outside to just sort of these abstract theoretical questions and I wasn't really thinking about

for changing the world what does Marxism have to offer and what is it saying? And I think that's sort of the really big shift that occurred for me was that I sort of reached a point where I was less interested in like what is theoretically correct as much as what gives us the tools to make the world a better place.

And that became a really important shift for me because a lot of the frustrations that I started to have with post-left denials of anarchism was sort of this realization that yeah there's some good points to these critiques but I just want to live in a better world than the one that I'm living in and this doesn't have the tools to get me there and I think that frustration sort of led me to get invested in Marxism more heavily and you know I think a lot of people have experienced this when you read Marx Marx himself gives you a really good description of the problems that we're facing and then doesn't spend that much time actually on what the solutions are Marx doesn't do a lot of time I think theorizing the dictatorship of the proletariat or mass organization in really concrete terms. And so I think that realizing that Marx is giving me this really useful description,

but not necessarily the tools to do something about it, is probably what pushed me to Lenin in the first place. And having friends recommend to me Lenin and Mao even as both of these figures who were taking what Marx talks about and then contextualizing it to these really specific contexts, like Lenin saying, well, if we take Marx as correct, what does that mean for Russia in this exact moment? and Mao doing the same thing for China. And so when I actually read both Mao and Lenin,

I think that I was really surprised at how grounded it is. And the text that really more than anything for me I think really made a big difference was Lenin's The State and Revolution, which is a text that I'm constantly recommending for everyone who's not interested in Leninism or Marxism, Leninism, or Maoism, to read. Because I think it's this really great introduction, where Lenin does some super cool work talking about what materialist theory what the state would look like, and also has this really solid critique of social democratic

and reformist approaches to the state. And I think when I read that and read a lot of Lenin's ideas about organizing, I started become really convinced that that was a good model. The sort of other thing that I think led to a big change for me wasn't even really theoretical so much as it was grounded in the context I was living in, was that when I wrote gender and I was involved in those politics, I was actually living in a living cooperative, like a housing cooperative with 20 or so other people. And the organizational models we used were really focused on horizontal organizing and

consensus and a lack of leadership. And some of the political work I was involved in that at the time was also using that. And in both of those contexts, I found that those principles led to really inefficient, really unorganized and slow meetings where not a lot got accomplished and it was hard to make group decisions. And where because there wasn't really formal leadership, people just kind of tacitly began to get social capital and have leadership in those positions. Exactly.

And I think that made me interested in a lot of what Lenin says about democratic centralism and more Leninist-oriented approaches to organizing that avoid some of those problems. So it's sort of those two things happening simultaneously, but I think pushed me there. I absolutely agree. And that mirrors in so many ways. My own development is precisely that organizational structure, that clear-headed analysis of where to go and also think, you know, Marx and with the help of angles and the labor of Jenny Marx, who always gets left out of this discussion, I put those three as like the

founders of the sort of broad Marxist tradition. But what Lennon and Mao did was take, as you said, Marxist theory, philosophy, and actually put it to work in the process, in the crucible of revolutions in big ways. And what you get when you actually put these ideas into practice is you get sort of more refined theory. You get things that come out of those revolutions that say, hey, this actually really did work and this stuff over here actually didn't work. And by creatively applying Marxism to Russia or in Mao's case

applying creatively Marxism, Leninism to China, you get these really fascinating theoretical breakthroughs that I think hinders you and your ability to move forward if you don't take them seriously and you just disregard them out of whatever sectarian or bourgeois inculcations that you might be operating

on. But I do want to say before we move on that I've really wanted to have an entire episode on state and revolution just kind of like dissecting it and making it accessible to people and you should come back on and me and you could tackle that text. I would absolutely love that honestly.

It's, I think, such an important text. I agree. It really does a lot of work that I think anarchists are already thinking in a lot of the framework of that text in a lot of instances. So I think it's a really good starting point. Definitely, yeah. I think lots of anarchists

and some of the most advanced anarchists that I know are materialists and do take, you know, that sort of Leninist conception of the state or his argument seriously, even if they ultimately don't fully agree with them. So I think it would be beneficial to everybody. But let's go ahead and talk about Marxist feminism.

We've had an episode on like sort of a 101 introductory episode on Marxism, feminism in the past, which is important. And people should check out if they're so inclined. But what does Marxist feminism mean to you? And how does it differ from non-Marxist forms of feminism? What I call myself a Marxist feminism, at least. For me, what I mean is that my feminism starts with the question of labor and starts with the question of material labor, economics, and how gender plays into the capitalist structuring

of society. So I'm really interested in how gender is sort of central to the modern family unit, which gets taken up within capitalism as a really important social organizing principle. There's like a lot of figures who are really influential for me. Colentai being a really big one, obviously, I think most Marxist feminists are incredibly grounded in her work. Sylvia Federici, who's looked at domestic work in a lot of ways and how that plays into capitalism. And then the thinker that I'm really, really invested in is Monique Batig, who not quite a Marxist herself, I think, lends a lot to Marxism and Marxist feminism, where she talks about the way that sort of modern capital society uses heterosexuality as a structuring principle to ensure that social reproduction continues through the sort of exploitation of women's reproductive labor. and also through insisting on sort of these theories of sexual difference as foundational, so that women's oppression can always be justified.

And for fatigue, what I think is really interesting is that when she looks at why these ideas of sexual difference in women's inferiority are so rampant in capitalist like society, she says it's because they justify a specific economic relationship of exploiting women in order to further capitalist society on the whole. So that's really what I'm interested in with Marxist feminism is how using a Marxist outlook and materialist sort of analytic lets us look at these things like heterosexuality, sexual difference, these issues that are really important in a lot of academic queer theory around trans issues and LGBT issues on the whole and how we can get at those from a Marxist perspective. And I think that that's lacking in a lot of the academic discussion. When you really look at a lot of what academics are writing today about queer and trans people, there's tragically little. analysis of what is economically happening in those situations, what's happening in terms

social reproduction there, and all this focus sort of just on discourse and just on the way we talk about things, and not the actual material social structures, the capitalism that play into transphobia and play into homophobia. So that's for me what I find interesting with Marxist feminism. And for me, it's the central focus on labor and the central focus on a material approach to understanding gender. Yeah, that's awesome. And I'm going to try to reach out and get those recommendations so we can put them in the show notes so people that want to pursue those lines of inquiry can. And, you know, one of the, the interview I had with Sylvia Federici, it was like, I was the most nervous I've ever been for that interview.

But the Caliban and the Witch is really an essential text, not even for Marx, it's just for anyone who wants to understand the history of capitalism and women's sort of domination in that process. When we talk about Marxist feminism, there are some like weird stereotypes that crop up. I've, like, been confronted, but my understanding of Marxist feminism was rooted in such a way that when some of these stereotypes about it were cropping up, I was very disoriented by them. Like, they were, they almost, like, some people almost combine or use synonymously Marxist feminism with, like, radical feminism in the turf sense. So what are some major misunderstandings of Marxism, feminism in your experience, especially in relations to trans liberation and gender? And why are they ultimately, like, those stereotypes, why are they wrong? Totally.

Yeah. So I guess here it might be useful for me to sort of like draw some distinctions between how I look at some of the different types of feminism that exist today and how they compete with each other. I think like a lot of radical feminists have sought to distance themselves from Marxist feminism actually. So I think it's interesting that that conflation happens because the way that a lot of radical feminists will define radical feminist thought is this idea that what is central and understanding society is understanding patriarchy and that patriarchy is this trans-historical category that, takes precedent over class. And if we take, you know, radical feminists at their word that that's what they're doing, that's obviously not a Marxist project, like really in any way. And so I think it's interesting that conflation happens there. When I talk about Marxist feminism, I guess I'm sort of talking about two schools of thought more specifically as academics would talk about them, which

should be social reproduction theory, which again, like Sylvia Federici and these other thinkers are very grounded in, and materialist feminism, which people like Monique Fatigue, Christine Delphi, and to some extent, Simone Beauvoir, are sort of grounded in as this French movement. And I think both of them have been kind of silent on trans issues, which is a really big frustration. Both social reproduction theory and materialist feminism don't spend a lot of time thinking about trans people. And a big thing that I've tried to do in my writing, and most of the pieces on my medium, honestly, are about how we could reconcile these. theories with trans liberation. So I think that Marxism, feminism probably hasn't done a really good job of theorizing trans people's liberation. One example that I think is frustrating for me

is the Stonewall Militant Front, for example, which is what Rat Pack Austin turned into, which is sort of a group of trans theorists who are thinking about feminism and thinking about it in a trans and a queer context, they released this statement on gender recently. And basically, their analysis of trans issues is that trans women's oppression comes because they are seen as being closer to people who are assigned female at birth.

And for me, and I think for a lot of trans women, when we read that, we thought, like, that really doesn't pay attention to how, like, specific trans women's mistreatment can be under capitalism, right? I'm not mistreated as a trans woman just because I approximate womanhood, but, like, the fact that people

see me as trans also influences my oppression. And so I that piece, like, is an example of how sometimes Marxist feminists have really failed to pay attention to trans and queer issues really well. And another part of that I think is sort of difficult is a lot of Marxist feminists have done a lot of work to distance themselves from postmodernism, whatever that means. And in the process of doing so have rejected a lot of queer and trans theory. And so I think that a lot of trans people and queer people who've seen themselves represented largely in the work of queer theory or more post-structuralist work, when they see Marxist feminists do, that kind of distancing, which is a distancing that I really understand, wonder if it's sort of a distancing from them as well to a certain extent. I see. Yeah, that's all, I mean, incredibly interesting

and I hope people pursue that and kind of think about those issues. And again, we're going to have a bunch of references for people who want to dive more into that. There's only so many things we can cover in this episode. So we're going to have to move on, unfortunately, even though there's an entire episode could be made just about that question alone. But I do want to focus on Foucault and Butler, and you talked about postmodernism gesturing towards the fact that that's even just a sort of vague amorphous concept, and it's often like weaponized, especially in today's discourse with people like Peterson and even Marxists and people in our own camp have a sort of one-dimensional or sort of shallow understanding of what postmodernism is, etc. So I think it would

be a mistake for Marxists or any left-wing person at all, any radical, to dismiss thinkers like Foucault or Butler, even though they certainly aren't Marxist. and they've been critical of Marxism. So let's take them one at a time and hopefully we can kind of flesh out what aspects of their thought can be embraced by leftists and Marxists or just radicals in general

and maybe some things that are in tension with some Marxist position. So let's start with Foucault. What do you think contemporary Marxists can learn from him? Sure. Gosh, so so many things, honestly. It's a huge questions. I'm so sorry. No, no, it's great.

Foucaulte's a figure that I go back and forth on a lot. because I think some of Foucault's ideas are fundamentally anti-Marxist, and that frustrates me. And at the same time, I think that a lot of Foucault's work is really insightful, and there is a lot that we can take away from it. So I guess, like, this might be a little philosophical, but I'm going to try to do it anyway. I want to make a distinction between, like, Foucault's theory of history and then Foucault's individual books. Because Foucault sort of has this theory of history that we can get into later, that I think is inherently anti-Marxist. And that is sort of problematic for me and something that I want to learn to criticize in Foucault's work. But at the same time, Foucault has these individual books where he

delves into a specific historical problem like sexuality or punishment. We think he does really great work. So in the context of history of sexuality, I think like what Marxists can take from that is that Foucault's insight is sort of correct that the way that power operates isn't always just by repressing. It isn't always just by pushing people down, but sometimes by expanding the ways we think about people, expanding the ways we talk about people. So in the first section of history of sexuality called the repressive hypothesis, Bucco is sort of arguing against how Marxists have seen sexuality in the Victorian era. And he sort of says Marxists have tended to say that this was a time of like extreme sexual repression when actually it was a time of increased

discourse and talk about sexuality and sort of a development of a science of sexuality. And I think that Foucault's just right, that the Marxists were wrong on that question and that what was actually happening there was this obsession with scientific management and with all of these sort of attempts to control society from a scientific perspective. And I think that's important for us as Marxists to think about, especially for Marxist Leninists, for those of us who believe in some level of state project. I think Foucault reminds us that these really progressive sounding state projects of managing life and building a prosperous society, if we're not careful, can have these darker, more insidious undertones to them that we often aren't attentive to. So I think there's something

important there to take away from Foucault. And the other thing that I think Marxists should really get from Foucault is even though Foucault doesn't really believe in the base superstructure distinction that Marxists believe in, if we do still read Foucault, we can read him as a really vivid description of capitalist ideology and the superstructure of capitalism. Like Foucault is not telling us a lot about the economic basis of capitalism, but he's telling us an incredibly detailed account of what capitalists believe and why they believe it. And I think that that's something that Marxist can take away from Foucault. And my general approach towards Foucault today is to say, yeah, Foucault is giving us a description

in capitalist ideology and of the capitalist superstructure. He's not doing that in a materialist context. But that doesn't mean we can't put it into that context and take useful things from it. I fucking love that nuance. So let's go ahead and flip it. What characteristics of Foucault's thought and intellectual legacy are irreconcilable and in conflict with Marxism? You mentioned it a little bit about his conception of history being anti-Marxist. Could you elaborate on that a bit?

Yeah. So for people who are interested in reading it at all the text that I always point to when I'm critiquing Foucault's theory of history is Nietzsche genealogy and history. It's this article that Foucault wrote where he's sort of in, I think, eight points tries to lay out what his view of history is, drawing it out of Nietzsche. And in this text, Foucault doesn't openly criticize Marxism, but I think he's very tacitly criticizing the Marxist and materialist history approach to history. And Foucault in that text sort of says, like, if we want to understand social phenomena, if we want to

understand why people believe things, do things, where social phenomena come from, we can't look to a single solid, stable thing and then say that that produces social phenomena. And I think there, Foucault is attacking the base superstructure model, essentially. The Marxist claim that if we want to understand why societies are, how they are, we should look at the class relations and the division of labor and how property is handled, right? And I think he's really pushing back against that Marxist claim. So Foucault instead suggests in that piece that,

every social phenomena we see has disparate origins from all over it's these random things coming together and these historical accidents occurring and accruing that then lead to things sort of by accident without any guiding logic or telos appearing in modern day society and again i get where he's coming from like this foucault I think has this just hyper obsession with nuance he thinks everything is reductionist and he really wants to avoid that um and i understand that impulse and I think like from an academic perspective, there's something if he said for that. But at the same time, I think it's important for Marxists for us to say, like, no, we have a theory of history that can point to not just historical accidents, but to class interests and classes acting in their economic interest. And these very specific moments and movements, not of individuals or ideas, but of classes coming together, struggling with each other, which then leads to social values and social phenomena and beliefs and all these other things. So I think there's probably an irreconcilable tension between Foucault's broader theory of history and the Marxist theory

of history. Absolutely. So let's go ahead and just keep it moving because this is clear rapid fire, but I love it and I think it's informative. And you know, you're doing an amazing job here juggling all of these concepts and these very difficult questions. So let's move on to Judith Butler. What do you think contemporary Marxists can learn from Butler? Sure. So from Butler's views on gender, I don't actually think that much. I am very frustrated with her views on gender in a lot of ways. Butler in her early work actually draws in some of the theorists that I name dropped as examples of feminists I like. She's very grounded in her very early work in Simone de Beauvoir and Monique fatigue, who are both, I think, theorists who are paying attention to the labor and

economic and material aspects of gender. But Butler sort of drops those in favor of focusing on like Foucault's theories of discourse and language. And so later on for Butler, I think largely in her theory of gender, what we get is an account of how gender is language and a lack of attention to how gender functions as a material division of labor. But Butler has this whole other side of her work, which is sort of the turn that she makes after 2004, where she starts to analyze the war on terror in the United States. And two of her really big texts for this that I actually really highly recommend to Marxists

are precarious life and frames of war. And both these texts are really awesome. And Butler does this really interesting, very Higalian look at how politics functions and on the precariousness of human life. And the way that all humans are born into the world always already in social relationships, always already dependent on other people and, you know, in a vulnerable state of precariousness. And how if we take that politics seriously, we can understand the way that, you know, we should build social structures that don't attack other people, but help create solidarity and help create unity.

And I think she actually gives like a fairly materialist account of how the subject comes into being always with an other. It's this very deep, pay goal kind of stuff that she's doing. But I think that works really cool and really important. And I think that there's some interesting anti-imperialist ideas that she has coming out of it, where she sort of talks about the West's inability to understand that it's imperialist actions, created the circumstances for 9-11 in the first place. And her claims that if we understood our interdependence with the global South, we could understand the way that it's our own imperialist actions

that make these sort of horrible moments come into being at all. And I think that that work from Butler is really fantastic. So, yeah, that's definitely where I think leftists can learn from her, is her more recent work where she's sort of dealing with ethics and terrorism and a little bit more with imperialism, actually. Okay, so then what parts of Butler's theories and ideas our intention explicitly with Marxism and how do you think about them as a Marxist Leninist? Sure. So again, it's more on her views on gender where I start to see a lot of frustration.

I think for Butler on the issue of gender, there's really no attentiveness to how gender functions materially. She's very interested in gender as a set of signs, a set of symbols, a set of performances, and as a language, with not a lot of attention to what that means for people's daily lives. And I think for Marxists, we really have to avoid that sort of impulse to abstract and never get away from the abstraction. And this sort of goes back to, again, that Marx quote about the point of philosophy for us isn't just to interpret the world. We want to change it. So if we get caught in just doing abstract analysis of gender as language or gender as symbol and never get to the concrete, what does that mean for changing the lives of people who are

oppressed on the basis of their gender, then we're failing as Marxists, as revolutionaries and as radicals. And I think that's someplace that Butler actually does fail, unfortunately. And I don't think that her work has a really good material grounding. And I think more frustrating is that Butler, like a lot of post-structuralist theorists, sees Marxism and materialism as inherently reductive. So she actually pushes back and really avoids that kind of material focus and really thinks about it as something that's a problem for theory in a certain sense. So I do think that, especially with her work on gender, there's a sort of anti-Marxism that's really frustrating. And then more broadly, this is less theoretical. Butler, and this will bother

Marxist Leninists more than anyone, I think. Butler recently signed a letter that Chomsky also signed, where basically calling for U.S. intervention in Syria on behalf of the Kurdish people. And I think that for a lot of us on the more Marxist-Leninist side of things, that call for U.S. intervention in that context really undermines a lot of the other things that I praised about her work on imperialism and makes me wonder how seriously she takes some of her theories on that question. Yeah, well, the question of Syria and the Kurds, we've had multiple episodes about all of those topics.

And I mean, that's fascinating. We could go off, but I'm going to restrain myself and not go there. Totally. So, yeah, so thank you so much for coming on. this has been just a whirlwind of information. It's absolutely fascinating. I'm going to, instead of asking you to like say recommendations right here, which I usually would, I'm just going to ask you to email me a list of them because I don't want to miss any, and I will put them into the show notes because I think not only other people, but me personally, like I want to

dive more into Foucault and Butler and those specific works that you mentioned, and as well as the works that you mentioned in the Marxist feminist segment of this conversation, I think there's a lot there that I still need to educate myself on, and hopefully other people take up that task as well. But before I do let you go, where can listeners find you and your work online? I'm on Twitter at Allison Esk, so that's A-L-Y-S-O-N-E-S-Q-U-E. So you can find me there, and I'm pretty active on Twitter. I talk about a lot of these things there in a much more truncated fashion, thankfully. Then also I'm on Medium. You can just Google Allison Escalante. that'll bring me up on medium.

And there, I have a whole bunch of writing about Marxist feminism that I've done. I have a piece that I wrote in response to my original gender nihilism essay, and that's probably a good starting point if you want to see some of the more theory-related work that I've been doing. And I just want to say, thank you so much for having me on. This has been absolutely a blast, and I've been really happy about it. Absolutely. It's been an absolute honor to have you on. I've learned a lot from you, and I'm dead serious about you coming back.