Rev Left Radio - Toward a Revolutionary Feminism: a Continuum of Women’s Work

Episode Date: March 2, 2022

Tai Lee joins the show to discuss feminist theory, marxist v. liberal feminism, patriarchal realism, gender abolition, historical and dialectical materialism, why the "gender critical" movement is fundamentally anti-Marxist, key feminist thinkers, and much more! Follow Tai on Twitter: https://twitter.com/yungz0rn Check out Tai's writing: https://taiencounter.substack.com/p/toward-a-revolutionary-feminism-a?s=r Outro Music: "Perfect" by Mannequin Pussy ----- Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio or make a one time donation: PayPal.me/revleft LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: www.revolutionaryleftradio.com

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, I have my friend Ty Lee on the episode to discuss all things Marxist, feminist, Maoist, Liberatory, etc. We touch on a whole bevy of topics from feminism to crucial feminist thinkers to criticisms to criticisms of turf ideology, to criticisms of the sex trade industry, and so much more. This is a really deep dive, fascinating conversation on an incredibly important group of topics that can be sort of put under the umbrella of Marxist feminism. So I'm really grateful for Ty to come on the show and share these insights with me and my audience, and I think you will find this conversation incredibly unique.

and interesting and worthwhile. So I'm very excited to share it with you. And as always, if you like what we do here at RevLeft Radio, you can support us on Patreon. And in exchange for a couple dollars a month, you can have access to bonus episodes every single month, early releases, and the whole back catalog of Patreon episodes, which at this point, five years in,

this month marks five years of Reveleft being online, has hundreds of episodes behind the paywall, and you'll be able to support what we do in the meantime. So thank you. to everybody who supports the show. Thank you so much to Ty for coming on for this episode. And without further ado, here's my discussion with Ty on Marxist feminism. Enjoy. Hello everyone. My name is Ty Lee. I'm an artist, a musician, an organizer, a revolutionary communist feminist, and I'm excited to be here on Rev. Left Radio, as I'm a huge fan and have been listening for a long time. Awesome. Well, it's an honor to have you on. I'm a fan of your voice as well on the left, and I think it's a very important.

voice, and we're going to share that voice with a wider audience today, hopefully. So, let's go ahead and get into it. And maybe the best way is just sort of introduce yourself a little bit more, specifically your political development and how you came to both Marxism and feminism. Yeah. So, you know, my coming into Marxism is actually a funny story. I didn't go to college, so I didn't have the experience of campus organizing that I think a lot of younger Marxists have. I actually was working in the theater and I would go to the bar next door to the theater every single night, you know, for my nightcap. And one time I brought in, I was reading Emma Goldman at the bar. And my bartender was like, oh, you're into radical politics. And I was like,

I guess, I mean, I just picked this up and I find it really interesting. And he goes, what do you think about Mao Zedong? And I was like, I was like, you know, I don't really have many thoughts on the guy. And he was like, well, come back in tomorrow night. I'm going to have something for you. And the next day, he gave me the little red book. And within about a month of that experience, he had linked me up with an org. And I just started organizing.

And, you know, it was a very, unexpected and beautiful encounter with radical politics. And that's kind of the magic of obviously New York City, but also to, you know, people who are really committed to their political work and looking for any opportunity to organize someone who appears to be interested in these very important things, you know. So it was a very, organic kind of run-in with Maoism, really. And then from that point, feminism just became something that through doing more co-ed organizing, I realized that women's issues were kind of put to the side,

or not centered enough, or maybe taken for granted or lumped in with the larger political project of Marxism. And it started to become very clear to me that, you know, women's liberation won't happen unless it is something that is theorized about and put really in the front and the center of our work as communists. So the feminism came as a necessity within other organizing, I would say. Yeah, absolutely. And I've found that to be true as well. And a lot of radical left-wing organizations, there will be sort of an assumption, at least in some organizations, that because we're already radicals, like feminism is already built in, I don't need to spend much time thinking about it or interrogating myself on my blind spots as, you know, perhaps a man in those spaces. And I

I think that's a critical error that a lot of times ends entire organizations. You even know throughout history, like the Black Panther Party, for example, you know, struggled with this exact same dynamic as well. And there was women within the party that, you know, brought these issues out and tried to fight for them and to place them at the center of organizing efforts. So, but I think that's incredibly interesting, especially the sitting at a bar, and the bartender is the one that helps radicalize you. What would you say if you had to say of a political ten?

right now, like, what would you consider yourself on the left? 100% Maoist and a feminist. I'm half Filipino. My mom is from the Philippines. So I, the first organizing that I did was with Filipino groups, Maoist groups, who are connected to the struggle in the homeland. Oh, yeah. And so, you know, that's always going to be what I think is at the forefront of revolutionary

struggle today. and so I want to align myself with that as much as possible. And, you know, the CPP NPA, NPA, they were the first gay marriage, the first, like, same-sex marriage. They were the first to do that and to make that an actual thing. And I just think that that's so, it just proves that they're not social chauvinist. You know what I mean? They're very much committed to a kind of full revolutionization of all of our relations, with each other. And I think that that's where we have to be. It's a very important thing that

we have to center. Because I think that when you get into feminism, certain strands of feminisms, there's a little bit of a social conservatism that can come out. And that to me seems like the wrong tendency. We have to stay away from that as well. Yeah, absolutely. I think the Maoist emphasis on the revolutionizing of social relations, right, as opposed to economism is a really crucial emphasis that Maoism, I think, is really essential in forwarding, as well as the whole idea of a cultural revolution, and that, like, you know, if we want to overthrow the political and economic powers, that be, there's also a cultural element to this that needs to be addressed and worked through and confronted.

And on both those fronts, Maoism in particular, continues to do, you know, really progress leading work and I applaud Maoism for that. But let's go ahead and talk about some major feminist thinkers, particularly ones that influenced you. They can be within Marxism or outside of it, but they can even be at different phases. Like at one point, certain thinkers were very crucial to me and then I eventually outgrew them, but I still have a soft spot for them because they played an important role in my development. So yeah, who are some major feminist thinkers that have done that to you? So right now, at the this current moment, I'm very much interested in a group of feminists called the French

materialist feminists, particularly the ones of the second wave in France, late 60s through the 70s and 80s, and some of them were even writing through the 90s. Some of them are still alive today, but less active politically. But the two main thinkers from that school that I think are incredibly important are Christine Delphi and Monique Wittes. Christine Delphi has a very sophisticated analysis of the social sex division of labor and the domestic labor that women are forced to do, whether that be the obvious things like the cooking, the cleaning, but also in ways where women are helping their husbands,

maybe with their intellectual work or things like this, but are never credited for it, this hidden labor force, a super-marginalized secondary labor force that is essential to the functioning of capitalism and patriarchy. And she has this quote, and I will read it right now because I think that this sums up why I love her so much. I hate to read quotes, but it's so good. That's okay.

Yeah, absolutely. She says this, what bothers the left is when women apply to their own situation, a materialist analysis. When they reject the ideology which says that they are naturally inferior or the victims of a culture which happens unhappily but mysteriously, i.e. without any material benefits for anyone, to be sexist. But women are now saying there is no mystery. We are oppressed because we are exploited. What we go through makes life easier for others. And the left is afraid that women will call a spade a spade, the economic, economic, and their own sufferings exploitation. This goes back to kind of what we were talking about, about how women's liberation is something

that is kind of taken for granted, and that we don't recognize the very specific economic exploitation of women, and that, you know, women as a group, our labor is appropriated by capitalists and also by men and that this has to be something that's very that is seriously contended with and what i like about delphi is you know a lot of second wave radical feminisms can be more focused on the cultural aspects which i think as a malist of course that's important but what i love about delphi is she really roots all of this stuff in the economy you know It's very rooted in economic exploitation and understanding that, which I think all feminists can really benefit from that analysis.

And then the other thinker that is a part of the French materialist feminist that I think is just one of the most important feminist thinkers of the 20th century is a woman named Monique Whittig, and she was a lesbian radical feminist. And she really theorized compulsory heterosexuality. And she viewed heterosexuality as a political regime that binds women to men and lays the groundwork for the appropriation of our labor within the nuclear family and through the marriage contract. And this is something that you get into with the more, well, well, Whittig, was a precursor in a lot of ways to what we would call queer theory now. But she defers probably the biggest way that she defers from what we would call contemporary queer theory is that she was very much a gender abolitionist.

Not someone who's trying to subvert gender norms per se, but someone that's trying to, through revolution, destroy the hierarchy that is gender altogether. which is a very radical position that I would hope more feminists start to seriously take up because, again, it has to do with the economic exploitation of women specifically. But, yeah, those two thinkers are really, really important. And the last I'll say on this that I think is another thing that we have to really interrogate. And it's kind of a complex idea. but they found, the French materialist feminists found in their organizing.

So this wasn't something that is like in some highfalutin academic circles. They found this in the women's liberation movement, that gender creates sex and not the opposite. So what this means is that gender does not flow naturally from biological sex. But rather, gender, the social context, of gender is the over-determining factor that makes biological sex socially relevant. And this is a really important inversion that they recognized because what they're doing is they're taking women's oppression and exploitation, and they're saying that it's not grounded in the natural world outside of history.

It's something that is completely dependent on economic, social, and political structures. And this is really important because when you understand it in those terms, then you can do something to change it. You can wage revolution, a women's revolution on those grounds. If you think of our oppression as something that is natural or biological, there's not much you can do about it. And, you know, when you think about these reactionary feminisms that we're seeing a lot of right now, the gender critical movement, the turf trans exclusionary radical feminist movement, what they're doing is the opposite of this. They're saying that women is a natural category. Women are a biological fact. And that's a very reactionary.

idea. It's an anti-revolutionary idea. And that's why I really want to urge people to engage with the work of Christine Delphi and Monique Whittick, because they really destroy that idea in a very concise, dialectical, materialist way. That's incredibly, incredibly interesting. We're definitely going to get into gender abolitionism and gender critical, quote unquote, Marxism, which you say does not really a thing, of course, and we'll get into that. The point that Delphi makes about even women underpinning men's intellectual output, but never getting credit for it, this is something that really comes to the floor. Anytime you study a so-called great man of history, even in the socialist tradition,

when you really peer behind the shallow understanding, you see that almost always there are one or multiple important women that made that work possible and actively contributed to it. In the case of Karl Marx, Jenny Marx and even his daughters were essential for the creation of what we now call Marxism. And some people will say, well, it leaves out angles. It should be Marxism, angleism, and whatever. But if you're going to include that, I mean, you should just as well include Jenny Marx, who was not only doing the labor of raising multiple children while Marks sat in the

British library for hours every day, but was actively an intellectual sparring partner. And her and her daughters would bring in the feminist point of view and challenge Marx's own chauvinism and patriarchal attitudes from within his own household. So I really think that that's a crucial, a crucial point. And it's true within Marxism as well as without. Totally. And this point that you're making about Marx, another great man that I've learned so much from, especially as someone who has cut my teeth in the theater, you know, Brecht. Brecht pretty famously had a lot of women who basically did a whole lot of writing behind the scenes. And he kind of just got all the credit for it, if not took it himself.

A good friend of mine brought this to my attention. And I was like, it kind of crushed me because I'm such a huge Brecht fan. But it also was exciting to me because, Brecht is not just one man. Brecht is really a whole group of people, a lot of them women, who collaborated and contributed to this really important revolutionary aesthetic. It wasn't just one man, you know, and in fact, it was a lot of women. That's a really, it's a good point, you know, and it's something that just because you're on the left doesn't mean that it's not happening here too, you know.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, and just in general, even broadening out, just thinking of individuals as free-floating individuals is a mistake. Yes. They're always, everything is socially produced, even the self, even the personality, even the genius that creates something that we all point to and say, this one specific person came up with this one specific idea, but in reality, they are the product of social forces and relations that separated from those things. they would never be anybody, let alone a genius of history. And so I think that's just true generally. But specifically with the sexist element and the patriarchal element where men get 100% of the credit that women behind the scenes contributed to constantly, I think is a real point that we have to think about and focus on.

Right. Yeah, of course. Well, let's go ahead and move on. And this is sort of dovetailing with some of the things we've already laid on the table. But in your substack, you wrote about. the continuum of women's work, which comes from an Audrey Lord quote. So can you kind of explain that phrase and sort of how you see yourself and your feminism in relation to that concept of the continuum of women's work? Right. I love that quote. Audrey Lord is an

amazing feminist and thinker. Another one of my favorites who's been massively influential in my life and my organizing. I guess I should start it off by saying that women, have been relegated to the private sphere. We are, you know, considered, again, a kind of natural being. And this takes us out of history. It takes us out of thinking collectively because of how atomized the private sphere is. So this idea of a continuum of women's work, to me, it says a community. couple of things. One that women should think of ourselves as women with an E, not woman with

an A. We are a group. The work that we make is in conversation with one another, not just in the present, but also throughout history. And we carry the voices of feminists that have came before us. We carry them with us. And in a lot of senses, our lives themselves, not just our intellectual work, but our very existence is dependent on this, the historical struggle for women's liberation. And it's very much alive right now in the present with us. And in that Audrey Lord quote, she makes this beautiful point that, you know, it didn't, this work doesn't begin with me and it will not end with me, that we're a part of this vast fabric of incredibly different women, you know, there's so much difference in the category of women,

but that we are still all in this relation to each other. And, you know, I think it's a really, it's a historical idea, it's a materialist idea, and I think that my work, whether it be artistic or political, is a part of this tradition and is a part of this leg, and is a part of this legacy of radical women who have questioned one of the most deeply entrenched hierarchical relations, which is, you know, the binary gender. And this is incredibly important work. And it's important to honor these women and stand with them in this, in this revolutionary feminism. Absolutely. Yeah. And I think, I think it's so crucial. to understand, you know, one's self and one's political struggle historically. And I think we sort of

under, especially people that are kind of nerds about history and we study history and we think historically and we very clearly over time without even always being conscious of it, we start to develop a historical understanding of ourselves. Like we came from these processes and from these centuries of this and these forces and this is where I am today and then that implies a future trajectory, right? A lot of people don't have that. I think a lot of people particularly raised in the U.S. educational system are sort of cut off from their own historical being. And specifically in the Cold War, when the radical tradition of what could be called leftism or socialism or communism was completely eradicated, it left a lot of us without even a sense of that history. And so much of left-wing cultural work today, specifically in the media, and certainly what I try to do on. this show is to try to re-show people coming up, you know, whether that's millennials or Gen Z now, that actually you do belong to a fascinating, beautiful, gorgeous tradition of radical, you know, feminists and workers and, you know, anti-colonialists and, you know,

people that stood up to power and wealth and fought back and many of them laid down their lives for it. And that tradition has been wiped out, but we can reclaim it. And once you reclaim it, You find yourself actually feeling like you belong in a tradition where, you know, usually in the American culture, like, there's no tradition. Unless you buy into this first grade level history, American history lesson, you know, like there's no real tradition that any thinking sensitive person can claim that they can be proud of in the United States. And so we have to look actually at this entire tradition of feminism and Marxism and radicalism that's been obscured and whitewashed and eliminated. revive that and then this begin to see ourselves as humble torch carriers in that broader tradition yeah of course of course and um you know the the the the dominant ideology the hegemonic ideology wants to erase these things and take them from us and it's a very it's a

political act it's a criminal political act the way that uh you know these these revolutionaries have been just completely acts from the record um and it does a you know, it's intentional, you know, it's kept from us because of its power. And, you know, of course, it's Asada Shakur who says, you know, I'm paraphrasing here, but she says, they're never going to teach you how to overthrow them. So the development of this radical consciousness or revolutionary consciousness is something that has to be done kind of outside of those institutions, I believe, because those institutions are desperately trying to, protect the status quo. And so things like this podcast and, you know, the internet for all of its

problems, I think that one positive is that you can kind of give yourself some sort of radical education and you can talk with other people who are on the same trajectory. And it kind of opens up all of these doors that are not as mediated by the ruling class, you know. It's very important. But another point I want to make here, too, is the French materialist feminists, a lot of people don't really know about their work. And there's an amazing essay that was written, or not an essay, it's the introduction to a book called Sex and Question, where the translator talks about how the French materialist feminists were basically completely axed, from the Anglo-American construction of what is called French feminism.

And she gives this amazing history of what exactly transpired there. And it's really fascinating. If we can link it, that would be really cool. I want people to know about this feminist history because it's deeply fascinating. Absolutely. That was a little bit of a tangent. My apologies. No, no.

Very important. Yeah. I've actually, I don't even think I've heard of the French materialist feminists. So the fact that that's a whole genre that I myself, somebody who studies leftism and feminism and Marxism, I'm not fully aware of. It speaks volumes in and of itself of the ability to obliterate those histories. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, we'll definitely add links. But speaking of the, you're talking about the development of revolutionary consciousness, specifically I kind of want to focus on feminist consciousness, and I want to talk about it in relation to patriarchal realism. People listening to this show have probably heard of capitalist realism, so you might get a general idea of what this means. But can you tell us what is patriarchal realism, and can you discuss the reemergence of feminist consciousness in the face of it?

Yeah, yeah. So patriarchal realism to me is something that goes hand in hand with capitalist realism. You might not even need to call them two different things. But, you know, when I'm thinking specifically about patriarchy, I think for decades in decades, feminism kind of disappeared as a viable revolutionary project. I think it became a politics. of basically accepting the status quo, accepting women's position, and just trying to make ourselves feel better about our subjugated status. So instead of challenging our sexual objectification, what ended up happening is we just kind of rejoiced in it. Or instead of challenging the social hierarchy of men and women, And we thinkers like Camille Pahlia, total reactionary, right? You know, she was very famous during this time, and she's a patriarchal realist.

Insofar as she essentializes the differences between men and women. And she says that they are a historical and they will last forever. And we just have to accept that. And women have to rejoice in being seen as a sexual object and nothing. else. And this was the case for decades and decades. I think something important happened with the Me Too movement. I have my criticisms of it in terms of the fact that the women that were centered in that movement were bourgeois women. But I think it was ultimately progressive in that a feminist consciousness erupted or emerged. And it seemed to

kind of spontaneous, where you have women coming forward and saying, what is happening to me in my workplace is not okay. It's not inevitable. It's not natural. I don't have to accept it. I was raped. I was abused because I was a woman. This is incredibly cruel. And I'm going to speak on it and I'm not going to be living with this alone anymore. And then you have all these women come forward saying, hey, that same thing happened to me. This is an incredibly important thing that can't be underestimated. I don't think that it was organized enough. You know, I have so many criticisms of me too. But the one thing that we can take away from it, I think, is women breaking with that patriarchal realism and challenging male power.

And then you see this kind of proliferate throughout a lot of different institutions. You had the Larry Nassar, the gymnasts who were sexually abused for years. They started coming forward. You had women of all races and classes online posting their stories about things that had happened to them. and I think you can't put that genie back in the bottle. You know, now this is something that is in the air. And you have a lot of reactionaries who are like, Me Too has gone too far.

And, you know, I'm saying it hasn't gone far enough. We need to be more organized. We need to now build on this feminist consciousness. But it's here and it excites me deeply. And, you know, Gen Z is, now questioning some things that I think need to be questioned. They're questioning the pornography industry. Someone like, even like Billy Elish, who's a major pop star, you know,

she came forward and was very brave and saying, you know, I think that pornography did a lot of harm to me as a young woman. That's not something that could have really been said even 15 years ago because there was this idea that all porn is good, all sexualization is good, you know, don't question it. It's empowering. Yeah, it's empowering. And that's changing now.

Right. And, you know, I am very excited by that. And there was also an article that was, that came out yesterday that was, it frustrated me because it was peddling what I would think is a false dichotomy of sex positive versus sex negative. I think that this is a vulgar, you know, misinterpretation, sex positive versus sex negative. And I don't think that that's really what it is at all. I think that what really is happening is that through this feminist consciousness, people are realizing again that sex itself is political. Of course it is. And when you think about the way that women, you know, where and how

women experience violence as women, it's happening a lot of times through sex. You know, it's happening through rape. It's happening through all of these kind of coercive sexual transactions. And so when you think about that, of course you have to politicize sex and you have to think about sex politically and understand, have an understanding of how sex functions in the lives of women. And this doesn't mean that you have to go and be a conservative. In fact, it's the opposite of that. You know, what would a real sexual revolution really look like?

You know, these are important questions to ask. So the idea that asking these questions just makes you some sex negative, prude, conservative, I think that that's a total mischaracterization of, of an important conversation that actually really needs to be had, you know. And I think the accusation is losing steam. You know, there's like the whole sex positive period. And then these criticisms start emerging. And at first there's like a barrage of insults and accusations when you bring up these nuances.

Like, you know, you're a swerf or you hate women or etc. But those accusations are increasingly falling flat. And people are actually like, no, there's something that we need to wrestle with and think through here. and these, you know, reductionist dichotomies, you're either this or you're that, they're actually used and they're weaponized to stop thinking and to stop discussion and to stop progress on these issues and to things like, no, we've already got it figured out, you know, we're done here sort of thing. And that is always going to be a problem and always needs to be resisted.

And I think you're really on point with the cultural impact of me too. I still don't think we have the hindsight to fully appreciate the cultural impact of that movement with all of its flaws and war. and failures and definitely over-emphasizing bourgeois women, especially toward the middle and end of that, you know, that acute moment. But it has, I think, a huge impact, perhaps on part or bigger than the impact of something like Occupy, which people on the left often talk about. I see a huge generational shift. I have a 15-year-old niece who I'm very, very close with. She's actually writing a paper, a feminist paper in her debate class, challenging some of the

narratives around the sex trade as being a wholly empowering or wonderful thing, but doing it in a very nuanced way. Yeah. And I'm like, she's asking me for help. And obviously, I look to people like you or Esperanza or my other comrades that I've had on the show that have helped me deep and understand these things. And then I use those resources to give to my niece to help her think through these things. And my daughter's 13. You know, she's long identified as a feminist. And I don't know. there's a lot of hope in this in this younger generation specifically around gender and and sexuality issues. I mean, you know, kids are already calling themselves, you know, these terms that even a generation ago would have been anathema. You know, they're being out about being queer or about being trans or about not being comfortable with the gender binary at all.

And, you know, even when I was in middle school or high school, that was not even on the table, you know, like that was unthinkable. and just over one generation there's been an insane shift progressively I think in that direction and I think Me Too played its role in that development, you know? Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And I think that

the feminist aspect, this connection you made with like Occupy, even the Bernie Sanders thing, obviously I have my strong criticisms of social democracy and Bernie Sanders is an imperialist but all of these things when you think about them together,

Occupy, Me Too, Bernie Sanders, they represent, again, this kind of breaking with capitalist, patriarchal realism and a kind of reemergence of revolutionary politics. And, you know, the younger generation, they were just kind of thrown into that. I had to kind of fight a lot of those tendencies because I was already older when I came up against these things.

You know, like when I first heard of Me Too happening, there was a part of me that was like, this is a little terrifying. You know, I was like, I don't know. I don't know how I feel about this. I wasn't immediately enthusiastic about it. You know, it kind of scared me because I was still operating under this assumption that, you know, speaking these things into the. the world was, was dangerous or was frowned upon or, and that, you know, it wasn't going to get me

liked. So I probably shouldn't, shouldn't participate. But then, you know, this collective emergence, you're like, oh, yeah, absolutely. You know, we should be talking about this stuff. But it was very uncomfortable. Sure, yeah. I think there's a, there's a momentum behind one social conditioning such that the older one gets, in general, the more their conditioning over time takes hold and has a momentum and a power of its own such that they become more and more has, unless you're, you know, you're very good at keeping up with the times and all this stuff. But on average, you know, you have a very hard time keeping up with these new developments and your reactions become increasingly, you know, repulsed or turn away from the new thing

because of the momentum of your social conditioning. And I think, well, we all face that. And in a changing environment, especially as historically charged as these next few decades are going to be, lots of new shit is coming. Good, bad, and ugly. And I think we should all prepare ourselves for that and to really criticize our own conditioning such that we don't become the reactionaries of tomorrow. Right. In whatever way, reaction manifests, you know. Totally.

And, you know, as revolutionaries, you have to be both the era. in the bullseye, you know, you're dealing with yourself because the enemy ideologically lives inside of you too. So, you know, you're acting on the world, but you're also having to change yourself in the process, you know. This is a beautiful idea. This is why reading with other people, getting together and doing theory with others, this kind of radical intellectual work is really important. And it's something that we should do in groups together, you know, because, as you said, you know, our social conditioning and the ideology that is imposed upon us constantly can seem, you know, insurmountable or you don't even question it anymore. Exactly. That's why, you know,

doing this work together is, is so important. And it's always fascinating. You read a text by yourself. Okay, you understand it. You come to some conclusions. Now read it with somebody that's very different from you. Let's say have very different life experiences or identities. And then their interpretation and reading of it opens up whole things in the text that you yourself missed or overlooked. And so that's the importance of like a communal or a collectivist form of knowledge, you know, production and learning is that you're constantly in dialogue with others who are reading the same text but are pointing out maybe things that you're blind to and you can help point out things that they might be blind to. And that's a, that's a beautiful thing. And the very last point I want to make on this before we move on is just to say, you know, in the same way that Occupy happened and it was a historically significant event that created an imperfect but continuing momentum that sort of reached its pinnacle in the social democracy of Bernie Sanders, right?

We reject social democracy. We see it as too limited, but we also understand the importance of that development for further developments in the class struggle. Same exact thing with Me Too. and feminism, there's always going to be a huge segment of any radical thing that gets co-opted by the forces of the status quo and of liberalism and like the girl boss feminism. Kamala Harris is a victory for all women. That sort of stuff does happen, but it's not the entirety of the point. And in a similar way, Black Lives Matter and the uprisings we've seen over the last several years, particularly in 2020, a historic uprising. The largest protests America has ever had.

that is another one of these moments of of radical progress and confrontation with things as they are as well as liberal co-option right the democratic party attempted with some success to co-op that movement some of the early leaders got rich off of it etc but what it was more broadly what it stood for more broadly is still reverberating throughout our entire culture and will continue to do so down the line so all those things are are incredibly important despite their imperfections. Yes, absolutely, yeah, that's right. Well, let's go ahead and move on, and I want to talk about dialectical materialism, one of my favorite subjects. And this is kind of interesting because people understand, I think, on the left, they really struggle to understand dialectical materialism, and then they get a good grasp on it in the abstract,

but still a lot of people struggle with trying to apply it to specific, you know, movements or in the present, and I think that's one thing that we could all get better at. So how does one apply dialectical materialism to women's oppression, exploitation, and their historical struggle for liberation? I know it's a huge question, so you can take it in any way that you want. But just kind of thinking in terms of dialectical materialism and how that helps us understand the struggle for women's liberation. Right. So these reactionary feminisms, turf feminism, gender critical feminism, they are not. dialectical materialists at all because again they're rooting women's oppression in nature

in biology and therefore it's a historical and what what this biologizing tendency does is it takes away any kind of dynamism these categories can't move when you do that so you have men and you have women and they're static they don't move they're a historical and there's nothing we can do about them. Their essences, man and woman are essentially different. And what Whittig's dialectical materialist intervention in feminism did is she said the ideology of natural difference serves as a form of censorship, ideological censorship, that masks what is actually a historical, hierarchical, oppositional relationship between men who are on top, who are dominating, and women who are on the bottom.

And what she's getting at, and what I think is really important and what I think women need to take on, and the women's liberation movement really needs to take on, is this anti-naturalist, position. Yeah, I think you're really on point when you talk about the naturalizing, biologizing, and essentializing of these two categories, men and women by reactionary feminists. And speaking in terms of dialectical materialism, right, it's juxtapositioned to bourgeois metaphysics. And men and women are bourgeois metaphysical categories in their statusism, in their naturality, in the lack of understanding them through their dynamism, their interrelation and their connection with broader social forces and changes and modes of productions and social relations. And so doubling down and attempting to reify those categories from an ostensibly feminist position is always going to be, by definition,

anti-dialectical at best and reactionary almost all the time. Right. Absolutely. Absolutely correct. And what you hear a lot of right now, you know, if you, pay attention to these discourses, you know, you hear a lot of this idea that there is kind of a pre-discursive body that exists outside of history, outside of society, and there's two different types of them, and there's man and woman, and this is obviously a very reactionary idea that is also not true to even biology, which says something totally. different too, that you have this multiplicity of genders, you have, or a multiplicity of even biological sexes. You have all of these intersex people and, you know, this proliferation of, of profound

differences, but they try to make them very neat, men, women, and those things are forever, and they can never be changed. But this ties into the idea of gender abolitionism as well. which I want to preface this by saying because I think a lot of people can get like, you know, pale-faced and freaked out when you say the word gender abolitionism because I think that it can images of, you know, androgynous people in gray jumpsuits, you know, I think that that can that can be where people's head goes first. but that's really not, not what the, what gender abolitionism is at all. The argument being made for gender abolitionism is that, you know, nobody fits perfectly into the categories, man and woman. And this gender binary is something that has to be violently enforced through our institutions. It's something that is naturalized and re-naturalized in our economy, in the social sex division of labor, in the imperialist sex trade,

in the exploitation of women's work more generally. And in the case of men, you know, from a very young age, men have to emotionally destroy themselves. Male socialization is also very, very violent. And so when we think about gender abolitionism, the idea is that if we revolutionize and attack all of these institutions and ideological apparatuses that produce and reproduce hierarchical social sex, when we get rid of those things, then what awaits us on the other side is a true human freedom, you know, where you really can be an individual that is not having to fit into these very oppressive constructs that ultimately serve, you know, the ruling class. So it's a revolutionary idea and it's not something that is meant to impose sameness onto people, but the opposite. And this is something that was a, this is an idea that was more popular in the second wave feminist movement

and kind of lost steam. But I think it's an idea worth bringing back into the fold. And I think it's an idea that is necessary for Marxists as well. And it's, it's challenging in a deep way. And even if you come down on the side of being skeptical or having criticisms of it, the fact that you're wrestling with it, thinking through it, is part of its power and part of its point. And to speak about dialectical materialism, you know, the very idea of gender abolitionism, right, is a product of social change and dynamism and movement and interconnectedness and the advancement of certain ideologies against the status quo, etc. So the fact that that idea even emerges is a testament to dialectical materialism as opposed to some idea that these categories are. are natural and static and, you know, exist through time and space, are trans-historical, basically. And I also think it's part of a deep cultural revolution to question not only just, like, swapping genders

or thinking about being critical of different ways that these categories are imposed on people, but thinking deeply through even the possibility of the transcendence of gender altogether down the line. And I think this actually puts some very interesting material in the hands of, like, sci-fi authors, for example, because I would really love to see a very well-informed attempt to explore gender in the deep future. And some sci-fi shows do do this, maybe as a part of what they're trying to do overall. But I think that's very interesting. And if you think really deeply, like hundreds, thousands of years in the future, you know, especially what we're going through right now, it seems hard to believe that these categories of man and woman will

exist in any way, let alone the hyper rigid ways that they exist today. And that's a product of cultural evolution and progress. And I think that's interesting. But I do have a question. And this is something that I'm genuinely curious about and I don't know how to answer. But with the specter of gender abolitionism, does there some tensions put on, let's say, the trans community who, you know, I identify as a woman or identify as a man now. But those categories, them themselves seem to be put under pressure by gender abolitionism. So, you know, I'm genuinely curious and ignorant. What are the tensions there between, you know, somebody who's trans but but says that, you know, basically keeping these categories, not naturalizing them or biologizing

them for sure, but at least seeing them as, as things that you can, I don't know, engage with and this idea of actually we just need to abolish all the gender. Do you have any insight into those tensions? Yeah, I mean, this is a very controversial point of, you know, contention. There's a lot of arguments from reactionary feminists that trans people are just reifying or concretizing gender norms. And I really disagree with that. I mean, trans people are, they're not the only people on the planet who are doing. traditional gender. You know, this idea that it's all trans

people's fault, which is what you get when you talk to these gender critical anti-feminists really is what they are. You know, they think that it's trans people alone who are creating gender norms. I mean, it's absolutely ridiculous.

And I totally reject that movement and have made a lot of enemies with those people because I think that they are, you know, to put it rather crudely, gender fascists, honestly. So that's not what I'm interested in at all. And I want to distance myself from them, of course.

But there are some members of the trans community who are gender abolitionists. And I've been engaging with them a lot because this question that you're asking is really interesting. You know, if you transition, what is that? don't you want, isn't there a kind of euphoria at that point in your expression of gender through this kind of gender self-determination? I think that's a really important question to ask. And I would never want to say that that is not a real true thing. But what I would push back against, and this is an interesting conversation I've had with a lot of trans and cis people, is that, yes, we want to honor that.

for you and that self-determination. But is that the end-all be-all, you know, or should we push it further and understand that, yes, that is one process. And I think that there's something really revolutionary in that process insofar as, you know, the trans experience of transitioning from one of these categories to the other proves that they are not static. You know, that transition proves the dynamism that is the way that these categories can move, that they're not biological, that they're natural. I mean, this is a really revolutionary realization. And I think what we should do is take it a step further and say, okay, we've proven now that

these categories are dynamic. Now we can also prove that the oppressive aspect of these categories does not need to exist. And we can do that through the destruction of the economic reality that creates these categories. And so it's all a part of like, the way I see it is all of these things are a part of a process that is destabilizing gender. Absolutely. And I think it's really important. Also the proliferation of all of these different gender identities, you know, they show us that it's not as cut and dry as it seems. You know, it's really important.

I think that a lot of TERFs or gender criticals view trans experience as something that is antithetical towards a revolutionary feminism. But I think the opposite. I think that these things are all working in tandem to destabilize and revolutionize gender itself. I agree with you. I think it's incredibly well said in this idea of thinking of the rise of and the acceptance and the resistance to trans identities as part of a much larger process that have you said of destabilizing these categories altogether, even if, you know, for. an individual going through one part of this process, they might not consciously conceive of what they're doing as that. But historically, culturally, a process is taking place. And if you elaborate deeply into the future, you can see how this might be a crucial step on the way to

a deeper revolutionizing of the categories as a whole and sort of putting pressure on these categories by proving, as you said, their dynamism, their ability to change and morph over time. And so, you know, for me, gender abolitionism is like, you know, like you say like this larger dialectical process that could very well be happening. And, um, and this is just a necessary stage in that broader process. I like, I like thinking about it in those ways. And I also like it because it doesn't say anything negative whatsoever about trans people. In fact, it's, it puts them at the forefront of this revolutionizing process. Yeah. And, and, uh, what would it mean to frame it in another way. I mean, like, trans people exist. It's happening. This is, you know,

this is a part of our world. Trans people have always existed. So this idea that we have to just, it's this gender critical idea that transness is not real. You know, what are you talking about? Of course it's real. It's here. You know, trans people exist. It's happening. And, you know, this is where a of those people are anti-communists. They're not Marxists. They're, they're reactionary, backwards idealists who, who think that you can, just by virtue of saying something, it doesn't exist, that makes it not a real thing. But, you know, this is total fucking bullshit, to be honest. Yeah. And, and, you know, what does Marx say? Nothing that is human is alien to me. You know, that's a beautiful idea.

gender nonconformity has been a part of people's lives for so long, you know, and again, proving that the violent imposition of this hierarchical gendered structure is completely at odds with what it is that human beings actually are, you know. And so it really bothers me to think that there are people who are trying to take on some kind of radical posture. But what they're actually doing is serving a very reactionary agenda to make these things as immutable as possible. You know, I feel very violently opposed to that, to be honest. That was a little bit of a tangent, but yeah. No, well said.

Yeah, I completely agree in that quote by my mind. Marx is absolutely gorgeous. I love it. But you've been talking about the gender critical movement for a while. And you recently said very, you know, put it out there very plainly, one cannot be part of the gender critical movement and also claim Marxism, which many of them attempt to do. You go on. There is no such thing as a gender critical Marxism. It's fundamentally anti-communist. Now, you've definitely alluded to this and pointed this out throughout this conversation thus far, but I was wondering if there's anything else you wanted to say on that topic. specifically before we move on?

Yeah, so what I've noticed there, and I've noticed this in a lot of these kind of more reactionary churns within Marxism or within the left, I've seen this in a lot of different groups of people, you know, the Tucker Carlson, Socialists, whatever, they also have a tendency towards this kind of vulgar materialism, which is actually just empiricism, where it's Like, they'll be like, you know, in the gender critical aspect, they'll say like, woman equals adult human female. That's materialism. You know, and really it's just common sense dominant ideology. But they're speaking it as if it's gospel. And they're not, you know, again, it's an a historical idea. It's not rooted in the. economic situations that create the category women, right? It's something that is, they claim that this mystical womanhood is something that can literally be found in your DNA.

I mean, it's just, you can't get more anti-Marxist than that, in my opinion. And to claim it as, they claim their position as like the true materialist position. And it has nothing to do with materialism. It's actually very irrational. But the way that they articulate their position, if you're not being a critical thinker, because it's so common sense, because it's so just cut and dry, it can be very appealing. You know, yeah, women equals adult, human, female. That's way easier of a thing to articulate than anything that we've just spent the last hour or so talking about.

Yeah, exactly. It's a very easy answer to what is a very difficult question. And I think that Marxism to me is, and our historical task as Marxists, is to undermine all of those easy answers that have just been imposed upon us. Who is saying that woman is a biological fact? Why do I have to accept that? What would it mean to accept that? I see a lot of, I've seen friends of mine, and it's really upsetting, become these kind of gender-critical Marxists. And I think it's an online radicalization that takes place.

I think it also is a product of not understanding the way that gender is produced and reproduced in our society. I want to push back against it all the time always because, and I'll add this, I'll finish with this, rather, that the stakes are really high in this conversation, not just for trans people, but also for cis people, because if we accept, again, if we accept that our oppression is rooted in our biology, there's nothing that we can do about it, you know, maybe we can ask for like breadcrumbs and reforms like don't take away row versus wade you know our backs against the wall and that has massive implications for cis women as well so i think it's a really important solidarity building endeavor to not do the liberal thing where you just pay lip service to trans rights but to actually understand how that naturalizing biologizing that's being put forward by these reactionary feminists is harmful to all women, and we all have a stake in that fight, and that I would argue that it is the single most

important question in feminism today, because it serves us the ground of where we are acting from. Are we acting from a place of believing that this is an inevitability that is tied to the body that our oppression comes from our body, or are we going to move from a place where we understand our oppression to be historical, economic, cultural, these things can all change, you know, and so the stakes are high for all of us in that. I don't want to like tokenize, and it shouldn't be an argument of like tokenizing trans people. Right. You know, this is something that matters for feminism as a whole. And I think that, thinking of it in those terms is a huge solidarity building endeavor and and we need to understand it in that way and

theorize and articulate it in that way you know yeah very very well said yeah in my in my experience with with these these folks that dress themselves up as as Marxists and advanced turf ideology is almost always in my interaction with them their their understanding of Marx and this I'm sure there are some people with really good understandings of Marxism, but it seems always very lacking, right? It seems like that's like sort of not a fully developed part of their ideology, and it's sort of used as a way to dress up a bigoted impulse in a principled revolutionary garb. Because I think a lot of times, you know, anti-trans sentiment is like a visceral felt emotion

that is never faced and looked at, and the impulse is immediately to address that that confusion and those discomforting feelings up in some sort of principled political stand, whether it's left, right, or center. And so I think we should always be suspicious of that. And once you start poking and prodding the Marxism and the dialectical materialism and the historical materialist elements of this ideology, it really starts to fall apart because, as you said, it's not particularly historical. In fact, it's a historical.

It's not dialectical because of its bourgeois metaphysical reification. of static categories, and it's not particularly materialist. It's this vulgar materialism, which is like DNA says this, therefore, this. It's like, that's not a living, breathing, Marxist materialism at all. No, not at all. And what they're doing is, you know, they also love to compare women and human beings in general like chimps and other animals. They compared humans to asparagus at one point.

I'm not even kidding you. This is the thing that they do. And I always tell them, you know, man, human is not an animal like that. You know, we're a historical idea. We're not the same as a chimp. We have language, you know. We have, we live in a society. Hate to use that mean.

You know what I'm saying? It's like, it's really their position is fundamentally irrational. but it's posed as this, you know, the end-all-be-all of just common-sense thinking. You know, it's, it's, if it wasn't so dangerous, it would be very funny. Right, right. But as you're alluding to it, does often result in more demonizing of a very vulnerable and marginalized community. And that's fundamentally anti-Marxism.

I mean, Marxism is among many other things, the ruthless criticism of all that exists. is fundamentally about the liberation of people from all forms of oppression. Right. And if you're not ruthlessly criticizing your own conditioned reactionary response to the, you know, the more robust emergence of trans people and non-binary people, then you're not being Marxist. And if you're not for the liberation of people and you're actually actively citing with bigots and full-on reactionaries and theocratic fascists on a point, that should at least be a moment to pause and reflect. on how you got here and if you want to hate if you want to hate trans people um what the fuck ever you

know you're already an enemy of ours we're going to treat you as such but you don't don't claim marxism to be behind your bigotry you fuck exactly what the fuck yeah and you know this speaks to like it's an anti-egalitarian impulse that they have it's an anti-universalist impulse that they have you know um they don't understand that none of us are getting free if you have a good boot in somebody else's neck you know that's an anti-Marxist position and and what i don't understand either is like what are trans people this super marginalized group and again like you know if you look at the places where women are the most oppressed where our exploitation is just the most bare and laid bare the women that you will find there are racialized women trans women

You know, look at the sex trade. Look at the imperialist sex trade and see how many trans women you will find there. Many, many, many trans women, you know. And so how could you call yourself a feminist? How could you say that you are in opposition to the imperialist sex trade while you're actively fighting against the liberation of the people who are the most oppressed by these things? Right. You know, so in a way, it also, and I think that it speaks to, if you look at the class composition or of where, of who these people are and where this ideology is coming from, it is very petite bourgeois. it is very white in my experience not across the board but you know the core kind of group of

people that are peddling these reactionary anti-feminisms are you know upper middle class white women in the imperial core especially it's it's very obvious what's going on and another point I want to make here too is like they act as though this is the first time ever in history that we have had to question the category women. You know, but think about the history of feminism. Think about the way that black women were violently excluded from feminism. Think about the way that indigenous women were violently excluded from feminism and the category women. And the way that femininity was structured around the femininity of white women.

And that doesn't mean that femininity is. liberating for white women, but it's just a part of the way that womanhood is constructed within patriarchal society. So we have constantly as feminists in the history of our movement had to question this category of woman. Who is a woman? How do we understand the difference that is the multiplicities of types of womanhood across the globe? This is a question we've had to continue asking ourselves over and over and over again. These women, these reactionary anti-feminists, really, they act as though, you know, trans people are the first, this is like a world historical first, and that before this,

the category woman was totally stable and was never had to, it was never something that was going to be questioned. You know, there's, there's a racist element to this stuff too. that can't be ignored yeah important point absolutely agree with you and you did mention the sex trade so let me just kind of combine these two questions and it's going to be a big question but you know take it in whatever way that you want i always let my guess take it whatever direction they they want especially i feel bad asking big questions so i always want to make that caveat um but basically what are your thoughts on on this sex trade and what do you consider a principled marxist

position to be in regards to the industry on one hand and to sex workers on the other, because this is often conflated. Any criticism of the sex trade industry is immediately conflated by a certain sort of person on the left that will say that that is synonymous with hating sex workers or whatever, being bigoted against them, being a swirf or whatever. So can you kind of talk about these ideas and you can even weave in this anti-imperialist analysis as well because I think that sits at the core of a lot of this as well. Yeah, yeah. So if I were to, you know, put it in a sentence of my

thoughts on the sex trade. It would be if something can be bought, it can also be stolen. And so in my view, I view prostitution and the sex trade, the imperialist sex trade, as

the bedrock of rape culture itself. This commodification of sex and the commodification of the bodies of women, girls, and people of marginalized genders is the groundwork that leads to our objectification across all of society. I think that there's no hard line that separates prostituted people, prostituted women, from women that are not prostituted, because, again, our objectification happens in that

industry and the idea that what we are here to do is serve men sexually is produced in that industry and then permeates throughout, throughout everything. So even if you are not a woman who is selling sex, that industry still has a very profound effect on your life. To think that you are somehow separate from it, this doesn't jive with me. You know, my experience as a woman is interconnected with,

you know, women who are trafficked in the sex trade. You know, our lives are connected. The way that we are seen in our society is connected. You know, absolutely. And I think that

a lot of these ideas about swerf or, you you know, sex work exclusionary, radical feminists. It's a really bad faith, you know, misinterpretation of the more principled sex trade abolitionist stance. Because, you know, what the Marxist feminists that I organized with and know and have learned from, what we all have in common is that the problem is not the women who are selling sex. That should be decriminalized. Because the reality is, is they are forced into the trade because there's less opportunities for women, you know, to work in other spheres.

And this has to do with the social sex division of labor as well. But the point is, you should never criminalize the person selling sex. But the blame should always be put on the pints who are buying and selling women and the Johns who are buying. women and who are participating in sex tourism that is also heavily racialized, obviously. And you see all of these men in the Imperial Corps, a lot of white men in the Imperial Corps going to countries like the Philippines where my mother is from and, you know, going on vacation to buy women and girls so they can fuck them, you know, and it's like, is it the women and girls' fault? Hell no. That John, though, needs to be punished.

That cannot be something that is accepted. What a lot of these pro-sex work, whatever, political lines do is they blur the very antagonistic relationship between pimps and prostitutes. And they kind of lump them all in together and they see them as two groups of people who have similar interests when that's not the case at all, right? You know, the pimp is like the capitalist. And he doesn't have the same interests as the person that he's selling. He's pimping out. No way. But what happens with these more liberal sex positive articulations of the sex trade

is they kind of get rid of these very real distinctions, flatten them out, and ultimately serve patriarchal male supremacy, in my opinion. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think, like, you know, there's, There's lots of accusations that get thrown up in the face of just having a conversation like this. And obviously, Swarf is a big one, but I think that's so reductionist and silly and just attempts to, you know, tar and feather the person advancing a criticism of the sex trade in a way that just like everybody just tunes you out and should not listen to you because you're this or that thing, as opposed to actually wrestling with the content of what's being said. It's not always true, but it's often true.

I think as communist, it should be, it should stand as no surprise that we do not believe that human beings are commodities. And, you know, and they should not be, and our political goal is to overthrow the system that turns human beings into commodities. Right. And whether that is as a laborer in an Amazon warehouse or a sex worker or anybody else, that's the ultimate goal. So if that's the ultimate goal, then reifying these things or calling them empowering seems to be totally out of line with an ultimate. goal of the decump modification of human beings and, you know, more broadly, the natural world. And another thing that I like to point out is if you and I sat here and we were criticizing Jeff Bezos and Amazon for their treatment of workers, everybody on the left would nod in

agreement, of course, right? Now, if somebody came up in the comment section and said, you guys are sitting there criticizing Jeff Bezos and Amazon, why do you hate Amazon workers so much? They would be laughed out of the room, you know? Clearly we don't fucking hate Amazon workers our love for them is what's making us criticize the terrible practices imposed on them by the Amazon leadership and by Jeff Bezos and capitalism more broadly. That exact same thing is true when it comes to criticisms of the sex trade, is that we are criticizing an industry, the pimps and the Johns who profit off of this. And we, of course, our love is for women who are forced into this thing or anybody, whether you're forced into it or you choose it or whatever the situation is, we're on your side. But critiquing the industry is not to be conflated with critiquing the people who are at the mercy of that industry. And so I think that is incredibly important.

And then the last thing I say, and you can follow this up with whatever your thoughts are, is another sort of knee-jerk reaction to a conversation like this is listen to sex workers. But you'll hear this a lot, like in Venezuela or Cuba, listen to Cubans, which ones? You know, listen to, listen to Americans, which fucking ones? Because if you ask me and a right-wing fascist about the problems of American society, you're going to have two very different answers such that demanding people listen to Americans is incoherent. And so I think that's another thing that we should push back on. But go ahead.

Right, sure. And it's like, you know, I think that this is a great point. And I think that there is a very real class politics that is going on with this conversation that's being had within feminism and Marxism more broadly right now. I think that a lot of expansionists, the sex trade expansionists, again, not across the board, but from what I've noticed, are more upper middle class. They're not survival sex workers, usually. And they're not, they're usually more online. What I find with abolitionists and the revolutionary line from communists in the global south is they are more critical of the trade.

Because of the reality that, you know, I'll take the Philippines again because that's so close to my heart, those women, because of imperialism, because of their poverty as women, the feminization of poverty, they are quite literally forced into sexual slavery. that's the bedrock. That's the foundation of prostitution as a global industry. Those women at the bottom. And so in my mind, as a Marxist, you know, and as a revolutionary feminist, we have to go to the women at the bottom. Yes. You know, what is going on there?

You see, there was a story that came out about how there were in a very poor part of the Philippines, There was, mothers were camming and, and the people that were buying sex from them over the cam, camming sites were white men in imperialist countries. White men in America, Australia and England, I think were the three main countries. And once those white men got bored with those women, the mothers, the mothers then started pimping out their children. And it turned into a child pornography ring. The depravity, the depths of how horrifically exploitative this industry is. I mean, it's some of the most heartbreaking, tragic, monstrous shit that you can think of. And as a revolutionary, you know, I'm motivated by a commitment to the liberation of all people.

And if those women and those children at the bottom are having to do that in the name of this industry, I just, it's indefensible. I just don't know how we could lie to ourselves and think that there's anything worth preserving. It's rotten. It's rancid at its core. And it's anti-human and oppressive. And, you know, what is it, what is being produced in that industry, really? besides massive amounts of suffering and orgasm for men. It's not necessary for human life.

We don't need that. It's completely 100% exists to serve male sexual entitlement. And the women at the bottom, and again, a lot of those women are also trans women. They do want it gone. And the historical line from feminist and Marxist has been abolition of the sex trade. Right. This is a relatively new thing, this glorification of the sex trade. It's not, it doesn't have historical precedent either.

It's very weird how it just appeared, you know. Yeah. Every Marxist and every Marxist feminist throughout the whole tradition of Marxism has been critical of this industry and has said that our political aim of communism is also the abolition of this entire industry. And of course it should be. And that's another thing like going back to the. ruthless criticism of all that exists. Some of the people that we've talked about today is like, yes, ruthless criticism except for the categories of man and women or except for the sex trade industry. It's like, no, no, no. Nothing hasn't except for. Let's think through

these things. Let's not become immediately accusational and hysterical, but let's actually think through carefully this problem, this industry, what it actually means, not just emphasizing a small layer of relatively comfortable women in the imperial core, you know, on the crust of this thing that we can point to and say they actually did choose to do this, but actually the bulk of women throughout history and today who only quote unquote choose to do it because their financial economic situations are so barren, so so restricted, so limited that they're kind of forced into this. And especially in poor countries, especially when you have sex tourism, it becomes an entire industry women are sucked into often at ages in which they cannot even

make informed consensual decisions about the rest of their life, but are forced into it by older people in the industry. This should at the very least be criticized. As Marxists, we should be able to criticize this industry, right? And to think that there's people on the left that say, no, shut up, you're being mean to sex workers is absolutely assinine. And that is a childish way to think about a very complex issue. And it should be discarded immediately when those things are thrown our way,

which they'll probably be thrown our way just for having this discussion right now. And to your point that you just made, you know, that kind of knee-jerk reaction. reaction or is of being like any criticism as being mean to sex workers, it proves another thing, which is that, you know, the domination of women is something that we hold so dearly, even Marxists. It's something that, you know, it cannot be questioned because what we're doing right now, really, is in having this conversation, you know, we're questioning the the domination, the sexual domination of women and girls.

And that's really the question that's being asked right now. And so when you get this very hostile reaction to even being critical of that domination, it proves that this particular hierarchy has such a hold over our minds and over our politics, which is exactly why we have to keep questioning it and keep questioning it. And, you know, I think that there's a lot of badass anti-imperialist feminists who are really doing a lot of amazing work. And some of them I organized with to kind of challenge these more dominant narratives around the sex trade. And people like Esperanza, rigid, these amazing women that I've learned so much from, you know, the conversation is shifting. Yes.

Is what I'll say. Absolutely. It is shifting monumentally. And hopefully these conversations can be a small, humble contribution to that shift of becoming more and more critical of these things. And I've personally found this is not always true, but I think it is worth saying that when I get the most angry, vile reaction to like, let's say my discussion with Bridget and Esperanza, I cannot help but notice. A lot of it comes from leftist men who are not in the sex trade industry. And when you see a particular, when you see leftist men who are not in the industry being the most vociferous, angry, riled up attackers of conversations like this, that should alert a whole bunch of alarm bells and say, among many other things that this is a problem on the left that needs to be dealt with. And why are some men so fucking invested on maintaining a narrative that this is a good and empowering way to live and to make.

money in this world. It should make us think, what is this person so hell-bent on this topic that they themselves are not even participating in, at least on that side of it, right? And I don't know. I see that a lot. It's absolutely right. Yeah, I totally agree. All right. Well, I've taken up enough of your time. I thank you so much, Ty, for you coming on. It's really been a fascinating discussion. I think you have a methodic and clear way of speaking. And you are a particularly insightful Marxist thinker. And I really appreciate you coming on and sharing that with our audience. And as I say, with guests that I particularly like, you always have a place here at RevLeft,

always can come back, talk about anything you want. I really appreciate it. But before I let you go, can you let listeners know where they can find you, your work, and your music online? Yes. So I'm pretty active on Twitter. And on my Twitter is where you can find my substack. and all of that stuff. But my handle is at Y-U-N-G, Z, and then a zero, not an O, a zero, R-N.

And my band is called Bodega. We have a record coming out on March 10th, and we're very excited to share that with the world. It's something that has been a labor of love since, like, 20, 20. So we're ready to get it out. And yeah, thank you so much for having me. I had an amazing time talking about this stuff with you. I think it's fascinating. I hope people get something out of it. Absolutely. Yeah. Thank you again, Ty. Keep up the amazing work. Thank you, Brett. Tell me a big. What's on base?

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