Sun & Solidarity: A Report Back from the August 10 National Day of Action Against Electoral Politics from Syracuse, New York
by E. Sebastian Snowflake

On August 10th 2008, participants in the Syracuse Solidarity Network, an affiliate of the North East Anarchist Network, took part in the National Day of Action Against Electoral Politics. To build support and momentum for the protests against the Democratic & Republican National Conventions, in Syracuse, New York we held a small un-permitted solidarity rally, distributed literature and had a community picnic/potluck.

The Syracuse Solidarity Network (SSN) is an anti-capitalist, anti-oppression, and anti-authoritarian network of groups, individuals and projects that has been organizing against the conventions with other anarchists state-wide through the Upstate NY Unconventional Action chapter, aka the Upstate Uprise Unconventional Action Faction. As with the North East Anarchist Network (NEaN), its been a chance for places like Syracuse to be in conversation with the larger movement.

Like the Unconventional Action Network (UA) and NEaN, the Syracuse Solidarity Network is a multi-tendency group of groups, a gathering of insurgent currents - not that it always ends up working as well as we’d like. As we’re always careful to mention, none of us speaks for all of us, we don’t claim nor want to fall into the traps of representation. The UA slogan “Representative democracy does not equal self-determination” and the anti-representative anti-politics of the radical moment finds echoes in our approach.

This is a late and lengthy report-back for a small event, but there are Syracuses everywhere, small towns and cities with active anarchists and anti-authoritarians getting ready for the conventions, whether they’ll be there or not. It was important for us to take part on August 10th to send revolutionary love to everyone taking action and to let our comrades know support and creative solidarity is coming from beyond just the usual radical enclaves. I hope comrades in other small cities and towns across the Empire see something of themselves reflected here and take encouragement. Alongside the big cities with longstanding radical institutions, its in small cities and towns like ‘Cuse that the impact of the convention protests will be decided. We are everywhere.

August 10th

“When the conventions are over, will we have more momentum, popularity, and strategic poise than before they started, or will we be caught up in massive state repression with no public support? With this in mind, let’s deepen our roots in our communities this spring so that when we are making headlines at the conventions this summer, the people around us know who we are and hear what we want from our own mouths, not just the propaganda of the State.”

- Jake Carman, “Full Speed Ahead!” The Nor’Easter #2

Despite impressive thunderstorms in our infamously dreary city, the sun came out just in time for us to take over the hill on a corner of Westcott Street. We covered the patch of green and trees with signs against the DNC & RNC and the electoral spectacle. The bench where people hang out was transformed into a literature table. A banner proclaiming the National Day of Action was hoisted alongside a pink and black flag and another large red and black flag that had been sewn by friends for the 2000 Republican National Convention protests and used as a blanket during jail support nights.

We handed out most of a huge box of False Hope vs Real Change newspapers made by Unconventional Action Voter Deregistration, stuffed with additional anarchist propaganda advocating direct action, CD’s of the RNC Welcoming Committee radio show and a flier we made explaining the National Day of Action.

Our literature recalled the state surveillance and repression at the conventions of 2000 and 2004, giving special attention to the NYPD spying on the local Syracuse Peace Council in the run-up to the protests of ‘04, a move exposed in the mainstream media. Beneath the heading “If you challenge the architects of war and poverty, they call you a terrorist” we asked people to keep an eye on the upcoming demonstrations and be prepared to respond to police crackdowns with solidarity.

While we were going up and down Westcott St asking people if they wanted a newspaper about how politicians are bullshit, one young woman laughed, “I don’t need a newspaper to tell me that, but OK!” We immediately started receiving feedback, with a voice mail message by the time we got home from a friend asking us if we knew what these papers he found against the conventions were about.

After the rally, we made our way to Thornden Park a few streets over, where we had our People’s Power Potluck & Picnic (Against Politicians). We were joined by a handful more people, sat in the sun and enjoyed some great food, laughs and excellent discussion about the RNC/DNC protests and beyond. A few people agreed to play support roles here at home in spreading info about what was happening at the protests and getting people numbers to call jails when people get arrested, etc.

With our focus for the picnic/potluck being essentially that we were inviting people to ignore the elections altogether to hang out in our neighborhood and have a fun summer afternoon, we mostly overlooked the story of the FBI seeking spies on vegan potlucks. While our potluck wasn’t specifically vegan, though vegan-friendly, this was an interesting talking point. I had some great discussions about the Green Scare at work while inviting people. The Green Scare is especially close to home for people from Syracuse. In the 1990’s a visible, fighting animal liberation movement was met with bone-breaking arrests at demos, surveillance and a media flurry of criminalization using the t-word before it came into fashion. Fresh in many of our minds, many radicals here have little doubt Syracuse in the 90’s was full of useful lessons in implementing the nationwide Green Scare today.

Circuits of Support

“We will go home to our communities after this Summer, and it is in our communities that the effects of the broadening ecological crisis, the crash of the economy and the implementation of security-as-a-way-of-life will take hold. Whether it is the right wing of capital or the left wing of capital, capitalism will continue to structure our lives and dissolve every inch of autonomy we carve out.
To the contrary of the common narrative of defeat and despair, we notice that it is also in these communities that our affects take hold. It is within these circuits of support—both material and emotional—that we produce ourselves as powerful.”
- Everything for Everyone: a Small Demand Call for an Anti-Capitalist Force at the DNC protests, a precarious workers-council of Unconventional Action

I can see why the FBI wants their informants at potlucks; a lot of the most subversive bonds between radicals, among ourselves and the people around us are made outside the meetings, having fun, with our mouths full of some damn good macaroni salad made by our neighbors. Many who didn’t make it to the picnic are planning to join us at future events. While we didn’t have a huge festival like we first envisioned, we’re definitely moving in the right direction to be able to host bigger, public events.

August 10th was all about the conversations we had with people around us and among ourselves. Thanks to the picnic, I had great discussions with people I work at a call center with about electoral politics, capitalism, and ways real change can come from below. The False Hope newspapers were eagerly read and people seemed giddy to be reading something ridiculing all the politicians. Co-workers from across the “political” spectrum have been overwhelmingly supportive and wished me and all of us luck at the convention protests. Hearing heartfelt words of encouragement from the people who help me get by at my miserable job, building that sense of connection to what’s going down at the conventions, has been really empowering. Listening when the space is opened up for people to talk about resistance in their own lives has helped me greater appreciate the courage and struggles of my friends and co-workers, often outside the view of any formal movement.

The discussions we had with each other said a lot about where the larger US anarchist movement is at, especially outside major cities; here in Syracuse we’re overwhelmed with the amount of problems to tackle, struggling with the pro’s and con’s of network organizing. We’re trying to pick campaigns, trying to think outside the dichotomy of “big” issues and “local” dilemmas, trying to find our own roles in the movement. We debated the collapse & anti-state communism, appreciated the contradictions in doing both formal and informal organizing, shared the most recent news about the fight against I-69. Like many other small town anarchists, we’re being self-critical, talking about how some of us don’t want to go to demonstrations any more, wanting more socials, and of course thinking of more ideas for events than we could ever possibly put on (or list). Like so many beaten down cities, Syracuse is small but we dream big.

Some of us discussed the recent Left Turn issue with different radical responses to how Barak Obama’s campaign will effect liberation struggles, the need to keep a commitment to fighting all forms of interconnected oppressions, keeping critical of power dynamics in the movement. Many of us are worried for the ways settler white supremacy and privilege within the anarchist movement will undermine our chance to make a dent at a critical time, especially if we’re unable to answer the Democrat’s co-optation of feminist and anti-racist opposition in ways that resonate. For us as a group rooted in and striving for anti-oppression anarchisms, with different approaches and analysis, all trying to learn from movement histories, this is particularly up front. Syracuse Solidarity Network proudly meets at one of the oldest independent feminist community centers in the northeast, the Women’s Info Center, and many of us are inspired by the recent events by Anarchist People of Color (APOC), the Bash Back! Network, and by the working class/class war caucus at the North East Anarchist Network assemblies. We hope the anarchist movement (including us) is listening, and changing into, in the words of Autonomy & Solidarity,”the enemy the enemy deserves.” We’ve been really impressed by the RNC Welcoming Committee’s sexual assault policy, by their presentation of their local history, by the breadth of different tendencies in the literature they tabled with on their tour. It all had a very small town feel, and there’s a lot we could learn from them.

August 10th was also the coming out party for the Upstate NY Bash Back! list serv to network radical anti-authoritarian trannies, queers, and anarcha-feminists across Upstate NY for the conventions and beyond. While we don’t have a regularly meeting chapter of Bash Back!, we decided to form an Upstate NY-wide Bash Back! Upstate NY has a powerful history of recent trans, queer, and feminist liberation struggle, like Rochester’s Beyond the Binary conference that many people from Rochester Unconventional Action are involved in. For more info check out https://lists.riseup.net/www/info/bashbackupstateny

The next day at a Syracuse Solidarity Network meeting, a few people wrote down messages of support and solidarity for everyone across the country getting ready to take on the electoral spectacle to be shared:

“Good luck and have fun. This is gonna be one of the most important events in years. I wish I could be more involved. Be safe!” - HS

“The peeps at home got your back - we’ll be sitting by the phones, waiting to NOT get the call from y’all in jail. Run fast, stay badass.” - anonymous

“Take care of yourselves, don’t get hurt or killed. Keep love and faith in the people in the front of your minds. We’ll do everything we can to build support for you in our community. In struggle,” - CB

“Remember the Audre Lorde quote ‘When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.’ ” - S

Upstate Anti-State

While anarchists are used to talking about global waves of struggle and their circulation, Unconventional Action and the conventions protests have been part of an impressive amount of communication and sharing in the northeast. Not a wave, but a significant ripple perhaps. For us in Syracuse, beginning with demonstrations in solidarity with Oaxaca, to the North East Anarchist Network, to the insurrectionary October Rebellion in DC screaming “Make total destroy!”, to regional organizing against the war and conventions, there has been a surge of struggles and coordination that we hope is only beginning. Its hard to say if Upstate NY anarchists are “more” connected than we were before; after all this is an area with a deep history of anti-authoritarian and radical revolt under the label “anarchist” and beyond, home to continuing indigenous resistance, stop after stop on the Underground Railroad, feminist opposition to the State and militarism from Matilda Joslyn Gage to the Seneca Women’s Peace Encampment and the Lesbian Avengers.

But Upstate NY has been in the thick of things. From cities hosting the RNC Welcoming Committee tour, to the small Northeast Unconventional Action conference in Binghamton, we’ve carved out a corner even when its just been a handful of us. Anarchists from across Upstate squeezed into their cars to trek to Pittsburgh for the North East Anarchist Network-Midwest Action Network consulta and to Chicago for Bash Back! The North East Anarchist Network anti-election campaign has supplied us with a steady flow of ideas, articles, and propaganda. New and familiar faces from Ithaca hosted a NeaN general assembly that devoted time to report backs from the Twin Cities. Rochester Unconventional Action, probably the most consistent and together group, has held regular meetings, held a movie showing of “Shut it Down” & organized the successful Burlesque For Bail fundraising event.

Upstate-wide Unconventional Action meetings, hosted in different towns and shaped by the locals putting them on, were a wonderful opportunity to meet anti-authoritarians working on every project you can imagine. What we lost in projects left unfinished we gained in communication and friendship. There was always a sense of uncertainty on what exactly we could do, what with all the things we were working on in our own towns, different and sometimes clashing tendencies/approaches, the geographical distance to the conventions. There’s a lot to be critical of, but it would be hard to deny the vital role Upstate Unconventional Action meetings have had for us in Syracuse keeping us connected, being able to extend solidarity and be kept up-to-date when our comrades in Binghamton were attacked, pepper-sprayed and arrested after blocking a major parkway during a student protest, keeping Food Not Bombs groups in contact, sharing street tactics. While I regret that we didn’t get the ambitious projects we often brainstormed done, I think they could be translated into our local and regional fights, from media ideas, to the skills that people have learned along the way. We expect to grow and deepen our ties beyond the conventions.

Its beyond the scope of this article to sum up all the motion across Upstate against the conventions, each town would have so much to say from their own varied perspectives. Hopefully we’ll hear more voices as the story unfolds. Anarchists in other small cities and towns, this is a nod to start sharing where you’re at.

If your town or city hasn’t used the conventions as a way to get anarchists in contact with each other, now is a great time to act. There are other articles and resources out there that talk about the more direct ways solidarity can take place, and remember the best solidarity is always about taking on your own oppressors.

Just a few small ideas for anarchists in smaller cities & towns interested in being part of the conventions solidarity:
- Set up dates for report backs in your area
- Have a few people agree to email list servs and talk with groups and friends about repression as it happens at the conventions
- Talk to your co-workers, pass around or post up reports of whats really happening at the convention protests and why, where to get more info
- Wear a shirt during the conventions opposing the repression and inviting people to ask you about the protests
- Students returning to school could photocopy zines or PDF’s with info about the protests and local struggles
- Find a corner to hold some signs & banners in solidarity with the conventions protest as they happen - in Syracuse, we’ll be holding signs in front of the New York State Fair during the DNC with the Syracuse Peace Council and other local anti-war groups who were already planning on sending an anti-war message
- If you don’t know many anarchists or radicals in your area, or if you wanna get closer with the ones you do know, host a get small together and share food and news about the convention protests with your friends into the night
- Organize beyond the conventions, at home and onward to the inauguration!

Original August 10th Call to Action:
http://dncdisruption08.org/?p=112

For more info about the convention protests check out:

Unconventional Action Network
http://UnconventionalAction.org
RNC Welcoming Committee
http://NoRNC.org
DNC Disruption ‘08
http://DNCdisruption08.org
Unconventional Denver
http://myspace.com/UnconventionalDenver
Bash Back! News
http://bashbacknews.wordpress.com
Bash Back! Denver
http://myspace.com/BashBackDenver
Bash Back! Chicago
http://myspace.com/BashBack
Upstate Uprise Unconventional Action Faction
http://myspace.com/UpstateUnconventional
UpstateUnconventionalAction@gmail.com

For more info about the Syracuse Solidarity Network and the North East Anarchist Network check out:
Syracuse Solidarity Network
http://SyracuseSolNet.wordpress.com
http://myspace.com/SyracuseSolidarityNetwork
Contact & article feed back at
SyracuseSolNet@gmail.com
SSN, September 29th anti-war march YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_S9FymHfYfQ

North East Anarchist Network
http://NEanarchist.net
The Nor’Easter, the official quarterly of the North East Anarchist Network
http://neanarchist.net/?q=noreaster/issue2

Some References & Relevant Articles:

North East Anarchist Network Endorses RNC WC Call to Action, http://www.nornc.org/2008/01/13/northeast-anarchist-network-endorses-wc-call-to-action/

Carman, Jake, “Full Speed Ahead!” The Nor’Easter # 2, http://neanarchist.net/noreaster/issue2/article2.html
NYPD Spies on the Syracuse Peace Council, 2004 http://www.peacecouncil.net/spy/
Left Turn Issue # 29, Mailing Addess: Left Turn, P.O. Box 445 New York, NY 10159-0445 http://www.leftturn.org
Milstein, Cindy, Hope in a Time of Elections, Left Turn #29 http://www.leftturn.org/?q=node/1176
Uhlenbeck, Max, Possibilities of a Movement: Reflections on RNC Organizing 04, Left Turn # 15,
http://www.leftturn.org/?q=node/354
Twin Cities Radical Community Meeting on Sexual Assault and the RNC http://www.nornc.org/2008/07/17/twin-cities-radical-community-meeting-on-sexual-assault-and-the-rnc-2/
APOC: Build It From Below! Call http://www.ainfos.ca/en/ainfos21055.html
IllVox: Anarchist People of Color http://illvox.org/

Only One Direction, Trans & Queer Insurrection, Bash Back! Convergence Reportback, http://dncdisruption08.org/?p=59
“Becoming the Enemy They Deserve” Upping the Anti Editorial, UTA # 4, http://uppingtheanti.org/node/2691
Militant Research on call centers, Kolinko Hotlines http://nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/kolinko/lebuk/e_lebuk.htm
Rochester Indymedia http://Rochester.indymedia.org
Beyond the Binary http://myspace.com/beyondthegenderbinary
Solidarity Is A Weapon, A Murder of Crows #1, http://www.geocities.com/amurderofcrows1/issue1/solidarity.htm

Upstate NY history & info
Onondaga Nation land rights & solidarity http://www.onondaganation.org/
http://www.peacecouncil.net/NOON/landrights.html
Yorkstaters Blog http://yorkstaters.blogspot.com
Emma Goldman in Rochester history http://rocwiki.org/Emma%20Goldman
http://yorkstaters.blogspot.com/2006/11/in-november-we-remember-emma-goldman.html
http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=20070709211507128
Syracuse Women’s Info Center http://www.myspace.com/womensinfocenter
Seneca Women’s Peace Encampment Herstory Project http://peacecampherstory.blogspot.com

Photos & the flyer handed out from Youth In Action’s musical anti-war protest & open mic on Westcott St June 21st. The next musical anti war protest will be Saturday, July 12th at 3pm in Hanover Square, alongside a meal share by Syracuse Food Not Bombs - see you in the streets!
E-mail contact Syracuse Youth In Action: Zachary (at) twcny.rr.com
FacebookGroup: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=6375414353
http://peacecouncil.net/youth/

Youth In Action Musical Anti War Protest!
Saturday, June 21st
2-6pm
at the bench at Westcott st and Beech st
http://peacecouncil.net/youth/

OPEN MIC, pass on the word, bring music, poetry, your friends!

on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=24806851292

“On Saturday June 21, Syracuse Youth in Action will be hosting a MUSICAL PROTEST of the ongoing war in Iraq.

We will send a message to our elected officials and the people of Syracuse that we are sick and tired of this unjust war and we demand change!
The protest will follow an ‘open mic’ format (without the mic). Bring your own guitars, print out song lyrics to pass, drums are great too.
Everyone is welcome! Come add your voice and be heard!
If you have poetry or other writing to read, that is also great!
Nothing amplified please since there is nowhere to plug it in and we don’t want the police on our tail, if we can avoid it.
We will have about 10 signs, but if you have a good one you’d like to bring please do so.”

- Youth in Action on Facebook

Youth in Action are a group of Syracuse young people fighting against the war and for social justice.
During the summer they held a large un-permitted youth anti-war march that took over the Federal Building lawn to denounce imperialism, activated the un-permitted youth and anti-authoritarian feeder march at the September 29th Upstate NY Citizen & Soldier March Against the War, and have made a spirited youth presence holding anti-war signs along Westcott st and downtown, and are planning future events.

Check out a recent article about the Westcott st demo here:
http://syracusesolnet.wordpress.com/2008/04/05/youth-in-action-protest-4208/

Jamesville-DeWitt High School Acceptance Coalition Benefit Concert
Friday, June 20th
6pm to 11pm
basement of MPH Presbyterian Church, 5299 Jamesville Rd

Check out AxCo on Myspace at http://www.myspace.com/JDAxCo

on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/home.php/event.php?eid=28856156864

Support this long-running fierce and fabulous queer youth group! Their annual benefits are always filled with creativity, wit and great performances!

“Now we realize that sounds odd but it’s in the basement and it has a really good stage and a lot of room and it was free. We have a bunch on different bands including Go all out, Here for the hour, Remember tommorow, All my ambitions, Magnet 79, and a few solo artist including Matthew Kelly. We still have a few bands we are waiting to hear from.

TELL ALL YOUR FRIENDS!”
- http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=109773996&blogID=404223985

“The acceptance coalition is a group committed to fighting discrimination, oppression and prejudice in our schools and community. We are the group who promotes acceptance of all people and their beliefs in order to bring them together. We recognize that racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, ageism, religious prejudice and other forms of discrimination and oppression are all connected and they are issues that need to be addressed. We wish to be a community resource to offer support and education. Also, we have broadened our horizon and focus on getting the youth active in helping others and speaking their mind.”
- http://www.myspace.com/JDAxCo

June Immigrants Rights Action - the Overground Railroad
11 AM on Saturday, June 14
(45-minutes to 1 hour) no longer
at the Regional Transportation Center (Amtrak and Greyhound Station)

Activities: High-visibility banner and sign-holding; distributing
critically important public education material on Border Patrol
arrests, material that will allow people to make INFORMED DECISIONS
about whether they want to risk having their family torn apart by the
detainment of a family member. Chants, prayers, powerful testimonies.
A peaceful but spirited assembly! Children welcome. This is a good way
to help them understand what it means to work hard for the dignity of
all people. It helps them learn more about their own immigrant
ancestors, and what they endured when they arrived in this country.
Immigrant rights are human rights!

At our first rally, there were about 50 people. Help us break that record!

WHERE to Show Up: Gather on the curved sidewalk near the big sign
labeling the RTC. The sidewalk is public property (we think), and we
therefore can use our U.S. Constitution, especially laws that protect
freedom of speech, peacable assembly, and the right to petition the
government for a redress of grievances (First Amendment); and
searches and seizures without Warrants (Fourth Amendment).

Other: bring sun screen or umbrellas or rain gear, depending on
weather; water bottles. We have found that back packs are helpful. We
can supply you with a sign.

Mark your calendar now for the July 5th Immigrant Rights Action.
Declare your independence from government policies that break up
families, incite racism, and encourage worker exploitation and modern
forms of slavery.

Shelter: a Squatumentary

Film Showing & Discussion with Film Maker Hannah E. Dobbz

Friday, May 9th
9pm at the Womens Info Center
601 Allen St
Syracuse, NY 13210
$5 suggested donation, no one turned away

presented by the Syracuse Solidarity Network

Shelter: a Squatumentary (2008), 45 min.

With universally skyrocketing property values, rent and home-ownership have become unaffordable at best and impossible at worst. Thus, people all over the world continue a long tradition of circumventing the expensive price tag and reclaiming this basic human right by squatting. Shelter: a Squatumentary is a documentary film that explores the squatting movement in the East Bay from 2004 to 2007. We follow three examples of the struggle for housing in an unaffordable marketplace such as the San Francisco Bay Area. Hellarity House, Banana House, and Power Machine are stories of squatters who have found one tentative solution to the ongoing housing crisis.

The screening will be followed by a discussion on squatting as a tactic and how to use it not for lifestylist dropout culture but instead for actual community building. Squatting—a historically clandestine move—needs to come out of hiding and build a real community around its claim to free housing for all. Otherwise, this age-old tactic will continue to serve temporary ends; squatters will continue to be evicted and crack new squats in secret; they will continue to alienate each other along with the mainstream—all the while, still under the thumb of the housing market and its landlords.

See: www.killnormal.com/shelter
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWMmJxmE-Hk

presented by
the Syracuse Solidarity Network

http://SyracuseSolNet.wordpress.com

http://myspace.com/SyracuseSolidarityNetwork
SyracuseSolNet(at)gmail.com

SSN is an affiliate of the North East Anarchist Network
http://NEanarchist.net

***
More info about squatting & squatter rights

SQUAT THE PLANET
www.squattheplanet.com

Nomadic travelers, squatters, anarchists, hobos, hitchhikers, punks, and dirty kids

RIDING DIRTY FACE
www.ridindirtyface.com

Photographs of Mike Brodie’s filthy friends

SQUAT.NET
video.squat.net

Squatting-related video archive

SQUAT WIKI
legal.squat.net/dokuwiki/doku.php

Squatting law information for different countries

SQUATTER CITY
squattercity.blogspot.com

Squatters and squatter cities around the world

UNGDOMSHUSET
www.ungeren.dk

News in English of the former Copenhagen squat

Köpi
koepi.squat.net

Squatting Berlin

Can Mas Deu
canmasdeu.net

Squatting Barcelona

“To the annoyance of some leftists who argue that capitalism and class form the fundamental basis of all oppression, anti-oppression organizing seeks to understand the connections between racism, sexism, heterosexism, colonialism and class… But is this happening?”

Roundtable on Anti-Oppression Politics in Anti-Capitalist Movements

http://uppingtheanti.org/node/1380
Upping the Anti
Edited by Sharmeen Khan

The modes of resistance and struggle that came out of liberation movements in the latter part of the 20th century gave rise to anti-oppression organizing and politics. Anti-oppression arose out of the left’s failure to develop a nuanced approach to questions of oppression and to consider various forms of oppression as “class issues.”

In recent years the rise of the anti-globalization movement has influenced, and been influenced by, anti-oppression analyses, as the movement sought to address the effects of global capitalism on different communities and peoples, and to understand the varied effects of power, privilege and marginalization in individual communities, as well as in national and international contexts.

Among social justice activists organizing around anti-oppression politics, many questions have come up as to how to envision and create a transformative politic around issues of racism, sexism, heterosexism and able-ism within an anti-capitalist analysis. The current separation of identity politics from class struggle does not speak to the experiences of marginalized and exploited people in our communities, and we need ways to discuss and organize around the connections between various oppressions and capitalism. As anti-oppression activists, we need to develop a critical discourse that connects the socio-historical contexts of capitalism and class to race, gender, sexuality and ability.

To the annoyance of some leftists who argue that capitalism and class form the fundamental basis of all oppression, anti-oppression organizing seeks to understand the connections between racism, sexism, heterosexism, colonialism and class. Anti-oppression politics have the potential to provide a useful antidote to reductionist perspectives which leave out the fundamental roles of patriarchy and racism in determining both capitalism and class relations.

But is this happening? Or are anti-oppression activists repeating the same mistakes made by proponents of identity politics in the 1960s and 1970s, and being co-opted by the claimed multiculturalism of the Canadian state? Do anti-oppression politics expand the analysis of radical organizing, or are they merely “reinventing the wheel” by addressing individual behaviors? Can anti-oppression politics provide a model for a multi-faceted analysis that addresses oppression and class exploitation as distinct but nevertheless intimately interrelated social relationships?

The dynamics of anti-oppression politics often reinforce notions of oppression that we should be trying to debunk. People of colour, for example, are often deemed anti-oppression “experts,” and are expected to do anti-oppression work for primarily white organizations. What are systemic issues then become problems stemming from individual behaviour, which can lead to the de-politicization or political paralysis of activist groups. As the radical roots of anti-oppression in feminist, anti-racist and queer movements become co-opted, the education model developed by anti-oppression activists is being taken up by mainstream, “multiculturalist” and liberal discourses.

The following is a roundtable discussion based upon interviews with three activists who have engaged with anti-oppression politics in the context of radical political organizing. These interviews address the relevance, influence and problems of anti-oppression politics for these activists. We encourage feedback and further discussion on the ideas expressed here. If you would like to write us with your own observations on these questions, or contribute an article for the next issue of our journal, please get in touch with us.

UTA: Please introduce yourselves.

Kirat Kaur: I am a young, able migrant woman of South Asian descent. I am currently an organizer with the Bus Riders Union and a board member of the South Asian Network for Secularism and Democracy (SANSAD).

Junie Désil: I am a Haitian-Canadian feminist community organizer and writer. I was born in Montréal, but I now live and work in Vancouver, where I provide training in the area of facilitation (using an anti-oppressive framework), community development, as well as working at the Vancouver Status of Women, a women’s centre in East Vancouver.

Gary Kinsman: I got involved in the revolutionary left in the early 1970s and, shortly after, came out as a gay man and got involved in queer organizing.1 I come from a white middle class background and I am now a university professor. I have been involved in the Sudbury Coalition Against Poverty and Autonomy and Solidarity.

UTA: What has been your experience with anti-oppression politics?

Kirat: My experiences with anti-oppression politics have been varied, and, initially, led me to find it a problematic discourse. I was first introduced to this kind of politics in my training for a local rape crisis line’s volunteer peer support work. The training was done in an anti-oppression framework, with the second half of it broken up into workshops that dealt with each individual oppression. In particular, I remember the workshop on ‘class oppression’ to be not much more than making sure people were not engaged in ‘poor bashing’ and discussions about how we should not ‘discriminate against poor people’. At this time in my political development, my class analysis was weak, and so I accepted that definition of ‘class oppression’ as a starting point from which my understanding of class developed (although my class analysis did not grow from within that particular organization). Moreover, even then, I found that particular brand of anti-oppression politics to be very much focused on inter-personal, individual change, with no attention paid to systemic issues and to fighting collectively for systemic change.

Since then, through my involvement with revolutionary grassroots organizations, I have come to realize that most anti-capitalist organizing does not integrate a strong analysis of other forms of oppression such as race and gender oppression. Through my organizing with the Bus Riders Union, I have come to see that a strong anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-oppression framework is integral to the success of social justice movements.

Junie: I have been involved in anti-oppression politics for some time, though in the past 4 or 5 years, I would say I have really come into my own. Having said that, my work and anti-oppression politics continually evolve, and will always be a “work in progress.” I first started as a young Black woman dedicated to anti-racism at the University of British Columbia. In my involvement with various student groups, I started to become self-aware and politically involved. Such spaces were critical for me as they validated my existence and my experiences as a racialized woman, but sometimes these spaces only validated one or two experiences at a time. I started to find “single issue” politics and organizing problematic; they only addressed one issue or discrimination at a time and did not necessarily take into account the multiplicity of locations myself and others around me experienced.

Somehow, quite by accident really, I started to facilitate “diversity and inclusion” workshops, which let’s be honest, tend to focus on “celebrating” difference, having (white) people feel good, and providing no actual space for participants to reflect on or acknowledge their privilege, or “see” the systemic discrimination and oppression marginalized groups experience. I started going through the pain of giving such workshops, and I had to start reconfiguring what such workshops should look like.

Two experiences stand out that really solidified my resolve to change my approach. The first involved my being contracted to do a three workshop series for youth at a youth resource centre. The youth, by outsider and social service standards, would be deemed “at-risk.” I was asked to do anti-oppression workshops, and to particularly talk about homophobia, white privilege, etc. The youth were primarily First Nations between the ages of 13-24, and there were a few white youth as well. The sessions were hard and intense given the nature of the workshops, the wide range of ages, the life experiences and status these youth occupied. Halfway through the second session, one fairly young attendee interrupted the workshop and said, “why do we have to learn about racism when they’re the ones who have problems with us?” I remember being floored, because, to a large extent, he was right; we had forgotten that this was an anti-oppression workshop that was supposed to examine all forms of inequality. But I was also floored because we were talking about different kinds of oppression (not just racism), and how they interconnect. For many of the youth, the workshop was about anti-racism and nothing else. I had to ask myself; “what was I (not) doing for this understanding to sink in (or not)”?

The second experience, which was an ongoing struggle, was my paid work, where I was working with a new regional organization that focused on how youth were affected by violence, using photojournalism as a medium. Part of my work was to do leadership-training workshops for youth. At the end of the training, youth were supposed to be able to go out to schools and into the community in order to talk about their experiences with violence. There were a number of problems with the model, one being that speaking from experience is fine, but without context it risks being misunderstood. For example, many of the youth experienced violence as a result of their sexual orientation (whether perceived as queer by their peers or consciously out). Others experienced violence as a result of their ethnicity and race. Thus talking about violence devoid of such contexts was problematic. I prepared a 12-week curriculum, and asked guest speakers from Women Against Violence Against Women, women’s centres and other community groups to come in while I covered the “presentation” basics. My efforts to contextualize the violence that some of the youth experienced as a systemic problem, as an institutional problem rather than an individual experience, were repeatedly thwarted. Those experiences made me realize that I needed to shift my politics or at the very least my framework. That realization and the fact that mentors and other like-minded activists in my entourage could show me an alternative really helped focus my anti-oppression work.

Gary: My first grappling with anti-oppression politics in the context of anti-capitalism and the left took place around queer struggles and queer liberation as we struggled to have lesbian/gay liberation integrated into the politics of the Revolutionary Marxist Group, and later, the Revolutionary Workers League in the 1970s. There were years of battle against the notion in much of the left that gay/lesbian liberation was a ‘marginal’ or ‘peripheral’ issue compared to the ‘centrality’ of a narrow political economy notion of class and class struggle.

In the context of this struggle, I also became profoundly affected by feminism and later by anti-racist movements. When it became clear to me that the Leninist left was not going to be able to learn in any profound way from feminism and the queer movements I left it in 1980. For a period of time (and still), I was very influenced by Sheila Rowbotham’s socialist feminist critique of Leninism developed in the book Beyond the Fragments. One of the main points developed in this book was the inability of the Leninist left to be transformed by feminism and other movements coming out of experiences of oppression, and how feminism could provide at least part of the basis for a new left that could move beyond the fragments.

For the next sixteen years I was a left activist in the gay liberation and AIDS activist movements with a little bit of anti-war organizing at the time of the first Gulf War. I was involved for a number of years in Rites magazine, which attempted to develop a more radical queer politic by making links between different forms of oppression, as well as between oppression and class. I also worked with Gay Liberation Against the Right Everywhere (GLARE). I was involved in the resistance to the police raids on gay men’s bath houses in the early 1980s in Toronto, and later in AIDS ACTION NOW! I learned a lot from my involvement in these struggles and movements.

In the mid-1990s, in the context of the Mike Harris neo-liberal ‘common-sense revolution,’ I once again joined a radical left organization. This time it was the New Socialist Group, which I thought held out some promise for developing a broader class struggle politics that could include feminism, queer liberation, and anti-racism. In the context of this group I again tried to help facilitate learning from feminist and queer struggles with some success. At the same time, this project was limited by the fact that a lot of feminist and queer struggles that were at one point extremely radical had been transformed into more moderate movements. In relation to queer organizing, this had to do with a shift in the class composition of queer movements with a new professional-managerial queer strata gaining hegemony. A critical class analysis was now necessary to grasp what was going on in queer movements and community formation. The more recent focus on same-sex marriage as the end-game of our struggle has made the moderate direction of the mainstream queer groups very clear. For me it is almost impossible to be a queer activist anymore given the connections that need to be made with class and other social struggles if these struggles are to be made radical again – radical as in getting to the root of the problem.

UTA: What, in your opinion, has been the greatest influence of anti-oppression work in anti-capitalist movements? How has it contributed to the consciousness of anti-capitalist activists?

Kirat: I think that to some extent, anti-oppression work is really the articulation of long-standing criticisms of anti-capitalist movements in the First World (i.e. that their class analysis ignores other forms of oppression, that their leadership is white male-dominated, and that this is precisely what has shaped the inability of anti-capitalist movements to organize the different sectors of the working class). Like it or not, class is lived through race, gender and other forms of oppression, and no, these will not magically disappear ‘after the revolution.’ In fact, we have seen historical examples of how a revolution has not, in fact, automatically eliminated gender and race oppression in places like Nicaragua and Cuba. Also, while it is true that race is often used to divide the working class, simply ignoring these racial divisions that already exist will not make them go away. Anti-racism is not the same as colour-blindness. I think it is about time that anti-capitalist movements start to develop a more sophisticated understanding of the intersections of the different oppressions, and how we must fight against all the forces of oppression together in the fight for a more socially just world.

Junie: One of the greatest influences that anti-oppression politics has had on the anti-capitalist movement is the understanding that power and privilege cannot go unexamined in the fight against capitalism. Additionally, we must recognize that capitalism affects different groups differently, that different groups have been exploited in different ways in order to advance capitalism, and that most importantly, it is no mere accident that these groups bear the brunt of capitalism. Despite that influence, I still find that individuals and groups who have difficulty understanding their power and privilege are unable to share power, and feel the need to speak for marginalized groups and often dominate anti-capitalist groups and movements. There seems to be a basic inability to understand that anti-oppression politics is a framework that informs how one organizes, how one shares material and information, how one participates, how one invites other groups to participate.

Good anti-oppressive feminist politics need to form the foundation. For example, a number of anti-capitalist/anti-imperialist groups exist in Vancouver. Organizing, educating, protesting and rallying are some of the activities these groups engage in. Yet many groups are left out as a result of the lack of a nuanced anti-oppression understanding and framework. Thus protests and/or rallies are planned quickly with little consultation, a lack of representation of people, issues and interests, a lack of acknowledgement of the fact that we are organizing on unceded indigenous territory, a lack of planning for accessibility, for interpretation, for making the spaces safe/accessible for children, etc. If none of these considerations take place at the basic level of coming together, of planning and educating, how then can we consider our politics to be anti-oppressive? While many of these groups are making changes, the changes are slow. However long these changes take, anti-oppression frameworks and politics can strengthen the anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movement.

Gary: While I have learned a lot from feminist and anti-racist movements, I have also become committed to a politics of responsibility in relation to fighting oppression. This is far more than a politics of solidarity based on learning to support other social struggles and learning from these struggles. We need to recognize our own social locations and our implications in social relations of oppression and to begin to challenge white and male privilege. As someone who identifies as male and white, this has been especially important in trying to develop a politics of responsibility in challenging patriarchal and white hegemonic relations from within my own social location. In addressing my own implication within, and responsibility for, white hegemony, the following quote from Himani Bannerji’s Thinking Through (in which she refers to white academics she has worked with), has served as a useful starting point;

“And sitting there, hearing claims about sharing “experience,” having empathy, a nausea rose in me. Why do they, I thought, only talk about racism, as understanding us, doing good to “us”? Why don’t they move from the experience of sharing our pain, to narrating the experience of afflicting it on us? Why do they not question their own cultures, childhoods, upbringings, and ask how they could live so “naturally” in this “white” environment, never noticing that fact until we brought it home to them?”

For me a politics of responsibility is crucial to developing anti-oppression politics. Those of us who participate in producing relations of oppression need to challenge them from our locations to open up more space for those who directly experience oppression. We don’t have to wait to be asked to act against oppression, we can take our own initiatives and begin to undo oppression from our places within it.

UTA: How do you feel about anti-oppression politics and education now being used by hierarchical and capitalist institutions such as union bureaucracies and the state? What are some of the contradictions and problems you have found with anti-oppression politics?

Kirat: It has been easy to depoliticize and de-radicalize anti-oppression in capitalist institutions, which is of course their aim, whether conscious or unconscious. It would not really be in the interests of the state or capital if people were to really start understanding and acting upon their analysis of oppression, would it?

So a lot of the language and ideas have been co-opted, stuck in the realm of ‘identity politics’ and rendered useless. However, I think there is still room to see that as a starting point in people’s political development, although there is so much out there to keep people stuck in that world-view and not develop their understanding further.

As I mentioned earlier, one problem is that it is easy to get stuck in the interpersonal, and lose sight of the systemic. While both aspects of oppression are important, we need to find ways to be constantly evaluating our personal and interpersonal relationships to each oppression, in the context of systemic forces, in order to unite in collective struggle.

Another problem that I find with anti-oppression politics is that there is a tendency to diffuse each kind of oppression as happening on an equal footing. I do not believe this to be true; I believe that class is the central contradiction in the world today. This is not to say that other forms of oppression do not act on people’s lives independently. For example, Maher Arar’s status as a middle class person did not stop his deportation from Canada to detention and torture in Syria. My point though, is that an anti-oppression framework can fall into being too simplistic, kind of like a checklist, where the more kinds of oppressions you fall into, the more oppressed you are, when really, all other kinds of oppression are experienced through class. For instance, an upper class disabled person will have far more access to resources and far less experiences of marginalization and of struggle than a non-status migrant from the Third World who can’t even receive disability benefits. Also, being classified as a member of more than one oppressed group does not just have an additive effect, but implies entirely different conceptions of people’s lived realities.

My best experiences with anti-oppression have been organizing with the Bus Riders Union. The BRU’s strategy involves building an anti-racist and anti-sexist organization of the multi-racial, mixed- gender working class. We fight to win concrete gains for transit dependent people, the majority of whom are women, people of colour, and Aboriginal people, while building a long-term movement for social justice. We recognize that it is precisely those who are the most marginalized who have the most to gain from fighting for a more just world. Thus, the BRU prioritizes the education, training and leadership of working class women of colour and Aboriginal women, and looks to Third World movements for inspiration and guidance. My worst experiences of anti-oppression have been when the framework has fallen into all the traps I have talked about earlier and become de-politicized, tokenistic and destructive.

Junie: Anti-oppression politics, however empowering and liberatory, does have its drawbacks. It’s now the new buzzword in the social activist/education scene, and is quickly being co opted and absorbed into mainstream spaces. In my paid work, I receive phone calls from organizations, unions, school boards, and university student groups asking for anti-oppression workshops. Others call wanting to find out what an anti-oppression framework would look like and how it can be implemented, as if doing so will only take a phone call, or the workshop time requested. On the one hand, the recognition that such work and education is important, that anti-oppression politics are integral, makes one feel excited at the idea that change is happening. On the other hand, a number of problems arise both in terms of understanding anti-oppression politics and how we do our work.

First, anti-oppression education is a lifelong commitment. No amount of workshops will make one an expert. Second, the nature of anti-oppression begs one to re examine one’s power relations, one’s privilege(s) in relation to other groups, to consider how our multiple locations may shift and change depending on the spaces we occupy. Sherene Razack in Looking White People in the Eye, argues that a politic of inclusivity, of adding up oppressions, so to speak, is simply not enough. Rather, a politics of accountability needs to occur, where we not only look at how we are differently affected, but also how we are complicit in the subordination of others. Because anti-oppression education is not comfortable and is challenging (as it should be), it does not follow the script of “let’s all feel good, and celebrate our differences, our foods and dances.” Thirdly, the very same people affected by these dominant systems of oppression are the same ones facilitating or doing anti-oppression education work. The emotional toll, the price we pay is extremely high. We put ourselves, our bodies, on display as we stand in spaces where participants may not reflect our experiences, where often we prove, yet again, that oppression does and continues to exist.

This brings us to the fourth problem with anti-oppression work; that we need to regroup and figure out what exactly anti-oppression work is about. Too often the anti-oppression education that is taking place becomes a space where participants from dominant groups become the centre of attention and focus, and the centre of education. This inevitably leads to the question of who should be doing the educating. I would invite readers to ask instead, “when and where are appropriate spaces to do anti-oppression work?” Ask yourselves and others, “how can I/we take on the work? How can I be an ally?” Fifth, as anti-oppression educators, we need to be connecting with our allies, and allies need to be stepping up to the plate to educate those privileged communities. While there is the understanding by some that it is not up to those that come from marginalized spaces to teach privileged “dominant cultured” individuals or groups, at the end of the day, many of us are in fact educating these privileged groups. There is also the concern that many of those individuals doing ally work using an anti-oppressive framework are not in fact doing so. Instead, individuals facilitating these workshops leave their privilege unexamined. Sixth, anti-oppression politics need to get out of academia. Many of us, (myself included) come in with a set of language and vocabulary that not only reifies the activist/academia divide, but also ignores the work that many have been doing in academic spaces.

Lastly, a conversation needs to occur between the anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist and anti-oppression movements. Pitting one against the other is not useful, but, given the focus of these three movements, the head butting is understandable. Each one needs the other, but I see the anti-oppression movement from a feminist perspective as integral to any organizing and education work. Perhaps it is necessary to have these three spaces to talk about the systemic injustices that are experienced by marginalized people and communities. If that is the case, each of these spaces needs to become much more nuanced in their approach to organizing and educating. The anti-oppression movement seems to be headed in that direction, but perhaps needs to be much more explicit when it comes to anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist education; I would argue that it is not entirely lacking that analysis. Each of these spaces needs to understand that the systems of power rely on each other to maintain themselves. Capitalism cannot work without imperialism; they go hand in hand. Capitalism and imperialism cannot work without the hegemonic, racist, sexist, ableist and heteronormative spaces that define our world.

Gary: While there have been major insights in anti-oppression politics as they have been developed there are also major contradictions and limitations. Each form of oppression has its own specific social character – its own autonomy so to speak – and there is a danger of flattening out the differences in the social organization of the various forms of oppression in developing a common anti-oppression politics. Sexism is not racism and is not heterosexism, even though they are made in and through each other and are connected to class relations in a broad sense. Each specific social form of oppression requires its own autonomous movement and struggle, while at the same time we have to see how forms of oppression and class exploitation mutually construct each other. It has been understandable that in response to the narrow “class first” politics of much of the left, activists rooted in movements against oppression have developed a distinct politics separate from class and anti-capitalist politics. At the same time, this also opens up space for the deployment of new strategies of regulation and management of movements and communities of the oppressed including formal legal equality (which is not the same as substantive social equality), multiculturalism, strategies for producing layers of a middle class elite that can speak for and be the ‘legitimate’ representatives for various communities, and various strategies of integration into the existing order of things (same-sex marriage as the end-game of our struggle being one of these strategies).

Often this revolves around a politics of inclusion and representation which poses the struggle as one of representation within and integration into existing forms of social organization rather than a radical transformation of existing social relations. These strategies of regulation construct a rigid separation between social identity and community and a radical critique of capitalism, thus denying the social and historical connections between community formation and class relations. This helps to create the space for the emergence of middle class elites in various communities and movements to rise to the top and shift politics in a more pro-capitalist direction. We have to reject this separation, and discover instead how to build a broader notion of anti-capitalist and working class politics that includes anti-oppression struggles at its core. Anti-capitalist politics cannot currently be developed without addressing its links to the various struggles against oppression.

In my view, this is the only way that anti-capitalist politics can be made actual as a revolutionary praxis. Anti-capitalist politics needs anti-oppression politics and radical anti-oppression politics needs a broader anti-capitalist perspective.

While anti-racism and feminism have been far more successful than queer politics as forms of radical anti-oppression, they (along with anti-disability and anti-ageist forms of organizing) are all crucial to the development a new anti-capitalist politics that addresses oppression as central to class politics. Most recently, I have found currents within autonomist Marxism (see my article “Learning from Autonomist Marxism” in this issue of Upping the Anti), that develop a broader notion of the working class and anti-capitalism that includes the struggles of housewives, students, and peasants. Broadening notions of working class struggle is very useful in bringing together anti-oppression and anti-capitalist politics. Autonomist Marxism has also grasped the need for the autonomous struggles of working class women against patriarchy, people of colour against white supremacy, and queers against heterosexism. While not resolving the problems we face, autonomist Marxism can provide us with tools that are key in the development of an anti-oppression politics that is at the same time anti-capitalist. Until we have broadened our understanding of anti-capitalist politics and working class struggle, it is vital to stubbornly hold onto anti-oppression politics (despite their imperfections), and to prevent them from being subordinated to a narrow notion of anti-capitalism. At the same time, on the level of forms of organizing and tactics, some of the acquisitions of the global justice movement (including direct action politics, affinity groups, spokescouncils, etc.), can also help us create the basis for a radical anti-capitalist anti-oppression politics.

NOTES:

1 See Gary’s interview with Deborah Brock for Left History called “Workers of the World Caress” on organizing around queer questions in the revolutionary left in the 1970s at www.yorku.ca/lefthist/online/brock_kinsman.html).

“Not only does the war perpetuate sexist inequality and patriarchy, but also it enlists patriarchal relations - economic, sexual, and ideological - to carry out its operations.”

Why The War Is Sexist (And Why We Cant Ignore Gender Anymore; Heres a Start for Organizing) by Huibin Amee Chew

December 01, 2005

“Our sons made the ultimate sacrifice, and we want answers” - Cindy Sheehan on truthout.org

“Nice puss - bad foot”
- caption under the photo of an Iraqi woman whose leg was destroyed by a landmine, on a website allowing soldiers to swap pictures of dead Iraqis for free access to pornography

Refusing to be silenced as a military parent, Cindy Sheehan’s courageous voice has lent new urgency to stopping the war in Iraq. “Mother Cindy” has been likened to a Rosa Parks of the anti-war movement. Both widely recognized women served as symbolic figures to help bring the weight of a larger base of organizing to bear on the public.

Yet today we have an anti-war movement which largely fails to point out connections between war, and U.S. patriarchy or gendered domestic inequalities. To galvanize organizing against militarism to its full potential, we must question its gender-blind approach. In fact, Sheehan came as a surprise to segments of the movement which prioritized looking to the troops and potential recruits as the centers of resistance. Sheehan and Hurricane Katrina remind us that as the war’s effects are much broader, we can expect and should look to support rebellion from a variety of mutually reinforcing fronts.

What would it mean to put not just Cindy’s son at the center of outrage, but women like Sheehan herself, as military mothers, wives, and partners? How have these women themselves, not just the troops, been militarized, manipulated, and exploited? What would it mean for the anti-war movement to interpret women like Sheehan as activists and agents fighting against exploitation which directly affects them in their own right - not just as stand-ins for others’ struggles, defined by a male-dominated left?

Below is a numbered list of suggestions for how to apply a gender analysis to the war - how to understand its links with U.S. patriarchy. Like lists enumerating “Why the War is Racist” which have circulated in the U.S., the below reasons get at why the war must be understood as sexist. This list is a start, by no means meant to be exhaustive, at offering a wider understanding of who is hurt by imperialism.

1) Soldiers are not the only - or main - casualties of war.

The ideology of militarism glorifies soldiers, focusing our attention on their heroism and sacrifice. The U.S. anti-war movement has largely not escaped this soldier-centered paradigm - causing a gender bias in who it recognizes as ultimately suffering from war.

In the 20th century, 90 percent of all war deaths have been of unarmed women, children, and men. As the occupation wears on, more and more Iraqi women and girls are killed - reported as “collateral damage.” Bombs and modern war weapons murder and maim noncombatant women in approximately equal numbers to noncombatant men - even if from the U.S. perspective, men make up the vast majority of our war dead. Soldiers are not those primarily losing their lives in this occupation. At the same time, note that U.S. imperialism benefits from certain strategies that maximize “collateral damage” (such as using long-distance, high tech weapons rather than infantry), because these also minimize our own soldiers’ deaths and the potential public relations blowup. The tendency to devalue the enemies’ lives is reinforced by not only racist but also sexist ideologies - history is made by “our boys,” and enemy females’ deaths are not even acknowledged.

Putting U.S. soldiers’ deaths abroad in the context of other wartime deaths occurring at home causes another shift in perspective. For example, during World War II, U.S. industrial workers were more likely than U.S. soldiers to die or be injured. Historian Catherine Lutz observes, “The female civilians who worked on bases or in war industries can be seen as no less guardians or risk-takers than people in uniform.” This is not to downplay the amount of suffering and exploitation soldiers are forced to endure, but to widen our scope of who we recognize as affected in war.

2) The economic harms of war are exacerbated by patriarchy for women - both within the U.S. and in Iraq.

With the destruction of Iraq’s economy, women and girls have suffered especially from deprivations. In the article, “Occupation is Not (Women’s) Liberation: Confronting ‘Imperial Feminism’ and Building a Feminist Anti-War Movement,” I discuss in detail some gendered ways Iraqi women and girls disproportionately bear certain effects of the country’s economic collapse - from unemployment to the dramatic drop in female literacy.

In the U.S., poor women bear the brunt of public service cuts. In Massachusetts, for example, most Medicaid recipients, graduates of state and community colleges, welfare and subsidized childcare recipients, are women - and all these programs have faced budget slashes. Most families living in poverty are headed by single mothers.

Furthermore, imperialism helps to intensify and increase unpaid labor that is performed by women in their traditional gender roles. Childcare, healthcare, homemaking all become heavier without public sector aid - whether due to economic collapse in occupied lands, or imperialist austerity in the aggressor nation. For instance, as hospitals are destroyed or become unavailable, women in both Iraq and the U.S. disproportionately shoulder responsibility for their families’ healthcare. As schools close or childcare becomes unaffordable, women are strained with extra work watching children. Alarmingly, industrialized nations plan to impose IMF Structural Adjustment Programs on Iraq because of its sovereign debt. Feminist scholars have documented how SAPs have disproportionately harmed Third World women across the globe in terms of health, education, and overwork.

U.S. women from military families, and wives of government contractors, are saddled with the unpaid task of holding the family together until their spouse returns. As the heads of single-parent households, these women take increased responsibility for homemaking and childcare, on top of their jobs. One brother of a serviceman put it: “Soldiers may enlist, but their families are drafted.”

That the military depends on such women to figuratively “oil its machinery” by maintaining troop morale is evidenced by its creation of “support groups” for military wives, even while it simultaneously lengthens troop deployments to cope with overstretch. Rather than being dismissed as a mere service for needy women, these support groups should be seen as an attempt to strategically harness and propel women’s labor - including their performance of correct, sexually loyal roles - that the troops’ emotional functioning and lack of rebellion partly relies upon. Bluntly, the Pentagon is responding to its post-invasion recruitment shortage by drawing on reserves, increasing deployments - and laying the economic, emotional strain on women of military families. These ’support groups’ are a cheap alleviation for structural oppression and exploitation, in the larger context of imperialism’s priorities.

At the same time, our government’s distorted agenda, sharpened in this period of outright military aggression, harnesses and compounds economic sexism that pre-dates the Iraq war. Given U.S. history, patriarchy’s operation cannot be disentangled from pre-existing structural racism either. Racist incarceration which disproportionately targets black communities intensifies black women’s unpaid labor heading single households - even as women on workfare-welfare are kept out of decent jobs. Arab, South Asian, Muslim, and immigrant women are similarly strained by the detention of their partners and family members under the War on Terror.

3) Militarization intensifies the sexual commodification of women.

Feminist anthropologists such as Cynthia Enloe have documented how the U.S. military perpetuates the sexual commodification of women around military bases both in the U.S. and abroad, to manage and motivate its largely male workforce. Additionally, we must analyze collusion between foreign and indigenous patriarchies under imperialism in exacerbating women’s oppression.

Following a pattern observed across different conflict regions by feminist scholars, Iraqi women face increasing pressures to earn their subsistence from men by bartering their sexuality. This is due to a lack of other economic options under both military attack and oppressive gender relations. In Baghdad, prostitution reportedly became widespread between the fall of the Hussein administration in April 2003 and November 2003, as women disproportionately suffered growing poverty. Today, reports have surfaced of young Iraqi teens working in Syrian brothels, after being displaced from Fallujah where U.S. forces launched brutal offensives and chemical weapons attacks on civilians. Sexual violence, as well as the trafficking of Iraqi women and girls, showed horrific rises almost immediately after the invasion and continue. While initially perpetrated largely by Iraqi men, these rapes and abductions were exacerbated by the occupation force’s negligence and inability to establish security - its priorities, afterall, have been to secure the oil.

The U.S. anti-war left was in general embarrassingly unsure how to address such violence, inconveniently at the hands of Iraqis rather than U.S. forces - let alone suggest an adequate remedy which might have direct effects on the problem, besides calls for a (male-led) resistance to replace the occupiers. But an understanding of the gender dynamics typical of wartime economies would press the need to provide solidarity for Iraqi anti-occupation movements for women’s rights. The U.S. anti-war movement largely has not treated freedom from sexual violence as a human right equal to Iraqi struggles for food, water, shelter, or healthcare. Meanwhile, as the occupation persists, with growing contact between military forces and Iraqi civilians, sexual brutality by both U.S. troops and Iraqi police under occupation authority has increased.

Jennifer Fasulo is co-founder of Solidarity with Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (SOWFI), a U.S.-based group providing political support to an anti-occupation, feminist women’s group in Iraq. She reminds us of the specific historical and geopolitical context of the occupation, pointing out that the conflict has intensified the growing religious fundamentalist movement in Iraq - opposed by Iraqi feminists and socialists - including segments that systematically perpetrate violence against and harassment of women. The rise of Islamist fundamentalism throughout the Middle East is not merely indigenous, but has its roots in U.S. support, which recruited and imported Islamist militias as opposition to secular, democratic and socialist movements throughout earlier decades.

4) Militarization helps perpetuate sexual violence, domestic violence, and violence against women - both in the U.S. and Iraq.

Even though women serve as soldiers, the U.S. military is a misogynist, homophobic institution that relies on patriarchal ideologies and relations to function - with effects on larger society, as well as the countries we occupy or station bases. While the racist ideologies behind the war are regularly paid lip service by activists, we less frequently raise how this war depends on sexism. But the military and its public support are based on deeply embedded patriarchal values and practices.

The U.S. military trains men to devalue, objectify and demean traits traditionally associated with women. It molds men into a gender role of violent masculinity defined in opposition to femininity. By ‘violent masculinity’ I mean a mode of operating that glorifies violence as a solution to tension - and that is unaccountable to the feminine/civilian ‘protected’ in that the masculine/soldier ‘protectors’ are encouraged not to view these people as their equals. Feminist historian Catherine Lutz observes militarism teaches us, “we prove and regenerate ourselves through violence.”

One soldier reported his training in boot camp:
“Who are you?” “Killers!”
“What do you do?” “We kill! We kill! We kill!”

Furthermore, soldiers are purposefully trained to eroticize violence - from a heterosexual, male-aggressor perspective, even if some soldiers are gay and some are women. For example, during the first Gulf War, Air Force pilots watched pornographic movies before bombing missions to psyche themselves up. Until 1999, hardcore pornography was available at military base commissaries, which were one of its largest purchasers.

The military teaches soldiers to internalize the misogynistic role of violent masculinity, so they can function psychologically. At the 2003 Air Force Academy Prom, men were given fliers - using tax-payer dollars - which read, “You Shut the Fuck Up! We’ll Protect America. Get out of our way, you liberal pussies!” They were then treated to a play which provided instructions on how to stimulate a female’s clitoris and nipples to get her vaginal juice flowing (in case she was otherwise unwilling?).

Alarmingly but not so surprisingly, according to the Veterans Association itself, over 80 percent of recent women veterans report experiencing sexual harassment, and 30 percent rape or attempted rape, by other military personnel. Crimes of sexual violence by military personnel are shocking - and institutionally ignored. Over the course of several years, a two-year-old girl was repeatedly raped by her Air Force father, who also invited his fellow servicemen to gang rape her. Eventually, he was simply allowed to retire; today, a decade later, he receives a pension and is fighting to claim his daughter’s custody. Lawyer Dorothy Mackey of Survivors Take Action Against Abuse by Military Personnel (STAMP) reports that of the 4,300 sexual assault and abuse cases she is handling which were brought up to military and government officials, only 3 were actually prosecuted. In Mackey’s own experience as a survivor of repeated sexual assault by military personnel, her attempt to press charges was opposed by the Department of Justice as a threat to national security.

The U.S. Inspector General reported that military service is more conducive to domestic violence than any other occupation, citing the military’s authoritarianism, use of physical force in training, as well as the stress of frequent moves and separations as factors. The military’s institutional sexism and indifference to violence against women could be added! A checklist used by the military to determine if rape reports are valid lists a women’s financial problems with her partner, and “demanding” medical treatment, as factors indicating she’s lying. The Army recently offered the perk of free breast implants for servicewomen, so its surgeons could “get practice.” Meanwhile, it has a drastic shortage of rape kits in combat regions and refuses to pay for servicewomen’s abortions even in the case of rape.

A therapist who practices near a large Army Base and treats soldiers returning from Iraq reported escalating domestic violence ever since troops began coming back, and wife-killings in bases at an all-time high - covered up by the Army. She also discussed soldiers’ addictions to pornography, cultivated over their service, as a source of sexual selfishness and abuse towards their partners. Pornography trained the soldiers to use women’s bodies as masturbatory devices.

Militarism’s patriarchal roles extend into larger culture, not just ideologically in terms of how little boys broadly are taught to be soldiers - but institutionally, as well. Phoebe Jones of Global Women’s Strike and Survivors Take Action Against Abuse by Military Personnel (STAAAMP) places the Abu Ghraib scandal in the context of a prison-military complex of abuse:
It’s all connected… You have prison guards here, like Charles Grainer [implicated in the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal], who go to Iraq and abuse people there. Then you have soldiers come back from Iraq or Afghanistan getting jobs as prison guards, and they rape and abuse people. The military could stop it if they want to, but they don’t want to. They’re socializing men into doing this.
Prison torture was outsourced to U.S. companies using personnel from domestic prisons. Beyond this the prison-military complex, the impact of rape culture nurtured by the military can be traced through U.S. society further. In 1997, the number one reason for veterans to be in prison at the state, federal, or local level was for sexual assault. An exploration of the effects of militarism on socialization, and institutions from school to family, are outside the scope of this brief essay - but must be considered.

The impact of violence against women cannot be separated from racial and economic hierarchy, even though these pieces are often analyzed without reference to each other. One result of Hurricane Katrina - little responded to by the left - was the devastation of domestic violence shelters and sexual assault services. The Louisiana Coalition Against Domestic Violence describes poor women forced to live in homeless shelters, experiencing rape and physical abuse from partners they have been unable to escape, on top of the storm’s destruction. Of course FEMA did not provide alleviation. Yet rather than critiquing the government’s patriarchal failings, the left allowed right-wing reports of abounding chaos (laced with racist undertones) to fill the gap of explaining sexual abuse. Needless to say, poor and non-white women disproportionately face a lack of recourses to gendered violence. For instance, although violence against women cuts across class, women on welfare suffer especially high rates of domestic and sexual violence - a direct result of having less freedom to leave their abusers. And again, government policy is involved; welfare law, purportedly to encourage ’strong’ families, denies funds to poor women who leave their partners, requiring their economic dependency and endurance of abuse.

5) Militarization and war decrease women’s control over their reproduction.

Just months after the invasion, increased back alley abortions were reported in Baghdad as women lost access to healthcare and contraception. In the U.S., budget stringency means that policies like universal healthcare and free contraception on demand will appear to remain a distant realities. Since women, not men, get pregnant, the lack of reproductive healthcare is an issue of women’s equality - affecting women’s control of their labor, bodies, and futures.

Furthermore, a Christian right-wing takeover of the U.S. political scene has reframed debates over “morality” in terms of issues like abortion and gay rights - diverting outrage away from, say, the economic exploitation of this administration and its war policy, to the treatment of a clump of cells and who one loves. The Christian conservative movement focuses its political intervention more on directly controlling individuals’ personal behavior, than on altering the structures of society to alleviate inequality and meet human needs. In our historical context, the ideology and agenda of limiting women’s control over their reproduction is connected to U.S. imperialism - and thus has much broader implications than strictly women’s reproductive health. For one, imperialism relies on a gendered reproductive division of labor, that trains poor men to be soldiers while valorizing motherhood for women, the better to exploit their women’s paid and unpaid labor. I am unable to do a full exploration of these connections in this essay - but they demand thought and examination!

6) Militarization and conflict situations result in a restriction of public space for women - impacting their political expression.

Feminist scholars have observed the physical barriers to women’s public access in conflict situations time and again. In Iraq, due to insecurity, women are restricted from seeking healthcare, attending school and work. Such limitations have shaped the trajectory and form of women’s organizing, as well. When the political actors are men, women’s bodies and behavior risk becoming a battleground to be fought over by others - they risk marginalization in the political sphere unless they are able to actively organize around an agenda that takes into account their gendered position.

Within the U.S., the anti-war movement’s troop-centered analysis has also shaped women’s space politically, if not necessarily physically. Military mothers like Cindy Sheehan are publicly recognized for their connection to the troops - and specifically, their stance of support for rather than conflict with individual troops. An analysis of gender which problematizes the effects of violent masculinity is less welcome.

7) Occupation will not bring women’s liberation.

As an occupier with little accountability to the Iraqi people (or the U.S. public), the U.S. government is not capable of - or interested in - bringing democracy and liberation to Iraqis. At the very best, U.S. officials have merely “played two sides of the fence” with regard to women’s rights - bartering them away when convenient in order to maintain power. But at worst, three long years later, events have made it tragically clear in all its horrific consequences that the continued occupation’s primary goals have been the economic, political, and military interests of a U.S. elite - with as much non-transparency as possible for the sake of public relations. A lengthier discussion of the specific historical and geopolitical forces at work in the U.S. occupation of Iraq, bearing on Iraqi women’s positions, was the subject of a previous essay, “Occupation is Not (Women’s) Liberation: Confronting Imperial Feminism and Building a Feminist Anti-War Movement.”

Conclusion

Imperialism requires particular gender relations to function. Little boys are taught that soldiering is a rite of passage - a vehicle to manly respect. The public learns that soldiering - and now serving as security or emergency personnel - entitles a special claim to citizenship, to this country and its offerings, even if in actuality such promises do not really materialize. But that is P.R. to boost recruitment. And by valorizing the violent, masculine protector at the expense of the feminine, at the expense of women, the state and society extract women’s labor at undervalued rates, preserving a gendered division of labor at women’s expense, and reinforce male sexual entitlement. Part of the military’s appeal to (heterosexual) men, the boost to troop morale it relies on, is the male privilege it promises to offer over economically dependent, sexually available women.

The military uses the work of women, sectored into patriarchal and exploitative economic relations, to function - whether as marginalized soldiers, military wives, sex workers, or civilians.

A gender analysis - a recognition of the connections between imperialism and U.S. patriarchy - drastically widens the spectrum of people we must consider the ‘casualties’ of war, and deepens our understanding of imperialism. Not only does the war perpetuate sexist inequality and patriarchy, but also it enlists patriarchal relations - economic, sexual, and ideological - to carry out its operations. I have outlined ways women are affected by the war - both as distinct from men, and disproportionately compared to men, due to gendered workings. Righting these injustices requires special attention to gender, and is not guaranteed by merely opposing the war.

We must recognize the connections between the war in Iraq and patriarchy at home - and resist.

“Americans have thousands of media outlets to choose from. But they still have to visit a porn site to see what this war has done to the bodies of the dead and the souls of the living. One of the pictures… depicts a woman whose right leg has been torn off by a land mine… a medical worker is holding the mangled stump up to the camera. The woman’s vagina is visible.. The caption for this picture reads: ‘Nice puss - bad foot.’”
- http://www.eastbayexpress.com/Issues/2005-09-21/news/news.html, about website allowing soldiers to swap pictures of dead Iraqis for free access to pornography

“There are plenty of women in Fallujah who have testified they were raped by American soldiers… They are nearby the secondary school for girls inside Fallujah. When people came back.. they found so many girls.. totally naked and.. killed.”
- http://www.dahrjamailiraq.com/hard_news/archives/newscommentary/000251.php

IF YOU ARE INTERESTED IN ORGANIZING WITH ATTENTION TO THE CONNECTIONS BETWEEN IMPERIALISM, PATRIARCHY, AND RACISM, CONTACT ME! I am having trouble finding political comrades. LET’S MEET!

Huibin Amee Chew, is active in anti-imperialist, feminist, and immigrant rights activism in Boston. She can be reached at hachew@gmail.com.

Footnotes

1 Homefront: A Military City and the American 20th Century, by Catherine Lutz, p.46
2 This analysis presented by Cynthia Enloe during a talk in MIT in 2003. Enloe would count sex workers around military bases, and female military personnel, as other women enlisted, both formally and informally, by the military, to facilitate its operation.
3 In the current Iraq war, girls and teens displaced from U.S.-destroyed cities like Fallujah have been traced to the sex trade in Syria.
4 UNIFEM; http://www.womenwarpeace.org/iraq/iraq.htm
5 More recently, with greater contact between U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians compared to early on in the occupation, sexual violence against Iraqis perpetuated by occupying forces has increased.
6 in Homefront, by Catherine Lutz
7 Michael Rogin in “‘Make My Day!’ Spectacle as Amnesia in Imperial Politics.” Cultures of United States Imperialism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993. See also Robert Jenson in “Blow Bangs and Cluster Bombs: The Cruelty of Men and Americans,” Not For Sale: Feminists Resisting Prostitution and Pornography.
8 http://www.feministpeacenetwork.org/MVAW.htm
9 Dorothy Mackey of Survivors Take Action Against Abuse by Military Personnel, 2004 Boston Social Forum.
10 http://www.womenagainstrape.net/Latest%20News/MackeyPaper.htm
11 Dorothy Mackey, private communication, Aug. 9, 2005.
12 in “Rape Nation,” http://www.alternet.org/rights/19134/
13 http://www.feministpeacenetwork.org/MVAW.htm
14 in “Rape Nation,” http://www.alternet.org/rights/19134/
15 http://www.quakerhouse.org/costs-of-war-01.htm
16 in “Rape Nation,” http://www.alternet.org/rights/19134/
17 http://www.womenagainstrape.net/Latest%20News/MackeyPaper.htm
18 http://www.lcadv.org/
19 http://www.mincava.umn.edu/library/articles/#506, for instance, see “Poverty, Welfare, and Battered Women: What Does the Research Tell Us?” by Eleanor Lyon