The Miscellaneous Marxists Manifest@

Voices (source)

After blogging for a couple of months now, I realize there is an emerging theme of criticizing contemporary and current events throughout my posts. Two other classmates shared radical visions of the world we live in, and they contacted me to join them in writing a manifest@ together.

I finish my final semester here at St. Olaf College reading the Redstockings Manifesto of 1969 and the Combahee River Collective Statement of 1982, and collaborating with Lauren Kramer and Rachel Johnson to write our very own manifest@--a public declaration of our principles, policies, and intentions for future actions.

We are the Miscellaneous Marxists, a group of students who believe that the way capitalism manifests itself in our world is inherently oppressive and contributes to every issue that we have encountered throughout this course. We are “Miscellaneous” because we each come to this collective with our own lived experience, perspective, and passion. As a working class woman of color, I am constantly challenge systems of oppression. As a heterosexual able-bodied individual, I am very aware of my own privileges and keep an open mind to greater understanding of how my privilege is another's oppression.

This is a “Manifest@” because language reflects culture, and we want to subvert the Western inclination toward linguistic androcentrism: the mistaken belief that the male stands for the whole. When we repeat androcentric phrases, we validate androcentrism. However, the power of language can also be harnessed as a vehicle for profound social change; when we reject the lexicon of androcentrism and replace it with gender-inclusive language, we deny that ideology its power. We use the “@” symbol to replace androcentrism with gender-inclusive language; in feminist Spanish-speaking circles, people replace “a” and “o” with “@” for mixed-gender groups or people who have not self-identified as a man or woman. Our use of “@” symbolizes that anyone and everyone is welcome and necessary in our struggle.

The purpose of this manifest@ is to declare what we believe, expose the problems that feminism must confront, and propose ways of enacting change. We identify as revised radical Marxist anti-racist feminists, and we recognize that every liberation is tied up with every other liberation.

Miscellaneous Marxists’ Manifest@

1. The biggest issues facing women today are structural in nature. The oppression we experience is not only individual, but also systemic and institutional. We reject liberal feminism, which preserves oppressive patriarchal structures, simply aiming to bring women “up” to the normalized status of (a certain type of) men in society, rather than challenging hierarchy itself. We reject choice feminism, which posits that any “choice” a woman makes is a feminist choice because it refuses to acknowledge the constraints on women’s options and avoids the fact that the personal is political.

2. All systems of oppression are inextricably interconnected and cannot be treated as isolated phenomena. These systems include racism, sexism, heterosexism, ableism, ageism, classism, cis-sexism, and every other way that a group of people are privileged or disempowered because of their identity. These oppressive structures have infiltrated every facet of our lives, even the way we speak about them.

3. In the process of our liberation, we recognize, validate, and hold to be central, the voices and experiences of trans*, lesbian, bisexual, queer, genderqueer, intersex, asexual, and other marginalized groups and individuals within the feminist community. Their issues are our issues regardless of whether or not we belong to those categories ourselves.

4. We must free ourselves of the oppressive ideologies that have pervaded our cultures and our own minds. To do so, we must actively decolonize and decapitalize our minds, liberating ourselves of patterns of thought and action that perpetuate the systems we will eliminate.

Mindfulness (source)

5. Our liberation will necessitate constant intentionality. We must be continually self-reflective so that we are conscious of the implications of all we do. There must be purpose to each of our actions, and the action must match our values to the fullest extent. We consider our means to be equally as important as our ends, which involves perpetually cultivating and practicing mindfulness.

6. Education reform is essential to liberation. This begins with access. Education, including higher education, needs to be free for all and equipped to support all students. It is immoral and unacceptable to fund schools differently based on property tax revenues or student performance rates. We must equally distribute resources, including teachers, to each school to ensure that all students have at least comparable learning environments. In addition to access, we demand that the curriculum taught in the classroom and the way this curriculum is presented validates a variety of peoples and experiences, not just white male imperialist patriarchs.

7. We must demolish the prison-industrial complex and the existence of privatized prisons. The United States has the world’s highest incarceration rate. The system of mass incarceration is a system of racial control that traps poor people of color in second-class status for a lifetime. Policies that encourage racial profiling need to be eliminated because they contribute to the unjust mass incarceration of people of color, and in addition, they are not grounded in fact. Ex-felons should not have their basic rights, especially the right to vote, taken away because of their status.

8. Everyone has the right to live comfortably without having to worry about meeting their basic needs. The wealthiest U.S. households need to contribute their fair share to the benefit of the rest of the population. We must tax unearned income at the same rate as earned income and return to the taxation rates effective in 1953, in which the wealthiest portion of U.S. earners paid a top tax rate of 92%. In addition to altering taxation rates, we also must reconsider the way our tax dollars are utilized. We must employ fair redistribution practices so that the lower-income members of our society are able to live the lives they deserve.

9. Healthcare is a human right. Everyone should receive high-quality and free care, which includes not only biomedical treatment, but also preventative and overall wellness care. We unequivocally demand reproductive rights, including the right to contraception, safe, legal abortion, prenatal care, and postnatal care, regardless of age, gender, marital status, or any other factor. We also believe that the production and distribution of a male contraceptive pill is of vital importance to the liberation of women.

10. Corporate media limits the audible spectrum of voices and conversations heard by the broader populace. The mainstream media is increasingly and unacceptably implicated with economic and political elites, refusing to confront those same people who hold power. Independent media breaks down the barriers to equal representation, opening access for marginalized people to speak for and accurately represent themselves. Dominant media conglomerates must be broken up, and the number of channels and stations that are owned by corporations must be matched by those owned by independent collectives. 

Demilitarize for Peace (source)

11. As a collective committed to nonviolence, we demand that our communities and our nation abide by the same principle. We prioritize demilitarization of the United States because the military industrial complex squanders resources, destroys peoples and the planet, and maintains exploitative imperialist colonial practices. We demand to cut the military budget by at least 50% and redistribute that money to fund a federal jobs program; to close overseas bases and end the corporate natural resource-driven wars, attacks, and conflicts; and to teach non-violent conflict resolution and the value of consensus-based decision-making. 

12. We demand election reform in order to enable us to create the society that we want. We must eliminate the two-party stranglehold and the Electoral College, abolish the Commission on Presidential Debates, introduce an Election Day national holiday and extend the voting period over a weekend, prohibit corporate funding of any candidate or party, and amend the constitution to ban corporate personhood.

13. These points are just the beginning of the large-scale revolution for which we stand. We have extremely large goals, and we are conscious and proud of that fact. In order to make these changes happen, we are willing to take small steps to get there (if necessary). We will be intentionally straightforward; we will not sugar-coat our stances and experiences. We refuse to skirt around issues that need to be dealt with openly and explicitly: we are calling out the faults of our society, and we are calling on our society to change them.