Category: Uncategorized

After gains for the Right in Sunday’s local and regional contests, Spain’s prime minister Pedro Sánchez has called a snap general election. Yolanda Díaz’s left-wing Sumar project can get a good result — but only if the Left can overcome its damaging splits.

Yolanda Diaz speaking at a campaign event at the Alcazaba Cultural Center on May 21, 2023, in Merida, Spain. (Europa Press via Getty Images)

It’s been described by Spanish media as both political suicide and a stroke of tactical brilliance. Just hours after suffering heavy losses in Sunday’s local and regional polls, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez called a surprise general election for July 23.

This may seem counterintuitive. Sánchez’s ruling center-left Socialist Party (PSOE) had just lost six of the nine regional governments it controlled. Still worse were results for his junior coalition partner, the left-wing Unidas Podemos. It suffered a devastating collapse, in three regions (Madrid, the Canary Islands, and Valencia) falling short of the 5 percent threshold for representation.

Yet with the conservative Popular Party (PP) celebrating a sweeping victory, including in city halls across the former PSOE stronghold of Andalusia, Sánchez swiftly moved to upend the narrative. Rather than wait until December for the scheduled national poll, he announced surprise elections for this summer. He hopes to silence criticism within his party while also ensuring the national campaign will coincide with tricky coalition negotiations between PP and the far-right Vox in multiple regions.

Sánchez thus aims to define the snap general election as a binary choice between a potential hard-right national coalition, which would include Vox leader Santiago Abascal as interior minister, and his own brand of moderate social democracy. “He is searching for a reaction to the reaction — harnessing the fear that these results have generated among progressive voters so as to pull them out of abstention in July,” Unidas Podemos MP Txema Guijarro tells Jacobin.

But Sánchez is also seeking to reinforce PSOE’s hegemony at the head of a wider left-wing bloc — both by positioning himself as the only option for tactical voters aiming to stop the Right’s advance and pushing a fragmented radical left to club together. If his announcement wrong-footed his Unidas Podemos coalition allies, it also imposed new deadlines on a divided left that had expected to spend this summer negotiating its reorganization around labor minister Yolanda Díaz’s new unity platform Sumar. Now the various factions, both within and outside Unidas Podemos, are up against the clock, having until June 9 to register such a coalition before the electoral deadline passes.

The alternative to such unity is likely to mean further marginalization in what will be a blitzkrieg campaign. But Díaz, a lifelong member of the Spanish Communist Party and currently polling as Spain’s most popular political leader, has the potential to reverse the Left’s fortunes if she can swiftly end its internal civil war.

A Divided Left

This will not be easy. The open conflict between Díaz and the Podemos leadership over her plans to overhaul the left-wing space has been going on for more than a year and created a toxic atmosphere in the run-up to Sunday’s local elections. Indeed, such internal tensions have seen a series of routine tactical disputes over the last year turn into near-existential crises, for instance in last fall’s row over judicial appointments.

Open conflict between Yolanda Díaz and the Podemos leadership over her plans to overhaul the left-wing space has been going on for more than a year.

Given current levels of mistrust, it is easy to forget that Podemos founder Pablo Iglesias himself named Díaz as his successor as deputy prime minister in 2021, on the back of her growing prominence as labor minister. At that time, Iglesias bet that with Díaz at the helm, Podemos could remain central to the Left even after his own withdrawal from frontline politics. This partly owed to the pair’s long-standing working relationship, but also to Díaz’s lack of an organizational base of her own. Even though she is not a Podemos member, it seemed she would be dependent on it.

Yet not wanting to be a continuity “Pablista” figure (as Iglesias’s firmest supporters are called) and believing a much broader process of renewal was necessary on the Left, from her appointment as deputy premier, Díaz quickly sought greater independence. Rolling out unity platform Sumar over the last year, she looked to balance Podemos’s influence with alliances with other left-wing forces and trade unions while insisting that the existing Unidas Podemos structure was no longer fit for purpose.

As one of her senior advisors told Jacobin in January, “[Sumar] is not just about ensuring [Díaz] can exercise authority over the Left, which as an objective would be legitimate in itself for any new leader, but also stems from the need to construct a new project centered on a fresh set of ideological coordinates. [The left has] to once again be capable of widening its electoral base — as the early Podemos did in 2015.”

Sunday’s election results would seem to confirm such an analysis, again pointing to the exhaustion of Podemos’s brand of left populism, particularly within a post-pandemic atmosphere marked by deep anti-political sentiment and demobilization after a decade of intense political upheavals and ideological debates on the Left. Its campaign, which was largely subject to a media blackout, sought to generate controversy around right-wing corruption and the party’s unfair treatment in the press but never gained momentum.

But even still, the sheer scale of the losses came as a devastating blow. The alliance went from forty-seven regional MPs across all Spanish territory to just fifteen as it lost votes to a mix of alternative local left-wing platforms, the PSOE, and abstention. In the capital, Unidas Podemos was wiped out; its former ally Más Madrid, led by Íñigo Errejón, also dropped votes, but ultimately maintained its position as the main opposition force there, winning twenty-seven seats at a regional level (with 18.35 percent of the vote) and twelve city councillors.

Díaz is also far from blameless in this regard, having chosen to largely sit out the campaign. She was surely put in a difficult position by the multiple left-wing electoral lists with different identities in various regions, such as Más Madrid, Drago, and Compromís. She had hoped to incorporate all of them into Sumar before a general election, which was expected in December. Often, these alternative regional forces have indeed been more receptive than Podemos’s leadership to the idea of Sumar as an umbrella platform. Yet for Unidas Podemos, not able to count on significant participation from its highest-ranking minister clearly added to its campaign troubles.

Furthermore, having such rival lists also ensured hundreds of thousands of left-wing votes were not converted into seats as one or both left-wing factions failed to make the minimum threshold. Huesca City Hall was the most extreme example. Together, forces to the left of the Socialists won close to 18 percent of the vote. But this was divided between four lists (Unidas Podemos, a local municipalist platform, the regionalist Chunta Aragonesista, and the Más Madrid-allied Equo), none of which managed to reach the minimum 5 percent — thus leaving the Left entirely without representation.

Unity How?

Such fragmentation has accelerated in recent years as critics of Podemos’s national-level leadership turned to build alternatives at the local and regional levels. The months leading up to last Sunday’s elections had been dominated by the question of how to put them back together and above all, how to prepare a primary election process that would be acceptable for both regionally and nationally focused formations. Sumar, meaning “Bring Together” was meant to provide the banner for this process. Yet Sánchez’s shock snap election announcement has made such questions moot: there is now no time to hold primaries, and the makeup of the lists and the distribution of subsequent state funding will have to be negotiated by party leaders behind closed doors within just days.

“If someone said to me [before the election was called] that we only had ten days to reach an agreement, I would have laughed at them,” Guijarro, a close ally of Díaz, tells Jacobin. “Impossible! Diplomacy requires time and that’s precisely what we don’t have but let’s see how Yolanda handles it.”

The fifteen forces Díaz is now trying to integrate below her leadership are already jockeying for position. Compromís, based in Valencia, has been most vocal in publicly insisting that it top the list in each of the three constituencies in this region and also have its name appear on the ballot in these races. Others have sought a lower profile. Más Madrid’s Mónica García asserted that though her formation would not impose any red lines, other formations should “be conscious” of their recent election results — an apparent reference to Podemos and its potential weight within any unity deal.

Yolanda Díaz is both pointing to incremental gains as proof that the Left can govern effectively and positioning Sumar as a deeper reformist project.

Podemos’s current leader, Ione Belarra, has toned down her party’s criticisms of Díaz since the beginning of the local election campaign — and after Sunday’s results has dropped public calls for a bilateral “pact of equals” between Sumar and her formation. Iglesias has even acknowledged that “it is our turn to be humble.” Yet according to journalist Antonio Maestre, the two sides remain far from a deal, not least because of the degree of autonomy Podemos is demanding in its campaigning. A further sticking point is whether to include Podemos’s number two and current equality minister, Irene Montero. Not only has she become a hate-figure for the Right, but she has suffered serious reputational damage over the implementation of a new sexual-consent law, which has seen hundreds of convicted rapists have their sentenced reduced unintentionally.

But beyond the negotiations is the question of on what basis a still hypothetical unity candidacy can fight the elections, with Sumar’s “program for a new country” still a work in progress. Díaz has repeatedly insisted that Sumar’s focus had to be less on vanguardist ideological struggle than on a hopeful material politics that can offer the social majority a tangible alternative to discredited neoliberal formulas. In her public interventions, this has seen Díaz attempt a balancing act: both pointing to the incremental gains of the last three years as proof that the Left can govern effectively and positioning Sumar as a deeper reformist project, stretching beyond what is possible within the current administration.

At the unveiling of Sumar’s initial programmatic outline in January, Díaz insisted that in a period of “epochal change comparable to the 1940s,” a progressive decade could be won in Spain with a politics based on social protection in the face of growing uncertainty and an expansion of labor and social rights. A core pillar of this new project is the promise of a “renewed” or “democratic” laborism, building on her progressive reforms as labor minister — including a 46 percent increase in the minimum wage, legislation cracking down on precarious short-term contracts, and strengthening union rights.

The enthusiasm with which this form of substantive social democratic discourse was received as Díaz toured the country over the last year, packing out venues during her so-called “listening process,” points to its potential to mobilize in a moment dominated by the cost-of-living crisis. But without a unity agreement and order in her ranks, the campaign will most likely be swamped by internal questions and never get off the ground. This is one of the principal arguments against taking the so-called “Melénchon road” of going it alone without Podemos and trusting that the vote will cohere as the campaign heats up.

A Rightward Drift

Furthermore, all the polling suggests that separate lists in the general election would substantially reduce the Left’s overall seat tally. This would be criminal in an election whose ultimate outcome is likely to be decided by who finishes in third place behind PSOE and the PP — i.e., either Sumar or the far-right Vox. Indeed the gap between the two major parties is not as large as might be suggested by the sheer scale of PSOE’s loss of local institutional power. The party’s overall vote share was 28 percent, just 3 points below PP, while national projections based on these figures suggest that PP and Vox will fall just short of an absolute majority in a general election — not least because of the Spanish right’s weakness in Catalonia and the Basque Country.

The conservative Partido Popular’s hard-line campaign also succeeded in keeping Vox to just 7 percent of the local vote.

“All is not lost” has been PSOE’s message — but the momentum is with the Right. As political scientist Pablo Simon notes, the PP did not simply get out its vote but was also able “to expand the right bloc,” in what is a further confirmation of a rightward drift among certain elements of Spanish society. Indeed, the campaign demonstrated PP’s ability to use a reactionary, and at times authoritarian, discourse to mobilize not just long-standing right-wing constituencies but also to tap into wider shifts in public opinion across much of Spain’s interior and southern heartland. Its campaign centered on a series of manufactured controversies playing on the growing anger of more socially conservative PSOE voters toward Sánchez’s alliances with Podemos and pro-independence Basque and Catalan forces — as well as on their discomfort around feminist and trans rights.

The conservative PP’s hard-line campaign, heavily focused on accusing Sánchez of being in bed with Spain’s “internal enemies,” also succeeded in keeping Vox to just 7 percent of the local vote (though these Francisco Franco nostalgists tend to perform better in national polls). Now against such Trumpian reaction, Sánchez is reverting to a defense of democracy strategy to mobilize progressives. The Left and Yolanda Díaz must be able to offer something more — a hopeful horizon for the future that can connect with people’s material concerns around the cost-of-living crisis and offer a credible collective exit from neoliberalism.

…

The post El retorno triunfal del fascismo appeared first on Global Research.

Truth in media is a powerful instrument.

Our independence matters to us and we know it matters to you too, our readers. You fund this work — our work. 

Your contributions will ensure that we’ll be able to have the …

The post Global Research Donation Drive: Where Will Your Donations Go? appeared first on Global Research.

…

The post América del Sur con Lula, de nuevo en el mapa appeared first on Global Research.

The Second Sex is rightly celebrated as a classic work of feminist theory. But it’s often forgotten that Simone de Beauvoir saw it as a socialist text carefully anatomizing the relationship between gender and class oppression.

Simone de Beauvoir explicitly warned us against the tendency to emphasize identity-based differences over and against the inequality generated by capitalism. (Bettmann / Getty Images)

When Simone de Beauvoir died in 1986, Le Nouvel Observateur’s cover carried the headline “Women, You Owe Her Everything!” This was a male editor’s audacious revision of philosopher Élisabeth Badinter’s article “Women, You Owe Her So Much!”

It is almost impossible to imagine men ever being told that they owe one particular person everything. The cult of Simone de Beauvoir and the accreted legends surrounding her two-part 1949 essay The Second Sex have developed in the context of a profoundly sexist world.

Contrary Readings

Beauvoir always seems to be a few things all at once. She is an icon of sexual independence but also Jean-Paul Sartre’s faithful, betrayed, subservient girlfriend; a pioneering feminist but also an honorary male and enduring misogynist; a card-carrying leftist but also a lipstick-clad bourgeois; a committed anti-colonialist and supporter of Algerian independence but also the embodiment of white Parisian chic, a cultural export. And on it goes.

These patterns of reception give us a sense of how the West tries to make sense of the so-called “key” choices women make. The all-too-eager contrary reading that is waiting just around the corner — independent yet promiscuous, polyamorous yet betrayed, accomplished yet childless — serve to remind women that the choices they make are ultimately not their own.

The drastically opposing perceptions of Beauvoir are again keenly felt when it comes to recent calls to “cancel” her, given the credible allegations that she groomed and seduced her underage female secondary-school students, while the Beauvoir commentator Margaret Simons is currently making a case for Beauvoir’s own history as a repeated victim-survivor of sexual violence.

The cult of Simone de Beauvoir and the accreted legends surrounding The Second Sex have developed in the context of a profoundly sexist world.

Some assessments of Beauvoir are more judicious than others, as we shall see. But one prevalent line of criticism is particularly unjust. Irrespective of who she was, or how she lived her life, her feminist philosophy — at least as she expounded it in The Second Sex — was not exclusively concerned with, or exclusively applicable to, white bourgeois women. In fact, this popular critique reveals more about our current Anglo-American climate of opinion than it does about Beauvoir or her work.

Marriage, Maternity, and Monogamy

Women from all over the world still visit Beauvoir’s grave in Paris’s Montparnasse cemetery, leaving behind thoughtful hand-written notes of gratitude and devotion. For a French middle-class woman, born in 1908 and raised by a fiercely Catholic mother and atheist father, her rejection of marriage, maternity, and monogamy was tremendously unorthodox, and at least a little courageous.

By the mid-1950s, for many women in the West, Beauvoir represented a certain freedom of lifestyle: to travel, to pursue pleasurable sex, and to follow one’s creative and intellectual passions. And since that time, the public has maintained an unhealthy interest in her love and sex lives. Wedged awkwardly alongside her status as an icon of freedom, she was first (and best) known to the world as Sartre’s partner (and often inaccurately referred to as his “wife”).

Women were justifiably inspired by her independence as part of the Left Bank milieu, where she and Sartre collaborated and partied with prominent artists and writers. Beauvoir and Sartre lived separately, took other lovers, and kept their finances separate (though they covered for one another when required). Yet many biographers and commentators have contended that their open relationship suited only him and that his liaisons tortured her.

Certainly, there is ample evidence in Beauvoir’s autobiographies and fiction to surmise that his relationships caused her pain. However, this interpretation struggles to accommodate the fact that their arrangement enabled Beauvoir to passionately love other men, notably the American writer Nelson Algren and later the French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, with whom she lived until she died.

It is best to view the grand Beauvoir-Sartre love story — and even Beauvoir’s heterosexuality — as delicately constructed fictions. They were first and foremost interlocutors and intellectual companions and were only sexually involved for a short time. After her death, it became clear that she had buried her relationships with women in both interviews and autobiographies.

A public fascinated with consuming (and policing) women’s sexuality viewed the posthumous revelations of her “lesbian connections” as tantalizing and scandalous. Indeed, this clandestine angle was instrumental to the publicity strategy for her recently excavated novel, The Inseparables.

Philosophy and Feminism

Beauvoir’s affiliation with Sartre proved to be a significant barrier to the acknowledgement of her philosophical acumen. For many, including Beauvoir herself, he was a philosophical genius — perhaps even the greatest of his time — and she his dutiful acolyte. The fact that Beauvoir firmly insisted that she was not a philosopher, preferring to identify herself as a writer, did not help the case.

Beavoir’s affiliation with Jean-Paul Sartre proved to be a significant barrier to the acknowledgement of her philosophical acumen.

Baffling feminist commentators, Beauvoir insisted that The Second Sex, a trailblazing work of feminist literary criticism in which she critically digested hundreds of texts from a sexist European literary and philosophical canon, had only one influence: Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. Some commentators have interpreted her reflections as evidence that Beauvoir was ridden with what we would now call “internalized misogyny.”

Yet some aspects of her self-conception feel more like loaded clues left for future feminist-philosophical excavation than the average discrepancies we encounter in autobiography. Was it simply more accurate to eschew the mantle of “philosopher” when she associated that term with an enduringly sexist and “systematizing” tradition?

Typically, The Second Sex is viewed as having been instrumental in developing an American feminist consciousness. Canonical US feminist authors like Shulamith Firestone, Kate Millett, and Betty Friedan were all expected to dutifully recognize their debt to Beauvoir. Perhaps because of the text’s prominence, critics also ascribe immense responsibility to it, presenting Beauvoir not merely as the founder of the feminist second wave but also as a key source of “white feminism.”

Beauvoir’s American Critics

Since the 1970s, commentators have repeatedly found fault with The Second Sex for what they see as its exclusive preoccupation with white, Western European, middle-class, heterosexual women. In 1994, for example, Norma Alarcón described Beauvoir as being responsible for Anglo-American feminist theory’s grounding in “a highly self-conscious ruling-class white Western female subject locked in a struggle to the death with ‘Man.’”

The Anglo-American “diversity” or “intersectional” critique of The Second Sex draws in large part on Beauvoir’s analogies between women’s oppression on the one hand and forms of oppression based on race or class on the other. In the introduction to The Second Sex, she states:

If woman discovers herself as the inessential, and never turns into the essential, it is because she does not bring about this transformation herself. Proletarians say “we.” So do blacks. Positing themselves as subjects, they thus transform the bourgeois or whites into “others.” Women — except in certain abstract gatherings such as conferences — do not use “we.”

A reader could certainly be forgiven for assuming that, in comparing the position of women to that of proletarians and blacks (and elsewhere to that of Jews in the face of antisemitism), Beauvoir presumes a subject that is white, non-Jewish, and bourgeois.

For the diversity critics, this analogy functions to exclude those at the crossroads of intersecting identities — woman and proletarian, or woman and black. In fact, according to Patricia Hill Collins, The Second Sex privileges the oppression such women face, presenting it as the constitutive form of oppression. However, this interpretation, with its focus on Beauvoir’s analogical thinking, only tells us part of the story.

Commentators have found fault with The Second Sex for what they see as its exclusive preoccupation with white, Western European, middle-class, heterosexual women.

Beauvoir wrote Le Deuxième Sexe in two volumes in 1949. It then made a long journey from the original context of postwar Paris to the Anglo-American academic paradigm of exclusion, intersectionality, and diversity. It is anachronistic to evaluate a text written in the late 1940s according to standards set in the late 1980s, and anatopic to evaluate a French text by American standards. In short: of course The Second Sex is not strictly “intersectional,” and nor could we reasonably expect it to be.

However, there is a longer and more interesting way of looking at this question. Although Beauvoir and her friends enjoyed extraordinarily rich lives, they were politically engaged and by no means blind to their privileged role as public intellectuals.

Beauvoir was horrified by the French colonial war in Algeria, and she felt deeply alienated from French society. In January 1959, she wrote to Nelson Algren, her American boyfriend, that she couldn’t possibly write “in this kind of France.” Though it might sound trivial to us, writing was everything to Beauvoir. The war provoked in her a dark and profound depression.

Despite facing a significant backlash, she spoke out publicly against the violence of the French state, putting her name to the “Manifesto of the 121” demanding Algerian independence. She published testimony about the war from Algerians and French soldiers alike in Les Temps Modernes, and she wrote an article for the national daily Le Monde exposing the torture and rape of Djamila Boupaucha, a Muslim member of the Algerian Liberation Front, by French soldiers.

Gender and Class

The Second Sex is full of examples that demonstrate Beauvoir’s ability to analyze the relationship between class and gender (as Meryl Altman’s book Beauvoir in Time has also pointed out). Few sections demonstrate this more clearly than her powerhouse analysis of abortion in a chapter titled “The Mother.” For Beauvoir, abortion is a “class crime” — “there are few subjects on which bourgeois society exhibits more hypocrisy.” She notes that the same powerful men who publicly denounce it often rely on it in private.

She makes the sober point that a woman’s experience of abortion is wholly dependent on her financial and geographical circumstances. Beauvoir confronts the reader with visceral accounts of what happens when the authorities make abortion illegal, mentioning one desperate woman who perforated her womb with a knitting needle, and another who accidentally injected vinegar into her bladder. With immediate relevance to at least fourteen American states today, she points out that while wealthy women will travel to access safe abortions, poor women cannot.

Beauvoir was candid about her Marxism and her socialist commitments in lectures, interviews, and autobiographies. After reading Capital, she recalled:

The world lit up with a new light when I saw labour as the source and as it were substance of values. Nothing ever made me deny this truth, neither the criticisms which the end of Capital arouses in me, nor those I found in books, nor in the subtle doctrines of more recent economists.

While French and Anglo-American commentators alike have consistently missed it, Beauvoir herself thought that The Second Sex was a straightforwardly socialist text. In her 1963 autobiography Force of Circumstance, for example, she recalled her surprise at the negative reception that the work received from the French Communist Party, remarking that it “owed so much to Marxism and gave it such a prominent place that I expected some impartiality from them!” In 1972, she stated that while writing The Second Sex in the late 1940s, she was a “pure” socialist, supposing that “the problems of women would resolve themselves automatically in the context of socialist development.”

Beauvoir demonstrates how women workers are uniquely oppressed on the basis of their gender — inexperienced in political organization, sexually harassed and abused.

The formidable erudition of The Second Sex and the sheer length and breadth of resources with which it interacts also function to conceal or bury her engagement with Karl Marx’s works. Interestingly, Beauvoir only mentions Marx’s name and those of his works explicitly a few times. While one might assume that the obvious place to find him is in the chapter titled “The Point of View of Historical Materialism,” this chapter actually engages with the book of his collaborator Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, which appeared the year after Marx’s death — although recent research suggests that Engels drew upon Marx’s unpublished notebooks in writing it.

Beauvoir’s engagement with Marx’s works in the history chapters of The Second Sex enables her to offer a nuanced account of the experience of being both working-class and a woman. In fact, she makes use of Marx to establish the specific ways in which women were “more shamefully exploited” than workers of the opposite sex, noting that employers preferred hiring women (and especially mothers) to men because women “did better work for less pay.”

Some key passages in these chapters show that Beauvoir did not exclusively imagine the working class as male (and nor did Marx for that matter). Drawing on Marx’s work, she demonstrates how women workers are uniquely oppressed on the basis of their gender — inexperienced in political organization, sexually harassed and abused. As girls, they are socialized into docility; later, as workers, they are reluctant to assert their rights. And as working mothers, canny employers ruthlessly find new ways to exploit them.

In a 1975 interview, Beauvoir explicitly rejected the idea of a privileged white feminism that was blind to class inequality:

In truth we need to change the society itself, men as well as women, to change everything. It is very striking in Betty Friedan: what she wants is for women to have as much power as men do. Obviously, if you are truly on the left, if you reject ideas of power and hierarchy, what you want is equality. Otherwise, it won’t work at all.

The comparison between Friedan and Beauvoir is a useful point of departure. While Friedan’s Feminine Mystique laments that the American, implicitly middle-class “suburban wife” endures a “problem with no name,” Beauvoir instead names the problem. In The Second Sex, the suburban wife is bored, boring, and ruthlessly self-interested.

Clinging to Her Golden Chains

The Second Sex includes scathing passages on the bourgeois housewife that indict her as a traitor to women less fortunate than herself:

It is easier to put people in chains than to remove them if the chains bring prestige, said George Bernard Shaw. The bourgeois woman clings to the chains because she clings to her class privileges.

According to Beauvoir, the housewife enthusiastically accepts her lot, no matter how abominably dull it may be, because she has wealth and prestige on her side.

We can set Beauvoir’s historical contextualization of the bourgeois housewife alongside the context-free appearance of a housewife in Friedan’s Mystique:

Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night — she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question — “Is this all?”

Beauvoir admonishes the bourgeois housewife for being in solidarity with her husband instead of with other women — especially working-class women.

Distinguishing between doing housework and being a housewife, Beauvoir points out that for bourgeois housewives, housework often only entails administering tasks for others to complete. Contrasting the peasant housewife’s plight with that of a more prosperous woman, she notes that middle-class women writers might lovingly describe “freshly ironed linens” and “the whitening agents of soapy water, of white sheets, of shining copper,” yet a poor woman’s shack has no freshly ironed linen (or linen, or iron). Only those with the requisite material advantages could possibly have a sense of pride in their home or enjoy housework.

Beauvoir admonishes the bourgeois housewife for being in solidarity with her husband instead of with other women — especially working-class women:

She believes that women’s liberation would weaken bourgeois society; liberated from the male, she would be condemned to work; while she might regret having her rights to private property abolished; she feels no solidarity with working-class women: she feels closer to her husband than to a woman textile worker. She makes his interests her own.

Echoing her argument in the introduction to the Second Sex’s first volume that bourgeois women “are in solidarity with white men and not with black women,” she argues that the housewife is incapable of solidarity with other women because she has her own interests — the material advantages of her class, her husband’s wealth — at heart. Were the housewife to develop solidarity with working-class women, it would compromise her ability to protect her husband’s interests.

“No Place for the Other”

One reason commentators have overlooked Marx’s presence in The Second Sex and Beauvoir’s wider understanding of class is that our current Anglo-American climate of opinion does not consider all forms of exclusion to be of equal importance. The diversity critique puts the emphasis on race-based exclusion as the key lacuna of The Second Sex. While it is obviously extremely important to focus on the problem of race in Beauvoir’s work, it should not be our sole concern.

Through her appropriation of Marx, Beauvoir explicitly warned us against the tendency to emphasize identity-based differences over and against the inequality generated by capitalism. She notes that a key outcome of workers coming together to unionize is to make the gender differences between them feel less compelling:

While employers warmly welcomed women because of the low wages they accepted, this provoked resistance on the part of the male workers. Between the cause of the proletariat and that of women there was no such direct solidarity as [August] Bebel and Engels claimed. . . . It is understandable that male workers at first viewed this cheap competition as an alarming threat and became hostile. It is only when women were integrated into unions that they could defend their own interests and cease endangering those of the working class as a whole.

In Beauvoir’s account, although the women were working under deplorable and exploitative conditions, they neither saw themselves as working class nor were perceived as such by their male coworkers until they joined their union. The act of unionizing promoted a “deeper consciousness” of the shared situation of oppression among the workers:

The problem was similar to that of the black labour force in the United States. The most oppressed minorities in a society are readily used by the oppressors as a weapon against the class they belong to; thus they at first become enemies, and a deeper consciousness of the situation is necessary so that blacks and whites, women and male workers, form coalitions rather than opposition.

According to Beauvoir, if the workers were to become conscious that they all share this experience of exploitation, they could form a coalition between “blacks and whites, women and male workers” based on fellowship and solidarity. The coalition would be neither a black movement nor a women’s one but an all-inclusive workers’ movement. While the capitalist class strategically emphasized the perception of difference between the groups, political collaboration in pursuit of equality could attenuate that perception. In other words, recognition of their shared experience as exploited workers was both a precondition and an achievement of the desired coalition.

Beauvoir explicitly warned us against the tendency to emphasize identity-based differences over and against the inequality generated by capitalism.

In the “Myths” section of The Second Sex, Beauvoir includes the following comment:

Socialist ideologies, which call for the assimilation of all human beings, reject the notion that any human category be object or idol, now and for the future: in the authentically democratic society that Marx heralded, there is no place for the Other.

While we can justifiably criticize Beauvoir for neglecting the experience of black women in The Second Sex, we must not overlook her interest in the plight of working-class women. As early as 1949, Beauvoir identified our tendency to get bogged down in the politics of identity and forget about class inequality. Importantly, she stressed that the inclination to emphasize gender and racial difference over and against — and to the point of obscuring — class inequality was a central ruling-class tactic. On my reading, at least, Beauvoir’s feminist-socialist analysis has an enduring relevance for our time.

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.

To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.

Click the share button above to email/forward this article …

The post “DNA Contamination” in Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine Vials appeared first on Global Research.

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.

To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.

Click the share button above to email/forward this article …

The post Weaponizing Anti-Semitism, Bringing Down Corbyn appeared first on Global Research.

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.

To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.

Click the share button above to email/forward this article …

The post Experts Urge Action to Mitigate ‘Risk of Extinction From AI’ appeared first on Global Research.

The Tomb is the burial place of the Biblical patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and their wives, and is one of Israel’s most visited tourist sites.

By Pesach Benson, TPS

After 30 years of legal and political battles, Israel will inaugurate an elevator to improve handicap accessibility at Hebron’s Tomb of the Patriarchs on June 8. Invitations were sent by the Ministry of Defense’s Civil Administration on Wednesday.

The Tomb of the Patriarchs is the burial place of the Biblical patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and their wives, and is one of Israel’s most visited tourist sites.

The $1.6 million project includes a sloped path linking the parking area to the tomb, an elevator and an enclosed footbridge connecting the elevator to the entrance of the holy site.

Until now, visitors had to go up “around 30 steps” between the street and the entrance to the Tomb. After entering the building, visitors had to climb another 60 steps to reach the prayer area, Elimelech Karzen, one of the managers of the tomb, told the Tazpit Press Service.

“We have people who come in wheelchairs, people who can’t walk, pregnant women, old people that want to visit Ma’arat HaMachpeila,” Karzen said, using the Hebrew name for the holy site.

“Even regular people who are tired. They don’t want to climb 60 or 100 stairs. People need elevators. It’s 2023. Each time to go up and down, it’s very difficult,” he said.

Karzen noted that before the Coronavirus pandemic, the holy site had 1.5 million visitors a year. Visitors are returning in increasing numbers, making the need for the elevator more acute.

Efforts to build the elevator were mired in legal petitions filed by Palestinians, who claimed that the elevator damaged the site’s archaeological and architectural significance, and that Israel illegally expropriated land for the initiative. A High Court of Justice ruling in November 2021 cleared away the last legal hurdles.

For security reasons, the tomb was divided into Jewish and Muslim areas. A rotation system allows Jews and Muslims to occasionally visit each other’s side.

Asked about accessibility on the Muslim side, Karzen told TPS that the Palestinians rejected Israeli offers to build a second elevator on the Muslim side.

“For 30 years, we’ve been trying to get this and the Muslims didn’t agree, even when we offered to build one on their side,” Karzen said. He added that there are fewer steps on the Muslim side.

Karzen rejected criticism that the elevator damaged the tomb’s character, stressing that the elevator is outside the building.

“We didn’t touch anything old,” Karzen said. “They only took a few blocks off a wall that was built by the Jordanians in the 1950s or 60s. But we were careful not to touch anything archaeologically important.”

As for the elevator and footbridge’s aesthetics, Karzen acknowledged, “The shape might not be the nicest thing in the world, but it’s okay because so many people will now be able to come. That’s a price we can pay.”

The current structure around the tomb was built 2,000 years ago by King Herod the Great. Byzantine and Crusader conquerors turned it into a church. During the Mamluke conquest, the site was converted into a mosque and Jews were banned from going past the seventh step of a staircase outside the building.

‘There are 89 steps there’

Steve Bloomberg, a long-time advocate for handicap accessibility lauded the elevator’s completion.

“I can go and pray at Machpeila now,” Bloomberg told TPS. He was left paralyzed from the waist down in a Palestinian drive-by terror shooting in August 2001 in Samaria. The attack killed his wife and also paralyzed his daughter.

“I went there quite a few times before my injury. Its a very important, central place for the Jewish and Muslim faiths,” he told TPS. “There are 89 steps there, it’s impossible to visit in a wheelchair. You need four people to carry you up the steps. That’s not very safe, it’s not very comfortable and not very practical.”

Bloomberg, an optical engineer, is also a one-man activist, who contacts local councils and other authorities whenever he encounters or hears about problems of accessibility.

He insists the need for the elevator in Hebron is obvious.

“According to the numbers, 1.5 million people visit the Cave of Machpeila every year. If you think about it, what percentage of them are in wheelchairs or are old and just can’t get up the steps? It’s a fight for people who are disabled and can’t get up so many steps, people with baby carriages and anybody like that,” Bloomberg said.

He noted that accessibility problems extend beyond  ancient holy sites to more modern buildings.

“I recently went to a hall for a ceremony for injured terror victims and injured soldiers. There were no accessible toilets. It was unbelievable,” he said.

The post ‘I can go and pray now’: Israel to inaugurate elevator at Hebron’s Tomb of the Patriarchs appeared first on World Israel News.