Chapter 08 - Rebellions of the Red Decade

Section Notes¶

Defining the Red Decade¶

• Late 1960s through early 70s = Red Decade

  • Toppled Jim Crow

  • Black power orgs, riots, militantism, legislative campaigns

  • Next phase: fighting urban poverty, exclusion from workers’ movement benefits, state violence (policing and incarceration)

  • Rebellions co-opted or defeated by 1974

Sex Radicals¶

• Gay liberation groups grew rapidly through the west

• Marginalization and militancy of trans people

• Experiments: celibacy, free love, exclusive homosexuality, group living, open relationships, banning monogamy

• Renewed call to abolish the family

Radical Feminists¶

• Radical feminists identified family as primary instrument of gender socialization, patriarchal tyranny, gendered violence

• Sought wholesale destruction of family

• Identified terrors of the family

• Vague in class basis of the family

• Shulamith Firestone (& Sophie Lewis’ analysis)

• Third world women’s alliance called for extended, communal family structures based on gender equality

• Group living arrangements

  • Informal mutual aid shelters for trans women of color

  • Highly rigorous cadre-based group homes

  • Rural hippie communes

Black Women Radicals¶

• 1930s mass migration to the North

  • Entered waged blue collar labor force

  • Shut out of suburbs, white collar labor

• Mass uprisings in mid-late 1960s

• Moynihan report ***

  • Blamed social dysfunction on Black matriarchy

• Francis Beale - Double Jeopardy ***

• National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO)

  • Fought against paternalistic programs

  • Postwar welfare programs intended as supplements to full employment

  • NWRO wanted to push welfare system into crisis and trigger massive restructuring

Wages for Housework¶

• Mariarosa Dalla Costa - Women and the Subversion of the Community***

  • Groundwork for social reproduction theory

  • Struggle against home, but not towards wage labor

• Silvia Federici

  • Wages for housework as means to later reject some or all of housework

• Wages for housework as means of exposing underlying dynamic of unwaged household labor

Limits and Contradictions of Gender Rebellion¶

• Radical feminist sex-class analysis misunderstands place of family under capitalism

  • Feudalism -> direct domination and interlocking of state, economy, and family

  • Capitalism severed direct bonds

    • public/private separation

  • Women’s oppression under capitalism has difference flavors in family, market, and state

    • Racial differences, trans identity not adequately accommodated in radfem theory

  • Gay liberation: free sex not path to liberation

    • Can have free sex under neoliberalism, with logics of domination

  • Theorizing family abolition as voluntary

    • Couldn’t imagine its generalization

  • How to achieve collective communist social reproduction beyond the factory?

Quotes¶

“The Red Decade was a unique conjuncture in the history of the workers’ movement. Thos previously excluded from the benefits of the workers’ movement sought to claim its promises for their own: Black Americans demanded access to employment, unions, and welfare benefits; women also fought their way into the labor movement and socialist organizations; queers demanded to be counted as allies in the revolution. The Red Decade was also a radical critique and effort to go beyond the limits of the workers’ movement. Rebellions of the period pursued a liberatory politics that also refused the drudgery of work, the racial discipline by welfare departments, the secual conservatism of the housewife family form, or the stagnant bureaucratization of socialist states. Many radicals rejected altogether the basic coordinates of the workers’ movement, seeing in union bureaucracies and socialist state the contuation of oppressive alienation. Yet in important ways, these struggles largely remained within the logical of the workers’ movement, unable to forge an entirely novel revolutionary horizon.” (pp. 127-128)