“What, Who, and How?” Session Two. Edited Transcript – 25 October 2026

More information about this series of discussions here.

Table of Contents

Introduction

DM: All right, I’ll try to give a very brief intro. My understanding of these four sessions, called “What, Who and How”, is that we are going to talk about: what needs to be done, who shall do it, and how it is to be done. That’s the idea of the title, in case that wasn’t clear. These four discussions are meant to link the text we wrote to more practical political and strategic questions – a little step beyond writing a text where you write down what you think is right. I’m not going to recap the discussion last time – I’m not prepared for that anyway. In this session we’ll make an attempt to cover a few different topics that were broached in Left Renewal in an Age of Waiting. We’ll start with this micro- and macropolitics topic: what it’s supposed to mean and why it’s important. There are five segments of around twenty minutes each. The next one would be gender and sexuality, then “race”, ethnicity and nation, then coloniality and imperiality – or colonialism and imperialism – and then a conclusion of some sort. That’s just a way of orienting us.

Micro- and macropolitics

DM: Macropolitics just means the big politics, relating to global or society-wide structures. Some people also use the idea of a medium level. Micropolitics is what happens in small groups – families, smaller peer groups, a classroom, a hospital ward – and politics in the sense of power relations, of how human relations are organised in that context.

Taking affective investments in various forms of domination produced and reproduced at the micro-political level seriously means we cannot only focus on removing macro-structures of domination and exploitation. Radical politics must critique the depoliticisation of the “private”, address the structures of small groups and households, and make proposals for the egalitarian transformation of all human relations. It must give clear answers to basic ethical questions of freedom, equality, individuality and community: how to live a good life, how to treat other humans, other animals and the world at large. It must address issues of human frailty, our capacity to change, justice, forgiveness and reparation.

That’s from something I was writing the other day.

SRM: I don’t know, it might be too narrow, but the first place I always go with this question is the question of what is internal to the left, organisationally. How do these politics – micropolitics in this terminology – or individual conceptions of self or subjectivity, or frameworks of interpersonal interaction, affect organising and organisations? That goes beyond just how left organisations structure themselves – in the States it’s pretty much your post-Trotskyist groups and your anarchist collectives. But even within those, I think there are a lot of unexamined questions about how people within these groups should relate to each other. And I think the lack of theorisation, or of practical implementation, is destructive to people who try to organise explicitly or even implicitly left-wing political organisations in the States. There are other factors, but that’s where I always come to the question from first. So that’s my frame of reference.

DM: I have one more thing to say about this macro–micro question. I think that at some point, at least in the West, in the 1960s and 70s, there were people in the New Left, or coming out of the New Left, who were really turned off by the old left and its disregard of the affective and psychological components. A few of them went off and started what later became a lot of alternative culture, lifestyle politics, and spiritual communities. Of course, people have always gone off to live in communes in the countryside; that’s not a sixties phenomenon. I’m just saying there was a specific discourse: the old left has not paid enough attention to micropolitics, and we’re going to fix that.

When I came of age politically, I was seeing these people when they were already a bit older, and seeing a lot of depoliticisation – a retreat into the personal, where this focus on micropolitics had become a depoliticisation. And I was aware of a lot of critique, mostly Marxist but also anarchist, that said: you cannot change the system one jam-making, one tree-planting, or one love relationship at a time; you have to address the big structures, otherwise you’re fucked. That was the situation as I saw it (and still see it): if we don’t change the big structures, we’re doomed, and if we don’t change the micro structures, we’re also doomed. So where do you start? And how do you sustain macro-political and micro-political activity, or emancipation, simultaneously? I have no answer.

SRM: At least in the 2020s US, this gets broken down into two caricatured camps, both of which seem true. You have the hardcore “everyone needs to shut up and listen to the central committee” camp, and the “we’re not going to have any rules at all” camp, circling this endless debate. Famously there’s – oh God, what’s the writer – it’s very short, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness” [Jo Freeman], that famous short essay. It’s not really that long, but people still constantly fight over this, at least in my experience.

DM: But now you’re linking this to a structure/non-structure debate. How are micro- and macropolitics and the structure/non-structure debate related? That’s not the same, right?

SRM: Yes, I was trying to tie them together. I think they do tie together, because a lot of people take that debate to be essentially not a strategic or tactical debate but a relational one. It’s really a debate over how people in a political movement should relate to each other. What recourse is valid if you feel that someone has, in some way, done something wrong? What do other people within the movement owe you, and what do you owe them?

In my experience, most of those structure/non-structure debates ultimately revolve, in practice, around recourse when someone was sexist or racist – or someone feels someone was sexist or racist – or someone abuses their authority over other people. If we agree on leadership, what do people personally owe to leadership versus what does leadership personally owe to other people? It becomes relational rather than strategic. So I think they’re one and the same, at least in my experience. It’s hard to get away from it: the strategic debate always just becomes the interpersonal debate, where I am.

CA: What would be the no-structure side of this opposition? I haven’t quite understood the terminology yet.

SRM: There are a few versions. The ridiculous version would be that there are just no rules at all and we consensus everything – which can usually only last up to about five people. In more practical terms, it tends to be an attempt to make consensus-led committees that are all autonomous from each other and that at some point intersect in some way. If we’re getting really technical, there are different federation models that people propose for organisations: a bunch of smaller organisations that each send a representative to a central delegation and have to reach consensus – usually a consensus model, in practical terms, is the attempt.

Again, this might just be my experience, but I think it’s very difficult to get away from people’s sense of: what if someone is perceived to have done something that hurts someone else? What is the way to resolve this? What do humans owe each other in a group? And it’s always a question of whether we should delegate to some outside party, whether the two people should fight it out between themselves, whether the whole group should have a six-hour debate about it. How do you resolve interpersonal issues? To me, that’s where they come together, because once you’re down to that personal level, what you answer about how people resolve disputes one-to-one is going to inform how you start to build an organisational structure. I don’t know if that’s valid.

CA: It makes sense; I’m just not sure if it works. The feminist movement has tried models of that, and one danger is, of course, that as soon as you have no structures, it becomes incredibly non-transparent. Then all sorts of assertions of power happen in ways that can’t even be thematised or reflected, because you don’t have any transparent structure where you can say, “okay, we all vote on this, and now we have five against three, and that’s how it’s settled.” But that’s just an association; it doesn’t really get us anywhere.

I was also wondering – one association I had with what DM said is that what counts as micro and macro also depends on how you analyse the social whole, what determines it, and whether politics is actually what you’re after. I’m saying that because I remember the times when the “New Marx Reading” (Neue Marx-Lektüre) was very prominent in Germany, along with the critique of the value form and all of that. There was then also a critique of traditional conceptions of politics and of what it means to overthrow capitalist society, because you move away from the idea that it’s all about state power. You move towards an analysis of what actually structures capitalism, which is, in a way, the very form of social mediation. So we all keep reproducing what makes capitalism tick every day, in every kind of interaction and exchange. And then the question of how that can actually be changed is different, because it’s no longer simply about capturing the state. A concept of revolution of “where are the arms going to be distributed, and then we all go and seize the capital city” just doesn’t capture what a radical change would be about.

People started discussing whether one way of approaching the question wouldn’t need to be to think about how human interaction and exchange of some sort – not only monetary exchange, but also Stoffwechsel mit der Natur, whatever that would be in English, the metabolism with nature – basically, how production and reproduction can be organised in different ways. People started experimenting with micro forms of how to organise a more complex unit, where not everybody is just doing subsistence agriculture, in non-value-form ways. For me, that was an interesting way of thematising the relationship of micro and macro practices or structures, or on which level change has to happen. But I don’t think any of that really went anywhere.

JTP: Picking up on DM’s earlier point about rural communes, and on what CA has just said about alternative forms of social organisation, I see something similar in the Catalan Countries, where I live, many people on the left have been drawn — and still are — to individual solutions, community-based alternatives, the idealisation of rural life, and ecovillage projects as alternatives to capitalism. Helen Hester’s work really helped me develop my own position on this debate between macropolitics and micropolitics. Are you familiar with her work?

DM: Helen Hester?

JTP: Helen Hester is associated with xenofeminism and with a broader intellectual current in the English-speaking world that includes accelerationism and post-capitalist thought. Thinkers like Nick Srnicek, Aaron Bastani, and Alex Williams are part of this broader conversation and, in different ways, could be seen as carrying forward Mark Fisher’s intellectual legacy. And Helen Hester developed a really interesting idea: technological change can transform micropolitics. For example, if we approach the question from this theoretical perspective, one possible strategy for challenging the patriarchal system would be to dismantle the material foundations of reproduction in our societies. In this context, ectogenesis technology — artificial wombs — could help transform the material conditions of reproduction and, potentially, contribute to the development of a post-patriarchal society. Are you familiar with the idea of ectogenesis?

DM: Ectogenesis – the growth of an organism in an artificial environment.

JTP: Sophie Lewis also explored related questions about reproductive labour, gestation, and the transformation of the family in her book Full Surrogacy Now, you know? From my point of view, it’s extremely important for the left to understand the significance of technological development for any post-capitalist emancipatory project. Technological change can transform the relationship between micro- and macro-social structures, blurring the boundaries between them and opening up new possibilities for social emancipation. And yet, within the alternative left, at least where I live, I would say that 90% of my left-wing comrades hate technology. There’s almost a consensus that technology is inherently bad. People associate it with the fact that Elon Musk is a fascist, and from there, actions like throwing your smartphone in the bin are presented as revolutionary. But I think this leads us towards conservative forms of political praxis that don’t challenge capitalism in the slightest. On the contrary, if anything, they actually contribute to prolonging its existence. From my perspective, it’s absolutely essential to understand the emancipatory potential of technology to transform patriarchy, speciesism, racism, classism, and all the other social structures of segregation and domination.

DM: I wanted to go back to the parallel that SRM drew. I’m not denying that there’s some linkage [between the issue of micro- and macropolitics and the issue of structure in political organisation], but I wanted to think about it more in terms of what our political goals are. And I take on board what you’re saying, JTP, about the importance of technological means, or technological change, in what is possible. I still think anarcho-communism would have been a good idea in, say, what was the Middle Ages in Europe. It would just have meant that we’d all be doing a lot of very hard agricultural labour, but at least we wouldn’t have masters, and we’d all be doing the same labour, and I think it would still have been worthwhile. Of course, today it’s much easier, because we don’t have to do so much work; we can have feminist anarcho-communism without breaking our backs.

What I really only wanted to say is that for me, this micro–macro thing is a question of what our demands are and what our theory of social change is. In terms of demands, I think it’s wrong that leftists – anarchists, Marxists – accept that the family has always been there and is going to be there, and that it’s just not a topic. I think it should be a central topic: the democratisation of households and – we can call it the transformation of the family, if the word abolition is too scary – radical transformation, how about that? I think that should be a central point.

In terms of what that means for politics: conservative politics – especially religious conservative politics – is very much focused on carving out a legal space where repressive household arrangements are protected. Family issues were and are often regarded as internal affairs of discrete communities, so that each subgroup can keep their women and children under control as they please. Any interference in these matters from society at large or the state, in the name of less particularistic values, national law, etc – “no, you cannot beat your children, because that’s illegal in this country” – is resented extremely by religious conservatives the world over, whether they’re Christian, Islamic, Jewish, Buddhist or Hindu. They’re all the same in that they really like their authoritarian education of children and disciplining of wayward women. Anyway.

As for why leftists are so hesitant to go there, it’s because people have such strong feelings, such strong attachments. These are just the two things that I think we, leftists, need to have something to offer against: we need to offer something that rivals the family and rivals religion. We have to be more convincing than [conservative] religion, and we have to offer a form of community that is more stable and at the same time more free than a [traditional] family. That’s a very tall order. I very much doubt we will be able to do that. But I think if not, we have no chance.

“Race”, nation and the state

SRM: My first thought is that it would be interesting to dissect where individuals, or the group, think the left – the broad left, or sections of it – gets these micropolitics wrong, and how that changes by locality. In my experience of the left here [in the US], on the broadest level and regardless of tendency, everyone’s like, “sure, get rid of the family, all this gender stuff, blah blah blah.” Most people on the left here are under 40. But it’s very vague; there’s not a lot of super-intense engagement with it.

And there are ways in which… for example, in the US, “race” is our endless preoccupation. Everyone in the US is hyperaware, hypersensitive, and intuitively has a very, very intricate racial categorisation system. I think it’s very hard for people to interrogate what “race” is and how we tend to think about it on the micro-political level. It’s kind of taken for granted that “race” is a thing, even though no one can really define it. Most people would say it’s not a biological reality, but at the same time we still tend to reify it. It still becomes a political object that’s really important to Americans, and to Americans on the left. People talk about it as though we do want to get rid of it, and yet if we ask people in more specific terms, it kind of…

DM: Are you saying that US leftists cannot imagine a world without “race”, even though they’re supposedly anti-racist?

SRM: In practical terms, it’s hard for us to imagine a world without “race”. I’m trying to think of good examples of where people on the left say, “we don’t want nations, we don’t want ‘races’” – but with Israel/Palestine, for instance, it’s very easy for people on the US left to project a specific kind of pro-Palestinian position that presupposes one nation. For US people, that is kind of a racialised concept of Palestinian nationhood triumphing over a different, bad, racialised nation of Israeli Jews. Regardless of what they say at the highest level, of socialist utopia, the practical tools people have to imagine political conflict are basically racialised nations in a kind of zero-sum struggle with each other, where one has to dominate the other. That’s the only way to imagine it, based on the actual theoretical tools people have. Does that make sense?

DM: Earlier, CA, you said something about capturing the state. I guess there’s a certain kind of left that dreams about capturing the state, and there’s another kind of left that dreams about abolishing the state. From this micropolitics perspective, I would say both are missing something. I have evidence that in both the abolish-the-state and the capture-the-state left there’s this idea that once that big oppression is gone – once capitalism is gone, or we have abolished the state – we’re good. And I would say, well, no, we’re absolutely not good. We have speciesism, we have sexism, we have this stuff going on between children and adults, which is actually fundamentally producing the kind of authoritarianism that is necessary to have the police and the army that keep the state going, and to socialise people who can compete in a way that makes capitalism run, if you understand what I’m saying.

So I think it’s really important to get away from this image that we have to take away this big roof, or this big boot of oppression, and then the good human nature is just going to pop up and flourish all on its own. That was point one.

DM: For Stalinists, there’s not such a big problem, because they want to keep most states. I don’t know exactly how they… they have Stalin’s stupid definition of the nation: the nation needs a territory, a language… Other Marxist-Leninists might have a different idea, of taking over states and turning them into workers’ states, whereas anarchists obviously want to get rid of them all.

But even though BG and I are much more on the “let’s get rid of the state” side of the spectrum, I think we’re also both believers in that there is going to be a transitional phase. There is not going to be some spontaneous insurrection of people who suddenly have perfect revolutionary consciousness and have the capacity to cooperate in a horizontal fashion, and from one year to the next we have a liberated society. That’s ridiculous. It’s going to take generations of transition. And for part of this transition, if there is ever going to be one at all, we’re probably going to have states, with armies and police, or post-police forces, popular militias, or something armed that’s not an army but that is able to organise defence against another state. I feel there’s a dearth of imagination and theorising about this. What could these transitional states, which would still be partially capitalist states, look like, and how would internal repression and external defence work?

I cannot imagine any kind of really radical social change where you wouldn’t have a bunch of people, particularly leaders, who have been politically and/or militarily defeated but can’t countenance losing their privileges and who would have to be put into prison if you want to prevent them from organising a coup, overthrowing the new arrangements by any means they deem necessary and reversing everything. So, while I am very sympathetic to prison abolition in the medium term, you can’t completely abolish prison from one day to the next, either.

So in this transitional phase – and also in the present, in the present of nation-states and competing nation-states – what kinds of states are worse, which ones do you support more, which ones do you want to change, how and in what direction? That’s something I would like to talk about, if that’s of interest.

JTP: DM, I have two questions about what you’ve just said, particularly concerning the transitional state and the need to prevent the ruling elites from defending their privileges. My first question concerns the development of robotics and artificial intelligence, which I think could fundamentally transform the relationship between capital and labour. In this sense, the proletariat is moving towards the end of work. Do you see what I mean? For example, in Valencia, at the Ford car factory, thousands of employment contracts have been terminated. So my reflection is this: if capitalism is a system in which the bourgeoisie, as the owners of the means of production, employs the labour of the proletariat, then what happens when machines surpass human productive capacities? Wouldn’t this make the wage-labour relationship increasingly obsolete and, in doing so, undermine one of the fundamental foundations of capitalism as a mode of production? And you mentioned that the elites protect their privileges. I have some doubts about that. Protecting privileges makes sense under conditions of scarcity. But would it still make sense for someone to protect their exclusive access to something that is already universally abundant, in a situation of generalised abundance or post-scarcity?

JTP: The violence exercised by the bourgeoisie in defence of private property is essentially violence against the poor, and it only makes sense in a society characterised by scarcity. In a post-scarcity society — and, from my point of view, we are getting close to having the material conditions for one — capitalism as a mode of production would come to an end through the development of the means of production. Marx, in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, the Communist Manifesto, and the Grundrisse, explained that the development of the productive forces is the necessary path towards what he understood as communism. For this reason, from my point of view, the debate about seizing state power is ultimately a sterile one. I mean, if we take seriously Marx’s emphasis on the historical development of the productive forces, I wonder whether making the conquest of state power our central political objective might actually become an obstacle to emancipation, particularly if it leads to restricting the development of those productive forces. In that case, wouldn’t we simply be delaying the emergence of the material conditions necessary for post-capitalism and post-scarcity? So, from this perspective, the fundamental question is not so much who controls the state, but how we can develop the productive forces to the point where the material foundations of capitalism itself become obsolete.

JTP: At the same time, I understand your argument about the need for a transitional period, although I still have some doubts. I’ve been thinking about the question of seizing state power for quite some time. But what exactly is the objective? For example, think about Cuba, the Soviet Union, or North Korea. I travelled to North Korea five years ago, and I found it to be a surreal society. Really surreal. These “socialist” projects have attempted to redistribute wealth, but many of them have struggled to sustain the kind of economic development that could overcome scarcity. And I think this helps explain some of the tendencies towards authoritarianism and stagnation that we have seen in these models. Do you see what I mean? And this question also invites us to reflect on the Chinese model. China has been able to develop the productive forces, but at the same time, some theorists have described the Chinese state as proto-fascist, because of its authoritarianism, imperialism, and so on. And that’s precisely the issue I’m trying to raise. Do you see what I mean?

DM: Not sure. I don’t understand why you said that the question of state power is sterile, because I don’t think the state can only be explained as some sort of servant of capitalism. The state existed before capitalism, and it is not only capitalist. A capitalist state is of course capitalist, but it also has its own state logic. Also, I’m not quite happy with simply calling the Soviet Union of the 1940s or 50s capitalist [although it was of course not in any meaningful way “socialist”, either]. It was capitalist to the degree that it was integrated into the world market, had money, and was forced to be, indirectly, capitalist. But it didn’t function according to a capitalist logic internally. Something like that. China today, on the other hand, is fully capitalist, I would say.

I think you can capture parts of the state. Usually left or social-democratic parties get the “soft parts”; it’s rare that social-democratic parties get defence, foreign policy and economics right away [for example when they first join a coalition government]. But I do think it makes sense to try. I don’t think it’s a sufficient strategy [for more radical leftists] to say we’re just going to have these maximalist demands, build dual power, stay out of electoral politics and expect the world to change overnight at some point.

I think there might one day be a situation where emancipatory movements have some momentum worldwide, but we have capitalist states, and we’ll be in the situation of having to make our capitalist states less dangerous, less damaging to the environment, more redistributive and so on, as one step towards, a precondition for, more radical change… You know what I’m saying. So I do think the question of the state is very, very important. I don’t understand why you’re saying it’s a sterile question.

DM: I can read a short passage that I wrote earlier on this topic, the relation to the state.

Sorry, this is very unfinished and not very good, but this is what I keep thinking about these days. I’m talking not in terms of our utopia or our final goal here, but in terms of politics today.

Wanting to get rid of state-ness does not mean treating all states as equally illegitimate. While one way of defining imperialism is simply what states do when they have the power to do it, there are more expansionist, aggressive and militarist states, and we oppose those more than ones that are currently less expansionist and aggressive. While we see liberal democracy as a very insufficient form of democracy, we must still work for the transformation of totalitarian and authoritarian states into liberal democratic states, as one stage in a struggle for true democracy, and recognise that states where the ruling class makes compromises with oppressed and exploited majorities are better than ones where there are no compromises. While we oppose all forms of nation-statehood, multiethnic, multinational and multicultural states are better than ethnonational states, and confronted with old [continental] empires that have tried to transform themselves into nation-states, such as Russia, China, and, in a sense, India, we have to work for the rights of national and ethnic minorities and cultural pluralism. When confronted with ethnically homogeneous states, we have to support the forces that would open these societies to immigration and to a future of ethnic and cultural pluralism.

I can explain the India point if that sounds strange. By ethnically homogeneous states I was thinking of Poland or Hungary, and there I would argue for open borders. I mean, this is all very banal, right.

So all this is a plea: even though our long-term goal should be the abolition of nation-states, and of states tout court, while we’re dealing with states I think it’s a political mistake – a very bad mistake – to say, “oh, the US and Russia are the same,” or “Sweden or Hungary, what’s the difference? For the very poor, the undocumented, it makes no difference; there is no democracy for them. Liberal democracy is just trappings and decoration.” I think that’s total bullshit, and it’s very widespread on the far left.

Interlocking systems and social reproduction

DM: CA, we sort of started this gender and sexuality, or feminism, discussion last time. At the discussion in September, we started with class, class reductionism, class fundamentalism and all that. Then, when CA, SRM and I last met a week ago, we got into a discussion about what’s today called intersectionality, or used to be called interlocking systems of oppression (a term I prefer). I was arguing against strong versions of racial-capitalism thinking, and strong versions of patriarchy and capitalism as a unity, or as grasped by a unitary theory – social-reproduction approaches.

As I remember, CA, you were somehow not happy with something, and I know you wrote something discussing critical theory and intersectionality – “Jews and Other ‘Others’: Identity and Constellation in Intersectional and Critical Theory”. Does it have something to do with that? Do you remember what you were unhappy with?

CA: It has something to do with it, but it’s certainly not an attempt to solve these theoretical conundrums. I guess what I was trying to push back against was something you didn’t really advocate, but it’s the other pole, right: a really strong idea of a multi-systems theory. Patriarchy causes gender imbalance, white supremacy – usually racism – and then capitalism is for class or material inequality, and so on. And I didn’t really want to say that these are all dimensions of capitalism. That would certainly be overly reductive, also because we have forms of gendered oppression and racialisation before capitalism.

But I would like to argue that certainly in most contemporary societies, these forms of oppression are all touched by capitalism in some form, and are made part of it. And I do believe it makes sense to think of capitalism as a totality: a dynamic society that has its dynamism imparted by the very way it’s structured, but that also has this expansive momentum. It expands geographically, but it also draws more and more dimensions of everyday life into itself and reshapes them according to its own imperatives, if you want. Say, child-rearing. In the critical women’s history of the 80s, and for good reasons, there was always this argument that capitalism was producing the sphere of reproduction as its own other, but still as something that’s fully integrated. So you have to have the house and the family as a place where other principles apply – not cutthroat competition, but care and love and all of that – in order to rear functioning subjects who can then be competent participants in the outside world of cutthroat competition and struggle.

That’s also an argument that Nancy Fraser – and with all the objections I have against her book Cannibal Capitalism I agree with it in part – tries to make: that in various ways and dimensions, capitalist society is colonising parts of itself that it constituted as something outside but needs in order to function. So also with overexploitation and ursprüngliche Akkumulation (primitive accumulation, aka original accumulation, aka primary accumulation). And even there, on the one hand, yes, those would also already be arguments that say these are not just separate things.

But capitalist society is using something that’s not necessarily generated by capitalism; it reshapes it and integrates it into its own mode of functioning, and thereby changes how it works. So the bourgeois family is very different from an early modern “whole house” type of production and reproduction unit. That also influenced gender polarities, or the imagined polarity of gender, because it reconstituted these spheres as the other of itself, if you want. So the woman is caring, close to nature, close to the body, whereas the man goes out into the hostile environment of business life and therefore needs to cultivate completely different qualities.

That’s a very modern thing, even though we think of it as an archaic thing that feminism then overcame. And I think one can make similar arguments about forms of racialisation. That’s why I think one has to see these things at the very least in their interconnection.

And exactly what I started from was that even things that, some decades ago, I thought couldn’t be completely commodified, like child-rearing – even there we can see that capitalist forms of socialisation start encroaching ever more, even on those spheres that we once might have thought of as a kind of internal outside to the society.

Sorry, that was probably very confused.

DM: Not at all, I think it was a really good exposition of everything that’s good and correct about this whole line of thinking – social-reproduction approaches, Fraser, and all the rest of it. And I personally agree with everything you said. I think my point last time was more that that’s all correct, and there’s a separate point that I would also like to talk about.

Frieda Afary’s recent book reviews various social-reproduction approaches and comes to the conclusion that what some theorists thought was unthinkable twenty years ago – namely, that giving birth and the mothering function could be monetised, where people tended to think, “well, if that happens, basically the human species is over, because the people coming out of that will all be completely crazy, or something; it’s not going to work” – some feminist theorists are starting to say, “actually, they’re in the process of doing that.” There are already these biobags and all that stuff; ectogenesis is just around the corner or already happening, and of course if there’s money to be made with it, money will be made with it. I agree with all that. I just still think it’s too neat.

For example, I keep coming back to the prime example: what used to be called radical feminists in the 60s and 70s – two of their major topics were sexuality and sexual violence. And I think sexual violence does not lend itself to an easy explanation in terms of some sort of political economy, however much you stretch this political economy. Of course, you can say – and I think there’s a lot of truth to it – that many men have a crisis when something is going to be taken away from them, when the woman wants to leave or refuses to be as nice as before, and that’s when they kill their whole family or beat the woman up. So violence has this disciplining function.

But there’s an internal psychology to it that you can’t just derive in a functional way, like “oh, this is for disciplining women so that they do this labour, so that everything keeps running.” That’s too neat. And the same with anti-black and “colonial” racism: there are all these fantasies about how the others smell bad, how they are sexually threatening, or attractive in a forbidden way, or both, and it’s very physical and sensuous; caste is also in many ways very sensuous, with strong feelings about touching and eating together, completely mad ideas about purity, and so on.

And you cannot explain this only functionally and in terms of political economies… And that’s just what you said, I guess: capitalism evolved, came into being in a world of social hierarchies of many kinds, of empires and war and so on, and it implanted itself in this world and modernised and re-jiggered gender and “race” and caste and all the rest of it to make it work for capitalism. It has to work for capital accumulation, otherwise it’s in the way. All that’s true, but still I think the unitary-theory approach is too neat.

And the last thing I’m going to say: I feel one thing that’s happening is that the left – the academic left, the Marxist left, but also the anarchist left – is still very male-dominated. The academic left is dominated by male thinkers who have great prestige. If you look at whose books are published, who’s invited, who does the conferences… one way to put it is that some Marxist feminists fit reasonably well into established left structures, and present only a limited challenge to patriarchal structures within this milieu.

I think, in a way, these feminist theories that modify Marxism, albeit in quite radical ways, tend to be more acceptable than feminist ideas that don’t link up as cleanly with the kind of thinking dominant in socialist left circles. I think they’re less of a personal challenge to established activists and intellectuals, less of an internal left political challenge… I admit this is not the most important point we have to discuss, but it belongs here, because I think it’s about what counts as legitimate left topics.

Feelings, and love, and the exploitation of love and the abuse of love, for example, are just not central topics in many parts of the left. If you want to talk about these topics, it’s best to shoehorn them into a different framework. Call it “affective labour”, and already it’s more palatable. But call it love, and it’s like, “ick, do you really have to?” Maybe I’m caricaturing a bit here, but you have to admit that there’s some truth to it.

CA: Yes, I do. And I guess one of my criticisms of certain types of socialist feminism, or of other forms of more simplistic Marxist explanations, would also be that it’s all just a bit too neat. They have no way of thinking about forms of – I’m not sure if you can call it counter-rationality – they’re still stuck in an explanatory model where everything you want to explain with “capitalism”, in inverted commas, is functional for that capitalism. In the end, of course, they say capitalism is turning against itself, but the whole story is still very functional: racialisation is there to make it easier to expropriate people’s labour. And the same with gender and so on. I agree that that’s too simple.

But I would still like to advocate – not really to contradict your argument that there are other dynamics in play that we can’t just integrate into a seamless grand unified theory; in that way I think that’s true – for a less vulgar-Marxist and maybe more critical-theoretical approach to what we would call capitalism. I think Critical Theory did try, firstly, to integrate Marxism and psychoanalysis and things like that, and to really also trace the inherent irrationalities and the violence that’s not actually serving the system and can’t simply be explained by its functionality for capitalism. But they still tried to see this as an interconnected affair, at least.

What you said about this whole panic about the undermining of traditional forms of masculinity, for example, which seems to drive so much of right-wing politics right now: yes, that can’t simply be explained with capitalism, I agree. But of course you also can’t understand it without looking at how capitalism has constituted subjects, and especially male subjects. This whole phantasm and paranoia of autonomy, of clear subject boundaries that have to be defended, if necessary by violence, and so on: that’s not extra-historical. That’s also part of that history. So I guess we’re not actually categorically apart.

Strategy, violence and subjectivity

DM: On the theoretical level, as far as I can tell, we totally agree. The reason I’m harping on it is the political and strategic consequences.

SRM: Is there a way to situate this in the immediate political context? How do we start thinking about it?

DM: As we mentioned in the discussion in September, many different people have many different beefs with “the left”, and situations are very different in different countries and different scenes. So it’s hard to generalise. But the political and strategic consequence, for me, is that we stop trying to attain some sort of political unity in what you could call the “traditional left” way. I think we should stop trying to create unity around one central key question, like class, and instead accept – and actually push, emphasise – the multiplicity of issues and struggles, while of course continuing to argue that they’re connected.

I would be the first person to say that we have to insist that everything today is connected to capitalism, and that it’s super important to talk about class in a very broad sense, about labour in a very broad sense. But that doesn’t mean that anti-racist struggles or gender struggles – and there are other things: ecological struggles, the question of species, the question of ability; in South Asia the question of caste; in the Sahel a specific kind of afterlife of slavery, a racialisation that is different from that in other places – all of that needs to have space.

Also, obviously you have to listen to people on the ground when they say, “this is what we’re angry about.” When people say “corruption, corruption, corruption”, it’s no good replying, “oh yes, that’s because late capitalism allows less social mobility.” That is correct, of course. But first: you want to protest against corruption? Let’s protest against corruption. And then, of course, you can have a whole theoretical account behind it, of why in the end you have to abolish capitalism.

Or take labour law in India, which says nothing about caste. You can’t have people being humiliated as Dalits in their work while labour law says nothing about it. If you’re going to conquer parts of the state and legislate against these things, you have to legislate against these specific kinds of humiliation, just as you have to legislate specifically against sexual harassment in the workplace, and so on.

SRM: I also agree with all that, but I want to ask: if you’re talking about domestic violence, or about the left taking feelings more seriously – if the specific feeling is male anger, or jealousy, rage, desire – do we need a theory of that? Should there be a theory? Is that just going back to psychoanalysis, or is it the human organism? Do you think there’s a need to situate that specific individual experience in some kind of framework, and if so, how?

DM: I think we’ll come back to some of that in a later discussion, because we have a session on violence, and I think we need to talk a lot about violence and the judicious use of violence.

There are different ways of talking about subjectivity, identity, emotionality. And yes, we need a theory of how to make the fight against masculinity a number-one priority. The goal is not a better masculinity or better men or any of that stuff, but abolishing gender. That’s my point of view, at least.

SRM: Just that I still think the question of emotions becomes structural. If someone pisses you off and you say “go fuck yourself” and then you get in a fight, that becomes a structural issue on the left very, very quickly.

DM: Are you making the micro–macro into structure?

SRM: I’m going back to the beginning. I maintain my position: it is tied together very directly.

Closing

CA: We didn’t really get to the whole colonialism business, right?

DM: No, we didn’t.

CA: So that’ll have to be for another time, then.

DM: Yes. We’ll take it up next time.