Splintering: Bell Hooks, Veganism, Religion and Parenting

Today I’ll be talking about Bell Hooks’ Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center because when I finished it, it really blew my mind. It’s the clearest explanation of intersectionality I’ve seen. Published in the 1980s, it critiques many other feminist theorists of the time, which allows it to build on existing theories. It also applies well to our current moment, with TERFs, class traitors, race traitors and the like.

One of the major texts hooks discusses is The Feminine Mystique by Betty Freidan which was published in 1963 and is still a common read for introductions to feminism. It generally argues that women should have equal rights with men in the work force, but it regards jobs as essential to fulfillment and neglects the class and race disparity in the amount of these opportunities. To think that any woman who is not employed in the workforce is not an actualized person is a cold view, especially when for the working class, jos are exploitation, not a road to fulfillment. With something like this that’s kind of dated, I like checking Goodreads reviews, to see what modern readers take away. Some said the book was dated or neglects some things, but many were echoes of the book’s class bias, one saying how her mom was, to paraphrase, super sick because they owned a bookstore and everyone else’s mom had to be “dead inside”. This is pretty brutal victim-blaming. It ignores the humanity of these housewives, whom she did not know, and also ignores the luck her mother and family had. Quite a strange takeaway to have from an essential text of feminist literature, right?

This is a symptom of capitalism’s emphasis on earning things. We are told to take great pride in our possessions, and a lack of pride in personal possession or a lack of ability to gain possessions alienates us from the rest of the world. For example, some consider made Christmas gifts cheap, and if you don’t have money it dictates where you hang out; our culture shuns library dates, even college libraries that are paywalled. This applies, maybe even more strongly, to our personal successes or failures; we are successful because we did all the good things, no luck about it. This is a staple of American culture that no counter-culture is immune to. Let’s look at social movements, what they are responding to, and how they become the same thing.

Social movements are at any time vulnerable to capitalist recuperation. For example, let’s say you’re a vehement anti-capitalist, but when you say this, people say, “well, you don’t look like one”. You could explain your positions, but c’mon. Absolutely not. Outside of this, there are many capitalist routes to project this image they expect. You could buy merchandise, tattoos, a copy of ASSUCK’s Anticapital from a flipper off Discogs for 70 dollars. You could even run for office so that this average joe, going by our typical metrics of money earned, appearances, and institutional respect will recognize you. Feminism is also not immune to this. Members of any movement are encouraged to aspire to power in one way or another and can be convinced that greater publicity will further their cause when aspiring to power preserves hierarchy. To reiterate, we’re told those who work hard get great rewards, but the truth is hard work is a prerequisite; only the very lucky are rewarded, not to mention capitalism often rewards bad behavior. Because of this, economic success should not be the stick by which we measure people’s worth. The stick is how many funko pops you own. We can see this most clearly in family life.

Hooks points out that lower-class black women tended to view parenting more positively because it was one place that they felt a sense of connection to the world, where middle and upper-class women viewed it negatively because it held them back from equal earning potential with middle and upper-class men. This difference indicates the varying ways that children were reared in black and white families, a result of slavery. Hooks claims to have personally been raised by a community. If you can’t afford to hire a babysitter, you’re more likely to rely on extended family or friends to watch children while you’re away. If someone watches your kids for you and you don’t pay them, you’re more likely to return the favor in some more personal way. When we put money in someone’s hand we’re often saying we no longer owe them anything. It closes the relationship. A lot of the money we spend is often to get away from the public because we don’t consider them family. There are plenty of empty seats in other people’s cars that could get you to work if you could socially orchestrate it, but you use your own because you lack the social network to do so comfortably. Hooks says that the white women in consciousness raising groups reveled in being together with women when to her it was nothing new. Solidarity was established between black people out of need, which explains this difference. I think of this sort of like the idea that under extreme circumstances we adapt socialist practices. You wouldn’t charge someone to save them from a natural disaster, well unless you were Haliburton in wake of Hurricane Katrina, just like you wouldn’t charge your hypothetical and/or real children rent. The inability of children and adolescents to take complete care of themselves shows that capitalism can’t be applied to everything. It’s really pretty obvious that we should not hate marriage, families, or housewives in and of themselves, and that doing so pits women against other women and all women against men, when people of all types who desire social change need to work together. Hooks also applies this to things like cleaning. Just because republicans want you to clean your room doesn’t mean it’s inherently bad. To give Freidan a break, marriage was legitimately a much different thing in the 60s and was a requirement for many. No one should be coerced into that role, but compared to the coercions felt by lower-class women, this wasn’t much. This direct inversion(they want me to be a mother, thus, being a mother is bad) does not seek the root cause.

The isolation of the nuclear family is likely to account for the empty feeling Friedan reports from housewives. The problems of the nuclear family are symptoms of the atomization caused by capitalism, so I do not see how opening capitalism’s doors to more people would ease this malaise. Professional relationships are sometimes stiff, because there is a hierarchical structure in the workplace. Being too frank with your boss could get you fired. If your work culture is a reporting one, the safest way to hang on to the job is to keep quiet; friendships are made in spite of work, not because of it. Being at work also separates parents from their loved ones and gives us the nuclear family structure: dad working, mom at home with the kids. In addition to its stifling of community among adults, children in these families are often seen as firmly belonging to the parents. This can be traced to our long history of children as property. In colonial America, the average age of indentured servants was about 15, and families often had their children working by the age of ten. The father was responsible for educating these children in general subjects including religion, but then he was entitled to the value of their labor. Children were viewed as economic assets and ensured that the parents would be taken care of in their old age. Hooks shows that these attitudes persist in the nuclear family which “…may make children into “love objects’’ and have no interest in teaching them to relate to a wide variety of people.” In other words, they love their children, but their hovering can be a hindrance. Those in the nuclear family are children of privilege, but as I’ve established that does not mean all is well in the nuclear family. A child who establishes relationships in their community has a better understanding. A child who only sees the world through their parents gets a skewed view. Conflict can arise between child and parent along any intersectional line, but, with this being their main source of conflict with the world, it is easily recuperated.

For example, A child burned by Christianity may go on to be a black metal nerd(i.e. the Nazi kind), while holding the same white supremacist, puritanist views that make Christianity stifling. Having a parent with a drug abuse problem might make you support anti-drug programs like D.A.R.E. which proved ineffective. A woman who felt her father’s disproportionate power in the household, may assume that it is something innate in men, not in grabbing at power wherever it’s available. Anyone in any group not often represented may look up to CEOs/politicians of their intersectionality who actually oppress them. I also think of American propaganda and education in the shadow of the Cold War. The great conclusion we made from it was “Communism bad, Capitalism good”. Communism in Russia was, in fact, bad. Some leftists try to dispute this because they think it’s a bad look for the left, and they’re caught up in this same binary trap. Communist Russia is a good example of how state communism destroys actual communism(i.e. people sharing land and resources through a commune) and does not challenge authority. We must free ourselves from this post-cold-war thinking. Capitalism being bad does not erase the gulag. State Communism being bad does not erase all of Capitalism’s evils which are, if you didn’t know, evil and unevenly handed out. In 2008, when the U.S. incarceration rate peaked, we imprisoned about 1 in 100 people; the average rate in the Soviet Union Gulag years was about 0.8 per 100.¹ In 2010, the rate of arrests of black men was nearly 3 times that of the rate of arrest of Russian citizens in the Soviet Union during the Gulag years. Simple inversion does not seek the root cause of problems. The way out of this binary is class consciousness.

Movements with overlap fracture when movements act out of self -interest. Realizing that all intersectionalities must forego parts of their personality to fit the patriarchal capitalist mode, they are more apt to adopt class consciousness. At every turn we are discouraged from doing so. This is tied to our view of power. Hooks says, “Radical feminists challenged the prevailing notion of power as domination and attempted to transform its meaning.” Upper-class feminists could use feminism to acquire the means to dominate like their white-male peers. She points to Margaret Thatcher, who, though a woman, passed milk-snatching, mass-privatization legislation, which hurt the lower class. Of course being a woman of power does not make her a feminist icon. Being conscious of class prevents people from doing things that hurt their own people, or people of different intersectionalities. This has become even more relevant as corporations realize that people of various oppressed groups have dollars too. Capitalism co-opts anything it can, while sucking the soul from it, because it can only accept things that at least tacitly support it. For example, a critique of capitalism is inherent to environmentalism, but in response to concern, capitalism returned us expensive hybrid cars, the organic food craze, and veggie sausage, the last of which will one day ensnare us all in its kinda rubbery grip. Vegetarians and vegans are split on whether the cause for vegetarianism or veganism is a protest of capitalism, when capitalism is the system that requires that animals be raised in crowded feedlots, and live a torturous life. I think vegetarianism and veganism serve as boycott movements, paying the grocery store less to meet your needs. Expensive meat substitutes are a result of the awareness of the vegan or vegetarian market, and they give more money to companies that demand meat be produced. This is to say that capitalism is very good at twisting movements that are against it to support it.

Movements splinter because capital separates us from each other. Working class people are overworked, and can not afford to sit and discuss our place in the world. We are encouraged to spend as much time working as possible; to have a job, another job, and a side hustle because, well, you don’t want to be a parasite do you? This of course neglects the social needs of humans, and forces us to compete rather than to cooperate. Often though, we are satisfied with anything that looks like progress. This often takes the shape of leaders from marginalized groups. Anyone who doesn’t see this as progress is just being a downer. But it’s necessary for both our government and corporations to appear progressive so that they can continue not to be in practice. In order to progress under capitalism we have to assimilate, which means to oppress someone below or beside us, and if we do this we are in effect not much different from our oppressors.

To conclude, class can unite us. When we act out of our self-interest we splinter along intersectional boundaries, but looking at class can reconcile these differences without ignoring them. A critique of capitalism isn’t complete without a hard look at how those in marginalized groups are treated unfairly, and vice versa. Movements must find new, less capitalistic ways of living to avoid recuperation. We must help those around us instead of aspiring to power. The current view of what a powerful person is is flawed, and deeply we all know that abusing power is a weakness. What does your job effectively do? Are you hurting others, and where does the money you make go? Consistently ask this, and you won’t act out of the self-interest this machine runs on.

¹Applebaum, Anne. Gulag: A History. pg.446