Marxists From The United States

"I believe myself that appointing women with their history is the single most important thing we can do to raise feminist consciousness. And feminist consciousness means for women to understand that they have a grievance in this world. That the grievance is not individual, that to change their grievance, they need to ally with other women. They need to define for themselves what their goals are. They need then, to form alliances with men and women to attain their goals, and that when their goal is attained, we will have a better society for all of us. Men and women."

"In order to survive in this interconnected global village we must learn and learn very quickly to respect others who are different from us and, ultimately, to grant to others the autonomy we demand for ourselves. In short, celebrate difference and banish hatred."

"I came into the study of history through my work on a biography of Sarah and Angelina Grimké... I was fascinated with the lives and characters of these two women, who had not had a biography written about them since 1885... They spoke to me in a very personal way and I wanted to transmit what I received from these women of another century to readers of my day."

"I have documented 700 years of feminist bible criticism prior to 1870, and every woman who engaged in that feminist bible criticism thought she was the first woman ever to do this. And when Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1893, published the Woman’s Bible, she put in the forward, “No woman before me has ever done this.” This is tragic, because it symbolizes the true position that women held in the world, which was to think, each woman thought, and each man taught each woman to think, and each mother taught their sons and daughters to think, that women have not contributed significantly to the creation of thought, to the creation of culture, and to the creation of civilization. This is a lie, all right?"

"We are living at a very wonderful moment. A moment that I believe is more important than a renaissance, a moment that is more important than the reformation. It is the moment when half of the human race is reclaiming its ID as full human beings. We have regained our history. And by regaining our history and by transmitting it to the next generation, we will create a basis where women will no longer have to reinvent the wheel. We will be able to stand on the shoulders of the women before us, and I think this is a very wonderful and exciting endeavor."

"I have sometimes been asked, "How has your being Jewish influenced your work in Women's History?" The simplest way I can answer this question is, I am a historian because of my Jewish experience."

"Patriarchy has not only invented itself and usurped a central place, but it has usurped intellectually, a kind of legitimacy, that described anything that is not like it, as deviant. And men and women have gone into that for 4000 years. Not all women. There were always some women who resisted. And our great tragedy is, that because we were deprived of a history of women, generation after generation of women who wanted to resist patriarchy, had to do it on their own."

"In U.S. historiography, as in American popular culture, historians have tended to over-emphasize the role of the individual in history. Great men are identified as founders and leaders; they become the virtual representatives of the movement: William Lloyd Garrison for abolition, Eugene Debs for the socialist movement, Martin Luther King Jr. for the civil rights movement. In fact, no mass movement of any significance is carried forward by and dependent upon one leader, or one symbol. There are always leaders of subgroups, of local and regional organizations, competing leaders representing differing viewpoints, and, of course, the ground troops of anonymous activists. And, as can be shown in each of the above cases, emphasis on the "great man" omits women, minorities, many of the actual agents of social change. In so doing it gives a partial, an erroneous picture of how social change was actually achieved in the past and thereby fosters apathy and confusion about how social change can be made in the present. As was to be expected, the same distorted historiography would be applied to the nineteenth-century woman suffrage movement. By elevating Stanton and Anthony to the great and unique leaders of the movement; by omitting Lucy Stone and most of the New England activists; by down-playing the role of radicals like Frances Wright, Ernestine Rose, and labor movement activists; and by disregarding the parallel struggles of African American women for suffrage and equal rights the movement's breadth and depth were lost and the complexities of its tactics were obscured."

"The new historians of "family and childhood," like the majority of theorists on childrearing, pediatricians, psychiatrists, are male. In their work, the question of motherhood as an institution or as an idea in the heads of grown-up male children is raised only where "styles" of mothering are discussed and criticized. Female sources are rarely cited (yet these sources exist, as the feminist historians are showing); there are virtually no primary sources from women-as-mothers; and all this is presented as objective scholarship. It is only recently that feminist scholars such as Gerda Lerner, Joan Kelly, and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg have begun to suggest that, in Lerner's words: "the key to understanding women's history is in accepting-painful though it may be-that it is the history of the majority of mankind.... History, as written and perceived up to now, is the history of a minority, who may well turn out to be the 'subgroup.'""

"A pioneering historian of women"

"Radical feminism combines the ideology of classical feminism with the class-oppression concept of Marxism, the rhetoric and tactics of the Black Power movement, and the organizational structure of the radical student movement. (1970 article)"

"Feminist consciousness begins with self-consciousness, an awareness of our separate needs as women; then comes the awareness of female collectivity-the reaching out toward other women, first for mutual support and then to improve our condition. Out of the recognition of communality, there emerges feminist group consciousness a set of ideas by which women autonomously define ourselves in a male-dominated world and seek to substitute our vision and values for those of the patriarchy. The two aspects of my own consciousness, that of the citizen and that of the woman scholar, had finally fused: I am a feminist scholar."

"She is one of the most prominent historians in our country...I first remember Gerda when we founded the first NOW chapter in the country, which was New York NOW – we’re all proud of that – in March 1967. I passed out a yellow line pad for people to write down their biographies, and Gerda Learner was in the room. She wrote down that she was teaching at Sarah Laurence, she was interested in women’s history. Gerda used to come to those early NOW meetings. I remember one day she said to me, “Would you please mention to the people in this chapter that I am writing this history on the Grimke Sisters and it’s going to come out soon?” And that was our first feminist history that really came out of NOW. Not the last, but the first, and we were all very proud of her."

"Revisionist theories usually begin with an argument with one's predecessors. In my case, these predecessors were 19th- and 20th-century feminist writers, who saw women's history as a manifestation of women's oppression and focused excessively on the struggle for women's rights. The most recent, and certainly indispensable book was Eleanor Flexner's Century of Struggle, which cut a wide swath, although it was essentially written in the woman's rights framework."

"As I began to work on my research priorities, the absence of black women from history appeared to me as an urgent problem to be considered."

"What I was learning in graduate school did not so much leave out continents and their people as it left out half the human race, women."

"Men have been writing the history of the world from their point of view, and according to their sets of values, for over 2000 years. In fact, 4000 years, if you want to be strict about it. Because when writing was invented, it was 4000 years ago and ever since then we have history.” I say, “Well, women have begun to reclaim their history about 150 years ago, and the modern women’s history movement is about 35 years old.” I say, “You give us 4000 years, and we’ll mainstream. I think we need to get a perspective that is larger than our time, larger than our memory, larger than our lifetime."

"…it was not in the dictionary. I've always said, "If I had the sense I was born with and looked it up in the legal code, I would have found it." And it was in the penal code, of course. It wouldn't be in any American dictionary until 1938. And in most American dictionaries not until the Second World War. We had no words for ourselves. That's the important point--we didn't have words..."

"…I always say to people, "If you share my dream, why don't we walk together?" And that's my only organizing tool."

"…In that time, you aren't a gay person, you aren't a homosexual person, you're a degenerate. And what you were suffering from was what was known as ostracism. Ostracism means you don't exist at all. And that's a very difficult situation to live with. As gay people, we had been chasing ostracism by that point for probably 300 years. You just knew that you should have dropped into your black hole."

"Though ethics are arrived at by the group, they are meaningful only when applied by the individual himself. It is essential that Homosexuals begin to direct their thinking in this way. Ghetto walls ca be knocked down, but cooperation is essential. There are, however, difficulties to be overcome. Those in greatest need are sometimes the most reluctant to help each other or themselves, tending rather to think of personal experiences as things apart from mutual effort toward betterment."

"Homosexuals do not understand themselves and thus it is not surprising that heterosexuals do not understand them ether."

"I knew that I was gay in every bone of my body. So I did the only thing I could do. I started the movement."

"We Homosexuals know much about ourselves that we've never talked about = even to our selves. History knows much about us that it doesn't know it knows - but we could recognize it if we would look. Myth and Legend, Tradition and Folk-ways know much about us that has been deliberately obscured by endless politically motivated Conspiracies of Silence - which we can explode if we will."

"We are in total opposition to America's white racism, to poverty, hunger, the systematic destruction of our patrimony; we oppose the rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer, and are in total opposition to wars of aggression and imperialism, whoever pursues them. We support the demands of Blacks, Chicanos, Orientals, Women, Youth, Senior Citizens, and others demands their full rights as human beings. We join in their struggle, and shall actively seek coalition to pursue these goals."

"We say that homosexuality is a perfectly natural state, a fact, a way of life, and that we enjoy our sexuality, without feelings of inferiority or guilt. We seek and find love, and approach love, as a feeling of loving mutuality."

"1969 was the Year of the New Homosexual."

"The Mattachine Society holds it possible and desirable that a highly ethical homosexual culture emerge, as a consequence ofits work, paralleling the emerging cultures of our fellow-minorities - the Negro, Mexican, and Jewish Peoples. The Society believes homosexuals can lead well adjusted, wholesome, and socially productive lives once ignorance and prejudice against hem is successfully combated, and once homosexuals themselves feel they have a dignified and useful role to ply in society. The Society, to these ends, is in the process of developing a homosexual ethic- disciplined, moral, and socially responsible."

"We are coming more and more to realize that the morally healthy person is he who is capable of realizing his sexual nature to its fullest potential for growth. Contemporary modes of discourse quite agree that such realizations require persons to be able to relate to none another on a subject-to-subject basis."

"Our goal is total liberation life is for the living. We are alive! We want all to be alive! Sex is a sure cure of boredom and an antidote to violence that is so American. Power to the People!"

"The Society, founded upon the highest ethical and social principles, serves as an example for homosexuals to follow, and provides a dignified standard upon which the rest of society can base a more intelligent and accurate picture of the nature of homosexuality than currently obtains in the public mind. The Society provides the instrument necessary to work with civic minded and social valuable organizations, and supplies the means for the assistance of our people whoa re victimized daily as a result of our oppression. Only a Society providing an enlightened leadership can rouse the homosexuals - one of the largest minorities in America today - to take the actions necessary to elevate themselves from the social ostracism an unsympathetic culture has perpetrated upon them."

"We, the Androgynes of the world, have formed this responsible corporate body to demonstrate by our efforts that our physiological and psychological handicaps need be no deterrent in integrating 10% of the world's population towards the constructive social progress of mankind."

"Despite making up only 13 percent of the male population of the United States, black men constitute almost half of the male prison population, and on any given day, nearly a third of all black men in their twenties are in prison, on probation, or on parole. These black men are overwhelmingly from ghetto communities. The high levels of police surveillance, racial profiling, stiff penalties for minor parole violations, felon disenfranchisement laws, and general harassment of young urban blacks intensify their hostility toward the criminal justice system, and invite urban blacks to conclude that they are living under a race-based police state whose intent is to prevent them from enjoying all the benefits of equal citizenship and to contain social unrest."

"If an unjust basic structure is a significant causal factor in explaining the rise and persistence of ghetto conditions and such conditions diminish the life prospects of citizens who live under them, the fact that some from the ghetto are still able to improve their lot through legitimate means and ultimately to leave the ghetto does not invalidate the claim for redress of those who remain behind."

"If ... the tax scheme allows enormous intergenerational wealth transfers within families, some families will maintain considerable socioeconomic advantages over others, which allows them to provide better educations and better environments (both residential and familial) for their children, and their children's children. ... Even in a constitutional democracy in which each citizen has a publicly recognized claim to all the basic political and civil liberties, these socioeconomic inequalities would create an informal social hierarchy by birth: some would be born into great wealth and other social and political advantages while others would be born into poverty and its associated disadvantages. ... If, because a social scheme had the characteristics described above, the life prospects of some children were vastly inferior to those of others, it would be reasonable to regard these disadvantaged children as members of the lowest stratum in a descent-based social hierarchy. When such a hierarchy is, and has long been, marked by racial distinctions, equal citizenship, in any meaningful sense, does not obtain. In a society with an established democratic tradition, such a quasi-feudal order does not warrant the allegiance of its most disadvantaged members, especially when these persons are racially stigmatized. Indeed, the existence of such an order creates the suspicion that, despite the society's ostensible commitment to equal civil rights, white supremacy has simply taken a new form."

"Any affluent, mass-consumer, capitalist society will encourage—indeed actively cultivate—the ambition to live comfortably (if not get rich). This is, after all, how such economies reproduce themselves: by creating continual mass desire for a wide range of consumer goods and services. If such a society only guarantees the constitutional essentials, however, without providing every citizen with a real opportunity to reach the goal of material comfort, then it is far from obvious that those who, because of lack of resources, are inhibited in this pursuit are being unreasonable when they choose crime as an alternative to subsistence living."

"Marx once said that workers (and this would perhaps go for consumers even more) are in their purely economic action in a capitalist society always the weaker side, and therefore they need to organize politically."

"It has been long understood that “” is a myth. To make fundamental changes in the commodity economy it is necessary to have power over production."

"Unless we change ourselves as individuals and our culture—the way we relate to the earth—we can’t expect to make the overall changes in society that our necessary."

"We are on a runaway train headed over the climate cliff as we stoke the engine with more coal to increase its speed."

"Right now alternative energy is still treated as a supplement rather than a substitute for fossil fuels within the as presently constituted. The rapid growth of alternative energy should not therefore be seen as a radical break with the domination of fossil fuels. That still needs to occur."

"We are in an emergency situation in the Anthropocene epoch in which the disruption of the Earth system, particularly the climate, is threatening the planet as a place of human habitation. However, our political-economic system, capitalism, is geared primarily to the accumulation of capital, which prevents us from addressing this enormous challenge and accelerates the destruction. have done an excellent and courageous job of sounding the alarm on the enormous dangers of the continuation of business as usual with respect to carbon emissions and other planetary boundaries. But mainstream social science as it exists today has almost completely internalized capitalist ideology; so much so that conventional social scientists are completely unable to address the problem on the scale and in the historical terms that are necessary. They are accustomed to the view that society long ago “conquered” nature and that social science concerns only people-people relations, never people-nature relations. This feeds a where Earth system-scale problems are concerned. Those mainstream social scientists who do address s more often than not do so as if we are dealing with fairly normal conditions, and not a planetary emergency, not a no-analogue situation. There can be no , answer to the dire ecological problems we face, because when looking at the human effect on the planet there is nothing gradual about it; it is a Great Acceleration and a rift in the Earth system. The problem is rising exponentially, while worsening even faster than that would suggest, because we are in the process of crossing all sorts critical thresholds and facing a bewildering number of tipping points."

"Science has established without a doubt that, in today’s “full-world economy,” it is necessary to operate within an overall Earth System budget with respect to allowable physical throughput. However, rather than constituting an insurmountable obstacle to human development, this can be seen as initiating a whole new stage of ecological civilization based on the creation of a society of substantive equality and ecological sustainability, or . , in this sense, is not aimed at austerity, but at finding a “prosperous way down” from our current extractivist, wasteful, ecologically unsustainable, maldeveloped, exploitative, and unequal, class-hierarchical world. Continued growth would occur in some areas of the economy, made possible by reductions elsewhere. Spending on fossil fuels, armaments, private jets, sport utility vehicles, second homes, and advertising would need to be cut in order to provide room for growth in such areas as regenerative agriculture, food production, decent housing, clean energy, accessible health care, universal education, community welfare, public transportation, digital connectivity, and other areas related to green production and social needs."

"The truth is that, rather than directly challenging capitalism from the Marxist perspective in line with reason and the material interests of the working class, Western academics still professing to be on the Left abandoned Marxism altogether, seeking to criticise modernity and humanism by drawing on the irrationalist tradition emanating from the Right."

"An understanding of the failure of capitalism, beginning in the twentieth century, requires a historical examination of the rise of neoliberalism, and how this has only served to increase the destructiveness of the system. Only then can we address the future of humanity in the twenty-first century."

"[[w:Economy of China#Development|[C]hinese development]] has its roots in the 1949 Chinese Revolution, carried out by the headed by Mao Zedong, whereby it liberated itself from the imperialist system. This allowed it to develop for decades under a planned economy largely free of constraints from outside forces, establishing a strong agricultural and industrial economic base. This was followed by a shift in the post-Maoist reform period to a hybrid system of more limited state planning along with a much greater reliance on market relations (and a vast expansion of debt and speculation) under conditions—the globalization of the world market—that were particularly fortuitous to its “catching up.” Through s and other pressures aimed at destabilizing China’s position in the world market, the United States is already seeking to challenge the bases of China’s growth in world trade. China, therefore, stands not so much for the successes of but rather for its inherent limitations. The current Chinese model, moreover, carries within it many of the destructive tendencies of the system of capital accumulation. Ultimately, China’s future too depends on a return to the process of revolutionary transition, spurred by its own population."

"For many people on the left, the answer to neoliberalism or disaster capitalism is a return to welfare-state liberalism, market regulation, or some form of limited social democracy, and thus to a more rational capitalism. It is not the failure of capitalism itself that is perceived as the problem, but rather the failure of neoliberal capitalism. In contrast, the Marxian tradition understands neoliberalism as an inherent outgrowth of late capitalism, associated with the domination of monopoly-finance capital. A critical-historical analysis of neoliberalism is therefore crucial both to grounding our understanding of capitalism today and uncovering the reason why all alternatives to neoliberalism and its capitalist absolutism are closed within the system itself."

"We have now reached a point in the twenty-first century in which the externalities of this irrational system, such as the costs of war, the depletion of natural resources, the waste of human lives, and the disruption of the planetary environment, now far exceed any future economic benefits that capitalism offers to society as a whole. The accumulation of capital and the amassing of wealth are increasingly occurring at the expense of an irrevocable rift in the social and environmental conditions governing human life on earth."

"Violence against women and the expropriation of their , as well as the higher level of exploitation of their paid labor, are integral to the way in which power is organized in capitalist society—and how it seeks to divide rather than unify the population. More than a third of women worldwide have experienced physical/. , in particular, are objectified, reified, and commodified as part of the normal workings of monopoly-capitalist marketing."

"The mass media-propaganda system, part of the larger corporate matrix, is now merging into a -based propaganda system that is more porous and seemingly anarchic, but more universal and more than ever favoring money and power. Utilizing modern marketing and surveillance techniques, which now dominate all digital interactions, vested interests are able to tailor their messages, largely unchecked, to individuals and their s, creating concerns about “fake news” on all sides. Numerous business entities promising technological manipulation of voters in countries across the world have now surfaced, auctioning off their services to the highest bidders. The elimination of net neutrality in the United States means further concentration, , and control over the entire Internet by monopolistic ."