Al Owski > Recent Status Updates

“Therefore the historical suppression of writers is the earliest harbinger of
the steady peeling away of additional rights and liberties that will follow.
...
And the efforts to censor, starve, regulate, and annihilate us are clear signs
that something important has taken place. Cultural and political forces can
sweep clean all but the "safe," all but state-approved art.”

“We all know nations that can be identified by the flight of writers from
their shores. These are regimes whose fear of unmonitored writing is
justified because truth is trouble. It is trouble for the warmonger, the
torturer, the corporate thief, the political hack, the corrupt justice system,
and for a comatose public.”

“German Zionism accepted, if not welcomed, the reversal of Jewish Emancipation, failing to perceive that the Nazis’ aim was not a separation of Jews and non-Jews but their exclusion, making Germany Judenrein. If necessary through annihilation.”

“The basis of collaboration between German Zionism and the Nazis was both shared interests and a shared ideology. Both accepted that Jews were not part of the German volk. The Zionists believed that they could reach a mutually satisfactory agreement as to the place of Jews in the new Germany, based on group relations.”

“Anti-Semitism was the price the Nazi party exacted from German capitalism for rescuing it from communism. It represented the “anti-capitalism” of the Nazi Party.”

“The importance of anti-Semitism in Germany lay in its political functionality, ‘the glue that held together a radical right-wing subculture of nationalistic federations, Freikorps groupings and paramilitary leagues.’ 30 Anti-Semitism had both a cohesive and integrative function.”

“Zionism began from the same philosophical premise as German nationalism. This was why Zionism was so appealing to anti-Semites.”

“the politics of reclaiming material wealth cannot do without a focus on the emotional dimensions of ownership and belonging, and how these need to change in the process of creating more liveable futures. Radical politics has to include an emphasis on emotional reproduction and social life, and we must assume that our current forms of sociality will be transformed within the process of transforming society.”

“Alan Sears notes that the current organisation of waged work, together with increased pressures on families to provide unwaged care work, leaves little time for pleasurable interactions with friends. The relatively low level of commodification of friendship compared to romantic or familial attachments means that friendship is currently being increasingly marginalised in our lives."

“Race is not a static thing but involves processes of racialisation. Racialisation marks certain groups as worthless, which facilitates their constitution as surplus populations — groups excluded from the labour force but simultaneously necessary for the capitalist economy and creating competition between workers.”

“moving beyond the family, we can draw inspiration from the African American tradition of multiple forms of parenting. .... these models are not exclusively about the care of one's own children but about a form of guardianship of the community as a whole. Other-mothering, the practice of being an extra parent of someone else's child, can become community other-mothering...”

“The goal should be to make eldercare and intergenerational solidarity generally accessible, thus counteracting the privatisation of care within kinship structures as well as the abusive and exploitative relations of care within many private and state facilities. It is essential that we move away from a model where having children becomes an investment in one's own future access to care.”

“The politics of childcare and eldercare fit together through a more generalised logic of heterosexual temporality and genealogy. As Kath Weston points out, the fear of ageing and dying alone may be a motivating factor behind the decision to have children. Family is one of the few structures that encourage intergenerational care, thus offering some support in an increasingly age-stratified society.”

“gentrification threatens the forms of working-class community and solidarity that have provided a social and material safety net for elderly people outside the nuclear family, but such sociality can be recreated. The project of queering eldercare can look to less individualised practices of care and support for inspiration for how to go beyond our currently privatised models of sociality and reproduction”

“The elderly have to be removed and made invisible in order for ideals of the productive subject, and the family as the reproduction of life, to become sustainable. Moreover, the social valuation of waged work serves to devalue the lives of the elderly and others who are not productive within the capitalist economy. Old age is made socially invisible...”

“eldercare needs to be central to rethinking models of reproduction. Ageing, illness, disability, and death imply a loss of individual autonomy, and can therefore challenge ideals of liberal subjectivity and possessive individualism. Yet ageing is conspicuously absent from much political discourse, including on the left.”

“But parenting practices which exist in heterosexual families, such as adoption, surrogacy, and reliance on nannies and childcare workers, already implicitly question whether a child can only have one mother. A queer critique of reproductive labour can point to these unstable and invisible aspects of the institu- tion of heterosexual reproduction.”

“Queer parenting can therefore resist the zero-sum game of emotional exclusivity that structures normative kinship forms and refuse the exclusive, proprietarian logic of heterosexual families, where there can be only one or two people primarily responsible for the emotional care of children.”

“Currently, childcare and eldercare are often organised along normative understandings of social property and propriety. A queer framework helps us recognise how these forms of care are regulated through welfare politics and structures of family law. It therefore implies a critique of the state, offering ways of going beyond heteronormative forms of kinship.”

“beyond patchwork welfare reforms that merely complement unwaged reproductive work in the family... we need large-scale innovations in housing, city planning, childcare, education, eldercare, and health in order to generalise less oppressive and exploitative forms of reproduction. These interventions would need to resist implicit assumptions of the family as the central site of reproductive work”

“The family is intimately tied up with structures of class, race, and heterosexuality through naturalised notions of genetics and bloodlines. It is also entangled with capitalist property relations through practices of inheritance and the privatisation of kinship, as well as the imaginary of family as a form of ownership of other people.”

“In order to abolish emotional labour and bourgeois family values, niceness has to be de-privileged as a socially desirable feeling. This might mean that we all have to live with some emotional discomfort, rather than allowing comfort to adhere to the most privileged. It would mean refusing the good life as we know it — a life of good jobs, home ownership, and proprietarian family relationships.”

“People keep imagining familial relations as the source of the good life, despite how inadequate they are in terms of meeting the emotional and physical needs of most people. ... In undoing the privatisation of family, we must also abolish the privatisation of feeling. The family under capitalism functions as a nexus of privatised emotional bonds.”

“A socialist politics that seeks to defend the family against the onslaught of neoliberal individualism has missed the fact that family values and familial labour are in fact essential conditions for the existence of such individualism.”

“Today, a heightened dependence on commodified reproductive services indicates that the family has become increasingly precarious — something that parts of the left consider a worrying sign of neoliberalism's impact on communities and human relationality.”

“Families are work relations, and in particular a central site of emotional reproduction. The family is a privatised arrangement of work, care, and economic distribution, shored up by ideological and legal means. Furthermore, families function to structure kinship and lines of inheritance, or lack thereof — forms of (dis)possession that are tied to the reproduction of classed and racial difference.”

“State-provided services are also often inaccessible to those who do not live up to certain conditions. They therefore function to discipline families, particularly mothers." For example, benefits recipients often have to behave in a certain way, and perform 'good' standards of reproduction, in order not to lose what little monetary support they get."

“Equality politics create a punitive and contradictory situation, even for white bourgeois women—the erasure of femininity is a precondition for their success in the sphere of waged work, while they are simultaneously punished if they become too masculine. Although gender equality has been realised in some limited... senses, this has often served to reproduce gender relations in less apparent and visible ways.”

“Patricia Cain argues that equality discourse continues to privilege masculinity as the standard against which women's sameness or difference is measured. This means that heterosexual masculinity, which is produced through difference from femininity, implicitly becomes the (impossible) standard for femininity.”

“A politics of equality cannot address the hierarchical structure built into the very notion of gender. Gender equality, as a conceptual framework, operates within the paradigm of sexual difference.”