Four waves of feminism, the struggle against wage labor, and the unfinished work of women's liberation.
On the unfinished history of feminism, the abolition of work, and the world we intend to leave behind.
By Tara Knight | Bundle of Styx | October 2026
INTRODUCTION:
THE REVOLUTION WILL HAVE TO CHANGE OUR LIVES
I wish I could say what happened at Cornell would launch another wave of feminism. If a new wave arrived every time an institution answered an allegation of sexual violence by defending its reputation, we would have several a year. The woman making the allegation has to live through the aftermath while an institution with lawyers, administrators, and property produces explanations of its conduct. Public disgrace has rarely been enough to dislodge the people who hold institutional power, especially when the women subjected to it must live with the consequences long after the scandal ends.
In September 2026, a former Cornell student filed a civil lawsuit alleging that seven members of the Chi Phi fraternity sexually assaulted her in October 2024. reporting dates the lawsuit's filing to September 16; the complaint was signed on September 14. Attorneys for some of the defendants have denied allegations of sexual assault, and as of October 19, 2026, no one named in the lawsuit has been criminally charged in connection with the alleged attack.
The university’s response has also made me think about who governs the spaces where students meet, and who gets to decide what happens after a woman files a complaint. A fraternity can control a house and decide which social activities take place there, while the university recognizes the fraternity and retains authority over its discipline. A student who attends a party has no comparable say over the arrangements already made for her. That inequality does not establish anyone's criminal responsibility, and I am not going to pretend it does. It establishes something worth investigating without waiting for a jury: whose social world is being protected, who can interrupt its operation, and what a woman risks when she complains about conduct inside it. Consent to enter a building gives the people who run it no license to govern what happens to your body.
The allegations at Cornell sit within a longer record of women describing sexual coercion and institutional indifference in universities, workplaces, families, and intimate relationships. Being silent and being unheard are very different experiences. Women have repeatedly described what happened to them, explained the conduct they were expected to tolerate, and organized to change the circumstances through which that conduct was made ordinary. Their testimony could be ignored while the institutions concerned announced their commitment to women's safety. A university can condemn sexual violence without abolishing a fraternity system. An employer can publish a statement about equality while preserving a hierarchy under which a woman's livelihood depends on the person she accuses. The institution's public commitments may be sincere. Sincerity does very little to settle the question of whether the arrangement continues to reproduce the problem.
And while everyone argues about the scandal, students still depend on the university for their education and the people investigating their complaints. Employees still need the wages paid by employers, and people whose housing comes through a partner cannot exit every relationship on demand. None of those obligations disappear when a campus issues another statement condemning sexual violence. I would rather ask what a woman is supposed to do on the morning after the statement, when the argument has left the front page and she still has to arrange her life around people who possess resources she cannot do without.
Over the last year I have written a series of essays under the name Invariance, intending to collect them in a book. I never released them. Every time I returned to the project I found another piece of the argument that seemed insufficiently developed, another historical problem I wanted to understand, or another reason to believe the name deserved something more substantial than what I had written. The title came to me through Jacques Camatte's journal Invariance, whose place in the history of the communist left and post-1968 theory I had been studying. It would be absurd, however, to treat his project as the doctrine governing mine. His questions emerged from the communist left, and his eventual answers went in directions I do not intend to follow. What I have been developing is Invariant Feminism, a separate feminist method grounded in the history of women's oppression, and especially in the contradictions that become visible when sex, class, race, and everyday life are considered together.
I spent so long deciding whether the essays were worthy of their name that I nearly turned a name into something sacred. Stirner would have had a field day with that one. There is a particular ridiculousness in becoming so deferential toward an idea that the idea prevents you from doing the work it was supposed to make possible. If a theory of emancipation cannot survive its author being imperfect, the theory has already acquired a kind of authority that I want nothing to do with. There is no institution here that can confer intellectual permission upon me, and I cannot reasonably demand the completion of a living political project before allowing its first public articulation to exist.
The recent fights over rights many women grew up believing were settled make that history harder to leave behind. When I use the word invariant, I mean a relation that continues to organize people's lives even as the law, the people governing it, and the language used to defend it change. The woman who owns property can still depend upon a husband's income. The woman who earns a wage can come home to a second working day for which nobody intends to pay her. A political category can be recognized while the person classified under it is unable to afford the housing or care she needs. Those are different circumstances, and any account of what persists between them has to explain the difference as carefully as the resemblance.
The standard history has a suspiciously comforting ending: each generation improves on the last until the present appears to be the destination toward which feminism was always moving. It flatters us and makes the limits of those victories harder to understand. I want to know what the women before us demanded, what they won, what they could not win, and why some of the relations they fought have proved capable of surviving nearly every political transformation we have thrown at them. I want to know why the right to work came to be considered sufficient evidence of freedom from an institution that makes work the price of survival. I want to understand what would become of domestic life if women were no longer compelled to maintain it under conditions they did not choose.
I. THE FIRST WAVE WANTED WOMEN TO ENTER THE WORLD
Long before suffrage became the emblem of the first feminist wave, women were confronting slavery, property law and the authority granted to husbands. The 1848 Seneca Falls convention has become a convenient starting date for the American women's rights movement, although it would be a mistake to imagine women began resisting patriarchal authority that year. Black women had already spent generations struggling against slavery and the theft of their legal personhood, while women in various reform movements were learning how to petition, publish, organize meetings, and challenge institutions that had no intention of treating them as political equals. The later demand for suffrage emerged from those struggles and from the contradictions they made impossible to conceal. National Women's History Museum, The First Wave.
Under the common-law traditions of coverture, marriage could sharply restrict a woman’s independent legal standing. The relation between husband and wife was understood in terms that limited her independent legal identity, while questions of property, earnings, and authority were organized through the marital relation. These rules changed unevenly across jurisdictions and over time, which is itself an important part of the history. There was no single moment at which all women possessed the same legal disabilities. Nevertheless, the broader social order made women's dependence intelligible as a proper condition of marriage, and it granted husbands forms of authority that women could challenge only by confronting the principles through which the household was recognized as a legal institution.
Owning property or entering a contract could give a woman means of acting beyond the authority of her household. Higher education opened routes into professions whose qualifications had been kept from her, and suffrage gave her a say in laws that had governed her without her vote. It would be remarkably foolish to dismiss these demands merely because they failed to abolish patriarchy in its entirety. They transformed the terms under which millions of women could live, and they did so through struggles that were frequently dangerous and exhausting.
Those demands never described the position of every woman equally. A white woman who demanded the right to hold property could experience that exclusion very differently from a Black woman whose labor and reproductive capacity had been appropriated through slavery. Enslaved Black women did not simply lack access to political institutions. They were subjected to a system in which their bodies, children, movement, and labor were subordinated through legally enforced ownership. Their struggle for emancipation could not be adequately described as a struggle to share in the rights enjoyed by respectable white households. The household itself had different meanings for women whose family relationships had been repeatedly violated by slaveholders and the law.
The racial politics of the suffrage movement are inseparable from these differences. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony made major contributions to women's political organization, and both also participated in arguments that placed white women's claims above those of Black men in ways that accommodated racist political sentiment. Black women organized for voting rights without enjoying the luxury of treating racism as a separate matter. Ida B. Wells challenged lynching and racial terror while confronting exclusions inside the suffrage movement itself. Mary Church Terrell understood political participation alongside the institutions that constrained Black women's educational and economic lives. These women did not merely ask that a more inclusive list of famous people appear in our history books. Their organizing exposed that the meaning of emancipation depended on what a woman could actually do once the formal right had been won.
Income determined what women could do with the rights they gained. A woman who possessed money could potentially exercise new rights in ways unavailable to a woman whose wages were already absorbed by her household's survival. The expanding possibility of professional employment meant one thing to a woman who could afford years of education and something else to a woman working in a textile mill. A woman employed in another woman's home might already be performing remunerated labor, although the nature of that labor reflected inequalities that formal women's rights could leave intact. Economic dependence could be displaced rather than abolished, with a relatively privileged woman purchasing a measure of freedom through the work of someone with fewer resources.
The Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920, and that victory mattered enormously. It prohibited denying the vote on account of sex, although Black women and other women subjected to racist disenfranchisement could still be turned away through the mechanisms of Jim Crow, and Native American women faced additional barriers to citizenship and voting. A legal guarantee does not walk itself down to the polling place and compel local officials to obey it. Nor does the vote pay rent or change the allocation of unpaid work inside a household. Once the demand for formal political inclusion could be met, feminists confronted the uncomfortable fact that the person legally entitled to a right might still lack the means to exercise it.
Recognition by the state matters, although exercising a right still depends on the conditions under which someone lives. A woman has the legal freedom to leave a marriage, yet the absence of her own income may make departure devastating. Another woman has the right to enter a profession, yet admission means little if she is required to abandon her education to provide unpaid care. Another may vote while employers effectively determine the hours in which she can reach a polling place. These are different circumstances, and each demonstrates how rights pass into the material world through institutions that do not necessarily share the rights' stated purpose.
Liberal feminist arguments for recognition remain indispensable wherever women are denied equal standing before the law. I am unwilling to sneer at a victory because it fails to end the world. I do, however, refuse to treat recognition as the final limit of feminist politics. If an employer can still require the sale of a woman's time on pain of destitution, admitting her to the profession changes her position inside that relation while preserving the power it grants the employer. Women can fight for access and ask whether the terms of access ought to govern anyone's life. The two questions have different answers, and the second does not make the first disposable.
The women who fought these battles secured rights that later generations could begin taking for granted, even as the limits of legal admission became painfully clear. Entering an institution changes who is permitted to participate in it, and participation can create real opportunities to transform it. Yet admission alone does not establish that the institution has ceased to reproduce the domination for which it was historically organized. That contradiction became particularly visible when later generations of women discovered that the world they had formally entered still required them to return home and perform the labor that made everybody else's participation possible.
II. THE SECOND WAVE DISCOVERED THAT THE HOME WAS POLITICAL
The legal rights won through earlier struggles gave women organizing in the 1960s and 1970s more room to act, while the rules governing their daily existence often remained untouched. The workplace might accept their labor while reserving authority and advancement for men. The university might permit their enrollment while treating their intellectual presence as an exception. The marriage recognized by law as a private relationship could still determine how a woman spent nearly every hour of her life. Explaining why subordination continued meant examining what happened in the household after the woman had been admitted to the office or the university.
The phrase “the personal is political” described a discovery women were making together: an apparently private difficulty kept reappearing in households whose occupants had never met. Women who thought the unequal division of domestic labor reflected their individual marriages found other women describing the same exhausting bargain. If a husband regarded care as his wife's responsibility, she might have to spend her energy asking him to contribute to a household he also inhabited; she had already performed the task of identifying the labor before any argument about whether he should share it could begin. Consciousness-raising made those recurring arrangements legible as political problems. It is a pity that the phrase has since been recruited to justify treating every unpleasant interpersonal disagreement as a historic event.
A woman describes feeling exhausted because her husband works outside the home while she cares for their children and maintains the household. Another woman describes the same arrangement, even though she also holds a paid job. Someone else explains that her partner regards any contribution to domestic labor as extraordinary generosity, while her own labor is treated as a natural obligation. They may love their partners. They may have entered their marriages voluntarily. Those facts do not explain why responsibilities are distributed in such consistent ways across households whose inhabitants possess different personalities and desires.
Radical feminism drew attention to male supremacy as a social order that extended into sexuality and intimate life. Socialist feminism examined the relation between women's subordination and capitalism, challenging versions of Marxism that regarded the organization of the household as peripheral to the production of economic value. Lesbian feminism questioned the expectation that a woman's life should be centered upon men. These currents disagreed about the origin of patriarchy and the relationships through which it could be overcome, often intensely. It would erase some of the most important debates in feminist history to pretend they had already arrived at a coherent doctrine.
The arguments led women to create institutions of their own. Feminists established shelters and rape crisis centers, developed independent publications, organized campaigns for reproductive freedom, and confronted employers over discrimination. The National Organization for Women pursued legal equality through institutional channels, while smaller radical groups developed different kinds of political practice. Women experimented with collective living and alternative forms of childcare, sometimes discovering that commitments to an egalitarian household were considerably easier to announce than to sustain when the dishes needed washing. The dirty dishes remained on the table even after everybody agreed they were a political problem. Even within movements that understood domestic labor politically, inherited habits and unequal distributions of time continued to reproduce forms of work that the women involved wanted to abolish.
The wages-for-housework campaigns developed an especially forceful criticism of the assumption that only paid labor was economically significant. Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James helped articulate the relationship between household labor and capitalist production, and Silvia Federici became a major voice in the international movement. Conventional accounts of production had little to say about how workers arrived at work fed and cared for. Every worker who enters a factory has already been fed, cared for, and reproduced through a network of activities that capitalism requires without necessarily purchasing as paid labor. Someone must prepare meals and maintain homes. Children must be raised, and sick workers must receive care. The labor through which these activities occur has historically been feminized, treated as a natural capacity of women, and often excluded from the accounting through which economies officially value human activity.
Once feminists demanded wages for housework, it became harder for economists and employers to treat care as a private matter outside production. Wage labor could appear as the proper object of economic theory while the activity necessary to reproduce wage labor disappeared into the supposed privacy of the family. The demand for wages made it much harder to dismiss the activity as private affection. Critics worried that wages would entrench the domestic role, and some advocates themselves understood the demand as a means of contesting the organization of the household rather than an invitation to perfect it. That tension cannot be resolved by treating either position as obviously foolish. Payment would materially assist women whose labor was otherwise unsupported; payment alone could also preserve the expectation that women remain responsible for labor society preferred not to share.
That still leaves us with the question of why the household is made responsible for so much care in the first place. Why should raising a child or caring for an ill parent depend so heavily on the capacity of one family, when the need for care arises throughout society and can consume the time of whoever is least able to refuse it? A woman can love the person she cares for while resenting the fact that her opportunities for paid work, sleep, or social life depend upon how long she can continue doing it alone. She may need somebody else to take a shift. An argument that ends by praising her dedication has avoided the expense of providing that person.
Black feminists had long been confronting the inadequacy of theories that understood womanhood through the experiences of white middle-class households. Black women had often been compelled to work for wages while also reproducing their own families under conditions of racial domination. The idea that employment outside the home would itself liberate women could therefore sound very different depending on whose life was being described. Black women cleaning wealthier women's homes were already participating in paid employment. A wage paid by a wealthier woman did not erase racial domination or relieve the worker of responsibilities in her own home. Any feminism that celebrated the liberation of women through professional success without asking who performed the labor enabling that success had avoided its own most obvious contradiction.
The Combahee River Collective's statement of 1977 remains one of the clearest expressions of this problem. The collective, made up of Black feminist lesbians, insisted upon examining the interlocking relations of racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression. Its members supported socialist transformation while refusing the promise that a revolution which neglected feminism and anti-racism would somehow produce their liberation as a consequence of its other achievements. They were describing a practical danger: a movement could seize power in the name of the oppressed while leaving intact relations that subordinated particular groups within that movement. Read the Combahee River Collective Statement.
I keep returning to Combahee because its members refused to postpone struggles over race and sex until some supposedly more fundamental revolution had been won. They also refused to describe women as a single social body whose interests could be separated from class and racial domination. Women's oppression has material organization, and that organization takes different forms through the histories of slavery, wage labor, colonialism, and the household.
The second wave also produced conflicts over sexuality whose consequences remain disputed. Some feminists understood pornography and prostitution primarily through their relation to male power, while others stressed the dangers of state censorship and the exclusion of women who exercised agency within stigmatized sexual practices. Some women developed critiques of heterosexual institutions that made lesbians' lives politically visible, while certain strands of feminist separatism converted a criticism of male domination into doctrines that could exclude transsexual women. To acknowledge these contradictions is neither to declare the entire period irredeemable nor to excuse the harm caused by its exclusions. The women a movement excludes have to be able to criticize its political categories, even when its other insights are worth preserving.
For transsexual women the history matters because liberation movements have often been sites of possibility and sites of exclusion at the same time. We have learned from radical feminism's insistence that relations described as natural are historically organized, even while confronting feminists who treated our existence as an offense against the category whose construction they claimed to understand. A feminist theory capable of investigating sex as a political relation should be able to examine the historical regulation of transsexual life without declaring us outside the history of womanhood. When its categories make that inquiry impossible, the categories require criticism.
The shelters and other organizations built through these struggles continue helping women escape immediate danger, while the criticism of unpaid care still applies wherever household labor is treated as the natural expression of love. The continuing burden of care does not mean these women fought for nothing; some of the institutions they created are precisely what keeps people alive. Yet the ability to find a shelter during a crisis, or to pursue formal remedies against discrimination, has not abolished the dependence that makes those protections necessary. Whether feminism can extend those victories into a transformation of daily life remains a political problem rather than an indictment of the women who achieved them.
III. THE THIRD WAVE MADE ROOM FOR THE INDIVIDUAL
The conflicts over whose experience feminism represented continued into the early 1990s, when younger feminists inherited institutions transformed by earlier struggles. Women had entered institutions previously closed to them, feminist scholarship had developed into substantial academic fields, and the language of equality was no longer the exclusive possession of a relatively small network of activists. Yet the public treatment of women continued to reveal that recognition had been unevenly distributed. The 1991 hearings concerning Anita Hill's allegations of sexual harassment against Clarence Thomas became an extraordinary demonstration of what happened when a Black woman described the conduct of a powerful man before institutions whose members were overwhelmingly male. The spectacle made visible the humiliation that could accompany the act of speaking, irrespective of whether the woman possessed the formal right to do so.
Rebecca Walker's articulation of a new feminist wave emerged against that political background. Younger feminists were also questioning assumptions about sexuality and womanhood that had characterized some older movements, while musicians, artists, and writers developed political forms suited to their own lives. The Riot Grrrl scene challenged male dominance within punk culture and created spaces for women to publish and perform on their own terms, although its internal difficulties around race and class became subjects of substantial feminist criticism. The history was much more varied than the image of a generation replacing political organization with lipstick and personal self-expression. It included arguments that feminism had to confront the complexity of women's lives rather than produce a single model of respectable liberation.
Many arguments associated with the third wave had been developed by Black feminists before anyone gave the new generation a name. Kimberlé Crenshaw's writing on intersectionality addressed the difficulty of understanding discrimination experienced by Black women when legal and political frameworks separated race from sex. Black feminists, including the Combahee River Collective, had already developed analyses of oppression that could not be explained through a single social category. Its popular reception sometimes turned intersectionality into a request to acknowledge difference, even though Crenshaw was criticizing legal frameworks that could fail Black women whose discrimination was simultaneously racial and sexual.
A woman can be excluded from employment through discrimination that is simultaneously racialized and sexualized. If the institution charged with recognizing that injury understands race exclusively through Black men's experiences and sex exclusively through white women's experiences, the woman may find that the law has no adequate category for what happened to her. The difficulty cannot be overcome merely by encouraging everybody to acknowledge that identities are complicated. Institutions must be capable of recognizing the specific relations through which people are harmed. Better etiquette cannot repair a legal framework that will not recognize the injury.
The criticism of universal womanhood was necessary because a theory built around one woman's circumstances will misdiagnose another's life. If its supposedly universal worker has a husband providing wages, it may never notice the woman who already works outside the home and then cleans somebody else's kitchen for a living. The difficulty comes when identifying differences is mistaken for having changed the conditions that produce them. A new description can make someone's experience intelligible to people who previously refused to hear her. It cannot on its own compel an employer to pay her enough to live or make a landlord offer her a lease.
As feminism entered advertising and popular culture, empowerment became easier to sell when it could be expressed through decisions women made within the existing economy. Choice became the object around which large portions of public feminism were organized. A woman who pursued a career traditionally dominated by men exercised freedom. Another who embraced conventional femininity could likewise describe herself as making a feminist choice. The defense of personal autonomy addressed an important history of restrictions upon women's lives, and I have no intention of replacing those restrictions with another set of commands about how a woman should behave in order to deserve political respect.
Choice tells us what somebody did while leaving the alternatives, and their costs, unexplained. Someone may accept a job she despises because the rent is due, while a mother may stay in a restrictive household because leaving would uproot her children. An intimate arrangement can offer protection against something more dangerous without becoming freely chosen in any meaningful sense. To say that she exercised a choice can be true while telling us almost nothing about her freedom. Freedom requires examining who controls the options, what refusing each option would cost, and whether the conditions of refusal could be changed.
It gets uglier when feminists judge another woman’s choices without asking what alternatives she could actually afford. A woman who conforms to conventional femininity may be making a calculation within institutions that impose costs upon nonconformity. A woman who rejects those conventions may possess resources that make refusal more possible, or she may accept substantial punishment because conformity has become intolerable. Neither action has a single meaning independent of the conditions in which it occurs. Feminism cannot explain coercion if it begins by treating every decision as an unrestricted expression of the individual's will.
The growing market for empowerment language discovered that a politics centered upon individual achievement could be attached to commodities with almost no disturbance to the relations through which those commodities were produced. A corporation could celebrate women's ambition while paying workers too little to live independently. A product could promise liberation from oppressive beauty expectations while deriving its value from the anxiety those expectations generated. The consumer was invited to express her political independence through a purchase, and the purchase became evidence of an identity no longer requiring much explanation. The market did not need to defeat feminism when it could sell an edition of feminism compatible with its own continued operation.
The refusal to impose one respectable model of womanhood gave many women room to describe their own lives and criticize exclusions within feminist institutions. It expanded the language through which women could understand sexuality and social difference, and it created room for criticism of the exclusions reproduced within feminist institutions themselves. Its limitations become visible where self-definition is asked to carry the burden of social transformation. The ability to name oneself differently can matter profoundly, especially for women whose existence has been regulated through hostile classifications. Yet the transformation of a category does not automatically transform the economic and institutional relations attached to it.
A transsexual woman may obtain recognition of her sex and still be denied employment or housing. A Black woman may attain professional status and continue facing racialized forms of sexual humiliation. A lesbian may openly acknowledge her relationships while remaining economically dependent upon a family that regards those relationships with hostility. These examples should never be collapsed into one experience. Recognition matters enormously to each of them, and none can pay rent or secure her safety with recognition alone.
IV. THE FOURTH WAVE LEARNED HOW TO SPEAK TO EVERYONE
I belong to a generation that encountered feminism in digital spaces, often before we knew very much about the organizations and publications from which its arguments had developed. A young woman can now discover ideas that earlier generations encountered only through access to particular books, political groups, or universities. She can find other women describing experiences she had assumed were hers alone. She can learn about the history of a struggle that her family never discussed and encounter political traditions that would otherwise remain inaccessible. Those possibilities are real, and I have no patience for the fashionable assumption that anything occurring on the internet must be politically worthless because somebody has also managed to make it annoying.
The fourth wave, whose boundaries remain debated by historians, is associated with the expansion of digital feminist organizing in the 2010s and with mobilizations against sexual harassment and violence. The development of #MeToo drew upon work Tarana Burke had begun years earlier, and the public explosion of the hashtag in 2017 demonstrated how women could recognize experiences that had been maintained in isolation through fear and professional dependence. The networks through which these accounts circulated allowed women across workplaces and countries to describe arrangements in which individual resistance had previously seemed too costly. The publicity could be transformative for particular people. It also revealed how difficult it was to turn public recognition into durable power over the institutions women were describing. National Women's History Museum, The Fourth Wave.
For a woman whose income depends on a powerful man, speaking publicly may mean risking her livelihood. She may have a family to support. She may have worked for years to reach a position where the opportunity to begin again elsewhere is limited. A public campaign can reduce the isolation of women in that position by making visible the fact that others have confronted similar conduct. But visibility alone cannot guarantee she will retain her employment, find another job, or survive the retaliation she fears. The political force of collective recognition becomes limited when the resources required to withstand the consequences of refusal remain privately controlled.
Even when public testimony prompts an investigation, the employer continues deciding who keeps a job and the landlord who keeps a home. Public testimony can alter an investigation, bring previously ignored evidence into view, or make isolation less unbearable. It cannot decide a woman's employment conditions once public attention has moved elsewhere. She may still need to negotiate with the same manager, pay her rent from the same wages, or decide whether she can afford an attorney. A university that listens sympathetically to a student can nevertheless retain all the authority to discipline its recognized fraternities. I want us to care about who exercises those powers long after the audience has finished being furious.
I have watched transsexual women develop a much wider feminist conversation during the 2020s, building on histories of organizing that began long before any of us had an account online. Earlier trans women organized community networks and fought for access to employment, legal recognition, and healthcare under circumstances younger women would do well to study. Digital spaces changed the means by which those experiences could become widely known. Trans women who grew up without access to local communities could encounter one another, recognize patterns in their experiences, and begin discussing the relationship between their oppression and the historical domination of women. I think this development has produced some of the most interesting feminist arguments of my generation, alongside a genuinely astonishing quantity of nonsense.
I grew up in online trans spaces where people could articulate elaborate theories of patriarchal power and still struggle to apply the most elementary implications to their daily relationships. A person could recognize every term associated with misogyny while treating another trans woman as expendable once disagreement became inconvenient. The language was sometimes sophisticated, and the behavior was sometimes indistinguishable from what that language had been developed to criticize. Knowing the right terms did not stop somebody from treating another woman as disposable, and I have little interest in awarding anyone a feminist certificate for learning the vocabulary.
That problem becomes much worse when the platforms hosting our arguments reward whatever keeps somebody looking at the screen. An accusation can travel farther than a meeting invitation; a spectacular conflict may bring a woman thousands of new followers who have no obligation to help her if she is evicted. That doesn't make publication useless. It means a movement cannot mistake the rules of distribution imposed by a technology company for a plan of collective survival. Somebody still has to open the space, maintain the records and make sure women who need assistance can reach the people who agreed to provide it.
I have experienced the instability of public attention personally. When people discuss online influence, they tend to imagine that an audience represents an accumulation of social power, as though followers could be converted into material security whenever necessary. I have learned that the conversion is considerably less reliable than the metaphor suggests. Visibility can create opportunities, but an audience does not automatically become a community capable of providing housing or helping a woman through a crisis. The difference becomes painfully clear when visibility itself becomes a source of hostility or when the platforms through which people maintain contact cease to distribute their work. Recognition can vanish while the ordinary costs of living remain entirely indifferent to the change.
Having seen what an audience cannot reliably provide, I want women to develop institutions that survive the accounts through which they become known. The internet can connect people and circulate political ideas, but it does not determine whether the people connected possess lasting responsibilities toward one another. A reading group, a publication archive, a financial support network, or an organization capable of carrying out work across several years can use digital communication without becoming identical to a platform's distribution system. It can create a relationship between participation and practical capacity that public popularity does not guarantee. These forms are difficult to establish precisely because they require resources and continuing labor that the attention economy has little incentive to reward.
The fourth wave has also encountered the revival of open misogynistic politics, including campaigns against reproductive autonomy and efforts to restrict the legal and social lives of trans people. Digital media make hostile ideas available to mass audiences alongside feminist criticism of those ideas. A young woman can encounter sophisticated political analysis and aggressive misogyny in the same afternoon, each packaged as an invitation to discover the truth everyone else is supposedly concealing. The extraordinary quantity of political language available to her offers little guarantee that she will possess the material freedom to act upon any conclusions she reaches.
V. EVERY GENERATION THOUGHT IT COULD FINISH THE JOB
Those overlapping struggles make the conventional chronology of feminist waves difficult to defend as a complete history. I dislike what the metaphor does when we begin to believe the movement behaved as neatly as our textbooks. Women's organizing did not retreat into the ocean after suffrage and reappear in the 1960s. Black women continued fighting disenfranchisement, working-class women organized at work, and organizers trying to protect women from violence carried on during years when no historian was announcing the birth of a new wave. A chronology can tell us when particular demands became prominent without awarding each generation exclusive possession of its own ideas.
The metaphor itself came into wider circulation during the late 1960s, when Martha Weinman Lear described a second feminist wave and connected contemporary women's liberation to the nineteenth-century struggle. It can illuminate changes in the public organization of feminist politics, but its usefulness declines when it obscures the movements that continued between the supposedly distinct periods. The period after suffrage and before the commonly recognized second wave included substantial Black women's organizing and labor activism, alongside feminist work whose achievements are often rendered invisible by the desire for a dramatic narrative of awakening. National Women's History Museum, Missing Waves of Feminism.
The danger of treating history as a sequence of completed waves is that we start demanding a single final verdict on each generation’s reforms. Women who fought for the right to vote were confronting political exclusion, and the achievement of voting rights changed their ability to participate in public life. Women who organized shelters were responding to the immediate danger of remaining in violent households, and those shelters saved lives without abolishing the economic conditions that made departure difficult. Women demanding equal pay sought to reduce inequalities within employment, although improved wages could not eliminate dependence upon employment as such. The fact that a reform does not abolish the entire social order is no reason to withhold it from the people who need it. Revolutionary seriousness does not entitle us to treat women's immediate survival as a distraction from history.
We can defend those reforms and still ask what dependencies remain after they succeed. A woman who earns enough to leave an oppressive partner may acquire a degree of independence that changes everything about her life. The power of wages to make that departure possible demonstrates how important access to income remains within capitalism. It also reveals that independence is still being mediated through a system in which a person must obtain money to secure shelter. A reform can transform her circumstances while leaving intact the more general relation that determines why so many women have to bargain for the resources necessary to leave. We should defend the reform and continue investigating the relation.
Movements can gradually narrow their demands without ever abandoning the language in which the demands were first made. If the demand for women's participation in public life becomes a celebration of successful individual women, feminism can identify with institutions that continue to exploit less privileged women. If the criticism of the household becomes a demand that women perform paid labor as efficiently as men, the social organization of care may remain untouched. If the recognition of women in their differences becomes a collection of identity declarations, the material conditions producing those differences can disappear from political discussion. The language continues to sound emancipatory even when the objective has narrowed.
Many women resisted that narrowing long before I named my own project Invariant Feminism. The Combahee River Collective recognized that economic revolution could preserve sexual and racial domination. Feminists investigating domestic labor understood that household activities were indispensable to production. Materialist feminists such as Christine Delphy examined domestic exploitation as a relation with its own organization, and Black feminist thinkers including Angela Davis examined the historical interdependence of labor, racism, and women's oppression. Their disagreements are real, and we should allow them to remain visible rather than assembling a fictional family of theorists who would all have endorsed the conclusions I am developing.
I am suspicious of every political generation that announces itself as the first to understand the world correctly. The confidence is attractive because it promises that history has finally delivered an adequate consciousness to the people who can complete the task. It also allows us to dismiss the women before us as insufficiently radical while inheriting their concepts, institutions, and practical victories. A movement that begins by forgetting its predecessors will be condemned to repeat some of their mistakes with the added arrogance of believing those mistakes are innovations.
To understand what changed and what endured, we have to compare the authority women were subjected to under different legal and economic arrangements. Patriarchal domination has survived transformations that altered its legal foundations and social language, although the forms it took were historically different and sometimes directly contradictory. A woman compelled into marriage through legal dependence occupied a different position from a woman who can legally divorce but lacks the economic resources to do so without devastating consequences. The continuity lies in the relation through which another institution acquires power over the conditions of her life. Those relations can survive because social transformation may change their outward form while leaving some of the underlying dependencies intact.
The comparison leads to a harder question: can a revolution change the dependencies that earlier reforms made easier to endure? Within the communist left, arguments over workers' councils, party authority, and the abolition of wage labor became bitter partly because the question could not be answered through the identity of the people in charge. Those traditions are not a substitute for feminist thought, and some of their theorists had remarkably little to say about women's lives. Their disputes do, however, give us another way to ask what it means to end an institution rather than place better people in control of it.
VI. THE COMMUNISTS WHO WANTED TO ABOLISH THE WORLD THEY INHERITED
Disagreements about taking control of existing institutions also divided communists, particularly when revolution became a practical question rather than a distant aspiration. The Russian Revolution had made the prospect of overthrowing capitalism appear immediate in ways previous generations of socialists had struggled to imagine, while the development of revolutionary states and international communist organizations raised questions about the institutions through which socialist emancipation was supposed to occur. What happens when a party that claims to represent the working class becomes the institution deciding how workers must live? What happens when production is nationalized but workers continue to experience the labor process as something imposed upon them from above? These were practical questions arising from historical movements, and the answers divided communists who sometimes agreed more about what they opposed than about the society they intended to create.
The Italian communist left, associated with Amadeo Bordiga, emphasized the continuity of the communist program and defended a central role for the party. Bordiga's opposition to parliamentary compromise should not be confused with a general rejection of political organization or leadership. His conception of communist revolution remained firmly centered on the revolutionary party and its historical program. The Dutch-German communist left, associated with Herman Gorter and Anton Pannekoek, developed a different criticism of party domination and emphasized forms of workers' self-organization that could coordinate production through councils. Pannekoek argued that workers had to become capable of governing their own collective activity rather than submitting to leaders who claimed to embody their interests. Pannekoek, Workers' Councils.
For council communists, replacing private owners with state managers accomplished little if workers remained subject to commands they had no authority to change. Workers' councils were imagined as means through which people directly involved in production could participate in deciding how it would be organized. A factory would no longer be governed by an owner who treated its workers as instruments for producing profit. The people whose activity made the factory possible would exercise collective power over that activity. This was a serious attempt to understand what emancipation meant beyond a change in the legal title to property.
The councils themselves could become a form through which capitalist relations continued. Suppose a factory's workers voted on its production targets but still had to sell what they produced, compete for revenue, and justify their access to necessities through employment. They would exercise real power over decisions that a private owner once monopolized, and that gain should be taken seriously. They would also remain bound by the exchange of commodities and the need for their enterprise to survive in a market. The old boss might be gone while the company continued deciding whether its workers could eat. That possibility helps explain why later communist arguments pushed beyond the question of who administers a factory.
Later revolutionary Marxists developed this criticism through arguments associated with communization. In the aftermath of May 1968, writers including Gilles Dauvé examined the historical failures of revolutionary movements that had established forms of political control while preserving wage labor and commodity production. Théorie Communiste developed a distinctive account of how possibilities for revolution changed with the historical organization of class relations. Endnotes later returned to these debates, investigating both the abolition of value and the relation of capitalist society to gender and social reproduction. These currents disagree about important historical questions, and the disagreements should prevent anybody from announcing communization as a finished doctrine handed down through a single authoritative tradition. Endnotes, Bring Out Your Dead; Endnotes, editorial to issue three.
I find the criticism useful when it asks why people must wait until after a revolution to begin changing the relations the revolution claims to abolish. If a revolutionary authority retains the power to allocate food through wages, its ability to compel obedience does not become harmless because the authority calls itself transitional. Of course medicine must be manufactured and transport organized while the world is changing. The immediate problem is whether people arranging those activities can build forms of provision that weaken the dependency on employers, money and political patrons, or whether they reconstruct it and promise the revolution will attend to the matter later.
Camatte's later writing moved toward an account of capital's capacity to reshape human life and absorb opposition into its own reproduction. That problem is worth studying because forms of opposition can themselves become ways of maintaining the institutions they once resisted, a possibility the history of feminist reform also forces us to confront.
Max Stirner contributes a different kind of criticism. In The Ego and Its Own, he attacks the tendency to elevate abstractions above the people whose lives they supposedly describe. The state, morality, humanity, and revolutionary ideals can acquire the status of authorities demanding submission. The argument is provocative because emancipation movements can themselves become institutions whose preservation matters more to their members than the lives they were created to change. Marx and Engels criticized Stirner for locating too much explanatory force in consciousness while failing to account adequately for the material relations through which social domination is reproduced. I think their criticism identifies an important weakness. A person cannot free herself from the need to pay rent by deciding that property relations possess no moral authority. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Max Stirner.
Stirner's criticism nevertheless helps expose the temptation to turn political ideals into sacred obligations. A movement may require women to sacrifice the present conditions of their lives in the name of future liberation, while declaring every objection to that sacrifice an expression of insufficient commitment. It may demand obedience to an organization whose rules are defended because the organization represents the revolution, even where the organization reproduces hierarchies the revolution was supposed to overcome. None of this can be settled through a simple affirmation of individual preference. Collective life requires durable commitments, particularly where care and the provision of material necessities are concerned. A movement earns the right to call its institutions emancipatory through what those institutions allow people to do, especially when people refuse their leaders.
The debate becomes more difficult once the abolition of class is discussed alongside the abolition of gender. Some communization arguments examine the abolition of the proletariat as a class and the abolition of gendered social relations through the same revolutionary process. Feminist contributions to these debates, including Maya Andrea Gonzalez's writing and the work published in Endnotes, investigate the relationship between capitalist production and the organization of social reproduction. These are important analyses, but we cannot conclude that every form of patriarchal domination originated with capitalism or would automatically disappear with the abolition of value. Women's oppression has histories that cannot be reduced to one economic mechanism, and transsexual women's existence raises questions about sexed classification that cannot be resolved by simply announcing that gender will be abolished.
For feminism, a theory about abolishing gender has to answer a question that cannot be dismissed with a clever footnote: what happens to women who intend to go on being women? Sexed classification has helped organize domination, while women have also fought through that classification to name injuries and demand recognition. Treating the destruction of compulsory roles as a command that women surrender the lives they have made would give a revolutionary program the authority to determine their identities. A communist revolution worthy of the name should remove the penalties attached to those identities and the coercive arrangements organized around them. It should have no interest in appointing itself the guardian of what a woman is permitted to call herself.
That refusal to let a revolutionary program dictate women’s identities also changes what we can demand of work. Women have spent generations fighting for the right to enter wage employment on equal terms. The struggle mattered because access to income could make departure from an oppressive household possible. Yet a revolutionary politics cannot reasonably stop with women's admission into an arrangement that requires the majority of humanity to sell its waking life in exchange for the means of survival. We should defend the gains made through employment while questioning the institution of wage dependence itself. That is a considerably larger demand, and I think feminism has every reason to make it.
VII. WE WERE NEVER SUPPOSED TO SPEND OUR LIVES WORKING
Whenever I argue for abolishing work, somebody can be relied upon to point out that food has to be grown and medicines manufactured, as though I had been planning to abolish antibiotics along with wage labor. Useful activity is unavoidable as long as human beings need to eat, live somewhere, and care for each other. The obligation to sell one's time to an employer to receive the means of doing those things is an arrangement made by human beings and enforced through property and law. It imposes demands on time that nobody can understand simply by observing that hospitals require staffing. Confusing those facts makes the existing way of organizing labor appear as inevitable as the need for labor itself.
If you lack independent wealth, the rent still comes due each month, and somebody has to pay you before you can pay it. The rent must be paid whether she enjoys her work or despises it, and her need for food does not diminish when an employer concludes that retaining her services is no longer profitable. She may possess legal freedom to accept or refuse a particular job, but the institution of wage labor organizes the alternatives under conditions she did not choose. Employers compete for her labor, and she may improve her position by moving between them, yet the larger requirement remains that she obtain money through employment or some other source capable of sustaining her. Negotiating better terms can substantially improve somebody’s life without ending her dependence on income.
For women, access to wages has often been the means of escaping financial dependence upon men, which is exactly why any argument about abolishing wage labor has to take that history seriously. A woman whose husband controls every resource in the household may gain extraordinary freedom when she obtains paid work. She may be able to leave a relationship that had previously been impossible to escape. She may acquire the capacity to make decisions without asking permission from the person who pays for her food and shelter. If she has been denied the opportunity to use her skills, employment may also allow forms of activity and social participation previously closed to her. These gains are substantial, and any theory dismissing them as irrelevant has mistaken a historical abstraction for an explanation of women's lives.
I would never tell the woman who finally leaves a controlling husband after getting a job that her employment was a mistake because capitalism remains bad. The question arises after we recognize the actual freedom her income makes possible: why must she sell hours to a different authority in order to escape the first? An employer controls whether she keeps her job, and that power can determine where she lives and how much mistreatment she feels able to challenge even without any claim to ownership over her person. Winning access to the wage did not make the wage a harmless condition of survival.
Even after a woman wins that independence, we are left with the ugly assumption that paid employment is what earns somebody the right to the necessities of life. Someone unable to work may be required to demonstrate that inability repeatedly, as though the need to eat were a privilege granted through proof of economic usefulness. Someone who provides care outside the wage relation may be told that she has failed to contribute, even while the activity she performs makes possible the paid employment of others. The language of deservingness makes survival conditional upon an institution whose requirements have no necessary relationship to human need.
Higher wages matter. Anyone who has been unable to pay rent knows what a change in income can do, and it would be idiotic to make a revolutionary argument by treating immediate improvements in people's lives as politically embarrassing. A minimum wage, a union contract, or enforceable protections against retaliation can give someone enough security to refuse demands she previously endured. These changes still leave survival attached to employment, and a person who loses the ability to work may find that her claim to necessities has become a problem requiring somebody else's permission. I want to defend the improvements and pursue a world in which the need for those improvements no longer determines the right to live.
Employers also decide which kinds of activity receive money according to whether paying for them serves the business. An activity that produces something useful may receive little economic support if the people benefiting from it cannot pay. Another activity may command considerable resources because it offers the opportunity to generate profit, even when its contribution to human well-being is dubious. The organization of production is shaped by competition and the imperative to accumulate value, and those mechanisms can encourage forms of activity that consume enormous quantities of time and resources without corresponding to human needs. The existence of useful labor within capitalism does not mean capitalism organizes useful labor according to any principle of necessity that we should wish to preserve.
When I call for abolishing work, I am talking about the imposed dependence on selling labor to obtain the necessities of life. People will still build things, care for each other and perform difficult activity, although they should have far more control over how those responsibilities are arranged. Necessary activity will continue, though its quantity and distribution can change enormously when production is organized for human use rather than value. Some unpleasant activity will probably remain. We should be interested in reducing it, sharing it fairly, and ensuring that nobody can use another person's need to compel a lifetime of service.
The hours sold to an employer also determine what happens to the hours that remain. Under the wage relation, people are required to arrange much of their waking existence around the demands of employment. Their meals and relationships become activities fitted into the time left over. The demands of childcare may conflict with the hours expected by an employer, producing a problem that is usually addressed as the private failure of the individual woman who is unable to reconcile them. The employer has purchased her labor according to an arrangement whose hours reflect the needs of the business. The child requires care according to needs that cannot be postponed until the working day is convenient. The burden of reconciling these institutions is then placed upon the woman whose life passes between them.
A woman who moves into a higher-paying profession may find a way to buy back some of those hours. A better salary may allow her to purchase care from someone whose wages are low enough to make the arrangement affordable. Her freedom of time can thereby depend upon another woman's lack of it. A household may escape the direct burden of domestic labor by transferring that burden to workers whose immigration status, race, or class position restricts their alternatives. This arrangement exposes the limitations of a feminism that celebrates the liberation of an individual woman without examining the labor through which that liberation is maintained. She has escaped part of the burden by transferring it to a woman with fewer ways to refuse.
Technology could reduce necessary labor considerably, although technological development under capitalism does not automatically produce greater freedom for workers. A machine that increases productivity may allow a firm to produce more goods with less labor, yet workers can experience its introduction as a threat to employment because their access to income depends upon the continued purchase of their labor. The development that ought to make life easier may instead threaten their ability to survive. This contradiction is one of capitalism's more spectacular achievements. Society acquires the capacity to reduce compulsory labor, and people are compelled to fear the very development that could release them from it.
Organizing production for human use would also require a way to provide its results to people who are no longer compelled to earn wages. It would require collective provision for necessities independent of the wage relation, and institutions capable of coordinating production without recreating a ruling class that determines who deserves access. Those institutions would have to confront practical questions of scarcity and responsibility that slogans cannot resolve. The distribution of medicine requires knowledge of what exists and who needs it. Infrastructure must be maintained, and decisions about finite resources will remain necessary. The abolition of wage labor does not dissolve these problems. It changes the principles through which they are approached and removes the market dependence that currently determines so much of their outcome.
And the work that keeps people alive continues after they leave the factory or the office. Employment is only one part of the organization of labor, and much of the activity through which society reproduces itself occurs after people have supposedly finished working for the day. The division between the wage and the household is central to the relation we have to abolish. Women's liberation will remain incomplete as long as freeing a woman from paid work simply returns her to a domestic institution that demands her labor without compensation or the possibility of meaningful refusal.
VIII. AND WHEN WE CAME HOME, THERE WAS MORE WORK
Once we leave the workplace, a different set of obligations awaits us at home. We describe the home as a refuge from the employer, which is sometimes true, while quietly relying upon somebody to keep it clean, arrange meals, and see that dependent people have what they need. The household can contain real affection while still assigning responsibilities according to expectations its inhabitants did not invent. The fact that people love one another may make the arrangement harder to question: refusing a task can be made to sound like refusing the person who depends upon its completion. Women know how quickly an ordinary argument about washing the dishes can become a referendum on whether they are selfish.
Somebody has to provide that food, even when everybody in the household has already spent a day at work. Clothing must be cleaned, living spaces maintained, and dependent people cared for. In households with children, the demands of care may occupy almost every waking hour of somebody's day. These activities are frequently treated as the natural background of existence because the people performing them have historically been women. The wage makes labor visible as an economic transaction, while the absence of wages makes domestic labor appear as something outside economics. The distinction tells us more about the institutions through which labor is compensated than about the importance of the activity being performed.
A woman who spends her day preparing meals and caring for a child is performing necessary activity. A woman who performs the same tasks for wages in another household is recognized as a worker, even where her employer pays her poorly. Money does not change what the work involves. What changes is the social relationship organizing it, including who exercises authority and the means through which the person performing the labor obtains resources. The household conceals part of the economic significance of reproductive labor by presenting the arrangement as an expression of private obligation.
Consider the man who sincerely describes himself as feminist and expects his wife to keep track of the children's appointments. If she reminds him, he may do what she asks and believe they have divided the work. Meanwhile she remains responsible for knowing what must be done, when it must be done, and whether anyone else has remembered. His political beliefs may be sincere, and they do not erase the administrative work of running a family. When an arrangement depends upon one person's continuous attention and another's occasional willingness to help, the dispute over who has been fair will tend to begin only after the first person is exhausted.
Affection can make that unequal arrangement even harder to challenge. A woman may love caring for a child and still require time in which she is not responsible for the child's needs. She may love her partner and resent the assumption that love obligates her to maintain the household alone. She may willingly care for a sick parent and still be harmed by a society in which no other means of providing care are available. Love does not abolish exhaustion, and it does not create additional hours in the day. If a social arrangement requires women to demonstrate love through indefinite labor, the expression of affection has become entangled with the conditions through which their refusal can be interpreted as moral failure.
For a woman who cannot afford to leave, even saying no to a domestic obligation may carry a cost. She may face an argument or a deterioration of affection. She may lose the support of a relative whose resources she needs. If economic dependence is severe, refusal may threaten housing or access to care. These consequences should not be conflated, because they involve different degrees of coercion and different institutions. Their common significance is that domestic expectations derive force from relationships that are rarely independent of the material resources through which people sustain their lives.
Marriage law has changed enormously since the periods discussed earlier, and those changes have mattered. Married women in many societies possess property rights and legal protections that earlier generations fought to secure. Same-sex marriage has expanded recognition of relationships previously excluded from important benefits. Divorce and family law have undergone substantial transformations. Yet the distribution of unpaid care continues to impose costs disproportionately on women, and the capacity to exit an intimate relationship remains deeply influenced by income and access to housing. The household has adapted to changes in its legal organization without ceasing to function as a unit in which essential activity is privatized.
I have no intention of abolishing the privacy of a woman's home or telling her that caring for her children makes her insufficiently revolutionary. A movement that assigns households to officials or treats private affection as an offense against the collective would be constructing another authority over women's lives. The issue is the cost of refusing domestic obligations, which is frequently much higher when somebody controls the house, the income, or access to children. A woman should have other places to live and other people capable of providing care without a political organization inspecting whether her personal relationships meet an approved standard.
Imagine housing as a guaranteed condition of social life rather than a resource secured through marriage, employment, or continued obedience to the person who owns the property. A woman who wishes to leave a partner would still experience grief and the difficulties of separating shared lives, but she would no longer confront homelessness as the price of departure. Imagine childcare provided through collectively supported institutions that parents could choose to use without surrendering their relationships with their children. The burden of reproduction could be shared across a society that recognizes care as necessary activity rather than the special duty of women. Imagine healthcare and disability support organized through common provision, reducing the pressure on households to absorb needs for which they possess neither the resources nor the time.
For any of that to become possible, somebody would have to build and maintain the places where care is provided. They would require buildings and people with relevant knowledge, and they would require mechanisms for distributing activity so that care workers did not simply become another exploited class performing the work from which everyone else had been freed. The aspiration to collective provision is empty if it merely changes the employer while preserving exhaustion and the lack of control over one's time. Freedom from compulsory domestic labor must be connected to freedom from wage labor, or the same work will be transferred to someone whose economic position makes refusal impossible.
When wealthy women purchase care from other women, the burden may move rather than diminish. I have no interest in making a woman feel guilty for hiring the help she needs to live, especially when care responsibilities exceed what any individual can reasonably manage. Yet the wages, working hours, protections and housing available to the person hired matter just as much as the relief gained by the employer. A society in which some women buy time from women with almost none to spare has found a market for an old inequality. Public services and collective access to care would have to improve the lives of the people providing it as well as those receiving it.
That need for somewhere else to turn is especially urgent for transsexual women whose families have made their housing and care precarious. Transsexual women can encounter family rejection, discrimination in employment, and barriers to healthcare that intensify dependence upon intimate partners or informal networks of support. A relationship that provides shelter may also become a relation difficult to leave. The person offering help may be generous and loving, and the help may be the difference between safety and serious danger. The structural problem is that essential support has been made dependent upon the continuation of a private relationship because society provides no adequate alternative. The material possibility of refusal is part of the meaning of freedom.
I want to abolish the social compulsion through which women become domestic servants to the people they love, while retaining everything in intimate life that makes love worth having. I want people to be able to care for one another without the presumption that care entitles somebody to ownership over another person's future. I want domestic life to cease functioning as the place where the work capitalism requires is completed at the expense of those who have the least power to refuse it. The private nature of a relationship should protect people from unwanted interference. It should never serve as an explanation for why their economic dependence is beyond political examination.
With those alternatives available, people could decide how to live together without making the household their only means of survival. People could live together because they wanted to, care for children through relationships sustained by genuine affection and adequate support, and maintain privacy without experiencing isolation as the inevitable consequence of independence. Freedom from the compulsory household would expand what a home could become. We might finally discover that domestic affection is considerably more pleasant when it no longer arrives attached to somebody else's unpaid shift.
IX. WHAT WOULD WE DO IF WE WERE ACTUALLY FREE?
Ask somebody exhausted by her job what freedom would look like, and she may answer with the smallest change that would make tomorrow bearable. Someone wants a manager who stops humiliating her. Somebody else wants a week without working. A woman who cannot afford to leave her partner wants her own apartment, and she is right to want it. These are real changes in people's lives, although they leave the wage, the landlord, and the privatized obligation to arrange care in place. I am interested in what becomes possible when we stop treating every desire as a request for a less unpleasant position within an arrangement that nobody asked us whether we wanted.
The question becomes more interesting when wages and landlords stop defining the limits of every possible answer. I am not asking whether human beings can become independent of the material world. We have bodies that need nourishment and relationships through which we become capable of living with one another. We will continue to encounter illness and the fact that some activities must be performed whether anyone happens to enjoy them. The question is whether the satisfaction of those needs must continue being organized through institutions that grant some people control over the survival of others.
Secure housing would also change what a woman can refuse at work. She might still choose to perform useful activity in a laboratory or an office, but her ability to remain housed would no longer depend upon persuading an employer to retain her. The authority of the employer would be transformed by the disappearance of the economic threat that currently gives the employment relation much of its force. If necessary social activity were collectively organized without wage compulsion, she could participate in decisions concerning its distribution rather than receiving her duties primarily through the market demand for labor.
The same security would matter when she chose whom to live with. A woman might love her partner and choose to live with her for many years. If the relationship became unhappy, separation would still be difficult, and the emotional consequences of leaving could remain profound. Yet departure would no longer mean losing the roof over her head because the house belonged to the person she was leaving. She would not need to weigh the possibility of homelessness against the indignity of remaining in an arrangement she could no longer tolerate. The freedom to leave would acquire a material basis independent of the goodwill of the other person. That difference would change the terms under which she chose to stay.
Children and parents would also have more room to make decisions without calculating every choice against future wages. Parents would no longer be compelled to view their children's future security primarily through the competition for lucrative employment. Young people could develop capacities without measuring every interest against the likelihood that it would produce a sufficient income. Older people would not need to remain in exhausting employment because the alternatives available to them were too precarious. Intergenerational care could be organized as a shared social capacity rather than an obligation whose distribution depended upon which daughter could be persuaded to sacrifice her career.
I imagine education changing enormously. The contemporary education system provides genuine intellectual opportunities, and it also sorts people according to the requirements of economic competition. Students are encouraged to identify fields of study that will make them employable, while institutions increasingly measure success through outcomes expressed in wages and occupational status. The pursuit of knowledge can become subordinated to the necessity of justifying the expense of education through future earnings. A society that removed wage dependence could make learning a continuing part of life rather than a temporary preparation for the labor market. People could study history or medicine because they wanted to contribute to human understanding, without treating the choice as an investment that must eventually pay for itself.
I think about the time women could spend writing and making things if their work did not have to finance their survival. People already produce enormous quantities of creative work without expecting immediate compensation, often in the little time remaining after employment has consumed their energy. Others attempt to sustain themselves through creative activity and discover that the market rewards some expressions while making the development of less profitable work extraordinarily difficult. The possibility of making art without the requirement that it become economically viable would not guarantee that every creation was remarkable. It would allow people to develop their capacities without needing to convert every interest into a commodity. Frankly, I would be delighted to live in a world where every girl with a notebook did not have to become a personal brand to afford the time to write.
Our leisure is commonly arranged around recovery from work. People spend their days off catching up on the household responsibilities employment forced them to postpone, and advertisers assure them that whatever remains can be transformed into an experience worth buying. I have no quarrel with somebody wanting to relax in front of a screen for a few hours. I do wonder what they might do if the question of how to recover enough strength for the next shift stopped governing the time when they are supposedly free. It is difficult even to imagine pleasures that have not been organized around exhaustion.
Any promise of free time would be fraudulent if women still had to perform the unpaid household work that makes everyone else’s leisure possible. A man may leave his workplace and regard the evening as an opportunity to rest, while the woman sharing his household returns from her own employment to another set of responsibilities. The disappearance of wage labor alone would not correct this inequality. Freedom requires the social redistribution and reduction of the activities through which daily life is maintained, so that the capacity to rest belongs to everyone rather than being purchased through somebody else's continued exhaustion.
What would sexuality mean when intimate relationships no longer performed the same economic functions? The question deserves more care than the familiar revolutionary fantasy in which abolishing private property mysteriously produces perfect relations between human beings. Desire will remain complex, people will continue hurting one another, and the existence of social provision will not abolish every difference in power. Yet the disappearance of economic dependence could change the conditions under which people negotiate intimacy. A woman who possesses secure housing and access to care is better able to refuse sexual relations she does not want than someone who fears that refusal may deprive her of life's necessities. The ability to refuse is part of the material content of freedom, even though it cannot guarantee the conduct of every person involved.
The rules governing disability benefits expose another cruelty in making survival conditional on work. Capitalism has organized many systems of support around distinctions between those considered capable of work and those required to demonstrate that they are not. These categories can impose exhausting administrative demands upon people who already require care. If access to necessities were unconditional, the question of a person's capacity to produce value would lose its power to determine whether she deserved to live securely. Disability would not disappear, and people would still have different needs. Society could begin organizing those needs through collective provision rather than treating dependence as evidence of diminished human worth.
I do not intend any of these possibilities as instructions for how liberated people must spend their days. Some women will want lives centered upon their children, and others will prefer forms of activity that take them far beyond the household. Some will devote themselves to study, and others will find fulfillment in forms of practical work whose usefulness they experience directly. A person may enjoy repairing machinery or preparing meals, even though those same activities are exhausting under conditions where she has no meaningful opportunity to refuse them. The character of an activity changes when the social relation organizing it changes. Freedom does not require us to abolish activities people enjoy merely because those activities were previously imposed upon them.
I cannot tell future people which kinds of association they should prefer or how every conflict over necessary labor will be settled. A society that abolished the power of employers over access to food could still make care workers miserable if it treated their time as an inexhaustible gift. Someone will have to decide where the burden falls, and the people living with the consequences will need power over those decisions. I would rather admit that question remains open than draw up a picturesque future in which everyone is always delighted to do the dishes.
X. THE NEGATION AND FALL OF ALL
After so many reforms have left those obligations intact, I understand the pleasure of imagining the institutions behind them coming down. I would be lying if I pretended that prospect held no emotional appeal. Women spend so much of their lives making accommodations to arrangements they did not establish that the idea of seeing those arrangements lose their authority can feel like the first honest response to years of humiliation. Yet political satisfaction and social transformation are different matters. An institution can be destroyed while the relation that made it possible survives, ready to acquire another name and another collection of administrators. If we understand negation merely as an act of destruction, we will fail to explain what must happen after the object of our anger has disappeared.
A more useful meaning of negation begins with changing the arrangements that keep recreating that authority. Removing a factory owner and appointing a manager on behalf of a revolutionary government leaves a question about the people who work there: must they still obey decisions made without them because the manager controls their means of survival? Removing a violent husband from a household does not give a woman an affordable place to live if the tenancy, income, and necessary care remain beyond her control. Those two situations have different histories and consequences, and I am interested in the way a political victory can leave the practical means of compulsion available for someone else to use.
Marx's criticism of capitalism developed precisely because exploitation could be reproduced through transactions in which individuals formally possessed legal rights. The worker appears as someone able to exchange labor power for wages. The employer appears as someone entitled to purchase that capacity under the terms of a contract. The relation does not require an employer to announce a personal intention to oppress the worker in order for the system to reproduce class domination. It operates through historically specific arrangements of property and production that compel most people to obtain the necessities of life by selling labor. The removal of an exceptionally cruel employer may improve workers' lives without changing the social necessity of employment itself.
The same difficulty appears in a household governed by habits that its inhabitants claim to have rejected. We can describe a man who treats women with contempt, and his behavior may deserve condemnation. Yet a theory of patriarchy cannot end with the personal beliefs of men who behave badly, because the relation persists through institutions that may be supported by people who sincerely regard themselves as egalitarian. The household can distribute care unequally without any participant publicly defending women's natural subordination. Employers can reproduce sexed inequalities through scheduling and promotion systems whose rules appear neutral in isolation. The economic requirements of reproduction can restrict women's lives even where the people involved possess genuine affection for one another. The relation must be examined at the level of its reproduction rather than reduced to the intentions of every individual participating in it.
Condemning harmful conduct can change behavior, but a political program also has to change the authority people hold over one another. A man may learn every approved word about equality while leaving the division of household responsibilities exactly as he found it. A university may teach consent while continuing to grant organizations control over spaces in which complaints are handled through procedures the students did not design. Political education becomes more consequential when it informs a struggle over who makes those decisions and what happens to the person who refuses them.
The revolutionary abolition of wage labor would involve transforming production so that human survival no longer depends upon employment in the capitalist sense. The abolition of compulsory domestic labor would involve providing for the reproduction of everyday life through arrangements that do not impose the burden primarily upon women or leave access to care dependent upon private relationships. The abolition of class would require eliminating the relations through which some people control productive resources while others must submit to their terms to survive. These objectives are connected because the reproduction of each relation depends upon activities taking place elsewhere in social life.
These changes involve overlapping histories, and we cannot explain them all through capitalism alone. Patriarchal relations have histories that predate capitalism, and the forms through which women have been subordinated differ enormously across social orders. We therefore cannot assume that the abolition of capitalist value would mechanically resolve every relation organized around sex. Social arrangements concerning reproduction and sexuality would continue to require transformation, and the development of a new economy could reproduce old hierarchies unless the relations through which those hierarchies operate were themselves confronted. This is a central reason for insisting that feminism remain a distinct revolutionary inquiry rather than a secondary chapter appended to a theory whose main conclusions have already been settled.
During a revolution, the people whose lives are being transformed must still eat and receive medical care. They cannot suspend their needs until a revolutionary organization has decided how provision should work. A revolutionary process that disrupts production without establishing ways to maintain those necessities can reproduce dependence through scarcity and administrative control. The people responsible for distributing limited resources might acquire power over those who need them, creating conditions under which the old forms of domination reappear in different institutional arrangements. We should approach this problem seriously because the alternative is to allow the grandeur of our abolitionist language to excuse the absence of any explanation for how people are supposed to survive the transition.
That is where I find the communization critique useful: it refuses to postpone the abolition of capitalist relations until after the moment of revolutionary victory. Its insistence that transformation must occur through the revolutionary process makes it possible to criticize institutions that preserve wage labor and commodity exchange under the justification of temporary necessity. The criticism should remain open to the actual conditions people confront. Producing medicine requires coordinated labor, and food distribution may face constraints that cannot be wished away. The relevant question is whether the means developed to meet those needs expand collective control over life or establish new forms of compulsory dependence that become increasingly difficult to abolish.
One obvious test is what happens to the women doing the movement’s care work. A revolutionary organization might socialize factories while assuming that women will continue feeding its members without any corresponding transformation of domestic relations. It might promise the future abolition of patriarchy while organizing its present activities around women's unpaid care. It might treat difficulties concerning childcare as private obstacles to women's political participation, when those difficulties reveal that the movement has carried the existing division of labor into its own practice. The revolution could then become another historical circumstance through which an invariant relation survives.
We should also reject the fantasy that abolishing patriarchal institutions means abolishing the human beings who have participated in them. People are historically formed within relations they did not choose, and the fact that they have benefited from those relations may give them substantial reasons to resist change. Those interests should be examined and confronted. Yet an emancipatory theory requires an account of how people can change their practices as the conditions organizing those practices change. We are attempting to abolish domination, which is why a politics that mistakes categories of people for permanent embodiments of domination would reproduce the very logic it claims to overcome.
A revolutionary program that promises the end of gendered domination still has to account for the people living inside the classifications it proposes to change. Women's self-organization has been indispensable because subordination is experienced through a social classification that continues to structure the distribution of power. If the relations producing that subordination were abolished, the political meaning of those classifications would change. This does not establish that women would cease to exist as women or that people should be compelled to relinquish identities through which they understand their lives. It establishes that a category's function within a relation of domination is historically changeable. Invariant Feminism seeks the abolition of the compulsory hierarchy attached to sexed existence, and it must remain capable of understanding the differences between women without treating those differences as justifications for subordination.
Revolution cannot afford to discard useful knowledge simply because it was developed inside existing institutions. Hospitals contain knowledge and techniques we need. Agricultural systems involve forms of human cooperation that cannot be replaced through an act of rhetorical refusal. People possess practical capacities developed under capitalism that could be used for purposes no longer subordinated to profit. Revolutionary transformation would involve taking those capacities out of relations that make them instruments of domination and developing different principles through which they are organized. The destruction of useful capacities would make freedom harder to achieve because it would reduce the resources through which people could live independently of oppressive institutions.
Keeping those capacities alive while changing who controls them makes abolition more demanding than a declaration of refusal. To abolish the wage relation, we must create conditions under which people can live without wages. To abolish the coercive economic function of the household, we must create arrangements through which people can obtain care and shelter without remaining bound to relationships they cannot refuse. These are positive developments because the existing institutions maintain their power precisely through their claim to be necessary. The revolutionary task is to make that claim cease to be true.
XI. WE NEED A FEMINISM THAT CAN SURVIVE US
I have been talking with older transsexual women, some of whom spent decades organizing under circumstances I know mostly through books and their own accounts. One of them has been involved for roughly forty years. I am twenty-three, which makes it difficult to pretend I have earned much authority to announce that my generation has finally solved the problems theirs could not. What stays with me from these conversations is how much knowledge an organizer can carry without ever having had an institution capable of protecting it from being lost. When women have to learn the same lesson again after each group dissolves, the price is paid by people who needed that knowledge before the next generation got around to rediscovering it.
Reading an archive cannot give me the experience of living through an entire generation of repression, and I have no wish to claim it does. The women I have interviewed know what happened when groups lost their meeting spaces, or when someone who had held a network together could no longer continue, because they have watched organizations reach the limits of the time and money available to their members. They have seen victories reversed. Younger women arrive to find some of those histories barely documented and have to learn, sometimes painfully, that the movements they hope to build will have ordinary practical needs long after the excitement of founding them wears off.
When an organizer leaves, somebody else should still be able to find what she learned and continue the work. A movement whose knowledge exists primarily within personal relationships becomes vulnerable when those relationships disappear. If an organizer knows how to obtain a necessary service and never records that information in a form others can use, the knowledge may vanish when she leaves. If a publication depends upon one woman writing and distributing everything, it may cease to exist when she can no longer perform the work. If a network of material support consists entirely of personal favors, its capacity may fluctuate with the health and circumstances of the people offering them. The generosity involved can be genuine, and the arrangements can save lives. Their fragility remains a social problem that individual kindness cannot solve indefinitely.
That fragility has made me more interested in institutions, even though I understand why the word makes some women suspicious. I know the word frightens women who have been ordered around by organizations claiming to act on their behalf. I share the suspicion of a structure that treats obedience to its founders as proof of loyalty. Still, an organization that preserves records, trains new organizers, and makes practical help available through procedures people can actually understand gives someone a better chance of being helped after the best-connected woman in the group becomes exhausted or leaves. That kind of durability seems worth the aggravation of writing things down and deciding who is responsible.
I care about what an institution allows a woman to do when she disagrees with the people running it. A reading group may appear modest compared with the rhetoric of revolution, but sustained political education allows knowledge to become common rather than remaining concentrated in a handful of prominent writers. An archive may preserve work whose relevance becomes visible only when circumstances change. A publication can provide continuity between women who never meet, allowing arguments to be revised and transmitted rather than repeatedly reconstructed. An independent network of material resources can reduce the necessity of securing shelter and care through intimate relationships whose terms may change without warning.
The institutions I want can only survive if their members have enough time to maintain them, and most women in the movement already have too much to do. There is a contradiction in declaring the abolition of compulsory labor while constructing a political movement that survives through the endless unpaid work of women who feel they cannot refuse. I have seen how easily a person who cares deeply about a project can become responsible for everything the project requires, because the work will otherwise remain unfinished. The result may appear as impressive dedication to everyone watching from a distance. For the woman doing the work, it can become another arrangement in which the demands of a collective institution consume the life that institution was supposedly created to improve.
Someone has to edit the publication, clean the meeting room, and make sure a person who needs a ride can get it. If these duties reliably fall on the women least willing to disappoint their friends, a movement demanding freedom from compulsory labor is practicing a peculiar interpretation of its own politics. Responsibility can be rotated where skills allow, properly compensated where resources exist, and written down so that women know what they have agreed to do and when they may stop. A movement should be able to survive somebody saying that she cannot perform a task anymore, because people need rest and their lives change.
If the founders leave a set of rules that nobody is allowed to revise, the organization can outlive them while remaining under their authority. If a younger generation discovers that an inherited practice has become inadequate to the circumstances it confronts, continuity may require changing the practice. A tradition that forbids revision in order to honor its founders can become a monument to their authority, even where the founders originally intended to expand the freedom of the people who would follow them. We should be interested in what can endure because it remains useful, and in what must change because the historical conditions that justified it have disappeared.
Even when an organization survives, the women who kept it running can disappear from the historical record. Publications and movements are often remembered through a small number of names, while the women who organized meetings and maintained relationships receive little acknowledgment. The famous theorist may become the object through which later generations encounter an entire historical movement, even though her work depended upon people whose contributions were less visible. This arrangement makes intellectual inheritance seem like a succession of exceptional individuals rather than a collective process of developing knowledge through social struggle. Preserving the record of ordinary organizing is one way to resist that distortion.
For transsexual women, gaps in that record have been made worse by criminalization, medical exclusion, and the disappearance of communities whose work was never systematically preserved. Some of what younger women encounter as newly discovered knowledge was developed long ago by people who had few opportunities to publish it or preserve their institutions. We should be collecting those histories while the women who lived them are still capable of telling us what happened. We should also resist converting them into comforting stories whose principal purpose is to reassure younger women that history always improves. Older women have earned the right to describe the difficulties of their lives without their experiences being turned into material for somebody else's optimism.
We can see the same problem in the better-known history of the feminist movement. We inherit the achievements of suffragists whose strategies we may dispute and the writings of second-wave feminists whose exclusions we must criticize. We inherit the insights of Black socialist feminism and the debates over domestic labor without having to endorse every position taken by everyone involved. Intellectual continuity does not require the abandonment of judgment. It requires enough historical seriousness to distinguish the achievements worth preserving from the relations of domination that developed alongside them. This is one of the advantages of a living tradition over a sacred doctrine. We can be grateful for what earlier women built while refusing to treat their limitations as obligations imposed upon us.
A woman encountering the movement after us should find records she can read, people who know how to help her locate resources, and institutions that will not vanish the moment their best-known organizers lose interest. She should be able to disagree with a founder and still use the archive. She should be able to decline a volunteer task without losing access to assistance. These are ordinary expectations to have of an organization, which may explain why radical movements sometimes work so hard to make them seem impossible. If we want any of our politics to survive, somebody has to take those expectations seriously before a crisis demonstrates how badly we needed them.
XII. THIS IS WHAT WE MEAN BY INVARIANCE
After following those histories and the women who preserved them, I keep coming back to what a victory leaves intact. The woman who gains the vote can still be driven out of public life by poverty. The woman who gains access to paid employment may find that the price of leaving one dependency is entering another. A society can speak respectfully about care while continuing to assign most of it to people whose other choices are restricted by the need to provide it. Those relations have changed greatly over time, and sometimes the change has saved lives. I want a feminism that takes the victory seriously enough to ask why there was still something for the next generation to fight.
That is what I am trying to investigate through Invariant Feminism. An invariant here is something to be demonstrated through history, never announced as a law of women's nature. I cannot infer that two arrangements operate in the same way simply because women are subordinated in both. I have to ask who controls the resources, which refusal carries a penalty, and how that penalty is enforced. Under one law the husband may directly control his wife's property; under a different set of circumstances her employer may decide whether she keeps the income on which her home depends. Their difference matters, and the connection between them has to be argued rather than assumed.
Property ownership can determine whether leaving a relationship also means losing a home. The employer controls wages, and the household often assigns care to the person who can least afford to withdraw it. Racial discrimination changes the terms on which those institutions deal with Black women, while transsexual women can encounter legal and medical exclusions that make ordinary necessities harder to secure. I call the inquiry materialist because those consequences survive the good intentions of individuals. If we blame everything on personal prejudice, we cannot explain why a person who speaks perfectly well about equality may keep benefiting from arrangements that distribute time and resources unequally.
Those questions apply just as much to movements that claim to be abolishing economic exploitation. Revolutionaries have understood capital brilliantly while expecting women to maintain their meetings and homes without complaint. Wealthy feminists have gained independence partly through hiring women whose work made it possible. It would be ridiculous to treat the removal of capitalism's value relation as a guarantee that every inherited sexual hierarchy would evaporate without anyone confronting it. Equally, admitting women to the commanding positions of existing institutions gives us no reason to stop asking what those institutions command.
The meaning and consequences of being classified as a woman have changed across histories of law and labor. There is no useful universal description that erases how slavery governed Black women's bodies or how colonial authorities imposed their own sexual categories. Transsexual women live within, negotiate, and sometimes resist classifications that the state and medical institutions claim the authority to settle for us. A feminist history that treats anatomy as sufficient explanation for all those circumstances abandons the material inquiry at the moment it becomes uncomfortable. We have to investigate the people affected by the classifications, including women whom a previous movement excluded from the definition of its own subject.
The organizations we build will face the same test. I have argued that women need organizations capable of preserving knowledge and developing practical resources across generations. I have also argued that institutions can become forms of domination when their preservation is treated as an end superior to the lives of the people participating in them. We cannot resolve this tension through the fantasy that emancipatory movements should remain permanently informal. Informality can conceal power just as effectively as a bureaucracy. The question is whether collective institutions develop capacities that expand people's freedom and whether their practices remain open to transformation when inherited arrangements cease serving that purpose.
Women's organizing can be necessary precisely because institutions classify and treat women as subordinate. It does not follow that the political form that helps us resist today must be preserved unchanged after the conditions we are fighting have altered. The same women who use a shared name to organize against an employer ought to be able to imagine a future in which that name no longer determines which work they will be made to perform. Any promise to abolish compulsory gender that demands the extinction of women's chosen identities would have managed to turn a struggle for freedom into one more program for ordering women around.
Some readers may be wondering why I have spent so many pages explaining that women deserve freedom. I understand the temptation. There are days when I would prefer to announce that patriarchy is intolerable and leave the matter there, particularly after spending hours reading arguments about whether women should possess rights that were supposedly settled before I was born. But the statement that women deserve freedom does not explain why their dependence persists under institutions publicly committed to equality. It does not tell us how the abolition of wage labor would change the division of domestic responsibility. It does not identify what forms of collective provision would be necessary to make exit from oppressive relationships materially possible. Without an account of those relations, freedom becomes something everybody can affirm while disagreeing about nearly everything required to achieve it.
At Cornell, the woman bringing allegations against a powerful organization should encounter more than a succession of statements about how seriously everyone takes the matter. The lawsuit must be decided through evidence and lawful procedures, with the accused entitled to contest what is alleged, and the political questions raised by the university's system of fraternities remain open whatever those proceedings establish. Students trying to change their university need authority over the arrangements they challenge, as well as routes to education and safety that cannot be taken away merely because challenging those arrangements has become inconvenient. The controversy brought the question into public view. I hope the women who have to live with its consequences get something more lasting than attention.
If Invariant Feminism is useful, women will be able to test the demand that the revolution change our lives against the arrangements they are being asked to accept, including the ones built by people who already call themselves revolutionaries. I intend to keep studying and arguing with the women who will have to live with the consequences of whatever we build. They should inherit institutions they can change without having to start again whenever one of us leaves.
Tara Knight
Bundle of Styx | Invariant Feminism
Notes and further reading
The Combahee River Collective Statement (1977) provides a particularly important account of the relationship between socialist feminism, racial domination, and the historical organization of Black women's lives. The discussion of revolutionary organization engages Anton Pannekoek's Workers' Councils and the historical debates surveyed in Endnotes' Bring Out Your Dead. For the feminist development of communization and value-form criticism, see Endnotes, issue three, alongside Maya Andrea Gonzalez's work on communization and the abolition of gender. For Stirner's philosophy and its relation to Marx's early criticism of the Young Hegelians, see the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.