Socialism? Feminism? You Don’t Have to Choose

The website of Lux, a new feminist socialist magazine [Lux]

Sarah Leonard, a senior editor at AJ+, recently launched Lux – a glossy magazine devoted to socialist-feminist thought. I asked her to explain the concept, and how she and her editorial team hope to change the world.

The term “socialist feminism” has been around for quite some time – Barbara Ehrenreich wrote an essay explaining the idea in 1976 – but many people aren’t familiar with it. What does it mean?

There’s a really good definition of feminism used by bell hooks – a socialist – where she says, essentially, "Feminism is not some sort of identity, it is a struggle against sexist oppression." And when you define it that way, everyone can be a feminist by participating in that struggle. It’s not enough for rich women to be equal to rich men and poor women to be equal to poor men — equality between genders by equitably distributing other forms of oppression. We only achieve actual equality by ending oppression for everybody. And socialist feminism gives us the tools to think about that.

A lot of the feminism on offer now is a sort of girl-boss feminism, or the idea that we need more women CEOs. That’s just not good enough – having a certain number of women join the exploiters or making the decisions to bomb other countries and ruin the lives of other women, that’s not feminism by our definition.

Why launch a magazine dedicated to this concept now?

Socialist ideas have hit the mainstream and become popular, but, at the same time, there's been an effort to use feminism against socialism. You saw this a lot in the 2016 election campaign, where either you were a Bernie bro or a Hillary feminist. (I am neither of those things.)

This false opposition was really, really destructive because, to me, feminism and socialism need each other. Socialist feminists redefined the very meaning of work in the socialist tradition. So it's not just wage work, but we're talking about reproductive work that's done inside the home, the work of maintaining a community, the work of raising children or caring for the elderly.

There's also this incredibly rich legacy of these thinkers from the 1970s, Italian feminists who invented wages for housework, to American labor history, to the Combahee River Collective (a Black feminist lesbian socialist organization), which coined the term identity politics and was socialist. This rich legacy ... isn’t easy for people to connect with because a lot of it isn’t easily available. So how do you make that tradition your own and make it useful? And I thought, we need a much more vibrant, ongoing place for this conversation.

The pandemic has made us think more deeply about our social structures and divisions over housework, education, emotional labor. How does socialist-feminist thinking help confront those challenges?

The pandemic has made clear that this capitalist system values profits over human life. And women – and I hesitate to say woman too much because we are all for the long-term abolition of gender, [Lux’s editorial team] is a very queer grouping – but, women have been the shock absorbers of this pandemic, just like they'd been the shock absorbers of the entire neoliberal assault on the welfare state. The state cuts support for child care, health care, everything, and who absorbs the burden? Women do.

Women are at a breaking point — that's why you see them at the forefront of all of these movements.

One reason women were in the street opposing Trump is that he was threatening to take away health care. Women are at the forefront of the uprising against police brutality. Obviously, women are at the forefront of the reproductive justice struggle, but women are also at the forefront of the housing struggle. You've got groups like Moms 4 Housing. And I think it's not a mystery why this would be the case; this is work that women are absorbing because the state, at the behest of corporations, won't pay for it.

Each of these struggles is happening in a social-justice framework – they are all demanding the same things. We need to defund the police, but then we need to put the money into housing, transportation, education, health care. And then you look at something like the reproductive justice movement is founded and led by Black women. And they're like, "Well, abortion rights are important, but what we also need is public transportation, health care, freedom from police brutality so my kid doesn’t get shot." It's all these things. And these frameworks are developed by women who were in touch with their communities. I think that's where the most powerful thinking is coming from.

What’s one thing you hope people will take away from the magazine?

Well, I'd like them to take away an enormous sense of potential. We have this rich and important legacy that we're transforming into tools that are useful to us today. And it's also important, too, that we have a political horizon that includes pleasure. The whole purpose of our politics is for everybody to have a good life. And we want to include that in every issue of the magazine.

For example, some of our photo editorial collective is obsessed with gardening, and we're trying to get Jamaica Kincaid to give us an interview about her garden, which she has famously written about for years in The New Yorker. We have a piece in the first issue about how in the early days of Soviet communism, they created a set of luxury products to compete with the West, including the perfume, Red Moscow.

It provokes these interesting questions like, what does luxury mean? What does a good life mean without rich people? What does it mean if it's for all of us? And we want people to be able to have both the hard analysis of what's happening today, but the beautiful vision for the future that makes all of this worth fighting for.

If we want to understand how we're going to push past this neoliberal capitalist clusterf**k that we're in right now, we need a socialist-feminist analysis. That is where the action is right now. That is what's going to help us understand how to get out of a system that's tipped in favor of profit over the maintenance of simple human life. You should come away from reading Lux feeling curious and interested in the world, stronger, and like you have the tools to change things.