Violent Geographies: Fear, Terror, and Political Violence Book

If you follow, as I sometimes do, various leftist magazines, it won't take long for you to sense the divide between two camps. Let's call them economic leftism and social leftism. You generally find authors either arguing for the prioritization of one over the other - or, perhaps more common at this point, arguing for the compatibility of the two notions.

In short, leftists generally agree on the need for greater equality across the board - economic equality in the form of socialism, or at least a much more regulated capitalist system than currently exists, as well as racial, gender and sexual equality - but can't always agree on whether or how a focus on class (economic equality) fits with a focus on identity (social equality).

This debate is not new, as evidenced by Michèle Barrett's 1980 book, Women's Oppression Today, which is not only 40 years old but also in several ways feels much newer than that.

In this insightful, though densely academic, work, Barrett makes several arguments. Some of them, such as her objection to the use of "patriarchy" then becoming trendy, haven't aged as well. Others, however - such as her analysis of the socially constructed notion of the family and how it is used as a tool of middle-class male dominance - remain quite fresh.

In the end, what makes Barrett's book worth reading is her efforts to straddle two bristling camps - Marxism and feminism - by criticizing both of them!

Marxists who believe women's oppression is essential to the capitalist project and therefore will end with the advent of a socialist system are engaging in ahistorical reductionism, acting as if women were not oppressed in feudal societies. And if there's any cardinal sin for the followers of the founder of historical materialism, it's being ahistorical.

Feminists, on the other hand, miss the ways in which patriarchal domination, whatever its origins, has come to serve the needs of capital - and that liberal reformism, no matter how many victories it wins for women in the social and economic spheres, will ultimately fail if it doesn't address the need for systemic overhaul.

Her insightful critiques of both camps aside, Barrett's work isn't perfect. In addition to being overly dense and academic, it's not clear that Barrett has any suggestions for resolving the weaknesses in the "encounter" between feminism and Marxism that she has identified, nor any solutions for how to break out of the restrictive notions of family she highlights.

Likewise, as she herself acknowledges in both her 1988 introduction and 2014 afterword, Women's Oppression Today - as did a lot of 1970s-era feminist works - focuses almost entirely on the plight of white and straight women; queer women and women of color are barely mentioned, which leaves a gaping hole in her analysis and contributes to the feeling of distance between identitarian leftists and their economic interlocutors that Barrett herself is trying to address.

As an initial exploration of several ways in which feminism and Marxism interact and challenge each other, however, Barrett's work still has much to say four decades after its initial publication. Unfortunately, that's reflective of how little has changed.

After a lost generation of reactionary politics and economics has left America and much of the world more unequal and polarized than they have been in generations, the fractiousness of leftism's two camps is in some ways a reflection of the urgency everyone on the left feels. Revisiting fundamental texts like Barrett's can be a helpful reminder not only that these debates are familiar, but that we do not need to reinvent the wheel in trying to solve them.