Serina

“How did former socialist states become bastions of right-wing religious conservatism? It may be partly because nations need their populations to grow. They have always leaned on families to have as many children as possible, and enforcing strict gender norms and promoting heterosexual marriage have been useful in achieving that end. It’s as true today as it was in ancient Athens, creating a constant tension for those in power.”
― Angela Saini, The Patriarchs: The Origins of Inequality

“Such a fantasy has long been a ruling-class obsession, no matter what particular form—feudal or capitalist or patriarchal—that rulership has taken. Every master lives in mortal fear of his own slaves, bile roiling in him night after night as he clings to his ideologies of superiority, falling asleep with prayers on his lips that the slaves continue to believe in their own inferiority as much as he does. The master loathes the slaves, reviles and resents them for his own weakness, his own dependence on their existence, his presumed supremacy spiraling further and further into contempt and hatred. Yet even as he deludes himself to the point where he begins to doubt the slaves’ worth entirely, convincing himself that his salvation lies in the destruction of those who enable his own mastery, he still cannot bring himself to so much as rear back for the killing blow. For the master remains aware that he only exists because his slaves do, realizes that his identity, his being, his self-conception all depend on the continued existence of the slaves. If there were no slaves, no one for him to subjugate, to contrast himself with, to define himself against, he too would cease to be. Unfortunately for him, sooner or later, the slaves realize this too.”
― Talia Bhatt, Trans/Rad/Fem

“Others felt that feminists would split the unity of the working class or of other oppressed classes, that they forgot the broader issue of revolution by putting the issue of women’s liberation before the issue of class struggle or national liberation struggle.”
― Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour

“Whereas the concept patriarchy denotes the historical depth of women’s exploitation and oppression, the concept capitalism is expressive of the contemporary manifestation, or the latest development of this system. Women’s problems today cannot be explained by merely referring to the old forms of patriarchal dominance. Nor can they be explained if one accepts the position that patriarchy is a ‘pre-capitalist’ system of social relations which has been destroyed and superseded, together with ‘feudalism’, by capitalist relations, because women’s exploitation and oppression cannot be explained by the functioning of capitalism alone, at least not capitalism as it is commonly understood.”
― Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour