By Michele L. Rossi
Today, most of us are only too painfully aware of leftists’ worldwide difficulty in winning and exercising power. Capital’s enhanced global mobility, legal challenges by undemocratic transnational bodies like the World Trade Organization, and the explosion of service jobs that offer little chance for wage and revenue growth sabotage states’ tools for safeguarding their people, firms, and environment. Governments starve for funds to implement the policies we socialists love, and our forebears fought bitter struggles to achieve: universal programs that prioritize human needs for food, shelter, health care, education; and regulations that protect humans and the planet and allow people a life outside of work.
今天，我们大多数人都非常痛苦地意识到左派们在世界范围内赢得和行使权力的困难。 资本增强的全球流动性，世界贸易组织（WTO）等不民主的跨国机构制造的法律挑战，以及几乎不提供工资和收入增长机会的服务工作激增，破坏了政府保护其人民，企业和环境的工具。 政府切断了实施我们社会主义者所热爱的政策需要的资金来源，而我们的祖先则为实现这一目标而进行了艰苦的斗争：普遍的计划，这些计划优先考虑人类对食物，住所，医疗保障，教育的需求; 和保护人类和地球的规定，让人们能够在工作之外生活。
Given the dire circumstances, it is heartening to see that over the last ten years segments of the US left and labor movements have grown savvier in identifying the dynamics behind these recent assaults on freedom and wellbeing, and more vocal in decrying them. While the labor movement’s leaders have not exactly dusted off Das Kapital, some have stepped up efforts to make union members, and wage earners and voters more broadly, aware of the extent of their losses. Labor and its supporters have publicized declines in wages, pensions, health care benefits, safety regulations, and environmental protections, and fingered global capital as the culprit. Indeed, the US labor movement deserves special praise for adopting an internationalist rather than protectionist stance and stepping up its commitment to grassroots electoral mobilization. (Direct action is fun, but eventually all but the most hardcore anarchist activists realize demonstrations are no substitute for goals and a strategy with regard to the state. It still takes the hard work of coalition-building and boring old electoral politics to deliver the changes progressives want.)
鉴于这些可怕的情况，令人振奋的是，在过去十年中，美国左翼和劳工运动的各个部分在确认最近这些对自由和福祉的攻击背后的动力方面变得更加精明，并且在谴责它们时更加直言不讳。虽然劳工运动的领导人并没有完全摒弃资本论，但有些人已经加紧努力使工会成员，打工仔们和选民们更广泛地了解他们的损失程度。劳工组织及其支持者们已经揭示了工资，养老金，医疗福利，安全法规和环境保护方面的下降，并将全球资本作为罪魁祸首。实际上，美国的工人运动应该特别赞扬的是其采取国际主义而不是保护主义的立场，并加强其对基层选举动员的承诺。 （直接行动很有趣，但最终除了最硬核的无政府主义活动家之外，所有人都认为示威活动无法替代政府的目标和策略。它仍然需要联合建设的艰苦工作和无聊的旧选举政治才能实现进步人士所希望的变革。）
What worries me, however, is a tendency on the left to assume that pointing to shrinking paychecks is sufficient to win elections. It is not. Identifying threats to working people’s economic security can help to sway their votes, but anyone who has watched the Right’s political successes knows that people get more fired up by a profound sense of loss, anger, and panic over what is happening to them outside of work. Of course the two are related – the market has grown so powerful that it now corrodes areas of life supposedly immune to its logic – but in the US, the Right has been especially clever at keeping this connection out of the mind of voters. People do not readily pin their deteriorating quality of life off the job – fatigue, fear, crime, lack of time to spend with family and friends, and frenzied consumption as the chief means to express affection and bond with others – on global capitalism fueling greater inequality. (A columnist in my hometown newspaper blamed an increase in rudeness and stress and a decrease in volunteering for Little League, the PTA, and church bazaars, on Americans’ watching too much TV!)
然而，令我担心的是，左派倾向于认为指出减少的薪水足以赢得选举。并非如此。识别对劳动者的经济安全构成的威胁可能有助于影响他们的选票，但任何看过右翼政治成功的人都知道，人们会因为工作之外发生的事情而感到极度失落，愤怒和恐慌而更加激动起来 。当然这两者是相关的 – 市场已经变得如此强大，以至于它现在腐蚀了被认为对其逻辑影响免疫的生活领域 – 但在美国，右派特别聪明地将这种联系放在选民的思维之外。人们不会轻易的将他们日益恶化的生活质量，由工作导致的—疲劳，恐惧，犯罪，没有时间与家人和朋友共度，疯狂消费作为表达情感和与他人联系的主要手段— 全球资本主义推动了更大的不平等。（我家乡报纸上的一位专栏作家指责，在美国人看太多电视的情况下，小联盟，PTA和教堂集市中的粗鲁和压力增加，而志愿服务减少了！）
And the left is hardly doing its best to help people make this connection. Confused and hampered by their own unexamined nostalgia for a way of life associated with traditional, authoritarian “family values” as much as economic security (think Mom in the kitchen baking pies as the kids come home from school), many on the left are tongue tied. We are uncomfortable or clumsy applying democratic and egalitarian principles to resolve conflicts in intimate life, so we prefer to remain silent on such questions, and cede the ground to the Right. Small wonder, then, that many working people follow the Right’s lead and blame working women, poor mothers, people of color, and queers for our society’s decay.
左派很难尽力帮助人们建立这种联系。 由于他们对传统的，独裁的“家庭价值观”以及和经济安全相关的生活方式的未经检验的怀旧感到迷惑和困扰（认为当孩子们从学校回家时妈妈在厨房烤饼），左派中的许多人都闭嘴了。 我们对在解决亲密生活中的冲突时采用民主和平等主义原则感到不舒服或笨拙，因此我们宁愿对这些问题保持沉默，并将阵地送给了右派。因此，不奇怪的是，许多工人都跟随右派的领导，并责怪职业女性，贫穷的母亲，有色人种和同性恋者为我们的社会衰败负责。
The Right will continue to trounce the left in public debate and elections if we think we can ignore the “social” or “moral” issues of intimate life and stick to economic analysis, where we feel confident. On the contrary, for the left to win on economic issues we must tackle moral issues. And to do that successfully we need to take advantage of insights from decades of feminist thought and organizing. To that end, I offer the following crash course in feminist analysis.
如果我们认为我们可以忽视亲密生活中的“社会”或“道德”问题并坚持经济分析，而经济分析是我们对自己感到自信的地方，那么右派将继续在公开辩论和选举中击败左派。 相反，要让左派在经济问题上取胜，我们必须解决道德问题。 为了成功地做到这一点，我们需要利用几十年来女权主义思想和组织的见解。 为此，我在女权主义分析中提供以下速成课程。
Socialists have long decried how humans’ dazzling ability to create things from the world’s resources leads to misery – when those who perform this work lack control over the product, production process, or profits, and the abundance they create by laboring together goes to someone else. In the case of industrial societies, that someone else is the capitalist, who uses profit to further diminish those who must work for a living, by making any one person’s labor power less necessary, and turning fellow laborers into hostile rivals for a shrinking number of jobs and smaller rewards. Under such desperate conditions – sing along with me now – men only feel human off the job, while eating, drinking, and, uh, procreating.
长期以来，社会主义者一直在谴责人类从世界资源中创造财富的炫目能力如何导致痛苦—当执行这项工作的人缺乏对产品，生产过程或利润的控制权时，他们通过共同努力创造的丰富财富会到其他人手中。 就工业社会而言，其他人就是资本家，利用利润来进一步减少那些必须通过工作谋生的人，使任何一个人的劳动力变得更不必要，并将同业工人变成敌对的竞争对手，因为工作数量和奖励都减少了。在如此绝望的条件下—现在和我一起唱歌—在工作之外，男人只会在吃饭，喝酒，和生育的时候感到像人。
If in the past some parts of the US left and labor movement were indifferent to this tune, today they are not. What has been less commonly absorbed – yet is vital for the left to improve its skill at handling “moral” questions – are the insights sparked by feminists, who drew attention to an array of oppressions in addition to economic ones. Socialist feminists in particular revealed how women are exploited, alienated, and coerced not only as wage laborers, but also in the very processes that permit men to enjoy eating, drinking and procreating. These efforts paved the way for later waves of feminists to examine how gender, race, and geography inflect nation building and economic exploitation.
如果在过去美国的一些地方左派和劳工运动对这种曲调漠不关心，那么今天它们就不是如此。对于左派来说，对提高其处理“道德”问题的技巧至关重要的是—这是女权主义者引发的见解，他们注意到了除了经济问题之外的一系列压迫。特别是社会女权主义者揭示了女性如何被剥削，疏远和胁迫，不仅作为劳动者，而且也在允许男性享受饮食和生育的过程中。这些努力为后来的女权主义者浪潮铺平了道路，研究性别，种族和地理如何影响国家建设和经济剥削。
Most significantly, feminists of all stripes insisted that what goes on in private, personal, “emotional” life is as deeply political as what happens in the “rational” public sphere of economic production and formal government. Thanks in part to their research and activism, we better comprehend how they all intertwine – with one another, and with unequal, gendered divisions of labor and power. Distinctions between “public” and “private,” “work,” “family,” and “government” have been exposed as unstable and contestable; they vary according to place and time. Furthermore, within any society only certain groups recognize and practice, let alone benefit from, them. In fact, the US left and labor movement built and consolidated their gains upon such separations, to the detriment of women and ultimately their own movements. Today’s dilemmas can be traced to yesterday’s betrayals; the contemporary left’s difficulty in beating the Right on moral and economic issues stems from unfinished revolutions.
最重要的是，各种女权主义者坚持认为，在私人的，个人的，“情感的”生活中发生的一切与在经济生产和正式政府的“理性”公共领域中发生的一样是深深的政治化的。部分由于他们的研究和行动，我们更好地理解它们如何交织在一起—彼此之间，以及劳动和权力的不平等的性别的分裂。“公共”和“私人”，“工作”，“家庭”和“政府”之间的区别被暴露为不稳定的和争议的;它们根据地点和时间而有所不同。此外，在任何社会中，如果只有某些群体认可和实践，其他人就不可能从中受益。事实上，美国的左派和劳工运动在这种分裂的基础上建立并巩固了它们的利益，损害了女性的利益并最终损害了他们自己的运动。今天的困境可以追溯到昨天的背叛;当代左派在道德和经济问题上击败右派的困难源于未完成的革命。
To be specific, in Europe and the US, as production of material goods increasingly moved out of the home, and liberal democracy spread, both men and women were forced off the land, out of the home, and into desperate wage labor in order to survive. Yet as Heidi Hartmann noted decades ago, in many cases male trade unionists found retaining control over women, especially their sexuality, care giving and domestic labor, more compelling than advancing working class interests as a whole. They often opposed women’s struggles for the vote. And rather than organize female workers to prevent them from becoming cheap competition, many trade unions pursued agreements with capitalists that specified a family wage for male workers and hiring policies and practices that excluded women.
具体而言，在欧洲和美国，随着物质产品的生产逐渐走出家园，和自由民主的扩张，男人和女都被迫离开土地，离开家园，进入绝望的工资劳动，这是为了生存。 然而正如Heidi Hartmann几十年前所指出的那样，在许多情况下，男性工会会员发现保留对女性的控制权，特别是她们的性生活，照顾和家务劳动，比提升整个工人阶级的利益更具吸引力。他们经常反对女性争取投票权的斗争。而不是组织女工来阻止她们成为廉价竞争者，许多工会与资本家们达成协议，为男性工人规定了家庭工资，并采用了排斥女性的政策和做法。
Establishing the family wage as the standard payment for male workers was an advance; it allowed some working class people to increase their level of consumption and to begin to adhere to a middle class ideal of separate spheres, public and private, for men and women, respectively. Now some working class men, too, could forego care giving and domestic responsibilities entirely, and devote their energies to participating in the contentious public world of wage labor and politics. Meanwhile, some working class women could withdraw from wage labor and confine their concerns to the private: caring for home and children, and replenishing husbands and sons when they returned from the fray.
确定家庭工资作为标准支付对男性工人来说是一项进步; 它允许一些工人阶级的人提升他们的消费水平，并开始坚持分别为男性和女性提供分别在公立和私立的独立领域的中产阶级理想。现在，一些工人阶级男人也可以完全放弃照顾责任和家庭责任，并投入精力参与有争议的公共雇佣劳动和公共政治世界。与此同时，一些工人阶级的妇女可以退出工资劳动，并将他们的担忧局限于私人领域：照顾家庭和孩子，并在他们从战斗中返回时补给丈夫和儿子。
But left and labor movement aficionados often miss the down sides to this victory, particularly in the United States. As compliance with the notion of separate spheres for men and women moved down the class ladder, many women found themselves worse off. Women’s working for wages lost respectability.
但左派和劳工运动爱好者经常会错过这场胜利，特别是在美国。 由于遵守男女独立领域的概念走下了阶梯，许多女性发现自己情况更糟。 女性的工作失去了尊重。
Union hostility and employer discrimination closed down the possibility of wage labor offering viable alternatives to women’s trading limitless affection, sex, childcare, and domestic labor for men’s economic support. Any woman not attached to an upper class man or an employed member of the male labor aristocracy – unmarried women, divorcees, widows, and women of color, especially African American women – had to hustle between public and private, between low wage labor and domestic duties, and expose themselves to extreme exploitation in both. The New Deal and subsequent welfare state expansion offered these women little relief (which recent welfare reform – the switch from AFDC to TANF – snatched away).
工会的敌意和雇主的歧视关闭了工资劳动的可能性，为男性的经济支持提供了可行的替代方案，使女性交易无限的感情，性，儿童照料和家务劳动。任何不依赖上层阶级男性或男性工人贵族雇员的女性—未婚女性，离婚者，寡妇和有色女性，特别是非裔美国女性 – 不得不在公共和私人之间，低工资劳动力和家庭责任之间徘徊，并在两者中暴露自己，被极度剥削。 新政和随后的福利国家扩张为这些女性提供了一点救济（最近的福利改革 – 从AFDC转向TANF – 将这点救济抢走了）。
Meanwhile, other kinds of problems festered among those who enjoyed enough distance from economic hardship to maintain a male breadwinner/female caregiver division of labor. Feminist thinkers like Nancy Chodorow and Jessica Benjamin pointed out that the two parent nuclear family in which the woman is responsible for raising young children – and by extension, any domestic arrangement with a rigid separation of male and female activity, and where caring for young children is primarily women’s work – predisposes human relationships to confusion and strife. At a most basic, personal level, such childcare arrangements incline boys to grow up to see the world in terms of difference and separation and to prove their masculinity by denying emotion, interdependence, and nurturance. Simultaneously, they encourage girls to grow up to see the world in terms of similarity and connection, to be uncomfortable with independence, and to learn to anticipate and respond to others’ wishes and needs more than their own. From the start, male-female interactions are set up to be dysfunctional.
与此同时，在与因为经济困难而保持男性养家者/女性照顾者分工之间有着足够距离的人中，还存在着其他类型的问题。Nancy Chodorow和Jessica Benjamin这类女权主义思想家指出，这个女性负责养育幼儿的两个家长的核心家庭 —以及任何严格分离男女活动的家庭安排，以及照顾幼儿主要是女性的工作的地方—使人与人之间的关系变得混乱和充满纷争。在最基本的个人层面，这种儿童保育安排倾向于让男孩成长为以差异和分离的方式看世界，并通过否认情感，相互依赖和养育来证明自己的男性气质。同时，他们鼓励女孩成长为在相似性和联系方面看世界，对独立感到不舒服，并学会更多地预测和回应他人的愿望和需求而不是自己的。从一开始，男女之间的相互依赖被设置为功能失调的。
Women’s movements caught fire because they promised to address the power inequality, coercion, waste of talent, and mutilation of selves required for women and men to fit into and maintain rigid, distinct, recognizably heterosexual roles within separate spheres. It is a pity that, for a variety of reasons scholars are still trying to untangle, radical political movements of all kinds died down or disappeared before they could (or would) digest the analyses or fight for the kinds of changes socialist feminists and their successors advocated. The boldest feminists sought to redistribute power and resources democratically across structural (public, economic, institutional) as well as personal (private) arenas.
女性的运动火了，因为她们承诺解决权力不平等，胁迫，浪费人才和自残，以及女性和男性在不同的领域内融入并保持僵化，独特，可识别的异性恋角色这些问题。遗憾的是，由于种种原因，学者仍在试图解开，各种激进的政治运动在他们能够（或将会）消化分析或为社会女权主义者及其继承者的变化而战之前死亡或消失的原因。 最有胆量的女权主义者试图在结构（公共，经济，制度）以及个人（私人）领域民主地重新分配权力和资源。
Instead, the liberal wing of the feminist movement that survived and became feminism’s dominant political voice avoided such radical reconfigurations. Liberal feminists made it easier for certain women to choose to move into the public arena, but on capitalist terms. They struggled to remove barriers to equality in the marketplace, allowing middle class white women increased access to education and professions, and to contraception and abortion. These advances should not be derided, simply kept in perspective. Freed to concentrate on more profitable endeavors, elite women could join many men in keeping distance from the labor that cares for frail bodies and cleans up messes – usually by hiring a more economically vulnerable woman to do it.
相反，女权主义运动中的自由派幸存并成为女权主义的主导政治声音，避免了这种激进的重组。 自由女权主义者使某些女性更容易选择进入公共领域，但是是以资本主义的方式。 她们努力消除市场上的平等障碍，允许中产阶级白人女性更多地获得教育和职业机会，以及避孕和堕胎的权利。我们不应该嘲笑这些进步，只是保持审视。由于能够专注于更有利可图的努力，精英女性可以与许多男性一起保持与劳动之间的距离，这些劳动关心脆弱的身体并清理混乱—通常是雇用一个经济上更为脆弱的女性来做这件事。
By contrast, many working class, poor women and women of color had long been in the labor market, and at low wages. If not, they were soon pulled into it. Global economic restructuring according to capitalist imperatives meant the family wage for their male counterparts vanished during the 1980s. No one rushed to assist these women with meeting their unpaid caregiving obligations. In the US, a liberal women’s movement and an embattled labor movement were painfully slow to recognize these women and acknowledge their problems: a need for quality child care, assistance in caring for aging parents, access to health care independent of wage labor, revaluation of wages for jobs where women predominate, a shorter work week for men and women, and a need for men to take on more caring labor at home.
相反的是，许多工人阶级，贫困妇女和有色人种女性长期以来一直在劳动力市场上工作，而且工资很低。 如果没有，他们很快就被拉进去。 根据资本主义要求进行的全球经济结构调整意味着，从1980s开始，男性同行的家庭工资已经消失了。没有人急于帮助这些妇女履行其没有薪水的照顾义务。在美国，自由主义女性运动和陷入困境的劳工运动对于识别这些女性并承认她们的问题行动得令人痛苦的缓慢：需要优质的儿童福利，帮助照顾年迈父母，获得独立于雇佣劳动的医疗保障，重新评估女性占主导地位的工作的工资，缩短男女工作周，男性需要承担更多的家庭照料劳动。
Today, we all feel the consequences from feminism and labor’s unfinished revolutions. The advent of separate spheres for men and women, facilitated in industrialized nations by working class men selling out working class women for a family wage, preserved a non-market logic – an ethic of care, a kind of morality – by assigning it to women to exercise in private. Nurturing was saved, but it was also thereby contained, made scarce and essentially banished from the public realm. Public institutions such as the state could be excused from providing care; any that attempted it were vulnerable to attack for overstepping their bounds and delivering inferior results.
今天，我们都感受到了女权主义和劳工革命未完成的后果。 男女分离的领域的出现，在工业化国家由工人阶级男性出卖工人阶级女性以获得家庭工资，通过将其在私有领域分配给女性，保留了非市场逻辑—一种关怀原则，一种道德。照料得到了拯救，但也因此被遏制，变得稀缺，基本上被排除在公共领域之外。 政府等公共机构可以免于提供照料;任何试图超越其界限并产生劣势结果的人都很容易受到攻击。
Indeed, as society accepted self interest, competition, and ruthless individualism everywhere, and in everyone, else, women in the home became a sort of “nurture preserve.” Minor concessions to liberal feminism aside, women provided the emotional grease and (unpaid and invisible) caring labor to keep everything running, especially “the market.” And now, largely thanks to global capitalism, this nurture preserve is fast disappearing everywhere, leading to widespread panic over women’s “carelessness.”
事实上，随着社会接受了自我利益，竞争和无情的个人主义，对每个人来说，家庭中的女性变成了一种“培育保存”。除了自由女权主义的轻微让步，女性提供了情感润滑剂和（无偿和 无形的劳动)，以保持一切的运行，特别是“市场”的运行。现在，这在很大程度上要归功于全球资本主义，这种培育保存在各地迅速消失，导致对女性“粗心大意”的普遍恐慌。
In advanced industrial societies, almost everyone suffers from what sociologist Arlie Hochschild identifies as the “care deficit.” Men and women move through their days drained and hostile from pursuing (increasingly hard to get) wage labor, with diminishing financial returns. Short on resources, time and energy to replenish ourselves and our loved ones, we can hardly bother with the unpaid labor of caring for anything, or anyone, else. Those who can afford it contract out, satisfying their and their dependents need for nurturance through the market. The rest of us do without.
在先进的工业社会中，几乎每个人都患有社会学家Arlie Hochschild所认为的“缺乏照料”。男性和女性在他们的日子里变得枯竭和相互敌视，这是由于追求（越来越难以获得）的工资劳动，和金融收益递减。缺乏资源，时间和精力来补给我们自己和我们所爱的人，我们几乎不会为照顾任何事或任何人所需的无偿劳动而烦恼。 能够负担得起的人将这些外包出去，通过市场满足他们和依赖他们的人对养育的需要。 我们其余的人都没有。
The Right seizes on this wretched situation and frames it as a moral crisis. And it is. But what is being violated are values that recognize and support caring labor – values that ought to be claimed as part of the left’s democratic, feminist, and egalitarian impulses, in defiance of the Right’s desire for rigid order, hierarchy, and brutal defense of (male) privilege. Moreover, we on the left can reveal how this “moral” crisis has structural (i.e., political and economic) components. We need to deliver the message loud and clear: the culprits behind our discontent are global capitalism and sexism. Our society’s crisis is not due to a lack of personal responsibility or “family values” among those who want an independent, adequate income, democracy, and respect in all relationships: women, lone mothers, wage earners, the poor, people of color, and queers.
右派们抓住了这种悲惨的局面，然后将其看成道德危机。它是的。但正在被侵犯的是承认和支持照料劳动的价值观—这些价值观应该被视为左派的民主，女权主义和平等主义冲动的一部分，无视右派渴望严苛秩序，等级制度和对（ 男性）特权的野蛮防御。此外，我们左派们可以揭示这种“道德”危机如何具有结构性（例如政治和经济）成分。我们需要大声和明确地传达信息：导致我们的不满的罪魁祸首是全球资本主义和性别歧视。我们社会的危机不是由于在所有关系中希望获得独立，充足的收入，民主和尊重的人缺乏个人责任感或“家庭价值观”：女性，单身母亲，工人阶级，穷人，有色人种， 和同性恋者。
At the moment, the left may not command the state, but we do have the power to promote an honest, accurate, pro-labor and pro-feminist discussion of our society’s shortage and devaluation of nurturance in all spheres. That is a first step toward winning elections and ultimately enhancing democracy and the quality of life: by creating and financing public goods like universal health care, child care and elder care; and by reassessing the value of the caring jobs women, especially women of color, are paid so little to do, expanding workers’ rights to organize, insisting men share in nurturing labor, and reducing the length of the work week. Otherwise, if we on the left fail to make use of our democratic moral resources, the Right will see to it that the market is the only thing that is “free.”
目前，左派可能不会指挥政府，但我们确实有能力促进一个诚实，准确，亲劳动者和亲女权主义的讨论，讨论我们社会在所有领域的照料的短缺和贬值。这是赢得选举并最终增强民主和生活质量的第一步：通过创造和资助诸如全民医疗保障，儿童福利和老年人护理等公共产品; 通过重新评估女性照料工作的价值，特别是有色人种的妇女，得到的工资很少，扩大工人组织的权利，坚持男人共同承担养育劳动，减少工作周的长度。否则，如果我们左派未能利用我们的民主的道德资源，那么右派将会认为市场是唯一“自由”的东西。