November 25, 2025 • 46 mins
A special extended, bonus episode for those of you traveling for the long weekend. Kristen Ghodsee shared a conversation with Astrid Zimmerman for the Shakespeare and Sons bookstore in Berlin, Germany on 6 November 2025.
In this less-than-perfect-phone-recording of the live event, they discuss motherhood, tradwives, socialism, and feminism among a variety of topics with a lively audience in attendance.
Thanks so much for listening. This podcast has no Patreon-type account and receives no funding. There are no ads and there is no monetization. If you'd like to support the work being done here, please spread the word with your networks.
Kristen R. Ghodsee is the award-winning author of twelve books and Professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Check out Kristen Ghodsee's recent books:
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Episode Transcript
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Kristen Ghodsee (00:10):
Hello and welcome to the AK forty seven
podcast.
My name is Kristen Godsey, andthis week I am posting a special
episode.
This is a bonus episode forthose of you who may have an
extra long weekend this weekend,depending on where you are in
(00:32):
the world.
There's holidays that arehappening, and you may have some
extra time to listen to thisreally fun conversation that I
had with a writer and editorhere in Berlin named Astrid
Zimmerman.
She was the former managingeditor of Jacobin Magazine here
(00:53):
in Germany, and she now works inpolitical communications for
Die Linke, which is the leftparty in Germany.
And we got together on November6th to do a conversation on why
women have better sex undersocialism, where we talked about
trad wives and sort of ideasabout feminism and femininity
(01:17):
and the difference betweenbourgeois and socialist feminism
in a way that I'm absolutelysure Alexandra Kollontai would
have approved of.
So for the sake of thisepisode, I am just introducing
it and I am including here thefull audio of our conversation.
And I hope you enjoy it.
(01:38):
And I will return in the nextepisode with my reading of the
Communist Valkyrie from my bookRed Valkyries.
And then I'm really hoping todo very soon a I guess sixth
anniversary conversation with mynow 24-year-old daughter.
(01:58):
But until then, thanks forlistening and keep up the good
fight.
Astrid Zimmerman (02:04):
Welcome.
Again, thanks for coming.
Thanks to Shakespeare and Sansfor having us today.
Thank you, Kirsten.
I'm very excited to get thechance to have this conversation
with you today.
I'm sure most of you arefamiliar with who you are and
familiar with your books.
I'm still going to brieflyintroduce you.
(02:24):
So you're an ethnographer,you're a professor of Russian
and Eastern European studies.
You've been publishedextensively.
You've written a number ofbooks.
Your writing has appeared inpublications like the New York
Times, the Washington Post, LeMont, Jakarta Magazine, which
I'm excited about because that'sthe publication I'm affiliated
(02:47):
with.
And your last book is EverydayUtopia, which is also available
in German under the titleUtopien für den Alltag.
But today we want to shift theconversation on a question that
you've explored in one of yourprevious books, where you
explain why capitalism isn'tonly harmful to women, but how
(03:10):
it also fails to provide thesocietal conditions that allow
for our relationships toflourish and why women therefore
have better sex in socialism.
So welcome, Kirsten.
Kristen Ghodsee (03:22):
Thank you so much.
Thank you so much for invitingme and for showing up tonight.
It's really a pleasure to beable to talk about the book and
to talk about the book at thismoment when we've just elected
the first socialist mayor of NewYork City.
So, you know, I didn't planthat for when we organized this
(03:48):
event, but it's great news.
And today, I, you know, I thinka lot of people were talking
about yesterday and today, justso much excitement about what's
happening in New York.
And I posted a little meme thatsays better sex coming
to a borough near you. And Ithink that it's really important
on the left to recognize whyMamdani was such a sensation in
(04:15):
New York.
And I think part of that, andit's very important to think
about the specific policies thathe was sort of proposing, but
one of them was aroundchildcare.
And one of them was around thesort of idea that human
relationships, right, forordinary people, should be front
and center.
This was a very bread andbutter campaign.
(04:38):
And I think that the left, inparticular, in this historical
moment, really needs to attendto this question of loneliness
and isolation and also the drawof the far right, specifically
around something like tradwives.
And so we were gonna try tofocus a little bit today on why
(05:04):
socialism and socialisticpolicies are specifically able
to address some of the needsthat women have that capitalism
cannot meet, but also thattraditional forms of feminism
cannot meet.
And I think that that's reallywhere I'd like to start.
Astrid Zimmerman (05:24):
Yeah, right.
So you've already set the stagefor the first thing I wanted to
ask you, because what you Swainin your work a lot is how if we
want to answer the question,how can we have good
relationships, we don't onlyhave to focus on the sort of
like interpersonal elements ofour partnerships, but also on
the structural conditions inwhich we have these
(05:45):
relationships.
Things like economic equality,independence, uh, childcare,
care infrastructures, thingslike this.
And as you've already alludedto, we're right now living in a
time where we live in deeplyunequal societies.
And up until very recently,there was this idea of female
empowerment, one ideal that wasvery popular, where we, as a
(06:06):
woman, you were supposed to leanin to advance your career, to
break the glass ceiling, andunder the guise of greater
gender equality.
And obviously, this hasn'tworked for the majority of
women.
So there seems to be like a bigdisillusionment with this idea
of female empowerment.
(06:26):
And what we're seeing now isthat rather than sort of like
leaning in, there's a growingmovement that's becoming ever
more popular where women arekind of told to rather lean back
and just like drop out of thelabor market, focus on being
mothers, being good wives.
And yeah, I would like to startour conversation by asking you
why do you think this is soappealing to more and more women
(06:49):
right now?
Kristen Ghodsee (06:50):
Right.
So I want to address two thingsbecause I do think there's a
reason why it's specificallyappealing to women.
And a lot of that has to dowith the great failures of late
capitalism that we're livingright now.
And the fact that for manypeople, their jobs feel very
meaningless, their work doesn'tseem to have a purpose, they're
barely making ends meet.
(07:12):
But there's also a biggerstructural question, which is
why there's such a push onsocial media.
But also, you know, there arethese new women's magazines that
are being funded bybillionaires like Peter Thiel
that are trying to convincewomen to stay home.
Why is it happening right now?
And one of the things that I'vewritten about in a actually in
(07:36):
Jacobin, and it was in aninterview with uh Meagan Day, is
that look, AI is going todestroy a lot of jobs.
And it's going to destroy a lotof jobs very quickly.
And we know from historicalprecedents, first in the
aftermath of World War II, butalso with the end of socialism
(07:57):
in Eastern Europe, that when youhave a massive exogenous shock
to the economic system thatrequires a drastic reduction in
the labor force, one of theeasiest ways to deal with the
social upheavals that willinevitably come from mass
unemployment is to convincewomen that they'd be much
happier at home, churning butterand baking bread from scratch.
(08:18):
And so one of the reasons whyin this historical moment we are
seeing the rise of thistradwife discourse is precisely
because we've already got theevidence of all of these
white-collar jobs, office jobs,are just being automated away by
AI.
And a lot of young people arehaving a very hard time finding
(08:40):
decent employment in the labormarket.
And so, not surprisingly, weget this idea of a return to
traditional gender roles, whichis exactly what happened after
the collapse of socialism inEastern Europe in 1989, and
exactly what happened afterWorld War II, when all the women
who had gone into the factoriesto replace the men while they
were fighting, when the boyscame home, the women went back
(09:02):
to the kitchen, right, withtheir appliances and their big
Dior new look dresses.
There was a very specificreason why it happened.
And let's not fool ourselvesinto thinking that there aren't
larger structural reasons forthis particular trend on social
media.
But the second response isabout why does it work?
(09:24):
Why are women being seduced bythis?
And so there are two forms ofthis.
First is the trad wife, and thesecond is what is often on the
hashtag softgirl life.
How nice it would be to stayhome with your candles and do
yoga and like cozy up by thefire with a nice cup of herbal
(09:47):
tea.
I mean, it's seductive.
unknown (09:51):
Okay.
Kristen Ghodsee (09:52):
It is a very nice, it's much better than
turning butter in a bustier.
And so, but what is thatindexing?
It's indexing an incredibleexhaustion with lean-in
feminism, an incredibleexhaustion with the precarity of
late capitalism and the gigeconomy.
And so there's within the tradwife movement, and I can give
(10:16):
very specific examples, anascent critique of capitalism.
But that critique is not beingarticulated in a way that
resonates with young women yet.
It's mostly about the fantasyof the soft girl life.
Astrid Zimmerman (10:33):
Okay, I have so many follow-up questions, but
I'm gonna start maybe let'sfocus on this trad wife,
housewife, the romanticizationof this kind of woman
femininity, but because I wasalso wondering if, you know, if
we understand capitalism as asystem that structurally depends
on all of this unpaidreproductive labor, and it
(10:55):
therefore valorizes the nuclearfamily as a unit of care because
it allows us to privatize caremore and more, where it's
performed unpaiddisproportionately by women.
But I also wondered if part ofthe appeal of being a
traditional housewife is alsobecause it gives people maybe
like a false sense ofrecognition or acknowledgement
(11:19):
of the labor that they performand kind of recognizing that
what they do when they take careof children, take care of the
elderly, take care of sickpeople, that this is kind of
like respectable work because wekind of we don't have a
language to describe this, andalso because this work is
(11:39):
structurally devalued in our inour economic system.
Kristen Ghodsee (11:44):
Yeah, absolutely.
And I think that that's one ofthe reasons why leftist appeals,
either to abolish the family orto socialize all care work,
don't always land becausethey're framed in a way that
sometimes reinforces the ideathat this labor is not very
(12:07):
valuable, that the real workthat should give your life
meaning is work that you do inthe formal economy and not in
caring for your relationshipsand caring for your loved ones.
If you care, capitalism makesit a liability, right?
It devalues care to such anextent that anyone who cares
(12:29):
becomes encumbered by that.
And so we see over and overagain that people who perform
care are some of the mostprecarious people in our
economies.
And these is this is not onlypeople who perform that work in
the home without remuneration,but also those who care in the
formal economy, right?
Who do this kind of work,taking care of the elderly or
(12:51):
taking care of children, arealso devalued because their
wages are generally lower than,you know, some guy who works at
a bank who moves money from oneaccount to another all day.
He makes a massive salary andall he does is, you know, move
numbers on a screen.
And the people that areactually raising the next
generation, actually creatingour societies that are actually
(13:14):
producing real value in terms ofhuman connection.
That's just not consideredanything worth valuing.
Now, I don't, I want to make itclear here that I don't mean
that the, that, that this valueis always indexed to a wage.
I think that value means, asyou said, the recognition that
(13:37):
this is important work and theway that we structure our
societies to change the way weacknowledge and even sort of
celebrate the people who do thatwork.
Astrid Zimmerman (13:50):
I want to go back to what you said about
exhaustion before.
Um, because like uh whatsomething you just described was
how capitalism is a system thatessentially penalizes those
that care the most, and that putyou at a higher risk of
precarization, of poverty, youhave lower grades of financial
(14:11):
stability, et cetera.
And how you would understand atrend, sort of this like soft
life movement as sort ofpeople's response, or maybe like
a way, they search for a way tolive a less exhausting life
because essentially we're alsoright now living under a time
where we're not only supposed tohave two shifts where we work
(14:33):
in our jobs and work in ourhomes, but we're also living
through a time where ourgovernments are telling us that
we have to work even more nowand we have to work even harder.
So you're essentially tellingan entire generation of women
that what they get is not awork-life balance, they get a
work-work balance.
So they have to balance, jugglethe work that they do as a j in
(14:57):
their jobs, where there's lesssocial mobility because our
economy is broken, but they'realso supposed to work harder and
work more in their homesbecause at the same time we're
privatizing more care.
So could we Yeah, I I was justwondering if you could maybe
speak a bit more to this kind oflike sense of exhaustion and
how people just maybe try tothey're searching for a way to
(15:20):
live in an economy where all theodds are essentially stuck
against them, maybe.
Kristen Ghodsee (15:25):
Right.
And I think that again, as a asa social scientist and somebody
who spent a lot of time lookingat what happened in Eastern
Europe after the collapse ofsocialism, where you had a
similar kind ofneoliberalization and a
dismantling of once-generatedsocial safety nets, what
happened, what is stillhappening, it was a birth
strike.
In Eastern Germany in 1990,1991, it was the lowest ever
(15:50):
recorded birth at that time inthe absence of a war.
Right?
The birth rate fell so low.
And still to this day, morethan 35 years after the
transition process, EastEuropean countries are the
fastest shrinking countries onthe planet.
Why?
Because you can't do it all.
And so what is happening inmost of the industrialized
(16:13):
countries in the world, and it'sactually starting to spread
even beyond that, is that womenwho are utterly exhausted, it's
larger than women, buteverybody's exhausted.
But there's a choice that'sbeing made, which is just like
no babies.
No done.
Like you can't, you cannot doit all.
And so I find it really richthat somebody like Elon Musk,
(16:36):
when asked what keeps you up atnight, he says the falling birth
rate, right?
That civilization is at stakebecause young people are selfish
and don't want to have babies.
And yet there's no recognitionthat the conditions under which
we are asking people to, as yousay, work work, there is no work
(16:57):
family balance, there is nowork life balance, is precisely
the pro the billionaires are theproblem, right?
There's no self-reflexivity onthat question.
And then the second question isto push this even a little bit
further into the realm ofrelationships, because after
all, if you're really, reallyexhausted at the end of the day,
(17:20):
it's hard to engage inactivities that would result in
babies.
So it there that exhaustion isnot just a kind of psychic
exhaustion.
It's real, but it's also arelational exhaustion.
(17:42):
We have so little energy leftthat rather than sharing our
attentions and affections withothers, we hoard them for
necessary bouts of self-care sothat we can get our ass up in
the morning the next day and goback to work.
That's just the way life isright now.
(18:03):
So it's a structural problemall the way from top to bottom.
Astrid Zimmerman (18:09):
I also feel like something you just talked
about, because you've mentionedElon Musk.
So I also feel like what it'skind of ironic, also in relation
to the falling birth ratesafter the fall of the one or
after the disintegration of realsocialism, is that ironically
(18:30):
when conservatives say, oh, it'sall of this gender equality
that makes women not want tohave babies.
In reality, there's probablynothing better that you could do
to convince people to maybestart a family with actually
greater economic equality.
Right?
Right.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Kristen Ghodsee (18:48):
Exactly.
Yeah.
And and you know, and there'sthere's there are reasons for
that, which is that the nuclearfamily exists, as so many
socialist theorists have pointedout to us, as the unit in
society that facilitates theintergenerational transfer of
wealth and privilege fromfathers to largely their
(19:11):
legitimate children, right?
That's what the nuclear familydoes.
You can read all about that,various things if you if that's
new to you.
But it and what it does is itmakes parenting a contact board.
It means that if we havefamilies, we raise our children
individualistically.
(19:32):
This is why the Tradwai family,tradwise fantasy is so
powerful, because if I give allmy love and attention to my own
child, I will give my childadvantages that other children
don't have.
And so then my children will befine in a society that's
falling apart.
So rather than saying, let'sbuild a society where
everybody's children will have achance to thrive, we're saying
(19:56):
the reality is, it's not anunreasonable reaction, by the
way.
The reality is that oursocieties are falling apart.
The reality is social mobilitydoesn't exist anymore.
The reality is there's anincredible amount of precarity,
even for people already in themiddle class.
So if you're going to try to bea good parent, and this is how
(20:19):
they get you, if you're a goodmom, you have to give your child
advantages, extra love, extraattention, extra resources.
And that necessarily means thatyou need to exclude other
children.
And that's where the nuclearfamily comes in.
And that's why it's soexhausting to be a parent in
(20:40):
2025.
You know, it it everything is acompetition.
And that in and of itself isexhausting.
Astrid Zimmerman (20:48):
Yeah, this idea that life and in its in and
of itself is reallycompetitive, is I think
something that speaks also a lotto the economic conditions that
in which this is happening.
And you've you've alreadytalked about this.
So I feel like if we take astep back and we think about
what was the promise of liberalcapitalism essentially, it was
(21:09):
that it was supposed to givepeople mass prosperity, social
mobility, and that if all ofthis was working, we're gonna
have a relatively well-offstable middle class.
And there was a brief moment intime where we had this in a
post-war period.
And I feel like it's probablynot a coincidence that if we
think about traditionalhousewives, we think of a woman
(21:30):
from the 50s from the post-warperiod, which, because those
were the economic conditionsthat made essentially the
nuclear family possible as amass phenomenon.
And so now this premise ofprosperity, of social mobility
doesn't hold anymore.
And it seems like capitalisteconomies all around the globe
(21:54):
are unable to resolve thisproblem.
And at the same time, you hearconservatives kind of lamenting
the disintegration of thenuclear family and they want to
revive it, and then they lookelsewhere, for example, oh, it's
feminism that hasn't done this,rather than the economic
conditions that sustained thisfamily model, knowing very well
(22:18):
that these conditions aren'tavailable anymore.
So it's an incrediblycontradictory kind of politics.
And I was wondering if, in away, we could also say it speaks
to like a deeper contradictionof capitalism, where it's no
longer able to reproduceconditions that sustain it.
Kristen Ghodsee (22:38):
Yeah, I mean, in some ways, and this is a is
this is a more esoteric questionfrom a political philosophy
point of view, right?
I mean, capitalism promisesthat a rising tide lifts all
boats, right?
That's the classic thing thatrather than dividing the pie
more equitably, you just growthe pie.
Growth becomes the enginethrough which mass prosperity
(23:02):
becomes possible.
So I want to say two things.
First of all, the post-war formof capitalism that we had in
the United States or in NorthAmerica more broadly or in
Western Europe or even in Japanwas predicated on massive
government spending.
It was Keynesian economics, itwas very close to socialism.
There was a lot of planninginvolved.
It was not the neoliberalcapitalism that we get after the
(23:25):
late 70s and 80s.
So that's the first thing.
There's an incredible amount ofgovernment intervention in the
economy that is happening incapitalist economies at that
time.
But I think that the, you know,there's an environmental
critique here that we could talkabout, that unlimited growth is
just not really sustainable inthe long run.
So capitalism as an economicsystem which is predicated on
(23:46):
growth is already in trouble,independent of the inequality
issue.
But the inequality issue, andthis is something I suspect I
spend a lot of time speakingabout in everyday utopia, the
inequality issue is the realproblem for the people at the
very top of our economic system,so the billionaires.
(24:07):
Because, and there's a lot ofliterature on this, which is
that societies become deeplyunstable, patriarchal societies,
which we all happen to live in,become deeply unstable when
there are a few men at the topwho hoard all of the resources,
and a massive population ofwhat's called bachelors.
(24:30):
So unattached men that are kindof at loose ends, one way or
the other.
They are precarious, butthey're also lonely, they're
also isolated, they're alsoangry.
And there's a lot of reallyinteresting evolutionary,
biological, anthropologicalevidence to show that society
that in order to sustain asociety with high levels of
(24:55):
inequality, in order for that toperpetuate from generation to
generation, where a very fewpeople have all of the resources
and a whole bunch of people atthe bottom have very little
resources, you need to make surethat the men at the bottom have
wives.
I'm sorry, this is the truth.
Because when you're dehumanizedin the workforce, when you're
(25:17):
dehumanized in society, you needto go home and have somebody to
humanize you.
And so that is why thesebillionaires are so bloody
concerned that women, that themarriage rates are declining,
right?
That that that and what are weseeing politically in the United
States?
This is also happening here inGermany, it's happening in
Belgium.
(25:37):
Young men are going to theright, and young women are going
to the left.
There's an incrediblepolarization that's happening
along gender lines.
And why?
Because women understand, Ithink, I mean, I'm just
triloquizing here, but there's acertain level of understanding
that, like, if we created moreequitable societies, all of
(25:58):
these problems would start toself-correct.
Whereas the algorithms or, youknow, the I'm not exactly sure.
I'd love to hear this from theaudience, like what it is that
is pulling young men so far tothe right, where it's like, it's
not this, it's not inequality,it's not capitalism, but it's
(26:20):
foreigners, it's minorities,it's feminism, it's trans
people, it's whatever, right?
It's somebody who's not thebillionaires.
When it's so obvious, right,from a structural, if you stop
for a second and you just lookedat this, if you could lay it
out on a chessboard or whatever,it's so obvious what the
structural problems are.
Anthropologists have beenwriting about this for hundreds
(26:43):
of years, right?
At least a hundred years.
The structure of societies andthe ways in which inequalities
perpetuate themselves and theways in which societies justify
inequalities.
And gender relations are at thecore of this, absolutely at the
core of this.
So that when we go back andreread Hobbes' Leviathan and the
(27:06):
justification for thesovereign, Hobbes argues very
clearly that human beings areborn free.
We're born independent.
We don't want to obey, we'rerebellious as children.
If you guys have toddlers orteenagers, you will know this.
So, how do we learn to obey thesovereign?
What's the most important thingto teach people who are born
(27:28):
free to obey the sovereign?
It's the father.
A strong father figure in thehome.
And if you have a strong fatherfigure who teaches children to
obey, then those children growup to be adults who obey the
strong man in the government.
And so it is not at allsurprising that research,
(27:50):
right-wing, and fascistmovements want the traditional
family back because you need toteach children to obey.
Astrid Zimmerman (28:18):
And when I was looking at some of these sort
of like drag wives videos beforein preparation of our class, I
think one one thing that youralgorithm is gonna improve now.
But something that reallystruck with me was that I felt
like these videos are soclaustrophobic because you
(28:38):
rarely see another person.
Sometimes where you see achild, but other than that,
these are like crushingly lonelypeople.
They're like all alone in theirhome the entire day.
It's not like you would think,okay, if you have all this time
to bake elaborate cakes and makemeals, you're gonna have your
friends over throw swanky dinnerparties.
(28:58):
None of this is happening.
They're just like alone intheir pristine homes.
And it made me think of, youknow, this is very famous
feminist classic from the 60s byBetty Friedan, where she was
talking about white middle classwomen in the 60s and how they
were all suffering from adisease that had no name because
they were literally goinginsane from isolation, from
(29:22):
boredom, from just like mentaland social understimulation.
They were going crazy.
Part of, you know, thisphenomenon was part of the
reason why we had second wave offeminism.
And now this seems so appealingto so many people to live like
this.
And I was trying to explainmaybe why that is.
I thought, okay, maybe thissense of distrust in larger
(29:44):
society is a contributing factorto this.
And I'm only bringing this upbecause I feel like people
often, or an argument I I comeby a lot of the times is that
people say, we get the treadlife now because feminism was so
we had so many advances, andit's just a normal cycle of
political dynamics.
We have progress, and there's abunch of people that don't like
this, so they rebel againstthis.
(30:05):
But I feel like in a differentway, you could also say maybe we
get this movement now becausewe get too little feminist
advances.
Because as a woman, you'recontinuously being told the
outside world is a dangerousplace, the workplace is a
dangerous place.
We have Me Too and all ofthese, you know, it's just like
continuously communicating toyou that we have this like
(30:26):
bizarre sort of carelessnesswhen it comes to the safety of
women.
So why not just stay at home?
So you could also just saymaybe you're sort of like
retreating from a world that youperceive to be incredibly
resistant to social change andsocial progress.
Kristen Ghodsee (30:41):
Yeah, I think that's absolutely true.
So, you know, one thing aboutthe housewives in the 1950s that
nobody likes to talk about isthe level of alcoholism and drug
use that those women, like LongIsland Iced tea, does anyone
know what this cocktail is,right?
This was like a very famousdrink among housewives.
And the Rolling Stone songs,the song, I think it's called
(31:03):
Mother's Little Helper.
It's literally about the drugsthat women were taking in the
kitchen because they were somiserable with their lives.
So, you know, conservativeswant to say that women were so
happy in the 50s, right?
They were at their kitchenswith their beautiful appliances
and their nice refrigerators.
And yet, exactly, Betty Fridianis talking about the disease
that has no name, they weretreating that disease.
(31:26):
The only reason women weresmiling was because they were
totally smashed most of thetime.
So that's not a good solution,right?
So I think that the the theproblem, and I I mean, I I feel
like I've spent the last 30years of my life trying to get
this one little point across.
(31:46):
I'm a professor.
And so I have this problem,which is that every year I have
new students and they stay 18 to22, and I keep getting older.
And so I I'll be giving mylectures to, you know, my new
group of students, and I'll say,wait, haven't you guys learned
(32:09):
this already?
I've been lecturing about thisfor the last 20 years, right?
So I feel like we have tounderstand that there are two
strands of feminism.
One was the liberal bourgeoisfeminism of the suffragettes
that largely wanted rights forproperty women.
(32:30):
They wanted the vote, theywanted the ability to get
divorced, they wanted to be ableto enter the professions.
And then there were workingclass movements, women who were
working in factories who foundsolidarity with working class
men.
And these movements go back tothe middle of the 19th century
just as much as the feminist,what we call the liberal
(32:52):
feminist or the bourgeoisfeminist movement.
There have always been theseparallel strands.
And I think when we talk aboutfeminism today, we're often
talking about the kind oflean-in, Cheryl Sandberg, girl
boss, slay the Ford room kind offeminism, right?
Like work harder so you canmake enough money so you can pay
somebody else to look afteryour kids and clean your house.
(33:12):
That was never the feminism ofpeople like Flora Setkin or
Alexandra Kalantai, right?
That was never the feminism ofsocialists like August Peibo or
Friedrich Engels.
They were always talking aboutthe socialization of labor.
They were all of reproductivelabor.
They were always talking aboutbuild building more equitable
societies so that women wouldn'thave to choose their partners
(33:35):
on the basis of whether theirpartner could pay their rent and
buy their groceries, but theycould choose their partners on
the basis of love and affection,right?
And shared mutual interest.
So this exhaustion is a, Imean, it's real.
And the the people who say,well, this is a backlash to
feminism, they don't understandwhat they're talking about
(33:56):
because they have a wrongdefinition of feminism.
And I think that that's, like Isaid, this is something that I
I will probably spend the next30 years if I live that long,
trying to explain this, right?
Which is that there's adifferent vision of feminism.
There's a much more egalitarianvision of feminism that is in
solidarity with people morebroadly, across borders, with
(34:20):
men, with with people of lots ofdifferent points of view, that
is about creating societies thatsustain connection and care and
comfort and solidarity thatgive us all better, less
precarious, more relaxed, quoteunquote soft girl life lives.
So why not build that society?
unknown (34:42):
Yeah.
Kristen Ghodsee (34:43):
Because it's hard.
Yeah.
Astrid Zimmerman (34:48):
Exactly.
And because uh I have afollow-up question to this
because um I just thought aboutmaybe this is cliche, but this
is like Rosa Luxemburg quotewhere she talks about the woman
worker.
And she says something alongthe lines of like for the woman
of the bourgeoisie, their entireworld is their home, and for
(35:08):
the woman of the organizedworking class, the entire world
is her home.
So where I feel like what she'skind of saying there also is
that there's this deepconfidence in the ability of
your own action and your ownagency to have an impact in the
world.
And when you just said, okay,why why are we so hesitant to
(35:30):
try to take up the political tobelieve in our own political
agency?
I was wondering if this is notalso in some way connected to
this entire question of how weallocate resources in our
society.
Because you were talking aboutthe billionaires earlier.
And I feel like, like you said,this the experience of scarcity
(35:54):
is real.
And we're always being toldthat, you know, we live in a
society where there's simplyless to go around.
So every conflict overresources is a zero-sum game.
If someone benefits, someoneelse loses, and this idea that
there could be something, acollective advancement is
completely out of reach.
Yet we know very well that theycreate an excess of resources
(36:20):
in the hands of very, very fewmen, you have to say, actually.
And also that our states are infact able, we've also
experienced this again and againcollectively, they're able to
mobilize resources very quicklywhen there's political will.
If, I don't know, the financialmarket's crashing, we need to
save things, we have theresources to do this.
If we're living through aglobal pandemic and big
(36:43):
corporations need tocounterbalance their loss of
profits, we have the resourcesto do this.
If we want to re-arm Germany,we have the resources to do
this, etc.
Every time we ask for resourcesfor public goods that would
make our lives more livable,that would make it more tenable
for us to have flourishingrelationships.
(37:04):
We're being told there areobjective constraints.
We simply don't have theresources to do this, and we
know this isn't true.
But at the same time, I feellike there's it's so easy for
all of us to just kind of likeabandon our agency and to just
simply accept that there's nopossibility in which we could
influence this political will inour favor.
(37:26):
And like there's this deepsense of political resignation.
How do you think?
Like, what can how did we getthere and how do we how do we
counter it?
Kristen Ghodsee (37:36):
Yeah, so I mean, I I absolutely believe
that the reason that it feels sodisempowering to live in the
political moment that we'reliving in is because those are
the messages we're gettingconstantly.
We're constantly being toldthat it's a zero-sum game, that
if you are kind, your kindnesswill be taken as weakness.
People will take advantage ofyou, people will scam you,
right?
There's no such thing as a freelunch.
(37:58):
Like everything that we learnis that opening yourself up to a
relationship of trust withanother person, whether it's
romantic or platonic, is puttingyourself at risk of being taken
advantage of.
That's why we get rid of toxicfriends, vampiric relationships,
and things like that.
We, the, the, the poppsychology and therapy speak is
all about boundary setting,right?
(38:18):
Set your boundaries becauseother people are gonna try to
take your affective resourcesaway from you.
So that being said, this is anold problem.
You mentioned RosalindLuxembourg.
I want to mention NadezhdaKrupskaya, who wrote a beautiful
pamphlet in 1899 that waspublished in 1901 called The
(38:41):
Woman Worker.
And Krupskaya, who was in exilein Siberia at the time, was
struggling with the problem thatmost Russian women were
illiterate and did notunderstand the possibility of
solidarity around politicalissues.
And she said something Ithought really interesting in
this pamphlet.
(39:02):
She says, the only way womenlearn to engage in politics is
to engage in politics.
That the minute you putyourself out there when you go
to a demonstration or you sitaround with your friends on the
kitchen table and you talk aboutpolitics or political economy,
you have conversations, you cometo a book event like this where
we're talking about thesequestions, you are
(39:24):
autodidacticallyself-radicalizing in a way.
And that becomes a vehicle forsolidarity.
And so I think that like thetrad wife, to come back to the
trad wife phenomenon, but tocome back to just contemporary
life, everything about thesealgorithms wants to keep us
(39:45):
isolated from each other.
Because we have power whenwe're together and we are
disempowered when we are apart.
And so I do again, I'm not aconspiracy theorist, but I don't
think it's a coincidence thatmodern life isolates us, that it
wants us to be on our phones,that the AI chatbots are trying
to tell us, you know, MarkZuckerberg is telling us that
(40:07):
our best friends are all goingto be chatbots in the future and
we won't have need for humanconnection.
Why is that happening?
Because precisely these momentsof collectivity are potentially
dangerous.
And when governments haveresponded with resources for the
common good, it's becausepeople demanded them.
(40:31):
And they demanded them in sucha way that the elites in charge
had no choice but to, if theywanted to keep the stability of
the system, they had to comply.
Okay, I might have one morequestion.
One more question, then weshould take some.
Astrid Zimmerman (40:49):
So I wanted, I mean, this was all urged.
So try to move us towards amore hopeful perspective.
And one thing you wrote wasOkay, I have to pick what's up,
but I actually wanted somethingthat you in an email.
Aha, yeah.
Where when you said somethingwhere you wrote me that you
(41:12):
think we need to ask ourselveshow we can build societies where
caring for others isn't asentimental weakness but an
essential part of our politicalactivity.
And this really resonated withme because I feel like even
among the left, there's sort ofthis tendency where you
acknowledge that care work isreally important and that it's
sort of like the underpinningthing of our society, and it's a
(41:34):
problem that it's performedmostly by women, and you sort of
like acknowledge this becauseit's common courtesy, you have
to say this, and then you go onwith your political discussion,
but it's not like a priority inour political vision, it's
always an afterthought.
And so, yeah, I was I waswondering what you think, what
(41:54):
can we do to build societiesthat are genuinely caring
societies, and how do we turnthis into an actual real
priority?
Kristen Ghodsee (42:04):
Yeah, and I think again, you know, going
back to this sort of earlyrevolutionary period in the late
19th and early 20th century,Alexandra Kalentai was a
Bolshevik who was pushing backagainst this idea that
transformations in the publicsphere would be enough to
(42:24):
transition from capitalism to amore equitable socialist
society.
She said that there have to betransformations in the private
sphere as well, in ourrelationships with each other,
with our families, with ourfriends, with our colleagues,
with our comrades.
And so feminists like to saythat the personal is political.
And I like to argue that thepolitical is personal.
Like the reason I wrote whywomen have better sex under
(42:46):
socialism is because a lot ofpeople think that like
capitalism stops at the bedroomdoor.
And capitalism, I'm sorry tosay this, is in bed with you.
When you are uh engaging inthese romantic, platonic,
whatever filial relationships,there's always a larger
political economic system withinwhich those relationships are
occurring.
And that political economicsystem is a system that devalues
(43:11):
human connection.
It is a system that devalueshuman relationships, it is a
system that devalues care.
Why?
Because it can't commodify itas well as it would like to.
And we are actually working onan article that will be out in
Jacob in Germany in Decemberabout this very issue.
So what I want to say to thoseof you in the audience is I
(43:33):
actually think that even thoughit may not sound very
revolutionary, that the mostimportant thing on a very simple
level that you can do is likespend time with your friends and
lovers and neighbors andcolleagues, go out for drinks,
walk in the park, like actuallyhave meaningful conversations
(43:55):
about things without worrying,you know, whether you can throw
a hashtag in front of it later.
But like the reciprocal flow,right?
There's this whole idea of usbeing together in space in real
(44:17):
time that creates a kind ofeffervescent possibility of
solidarity that doesn't existwhen we're online, that doesn't
exist when we're being mediatedthrough for-profit platforms
that are trying to commodify ourattentional resources.
So it doesn't seem like much.
And I can certainly name lotsof other things that we can do
(44:41):
on a grander scale.
But I think that there isrevolutionary potential in our
relationships, and that that'sone of the most important things
that gets dropped out ofconversations on the left, which
is why the right has been sogood with this trad-wife
discourse of luring people,because there they feel like
their relationships matter.
The relationships betweenhusband and wife, the
(45:02):
relationship between mother andchild.
Leftists are like, you know,we're just gonna be comrades arm
in arm, like throwing ourselvesat the police, right?
That's not necessarily gonna bethe the the most it could be
fun.
I'm not saying that it will, itit's not, especially if you go
out for drinks afterwards andyou know, debrief.
But but I think that there'sthere's something really
(45:25):
important about care, givingcare and and giving attention
and affection to those in yourlife whom you want to share it
with without regard for thevalue of your time or the other
person's time, right?
And so drink more in the parkwith your friends.
Astrid Zimmerman (45:49):
I think this is a perfect.
Hello and welcome to the AK forty seven
podcast.
My name is Kristen Godsey, andthis week I am posting a special
episode.
This is a bonus episode forthose of you who may have an
extra long weekend this weekend,depending on where you are in
(00:32):
the world.
There's holidays that arehappening, and you may have some
extra time to listen to thisreally fun conversation that I
had with a writer and editorhere in Berlin named Astrid
Zimmerman.
She was the former managingeditor of Jacobin Magazine here
(00:53):
in Germany, and she now works inpolitical communications for
Die Linke, which is the leftparty in Germany.
And we got together on November6th to do a conversation on why
women have better sex undersocialism, where we talked about
trad wives and sort of ideasabout feminism and femininity
(01:17):
and the difference betweenbourgeois and socialist feminism
in a way that I'm absolutelysure Alexandra Kollontai would
have approved of.
So for the sake of thisepisode, I am just introducing
it and I am including here thefull audio of our conversation.
And I hope you enjoy it.
(01:38):
And I will return in the nextepisode with my reading of the
Communist Valkyrie from my bookRed Valkyries.
And then I'm really hoping todo very soon a I guess sixth
anniversary conversation with mynow 24-year-old daughter.
(01:58):
But until then, thanks forlistening and keep up the good
fight.
Astrid Zimmerman (02:04):
Welcome.
Again, thanks for coming.
Thanks to Shakespeare and Sansfor having us today.
Thank you, Kirsten.
I'm very excited to get thechance to have this conversation
with you today.
I'm sure most of you arefamiliar with who you are and
familiar with your books.
I'm still going to brieflyintroduce you.
(02:24):
So you're an ethnographer,you're a professor of Russian
and Eastern European studies.
You've been publishedextensively.
You've written a number ofbooks.
Your writing has appeared inpublications like the New York
Times, the Washington Post, LeMont, Jakarta Magazine, which
I'm excited about because that'sthe publication I'm affiliated
(02:47):
with.
And your last book is EverydayUtopia, which is also available
in German under the titleUtopien für den Alltag.
But today we want to shift theconversation on a question that
you've explored in one of yourprevious books, where you
explain why capitalism isn'tonly harmful to women, but how
(03:10):
it also fails to provide thesocietal conditions that allow
for our relationships toflourish and why women therefore
have better sex in socialism.
So welcome, Kirsten.
Kristen Ghodsee (03:22):
Thank you so much.
Thank you so much for invitingme and for showing up tonight.
It's really a pleasure to beable to talk about the book and
to talk about the book at thismoment when we've just elected
the first socialist mayor of NewYork City.
So, you know, I didn't planthat for when we organized this
(03:48):
event, but it's great news.
And today, I, you know, I thinka lot of people were talking
about yesterday and today, justso much excitement about what's
happening in New York.
And I posted a little meme thatsays better sex coming
to a borough near you. And Ithink that it's really important
on the left to recognize whyMamdani was such a sensation in
(04:15):
New York.
And I think part of that, andit's very important to think
about the specific policies thathe was sort of proposing, but
one of them was aroundchildcare.
And one of them was around thesort of idea that human
relationships, right, forordinary people, should be front
and center.
This was a very bread andbutter campaign.
(04:38):
And I think that the left, inparticular, in this historical
moment, really needs to attendto this question of loneliness
and isolation and also the drawof the far right, specifically
around something like tradwives.
And so we were gonna try tofocus a little bit today on why
(05:04):
socialism and socialisticpolicies are specifically able
to address some of the needsthat women have that capitalism
cannot meet, but also thattraditional forms of feminism
cannot meet.
And I think that that's reallywhere I'd like to start.
Astrid Zimmerman (05:24):
Yeah, right.
So you've already set the stagefor the first thing I wanted to
ask you, because what you Swainin your work a lot is how if we
want to answer the question,how can we have good
relationships, we don't onlyhave to focus on the sort of
like interpersonal elements ofour partnerships, but also on
the structural conditions inwhich we have these
(05:45):
relationships.
Things like economic equality,independence, uh, childcare,
care infrastructures, thingslike this.
And as you've already alludedto, we're right now living in a
time where we live in deeplyunequal societies.
And up until very recently,there was this idea of female
empowerment, one ideal that wasvery popular, where we, as a
(06:06):
woman, you were supposed to leanin to advance your career, to
break the glass ceiling, andunder the guise of greater
gender equality.
And obviously, this hasn'tworked for the majority of
women.
So there seems to be like a bigdisillusionment with this idea
of female empowerment.
(06:26):
And what we're seeing now isthat rather than sort of like
leaning in, there's a growingmovement that's becoming ever
more popular where women arekind of told to rather lean back
and just like drop out of thelabor market, focus on being
mothers, being good wives.
And yeah, I would like to startour conversation by asking you
why do you think this is soappealing to more and more women
(06:49):
right now?
Kristen Ghodsee (06:50):
Right.
So I want to address two thingsbecause I do think there's a
reason why it's specificallyappealing to women.
And a lot of that has to dowith the great failures of late
capitalism that we're livingright now.
And the fact that for manypeople, their jobs feel very
meaningless, their work doesn'tseem to have a purpose, they're
barely making ends meet.
(07:12):
But there's also a biggerstructural question, which is
why there's such a push onsocial media.
But also, you know, there arethese new women's magazines that
are being funded bybillionaires like Peter Thiel
that are trying to convincewomen to stay home.
Why is it happening right now?
And one of the things that I'vewritten about in a actually in
(07:36):
Jacobin, and it was in aninterview with uh Meagan Day, is
that look, AI is going todestroy a lot of jobs.
And it's going to destroy a lotof jobs very quickly.
And we know from historicalprecedents, first in the
aftermath of World War II, butalso with the end of socialism
(07:57):
in Eastern Europe, that when youhave a massive exogenous shock
to the economic system thatrequires a drastic reduction in
the labor force, one of theeasiest ways to deal with the
social upheavals that willinevitably come from mass
unemployment is to convincewomen that they'd be much
happier at home, churning butterand baking bread from scratch.
(08:18):
And so one of the reasons whyin this historical moment we are
seeing the rise of thistradwife discourse is precisely
because we've already got theevidence of all of these
white-collar jobs, office jobs,are just being automated away by
AI.
And a lot of young people arehaving a very hard time finding
(08:40):
decent employment in the labormarket.
And so, not surprisingly, weget this idea of a return to
traditional gender roles, whichis exactly what happened after
the collapse of socialism inEastern Europe in 1989, and
exactly what happened afterWorld War II, when all the women
who had gone into the factoriesto replace the men while they
were fighting, when the boyscame home, the women went back
(09:02):
to the kitchen, right, withtheir appliances and their big
Dior new look dresses.
There was a very specificreason why it happened.
And let's not fool ourselvesinto thinking that there aren't
larger structural reasons forthis particular trend on social
media.
But the second response isabout why does it work?
(09:24):
Why are women being seduced bythis?
And so there are two forms ofthis.
First is the trad wife, and thesecond is what is often on the
hashtag softgirl life.
How nice it would be to stayhome with your candles and do
yoga and like cozy up by thefire with a nice cup of herbal
(09:47):
tea.
I mean, it's seductive.
unknown (09:51):
Okay.
Kristen Ghodsee (09:52):
It is a very nice, it's much better than
turning butter in a bustier.
And so, but what is thatindexing?
It's indexing an incredibleexhaustion with lean-in
feminism, an incredibleexhaustion with the precarity of
late capitalism and the gigeconomy.
And so there's within the tradwife movement, and I can give
(10:16):
very specific examples, anascent critique of capitalism.
But that critique is not beingarticulated in a way that
resonates with young women yet.
It's mostly about the fantasyof the soft girl life.
Astrid Zimmerman (10:33):
Okay, I have so many follow-up questions, but
I'm gonna start maybe let'sfocus on this trad wife,
housewife, the romanticizationof this kind of woman
femininity, but because I wasalso wondering if, you know, if
we understand capitalism as asystem that structurally depends
on all of this unpaidreproductive labor, and it
(10:55):
therefore valorizes the nuclearfamily as a unit of care because
it allows us to privatize caremore and more, where it's
performed unpaiddisproportionately by women.
But I also wondered if part ofthe appeal of being a
traditional housewife is alsobecause it gives people maybe
like a false sense ofrecognition or acknowledgement
(11:19):
of the labor that they performand kind of recognizing that
what they do when they take careof children, take care of the
elderly, take care of sickpeople, that this is kind of
like respectable work because wekind of we don't have a
language to describe this, andalso because this work is
(11:39):
structurally devalued in our inour economic system.
Kristen Ghodsee (11:44):
Yeah, absolutely.
And I think that that's one ofthe reasons why leftist appeals,
either to abolish the family orto socialize all care work,
don't always land becausethey're framed in a way that
sometimes reinforces the ideathat this labor is not very
(12:07):
valuable, that the real workthat should give your life
meaning is work that you do inthe formal economy and not in
caring for your relationshipsand caring for your loved ones.
If you care, capitalism makesit a liability, right?
It devalues care to such anextent that anyone who cares
(12:29):
becomes encumbered by that.
And so we see over and overagain that people who perform
care are some of the mostprecarious people in our
economies.
And these is this is not onlypeople who perform that work in
the home without remuneration,but also those who care in the
formal economy, right?
Who do this kind of work,taking care of the elderly or
(12:51):
taking care of children, arealso devalued because their
wages are generally lower than,you know, some guy who works at
a bank who moves money from oneaccount to another all day.
He makes a massive salary andall he does is, you know, move
numbers on a screen.
And the people that areactually raising the next
generation, actually creatingour societies that are actually
(13:14):
producing real value in terms ofhuman connection.
That's just not consideredanything worth valuing.
Now, I don't, I want to make itclear here that I don't mean
that the, that, that this valueis always indexed to a wage.
I think that value means, asyou said, the recognition that
(13:37):
this is important work and theway that we structure our
societies to change the way weacknowledge and even sort of
celebrate the people who do thatwork.
Astrid Zimmerman (13:50):
I want to go back to what you said about
exhaustion before.
Um, because like uh whatsomething you just described was
how capitalism is a system thatessentially penalizes those
that care the most, and that putyou at a higher risk of
precarization, of poverty, youhave lower grades of financial
(14:11):
stability, et cetera.
And how you would understand atrend, sort of this like soft
life movement as sort ofpeople's response, or maybe like
a way, they search for a way tolive a less exhausting life
because essentially we're alsoright now living under a time
where we're not only supposed tohave two shifts where we work
(14:33):
in our jobs and work in ourhomes, but we're also living
through a time where ourgovernments are telling us that
we have to work even more nowand we have to work even harder.
So you're essentially tellingan entire generation of women
that what they get is not awork-life balance, they get a
work-work balance.
So they have to balance, jugglethe work that they do as a j in
(14:57):
their jobs, where there's lesssocial mobility because our
economy is broken, but they'realso supposed to work harder and
work more in their homesbecause at the same time we're
privatizing more care.
So could we Yeah, I I was justwondering if you could maybe
speak a bit more to this kind oflike sense of exhaustion and
how people just maybe try tothey're searching for a way to
(15:20):
live in an economy where all theodds are essentially stuck
against them, maybe.
Kristen Ghodsee (15:25):
Right.
And I think that again, as a asa social scientist and somebody
who spent a lot of time lookingat what happened in Eastern
Europe after the collapse ofsocialism, where you had a
similar kind ofneoliberalization and a
dismantling of once-generatedsocial safety nets, what
happened, what is stillhappening, it was a birth
strike.
In Eastern Germany in 1990,1991, it was the lowest ever
(15:50):
recorded birth at that time inthe absence of a war.
Right?
The birth rate fell so low.
And still to this day, morethan 35 years after the
transition process, EastEuropean countries are the
fastest shrinking countries onthe planet.
Why?
Because you can't do it all.
And so what is happening inmost of the industrialized
(16:13):
countries in the world, and it'sactually starting to spread
even beyond that, is that womenwho are utterly exhausted, it's
larger than women, buteverybody's exhausted.
But there's a choice that'sbeing made, which is just like
no babies.
No done.
Like you can't, you cannot doit all.
And so I find it really richthat somebody like Elon Musk,
(16:36):
when asked what keeps you up atnight, he says the falling birth
rate, right?
That civilization is at stakebecause young people are selfish
and don't want to have babies.
And yet there's no recognitionthat the conditions under which
we are asking people to, as yousay, work work, there is no work
(16:57):
family balance, there is nowork life balance, is precisely
the pro the billionaires are theproblem, right?
There's no self-reflexivity onthat question.
And then the second question isto push this even a little bit
further into the realm ofrelationships, because after
all, if you're really, reallyexhausted at the end of the day,
(17:20):
it's hard to engage inactivities that would result in
babies.
So it there that exhaustion isnot just a kind of psychic
exhaustion.
It's real, but it's also arelational exhaustion.
(17:42):
We have so little energy leftthat rather than sharing our
attentions and affections withothers, we hoard them for
necessary bouts of self-care sothat we can get our ass up in
the morning the next day and goback to work.
That's just the way life isright now.
(18:03):
So it's a structural problemall the way from top to bottom.
Astrid Zimmerman (18:09):
I also feel like something you just talked
about, because you've mentionedElon Musk.
So I also feel like what it'skind of ironic, also in relation
to the falling birth ratesafter the fall of the one or
after the disintegration of realsocialism, is that ironically
(18:30):
when conservatives say, oh, it'sall of this gender equality
that makes women not want tohave babies.
In reality, there's probablynothing better that you could do
to convince people to maybestart a family with actually
greater economic equality.
Right?
Right.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Kristen Ghodsee (18:48):
Exactly.
Yeah.
And and you know, and there'sthere's there are reasons for
that, which is that the nuclearfamily exists, as so many
socialist theorists have pointedout to us, as the unit in
society that facilitates theintergenerational transfer of
wealth and privilege fromfathers to largely their
(19:11):
legitimate children, right?
That's what the nuclear familydoes.
You can read all about that,various things if you if that's
new to you.
But it and what it does is itmakes parenting a contact board.
It means that if we havefamilies, we raise our children
individualistically.
(19:32):
This is why the Tradwai family,tradwise fantasy is so
powerful, because if I give allmy love and attention to my own
child, I will give my childadvantages that other children
don't have.
And so then my children will befine in a society that's
falling apart.
So rather than saying, let'sbuild a society where
everybody's children will have achance to thrive, we're saying
(19:56):
the reality is, it's not anunreasonable reaction, by the
way.
The reality is that oursocieties are falling apart.
The reality is social mobilitydoesn't exist anymore.
The reality is there's anincredible amount of precarity,
even for people already in themiddle class.
So if you're going to try to bea good parent, and this is how
(20:19):
they get you, if you're a goodmom, you have to give your child
advantages, extra love, extraattention, extra resources.
And that necessarily means thatyou need to exclude other
children.
And that's where the nuclearfamily comes in.
And that's why it's soexhausting to be a parent in
(20:40):
2025.
You know, it it everything is acompetition.
And that in and of itself isexhausting.
Astrid Zimmerman (20:48):
Yeah, this idea that life and in its in and
of itself is reallycompetitive, is I think
something that speaks also a lotto the economic conditions that
in which this is happening.
And you've you've alreadytalked about this.
So I feel like if we take astep back and we think about
what was the promise of liberalcapitalism essentially, it was
(21:09):
that it was supposed to givepeople mass prosperity, social
mobility, and that if all ofthis was working, we're gonna
have a relatively well-offstable middle class.
And there was a brief moment intime where we had this in a
post-war period.
And I feel like it's probablynot a coincidence that if we
think about traditionalhousewives, we think of a woman
(21:30):
from the 50s from the post-warperiod, which, because those
were the economic conditionsthat made essentially the
nuclear family possible as amass phenomenon.
And so now this premise ofprosperity, of social mobility
doesn't hold anymore.
And it seems like capitalisteconomies all around the globe
(21:54):
are unable to resolve thisproblem.
And at the same time, you hearconservatives kind of lamenting
the disintegration of thenuclear family and they want to
revive it, and then they lookelsewhere, for example, oh, it's
feminism that hasn't done this,rather than the economic
conditions that sustained thisfamily model, knowing very well
(22:18):
that these conditions aren'tavailable anymore.
So it's an incrediblycontradictory kind of politics.
And I was wondering if, in away, we could also say it speaks
to like a deeper contradictionof capitalism, where it's no
longer able to reproduceconditions that sustain it.
Kristen Ghodsee (22:38):
Yeah, I mean, in some ways, and this is a is
this is a more esoteric questionfrom a political philosophy
point of view, right?
I mean, capitalism promisesthat a rising tide lifts all
boats, right?
That's the classic thing thatrather than dividing the pie
more equitably, you just growthe pie.
Growth becomes the enginethrough which mass prosperity
(23:02):
becomes possible.
So I want to say two things.
First of all, the post-war formof capitalism that we had in
the United States or in NorthAmerica more broadly or in
Western Europe or even in Japanwas predicated on massive
government spending.
It was Keynesian economics, itwas very close to socialism.
There was a lot of planninginvolved.
It was not the neoliberalcapitalism that we get after the
(23:25):
late 70s and 80s.
So that's the first thing.
There's an incredible amount ofgovernment intervention in the
economy that is happening incapitalist economies at that
time.
But I think that the, you know,there's an environmental
critique here that we could talkabout, that unlimited growth is
just not really sustainable inthe long run.
So capitalism as an economicsystem which is predicated on
(23:46):
growth is already in trouble,independent of the inequality
issue.
But the inequality issue, andthis is something I suspect I
spend a lot of time speakingabout in everyday utopia, the
inequality issue is the realproblem for the people at the
very top of our economic system,so the billionaires.
(24:07):
Because, and there's a lot ofliterature on this, which is
that societies become deeplyunstable, patriarchal societies,
which we all happen to live in,become deeply unstable when
there are a few men at the topwho hoard all of the resources,
and a massive population ofwhat's called bachelors.
(24:30):
So unattached men that are kindof at loose ends, one way or
the other.
They are precarious, butthey're also lonely, they're
also isolated, they're alsoangry.
And there's a lot of reallyinteresting evolutionary,
biological, anthropologicalevidence to show that society
that in order to sustain asociety with high levels of
(24:55):
inequality, in order for that toperpetuate from generation to
generation, where a very fewpeople have all of the resources
and a whole bunch of people atthe bottom have very little
resources, you need to make surethat the men at the bottom have
wives.
I'm sorry, this is the truth.
Because when you're dehumanizedin the workforce, when you're
(25:17):
dehumanized in society, you needto go home and have somebody to
humanize you.
And so that is why thesebillionaires are so bloody
concerned that women, that themarriage rates are declining,
right?
That that that and what are weseeing politically in the United
States?
This is also happening here inGermany, it's happening in
Belgium.
(25:37):
Young men are going to theright, and young women are going
to the left.
There's an incrediblepolarization that's happening
along gender lines.
And why?
Because women understand, Ithink, I mean, I'm just
triloquizing here, but there's acertain level of understanding
that, like, if we created moreequitable societies, all of
(25:58):
these problems would start toself-correct.
Whereas the algorithms or, youknow, the I'm not exactly sure.
I'd love to hear this from theaudience, like what it is that
is pulling young men so far tothe right, where it's like, it's
not this, it's not inequality,it's not capitalism, but it's
(26:20):
foreigners, it's minorities,it's feminism, it's trans
people, it's whatever, right?
It's somebody who's not thebillionaires.
When it's so obvious, right,from a structural, if you stop
for a second and you just lookedat this, if you could lay it
out on a chessboard or whatever,it's so obvious what the
structural problems are.
Anthropologists have beenwriting about this for hundreds
(26:43):
of years, right?
At least a hundred years.
The structure of societies andthe ways in which inequalities
perpetuate themselves and theways in which societies justify
inequalities.
And gender relations are at thecore of this, absolutely at the
core of this.
So that when we go back andreread Hobbes' Leviathan and the
(27:06):
justification for thesovereign, Hobbes argues very
clearly that human beings areborn free.
We're born independent.
We don't want to obey, we'rerebellious as children.
If you guys have toddlers orteenagers, you will know this.
So, how do we learn to obey thesovereign?
What's the most important thingto teach people who are born
(27:28):
free to obey the sovereign?
It's the father.
A strong father figure in thehome.
And if you have a strong fatherfigure who teaches children to
obey, then those children growup to be adults who obey the
strong man in the government.
And so it is not at allsurprising that research,
(27:50):
right-wing, and fascistmovements want the traditional
family back because you need toteach children to obey.
Astrid Zimmerman (28:18):
And when I was looking at some of these sort
of like drag wives videos beforein preparation of our class, I
think one one thing that youralgorithm is gonna improve now.
But something that reallystruck with me was that I felt
like these videos are soclaustrophobic because you
(28:38):
rarely see another person.
Sometimes where you see achild, but other than that,
these are like crushingly lonelypeople.
They're like all alone in theirhome the entire day.
It's not like you would think,okay, if you have all this time
to bake elaborate cakes and makemeals, you're gonna have your
friends over throw swanky dinnerparties.
(28:58):
None of this is happening.
They're just like alone intheir pristine homes.
And it made me think of, youknow, this is very famous
feminist classic from the 60s byBetty Friedan, where she was
talking about white middle classwomen in the 60s and how they
were all suffering from adisease that had no name because
they were literally goinginsane from isolation, from
(29:22):
boredom, from just like mentaland social understimulation.
They were going crazy.
Part of, you know, thisphenomenon was part of the
reason why we had second wave offeminism.
And now this seems so appealingto so many people to live like
this.
And I was trying to explainmaybe why that is.
I thought, okay, maybe thissense of distrust in larger
(29:44):
society is a contributing factorto this.
And I'm only bringing this upbecause I feel like people
often, or an argument I I comeby a lot of the times is that
people say, we get the treadlife now because feminism was so
we had so many advances, andit's just a normal cycle of
political dynamics.
We have progress, and there's abunch of people that don't like
this, so they rebel againstthis.
(30:05):
But I feel like in a differentway, you could also say maybe we
get this movement now becausewe get too little feminist
advances.
Because as a woman, you'recontinuously being told the
outside world is a dangerousplace, the workplace is a
dangerous place.
We have Me Too and all ofthese, you know, it's just like
continuously communicating toyou that we have this like
(30:26):
bizarre sort of carelessnesswhen it comes to the safety of
women.
So why not just stay at home?
So you could also just saymaybe you're sort of like
retreating from a world that youperceive to be incredibly
resistant to social change andsocial progress.
Kristen Ghodsee (30:41):
Yeah, I think that's absolutely true.
So, you know, one thing aboutthe housewives in the 1950s that
nobody likes to talk about isthe level of alcoholism and drug
use that those women, like LongIsland Iced tea, does anyone
know what this cocktail is,right?
This was like a very famousdrink among housewives.
And the Rolling Stone songs,the song, I think it's called
(31:03):
Mother's Little Helper.
It's literally about the drugsthat women were taking in the
kitchen because they were somiserable with their lives.
So, you know, conservativeswant to say that women were so
happy in the 50s, right?
They were at their kitchenswith their beautiful appliances
and their nice refrigerators.
And yet, exactly, Betty Fridianis talking about the disease
that has no name, they weretreating that disease.
(31:26):
The only reason women weresmiling was because they were
totally smashed most of thetime.
So that's not a good solution,right?
So I think that the the theproblem, and I I mean, I I feel
like I've spent the last 30years of my life trying to get
this one little point across.
(31:46):
I'm a professor.
And so I have this problem,which is that every year I have
new students and they stay 18 to22, and I keep getting older.
And so I I'll be giving mylectures to, you know, my new
group of students, and I'll say,wait, haven't you guys learned
(32:09):
this already?
I've been lecturing about thisfor the last 20 years, right?
So I feel like we have tounderstand that there are two
strands of feminism.
One was the liberal bourgeoisfeminism of the suffragettes
that largely wanted rights forproperty women.
(32:30):
They wanted the vote, theywanted the ability to get
divorced, they wanted to be ableto enter the professions.
And then there were workingclass movements, women who were
working in factories who foundsolidarity with working class
men.
And these movements go back tothe middle of the 19th century
just as much as the feminist,what we call the liberal
(32:52):
feminist or the bourgeoisfeminist movement.
There have always been theseparallel strands.
And I think when we talk aboutfeminism today, we're often
talking about the kind oflean-in, Cheryl Sandberg, girl
boss, slay the Ford room kind offeminism, right?
Like work harder so you canmake enough money so you can pay
somebody else to look afteryour kids and clean your house.
(33:12):
That was never the feminism ofpeople like Flora Setkin or
Alexandra Kalantai, right?
That was never the feminism ofsocialists like August Peibo or
Friedrich Engels.
They were always talking aboutthe socialization of labor.
They were all of reproductivelabor.
They were always talking aboutbuild building more equitable
societies so that women wouldn'thave to choose their partners
(33:35):
on the basis of whether theirpartner could pay their rent and
buy their groceries, but theycould choose their partners on
the basis of love and affection,right?
And shared mutual interest.
So this exhaustion is a, Imean, it's real.
And the the people who say,well, this is a backlash to
feminism, they don't understandwhat they're talking about
(33:56):
because they have a wrongdefinition of feminism.
And I think that that's, like Isaid, this is something that I
I will probably spend the next30 years if I live that long,
trying to explain this, right?
Which is that there's adifferent vision of feminism.
There's a much more egalitarianvision of feminism that is in
solidarity with people morebroadly, across borders, with
(34:20):
men, with with people of lots ofdifferent points of view, that
is about creating societies thatsustain connection and care and
comfort and solidarity thatgive us all better, less
precarious, more relaxed, quoteunquote soft girl life lives.
So why not build that society?
unknown (34:42):
Yeah.
Kristen Ghodsee (34:43):
Because it's hard.
Yeah.
Astrid Zimmerman (34:48):
Exactly.
And because uh I have afollow-up question to this
because um I just thought aboutmaybe this is cliche, but this
is like Rosa Luxemburg quotewhere she talks about the woman
worker.
And she says something alongthe lines of like for the woman
of the bourgeoisie, their entireworld is their home, and for
(35:08):
the woman of the organizedworking class, the entire world
is her home.
So where I feel like what she'skind of saying there also is
that there's this deepconfidence in the ability of
your own action and your ownagency to have an impact in the
world.
And when you just said, okay,why why are we so hesitant to
(35:30):
try to take up the political tobelieve in our own political
agency?
I was wondering if this is notalso in some way connected to
this entire question of how weallocate resources in our
society.
Because you were talking aboutthe billionaires earlier.
And I feel like, like you said,this the experience of scarcity
(35:54):
is real.
And we're always being toldthat, you know, we live in a
society where there's simplyless to go around.
So every conflict overresources is a zero-sum game.
If someone benefits, someoneelse loses, and this idea that
there could be something, acollective advancement is
completely out of reach.
Yet we know very well that theycreate an excess of resources
(36:20):
in the hands of very, very fewmen, you have to say, actually.
And also that our states are infact able, we've also
experienced this again and againcollectively, they're able to
mobilize resources very quicklywhen there's political will.
If, I don't know, the financialmarket's crashing, we need to
save things, we have theresources to do this.
If we're living through aglobal pandemic and big
(36:43):
corporations need tocounterbalance their loss of
profits, we have the resourcesto do this.
If we want to re-arm Germany,we have the resources to do
this, etc.
Every time we ask for resourcesfor public goods that would
make our lives more livable,that would make it more tenable
for us to have flourishingrelationships.
(37:04):
We're being told there areobjective constraints.
We simply don't have theresources to do this, and we
know this isn't true.
But at the same time, I feellike there's it's so easy for
all of us to just kind of likeabandon our agency and to just
simply accept that there's nopossibility in which we could
influence this political will inour favor.
(37:26):
And like there's this deepsense of political resignation.
How do you think?
Like, what can how did we getthere and how do we how do we
counter it?
Kristen Ghodsee (37:36):
Yeah, so I mean, I I absolutely believe
that the reason that it feels sodisempowering to live in the
political moment that we'reliving in is because those are
the messages we're gettingconstantly.
We're constantly being toldthat it's a zero-sum game, that
if you are kind, your kindnesswill be taken as weakness.
People will take advantage ofyou, people will scam you,
right?
There's no such thing as a freelunch.
(37:58):
Like everything that we learnis that opening yourself up to a
relationship of trust withanother person, whether it's
romantic or platonic, is puttingyourself at risk of being taken
advantage of.
That's why we get rid of toxicfriends, vampiric relationships,
and things like that.
We, the, the, the poppsychology and therapy speak is
all about boundary setting,right?
(38:18):
Set your boundaries becauseother people are gonna try to
take your affective resourcesaway from you.
So that being said, this is anold problem.
You mentioned RosalindLuxembourg.
I want to mention NadezhdaKrupskaya, who wrote a beautiful
pamphlet in 1899 that waspublished in 1901 called The
(38:41):
Woman Worker.
And Krupskaya, who was in exilein Siberia at the time, was
struggling with the problem thatmost Russian women were
illiterate and did notunderstand the possibility of
solidarity around politicalissues.
And she said something Ithought really interesting in
this pamphlet.
(39:02):
She says, the only way womenlearn to engage in politics is
to engage in politics.
That the minute you putyourself out there when you go
to a demonstration or you sitaround with your friends on the
kitchen table and you talk aboutpolitics or political economy,
you have conversations, you cometo a book event like this where
we're talking about thesequestions, you are
(39:24):
autodidacticallyself-radicalizing in a way.
And that becomes a vehicle forsolidarity.
And so I think that like thetrad wife, to come back to the
trad wife phenomenon, but tocome back to just contemporary
life, everything about thesealgorithms wants to keep us
(39:45):
isolated from each other.
Because we have power whenwe're together and we are
disempowered when we are apart.
And so I do again, I'm not aconspiracy theorist, but I don't
think it's a coincidence thatmodern life isolates us, that it
wants us to be on our phones,that the AI chatbots are trying
to tell us, you know, MarkZuckerberg is telling us that
(40:07):
our best friends are all goingto be chatbots in the future and
we won't have need for humanconnection.
Why is that happening?
Because precisely these momentsof collectivity are potentially
dangerous.
And when governments haveresponded with resources for the
common good, it's becausepeople demanded them.
(40:31):
And they demanded them in sucha way that the elites in charge
had no choice but to, if theywanted to keep the stability of
the system, they had to comply.
Okay, I might have one morequestion.
One more question, then weshould take some.
Astrid Zimmerman (40:49):
So I wanted, I mean, this was all urged.
So try to move us towards amore hopeful perspective.
And one thing you wrote wasOkay, I have to pick what's up,
but I actually wanted somethingthat you in an email.
Aha, yeah.
Where when you said somethingwhere you wrote me that you
(41:12):
think we need to ask ourselveshow we can build societies where
caring for others isn't asentimental weakness but an
essential part of our politicalactivity.
And this really resonated withme because I feel like even
among the left, there's sort ofthis tendency where you
acknowledge that care work isreally important and that it's
sort of like the underpinningthing of our society, and it's a
(41:34):
problem that it's performedmostly by women, and you sort of
like acknowledge this becauseit's common courtesy, you have
to say this, and then you go onwith your political discussion,
but it's not like a priority inour political vision, it's
always an afterthought.
And so, yeah, I was I waswondering what you think, what
(41:54):
can we do to build societiesthat are genuinely caring
societies, and how do we turnthis into an actual real
priority?
Kristen Ghodsee (42:04):
Yeah, and I think again, you know, going
back to this sort of earlyrevolutionary period in the late
19th and early 20th century,Alexandra Kalentai was a
Bolshevik who was pushing backagainst this idea that
transformations in the publicsphere would be enough to
(42:24):
transition from capitalism to amore equitable socialist
society.
She said that there have to betransformations in the private
sphere as well, in ourrelationships with each other,
with our families, with ourfriends, with our colleagues,
with our comrades.
And so feminists like to saythat the personal is political.
And I like to argue that thepolitical is personal.
Like the reason I wrote whywomen have better sex under
(42:46):
socialism is because a lot ofpeople think that like
capitalism stops at the bedroomdoor.
And capitalism, I'm sorry tosay this, is in bed with you.
When you are uh engaging inthese romantic, platonic,
whatever filial relationships,there's always a larger
political economic system withinwhich those relationships are
occurring.
And that political economicsystem is a system that devalues
(43:11):
human connection.
It is a system that devalueshuman relationships, it is a
system that devalues care.
Why?
Because it can't commodify itas well as it would like to.
And we are actually working onan article that will be out in
Jacob in Germany in Decemberabout this very issue.
So what I want to say to thoseof you in the audience is I
(43:33):
actually think that even thoughit may not sound very
revolutionary, that the mostimportant thing on a very simple
level that you can do is likespend time with your friends and
lovers and neighbors andcolleagues, go out for drinks,
walk in the park, like actuallyhave meaningful conversations
(43:55):
about things without worrying,you know, whether you can throw
a hashtag in front of it later.
But like the reciprocal flow,right?
There's this whole idea of usbeing together in space in real
(44:17):
time that creates a kind ofeffervescent possibility of
solidarity that doesn't existwhen we're online, that doesn't
exist when we're being mediatedthrough for-profit platforms
that are trying to commodify ourattentional resources.
So it doesn't seem like much.
And I can certainly name lotsof other things that we can do
(44:41):
on a grander scale.
But I think that there isrevolutionary potential in our
relationships, and that that'sone of the most important things
that gets dropped out ofconversations on the left, which
is why the right has been sogood with this trad-wife
discourse of luring people,because there they feel like
their relationships matter.
The relationships betweenhusband and wife, the
(45:02):
relationship between mother andchild.
Leftists are like, you know,we're just gonna be comrades arm
in arm, like throwing ourselvesat the police, right?
That's not necessarily gonna bethe the the most it could be
fun.
I'm not saying that it will, itit's not, especially if you go
out for drinks afterwards andyou know, debrief.
But but I think that there'sthere's something really
(45:25):
important about care, givingcare and and giving attention
and affection to those in yourlife whom you want to share it
with without regard for thevalue of your time or the other
person's time, right?
And so drink more in the parkwith your friends.
Astrid Zimmerman (45:49):
I think this is a perfect.
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