It’s been said, many many times at this blog and in various and sundry places, that if you don’t deal with the racism and the sexism in the Occupy Movement, then it isn’t really a revolutionary movement at all. That is fucking obvious and elementary to those of us who’ve been victims of racism and sexism, it’s less obvious to the newbies, the shoulda been middle class white doods who are just now seeing what it feels like when the people we give power to just don’t give a flying fuck about you.

But capitalism is a system that requires an ever-growing population of people providing labor for free or for damn near free. It starts by devaluing the work done predominantly by women. That work, without which there would be no society because there would be no people, is the real work. It is the work of having children, maintaining a home, cooking dinner, doing laundry, caring for the sick and the old and the young. And in cases where you couldn’t get that work done for free, capitalism has devalued so that the people who are paid to do it don’t make a wage that provides for the basics. Think about any mom earning minimum wage. Her paycheck will to paying someone else minimum wage to look after her kids, effectively cancelling out her earnings.

Now if you have a system that requires half your population to provide labor at no cost, you have to have some mechanism for preventing that group from grabbing the nearest pitchfork. Fortunately, misogyny was old when capitalism was new, so there was already a system of violence and coercion in place.