then you’re gonna have to acknowledge some super shitty truths.

Capitalism is a system built on unpaid labor, the unpaid labor done by women in caring for children and home and family, the unpaid (or might as well be unpaid) labor of non-whites both in building our country in the past and making the products we use in the present. Capitalism is a system that cannot exist without ever broadening definitions for what kind of work is of little monetary value, because the wages must go down for profits to go up. The only difference between now and before is that people who expected to be valued (middle class, white, male, educated, etc) are finding that they aren’t.

There was a French writer, who I can’t remember and who I actually haven’t read, being that his work hasn’t been translated, but who I had summed up by the amazing Ruthzilla that wrote that the reason the nuclear family was so important to capitalism is that you needed the back up workforce of women who could take over the tasks left by men who went to feed the war machine. That’s probably less true now that (white, middle-class and better) women are in the work force (non-white, non-middle class women have always worked). But no one could go out to their box-of-labor-pain* if there was no one to have the babies, raise the babies, educate the babies, cook the dinners, shop for groceries, clean the house, do the laundry, care for the old and the sick relatives, etc. Etc. And it is no fucking mistake that when we have to outsource these jobs for pay, that pay is never a living wage. Capitalism can barely be assed to value something that it thinks should be “personal responsibility” and cost nothing.

But these are the core things that a person, a family, and most importantly, a society needs in order to continue. There isn’t actually a society at all if there aren’t children being born. Ask the Spartans, who killed themselves off in wars faster than they could make new soldiers. These are the things that must be done before a profit is even made. These are the things that would still be done if every business on the planet was wiped out tomorrow. These are the things that are usually done by women, and if for pay they are usually done by women of color at the expense of their own families.

So if your revolution doesn’t take that into account, if you want to change the system but you don’t seriously take sexism, racism, ableism, etc into consideration and do the long hard work from the bottom up, then you’re revolution isn’t really going to fix anything for long.