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Micropolitics Links

Micropolitics is the politics of consumption—they erase all examination of oppressive structures in favor of an examination of the individual without context, allowing oppression to work silently in the background

Ebert 5 (Teresa, Professor of Humanities at the College of Arts and Sciences at the University at Albany who specializes in Critical and Cultural Theory, Feminist Critique, Marxist Theory and Globalization Theory, “Rematerializing Feminism” http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/40404228.pdf)//meb

On the Salience of Micropolitics The emergence of micropolitics marks the impact of the global- ization of capitalist production and the way that the dimensions of this objective reality have become less and less graspable by a subject who, through the working of ideology, has been remapped as the subject of desire. The subject of desire is, by its very formation, a local and localist subject. This desiring subject grasps the world through its identity and furthermore constructs this identity through the sat- isfactions that it acquires in its consuming relations to the world around it. Micropolitics is the politics of consumption, and consump- tion is always a matter of localities. Micropolitics does not have an inverse relation to universal objective reality, but rather is comple- mentary to it: it preoccupies the subject with the here and now and, in doing so, distracts its attention from the all encompassing objec- tive reality that in fact determines the here and now. Advanced capi- talism deploys micropolitics to restrict the access of the subject to the dynamics of traveling capital and its expanding range of exploitation. It is of course ironic that micropolitics is seen as enabling politics - a politics that attends to the connections and relations of the subject with its immediate conditions and serves as the basis for coalition and other local practices. In fact, micropolitics has become the logic of activism in the new social movements. To say what I have said in a different way: micropolitics is the politics of bypassing class and put- ting in its place lifestyle and consumption. It is a politics that erases any examination of the structures of exploitation, substituting instead ethnographical studies of the behavior of the subject in its multiple consuming relations.

Oppression Link

Our centering of labor as the cite for division and oppression is key to visible and effective struggle—any other focus obscures the ways in which women are oppressed and thus allows the violence to continue

Ebert 5 (Teresa, Professor of Humanities at the College of Arts and Sciences at the University at Albany who specializes in Critical and Cultural Theory, Feminist Critique, Marxist Theory and Globalization Theory, “Rematerializing Feminism” http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/40404228.pdf)//meb

FEMINISM AFTER THE "POST" has become in theory and practice largely indifferent to material practices under capitalism - such as labor, which shapes the social structures of daily life and has fetishized difference. It has, in other words, erased the question of "exploitation," diffusing knowledge of the root conditions of women's realities into a plurality of particularities of "oppressions." Feminism has embraced the cultural turn - the reification of cul- ture as an autonomous zone of signifying practices - and put aside a transformative politics. The revival of a new feminism thus requires clearing out the undergrowth of bourgeois ideology that has limited the terms by which feminism understands the condition of women. A new (Red) Feminism, in short, is not only concerned with the "woman question," it is even more about the "other" questions that construct the "woman question": the issues of class and labor consti- tuting the very conditions of knowing - and changing - the root realities of global capitalism. The present text is grounded in the conviction that canonical feminist understandings of gender and sexuality institutionalized by "post" theories (as in poststructuralism, postcolonialism, postmodern- ism, postmarxism) are - after one allows for all their local differ- ences and family quarrels (e.g., Benhabib, et al, 1995; Butler, et al, 2000) - strategies for bypassing questions of labor (as in the labor theory of value) and capital (the social relation grounded in turning the labor power of the other into profit) and instead dwell on mat- ters of cultural differences (as in lifestyles). Reclaiming a materialist knowledge, I contest the cultural theory grounding canonical femi- nism. Specifically, I argue that language - "discourse" in its social circulations - "is practical consciousness" (Marx and Engels, German Ideology) and that culture, far from being autonomous, is always and ultimately a social articulation of the material relations of produc- tion. Canonical feminism in all its forms localizes gender and sexu- ality in the name of honoring their differences and the specificities of their oppression. In doing so, it isolates them from history and reduces them to "events" in performativities, thus cleansing them of labor. For Red Feminism, the local, the specific and the singular, namely the "concrete," is always an "imagined concrete" and the result of "many determinations and relations" that "all form the members of a totality, distinctions within a unity. Production (labor relations) predominates not only over itself . . . but over the other moments as well" (Marx, Grundrisse). Going against the grain of the canonical theories and instead of making woman "singular," I situate gender and sexuality in the world historical processes of labor and capital. My analysis of gender and sexuality will, predictably enough, be rejected by mainstream femi- nism as too removed, too abstract, too theoretical and, therefore, a form of exclusion of women as difference. I do not deny difference. I simply do not see difference as autonomous and immanent. Rather, I understand difference as always and ultimately determined by class difference - that is, by relations of property. In the following sections, I thus critique some of the dominant practices in contemporary cultural theory and map out some of the conditions under which gender and sexuality, abstracted from class and exploitation, are dematerialized into floating oppressions. I take up questions of language and reference; agency; essentialism and anti- essentialism; theory; postmodernity; identity politics; ideology; micro- politics; the desiring subject; the intellectual; totality; labor; class; and what I call "global history," taking China as exemplary. It is only by burning away this ideological underbrush that Red Feminism can clear the ground to make the root realities of women's exploitation - as the subject of labor - visible for struggle.1