“The personal is political” was originally intended to mean that the oppression you experience as an individual is patterned – that there are structural patterns underlying your experience. It encouraged individuals who were experiencing oppressive situations – a woman abused by her husband or a worker exploited by her employer – to view these situations not as personal problems but as political problems that require coming to getting with others to address the issue in the public sphere.
It is no small irony that the phrase “the personal is political” is now often used to mean something opposite of the original meaning. While it once meant that personal problems are not really personal, but are structural problems that require collective action, now people use the phrase to advocate uncoordinated individual action (buying organic shampoo) as somehow constitution a political intervention.
Jonathan Matthew Smucker – Hegemony How-To. A roadmap for radicals.
@queeranarchism Hello! I was wondering, if we tried comparing the oppression of capitalism to that of patriarchy, and how our personal daily oppression is structured, could you say that critically evaluating and resisting your ‘forced’ daily consumerism and adherence to the system (to buy food, water, shelter) be a fair thing to think about? Or should the phase never be used outside of the context of patriarchy? In your opinion
For as far as I understand ‘The personal is political’ was always meant to be used to apply to all systems of oppression. Patriarchy, capitalism, white supremacy, the interaction of those things.
But it was meant to say ‘political forces have a personal impact’
It was NOT meant to say ‘your personal choices have political impact’
So it was meant to say thinngs like ‘the patriarchy is why men treat you like that, it’s not anything you did’ and ‘racism is why your coworker gets paid more’ and ‘capitalism is why you hate mondays’
It was not meant to say ‘liberate yourself by buying feminist make up’ or ‘stop buying make up to liberate yourself’ or any variations of that.
So, if you do want to alter your consumer choices, fine, but you should probably stop using ‘the personal is political’ when you describe your consumer choices. That’s not what that means.
(Likewise, I think the feminist seperatists who translated ‘the personal is political’ to ‘liberate yourself by pushing yourself to only date women’ made a terrible mistake. But that’s a story for another day.)
QueerAnarchism 