155 - A.K. 47 - Bonus Episode - Kristen Ghodsee and Astrid Zimmerman in Berlin (6 November 2025)

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:

• Everyday Utopia
• Red Valkyries
• Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism
• Second World, Second Sex

Subscribe to Kristen Ghodsee’s free, episodic newsletter at: https://kristenghodsee.substack.com

Learn more about Kristen Ghodsee's work: www.kristenghodsee.com or request to follow her on Instagram @prof_kristen

Transcript

Kristen Ghodsee: 0:10

Hello and welcome to the AK forty seven podcast. My name is Kristen Godsey, and this week I am posting a special episode. This is a bonus episode for those of you who may have an extra long weekend this weekend, depending on where you are in the world. There's holidays that are happening, and you may have some extra time to listen to this really fun conversation that I had with a writer and editor here in Berlin named Astrid Zimmerman. She was the former managing editor of Jacobin Magazine here in Germany, and she now works in political communications for Die Linke, which is the left party in Germany. And we got together on November 6th to do a conversation on why women have better sex under socialism, where we talked about trad wives and sort of ideas about feminism and femininity and the difference between bourgeois and socialist feminism in a way that I'm absolutely sure Alexandra Kollontai would have approved of. So for the sake of this episode, I am just introducing it and I am including here the full audio of our conversation. And I hope you enjoy it. And I will return in the next episode with my reading of the Communist Valkyrie from my book Red Valkyries. And then I'm really hoping to do very soon a I guess sixth anniversary conversation with my now 24-year-old daughter. But until then, thanks for listening and keep up the good fight.

Astrid Zimmerman: 2:04

Welcome. Again, thanks for coming. Thanks to Shakespeare and Sans for having us today. Thank you, Kirsten. I'm very excited to get the chance to have this conversation with you today. I'm sure most of you are familiar with who you are and familiar with your books. I'm still going to briefly introduce you. So you're an ethnographer, you're a professor of Russian and Eastern European studies. You've been published extensively. You've written a number of books. Your writing has appeared in publications like the New York Times, the Washington Post, Le Mont, Jakarta Magazine, which I'm excited about because that's the publication I'm affiliated with. And your last book is Everyday Utopia, which is also available in German under the title Utopien für den Alltag. But today we want to shift the conversation on a question that you've explored in one of your previous books, where you explain why capitalism isn't only harmful to women, but how it also fails to provide the societal conditions that allow for our relationships to flourish and why women therefore have better sex in socialism. So welcome, Kirsten.

Kristen Ghodsee: 3:22

Thank you so much. Thank you so much for inviting me and for showing up tonight. It's really a pleasure to be able to talk about the book and to talk about the book at this moment when we've just elected the first socialist mayor of New York City. So, you know, I didn't plan that for when we organized this event, but it's great news. And today, I, you know, I think a lot of people were talking about yesterday and today, just so much excitement about what's happening in New York. And I posted a little meme that says better sex coming to a borough near you. And I think that it's really important on the left to recognize why Mamdani was such a sensation in New York. And I think part of that, and it's very important to think about the specific policies that he was sort of proposing, but one of them was around childcare. And one of them was around the sort of idea that human relationships, right, for ordinary people, should be front and center. This was a very bread and butter campaign. And I think that the left, in particular, in this historical moment, really needs to attend to this question of loneliness and isolation and also the draw of the far right, specifically around something like trad wives. And so we were gonna try to focus a little bit today on why socialism and socialistic policies are specifically able to address some of the needs that women have that capitalism cannot meet, but also that traditional forms of feminism cannot meet. And I think that that's really where I'd like to start.

Astrid Zimmerman: 5:24

Yeah, right. So you've already set the stage for the first thing I wanted to ask you, because what you Swain in your work a lot is how if we want to answer the question, how can we have good relationships, we don't only have to focus on the sort of like interpersonal elements of our partnerships, but also on the structural conditions in which we have these relationships. Things like economic equality, independence, uh, childcare, care infrastructures, things like this. And as you've already alluded to, we're right now living in a time where we live in deeply unequal societies. And up until very recently, there was this idea of female empowerment, one ideal that was very popular, where we, as a woman, you were supposed to lean in to advance your career, to break the glass ceiling, and under the guise of greater gender equality. And obviously, this hasn't worked for the majority of women. So there seems to be like a big disillusionment with this idea of female empowerment. And what we're seeing now is that rather than sort of like leaning in, there's a growing movement that's becoming ever more popular where women are kind of told to rather lean back and just like drop out of the labor market, focus on being mothers, being good wives. And yeah, I would like to start our conversation by asking you why do you think this is so appealing to more and more women right now?

Kristen Ghodsee: 6:50

Right. So I want to address two things because I do think there's a reason why it's specifically appealing to women. And a lot of that has to do with the great failures of late capitalism that we're living right now. And the fact that for many people, their jobs feel very meaningless, their work doesn't seem to have a purpose, they're barely making ends meet. But there's also a bigger structural question, which is why there's such a push on social media. But also, you know, there are these new women's magazines that are being funded by billionaires like Peter Thiel that are trying to convince women to stay home. Why is it happening right now? And one of the things that I've written about in a actually in Jacobin, and it was in an interview with uh Meagan Day, is that look, AI is going to destroy a lot of jobs. And it's going to destroy a lot of jobs very quickly. And we know from historical precedents, first in the aftermath of World War II, but also with the end of socialism in Eastern Europe, that when you have a massive exogenous shock to the economic system that requires a drastic reduction in the labor force, one of the easiest ways to deal with the social upheavals that will inevitably come from mass unemployment is to convince women that they'd be much happier at home, churning butter and baking bread from scratch. And so one of the reasons why in this historical moment we are seeing the rise of this tradwife discourse is precisely because we've already got the evidence of all of these white-collar jobs, office jobs, are just being automated away by AI. And a lot of young people are having a very hard time finding decent employment in the labor market. And so, not surprisingly, we get this idea of a return to traditional gender roles, which is exactly what happened after the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe in 1989, and exactly what happened after World War II, when all the women who had gone into the factories to replace the men while they were fighting, when the boys came home, the women went back to the kitchen, right, with their appliances and their big Dior new look dresses. There was a very specific reason why it happened. And let's not fool ourselves into thinking that there aren't larger structural reasons for this particular trend on social media. But the second response is about why does it work? Why are women being seduced by this? And so there are two forms of this. First is the trad wife, and the second is what is often on the hashtag softgirl life. How nice it would be to stay home with your candles and do yoga and like cozy up by the fire with a nice cup of herbal tea. I mean, it's seductive.

unknown: 9:51

Okay.

Kristen Ghodsee: 9:52

It is a very nice, it's much better than turning butter in a bustier. And so, but what is that indexing? It's indexing an incredible exhaustion with lean-in feminism, an incredible exhaustion with the precarity of late capitalism and the gig economy. And so there's within the trad wife movement, and I can give very specific examples, a nascent critique of capitalism. But that critique is not being articulated in a way that resonates with young women yet. It's mostly about the fantasy of the soft girl life.

Astrid Zimmerman: 10:33

Okay, I have so many follow-up questions, but I'm gonna start maybe let's focus on this trad wife, housewife, the romanticization of this kind of woman femininity, but because I was also wondering if, you know, if we understand capitalism as a system that structurally depends on all of this unpaid reproductive labor, and it therefore valorizes the nuclear family as a unit of care because it allows us to privatize care more and more, where it's performed unpaid disproportionately by women. But I also wondered if part of the appeal of being a traditional housewife is also because it gives people maybe like a false sense of recognition or acknowledgement of the labor that they perform and kind of recognizing that what they do when they take care of children, take care of the elderly, take care of sick people, that this is kind of like respectable work because we kind of we don't have a language to describe this, and also because this work is structurally devalued in our in our economic system.

Kristen Ghodsee: 11:44

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that that's one of the reasons why leftist appeals, either to abolish the family or to socialize all care work, don't always land because they're framed in a way that sometimes reinforces the idea that this labor is not very valuable, that the real work that should give your life meaning is work that you do in the formal economy and not in caring for your relationships and caring for your loved ones. If you care, capitalism makes it a liability, right? It devalues care to such an extent that anyone who cares becomes encumbered by that. And so we see over and over again that people who perform care are some of the most precarious people in our economies. And these is this is not only people 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 taking care of children, are also devalued because their wages are generally lower than, you know, some guy who works at a bank who moves money from one account to another all day. He makes a massive salary and all he does is, you know, move numbers on a screen. And the people that are actually raising the next generation, actually creating our societies that are actually producing real value in terms of human connection. That's just not considered anything worth valuing. Now, I don't, I want to make it clear here that I don't mean that the, that, that this value is always indexed to a wage. I think that value means, as you said, the recognition that this is important work and the way that we structure our societies to change the way we acknowledge and even sort of celebrate the people who do that work.

Astrid Zimmerman: 13:50

I want to go back to what you said about exhaustion before. Um, because like uh what something you just described was how capitalism is a system that essentially penalizes those that care the most, and that put you at a higher risk of precarization, of poverty, you have lower grades of financial stability, et cetera. And how you would understand a trend, sort of this like soft life movement as sort of people's response, or maybe like a way, they search for a way to live a less exhausting life because essentially we're also right now living under a time where we're not only supposed to have two shifts where we work in our jobs and work in our homes, but we're also living through a time where our governments are telling us that we have to work even more now and we have to work even harder. So you're essentially telling an entire generation of women that what they get is not a work-life balance, they get a work-work balance. So they have to balance, juggle the work that they do as a j in their jobs, where there's less social mobility because our economy is broken, but they're also supposed to work harder and work more in their homes because at the same time we're privatizing more care. So could we Yeah, I I was just wondering if you could maybe speak a bit more to this kind of like sense of exhaustion and how people just maybe try to they're searching for a way to live in an economy where all the odds are essentially stuck against them, maybe.

Kristen Ghodsee: 15:25

Right. And I think that again, as a as a social scientist and somebody who spent a lot of time looking at what happened in Eastern Europe after the collapse of socialism, where you had a similar kind of neoliberalization and a dismantling of once-generated social safety nets, what happened, what is still happening, it was a birth strike. In Eastern Germany in 1990, 1991, it was the lowest ever recorded birth at that time in the absence of a war. Right? The birth rate fell so low. And still to this day, more than 35 years after the transition process, East European countries are the fastest shrinking countries on the planet. Why? Because you can't do it all. And so what is happening in most of the industrialized countries in the world, and it's actually starting to spread even beyond that, is that women who are utterly exhausted, it's larger than women, but everybody's exhausted. But there's a choice that's being made, which is just like no babies. No done. Like you can't, you cannot do it all. And so I find it really rich that somebody like Elon Musk, when asked what keeps you up at night, he says the falling birth rate, right? That civilization is at stake because young people are selfish and don't want to have babies. And yet there's no recognition that the conditions under which we are asking people to, as you say, work work, there is no work family balance, there is no work life balance, is precisely the pro the billionaires are the problem, right? There's no self-reflexivity on that question. And then the second question is to push this even a little bit further into the realm of relationships, because after all, if you're really, really exhausted at the end of the day, it's hard to engage in activities that would result in babies. So it there that exhaustion is not just a kind of psychic exhaustion. It's real, but it's also a relational exhaustion. We have so little energy left that rather than sharing our attentions and affections with others, we hoard them for necessary bouts of self-care so that we can get our ass up in the morning the next day and go back to work. That's just the way life is right now. So it's a structural problem all the way from top to bottom.

Astrid Zimmerman: 18:09

I also feel like something you just talked about, because you've mentioned Elon Musk. So I also feel like what it's kind of ironic, also in relation to the falling birth rates after the fall of the one or after the disintegration of real socialism, is that ironically when conservatives say, oh, it's all of this gender equality that makes women not want to have babies. In reality, there's probably nothing better that you could do to convince people to maybe start a family with actually greater economic equality. Right? Right. Yeah. Exactly.

Kristen Ghodsee: 18:48

Exactly. Yeah. And and you know, and there's there's there are reasons for that, which is that the nuclear family exists, as so many socialist theorists have pointed out to us, as the unit in society that facilitates the intergenerational transfer of wealth and privilege from fathers to largely their legitimate children, right? That's what the nuclear family does. You can read all about that, various things if you if that's new to you. But it and what it does is it makes parenting a contact board. It means that if we have families, we raise our children individualistically. This is why the Tradwai family, tradwise fantasy is so powerful, because if I give all my love and attention to my own child, I will give my child advantages that other children don't have. And so then my children will be fine in a society that's falling apart. So rather than saying, let's build a society where everybody's children will have a chance to thrive, we're saying the reality is, it's not an unreasonable reaction, by the way. The reality is that our societies are falling apart. The reality is social mobility doesn't exist anymore. The reality is there's an incredible amount of precarity, even for people already in the middle class. So if you're going to try to be a good parent, and this is how they get you, if you're a good mom, you have to give your child advantages, extra love, extra attention, extra resources. And that necessarily means that you need to exclude other children. And that's where the nuclear family comes in. And that's why it's so exhausting to be a parent in 2025. You know, it it everything is a competition. And that in and of itself is exhausting.

Astrid Zimmerman: 20:48

Yeah, this idea that life and in its in and of itself is really competitive, is I think something that speaks also a lot to the economic conditions that in which this is happening. And you've you've already talked about this. So I feel like if we take a step back and we think about what was the promise of liberal capitalism essentially, it was that it was supposed to give people mass prosperity, social mobility, and that if all of this was working, we're gonna have a relatively well-off stable middle class. And there was a brief moment in time where we had this in a post-war period. And I feel like it's probably not a coincidence that if we think about traditional housewives, we think of a woman from the 50s from the post-war period, which, because those were the economic conditions that made essentially the nuclear family possible as a mass phenomenon. And so now this premise of prosperity, of social mobility doesn't hold anymore. And it seems like capitalist economies all around the globe are unable to resolve this problem. And at the same time, you hear conservatives kind of lamenting the disintegration of the nuclear family and they want to revive it, and then they look elsewhere, for example, oh, it's feminism that hasn't done this, rather than the economic conditions that sustained this family model, knowing very well that these conditions aren't available anymore. So it's an incredibly contradictory kind of politics. And I was wondering if, in a way, we could also say it speaks to like a deeper contradiction of capitalism, where it's no longer able to reproduce conditions that sustain it.

Kristen Ghodsee: 22:38

Yeah, I mean, in some ways, and this is a is this is a more esoteric question from a political philosophy point of view, right? I mean, capitalism promises that a rising tide lifts all boats, right? That's the classic thing that rather than dividing the pie more equitably, you just grow the pie. Growth becomes the engine through which mass prosperity becomes possible. So I want to say two things. First of all, the post-war form of capitalism that we had in the United States or in North America more broadly or in Western Europe or even in Japan was predicated on massive government spending. It was Keynesian economics, it was very close to socialism. There was a lot of planning involved. It was not the neoliberal capitalism that we get after the late 70s and 80s. So that's the first thing. There's an incredible amount of government intervention in the economy that is happening in capitalist economies at that time. But I think that the, you know, there's an environmental critique here that we could talk about, that unlimited growth is just not really sustainable in the long run. So capitalism as an economic system which is predicated on growth is already in trouble, independent of the inequality issue. But the inequality issue, and this is something I suspect I spend a lot of time speaking about in everyday utopia, the inequality issue is the real problem for the people at the very top of our economic system, so the billionaires. Because, and there's a lot of literature on this, which is that societies become deeply unstable, patriarchal societies, which we all happen to live in, become deeply unstable when there are a few men at the top who hoard all of the resources, and a massive population of what's called bachelors. So unattached men that are kind of at loose ends, one way or the other. They are precarious, but they're also lonely, they're also isolated, they're also angry. And there's a lot of really interesting evolutionary, biological, anthropological evidence to show that society that in order to sustain a society with high levels of inequality, in order for that to perpetuate from generation to generation, where a very few people have all of the resources and a whole bunch of people at the bottom have very little resources, you need to make sure that the men at the bottom have wives. I'm sorry, this is the truth. Because when you're dehumanized in the workforce, when you're dehumanized in society, you need to go home and have somebody to humanize you. And so that is why these billionaires are so bloody concerned that women, that the marriage rates are declining, right? That that that and what are we seeing politically in the United States? This is also happening here in Germany, it's happening in Belgium. Young men are going to the right, and young women are going to the left. There's an incredible polarization that's happening along gender lines. And why? Because women understand, I think, I mean, I'm just triloquizing here, but there's a certain level of understanding that, like, if we created more equitable societies, all of these problems would start to self-correct. Whereas the algorithms or, you know, the I'm not exactly sure. I'd love to hear this from the audience, like what it is that is pulling young men so far to the right, where it's like, it's not this, it's not inequality, it's not capitalism, but it's foreigners, it's minorities, it's feminism, it's trans people, it's whatever, right? It's somebody who's not the billionaires. When it's so obvious, right, from a structural, if you stop for a second and you just looked at this, if you could lay it out on a chessboard or whatever, it's so obvious what the structural problems are. Anthropologists have been writing about this for hundreds of years, right? At least a hundred years. The structure of societies and the ways in which inequalities perpetuate themselves and the ways in which societies justify inequalities. And gender relations are at the core of this, absolutely at the core of this. So that when we go back and reread Hobbes' Leviathan and the justification for the sovereign, Hobbes argues very clearly that human beings are born free. We're born independent. We don't want to obey, we're rebellious as children. If you guys have toddlers or teenagers, you will know this. So, how do we learn to obey the sovereign? What's the most important thing to teach people who are born free to obey the sovereign? It's the father. A strong father figure in the home. And if you have a strong father figure who teaches children to obey, then those children grow up to be adults who obey the strong man in the government. And so it is not at all surprising that research, right-wing, and fascist movements want the traditional family back because you need to teach children to obey.

Astrid Zimmerman: 28:18

And when I was looking at some of these sort of like drag wives videos before in preparation of our class, I think one one thing that your algorithm is gonna improve now. But something that really struck with me was that I felt like these videos are so claustrophobic because you rarely see another person. Sometimes where you see a child, but other than that, these are like crushingly lonely people. They're like all alone in their home the entire day. It's not like you would think, okay, if you have all this time to bake elaborate cakes and make meals, you're gonna have your friends over throw swanky dinner parties. None of this is happening. They're just like alone in their pristine homes. And it made me think of, you know, this is very famous feminist classic from the 60s by Betty Friedan, where she was talking about white middle class women in the 60s and how they were all suffering from a disease that had no name because they were literally going insane from isolation, from boredom, from just like mental and social understimulation. They were going crazy. Part of, you know, this phenomenon was part of the reason why we had second wave of feminism. And now this seems so appealing to so many people to live like this. And I was trying to explain maybe why that is. I thought, okay, maybe this sense of distrust in larger society is a contributing factor to this. And I'm only bringing this up because I feel like people often, or an argument I I come by a lot of the times is that people say, we get the tread life now because feminism was so we had so many advances, and it's just a normal cycle of political dynamics. We have progress, and there's a bunch of people that don't like this, so they rebel against this. But I feel like in a different way, you could also say maybe we get this movement now because we get too little feminist advances. Because as a woman, you're continuously being told the outside world is a dangerous place, the workplace is a dangerous place. We have Me Too and all of these, you know, it's just like continuously communicating to you that we have this like bizarre sort of carelessness when it comes to the safety of women. So why not just stay at home? So you could also just say maybe you're sort of like retreating from a world that you perceive to be incredibly resistant to social change and social progress.

Kristen Ghodsee: 30:41

Yeah, I think that's absolutely true. So, you know, one thing about the housewives in the 1950s that nobody likes to talk about is the level of alcoholism and drug use that those women, like Long Island Iced tea, does anyone know what this cocktail is, right? This was like a very famous drink among housewives. And the Rolling Stone songs, the song, I think it's called Mother's Little Helper. It's literally about the drugs that women were taking in the kitchen because they were so miserable with their lives. So, you know, conservatives want to say that women were so happy in the 50s, right? They were at their kitchens with their beautiful appliances and their nice refrigerators. And yet, exactly, Betty Fridian is talking about the disease that has no name, they were treating that disease. The only reason women were smiling was because they were totally smashed most of the time. So that's not a good solution, right? So I think that the the the problem, and I I mean, I I feel like I've spent the last 30 years of my life trying to get this one little point across. I'm a professor. And so I have this problem, which is that every year I have new students and they stay 18 to 22, and I keep getting older. And so I I'll be giving my lectures to, you know, my new group of students, and I'll say, wait, haven't you guys learned this already? I've been lecturing about this for the last 20 years, right? So I feel like we have to understand that there are two strands of feminism. One was the liberal bourgeois feminism of the suffragettes that largely wanted rights for property women. They wanted the vote, they wanted the ability to get divorced, they wanted to be able to enter the professions. And then there were working class movements, women who were working in factories who found solidarity with working class men. And these movements go back to the middle of the 19th century just as much as the feminist, what we call the liberal feminist or the bourgeois feminist movement. There have always been these parallel strands. And I think when we talk about feminism today, we're often talking about the kind of lean-in, Cheryl Sandberg, girl boss, slay the Ford room kind of feminism, right? Like work harder so you can make enough money so you can pay somebody else to look after your kids and clean your house. That was never the feminism of people like Flora Setkin or Alexandra Kalantai, right? That was never the feminism of socialists like August Peibo or Friedrich Engels. They were always talking about the socialization of labor. They were all of reproductive labor. They were always talking about build building more equitable societies so that women wouldn't have to choose their partners on the basis of whether their partner could pay their rent and buy their groceries, but they could choose their partners on the basis of love and affection, right? And shared mutual interest. So this exhaustion is a, I mean, it's real. And the the people who say, well, this is a backlash to feminism, they don't understand what they're talking about because they have a wrong definition of feminism. And I think that that's, like I said, this is something that I I will probably spend the next 30 years if I live that long, trying to explain this, right? Which is that there's a different vision of feminism. There's a much more egalitarian vision of feminism that is in solidarity with people more broadly, across borders, with men, with with people of lots of different points of view, that is about creating societies that sustain connection and care and comfort and solidarity that give us all better, less precarious, more relaxed, quote unquote 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 a follow-up question to this because um I just thought about maybe this is cliche, but this is like Rosa Luxemburg quote where she talks about the woman worker. And she says something along the lines of like for the woman of the bourgeoisie, their entire world is their home, and for the woman of the organized working class, the entire world is her home. So where I feel like what she's kind of saying there also is that there's this deep confidence in the ability of your own action and your own agency to have an impact in the world. And when you just said, okay, why why are we so hesitant to try to take up the political to believe in our own political agency? I was wondering if this is not also in some way connected to this entire question of how we allocate resources in our society. Because you were talking about the billionaires earlier. And I feel like, like you said, this the experience of scarcity is real. And we're always being told that, you know, we live in a society where there's simply less to go around. So every conflict over resources is a zero-sum game. If someone benefits, someone else loses, and this idea that there could be something, a collective advancement is completely out of reach. Yet we know very well that they create an excess of resources in the hands of very, very few men, you have to say, actually. And also that our states are in fact able, we've also experienced this again and again collectively, they're able to mobilize resources very quickly when there's political will. If, I don't know, the financial market's crashing, we need to save things, we have the resources to do this. If we're living through a global pandemic and big corporations need to counterbalance their loss of profits, we have the resources to do this. If we want to re-arm Germany, we have the resources to do this, etc. Every time we ask for resources for public goods that would make our lives more livable, that would make it more tenable for us to have flourishing relationships. We're being told there are objective constraints. We simply don't have the resources to do this, and we know this isn't true. But at the same time, I feel like there's it's so easy for all of us to just kind of like abandon our agency and to just simply accept that there's no possibility in which we could influence this political will in our favor. And like there's this deep sense of political resignation. How do you think? Like, what can how did we get there 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 so disempowering to live in the political moment that we're living in is because those are the messages we're getting constantly. We're constantly being told that it's a zero-sum game, that if you are kind, your kindness will be taken as weakness. People will take advantage of you, people will scam you, right? There's no such thing as a free lunch. Like everything that we learn is that opening yourself up to a relationship of trust with another person, whether it's romantic or platonic, is putting yourself at risk of being taken advantage of. That's why we get rid of toxic friends, vampiric relationships, and things like that. We, the, the, the pop psychology and therapy speak is all about boundary setting, right? Set your boundaries because other people are gonna try to take your affective resources away from you. So that being said, this is an old problem. You mentioned Rosalind Luxembourg. I want to mention Nadezhda Krupskaya, who wrote a beautiful pamphlet in 1899 that was published in 1901 called The Woman Worker. And Krupskaya, who was in exile in Siberia at the time, was struggling with the problem that most Russian women were illiterate and did not understand the possibility of solidarity around political issues. And she said something I thought really interesting in this pamphlet. She says, the only way women learn to engage in politics is to engage in politics. That the minute you put yourself out there when you go to a demonstration or you sit around with your friends on the kitchen table and you talk about politics or political economy, you have conversations, you come to a book event like this where we're talking about these questions, you are autodidactically self-radicalizing in a way. And that becomes a vehicle for solidarity. And so I think that like the trad wife, to come back to the trad wife phenomenon, but to come back to just contemporary life, everything about these algorithms wants to keep us isolated from each other. Because we have power when we're together and we are disempowered when we are apart. And so I do again, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I don't think it's a coincidence that modern life isolates us, that it wants us to be on our phones, that the AI chatbots are trying to tell us, you know, Mark Zuckerberg is telling us that our best friends are all going to be chatbots in the future and we won't have need for human connection. Why is that happening? Because precisely these moments of collectivity are potentially dangerous. And when governments have responded with resources for the common good, it's because people demanded them. And they demanded them in such a way that the elites in charge had no choice but to, if they wanted to keep the stability of the system, they had to comply. Okay, I might have one more question. One more question, then we should take some.

Astrid Zimmerman: 40:49

So I wanted, I mean, this was all urged. So try to move us towards a more hopeful perspective. And one thing you wrote was Okay, I have to pick what's up, but I actually wanted something that you in an email. Aha, yeah. Where when you said something where you wrote me that you think we need to ask ourselves how we can build societies where caring for others isn't a sentimental weakness but an essential part of our political activity. And this really resonated with me because I feel like even among the left, there's sort of this tendency where you acknowledge that care work is really important and that it's sort of like the underpinning thing of our society, and it's a problem that it's performed mostly by women, and you sort of like acknowledge this because it's common courtesy, you have to say this, and then you go on with your political discussion, but it's not like a priority in our political vision, it's always an afterthought. And so, yeah, I was I was wondering what you think, what can we do to build societies that are genuinely caring societies, and how do we turn this into an actual real priority?

Kristen Ghodsee: 42:04

Yeah, and I think again, you know, going back to this sort of early revolutionary period in the late 19th and early 20th century, Alexandra Kalentai was a Bolshevik who was pushing back against this idea that transformations in the public sphere would be enough to transition from capitalism to a more equitable socialist society. She said that there have to be transformations in the private sphere as well, in our relationships with each other, with our families, with our friends, with our colleagues, with our comrades. And so feminists like to say that the personal is political. And I like to argue that the political is personal. Like the reason I wrote why women have better sex under socialism is because a lot of people think that like capitalism stops at the bedroom door. And capitalism, I'm sorry to say this, is in bed with you. When you are uh engaging in these romantic, platonic, whatever filial relationships, there's always a larger political economic system within which those relationships are occurring. And that political economic system is a system that devalues human connection. It is a system that devalues human relationships, it is a system that devalues care. Why? Because it can't commodify it as well as it would like to. And we are actually working on an article that will be out in Jacob in Germany in December about this very issue. So what I want to say to those of you in the audience is I actually think that even though it may not sound very revolutionary, that the most important thing on a very simple level that you can do is like spend time with your friends and lovers and neighbors and colleagues, go out for drinks, walk in the park, like actually have meaningful conversations 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 us being together in space in real time that creates a kind of effervescent possibility of solidarity that doesn't exist when we're online, that doesn't exist when we're being mediated through for-profit platforms that are trying to commodify our attentional resources. So it doesn't seem like much. And I can certainly name lots of other things that we can do on a grander scale. But I think that there is revolutionary potential in our relationships, and that that's one of the most important things that gets dropped out of conversations on the left, which is why the right has been so good with this trad-wife discourse of luring people, because there they feel like their relationships matter. The relationships between husband and wife, the relationship between mother and child. Leftists are like, you know, we're just gonna be comrades arm in arm, like throwing ourselves at the police, right? That's not necessarily gonna be the the the most it could be fun. I'm not saying that it will, it it's not, especially if you go out for drinks afterwards and you know, debrief. But but I think that there's there's something really important about care, giving care and and giving attention and affection to those in your life whom you want to share it with without regard for the value of your time or the other person's time, right? And so drink more in the park with your friends.

Astrid Zimmerman: 45:49

I think this is a perfect.