Close to Home: A Materialist Analysis of Women's Oppression

"Yeah, the content is not related to Millennials, obviously. The essays that make up this book were written before we were born as a cohort. But I think what Delphy does – she’s alive and still working in France – so well in this collection is use dialectical materialism, the Marxist method, more expansively to show how it can illuminate social conflicts of any sort and how you can apply it to data and systems that are produced within capital and break them down and come to understand them through the structure of conflicts. She does this in Close to Home mostly with gender, and female and male opposition — as social forces, not with any biological essentialism. But she does it, I think, amazingly well. It’s one of the most rigorous applications of Marxist thought and method that I’ve seen. It definitely affected the way I thought and how I thought about using the resources that I used for my own book. Yeah, that’s definitely my ideology, explicitly, and it’s how I understand the world. It’s not something I talk about in the book at all, I think the name Marx comes up zero times. Neoliberalism comes up one time. But you don’t have to say, ‘Marx, Marx, Marx,’ to be doing Marxism. What I’m looking at is a world that is structured by class conflicts. It’s not that I’m saying young people are metaphorically the proletariat, or whatever. It’s about seeing that the most useful explanatory relation for our society is the dynamic between workers and owners. So we can understand Millennials best through the changing dynamic between workers and owners in our society. That’s an idea that people are not exposed to, I think, a frame that people are not usually exposed to, but one that explains what’s going on much, much, much better than the official versions do. If people find my book illuminating, it’s a credit to that mode of thought. I’m definitely going to be interested to see how that shakes out. I’m curious to see what the differences are going to be. I certainly think people from different cohorts will get different things out of it, but I think people from any cohort could get something out of it. And it’s not going to divide evenly. I’m sure there will be Millennials who don’t find it a credible account and there will boomers who think this is exactly what they’ve seen. But if Millennials read this and see their own lives and can think about the world in terms of the social conflicts I talk about in the book, then that would be great. That’s definitely my goal more than anything."