Citizenship is in the air. It makes a lot of sense that readers of Cosmonaut would embrace this. A cursory investigation will find citizenship to be at the center of Lenin’s Erfurtianism. The release and acclaim of last year’s Citizen Marx by Bruno Leipold is no doubt a contributor. I make no attempt to refute the role of citizenship in Marx or Lenin’s ideas.
Citizenship is something I’ve stumbled upon mostly by accident in my studies. An important early encounter was through Margot Canaday’s The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth Century America. Citizenship has also become a focal point in my study of the Mormon working class. It would seem I cannot avoid the matter.
My hope is to complicate citizenship a bit, in hopes of putting citizenship forward as a question. I feel constantly challenged by alternative ideas and views of citizenship throughout history that have led me to continuously re-evaluate it. My current thoughts are not to assign a value judgment whatsoever to it, citizenship is not “good” or “bad,” it is contradictory, with the worst parts of itself working against the best parts of itself. Contained within it are hopes and dreams; within it also are nightmares and tragedy. The following are problems in the citizenship question that I feel Marxists are overlooking to their detriment:
- No paradigm of citizenship has ever treated it as universal, it has always had the primary function of excluding women, first and foremost. It is a *civil* category, or within the household, it flows from there to the polis and ecos. Citizenship will never mean only practices and activity; it is also status.
- Citizenship expands and contracts primarily based on how useful it is to the ruling class of the historical epoch. When citizenship was needed to support a patriarchal social order, it was given to men. When citizenship was useful to managing a large population of wage laborers, it was given to women.1
- Laymen tend to delineate citizenship questions by rights vs. duties, but scholars tend to do this by exclusion/inclusion “threshold” questions vs. “nature and quality” (x-class citizenship) questions, leading to gaps and differences between the way citizenship is understood and the way citizenship is experienced.2
- Citizenship should be understood as ascriptive process which includes citizens and noncitizens beneath citizenship’s thresholds. Citizenship being ascriptive in the current model means its primary function is not something earned through consent, achievement or activity but rather is assigned, regardless of how it may function for naturalized citizens. Citizenship is a social relation and unified process that creates both the citizen and non citizen, as political scientist Lisa Jane Disch remarks “otherness is immanent to citizenship.”3
- The category, and therefore its sum “the city”, is cross-class, this reproduces second class citizenship on an ongoing basis. “The city” is not simply the place where citizens are, it is where citizenship is bound, limited, tested and betrayed.
- The rights and duties of citizenship are mutually sacrosanct and exist almost always in relation to each other. Duties and obligations become the rights to perform duties and obligations (such as in the case of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”), and rights (such as the right to marriage and divorce or the right to vote) become duties and obligations. “No rights without duties” doesn’t begin to describe what the system of citizenship consistently fails to do. There are never enough rights for citizens to adequately perform the duties, and the duties fail to secure the rights of citizens.
- Citizenship has not been universally enfranchising throughout history. Utah women lost suffrage in the process of gaining US citizenship.4 Indigenous people’s citizenship was tied to “civilizing” programs in the US and Canada.
- The “Golden Age of Citizenship” (or sometimes “citizenship and marriage”) is a useful periodization for the post-war era, although it might also rightly be projected on the mid-century period of both the 20th and 19th centuries. Gilded eras are like dark ages of citizenship. Golden Ages of Citizenship accelerate capitalist development and discipline the working class, as greatly as they also might proliferate wealth and growth.
- The ideal citizenship has only ever existed in theory. Although universal citizenship is certainly worth discussion,5 it should not come in the form of a fetish that overlooks the various dimensions of actually existing citizenship and how it has shaped the political economy as we know it.
I do not say all of this to throw babies out with bathwater, or to contend that we should “not do citizenship,” or that such a thing is even possible. Like all political activity, you either do citizenship or it will do you. It is neither a “silver bullet,” nor is it something we can circumnavigate. Otherwise, we’re condemned to Murray Bookchin’s quest for an ideal citizenship, for a purity that has never been there.6 I think we can do better than that.
-Gus Breslauer
- See Heidi Hartmann’s The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism (1979). Hartmann gives one example of how this shift in citizenship for women coincided with changes in capitalist development: “While the family wage shows that capitalism adjusts to patriarchy, the changing status of children shows that patriarchy adjusts to capital. Children, like women, came to be excluded from wage labor. As children’s ability to earn money declined, their legal relationship to their parents changed. At the beginning of the industrial era in the United States, fulfilling children’s need for their fathers was thought to be crucial, even primary, to their happy development; fathers had legal priority in cases of contested custody. As children’s ability to contribute to the economic well-being of the family declined, mothers came increasingly to be viewed as crucial to the happy development of their children and gained legal priority in cases of contested custody. Here patriarchy adapted to the changing economic role of children: when children were productive, men claimed them; as children became unproductive, they were given to women.”
- For a good balance sheet of the various different citizenship paradigms and existing scholarship, see the introduction to Margot Canaday’s The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth Century America (2009).
- Ibid, 10.
- For more on Utah’s transition to statehood, see the final chapter of Leonard Arrington’s Great Basin Kingdom (1958).
- For a more sophisticated system of universal citizenship, see Universal Citizenship: Latina/o Studies at the Limits of Identity (2019) by R. Andrés Guzmán.
- See Urbanization without Cities (1992) by Murray Bookchin.