Rachelle Miller shows the left must think about victim feminism

Decades ago, the left developed the concept of “structural violence”, to show a state could willingly kill people in ways other than shooting them. The cuts to Western public sectors of the Thatcher/Reagan years, and the evisceration of services in the Global South under the “Washington consensus” and the global debt bomb, made it clear the withdrawal of health services, social care and employment could cause deaths and illness and destroy lives — and were not random with regard to the social classes they hit.

Since the 1917 October Revolution, the right based its political morality on policing the divide between politics (where amoral killing was possible) and economics (where, they argued, it simply wasn’t). The Republicans’ desperate move in Congress last week, condemning “socialism” and tying Joe Biden’s mild social market policies to Stalin, is an example. 

But then, on the left, a funny thing happened. The notion of “violence” began to expand in another direction: the personal level. An increased focus on domestic violence from the 1990s onwards caused an examination of the wider context in which it occurs, and the way in which physically violent (and non-violent) men used verbal abuse, mind games, financial control, etc, as part of a suite of techniques to control women, some of whom they also physically assaulted.