estimated reading time: 8 min

For decades, in courthouses and government offices all across the US, people have been filing bizarrely worded pseudo-legal documents filled with strange symbols, secret coded language, and even bloody fingerprints in an effort to unlock secret bank accounts set up for them by the evil impostor government that runs this country.

These people call themselves "sovereign citizens," and the complex symbolism they use in these documents offers a fascinating insight into the beliefs and practices of a fringe movement whose prominence in America has grown over the past few decades and whose ideology overlaps with that of many other, often more dangerous, far-right extremist movements in the US, including groups like the militia that recently took over a national wildlife refuge in Oregon.

The bizarre conspiracy theory at the center of this all

The sovereign citizens movement is a far-right anti-government extremist movement in the US that believes the government — at all levels, local, state, and federal — is illegitimate and has enslaved the American people.

Their belief system is complex and rooted in a series of bizarre conspiracy theories that hold that the original US government set up by the Founding Fathers has been replaced with an evil secret government that has sold all US citizens into slavery by using them as collateral against foreign debt.

As explained by the Southern Poverty Law Center, they believe the government creates a secret alternate identity for each American at birth and sets up a secret US Treasury account — sort of like a corporate "trust" — under that alternate identity. The US government funds these "corporate shell" accounts to the tune of hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars.

Because the US no longer uses the gold standard, it instead uses these accounts as collateral to back up its currency. The money is said to represent each citizen's future earning potential. The sovereign citizens thus believe the government has "pledged its citizenry as collateral, by selling their future earning capabilities to foreign investors, effectively enslaving all Americans," according to the SPLC.

Part of their proof is that birth certificates and other government documents, said to represent this scheme, put names in all capital letters. So whereas Jennifer Williams is the real person, JENNIFER WILLIAMS is the secret Treasury account.

By declaring themselves "sovereign citizens," members of these groups say they are freeing themselves from government enslavement and separating themselves from their secret, government-created alternate identity.

According to the FBI, which considers this a domestic terrorist movement, "By declaring themselves 'sovereign citizens,' they [believe that they] are emancipated from the responsibilities of being a U.S. citizen, including paying taxes, possessing a state driver’s license, or obeying the law."

Things like driver's licenses, permits, and even zip codes are seen as "contracts" with the illegitimate US government that cede one's sovereignty. By rejecting these things, you're "tearing up" the contract and freeing yourself.

These beliefs may be nutty, but the groups are quite serious. A 2014 survey asked US law enforcement officials to rank terrorist threats to the United States. They ranked sovereign citizens as the highest threat — with Islamic extremists coming in second.

How sovereign citizens think court documents will unlock their secret accounts

Sovereign citizens believe they can tap into their secret US Treasury account (and get access to all that secret hidden money) by "filing particular government forms in a particular order, and by using precisely the right language," according to the SPLC.

This is what is known among sovereign citizens as "redemption theory": Basically, all you have to do is break the secret code, and the government — in particular, court judges, who are all in on the conspiracy — will be forced to unlock your account and give you access to all that money that is rightfully yours.

This is part of why sovereign citizens file endless court documents with strange wording, odd capitalization, fingerprints made in red ink or even blood, and other coded symbols. Take this document, for example, written by a sovereign citizen, in which he declares himself to be a superior court judge:

JJ MacNab, who tweeted the document, is an expert in far-right extremist groups who has studied and written extensively about the sovereign citizens movement. In a series of tweets, MacNab "decoded" the document, explaining the meanings behind many of the strange elements included in it.

Here are a few of those tweets, which are really fascinating (note: "sovcits" is sovereign citizens):

As mentioned above, sovereign citizens believe each person has two identities: a real identity, which they refer to as their "sovereign" or "flesh and blood" identity, and a secret government-created alternate identity, which they refer to as their "corporate" identity.

They use red ink (or sometimes even blood) instead of blue or black ink to signify to the evil shadow government and their puppet judges that it is the true flesh-and-blood person who is signing a particular document and not the corporate shell.

This is a signal to the judge both that the individual knows the secret code that will unlock his sovereignty (and Treasury account) and that the signature on the document is not to be interpreted as the individual signing over his sovereign rights in a contract with the shadow government.

This use of postage stamps and blood on legal documents, MacNab explains, is related to a broader "ritual" that is used to get one's sovereignty recognized by, of all things, the US Postal Service.

The strange way they write their names on documents — with odd punctuation and lowercase letters — is also part of the secret code.

According to a 2010 report by the Anti-Defamation League, it's "very common" for sovereign citizens "to use punctuation in their name — such as commas, colons, and semi-colons — to separate their first and middle names (their 'Christian appellation') from their last name, which many think is their 'government-given' name."

For example, "Michigan militia leader Mark Koernke, when he also became a sovereign citizen, began writing his name as 'Mark Gregory,, Koernke.'"

These are just a few of the odd, secret coded messages that are often included in these documents, but they give you a sense of the incredible intricacy of these rituals and how very seriously these people take their beliefs.

Okay, so they're weird. But are they actually dangerous?

As I mentioned, the FBI considers the sovereign citizens movement to be a domestic terrorist movement, and there have been a number of violent incidents involving sovereign citizens.

Terry Nichols of the Oklahoma City bombing was a sovereign citizen; Andrew Joseph Stack, who flew his small plane into the IRS building in Austin, Texas, in February 2010, was also affiliated with the movement.

Sometimes violent incidents erupt from routine encounters between sovereign citizens and law enforcement. For example, on May 20, 2010, a routine traffic stop in West Memphis, Arkansas, ended in the deaths of two police officers at the hands of Jerry Kane and his 16-year-old son Joseph, both of whom were "deeply immersed" in the sovereign citizens movement. Both Kanes were also killed in the shootout.

Sovereign citizens also frequently find themselves in court for criminal activity. SPLC reports that sovereign citizens "are notorious for engaging in a variety of schemes involving money, false identification documents and the courts — scams that land them in criminal trouble with remarkable regularity."

But for a lot of sovereign citizens, their "activism" mostly comes in the form of harassing county clerks and judges by filing endless pseudo-legal documents in an attempt to "crack the code" and unlock their sovereignty and their secret US Treasury accounts.

Given that these secret accounts are completely fictitious and do not actually exist outside the minds of these people, they strangely never seem to be able to crack the code. So they just keep filing more documents.

estimated reading time: 7 min

The oppression of women is ancient and has manifested itself in different ways over the centuries. It is one thing to see this, it is another to ask how, when it is so deeply unnatural, it has been maintained.

Having previously identified the socialization and naturalization of inequalities, we now look at the influence of capitalism. Although patriarchy pre-existed it - many societies were already characterized by a sexual division of labour, gender-based violence, or gender norms often privileging the male - the specific contribution of capitalism was undoubtedly the institutionalization of the devaluation Devaluation A lowering of the exchange rate of one currency as regards others. of women and their work. The devalued or even unpaid domestic work, the concept of the “housewife” that accompanies it, as well as professional segregation, have their origins in the era when capitalism gradually replaced the medieval feudal system. They are thus not, as we often hear, the remnants of a dark and barbaric medieval era, but rather constitutive of the first phase of capitalist accumulation which, as we shall see, led to a phenomenal regression in the status of women.

The role and image of women is historically transformed in relation to the economic developments that have prevailed, particularly in Western Europe, the cradle of capitalism and so-called human rights. Through economic and social transformations, capitalism and patriarchy end up reinforcing each other. Capitalism is not the only factor, but by establishing unequal social relations (as a consequence but also as a condition for its existence), capitalism explicitly serves patriarchy by facilitating the oppression of women. Patriarchy, on the other hand, is useful to capitalism as it provides a devalued population from which it will be able to derive maximum benefit.

Three visions structure the feminist analysis of the links between capitalism and patriarchy

The first considers gender and sex relations as constituting an autonomous system and that the same applies to race or class relations. Since patriarchy preceded capitalism and persisted during it, it would therefore reproduce itself independently. However, this hypothesis does not exclude the possibility that the two systems influence each other: capitalism is sometimes useful to patriarchy and vice versa. This theoretical current influenced by Marxism tends to analyze the oppression of women according to the same methodology as class oppression: it defines women as composing a patriarchal class exploited by the dominant class of men appropriating their surplus labour. Despite the importance of Christine Delphy’s reflections developed in the book The Main Enemy - Political Economy of Patriarchy which demonstrate that all women, regardless of their status, are victims of oppression, this analysis minimizes the importance of other dynamics and is insufficiently based on a more economic analysis of domination. According to this logic, it could be argued that the housewife of an immigrant worker would belong to the same class as Silvio Berlusconi’s ex-wife, Veronica Lario. Proponents of this hypothesis consider the anti-patriarchal struggle to be predominant: there must be greater solidarity among all women than between men and women of the working class. As Cinzia Arruzza claims, we believe it is necessary to add capitalism to the equation. Not all members of the same “patriarchal class” live the same realities and oppressions and are therefore not immediately in solidarity with each other. One cannot compare the experience of immigrant (working class) women with that of wealthy women, as the latter can exploit the former. Thinking only of the gender class (even if it does exist) while ignoring the socio-economic aspects inherent in capitalism blurs the understanding of patriarchy as it is and ? actually helps to its perpetuation?

The second hypothesis, embodied in the neoliberal discourse, sees capitalism as indifferent to patriarchy, having even eroded it: thanks to capitalism, they claim, women have experienced a degree of liberation through access to salaried work, credit, consumption, etc... For these theorists (generally represented by liberal feminists), capitalism could do without gender oppression because the market is indifferent to the identity of workers. Yet it is obvious that capitalism benefits from reproductive services performed by women. It also benefits from the fact that part of the population is devalued (and therefore more flexible, less paid). This theory implies that capitalism is not only be independent of patriarchy, but even to be glorified when it comes to gender equality! To consider patriarchy as a residue eroding in contact with capitalism is a fundamental error, highly detrimental to any dynamics of women’s emancipation, as we see in this section.

The third hypothesis, which we support, argues that patriarchy cannot be regarded as an independent system. Women and feminists in the colonies understood this well through the various structural and physical violence they faced, whereas very few Western feminists were just beginning to address the issue. Cinzia Arruzza insists "on the need to consider capitalism not as a set of purely economic laws and mechanisms, but rather as a complex and articulated social order that contains within it relations of exploitation, domination and alienation. From this point of view, the attempt is to understand how capitalist accumulation continues to produce, reproduce, transform, renew and maintain relations of hierarchy and oppression. It is a question of analyzing and understanding gender oppressions in a comprehensive way, without turning a blind eye to the diversity of mechanisms that participate in them, and avoiding falling into simplifications that would exclude certain realities.

An historic alliance

In the forthcoming book on debt and feminism, we will devote a whole section to deconstructing historical myths about the place of women. We see how the devaluation of women is not a coincidence of history - the time when their position changed coincided with the commodification of the world. The advance of capitalism has profoundly transformed their role within family and society while modifying and amplifying their oppression. Many of the discourses and stereotypes explored above have their origins in the historical stages of capitalism. At the same time as capitalism was taking root at the expense of the feudal system - where sex and gender were not the first criteria for discrimination - a wave of expropriation, privatization and monetarization of life laid the essential foundations of male domination as we know it today. By accentuating the worst features of already existing marginalization and thus formalizing a status of “inferior” to a number of activities, capitalist accumulation formalizes the separation between so-called productive and reproductive work. Domestic work becomes a woman’s affair, a private affair, cut off from the collective, from remuneration, from social recognition. Yet it is necessary and essential to life, to well-being, to the reproduction of social conditions... and ultimately to capitalism. The elites have understood this: the idealization of the housewife and the persecution of all the others are proof of this.

The devaluation of women and their work - in the broadest sense of the word - in the same way as colonial expansion, the plundering of resources or slavery, is thus not simply a consequence but a condition for capitalist expansion. This is not to say that capitalism by definition needs gender oppression in order to reproduce itself, but we can see that it has never existed without gender oppression. Capitalism and patriarchy are therefore today simply inseparable: the former establishes social relations that facilitate the exploitation of women, the latter provides the justifications for it.

Capitalism in its current form is thus structurally patriarchal: it fundamentally needs the appropriation of women (of their work, their bodies, their knowledge, etc.), but also of other groups categorized as inferior during the great moments of capitalist expansion (nature, animals, racialized people, etc.), in order to make profits and therefore to reproduce.

This system is extremely dynamic and opportunistic, capable of adapting, finding gaps and new opportunities for profit Profit The positive gain yielded from a company’s activity. Net profit is profit after tax. Distributable profit is the part of the net profit which can be distributed to the shareholders. . Crises feed it; current social relations are opportunities for commodification and profits. In essence, capitalism will never be able to contribute to a reduction of inequalities. It is therefore completely illusory to believe that gender inequalities can be fought without fighting capitalism and other social relations that are intimately linked to it such as racism and extractivism. They are consubstantial and clearly manifest themselves in the current realities of women’s work.