Unsystematic remarks about how to theorize oppression in a Marxist framework

What does solidarity mean for socialist politics? Take the example of the oppression of women. We've all encountered self-styled progressive men who seem to think that the fight against sexism is merely of interest to women. The liberation of women isn't their own responsibility; it's only the job of women to fight sexism and gender oppression. Because they're men, they might even think that they just won't be able to ever understand the oppression of women. So these men think it's OK to stand on the sidelines.

That's not a socialist position. To be a socialist and a man is to be absolutely committed to ending the oppression of women. It is think that you have a responsibility to learn everything there is to know about how women are oppressed by listening and immersing yourself in the history of struggle. To be a socialist and a man is to believe, first of all, that you have a responsibility to refuse participate in the oppression of women. Second of all it is to believe that you have a responsibility to be an active participant in the struggle for women's liberation. You have to think that the fight for women's liberation is your fight too. The same goes for straight people and the fight against lgbt oppression, for white lgbt people in the fight against racism, and so on. To be a socialist is to think that you have a responsibility to stand in solidarity with all groups fighting against oppression, to see their struggle as your own struggle. That's the core meaning of the politics of solidarity, of uniting and fighting.

***

A major way that racism functions in contemporary societies is that many white people feel indifferent to the suffering of people of color. Their default position is to think that black suffering is their problem, but someone else's problem. This was obvious during the aftermath of Katrina. What this makes clear is that many whites don't see racial oppression and inequality as a problem which they have a responsibility to struggle against. We can imagine them telling themselves things like "well, that's not my problem, that's just a problem for the black community to solve." You see this same thing in the conservative victim-blaming ideologies of "self help".

Socialists completely reject this way of thinking. Solidarity requires that we care about the pain and suffering of other human beings. It means that we take the oppression of any one particular group to be an injury to all. We don't carve up society into different racial groups and say that injustices faced by one group are only of concern to members of that group. The politics of solidarity requires that you see the struggles of the oppressed as your struggle as well. It requires that you make it your business to learn about the history of resistance to all forms of oppression, even those that don't affect you directly. The more people that are enlisted in the fight against oppression the better.

***

Modern racism emerges out of European colonialism and the slave trade. It grows out of a need to justify the enslavement, domination and subordination of non-white peoples to the ruling classes of Europe. Thus, racism and capitalism co-originate and make each other possible. Modern capitalism comes of age in the context of expropriations of indigenous populations, colonial extraction of natural resources, and the enslavement of human beings. It is for this reason, that race and class are deeply intertwined. The class system has always depended upon racial oppression, and racial oppression has always occurred in the context of class divisions. Thus, to think that you can overthrow one without the other is naive. For example, the Latino and Black liberation struggles in the US, in periods of heightened struggle and radicalization, have always concluded that fully abolishing racism means doing away with capitalism. Read the 13 point program of the Young Lords Party, or the program of the Black Panthers. They are uncompromising anti-capitalists. I think that's the kind of perspective the Left needs today.

***

Black oppression is not entirely reducible to class oppression, but it is inextricably bound up with it. Capitalism comes into existence "dripping", as Marx vividly put it, "from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt". That is to say, Marx's theory of primitive accumulation had it that capitalism only comes to exist on the back of the dispossession of peasants, the expropriation of indigenous populations, colonialism and slavery. Racism and capitalism are linked from the very beginning.

This view, that racial oppression is not wholly reducible to class exploitation is basically the position defended by Trotsky in debates with Afro-Trinidadian Marxist CLR James within the SWP in the 30s and 40s. Trotsky's position was to reject the nationalist approach staked out by the CP as mechanical and inflexible. Whether socialists should support the self-determination line is a question of whether the masses of black people are demanding it. But Trotsky wanted to walk a fine line here, he did not want to simply reject the call for self-determination out of hand. On the contrary, Trotsky sensed some latent racism amongst leftists who decried self-determination because it "distracted from class". Trotsky said of this phenomenon that "the argument that the slogan for self-determination leads away from the class point of view is an adaptation of the ideology of the white workers". "The Negro", Trotsky argued in 1939, "can be developed to the class point of view only when the white worker is educated", i.e. only when white workers are disabused of racist beliefs, when racism is smashed within the labor movement. For Trotsky, however, the black struggle against racism should not wait for white workers to be won over to anti-racism, it had to begin immediately, and the job of all socialists was to support such struggles in whatever form they took. He thus argued for a "merciless struggle against... the colossal prejudices of white workers [which] makes no concession to them whatsoever".

***

What is the relationship between race and class? In order to answer this question, we have to talk about social relations, the level of development of the productive forces, the mode of production, distributions of power, geography, culture, the basic structure of political institutions, in short all the things that make up the bread and butter of the Marxist analysis of society and history. That is to say, race must be understood materially and historically, i.e. in terms of the material conditions of society in its historical context.

The material character of racism makes clear why we can't disentangle race and class. This is why we cannot say that race is a mere epiphenomenon that is only to be found in our language, culture and discourse. Race isn't just an idea or concept which we can critically analyze by solely examining the genealogy of its movement in thought and language. Neither is racism a merely individual or ethical problem that happens to afflict certain individuals. Racial domination is materially inscribed in the basic social institutions that constitute modern capitalist societies. It is a structural feature of the system. We therefore can't properly understand contemporary capitalism without understanding the function that race plays within it. Capitalism has always been racialized from the very beginning. But if we can't understand capitalism without understanding racism, neither can we properly understand race without understanding how racism has always been entangled in other social relations of power, in the economic structure of society, etc. That is, we can't understand what the roots of racism are unless we understand the historical development of contemporary capitalist societies (including their imperialist and colonialist projects). No critique of capitalism without the critique of racism; no critique of racism without the critique of capitalism.

Read More...

Summary only...

Turning the Clock Back

Via the Guardian:

Planned Parenthood has become a symbol of the kind of government spending that fiscal conservatives reject. The clientele of Planned Parenthood is the intersection of many groups that are considered unworthy by fiscal conservatives: lower-income, female, assumed to be unmarried and/or queer. Conservatives have argued, roughly forever, that such women should be cut off from any federal spending, with the hope that deprivation will force them to marry for sustenance. If women can avoid childbirth, they're less needy, and in the conservative imagination, that much more likely to avoid getting married for support. The fact that Planned Parenthood touches on the anti-sex faction of the Republican party is an added bonus, ensuring that they'll have rabid support from anti-choicers.

This is horrifying, to say the least. Republicans want to turn the clock back and re-institutionalize forms of gender domination that have been undermined by organizations like Planned Parenthood.

But I reject the framing of this as a "cultural issue" (and, in general, I reject the claim that gender oppression is a mere "cultural issue", though there are, of course, cultural dimensions to all forms of oppression). This is part of a broad onslaught against the majority of Americans: austerity. This is coming first and foremost from the ruling class, not from poor backward conservatives. And this particular destructive austerity measure will hurt working class and poor women more than anyone else. That is not to say that there aren't poor and working class people, especially men, who will get behind the assault on women's freedoms. They will, and they should be vehemently opposed and challenged for doing so, hopefully by a renewed and reinvigorated abortion rights movement in the US. But let's be clear: this isn't some isolated policy issuing in the first instance from grassroots reactionaries. This is part of a broad onslaught against working class living standards. But ruling class politicians in the GOP are smart: they break the onslaught up into different parts and try to sell the various parts as best as possible by pandering to racism, sexism, and other toxic ideologies.

Again, as always, it is a huge mistake to paint this as a battle between progressive Democrat politicians (who are supposed to stand up for women's rights) and conservative Republicans (who on the whole want to maximize the oppression of women wherever possible). This gets the Republicans right, but gets the Democrats wrong. This is not a "cultural" disagreement between "social liberalism" and "social conservatism", for two reasons. First, this is occurring in the context of the broad framework of austerity, accepted by both parties. The Democrats accept the need to make punishing cuts to public goods, and many of them even accept the need to cut funding for PP in particular. Second, the Democrats aren't crusaders for women's liberation. They mostly do nothing on that front, and, worse yet, the Democrats have been happy to throw women under the bus and allow assaults on abortion rights and other gains. Bart Stupak was a Democrat.

Read More...

Summary only...

Confusions About Class/Race/Gender Intersectionality

No honest, reflective person would tell you that the relationship between race and class, or gender and race, etc. was a simple and straight-forward matter. It doesn't mean that there aren't better and worse views about how different oppressions are related to one another. It doesn't mean that there are "no right answers" here, or that things are so difficult that there's no hope of making headway. But it does mean that things are often more complex than a simple slogan or one-liner would have us believe.

Now having said that, I think there is something that should be extremely obvious, politically speaking, even in the absence of a fully articulated theory of how racial subordination, class exploitation, gender domination (and other modes of oppression) are interrelated.

In order to even be on the Left at all, you have to oppose unjust subordination and oppression wherever you find it. There is no excuse for anyone on the Left to be sanguine about racism or sexism. To be on the Left is to oppose class domination, sexual oppression and racism all at once, even if you lack a systematic understanding of how these are all interrelated.

Thus, there should be no confusion or hesitation about why Leftists must defend even people like Sarah Palin from sexist attacks. The reason is simple: the problem with Palin is quite obviously not that she's a woman, the reason to criticize her is that she stands for reactionary politics. Leftists cannot sit comfortably while she is criticized merely for her gender. To tolerate sexist attacks against her is to tolerate oppression, something no self-respecting Leftist could do.

Similarly, no Leftist could sit calmly while someone leveled racist slurs at Thomas Sowell or Michael Steele. Again, the problem with Sowell and Steele is that they are Right-wingers, not that they are black! No genuine Leftist could possibly sit calmly while someone called Sowell racist slurs. Confusing criticism of his politics with a criticism of his qua black person is an ugly mistake indeed, one which absolutely brushes entirely against the grain of what Leftist fight for.

Finally, consider a poor, White racist man. It is obvious that Leftists must criticize such a person for his racist views. Poor or not, racism as such can never be tolerated. But a Leftist should feel uneasy about criticisms of such a person which impugned him only insofar as he is poor. Snickering about holes in his clothes or his malnutrition is not material for a Left-wing critique. Likewise, it would certainly not be a Left criticism of such a person to say that his low wages and long hours at, say, Wal-Mart were entirely his own fault. The problem with such a person is just that he is a racist, and no apologies whatsoever should be made for criticizing him as such. No socialist would deny that sections of the White working-class have been quite racist and xenophobic indeed. What socialists could not tolerate, however, are bourgeois slanders to the effect that some are born to be poor and exploited and therefore deserve their lot.

Even in the absence of agreement on a systematic theory that explains the relations between sexism, racism and class domination, the need to avoid the above confusions should be obvious.

Read More...

Summary only...

Seymour on Assange Allegations

Richard Seymour has an excellent post on the allegations against Assange here, which makes similar arguments to the claims I put forward here. Seymour's analysis is spot on. His criticisms of Wolf and Counterpunch are also fitting.

It has been infuriating to see so much muddled, basically sexist responses to the Assange allegations. To rule out a priori that Assange committed rape is ludicrous (and sexist). Rape happens all of the time, and most of the time the crime goes unpunished entirely. To defend the organization called wikileaks is one thing. To claim that you know beyond on the shadow of a doubt, simply because you support the organization wikileaks, that Assange couldn't have raped anyone is preposterous. Perhaps he didn't- I myself don't know. But I don't pretend to have a priori knowledge of his innocence. I also don't go around regurgitating falsehoods about laws in Sweden that define rape as "consensual sex with no condom". It's disgusting how many supposedly "Left" defenders of Assange have made these two blunders.

Of course, the US war machine could care less whether he did or not- they want to get him by any means necessary, for reasons completely unrelated to rape. Even if he did commit rape in Sweden, there is no real reason for extradition- yet we know that the US will try to capitalize on what happened in order to bury wikileaks.

Read More...

Summary only...

On the Allegations Against Assange

Julian Assange, the spokesman for Wikileaks, stands accused of sexual assault in Sweden. It is well-known that U.S. officials have been scrambling to find something, anything to charge him for in order to try to stop him from doing what he does.

The mere existence of Wikileaks is a threat to the integrity and continued dominance of the U.S. military-industrial complex. To be sure, the whistle-blower website hardly has the power to topple this punishing machine on its own -for that we'd need a mass movement in the belly of the beast. But it is still a serious threat- a threat to the smooth functioning of the U.S. military machine. It is not for nothing, then, that elites are livid. If I were Assange, I would fear for my life- the U.S. government has a long tradition of carrying out political assassinations.

So in this context, it is a bit unsettling that Interpol has issued an international warrant for Assange based on the allegations he faces in Sweden. Whatever it is that is alleged to have occurred in Sweden, and I'll get to that in a moment, you can bet that Interpol and international power brokers don't really give a shit. They just want to bring Assange down by any possible means, solely because of his political role in Wikileaks.

But it is a separate question whether Assange committed rape. I myself have no idea whether he did or not- but I will tell you that much of the response to the question has been dismissive and sexist. For example, from Counterpunch:

"Ardin has written and published on her blog a “revenge instruction”, describing how to commit a complete character assassination to legally destroy a person who “should be punished for what he did”. If the offence was of a sexual nature, the revenge also must also be sex-related, she wrote. Ardin was involved in Gender Studies in Uppsala University, in charge of gender equality in the Students’ Union, a junior inquisitor of sorts.

In other words, she was perfect for the job."

Perfect for the job, huh? Because she worked in a Gender Studies department and was involved in work enforcing gender equality? That sounds to me like feminist-baiting. The caricature is well-known enough: feminists are always women, they are always "man haters" and they are just out for "revenge". They might as well have just called her a "bitch".

Now, I'm not really interested in Ardin the person, what her politics really are, etc. I'm just noting that she's been impugned for allegedly being a feminist, etc. as in the above quote from Counterpunch. It might turn out that she is a CIA agent, and it would hardly matter for the point I'm making here: there should be nothing illicit or suspicious about being a feminist, fighting for gender equality, and so on.

The other layer of the sexism here has to do with the talk about the legal dimensions of rape. It seems to be a favorite line of many sexists that, somehow, all cases of rape are the fault of the woman, on the one hand, or simply malicious acts of "defamation" waged by bitter women that "hate men" on the other. I've read bits about this issue on several websites that more or less invoked these very tropes.

I've also seen character defenses of Assange to the effect that "he simply couldn't have committed rape... he's a great guy who does a lot of good political work!". That's non-sense. As I note above, he is a great guy who does a lot of good political work, to be sure. But that is not a defense in a court of law for a good reason: it has nothing whatsoever to do with whether he did, or did not, sexually assault someone. They don't call it the ad hominem fallacy for nothing.

I've also seen complaints about the allegations that are so general in their attacks that, if generalized, they would to rule out the possibility of conviction in any rape case whatsoever. That's clearly reactionary. As is well-known, the U.S. legal system is woefully unable to address the problem of rape. It's not surprising, then, that a very small percentage of rapes are even reported, and a far small number ever conclude in a conviction. The system is set up against the interests of women.

As far as I can tell, none of this has anything to do with imperialism, the politics of whistle-blowing, hacktivism or global power plays. That is, none of the business in Sweden, whatever the facts are, has anything whatsoever to do with the politics of Wikileaks.

Now, the powers that be want us to think that it does. They want us to think that the allegations in Sweden are a knock against Wikileaks itself. They want us to, irrationally, let the U.S. war machine off the hook because of something Assange, the man, did or didn't do in his personal life. That's clearly bullshit.

So let's not buy into the imperialist narrative. Whatever did or did not happen in Sweden is a separate issue- let's not shit on feminism because the U.S. war machine sucks. And let's not use this as an excuse to further the oppressive myth that rape accusations are always about some "vindictive" feminist scholar looking to castrate some innocent, angelic man.

Read More...

Summary only...

Don't you hate it when...

(Via Feministe) Read this, and then this. Zing! What is it with this stupid genre of quasi-confessional male whining about the "conquest" of women that has generally been confined to college newspapers, but is now breaking into such "reputable" periodicals as the Chicago Trib?

Read More...

Summary only...

Stop Street Harassment Blog

Here.

Read More...

Summary only...

Should we legislate against cat-calling: I say yes

But the suggestion in a recent post by Jill at Feministe is "no". She doesn't give reasons why not in the post, but in the comments thread her reasoning is, in part, that "the problem with trying to ban street harassment is that it’s (a) a First Amendment issue, and (b) a practicality issue".

She also suggests that since we're "talking about things that happen in public spaces, like on the street" there should not be any legislative action, whereas "in private spaces — at your office — or in places like schools, there are different rules, and there should be recourse for harassment."

I agree that the personal is political. But that doesn't mean that the public ceases to be political. The point of politicizing the personal, the private sphere if you like, wasn't in order to drain politics out of the public sphere. If harassment and sexist intimidation should be outlawed anywhere, I would have thought that the public sphere would have been the first place place to start. Public space is supposed to be that space in which we should all be able to comfortably appear as equals, free from domination, intimidation or shame.

So, I disagree rather sharply with Jill's suggestion that because the street is public, it should therefore be a space in which harassment is protected. I would have wanted to draw precisely the opposite inference.

Also, I'm perplexed most of the time when it is suggested that something is a "free speech issue". That seems to me, often, to be a way of avoiding talking about the politics of the situation. To be sure, freedom of speech --the idea that the State shouldn't coercively prevent people from making their reasoned views known in public spaces-- is worth fighting for.

But rather than too quickly assuming that such free speech is a good thing and leaving it at that, I think it's worth asking why we care about protecting the right to free speech discussed above.

There are many reasons one could give here, but the most convincing one for me is that we want the public sphere to be one of openness, free from intimidation, discrimination and domination. So if we're for freedom of speech, our main question, then, must be: how do we best foster public spheres of openness and equality?

It seems to me a deep mistake, and one often committed by liberals, to assume that we achieve this by simply removing the State from the picture. As the second-wave feminist movement uncompromisingly pointed out in the 60s and 70s: when you remove the State you don't get a realm of pure equality and freedom. You get private institutions, organizations, roles, norms, practices, etc. that are structured hierarchically. When you look at the vast majority of non-State social institutions (e.g. churches, schools, clubs, media organizations, workplaces, etc.), you see elements of patriarchy, among other things. This fact about private social institutions was the motivation for the famous feminist slogan that the "personal is political". The idea was that when you looked in places where the State proper did not reach, you nonetheless found power and domination that needed to be dealt with politically, not on an individual-to-individual basis.

So, what we see here is that fostering spaces of openness --the precondition of having freedom of speech-- isn't accomplished by simply removing the State from the picture. Instead, fostering openness is accomplished by reconfiguring basic social institutions and public spaces in such a way that people can appear before others as equals, free from domination, shame, intimidation, etc. For my part, I see no plausible reason not to use every tool at our disposal to accomplish that goal. Excluding the legal or legislative changes from our toolkit strikes me as dogmatic.

For these reasons, I don't see a good reason not to consider a legislative onslaught against street harassment. I'm not convinced that claiming that this is a "First Amendment Issue" means that we should not legislate against harassment. On the contrary, any plausible interpretation of the spirit of First Amendment seems suggest that we should legislate against it.

Moreover, if we cannot structure our own public spaces democratically, then I don't know what democracy is for. Public space is, by definition, space that is open to all of us. But it is not a space where anything goes --violence, sexual assault, oppression, and subordination should not be welcome. If democracy is good for anything at all --it is good for enabling us to collectively decide what norms we want to structure the public spaces we share in common. So its hard for me to see why we shouldn't be able to collectively decide whether or not we want our public spaces to be ones in which harassment and domination is tolerated. To reject this seems to me to reject the role of collective self-rule in a democratic society.

Jill also suggests in the post that "I actually don’t agree with hate speech laws either." Perhaps that is the crux of the disagreement. I would have thought that hate speech was the paradigm of speech that doesn't deserve to be protected. Perhaps the thought is that the political community should be neutral about whether or not something is hateful, and thus refrain from banning it. But for my part, I don't think there's anything neutral about hate speech. Hate speech, as the name implies, is not speech that expresses some reasonable opinion or view that we might disagree with but nonetheless understand and tolerate. It is not "one contender" among many competing views about how to treat others. Hate speech is an expression of oppressive social norms that function to sustain existing inequalities of power. As such, it has no claim to being protected. There's no slippery slope here. If we have a clear idea, more or less, what is hateful and what is not, I don't see why we wouldn't want our laws to structure public spaces in such a way that puts a damper on oppressive speech.

Now some are bound to disagree here because they think that leaving "hate" open to interpretation is dangerous. Because we can't specify what all cases of hate share ex ante in a "fully directive" law, this kind of legislation leaves the door open for abuse. I think objection misses the mark. Lots of laws can't be fully directive, and we wouldn't always want them to be if they could. To be sure, some interpretation and deliberation will be required to parse out serious cases of oppressive street harassment, but is that a problem? I would have thought that laws which, as legal philosopher Seana Shiffrin puts it, "induce deliberation" would have the advantage of sparking public discussion and critical reflection. And since when has it ever been the case that we didn't need to think critically and reflect on how generalized laws apply to specific cases? I don't think the law is ever that simple. The slippery-slope worries here seem rather empty when you think through how unfounded they are.

Perhaps there are better reasons for recoiling from legislative action here, but I cant see what they are.

Read More...

Summary only...

Horrific Time Cover

I have come to expect that just about everything Time produces will be inept, superficial and basically reactionary. But this is pushing the envelope.

Responses here and here.

Others have already pointed out the following, but I'll restate a couple of the racist, sexist, imperialist assumptions motivating the "argument" articulated by the cover and its headline:

1. Afghan women are inert, voiceless objects in need of the protection of an occupying foreign army.
   
2. The interests of imperialist military occupations coincide exactly with the interests of Afghan women.
3. The majority of "the Afghan people", and women in particular, want the occupation to continue.
   
4. Even if they don't, the U.S. army has a duty and a right to occupy Afghanistan indefinitely by whatever means necessary.
   
5. There is no rhyme or reason to why such things happen to women in Afghanistan: "they" must just be "brutes" who need the shining light of reason brought by U.S. military personnel.
   
6. The absence (rather than the presence) of occupying U.S. forces (who routinely go on rampages killing dozens of innocent elderly and children) means chaos, violence and death.
   
7. And related to 5. and 6. is the thought that the "Afghan people" (who? which ethnic groups? which classes?) cannot govern themselves, but need the "protection" of big old Uncle Sam.
   
8. The Afghan people love drone attacks, misplaced mines, accidental bombings, occupation and constant "collateral damage" to their friends and family.
   

So, yeah, if you buy all of the obviously false bullshit above, perhaps you might be disposed to accept the "argument" on the cover.

According to the editor of Time:

What you see in these pictures and our story is something that you cannot find in those 91,000 documents: a combination of emotional truth and insight into the way life is lived in that difficult land and the consequences of the important decisions that lie ahead.

Yeah, right... there's nothing "emotional" or of interest in those 91,000 pages. Reading about 19 dead and 50 wounded unarmed innocents cut down in a hail of US troops' automatic gunfire isn't emotional at all. That's "just what war is". Or something. What a fucking bonehead this guy is. For all we know, US bombings disfigured the woman on the cover.

Read More...

Summary only...

Are men really better athletes?

Read Sherry Wolf's review of McDonagh and Pappano's Playing With the Boys: Why Separate is Not Equal here.

Read More...

Summary only...

The Return of Eugenics

I'm only writing this post because my genes are configured in a particular way. At least that's the view of the social world that we get from crude, pseudo-scientific bullshit like the views pedaled in this article on marriage.

What is scientific about the suggestions and innuendo in this article? I'm not sure. Science proceeds by putting forward hypotheses, while attempting to show that the available evidence is explained well by these hypotheses. What reasons have we to think that immutable facts of our genetic makeup explain social phenomena? Very few. It's rather obvious to anyone doing serious work in social science or psychology that the pseudo-scientific speculation pedaled in books like The Selfish Gene is false. It is also worth pointing out that even the connection between behavior and "breed" in dogs is not well-understood by scientists. If pressed, any of the charlatans penning "pop-science" books on the tight connection between genes and social phenomena will concede that what they're saying is wild speculation.

But there are more important questions to ask here. In particular, what is it about our society that makes eugenic views so convenient and apparently plausible? We must keep in mind here that the current vogue of eugenics and genetic-determinist ideas about social/political phenomena has nothing to do with evidence or facts.

Genetic-determinist "theories" are simple and easy to state. They are free of the complications that, sorry to say, are in fact parts of social phenomena. But most importantly, these ideas fit neatly and cleanly into existing configurations of power. There is no friction between them and the status quo.

Thus we find these "theories" in popular outlets like the NYTimes because they are ways of making sense of the social world that suggest that things are as they should be. The message is clear: if we're hardwired to be racists... why struggle against such things? If certain "races" are genetically predisposed to behave in certain ways... why aim for political equality? If women are genetically hardwired such that they are deferential and conventionally "feminine", then why criticize existing gender norms and hierarchies? This could go on and on.

I don't think that therapists and psychoanalysts have been wrong to focus on family history and other contingent features of a life when interpreting drives, desires and neuroses. Nor have social theorists been wrong to focus on big structural features of societies when they think about institutions like marriage and how they change over time.

It is far from obvious to me that considerations of this sort should be alien to an examination of "marriage stability". Are we to think that, for example, severe economic hardship has no real implications for the stability of a marriage?

Moreover, political theorists and historians have not been wrong to examine the ways in which changes in societies, political configurations and so on often track political struggles directed towards changing them. The Womens' Movement of the 60s and 70s, for example, radically changed the way that Americans think about heterosexual marriage relations. Moreover, the black liberation struggles of the 1950s and 60s shattered a certain configuration of power in the South that was basically a form of apartheid. Of course, racism and sexual oppression still persist in potent forms, but it is undeniable that things have changed quite a bit since the suffocating conformism and patriarchy of the 1950s. And, most importantly, the reason they changed had to do with active political struggles on the part of the oppressed, NOT genetic configurations causing people to act in certain ways rather than others.

But if you accept the genetic-determinist story... why struggle? Why think that social relations could change? If the genetic-determinist account tries to say that can also explain why people struggle against certain configurations of power, then it just looks entirely ad hoc and incapable of being falsified. This brings out, I think, just how speculative and underspecified these approaches are and, thus, why they are so dangerous. They can give a "scientific" veneer of credibility to whatever you like: racism, sexism, you name it.

I'm not suggesting that there aren't any facts about human psychology or behavior that derive from natural features of our constitution. On the contrary- we have certain naturally given capacities in virtue of which we are human. But our faculties and capacities include the ability to reflect on reasons for which we act, and to choose whether or not to endorse such reasons.

Having a set of capacities and faculties that are natural in no way entails that our behavior must be regular and predictable, or worse, determined (without our knowing it) by our genetic makeup. On the contrary- human behaviors are malleable: we adapt to different environments and change as a result of those environments. That is, after all, what the content of evolutionary theory actually is: random mutations render certain organisms more fit in a particular environment, and if that environment changes, they may no longer be as fit, and hence, as favorably placed to reproduce. It is not as though the environment is "determined" by the genes themselves.

But again, I must stress the non-scientific character of the "sociobiology" or "genetic-determinist" phenomenon in recent years. It is not a full-fledged scientific research program: it is window-dressing for the status quo. It is a set of ideas that purport to show that all is well in the world and that it couldn't be otherwise. Ideology is at its strongest when it convinces people that contingent, malleable features of social life are inevitable and natural. Why think of resisting what could not be changed?

Read More...

Summary only...

Traditional Embrace and Sexism

From Elizabeth Anderson's Value and Ethics in Economics (p.18):

"West European and North American societies lack adequate normative vehicles for expressing heterosexual affection on egalitarian terms, although many members of these societies seek to establish loving relationships on such terms. Norms for bodily contact between heterosexual lovers- for example, that the man may express his affection by wrapping his arm around his lover, or by leading her on the dance floor- also express a status hierarchy in which the man is the protector and leader, the woman the dependent follower" (Anderson cites Tannen (1990) here).

Read More...

Summary only...

National Network Of Abortion Funds Slams Obama

(Via TPM)

Stephanie Poggi, executive director of the National Network of Abortion Funds, released the following statement on President Obama's executive order on abortion funding.

"At this very moment, a woman is rationing the food left in her pantry, further delaying her electricity bill, and facing heavy penalties on her late mortgage payment -- all because she cannot pay for an abortion she needs. This is the cruel legacy of the Hyde Amendment, a legacy that President Obama renewed yesterday by signing an executive order to appease a handful of legislators who represented no one's interests but their own. As a nation, we demanded that health care reform address the inherent inequality and unfairness in our existing system. But with the stroke of his pen, President Obama expanded the Hyde Amendment's guarantee of inequality and unfairness. Because of the Hyde Amendment, every year nearly 200,000 women who cannot afford abortion care must make extreme sacrifices in order to pay for a basic health care procedure. By singling out abortion care, Congress and our President have betrayed their obligation to protect the interests of all people living in this country, not only those who already have every advantage. Our nation deserves much better.

The National Network of Abortion Funds has been leading efforts to dismantle the Hyde Amendment and ensure that every single woman in the United States has the ability to make important life decisions for the health and wellbeing of herself and her family. We are absolutely committed to educating Congress, the Administration, and the public about the devastating impact of the Hyde Amendment and yesterday's executive order and continuing the work to restore fairness.

Every week, our local abortion Funds help at least 400 women obtain abortion care they could not otherwise pay for. While we cannot meet the need created by our discriminatory health care system, we will continue to provide this essential service until every woman is treated with respect and dignity by her government."

Read More...

Summary only...

The Racist, Sexist Rhetoric of "Population Control"

A friend linked me to this facebook photo album (cool use of web 2.0 for activism) from the Population and Development program at Hampshire College.

The album takes a critical look at the rhetoric and imagery employed by population control movements that seek to blame ignorant, poor, brown women for environmental degradation and for the scarcity of resources.

For instance, the album begins with this image:

The caption that accompanies it reads:

Some population, environment and anti-immigrant interests are blaming climate change on population growth as a way to gain support for population and immigration control and divert attention from the real causes of global warming.

Rather than considering the negative role of overconsumption, large oil companies, and militarism, they are raising fears of potentially violent "climate refugees" threatening Western security. Note this exoticized image of a Bangladeshi woman drowning as sea levels rise on the cover of OnEarth magazine. The article implies that poor Bangladeshis displaced by global warming are potential Islamic terrorists.

Check it out. It's an interesting way to take in a lot of information and a complicated analysis, and hopefully, to learn more about what feminists are saying about population hysteria..

Read More...

Summary only...

Hilarious anti-feminist letter in LRB from 1992

The following is a letter to the editor of LRB regarding a book review by G.A. Cohen:

Vol. 14 No. 12 · 25 June 1992

From E.J. Mishan

Much as I enjoyed Professor Cohen’s review of Thomas Nagel’s Equality and Partiality (LRB, 14 May), it was hardly possible to avoid noticing his recourse to ‘she’ and ‘her’ instead of the standard ‘he’ and ‘him’ to indicate either sex. Is this departure from grammatical convention a bid to establish enlightened credentials, or is it part of his private campaign to add the weight of his authority to the promotion of peripheral women’s lib desiderata? The traditional usage of ‘he’ as an alternative to ‘one’ goes back centuries and – notwithstanding the exigencies of fashion – is wholly unambiguous. In contrast, the self-conscious departure from common usage in this respect invariably imparts something of a mental jolt to the reader.

Perhaps the editors will agree that occasional recourse to this practice does nothing to realise the goals of the women’s liberation movement. These goals, in any case, are being realised chiefly through economic forces: with the growth of mass affluence in the West, affordable domestic labour-saving innovations have made housewives all but expendable. And while such innovations push women out of the home, so do other innovations facilitate their employment in industry and commerce.

There is really no call, then, for our hyper-conscientious progressives to subscribe to the more eccentric tactics of those ‘conscious-raising’ zealots scattered along the fringes of the feminist movement.

E.J. Mishan
London NW11

This is hilarious. This guy is really pissed off because G.A. Cohen didn't unreflectively adhere to a traditional, sexist norm of language use.

But I actually agree with some of what Mr. (presumably, right?) Mishan has to say. I agree with him when he writes that "the traditional usage of ‘he’ as an alternative to ‘one’ goes back centuries and – notwithstanding the exigencies of fashion – is wholly unambiguous." This is true. The traditional use of "he" and "mankind" is unambiguous: male pronouns, and perhaps men in general, are alleged to be the appropriate stand-ins for humanity as such. This is why we should unambiguously oppose this practice.

I also find it hilarious that Mishan claims that "this practice does nothing to realise the goals of the women’s liberation movement" (as though he cares). The funny thing is that one frequently hears this refrain from opponents of feminism: "but it doesn't really matter whether or not we say 'mankind' or 'humanity'... so why bother?". My reply here is always the same. If it doesn't matter, if it's not important one way or the other, then why are you so angry and disgruntled that we're departing from traditional practice? It seems to matter quite a lot to the likes of Mishan that I say "him" and "mankind" and so on.

I should note as well that I also agree that "the self-conscious departure from common usage in this respect invariably imparts something of a mental jolt to the reader." This is precisely the fucking point. If it didn't ruffle the feathers of doddering old sexists like Mishan, it wouldn't be worth the effort. The point is precisely to destabilize a traditional practice, "that goes back centuries", which contributes to the reproduction of sexism. The more acute the "mental jolt" that this elicits from misogynist wankers like the author of the letter, the better.

Read More...

Summary only...

"A Culture of Indifference"

Feministing has an excellent post on the culture of indifference that enables a sexual assault epidemic to persist unchallenged at most US universities. I can confirm, from personal experience with how universities deal with these matters, that most all of the important points from the post are commonplace at many colleges. For example:

• Many times, victims drop out of school, while their alleged attackers graduate.
• Students deemed "responsible" for alleged sexual assaults on college campuses can face little or no consequence for their acts.
• 75 to 90 percent of total disciplinary actions that schools do report are minor.
• The full extent of campus sexual assault is often hidden by secret proceedings, shoddy record-keeping, and an indifferent bureaucracy.
  

All of these are facts that apply to virtually every university in the country. I and others at my undergraduate institution arrived at identical conclusions just based on circumstances particular to that university. It's appalling how widespread and uniform these problems are, and even more appalling how college administrations and student culture turns a blind eye to it.

I'm convinced that it is going to take direct action (be it civil disobedience or class-action legal attacks) of some kind to force (mostly male) administrators to take steps to stop institutionally-sanctioned rape at universities. Of course, this problem is much, much larger than universities and no doubt speaks to deep problems with our (sexist) legal system and culture (e.g. as the post notes: we have college newspapers printing pieces that blame rape victims and women's magazines spreading the myth of "gray rape.")

Something needs to be done, and we can't wait for university big wigs to take care of the problem.

Read More...

Summary only...

Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?

In doing some research/writing I came across this (evidently famous) 1971 essay by Linda Nochlin (feminist art historian/theorist) entitled "why have there been no great women artists?". For Nochlin, the question itself is a problem:

The question "Why have there been no great women artists?" is simply the top tenth of an iceberg of misinterpretation and misconception; beneath lies a vast dark bulk of shaky idees recues about the nature of art and its situational concomitants, about the nature of human abilities in general and of human excellence in particular, and the role that the social order plays in all of this.

Once I'm through reading it, I'll post a little something on it, but I thought I'd pass it along to any who are interested.

As I understand the main argument, Nochlin is hostile (as am I) to the entire notion of a "genius" as it has been traditionally understood in history writ large. In fact, this notion is a product of the late 18th century, and took off in the 19th, when Romantic theorists talked about a (gendered, male) person as a "fountainhead" of creation... someone unencumbered by history and society... reliant on nobody but themselves, who creates "great" things.

Read More...

Summary only...

Sexism, Racism and Liberal Political Thought

Consider for a moment how often we encounter "post-racist" and "post-feminist" ideologies. On the one hand, they acknowledge some version of the claim that history is marked by racism and sexism. On the other, both claim that contemporary societies are no longer encumbered by sexism or racism: we now live in a more or less post-racist, post-sexist social order.

Now to the extent that liberal political thought tends to hang its hat on a private/public distinction, it seems to me that it is bound up with the maintenance of the ideology sketched above. Moreover, the liberal tradition (broadly construed so as not to connote the idiosyncratic American sense of the term) has tended to focus intensely on legal and political institutions in lieu of critically engaging ostensibly "private" institutions such as the family, the workplace, the church, schools, clubs and organizations, culture, media and so on. And insofar as this is true, the relationship between "post" ideologies and liberalism should be even clearer.

We should therefore find it suspicious that the women's liberation movement and what is now called the "Civil Rights Movement" are remembered today as more or less legally-oriented and conventionally political movements. The slogan "the personal is political" couldn't be further from the way that feminism is construed today in many mainstream appropriations of the women's movement: today feminism is described as though it ought to be a politics that prizes "choice" above all else. Thus, "private choices" are once again apolitical: it is the job of post-feminism to shield ostensibly private matters from the political scrutiny they received from second and third-wave feminists.

Today, my sense is that the women's liberation movement is remembered as a movement aiming merely to achieve certain legal changes. The same is true of the way that the Civil Rights Movement (as indicated by its label) is remembered: it was just a movement aiming to eliminate certain racist laws and to enforce voting rights.

But as Angela Davis points out, it wasn't clear during the 1950s and 60s that what was under way was a "Civil Rights Movement". Davis claims that in those days, among her comrades in SNCC it was known simply as the "Freedom Movement". While certain legal reforms were obviously part of the movement's goals, it is far from obvious that this exhausted its aims. In fact, the history of the movement itself suggests that the legalistic re-reading of history is dubious.

Consider first of all that the main locus of disagreement between the ostensibly more "moderate" MLK and the more radical Malcolm X (religious differences notwithstanding) was essentially one of tactics, i.e. not in the first instance one of divergent emancipatory aims. Furthermore, even MLK's politics do not fit within the narrow legalistic reading of the movement: MLK was a staunch opponent of the Vietnam War, American Imperialism abroad and Cold War foreign policy, and he argued forcefully in the last years of his life that the fight against racism was also at the same time a fight against certain socio-economic conditions. We'd need to fundamentally re-think the basic social and economic institutions in capitalist societies, MLK held, in order to have any hope of successfully smashing racism.

But given that this is the case, what does this suggest about the viability of post-racist and post-sexist ideologies? As I see it, there are 3 important conclusions to draw here.

(1) One conclusion that seems clear to me is that these "post" ideologies depend first of all on a re-interpretation of the historical meaning of social struggles. In other words, a condition of thinking that these "post" narratives have any plausibility is that we first of all believe that the goals of the Women's Movement and the CRM were purely legal.

(2) Another conclusion is that the distinction between "de facto" and "de jure" oppression or domination has been obscured by the prevalence of liberal ways of thinking about politics. The point of the distinction is to distinguish between de jure forms of domination that are literally written into the word of law (e.g. aspects of Jim Crow) on the one hand, and de facto forms of domination that derive from non-legal features of social institutions and norms. Thomas McCarthy, in drawing a parallel between what he calls "neoracism" and "neoimperialism" draws the distinction as follows.

"Whereas neoimperialism is a way of maintaining key aspects of colonial domination and exploitation after the disappearance of colonies in the legal-political sense, neoracism is a way of doing the same for racial domination and exploitation after the disappearance of "race" in the scientific-biological sense... just as postcolonial neoimperialism could outlive the demise of former colonies, post-biological neoracism could survive the demise of scientific racism... and just as the shift to neoimperialism required modes of domination and exploitation that were compatible with the nominal independence and equality of all nations, the shift to neoracism required modes that were compatible with the formal freedom and equality of all individuals."(Race, Empire and the Idea of Human Development. (2009: Cambridge UP)

I believe something similar could be concluded about sexism. While some (though not all) de jure forms of sexual oppression have been repealed and replaced by important new legal forms, focusing our attention only at this legal level of analysis makes it impossible to understand gender oppression now or throughout history.

(3) And a final conclusion to draw from this phenomenon is as follows. In order to find the 'post' ideologies compelling we must also have an individualist way of thinking about society and politics. After all, the familiar post-racist claim goes something like this: in the past there used to be explicit, de jure forms of discrimination that were restrictive. But now that these de jure forms of oppression have been lifted, there is no fetter on the ability of individuals (of any gender or race) to "succeed" in making a lot of money if they simply work hard enough.

There are many ways to refute this claim, but here's a rather general way of dispatching it. Now I would not contest the claim that in principle, it is possible that any one individual working-class person of any background to become the next Bill Gates. But conceding this trivial claim about what might be possible does not obscure the fact that it must also be true (for the 'individual' claim to work) that the working class is collectively unfree to leave the working-class. In other words, while it is true in some trivial sense that any one person "could" hit it big, it must also be true in capitalism that everyone in the working-class couldn't hit it big at the same time. Capitalism requires that a large mass of working-class people whose cheap labor make the wealth of a small class of people possible. Massive improbability notwithstanding, it is also conceptually impossible within capitalism for everyone to become Bill Gates all at once, since there would be nobody doing the socially-necessary labor that sustains capitalism.

The result is that focusing on the possibilities that a generic "individual" has for social mobility says nothing of the way that the entire society, writ large, is structured. For if the "individual claim" is only true in a situation in which lots of other people are restricted from leaving an oppressed status, then it amounts to very little in the way of dispelling claims that racism, sexism and class oppression are important features of the present.

Read More...

Summary only...

Socialist Worker on "Tucker Max"

It's frightening what some people think is funny.

I hadn't heard of this tool-bag before reading this article but it's pretty fucked up.

Read the article here.

Read More...

Summary only...

Going mad for Mad Men? What's with the feminist love?

For the past few weeks the blogosphere has been buzzing about the premiere of season 3 of AMC's critically acclaimed Mad Men. Feminist after feminist blogger has declared her love for the show and its portrayal of gender roles in 1960s America.

At some points I found myself enjoying the show. The drama was interesting. Some of the characters are incredibly compelling. Everyone can play armchair psychologist while they watch the show. "Pete Campbell has such daddy issue and a huge case of white privilege. " "Peggy is trying so hard to shake the repression she faced growing up, but she can't even fully decide if it was a bad thing." So it has that appeal. Plus, an article in the London Review of Books after the first season really sums up its other sources of appeal perfectly:

Mad Men is an unpleasant little entry in the genre of Now We Know Better. We watch and know better about male chauvinism, homophobia, anti-semitism, workplace harassment, housewives’ depression, nutrition and smoking. We wait for the show’s advertising men or their secretaries and wives to make another gaffe for us to snigger over. ‘Have we ever hired any Jews?’ – ‘Not on my watch.’ ‘Try not to be overwhelmed by all this technology; it looks complicated, but the men who designed it made it simple enough for a woman to use.’ It’s only a short further wait until a pregnant mother inhales a tumbler of whisky and lights up a Chesterfield; or a heart attack victim complains that he can’t understand what happened: ‘All these years I thought it would be the ulcer. Did everything they told me. Drank the cream, ate the butter. And I get hit by a coronary.’ We’re meant to save a little snort, too, for the ad agency’s closeted gay art director as he dismisses psychological research: ‘We’re supposed to believe that people are living one way, and secretly thinking the exact opposite? . . . Ridiculous!’ – a line delivered with a limp-wristed wave. Mad Men is currently said to be the best and ‘smartest’ show on American TV. We’re doomed.

Beneath the Now We Know Better is a whiff of Doesn’t That Look Good. The drinking, the cigarettes, the opportunity to slap your children! The actresses are beautiful, the Brilliantine in the men’s hair catches the light, and everyone and everything is photographed as if in stills for a fashion spread. The show’s ‘1950s’ is a strange period that seems to stretch from the end of World War Two to 1960, the year the action begins. The less you think about the plot the more you are free to luxuriate in the low sofas and Eames chairs, the gunmetal desks and geometric ceiling tiles and shiny IBM typewriters. Not to mention the lush costuming: party dresses, skinny brown ties, angora cardigans, vivid blue suits and ruffled peignoirs, captured in the pure dark hues and wide lighting ranges that Technicolor never committed to film.

Sooner or later, though, unless you watch the whole series with the sound off, you will have to face up to the story.

And the main gist of the story centers around Don Draper. And Don Draper is a real asshole. And that's really what I can't get over when I watch this show. He's a terrible person, and the people around him are worshipping terrible people. That or their victims of the terrible people. And I get so tired of the psuedo-edgy male protagonists in dramas these days...it's nothing new. It's been around at least since Joseph Conrad in the 1890s. The detached male figure, isolated, trying to figure out his identity in a crazy, mixed up, modern world. It's so cliche. And what bothers me even more is that he's portrayed as being so dreamy. He's an asshole, and yet his fellow characters, and even progressives who watch, seem to admire him. You might know he's a sexist, capitalist, narcissistic asshole, but you can't help but gawk at his beauty, his power, his smooth talking.

I think there's a desire to see a lot more subversion in this show than is there. I just can't see the depiction of patriarchy and racism and economic injustice as subversion, if it's never called those things, and the man who stands as their champion is our hero. Yeah, we see a lot of misogyny, and every once in awhile we see a little hope that the women on the show just aren't going to take it any more. But that's not a startling critique of society -- society then or now. It's just a depiction of society in the 1960s.

I think it's part of an artistic cowardice among progressive artists these days that creator Michael Weiner betrays in choosing this approach. They want to show negative social structures, but they don't want to get preachy, because they don't want to alienate people who might still believe in those structures. They'd rather keep their audience big. They want to show self-congratulatory folks how far we've come and how bad things were and make them think they're watching a good piece of criticism, but they don't want to turn off the people who remain misogynists and racists among us, at least not entirely. While some of us are seeing the sexism in the show as exactly that, vintage sexism from a time before the women's movement of the 1960s, others might see it as simply a portrayal of how things once were, and maybe even, be able to watch the show and go on thinking those gender relationships were just fine. Don Draper is sexy. And rich. And he gets everything he wants, even if he is torturing himself a little inside. It's doesn't look all that bad, in the end.

And let's face it, there's something intoxicating about the show and all of its sin, and I don't just mean the incredible amount of alcohol the characters consume. These people are attractive. They have very sexy sex. And the nostalgia of years past, even if we can recognize the social ills of the time, appeals to us at some level, even if it's not the old fashion or the traditional family, but something like the smell of social change in the air. I can understand the desire to try to read more subversion into the show than is actually there. Watching the show has some pleasure in it, so it's not unbelievable we'd want to think we're doing more than we are by watching it.

I just wish we could watch shows like this and acknowledge what it is we like about them, not try to turn them into the works of art for social justice and social commentary that they aren't even trying to be. Showing sexism is not the same thing as fighting sexism or even labeling sexism. And it isn't necessarily progressive in any way (Even Jezebel's feature on "15 Feminist Moments From Mad Men" is really just a list of moments where sexist things happened to women). Let's just face the fact that at the end of the day, watching a drama about Don Draper and the madness of the 1960s is good entertainment. There's little redeeming about him, and as far as I can see, little redeeming about the show and its take on anything, including gender roles.

Read More...

Summary only...