I am just back from the Southeast Social Forum, and while there I attended a workshop on “gender.” Not coming form the Academy, I am often struck by the depth and force of postmodern orthodoxy that has taken root there. That orthodoxy has found a new meme-host in the anarchist left and even in certain sectors of the putatively marxist left. The former is not surprising to me. Anarchism almost always becomes stateless liberalism — acutely individualistic. It has reached a point where raising the issue of the oppression of women invariably meets with he challenge that “there is no such thing as women,” as if both having a womb and the relentless and violent social system that allows people with testicles to control people with wombs is merely a “narrative.” The same people who would say that a worker is a wage slave, and therefore needs solidarity and shared space with other workers in order to mount a resistance, are now claiming that biological women who make up 53% of our population are not entitled to the same… this is the legerdemain that postmodernism has accomplished to erase the bases for social solidarities, and depoliticize our struggles. To question this has now become a kind of negative litmus test; those of us who point this out, and who still define gender as a system of social power (a metanarrative, gasp), instead of a consumer choice of identities (many of them actually reinforcing the gender binary they claim to disrupt) are now called “transphobic,” which is — presumably — tantamount to being racist, or more to the point, anti-Semitic when we question the State of Israel. I have linked to a very sharp critique from Karla Mantilla, and I hope we can have a good discussion of this very tricky topic.

I want to introduce the Robinson Rojas Archive for those who have expressed an interest in the intersection of ecology and political economy. I am posting a piece by Alf Hornborg, a fave of my own, whose work and critiques thereof are available at at the RRA. If you are looking for reassurances in the form of alterantive religions, this is not what this analysis of human ecology is about. It is a very serious attempt to bring a 19th Century “materialist conception of history” into the light of 21st Century thought, and to deepen our understanding of its implications.

A Marine corporal has apologized — after he was busted by the Council on American Islamic Relations — for making a video of his musical performance, before his company of Marines, who are cheering wildly when the lyrics refer to killing Iraqi children.

by Julian Real, 2006

Here’s a list of what men can do:

First, recognize and accept that the personal is political, and that interpersonal behavior is part of your political work as a responsible humane being. Stop either/or’ing the private and the public, the personal and the social, the interpersonal and the institutional. All are breeding grounds for male domination of women and children.

Thank you very much for that welcome and that introduction. I am delighted to be back in London today and have an opportunity to spend some time with all of you. To hear that resume reciting all ol my political background and experience, of course oftentimes people say that work in the oil industry is not really sort at an uppercrust kind of organisation and I say. ‚Yeah, but I used to be a Congressman and it‘s clearly a step up for me to go from the political world to the world of the oil and gas industry, I‘m often asked why I left politics and went to Halliburton and I explain that I reached the point where I was mean-spirited, short-tempered and intolerant of those who disagreed with me and they said ‚ Hell, you‘d make a great CEO‘, so I went to Texas and joined the private sector.

By Robet Jensen

It may seem self-indulgent to talk about the fears of white people in a white-supremacist society. After all, what do white people really have to be afraid of in a world structured on white privilege? It may be self-indulgent, but it’s critical to understand because these fears are part of what keeps many white people from confronting ourselves and the system.

by Julian Real, 2006

This is where many radical feminists draw the line, or one of them, in the sand of patriarchy: consenting to do things that oppress classes of people is not OK, even if, or especially if, it produces pleasure. When sexism and racism produce orgasm, racist patriarchy has us by the genitals, so to speak, and, more so, by the psyche.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is apparently dead. The United States armed forces in Iraq have been bombing al-Zarqawi hideouts almost weekly since May 2004 when American businessman Nicholas Berg was shockingly beheaded on film, and someone claiming to be Zarqawi is said to have taken credit for it. With a $25 million reward on his head, there were surely a series of tragic mistakes based on opportunistic calls.

Gay marriage. Ralph Nader says he doesn’t do “gonadal politics.” The Democrats try to slither around the issue. The Republicans, now facing an uphill battle in November, know exactly where to go. They can even get much of the Black clergy to back them on this one. “President Bush on Saturday backed a resolution to amend the Constitution to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman.”

Still think gender is a “secondary contradiction”?