Is the fear of Jacobinism the fear of feminism?
Statue Fontaine des Jacobins
I was having a brief conversation yesterday morning at Berkeley, California. I have heard Berkeley called the “People’s Republic” before, but as long as it costs $400,000 for a two bedroom house with 1,500 feet of floor space and $3 for a cup of coffee, I’m going to have to challenge this “People’s Republic” claim.
This is definitely a reflection of how firmly entrenched philosophical idealism is in the American intellectual landscape. We measure politics based on an extremely limited set of allegedly polarized ideas.
At any rate, he and I and one other person (all men) were discussing the recent coup in Thailand, and the two of them drifted into a discussion of how much more superior the US system was to most others, based on the Founding Fathers’ vision. Yeah, those guys again. Founding. Fathers.
Their genius, it seems, was that they understood that without a functional and universally enforced set of procedures to carry out public decisions, there was a danger that democracy would “tumble” into a situation with angy mobs carryng pitchforks. In my usual circumspect way, I blurted out, “That can often be the only real form for democracy.” Pitchforks, that is.
I was about to leave, so this youngish fellow, being diplomatic, decided to simply validate without any argument.
“So, you’re a Jacoban.”
“We could use a bit more Jacobinism,” I relpied… both of us smiling and saying good-bye.
But the remarks stuck with me for the rest of the day.
Okay, it’s a funny word. But it’s one we should know.
During the French Revolution, one of the most prominent revolutionary groups was the Jacobin Club. This was the actual period where the term “left wing” came into use, which I will not explain here (it is linked). The name Jacobin came from the club’s headquarters address on St. Jacques Street. In October 1789, the monarchy tanked, leaving the Jacobins a prominent force on the National Constituent Assembly. In time, the Jacobins were further radicalized and brought popular deomcracy right into the Assembly, outraging the bourgeoisie who felt they owned the Revolution. La Rochefoucauld was so freaked out that he wrote:
[I]n the midst of the capital committed to our care a public pulpit of defamation, where citizens of every age and both sexes are admitted day by day to listen to a criminal propaganda. . . . This establishment, situated in the former house of the Jacobins, calls itself a society; but it has less the aspect of a private society than that of a public spectacle: vast tribunes are thrown open for the audience; all the sittings are advertised to the public for fixed days and hours, and the speeches made are printed in a special journal and lavishly distributed.
Nothing so inflamed the fear of the ascendent “middle class” (soon to become the ruling class) as the association of many of the Jacobins with their emerging popular base within the lower classes. FS denizen Audrey Mantey is particularly fond of the description of an “army of the homeless” that came to defend the Paris Commune. I quite agree with her.
Then shit happened, Napolean finally took power, and things went on a different tack. But the association of Jacobinism with popular uprising as a form of democracy remained…. ergo, the demonizaiton of the Jacobin spirit.
This association was immortalized in C. L. R. James’ immensely readable history of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins.
My two acquaintences were right, of course, that the Foundering Fathers were intensely fearful popular democracy, in exactly the same way that today’s American bosses fear the developments in Venezuela, Bolivia, and now Mexico.
The Federalists in particular were vividly cognizant of the threat posed to them by an uncontrolled mass. Living in a seething sea of disaffected indentured servants, slaves, poor people scratching out a living on the edge of the forests, and indigenous nations, they were keenly aware that the “freedom” for which they fought was limited to a few. Madison, Hamilton, and Jay wrote the Federalist Papers in 1787-8, precisely as a guide for retaiing white, male, bourgeois power in the new nation. The addition of a Bill of Rights was the result of a nascent class struggle that the Federalists lost. They opposed the Bill of Rights vigorously. So when faced with the threat of non-ratification of the Constitution, Madison himself wrtoe the Bill of Rights, in a manner that still expressed these rights not as positive entitlements, but as a list of what the government could not do, and in a way that left those in power… in power. So there was “freedom of the press,” but no provision to ensure that the poor had the same access to public communications as the rich. Literally, “freedom of the press was for those who owned one.”
In no time, Jacobin became an epithet in the US to refer to lower class rabble-rousers. The urgency to impose federalism in accordance with the newly drafted papers was based on a recent rebellion by an American “Jacobin,” named Daniel Shays, in a rebellion that pitted scrabble-farmers against big landowners.
Jefferson’s expressed sympathies for Shays’ rebels led him to being called “Jacobin,” which the Federalists said can only lead to [eek!] “athieism and democracy.” Of course, Jefferson’s sympathies didn’t extend to women, indigenous folks, or slaves. The point is, ths Jacobin thing was a serious expression of fear among the privileged.
People in Berkeley are privileged, too.
As it turns out, there is a living public fugure who has been called “Jacobin,” the frequent subject of this blog: Catharine MacKinnon. Diana Schaub called her that, listing fellow Jacobins, Naomi Wolf, Andrea Dworkin, Alison Jaggar, Susan Faludi, and Catherine Stimpson — while holding up nitwits Camille Paglia and Katie Rophie as the alternatives.
The prolific Welsh Trotskyist, Alan Woods, who still chews on the Tralin-Statsky debate like an old bone, and waits for the decisive event that will send the masses flocking behind the flag of the fifty-person Fourth International. Once again, Marxists can critique the hell out of The Federalist Papers for their fear of the lower classes, but they can’t seem to divest themselves of their hostile fear of feminism. Wood wrote in the aptly titled “Marxism versus feminism – The class struggle and the emancipation of women ,”:
For Marxists, the root cause of all forms of oppression consists in the division of society into classes. For many feminists, on the other hand, the oppression of women is rooted in the nature of men. It is not a social but a biological phenomenon.,
The fact that this is opening sentence utter horseshit, of course, hasn’t caused a peep of consternation on the male left, even though this ridiculous screed was written as late as 2001. This began an essay that supposedly linked the Jacobins to feminism, but the vast majority of it seems to be an essay teaching the ladies how to be proper Trotskyist women.
How is it, then, that the Marxist who is sympathetic to the Jacobins and even their liberal use of the guillotine, is moved to make a straw woman of feminism, while Diana Schaub, erstwhile supporter of feminist impersonators Paglia and Rophie resurrect the epithet just for MacKinnon the Anti-Christ?
I’ll tell you why? The hostility to feminism on the left is identical to the hostility of the privileged to Jacobinism. It’s is the fear of losing control. It is the slavery-period white Southerner’s fear of slave revolt.
I can hear the feigned outrage already. How dare you compare me to a racist! Anything but confont the real fears that are being named.
The fact is, the turbulence of Jacobinism brought an upsurge in feminist consciousness and organizing. Note that among the main complaints of criminality by La Rochefoucauld was the mixing of men and women in public.
In the correct biblical theory of marriage it is the wife who is not made full equal in the copartnership, but is made subordinate, in a limited degree, to the affectionate authority of the husband. Hence, a superficial person may think that women would gain by substituting the infidel Jacobin theory of marriage for the true one. But this is a huge practical mistake. It will ever be the women who will incur the chief calamities from this instability of the marriage relation. The history of six thousand years has shown the only fortress for the safe defense of the rights, dignity and happiness of woman (who is practically the weaker vessel) is scriptural and life-long monogamy. The sure tendency of all lower forms of union is to corrupt the offspring, to barbarize the male sex, and reduce the ‘weaker vessel’ from the honored place of wife to that of a toy of man’s lust, and then the slave of a superior brute force. Will our shallow, conceited age utterly refuse to learn from history? Where else has woman escaped practical enslavement, except in the lands where she is a scriptural wife…The American woman who seeks this liberation… is clutching at a shadow, but letting slip the vital substance…She has her Jacobin freedom, but she has sunk herself from the wife to the concubine. -Robert Lewis Dabney, 19th Century Presbyterian Scholar
Jacobinism, in spirit, is not about breaking taboos (which always serves to demonstrate the privilege of those who can “transgress” these boundaries and to re-validate those same boundaries); it is about ignoring them. It is in the laughter of the indigenous people who sealed off the roads into La Paz and brought down a government. It is not in a woman learning how to desire “like a man,” but learning how not to need a man.
The fear of disorder is a male-constructed fear, the Terror of The Chaos residing in the heart of masculine dualism… chaos being charactersitic of nature and women (Mother Nature – Irrational Woman)… all that stuff that Man has to control. The supreme irony of course is that by working against nature, as patirarchy as done from the very beginning, serial episodes of truly terrifying chaos are the result.
We’ve been over this terrian before on FS (several times), but I was feeling the compulsion to riff on Jacobinism. Take it from here, folks.
Marilyn Farhat:
I really like what this statement had to say because, in my perception, it reflects the reality of how we have always lived:
“Jacobinism, in spirit, is not about breaking taboos (which always serves to demonstrate the privilege of those who can “transgress†these boundaries and to re-validate those same boundaries); it is about ignoring them. It is in the laughter of the indigenous people who sealed off the roads into La Paz and brought down a government. It is not in a woman learning how to desire “like a man,†but learning how not to need a man.”
Ultimately that is what true freedom is all about, the ability to think and act for oneself based on one’s ideals and wishes in fulfillment of each person’s particular potential. It is the simple life path of least resistance and the ability to stay true to our own selves and be happy.
My familiarity with Jacobinism was pretty superficial. My first and last contact with it was in 8th grade in the person of Robespierre and his tyranny, but of course, in the Levant of the 20th century, the sun rose and set over French history, revolution, democracy, and of course, Bonaparte.
My familiarity with Marxism and the Left, from an academic perspective, came about in the late 70s and early 80s. My college exposure to those philosophies was unique in the sense that the professor behind the program was an American Marxist (an oxymoron in an anthropology program at an American University).
Practically speaking, the war was raging, and the Left was part of the quagmire. As you have indicated, women continued to be a sideline. The Left “guerillas” would do dumb stunts like raiding the homes of wealthy Lebanese and, instead of distributing the wealth to the poor people with no jobs, they would destroy it out of contempt for the object and their owners. There is something terribly wrong with the approach because it puts ideology ahead of human life and dignity. Ultimately, we become subservient to the ideology and instead of “suffering” at the hands of those in power, we continue to “suffer” in servitude to such a dogmatic way of life.
We are prisoners of our own ideas sometimes, aren’t we!
I think the problem with the Berkeley-type intellectuals on the Left is that they are so far removed from the realities of poverty and discrimination. They may have seen them, but they may not have suffered their consequences first-hand. Theirs is an elitist and sometimes condescending approach to social issues. We saw that in the Communist elite of the Russian Revolution and the political Zionist ideology. This is the same kind of destructive ideology we are witnessing in the rise of violence in the name of justice in the 21st century. The Berkeley elitists on the Left can afford to sit in coffee shops and contemplate social inequalities because they have the time and the money to do it.
There is a disconnect in American politics between the ideals we hold and the way we practice them. For over 200 years we have been under the illusion that ours is the best democracy because a revolution was won and a few men got together and drafted a set of constitutional basics that were beneficial to them at the time based on their world view. I am not saying that it was not good. What I am saying is that it is not as good as we claim it to be.
For over 200 years this nation has lived in an illusory world we created in our minds. Our ideas of liberty, justice, freedom, equality, dignity, diversity, are entrenched in our psyche and what we project onto the world, but we rarely see their manifestation in society.
We are one of the few societies in the world where there is such a disconnect and illusion. Other societies know they are not perfect and know they are oppressive and have no illusions about it. We, on the other hand, have all the democratic laws, but we also have the loopholes to break them. This, in my opinion, is a very dangerous state of affairs because it gives the rulers the ability to sell us on anything by playing on our idealized versions of ourselves and our mission.
What you said about disorder and fear of it is true. Actually, there are those who believe that the purpose of our current laws and wars is to keep the status quo of the powerful few over the many consumers and cannon fodders. Ironically, maybe those who are afraid do not realize that order is built into our psyche, and therefore, we can never lose it. Even armed revolutions, all-out wars, and natural disasters, some of the worst calamities that can affect human societies, have not stood in the way of us adapting and maintaining order. Even groups and cultures that exist on the margins of society and are on the brink of annihilation, like the Palestinians, the current citizens of Darfur, and the homeless of our inner cities, do have order in their midst.
The biggest hurdle in the way of our freedom and happiness is fear by ideas we generate in our heads that have little or no base in the practical applications of our lives. We use big words and go around in circles to get to the nearest point.
27 September 2006, 3:49 amBrianR:
Thanks for the history lesson Stan. I’ve learned so much from you. Seriously… Thank you!
27 September 2006, 8:31 amStan:
I hope I didn’t seem to promote “Jacobinism” as an ideology or a schema. I really wanted to represent it as the mass rowdiness where new ideas and actions can take hold, a kind of spirit of cretive and, yes, sometimes dangerous fermentation. The fear of it seems to be closely related to Carolyn Merchant’s archeological excavations of “science,” wherein Nature is called blind and “chaotic,” it is gendered female, and simultaneously women are assigned to Nature as one of its “irrational” forces.
The links between the (male) Enlightenment, (male) liberalism (in the classical, not currently popular sense), bourgeois revolutions (both the American and French revolutions pushed aside doddering fuedal-aristocratic power — that had become out of synch with the actual organization of society — by the emerging power of the bourgeoisie), and the present-day boundaries around public discourse and our epistemology. It relates to the fetish of the Constitution and Founding Fathers. It relates to the inability of people to see beyond electoralism in practical politics. And we never seem to relate it, even when it is glaring into our eyes, to the male-meme of Control.
You are right, Marylin, about the limosine liberals. We like to pretend that the right-wing just trots that hoary old stick out to beat us with… but in every good cover story there is a powerful element of truth, or the lie won’t wash. Liberals are represenative of a class — and that is a bad word among these chattering classes, who don’t want their entitlements questioned any more than men do. The Jacobin impulse comes from the very people these liberals DO claim to speak for and DO avoid having any personal contact with.
That has beenone of the recurrent subjects here, this association between one face of patriarchy and liberalism. MacKinnon and Dworkin and Clarke and Mantey and Carrington and Gibbs and many, many others, are called partisans of the right-wing theocrats onthe question of pornography-prostitution, for example, as a way of re-asserting a world view in which we are divided between theocrats and liberals (republicans and democrats, etc etc etc). They can’t let us out of that false dichotomy, because we are showing they are as hypocritical as the theocrats, and that there is a reality outside of their dualized-constructions. More dangerously, we are exposing the privilege of liberals in million-dollar homes and of men. We are saying that the LIBERAL solution has not “liberated” women; it has exchanged one form of control for another. Where do they take this? I’ll tell you… and it is as reliable as sunrise and sunset. The First Amendment. This is the Deus ex machina that is always coming in the third act.
Mention that this is not the subject, or worse, critique the First Amendment for the power it really protects (it is the reason there can be no limits placed on political campaign treasuries, for example, and it protects people like Larry Flynt), and we are equated with despots and censors.. never mentioning that economic class is the most effective form of censorship. Money buys the megaphone.
And I want to unite with one other point you bring up, Marilyn: that is the reality that no matter how torn up, people will organize themselves. We have talked about self-organization here before. The entire philosophy of individualism is a lie. Human beings can’t even survive the first years of their lives wihtout constant social assistance, and we go mad in a matter of days without human contact. The posts here on neurology that mention mirror-neurons suggest, strongly, that our very nature is to to develop in response to social interaction… biologically determined NOT to be biologically determined, and yet the notion of personhood as a series of independent choices — the Big Lie at the heart of liberalism (classical), of post-Enlightenment fraternal patriarchy, of capitalism (not “bad” capitalism; it’s all bad) — persists. It persists becasue it is THE most important of lies, the one that puts the master’s eye and hand in our heads, the implanted microchip of obedience… and the Jacobin celebration of the rowdy crowd puts too many people face to face with others, where the rules get ignored and the sky doesn’t fall, and we are never afraid of the dark when we are not alone. It replaces the lie of “I can do it,” with the perilous reality of “We can do it.”
The ordely anti-Jacobin politics of the liberal os one where those at the bottom DEPEND on their well-to-do interlocutors, just as women are made to DEPEND on men, just as the slave was made to DEPEND on the master… and so it goes.
Audrey will appreciate these links to our last Jacobinn experience. That is the other thing they don’t want us to know about the exercise of the Jacobin spirit, of popular democracy. There is joy there in the existence of others… the opposite of their Hobbesian view of society constructed as conflict.
http://www.vetgulfmarch.org/
27 September 2006, 9:25 amhttp://www.veoh.com/seriesDetails.html?s=s251738
http://www.vvaw.org/veteran/article/?id=592
http://www.traprockpeace.org/new_orleans_march/
http://dianelent.com/vets1.htm
http://homepage.mac.com/union_county_labor/Veterans_for_Peace/PhotoAlbum126.html
http://peacechicago.blogspot.com/2006/03/veterans-survivors-march-for-peace-and.html
http://www.veteransforpeace.org/march_news_31506.htm
http://ltbrin.typepad.com/marchin/
http://dianelent.com/vets2.htm
Required:
Stan, any plans for similar actions in the future?
27 September 2006, 10:39 amRequired:
And have any of the doco crews that were with you released anything?
27 September 2006, 10:40 amjay taber:
There’s more to pious posturing than class privilege. Even amongst those institutionalized revolutionaries of modest means in the Bay Area, there is the tendency to be doctrinaire and exclusive. Capitalist activists, as I call them, wear the mantle of social justice while exploiting those who practice it.
27 September 2006, 12:15 pmYolanda Carrington:
And I’ve dreamed of visiting Berkeley too. Sounds like Chapel Hill on speed.;)
In the fevered repudiation of the Jacobin boogeyman, we see that it ain’t just the white man’s fear of losing control, but also their female/POC decoys’ fear of possessing genuine power—an unconscious admission that we do not yet have power. Indeed, some oppressed folk are scared of revolution.
Real revolution means you don’t get the fat book deals and media celebrity of a Paglia or Rophie, nor the billions of dollars of an Oprah or the high-falutin’ political appointments of a Colin Powell, Condi Rice, Clarence Thomas, etc. Real revolution is scary, with no six-figure salary, four-car garage, or job security waiting for you at the end of all your trouble. Chaos indeed.
But the question remains: Do you want to be a member of the domination club, or do you want to end it?
27 September 2006, 4:07 pmDeAnander:
random musings… I’m not feeling terribly intelligent at present so begging yr collective patience…
the false dichotomy that the Right offers is the Rule of Law (State monopoly on armed force plus patriarchal authority and tradition) vs the Rule of Muscle (diffuse warlordism and a Hobbesian dystopian war of all against all). there’s enough of a kernel of truth to the story (Darfur? Afghanistan? the pornification of western culture?) that women have, I think, legitimate reasons to fear the breakdown of the State… and Dworkin’s eponymous Right Wing Women are not stupid, they are placing a pragmatic bet on the lesser of several evils. they agree with La Rochefoucault. looking at the vileness of commercial and amateur porno, and researching the so-called “sex industry,” it is easy to see how scriptural marriage looks preferable to masculinist misogyny let off the leash. being a trusted and loyal servant to a powerful master can look way better than being a vagabond with a price on your head and every man’s hand against you. the fear of chaos for the lower castes is the fear of a society with no niche to fit into, no rules, no protection from random abuse. and for the upper castes of course it is the fear of the vengeance that might be taken by the lower castes for their long suffering and privation… piano wire, anyone? and western women — middle class women in the G8 I mean — are both upper and lower caste, gendered as untouchables with much to fear if the few protective rules are relaxed, but privileged by income and resource access enough to fear the unwashed mob with pitchforks… as one such, I confess my relationship to the State is vexed; it is my protector and my oppressor. it is a dysfunctional marriage. and my association with it taints me with the stain of its crimes allegedly committed for my benefit, yet which benefit me only tangentially in the process of its real goal, the accumulation of capital by wealthy men…
complicating the matter is the tendency of male-centric Jacobinist movements to personify the class enemy as female (the “rich bitch” theory of class politics, a variant on the Socialism of Fools) and to vent hatred of the upper classes on “Their women” or on women perceived as collaborators (much as prostitutes who had very little choice in the matter were demonised and publicly humiliated by the Maquis for ‘entertaining’ the Boche, rather than regarded as victims of the occupation). women often have reason to fear misogyny from male “revolutionaries” who impose a gender filter on class (identifying rich men as “sissy” for example or blaming women for capitalism).
anyway, despite all these digressions what I’m stumbling around here is that the scenarios presented by wingnut (or even Librul) apologists for Order are not opposites, merely variations in the complexity and density of orders of male power. a system in which a woman fears violence from her husband but relies on his protection from random stranger-male violence is not the opposite of a system where women fear violence from the State but rely on its protection from individual male violence. it’s the same protection racket. it’s a complexity (see Tainter) continuum. and as Tainter said, why do we assume that a devolution of complexity is always a bad thing?
as we see lavishly illustrated (in every sense) all around us, the patriarchal capitalist State does not protect all women; it systematically abandons a subset or underclass of women as fishfood and punching bag for general male frustrations and angers (and to service male sexual prerogative), and protects only women of relatively privileged classes from men of relatively lower caste. the patriarchy is still inbuilt, inhering in the institutions. and for many women (of poverty class, of colour, etc) the agents of the State are the primary agents of misogynist threat and violence…
the “chaos” that control freaks rant on about is less to be feared imho than random and hotly contested attempts to impose authority and micro-order by lesser control freaks. in other words, warlordism is not anarchy; it is the imposition of small-scale order, hotly contested and ephemeral. in true anarchy, warlords could not recruit bands of henchmen to terrorise the peasants, because no one would obey orders. true social chaos would be lacking in the rules of gender, caste, and alpha-male hierarchy formation that lead predictably to atrocity… warlordism and Mad Max scenarios are terrifying because of the strongmen and their gangs attempting to create microStates. if no one were attempting such coercion, pillaging, primitive accumulation and so on, true anarchy would be far less frightening (cf the discrepancy between officially promulgated racist and Hobbesian fantasies aobut disorder in NOLA during the disaster, and the reality on the ground per eyewitness accounts, of occasional badguys but more prevalent self-help and self-organisation and social altruism).
anyone but me ever read Cecilia Holland’s strange sci fi novel Floating Worlds, an exploration of anarchism (personified by a female character) confronting patriarchal “order and authority”? a haunting story of patriarchy and resistance which I should re-read sometime (it’s been many years). also the classic short story “Houston Houston Do You Read” by the astonishingly subversive “James Tiptree Jr” (who was really Alice Sheldon), in which a small group of C20 males confront a female society of the future and cannot cope with it…
wow, that was totally incoherent. like my relationship to the concept of the State, I guess.
27 September 2006, 6:19 pmpeggy:
I got up this morning just to see what’s new on FS. Stan, your discussion of Jacobinism is great. Not because I necessarily agree with everything you say, but because you have once again divested me of illusions floating around in the back of my consciousness that I picked up in junior high and had long ago forgotten about.
The idea of woman as chaos is as old as the hills, as old as the Bible, as old as Kali (and that’s *really* old). It goes right along with the idea of woman as domesticating, civilizing, and taming man. We are imagiined to be everything, good and bad, that men are not.
If I had to choose between being chaotic and being a civilizing force, I would definitely choose to be chaotic. I would be stroppy as hell (love that word “stroppy”). I would be a total wild woman, nobody could control me or tie me down, and everyone would fear me and worship me. It would be so cool.
But that is just a fantasy. And when I think of angry crowds with pitchforks (or machetes, or cans of kerosene and packets of matches) I think of terrible massacres of ordinary harmless people that have happened in recent history, the burning alive of whole families, the convergence of crowds convinced of their own righteousness on people who by dint of the language they speak are assumed to be “terrorists” and hacked to death or beaten to death or stoned to death by those same self-righteous people. I don’t want more of that. I don’t think the world needs more of that.
I think of India, “the world’s largest democracy” as being pervaded by Jacobinism in the way you describe it. When the poor and women act collectively, which they often do in that country, the results can be remarkable. Consider the fight of impoverished villagers against the Coca-Cola corporation, and other such actions that Vandana Shiva and her cohort have written about. There is the occasional genuine victory, the occasional near miracle. But there is also the not-so-occasional nasty massacre of a minority by a majority. I don’t know if the great good and the great evil are two sides of the same coin or not. It would be worth considering, examining, to find out.
Marilyn writes:
“We [Americans] are one of the few societies in the world where there is such a disconnect and illusion. Other societies know they are not perfect and know they are oppressive and have no illusions about it.”
I’m not sure I agree with this. Other societies can be even more nationalistic than us Americans. Nationalism is all over the fucking planet. New Zealanders (of all people!) are absorbed with what is called the “image” of their country. They take offense at even the mildest criticism of their country by outsiders – although, thank heavens, they feel free to criticize their own country themselves. Earlier, or currently in non-Western countries, what kiwis call “image” would be called or have been called something else. Pride maybe.
Elsewhere on FS there has been some discussion of “American exceptionalism.” I wonder if some of the most severe critics of America fall into this same trap. “We are different from every other country because we think we are different from (and better than) every other country.” But I know other countries (and non-state nations), who think they are different (and maybe just maybe better than) every other country.
It’s funny.
27 September 2006, 6:35 pmJames M:
Stan, I apologize for being in a hurry and not having time to read the entire post — but I did catch that you’re in Berkeley. I’m a resident, and would be happy to treat you to coffee & show you around, or somesuch thing if you’re still in the area. Maybe I could also show you my perpetually-almost-finished documentary about the March, and get your input. Send me an email or call (510) 410-4916 if so inclined.
What brings you to our fair overpriced city, BTW?
27 September 2006, 6:41 pmStan:
Back now, James. In Raleigh. Had to go for a job for a couple of days.
It was good coffee, and I’ve never seen so many bakeries in one place in my life.
I went into that ship-like hotel on the hill just to see what rich people do. Al I could think of is how the employees were smiling, and how I would be thinking — in the same situation — oh thank you thank you thank you rich people for letting me eat your shit and act like I like it.
I’m off the meds, obviously, and my mellow quotient is down. See Memorandum #1. (-:
27 September 2006, 7:39 pmJames M:
You’re right, damn fine coffee. And in addition to bakeries, we also rank among the highest in bookstores-per-capita.
As far as the hotel goes, I assume you mean the Claremont? I share your sentiment about the place’s ostentation, but it may be somewhat heartening to note that last year the hotel workers’ union held a protracted and ultimately successful boycott / strike against the Claremont.
http://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/article.cfm?archiveDate=05-27-05&storyID=21480
27 September 2006, 8:57 pmelaina:
Wow.
So everytime De says that she’s not thinking clearly, I absolutely have to devote time to reading what she’s written ’cause it’s always damn good. Yolanda’s shit always blows me away too.
Something ostentatious, I guess, about my new job experience is having to listen to people with much more money, etc. than me telling me how to talk to poor people, as if I’ve never smelled one of those things in my life. I’m trying to just grind my teeth and get through my extended-trial period on the job, but sometimes I get to wishin’ there was a pitchfork just layin’ around somewheres.
And if I have to hear one more woman tell me that feminism’s some sort of a “distraction,” or a “devisive” preoccupation, or anything besides the truth and the way towards liberation for humanity, I’m gonna just vomit. I hear “fine line” and I honestly want to puke. I’m that over the namby-pambyisms. I thank holy jeebus for Stan’s blog, ’cause it cuts through all that mess regularly.
I don’t know much about the Jacobins. I AM a working-class intellectual after all, and at a certain point the jargon all melds together.
But anyways. How’s that for incoherent???
28 September 2006, 12:15 amCharles:
“Jacobinism, in spirit, is not about breaking taboos (which always serves to demonstrate the privilege of those who can “transgress†these boundaries and to re-validate those same boundaries); it is about ignoring them. It is in the laughter of the indigenous people who sealed off the roads into La Paz and brought down a government. It is not in a woman learning how to desire “like a man,†but learning how not to need a man.”
^^^^^
CB: There is a material underpinning to the socially constructed institution of women “needing” a man. It is that men have, in general, more money than women. The key to women not having a socially constructed need for a man is to end the material inequality between women and men.
This material dependency explains the paradox that in the real world, it is women who uphold the institution of marriage more than men these days.
28 September 2006, 4:45 pmComandante Gringo:
I still have a very hard time not seeing much of what develops on the Feral Scholar blog as a defence of feminist and other “identity — and often, uh, obtuse — politics”. Whether it’s in theory or in practice, there’s IMO a dark, not-too-progressive, side being revealed in the positive enjoyment expressed by some over “fixing” some marxist/trotskyist/whatever boogeystrawman in sundry, serial ways as often demonstrated here.
I think marxism, in spite of what the world and it have been thru, has shown itself to be self-correcting, as a science should be. However poorly. However late in the game. And this blog is supposed to be part of that effort in self-correction, right? What I’m saying is that AFAIC, women have been given much power in marxist organizing, however imperfectly maybe; and that there is rather a libertarian, identity-politics agenda behind fixating endlessly on what has been lacking in this historical dynamic.
Fact is, feminists can be just plain wrong and paranoid about things. I’ve seen it, and been the target of it. Same with race and identity politics. You’re white and male?? You ARE what WE see you as! In spite of what you actually think or say or mean. In spite of what you’ve actually done to support women or other oppressed and targetted groups. Whatever it’s been, *it hasn’t been enough — or even real — because WE do not see it*.
Sound familiar? Think this is just sour grapes?
What I am describing *can be downright life-threatening*. It’s not a joke what sometimes transpires as “feminism”.
Methinks some perspective has yet to be reached in this struggle to create a multifaceted materialist struggle for a better world. Something going on here is just a little too precious, IMO. But this is the dialectical process at work; so I expect what that is to eventually come out and be rectified. Or it won’t — and this blog will have shown its own true limits.
28 September 2006, 9:16 pmJeremy:
My brother just told me about something that happened in his political science class. His teacher asked the class whether, all things being equal (political views, morality, money, qualifications, etc.), they would vote for a male candidate or a female candidate for president. 3/4 of the class (including most of the women) raised their hand for the male candidate. 1/4 of the class opted for the female, mostly out of principle. But that’s not the worst of it. The teacher then went on to explain why women are biologically less capable of serving in public office than their male counterparts. Apparently he claimed that a woman’s ‘maternal instincts’ would get in the way of making rational dicisions. It’s completely ridiculous. I haven’t met the teacher, but every time I hear a story about him I hate him more and more.
28 September 2006, 9:50 pmAudrey:
One of the things I learned this summer is that there are two ways of moving a house. One is to get building permits, hire contractors after checking their licenses and credentials, take time off from work to consult with them, deal with insurance claims and all that nonsense, and work for a good spell to pay the contractors and city hall off when you’re done.
The other way is to borrow some jacks, lift the house an inch or two here and there, jam some cut-up scavenged metal fence posts under it for bearings, and just move the damn thing.
The army of vagrants uses that second method and gets shit done without worrying about the rules that tend to paralyze the rest of us, which is why I’m fond of them – that and if I need a door opened, they’re less likely to hold it for me than they are to hand me a crowbar so I can pry it off its frame.
We fall into patterns of obediently following absurd regulations that don’t regulate, but prevent action (the opposite of the usual complaint, that the laws don’t prevent; they regulate), to the point where we will do without basic necessities rather than cross an arbitrary legal restriction, for fear of contributing to a breakdown in law and order. The relief supplies in the Vietnamese neighborhood in New Orleans were like that, sitting within arms’ reach on the other side of a waist-high fence for months, untouched and spoiling in the heat and rain, because someone slapped a “NOLA police†sign on the fence. Better that the FEMA supplies should be neatly bundled and stacked, than risk having them distributed by a non-FEMA employee who doesn’t know what they’re doing. God help us all if, in the ensuing chaos, someone who was authorized to receive a box of oatmeal instead got a can of cling peaches.
I had a longer rant on that, but decided to spare you all, since I found myself frightfully off-topic, mentally wandering around Canada with medications that are over-the-counter there, a half hour away, while I have to deal with doctors visits and insurance claims to get the same here.
The more I think about it, the more the idea of not exactly breaking laws but just dismissing them as irrelevant not only makes sense, but is often the only realistic option. Sometimes it’s the only way to get stuff done; other times it’s just that the “Terror Of The Chaos†is so absurd that it has, as Marilyn put it, “no base in the practical applications of our lives.” Language legislation is an example of that – we can enshrine all sorts of linguistic demands into our laws out of fear that the others are taking over our country, but at the end of the day it’s not going to prevent my baker from talking to his customers in their native tongue.
I wonder if people would take the hint if we started tacking prints of Grant Wood’s American Gothic around middle America, with “Just do it†scrawled underneath.
28 September 2006, 11:02 pmpeggy:
Okay, here it is, what you’ve all been waiting for (not). Charles’ post above encouraged me to send it in.
PEGGY’S MANIFESTO (FIRST DRAFT)
No existing, formal political system works for women. All existing formal political systems are made by and for men – and only certain categories of men. The worst kinds of men – the greedy, the stupid, and the cruel – benefit most from all existing political systems.
The argument that men, by and large, are more interested in power than are women, by and large, remains beyond refutation. It follows that men will always benefit more than women from any political system, because the political is by definition about the organization, manipulation, and exercise of power.
It is not prima facie unreasonable to advocate total separation – men and women to live entirely separately from each other, each sex with its own contiguous territories, its own economies, and its own array of cultural forms. Reproduction to be carried out by means of artificial insemination. Everyone would be happier. But such a total separation could never be implemented in practice, and if it were, it would soon lead to all-out war between the two sides. In all probability the male side would be the aggressor in this war, as men are by and large more given to physical aggression than are women by and large. This is a proven fact. No guarantee exists that the female side would be able to defeat this war of aggression. It is therefore unwise to advocate creating the conditions for such a war.
Partial separation is feasible, however – in fact it is widely practiced. Men have their domains and women have theirs. Men and women meet only on public ritual occasions, and privately, under careful chaperonage, for purposes of procreation. Outside such ritual occasions, women may associate with their own and their sister’s sons and with their own brothers, in the presence of other women.
Two principal flaws mar existing systems of partial gender separation. The first flaw is that men and women remain economically dependent on one another. This economic co-dependency is always to the disadvantage of women. Therefore it must be abolished.
The second principal flaw to existing systems of partial separation is that fathers (in some such systems) have free private access to their daughters. Such free private access must be abolished. Older women must assume full responsibility for the protection of younger women from men, including male kin, and any equivalent or greater dangers, if such exist.
(to be continued)
29 September 2006, 2:57 amStan:
Comandante Gringo: “I still have a very hard time not seeing much of what develops on the Feral Scholar blog as a defence of feminist and other “identity — and often, uh, obtuse — politicsâ€. Whether it’s in theory or in practice, there’s IMO a dark, not-too-progressive, side being revealed in the positive enjoyment expressed by some over “fixing†some marxist/trotskyist/whatever boogeystrawman in sundry, serial ways as often demonstrated here.”
***
Stan: I quoted from a Trotskyist. How can that be a straw man? In the first post I found from you — and I assume from your lexicon you are a Marxist — on another list, you made reference to “bitch-slapping” someone. This kind of cluelessness about feminism — and I for one find myself in synch with the feminist insights of sundry people, Catharine MacKinnon, bell hooks, Chandra Mohanty, Maria Mies, Carole Pateman, Nancy Hartsock, et al, to the last one quite familiar with Marxist perspectives — this kind of casual dismissal, I should say,of the most basic feminist insights (“bitch-slap”?) is exactly the kind of macho posturing on the left that this list wants to call into question. The only thing “dark” about it is that it calls into question the religious faith of some (often expressed in the claim that Marxism is a science). And unless I’ve been expelled by someone’s Central Committee, I still claim Marxism for myself. The whole feminist critique of ruling class/gender epistemology is built on the breakthrough of Marxism that inverted Hegel and at the same time critiqued the mechanical scientism of the Enlightenment. It was not Marxism, but Marxists, ossifying in the Zinoviest version of democratic centralism that demands a kind of Papal ideological conformity and strict adherence to the holy canon, who slammed on the brakes when women suggested that the same scalpel be applied to the rule of men that Marxism had applied to the rule of class.
If you are going to make the claims that feminism is “identity politics,” and that whatever you mean by this is “obtuse,” then define your terms, and explain your position instead of simply making pontifical declarations. This blog has always encouraged debate, though I’ll admit to being autocratic about unsupported manly degrees and flame-throwing.
The reason we keep going back to this gender issue again and again is not to somehow wreck Marxism, at east that’s not where I’m coming from. Mistakes can be like kitchen accidents where we burn food onto the bottom of a pot. Marxist hostility to feminism is not only a tremendous historical error (that urgently needs self-correcting), it has become a default positon so stubborn and recurrent that it is stuck to the bottom of the pot. When that happens, I have found, one wipe at the problem doesn’t solve it. You have to scrub at it again and again until you get it out.
******
Comandante: “I think marxism, in spite of what the world and it have been thru, has shown itself to be self-correcting, as a science should be. However poorly. However late in the game. And this blog is supposed to be part of that effort in self-correction, right?
******
Stan: Yes.
******
Comandante: “What I’m saying is that AFAIC, women have been given much power in marxist organizing, however imperfectly maybe; and that there is rather a libertarian, identity-politics agenda behind fixating endlessly on what has been lacking in this historical dynamic.”
******
Stan: How is it libertarian? What is identity politics? Is class-struggle identity politics? I explained the “fixation” above. When we get out house in order, I’ll shut up about it. I have heard putative communists trash women who did not shave their legs, support pornography on “decidedly libertarian” grounds, refer to”bitch-slapping,” engage in endless male adventurist polemics, dismiss people like bell hooks as “ultra-feminist” (whatever TF that means), declare that “feminism” is petit-bourgeois, gay-bash, and issue endless apologetics for everything like the nearly exclusive male pantheon of Marxism to the rape of German women by Soviet soliders in Berlin. I have heard them joke about prison rape in talking about their enemies, make leering comments about women’s body parts, refer to “enemy women” in the terms of sexual revenge, state that “women are backwards,” and refer to physical courage as “having balls.” This is not from the outside. I have been an extremely active member of two different Marxist formations, and have worked closely for over ten years with one in another country through three elections and a very violent coup d’etat. Marxist men talk like this, and act like this.
*****
Comandante: “Fact is, feminists can be just plain wrong and paranoid about things.”
*****
Stan: Prove that. Give examples. Simple declarations carry no wieght here.
*****
Comandante: “I’ve seen it, and been the target of it. Same with race and identity politics. You’re white and male?? You ARE what WE see you as! In spite of what you actually think or say or mean. In spite of what you’ve actually done to support women or other oppressed and targetted groups. Whatever it’s been, *it hasn’t been enough — or even real — because WE do not see it*.
“Sound familiar? Think this is just sour grapes?
What I am describing *can be downright life-threatening*. It’s not a joke what sometimes transpires as “feminismâ€.”
*****
Stan: Sounds depressingly familiar. White folks and men are constantly carping about the fact that those on the bottom of the hierarchies are not giving them their creidt as individuals, with no fleeting thought about how that demand squares with the more general experience of oppression with most men and most white folks. Anti-feminism, like much anti-Marxism, inevitably falls back on liberalism. Sorry that women and dark people have “threatened your life.”
I walk in constant fear of being killed by feminists, too, doncha know? I’m somewhat sorry about being so flip, but these are the kinds of predictable interventions that a couple of us here could almost itemize based on their frequency.
*****
Comandante: “Methinks some perspective has yet to be reached in this struggle to create a multifaceted materialist struggle for a better world. Something going on here is just a little too precious, IMO. But this is the dialectical process at work; so I expect what that is to eventually come out and be rectified. Or it won’t — and this blog will have shown its own true limits.”
*****
Stan: Well, that straightened us right out. The gauntlet is down, it seems… Comandante. Will you bitch-slap us if we don’t pickit up?
29 September 2006, 9:20 amYolanda Carrington:
“Fact is, feminists can be just plain wrong and paranoid about things. I’ve seen it, and been the target of it. Same with race and identity politics. You’re white and male?? You ARE what WE see you as! In spite of what you actually think or say or mean. In spite of what you’ve actually done to support women or other oppressed and targetted groups. Whatever it’s been, *it hasn’t been enough — or even real — because WE do not see it*.”
Glad to know what you really think of us, comrade. By the way, the above passage is totally liberal.
29 September 2006, 12:40 pmDeAnander:
…women have been given much power in marxist organizing…
have been given?
given? oh, how nice of the boys to give the girls some power. that about sums it all up, doesn’t it. CG, call a friend or buy a clue. your patriarchal boxer shorts are showing.
29 September 2006, 3:31 pmpeggy:
El Comandante lost it when he said that feminism “can be downright life-threatening.” Yeah right. Our ballsy little muchacho is playing the victim here. We really should just ignore him.
29 September 2006, 9:55 pmelaina:
It’s the same bullshit whiny man talk that always pops up when anybody talks about any kinda feminism that isn’t the “fuck-me” kind. Or that in any way threatens the masculinist hegemony.
And yeah. It’s a fucking hegemony. That’s why radical-ness is needed, yet these folks try so damn hard to make us think that we’re crazy or “going too far.” Fuck ‘em.
Anyways, just some late-night posting before I leave the realm of computer-access. So somebody buy me a laptop.
3 October 2006, 9:09 pmelaina:
And Stan, get to work on Memo # 2.
3 October 2006, 9:10 pmStan:
Ahhh, Memo #2. Weeellll, Memo #1 was the National Security Memo, the one that can protect us Amerikans, held hostage here in a vast aggolmeration of predeployed chemical, biological, and radiological weapons of mass destruction (our modern imperial infrastucture, that is), by removing the righteous grievances that people with access to C4 might have.
Memo #2 should be the Domestic Security Memorandum (pun definitley intended), and that IS INDEED a good place to outline how we secure 52% of our population from 48%..
Meanwhile, for those who think this gender thing is overstated as an organizing principle in our society, check out the response that the Freepers are making to a piece on Bill Hathaway and me (Bill is an ex-Special Forces guy who is also trying to get gender).
The gay-baiting is used as what they believe is the heavy artillery. As entertaining as it is distrubing.
4 October 2006, 9:19 amJorge:
To all good socialists:
What Professor Ortega y Gasset rightly calls the gravest danger that today threatens civilization: the absorption of all spontaneous social effort by the State. “When the mass suffers any ill-fortune, or simply feels some strong appetite, its great temptation is that permanent, sure possibility of obtaining everything – without effort, struggle doubt or risk – merely by touching a button and setting the mighty machine in motion.”
17 October 2006, 3:45 pmCharles:
Would insert here “Holy Writ” on the state, but …
19 October 2006, 12:59 pm