« Saudi Arabia & Iran / Mad capitalism
Weird story alert from Audrey »

Doctrine

29th November 2006, 09:27 pm by Stan

With some sadness and with not the least desire to devalue the experiences I have had with comrades, nor to minimize the hard work, nor the consciousness and concience, nor the friendship of many comrades, I am herein announcing and explaining my definitive rejection of Marxism in its current organizational forms, be they called Marxist-Leninist or Trotskyist or Maoist.

This decision comes after months of intense reflection. I will not attempt to separate the personal from the political reasons. My personal life, as a spouse, father, grandfather, friend, and member of local and poltical communities, is my most direct window on the world, and the experience against which I have to measure any political belief or organizational theory. Even moreso, as I now find myself indefinitely caring again for an infant; and thereby bound to the house in the same way as many women, constantly being confronted with the most immediate and practical necessities. The kind of politics that does not take these constraints as the starting point of all politics is what I am now taking under long review.

One of my primary disappointments has been what I consider the failure to take seriously the struggle against patriarchy, and to give it the same weight in our organizing as we do class and national oppression. There have been only token efforts in this regard, and no serious initiative that I have seen to go outside the canon to understand this system. Worse, there has been a reactive embrace of liberal-libertarian “feminism” by many comrades… which I consider to be a sly academic reassertion of male power in the consumer-choice package of “freedom,” undermining the whole analysis of gender as a system. But this is not the crux of the issue for me. Feminism was the gateway to a number of other interrogations of the assumptions of organized Marxism.

My own last association with organized Marxism was with members whose work I greatly admire. In particular, I was attracted to their analysis of national oppression, which remains in advance of most of the US left, and their stated committment to refoundation of a politically efficacious left in the US.

It is this project, refoundation, which carries with it wherever it goes another question, that has preoccupied me for my entire tenure in and out of Marxist formations. The associated question, of course, has been “What happened? Why is there no organized left with the attention and support of broad masses of peope in the US?” What is the nature of this “Crisis of Soicialism”?

The Marxist method (as opposed to doctrine) of interpreting these issues led me to address that latter question with deeper ones still? What do we mean when we say “organized”? Who do we mean when we say “masses”?

In arriving at tentative answers to these questions, I have — almost with a sense of grief — concluded that neither Marxist-Leninist nor “Trotskyist” nor Maoist, nor Guevarist, etc etc etc, organizations are suitable to the task, no matter the quality of the individuals who populate them. The history of these organizations has been, for more than six decades minimum, a string of failures, punctuated by periodic successes only in mass work that was self-organizing outside Marxism to some extent anyway. I have come to believe this is a failure of the structure and of the over-reaching scope of these organizations.

Marx himself began his career preoccupied not with questions of economics, but of human happiness. What he observed was oppression of one by another, and the sense of personal fragmentation — of alienation — that permeated modern society; and he determined that these two things were related.

Since then, the accumulation of historical experience has provided us with both confirmations and rebuttals of the “lessons” of Marx and Engels. A series of thinkers and leaders after them, in the same tradition, elaborated on that connection between social power and personal alienation.

Unfortunately, the struggle to give these intellectual and practical breakthroughs organizational assertion has been one of hostile encircelment — literal and figurative — which gave rise to a bunker mentality.

This bunker mentality led to the transformation of Marx’s analyticial toolbox into a quasi-religious organizing doctrine, and one that was fought out almost like an epoch religious struggle in painful cycles of orthodoxy and reformation, then reformation itself morphing into orthodoxy.

Marxism-Leninism is a term coined by Stalin to establish an imaginary line of predestination (Stalin had his opposition shot as a demonstration of his own ardency on the issue.) from Marx-the-Godhead to himself as a way of mapping his encircled-and-militarized state leadership onto the collective consciousness of Eurasian mass still steeped in the episteme of hierarchical and patriarchal religion, complete with its struggle-to-salvation teleology.

It was this disciplinary regime that inherited and ossified in its own image the notion of a Leninist Party as the last word in political organization, and “democratic centralism” as its organizing principle. It remains to this day the axiomatic faith of Marxism-Leninism and all the other variants.

From the very beginning, however, this principle that worked during the contingencies of the Russian and Chinese Revolutions — both still majority peasant societies (look at Nepal and Haiti today) — was never an organic match to the social conditions nor the prevailing consciousness in the United States. For this reason, I believe, the mismatch between the idea-driven M-L organizations and the lived experience of US society at large has consistently been a history of leadership sects without a solid, organic popular base, especially since the World War II.

Each of these sects then competes with all others for the extremely finite pool of potential recruits. In such a market competition, the competing “sellers” are obliged to explain and emphasize their differences, not their similarities — a point made very clearly by Louis Proyect — and in emphasizing differences over unity, a climate of perennial sectarianism has been created that seems inescapable. This has also created an internal climate in each of these organizations of consolidating members into an ideological conformity… to the point where members ask leadership questions like, “What do we think about this?”

This has further led us to believe that the obstacle to consistent influence — as opposed to temporary and contingent successes, mostly in mass work — has been the “false consciousness” of the masses. My own last affiliation was better than most of the other M-L formations in eschewing the establishment of the One True Revolutionary Party, not hawking sectarian newspapers, and looking self-critically at the left (as evidenced by their collecitve preoccupation with the “crisis of socialism”).

It is not what has been done well by members of these organizations that concerns me; it is the fact that the people who have done well would have done well with or without the organizations. In my own last gourp, there is a very good, very committed, and very non-sectarian impulse that is widely shared by the members. The flaws with which I cannot myself be reconciled are flaws in Marxism-Leninism itself, the orgnizational fetish of democratic centralism, and the unavoidable overreach of any inorganic effort to “build a national organization” on the basis of an alien ideology and political practice. And Marxism-Leninism, as it is presently organized, as well as its Trotskyist cousin, constitutes a structurally alien formation within American culture.

It is the organizing principle of the “Leninist Party” that still carries the day, democratic centralism, and the method inhering in that organizational model, which requires “the line,” which I have come to believe is responsible not merely for a failure of the left to gain a consistent foothold among the broad masses, but which is — more significantly — an illusion that “the left,” as we define it, is the only appropriate vehicle to carry out the transformation of society. This illusion is shared by many elements in what we widely call the left, that “correct ideas lead to correct practice,” yet we have never questioned the whole notion of correctness, with its hubristic assumptions of cookie-cutter universality.

While I observed some formations last year, responding to Katrina, put the brakes on actual relief efforts in the process of trying to develop a line on the response to Katrina, it was impossible not to notice that in the spaces abandoned by patriarchal white supremacist capitalism, the more decentralized efforts of one group’s volunteers managed to move into those abandoned spaces and establish outposts, operating in a very immediate and practical way, and exercising the utmost tactical agility. This was when it occurred to me that the notion of unity at the core of Leninist organizing philosophy is one that is a centralized and imposed unity, and an imposed ideological and practical unity which reaches for a scale that cannot keep pace with social development. It is, then, constantly mismatched with the social reality of the masses these ideational vanguards wish to lead.

And yes, I still believe in vanguards… but that is another topic.

There are things the Hezbollah can teach us that the former Chinese Communist party cannot; and distance and scale set material limitations on the ability of political cadres to simultaneously administer themselves in a singular organization and remain conversant with emergent social and political realities.

The Leninist tradition in organization, whether taking its cue from Trotsky, Stalin, or Mao, is uniformly possessed of this crippling combination of internal comformity, external lack of an organic class-for-itself, the illusion that bigger is better, the market-trap of competing orthodoxies, and the patriarchal attachment to “conquest of nature” dualism.

It is this latter issue which led me — in familiarizing myself to the extent possible — to try and understand the epistmeology, social structure, and psychic realities of gender as a system of men’s social power, and which has contributed to my own decisive break with Leninism. The other area of study that has led me to reject Leninism is that of energy as both a phsycial and social phenomenon. These are connected in my mind, and point directly to the major errors not only of Leninism but within the whole Marxist tradition more generally… and I still consider myself in many respects a Marxist.

The industrial utopia imagined by Marx and touted by Lenin (who even embraced the soul-killing efficiency doctrine of Frederick Winslow Taylor) is not possible in the real world, and less so each day, and it is a Man’s world in any case, a notion based fundmentally on the patriarchal belief in Man-Nature dualism (and the gendered pronoun is not an accident, nor has it ever been neutral). It is the Marxist method of inquiry that exposes the fetishism of the machine — the idea that technology is innocent of the social system that produced it, and that a factory under socialist control works differently than one under capitalist control, even though the spirit-murdering machinery of capitalism remains unchanged. It was Lukacs theses on reification that gave rise to the most radical version of Western feminism, which also called the Man-Nature dualism to account. And these were summarily rejected by the “organized” left.

These are not incidental errors. The theories of socialism that stumbl;ed again and again through the world system of the 20th Century were fundamentally shaped by these basic assumptions, and the rejections of the basic premises necessarily implies at least the dramatic reformulation of the whole theory. Marxism is effective to study one dimension of capital accumulation; and Marxism has provided some valuable interpretive instruments, like fetishization, like reification, like commodification. But as Myles Horton said, Marxism is a good tool box, but a bad blueprint.

The struggle for state power here is chimeric. There is not the slightest chance of any Marxist-Leninist group ever taking state power in the US, or of any movement under the sway of Marxism-Leninism, or Trotskyism, or Maoism, et al. It is a theoretical doctrine that is alien to the American experience: one that has made some of us smarter than the average American, in some sense, but which has no chance — because it is so culturally alien — of ever making us stronger than the mass of US residents who will continue to reject it. It is not organic to our reality; and like a failed organ transplant, it will continually be expelled from this body. This in no way reflects negatively on the people in M-L organizations, who are some of the smartest, most tireless, and dedicated people I have ever known.

There is some “sense” in the recapturing and cumulative strategic principle of mass line, as a way of assessing work within movements. But M-L organizations who employ mass line, and other dotrines, apply them to reified instances like the anti-war movement, which is not a social transformation movement at all, but a very contingent and heterogeneous response to a symptom of the crisis of empire. The role of Marxists in this movement has been mixed. On the one hand, they were quick to do the grunt work required to cohere opposition to the war into some political focus; on the other hand, they brought their competing agendas and lines into the heart of American response against the war… and we cannot know what deletrious effect that had at the end of the day, because we cannot know what might have happened without the great UFPJ-ANSWER struggle. It was, however, without a shadow of a doubt, a sectarian struggle between Marxists. We have employed our doctrines in the context of work with a national scope, in the spoken and unspoken belief that the larger scale work will be determinative of local work, and that this is a sound strategic docrine.

If it is, then I am having difficulty seeing the evidence of it. Top-down strategies do not work. We are not turning our fingers into a unified fist. We are building one-sized beds for a thousand Procrustes.

Every one of the Marxist formations, in accordance with its most teleological assumption — that the working class, once forged in struggle as a class-for-itself — will be the inevitable midwife of socialism ( claim for which there is not yet one shred of supporting evidence), have hewn to a dying trade union movement in the US, and one with its remainder so woven into the military-industrial-security complex as to be almost indistinguishable from it. The Crisis of Socialism can be found here, I believe, in the heart of Marxist doctrine, and not in treasons and deviations and contigent “errors.”

First, our conception of socialism as a blueprint for state power that addresses the questions rasied by dualism and industrialism only after some imagined political victory ignores what we haven’t studied (or have selectively ignored as a “deviation”) from Ivan Illich to Alf Hornborg to Maria Mies. This inherently patriarchal, industrial, state-socialist “theory” is as dead as my great grandfathers. Second, the trade union movement is not the whole working class, and the trade unions in the US have chosen — more often than not — patriarchy and-or white supremacy and-or reactionary nationalism at almost every turn. The exceptions do not disprove the rule. There is a reason for that. An imperial working class has imperial privilege, and their livelihoods are lashed to the survival of a system designed for domination and war. As a friend — Joaquin Bustelo — recently put it:

“I can’t imagine how it is possible to deny that there is not now nor has there been for a very long time a working class movement worthy of the name in the United States (a “class-for-itself” movement). Does anyone disagree? Does someone want to correct me on the half-century long decline in union membership, the decline in the number of strike-days, etc.? Does someone want to let me know about the thousands of Anglo workers who organized their workplaces to walk out last May Day in solidarity with Latino and immigrant protests?

“That white male workers would try to decert their union because they don’t want to be in the same collective as Blacks and Latinos, doesn’t that tell you something? That’s going on right now, TODAY in my area. And things like that have been going on day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, decade after decade for a VERY long time in the United States. (’Things like that’ = white Anglo male workers identifying their interests with those of their nationality, gender and ruling class instead of with their class. But this isn’t an exclusively white, male thing. You will find varying degrees and sorts of privilege –male privilege, ‘legal’ privilege, ‘citizen’ privilege, age privilege– among women, Blacks, Latinos, and so on, where it also tends to have a corrupting influence but that is a much more complicated discussion.)

“This is not ‘a period of reaction,’ this isn’t ‘the downturn after a defeat,’ nor ‘a lull during a prolonged prosperity,’ nor anything else like that.

“You cannot explain the state of the U.S. working class movement by pointing to economic cycles or things like specific punctual or exceptional circumstances, even ones lasting many years. It wasn’t the post-WWII boom, because that ended three and a half decades ago. It wasn’t the cold war, that’s been dead and buried for a decade and a half. Try to think of the reasons why this situation has come to be… It is time we start reconstructing Marxism to explain the real world, instead of dreaming of catastrophic scenarios that will restore the real world to compliance with our Marxist class-reductionist dogma.”

And to that, I would add that it might be time to reconstruct a politics of resistance that is not Marxist, in the sense that Marx himself said, “I am not a Marxist.” This ande that formation have been ahead of the pack on deconstructing privilege as a material feature of whiteness (far less so masculinity); but as “Marxist” formations, they inevitably return to the default position — sometimes by a circuitous route — of the working class as the key, and democratic centralism as the organizational principle. When we have seen all the other variables tested, and no fundamental change has happened, then it seems time to question the untested variables. But Marxism — the organizational doctrine, not the interpretive method — may well be part of the problem of the Crisis of Socialism. I tend to believe that this is so.

Democratic Centralism has put a series of socialist governments in power; and in almost every case, the restoration of capitalist relations of production (the insturuments of capitalist producion were kept, and even sought out) has been accomplished, or the society has fallen into collapse. The machinations of imperial governments cannot be discounted in this; but that is a real thing, too.

The single exception where the revolution has been effectively defended to any degree has been in Cuba, but Cuba began with smaller scale (ergo, greater social embeddedness, in the Polanyian sense), and Cuba was forced to decentralize and re-localize as a survival strategy. The centralism of DC was forced to give way to the democracy of effort required to re-localize the very basis of Cuban survival and independence; and the successes of Cuba have largely been predicated, since 1990, on implementing deviations from the norms of Marxism-the-doctrine.

My friend goes on to say:

“Building a socialist movement for the 21st Century means starting from the premise, and very palpable reality, that the socialist movement of the second half of 20th Century, viewed as a whole, largely DID NOT WORK. And it especially did not work in the places where Marxist theory says it was SUPPOSED to work, in the advanced capitalist countries with a fully-developed working class that is the big majority of the population.”

Unless and until we face this fact, and ask the critical question, Why?, then refoundation of an effective politics of resistance in the US will never happen. We will simply become more and more politically irrelevant, and grasp every contingent breakthrough, like our important roles (which I recognize) in the antiwar movement, as proof that Marxist (meaning Leninist) organization works, whereupon — with the inevitable waning of that influence as the fissures close — we rely again on the explanations that we are experiencing “periods,” “lulls,” and “downturns.”

The tendency to compartmentalize, to which I myself fall prey, and which is an essential part of the dominant ideology into which we are all trained from birth, combines with the conservatism of institutions that characterizes even very radical political formations. That combination provides us with the excuse that “the ideas are right, but the method, or tactic, is wrong.”

One of the most difficult but important realizations that I am coming to in this process of trial and error is that the ideas and the methods and the tactics are all both determinants and products of each other.

The Marxist doctrinal belief that the working class represents the potentially liberatory force within the primary contradiction — a notion that is, in my view, plain mysticism posing as a “scientific doctrine” — of bourgeois-proletariat, attempts to override the demonstrable fact that patriarchy is an older, deeper, and more durable “contradiction,” that the most turbulent and transformative struggles of the 20th Century, while often under the leadership of Marixists, had a primarily national character, and that they were more often carried out by majority-masses of peasants, not proletarians.

The Marxist history of bourgeois revolutions makes prominent note of the fact that the bourgeoisie gestated its social power outside the “primary class contradiction” of its time — artisocrat and serf. Why do we believe a metropolitan industrial proletariat will — even recognizing its exploited position — rise up against the system upon which it is completely dependent, and from which it takes its very identity? The advantage that a peaseantry had in emerging capitalism was that it was not yet locked into the capitalist unity of opposites. The implications of this fact seem to have been lost on us.

The last thing a metropolitan industrial working class is going to do is embrace a project that threatens the only stability it knows. Boeing workers are not going to oppose the military-industrial complex. Prison guards are not going to oppose prisons. Agri-business workers are not going to oppose processed foods. Auto workers are not going to oppose cars.

Our experience is that this class in the US, with occasional exceptions, fights for its privileges within that class — male, national, and white. Moreover, the collapse of the current system faces this working class with catastrophe, beginning with the fact that it is thoroughly dependent on military spending to hold back that catastrophe. I can only conclude that an imperial working class is not and never will be the midwife of anything except reaction.

It is only possible, then, in my view for now, at least — and I am enthusiastic about saying I could be wrong — to effect the basis for any genuine and sustainable resistance movement in the United States by first attending to the question of local community independence, beginning with the material basics: food security, water security, energy security, acess to learning, and a health infrastructure.

We have mostly ignored the laboratories for exactly these things, calling the “utopian,” i.e., intentional communities; and we have looked on locally organized efforts to impact local politics as somehow less developed than we are… when these formations are often well advanced of anything being done by the M-L and Trotskyist left. They don’t need a line. Their practice is always responding to things immediate and concrete; and their leadership, though this practice, is very very smart, in very very practical ways.

World systems theory has gained an element of acceptance within Marxism, but only to a degree that doesn’t contradict the canon. But there are other theorists, Hornborg stands out on the issue of unequal exchange and Carole Pateman on the flaws in “labor power” as a concept, who have taken siginficant steps toward overcoming all that is normative in Marxism, and incorporated the best and most universal values of Marxism into theories that are far more adequate accounts of imperialism and gender than anything still residing within the canon of the M-L and Trotskyist left.

One of the reasons we have had such difficulty keeping up with these genuine breakthroughs has been our sectarian insularity — a feature of our organizations even when we struggle against it, as several aborted attempts at “integration” should be telling us. We recruit, then we push through an educational program to consolidate new membership around the line, relying on our own group-by-group canon, and our respective exigeses of dead revolutionaries in the Marxist pantheon.

Not only have we not incorporated the laws of physics (energy) into our world view, we have not incorporated any of the discoveries that have permanently altered the science known by Marx and Lenin, except to elaborate on their Cartesian dualism. Ivan Illich wrote in 1973 (in typical sexist fashion, but accurately aside from that):

“If a ruler could draw power from sources other than men, his control over this power still depended on his control over men… Political control coincided with control over physical power, and the control of power depended entirely on authority. Equal power and equal direct control of power [generated by individual bodies] were both features of preindustrial societies, but this did not guarantee an equal autonomy in the exercise of this control.”

This was the beginning of a comprehensive critique of industrialism, and one which Carolyn Merchant and Alf Hornborg and others have elaborated on at length. The implications of the incorporation of energetics, and chaos theory, and of the patriarchy in the very DNA of the myth of “scientific objectivity,” are not add-ons to Marxism that will leave its basic structure unaltered. The produce a comprehensive change in how we understand the world… and if we are in a DC organization, that means we reject it.

Hornborgs’ thermodynamic analysis of unequal exchange (in understanding imperialism in a mesaurable, non-normative way) yields dozens of new insights into the dynamic of imperialism that address apects of the world system that Lenin and Hilferding never touched. And the reason Marxism has been so far unable to accommodate these new insights has been a kind of reactive reluctance to hear anything that might suggest that Marxist organization (and therefore practice), and the class-reductionism that has been carried forward for 150 years, no longer match reality.

By and large, we remain trapped in the development paradigm, which still fails to grasp energy physics as the zero-sum game that it is, and establishes goals that would leave the masses at the mercy of machines and bureaucrats. This has not only led us to remain insular; it continually leads us into competition for people and resources with more organic efforts that have more traction and relevance than the projects flowing out of our DC process, making a fetish of collectivity, and stifling individual initiative and the creativity that goes with it.

Any revolutionary movement that has a prayer of taking hold in the US must be organic, that is, self-organizing… and consist of small and many independent, but networked, practical efforts. The larger any organization is, in personnel or in scope or in geography, the more the institutional tail begins to wag the mission dog. This is no longer pop science. With increased scale, the tooth-to-tail, operations-to-adminstration/management ratio of any organization shifts correspondingly. Larger scale, smaller ration of energy invested in operations, higher into management. The average human is only bio-psychologically equipped to handle around 150 relationships in the absence of administration (Dunbar’s number), and a bunch of those people are already family and friends. But has the left even studied this cross-disciplinary discovery? No. We just say we have to struggle against bureaucratism without ever trying to identify its origins. If it hasn’t been mentioned by the pantheon, we don’t know it. And if it doesn’t extend directly from the pantheon, we reject it.

Again, this is not a moral or intellectual failure. It is, I believe, a failure that is hard-wired into the organizations’ structural-practical dialectic, into Marxism-as-a-doctrine.

It is my opinion, at least at this point in time, that leftist organization in this disciplinary cadre model is not only incapable of bringing the refoundation of an effective politics of resistance into being, it stands as a real impediment to any refoundation process for a wide-scale politics of resistance.

Category: General  |  Comment (RSS)

185 Comments

  1. charlene grant:

    I would like to make a few, scattered comments (no coherent philosophizing) as to why I find the Marxists objectionable. I started reading the World Socialist Website (WSWS) several years ago. At first I liked them because they were the only ones referring to the Bush Administration as being a bunch of thuggish criminals (now, more voices are saying this). But I quickly grew disenchanted because they were such “one-issue” people. The only problem they saw with the world and the only solution they had for the world was summed up by “Workers of the world, unite!” Nothing here has changed.

    They do not acknowledge the reality of Peak Oil (how could they, since this is going to be a real “globalisation and internationalism” killer-diller?); they do not acknowledge the problems of over-population (along with the highly patriarchal Catholic Bishops, they seem to think the world can easily accomodate 40 billion people); they do not acknowledge that all mankind shares the same basic, human nature (why should I believe that a “dictatorship of the prolertariate” would be better for me than all the other worldly power structures have been - I well remember the 1960’s when women were not welcome in Unions or working-class jobs).

    They seem to believe that only rich people can be thuggish criminals, whereas it is obvious to almost everyone else that precious “working-class” people can also be thuggish criminals. As Hemingway supposedly noted, the poor and the rich are different primarily in the amount of money they have. Give the poor more money and more power and watch them them start to act exactly, in every way, just like their richer brethren. A wonderful book has been written about some pigs who took over a farm, drove the oppressive human farmer out, and then rather promptly began walking about on their two hind legs (like the detested humans) and oinking the philosophical line that although “all animals are equal, some are more equal than others.”

    Anyway, “workers of the world, unite” does not seem to me to be any kind of solution to this world problems, especially, in the face of “Peak Oil” and “Global Warming”.

    “Population Reduction”, however, is an idea whose time has come.

    29 November 2006, 10:59 pm

  2. Fire Witch:

    “It is only possible, then, in my view for now, at least — and I am enthusiastic about saying I could be wrong — to effect the basis for any genuine and sustainable resistance movement in the United States by first attending to the question of local community independence, beginning with the material basics: food security, water security, energy security, acess to learning, and a health infrastructure.”

    Exactly. And in order to realize these very basic elements of community independence, would it not do for us latecomers (whether immigrant or imported)to humble ourselves and ask our Indigenous neighbors, who, through at least 500 Nations, already had developed sustainable, human-scale, deeply embedded lifeways that were shattered only after these Nations were invaded and deculturated?

    Yet despite that shattering, Traditionals throughout Indian Country struggle everyday to continue their ancestral ways in the face of overwhelming odds, and have done so for better than 500 years. No doubt they have much to teach us about where we are and what we need to do to live here with this land, and in accordance with laws worked out since time immemorial.

    By both treaty (legally binding international agreements) and tradition, we who are not Native are on someone else’s national territory. If we moved to Ireland or Ethiopia or India, we would be expected over time to be naturalized into the traditional lifeways of those countries.

    Why should it be any different here on Turtle Island?

    So the question remains, for me anyway - what does Naturalization look like?

    And how might honoring the treaties and listening to the land be a part of that process?

    29 November 2006, 11:50 pm

  3. Stan:

    How, exactly, does this “population reduction” occur?

    If it’s an idea whose time has come, what is the first step?

    This is likely to open up a whole ‘nuther thread on neo-malthusianism, so we must be veddy veddy alert.

    One way I suggest we reduce the population-effect is we cut consumption by two-thirds in the United States, begining with those who earn more than $100,000 per capita.

    Higher population countries aren’t using a fraction of what we do. One rich American, so to speak, has the ecological footprint of a couple thousand rural Indians.

    But again, the question comes up: What do we do? Aside from have ideas, that is.

    If it’s to be population reduction, and not population-effect reduction, then combining the two means we begin “reducing” with the rich people first. More bang for you buck if you see my meaning.

    Mass sterilization?

    Firing squads?

    Space colonization?

    See how tricky this population thing is?

    29 November 2006, 11:58 pm

  4. RedDan:

    Are you rejecting Marxist Parties and other political formations, or are you rejecting Marxism as a tool for political, social, and economic analysis?

    The former I certainly understand and have some strong agreement with.

    The latter I see as needlessly limiting - there is no reason (at least to me) why Marxist analysis (and the many flavors thereof) cannot be a powerful complement to gender/liberation/feminist and other analyses that have equal or greater power to illuminate in different venues of intellectual exploration and political organization.

    Marxism and its various variants make for excellent diagnostic tools, and very poor prescriptive tools.

    I, myself, remain committed to the root/fundamental ideals and core analyses expressed in many Marxist writings, theories, and actions/organizations….

    But I agree with you in that ultimately there is something about all of the above that induce or pre-dispose Marxist political parties to factionalize, decompose, and scatter to the winds.

    Many of those parties then spend more time fighting each other, even to the point of actively hurting the political movements and harming the political fortunes of the very same “oppressed” that Marxists invoke as political and ideological inspiration.

    When I think about political parties, political organizing, and political groupings that are or were most effective, especially in the US, I think about the IWW.

    Elizabeth Gurley Flynn is one of my heroes, as are the other “leaders” of that movement.

    It seems to me that what “Marxists” all to often lack in terms of connection to the struggles that are so avidly analyzed, the “populists and syndicalists” understand and utilize to great effect. The opposite is true when it comes to hard core analysis and diagnosis…

    I am not sure that “disavowing” one or the other, or any other theoretical basis is the way to go.

    I have, in my own travels, taken to “absorbing” and then trying to see how the advantages of one can be combined with the advantages of the other…and how the drawbacks and flaws can be eliminated.

    In short, I understand where you’re at, why, and how you got there…and I have a lot of agreement and sympathy…

    I remain redly yours…and regardless of the nametags, the struggle continues.

    30 November 2006, 1:10 am

  5. Yolanda Carrington:

    Charlene, two things. First “over-population” is a white male supremacist boogeyman. As Stan noted, the problem isn’t overpopulation, it’s overconsumption of finite resources by people in the industrialized metropoles (read: the White West). If Americans and other fools in the Global North would just stop chugging down all the petroleum, natural gas, and water, the Earth would be alright.

    Second, please don’t refer to humanity as “mankind.” There’s nothing neutral or benign about this appellation—indeed it cuts to the very heart of what white male supremacy is about. “Mankind” is a term loaded with every colonialist notion ever conceived, from the “White Man’s Burden” theory of progress to eugenics. Most humans on Earth are not in the Brotherhood of Man.

    30 November 2006, 1:12 am

  6. Marilyn Farhat:

    Stan,

    This is a very sobering analysis and I think your observations hold so true. I will address a couple of aspects only.

    I am not deeply familiar with the Left/Marxist/Socialist movement(s) in the United States. There are many who claim they are Leftist, but that really means nothing if it only implies a certain framework of thought with no action.

    My experience with the Marxist and Socialist movements in the Middle East are extensive and, from your observations, it is clear to me that the problems you address are more ubiquitous than we may have liked to admit.

    In the US and in my part of the Middle East, the leadership of the M/S (abbr.) is comprised of the educated and economic elite. They had the ability to “mobilize” the masses around two main areas: economic (not class. Class is the backbone of Lebanese society) struggle and political reform. Although women were a large part of the movement and were more active than their counterparts in other political organizations, their status as women was not part of the stated “struggle.” All M/S leaders I came in contact with were men, rich men from old money, educated men who had a “vision” of what was just and what was not. I doubt if there was mass consensus per se as to what those injustices were for everyone. Also, those same movements were tied to other states. In a sense, they were not autonomous and were more driven by regional and international political maneuvering as much as by people’s rights. The Middle East was a hotbed of mass demonstrations, sloganeering, shooting guns in the air, yelling the evils of Capitalism, Imperialism, Zionism, terrorism (yes, that term was in existence among the Left in the 60s, and it implied state terrorism), treason, etc. People were riled up and went home complaining about all the evils in the world that the Left was going to eradicate, but they went home with the same feudal and corrupt mentality, and they went home with the same cultural paradigms that kept their women second class citizens. I believe that the right conditions have to exist for a successful mass movement of the oppressed. I think it is a rare occurrence in history, but it does have a chance. However, I do not think that mass movements will eradicate class or prejudice completely. Our human system is one of checks and balances, whether in Capitalist or non-Capitalist societies. However, even that is not enough. Political and economic struggle cannot be divested from the moral and cultural base. People can be indoctrinated into a certain framework of thinking without really giving the reasons behind them much thought. That is why many movements have failed and that is why most people end up believing what their parents believe in.

    In order for the masses of the world to take charge in a just and equitable fashion, a few things have to be present:

    1- There has to be an ideology, or belief, that all human beings, no matter what their religion, culture, gender, politics, criminal background, disability, etc., are worthwhile and that they are all entitled to a “piece of the pie.” These same people are also obligated to behave honorably towards others and participate in society to the best of their individual abilities. Women have to be a rationally, as opposed to an emotionally or ideally, recognized part of that struggle. This means that if my religion or culture tells me that women should cover their head whether they like it or not, but I believe in justice for all (a common contradiction in Islam and other religions), I really have to evaluate my moral honesty (by the way, you probably know that Islam and Marxism are mutually exclusive, unless Marxism decides to divest itself from the issue of God and leave it to the individual person. But I am sure there are those who can reconcile both). We have to also understand that many poor people do come from religious and cultural backgrounds that have their prejudices built in.

    2- There has to be power sharing and it does not have to always be the educated elite. Mass movements seem to work well on the community level because of the uniqueness of the circumstances of each community. That encourages self-worth and participation by all. People need to govern themselves by consensus as opposed to elections. Consensus, although more time consuming as a political and social process, is more equitable and just in the long-run.

    3- The new movement has to be able to address and tackle, to a certain functional degree, the problems raised by the troublemakers who will try to manipulate situations to their advantage. I am in total agreement with what Charlene has pointed out. And I have read “Animal Farm” in high school and it is so applicable.

    I always say that we are all capitalists at heart if we do not put rational and moral thought into every action we make. We all engage in consumption practices that do not promote individual and group justice. The way our behavior impacts the environment is also very critical as you stated (that is a whole new dissertation).

    It is doable, but it gets more difficult by the day. Marxism was the answer to our ills in the minds of the old time Marxists and the old revolutionaries but it has failed in the “field.” It joined the ranks of the oppressive monarchies, oligarchies, and democracies. When the Arab countries were carved up after WWII, many of them tried all the “isms” and the poor are getting poorer and state oppression is on the rise. This new age of Empire and the militarization of the youth will, in my opinion, serve to polarize the working classes (the military are working class too). One segment of the working class will serve the military/industrial elite (either in the system as soldiers or in work areas that support the military system), another will be resisting it, and another will probably be completely apathetic or incapable (like today).

    Which brings me to my final point; there can be no effective long-term justice for the masses and mass awareness if disarmament does not become part of our ingrained world view. Demilitarization on all levels and respect for human life have to exist on a global level, along with respect for women and the environment, before we can even think about functionally aware masses. Some of this can be accomplished through social consensus and after hundreds of generations have been indoctrinated into this new world paradigm.

    Did I forget multi-national corporations and exploiting people in the non-Western world?

    It is going to be a mess before it gets better.

    30 November 2006, 2:27 am

  7. Dick R.:

    Hmm. “Thinking” and ‘acting’ locally - creating decentralized and automomous initatives and organizing around immediate concerns certainly has much to recommend it. But the very real objective limitations of this as a primary focus for forging revolutionary or transformative praxis are also increasingly apparent …

    Ask the APPO in Oaxaca about this.

    30 November 2006, 5:02 am

  8. Yolanda Carrington:

    Oh…by the way Stan…this piece is powerful. I can already hear folks accusing you of a shift towards anarchism. But that’s the mindset we marxists are stuck in.

    I’ve grappled with this impasse for a minute now, as you well know. To me there always seemed to be this huge gulf between marxist practice and American reality as I knew it. The reality of living here, while it has evolved and adapted for the better, has not fundamentally changed. This is still a settler state based on white male supremacy—-and nowadays it’s a settler state that’s the dominant empire of the world.

    An effective politics of resistance has to begin with that basic understanding.

    30 November 2006, 6:09 am

  9. Stan:

    Full disclosure: Dan and I have a history, practical solidarity and ideological struggle, whic supports my points… we wasted a fair amount of bandwidth some time ago on the Tralin-Stotsky debate. He was among a circle of rads hereabouts who took me in, so to speak, befroe I’d even taken off my uniform eleven years ago.

    I’m with you, Dan. I love Marx, warts and all. People may not realize it, but when they get hold of a gem like Foner’s Reconstruction, they are enjoying the result of an analysis that is strongly influenced by that special Marxist standpoint.

    It’s democratic centralism that no longer makes a lick of sense to me. I mean, no one here — as far as I know — is hiding from the tsarist secret police.

    My issue with Marxism (the doctrine, the organizational model, etc) is not that Marxism (the interpetive method) doesn’t explain a lot of stuff. It damn well does; and that’s why the ruling class still hates it. The problem is, it doesn’t explain everything, including a lot of stuff that has a real influence on the political work we do. Yet that pretension is there among Marxist orgs, that they have gotten hold of the final Grand Unified Theory, which is treated more as an article of religious faith than “science,” which acolytes also claim M-L is… “the science of Marxism Leninism.”

    On the issue of Marxism’s supposed incompatibility with religion; that has been the outgrowth of doctrinaire Marxism. Illich was a Christian socialist. Gustavo Gutierrez was very explicit in his embrace of historical materialism as the secular core of liberation theology’s outlook.

    As a resident of the American South, I can say pretty much categorically that there ain’t gonna be no mass movement down here that don’t get prayed over. During the final struggle to break legal US Apartheid, there were preachers out front and praying at every turn. I don’t know if angelic postal workers were carrying the messages through the barrier between us and infinity; but the praying sure kept the prayer-makers steady in some perilous times. Being a results-based person, I’m not gonna argue with that.

    30 November 2006, 8:29 am

  10. howard:

    Stan wrote:
    On the issue of Marxism’s supposed incompatibility with religion; that has been the outgrowth of doctrinaire Marxism. Illich was a Christian socialist. Gustavo Gutierrez was very explicit in his embrace of historical materialism as the secular core of liberation theology’s outlook.

    –Has anyone seen Bob Jensen’s pieces in Counterpunch over the past few months about how he as a committed progressive activist has been coming to terms with his own spirituality? Also, folks might want to check out the writings of theologian Walter Wink. I think he is fairly good on patriarchy and its inherent problems — he calls it the Domination System. A good starter for anyone interested in this is his book The Powers that Be.

    –I haven’t run into a better “interpretive method” (Stan’s term) than Marxist analysis, especially as updated by radical feminists and others. That said, I can think of maybe dozens of great leftist analyses I’ve read over the years, pages and pages of great facts, analysis, and presentation on some issue of huge importance, and then you get to the “what we can do” chapter at the end and you can tell it is just a tacked-on afterthought — suddenly it gets all vague and abstract and “we must be more vigilant” or something like that is the usual sort of statement. Noam Chomsky would be a good example of this kind of writing — terribly stimulating, thought-provoking, and informative, but very short on any sort of suggestion about what to do.

    So for me the problem has always been - “what is the praxis here”. Maybe that’s where spirituality can come in to play, and maybe that’s where feminist Marxism is taking us.

    30 November 2006, 11:33 am

  11. Winston Warfield:

    Stan,
    I spent a year in Vietnam in the infantry (I Corps, Quang Tri, 1st Bde., 5th Inf. Div.), and had already been “infected” with the organic and local essence of resistance to the war. No M-L party formation with an “advance line” brought me to it. It was direct experience and observation, with a little background reading (Malcolm X, some Marxism). Resistance was truly “local” (one’s own unit), and usually found expression in countercultural modes. Refusal to respect officers; long hair; the music you listened to; if you were white (like me), hanging out with black brothers, etc., etc. It had organizational impact when I declined an order/invitation go out on ambush with our mustang brigade S3; the authority crisis passed without me seeing the wrong side of a stockade (I was a Spec./5 at the time). He knew my disgust with the war, and agreed with some of it; we had had a few verbal flareups already. I recently finished “Soldiers in Revolt”, by Cortwright, and was astonished at how widespread and effective was the resistance on the inside. It was huge, and had grown over several years, by the piling up of myriad local acts. There were heroic organizers at some bases, but they weren’t M-L “outsiders”; they were grunts, too.
    After I got out, VVAW hit the streets like a 20-megaton meme, and I joined immediately. To my knowledge, VVAW grew out of local experience and wasn’t the organizational creature of some M-L central committee, either. It was only later that M-L formations, lusting for credibility, infiltrated and started their games.
    I experienced some of the same frustrations you have articulated with the M-L firmament, having gone through that particular wringer for a time. I ended up quitting in disgust with the sectarianism, the lack of any reality-checking, the requirement for ideological conformity, etc., etc.
    You have written an important piece in this critique. Marxism is not a religion, and emerged at a point in history when its discoveries were progressive. It was not the last word. Feminism, the environmental movement, etc., needn’t ride parallel rails, but continue to do so because the “canon”, as you say, is still worshipped (reified?). The notion of “unlimited growth”, shared by both capitalism and socialism, has to find its way into the dustbin of history, for starters.
    Keep writing. You have something to say.

    30 November 2006, 12:23 pm

  12. Stan:

    There you have it, Howard. Chomsky is actually a Bukuninist or some such thing; but I saw his faltering with his approach to Haiti. Describe what is wrong, then castigate the people who take up the struggle in earnest when it gets messy.

    The problem with the left, as laid out above, imo, is structural, and the structure determines the practice, and the practice shapes the reflection on practice into an ideology.

    Marx was against ideology.

    Praxis, for those who may find this arcane is a 50-cent word meaning reflective practice. Reflection without action is sterile. Practice without reflection is chaotic. Praxis is the notion of these two artificial divisions organically linked.

    Two reasons, imho, that the organizational forms fail are (1) the actual system is still stable enough to survive, and (2) we cling to the illusion that we can “take it on” head-to-head as it were.

    Cribbing again from the late Mark Jones:

    How will it happen?

    It will happen amid a general and catastrophic crisis of capitalist commodity production or it will not happen at all. The point of planning will then be transparently, abundantly clear to every survivor on the planet: planning will be, not to produce, but to conserve and repair damaged ecosystems, to ameliorate the catastrophic aftermath of the demise of capitalism and its prior exhaustion of all the great ‘commons’ — the commons such as land (19th century, beginning with the English enclosure movement, ending with Africa); the intellectual and cultural heritage of all previous civilisations; water; all that is under the land or seabed; and in our own time, the last great common — DNA, the pillaging of which also embraces the deconstruction of the human genus.

    Mark’s point that the system itself has to unravel is not original. It came directly from Marx. And Mark Jones was constantly in trouble with other Marxists for pissing all over their pretty schemas and stating obvious but painful truths.

    So, to me at least, the primary question becomes one of organization, but there must be organizations that are stable in the Prigogenian sense, that is, embedded — with all the limitations that imposes on organizing. And by organization, I don’t mean book clubs or periodic coffee klatches or toy Internationals. I mean networks of durable human relationships that are actively preparing for and addressing the concrete manifestations of said crisis and on-going collapse.

    This is obviously not the same as Mark’s suggestion about the eventual necessity for global planning, about which I believe he is absolutely correct. The more immediate question is how do we get there from here… I mean, really? We can’t just name a series of fantasy milestones, when we haven’t given the first thought to what we do tomorrow or next week or next year to get to the first milestone.

    Given my own deep mistrust of the psychic hotliners of schematic Marxism, and my firm belief in unpredictability in complex systems, the key at this stage seems to be facilitating the development of these locally-embedded strucutres, mere oases for the time being, into islands of resistance culture. Do we call it that? Not if we want anyone to participate.

    This is really the main question we’ll be addressing when we open Insurgent American, a subscription website, (The date is still fuzzy, but we’ll announce it here, and publish The Insurgent’s Handbook there.).

    We need a practice that simultaneously creates the networks and the culture, an anti-commodity culture, a cooperative culture, and that also serves as a broad, decentralized laboratory to figure out the hard practical solutions to the incoming crisis. So we need to try and understand what that crisis may look like, and not in purely apocolyptic terms (as malthusians are wont to do, because they are statisticians).

    That’s why ideas like feminist food praxis and such are intriguing to me. The preoccupation with food is universal. Eating together is an integral part of human bonding.

    It’s also why figuring out how to get off the grid (that is, outside the system to the degree possible) is not a survivalist method, but a way to start staking out literal independent zones that serve the same purpose that the rural hinterlands did for the Chinese revolutionaries. The reason we don’t need the True Revolutionary Party, aside from the fact that it is an illusion, is that people in Rochester are not facing the same circumstances and people as the people in Birmingham or San Pedro.

    So my simple suggestion for what to do, aside from what we are already doing — which is plenty — is start small and work on things like food independence, or establishing local independent media, or community gardens, or building community around women’s shelters, etc etc etc.

    No reason to invent the wheel. As an indigenous Nations organizer from New Mexico told me once, we (whoever that is) don’t need to organize people. All people are already organized. We just have to find out where, and show up.

    30 November 2006, 1:06 pm

  13. Victoria:

    I always learn from you Stan, thanks very much for your analysis. Not that I felt drawn to commit to Marxism at any time, but I do like one of his questions and use it many times when there seems to be too much hype - “Who benefits?” Sometimes it is obvious, white men, usually. Sometimes the surface hype is that “people” benefit, say with Welfare Deform, uh, Reform, or Trickle Down Economics. What has had me puzzled for a long time is that when the answer seems so obvious - who benefits from the government bailing our hedge fund investors to the tune of billions of dollars - not so much as a ripple of protest ensues, except among a handful of people like the folk who read your blog.

    Patriarchy and capitalism are so closely entwined that the death of one will be the death of the other. It has been encouraging over the years to learn of your growth as a human being and a feminist, though I sure do wish your experience could be more widespread among the men of the world! How about making all men take charge of infants for the next two years while women go out to do the “important” work of earning money? We will quickly find that any work men do IS the important work. Personally, I think the time of the Goddess is coming again, and you may interpret that as the Gaia theory or Mother Nature taking back her own after us human parasites have annoyed her just too far to be ignored any longer.

    I dont think there can be any mass movements without local movements. The issues facing localities, while similar on the surface, can be very different and certainly the approaches to solving them are various. From my work with a Haitian organization that works with grassroots groups, the first thing you do is listen! With respect! And include everyone in decision making! Sounds kind of democratic but I dont want to go out on a limb here. People know what their problems are and know how to solve them - no need for outside experts or evaluations or commissions or more study! Talk to the experts, the people themselves.

    If we remember Friere, one of the first things people who have lived under oppression do, is oppress those they feel are “under” them. What do we mean by “working class”? People who we may classify that way probably think of themselves as middle class, and think they do not share the concerns of those who they think of as working class, even though economically they may not be earning a middle class wage. We know from repeated experience that people vote against their own self-interests if they think they may get some benefits trickled on them. NOT that I think Bush was ever actually elected, but still, it seems people didnt care enough that he wants to privatize social security and kill their children in multiple ways - war in South West Asia, “war” on drugs, limiting their educational prospects through “All Children left Behind” or gutting nutritional and medical programs.

    Enough - I applaud your efforts always and wish that more people could actualize their experiences so honestly.

    30 November 2006, 2:58 pm

  14. Louis Proyect:

    For people interested in my critique of “Marxism-Leninism”, go here:

    http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/organization.htm

    I want to respond to Stan’s obviously very important statement but I need some time to digest it fully.

    30 November 2006, 3:54 pm

  15. Curiouser:

    A non-doctrine related question, Stan: what prompted you to write this? And does it mean you’re renouncing membership in Freedom Road?

    30 November 2006, 4:17 pm

  16. Stan:

    Just as it says. I am without political affiliation.

    30 November 2006, 4:39 pm

  17. onto:

    This is exactly what anarchists, anti-authoritarians, and non-heirarchical autonomous social movement activists have been saying for years! Read David Graeber’s short book “Fragments of An Anarchist Anthropology” (online here: http://prickly-paradigm.com/paradigm14.pdf ) for a short primer on what anarchism actually means, which is basically, exactly what you’re saying. Fighting for localized, networking independence and autonomy, understanding the intersections of oppressions and not privileging any revolutionary subject or class above another, taking seriously ecology and energy, against democratic centralism, against the illusion of the ‘mass’, and more. Whether you see it or not, you’re critiques and projections are ‘anarchistic’, which is really a good thing, since anarchist or anarchistic social movements and organizing has been resurgent, strong, successful, vibrant, practical, self-critical, and exciting.

    30 November 2006, 4:48 pm

  18. Legume Sam:

    Kees van der Pijl describes the Soviet Union as follows:

    The Soviet Union has posed the most serious challenge to the pre-eminence of the West in modern history. It not only mobilized a large population and a vast territory rich in resources; in addition, the state class pushed the contender state posture to its logical limit, as a state socialism with a planned economy. (p. 216, Global Rivalries from the Cold War to Iraq

    Van der Pijl describes the history of capitalism as the history of two basic state formations: 1) the “Lockean heartland,” the dominant state formation (as a guarantor of the capitalist class) which, for van der Pijl, began in England with the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and 2) the various “contender states,” which typically have employed autocratic methods (in the spirit of political theory as laid out by Thomas Hobbes, thus “Hobbesian”) in order to resist “peripheralization” by capital’s tendencies to world-domination. (See Chapter 3 of Transnational Classes and International Relations for elaboration.)

    Thus we might take the above assessment of the Soviet Union as fitting into this history. The Soviet Union was a contender state — thus its resistance to capital took authoritarian forms, as (within the context of global domination) contender states generally must “catch up” in industrial terms with the “Lockean heartland,” which had all of the advantages of imperial exploitation at its disposal. Contender states, moreover, had to cope with populations that had been subject to capitalist discipline to a lesser degree than the “Lockean heartland,” thus their imposition of authoritarian forms of what we might still call “capitalist discipline” was an adaptive feature of their various “catch up” efforts. Contender states which dared engage the “Lockean heartland” in global combat lost; thus Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm, and Hitler lost their wars.

    The Marxist-Leninist parties IMHO borrowed whatever legitimacy they claimed to have from the fact of the Soviet Union’s existence. They may have claimed adherence to “Marxism-Leninism-Maoism,” but such an ideology rested upon the rivalry between the various other “Marxist-Leninist” states (China, Albania, Romania) and the Soviet Union itself.

    Thus, we might conclude, “Marxism-Leninism” appropriates the insights of Marx, only to use said insights in defense of the creation and maintenance of contender states. What points to the obsolescence of said doctrines is, obviously, the disappearance of “Marxist-Leninist” states around the world, but also the spread of capitalist discipline throughout the preponderance of human societies. The Maoists may still lurk in the corners of Peru and Nepal, but this points to their isolation. The US, the “Lockean heartland” of the era of populist Keynesianism, is becoming more and more “Hobbesian” with the increasingly authoritarian character of its government; the “contender states” are becoming more powerful by the day, and the crises spawned by neoliberalism, the last stage of capitalist discipline, get worse each decade.

    As Stan and others have pointed out, any revolution in this era will precipitate as the result of a “general and catastrophic crisis of capitalist commodity production,” quoting Mark Jones. Simply put, the world will at that point have had enough of capitalist discipline per se, and that then we can expect a revolt against capitalist discipline at all levels.

    Stan suggests actions such as “getting off the grid” — it may be of use to broaden this into a general call to reassert the right to live off of the land, against the general state of enclosure with which capitalism was imposed upon the world’s nations. It may also be useful to call for the general abandonment of what Marx called the “circulation sphere,” since its main ruses (especially law and economics) lie in capitalist ideology.

    30 November 2006, 5:10 pm

  19. James M:

    the key at this stage seems to be facilitating the development of these locally-embedded strucutres, mere oases for the time being, into islands of resistance culture. Do we call it that? Not if we want anyone to participate.

    I recently began to tell a friend about the Vets’ Gulf March, whereupon she interjected that she doubted the efficacy of this form of protest … something I doubted at the time, too, and still doubt, if all we’re talking about is marching and carrying signs and shouting slogans. But I explained to her that it actually taught us all something about spreading the meme of our resistance culture in what Audrey called “negative spaces” (the artist’s metaphor applied to social geography) — places abandoned in the wake of disaster and capital flight. Places like Slidell, LA, where we stayed at Bayou Liberty Relief Camp. Veterans for Peace, IVAW, and others moved in there to fill the void of human assistance left by the government’s neglect, and to my amazement (having grown up in the region,) the locals came to be on our side, and were even proclaiming our values.

    My question is this: We have demonstrated an ability to embed ourselves and begin to incubate socialistic structures in these negative spaces, where previous social structures had broken down due to inability to cope with disaster … is it not possible that we’re creative enough to also do it in less receptive places, like complacent suburban enclaves, as well? It would have to be *extremely* covert in terms of ultimate motives, but the first thing that comes to mind would be something like a community food garden that would invite locals to participate in producing their own sustenance, rather than relying on the industrial-ag and Safeway model. And perhaps organizing some kinds of events through churches, or somesuch thing. I don’t know, I fear I’ve got stars in my eyes, but it seems there is a general (submerged) yearning, even among complacent suburbanites, to escape their disaffection and atomization … and there’s got to be a way to exploit it, in the best possible sense.

    Am I dreaming?

    30 November 2006, 5:22 pm

  20. DeAnander:

    I am pleased to offer a comment by my buddy rootlesscosmo — he of the sadly impaired Safari browser which cannot handle this site for some reason. all that follows is his text not mine:

    I can’t imagine how it is possible to deny that there is not now nor has there been for a very long time a working class movement worthy of the name in the United States (a ‘class-for-itself’ movement). Does anyone disagree? Does someone want to correct me on the half-century long decline in union membership, the decline in the number of strike-days, etc.? Does someone want to let me know about the thousands of Anglo workers who organized their workplaces to walk out last May Day in solidarity with Latino and immigrant protests?

    I agree completely but I’d extend the scope of this point, as also of this one:

    Building a socialist movement for the 21st Century means starting from the premise, and very palpable reality, that the socialist movement of the second half of 20th Century, viewed as a whole, largely DID NOT WORK. And it especially did not work in the places where Marxist theory says it was SUPPOSED to work, in the advanced capitalist countries with a fully-developed working class that is the big majority of the population.

    I think it’s in order to ask whether a “class-for-itself” movement, in the sense postulated by Marx, has ever existed anywhere. In none of the countries where Communist Parties came to power was there anything much like this ideal-type movement, except in the Eastern sector of Germany (where the Communists came to power under the guns of a victorious occupying army) and in Czechoslovakia, where a real mass Communist Party, which had won a comfortable plurality of the votes in the 1948 election, then seized complete power (almost certainly at the behest of the USSR) and proscribed its political rivals, transforming itself from a fairly honest participant in democratic life to a hated elite whose next major activity was to conduct a monstrous show trial of many of its leading members. (The best source on this, I think, is Artur London’s “The Confession” — he was one of the few accused to escape with his life.)

    The classic mass, working-class-based CPs of the developed capitalist world (Italy, France, Greece, post-dictatorship Spain and Portugal) were, and their inheritors still are, essentially Left Social-Democrats, leading trade union movements (which are *by definition* not revolutionary organizations) and forming Parliamentary blocs or junior coalition partners in governments based on programs of reform. (This is why the custodians of Marxist purism denounce them; it’s also why those custodians remain politically negligible.)

    Which is another way of stating my proposed extension of the second quote (from Joaquin Bustelo) above: the socialist movement of the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th century DID NOT WORK either, if by “work” we mean “overthrow capitalism and inaugurate workers’ power over a fully socialized economy and social life,” or even “win a majority of workers to a practical revolutionary program at the level of tactics.”) The Bolshevik Revolution — as pretty much everyone knew at the time, including Lenin — was not a fulfillment of Marx’s (sketchy) prediction but on the contrary a direct challenge to it; the consolidation of “socialism in one country” was (as Trotsky pointed out) not a fulfillment of Lenin’s prediction that the revolution could survive only on condition that the workers of capitalist Europe, especially Germany, made successful revolutions of their own, but on the contrary a response to that prediction’s failure to come true.

    I think we’re only fretting over how much of Marx to retain because we’re still standing amid the remains of a historical peculiarity, namely that real (trade union) movements and real (social-reformist) parties, headed in the main by Left intellectuals, latched onto the ideas of Marx and Engels as a “scientific” validation that their efforts would have some final, contradiction-transcending triumph — they got very angry when Eduard Bernstein suggested that this was a distraction (at best) and that the only sure thing was struggle, on into the indefinite future. Marx’s theory of value in Vol. I has to be laid aside, in Vol. III, in order to try to analyze how actual capitalist economies (not capitalism in the abstract) function; the labor theory is there, I believe, not because it’s empirically accurate but because it lays a “scientific” foundation for the theory of crises which in turn supports the vision of revolutionary change. (The same goes for the even less well-founded view that capitalist productive relations become “a brake” on the development of the productive forces.)

    Lenin’s theory of the state is crudely reductive except as enriched by Gramsci, who laid the theoretical basis for a political practice — that of the post-Stalin CPI — that was *not* revolutionary (as, again, the Italian ultra-Left kept saying, though as events showed they had no real revolutionary strategy of their own, only a set of dogmatic formulas about “autonomy” and a practice that repelled most workers by its evident contempt for democracy. And as for the “vanguard party,” I think Stan lets the air out that balloon quite effectively.

    In short, I think that *even on its own terms* — and leaving aside the way it hypostasizes one social contradiction while ignoring or minimizing others, and the way it’s committed to an unsustainable view of the relations between humanity and the limits of its physical environment, and the impossibility of reaching agreement on what it is, and the really terrible crimes that have been committed in its name — Marxism really doesn’t hold together. Like Stan, I’m not sorry for the time I spent in a (soi-disant) Marxist-Leninist group, in my case the CPUSA; like Stan, my greatest debt to it is that I met brave, smart, extraordinary people, some of whom really understood how our society is soaked in racism (though not how it’s also saturated by patriarchy) and were serious about trying to fight that. I wasted a fair amount of energy and time — going to pointless meetings, defending or excusing the glaring defects of “existing socialism” — but who’s to say I would have spent that time and energy more usefully if I’d taken another path? I might very well have frittered it away at the poolhall.

    At all events I don’t have an alternative revolutionary strategy, or comprehensive analysis, to put in Marxism’s place; partly that’s because I haven’t got a tenth of Marx’s learning and originality and application, partly also because I don’t foresee a revolution of any kind and I distrust Theories of Everything such as Marxism tried to be. I talked to our friend S B the other evening… It was a very interesting conversation, in the course of which she said quite matter-of-factly that she — I imagine she’s probably 31 or 32 now — fully expects to live long enough to see the tide of cruelty and horror and violence and misery, the condition that most of the world’s people are already living in, reach her still-sheltered life. This makes me feel really bad, as I told her, because our generation, including her own parents — lifelong teachers’ union activists — really thought we were going to leave a better world for her and her contemporaries, and we failed. She answered that that’s why she’s decided never to have any kids. I think this is as good a summary of where we are as any I’ve come across, and I think Marx is no more help in dealing with it than Saint Anselm.

    30 November 2006, 5:34 pm

  21. Guy Montag:

    Stan,

    Good to hear you’ve joined the club of apostates to Marxism. Folks like Simone Weil and Dwight MacDonald came to the same conclusions you did back in the 1940s. Marx’s analysis of capitalism is valuable. But, I never liked the idea of “democratic centralism”. Later, I discovered the “anarchists” (e.g. Proudon, Kropotkin, Tolstoy, Ed Abbey) who advocated decentralism and self-governing communities. Maybe thats utopian. But hell, industrial civilization is utopian! (especially considering the implications of global warming and peak oil). Wendell Berry is a fine advocate of local eonomy and community and well worth reading (try “What are People for?” or “Sex, Community & Economy).

    Guy Montag, Engine Co.451

    30 November 2006, 8:19 pm

  22. DeAnander:

    meanwhile I am going to say something nice for the only actually-existing socialist state that still looks anything like a socialist state, and I’ll let old Fidel say it for himself (in his 80th birthday speech the brevity of which is testimony to his frail health).

    A few days ago, the prestigious organization World Wildlife Foundation, based in Switzerland and considered the most important NGO in the world to monitor global environment, acknowledged that the set of measures implemented by Cuba to protect the environment made it the only country on Earth to meet the minimum requirements for sustainable development.

    emphasis mine. note those important words, only country and minimum requirements. wanna read ‘em again?

    Cuba it seems to me is one of the the great riddles of our time. if we understood how it survived/transcended the doctrinaire socialism that decayed into such aberration in Russia, China, NK; how Cuba flourishes in its multiracial diversity instead of devolving into interethnic strife; how one of the lighter-handed dictatorships on the planet maintains relative order and cooperation in a population severely stressed over 50 years by revolution, blockade, peak oil… we might understand far better how the rest of the human race might survive this coming century.

    does Cuba meet the minimum sustainability requirement because it is a socialist state? (that is, the future and the commons are a legitimate part of planning and planning is a legitimate part of governing) … or does it succeed because it is Cuba, and the ideology is just a veneer on some deeper historical or cultural pattern that gravitates towards community and survival?

    Cuba, Tikopia, Gaviotas, Curitiba, Mondragon: riddles of our time, Rosetta Stones which we’d do well to study as we contemplate the final days of the fossil empires (in every sense). anyone want to add some more examples of (at least local) success?

    30 November 2006, 8:32 pm

  23. Jonny:

    Back at age 21, I was a full time activist in Vancouver, Canada. Attending Communist Party of Canada (CPC) meetings, I was intellectualy and politically attracted yet ultimately repelled by the culture inside the CPC: their young member was 38, and the rest were 65 plus. The principle of democratic centralism further pushed me away cuz I didn’t want to be just an arm instituting policies from above(which were then halking papers, wooing union members and general recruiting). Although I desired strongly to be part of an organization, I found none that seemed worth joining at that time.

    My experience + that of at least 20 people like myself who went thru the same, supports Stan’s thought. Rather than problems of mystified, anti-communism innoculated, overworked or confused masses presenting new challenges to recruiting, high quality potential party components such as my comrades and I were finding parties of that type uninhabitable, despite our initial attraction to the many good points the party had.

    I did become demoralized by age 24 by the repeated tragedies I witnessed: my beloved and electrifying political groups were being destroyed from the inside via repeated fuckups by patriarchally thinking male leadership. Of my 3 heroes who abused their leadership positions by having sex with much younger female members, 2 destroying their marriages in the process, all 3 irreparibly damaged their credibility as leaders, particularly among the female group members.
    After each instance, each group lost key people, limped along for a bit, then dissolved. Who needs COINTELPRO simulations when our leadership is this messed up?

    30 November 2006, 8:57 pm

  24. Sololeum:

    Methinks there is an over intelectualisation of the issues, which are infact very simple.
    1. Most people now are employed in the “Superstructure”, in admin and personal service industries, and many more in non-essential industries.
    2. Non-essential industries and the superstructure is fueled not by people but by fossil fuels - in the smaller scale past it was fueled by sun vide the grass.
    3. Our system is based on growth and is now hitting its straps as sources of oil and other fossil fuels are not providing more fuel…
    4. Soon we begin the decline and we have to decide on the type of society that will replace ours, and how will we eat.
    5. I see Stans article as the beginings of an eco - anarchy movement, that will only succeed if it is tied to the earth. The alternative is Fascism - see how in England the Right are planning for Peak Oil….for only a strong centrist government could bring about the Cuban model for food production - the only one possible for a mass society.

    Yes Stan to avoid Fascism we must move to small scale, local food and necessities production systems that fit well with the earth, and that means abandoning the current mass society.

    I for one have moved to a rural area, and am learning to provide food from the land within an organic land use system. I advocate the lifeboat model - Arks and hence the development of an Arkadian society. Living simply is just alot nicer!!!

    30 November 2006, 9:15 pm

  25. Antonio:

    The radical right is dancing for joy. But I don’t know why. It is a sad thing to see here and I don’t know how to address it. As an African-American revolutionary I never saw Marxism as a doctrine or a religion for me so I guess there is no delusion for me to get over here. As one who came up in the struggle for Black Liberation I remain aware of the need for a revolutionary party in this country. As a gay male who has some of the privilege of being male but also the experience of hetrosexism and homo hatred I know all to well the need for the struggle against patriarchy and all forms of oppression. One century in the struggle against capitalism is a short time. We learn from our mistakes and our victories. We persevere in a revolutionary love. Stan I wish your journey to this point could have been a little more transparent. I don’t understand but I still love you.

    30 November 2006, 9:23 pm

  26. DeAnander:

    it’s not just the god-botherers…  [sorry, that was in response to Jonny]

    30 November 2006, 9:32 pm

  27. Stan:

    The right can jump all it wants… all three of them who even ever stop by here. My contempt for white supremacist capitalist patriarchy remains intact.

    On growing food, etc, I hope we can talk about how to do it in the suburbs. That’s where most of us live, and we can’t just evaporate when things start frazzling on the edges. Burbs off the grid could actually be fine; burbs in crisis are hothouses for fascism.

    That’s why permaculture is so interesting to me.

    Later, we can plow up the strip malls to build suburban community farms.

    30 November 2006, 9:39 pm

  28. Fire Witch:

    At what point do we begin to develop community defense/offense?

    Do you arm from the beginning?

    30 November 2006, 10:22 pm

  29. Stan:

    I have a lot of trepidation about discussing self defense, but we have to say it sometime. The trepidation is that this discussion seems to trigger gun fetishists (and often males generally) to dive in and show how enthusiastic they are about using firearms against human beings… a kind of male dominance display rooted in what Hartsock called the agonal male universe.

    I think gaining control locally of all security issues is part of this; especially getting control of the police. I also think that women need to have access to graduated, multi-dimensinal self-defense training, to ensure that this need and responsibility is uprooted from its traditional gendered division of labor (since the sexual contract, as Pateman notes, is protection for obedience). Defense is not about firearms, though it can — under specific circumstances — require them. It is an integrated, multi-layered, multi-dimensional task, that thinks about how environments are structured, and about how relations are structured. It can be physical barrier, legal, social camouflage and deception measures, various organized forms of vigilance and intelligence, trained situational awareness, etc etc. And it can — in the case of an individual woman, for example, be graduated… martial arts training, situational awareness training, small non-lethal weapons, pepper-spray, etc, up to an including firearms.

    Plain conflict resolution and de-escalation are undervalued in this society, but they are forms of community self-defense.

    When to begin? I think that depends. A cohesive community can begin immediately, and how is determined by situation.

    One thing I am clear on, it has to be organic to the community, and accountable to it. Otherwise, we just end up with thugs.. or cops. (I’m really mad at cops tonight.)

    30 November 2006, 11:15 pm

  30. Elaina:

    Shit. I think my head just exploded. Maybe I just really need to learn to take stuff more lightly.

    30 November 2006, 11:19 pm

  31. howard:

    To Rootless Cosmo (through Denander) – I have the Safari problem on this site too. I am going to try to get around it by writing up my comments in say Word or notepad and then pasting them in to the comment window. If it works for me maybe it will for you too (my other posts have been from my computer at my job – accounting for the at times furtive tone) — so if you see this post, then you could try the technique.

    To Denander on the request for other positive examples: how about the Peace Communities in Colombia – campesinos who’ve refused to be displaced by the armed actors in the half-century-old civil war. They’ve come to a lot of the things discussed in this thread naturally, just working out on the fly what they needed to do to survive, keep their humanity, and assure the best possible outcome for their children. For instance, they’ve developed technologies of food independence (in their rural tropical setting – they call it “soberania alimentaria”) because they were under economic blockade; they’ve worked out an assertive radical, anarchic pacifist stance in a situation that’s probably almost as violent as Iraq or Darfur or the Congo (for instance, they completely moved their village, undergoing several months of extreme physical hardship, when the Colombian government insisted on putting a police station in the middle of the town); and they have networked between geographically disparate communities to pool traditional and other forms of knowledge with the Universidad Campesina (btw, I noticed that the afro and euro campesino peace communities refer to the indigenous communities as “elder siblings” (herma@s mayores). I heard one of their members say with quiet emotion “ellos [the governing elites] siempre creian que los campesinos eramos no mas unos brutos. Ahora pueden ver que estaban equivocados.” [they always thought that we country people were just a bunch of dumb brutes. Now they can see that they were wrong.] And btw they aren’t doctrinaire about any of this. For instance, they’ve refused to have anything to do with the Colombian state – but only with the repressive aspects of such. So that means no dealings with police or army or with the justice system (this latter because when they reported atrocities to the authorities, the people doing the reporting got disappeared). But they would accept a health clinic (well, in principle anyway, since there’s little chance Bogota would come through on something like that – as they say “pedimos medicos y nos mandan soldados y pedimos maestros y nos mandan policias” [we ask for doctors and they send us soldiers and we ask for teachers and they send us police].

    To Stan and others on local activity, food independence, permaculture, the suburbs: my wife and I had been thinking along these lines for several years. In April we found and moved into a pretty cheap house on a whole acre of land in an unincorporated suburban area with the intent of experimenting long term with food independence (specifically looking at permaculture techniques) in a suburban setting to see what ultimately could come out of it, both with the land and with some as yet undefined community. Four blocks to the south begins a significant (mostly Mexican) immigrant trailer community. Our immediate surroundings are more traditional suburban dwellers. On the other side of a large busy road at the back of our property are housing developments with racially and ethnically mixed working class people. Opportunities for community or tinder for fascism – we shall see.

    We are moving slowly, but always trying to accomplish some little thing every day, inventing as we go along, and we would like to know more about the American Insurgent web site Stan mentioned.

    1 December 2006, 1:25 am

  32. d:

    It’s funny reading Stan and Joaquin’s disquisitions on “patriarchy” - a concept anti-racist and Black feminists have long challenged, particularly in the ahistorical and essentializing ways it is too often applied (which is unfortunately just how S&J avail themselves of it)…

    MODERATOR’S NOTE: Let’s see… bell hooks refered to the system, over and over, as “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” I just wrote a book on gender, and in it quoted quite a few Black and anti-racist feminists, as well as Latina and post-colonial feminists from the periphery. They all seemed pretty much convinced of the existence of systemic male power over women, whatever linguistic marker you want to attach to it. The book also has a pretty comprehensive critique of anti-essentialism. The editor for that book is a regular here, and a writer herself.

    Don’t drop in with these anonymous, elliptical, and inaccurate little jabs, when you won’t name your sources and give an example or two. This is very post-modern in the same sense as the Bush administration, that does the same thing. You construct your own simplistic narrative in the hopes that it the narrative might actualize itself, yours being to trump the notion of patriarchy with an imputed racial critique to place a wedge between “feminists” and feminists of color… as if there were no overlap here.

    1 December 2006, 1:32 am

  33. RedDan:

    Stan,

    First of all, it’s been a long strange trip, eh? (Do you remember the first time we met, and E.M. confronted you and asked if you were a cop??)

    Regarding Tralin and Stotsky (ha!) It seems to me that the Statist Dictator has much less to offer than the Rootless Cassandra…the one offers temporal power at the expense of progress, soul, and potential; while the other offers the immediate prospect of howling in the wilderness, but rich ground for pondering future directions and ways out of self-erected traps…

    The wonder of Marxist analysis is exactly that it can encompass works like those of Foner, or CLR James, or Fanon, or Luxemburg. The horror of Marxist parties and groupings is that if you get 10 Marxists in a room, you will immediately witness the formation of 14 political parties, NONE of which have any chance of actualizing or reifying the veritable torrent of verbiage sure to ensue.

    It’s democratic centralism that no longer makes a lick of sense to me.

    Frankly it NEVER made sense to me, and still does not. I understand the need for party discipline of some sort, but that particular version of it is so noxious, so open and easy to use for material gain and power games, so stifling, I simply cannot imagine that such a system would EVER flourish except under conditions requiring the need to maintain a cellular, highly authoritarian control (like secret police and etc).

    My issue with Marxism (the doctrine, the organizational model, etc) is not that Marxism (the interpetive method) doesn’t explain a lot of stuff. It damn well does; and that’s why the ruling class still hates it. The problem is, it doesn’t explain everything, including a lot of stuff that has a real influence on the political work we do. Yet that pretension is there among Marxist orgs, that they have gotten hold of the final Grand Unified Theory, which is treated more as an article of religious faith than “science,” which acolytes also claim M-L is… “the science of Marxism Leninism.”

    Well put! First of all, I am a practicing, professional scientist…and Scientific Socialism is not even close to being scientific. Science in its pure form involves observation, hypothesizing, testing, and reconfiguring the hypotheses based on failures.

    Since when has any Marxist grouping actually sat back and said “Hmmmm, this and that doctrine, theory, ideological line are failures, we therefore need to reconfigure how we operate and view this or that situation!!” How many have done that? Like…zero?

    As a resident of the American South, I can say pretty much categorically that there ain’t gonna be no mass movement down here that don’t get prayed over. During the final struggle to break legal US Apartheid, there were preachers out front and praying at every turn. I don’t know if angelic postal workers were carrying the messages through the barrier between us and infinity; but the praying sure kept the prayer-makers steady in some perilous times. Being a results-based person, I’m not gonna argue with that.

    I would go even further than that…I would say that no mass, populist, class-based, popular political rising or grouping will take place without hefty admixtures of religion, racism, sexism, nationalism, ignorance, crudity, and other things that so many of us here spend so much time fighting or rejecting or criticizing.

    Will we therefore refuse to act, refuse to help, and refuse to participate?

    It’s a tough question, and it runs parallel to the Electoral question regarding whether or not to vote for a Democrat…well, it seems to me that you nailed that one a while back, and that the same lessons should apply.

    No reason to invent the wheel. As an indigenous Nations organizer from New Mexico told me once, we (whoever that is) don’t need to organize people. All people are already organized. We just have to find out where, and show up. (from the comment about getting off the grid and etc)…

    More than just show up…we (meaning “intelligentia”) have unique and extremely specialized skills that are in desperate shortage among so many of the groups that are ALREADY organized. Writing for impact. Sloganeering. Web design. Communications, Desk Top Publishing, Data analysis, Information search and retrieval, Pig-speak decoding, Graphic Design, and so on and so forth….we need to more than show up, we need to HELP. We need to put ourselves at the disposal of the people that are already out there, doing what needs to be done…we don’t lead, they do. We don’t know what “must be” they do…but we have skills and training and tools at our disposal that many do not.

    1 December 2006, 1:48 am

  34. Janet W:

    Wow… this is a Major Statement, and I’m still digesting it. I’m sure I’ll re-read it. A few non-intellectual comments at the end of a long day, on points that no one has yet addressed:

    1) Taking care of a baby. Good for you, Stan, for taking on this difficult work, and I immediately thought back to my baby-caring days of long ago, and my heart went out to you… though you are not suffering from depression, as I was, so maybe it’s a little easier for you, harder in other ways, maybe. Your grandchildren are fortunate to have your love and capable attention. Caring for children is the most humbling, real, dynamic, demanding work, and any politics that does not recognize and honor it (not falsely, but truly) is not worthy of our commitment.

    2) My senior thesis in college was on bread riots in Milan, around 1900, led by poor women, and their influence on Italian politics. A lot of politics can be reduced to these questions: who’s eating what, and how reliably? and what are the women doing and feeling?

    3) Cubans dance. I mean, REALLY dance. What does that do for social solidarity, gender relations, ability to be flexible? (Of course, that doesn’t mean automatic virtue; Cubans in Florida dance too.) We need to go with the flow and move with the groove… seriously.

    4) I went to a talk by an ANSWER “leader” in SF in October. I had never been and was curious. He went on about labor history in the 30s, and his own history as a young Marxist in Rochester, NY, although the talk was supposedly about the possible effects of the November election on Iraq! Some was mildly interesting, but it was all so terribly dated, so lame. The only good thing was I spent some time with an interesting acquaintance and after the talk we chatted with a few other interesting folks… like a church where you put up with the boring sermons to get to the gossip over good coffee and cake later… I won’t go again.

    You’ll find another political home, Stan, or make one, outside on this online one, that is… Hope I do, too.

    1 December 2006, 3:24 am

  35. RedDan:

    I feel somewhat compelled to comment on a lot of the “off-the-grid” comments and discussion…

    I grew up in an off-the-grid, semi-communal group.

    My parents moved to Maine in the late 1960’s, bought a farm, and lived as close to subsistence as you can get in the modern day.

    When I was a child we grew all our own vegetables, raised our own meat (chickens, pigs, cows, sheep, etc), made our own yogurt, butter, cheese; canned and pickled and froze and root-cellared vegetables, smoked the meats, and so on and so forth.

    We cut our own firewood, we traded labor on neighbors farms (similar folks, different focus) hefting hay bales, bringing in harvests, canning foods…in return for labor in kind, in return for the use of tools and equipment, or in return for raw materials. One example is that we would help neighbor X with harvest and hay, and in return we would receive some of the bounty, and we also received a large alottment of wool. We carded and spun the wool, and we knitted or wove the thread into cloth that was made into blankets, clothes, etc. We made our own shirts and etc for a while. We set up raw material production businesses - ours was a shingle mill, and we cut the trees, sawed up the bolts, ran the mill, and dealt with the waste…sold or traded the shingles to builders or homeowners, again for labor/materials in kind, or for cash to pay for the things we could not or did not provide for ourselves - electricity, gasoline, grains that did not grow in Maine, and so on.

    In short, I grew up inside the “off-the-grid” life that many are discussing here.

    My experience was wonderful - it was a great way to grow up, and I would not trade it for the world, but it has immense costs and has, in some way, a tremendous detrimental impact.

    Here’s why:

    1) That lifestyle is an incredible, intense, amazing amount of work. I would venture to state that living that way for a year is more work than most people do in ten years. If you get sick? If you get injured? Well…you’re in deep, deep trouble, and not just because you lose your sick days or maybe lose your job…but because you literally will have not enough food for the winter, and you will have no cash to get you by.

    2) You are living extremely, totally, and intensely close to the bone. Bad weather, crop blight, animals eating your stock or your garden, sickness in the animals kills or renders them sterile or inedible and you have no meat, no stock, and no way to insure the next year’s stock…unless you can buy more. But without the produce to sell or trade, without the milk/butter/cheese/eggs to eat, sell or trade…you can’t afford to buy that crucial base stock.

    3) Dependence on neighbors and communal style living is the most marvellous way on the planet to live…until there is a dispute about money, food, tools, labor, love, land, or whatever. Then, the same people who made living possible, enjoyable, and easier than going alone…well, now they make your life miserable, they endanger your security…this gets more critical the smaller the community or the “closer to the bone” you live.

    4) “Getting back to our peasant roots” - this became a serious issue in our community for a number of reasons. Living off-the-grid requires working in ways that resemble our historical roots in many aspects. One aspect is the “traditional” division of labor, and the roles of men, women, children, weaker, stronger, dextrous, clumsy, intellectual, non-verbal and so on and so forth. This, needless to say, caused a LOT of tension. Here we had college educated, lower-to-upper middle class men and women taking on roles from 200 years ago. Many, many of them, both men and women, found this refreshing, interesting and rewarding…for a while. But then, WHOA! “here I am, college educated, liberated, feminist, working like a peasant wife from 1740…fuck that noise!” This caused a LOT of tension (I know from very, very intimate experience what happens when the tension between the lifestyle, the project, and the roles played gets nasty. My parents now live on opposite sides of the country, and the same is true of about 80% of the people I grew up with.)

    5) Impact of “getting out” on the places that you get out OF…one of the reasons, IMO, for the chaotic fracturing of the various social progress movements in the late 60’s and early 70’s (Anti-War, Women’s Rights, Black Power, and so on) was that a significant fraction of the “middle class intelligentsia” demographic simply disappeared and “did their own thing”…those people felt that if everyone did the same, then we could simply change the world by living differently. This was, again IMO, an extremely selfish and shortsighted view. To be sure it is one that I, personally, benefitted immensely from! But selfish nonetheless. Not everyone could move, not everyone could afford to move, not everyone had the requisite freedom (financial, temporal, social) to move out…and the people that did move out had skills (see my last post) that were needed to maintain and grow a coherent progressive movement. When they disappeared, perhaps coincidentally, the beginning of the destruction of the various movements began to accelerate. This was both a result of internal tensions AND a result of external opposition (COINTELPRO, for example). Would the results have been different had they all stayed, stayed engaged, and kept fighting? I really do not know, but I have my suspicions that things may have been different. Basically, though, when the shit got real, and bloody (Kent State, Trenton, Watts, Chicago, and etc…) a huge group got scared, got paranoid, and “went back to the land”…and then the early 70’s happened. And then Carter. And then Reagan.

    To sum up, IF people here and in other places are serious about getting off grid, then I would beseech you to make close study of the successes and failures of the “back to the landers” of the late 60’s and early 70’s.

    If you are interested, I can put you in contact with people who are STILL living off the grid, communally and semi-communally, in a variety of settings both rural and urban. Listen to them, find out what they did, and did not do. Check out some of the histories and some of the colossal failures as well, as those might be even more instructive.

    It’s not as easy or simple as it sounds, and there are a huge number of pitfalls, traps, dead ends, and potentially fatal (literally!) problems that can come up.

    In struggle…

    RedDan

    1 December 2006, 5:04 am

  36. RedDan:

    One addendum…

    Living off the grid also has another, somewhat hidden requirement/pre-requisite if you intend that such living will really change the world…

    You have to make it a viable long-term community that grows.

    Which means that you have to make sure that there are people coming into the movement.

    That requires either aggressive recruitment, serious and simultaneous desires on the part of a large group of people (zeitgeist?!), or…lots of children.

    And people have to STAY in that community and KEEP living/working that way, otherwise, it all goes away after one generation.

    Kinda like where I grew up.

    1 December 2006, 5:09 am

  37. Dick R.:

    The sad historical fact is that alternative intentional communities - organized around principles of solidarity, self organization mutual aid, living off the grid and delinking from capitalism have had an abject failure rate in the United States equal if not surpassing ML political formations or structural defiencies. Nothing to cheer about there.

    Nor can we ignore exactly what became of those grassroots organizing projects - rooted in the realities of everyday life - which sought to develop forms of ‘organic’ popular power and succumbed to brutal state repression or coptation and corporate donor capture. Or both.

    Several powerful examples jump to mind — the community survival programs of the the Black Panther Party or the various commumnity initiatives the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union [ http://www.cwluherstory.com/ ] - arguably one of the largest urban radical feminist organizing projects of the 1960-70’s.

    1 December 2006, 5:58 am

  38. Dick R.:

    The sad historical fact is that alternative intentional communities - organized around principles of solidarity, self organization mutual aid, living off the grid and delinking from capitalism have had an abject failure rate in the United States equal if not surpassing ML political formations or structural defiencies. Nothing to cheer about there.

    Nor can we ignore exactly what became of those grassroots organizing projects - rooted in the realities of everyday life - which sought to develop forms of ‘organic’ popular power and succumbed to brutal state repression or coptation and corporate donor capture. Or both.

    Several powerful examples jump to mind — the community survival programs of the Black Panther Party or the various commumnity initiatives the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union [ http://www.cwluherstory.com/ ] - arguably one of the largest urban radical feminist organizing projects of the 1960-70’s.

    1 December 2006, 5:58 am

  39. Jonny:

    DeAnander, I’m not sure what you mean..
    “it’s not just the god-botherers…”

    1 December 2006, 6:51 am

  40. DoC:

    Stan,

    I understand this must have taken some commitment from you.

    My feeling is that you have rightfully identified some limitations of marxism-leninism (and I do believe its a science) but you have generalised these in an overarching rejection of marxism leninism itself.

    You raise a number of problems with traditional marxism-leninism. Many of which I agree with you on.

    The first is the obvious sectarianism of the cults and the limitations of applying a model of organisation which is an idealised reflection of a model used in Russia or China almost 100 years ago. This is a critique of misappropriating the ‘leninist’ model of party organisation.

    The second is that this sectarianism closes the eyes of marxists in these organisations to developments in theory elsewhere. I think that this is very true.

    The third is that marxism fails to fully develop an analysis of patriachy and undercuts the feminist struggle. I think I agree with this as a reflection of concrete reality but I disagree that there is something fundamental about marxism that precludes feminist struggle. To me, understanding the origins of patriachal society is only possible following Engels. Just as understanding the origins of Christianity is only possible following Kautsky. In some sense you stray in this argument from rejecting the inherent monism of marxism. That economic relations and the mode of production defines the superstructure through dialectical change. This to me is the crux of marxism. You admit that is provides us with a useful toolkit but not a useful blueprint. Marx was at pains to not provide a blueprint. The central element of marxist struggle to me is that the people themselves need to drive history. Marxists attempt to analyse that history in relation to the underlying dialectic. The role of marxists in that is akin to a catalyst in a chemical reaction. We are the yeast that makes the bread rise. You don’t seem to deal with this sufficiently. You don’t once deal with dialectical thought or analysis which lies at the heart of marxism. How you can reject marxism without stating a position on dialectical materialism is questionable, I have to say.

    The fourth thing you refer to is the reality that the US working class has become a worldwide labour aristocracy. Or to clarify, there is male white privilege which underpins imperialism. This is not new to marxists. Lenin himself (and Trotsky even) understood this as far back as 1917. Sir Cecil Rhodes admitted that there would be a revolutionary situation in Britain if it weren’t for the empire (and that wasn’t simply economic). Again, we return to the monism of marxism - which I don’t see you undermining in your argument.

    Does this reality undermine marxism? No, of course not. That Marx forecast a revolution in the imperial centres was natural for a man living at a time before industrialised imperialism was fully developed. Like all sciences ideas need development to step forward and describe the present. The ideas you raise in relation to an energy model of imperialist trade relations seems interesting although I haven’t come across it myself yet. There’s certainly a sense to it if it isn’t another case of substituting mathematics for thought. Reformist Social Democracy was largely the philosophy of this privileged layer and had (monist) roots in their economic position in the imperialist hierarchy.

    Once we realise that the US working-class is infected with chauvinism and largely lives at the expense of the third world. The logic of beginning the struggle *where they are at* which is what you seem to suggest is tantamount to proposing tail-ending of their chauvinist agenda. This is the problem with what you appear to be saying which is to do politics where people will react to it.

    Marxist politics cannot proceed from an analysis of where the working class of any particular country are at. It must proceed from an economic value based analysis of social reproduction. That’s really saying we must proceed from a class-based analysis of imperialism and then identify where opportunities exist in our own circumstances to advance the struggle.

    I would think that Marxists in the USA have a duty to orientate themselves to struggle alongside those layers of the US working class who are not part of the imperialist labour aristocracy. That means the dispossessed, disadvantaged, discriminated against and immigrants. That such an engagement can occur within a non-’Leninist’ political structure is obvious.

    Does this constitute a historic break with marxism? To me of course not. I think that you are overgeneralising your disagreements with some aspects of Marxist theory and practice to reject the body of what is the science of human society.

    1 December 2006, 6:53 am

  41. RedDan:

    DoC,

    The problem is that what has potential to be a tool for the scientific analysis and implentation of political organizing for change…is all too susceptible to unscientific, and indeed anti-scientific warping, twisting, and misuse on every scale from the personal interaction to the local group to the nation to the globe.

    The problem in the transformation from analytical method and theory to political organization in many ways mirrors the problems found in the translation from religious philosophy and moral code up to organized religion…hierarchy, patriarchy, power games, and so on and so forth.

    My problem could be boiled down to this:

    Marxist analysis COULD BE scientific, in the same way that cooking is scientific (which it most definitely IS!)…

    But all too often, Marxist Parties are to Marxist Analysis what TV dinners are to cooking.

    1 December 2006, 8:00 am

  42. Stan:

    DoC,

    THE science of human society? This kind of sepcious claim is exactly what I am breaking with… not Marxism, which to “break” with it implies that it’s a church.

    On intentional communities, I think I said they are laboratories… not the final answer. Dan’s comprehensive description is a good example of some lessons learned.

    And I don’t see the re-localization of food, energy, water, health, and learning independence as a withdrawal strategy. There are 7 billion of us worldwide, and 300 million here in the US. There’s no place to withdraw. We are here. The question is, what do we do now? And I mean poltically, because as long as social organization raises questions fo social power, we are stuck with politics, too.

    In order to contest effectively for social power, it seems, to this oberserver at least, that making the goal of that contest to assume control of a machinery comnplex that is dirty, dangerous, expensive, and headed to dinosaur-heaven… doesn’t make sense.

    But even more immediately, seeing this out of my old lenses as a tactician, we need to begin now establishing a wide network of semi-autonomous bases that are sufficiently developed to eventually serve — in concert around goals, and independently around tactics — as the self-supporting logistical islets from which to mount a more general struggle. A spatially re-ordered version of Mao’s “countryside.”

    Uniform strategies not only cannot be applicable to these efforts, such abstractions tend to put the brakes on initiative. When I was galavanting around the country the last couple of years, giving antiwar speeches and whatnot, I was invited to one after another local formation, each unique, some with very substantial resources (buildings, radio stations, old movie theaters, cultural centers, lending libraries, etc.) They are already out there, developing organically.

    As to growing food, or setting up women’s self defense classes, or mounting coups against homeowners’ associations, or fighting gentrification, or assisting poor folk with debt clearance, or doing community gardens…. the value of these things, aside from the direct one, is that they have people in motion, doing something.

    Every time we give people a convincing argument about what is wrong in the world, they invariably look back at us — all demoralized by the scale of it all — and say, what can we do? We can either say, Join the One and Only True Revolutionary Party, or we can say… try growing vegetables next year in place of that patch of lawn… or suport your local farmers market, or let’s grab a spot on cable access tv… whatever.

    But it’s gotta be something that fits, organically, into the lives that — for now, at least — are inescapable.

    The development of that practice will tell us a lot more about what next steps to take than a Leninist speech.

    1 December 2006, 8:09 am

  43. Nil:

    Haven’t read the whole essay yet, but I assume you are familiar with “Night Vision” by “Butch Lee and Red Rover”? If not, you really ought to be, I guarantee you’ll find it thought provoking and/or worthwhile.

    1 December 2006, 9:05 am

  44. Nil:

    PS: Also Butch Lee’s “The Military Strategy of Women and Children”. I figure you must already be familiar with these works, Stan, but in case you’re not I mention them, they are invaluable.

    1 December 2006, 9:08 am

  45. Chris Harrison:

    Stan,

    Your analysis of the limitations of Marxist doctrine is quite refreshing, especially coming from someone as deeply immersed in leftist politics as yourself.

    I would dare to say that much of what you are saying refers directly to the works of Critical Marxism — the scholars of the Frankfurt school such as Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse and Jurgen Habermas. Adorno and Horkheimer, specifically, found themselves recoiling from horror in response to the way that hyper-commercialized post-WWII US society subordinated the conscience and worth of the individual to the mass-mind of hyperconsumerism (one wonders what they would say to the US today). However, they equally rejected the USSR and they way that it assigned absolutely no worth to the individual and subordinated him or her to the mass mind of the state. In their eyes, the US and USSR were equally repugnant sides of a same coin.

    The problem that these scholars faced was that they were only really able to offer critiques, without moving anything new forward. Peak Oil and the challenges it provides, however, present a monumental opportunity to take their standard forward and expand it. I personally believe that the relocalization movements and decentralized efforts surrounding permaculture and the like are the alternatives that we have been waiting for.

    1 December 2006, 10:35 am

  46. Red Cloud:

    What a sorry lot of “god that failed” burnouts you all are. You people literally have had nothing new to add since Lenin exposed the Mensheviks and Kautskyites a 100 odd years ago.

    As to the various sorry rehashes of bourgeois enviro/feminist pomo criticism you are offering… Here’s an idea: spare the environment of all the smoke you are blowing to cover your various shamefaced reconciliations with capitalist society.

    To those of you who are curious about what is being so self-importantly ‘rejected’ by Goff & Co., please see the most fundamental, powerful and powerful opposition to the capitalist system ever set to paper. This is what they HATE:

    http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/index.htm

    http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1913/mar/x01.htm

    and above all:

    http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/index.htm

    http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/prrk/index.htm

    It’s only a beginning, but you gotta start somewhere.

    1 December 2006, 11:37 am

  47. DoC:

    Stan,

    What you are effectively proposing is to effectively cut the cloth to fit the realities/interests of a largely bourgeoisified US working class. I can see that path leading far from leftism - it will end up tail-ending the bourgeoisie themselves. Not the first time a marxist has went this path but you’ll have loads of cheerleaders along the way.

    I am an activist and I just think that this loss of belief represents a tremendous betrayal of the worldwide poor. I’m not saying that you have to sign up to a sect - neither would I. I agree with much of your criticism. But activism is more than petty-bourgeois ‘initiatives’ as worthy as they might seem. Throwing out marxism as a scientific basis for struggle seems to me a way of avoiding the hard questions rather than being based on an assessment of its inherent limitations. You say nothing negative about the monism principle which defines marxism.

    The struggle must be seen from a level beginning with an analysis of the world. Nothing in your reply dealt with the fundamental relation here - which is imperialism. Going off and growing a nice organic garden or living in environmentally-friendly communes and protesting every once in a while about Peace or some such is not really going to prevent US armed imperialists blowing the heads off children so that the price of oil is kept low.

    And I do think Marxism is a science. I guess it studies humans like a biologist studies ants except our societies are apparently more complex (talk about reification). The big difference is that as we are also the subject of the science there’s a moral imperative to effect revolutionary change. As a science its findings are always subject to review and criticism but I’m wasting my time.

    Leninist lecture over. We’ll do it without you.

    DoC

    1 December 2006, 12:42 pm

  48. jamais vu:

    “Being begets consciousness”

    I agree with much of what you say,and I sympathize with anyone not wanting to be in an organization in this period. I also agree that too often we use “Marxism” as a doctrine rather than a set of tools. It may be true that no currently existing organization holds the key to the kind of refoundation that we want/need. The organizations stand in the way of refoundation in as much as they exist, clinging to their own organizational fetishes and the weight of tradition. But to make such a complex argument that arrives at what seems to be a concusion that some kind of “authentic” left would somehow “organically” rebuild in the absence of “Marxist” organizations is self-delusional.

    1 December 2006, 3:37 pm

  49. Stan:

    Hi Chris,

    Your argument actually merits a response. I have to admit, however,that I am not as well-schooled as you. I’ve never read Adorno or Horkheimer.

    Some of these others are simple ritual denunciations — a key feature of democratic centralism in practice… something people can show to their own comrades to demonstrate their cleavage to the True Faith.

    To Red Cloud, nothing was ever written that is worth read in after Trostsky, that is, unless it didn’t contradict the Masters. I love it when people haul out the holy texts, as if that’s an argument. And DoC has excommunicated me. And jamais has reconstructed my remarks for me.

    I’m actually a great fan of Lenin. I dont consider him infallible, but he was a masterful political tactician. Of course, his tactics were for Russia in the beginning of the 20th Century. He did ask the question, however, what is to be done? Simple, elegant, and to the point.

    Obviously, I don’t think what jamais says I think — “that some kind of ‘authentic’ left would somehow ‘organically’ rebuild in the absence of ‘Marxist’ organizations”. I said that Marxist organizaiton,as presently constituted are an obstacle to the kind of organic organizations that can be the building blocks of an authentic mass movement. It’s different.

    The reason I bring this up in reply to Chris is we need to remind people that after the Bolsheviks, the key feature of every major liberatory mass movement in tbe context of US imperialism has been national. There were Marxist cadre at the heads, sometimes, but the character of the mass movement was not Marxist.

    Figuring this out is important. That’s why I am also post in less conventional — in the sense of Zinoviest orthdoxy on organization (if Lou can send his link on this excellent article, that would be good.. I don’t have it handy)– less conventional theses on what imperialism actually is nowadays. it is definitely inter-national — in the sense of one nation oppresing another, whch is a bit more complicated that the standard “monopoly capitalism” definition.

    Joaquin writes very clearly on this.

    So things were getting done. But they were getting done via nationalism. What hasn’t been incorporated into revolutionary practice yet is giving the struggle an anti-industrial character and a feminist character. I have humbly submitted that this might be worth trying on the next round. After clearing away this anachronism of class-reductionist democratic centralism. If some want to insist that CRDC is the True Church, there isn’t much I can do about it.

    They’ll conintue to enjoy their remarkable successes, as DoC ironically notes, “without me.”

    Actually, Chris, IVAW is doing some pretty interesting stuff these days, if you’re inclined to check back in.

    1 December 2006, 4:53 pm

  50. DeAnander:

    I think Stan’s said a big scary word, one which highlights his apostasy from the Marxian Church, and that is “anti-industrialism.” and RedDan’s extremely interesting and thought-provoking post illustrates some of the reasons why that word is so scary. thanks RD for very concrete, specific info to chew on. I should be working for The Man right now so cannot comment at great length but I want to come back to this thread bigtime as soon as I take a break from the day job.

    this is turning into a damn good thread. I have more from my buddy rootless:

    I can’t imagine how it is possible to deny that there is not now nor has there been for a very long time a working class movement worthy of the name in the United States (a ‘class-for- itself’ movement). Does anyone disagree? Does someone want to correct me on the half-century long decline in union membership…

    Can’t resist one more comment on this. I don’t disagree with Bustelo’s basic idea here but the evidence offered is questionable. There was actually a sharp rise in strike activity during the 1970’s, and Reagan’s swift and merciless crushing of the PATCO strike, almost immediately following his inauguration in 1981, was meant as a clear signal that this militancy would be met with repression, not negotiation. Meanwhile the decline in union membership has to be put in context of the decline in what were some of the best-organized sectors, the mass production industries where the CIO had its greatest victories in the Roosevelt years.

    It’s also true that the corporate counterattack began much earlier, in step with the onset of the Cold War, when Congress passed Taft-Hartley (over Truman’s halfhearted veto), Truman himself broke the national railroad strike, and the CIO leadership expelled the Left-led unions. Organized labor isn’t “the working class,” of course, but it’s worth remembering that even the tame, quasi-officialized labor movement didn’t exactly jump — it was pushed.

    [end of rootlesscosmo, return to deanander]

    Jonny, sorry, what I meant was that it is not just the godbotherers (preachers, priests, etc) who abuse their power and standing in a community to realise alpha male sexual privilege, seducing or molesting or raping women and juveniles like an old bull gorilla dominating a harem. red leaders too. which is why patriarchy trumps (imho) ethnicity, religion, and class as the Primary Contradiction (hat tip to Yolanda).

    1 December 2006, 5:45 pm

  51. Legume Sam:

    In the second volume of the 3 vol. History of the International, Julius Braunthal discusses Lenin’s abortive attempt to make the Russian Revolution into a worldwide revolution. As Lenin’s supporters purged those in the ranks of the various Communist Parties of those who did not sign on to the “Twenty-One Conditions,” large social-democratic parties were born, and the Communist Parties shrunk accordingly.

    At the end of his book The Question of Class Struggle, Craig Calhoun points out that, as capitalism becomes more and more entrenched in particular countries, workers’ political formations tend more and more to endorse social-democratic, and not revolutionary, outcomes to class struggle.

    What the Leninists commenting here should try to explain to us all is: why do you imagine the working-class movements of the world choosing revolutionary, and not social-democratic, outcomes to the class struggle? It didn’t happen during the 20th century, and so all theories that predicted 20th century socialism have been proved wrong. It doesn’t appear as if your notion of labor discipline (given, for instance, Lenin’s endorsement of Taylorism) is really all that different from what van der Pijl calls “capitalist discipline” — the exploitation of labor and nature for the creation of a surplus. Is the main difference between you and the social-democrats that you want the surplus distributed socialistically, or is there more to it than that?

    Now, in the real world, capitalist discipline has reached all the way down into the genetic code, thus genetic engineering. At some point, the world will have had enough of this capitalist discipline, and it will vomit up the capitalist system, and reject capitalist discipline, including its Leninist variant. This, after all, is the meaning of the second contradiction of capitalism as formulated by James O’ Connor. Are you saying that you don’t believe in the second contradiction?

    Working-class militancy, as I pointed out above, has been more and more co-opted as capitalism imposed its stamp more and more firmly upon each nation. In fact, we can see that even the most bourgeois left parties have been co-opted of their contents in the neoliberal phase of capitalism. I don’t see that this trend is going to reverse itself without, as I said, some sort of ecological catastrophe, with an accompanying ecological consciousness; certainly the attempt to force the Left into some kind of Leninist mold in the most co-opted nations will not bring back communism. And, when the obsession with ecological crisis has completely engulfed the consciousness of the most advanced societies, will you be there demanding a return to old-fashioned capitalist discipline, or will you be joining the growing ranks of those who call for ecological discipline for the sake of an ecologically sustainable global society?

    1 December 2006, 7:44 pm

  52. the burningman:

    I’ll just say here that I am a fan of Stan’s writing, and his reinventions of himself and his place in the world.

    What I’d like to ask about, and comment on, is in reference to this:

    “Marxist organization, as presently constituted are an obstacle to the kind of organic organizations that can be the building blocks of an authentic mass movement.”

    What is this “obstacle” exactly?

    I’ve been a part of a few movements, at least one of which would probably pass Stan’s notion of “organic.” In each case, my experience was exactly the opposite of what Stan has concluded.

    To give credit to Freedom Road, with whom Stan had several years of association, they entered the CUNY student movement, and SLAM, to overall great effect.

    Their cadre were disciplined, principled, self-sacrifing in a way that wasn’t creepy and didn’t pimp off the movement. They respected decisions which they may not have agreed with and helped sustain and expand the movement longer than it would have under its own steam.

    They weren’t the only group to do this either. A Dominican ML (formerly Maoist) party did sustained work to build some of the type of institutions Stan references… as they were being sucked into the Democratic Party, unfortunately (and post-Maoistically).

    We worked in coalition with Workers World, various projects initiated by the RCP, and the ISO, as well as various anarchist groupings including Love and Rage and the Direct Action Network.

    In each case, even when there were sharp disputes (generally with Trotskyite grouplets of one stripe or another), none of these groups had the ability to act as an “obstacle.” The only ones that even tried were the Communist Party and Sparticist League, through methods appropriate to each.

    In other words, these ML (and anarchist) groupings couldn’t have been an obstacle even if they tried, which – I really have to say clearly – they did not.

    SLAM developed very much as what you call an “organic organization” that was both spawned by and in turn re-created a genuine mass movement, rooted in oppressed nationalities predominantly from the working classes.

    This experience left me deeply marked by both the rightness of your yen for organic, grounded organizations, and also a felt understanding of the profound limitations of such organizations.

    At some point, you have to be for something. Without a class analysis, and a political basis of unity capable of combating the profound, often conservative pulls of spontenaeity – these “organic” groups [in your sense] will be swamped by the immediate/local demands of their social base AND the very real operatives of the Democratic Party and its leftist enablers.

    That’s my own experience anyway. And it, as well as observable efforts inside the MLM movement to address a number of the very things you raise above, brought me back into communist politics as an organized force.

    ———-

    My commentary aside, I am curious how you see (literally every existing) revolutionary/ML(M) organizations as an “obstacle.”

    That’s not what I see in Oaxaca, where the APPO has brought together both “organic” organizations as well as long-standing ML and radical democratic groups into open, unified conflict with the Mexican state. It’s not what I’ve seen in New York, or California or the Midwest – all places I’ve worked politically.

    Maybe diving into the struggle has blinded me to how I, or others, were somehow an obstacle to rebellion and resistance that was otherwise invisible.

    Consciousness organized is not an alienation. It is, or at the very least can be, a vanguard.

    1 December 2006, 8:09 pm

  53. DeAnander:

    Thank you Legume Sam! it has long been a discomfort of mine and finally an outright allergy attack, that trad Marxism seems increasingly like nowt but an egalitarian version of Industrial Cornucopianism. Which makes the Marxism vs Capitalism Death Match, from my POV, kind of like the Albigensians vs the Pelagians (or pick your own personal favourite obscure Christian heresy) as seen by a modern secularist — more a fraternal or sectarian strife than an epochal clash of titans.

    It may be that the shared fundamentalist faith in industrialism, “development,” growth and perfectible productivity — Taylorist, Simonian, reductionist, and ultimately doomed — is a commonality stronger than the squabble over who should manage the Machine and how its miraculous yields should be apportioned. Surely a shared belief in the miracle of the loaves and fishes is a kinship marker far stronger than a disagreement about who should hand them out or how many fish per person…

    If only Marx had got around to that work on soil depletion which, rumour has it, a Ukrainian friend was urging him to consider. History — particularly that of the USSR — might have been quite different…

    1 December 2006, 8:15 pm

  54. Stan:

    I would say the socialist state was doomed to industrialism, and not just because they had accepted the cornucopian model. The hostile encirclement after the failure of the rev to pour into Western Europe guaranteed that the socialist state would have to militarize in order to survive. This was the basis of Stalin’s decision to place the emphasis on heavy industry (for war materiel), not to build socialism, but to prevent the West doing what it wanted… which was to turn Russia into a colony. Again, it was not a socialist movement any longer, except in name. It was nationalist, and unavoidably so (which is what perennialy confuses the class reductionists).

    In the US, we don’t have that excuse, and the science is in. Hydrocarbon homo sapien is a one shot deal.

    On burningman’s remarks: Please read what I said. I credit the quality of the people in the organizations. it si DC that is the issue, one of them. The others are: questions of scale, resistance to take on patriarchy seriously, failure to anlayze industrialism, and class-reductionism.

    These cannot be add-ons.

    And for all the good things I can say about my comrades, and I can say plenty — where are the victories? Castro’s revolution didn’t require ML, and in fact had to struggle against the CP before the revolution. Chavez is not ML. What’s happening in the streets of Mexico City and Beirut is not ML. The Chipka Movement in India is not ML. Muqtada al Sadr’s community is oranizing a victory against the entire US military, and they are not ML. For that matter, what is happening in Oaxaca may involve ML groups, but it is not ML.

    What these are, are organic and embedded.

    1 December 2006, 9:21 pm

  55. Fire Witch:

    Thank you for that multi-layered answer regarding community defense and arms, Stan.

    I asked the question largely because it so often DOES get left out of conversations about community. Many white people I know can go on all day long about “community” but what they really mean is some sort of back-to-the-lander version of white flight. But. As soon as internal and external defense/offense are mentioned, their aversion to facing the violence dealt out to communities of color and most women quickly shows. In my experience, it is an interest in escaping the responsibilities for stopping that violence that motivates these community-touting folks in the first place. Mentioning defense serves as a good litmus test for that irresponsibility.

    I agree with the idea of a graduated approach and really should not have used the word “arms” knowing full well that Sun Tzu said that “Nothing is harder than armed struggle.” The last thing I would want to see is a bunch of macho poseurs waving guns around when the simpler approach might work better. Of course, it is a matter of what works. But why use a gun if a letter to the editor will do the trick?

    Still. Oaxaca haunts. When, when, when…. do you pick up a machete, a gun, an RPG?

    On a personal note, I once studied the sweet science of boxing. While I never did become comfortable with hitting another person, the payoff in learning how to maintain balance while attacking and being attacked was priceless.

    Of course, chess can teach this, too, but there is nothing like letting the whole body in on the art.

    Training the mind to use the right measure of force in any given situation seems the key.

    1 December 2006, 9:38 pm

  56. DeAnander:

    A lot of politics can be reduced to these questions: who’s eating what, and how reliably?

    I cannot resist…

    The history of the world, my sweet –
    ooo Mr Todd, yes Mr Todd, what does it tell?
    is who gets eaten and who gets to eat!
    yes Mr Todd, and Mr Todd, who gets to sell…

    anyway, I agree 100 percent. FM Lappe seems to me more and more vindicated w/each passing year, though as Pollan points out the vegetarian/carnivore decision is not quite as morally simple as it seems on the surface…

    1 December 2006, 9:40 pm

  57. DeAnander:

    Maybe the mascot or heraldic beast of a renewed Gramscian/Hornborgian/feminist/Polanyian Left should be the earthworm, humble Lumbricina. It is after all: organic, incredibly embedded, and aerates and fertilises the soil (of resistance, for example). It is one of the most gender-neutral of animals — all earthworms are hermaphroditic, though they do need another earthworm to fertilise their eggs. No dimorphism here, no mad male strutting and fussing to compete for dominance. The earthworm is also successfully invasive when imported into most temperate biomes :-)

    The earthworm, like the peasant, is a truly productive (not extractive) and undervalued (in the popular imagination) member of the biotic community, working ceaselessly to increase nutritional content and robustness of the soil, the basis of all land life: working down literally among the grass roots, the earthworm is a real radical. Earthworms can sustain a lot of damage and survive — they can regrow damaged segments to some extent; despite their frail appearance they are kind of tough little critters, and environmentally hardier than you might think — one or other variety thrives everywhere except the polar and most arid zones. They are threatened by machine-till industrial/chemical ag — aren’t we all — with its poisons, soil nutrient leaching and soil compaction and desertification.

    Earthworms work quietly, patiently and tirelessly down among those grass roots. Their work is largely invisible to the clomping, clowning, self-important species above ground, yet a huge swath of the terrestrial food chain depends on their contribution to soil health. And they are capable — particularly some variants like Eisenia Fetida — of transforming shit into life, detoxifying the waste streams of the more powerful and extractive organisms “above” them.

    I am very fond — as are all susti ag types — of our friends the earthworms. Time they had their day on the banners and badges of the revolution, say I.

    1 December 2006, 9:57 pm

  58. Stan:

    Firewitch,

    I have been asked more than once if I would ever again take work “consulting” on matters of security and specifically military science.

    My answer remains: only on one condition, that the training is exclusively for women, with majority women of color. It’s the only way I can think of to begin establishing future training cadres on this topic that disrupt the traditional gendered division of labor.

    The Insurgent American web site will have a few things on this.

    1 December 2006, 10:07 pm

  59. Fire Witch:

    There is a Cheyenne (Tsitsistas) saying that goes, “A nation is not conquered until the hearts of its women are on the ground.”

    I am looking forward to reading and studying The Insurgent American web site.

    1 December 2006, 11:04 pm

  60. richard myers:

    There’s so much analytical power being exercised here, it seems a shame to use it all up on M-L and Democratic Centralism.

    I note that RedDan commented,

    “It seems to me that what “Marxists” all to often lack in terms of connection to the struggles that are so avidly analyzed, the “populists and syndicalists” understand and utilize to great effect. The opposite is true when it comes to hard core analysis and diagnosis…”

    What about that? What are the perceived shortcomings and strengths of syndicalism, anarcho-syndicalism, and the revolutionary industrial unionism of the IWW?

    Is this also familiar philosophical territory? If so, i’d be interested to hear about it.

    I’m also wondering, why is vanguardism necessary?

    I’ve found it so distasteful over the years that i cannot imagine how it can contribute more than it takes away. But then i’m just a retired factory worker who wants to see working people respected and trusted for their own abilities and ideas.

    best wishes,
    richard myers
    Denver, Colorado

    2 December 2006, 4:44 am

  61. JG:

    At first, I was perplexed as to why this disquisition immediately took on the status of a bombshell. After all, this is merely a more formal and lengthier statement of arguments Stan has been making and positions he’s been taking for as long as I’ve been reading him – going on five-and-a-half years now. The only new element is personally renouncing working within sectarian “Marxist-Leninist” organizations; he’s been openly reflecting on the admixture of experiences and insights that ultimately led to this recent renunication for quite some time now.

    For all the reasons Stan states plus others, “M-L” organizations are utterly irrelevant in the US political landscape, but ironically it is their utter irrelevance that (partially anyway) explains why his statement has ignited such comment both here and elsewhere. Let me put it this way: in the US there are more independent radical intellectuals who to a greater or lesser degree self-identify as “Marxists” (I count myself among them) than there are rank-and-file in the “M-L” sects. I would also hazard to say that the former are more likely than the latter to have read, and to have remarked upon, his statement. What makes them uncomfortable is not his dismissal of what he calls the “organized left” – which, if anything is even MORE of a bit player than he makes it out to be and is thus NOT even WORTHY of intensive criticism – but rather his inconclusive gestures toward disaffiliating from a Marxist theoretical perspective altogether.

    To be fair to Stan, he claims that “I am still a Marxist in many aspects” (or something to that effect). He acknowledges that a Marxist analysis of the accumulation imperative is indispensable to properly comprehend ongoing ecocide. He even suggests that the Marxist method can provide a privileged historical understanding of why the working class in the overdeveloped capitalist metropoles cannot and will not be agents of progressive social transformation. At the same time, however, he says that the failure of the “M-L” sects to successfully grow represents a failure of Marxism since movement and theory are inextricably wedded; the implication that follows is thus that Stan is no longer a Marxist. There is a rather glaring lack of consistency here.

    The problem seems to be that Stan’s own education in Marxist theory is so deeply intertwined with his own participation in “M-L” sects that he cannot cut himself off from the latter without distancing himself from the former. Sure, Marxist theory has its limitations and blind spots, in precisely the ways the Stan has articulately demonstrated here (on issues of patriarchy, most particularly). But to weigh the merits of Marxism on the basis of the assumption that the “M-L” sects represent the organizational form of Marxism is sheer folly.

    Personally, I am usually reluctant to proactively declare myself a Marxist, even (or perhaps especially!) when I’m in the company of people who are not prone to misinterpreting or disfiguring such a stance; it is precisely now, when someone whose admirably heterodox translations of Marxism threatens to jump ship, that I realize just how much of a Marxist I actually am.

    JG
    Akita, Japan

    2 December 2006, 5:15 am

  62. Mark Nagel:

    “But Marxism — the organizational doctrine, not the interpretive method — may well be part of the problem of the Crisis of Socialism. I tend to believe that this is so.”

    Perhaps this piece by Dave Neal might be of use in helping to shed some light:

    ANARCHISM: IDEOLOGY OR METHODOLOGY?

    2 December 2006, 8:19 am

  63. Stan:

    I want to say something very quickly, three things actually.

    (1) I wrote this thing with a lot of distractions, which accounts for both the typos and the imprecision of expression. I’m not a good perfectionist anyway, so c’est la vie. Some folks are treating it like its some kind of deep thesis. It doesn’t warrant that. I put it here as a discussion catalyst really. If some of the logic gets a hole shot in in here and there, so be it.

    (2) The word seems to be circulating that I was in Freedom Road, which is true, but I want to disclaim something since that is out there. My issues are with the whole paradigm, and in my opinion, FRSO/OSCL is composed of some of the nicest, smartest, and most dedicated people I have ever known. Moreover, among the “organizational sins” associated with sectarian behavior, FRSO/OSCL was the best I found (since I don’t know them all intimately, that’s not a slam elsewhere either) at avoding this behavior — hawking papers, colonizing people’s movements, setting up front organizations, and all that other opportunistic practice. My disagreements with them as an ML organization is a disagreement among friends, some valued personal friends. I have not the slightest intention of engaging in any public polemic with my comrades. Ever.

    (3) Folks of a more feverishly sectarian bent, however, have already started to characterize this critique as evidence that I am “a renegade.” The first time I remember hearing that word was on the racist Westerns of my youth, to describe indigenous Americans who refused to accept the theft of their lands. Given my own protean political development, that doesn’t strike me as such a bad thing. It is interesting, however, to look up the word.

    • someone who rebels and becomes an outlaw

    • deserter: a disloyal person who betrays or deserts his cause or religion or political party or friend etc.

    • rebel: break with established customs

    • recreant: having deserted a cause or principle; “some provinces had proved recreant”; “renegade supporters of the usurper”

    2 December 2006, 11:21 am

  64. Louis Proyect:

    http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2006/12/02/stan-goff-rejects-marxism-a-reply/

    2 December 2006, 2:10 pm

  65. Tellurian:

    A few years ago, Stan, I wrote you, under another name, that you weren’t a marxist in any traditional sense, and your replies indicated that you were already thinking along similar lines, which resulted in your current position.

    The basic ideological problem is very simple. The fundamental historical problem of our time is not political in the narrow sense, but religious, just as religious reactionaries say it is. The irrationality of the traditional religions and their perverted values have disguised the need of earthpeople to think in moral and spiritual terms, about politics as well as other areas of the human condition. What is necessary is to legitimate human relations maong groupings of people, just as has been evolved among individuals, to enable earthpeople not only to survive but to prevail.

    The ideological problem is that anti-people religious concepts and values have been incorporated into scientific ideology, and this scientific ideology has been incorprated into marxism. At the time Marx and Engels wrote science was still a progressive force and, as is well known, Marx wanted to dedicate CAPITAL to Darwin. The scientism of marxism, which supported the ‘laws of the evolution of societies’ mirrored the scientific laws that purported to guide matter and energy.

    The gods of religion are imaginary, as are the laws of science. The former legitimated the absolute power of the rulers of agrarian polities, and the latter legitimated the Law and Order of liberal (capitalist) polities. The ideology of the scientist-theologian Issac Newton, which postulated a God’s eye perspective of the universe, rather than a geocentric perspective, has been superceded in physical science by Einstein’s view. But social science historically lags far behind the natural sciences because its ideological implications are far more explosive.

    Our traditional religions are ideologically diseased because they have been perverted by class-based power to legitimate their power interests. But earthpeople are currently developing an incipient worldview which William Greider in ONE WORLD READY OR NOT called global humanism. This worldview can be legitmated and systematized by conceptual innovations associated with Amereican social scinece in the 20th century, including math conceptual structures.

    Your current ideological position, Stan, is a step in this direction. Our political positions must be reinforced by moral and spiritual ideology.

    2 December 2006, 2:28 pm

  66. Stan:

    Louis’ reply notes Marx’s later engagement with Leibig, which De also references. But even this awareness of the ecological destruction latent in capitalist relations in agriculture did not overcome Marx’s scientism, in particular his “neutral, instrumental” view of technology, or machines.

    Just as Hornborg noted, “Karl Marx visualized an egalitarian society based on advanced, industrial technology. The collapse of the Soviet Union ultimately reflects the failure of Marxist thought to escape the illusions of what I refer to in this book as ‘machine fetishism.’” (The Power of the Machine)

    My suspicion is that this reluctance to recognize this fetishim of the machine emerges, aside from the competition imposed by capitalist encirclement, from or is closely related to Marx and Engels’ (even in the latter’s positivistic account of gender) naturalization of women, which is demonstrated in their writings again and again. This is part of a male conquest (of nature) meme, that tends to go unexamined.

    When I refer to liberal feminism in my admittedly rushed and distracted critique, I am refering to the feminism that seeks as its primary persuasive objective the “equality” of men and women. This juridical equality was critiqued quite effectively by Catharine MacKinnon in Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, as a device to preserve social inequality that operates prior to the operation of the law in liberal (white-bourgeois-male dominated) society.

    Women are not the literal “equals” of men. We are different. What rad-fems have said repeatedly is that this difference does not justify male domination of women. They (we) want to extricate the heirarchy from the difference. The juridical equality POV simply assigns an abstract “equality” to all, but adopts a hands-off approach (zero legal recognition) to the socialization-internalization-materialization of male power by all of us.

    Her critique of liberal law is a deeply Marxist thesis, in this writer’s opinion, but it is consistently ignored by Marxist organizations (and by the male Marxist pantheon), who have not only favored the juridical equality standard of critique for gender as a system of social power, but who are more and more embracing the bizarre libertarianism of post-modernist anti-constructivists who deny that there is any difference between women and men at all, and that these categories are nullified (in this solipsitic account).

    Marx was correct, as are the radical feminists, imo, in saying that human beings are at some level irreconcilably alienated from “nature,” in the sense that we have uniquely taken evolution inside the social process (which has a biological basis, btw); and rad-feminists acknowledge that male-female biological differences exist as part of human nature, too.

    The dualism that matters, and it is essentially the same in the case of “nature” and the “naturalized” woman (in the eyes of Man), is that these differentiations have hierarchies of instrinsic value and power imposed upon them.

    The masculine trope of “conquest” is reflective of and emblematic of this, as has been pointed out more than once here. Conquest of Nature, Conquest of (naturalized) Colonies/Enemies, and Conquest of (naturalized) Women.

    I ask the question again and again, why are so few womenin Marxist organizaitons, on Marxist discussion lists, etc.? That we even ask this question is telling us plenty. We don’t want to acknowledge the simplest and most direct answer. Because these spaces are dominated by men.

    (This space, FS, hopes to be a place where men show up, and precisely this answer is given. I am, after all, myself a man. It just seems only fair that women not be assigned the sole repsonsibility for “educating” us. I’m not saying the question — Why don’t the women join/stay? — is asked by leftist men with the malintent. As Amee Chew mentioned recently, the kinds of challenges feminists and gender-traitors are making are political; and we want people to take them that way… with a sense of repsonsibility. No one is being “bashed.”)

    Baby is waking, gotta run.

    2 December 2006, 3:48 pm

  67. Louis Proyect:

    Stan, I don’t think it is very useful to quote secondary literature on Karl Marx. I have no idea who Hornberg is and refuse to accept his characterizations of Marx’s thought. If you are going to critique Marx, you have to quote him not his detractors.

    2 December 2006, 5:40 pm

  68. Julio:

    To me, Stan’s reflections show that he is as good a Marxist as anybody. For Marxists, no human institution (Marx’s written word inclusive) is beyond critical examination.

    My background is very different from Stan’s or others’. And living in the U.S. since the mid 1990s, trying to relate both to the work of local activists and discussing ideas with leftists on the web, I’ve come to the realization that there’s much noise in these discussions. Not infrequently, the terms one uses mean something completely different to readers with other referents. With that sober warning, I’ll make my remarks.

    I usually start by — like in reverse engineering — envisioning a feasible human society in good standing with nature (including our own human nature, to the extent it is not entirely fluid), in which diverse individual members face the world in some form of workable unity, collectively and consciously regulate the products they create and the mutual relations they establish with one another. In this society, exploitation and abuse are not merely abolished, but rendered unnecessary, because people’s lives gain coherence through the concourse of others, not at the expense of others.

    Admittedly, it’s a vague vision — not a blueprint. But it is not predicated on some idealization of what humans can achieve. Clearly, if we can envision it, even vaguely, then we must observing, in ourselves and others, the basic premises to realize it. To set this transformation in motion, one doesn’t need to impose as a precondition that people are who they are not, here and now. Change is predicated on what we have historically proved capable of exhibiting, even ordinarily — traits and behaviors that “only” need to be generalized.

    There’s nothing inevitable in the realization of a vision like this. It’s contingent on concrete people taking action. And timing and randomness play a role. But the fundamental vision is *not* arbitrary. It’s not far-fetched (”jalada de los pelos”), as we say in Mexico. The vision of a society without exploitation and alienation has an impulse rooted in the fundamental attitude human beings have evolved and reinforced, the impulse — not merely to adapt to — but to willfully shape up our environment to fit our needs and dreams. And this impulse has been turbocharged by capitalism, with its antagonisms and insinuation of the plasticity in the range of human possibilities. It is an inherent to “producing” (transforming the world to fit human needs and dreams) and “working” (consciously leading “production”), which is to say, it is pervasive, inherent to human life.

    It is only natural to think of “laborers,” “direct producers” — in the very broad sense of these terms: those who directly create what we deem necessary and useful (whether or not is traded in markets or exists in tangible forms), as the leading crowd in the ambitious process of human self-transformation. Who else could lead the process? The social parasites? Those who benefit most from the status quo?

    There’s nothing in the world I observe, near or far, that indicates *a lasting recess* in this thrust towards a conscious, collective human self-transformation at a global scale like the one Marx and Engels envisioned. Nothing. It is an optical illusion to believe that because self-proclaimed Marxists, communists, or socialists of this or that variety remain or have made themselves politically marginal with their attachment to doctrine or sect, this or that political effort has wound up betraying its original intentions at great human cost, or things have turned out bad political season after political season, the premises of human emancipation have vanished. It seems clear to me that the trend, the overall trend, is going in the right direction. While conditions are just conditions, this can be verified empirically.

    I can illustrate it. In the last few decades, China and India have become economic powers. The ultimate driving force behind these developments — contradictory, antagonistic as they have been, but involving 2/3 of the human race! — has been the mass of direct producers. It’s hard not to view these process as announcing a greater historical protagonism for these masses of people. More directly political, there’s a tremendous impetus coming from the poorest among the direct producers in Latin America societies, ethnic descendents of the early inhabitants of the continent, towards national self-determination, grassroots democracy, and economic equality. These mass efforts are *entirely aligned* with the process of self-transformation that Marx, Engels, and others envisioned. In broad terms, if not in the details. And then, the people of Iraq — a poor country, devastated by decades of war, “sanctions,” bombings, invasion, occupation, and civil war — is showing for everyone to see the pathetic limits of a commanding global force for at least sixty years: U.S. imperialism! We don’t need to be prophets to note that the tectonic events that these developments announce will make 1848 and 1917 look like kindergarten rehearsals.

    It is a tautology to say that only the people *themselves*, most people, the overwhelming majority of the human race, as we are, can and should carry out this refoundation of our collective life, in the forms and tempos we may manage to impose on ourselves. Of course, not all of us live and work under conditions that make us equally fit to jump-start this process of collective self-transformation at the global scale. But, again, conditions are only conditions. People can, every and then, transcend the limitations that their conditions impose on them. We know that the search for a collective agent capable of (*capable of*, not ready made for) *leading* (*leading*, not being the exclusive agent of) the process made some young folks in 1840s’ Europe pinpoint a particular crowd.

    Quibbling about their answer is of little use. What matters is the question. Merely posing the question entails part of the answer or, more specifically, entails criteria to theoretically test the validity of a given answer. The leading crowd has to meet at least two criteria: (1) collective *ability* to rebuild society on a higher human level and (2) embodiment of the most constructive, decent traits of humanity, yet minimal attachment to (or maximal detachment from) the status quo. As loose and general as they are, the criteria keeps making sense. The concrete crowds that will somewhat, somehow meet them will necessarily vary from society to society and from historical time to historical time.

    The specs of the answer given by those people back in the 1840s, and then their followers, the specific economic, social, and political profile, etc. of the leading crowd was *entirely contingent* upon (enabled and limited by) the context in which they posed the question. Their answer could not be definitive, because they were humans, not prophets sharing revealed universal truths. To us, what should matter most is not the answer, but the implicit question — as we may re-pose it based on our own needs. Who can *lead* the process? Text exegesis can’t help here. Ultimately, we are left to our own devices. The ultimate answer to the question of collective agency is empirical, not theoretical. And, collectively, the only way we can take a stab at the question is through *trial and error*. We have to experiment, see what works and what doesn’t, try to learn from others’ experiences, and generalize best practices to the best of our ability. But it is a fallacy to say that, because people have not yet transformed themselves into X, then they cannot transform themselves into X, period.

    This country has tremendous resources and it can contribute tremendously to global socialism. So, a specifically-American reverse-engineering mental experiment of the kind above has to be conducted. Who are going to be the leaders and protagonists of the social transformation this country needs to play a constructive role in building global socialism (if and when we manage to build it). I don’t think we can discard the large majority of the working people in this country. Past performance is no necessary indication of future results. And small groups simply are not up to the scale of social change required. The leading force has to be a large majority, a large working majority. The majority of the people in this country are white. So, yes, I’m thinking of white workers, female and male, as protagonists of this struggle, along with their sisters and brothers of all other races, nationalities, ethnicities, etc. We are not there yet, but wherever we happen to be now, that’s where we should be heading to.

    The collapse of U.S. imperialism doesn’t seem like a leftist fantasy anymore. It seems feasible. There are a lot of people envisioning a national foreign policy based on mutual respect and genuine international cooperation. And once people get ideas like these in their collective heads, they are not easily uprooted. Institutional constraints on the imperialist impulses of U.S. capitalism will be accelerated, but not determined, by external events. The people in this country have to turn things around. While a change of that magnitude is not be equated with the abolition of capitalism or of commodity production in the U.S., it is likely to shake the foundations of this society, economically, politically, culturally, socio-psychologically, like few other events in the history of this country. In that context, clearly prefigured in the current situation, who is going to lead?

    In my opinion, the main flaw of Joaquín’s views is that he fails to note how historically contingent the (fragmented, subordinate) condition of the U.S. working class is. He has suggested that, at least partially, the anti-class behavior of white workers in the U.S. stems from imperialism. Clearly, the crisis of U.S. imperialism has to shake (at least partially) one of the conditions that perpetuate class division in the U.S. But the argument that, since historically white workers haven’t yet been able to unite with non-whites (whatever the causes involved), being there the current bulk of the class in itself, they are then incapable of uniting with non-white workers is a fallacy. There are many processes in nature and society with a lasting, self-reinforcing dynamics. The disunity of the U.S. working class, historically conditioned, has fed back into itself, turning this disunity into a hardwired, but not unsurmountable, obstacle to historical progress. Understanding the historical contingency of class division is necessary to overcome it at the least cost. But denying it doesn’t make the groping efforts people make to unite the class disappear. It only makes them more costly.

    Finally, the struggle to unite the class has strategic and tactical imperatives. I’m don’t mean a rigid, grand strategy. I mean advancing, as much as we can, towards our vision. These imperatives, categorical or not, depend on the state of the class and the socio-political environment. Since the class is utterly disunited, seeking its unity requires focus on struggles that emphasize common needs and interests that people immediately feel and can act upon. Stealing an idea from DeAnander in another thread, mere repetition stabilizes a behavior. We need white and nonwhite workers to unite in small-scale struggles first, and repeat the experience over and over and over, until we create the collective synapses that support much broader unity. That’s how we prepare quantum leaps, by small, seemingly invisible efforts at first.

    The only precondition is that each struggle contributes to (or at least doesn’t sabotage) the broader unity of the class. A struggle that sacrifices the needs and interests of the most oppressed (e.g. women, blacks), legally vulnerable (e.g. immigrants), or poorest segments of the class can’t meet this criterion. On the other hand, a struggle that requires sacrifices from the better-off members of the class are okay. However, this cannot mean that the pivots of the struggle will *necessarily* be anti-racism or feminism. They may or may not be. We cannot require that the workers be who they are not *to cooperate in struggles that meet the criteria*. We make it clear that overcoming patriarchy and racism are indispensable to building true socialism. But if we use feminism or anti-racism as our political litmus tests, then we’re really saying that social change led by workers (as they exist) is impossible. Because — I speak here for myself at least — even those of us who may deem ourselves most “conscious” are far from overcoming the most insidious manifestations of patriarchy or racism.

    I’m not an advocate of organized Marxism. Starting by building political groups on the basis of ideological community and turning them into the pivots of the political struggle is assbackwards. Clashes of opinion, ideological battles, etc. are inherent to people trying to cooperate on some equitable basis. They are a matter of fact. But the starting point of the struggle is not commonality of ideas, but commonality of needs, interests, and disposition to fight. The immediate setting of the struggle is where we live, work, and communicate. The commitment is to cooperate at the grassroots, advancing at whichever pace we can, putting first the needs and interests of those most abused and oppressed. These struggles (and not doctrinary battles) should *organize* and inform Marxism and Marxists (rather than Marxists thinking of themselves as the organizing force and political factotum of these struggles.

    From this perspective, I insist, Stan’s work is as Marxist as I can think of.

    2 December 2006, 6:43 pm

  69. peggy:

    “and I still consider myself in many respects a Marxist”

    Stan, rather than saying that you are a Marxist, why do you not say that you find many useful ideas in Marxism? From the discussion above, I gather that for some, Marxism is a personal identity, a group to which one either belongs or does not belong. Moreover, if one belongs to Group A (say, “Marxists”) one cannot belong to Group B (say, “liberals”). And within the group called Marxists, there are multiple mutually exclusive groups. It is like a virtual caste system. I doubt that Marx had such a social organization in mind, as a model to be emulated, when he developed his ideas.

    I think that when an idea becomes appropriated by a group, it loses much of its power as an idea. Different groups fight over its ownership. It becomes somebody’s private “intellectual property.” It becomes a form of capital, from which the owner derives profit.

    Some have suggested that a good way to prevent conflict over accumulation of various forms of capital is through the encouragement of multiple affiliations on the part of individuals, such that, in the ideal, each individual stands at the conjunction of a unique combination of affiliations. Conversely, a system of mutually exclusive group memberships inevitably leads to conflict between groups.

    In a parallel fashion, certain groups consider it heresy to derive ideas from rival groups. Fundamentalist Christians, for instance, may consider it heresy even to contemplate ideas contained in the Quran - indeed, even to read it. For pure Marxists, ideas derived from liberal thinkers are heresy.

    I am such a bad heretic, Stan. I am the very soul of impurity - if impurity has a soul, which I doubt. I read all kinds of things that you would call shit. You would puke on the bastard ideas that emerge from my stinking bitch-hole of a mind. As a thinker, I am shameless. So many people hate me. And yet, this is my freedom, that I wouldn’t give up for anything - not even love. Should we heretics organize? No way. Call us whatever you will.

    2 December 2006, 7:12 pm

  70. Stan:

    “Hand in hand with this centralization, or this expropriation of many capitalists by few, develop, on an ever-extending scale, the co-operative form of the labor-process, the conscious technical application of science, the methodical cultivation of the soil, the transformation of the instruments of labor into instruments of labor only usable in common, the economizing of all means of production by their use as means of production of combined, socialized labor, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world-market, and with this, the international character of the capitalistic regime. Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolize all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working-class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. Thus integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.

    “The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labor of the proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of negation. This does not re-establish private property for the producer, but gives him individual property based on the acquisition of the capitalist era: i.e., on co-operation and the possession in common of the land and of the means of production.

    “The transformation of scattered private property, arising from individual labor, into capitalist private property is, naturally, a process, incomparably more protracted, violent, and difficult, than the transformation of capitalistic private property, already practically resting on socialized production, into socialized property. In the former case, we had the expropriation of the mass of the people by a few usurpers; in the latter, we have the expropriation of a few usurpers by the mass of the people.”

    -Capital, Vol I, Part VIII, Chapter 32

    I don’t see anything there about re-tooling.

    2 December 2006, 9:25 pm

  71. Stan:

    I want to appreciate Julio, and not for defending my Marxist status. (-:

    These are thoughtful comments that are struggling with contradictions that should be obvious. I’m seeing that sensitivity to the conditions (conditions being needs and shared visions, too) in Latin America (where I have also spent a fair amount of time, albeit as an imperialist tool).

    Hornborg, who is worth the read Lou, as well as Mies and Beil and Harvey and a few others, have paid attention to Luxemburg’s theses on primitive accumulation remaining a constant feature of capitalist accumualation.

    This is exacerbated as we enter a period of exterminism, when the very Marxist prognostications on the organic composition of capital are actualizing with a vengeance to wreak havoc around the globe and render seas of humanity superfluous to the accumulation process. And the greatest weapons of primitive accumulation are now the instruments of financial speculation weilded as a weapon of the hyper-state.

    We will not witness the break-up of American power in scenes reminiscent of the great CIO sit-ins. We will witness it as we do now in fistfights at the Mexican Parliament, in the whole continental drift of Latin America, in the streets of Beirut… American power is international, even though only a tiny handful of Americans recognize this simple fact.

    Here, we will witness housing bubbles…. shit like that, banal sounding crises that will be felt first as stresses on our most intimate relationships, and as threats to our children’s “security”.

    I live in an area that is majority white; and they all think they are middle class. They are in debt up to their tender asses; and they are armed to the teeth. They accept the daily humiliations of their cubicle jobs; and they watch tv… and they are alienated in every way imaginable: powerless, disharmonious, afflicted with shallow meanings, living with McNorms in a comletely disembedded community, culturally estranged, and estranged from themselves.

    This is what I look around and see, right here and now, within my own reach, while Oaxacans do their thing (God bless em), and Lebanese do their thing (God bless em), and Iraqis do their thing (God bless em all), etc.

    One night a few years back, when someone’s car was vandalized, an anonymous person sent a cop to my door, who told me to see if my sons were in their beds (I didn’t. I knew they were in bed. I told him so, and asked him to vacate my porch.). Someone told them, you see, that (at that time, it’s changed now) these were the only two African American teenaged boys living on this street.

    So, if the planets align tomorrow to pole axe the US economy, who do you think these negative-net-worth, indebted, insecure, deracinated folks are going to turn on? The government?

    The couple across the street have met my grandson and know him by name. I give them tomatoes and basil and Greek oregano from the garden. They don’t like my bumper stickers, but they like us. They wave at Sherry when she’s having s cigarette on the front steps.

    When the next ice storm or hurricane shuts off our electricity, we’ll touch base to see what we each might have that the other household needs.

    They won’t attack my house because of who goes in and out there.

    When Julio talks about bulding up an aggregate of synapses as the preliminary basis for establishing whatever forms of social soidarity become necessary in the future, I’m feelin’ Julio, big time.

    2 December 2006, 10:05 pm

  72. Legume Sam:

    “Thank you Legume Sam! it has long been a discomfort of mine and finally an outright allergy attack, that trad Marxism seems increasingly like nowt but an egalitarian version of Industrial Cornucopianism.”

    Thank you, De… I still think it’s meaningful to note that Marx’s feet were firmly placed in the 19th century…

    3 December 2006, 12:48 am

  73. Bruce Dixon:

    This is indeed a lot to think about, Stan, and something I will certainly be passing around. Thanks for putting some clear thought & words to a place I guess quite a few of us find ourselves arriving at the last few years. But that’s probably what a feral scholar is supposed to do, huh?

    3 December 2006, 12:54 am

  74. Tim:

    Well said Stan but I don’t think you should take on so…

    I have been an active lefty since the 60’s but I never joined a leftwing party. I always thought they were too sectarian. Instead I allied myself with and worked with progressive issues both personally and professionally.

    I would call my self Marxian, not simply “Marxist” and definitely a communist of some kind, leaning to the libertarian left but not an anarchist as such.

    I too am interested by some ideas in Illych and all kinds of other people from Malcolm X, to Hasan Nasrallah. None if these people are Marxists but they have some useful things to teach us. Nasrallah for example teaches us the value of honesty and moderation combined with the resolute defence of the principle of self-determination in the face of armed aggression by a much more powerful enemy.

    I see no contradictions between what you have observed and building a way forward. Communism is in it’s infancy, it will get stronger as time goes by, not because of some historical inevitability but because it is an expression of the human faculty of altruism. It has survival value and so it will continue to be employed in various guises as people rediscover it.

    Those who don’t like the word communist or socialist can call it Democracy…

    No movement or human entity (party, state, religion etc.) is without error. Our aim should be to critically and intelligently support or enhance those aspects of society and culture which lead to real progress in rational improvements.

    3 December 2006, 3:13 am

  75. Stan:

    Much as I’d love to take credit, I have to note that I was turned on to Ivan Illich, and the term “weaponized phallus,” and a whole lot of other useful and insightful things by Deanander (who co-moderates here, and who was the editor for Sex & War. She is a first-rate thinker, writer, friend, and mentor… and a future founding member of the Earthworm Party. (-:

    3 December 2006, 9:17 am

  76. Tellurian:

    There is a recent book by Lauren Sandler subtitled DISPATCHES FROM THE EVANGICAL YOUTH MOVEMENT. It details the recruiting of the American youth to a Bushite religious ideology.It begins with a list of statistics:

    1.age of born again Christians most likely to engage in evangical behaviior in 2004: 18 to 20- year- old
    (88 percent)

    2.Percentage of high shcool students who support prayer in public schools: 84

    etc, etc She argues that the left does not speak to these kids. I agree. When I was a communist organizer on the truck docks of Los Angeles, I found that traditional marxist truth did not communicate to American dock workers and truck drivers.

    Parts of marxist conceptual language are obsolete. Since in the 20th century it unified the world left, a revolution in marxist truth is necessary to make it applicable to the worldviews of the dispowered population.

    It must be EMOTIONALLY applicable as well as conceptually, because emotional truth is more important to most people. The Bushites have developed an emotional gateway to the souls of the young, inducing an ideology that indirectly legitmates capitalist power. And the American left…. well, the left has just begun to break out of the stylistic marxist straightjacket.

    I suggest that secular humanism is no longer an adequate weapon against capitalism: we must convert to a spiritual humanism. It is assumed that an ideology that institutionalizes the moral and spiritual truth must be irational. This is not true. The spiritual emotions, hope, faith and love, can be detatched from the infantile delusions of traditional religion and integrated into a rational ideology.

    But we live at a time in history when no one person, or one hundred persons, can construct it: it must be a communal effort, and emergence of truths from the population. The truth consumers of the world must be converted into truth producers. The historical truths of marxism must be integrated into a spiritual ideology that appeals to the youth of the world. We are living at time in history when this is beginning to be possible

    3 December 2006, 12:38 pm

  77. the burningman:

    For anyone interested, there’s a substantial amount of commentary from Marxist-Leninists at Red Flags about Stan’s essay.

    http://burning.typepad.com/burningman/2006/11/stan_goff_follo.html#comments

    3 December 2006, 1:54 pm

  78. stacia:

    peggy, please don’t ever refer to your mind with anything less than complete respect.
    be proud of what you think about, and be proud of how you think about it.
    if that’s your only contribution to ‘the revolution,’ it’s a lot, and it’s enough.
    stacia

    3 December 2006, 4:05 pm

  79. Stan:

    Burningman is being over-generous calling my rambling explanation of a decision anything as exalted as “an essay.” (-:

    Also, thanks for what appears to be an invitation to participate in the discussion on your blog.

    Tellurian, thanks for sharing that experience and the thoughts on the affective lives of people. I remember the isolation I felt back when I was hawking papers for one organization.

    What you say about people’s emotional lives is terribly important; and this goes to the heart of my conivction that we appear to this culture as alien.

    For a very very good book on this, I heartily recommend Linda Kintz’ book Between Jesus and the Market.

    3 December 2006, 4:46 pm

  80. peggy:

    Thanks, stacia, for your kind response. Actually, I do respect my mind highly, and those nasty words I used when referring to it were mainly for shock value. This thread appears to be largely male dominated: guys trying to impress each other with how much they know and how active they are and have been. I have followed the discussion on this thread, and thought I might have something to say. But somehow I felt that nobody would take notice of anything I said. Even De’s comment on earthworms, which I thought was very much to the point, was barely noticed, and even then, as a kind of joke. And De is among the most highly respected contributors to this blog, perhaps _the_ most highly respected. So who would pay attention to me? I was exasperated by what I saw as the purity competition among the guys. Somewhere in the back of my mind was the thought that it (my mind) is as impure as an eartworm, and to my mind this was a happy thought. But, you know, to call a person a “worm” is generally an insult, so I figured I would wear that insult and see what happened. Also, it was late at night and I had experienced a long unpleasant week.

    3 December 2006, 7:57 pm

  81. Legume Sam:

    I liked De’s comment about earthworms; it made a ton of sense, and showed agroecological forethought. And I’ve decided to take the van der Pijl stuff elsewhere…

    3 December 2006, 11:57 pm

  82. Elaina:

    Peggy-

    I totally hear ya. Calling from the bowels of organizer culture. God damn it makes me so tired sometimes.

    4 December 2006, 3:28 am

  83. stacia:

    good, peggy. i’m glad you didn’t mean it.
    speaking of earthworms, god bless em, but did you know that like most of us they are not indigenous to north american soil.
    many species like the nightcrawler come from europe. they pull nutrients from the surface of the soil down into the soil, making the soil richer, but some of the native species that germinate near the surface of the soil, like anemone and trillium and other spring flowers of the woods depend on nutrients near the surface (called ‘duff’) and their survival as a species might be compromised when the earthworm changes the soil profile.
    so, like everything else, including marxism, even the earthworm is a mixed bag.
    stacia

    4 December 2006, 1:27 pm

  84. Randy Morris:

    Peggy, just so you know, you are one of the commentators I ALWAYS read. Keep it up.

    Randy

    4 December 2006, 3:25 pm

  85. Sandy:

    After reading this essay, I am convinced that this entire movement will remain as alien to “organic” experience as Goff asserts for Marxism generally. Why, well, one key reason will surely be the unexcelled level of turgidity and sheer pedantry in their discourse.

    4 December 2006, 6:36 pm

  86. DeAnander:

    @stacia

    Everything has something wrong with it - Clair C. Patterson.

    :-)

    the honeybee, apis mellifera, is also an immigrant…

    4 December 2006, 6:38 pm

  87. Kelli:

    The reason there hasn’t been a sea change in the world as a result of the ideals I see expressed in this article and these comments is simple:

    You all over-analyze everything.

    Stan, your central thesis is correct: People responding in local ways to local problem while keeping lanes of communication open to other parts of the world is not just the best, but the ONLY way to effect the kind of change you’re hoping for.

    No one among the masses is going to bother with dialectics and socioeconomic dynamics and so on and so forth when what they want to do is simply improve their lives.

    Everything else is academic. And I chose that word on purpose, and used it literally. Most of what I see here are political, sociological, and economic theorists engaging each other in a debate that the average person DOESN’T CARE about, and no amount of trying to convince them that they should is going to make a difference.

    5 December 2006, 11:27 am

  88. Zyx:

    If you have a chance, visit the Hannity Forums. Tap into the Washington Politics section, and count up the number of posts and threads dedicated to the the immediate threat posed by the Communist left. Since their fearless leader has backed away from blaming everything on Muslims, they’ve got themselves in a fit trying to find someone else to blame for everything.

    It would seem they haven’t been clued into y’alls sould-searching.

    Very informative, if you have the chance.

    6 December 2006, 9:56 am

  89. r graves:

    red dan,

    i found your post on drop-out/commune culture very interesting– have you written elsewhere on this? are there any books/articles/other materials you’d recommend on the subject?

    thanks!

    6 December 2006, 12:21 pm

  90. the burningman:

    Kelli writes: “No one among the masses is going to bother with dialectics and socioeconomic dynamics and so on and so forth when what they want to do is simply improve their lives.

    “Everything else is academic. And I chose that word on purpose, and used it literally. Most of what I see here are political, sociological, and economic theorists engaging each other in a debate that the average person DOESN’T CARE about, and no amount of trying to convince them that they should is going to make a difference.”

    Is this true?

    Then what is it that makes Muhamed Ali such a hero? Because of “everyday life,” or the way in which he resisted an entire system of oppression?

    Where did those tens of thousands of people working to free Mumia come from?

    But I guess they aren’t “average.”

    So should those of us who aren’t average, and see in the conditions of our own lives (and those far worse off than us) the symptoms of a larger system just be quiet about it? Let it all “sort itself out”?

    I am not a “political, sociological, and economic theorist.” I’m a typesetter, former waiter and grown man looking to contribute to the end of a system that causes global warming.

    What the “average American” is up for might not be the best measure of what decidedly “unaverage” people should be working for.

    In fact, I don’t think the “average American” even exists. It is a mirage.

    6 December 2006, 1:15 pm

  91. Legume Sam:

    “In fact, I don’t think the ‘average American’ even exists. It is a mirage.”

    I’m still trying to find the attribution to that now-cliched quote: “The average American has one testicle and one breast”…

    6 December 2006, 1:49 pm

  92. Charles:

    Peggy,

    Give yourself more credit than that. I don’t believe you think NOBODY would take notice of what you said.

    Charles

    6 December 2006, 2:14 pm

  93. Charles:

    Comment by Tellurian — 12/3/2006 @ 12:38 pm :

    I suggest that secular humanism is no longer an adequate weapon against capitalism: we must convert to a spiritual humanism. It is assumed that an ideology that institutionalizes the moral and spiritual truth must be irational. This is not true. The spiritual emotions, hope, faith and love, can be detatched from the infantile delusions of traditional religion and integrated into a rational ideology.

    ^^^^^^^

    How about feminism as the new “weapon” ( uh, masculinist term there) or solution to capitalism ? It deals with emotions, hope, and love. Since woman do the overwhelming majority of the caring labor in society, making human beings in all their facets, from cradle to grave, liberation of women is the key to getting to socialism.

    6 December 2006, 2:21 pm

  94. Charles:

    My suspicion is that this reluctance to recognize this fetishim of the machine emerges, aside from the competition imposed by capitalist encirclement, from or is closely related to Marx and Engels’ (even in the latter’s positivistic account of gender) naturalization of women, which is demonstrated in their writings again and again. This is part of a male conquest (of nature) meme, that tends to go unexamined.

    ^^^^
    Doesn’t your critique of positivism originate in Marx and Engels ? Are you sure they are inconsistent in their own thinking in this regard ?

    Do you really think women were back there discouraging the European men from “conquering” nature ? Conquest of nature is a co-gender thing in Europe. All those European mothers were raising those little boys to be men “conquering” nature. A lot of the conquering of nature was _for_ the women. Big strong heman making the world safe for their women. Women are also the essence of culture/ antithesis of nature in the European ideology.

    This is more contradictory than you allow.

    There’s a big naturalization of men “meme” in European culture, too. For example, capitalism, which is surely masculine, is “natural” in the bourgeois ideology. Social Darwinism is the notion that _men_ are acting naturally when they do all this conquering.

    One has to think in terms of relations not things. It is not in every realm that women are more natural than men. Sometimes the reverse in European ideology.
    Can’t speak of naturalization of women without relating it to how men are thought of. When one does that, one finds naturalization of both women and men in many ways in European “deep structure.”

    The big conquest problem is Europeans conquering other peoples. That should be number one on your conquest no-no list.

    ^^^^^^^

    When I refer to liberal feminism in my admittedly rushed and distracted critique, I am refering to the feminism that seeks as its primary persuasive objective the “equality” of men and women. This juridical equality was critiqued quite effectively by Catharine MacKinnon in Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, as a device to preserve social inequality that operates prior to the operation of the law in liberal (white-bourgeois-male dominated) society.

    ^^^^
    CB: Of course, the juridical is superstructure. Engels is famous for attention to base. Engels emphasizes material , economic equality of women and men, making women economically independent of men. Marxism attends to political economy, that is power in material relationships, not just legal equality.

    Not that we shouldn’t all become Mackinonists, but why anybody would want to downgrade Engels’ point, I don’t know.

    ^^^^

    Women are not the literal “equals” of men. We are different. What rad-fems have said repeatedly is that this difference does not justify male domination of women. They (we) want to extricate the heirarchy from the difference. The juridical equality POV simply assigns an abstract “equality” to all, but adopts a hands-off approach (zero legal recognition) to the socialization-internalization-materialization of male power by all of us.

    ^^^^^
    Yea ! Women are doing most of the raising of children, most of the elementary school teaching, “making of people”, caring labor, so that is largely directly in their hands. See my “For Women’s Liberation ”
    ^^^^^^

    Her critique of liberal law is a deeply Marxist thesis, in this writer’s opinion, but it is consistently ignored by Marxist organizations (and by the male Marxist pantheon), who have not only favored the juridical equality standard of critique for gender as a system of social power, but who are more and more embracing the bizarre libertarianism of post-modernist anti-constructivists who deny that there is any difference between women and men at all, and that these categories are nullified (in this solipsitic account).

    ^^^^
    Since her critique is a good thing , and it’s Marxist, doesn’t that imply that Marxism is still a good thing ?

    ^^^^

    Marx was correct, as are the radical feminists, imo, in saying that human beings are at some level irreconcilably alienated from “nature,” in the sense that we have uniquely taken evolution inside the social process (which has a biological basis, btw); and rad-feminists acknowledge that male-female biological differences exist as part of human nature, too.

    ^^^^^
    Culture gives humans a LaMarckian adapative mechanism, i.e. non-Mendelian, one in which the inheritance of acquired characteristics is possible. Probably don’t want to get too irreconcilably alienated from “nature” though. Wouldn’t be good for our natural health. :>) We are still a natural species, despite all the “supernatural” stuff we have come up with in culture over the years. Getting too alienated from nature results in things like nuclear weapons and global warming.

    ^^^^

    The dualism that matters, and it is essentially the same in the case of “nature” and the “naturalized” woman (in the eyes of Man), is that these differentiations have hierarchies of instrinsic value and power imposed upon them.

    The masculine trope of “conquest” is reflective of and emblematic of this, as has been pointed out more than once here. Conquest of Nature, Conquest of (naturalized) Colonies/Enemies, and Conquest of (naturalized) Women.

    ^^^^
    Yea, we have to get rid of the state, fo sure. Putting women in the state offices might be a big step in that direction.

    Of course, I’m not sure women agree to do all this work and clean up men’s mess.

    ^^^^^^

    I ask the question again and again, why are so few women in Marxist organizaitons, on Marxist discussion lists, etc.? That we even ask this question is telling us plenty. We don’t want to acknowledge the simplest and most direct answer. Because these spaces are dominated by men.

    ^^^^^
    Yes, very true. Tautologically true even. But do Marxist organizations or discussion lists have much power or give members much money ? No. Show the women the power and money ! Vote for women for offices that have real power. Give them your money ,if you want to be a materialist feminist. Talk is cheap.

    ^^^^^^^

    (This space, FS, hopes to be a place where men show up, and precisely this answer is given. I am, after all, myself a man. It just seems only fair that women not be assigned the sole repsonsibility for “educating” us. I’m not saying the question — Why don’t the women join/stay? — is asked by leftist men with the malintent. As Amee Chew mentioned recently, the kinds of challenges feminists and gender-traitors are making are political; and we want people to take them that way… with a sense of repsonsibility. No one is being “bashed.”)

    Baby is waking, gotta run.

    ^^^^^
    CB: Chanllenges must be political and material/economic/money

    Oh ,and Rosa Luxemburg, a woman and a Marxist, gives us the basis for our slogan today : Socialism or Barbarism/Environmental Catastrophe !

    6 December 2006, 3:43 pm

  95. Stan:

    And Condi Rice is femal and Black.

    Charles, women today train their sons into patriarchy. That’s not an endorsement. It’s an outgrowth of a gendered division of labor that makes women responsible for the early socialization of children.

    6 December 2006, 4:53 pm

  96. James Cannon:

    Hey Goff,

    Good riddance you miserable bastard. As an Officer, you never really worked for a living and as a Leftie Know-It-All you never really worked for a living or organized anything or explained anything. You are pathetic and the movement for soclialism is much healthier without you and your “experience” in imperialist adventures and your bourgeois ideals which you obviously will never, ever be able to shake-off or get beyond.

    Sincerely,

    James Cannon

    MODERATOR’S NOTE: I was never an officer. I retired as a Master Sergeant.

    6 December 2006, 6:04 pm

  97. Randy Morris:

    Hey Charles, I have a request. I like reading your responses to other peoples’ comments, but it is very hard to read the way you quote them. Is it possible you could italicize the quoted material so it can be easily differentiated from your own?

    Thanks in advance,

    Randy

    6 December 2006, 7:04 pm

  98. required:

    God damn I hate it when people quote some else’s post, in 2 sentence chunks, in its entirety. It’s damn hard to read. I used to do it all the time when I was a teenager and I thought by doing it I was completely decimating the other person’s argument, elevating me to God status in the eyes of all those who read. Now I can see it was more of a result of not being able to construct paragraphs of your own. At the very least I recommend people use some HTML bold and italics to make it easier to digest. Instructions are below.

    7 December 2006, 1:25 am

  99. peggy:

    Dear Ones,

    Thanks for your words of comfort. But still, nobody has paid attention to the first paragraphs of my initial post on this thread, and those were the important part.

    Shall I send you references? Long arguments?

    Love,

    7 December 2006, 5:26 am

  100. Charles:

    Hey Charles, I have a request. I like reading your responses to other peoples’ comments, but it is very hard to read the way you quote them. Is it possible you could italicize the quoted material so it can be easily differentiated from your own?

    Thanks in advance,

    Randy

    ^^^^^^^

    Randy,

    I don’t know how to italicize in this mode. If you know how , please tell me.

    Otherwise, here’s how I do it.

    I put this ^^^^^^^^^^^^ in to separate what I’m quoting from what I say, and I also start out everything I write with “CB:” Then I put another ^^^^^^ in to separate what I have just said from the next section I quote. Like below

    quoted

    ^^^^^^

    CB:

    ^^^^^^

    quoted

    ^^^^^^

    CB:

    ^^^^^^

    Let me know if that explains it for you.

    Charles

    7 December 2006, 2:30 pm

  101. Charles:

    Randy,

    Oh I see I left out some “CB’s” in the quoting I did in the immediately previous post quoting Stan. Sorry. Sometimes I type too fast and don’t follow my own method.

    Charles

    7 December 2006, 2:34 pm

  102. Randy Morris:

    “I gather that for some, Marxism is a personal identity, a group to which one either belongs or does not belong. Moreover, if one belongs to Group A (say, “Marxists”) one cannot belong to Group B (say, “liberals”). And within the group called Marxists, there are multiple mutually exclusive groups. It is like a virtual caste system. I doubt that Marx had such a social organization in mind, as a model to be emulated, when he developed his ideas.

    I think that when an idea becomes appropriated by a group, it loses much of its power as an idea. Different groups fight over its ownership. It becomes somebody’s private “intellectual property.” It becomes a form of capital, from which the owner derives profit.”

    I usually resist commenting on the cogent posts because I have little original to say on much of this politico-philisophical stuff; I am a neophyte, and will probably always be so. Also, most of my posts end up being anecdotal because relating personal experience is the only way I feel my contributions can be truly legitimate in this context.

    Having worked in that enormous caveat, I will now say that I have felt that exclusivity in my own political dealings. During my romp through Democratic Party politics in the last two years (pretty minor romp, admittedly) I found myself with a conundrum: I didn’t believe in “The Party” but I wanted to try to get local people activated to make a change politically. Here in rural Wyoming it is either Democrat or Republican–you speak any other lingo and you instantly alienate yourself in 99% of the populace’s eyes. So Democrat it was.

    Problem is, I’m not a Democrat. Nor am I a Marxist or a Greenie or a Libertarian, and on and on…

    Peggy, my conundrum was that I was asked to lead the local Dem party. My torment didn’t come from being a dogma-monger who can’t accept variety, but rather being ideologically amorphous (by virtue of not knowing enough, probably) and leading a group of people who know what they believe! This didn’t make me a better person than them, just less effective politically.

    It’s really hard to advance an agenda when you don’t have one, and it definitely strikes me as duplicitous to help advance an agenda you don’t really believe in. Fortunately for me, I subscribe to the same “Tactical Efficacy” school of politics as Stan, or I would currently be coiled in the fetal position, denying the ugly complexity of the world with help from the magic of my bed.

    Anyway, to attempt to make some kind of point relating back to your original post: Sometimes ideological exclusivity and alienation comes from inflexibility in individual desire to maintain an identity, like you pointed out. In my case (and I doubt I am unique) exclusion often arises from the fact that I am deeply uncomfortable rocking other peoples’ boats; after all, who am I to think that my philosophical musings have led me to a more enlightened course, especially when I can’t even articulate those musings a majority of the time? If one group’s infexibility lends some amount of energy to their political efforts, then maybe they are better off without my input.

    Live good,

    Randy

    7 December 2006, 2:39 pm

  103. Charles:

    And Condi Rice is femal and Black.

    Charles, women today train their sons into patriarchy. That’s not an endorsement. It’s an outgrowth of a gendered division of labor that makes women responsible for the early socialization of children.

    Comment by Stan — 12/6/2006 @ 4:53 pm

    ^^^^^

    CB: Yes, so , by and large, it’s in women’s hands to stop training their sons AND DAUGHTERS into patriarchy, no ?

    I agree on the gendered division of labor. See my “For Women’s Liberation”. Women do most of the caring labor, not only raising children in the family, but teaching children in school, and taking care of people in the hospital (nurses), taking care of elderly in the home, caring labor all around. Housework is caring labor for “the husband”. Cooking dinner is caring labor for the husband. Women are the main caring laborers of society.

    Caring labor is where labor power is made. So in raising children and caring for the husband-worker, women make the “workers”,make “labor power” in Marx’s scheme in _Capital_. Given how important labor power is in Marx’s scheme, this means women ( as the general caring laborers in society) can be fit into Marx’s scheme very fundamentally. This makes women more fundamental than “workers” in one sense. They are the only source of the only source of value ! See my argument in “For Women’s Liberation”.

    ( Of course women are workers, wage-laborers ,too)

    7 December 2006, 3:12 pm

  104. Randy Morris:

    Lol…they don’t show up. How to explain…

    “” (beginning of italics) and “” (end of italics) without spaces.

    Try that

    MODERATOR’S NOTE: Begin italics with <i>, then end it with </i>

    7 December 2006, 4:23 pm

  105. Paul Finch:

    I have published a minor repost to your post, challenging some of the assertions you make I’m in disagreement with. I would appreicate any criticsm anyone on here has:

    The document can be found at this web address:

    http://docs.google.com/View?docid=ddjjbtcm_1fxw56r

    Here is the text of my response reproduced here:

    [MODERATOR: no, please don’t paste in the entire text. it’s rather long and the link is sufficient. –dc]

    Response to Stan Goff’s “Doctrine” Post
    by Paul Finch

    I am writing in response to your post of November 29, 2006 entitled “Doctrine”, posed on your “Feral Scholar” weblog. I can only say after examining the contents of the post, that it has generated a great deal if discussion and debate amongst radical circles familiar with your writing. It goes without saying that you have exerted a considerable influence over revolutionary left circles to date, and that a major shift in the ideological positions you support and justify has an impact beyond yourself.

    Because of your widespread influence, I believe it is necessary to make a response to the positions mentioned in your post - not because I feel the need to refute or argue with the positions you hold, but rather in the interest of carrying out a public debate that will reach the many committed radicals who have, over the years, been influenced by the positions you publicly take.

    Let me first make clear I am not opposed to your stated break with Marxist democratic-centralist orthodoxy.

    [… most of essay elided, follow the link above to read full text…]

    Let me say that I agree with a large portion of the sentiments expressed in your “Doctrine” post, although in many cases for reasons that may be at odds with the ones you hold. I have not attempted to address many of the specific points you raise, but rather the general spirit of your post. It would be far too time-consuming to uncesssarily address every point you raise, or even to refute each one I find myself in disagreement with. Rather I welcome and will respond to specific contentions or challenges that are put forward to what I’ve written, especially if they arise from a section of your post that I haven’t properly or adequitely addressed.My criticism of your post stems from what I perceive as the rejection of elements integral to the survival and success of the revolutionary left, and acceptance of liberalism that ultimately corrode and degenerate the revolutionary left — elements which I attribute largely to the ineffectiveness of the left in the latter half of the 20th century.

    7 December 2006, 5:57 pm

  106. metis seeker:

    I have found the ideas of local independence that have been presented at this site to be very compelling and a lot of them are ones that I’ve been mulling over myself. It just intuitively makes sense.

    I am now trying to synthesize some of what I’ve been learning by doing some writing and advocating these ideas to at a forum that I am involved in… I was hoping that those here could point me in the direction of some resources where I could learn more. Books are great, but I am short on money so web material would be preferable.

    One thing that I’ve noticed among those that I have discussed the issue of peak oil with is a singular focus on the need for new technology. I’ve been trying to get it across that even with new tech it is not going to be business as usual but that radical change is going to be necessary. However, I need supporting information as to why this is the case – does anyone know a good article I can reference?

    Also, does anyone know of any link to reports of the success of organically grown local movements like those mentioned? (Hezbollah and Gulf coast?)

    My thanks in advance for any help you can provide. I look forward to getting more involved in the discussions at this great site.

    7 December 2006, 6:08 pm

  107. Randy Morris:

    Thanks for the bailout MODERATOR (De?).

    Welcome Metis Seeker! :)

    For Peak Oil related info, check http://www.theoildrum.com and follow their links to even more great sites.

    Stay jacked-in to this site for a constant stream of essays and commentary that will rock your boat on an all-too-regular basis. If you are committed to being open-minded, and to questioning your current paradigm and its origins, Feral Scholar is the home for you!

    Btw, I share your sentiment expressed above. Stay in touch.

    Randy

    7 December 2006, 7:37 pm

  108. James M:

    does anyone know of any link to reports of the success of organically grown local movements like those mentioned? (Hezbollah and Gulf coast?)

    Happy to oblige:

    http://bayoulibertyrelief.com/

    http://feralscholar.org/blog/?p=352

    http://feralscholar.org/blog/?p=384

    These are just off the top off my head. I’m sure there are plenty of folks here who can provide links to other resources on this topic.

    7 December 2006, 8:01 pm

  109. peggy:

    Randy, wrt to your being asked to lead the local Dems - maybe you were asked to lead precisely because you did not have a specific agenda or dogma, and were willing and able to adapt and be flexible toward those who believed they knew what they wanted, and believed they knew what they believed. Isn’t this something like the kind of leadership that Mao advocated? Learn from the people what they want, and then just facilitate their achieving that end? I confess that I know less than anybody else here about Marxism and its varieties. So if anyone cares to correct me about my interpretation of something I read long ago in Mao’s little red book, please do.

    I agree with Stan about the great value of tactical flexibility. And I understand that tactics can be the subject of at least as much dispute as long-term strategy. The easiest thing for a group to agree upon, perhaps, is ultimate goals.

    I feel that to act organically is to act humbly, and humility is one thing that all known leaders of people, and would-be leaders, lack. Truly organic movements are happening all around us, and as long as they remain organic they have no names and no leaders.

    Finally, organic does not necessarily always mean good. Therefore, one must be like the earthworm in acting organically, but one must be human in choosing what is good, and acting toward the good and not away from it.

    What I say here will be obvious to everyone, and possibly therefore useless, but I just felt like putting my own thoughts in order here.

    7 December 2006, 11:33 pm

  110. Charles:

    MODERATOR’S NOTE: Begin italics with , then end it with

    test

    MODERATOR’S NOTE: Applause!

    8 December 2006, 2:17 pm

  111. Charles:

    Bow

    8 December 2006, 5:44 pm

  112. Charles:

    Oops. I mean

    bow

    8 December 2006, 5:45 pm

  113. Julio:

    Today, I was looking for a passage in Marx’s Theories of Surplus-Value where the old man blasted Malthus for his lack of clarity in exposition. Found it and continued reading…

    Then I ran into this quotation, in which Marx refers to the decomposition of Ricardo’s school of political economy. Mutatis mutandis, it applies to Marx himself (and those of his followers who defend the orthodoxy):

    “With the master what is new and significant develops vigorously amid the ‘manure’ of contradictions out of the contradictory phenomena. The underlying contradictions themselves testify to the richness of the living foundation from which the theory itself developed. It is different with the disciple. His raw material is no longer reality, but the new theoretical form in which the master had sublimated it. It is in part the theoretical disagreement of opponents of the new theory and in part the often paradoxical relationship of this theory to reality which drive him to seek to refute his opponents and explain away reality. In doing so, he entangles himself in contradictions and with his attempt to solve these he demonstrates the beginning disintegration of the theory which he dogmatically espouses.” (Part III, Chapter XX.)

    And, with only one comment, this is from Chapter XXIV:

    “All people do not have the same predisposition towards capitalist production. Some primitive peoples, such as the Turks, have neither the temperament nor the inclination for it. But these are exceptions. The development of capitalist production creates an average level of bourgeois society and therefore an average level of temperament and disposition amongst the most varied peoples. It is as truly cosmopolitan as Christianity. This is why Christianity is likewise the special religion of capital. In both it is only men who count. One man in the abstract is worth just as much or as little as the next man. In the one case, all depends on whether or not he has faith, in the other, on whether or not he has credit. In addition, however, in the one case, predestination has to be added, and in the other case, the accident of whether or not a man is born with a silver spoon in his mouth.”

    9 December 2006, 12:07 am

  114. d:

    With all due respect, Stan, I think you’re taking my comment a little too personally, and moreover, that you’ve not fully addressed my point. First, you justly quote bell hooks’ formulation, “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” Yet you fail to draw out its implications for your analysis. That is, hooks’ early interventions against white middle-class feminism, with its master-concepts of “patriarchy” and “male domination,” were intended to demonstrate that gender oppression is invariably mediated by classism and racism, and that the experience of African-American women in particular testified to the ways in which race, gender and class are articulated through and in terms of one another. That in fact is why hooks speaks with exception of “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” - in order to stress the indivisibility of these terms, and to resist any hierarchy of determination that would posit any one of them as more fundamentally than the others.

    You suggest, more dubiously, that “post-colonial feminists from the periphery” are “pretty much convinced of the existence of systemic male power over women.” Yet one of the defining texts of postcolonial feminism, Chandra Mohanty’s “Under Western Eyes,” challenges that very notion, of a universal, transcultural patriarchy, as a construction of white Western feminism, resting on fundamentally racist and essentialist assumptions about the Other.

    Whereupon you ask for a reference to support my claims about antiracist/third-generation feminism. How about Hazel Carby’s classic, and indeed programmatic, text, “White Woman, Listen!” - which you should be able to locate in most Black feminist readers or collections? In this connection, you charge me with seeking to introduce divisions where there is only an unbroken community of interests. But as Carby, Audrey Lorde, and others have long argued, the notion of a ubiquitous system of male domination, premised on the patriarchal nuclear family and crossing lines of race and class, occluded the specific herstorical and social experiences of non-white women, whose oppression is irreducible to any single source and assumes forms different from those of white women. That is to say, white middle-class feminism itself precluded any genuine solidarity from non-white women, inasmuch as its concepts, slogans, and strategies rested on an erasure of their experiences and herstories. This is why the African-American feminist Patricia Hill-Collins, among others, has suggested that we think in terms of “matrices of domination,” which has the virtue of refusing to assign explanatory primacy to any single one or other instance, and recognizes, rather, that class is always already signified along the axes of race and gender. And in fact, that is one of my main problems with the way you’ve framed your break with Marxism, which, to borrow a Spivakian coinage, strikes me more than anything else as a rupture-in-repetition. That is to say, while claiming to have bid adieu to the Marxist tradition by reason of its blindnesses vis-a-vis gender and race, you’ve brought along some of its worst baggage (and not just the tried-and-true method of discreting those who disagree with you by likening them to reactionaries, i.e., “the same sense as the Bush administration”), insofar as you remain committed to reductionism/essentialism, albeit one that elevates gender and race over class.

    Finally, while I appreciate and share your and Joaquin’s dawning skepticism about Marxism - a tradition for which I never shared your initial enthusiasm, but by the same token, nor your ultimate disappointment - and have long been an admirer of your activism and work (though I admit to not having read your book yet; I will now), I can’t help but feel that both of you are invoking feminism in order to rationalize something that was, or rather *should* have been, already a long time coming…

    9 December 2006, 2:06 am

  115. Paul Finch:

    Ok, this post is in response to “d”s pomo post:

    First, you justly quote bell hooks’ formulation, “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.”

    For me this is one of the fundamental problems with most of the posts flying around on this subject - the idea, prevalent in the anarchist community for quite some time [although thankfully receding after being largely discredited] that ethnicity and gender play an equal role to class, rather than a parallel and shallower role that relies upon the fault-lines of class divisions to exploit their own particular niche of division.

    When the divisions caused by ethnicity and gender are confused as belonging solely unto themselves, and it is conveniently ignored how they fall long and are underpinned by socio-economic class, any reasonable analysis of what is going falls apart. It’s how we end up with go-nowhere programs like BTR’s “Race Traitor” program.

    The reality of the situation is this, to speak broadly: There are many contradictory points of division within society, and many injustices that we can seek to right or “purify” ourselves and our organizations from. But the fundamental structures underpinning this are based along class lines, and although the restructuring of class lines will still leave the residue not only of class society but especially of racial and gender inequality, if we try to address these things without first addressing the primacy of socio-economic class, we end up nowhere.

    It is not a coincidence that the only societies in the history of humanity, especially the modern history, to ever win major victories against racism and sexism have been and are ones where the driving force of analysis is based on the primacy of class. The experience of the Nepalese rebels right now really hammers that point in — they went from female children who were from more indigenous Nepalese ethnic groups being sold into sex slavery in infancy to sustain families, to those same would-be slaves occupying almost half of the senior command positions within the Nepalese People’s Liberation Army.

    That in fact is why hooks speaks with exception of “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” - in order to stress the indivisibility of these terms, and to resist any hierarchy of determination that would posit any one of them as more fundamentally than the others.

    Which is exactly the problem with Hooks - who posits the equality of these concepts due to a lack of understanding of how they interact with each other in reality. These terms are not indivisible, and there are several capitalist societies that are not white supremacist. This is a case of mistaking the “forest for the trees”, and worse of putting out bad analysis with little to no evidence.

    Carby, Audrey Lorde, and others have long argued, the notion of a ubiquitous system of male domination, premised on the patriarchal nuclear family and crossing lines of race and class, occluded the specific herstorical and social experiences of non-white women, whose oppression is irreducible to any single source and assumes forms different from those of white women.

    The current nuclear family is easily adaptable to non-patriarchal terms, and patriarchy is not its defining feature. It’s defining feature is as the most efficient unit for workers to be assembled in when considering their mobility between different strata of the workforce, with all that entails [unit-based housing, lack of social programs, segregated schooling, and so on].

    Saying their oppression is “irreducible” to any single source carries a big lie and a kernel of truth. The big lie is that the reality there is a specific class system in place which enforces, underpins, and determines the essential structures by which this exploitation takes place is denied. The kernel of truth is that it’s not just class that determines the nature of oppression, but a host of other cultural factors, including ones inherited from previous psychological and material cirucmstances that have impacted not just our culture, but the cultures that have fed into or impacted ours throughout history.

    What we are left with by this faulty analysis is the idea that there is no common ground or front for these people to engage each other, or worse that the role of people who are considered more “privileged” [ie - everyone who is not black and female, etc.] is to serve as a slavish “support network” for those who are. It creates this never ending cycle of subordination and guilt-politics driven by the liberalism that underlies the entire idea in the first place.

    This is really a conflcit, as I pointed out in my previous post, between a revolutionary culture of analuysis and the pervasive influence of liberalism. The liberal individualistic tendency is to reduce the class contradictions into individual identity, in any number of ways but primarily regarding gender and ethnicity, and to posit that the individual identities being put forward are on equal footing with the collective, class-based identities that underpin the entire structure.

    In terms of revolutionary practice, this line of thinking is a respice for marginalization into the squalid terrain of liberal academia at best, and widescale defeat at worst [if it is ever implemented on a mass scale, which I’m sure it wouldn’t and couldn’t be].

    Eventually this line of thinking ends up with the same decontextualizing liberal qualities as every other - the reductionism of this line is projected onto opposing lines, so people who posit the primacy of class in societal structures are ironically referred to as being “reductionist”. Because the extreme individualism requires a wholesale denial of objective reality and posits an ethereal network of subjective realities in a web-like relation to each other, it takes on the character of decrying “essentialism”.

    A couple words on essentialism: It is a core value of rev thought and philosophy and grounds it in reality. Essentialism is the understanding that while the context of something happens determines it’s function, that objects have essential characteristics from which we can reasonably infer, at least in part, the scope and limitations of those functions.

    To deny “essentialism” is to deny historical materialism, and modern science. You might as well just go back to living in a cave without the benefit of agriculture and medicine, let along any of the technology that has advance the human condition [and in other ways degraded it, but I would say this is a funciton of it’s use, not of the technology itself].

    Finally, in contrast to D’s position, I think this new tact by Stan has some good and bad. For me teh good in it is the realization that there are some really fucked up group dynamics within rev circles that prevent them from growing organizationally. The bad is that liberal identity politics, which ironcially have done more to alienate and destroy rev groups than any series of sexist and racist dyanmics ever have or will, are being enshrined as the means to overcome this growing alienation of the left from public discourse and life.

    9 December 2006, 11:33 am

  116. Stan:

    So many lectures, so little time. (sigh)

    I’ll bypass most of Paul’s, because it is composed primarily of delcarations and admonishments — many based on faulty premises, like one, over-arching something called “middle class feminism,” etc. If Joaquin is inclined to set him straight on whtie supremacy — and where these mythical capitalist countries are that are unaffected by it — then I’ll spectate. There are so many straw men there, I am inclined to incorporate it into some new scarecrow municipality.

    d’s comments, however, require a response. Let me praface that, however, by citing the original post from d, which was just a three line slap, seemingly to show how clueless Joaquin and I were to reference patriarchy (as something that exists) without providing an inset-analysis of it in all its forms in the context of saying that Marxism has tried to subsume it into class. It was the style of that intervention, and not the content (there was very little there) that irritated me and stimulated my caustic reply… and I was having a pretty bad day, so if I misinterpreted your intent, I stand corrected.

    I tend to agree with you, up to a point, but my critique of antiessentialism being as harsh as mine of essentialism, I’m not sure we end up in the same place. So be it.

    Neither I nor any feminist that I have cited has ever failed to reference the interfusion of patriarchy with all other social power dynamics in our bodies of work. If your reference to “middle class feminism” is to liberal feminism, then find me one feminist I have cited, or one time I have ever said that patriarchy is some single-form phenomenon. The reason we have to assert its existence in this debate, and describe it as a phenomenon that has proven infinitely adaptable across class and national lines, and through serial epochs, is precisely why we have to single it out in the debate with ortho-marxists. Singling it out for analysis, or to assert its existence at all, is not suggesting that it has some independent essence.

    Chandra Mohanty, who is quoted more than once in my own book, does not deny patriarchy, but critiques the myopia of first world feminists that fails to take into account things like women in the underdeveloped world being most severely oppressed by neoliberalism, which has increased the general dependence on the unwaged economy. She does not deny the universality of male power over women.

    She and others have not sought to deny patriarchy, but to rectify the blind spots in its analysis, by pluralizing its FORMS.

    A few quotes:

    “In addition to the construction of hegemonic masculinities as a form of state rule, the colonial state also transformed existing patriarchies and caste/class heirarchies.”

    “I want to highlight [1] the presistance of patriarchal definitions of womanhood in the arena of wage labor; [2] the versatility and specificty of capitalist exploitative processes providing the basis for thinking about potential common interests and solidarity between Third World women workers; and [3] the challenges for collective organizing in a contex where traditional union methods (based on the idea of the class interests of the male worker) are inadequate as strategies for empowerment.” [Paul!]

    “Capitalist patriarchies and racialized, class/caste-specific hierarchies are a key part of the long history of domination and exploitation of women, but struggles against these practices and vibrant, crative, collective forms of mobilization and organzing have also always been a part of our histories.”

    That said, neither Joaquin nor I has EVER elevated gender or nationality OVER class. What Joaquin and I are pointing out is that class reductionism has led the US left into a dead end… and we are asking the question, why?

    Finally, while I appreciate and share your and Joaquin’s dawning skepticism about Marxism - a tradition for which I never shared your initial enthusiasm, but by the same token, nor your ultimate disappointment - and have long been an admirer of your activism and work (though I admit to not having read your book yet; I will now), I can’t help but feel that both of you are invoking feminism in order to rationalize something that was, or rather *should* have been, already a long time coming…

    Well, we can’t all be as smart as you, can we.

    9 December 2006, 2:04 pm

  117. DeAnander:

    This is why Christianity is likewise the special religion of capital. In both it is only men who count.

    oh boy and how.

    although I’m sure he didn’t mean it quite that way.

    9 December 2006, 7:52 pm

  118. Jonny:

    While it’s true that the expansionist orientation of the European/Spanish royalty has resulted in a world that looks like white supremacy could be the main contradiction, some examples of class superceding race can be seen in the massive bombing of Yugoslavia, the third world-ization of primarily “white” Russia, the occupation of the Irish [a colonial class orientated tradition that casted the label of “black Irish” on them as part of oppressing them] -it seems you don’t have to be non-white to be subhuman to the colonialists.

    2. Having worked inside of groups with a mostly female leadership hierarchy, I saw no inherent nobility in females that wasn’t also present in males - I feel the role of gender is being essentialized to the point where who you are matters more than what you say and do. I don’t think that going further in this direction is a way forward.

    9 December 2006, 8:59 pm

  119. Paul:

    The idea that Stan and others are putting forward that the role of race/gender plays an equal role to that of class is my main contentio I’m opposed to here. My earlier posts were designed to give some philosophical background on why that is - these could be labelled “strawnmen arguments” because from an opposing point of view there are so many angles to attack, but that’s the nature of making broad ranging posts. Instead I’ll address something specific here:

    If we look at the role the concept of “race” has played in the revolutionary left in the US, we can kind of see why this idea of race being equal with class has developed in isolation in the US, while the rest of the worldwide left - that is, the left that is successful and has accomplished so much [such as the FARC, the Nepalese CP, and so on] — has long ago rejected this formulation and rightly upholds the primacy of class contradictions.

    The contradictions of slavery in the US were peculiar because the slaves being brought in were predominantly African, whereas in Europe and throughout Asia many slaves were white, and in fact many slave-traders were Middle Eastern. The colonial experience of the US created conditions where racial liens were often erected along class lines — it’s important to consider that class lines were NOT erected along racial lines, the one being subordinate to the other. As Jonny touched upon, Irish people in North America were frequently placed at a status that, in a strict white supremacist environment, would have contradicted their role in relation to non-white groups that were often seen as being superior in status.

    The current form of librulism that has seeped into the radical left since the the 60’s, as regards race politics, comes from the peculiar experience of Keynsian economics and the natural transition to neo-Liberal strategies of accumulation [movie to the floating point currency turning on the basis of changes in geo-strategic system, and so on].

    After WWII, it appeared to many on the left that the white working class had “sold out” the non-white working class, because a large portion of its membership accepted high paying, often unionized jobs and moved to the suburbs, ceding massive unemployment, compulsory military service [which they too experienced in different ways] and the creation of inner-city ghettos to the predominantly African and Hispanic working class. This is where I believe the kernel of the “race traitor” analysis comes from - that it was a white working class exercising its privilege that sold out the black and hispanic working class.

    I think this position is entirely wrong, and unsupported by empirical reality. It ignores the deep contradictions within the “white” working class, and even the peculiar historical conditions of the working class in the antebellum south, where white sharecroppers often shared similar or even lower status than their black neighbours. This position is predicated on a misunderstanding of how class works — it’s based on the idea that class is an individual, rathern than a collective construct. The problem is that class is so poorly understood in North American society, that how a rev would make define “economic class” and how your average American would differ greatly.

    You also cite a quote, and this seems to be a common theme, that “traditional union methods of organizing” are “inadequite” and have failed. There is again a kernel of truth in this statement - insofar as a superificial parody of traditional organizing methods have been cookie-cuttered into place, things like Trotskyist-entryism have largely [and predictably] failed to garner results. What is ignored are the successes - when the [predominantly white, not that it matters] working class miners staged a series of wildcat strikes in the 70’s, that were largely connected to the common struggle with the BPP. It ignores how the working class of the US were at their arguably strongest organized position, in the days of Lucy and Albert Parsons, and the positions they held that were so successful.

    Contrary to what has been said, I believe it’s librul identity politics, with their emphasis on gender and ethnicity, that have firmly contributed to the failure of the american left. The logical conclusion of thsee politics is to create rad groups that are committed to introspective puritanical which hunts for alleged character irregularities, ones which implode under their own weight, and the slavish and backwards social systems [white male “support” collectives, etc.] they create. This has been the real downfall of the New Left.

    9 December 2006, 9:26 pm

  120. Yolanda Carrington:

    Says Paul:

    Contrary to what has been said, I believe it’s librul identity politics, with their emphasis on gender and ethnicity, that have firmly contributed to the failure of the american left. The logical conclusion of thsee politics is to create rad groups that are committed to introspective puritanical which hunts for alleged character irregularities, ones which implode under their own weight, and the slavish and backwards social systems [white male “support” collectives, etc.] they create. This has been the real downfall of the New Left.

    Paul, this is pure reactionism. And misogyny. And white supremacy. If your words aren’t proof-positive that revolutionaries desperately need engagement with radical feminist theory, I don’t know what is.

    Your words have white male victimhood written all over them.

    10 December 2006, 1:02 am

  121. Elaina:

    Leave it to a man to throw out patriarchy as a primary contradiction, name-call it’s analysis “identity politics,” and tout his supreme knowledge of the class struggle.

    *yawns*

    Women are a class. Anyone who can’t see that is blind. Or a privileged, presumably white male who doesn’t want to lose his privilege when the almighty “revolution” comes. Like we radfems don’t know anything about class struggle. Hmph.

    10 December 2006, 2:24 am

  122. Legume Sam:

    Contrary to what has been said, I believe it’s librul identity politics, with their emphasis on gender and ethnicity, that have firmly contributed to the failure of the american left. The logical conclusion of thsee politics is to create rad groups that are committed to introspective puritanical which hunts for alleged character irregularities, ones which implode under their own weight, and the slavish and backwards social systems [white male “support” collectives, etc.] they create. This has been the real downfall of the New Left.

    The “american left,” which wasn’t a very large entity to begin with, may have lost a few members here and there by turning race and gender into essential, rather than historical, categories. This phenomenon hardly accounts for the shrinkage of the “Left” in the US to any meaningful extent. The general macroeconomic change-of-phase which Paul explicates points more directly at the challenge that the “Left” faces. To wit, Paul again:

    The current form of librulism that has seeped into the radical left since the the 60’s, as regards race politics, comes from the peculiar experience of Keynsian economics and the natural transition to neo-Liberal strategies of accumulation [movie to the floating point currency turning on the basis of changes in geo-strategic system, and so on].

    The real problem, then, is that the “Left” as a whole has become a byproduct of the abovecited experience of Keynesian economics. I think it could be successfully argued, in fact, that the “Left” in the US still largely hangs onto a nostalgia for the populist Keynesianism once considered to be part of orthodox macroeconomics. Thus, as neoliberal strategies of accumulation took hold of capitalism, the “Left” has transitioned from the George McGovern Presidential campaign of 1972 to Dennis Kucinich’s 2% showing in the 2004 primaries. This can be said to be a byproduct of the corporatization of the political process (and its actors) more than anything else.

    In racial terms, the nostalgia for populist Keynesianism points to the “librul” discourse of equity — conditions must somehow be made “equal” (usually, it is offered, through equal educational opportunity and the eradication of job discrimination) so that everyone is playing on an “equal playing field” without, of course, disturbing the fact that neoliberal capitalism as a whole is an economic field of ever-increasing inequity. Thus the “Left” planted the seeds of its own co-optation, and its current obsolescence is what we can see from our little chat-groups. This has very little to do with “introspective puritanical which hunts,” of negligible scope to begin with. We might use the just-mentioned “hunts” to explain, for instance, the failure-to-grow of California’s Peace and Freedom Party, but the P & Fs would still be a tiny club even with more rational race relations.

    As Kees van der Pijl points out, politicians under neoliberalism have become a privileged professional class as a group, protective of their own privileges, regardless of nation. Neoliberalism, however, will not last forever; for signs of its break-up, one can point to capitalism’s inability to mitigate the crises it itself creates in this era. Predictions of impending doom are probably false; but this still doesn’t mean neoliberalism is stable. When it breaks up economically, its political formation will follow it into oblivion. What will replace it, i.e. the realistically-conceived future, ought to be the project of the “Left,” rather than the nostalgia for populist Keynesianism.

    10 December 2006, 6:57 am

  123. Stan:

    Amazing.

    Jonny, if you know of some organization, where there is a “female leadership hierarchy” that is operating independently of the male-dominated system point the way. The way you guys shift from the systemic to the anecdotal premise reminds me more of a boxer, bobbing and weaving to throw off his opposition, than people engaged in a principled if contentious conversation about the condition of humanity. I’ll give the benefit of the doubt as to motives. I think the repeated employment of the most basic logical fallacies is more a cultural than personality character… people being raised now on the rhetorical point-scoring model of debate, as oppposed to defending or conceding assertions based on the coherence of an argument and the form of evidence used to support or critique it.

    The existence of male social power of women is not an “essentialist” fantasy; it is an empirically demonstrable fact. Furthermore, that power can be shown to exist across class and racial-national lines, albeit in forms that are articulated into the variant realities of those class and racial-national dynamics. These are not anecdotal facts; the exceptions are.

    Since the term is being bandied about so much, I am hereby challenging posters who are using this term — essentialist — to give us a definition.

    As to “white,” white supremacy has been a key feature in the buildup of and perpetuation of actually existing capitalism. Russians do not qualify. Capitalism is a world system now, and not an Anglo-American one.

    We live in the United States — most of us here — and for those of us who do, we not only live within the geographic boundaries of the US state which currently directs that world system through its monetary and military power; we live in a system where white supremacy (as well as patriarchy) remains one of the key organizing principles of our society. Class is, too.. or I should say, simultaneously.

    WHITE is only a phenotype secondarily. It is, first and foremost, a social construction of the norm. If I dress in a certain way and behave a certain way, I will be perceived as a Latino… because of our social circumstances here where I live. It would be acting, in a sense, but I could easily forfeit my “white Anglo” (a racial-national category) status in the eyes of most people.. then, of course, I could also easily take it back, by reverting to my enculturated speech, mannerism, and dress, as the offspring of white Arkansans.

    “White” is an imperial category, and with it goes imperial privilege that most working class white people are loathe to even admit, much less forego. Having grown up in a working class family, and living among working class folks (even in the Army, where most enlisted people are working class) — I can assure you that these are not anecdotal observations, but the accumulation of experience over the last 55 years.

    Your example of the Irish supports my argument, if you look in the history of How the Irish Became White.

    Paul’s insistence on calling this “identity politics” and individualism pretends that the category “women” is not collective, nor is race or nation. It’s an odd claim, expicit or implicit… and backing it up is what is tying him into knots, and abandoning him to sectarian terminology like “Trotskyist entryism.” The citation of a handful of successes (like Nepal, the jury is still out in Colombia) only reinforces my original critque of metropolitan Marxism as a practice that has never succeeded in achieving political power. The former FARC liberated zones and Nepal are both predominantly peasants… NOT proletarians.

    What the radical feminist pointed out, and it remains valid today, is that rape is a subject about which the male left can’t seem to talk overmuch, without copping to liberalism themselves. Rape and the threat of rape corrals women into a system of “protection in exchange for obedience,” and obedience is precisely the issue with economic class where Marx divides from Ricardo, et al, callling waged work “wage slavery.”

    Rape culture circumscribes the real lives of real women every single day, as does the male power of which it is both causative and symptomatic. It does so in ways that have more immediacy for many women than class oppression. Domestic violence is a right-now phenom. When we tell women that thi8s experience gets dealt with after the expereience of exploitation as wage labor (for some women, the only “safe” place in their day), we are telling them that our (male) experience of the world takes priority, and that winning our battles is the prerequisite for even addressing the violence women are faced with every day.

    So along with the challenge to define “essentialism,” I challenge posters who are claiming class as the “primary contradiction” to tell us what their take is on rape… and not merely that you oppose it. What is it? How is it perpetuated? Is it a capitalist phenomenon? Does it only exist among white middle-class, First World women?

    10 December 2006, 7:28 am

  124. Josiah:

    “The contradictions of slavery in the US were peculiar because the slaves being brought in were predominantly African, whereas in Europe and throughout Asia many slaves were white, and in fact many slave-traders were Middle Eastern.”

    Actually, according to Hugh Thomas (a major historian of the Atlantic slave trade), “British North America imported only about 500,000 Africans out of the 11 million shipped across the Atlantic.” Mass African enslavement and white supremacy are “peculiar” to the whole Western hemisphere, not to mention southern Africa and Mauritius. I also take issue with this: “The colonial experience of the US created conditions where racial liens were often erected along class lines — it’s important to consider that class lines were NOT erected along racial lines, the one being subordinate to the other.” But even if class predates race in history, apartheid laws/practices have created given race material significance in its own right. Actually, in all the white settler states, from Brazil to the U.S. to South Africa to Australia, people of color are disproportionately imprisoned and in poverty. Tell the people defacing Spanish monuments in Oaxaca last week that Indios and Blancos are only separated by “class.” Or Evo Morales’ supporters; or North African rioters in Paris; or Palestinians vis a vis working-class Israelis.

    The reality is that political movements everywhere on the planet practice identity politics around the axes of race/ethnicity as well as class, but the white male variety is unique in masquerading as universal, transracial and transgender. This leads unconscious adherents of this false universalism to balk at women and POC’s insistence that non-class factors (which also correlate with class) really matter.

    10 December 2006, 8:19 am

  125. the burningman:

    Speaking of primary contradictions…

    I’d start with this:

    There are contradictions between the people and the enemy, and contradictions among the people.

    With all the ugliness of women as property – this is a contradiciton that we must solve in tandem, with each other by struggling against male chauvinist (if not outright misogynist) behavior and ideas.

    Disentangling any social oppression from the class rule of the society is a way of “getting a piece,” whether that is affirmative action or narrow nationalism or what we too often get as a kind of (ultimately) misanthropic identity politics.

    Men are not the enemy. Nor “white” people. Nor “Americans.”

    The unity of oppressed people, in their sometimes autonomous struggles for emancipation, is found in proletarian politics – in the demand to end alienation and oppression AS SUCH.

    The “primary contradiction” is different IN KIND from the ranking of oppression that pitted, for example, Radical Feminism against Black Liberation. It was in those organizations of the New Communist Movement, synthetic as they were, that found a synthesis which can make us stronger than the sum of our parts rather than crabs in a barrel.

    The “Twilight of Common Dreams” thesis, I think basically shared by “What’s the Matter with Kansas,” is that if we reduce our aspirations to “broad social justice” concerns and drop “divisive” social issues – like African-American self-determination, women’s liberation (starting with abortion) and “sexual issues,” then we’ll have a “new majority” based on “shared interest.”

    But our “shared interest” is in the liberation of all people – from both the traditions and habits of oppression, and from our own participation in reproducing these systems.

    Put another way, paying rent is one form of oppression – but as Stan says, “rape culture” is not just over there somewhere… nor are colonial mentalities or heterosexism and the social facts of white supremacy.

    The degree of autonomy that social struggles NEED seems to depend largely on the degree of oppression involved, the consciousness of the population – and to the degree that there is an actually, existing proletarian political pole.

    The primary contradiction is the gordian knot, but every one of those strings is still real…

    10 December 2006, 9:02 am

  126. the burningman:

    There is an interesting discussion to be had, I think, about the nature of a “proletarian line” politically. Not only is Nepal not “predominantly” proletarian – neither is the United States, nor is any country on earth.

    In the USA, no less that Nepal despite differences in almost everything, we NEED a “united front under the leadership of the proletariat.”

    What that MEANS is different than doing what any given worker thinks… but is… cough… ESSENTIALLY proletarian, in the “Marxist” sense.

    —————

    I’m off to go shopping at Macy’s – dressed as a Gitmo detainee… Because whatever happened in the last election, someone is being tortured right now to further empire.

    10 December 2006, 9:09 am

  127. Paul:

    Lots of stuff to reply to here, so the quotations will be from different posts…

    Paul, this is pure reactionism. And misogyny. And white supremacy. If your words aren’t proof-positive that revolutionaries desperately need engagement with radical feminist theory, I don’t know what is.

    Your words have white male victimhood written all over them.

    I think this claim is ridiculous, but since you’re making it, do you care to back it up? Could you please provide an explanation as to how the post is “pure reactionism” [reaction against what?] Moreover, how the post is in any way mysogynistic?

    I’m familiar with radical feminist theory, and the feminist theory that’s being put out on this list I don’t consider “radical”, and I’ve explained why several times over.

    Women are a class. Anyone who can’t see that is blind. Or a privileged, presumably white male who doesn’t want to lose his privilege when the almighty “revolution” comes. Like we radfems don’t know anything about class struggle. Hmph.

    No, women aren’t a class. Groups of women are part of classes. To say that women are predominantly more a part of the oppressed classes than men is a true statement - but not one that leads to the conclusion you’re making.

    And this is the point I’m trying to make: it’s important to understand the primacy of class in social relationships on a general level, while understanding that on a specific level social relationships can often devolve to issues of identity. And more importantly, while class trasncends identity barriers such as ethnicity and gender, it does not obliterate those barriers, but in fact those barriers find structure and deeper meaning along class lines.

    I think it could be successfully argued, in fact, that the “Left” in the US still largely hangs onto a nostalgia for the populist Keynesianism once considered to be part of orthodox macroeconomics.

    Yes, this is one of the points I was making. The reformist left, largely the social-democrats, are imbued with a nostalgia for the days of Keynesian economics. They don’t see [or don’t care] that Keynesianism inevitably leads to a transition to neo-liberal accumulation strategies, and they have nostalgia for an economic model taht was fuelled by segregation and the wholesale division of the working class [not explicitly but often along racial lines, insofar as where those racial lines ran parallel or adjacent to the deeper class lines].

    I think the repeated employment of the most basic logical fallacies is more a cultural than personality character… people being raised now on the rhetorical point-scoring model of debate, as oppposed to defending or conceding assertions based on the coherence of an argument and the form of evidence used to support or critique it.

    I think I’ve refrained more than most on this thread from posting anecdotal evidence for my claims, and in fact in my initial response I gave a very broad and generalized explanation of where I was coming from, to fully explain my position so it could be accurately criticized - no one has yet repsonded to that post. More than most the assertions I’ve put forward have been challenged by anecdtoral quips or jibes, and the body of my contentions have been left uncriticized, including by yourself.

    The existence of male social power of women is not an “essentialist” fantasy; it is an empirically demonstrable fact. Furthermore, that power can be shown to exist across class and racial-national lines, albeit in forms that are articulated into the variant realities of those class and racial-national dynamics.

    I have yet to see any post here assert that the existence of male social power over women is a “fantasy”. I think we all recognize it as a reality.

    To me there are a couple questions attached to probing deeper into this question. One of them is - Where does this domination come from? and another is - How does this domination work and interact with all these other social processes?

    I do not adhere to any school of economic determinism. I think there are psycho/sociological factors in which male supremacy [and indeed contradictions between genders] are rooted. But where the relationship to the means of production and distribution comes in, It’s important we recognize that our relationship to the means of production and distribution provide a vehicle by which the psychological factors that give rise to male supremacy are given the ability to be implemented in the form of widespread social policies that in turn have their own effect. This is a really important point and one that is frrequently ignored and denied by adherents of identity politics.

    What I’m saying in a nutshell is - gender and racial tensions can exist independently of class contradictions, and have existed independently to this point. But class contradictions give structure and rise to these gender and ethnic contadictions on a social scale, and that is why it is important to understand the primacy of class contadictions.

    Let me repeat: I am NOT saying that gender and ethnic contradictions come from class contradictions. I am saying that they are given form and expression on a broad social level through and by class contradictions.

    And further, if we look at the history of revolutionary struggle, it is only those groups that have embraced this understanding, or some variant of it, on how gender and ethnic contradictions are related to class contradictions, that have achieved any kind of meaningful, widespread social change that has benefited oppressed peoples.

    It was the Spanish CNT/FAI in Spain that largely abolished prostitution, brought forth arguably one of the most advanced revolutionary feminist organizations in the history of humanity [Mujeres Libres], and through struggle over transofmrmation of the means of production and distribution, had a huge impact on the very real, material and psychological conditions of women. It was the Russian Revolution that gave women basic freedom from forced marriages, and the Chinese revolution that abolished foot binding - it is the Nepalese revolutionaries who have abolished child prostitution in the area they control.

    There is a common thread to the successes of all this groups, and part of it is the explicit rejection of the type of identity politics that are now being advocated in the North American left.

    ince the term is being bandied about so much, I am hereby challenging posters who are using this term — essentialist — to give us a definition.

    One of the first things I did was to give a definition of how I was using the term “essentialist”. I am dismayed that my posts are obviously not being read and only lightly responded to, although this is probably my fault for putting out ethereal and verbose rantings that are not tied to the “conversationaL’ flow of discussion on this message board. I’ll try and improve.

    Here is the [brief, not full] definition of essentialism I gave in my earlier post:

    “A couple words on essentialism: It is a core value of rev thought and philosophy and grounds it in reality. Essentialism is the understanding that while the context of something happens determines it’s function, that objects have essential characteristics from which we can reasonably infer, at least in part, the scope and limitations of those functions.”

    Because our positions are so far apart on many levels [and I believe closer than they appear on many other levels], if I were to try to fully flesh out and explain every statement I made, It would take up way too much time and space. Therefore when I make statements that look like they have a week premise, they are meant to be challenged and criticized, because it is through that process that I can then specifically address the premises that are being challenged in detail, instead of having to guess what is contentious beforehand.

    we live in a system where white supremacy (as well as patriarchy) remains one of the key organizing principles of our society.

    I live in Canada. For the longest time I had trouble understanding why of all places in the world, it was the US left that put out these crazy lines on identity politics. Then when I started visiting the US on a regular basis it became really apparent - the conrtadictions between ethnicity especially in the US are so extreme and exacerbated, that it is an easy mistake to meld together class and ethnic contradictions in such a way as to be unable to disitnguish between the two and understand more fully the dynamic relationship at work.

    “White” is an imperial category, and with it goes imperial privilege that most working class white people are loathe to even admit, much less forego.

    This is identical to the discredited “race traitor” line that is all but dead in most rev circles. It is dead because it fails to analyze reality as it exists and understand it for what it is, and so any targeted social action or program based on this understanding would only acheive any favourable results by fluke.

    But lets dig deeper into this - How do you propose that “white” people forego their “imperial privilege” ? What actions do they take to do this? How, specifically, is this process carried out?

    To me this whole line of thinking misses the point - that while racism can [and does, rampantly] exist in the temproary absence of class contradiciton, or in shited ones, that it finds expression as a widespread, social means of oppression and exploitation by and through class contradictions.

    If you were to ask me how the “white” working class can actively challenge the “imperial privilege” [and good luck convincing a LOT of poor, desittute and oppressed white people they are privileged, they will probably laugh] that is a byproduct of racism, I would answer it would be through building revolutionary movements that recognized the inter-connectedness of struggle between oppressed groups in the US [ie - you cannot have hispanic, african american, and white working class feifdoms as a revolutionary goal - the fate of all three of these groups is inextricably bound with eath other].

    Paul’s insistence on calling this “identity politics” and individualism pretends that the category “women” is not collective, nor is race or nation.

    My claim of identity politics does not such thing. In fact if you’d read my original post [which I know was long adn poorly written, for which I apologize] you’d see I explicitly stated that the categories of gender, ethnicity, and nationality had both collective and individual aspects, and I explained how I think those aspects interact and what brings them out in particular conditions and circumstances.

    The citation of a handful of successes (like Nepal, the jury is still out in Colombia) only reinforces my original critque of metropolitan Marxism as a practice that has never succeeded in achieving political power. The former FARC liberated zones and Nepal are both predominantly peasants… NOT proletarians.

    While I cited a whole bunch more that have impacted over 1/5 of the worlds population in this most recent post, but that’s not entirely the point. I’m just as critical of Marxism - I’m not a Marxist and largely adhere to Platformist anarchist-communist ideology [I know that’s a verbose sounding category but it’s one of the only ways of distinguishing in North America between real anarchism and the blend of subcultural politics and fashion that account for most ideas of “anarchism” here]. So I’m not going to defend the Marxist model of urban proletarian-led revolution. In fact I criticize it the same way Bakunin criticized Marx for it.

    But more on that subject — it was the anarchists who, in opposition to Marx, said that revolution would occur in the “weakest links” of imperialism, that is in countries like China and Russia and Spain, a theory that has been proven largely correct. And actually Mao stood up and [presumably under the heavy influence of the Chinese anarchist movement in igniting the national liberation struggle across China] revised Marxist theory to account for this discrepancy.

    Rape and the threat of rape corrals women into a system of “protection in exchange for obedience,”

    I view rape and the treat of rape a bit differently - I think it is a tremendous social force that is little addressed, and has a massive impact that is rarely acknowledged. However, I don’t think it’s the primary motivating factor of protection in exchange for obedience - I think it is the threat of lack of food, lack of clothing, and lack of shelter that is the primacy motivating factor, with the threat of rape impacting and enforcing particular social relationships within that framework. It is similar to the condition in which the african american population inthe US has lived under the constant threat of summary execution without trial [and still in many cases does, to a lesser extent].

    Yhese are phenomenon that have to be dealt with simulataneously - you can’t have a functioning revolutionary movement where rape and racism are common place or in any way condoned (and both of these factors have been exploited by government counter-intelligence prorgams for a long time).

    However if you say that things like racism and sexism are going to be done away with, or even meaningfully combatted, outside of the context of removing the vehicle [class opperssion] for their wisdespread, social character, then you’re sorely mistaken and advocating a line that leads to irrelevency or certain defeat. Can you name a single movement that has successfully employed the identity politics you advocate?

    Some more on rape, since you asked: If you want to look at what practically achieves protection on a broad social scale [that is a general scale] from rape, we need to look at it seperately from what achieves that on a localized [specific] scale. That is, whereas you can reasonably exert social presure within small groups [such as rev organizations] to eradicate rape [or at least make every effort to and punish severely any occurence], you can’t do that on a social-wide scale. Why? because it’s class contradicitons that are enforcing that system.

    And this is what it comes down to - rape is a lot less common in say, for eaxmple, a revolutionary society [exmaples I have mentioned previously come to mind] where a large percentage of the female poulation is armed and knows how to use those guns. Where there are popular and democratic social structures, both socially and economically, that can collectively implement polcieis adn protections that are designed to eliminate rape. I could go on but I’m not going to - so much of this phenomenon is so intriciately tied up with who has access to what, and these prevailing issues, that I think what I’ve said addresses the issue substantially enough [for this forum at this time].

    There are contradictions between the people and the enemy, and contradictions among the people.

    A little simplistic, but a great line.

    10 December 2006, 2:21 pm

  128. DeAnander:

    Lack of food, lack of clothing…

    I think if you took the average man and said, “I’m gonna dump you on the street in your underwear,” his first worry would be how cold it is out there, how ridiculous he would look, where he could steal some clothes.

    If you took the average woman and said, “I’m gonna dump you on the street in your underwear,” her first worry would be her vulnerability to rape by any passing male, the predatory interest her near-nudity would attract. Because you can be raped faster than you can die of cold, at least in most temperate zones.

    It also seems to me that the revolutionary movements in Nepal and in China, at least — maybe even Spain as well — occurred in far less race-fragmented cultures than the US. Race/national unity was often a foundation and a glue for third/emerging world revolutionary struggles, and I tend to agree with Stan [if I am interpreting past posts of his correctly] that this race/national unity and opposition to (usually White/Western) colonial power was a stronger motivating and inspiriting force than abstract theories of capital and class.

    One could argue that the Christian Church achieved considerable social-justice aims in 19th century Britain, in the struggle against both the kidnap and enslavement of African people, and the enslavement and abuse of labour — especially child labour. They also made some headway on abusive conditions in prisons and schools. These successes — well attested — don’t (imho) demonstrate the innate superiority of the Christian analysis of social conditions, i.e. perfect theory. What they do demonstrate is effective organising strategy and tactics, and the good fortune of catching the teachable moment in the prevailing social conditions.

    National self-determination movements and other revolutionary success stories, imho, stand and fall, succeed and fail based on a lot more than the innate correctness of their theory.

    10 December 2006, 3:28 pm

  129. Paul:

    In response to DeAnander…

    I think you’re position on rape is entirely inaccurate, and I’d like to explain further why compulsion by rape is secondary to compulsion by deprivation of basic material necessities [in a broad sense I agree with Nietzsches “man can endure almost any how if they have a why”, and I think a sense of communal belonging and use is important and im not trying to undermine that]:

    The fact that copulsion based on deprivation of basical material necessities is primary necessities is evidenced by the nature of social oppresion around us. For example, women often stay in abusive relationships because of the fear of a lack of material necessities - this is why women’s shelter’s exist, to first and foremost provide an alternative [as anyone staffing a women’s shelter will tell you], and secondarily to offer counselling and support services.

    Why do you think women become strippers? Prostitutes? What is prostitution but the commodification of rape? The nature of sexual oppression in the US and around the world clearly demonstrates that women are consistetly forced into subordinate roles not out of a fear of rape [in fact they enter scenarions of constant exposure to rape] but out of fear of being deprived of basic material necessities.

    You can find individual or anecdotal events and circumstances that contradict this — and in fact as revs we’d always encourage people to overcome this and fight in the face of material deprivation to overthrow this stuff, but on a massive, systemic and social scale, this oppression is enforced along class lines by the constant and explicit threat of material deprivation.

    DeAnander, I feel your circumstance is misleading, subject to peculiar circumstances, and what’s more doesn’t address the issue I’ve raised.

    As for the idea of a “less race fragmented society”, to say that China, Nepal, or Spain haven’t dealt with issues of racism is absurd (in fact there is a strict racial caste system, the legacy of the British empire, still partially operating in Nepal). And in fact in Spain, the fascists used loyal Morrocan moorish troops [themselves an oppresive class over the morrocan working class] as shock troops against the [predominantly white] spanish working class! In fact the history of the British Empire is frought with examples of them using darker-complexioned ethnic groups organized military against lighter-skinned ones [and vice versa].

    While I think the Anglican church achieved some social justice aims [and I’ve worked with them contemporarily in Canada], I don’t attribute the end of the slave trade to their work. In many ways the end of the slave trade was brought about with a radical shift in the economic necessities of the time — the kind of slavery that existed at that time helped with fuedal estates and building up agrarian surpluses, but once a society transitioned to heavy industrialization, they needed a mobile population of migrant workers, and had to break down the slavery system, in part to weaken the remnants of the feudal landowning class that opposed the tarriff-system required by the industrial class [re: the reason for the American civil war].

    I’m not saying these rev movemnts succeeded do to correctness of theory, but that there is’t a single example of a rev movement anywhere being in any way successful with the use of the identity politics that are being advocated on this forum, and there are some very good and compelling reasons for that.

    10 December 2006, 4:19 pm

  130. Paul:

    Is there a substantial time delay on posts, or did my response to DeAnander just get censored out?

    10 December 2006, 4:47 pm

  131. Paul:

    oops - substantial time delay on posts!

    10 December 2006, 4:48 pm

  132. Paul:

    To follow up a bit more on DeAnander’s metaphor, specifically:

    your example gives us one where a woman and a man are put into a specific scenario of immediacy. It doesn’t serve as a good metaphor for the role of rape in society because of the specifics of the context - it assumes the woman is being dropped off in a neighbourhood where they are highly at risk of sexually assault, that the climate is hospitable enough that they aren’t going to freeze to death, that they aren’t starving to death, that they don’t have kids to look after, and so on. Basically your scenario is only accurate within itself, because it removes all the phenomenon [of needing food, clothing, shelter, childcare, etc.] that I’m talking about.

    10 December 2006, 4:51 pm

  133. Jonny:

    Wow, this is quite a long thread!

    Stan - “Jonny, if you know of some organization, where there is a “female leadership hierarchy” that is operating independently of the male-dominated system point the
    way.”

    Stan,the organization I worked in was a collective which had stepped in to continue running a coffeehouse/political hub started by Chilean revs who fled to Canada during the dictatorship. From the time I joined to the time I left years later, there was a Rad Fem matriarchal leadership pole that more often than not ran the place. I saw other groups like ours as well. I saw female leadership running their groups with the same level of independence as any male-operated rev leadership pole. Apparently ours was effective, as the RCMP sent two (discovered) agents to infiltrate our place.

    Stan- “The existence of male social power of women is not an “essentialist” fantasy; it is an empirically demonstrable fact.”

    Male power and priveledge over women is a fact I have not contested in any of my few posts. I’m right with you there, and have long considered myself a feminist.
    The word “essentialized” was inappropriate on my post, because of the ethereal connotations of the word. Thanks for pointing that out. My beef is that I see you reifying gender: imbuing gender with inate characteristics which supercede class. As I mentioned in earlier post, I have seen plenty of male leaders commit patriarchal fuckups that dissolve organized rad and rev groups and that needs to be solved by empowering real women in the here and now. Males in capitalism have massive opportunities to violate
    and oppress females, and like you Stan, I would argue are encultured and even trained(porn etc) to enjoy doing so. Rape performs similar social functions as racial lynching(legal or not). Rape occurs accross class and racial lines. Canadian Rads have been unable to significantly decrease rapes here because men who rape know that there will be little if any consequences. Until we can alter that fact, little will change. Geronimo Pratt’s observation of the new and strengthening rape culture in prisons demonstrates
    how rape crosses gender lines.

    I understand the social formation of racialism. Your response on that poiint has clarified your position to me:that the racial categories arbitrarily imposed from above (as well explained in your link) are ones that some individuals can voluntarily opt in or out of. While that may be true for sub-cultural characteristics and lifestyle choices, it obviously has its limits depending on one’s skin tone. The British policy of lowering the status of women and creating new classes, castes and races in new colonies served to fragment the internal opposition and facilitated relatively numerically tiny detachments of colonial rulers. Any revs seeking to form a rev force among the new classes, castes and races would have to understand each differing circumstance to have any great appeal.

    My intentions in this debate are good, I too am looking for a viable way forward.

    10 December 2006, 5:18 pm

  134. the burningman:

    “It also seems to me that the revolutionary movements in Nepal and in China, at least — maybe even Spain as well — occurred in far less race-fragmented cultures than the US. Race/national unity was often a foundation and a glue for third/emerging world revolutionary struggles, and I tend to agree with Stan [if I am interpreting past posts of his correctly] that this race/national unity and opposition to (usually White/Western) colonial power was a stronger motivating and inspiriting force than abstract theories of capital and class.”

    I don’t think this would be correct. Not in the specific way that “race” functions in the USA, but in cultural diversity – whoa nelly!

    Nepal is probably the most ethnically and linguistically diverse country on earth, ruled by a Hindu caste system (that functions in many ways similar to race) and “China” with its dominant Han nationality was cut up in a thousand ways. And the patriarchal tradition there, before the socialist revolution, was so brutal that it was the world model. Before the veil was “the” symbol of women’s subordination out of public life, it was foot binding.

    What’s notable about both of these mentioned revolutions is that they took that basic Marxist maxim to heart: everywhere and always represent the interests of all oppressed people. NOT the simple, so-called “national interest,” but the “people’s interest.”

    It’s also worth noting that in both of these countries, Marxism has been refered to as an “alien” ideology… and that in China today, a reactionary nationalism is EXACTLY what the forces inside the Communist Party who restored capitalism USED to provide ideological hegemony in lieu of “proletarian internationalism”…

    In any case, the Maoists in Nepal recently put out their major position papers on what is happening and what they intend, with a discussion of how caste functions that seems (initially and partially) to have philosophical bearing on questions of “race.”

    THE PEOPLE’S WAR AND THE QUESTION OF DALITS
    by Parvati, CPN-M
    (From The Worker #10)
    http://nepal.singlespark.org/?id=worker10pp

    Opening quote:

    ” Culture is an ideological reflection of the political and economic system of the society in question. The questions like ideology, feeling, conduct, interest, custom, value, principle etc. fall under culture. In whole, culture is the synthesis of material and spiritual values of the society under discussion. In a class society, the character of such values is of class, hence, the character of culture too is of class. The way the political and economic system of a society influences the culture, exactly in the same manner the culture also influences the politics and economy of that society. In essence, the culture goes along the direction of political movement.”

    11 December 2006, 11:52 am

  135. Stan:

    Reiterating my own class analysis here. I have worked with one ML organization, that has a strong affinity with Maoism, that worked… that is, that established itself within a broad popular base. It was in Haiti, where almost 70% of the population is still peasant… and to the degree that it worked, it caught on among the most independent of the peasantry. Its appeal, btw, was nationalist all the way to its core.

    In fact, it compared Aristide’s nationalist movement to that of Peron or Sun Yat-sen; and bound itself to that mass movement as a critical supporter.

    The fact that this population existed outside the capital contradiction to a degree that its members could provide for themselves, IN THE COUNTRYSIDE, had everything to do with its attraction for peasants and their survivability in times when they were under extreme pressure from coup governments and reactionary militias.

    The fact that no Marxist formation has ever succeeded at taking poltical power in a country that was not majority peasant at the time of the revolution cannot be discounted as some historical accident.

    Even the quasi-religious tenor of People’s War discourse is matched (not alien) to the consciousness of a peasant CULTURE.

    And the CCP’s appeal during the revolution was explicitly nationalistic, with the Japanese occupation as its primary catalyst.

    11 December 2006, 12:44 pm

  136. Paul:

    I appreciate Burningman’s post [he will know me by the pseudonym “rise”] because I think provide some good background in the issues that are being raised. I also agree strongly with Jonny’s position.

    Stan, I think most of us who have been involved in serious rev work are dismayed by the cookie-cutter approach of some sectors of the left, which is “take over the trade unions and use them as a vehicle for revolution” [this is obviously a gross oversimplification, but I”ll assume we both know the line we’re talking about].

    We all know this outdated line, the line of groups like the CP-USA, doesn’t work - and we all know it actively alienates people from participation in and support of existing rev movements that are associated with that line.

    I don’t think this means that rev movements aren’t possible in countries that dont have peasent majorities. Historically the rev I would find most ideological sympathy with would be the CNT/FAI rev during the Spanish Civil War - and that took place in a country with a majority industrial proletariat population, and the specific areas of CNT/FAI support were overwhelmingly industrial proletariat, and it was these workers who formed the backbone of the rev movement, not the peasantry.

    It’s an interesting discussion and we could get into the specifics of what role peasents play, the role of nationalism in constructing that resistance, and so on, but I’m not going to venture too deep because I think that’s a secondary issue to the real important issues were addressing here.

    Basically, I feel we’re all on the same page here that what’s being done know doesn’t work, isn’t working, and needs some hard criticism and reconstruction. What I strongly disagree with is the idea that class isn’t the primacy contradiction in our analysis — I think the adoption of identity politics, while superficially appearing to put emphasis on gender and ethnic equality issues that are often ignored or not properly address, actually further marginilize gender and ethnic issues as a whole. The adoption of identity politics also marginilizes a group and dooms them to irrelevency, and a bad line that isn’t based on a shared reality.

    I would like to stress the conversation on rape as a good example of where the analysis of identity politics take a dramatic turn away from the analysis based on the primacy of class contradictions. This isn’t just absttract theory, it has a real effect on how groups organize, and how we communicate with people about how this system is structured.

    In my view, whether or not a rev situation is imminent in a given country, it’s our repsosibility to put forward a coherent analysis of what’s going on, and to communicate that analysis to people in accordance with their understanding - and to recognize the different levels of understanding, because if we speak to one level with the words that are meant for another level, we’ll alienate them.

    The left has a lot of problems, and one of them is that of being turned slowly into an introspective self-help group for people with big social and personal psychological issues. This is always going to exist to some extent, but I think it’s improtant to make sure the activity is, whenever possibly, outwardly focused.

    11 December 2006, 1:04 pm

  137. Stan:

    I would like to stress the conversation on rape as a good example of where the analysis of identity politics take a dramatic turn away from the analysis based on the primacy of class contradictions. This isn’t just absttract theory, it has a real effect on how groups organize, and how we communicate with people about how this system is structured.

    In my view, whether or not a rev situation is imminent in a given country, it’s our repsosibility to put forward a coherent analysis of what’s going on, and to communicate that analysis to people in accordance with their understanding - and to recognize the different levels of understanding, because if we speak to one level with the words that are meant for another level, we’ll alienate them.

    The left has a lot of problems, and one of them is that of being turned slowly into an introspective self-help group for people with big social and personal psychological issues. This is always going to exist to some extent, but I think it’s improtant to make sure the activity is, whenever possibly, outwardly focused.

    I should rest my case, but I’m not sure you’d get it.

    You have managed to call rape an issue related to “identity politics,” and to give a vivid example of masculine dualism… internal, emotional, private equals feminine vs external, “objective,” public equals masculine… with the devaluaiton of the “feminine” and valuaiton of the “masculine.”

    I have to suppose “the people” we’ll analyze won’t be women, who are vitally and daily interested in rape culture.

    Working class women are most often sexually abused and battered by working class men. A similar equation could be posited using any class or nationality. Ah, but that is a “private” (not external) matter.

    Men-as-a-class subjugate women-as-a-class.

    To quote womeone:

    “This isn’t just abstract theory, it has a real effect on how groups organize, and how we communicate with people about how this system is structured.”

    11 December 2006, 1:43 pm

  138. Paul:

    I’ve seen several posts intimating that because I disagree with what I term liberal identity politics, and this method of analysis, that my positions are anti-feminist, sexist, white supremacist, and so on [depending on how shrill the opposition to rev politics is]. I would say nothing could be further from the truth, and what I’m trying to do is hold up a torch of revolutionary feminism as it contrasts with liberal feminism.

    I think a lot of assumptions are being made about what I”m saying, maybe from reading inbetween the lines, and certainly positions I don’t hold are being attributed to what I’ve written, so let me clarify on these issues:

    You have managed to call rape an issue related to “identity politics,” and to give a vivid example of masculine dualism… internal, emotional, private equals feminine vs external, “objective,” public equals masculine… with the devaluaiton of the “feminine” and valuaiton of the “masculine.”

    I’ve never called rape an issue “related to identity politics”. On the contrary, I’ve said there are different understandings of how rape works as a social phenomenon, and one position comes from liberal identity politics, and another comes from social revolutionary politics, and I’ve contrasted those positions.

    I think the problem here is an implicit assumption that revolutionary social politics don’t deal with the phenomenon of rape, and with wider issues related to gender and ethnic oppression. On the contrary, I’ve demonstrated how revolutionary movements have dealt with those issues on a mass scale that has measurably impacted over 1/5 of the world’s population. My contention that the identity politics analysis fo rape has never helped anyone - ever - has not been challenged yet in this thread.

    My post is not an example of masculine dualism, which I understand and interpret through the lens of analytical psychology. Often the dualism based on gender types has been and is used to categorize various psychological processes, and to label them in an attempt to better understand the relaitonship between apparently contradictory aspects of the psyche(conscious and subconscious, dominant peronsaity and shadow, anima and animus, etc.). While I think this dualism is integral to an understanding of theology and psychology [which largely stems from the former], I don’t apply it on a social level and, moreover, I have not presented that in any of my posts.

    I have to suppose “the people” we’ll analyze won’t be women, who are vitally and daily interested in rape culture.

    I don’t think liberal feminist analysis holds a monopoly on the ability to analyze the role of women in society. I am positing a contrasting revolutionary feminist analysis of the role of women in society, one that sees class as the primary contradiction at work, but does not in any way negate the reality of social relationships dealing with gender, ethnicity, and nationality.

    Working class women are most often sexually abused and battered by working class men. A similar equation could be posited using any class or nationality. Ah, but that is a “private” (not external) matter.

    This is not a private matter, nor have I ever said it was a private matter.

    The truth is that most working class soldiers are killed in war by other working class soldiers. That most people in prisons and ghettos are watched over by those recruited from the working class, and so on. The reality of this class system is that it divides and conquers in a multitude of ways.

    One of the most dangerous errors we can make in analysing this system is in blaming the working class for the divisions that exist within the working class, or in even assuming the “working class” itself is a homogenous body that doesn’t have contradicitons within itself deeply related to the entire class structure. As burningman qouted, “there are contradictions between the people and the enemy, and contradictions among the people”.

    This is a system and culture that perpetuates the existence and prevalence of male domination, and a large segment of the male working class are encultured to degrade and oppress women. But in order to work towards changing this, we need a realistic idea of where this is all coming from and how it works. The position you take blames a large segment of the working class for the social relationships into which it has been conditioned.

    One of the worst things we can do is attempt to take this enculturation, and project it onto the entire male working class, and then turn around and attribute the conscious actions of the ruling class to those who are being and are even remotely related to by identity those who are carrying out some fucked up social roles. This is a huge mistake and, like I said earlier, it leads us nowhere in dealing with the issue.

    You’ll find that all of the most active and influential revolutionar feminist organizations, both historically and contemporarily, have outright rejected the formula of “men as a class sujugate women as a class”. This is a divisive formula that artificially posits a deeper division than what exists, and in so doing ignores and “flattens” the class contradictions at work, rendering any rev group adopting this analysis impotent in challening this process of enculturation.

    11 December 2006, 2:36 pm

  139. Paul:

    Additionally, I would like to emphasize my point about the rape phenomenon being rooted in class oppression, and it serves as a glaring example of how gender inequality is propogated on a social scale by class contradictions, and how it’s these class contradictions that underpin the entire massive scale of exploitation of women in our society.

    11 December 2006, 2:37 pm

  140. DeAnander:

    of course for a male lefty to dismiss anyone who disagrees with him for more than 30 seconds as “shrill” is a wonderful way to prove how non-sexist and pro-feminist he really is :-) keep digging, Apostle Paul, we can still see yer hat.

    11 December 2006, 6:32 pm

  141. Paul:

    DeAnander-

    I haven’t dismissed anyone who has disagreed with me here. In fact, quite the contrary, I’ve put forward a reasoned argument with a lot of evidence and explanation to back up my position, on every single point that has addressed my stance, and have responded to every single piece of criticism levelled at my position. I challenge you to name a single point I haven’t addressed, or that I have merely “dismissed”.

    What I labelled as “shrill” wasn’t criticism of my position, but the desperate rantings of people who would label my position as “white supremacist” or anything of that nonsense.

    What is really ironic is that you’re the one who is attempting to “dismiss” my position [and those who agree with it] by posting personal attacks, without so much as a shred of response to the lengthy criticism that has been levelled around your position.

    On a side note, and unimportantly, I have nothing to prove about how “non sexist” and “pro-feminist” I am, although it is telling your political stance you would seek to individualize a debate with insults and innuendo. If you think my political line is sexist and anti-feminist, then explain how. Right now all I see is smoke to cover the ruins of your position.

    11 December 2006, 8:15 pm

  142. Randy Morris:

    Ok, I’ve read almost everything in this thread. There is a nutshell I want to throw out, an image of the paradigm I hear from the “Revolutionary Left” showing up to defend their ideology from Stan’s withering assault (sarcasm alert). This will be simplistic, but being able to break things down and explain them to lay-people is very important to me. Please let me know how far off I am:

    RevLeft SpokesMan (yes, Man): “If the Revolution takes hold, there will no longer be a need to worry about things like misogyny, rape, bigotry, elitism, energy consumption, ecocide…ad nauseum. All these concerns will be addressed by the abolition of Class in Amerika. As a matter of fact, spending any time on those issues is a waste as they don’t exist within the structure of the Revolutionary Movement. Taking a look at the roots of our gender and/or race inequality on a personal level is a tremendous waste of our potential political energy; instead, we need to be striving to convince “The Worker” to embrace Marx in place of whatever useless dogma they already follow—i.e., religion.”

    The other picture I get is that Marxism (as the political movement/identity, as opposed to the intellectual methodology) is just looking to replace capitalism and all of its destructive byproducts with a system wherein everyone makes equal money off that destruction.

    Now I’m going to go read Peggy’s post on the “Ortega’s…” thread—see what I missed!

    Randy

    11 December 2006, 8:24 pm

  143. Paul:

    Randy -

    Where are you getting this idea of the political linme of the “RevLeft SpokesMan” ? It has absolutely no similarity to my line, or the line of anyone else on this thread. In fact, several times i’ve explicitly rejected the thesis you state.

    Can you please back up your statements by qouting from people who are saying this stuff? It seems you’re just making it up. Back up your criticism with examples.

    11 December 2006, 9:31 pm

  144. Stan:

    So far, the only thing I am hearing at the core of your “evidence” is that class is the primary contradiction. That is an assertion. It is not backed up with a bit of evidence, or even an explanaiton oabout why this is supposedly so.

    What makes class more central than gender? There is just one straightforward question. Explain how class is more formative, more durable, more important in the experience of people, than gender.

    No one has tried to elevate anything ABOVE class, or at least I haven’t. I am saying that this ortho-marxist POV where clas trumps all else is plain wrong… and is an outgrowth of a male standpoint, beginning with Marx’s very un-marxist naturalization of women.

    Marx:

    “The distribution of the work within the family, and the regulation of the labor-time of the several members, depend as well upon the differences of age and sex as upon natural conditions… Within a family… there springs up naturally a division of labor, caused by difference of sex and age, a division that is consequently based on a purely physical foundation.” [from Capital, Vol I]

    A PURELY PHYSICAL FOUNDATION?!?!?! I emphasize this for three reasons. (1) It was written by the older Marx as part of Capital — so there is no excuse that it was part of the more Hegelian younger Marx or whatever; (2) this becomes the starting point of Engels treatment of gender in OFPPS; and (3) neither Marx nor Engels would have stood for such nonsense in any treatment of class. In fact, their entire body of work, it might be argued, is a refutation of the “naturalization” of economic class. Their method was the de-naturalization of social relations. And yet here you have the beginning, and “in the beginning” (to coin a phrase) there was a male standpoint. Go to any Marxist list on the internet, and look at the ratio of men to women who post there… I just now dropped by one I know well, with hundreds of people who go there, and the ratio was more than 40 to 1 male to female.

    11 December 2006, 9:44 pm

  145. Randy Morris:

    First, I will apologize for the snarky post—I’m just sick of the ongoing communication rift. I was venting…and I shouldn’t do that here.

    Paul-

    I wasn’t actually referring to you specifically, and no, I will not reference everything that brought me to my generalization. If you don’t agree with my statement, that’s cool—I’d like to hear why. But most of the material is from before your last posts.

    The language used by you and Stan and many others on this site to talk to each other about revolutionary politics is alienating in the extreme. I am trying to learn that lingo because I am interested in the ideas that hide behind it, but I’m pretty sure most people aren’t.

    If I am getting the wrong message, and you are willing to put the time into me, please put it in layman’s language.

    Randy the Neophyte

    11 December 2006, 10:47 pm

  146. Polly:

    Class structure and patriarchy are the two largest problems in our world today. To me, it is silly to debate as to which one is worse; they are interdependant and interplaying. Patriarchy is not limited to the patriarchal structure we are seeing and have been seeing in our world. Altough difficult, I can concieve of a different patriarchal structure - one that is not harmful. I believe that our current patriarchal structure is emmensly damaging largely because of the current class structure. Opression is opression is opression…That is the core of the topic. No matter who, how, what, where, when we are speaking about, the problem is opression. Seeing every aspect of social life in a hierachal structure is a problem. This creates a dichotomy: female vs. male, poor vs. rich, black vs. white, old vs. young, etc. However, no matter what we are looking at, the true problem is opression. We need to see ALL people of society as equally beneficial and important, whether the topic is about gender, class, race, age etc.
    I do identify myself as a feminist. But as a feminist I do not need to point out patriarchy as the problem, as my enemy. Women are in fact largely opressed. I am certainly not denying that in any way; however, there are many groups of people that are widely opressed besides women including:children, those who have physical and/or mental disabilities, the elderly, raical or cultural minorities, homosexuals, bisexuals, transgendered…need I go on. Some people belong to more than 1 of these groups. There are many interplaying factors that are causing opression, which all need to be addressed and thought about before pointing fingers.

    11 December 2006, 10:56 pm

  147. Paul:

    Stan -

    As evidence I’ve cited revolutions that have affected over 1/5 of the world, and the change they brought which were both qualitatively and quantitiavely dramatic improvements in the lives of women and many other sections of society as well. In addition, I’ve written roughly 8,000 words going into detail explaining that evidence and defending the assertions I’ve made.

    What makes class more central than gender? There is just one straightforward question. Explain how class is more formative, more durable, more important in the experience of people, than gender.

    1. Society is primarily structured around class. Sexism and male domination play a huge role in how society is structured, but they aren’t the fundamental basis of how the economy is orientated. You could have a theoretical capitalist economy where male domination was lessened, but you couldn’t have one where there wasn’t exploitation between classes.

    2. Class cuts through ethnicity, gender, and nationaity and unites all oppressed people from a common standpoint - it’s something that everyone has in common.

    3. The most basic method of coercion in society, on a mass scale, is economic deprivation - depriving people of their basic necessities of food, shelter, and clothing. The existence of prostitution proves, for example, that women as a group fear economic deprivation more than rape and sexual exploitation. The history of slavery in America deonstrates the same thing.

    4. Forms of oppression that are based on nationality, gender, ethnicity, sexual orietnation, and so on are no rooted in class - they can exist independently of class. However, there is a huge difference between teh social expression of these psychological phenomenon under different methods of organizing society economically. Class society is designed to strategically exploit divisions based on gender, ethnicity, and so on, and these forms of oppression find an ampligied, widesperad social characteristic through class society As a result, the common denomination that all these forms of oppression have the class-based nature of oppression.

    5. Every major collective imrpovement to the rights of women and oppressed ethnic groups in history has come out of a revolutionary movement, and has been based largely on the reorganization of the means of production and distribution. This doesn’t mean it is the sole basis, but it is the primary overarching one that has the most demonstrable impact.

    6. Every major revolutionary feminist movement in the history of humanity has upheld the primacy of class contradictions in analyzing how society functions, and has defended that analysis against the encroachment of social-democrat and other liberal forms of feminism that sought to undermine the role of class contradictions.

    I am saying that this ortho-marxist POV where clas trumps all else is plain wrong… and is an outgrowth of a male standpoint, beginning with Marx’s very un-marxist naturalization of women.

    Well again I’m not going to defend Marx because I’m not a marxist.

    I think it’s important to assert the primacy of class contradictions in social relationships, without negating the importance of things like sexism and racism.

    I don’t think a revolution does away with racism or sexism. I do think a revolution deprives the ruling class of the means to exploit people on those lines in the same way and on the same scale.

    So lets say you have a revolutionary society where suddenly [and this has happened in sevearl cases] it’s illegal to beat a spouse, there’s an attempt to outlaw prostitution, massive number’s of women’s shelters are created, women are allowed to divorce, communal nursing halls are set up so that women have some kind of support and aren’t economically tied to raising their children (this support has existed in practically every society except indutsrial capitalism’s nuclear family). and so on. Sexism still exists, but women are uplifted to a huge extent, and the basis is built upon which sexism can further be meaningfully challenged and opposed. Without that basis, in the end it’s just talk.

    It’s also important to recognize that there is a physical component in sexism, based on a relationship to the means of production and distribution. On the one hand there is sexual dimorphism, which gives males a significant physical advantage. On the second there is the need for childbirth, which again puts women into a role where they are in many ways collectively dependent upon males. Now all this changes when advanced civilizations come into the picture, but only if the resources of that civilization are distributed in such a way that there can be things like communal daycare and a social/cultural order that mitigates the physical advantage.

    11 December 2006, 11:13 pm

  148. DeAnander:

    rendering any rev group adopting this analysis impotent …oh for gawdssakes.

    Paul, like leftyboys before and since, insults women in every other graf and then whines that women are not listening to him and that criticism is getting too angry or “personal”. poooooor baby. you walk into a new bar and start insulting the regulars, there’s likely to be harsh words spoken. and people do have difficulty listening when they’re being insulted and condescendingly lectured. ya know what, I do take it kinda personal when men use supercilious dick-fetishising language that insults me as a woman, like calling any argument they disagree with “shrill” [i.e. feminised/feminine, therefore trivial and/or dismissable] and using “impotent” as a universal metaphor for failure, cowardice, disorganisation (see previous threads on dickspeak as an exclusionary tool).

    for grins let’s engage for a moment with this tedious old Dogma of the Primacy of Class — which allegedly ensures that these class contradictions […] underpin the entire massive scale of exploitation of women, that the rape phenomenon [is] rooted in class oppression [”the rape phenomenon”? WTH? a ‘phenomenon’ is a markworthy or unusual event. rape is a daily structural reality, foundational.] does this explain why Bettina Aptheker’s father (notable Leftist) molested his daughter? does it explain why even the wealthiest uppercrusty SUV Mom still looks in the back seat of her shiny Explorer before she gets into it, and is afraid to go out jogging by herself? why middle-class and upper-class men not only exploit women of “lower” classes and castes, but also beat, intimidate, verbally and physically abuse and rape their own wives, women of their own class and social circle? why upper-class college boys put Roofies in the drinks of upper-class college girls?

    does it explain why in “classless” Cuba, virulent homophobia and official oppression of gay people persisted after the Revolution and well into the 90’s — and why homophobia was also strong among the Maoist cadres? does it explain the attempt of the Soviet State with its “Medals for Motherhood” to bring women’s reproductive potential under State direction as a kind of mass production effort? does it explain why the nearly-propertyless !Kung (aka Bushmen to whitefellas), classless and nomadic, report the sexual harassment and molesting of girls by adolescent boys? is it marxist “class” that informs the patriarchal social systems of some of the New Guinea tribes, in their remote valleys, without a single factory, capitalist, or labour organiser in sight?

    verily, it appears not a sparrow shall fall without an explanation somewhere in Kapital.

    OTOH a theory of patriarchy explains all these apparently disparate phenomena — and more — with economy and descriptive (and predictive) power, as part of a consistent pattern of male supremacy, easily observed from the ground, not requiring any arcane jargon or advanced theory, recognisable to women all over the world. why such verbal shenanigans to deny the elephant in the livingroom? methinks the Apostle doth protest a bit too much.

    the success of selected revolutionary marxist/maoist movements in challenging patriarchal traditions is heartening, and I hail it with moderated rapture. but only time will tell — it may yet be nothing more than the usual pattern of male-dominated political and strategic efforts embracing women’s contribution and equality while they need the extra bodies for their army or their production push, then reneging later on when the effort is over or political power consolidated. f’rexample the early Zionist movement embraced socialist ideals and women’s equality, communal childcare, yadayada, until the State didn’t need the kibbutzim any more; in the 40’s the US war effort drew women into high-paying industrial work only to toss them out again once the war was won, etc. feminists with a long historical view of the ways in which political movements and governments treat women and women’s rights before and after establishing secure power, are bound to be somewhat skeptical. hopeful, yes, but skeptical. we’ve heard it before.

    and now, Plonk.

    11 December 2006, 11:47 pm

  149. Paul:

    DeAnander -

    You have still yet to address any of the points I bring up. Instead, you keep posting new personal attacks, imply the content of my posts is wrong because of my gender(!), and then proceed to create a fictitious charicature of my position, which you when proceed to hack away at with the dull knife of anecdotal diatribe and seemingly structureless and inconsistent pieces of unrelated information.

    So lets dig a little deeper at what you’re saying, yet again, and maybe eventually you’ll start responding to what I say.

    insults women in every other graf and then whines that women are not listening to him and that criticism is getting too angry or “personal”.

    Can you please quote the text where I “insult women in every other graf” ? I must have missed that part. Maybe because it never happened. Or maybe you could quote the part where I complain that “women are not listening” ?

    I challenge you to back it up with quotes.

    I do take it kinda personal when men use supercilious dick-fetishising language that insults me as a woman

    Could you please quote where “dick fetishising language that insults [you] as a aoman” has been used? What was the language?

    calling any argument they disagree with “shrill” [i.e. feminised/feminine, therefore trivial and/or dismissable] and using “impotent” as a universal metaphor for failure, cowardice, disorganisation (see previous threads on dickspeak as an exclusionary tool).

    I called a single post shrill, and I will repost that quote here:

    “Paul, this is pure reactionism. And misogyny. And white supremacy. If your words aren’t proof-positive that revolutionaries desperately need engagement with radical feminist theory, I don’t know what is.
    Your words have white male victimhood written all over them.
    Comment by Yolanda Carrington — 12/10/2006 @ 1:02 am”

    I think everyone could agree, at least I hope so, that calling my position “mysogyny” and “white supremacy” is shrill.

    But you object to the word “shrill”, because you think it carries some kind of hidden sexist agenda? Well lets look at the word. Here’s a common definition that suits the adjective:

    “shrill: being sharply insistent on being heard”

    The criticism was that, by making such a ridiculous argument as calling me a white supremacist, the poster was sharply insistent on being heard, and was dishonestly using false terminology to raise their voice above reason. That’s the criticism, as it applied to this specific post. Where is the hidden sexism? Again, please explain where you’re coming from.

    Equally absurb is objecting to the use of the word “impotent”. You claim this word means “failure, cowardice, and disorganization”. Clearly what the world actually means, is that the thing which is “impotent” is incapable of bringing new life, that is of effectiv the cycle of life, death, and rebirth, into being. In the context in which I used the word, it means that no group has successfully used the analysis you put forward to meaningfully change the material or cultural conditions of anyone, let aloen women.

    a ‘phenomenon’ is a markworthy or unusual event.

    “phenomenon: a fact, occurrence, or circumstance observed or observable. e.g. - gravity”

    Hmm, seems like your definition is intentionally misleading. Calling rape a phenomenon is accurate, and does not belittle the process in any way, shape, or form.

    does this explain why Bettina Aptheker’s father (notable Leftist) molested his daughter?

    It does indeed! As I explained at length and in detail, the conditions that constitute sexual oppression are not individual in nature, they are widespread and a social phenomenon.

    It also explains all of the ensuing examples you bring up. But insteaf of me repeating myself, yet again, I’d prefer to see you explain how any of what you’ve said actually contradicts what I’ve put forward.

    I didn’t make this stuff up on this spot, these positions im extolling are all tried and true revolutionary feminist positions, and I’ve drawn very heavily from the wealth of rev feminist thought in presenting these ideas here, in oppositing to the liberal individualism you’re proposing instead.

    does it explain why in “classless” Cuba, virulent homophobia and official oppression of gay people persisted after the Revolution and well into the 90’s

    Cuba isn’t classless. But in any case, that’s diverging from the point because I’ve said that homophobia, like sexism, doesn’t come from the class system.

    verily, it appears not a sparrow shall fall without an explanation somewhere in Kapital.

    For the last time, I’m not a Marxist. If you want to attack my position, you should be taking cheap anecdotal potshots at revolutionary anarchists and feminists, NOT marxists.

    But maybe you could humour us all and quote some passages where I imply this is all explained by Das Kapital.

    the success of selected revolutionary marxist/maoist movements in challenging patriarchal traditions is heartening, and I hail it with moderated rapture. but only time will tell — it may yet be nothing more than the usual pattern of male-dominated political and strategic efforts embracing women’s contribution and equality while they need the extra bodies for their army or their production push,

    Of course it means little to you that tens of thousand sof the poorest people in the world have been liberated from sex slavery, feudal oppression and bondage, sexual servitude, and that almost half the rebel army including top command ranks are composed of female membership. Of course you greet this with “moderated rapture” - because in the comfort of your privilege, where you can dissect obscure theoretical points from a post-modernist perspective, the real question of women’s liberation is a mute point, a non entity you arrogantly dismiss as belonging to some eventual unworthy motive.

    I would say, even if the Nepalese rebels turn out to be tyrants, at least that’s an entire generation of kids who didn’t grow up child prostitutes, an entire generation of women who learned to use a rifle and defend themselves, and an entire generation of a people who stood on their feet instead of living on their knees.

    12 December 2006, 2:15 am

  150. Jonny:

    Polly- “Class structure and patriarchy are the two largest problems in our world today. To me, it is silly to debate as to which one is worse; they are interdependant and interplaying”

    I’m with you on that, Polly.

    DeAnander- impotent,sterile, fruitless, are all words. Attacking others for eating at Mcdonalds, or using common words will separate us from those we wish to influence by making them feel stigmatized for not meeting our standard of dietary or linguistic purity. As far as attacking Cuban policies, a quick comparison of the status of women in Cuba vs El Salvador or Grenada will solve any doubts as to the effectiveness of that model in surpassing our current one in this regard. It seems to me that groups dominate and opress other groups to the extent that there is no consequences for doing so. That applies to all of the conflicting groups Polly listed. I really think that the answer lies in a system that pays women for domestic labor(Venezuela) or makes it illegal for men NOT to do half (Cuba). NOW we’re talking about changing mens’ behavior by instituting penalties for patriarchal shittiness.

    12 December 2006, 3:01 am

  151. Jonny:

    Stan - “A PURELY PHYSICAL FOUNDATION?!?!?!”
    I’m not certain, nor any scholar, but maybe Marx was referring to the differing degrees to which capitalists saw potential profits when they look at humans of differing ages, genders, able-ness , color, etc.

    As we all prolly know, women were then seen by capitalists as best placed in the home to do free domestic labor which guaranteed the paid workers’ ability to generate surplus which could be converted to profit. Women (excepting the war years DeNander mentioned), along with children, elderly, injured, those with medical conditions and differently abled, were left depending primarily on the good will and whim of waged (and opressed themselves)males for access to housing, food, transport, etc. Although some things have changed a wee bit since then, they are headed back to where they started. still today any group successfully challenging their subordinate status in the social order faces repression by the capitalist state. Stan, what makes the gender contradiction more compelling than the conditions of any other subordinate group? workplace “accidents”, rape, child neglect, molestation and beatings, abuse of the handicapped, starvation and medical abandonment of the elderly happen to human beings male and female in North America. That’s a big tent.Whatever you may think of the males inside of it,and whatever you may call yourself, I’m sure you will continue your activities as a working-class militant to advance the struggle on one front or another(even if not in the role I wish you would play). I will not post to you again on this thread unless you specifically ask
    me something, though I will enjoy and benefit by the intellectual ferment on other threads.

    12 December 2006, 4:21 am

  152. Stan:

    1. Society is primarily structured around class. Sexism and male domination play a huge role in how society is structured, but they aren’t the fundamental basis of how the economy is orientated. You could have a theoretical capitalist economy where male domination was lessened, but you couldn’t have one where there wasn’t exploitation between classes.

    This is just another assertion. It IS stuructured aroudn class. It IS structured around class. It IS structured around class. Paul, you really need to get your head around what we are saying here about “naturalization.” The reason the masculinity of the economy and every other aspect of society is invisible is because it has been naturalized… that is, treated as an inevitable fact of nature arising directly from gender dimorphism… with no account of the evitable hierarchy that has been socially imposed on that fact. Theoretically, pigs might fly. There has never been a day of capitalist development in the real world that did not incorporate the preexisting system of male power directly into itself. Following that with a tautology about capitalism does nothing to validate this faulty premise preceding it. You really need to get more familiar with Luxemburg’s thesis on primitive accumulation (it’s linked in my blogroll, see “Luxemburg”), then drop in on someone like Nancy C. M. Hartsock (Money, Sex, and Power: Toward a Feminist Historical Materialism)or Maria Mies, who can explain in great detail how the gendered economy existing outside the direct capital valorization cycle is absolutely necessary for capitalism to continue. Patriarchy pre-existed capital as the modern class relation; so the idea that capital came along just dragging patriarchy with it seems no more credible in these kinds of historical retrojections, than the notion that patriarchy itself produced capital.. in its feminiztion of the other (colonialism, racism), in its “conquest of nature” trope, in its agonal competition, and with its tendency to externalize (divide the worldinto public and private, and make the public domain that of men).

    2. Class cuts through ethnicity, gender, and nationaity and unites all oppressed people from a common standpoint - it’s something that everyone has in common.

    Gender cuts through ethnicity, class, and nationality. But the question unity is a political question, and it is contingent, not theoretical. A proletarian in the United States is NOT the same as a proletarian in Indonesia; and both damn well know it. So it is not universally unifying. In fact, the metropolitan proletariat has a vested interest in the exploitation — through unequal exchange (a NATIONAL phenomenon) — of the peripheral worker. And that was Joaquin’s point… the conditions required for a mass movement include the self-organization of a group “for-itself,” that is politically self-conscious. The American working class is not a “class-for-itself,” because its membership gives primacy to imperial (racial-national) privilege and to gender… which are themselves real systems of power in the real world, right now.

    3. The most basic method of coercion in society, on a mass scale, is economic deprivation - depriving people of their basic necessities of food, shelter, and clothing. The existence of prostitution proves, for example, that women as a group fear economic deprivation more than rape and sexual exploitation. The history of slavery in America deonstrates the same thing.

    You just made my point. Deprivation, whether imposed through murder or enclosure or the threat of rape, is not unique to capital as a social relation.

    4. Forms of oppression that are based on nationality, gender, ethnicity, sexual orietnation, and so on are no rooted in class - they can exist independently of class.

    Really? Provide a single example… in the real world, that is. Gender includes sexual orientation, btw, and nationality includes “ethnicity”. Again, give me one example ever in history of any real human being who could be reduced to one of those taxonomic categories at the exclusion of the others.

    However, there is a huge difference between teh social expression of these psychological phenomenon under different methods of organizing society economically. Class society is designed to strategically exploit divisions based on gender, ethnicity, and so on, and these forms of oppression find an ampligied, widesperad social characteristic through class society

    I would quote you and substitute Gender for Class, and it would be equally true, except that you have reified “system.” Capitalism was not “designed” by anyone. And women ocntinue to suffer far more — economically — outside the capital relation, that is, at home, and-or within prmimitve accumulation dynamics. This is just another assertion you have made, by the way.

    As a result, the common denomination that all these forms of oppression have the class-based nature of oppression.

    You could say exactly the same thing about gender or race-nationality.

    5. Every major collective imrpovement to the rights of women and oppressed ethnic groups in history has come out of a revolutionary movement, and has been based largely on the reorganization of the means of production and distribution. This doesn’t mean it is the sole basis, but it is the primary overarching one that has the most demonstrable impact.

    Baseless assertion. Are you telling me that the American Civil Rights struggle was anti-capitalist? Lat I checked, it was run mostly by preachers demanding an “equal” place within the system.

    6. Every major revolutionary feminist movement in the history of humanity has upheld the primacy of class contradictions in analyzing how society functions, and has defended that analysis against the encroachment of social-democrat and other liberal forms of feminism that sought to undermine the role of class contradictions.

    Ourageously baseless assertion, and one that ignores the subjugation of women within the “private” sphere. This would imply that women are not entitled, by your sights, to struggle for any political space within the current system until there is a class uprising. Can you name these feminist movements, where they were and when, and give us a synopsis of how women are faring there now?

    12 December 2006, 8:16 am

  153. Yolanda Carrington:

    Okay Stan…I’m sick of seeing posts that attack me or any other woman personally being approved. Paul has called my words “shrill” several times now—and you know damn well that shit’s meant as a personal put-down.

    Wasn’t Paul supposed to be plonked anyway? I could’ve swore De said that on her last post.

    “and now, Plonk.”

    Plonk Paul already!

    STAN: Zapping is a collective decision now.

    I think De was calling out a plonk meaning face-plant for the night, but I can’t say for sure. He is ducking and dodging in his typical ahistorical way about “shrill,” doing the dictionary game to evade the cultural associations of this word with women and feminism.

    I am done repsonding to him, because I am weary of the apparently copious amount of time he has to devote to sending “8000 words” or whatever his latest avalanche strategy is. He is not interested in doing anything except defending his class reductionism. In the process, he has provided us with numerous examples of exactly the kind of masculinist discourse we have been trying to expose here… which remains completely invisible to him. he is also, as De pointed out, using his apparently endless time to sit and type, to bait other posters.

    I am thinking of adding monopolization-strategy (flooding) to the list of prohibited practices in the rules.

    He thinks he is winning this argument by volume. And winning is what he is about… but he’d never recognize that as a masculine characteristic. The underlying premise is… I can’t be wrong, I can’t be wrong, I can’t be wrong (De’s formulation).

    12 December 2006, 8:41 am

  154. TIZYA:

    As for “middle-class and upper-class men not only exploit women of “lower” classes and castes, but also beat, intimidate, verbally and physically abuse and rape their own wives, women of their own class and social circle? why upper-class college boys put Roofies in the drinks of upper-class college girls?”
    -DeAnander

    …a common truth, as would saying any class of men exploiting women. or in some cases the wife abusing the husband. in another (more often than not unreported) same sex partner domestic violence.

    Paul, this is pure reactionism. And misogyny. And white supremacy. If your words aren’t proof-positive that revolutionaries desperately need engagement with radical feminist theory, I don’t know what is.

    Your words have white male victimhood written all over them.

    Comment by Yolanda

    First off, I would like to note Paul’s dad is Black. You can nix the “white” out of “white male victimhood”. Anything else is is still up for debate :)

    Paul, like leftyboys before and since, insults women in every other graf and then whines that women are not listening to him and that criticism is getting too angry or “personal”. poooooor baby.
    -

    Terms such as “leftyboys”, “dick-fetishising” are sexist in themselves. Had there been a gender role reversal of this obloquy I could hardly imagine the the stormy backlash. Especially had the person actually made the initial sexist or racist comment. Maybe his name was Paula? I seriously doubt any cheap hack simply by gender default. These pigeonholes and personal ideological manisfestaions impairs any progression of a “rev” collective. If this is any idea of Feminism, I shake off my radical cheerleading pompoms promptly. I also say this as a First Nations and a woman. (haha)

    I have seen my fair share of “mAnarchist’s”, but in this thread? not so much.

    12 December 2006, 10:22 am

  155. Charles:

    A PURELY PHYSICAL FOUNDATION?!?!?! I emphasize this for three reasons. (1) It was written by the older Marx as part of Capital — so there is no excuse that it was part of the more Hegelian younger Marx or whatever; (2) this becomes the starting point of Engels treatment of gender in OFPPS; and (3) neither Marx nor Engels would have stood for such nonsense in any treatment of class. In fact, their entire body of work, it might be argued, is a refutation of the “naturalization” of economic class. Their method was the de-naturalization of social relations. And yet here you have the beginning, and “in the beginning” (to coin a phrase) there was a male standpoint. Go to any Marxist list on the internet, and look at the ratio of men to women who post there… I just now dropped by one I know well, with hundreds of people who go there, and the ratio was more than 40 to 1 male to female.

    ^^^^^

    CB: Now I see where you get this naturalization of women thing. However, it’s a bit tricky on whether Marx and Engels naturalize _class_. For example, in one of his Prefaces to _Capital_, Marx says that his wants to treat political economy as a branch of _natural history_ , which is a mild implication that he is naturalizing class too. Here’s the quote from holy text:

    “To prevent possible misunderstanding, a word. I paint the capitalist and the landlord in no sense couleur de rose. But here individuals are dealt with only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, embodiments of particular class-relations and class-interests. My standpoint, from which the evolution of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of _natural history_ ( emphasis CB), can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he socially remains, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them.”

    Karl Marx
    Capital Volume One

    1867
    PREFACE TO THE
    FIRST GERMAN EDITION

    CB: Also see my discussion in “For Women’s Liberation” in which I argue that Marx and Engels focus on class _is_ grounded in biologic. I argue right from the start that class focus in grounded in biology, i.e. nature. Here is the passage:

    “By _The Manifesto of the Communist Party_ , every Marxist knows the A,B,C’s of historical materialism or the materialist conception of history. The
    history of all human society, since the breaking up of the ancient communes,is a history of class struggles between oppressor and oppressed. Classes are
    groups that associate in a division of labor to produce their material means of existence.

    In _The German Ideology_, Marx and Engels asserted an elementary anthropological or “human nature” rationale for this conception. In a section titled “History: Fundamental Condtions” they say:
    … life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation , clothing and many other things. The first historical act is thus the
    production of material life itself. And indeed this is an historical act a fundamental condition of all history, which today, as thousands of years
    ago, must daily and hourly be fulfilled merely in order to sustain human life.”

    Production and economic classes are the starting point of Marxist analysis of human society, including in the Manifesto, because human life, like all
    plant and animal life must fulfill biological needs to exist as life at all. It is an appeal to biologic ( which I support, all anti-vulgar materialist
    critiques to the contrary notwithstanding, but that’s another essay).
    Whatever, humans do that is “higher” than plants and animals, we cannot do if we do not first fulfill our plant/animal like needs. Therefore, the “higher” (cultural, semiotic etc.) human activities are limited by the productive activities. This means that historical materialism starts with human nature, our natural species qualities.”

    CB: So, Marx and Engels do ground class in nature to a significant extent.

    I realize that Marx is also famous for denying that _capitalism_ is eternally natural or whatever. However, the determining force of class struggle is grounded in the fact that classes provide our natural subsistence in their work in economy. Economic class work provides necessities to the sustainence of life. They go on to produce much much more, but they still produce that and thereby have a necessary determining effect at some level.

    Actually, I’m not sure you are correct in the way you characterize Engels start in OFPP&S. He marks the transformation from the original matrilineal form of family to the male supremacist family in history, not biology. Note also, that his first term in the title is “The Family” , not “Private Property”. This implies that he is saying that the shift begins with the overthrow of motherright, exactly gender as the primary, or first in time, historical contradiction.

    As far as the division of labor wherein women do the predominance of childcare, one cannot ignore that by biology, women _make_ babies with their bodies in pregnancy. Of course, it’s not impossible that they could immediately upon give the babies over to men for care, such that the division of labor was men doing all post-birth childcare. But it’s not exactly difficult to understand how the division of labor has developed the other way as a sort of “momentum” out of the natural division of labor or natural assignment of pregnancy to females. This especially true in the conditions of life of the first million or 200,000 years of human existence.

    Coincidently, the following article just came through the lists.

    Evidence indicates that a sex-based division of labor among early humans
    gave them more ability to adapt than the Neanderthals had….
    http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/12/061207-sex-humans.html

    12 December 2006, 10:24 am

  156. Stan:

    Here is a good read on a good read, from Cathy Lutz, about National Geographic.

    Charles, we have never denied the biological fact of sexual dimorphism (we are not postmodernists). We are challenging the hierarchies associated with it, and the cultural “superstuructures” that reinforce those heirarchies.

    As to NG speculation about Neanderthals, I believe that happened roughtly 40,000 years ago, and there are also theses afoot that claim “free trade” caused their extinction (also heat, meat, and disease have been cited as causative agents of the extinction… I wonder what they’ll say about ours…). If I’m not mistaken, the year is 2006 now.

    Marx’s entire thesis was based on capital as a social relation, not natural. C’mon comrade, you know that. Marx and Engels were still trapped in many gendered habits of thought. Why is that so hard to admit? It’s not surprizing, nor some sin; and it doesn’t take away from their accomplishments… only their apotheosis.

    12 December 2006, 10:45 am

  157. skol:

    Paul: The way I see it, the only thing you ( can be at this point is confused, which is so much better than thinking you aren’t, because it lets you listen if you try.
    I haven’t read Capital (I’ve tried, but…uuugh), which is why I don’t get in conversations with socialists about socialism. But I understand socialism (etc) more and more just by listening. And if a bunch of socialists are telling me I’m wrong, I probably am. If a bunch of feminist women are telling me I’m wrong, I probably am.
    So just keep an open mind :)
    Also: If I start talking, and I feel I’m getting in over my head (often), I go into lurk mode. You can A) recuperate, and B) stop to listen. And it’s okay to not know what you’re talking about; that’s what education is for. And on the web, no one needs to know you’re being educated. Except yourself, but that’s a hurdle you can jump, right?

    12 December 2006, 12:15 pm

  158. Randy Morris:

    Ok, I guess I’ve finally been coming here long enough that I’m actually seeing the masculinist domination of the boards that y’all are constantly warning against. I understand now.

    Thanks to all the regulars on this thread who have tried so hard—I’ve actually learned a lot. I’ll try to express something useful after I synthesize some more.

    To Paul and others: I would advise that you give yourselves the gift of Introspection this holiday season. Take the words of De, Yolanda, Peggy, etc., as revealed knowledge (just for the sake of easing the transition) and roll around in the possibility that they are RIGHT!: we really do live in a white patriarchy, and we as men unconsciously further the aims of that system every time we engage in “blog domination” like we’re seeing here.

    Hey guys! Take a break from working so hard to be RIGHT all the time…being position neutral is actually quite liberating, and it has the bonus of allowing your mind to expand and consider new ways of understanding.

    Good luck!

    Randy

    12 December 2006, 1:43 pm

  159. Randy Morris:

    Wow skol, sounds like you and me have a similar blog-thought-process!

    :)

    Randy

    12 December 2006, 1:54 pm

  160. Paul:

    skol -

    I’m pretty sure I have a good grasp on what’s being said here. I’ve responded to every single specific point that has been raised in criticism of the position I’ve taken, and moreover, over 90% of my points have not been responded to.

    And no, because a small number of liberal feminists [note they are opposed to “the left”] are claiming they are right, does not by default mean I’m objectively “wrong”. Moreover, that method of determining right and wrong denies the phenomenon of plurality.

    In any case, this isn’t about right or wrong, and I’m primarily posting for the benefit of everyone reading this thread and not posting.

    But as I’ve said all along, I welcome criticism - I want everyone to challenge my position. It doesn’t even have to be principled criticism. Even though some poeple have decided to not respond to 90% of the points im making, it’s still useful because they’re brining out their position and what it stands for, which is the whole point. The only time this criticism gets really deconstructive is when you get people like DeAnander and Yolanda making outrageous personal attacks, like calling me a “white supremacist” [interesting to note im part African and am in a relationship with a first nations woman, but ok!]

    12 December 2006, 2:20 pm

  161. Paul:

    Stan -

    Thanks for your reply.

    I don’t think this is a “naturalization” of class. I think in all my posts I’ve recognized the dynamic relationship between material and psychologices forces at work, and how they interact with one another. If you read my original post, you’ll note I make a specific point of referencing this fact.

    Patriarchy pre-existed capital as the modern class relation; so the idea that capital came along just dragging patriarchy with it seems no more credible in these kinds of historical retrojections, than the notion that patriarchy itself produced capital

    I still think there is confusion around my position. I didn’t say capital created patriarchy. I’ve always maintained that patriarchy is an indepednently existing phenomenon, but that when we talk about how things like patriarchy are implemented on a social scale, we need to talk about how the means of produciton and distribution are structure. The reason is because the mechanisms for porpogating and enforcing things like patriarchy stem from how the socio-economic is structured. Look at Xenia’s post on the other thread for a very good, practical example of this.

    I’m not going to go on because my numerous other pints have already illuminated my position in depth on why this is the case.

    A proletarian in the United States is NOT the same as a proletarian in Indonesia; and both damn well know it. So it is not universally unifying

    I think you’re confusing unity with being identical. I think there is internationalism between the proletariats of different countries, and I don’t hold the proletariat of an advanced industrialized country responsible for the oppression of hte proletariat of a devleoped or exploited country.

    There is a saying of “aim the spearhead up”. What it means that that if we look at the whole global hierarchy of how things are structured, we could go down adn blame every single level until we get to what we see as absolute bottom, and we could create endless subdivisions. This may be a fun exercise, but yeilds no real practical results, or theoretical insights. Instead we should point the apex of blame and our attacks squarely where it belongs - at the ruling class - and in the process of attacking the ruling class, our spearpoint will catch all the reactionary forces that can’t be won over or neutralized on teh way up to reaching them.

    The American working class is not a “class-for-itself,” because its membership gives primacy to imperial (racial-national) privilege and to gender

    No, they as a whole class don’t do that. The ruling class does that, and in stating that you’re effectively attributing the actions of the prime mover to the object or group that is being moved. There are deep contradictions amongst the working class, and there are solidly reacitonary sectors that aren’t going to be won ever - in fact in every rev conflict it has turned into a civil war, with the reactionary groups in the working class used as cannon fodder by the ruling class, against the revs. But in making these blanket, untrue statements you’re painting everyone - especially all working class white males - with the same brush. and it just doesn’t fit.

    You just made my point. Deprivation, whether imposed through murder or enclosure or the threat of rape, is not unique to capital as a social relation.

    No, I enforced my point, which is that the social phenomenon of rape is subordinate to the phenomenon of material deprivation - something that was demonstrated in earlier discourse, and that I’ve epxlained at length.

    Provide a single example… in the real world, that is. Gender includes sexual orientation, btw, and nationality includes “ethnicity”. Again, give me one example ever in history of any real human being who could be reduced to one of those taxonomic categories at the exclusion of the others.

    My point was that a lot of diviisons around gender, ethnicity, and so on originite in psychological constructs that are then projected by people onto the material world. This is how I view the basic [not applied] origins of these things.

    and one that ignores the subjugation of women within the “private” sphere. This would imply that women are not entitled, by your sights, to struggle for any political space within the current system until there is a class uprising. Can you name these feminist movements, where they were and when, and give us a synopsis of how women are faring there now?

    It doesn’t ignore the subjugation of women in the private sohere - in fact the rev feminist line of representing here says that the private sphere is intimately linked to the social sphere, and that you cannot deny the social sphere [as DeAnander and others are attempting to do].

    I’ve already named these feminist movements, but if you want we can focus on my favourite - Mujeres Libres of the CNT/FAI forces during the Spanish Civil War. They upheld a class analysis of gender oppression, while at the same time carrying out a campaign to identify sexism within the ranks of the anarchist movement internally, and at the same managed managed to practically uplift and raise the conditions of women through revolutionary struggle. They are a perfect example of the line I’m taking, and my line is virtually identical to theirs.

    As for Yolanda –

    He is ducking and dodging in his typical ahistorical way about “shrill,” doing the dictionary game to evade the cultural associations of this word with women and feminism.

    I’m not dodging anything — you’ve just been caught in another falshood, this time in trying to decontextualize the meaning of words to suit your own agenda. If there was any confusion about the meaning of those words, it should be gone as I’ve quoted their definitions.

    I am done repsonding to him, because I am weary of the apparently copious amount of time he has to devote to sending “8000 words” or whatever his latest avalanche strategy is.

    You haven’t responded to me in the first place. All you’ve done is throw out cheap inaccurate insults [like calling me white supremacist, an oxymoron if you’ve ever met anyone like myself with sickle-cells].

    I’ve explained earlier I feel the length of my posts has hurt, not aided my position, and I’ve cut down on the verbosity. And it doesn’t take me a long time to write this stuff - I’m typing it at about 80-90wpm, usually on breaks in between work, doing chores at home or more important work. This isn’t consuming any great period of time.

    How about an apology for your innapropriate slander on this forum?

    MODERATOR’S NOTE: Paul, what you are repsonding to (from Yolanda’s post) was in the moderator’s note, not Yolanda’s post. I wrote that, not Yolanda.

    12 December 2006, 2:43 pm

  162. Charles:

    Here is a good read on a good read, from Cathy Lutz, about National Geographic.

    Charles, we have never denied the biological fact of sexual dimorphism (we are not postmodernists). We are challenging the hierarchies associated with it, and the cultural “superstuructures” that reinforce those heirarchies.

    ^^^^
    CB: Me too.

    So, we oppose male _supremacy_ ( hierarchy). This is why “male supremacy” is preferable to “patriarchy”. It is not just “rule of the father”. It is the dominance of “males”, whether fathers or not.

    However, not many Marxists , even, explicitly address the point I made on Marx and Engels’ focus on class being rooted in biology. In other words, _why_ do Marxists focus on class ? Why did Marx and Engels get focussed in on class ?

    ^^^^^^

    As to NG speculation about Neanderthals, I believe that happened roughtly 40,000 years ago, and there are also theses afoot that claim “free trade” caused their extinction (also heat, meat, and disease have been cited as causative agents of the extinction… I wonder what they’ll say about ours…). If I’m not mistaken, the year is 2006 now.

    ^^^
    CB: By the way, the NG article is reporting on an article in _Current Anthropology_, which is a more a scientific anthropological journal.

    It’s still interesting to find out that Neanderthals may not have had a sexually-based division of labor. I didn’t know that. The article also seems to say that sexually-based division of labor started 40,000 years ago. If that’s true that could mean a lot of things. Maybe longer childhoods started then. And longer childhood goes with culture and language being more important. Probably women invented language to teach children in this context ? A lot of interesting speculation could come out of that.

    The reason we go back so far is that it helps to determination what is “natural”. For example, it’s part of the reason we know capitalism is not the only natural human way of organizing.

    ^^^^^^

    Marx’s entire thesis was based on capital as a social relation, not natural. C’mon comrade, you know that.

    ^^^^^^
    CB: Yes, I know what you are talking about. He was fighting the bourgeois who were arguing that society had always been capitalist, by nature.

    You might want to consider that Marx’s whole thesis is a little broader than his discussion of capital. That’s pretty clear from _The Manifesto of the Communist Party_ which discusses the modes of production before capitalism, and thereby more than capital, no ? There is the famous thesis that history is a history of class struggles, including feudal and slave society before capitalism.

    So, have you ever asked yourself _why_ history is a history of _economic_ class struggles ? Marx and Engels assert “history is a history of class struggles”. A non-religious response to that would be to ask “why”. ( In fact, that’s sort of the question you are asking when you say, class is not the primary contradiction)

    I’m suggesting it’s because of what they said in _The German Ideology_ All humans must take care of their biological needs in order to live at all. It is because economic class activities encompass fulfilling certain biological _necessities_ that class struggle has a determinative effect on the other activities of life. Everybody _must_ do these things before they can do anything else, so “these things” have a limiting effect on everything else.

    Marx and Engels never say that explicitly too much, but that’s probably it.

    Similarly, _reproductive_ activities, in the broad sense, are also naturally necessary for the perpetuation of the species over more than one generation. By the same logic, thereby, reproductive, caring labor has a determinative effect on history and society, the rest of the things we do. This is a logical way in which gender becomes a primary cause along with class. ( See my “For Women’s Liberation”)

    ^^^^^^

    Marx and Engels were still trapped in many gendered habits of thought. Why is that so hard to admit?

    ^^^^
    CB; I thought I admitted that when I wrote “For Womens’ Liberation”.

    We have to be more specific. “Gendered habits of thought is too vague.” Engels doesn’t uphold the gendered difference in income between women and men. So, that’s not a gendered habit of thought he’s trapped in. As far as men having more property, of course Engels and Marx were proposing the abolition of private property. So, that’s not a gendered habit of thought Marx and Engels have. As far as I know, they had nothing about women not holding political offices equal with men. So, that’s not a gendered habit of thought they had. They didn’t justify rape. So, they don’t participate in socalled rape culture, gendered habit of thought. They didn’t promote pornography. So, no gendered habit of thought in that regard. Marx was a very protective, and paternalistic father when it came to his daughters and suitors.

    Now that you mention it, I’m not so sure there are so many politically incorrect “gendered habits of thought” in Marx and Engels’ writing. I know you say they “naturalize women”.

    I’m trying to think how to articulate what I would say are the shortcomings of this criticism, naturalization of women. There are two separate issues. Men in European society thinking of women as “natural”. Marx and Engels participating in this alleged general Western male ideology.

    I guess I don’t think the main problems of men oppressing women are rooted in men thinking that women are animals and men are not animals. Does that help ?

    I don’t think (_some_ !)men rape women because they think women are animals, i.e. “natural” in some sense. It’s not some “gendered habit of thinking” that designates women as “more natural” than men that is at the root of rape. I don’t see that.

    I guess the problem with saying it as “naturalization of women” is that the problem is not that men think of women as “natural” and men as “cultural” ( or whatever the opposite of natural is in this context). There are lots of ways that men think of themselves as natural. The problem is the “content” that is put into the socalled nature of each sex. The notion that women naturally stay in the home and men naturally go out into the world of work is the problem. And it’s a problem not because there isn’t a very ancient kernel of truth in it (that is now an anachronism); no, the problem is women can’t get any money if they don’t go out into today’s world of work, and thereby men have more money than they do, more material wealth. And women do double work, housework and outwork.

    The main problem is the idea that men naturally order and women naturally obey men- male supremacy. Of course, this is also thought to be God given, which would be supernatural , not natural.

    Marx and Engels didn’t go by “supernatural” causes. And Marx and Engels don’t subscribe to the abstract supremacy of men over women, i.e. male supremacy. So, there’s not that “gendered habit of thought.”

    ^^^^

    It’s not surprizing, nor some sin; and it doesn’t take away from their accomplishments… only their apotheosis.

    ^^^^^^

    CB: Elaborate for me on what you see as their problematic “gendered habits of thought”. Now that you have asked me to think about it more closely, I can’t think of many invidious “gendered habits of thought” in Marx and Engels.

    I guess it comes down to this. I don’t see where Marx and Engels engage many “gendered habits of thought” that underpin the oppression of women ( pace; your naturalization of women thesis). Seems to me their theoretical framework is very friendly to integrating all cogent theories for the liberation of women. No aya contradiction between Marxism and feminism. Materialism and feminism are made for each other.

    I know you have mentioned “naturalization of women” , but when I analyze that more closely , it doesn’t seem to hang together to me , as I discuss above. If you feel like it ,rebut what I say here( even though you have discussed it so much). What exactly is wrong with what I say above ?

    apothesis: in the name of the Gods, Marx , Engels and Lenin amen :>)

    And by the way, I don’t say all this because I think Marxist groups in America are so wonderful ,or that you are wrong in counselling some people to move out of said groups. I’m not a member of any Marxist group myself. Haven’t been for more than ten years. On the other hand, to be wishy washy, I wouldn’t myself criticize people who are in such groups, nor would I criticize them for failing to accomplish much in recent decades. The bourgeoisie have really tied things up,played dirty etc. C’est la vie. C’est la guerre.

    Actually, even though I still respect Lenin, I’m not a practicing Leniinist in that I’m not in a group.

    Politics makes strange non-bedfellows.

    12 December 2006, 5:01 pm

  163. Audrey:

    Thanks, Skol, for saying what I was thinking. I was nodding along with De when she described that scenario of being dumped on the street exposed and vulnerable. I had trouble reading Paul when he was explaining very patiently to us women what we’d really feel in that situation - which, oddly enough, was very foreign to me, as a woman. I also had trouble grasping what was meant by “it assumes the woman is being dropped off in a neighbourhood where they are highly at risk of sexually assault.” Yes, we assume that. I think that’s part of what De’s saying, that we generally live with that assumption, whereas that same assumption is nonexistent for men, and even considered by men to be conditional for women. For us, the assumption is that all neighborhoods are places where men rape women, regardless of class, racial makeup, dominant religion, rural or urban, college town or military town, etc.

    Paul’s explanation of what women fear most in that scenario ignores women’s history, as if we arrive in that moment in time with no past, no experience with rape and abuse, no sort of ingrained knowledge of what that means.

    One of my students was telling me recently about having to take his shoes off quietly when he was growing up because if he tossed them on the floor, his dad, a combat vet, would react to the noise. It doesn’t matter that his living room is a safe place; what matters is that his father had learned that a loud sudden noise is a threat.

    I could have used rational arguments and presented evidence to demonstrate to my student that what his father feared most in that situation wasn’t the noise – surely if it was the noise, he would have moved away, but I’m not convinced you can use intellect to disprove what people know of their own lives. The conversation reminds me a bit of what I wrote before on this blog, about my husband explaining to me in scientific terms why I’m not cold, even if I feel cold.

    Johnny, if you could take all that and adapt it to what we’re saying about feeling offended by language that continually puts down women, that would be awesome. Maybe also you could think about Stan’s estimate that male/female participation is running 40/1 on some lists, and ask yourself why you are more concerned about men feeling stigmatized when they can’t use sexist language, or whether you should be more concerned about women feeling stigmatized when it’s used and accepted and defended.

    12 December 2006, 9:48 pm

  164. peggy:

    “The most basic method of coercion in society, on a mass scale, is economic deprivation - depriving people of their basic necessities of food, shelter, and clothing. The existence of prostitution proves, for example, that women as a group fear economic deprivation more than rape and sexual exploitation. The history of slavery in America deonstrates the same thing.”

    Wrong on all counts. The most basic method of coercion in any society is physical force. Prostitutes do not like or want to be raped or sexually exploited. They want to be in control of their situation. Slaves in America did not choose to be slaves, not for economic security or for any other reason. They were kept in line by physical force. A runaway slave, or a disobedient slave, could be killed just like an animal.

    13 December 2006, 1:34 am

  165. peggy:

    Oh yes, and a battered woman does not choose to stay with her husband simply because she prefers economic security over freedom from battery. She stays out of a combination of love for, and fear of, her batterer. Work in a battered woman’s shelter and see how complex the situation really is.

    It is ironic that a person who opposes capitalism should believe that life is all about money.

    13 December 2006, 1:47 am

  166. DeAnander:

    the notion that prostitution proves that women fear physical deprivations such as hunger or exposure “more” than we fear sexual abuse, also makes the imho ludicrous assumption that there is a choice between a life with physical deprivations but no abuse, and a life of sexual abuse without physical deprivations, some kind of tidy choice between them as if we were lab rats pushing button A or button B. most prostituted women were already sexually abused by male family members or “boyfriends” before money entered the picture, which it does on average around the age of 14 or 15.

    for many women refusing the money would not mean being safe from the sexual abuse. the sexual abuse is a constant — there isn’t an option to be “hungry but safe from rape”.   it is not an either/or choice which conveniently illustrates some ortho revolutionary theory, any more than the “choice” of 3w peasants to migrate to the city and take shitty jobs in FTZ’s “proves” the validity of the neoliberals’ priorities (land enclosure, monetisation, privatisation).

    meanwhile (my, it’s flying thick and fast around here of late) So, no gendered habit of thought in that regard. Marx was a very protective, and paternalistic father when it came to his daughters and suitors.

    and being a protective [read: controlling] and paternalistic father is, of course, not a gendered habit of thought? Marx’s assumption of control over his daughters’ love lives, his right to approve or disapprove their “suitors”, was not a gendered habit of thought. right. and the Pope ain’t a Catholic.

    13 December 2006, 2:59 am

  167. Tatiana:

    Hello, Stan.

    I think the answer to your question: “What happened? Why is there no organized left with the attention and support of broad masses of peope in the US?” - is another question: what is the success of capitalism?

    … What do people want? What do ALL of them want? Why are there so many immigrants coming to this country of the most profound and successful capitalism? (And surely the answer is not in democracy, or freedom or human rights, as you, undoubtedly, know).
    The notion of capitalism comes down to one simple word – desire.
    What can battle a desire?
    As you’ve written, Marxism is alien to the most of the American society and it will be. Socialism is impossible for the masses consisting majorly, and especially in America, of self satisfied, self sufficient, self righteous, self important, brainwashed, machine operated consumers.
    You know, I presume, the factors that made the Russian revolution possible. But do you now why the USSR collapsed? Was it a violently enforced regime and therefore lack of freedom of speech, lack of political freedom, violation of human rights, closed society, Cold War, defeat in Afghanistan? What was it that people lacked and so desperately craved in a society free of drugs, virtually free of crime, pornography, society with free healthcare, free excellent, no, I would say magnificent, education, in a society where one could talk about art and culture and history even with a janitor? What was it that they wanted? Just a stable economy? The reforms? Perestroika or glasnost?

    And despite all the theories and patterns and methods and righteousness and goodness the answer is ridiculously true – they wanted shiny things. Pretty cars, Hollywood, a leather sofa, low quality Chinese sweaters, porn, women as commodity, a muscular prince in a Mercedes, jewelry and a lot of it, private helicopters, people that open doors of their cars, pine-apples in winter (in Russia – of course), to talk about their evil mother-in-law on the national television – dreams and desires…

    And the interesting thing is that all of them wanted it at once and they all still believe they can get it!

    And who are the socialists? Really, what do they hold in stock for you? And for an average, continually propagandized American that can only see the fruit of socialism in a collapse of the Soviet Union, what is the world free of poverty, free of misogyny, free of corporations and sweat shops? What does it mean? What kind of dressing does this sandwich come with? And does it come with a dressing at all?
    There is nothing wrong with the theory and history of socialism. Intrepid socialist thinkers overlook the reasoning behind the success of capitalism and they overlook it just because they are so infinitely pure and the rubbish at the core of the everyday human concerns doesn’t touch their beautiful minds. Oh, how come - it shouldn’t, it is unthinkable, it is below them!
    Remember Dostoevsky? Everybody is so enamored with him presenting Russia in a bad light that they do not notice his genius of singling out the lowly of the human soul that literally makes this world possible.

    Just like any theory this one has to grow and evolve and the target from now on should be the transformation of the human soul and its desires - the task far more difficult to undertake than to create another revolution.

    13 December 2006, 10:21 am

  168. Mark:

    All of the desires you’re talking about are manufactured, not somehow intrinsic to humanity. The studies and surveys I’ve read about human happiness seem to indicate an inverse realtionship between gross material accumulation and personal satisfaction. That doesn’t stop people from pouring more Wal-Mart crap down that empty hole inside them because they’ve been left adrift in a society that tells them that’s the only way to feel better, in spite of personal experience to the contrary.

    On a local, personal level I’ve found it only takes a little leading in a different direction to show people that there are much more fulfilling alternatives to the ‘most toys’ lifestyle. I’ve watched the amazement of people’s faces when they see their children having fun working in a community garden with no TV, computer or video game in sight.

    13 December 2006, 12:59 pm

  169. skol:

    Paul, I’m not accusing you of objective anything. That’s the point. This isn’t a “here are my opinions, en garde!” blog. That’s what Stan has been saying, I think.
    Besides, “here’s what I think, how about you?” is so much nicer anyhow. You can trade ideas.
    And people are, on one level, debating your theory. But you aren’t practicing what you preach. So when you say “shrill”, and someone is offended by it, you say “I’m sorry” and stop, not refute it. That’s common sense. Well, granted, maybe just sense. Sensitivity. This is a simple matter of willpower if you want to stop reproducing patriarchy within yourself and your society. Plain as day.

    13 December 2006, 2:35 pm

  170. r graves:

    Interesting discussion.

    The question of whether class domination or patriarchy “came first” or “is worse” doesn’t seem to me to be one that can ever be proved definitively.

    The real question is one of strategy- assuming we are all people who want to get rid of both capitalism and patriarchy, the question is, how do we go about it?

    Can we put patriarchy at the top of our hit-list, undertaking an intensive campaign of collective soul-searching and atonement as to the ways we have individually participated in a system of domination over women? The record of world religions in persuading people to behave ethically against their material interests is not, looking back at the sweep of histiry, encouraging. It is impossible to dismantle patriarchy in the context of global capitalism. I think this is what Paul means when he says that “revolutionary” programs based on Liberal feminism are impotent (infertile, if you prefer.)

    But is it possible to begin to dismantle patriarchy under socialism? Paul has introduced a significant evidence that it is, pointing to the tremendous improvements in women’s lives after socialist revolutions in Russia, China, and Nepal. DeAnander was the only one to respond substantively to these points, and noted that many of these gains were mixed, limited or soon taken back. But for the Anarcho-Communist, this is precisely the point! As Russia, China, and Cuba moved towards State Capitalism, becoming bureacratic siege states encircled by capitalist powers, the very gains that successful class struggle had brought to women were undermined. (I suggest reading the last chapter of Brinton’s “The Irrational in Politics” for a painful narrative of how Stalin destroyed women’s rights and sexual freedom.) Under global capitalism, patriarchy will always rear its head/spread its lips. This fact would seem to argue for pressing the class struggle home worldwide, and building movements that are structured to guard against vanguardism and bureacracy, not for abandoning the socialist project.

    The question Stan raises as to how patriarchy in our movements undermines their potency/fertility is, I think, the one that should be generating the Lion/ess’s Share of discussion. What can revolutionaries do to increase the fruitful participation of women in radical struggles? In the anarchist group I’m in, we employ the technique of “gender stacking” in our meetings– women are called on to speak earlier when men dominate the discussion. The voting process for putting people in positions of relative authority is set up so that women will be represented if they so choose. Have people found methods and strategies that work? Workshops? Group work?

    There is a disturbing tendency here to attribute Leninist attitudes to Paul, who, like myself, identifies his politics as anarcho-communist. Since many of you have applauded Stan’s rejection of Leninism for a more decentralized, localized, autonomous approach to revolution, I would encourage you to start to dig into anarchism– as Onto pointed out, there is a rich history of theory and struggle here. Some resources I recommend:
    Murray Bookchin- Post-Scarcity Anarchism
    Peter Kropotkin- Revolutionary Pamphlets
    Colin Ward- Anarchy in Action
    Paul Goodman- Drawing the Line

    -R.Graves

    p.s. I am dismayed that Paul’s use of charged language is so heavily censured here, complete with calls for his removal from the site, while Yolanda’s direct slanders of his character have yet to be called out by a single person other than himself and his friend. This dicussion, which is, I think, an important one, will remain on the fringe if this sort of thing continues.

    13 December 2006, 2:48 pm

  171. Tatiana:

    To Mark:
    Well, then we are on the way to a wonderful socialist society, aren’t we? And there is nothing to fret about…

    13 December 2006, 4:14 pm

  172. required:

    Paul, I’m not saying that you are (although my instinct is to believe Yolanda) a white supremacist, that is espouse white supremacist ideology, but just because you are a POC or you’re married to a POC or “some of your best friends” are POC’s does not mean that you could not possibly be a white supremacist. So, both you and TIZYA can take your condescending mock laughter and piss off. TIZYA’s comments about
    “leftyboys”, “dick-fetishising” being sexist is evidence of the liberal thinking required to come such a conclusion. And so arrogantly too.

    The fact that you can’t see that shrill contains conitations that may not be written in a dictionary is incredible. It’s like calling a POC “uppity.” And let’s look at your defition “being sharply insistent on being heard.” Essentially this woman is acting hysterically, and needs to calm down. If anyone’s insistent on being heard it’s the man who continuously posts about how the coversation is revolving around him while simultaneously dumping on everyone else.

    For godsake shut up about people not responding to 90% of your tirades (personally I think, you should be thankful for the 10% you got). If I am following correctly Stan took a machette to your arguments with his post at 12/12/2006 @ 8:16 am, to which you’ve have
    responded with nothing but hot air.

    13 December 2006, 5:00 pm

  173. Ricky:

    What can battle a desire?

    Good question.

    My first thought was beauty. Then hope.

    On second thought; a bigger, better, deeper desire?

    What is that that you want - most of all?

    13 December 2006, 7:09 pm

  174. Marilyn Farhat:

    I think what can battle “desire” is “detachment,” otherwise all you are doing is replacing one desire with the next.

    The trick is to maintain caring while you detach. That is where most of us “fail.”

    13 December 2006, 10:16 pm

  175. peggy:

    Marilyn, you are telling us to work toward bodhisattvahood, and I agree. I aim for this myself, although I obviously have a long way to go. There is some debate over the value of efforts at personal improvement, along the lines of each person questioning and working to correct that person’s individual sexist behavior. Some may consider that such effort is trivial, individualist, and irrelevant to the larger effort of creating a just society. But I think the opposite.

    R.Graves, that was a helpful post. It has caused me to reconsider my previously stated position re what should be tackled and dismantled first, patriarchy or capitalism. To the extend that these two things go together, they have to be tackled together. But I am not satisfied with the idea that male-dominance within a group can be remedied by the strategies you propose - i.e., equal representation of women in leadership positions. People’s whole consciousness has to be changed, and it is very different to change the consciousness of people who are resistant to change, and think they may have a lot to lose by changing from what they are.

    Also, I think the idea of “class” as a global phenomenon has passed its use-by date. The workers of the world will never unite, for all the obvious reasons, some of which have been mentioned in this blog.

    Maybe we should count on the inevitable collapse of global capitalism to shake things up and make room for a real revolution. But to be honest, I don’t think we dare be that optimistic. Working within local but not isolated communities would seem to be the way to go. But I fear it will be too little, too late. Beyond that thought, my mind goes blank.

    14 December 2006, 12:25 am

  176. required:

    Skah! Desire doesn’t just come from no where, particularly the desire for consumer goods. It’s not an innate human trait. If it was it would be quite misfortunate for all those cave people stuck longing for item they’ve never even seen. “ugh, me want 51 inch plasma screen with superior…” blah blah, you get the point.

    14 December 2006, 12:37 am

  177. metis seeker:

    I’ve never held any allegiance to Marxist analysis and I can’t say I’ve studied it to any great extent. When I’ve come across it and used it to understand the world it has proven a powerful tool but certainly not the only one. So I am a bit perplexed as to the energy spent in trying to give class analysis some primacy of importance. (and interestingly not much on why it should be more important, just that it is important because it is more important)

    I’ve come along way in my thought but it now seems painfully obvious that patriarchy is a system of power that is very deeply rooted, complexly entwined and largely unexamined in our society. That it goes very deep – deeper than class – is obvious when thinking about some basic human experiences: I spent the first 9 or so months of my life developing in my mother’s womb and several years after that listening to her heartbeat while nursing. When thinking about this - I realize that this most basic experience is deep beyond reckoning. Now, soon after that (and long, long before I ever understood or was informed by class) I learned what was expected of me as a male. Indeed, the very process of learning and socialization is a rejection of the mother as understood to be feminine. This dualism informs all the way down into how we perceive ourselves existentially. I’ve been mulling over a theory that this dualism arose from an evolutionary (evolution is not “progress” on all levels) switch from foraging to harvesting – the first is integral and the other is mediated…but I digress.

    I have never seen Stan or anyone else here claim that patriarchy has primacy over another kind of analysis – this kind hierarchal taxonomy is a key trait of a patriarchal mindset, capitalistic even. You can separate the two perhaps for the service of thought but if you are going to make a plan of action you better put them back together or else you got a plan that has no relevance to reality. That patriarchy should be stressed and more focus placed on it over a class analysis is meant as a corrective (it being largely neglected) doesn’t mean it is being given categorical importance. (if I am interpreting Stan intentions correctly) Besides if you are someone who claims to be interested in radical political change you don’t get much nearer to the root than this…

    Taking another tack….The ideas of re-localization and communal independence make a whole lot of sense to me. I don’t want to fall into my own trap by giving it singular importance but it seems that if people have any hope (esp. men) of re-learning a new an more sustainable way of viewing the world it will have to be in an environment that fosters this kind of (re)learning.

    I hope this makes sense and is not too rambling… this is relatively new territory for me.

    14 December 2006, 2:12 am

  178. Tatiana:

    To direct this desire in a different direction.

    14 December 2006, 1:44 pm

  179. Marilyn Farhat:

    Peggy,

    I agree. There is no such thing as a “trivial” effort. It is better to do one small thing than nothing at all. I also agree that individual change will also have to occur before achieving a reasonably just society. I think people who trivialize individual effort and worth really miss the point. The argument of the forest and the trees is so apt. One cannot exist without the other and the individual is AS important as the group.

    Sacrificing individuals for the group is immoral in my framework of thinking and vice versa. Cultural change occurs simultaneously with individual change. The cells in our body continue to change and we change with them as a human being, but they occur together in a natural way.

    We can never “force” people to believe what they do not want to believe, that is, we cannot force people to believe in justice and treat each other equitably (oops, a liberal term?). True change will come when people are “convinced” that what they are doing is good for EVERYONE and when they CHOOSE to participate as free individuals.

    The reasons most revolutions have failed after the initial euphoria of “victory” has worn off is that those who took power by force were just as entrenched in the systems of tribalism, patriarchy, nepotism, and immorality that plagued their predecessors. It was part of their value system and upbringing and they really did not give it much soul searching thought. Even “revolutionaries” can be self-centered, self-serving and immoral. They can be also be pretty intolerant and vindictive. Unfortunately, that is the nature of the beast. Such activism does attract militant types who are focused on one thing alone, their own values and what THEY think is right for everyone (no different from many religious zealots really). The “struggle” becomes the issue and all other things are expendable. Zealousness is very easy because it does not require much thinking and “inner struggle.” It is easy to serve someone or an ideology. It is far more difficult to struggle mindfully to achieve the best possible outcome in a calculated and long-term manner. After successful revolutions, those who take power usually become lax and fall into the excesses of their predecessors. It is hard to be in a constant state of vigilance and, you have to be to maintain justice.

    It is also a world culture problem that is rooted in the symbiosis of individual and group behavior that has learned that might is “right” and that those who can “will.” Our laws, religions, and moral values are meaningless if we only pay lip service to them and do not practice them in our everyday lives. They can also be the fascade for social control through double speak. Rulers talk about peace and justice, while engaging in war and oppression. This has been a well-understood tactic across all generations. The problem is that most of us sods on the bottom continue to believe in this hog wash and we continue to fall for it because we do not think beyond our immediate morality. This is the way the world is and that is why individuals are very important. Without individual initiative, no matter how small, we cannot have positive change and the breaking away from the flock.

    Christ is one of the most notable revolutionaries in our recorded history, and look where he ended up and what his legacy has been. His mission of advocacy for women and the ostracized continues to be perverted by his followers who are really entrenched in a patriarchal system controlled by the old value system.

    We cannot advocate for justice for women and the poor when we continue to buy from Wal-Mart and when we continue to support the means that oppress them. Pornography is an example. I am a firm believer that pornography is very demeaning to women in the way it is disseminated and portrayed. However, we cannot and should not force people or individuals to not engage in it if they choose to want to. The most important reasons being: people do have a choice and badgering people about their morals will not change their views about women. The best possible approach (and there is no sure-to-work approach) would be for each one of us to practice what we are preaching and continue to educate others. I am a firm believer that we learn best by role modeling as opposed to being told what to do. Most dysfunctional behavior comes from the discrepancy between our moral beliefs and our behavior. Most of us do NOT practice what we preach and we have grown up watching our parents and neighbors constantly violate what they teach. Those are important experiences that shape who we are as individuals and we should not discount them.

    I really think the debate about what is more important, the individual or the society, is moot. Once we choose to value one more than the other, we minimize the importance of the other and that is unjust. Both the individual and society are entitled to justice. I do not believe in “sacrifice” as a general way of conduct to achieve anything. Most of the time it is so wasteful of human life, dignity, and property. Sacrifice has to be conducted as a “calculated” risk. In a way, its haphazard use can be immoral.

    I also do not think we can create a “class movement” on a global level. People are not disposable machines that are subservient to ideology. People take pride in their individual achievement and their pride is increased if their achievement benefits those around them in the process (assuming they have an ounce of morality in them).

    Which brings me to a last point. There are those people in the world who are immoral and psychopaths. Those cannot be reasoned with. They alone are responsible for much of the havoc in the world. Neither revolution nor legal system will negate their influence because they are your next-door neighbor, your teacher, your mother, and your priest.

    We will never achieve true justice and a mass movement in the world. The best thing to do while we are alive is try our best with the abilities we have been given to help ourselves and each other and try to avoid the psychopaths as much as possible. Unfortunately, for many that is not possible, especially if they are born into a family with a psychopath or if they are born into unfortunate circumstances (like abuse, poverty, and war).

    14 December 2006, 3:01 pm

  180. Ricky:

    Which came first - the hierarchal chicken or the patriarchal egg?

    So where did/does the “hierarchal mindset” come from?

    When did this “system of persons or things ranked one above another” get such a hold on us?

    And how is that mindset, that structural myth, that mind-forged manacle, that breeder of enmity, that almost universal Big Lie that costrains us all to categorize and divide up and sort out and rank and other every human being on the planet sustained and perpetuated and enforced?

    Near as I can tell we need look no further than our own beds for answers. The over-ruling dom/sub power dynamic between persons has got to go. Patriarchy *is* the root archy - the father of all archies. The first sort was and is according to sex. It’s closest to home. It must begin there.

    How can one say they love the brothers they haven’t seen if one doesn’t love their sister they have?

    14 December 2006, 3:55 pm

  181. Ricky:

    I think the idea of “class” as a global phenomenon has passed its use-by date

    I used to feel bad that I had no shoes.

    Until I met a man who had no class.

    We can do without the classisms, for sure. But not style. Got to have style. Miles and miles and miles of style.

    Sorry. Couldn’t resist. Please drive through.

    14 December 2006, 4:51 pm

  182. Jonny:

    Peggy, Im with you on that strategy. As far as ending male terrorism goes,the view of a black man who’s politics and practice united black, latin@ and white supremacist prisoners, ending prison rape there in the process(George Jackson) might be relevant…

    “(T)he contradictions that disunite, that make unitarian conduct seem impossible, remote, distant, WILL, as Mao predicted from his observations of the oppressed mentality, become less apparent and then disappear altogether with revolutionizing practice. In the throes of combat, unitarian conduct will almost flow naturally; it will not have to be contrived or strained; the pressure from without, from the enemy of all will force us to tolerate each other’s humanity.”

    14 December 2006, 5:11 pm

  183. peggy:

    When someone talks about doing something “for the good of the whole” (whole family, whole village, whole country) more often than not it means for the good of the most powerful individual(s) in that whole, the person or people controlling that whole.

    As for the chicken and the egg, patriarchy is always hierarchical, by definition. No exceptions. And one could argue that the very idea of hierarchy was and continues to be forged within the context of patriarchy. One cannot exist without the other. Therefore, the idea of some original primordial matriarchy is dead wrong. Matriliny exists, matrilocality exists, gynocentrism exists (sometimes right together with patriarchy)but matriarchy, as some kind of mirror-image of patriarchy, does not and has never existed. Matriarchy is just an oedipal fear, a carry-over and magnification of the frustration of infantile fantasies of omnipotence.

    I know these are strong claims, but I am not just making them up out of my head. People should study up on anthropology, read a lot, do a lot of research, and see to what conclusions it leads.

    14 December 2006, 10:12 pm

  184. Legume Sam:

    Marilyn Farhat said:

    I also do not think we can create a “class movement” on a global level. People are not disposable machines that are subservient to ideology. People take pride in their individual achievement and their pride is increased if their achievement benefits those around them in the process (assuming they have an ounce of morality in them).

    People also blame themselves when their “individual achievement” doesn’t measure up to the grim reality of life within an economic system where they are heteronomous and their labor is alienated. This was Arthur Miller’s point in having his character Willy Loman commit suicide at the end of his play Death of a Salesman. So the ideology of individual achievement cuts both ways, and if (like Willy Loman) we have nothing else, we are indeed disposable machines to an ideology.

    To me, the point of organizing a movement oriented around collectives would be to allow the achievers to feel that they are not alone in their achievements, as indeed they are under capitalism. We can have collectives under capitalism. But our collectives are indeed superficial if they are not rooted in our connectedness to each other and to the world. Where we stand today, our labors are alienated to corporations and markets. Thus, then, eventually, the dream of a class movement, specifically a WORKING class movement, in which we create a “union of free producers” co-producing our society. Maybe not today or tomorrow or next year. But as a dream, yes.

    The class movement, however, must also be decentralized. Any real revolution in human affairs, as I tried to point out here, will have to adopt an ecological discipline, so as to save what’s left of our planet from being crushed under capitalist tractors. We adopt ecological discipline by putting ecology first in our productive practices and defending our right to do it on specific plots of land. We will indeed have to adopt the other liberatory struggles too. I think the struggles can be reconciled with each other through meditation on history.

    The idea of “ranking” race, class, and gender seems to me to be beside the point. At this stage in our collective struggle, it seems to me, we do a lot of good by encouraging the silent to speak, and by opening debate about that which is taken for granted. Social domination has been achieved over the centuries by granting communicative rights to the few, and by letting them set our agendas. Against this, we defy patriarchy by enabling the victims of rape culture to plot its demise; we defy capitalism by enabling its victims to voice credible alternatives to capitalist life.

    It’s easier for me to imagine the former, against patriarchy, than it is for me to imagine the latter, against capitalism. This doesn’t mean for me that one struggle is more important than another; but I can see more clearly how enabling a multitude of anti-capitalist voices could be really difficult.

    15 December 2006, 1:37 am

  185. ZF:

    Thanks very much for providing a glimpse of what might have happened to the rest of us, had we not grown out of this stultifying crap while still in college.

    Too late for you now, is my guess - you’ll sadly be wailing about ‘patriarchy’ in your wheelchair.

    STAN: My college was the US Army, 1970-1996. I didn’t grow out of feminsm, but into it. Be gone, troll! Poof!!!

    8 January 2007, 10:52 pm

Leave a comment