Continuing thread… co-optations & movements
Stan- you have a lot of interesting thoughts but I still can not hear the response to some of the questions I raised about the difference between community work and movement-making, and the false polarity of bureaucratic model centralized politics and community-making as the only alternatives (it seems you assume) of political change (clarify if I’m wrong). Again my question about how something like sexual slavery would be abolished within the myocelluarl/community-making model??
I’ll just pause on one of your statements: “Our own underground food movement here is germinal”again- how does food praxis count as a “movement” if it is just going on within small family and community networks? I like the idea of food-praxis as “potential” for building something..
so- a new thread??
Yes, and soon.
In the meantime, I’ll try to take more time to clarify this false polarity (I agree there are false dichotomies that crop up in these conversations).
A little amateur political geneology as preface. My own intro to radical feminism was through MacKinnon’s work. In many respects, this was easiest for me because I had been swimming in Marx’s materialist conception of history (now shorthanded for better or worse as “historical materialism”) for a while; and MacKinnon started out heavily influenced by Marxism (Lukacs, especially, I think). MacKinnon’s grounding in law (she is a law professor to this day, I think) and in the feminist upwave of the late 60s/early 70s, along with her very keenly developed grasp of the deeper epistemological implications of Marxist critique, led to her out-Marxing the Marxists, who had substituted orthodoxy for critique on what they called “the woman question.” She took the method and followed it to its logical conclusions on the question of gender, and the pinned a great big tail on leftist phallocentrism masquerading as solidarity with a (liberal) feminist position called “equality.”
But when this critique was put into practice, the logic of MacKinnon’s critique led to two kinds of campaigns: the civil (as opposed to criminal) anti-porn campaign, and the “wages for housework” campaign (a al Thelma James). In a way, each of these addressed two faces of patriarchy: one, the sexual apsect, and the other, an economic class aspect. They definitely called some major questions, especially on the left, and both campaigns raised a hell of a ruckus among intellectuals and activists.
But neither campaign ever evolved into a mass movement.
At the same time, the class-left remained mired in the trade union movement, which itself began withering away to the extremely low union density we see today in the US.
At one point, the trade union movement was a real mass movement, so much so that it triggered some pretty dramtic social changes, as well as state repression, and even acquired a powerful organizational expression in the CIO. Then Taft-Hartley came along and codified the gains, at the same time limiting them (as clever a cooptation as we are likely to ever see… using the sacrosanct contract as its basis); then outsourcing combined with suburbanization de-concen trated workers in both workplace and living quarters; financialization removed the owning class from the line of fire; and the eft hangs on in the unions, fighting one rearguard action after another…. and blaming “false consciousness” for the abandoment of union-based class struggle.
Yet Historical Materialism 101 taught that material conditions have the more determiniative influnce on social development, compared with the ideological feedback (ideas) that reinforce and reproduce these conditions.
Leftists to this day invest 90% of their capacity and effort into convincing people of the validity of their arguments. That this might be a strategic error does not in any way inivalidate the theoretical arguments. It simply means that we have not found a way to practice what we preach.
We have copped to the notion that bad ideas produce bad practice, and in the process we have implicitly accepted that better ideas will produce better practice. So we lay out all the items we would like to see, then set about making elegant arguments for each of them… programs. The arguments are logically sound for the most part, but they never translate into changed practices in society at large.
So there is a larger question — a strategic one — that operates on a deeper cycle of reality than our logics; and it has to do with the way we do politics.
The logics that explain how class oppression works (which need serious updating), the logics that explain how racism is the stunted consciosuness of a colonial condition, and the logics that explain why sex cannot “dream its innocence” in the presence of actually-existing male dominance… are all sound logics with profound explanatory power.
But logic is a mental realm. And as we see with “wages for housework,” even though it mentally calls the right questions in a very provocative and clear way, it gains no real traction in the realm of social movements.
That is not to pose a false dichotomy that opposed mental phenomena to social phenomena; but to suggest that we are prone to assume that because we can recognize the problem, we have also solved the riddles of how to make movements happen. The evidence tends to refute that.
There are several pieces of this train of thought that I’ll just put out there to do with what you will.
One is the idea that we can make movements happen at all. Can we? What kinds of conditions emerged in past movements that made the social soil fertile enough for the potential in these ideas to actualize themselves into real movements?
Two is the question of tactical agility and organizational structures. I do not suggest that everyone be off on their own to do local stuff without any coordination. What I suggest is the organizational expressions of campaigns in the past and present might carry wihtin them certain strategic assumptions that inhibit their performance, and that mitigate toward preserving power only among the most monolithic organizations. We can all join a campaign to fight sexual trafficking, but does the organizational expression of that campaign have to mirror the centralizations we have seen in the past? I have serious doubts about the strategic efficacy of centralizing control for the purpose of “aiming the main blow.” This is an Old Left article of faith; and I believe it is an anachronism… a dangerous one. And networked coordination does not have to be chaotic voluntarism… what it is, is potentially a way to determine strategic direction by consensus and leave the tactics to tightly-knit, culturally-embedded structures, who can bob and weave quickly in response to local developments.
I will also say for the record that localism can easily be reified into some kind of panacea (there, I just did it by calling it an ism). There are no panaceas. But the stick has been bent so far in the direction of strategic-centralism and all its dodgy assumptions for so long that we can be forgiven if we bend back pretty hard.
Finally, I’ll say that there is no polarity between community-building (we should lose that construction metaphor) and movement-building (ditto) if we understand one to be the material precondition for the development of the other. The relation is phased, temporal, not competitively spatial or even a dynamic polar tension.
The conditions we have now, with the extreme atomization of suburbanizing consumer culture, have dissolved the material bases of social solidarities, leaving us with our logics to be “like a foolish man who built his house on the sand.”
Combine that with the Grasmcian structures so well-encapsulated above, and we need to look pretty deep.
And now more errands call.
Hope this makes a bit of sense.
David A. Jones:
The problem is basic human sociology. and yes, marx struggled with it too. You perceive society as a stucture, if that structure is producing “problems” or any manner of bad or destructive “results” it is natural (perhaps inevitable) that one would then try to oppose such an unsatisfactory structure with another one. The cynic says you only reproduce the problem. The rest of us note at best the problematic that we only “know” the structures that don’t work and they continue to not work and to be destructive at the very same time we are trying to build a better world. The frustration of all this is what gives rise to the suspicions and accusations of utopianism. Of course without imagining a better world no human being could ever create one.
7 April 2008, 10:15 amStan:
It’s not the same thing to argue that local manifestations of systems require the capacity for local confrontations (with a plurality of tactics) as it is to say, a la certain postmodernists (reffed by Kathy), that there are no “metanarratives” (ie, systems). There is a profound difference between a plurality of actions and the (imo) consumer-individualist nonsense of postmodern orthodoxy that ate the heart out of feminism in the academy.
Empty stomachs are not “narratives.” Neither are rapes nor lynchings nor Howitzers.
7 April 2008, 6:42 pmShaukat:
Sam, thanks for that link to Van der Pijl’s online text. I read “Transnational Classes” and I believe it offers one of the best analyses of the process of commodification under early and late capitalism as well as an excellent exploration of international relations (specifically his examination of the relation between the “heartland” and the “contender states”). I hadn’t yet come across this resource so thank you.
7 April 2008, 9:35 pmStan:
Interesting that Van der Pijl’s Hermeneutics chapter cites Schleiermacher. I’m reading all three volumes of Tillich’s opus now, and the influence of Schleiermacher is heavily acknowledged.
8 April 2008, 5:28 amLegume Sam:
You’re welcome, Shaukat. I myself am really interested in how van der Pijl uses this concept of “capitalist discipline.” Van der Pijl borrows this concept, largely, from Stephen Gill, but in his writings it takes on an entirely different character from what you see in Gill, which is mostly about labor discipline. Van der Pijl regards “capitalist discipline” as pertaining to the commodification of the work-force, but also to the various transformations of the environment for the sake of facilitating processes of capital accumulation.
So for van der Pijl “capitalist discipline” means something like “commodification,” but with an emphasis upon how, for a worker, being a labor-commodity takes on the character of discipline. This fits the description of “discipline” that one can read in Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, to wit:
So we might say that capitalism coerces the body, and manipulates its elements, in order to produce labor discipline. The example of “discipline” that Foucault gives is that of a soldier standing at attention — but we might just as well apply “discipline” to any ongoing set of practices that requires bodily regulation of that sort.
Thus my prior response to Stan’s complaint. Stan:
If leftists’ ideas do not “translate into changed practices,” this is perhaps because the practiced bodies of capitalist discipline are not compatible with ideas of a different sort of (non-capitalist) society. For the successful, and for the wannabe-successful, and even for the middling, one’s job defines who one is, and so capitalist discipline is the important force molding one’s character. Persuading them of leftist ideas is not likely to lead to practice because practice has already been defined, in a bodily manner, as employment. The idea is there, but not the appropriate mode of discipline.
No?
8 April 2008, 10:38 amkathy miriam:
“Leftists to this day invest 90% of their capacity and effort into convincing people of the validity of their arguments. That this might be a strategic error does not in any way inivalidate the theoretical arguments. It simply means that we have not found a way to practice what we preach.”
(I hope that the metaphor is ok 
[p.s, I’m not convinced that “building” is such a bad metaphor, but i’m open ..]
8 April 2008, 3:19 pmI’m not sure that this is completely an adequate way of stating the problem. The “preaching” itself is horribly inadequate. In terms of feminism: Though there are pieces of brilliant theory in far flung corners–there is a huge need for the kind of critical breakthrough that theorists like MacKinnon and Pateman have made. I haven’t read anything since Pateman that helps make sense of male dominance, gender, sex–MacKinnon and Pateman have pushed the boundaries of thought and not much new work (I’ve done a tiny bit) has risen up to meet the challenge and extend it further.
Re: your specific points about MacKinnon, another post to come. You make many different points- i feel I should address them in separate posts.. Or anyway, I must do so, because i can’t chew it all of at once
kathy miriam:
“MacKinnon’s grounding in law (she is a law professor to this day, I think) and in the feminist upwave of the late 60s/early 70s, along with her very keenly developed grasp of the deeper epistemological implications of Marxist critique, led to her out-Marxing the Marxists, who had substituted orthodoxy for critique on what they called “the woman question.” She took the method and followed it to its logical conclusions on the question of gender, and the pinned a great big tail on leftist phallocentrism masquerading as solidarity with a (liberal) feminist position called “equality.”
But when this critique was put into practice, the logic of MacKinnon’s critique led to two kinds of campaigns: the civil (as opposed to criminal) anti-porn campaign, and the “wages for housework” campaign (a al Thelma James). In a way, each of these addressed two faces of patriarchy: one, the sexual apsect, and the other, an economic class aspect. They definitely called some major questions, especially on the left, and both campaigns raised a hell of a ruckus among intellectuals and activists.”
Ok, there’s again a few different issues here that need to be teased out. I’m not sure that MacKinnon did out-Marx Marx (Christine Delphy, Close to Home, does a better job in some ways on this)– but she certainly critically revised marxist methods to construct her peerless radical feminist critique of sexuality–and especially how sexuality (the subordination of women, and construction of “woman”) is maintained/mystified through liberalism. One difference between her approach and the marxist approach (besides her ingenious feminist critique of the gendering of liberalism) is that it lacks the notion of “dialectical reversal” that is critical to marxist “method” and *praxis*. I’m not trying to hold on to this notion of dialectical reversal as a tenet of faith or piece of dogma- but it is extremely interesting as a notion of praxis: in marxist theory, work as a source of exploitation and oppression is reversed, transformed into a source of revolution. The reason i’m going over this is because for MacKinnon, sexuality is analogous to work: what seems to most belong to us, is the most taken away, as she puts it. But unlike Marx, sexuality in her theory does not become, as work does for marx, the source of transformation at a practical level. it does become the basis of an *epistemological* shift: when the reference point of knowledge is changed, through consciousness-raising (and yes, this is a practical activity), so that women re-see what men “see” but through our own eyes, awareness is created–but this is a theory of consciousness (albeit created in group practices) not a theory (which we need) of how consciousness is the basis of further dissembling of patriarchy, etc.
unlike the notion of “the rise of the proletariat” (and I’m not for second advocating for or cleaving to this notion, just pointing out an importance difference in the *model* of “praxis”), “sexuality” as MacK. discusses it, and unlike work, does not become the new means of a new mode of life, new social totality.. The practices to emerge from her critical work–are practices of legal reform– legal reform that if enacted (the anti-pornography legislation) could have a radical impact (which is probably why it was never enacted)–radical because it strikes at a nerve-center of liberalism/contemporary patriarchy. Her work would need to be extended beyond radical critical legal theory, beyond epistemological critique of liberalism-in-patriarchy/as patriarchy to clear the grounds for a vision of non-reformist, “revolutionary” practice. She has done what no one else has done- which is to expose sexuality as a structuring force of gender itself–thus of male dominance and female subordination. Now it is up to other feminists to take up the challenge and both extend the theory in its interconnections with economic and other analyses, and to think about the kind of practices that should follow.
As far as “wages for housework” goes, this campaign would contradict key premises in MacKinnon’s work. Wages for Housework presupposes rather than challenges the basic social relation that (as Delphy discusses) makes a wife a wife– a relation of servitude. The premise of Wages for Housework is that by re-valuing housework as a “real job”, both morally and through wages, the problem of housework will be solved. But the problem is gendered servitude not moral attitudes towards or payment of this servitude. Or rather non-payment (and moral attitudes like the degradation of housework) are the effect not cause of housework-as-servitude.
I know there’s a lot here- hope it’s not too academic. feel free to challenge or ask questions!
8 April 2008, 3:50 pmCharles:
Leftists to this day invest 90% of their capacity and effort into convincing people of the validity of their arguments.
^^^^
Not the CP. They are always emphasizing practice, action, not sitting around discussing and arguing - action, action, action !. They often quote “the philosophers have interpreted ( argued about) the world in a number of ways; the thing is to change it ( through practice and action and organizing)
STAN: Yes, and the action, action, action is to elect Democrats, elect Democrats, elect Democrats.
8 April 2008, 4:15 pmCharles:
are all sound logics with profound explanatory power.
^^^^^
The test of theory and logic is practice. So, until a theory is successful in practice, we are not sure if it is sound or whether it has explanatory power or validity.
Notice: Marxism failed its own test of practice in Marx’s lifetime. Only with the Russian Revolution was Marxist theory validated under its own test of practice.
8 April 2008, 4:58 pmStan:
On the preaching (ie, development of the theory and language to communicate it), Marx started something on class 150+ years ago; and that has been developed in every conceivable direction: deskilling, commodity fetishism, organic composition of capital, value-theory and crisis, hegemony, and as with MacKinnon even on gender. Yet the only practices we see associated with it become bureaucratic distortions inside nations that are encircled, or something demonized and-or totally incomprehensible in the capitalsit metropoles.
I take Sam’s point on how our lived experience shapes us (and disciplines us), which was kind of where I was headed anyway. Though I reject the mechanical explanation of ortho-left “sturucture-superstructure” as too rigid and schematic.
I agree that feminism got stuck; partly by co-optation and attack, and partly (like the left generally) because the culture of resistance disappeared into the US neoliberal consumer paradigm. The most potent attacks on feminism, imo, came from the “sex-positive” (one of the most polemically dishonest terms we may ever encounter) “feminists”. At its very core, even with all the pomo intellectual window-dressing, this was simply a successful appeal to the same acquisitive individualism that constitutes the soul of consumerism. So it mapped onto liberalism perfectly; and onto liberal men’s fantasies of having greater access to objectified liberal women’s bodies than ever before.
This has served to confuse people; and as in most cases, it is easier to play the successful demagogue in the debates within feminism than it is to stake out and defend a radical position against real power.
And this is where I think we have to factor in consumerism at least as much as job discipline in every aspect of resistance, whether it is against patriarchy, white supremacy, or capitalism. In US society, our political identity is Consumer. This is actualy demonstrable via a historical materialist account… looking at the trtends that have furhter divided labor and production into global regions, with the US serving the valorization cycle more and more in its role as global consumer. A 16-year-old Chinese girl in a sweatshop makes something for pennies an hour; and a 16-year-old American buys it. The “virtuous cycle” is completed, but the roles have been concentrated across regions, and are no longer embedded within the same communities.
The role of “virtuous women” in the US in 1935 was to be a frugal homemaker. The role of “virtuous women” by 1965 was to buy washing machines and vacuum cleaner.
Mies writes about this transition in “housewifization,” where women were asked to be sex objects and consumers.
By the 1990s, with “globalization” in full swing, we had been transformed into Consumers, as the center of our personhood.
And this is where I have to bring up the philosophical point that while experience resides in personhood, as the embodied centeredness of the individual, social structures and culture have dynamics that are supra-personal and to some extend out of anyone’s capacity to fully understand or control. This applies to fads, to a sense of solidarity, to genralized political apathy, to catastrophe altruism, or to lynchings.
Bordo’s “Unbearable Weight” is a worthwile read on gender, imo. Also Nancy Cott’s “Public Vows.” And though I make no oringinal contribution to feminism per se, “Sex & War” (I’ll send the pdf to anyone here who wants it) attempts to get hold of “masculinity.” De gets a lot of credit for that, since she edited it. All these have happened since Pateman.
8 April 2008, 5:44 pmRequired:
“Finally, I’ll say that there is no polarity between community-building (we should lose that construction metaphor) and movement-building (ditto) if we understand one to be the material precondition for the development of the other. The relation is phased, temporal, not competitively spatial or even a dynamic polar tension.”
Stan, could you explain this a bit further? Particularly the last sentence. I understand the “competitively spatial or even a dynamic polar tension” part but I don’t get the what you mean by phased or temporal.
Ok, so to use the seed mataphor it seems that the left is furiously spreading seeds onto parched barren soil, which has been working less and less, and so we just continue to try and make better seeds. Trying to Monsanto our way out of the problem. So we need better soil. My questions is if we aren’t capable of creating movements are we any more capable of creating communities? Why are they easier to nurture? Are they easier to nurture? I guess they are. Because when you think about a community you think about the people you’ve got around you and then what they would like. When you think about a movement you start with an idea and try to get people to like it.
I was also thinking that perhaps plants are a bad metaphor, because we feel like WE grow a plant. As though it’s us doing the growing as opposed to the plant. We rarely say that we’re helping plants to grow. On the other hand no one says “I’m growing a child”, but we do help children to grow. I think movements are like that.
I really like the idea of a community movement. A movement to create communities. Back when I used to have a television (I haven’t given up watching crap I just do it on my computer now) I would find myself watching Big Brother. At one point I thought, if everytime Big Brother was on, I practiced an musical instrument instead, I’d be pretty decent after just one season. I was thinking that would be a cool idea for a movement. You’d have a bunch of people who wanted to learn a skill. They’d get together to motivate and help each other do so. Then at the end of each season, you’d could have an event to show case peoples’ talents. It would be anti-television, anti-celebrity & pro-community.
That was scattered but hopefully helpful.
8 April 2008, 6:30 pmkathy miriam:
“Bordo’s “Unbearable Weight” is a worthwile read on gender, imo. Also Nancy Cott’s “Public Vows.” ”
8 April 2008, 8:15 pmI haven’t read Cott and guess I should. And I have your opus- but am intimidated by the size of it, and small print- I’m having more issues these days by the way I can or can not physically handle reading and writing materials (like I hate reading on the computer screen…).. but I WILL read it.
I am not trying to rank feminist works for the hell of it or argue that nothing valuable has been produced: I think that Bordo’s work is very good, and it is also very minor with respect to opening up new theoretical ground. Pateman and MacKinnon on the other hand- to bring make the marx analogy–are something like what marx was to political economy: exposing in a much more radical way than before (within feminism) the hidden presuppositions (mostly embedded in liberalism) from which previous feminist theories had departed. The way that Marx argued that previous economic theory had departed from rather than interrogated private property as its foundation (treating it as natural). This is what Pateman and MacKinnon do, extending prior radical feminism of course (and some marxism) to sexuality (the latter, as MacKinnon sees it, as the main organizing force of male dominance). The reason I’m emphasizing this, is that I don’t think that leftists or feminists are in a position in terms of “preaching” and “theory” where there is too much theory and not enough practice. The kind of theory out there is pretty pitiful and it’s been getting worse and worse–because of its production in the academy and how that relates to processes of depoliticization (the sex-positive agenda overlaps here).
more on the other stuff later!
Robert Karaffa:
And the humans said, “great, let’s do whatever we want, we can grow anything, we can manipulate all of this stuff, what do we need a creator or creation for? It’s all right here under our feet, around us and in the heavens. And The Creator said ” OK, get your own dirt, get your own planet, create your own universe, easy ain’t it?.”…. Just teasing, kind of stressed out right now.
8 April 2008, 8:59 pmDeAnander:
I sometimes wonder whether our thirst for “new work” in analysis isn’t a reflection of that misplaced optimism that all we need to do is describe the problem better, make a better model, have a sharper analysis. but power is a pretty blunt instrument; it isn’t all that subtle on the ground. as my good feminist lawyer friend Peggy says about patriarchy: “First they rape you, then they steal your children.” it doesn’t take a very advanced theory to understand that…
so how much “new work” do we need, to understand that men have more power than women, and that they abuse that power? really, hasn’t it all been pretty much said? seems to me that the crying need is not for the ever-more-subtle elucidation of complex ideas, but for the more effective defence and dissemination of simple, easy-to-grasp ideas (like men having too much power over women, like it being wrong to treat a person like a thing, like it being wrong for wealth to concentrate in the hands of a few…) and simple, easy-to-understand tools for resisting abusive power.
I recently came face-to-face with a genuine mean-drunk woman-hating raving misogynist. I’m not sure that any of the great names in social theory give me a clue as to how to deal with this person; basic self-defence skills would be far more applicable.
I dunno… I’m tired (been doing hard physical work the last couple of days) and though these days I feel strongly in agreement with “acting your way into a new way of thinking” (and am experiencing some of it in practise) I’m not quite lucid enough to make a coherent case for the validity or importance of community building, or the power of the mycelial model. will try to be more verbal tomorrow
btw, we don’t “grow” plants. we just kid ourselves that we do. our attempts to coerce, micromanage, and force plant growth — to claim ownership of the process of photosynthesis — have resulted in the travesty we call industrial agriculture… which is now slowly killing (or at least sickening) us… in that sense I think the plant metaphor is, actually, very apt; and leftist praxis rooted in the sensibility of the factory floor, efficiency, “mass” production, etc. has an inevitable (?) bent towards technocratic management fantasies…
8 April 2008, 9:22 pmDeAnander:
but I don’t get the what you mean by phased or temporal
oh heck, I have to stay awake long enough to try to explicate what (I think) Stan was saying here, and that is that community — that web of reciprocal altruism, affinities, families, mutual responsibility, intersubjectivity, loyalty, etc — is pretty much a prerequisite for coordinated action in solidarity. we often heark back to the strength of the Civil Rights movement in oppressed Black communities in the southern US, but something I think we often forget is that those communities were already strong in solidarity, affinities, self-help and mutual aid, etc — and the Black churches were the mycelial web that created the rich soil for the seeds of revolutionary action, if we want to look at it that way.
similarly the strongest labour movements in the US were among the families of recent immigrants — people who had within living memory been peasants and artisans in clan-oriented, family-oriented, village-oriented cultures from Europe. one of the most interesting, sometimes liberating, often devastating effects of capitalism is the wholesale (ahem) destruction of this social fabric and its replacement with relatively impersonal money relations and the embedding of the individual in a commercial rather than social network. “consumer culture” is one way to talk about this, but so is the definition of self by career title or salary level; the bizarre concept of “brand loyalty” (I mean, when you really think about it, that’s a very strange concept which no previous generation of humans would have understood as “loyalty”); the much-documented isolation and anomie of the carburbs, etc.
for people to commit disobedience together, defy power together, they have to trust each other and be committed to each other, not just to some abstract ideal or The Struggle. or so I increasingly believe. and hence the smartest thing that power has ever done is to convince us all that there is no such thing as a community, and we are all lone rational actors swimming in a sea of mediated transactions. that loyalty is for brands, not for people.
hence (again, mho) community-building is an act of resistance; it is also one pre-requisite for further acts of resistance, for at least two reasons. one is the building of trust, solidarity, and loyalty without which it is very hard for people to take risks; the other is the building of a parallel infrastructure (an “underground,” which itself is a rather agrarian or mycelial image) which provides material support for disobedience. a local barter-oriented foodshed for example, is the equivalent of a strike fund; it means that numbers of people can secede from the money economy and hence defy the bosses.
but there is more to it than that. what is the aim of revolution, if not to create/enable a “better way” for people to live? and what is a better way for people to live, if not with more autarky, better health, a stronger community, more dignity, more mutual respect and recognition, more security, more happiness, more human connection? the building of community — especially through means that enhance public health — achieves some of these goals, at least within a local radius. in other words, instead of the revolution being an ideal end-state someday to be achieved, it becomes a praxis to be lived today, right now, even if imperfectly.
here again I think of Cuba — vexed imperfect example though it is — where the ideals of solidarity and freedom were more closely approached after the transition from fossil-fuel-intensive Socialist Industrialism to a food-self-sufficient, relatively more localised, decentralised communitarian agricultural programme. we could argue for weeks about the details of that particular implementation, but few would argue that community and political life benefitted from the relaxation of State micromanagement and industrialisation of ag and the relocalisation of foodsheds (plus the return to biotic rather than chemical farming practise).
it may be that the internet age allows us to combine the best of both worlds: intensive praxis in our local region with near-instanteous connectedness and the opportunity to exercise solidarity with distant struggles. (good heavens, did I just say something optimistic?)
8 April 2008, 9:43 pmpeggy:
Now, please don’t get mad at me. I still believe that providing useful knowledge to people is a good thing to do. And useful knowledge can come from many sources.
9 April 2008, 1:22 amHere is one such: http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10958702
Since there has been much discussion on FS about the current financial disaster and how one may understand it, in conjunction with how to build movements, I was thinking this article might help
On the matter of building movements, I still think movements build themselves. Even when it is organized by one or a few, a movement does not necessarily go in the direction the organizers intended. Therefore, I think it is best to have a very specific, modest goal and join with others to work toward that, or work alone if one must. Have faith that others will take an interest and join in if what you are doing makes sense.
I agree with De that the current internet age provides us, and all other organizers, with a special opportunity to exercise solidarity with distant struggles. And yes, this is an optimistic assessment, but some degree of cautious optimism is necessary, otherwise no one would ever do anything to try to make things better.
Required:
You’re ****ing awesome. Thanks DeAnander.
9 April 2008, 2:42 amkathy miriam:
“I sometimes wonder whether our thirst for “new work” in analysis isn’t a reflection of that misplaced optimism that all we need to do is describe the problem better, make a better model, have a sharper analysis. but power is a pretty blunt instrument; it isn’t all that subtle on the ground. as my good feminist lawyer friend Peggy says about patriarchy: “First they rape you, then they steal your children.” it doesn’t take a very advanced theory to understand that…
so how much “new work” do we need, to understand that men have more power than women, and that they abuse that power?”
Apparently a lot.. from my experience.
Hey De, hmm, it seems strange to have to defend the value of theory on *this* site which is very much engaged in finding powerful ways to describe reality. First of all, I think, alas that it does take work to describe the obvious– that men have more power–because of the pernicious ways that this “simple” (or not so simple) reality has been mystified and also reproduced in new ways. WE need ways to talk about the “sex positive” movement, sexual individualism- the particular ways that men’s control of women takes today, the forms of exploitation of women that are less obvious than “traditional” patriarchal ways. I teach undergraduates, I’ve been teaching them for many years, and it’s obvious to me that the reality of rape is completly mystified to them because of how sexual coercion is embedded within “normal” heterosexual relations.
I am only focusing on (hetero)sexuality here.. but I believe that this is true of many different forms of rank exploitation and oppression. For example, I think about the liberal-democratic model for “explaining” and “enacting” “reforms” of immigration: basically the liberal-democratic model would serve up a kinder, gentler form of indentured, and transient servitude. this needs to be described and explained.
alas, it often does often take a lot of reinventing of the wheel- but that’s because of the incredible density of mystification we’re dealing with, and the complexity of new forms of subordination and domination. including the way rape is mystified (to go back to your example).
AS for finding one’s way through practice. absolutely. again, false polarity. Both the practice and the thinking has to go on. However, without new ways of thinking- which is evidenced on this very site!!! we have “practice” such as the Obama-phenomenon–to take only one example of mindless activity/practice. I do not think that the absence of powerful theory is the cause of the mindlessness of this practice (because there are many causes, including the commodification of politics and such- but these causes need to be *explained*– see, again, the need for theory–
9 April 2008, 6:26 amanyway, what I thought was obvious was the need for a relation between theory and practice: my point in the beginning of one of these threads was that I did not see that one of the problems of the “left” or what’s left of it, was a surfeit of “preaching” and an inability to practice what is preached. I think there’s a dearth of both “theory” in terms of description and explanation of what is happening to us now (which again, why i’m grateful for this site) and a dearth of thinking about practice, about creating substantive change on a grand scale.
DeAnander:
a dearth of thinking about practice, about creating substantive change on a grand scale.
ah well, I think that may be the nub of the disagreement — if it really is a disagreement, rather than merely a question of focus — and that is whether “practice” to be legitimate must involve working on a grand scale.
the most important biotic processes on Earth — the ones that keep me and everyone else alive — happen on the micro scale. the “grand scale” of charismatic large mammals is almost — not quite — irrelevant to the basic processes of life. this is the lesson from field biology — and other biotic studies — that I find illuminating.
if you want to restore a fishery in the NW, do you introduce fish, or kill off predators, or stop human fishing operations? none of the above are as effective as planting eel grass. because eel grass is the premier nursery environment for young fish, and it has been damaged and reduced by various human activities. overpredation is a problem, and so are large scale problems like climate destabilisation, but the activity most associated with a rapid recovery of coastal fish stocks is planting eel grass. it’s not a particularly charismatic plant, and it’s muddy and tedious work. but it’s far more effective than interventions higher up the chain of scale and visibility.
of late I am wondering whether it may simply not be possible for any one person or a small group to “create substantive change on a grand scale.” the process of change may be far more subtle than that — seems to me it’s worth mulling over, anyway, in the light of repeated failure to achieve a Grand Plan for the Transformation of Humanity. certainly the “grand scale” changes that we have seen engineered in recent history have had poor staying power. neither the FSU nor China is a working socialism, despite the grand-scale upheavals (paid for by massive mortality and suffering) that were supposed to have altered the course of those parts of the world forever towards a utopian future. even the gains of mass movements in the West, as we’ve seen in recent years, have been rolled back with appalling ease.
I suppose — ironically — that what I’m working on (in the idea sense) is yet another “new theory”, that is, a new metaphor or explanatory model based on adaptive, opportunistic biotic processes rather than on civilisational myths of grand structure-building with blueprints and fixed designs and Destinations. maybe there is no end state. maybe the struggle is forever. maybe what we can do with our own hands is what we can do in this lifetime. maybe there is no blueprint. maybe revolution is more like riding a bicycle than like reading a user’s manual. maybe words in the end have far less impact than deeds. I don’t know, I’m not sure; I’ve been a wordsmith all my life, and tend to believe with a fierce possessive faith that words shape reality, that forging “new” ideas (meme warfare, as it’s sometimes called) or putting attractive new wrappers around sound old ideas (like justice, respect, autarky) is the most important work we can do in this wounded world. being an idea-salesperson has long been my notion of the most important work I can do. but I am no longer so certain of that as I once was. it’s an unsettling moment…
actually, coming around to the wordsmith side of the net again, perhaps one thing I think today is that there is an enormous body of perfectly adequate theory and explanation, but it’s been compartmentalised and desperately needs to be connected across artificial disciplinary boundaries: i.e. radical feminism and a critique of masculinity connected with anti-war activism connected with peak oil consciousness (wars are about resources and money after all, as well as about manly posturing) connected with ecological field work, combined with the tools for community survival in the dislocations that are the inevitable result of the wars, the masculinism, the capitalist fantasy, the biotic liquidation… which is of course what we’re trying to do here… to connect the artificially isolated bits of theory to each other and to practical, lifesaving practise. [Wangari Maathai has a pretty good theoretical grasp of trade inequity and patriarchy — and what she does, unceasingly, is encourage women to plant trees.]
I have a nagging feeling that in the decades that — unfortunately, perhaps, or fortunately — will constitute the last third of my lifespan, “theory” will be far less important than knowing how to fix a bicycle or preserve food, in terms of my worth to my community and my community’s chances of a life worth living. that’s a pessimistic estimate, I freely admit… I hope I’m wrong.
I think to me, advanced theory has become like religion — a faith that guides my efforts, a moral yardstick in my head, but less important to the people around me than the actions I take in mutual daily support with them… f’rexample it is a radical feminist consciousness as well as neighbourly concern that impels me to teach a newbie cruising woman how to row a dinghy, because her domineering husband will not teach her (he wants her to remain dependent and ignorant so he can better control her). I can no more convert this woman to my radical feminist consciousness than she can convert me to her crystals-and-Christ new age “faithiness”. but she’s grateful to get some learning in, and I’m happy to undermine her husband’s control strategy by whatever means I can. each of us is guided by a “Theory” about how the universe works, but on this ground of neighbourliness, reciprocal altruism and female solidarity we meet and do a little subversion. she will never read a word that I or any other radical feminist has written — but she’s one skill closer to not being so easily dominated or controlled. it’s small potatoes, it’s not grand scale. but it’s community at work. this kind of community work has been lacking in my life for many years — years rich in words and theory — and I’m trying to find an appropriate balance between the world of praxis and the world of Big Ideas.
if enough people were doing the praxis, maybe we wouldn’t even need the Big Ideas
egalitarian gatherer-hunters had — as far as we know — no need of Gramsci.
anyway, my intent is not to knock or mock intellectual endeavour — I have great respect for the endless effort to describe and analyse the big structures. my own challenge — as ever — is to figure out where to put my practical daily energy, for my own survival and peace of mind in the troubled times dead ahead.
and may I say, btw, that it’s really a delight to have you here KM? I know a couple of other FS lurkers who are also very pleased with your posts. I am so glad you “dropped by” and hope you’ll be with us for a long time to come — and maybe give us a feature article now and then? I’d be particularly interested in hearing more about your undergrads and how gender (and gendered violence) is being perceived (and experienced, yuck) by their generation — the first generation saturated in porn culture from early childhood. I’d be curious to know how weak or strong homophobia is in their peer group vs misogyny, etc., and other cultural-shift indicators if any.
9 April 2008, 1:24 pmStan:
Ditto.
9 April 2008, 5:00 pmm.c.:
On a general track:
One of the few feminists I’m familiar with is Marilyn Frye. I think she still teaches womens studies at Michigan State. Her ‘Politics of Reality’ was required reading for a intro phil. class I took & I liked her writing style(not too much jargon), & aesthetically of my taste[a little theory goes a long way, particularly when backed up with solid empiricism.]
Any comments by anyone on Frye as a writer or feminist? Is she still relevant?
10 April 2008, 5:32 amkathy miriam:
I still teach Frye. Her book is unmatchable, in my opinion, for any introduction to feminism at the least.
10 April 2008, 6:25 amStan:
Frye teaches philosophy; and I’d say all the feminist writers, activists, thinkers, teachers… are still relevant. One of the things a few of us are decrying in a kind of inside-game conversation is the way several of the most revolutionary thinkers were sidelined as early as the seventies. Frye connects to that lineage and is concerned, as are amny philosophers, with the inexactitude (intentional and not) of language. The sophistry (and ultimately demagogy) of men saying they are “oppressed” by masculinity, for example, is one of Frye’s preoccupations. This cooptation of the term “oppression” effaces the specific experience of women in a male-dominated society. That is not denying that the oppressor suffers some fragmentation of the personality in the act of oppression (many feminists and antiracists acknowledge that); but that this is not oppression. Used this way (men are oppressed too), aside from being just plain dishonest, the term “oppression” is drained of any political content.
This insistence by Frye and others on maintaining the integrity of language in order to maintain the focus on actual oppressive power and how to confront it is actually part of the struggle that erupted within feminism — to which Kathy alludes several times — when “sexual identities” were smuggled into the language , again, to dissolve women-as-a-class as a political subject.
It’s a very clever and often arcane debate; but it remains vitally important because the soul of feminism (imho) is at stake. Since many of these debates have now retreated to the Academy, because they are arcane and often so very very sly, “theory” has become a kind of last battleground. In popular culture, (so-called “second wave”) feminism has been routed; and so the debate cannot be abandoned in the one place where it has been driven by resurgent and re-masqueraded patriarchy now inflected with consumerism.
This site’s name is kind of an attempt to coax these debates beyond of the Academy, and to figure out how to reinject them into popular culture again.
The crux of the debate has appeared around the issues of rape, pornography and prostitution… the latter two with the most difficulty, because the radical feminist interpretation of these phenomena runs headlong into the liberal penchant for abstraction, a trope that uttelry dominates the way our culture “knows” what it thinks it knows. Thus our preoccupation with epistemology. The cultural kneejerk reaction — which synchronizes perfectly with the interest of males in maintaining their sexual-objectification of women (and the self-objectification of women who internalize their oppression) — is that pornography is a “free speech” issue… a reduction of the issue to some abstract “principle” that invisibilizes real women in real situations.
This is the complaint — well and thoroughly articulated — of Catharine MacKinnon and Carole Pateman about “liberalism,” with its abstract “equality” and its “social contract.”
Gotta go to work.
10 April 2008, 6:28 amDanielle Zora:
Thanks for discussion- You know I am at a point where I am thinking- What Price Feminism? Fifteen years ago in my town the Housing Authority had 25 full time employees and lots of programs and work for them all. The local domestic violence shelter had 8 mostly part time employees in a rundown old home. Today the DV shelter has offices in former corporate offices- beautiful old wood work with 25 full time employees with a finace office and a development office and the Housing Authority has 8 employees and very few programs- as a government office they are not allowed to have development offices. Industry just left here- 2-10 years ago so we are considerably poorer and more unstable than fifteen years ago. There are few resources for people. The DV program has teas and tennis matches that bring in go gobs of money. Where does that money go? In 25 years not much has changed. We have institutionalized a program that began when women had few options and there was little understanding of these issues by human services, criminal justice, or the general public. Today is different. So why are women still in shelters? Why aren’t the abusers in shelters?Are we creatively thinking about the next steps for eradicating violence personally, politically, societally? And if we are not how do we rationalize drawing money from other programs or letting them get slashed or torn to bits? Because I have been there fighting the cuts in housing programs and welfare programs and I have not seen many feminists there. Occassionally they run an article some where but not many are fighting now or recently. I feel I have come full circle- as a woman raised in the fifties in a Catholic ethnic working class community I have always been aware of a woman question- limitations because of gender so I have always considered myself a feminist. But at this point I do not see practice that compells, or uplifts me and the theory I think has been found lacking. Capital and class make the world go round today- does the fight for full equality really need feminism on any level? REal question- not sure.
10 April 2008, 7:01 amkathy miriam:
Thanks De and Stan, It’s a delight to be on this site, to have the space for an intellectual exchange. In my life right now there are very few people with whom I can have this kind of intellectual exchange, and this is certainly the only web-site. (I love Black Agenda Report but don’t know how to yet insert myself into the conversation there).
De you say “anyway, my intent is not to knock or mock intellectual endeavour — I have great respect for the endless effort to describe and analyse the big structures.” Indeed- I really don’t think this is the point of our disagreement- which i’m not yet clear about–because what you are doing with this site *is* an intellectual endeavour. I don’t think our disagreement is about the importance of theory, insofar as you are also engaged in the same project.
I didn’t make any claims about *how* important theory is relative to other projects, although I have my thoughts.
De, you say: ” my own challenge — as ever — is to figure out where to put my practical daily energy, for my own survival and peace of mind in the troubled times dead ahead.” Well, that’s fine, and the quality of my own daily life pretty much sucks in terms of engaging in the kind of practices you write about– of community, and whatever aspect of permaculture you are working at…
but when I wrote about the importance of theory, I was not making any suggestions or claims about how people should use their energy.
That to me how to live one’s life is a different issue- than the question of whether theory is valuable for radical change to happen. And there is living one’s life in an ethical manner, there are tactics with respect to creating community, and there is strategy with respect to the question of What is to be done? sorry to those of you (STan?) allergic to aspects of marxism, i still think it a worthwhile question.
The original thread started with Stan saying that 98% of leftists spend time trying to preach and convince. And my response was that- to now bluntly paraphrase myself (reword it): 98% of leftists today are brain dead, including feminists. so i simply don’t see that as the issue.
De you write: “ah well, I think that may be the nub of the disagreement — if it really is a disagreement, rather than merely a question of focus — and that is whether “practice” to be legitimate must involve working on a grand scale.”
First of all- I’m not talking about whether “practices” are legitimate, good, etc, in any general sense, but whether practices are “good” in the sense of whether they lead to substantive social change– just to be clear-because it’s obvious to me that creating community is extraordinarily valuable, as is the attempt to live in environementally sustainable, and self-sufficient ways.
I’m very interested in the model of explanation you are working on - see you can’t escape the fact that you’re a theorist, sorry– in terms of change based on biotic models.
I really am struggling and fumbling in terms of the issue of how movements are created- but if we look at history (which you dipped into, thinking of labor movements)– but it seems obvious that any measure of freedom and liberation for exploited and subordinate groups have come about through changing structures on a “grand” scale. (I’m not yet talking about how movements were coopted, flawed etc– and yes there were flawed models of revolution at work, among other factors, but these flawed models don’t to me cancel out the basic value and urgency of structural change at a global level. I also have not yet said anything about the tactics of getting to that level).
If you look at the example I know best (one i know better, through study, than feminism as a “movement”)- the civil rights movement, the question is, could Jim Crow and segregation have been abolished (to the degree it has which is not to say that racial segregation is not still a de facto reality) without a mass movement? People working merely locally without at the same time working on networking with other communities, and mobilizing black america, as well as white allies nationally, would not have created the change that this movement created.
This movement was coopted in many ways- the best writer on the subject is Adolph Reed Jr, Stirring in the Jug- brilliant, historically meticulous and lucid book on the demobilizing of black dissent.
Then take the issue, again, of trafficking- of the sexual slavery of women: how might your biotic model–as well as of community work– apply to the abolition of slavery? I’m really asking.
de, you write: “and I’m trying to find an appropriate balance between the world of praxis and the world of Big Ideas.”
but my discussion of theory was not about how one lives one’s life. I think that as individuals engaged with questions of radical change, of course we each have to figure this out. but that is a very different question than the issue of what is needed for radical change to happen- e..g the abolition of slavery. It’s an important question, and one that overlaps in interesting ways perhaps- but a different one. My question is also not about how an individual relates to theory- e.g. — you talk about it as a moral yardstick and such. I don’t see theory that way. I think theory is about making sense of the world, of reality, and in the context of political transformation–right now one important task is making sense of the layers and layers of cooptation, via the workings of neoliberalism on progressive movements (with feminism, for example, sexual liberalism –in intersection with neoliberal economics and other practices) these past decades. This is exactly what i see you doing in your own intellectual work, btw.
also, you say: “one thing I think today is that there is an enormous body of perfectly adequate theory and explanation, but it’s been compartmentalised and desperately needs to be connected across artificial disciplinary boundaries: i.e. radical feminism and a critique of masculinity connected with anti-war activism connected with peak oil consciousness (wars are about resources and money after all, as well as about manly posturing) connected with ecological field work, combined with the tools for community survival in the dislocations that are the inevitable result of the wars, the masculinism, the capitalist fantasy, the biotic liquidation… which is of course what we’re trying to do here… to connect the artificially isolated bits of theory to each other and to practical, lifesaving practise.”
Yes, I can’t agree with you more about how there is a lot of great, yet disconnected works of explanation out there- and i’m glad i’m on this site to learn more– because i do think that the work of radical feminist theory is for much more synthesis.
The question of how theory applies to practice- “applies’ is too mechanical and just not right.
And i’m not making claims that theory “precedes” practice- only that theory is very valuable.
By the way- none of this is to say that I don’t have a questionable faith and often unwarranted optimism myself in the power of ideas- But again, teaching has made me both more humble about the value of “ideas” and at the same time feeling more urgent about the need for “education” (outside of an academic setting which of course constrains mightily the type of consciousness-raising and theory creating that can occur– if it doesn’t kill it altogether [it doesn’t in my case])
one more thing- which I believe i’ve posted about earlier: in the civil rights movement, community work (including galvanization of church communities0 was of course essential- it’s always essential for the vitality/life of the larger social movement. But as with this movement, the community work was worked, as it were, for larger, political purposes. So there has to be an activated connection between community-creating and larger movement building, in my view (and gramsci’s) for community-creating to lead to substantive change.
well- I guess that’s it for now- again, thanks for welcoming me here. I’m looking forward to continuing the conversation, you brilliant ones!!
10 April 2008, 8:16 amon the issue of sending feature “articles”: i’m having a huge problem pulling together masses of threads for/on my “election/obama” article so maybe an idea for me and you would be to distill different threads and send some here– so i dont have to worry, yet, about pulling them all together???
Bruce F:
……. [applause from the cheap seats]………..
Thanks.
10 April 2008, 1:48 pmkathy miriam:
Danielle,
10 April 2008, 2:44 pmwe need feminism! Your points about the DV non-movement have to do with massive cooptation of this movement. Your making exactly the right points, posing the right questions: why after all these years has the DV “movement” failed to stop batterers? It has become completely depoliticized, part of the dominant apparatus of power rather than acting as a force for social change. Well i have to go and teach (women’s studies) soon, so I don’t have time to write.. but this is exactly why we need good theory –to understand what went wrong, how feminism has been coopted and domesticated as it were.
more later.
Shaukat:
Sam, I’m glad you brought up the concept of capitalist discipline, as it’s one that I’m very interested in as well. Feminist scholarship has much to offer on this subject as well; one of the best examinations of primitive accumulation and the forging and disciplining of human bodies and sexuality in the transition to capitalism is Sylvia Federici’s “Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation.” Federici analyzes in great detail the massive violence and sexual terror that was unleashed against women and the recently expropriated peasantry in order to mold the body and create breeders of labor power as well as a new proletariat who, to paraphrase E.P Thompson, only by the late 18th century could be characterized as diligent, disciplined, and proud to wear a watch. She also provides a valuable critique of Foucault who, despite his important insights, fails to situate his analysis in a materialist context in order to account for the rationale behind the new policies of coercion against the body that were intricately connected to the emergence of capital as a social relation. Her work on the extra-economic force that accompanied early commodification is thus a good supplement to Van Der Pijl’s schoalrship on the topic.
On a side note, one of Stephen Gill’s most interesting concepts is the “New Constitutionalism,” which refers to process by which a sovereign state’s control over economic matters is shifted away from the electorate, which thus serves to lock in neoliberal designs. When I wrote my Masters thesis under his supervision a couple years ago I used this concept to examine the dismantlement and restructuring of Yugoslavia-particularly Bosnia under Carl Bildt. The process was replicated in Iraq under Paul Bremer, who used his mandate to juridicially lock in the privatization of the economy before handing power over to Iraqis. Once this shift takes place a certain degree of formal democrcay is permitted, or, as Edward Herman puts it, “demonstration elections” are then allowed.
10 April 2008, 6:20 pmStan:
As a marxist, I say we need feminism. As an anti-imperialist, I say we need feminism. As an anti-racist, I say we need feminism. As a proponent of a deep ecological shift, I say we need feminism. As a Christian, I say we need feminism. And the feminism we need is the one that wants to tear out masculinity constructed as conquest and domination, root and branch. We do not need a feminism that considers Chippendales strippers to be a sign of emancipation, or more female CEOs in the fortune 500. Whichever lens I am looking through at any given moment, I can no longer escape the insights of MacKinnon and Patricia Williams on liberal law, the prima facie case Pateman laid out against the sexual contract, the connections between ecocide and colonialism and patriarchy described by Mies, Shiva, and Merchant, or the psychoanalytical connections to social structures illuminated by Hartsock and Benjamin.
Feminism, in my own opinion for what it’s worth, is the critique of the absolute deepest structure of oppressive power, gender. As such, it faces the most formidable, complex, interdependent challenges at all scales and dimensions of any social movement, ever.
Honestly, I believe that feminism therefore has the greatest transformative potential of any social movement in history.
So what did happen to the upwave of radical feminism; and where do things need to go from here? We’ve hit some of these points… but I, for one, would be very keen to hear from the vets of this movement on their own experiences.
10 April 2008, 6:43 pmpeggy:
“Feminism” in the sixties was in most quarters a dirty word, and it still is. “Women’s studies” in academia was and still is marginalized, compartmentalized and unsupported. Most women, including most feminists, have concluded that they can get along better, and go further, by *not* being overt feminists, even if they are fully cognizant of and agree with feminist theory. Such women might be called closet feminists. They speak their minds on this issue only in safe environments, such as FS.
Rooting out masculinism is unimaginably difficult, precisely because it pervades every aspect of human life. Some parts of it, some aspects of it, may be part of public discourse, piecemeal advances may be celebrated, and major failures - such as the growth of violence against women - may be noted, but such failures are dealt with only on a piecemeal basis, because the Powers That Be are thoroughly masculinist and depend on oppression of women for their very existence, as Mies has clearly shown. Therefore women depend on ruses and smiles and back-channels to advance their feminist agendas. We have to convince men that it is in those men’s own best interests to “allow” us, for instance, control over our own bodies. We must resort to ruses because it is in fact in men’s best interest to control the bodies of women.
Half the species owns and controls the other half. For this fact to really change, women would have to unite as women globally, seize the tools of killing, and use those tools en masse against men. We would have to kill every man who opposes us, and every woman who opposes the killing of men. We would have to keep those killing tools in the hands of feminist women for all time. And we would have to build a just, humane, and world-conserving society, and maintain it. Those are the three things we have to do to overturn patriarchy. Those are the things we have to do and we are not ready to do those things. I am not ready. Nobody is ready. And that is why “the feminist movement” has become dissipated. Maybe what has to be done will eventually be done. It will be the bloodiest nastiest thing humanity has ever done or witnessed. But it will be the ONLY way.
Just my humble opinion.
10 April 2008, 9:18 pmpeggy:
Just one of the reasons:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080421/houppert
10 April 2008, 11:10 pmxenia:
we also need to look at the *various and manifold* manners in which patriarchy deforms people.
usually we imagine that the male holds most of the control, financially as well as socially. in most cases, this is true.
but i’m thinking about the former yugoslavs, especially the dispossessed urban classes. i have seen many a meek man publicly humiliated and abused by his disappointed wife, who can’t believe that he is only making 7$/hour, and that he actually can’t afford to buy a house or a big car. she has his bi-weekly check, and because there is only one car, he is only allowed to invite friends over and get drunk while she is berating him. bitterly amusing scenes ensue sometimes, with both partners threatening to call the police for domestic abuse and then being forced to bail each other out, because they rely on each other’s income and presence! now, unlike most american couples, those people will stay together for decades for the sake of their children, even if it is hell and there has been no sexual relation whatsoever for years. i’ve seen it so often it has become a cliche.
so, in the individual circumstance, it may even well be that the woman holds more power in a relationship, and that she is the abusive person. because most males i knew were convinced that they were worthless, it has taken me years to understand that such a situation still implied patriarchy and oppression of the female, since they were both holding onto the convention, expecting the man to be “the Man”, and were deeply traumatized by his economic and social failure.
under the pressure of political and economic violence, that’s one way in which families and individuals fall apart. i am sure it is similar for many peoples who have been historically defeated — irish, palestinians, iraqis, native americans, you name it. another related instance from the 1950s that we are all familiar with: for the average white woman, going out to work meant liberation. for the average black women, not going to work was a blessing. as we know, race is one of the reasons why feminism in the us stalled.
so, it has also taken me a long time to understand how men who held actual power were different,and most western european and american scholarship made no sense to me — it assumed a strong male and a gradually individualizing naive female, both of them atom-like and free to leave except for psychological reasons. that did not reflect my reality of strong women and crushed men.
now, what i find interesting in the case of white americans is the elevation of another kind of “strong” female — one that can hold a gun and kick your enemies in the butt, but who is also ready to die her hair blond, accede to any sexual demand and make cookies (yes, alluding to someone here). a sheep in a wolf’s clothing, as it were, most likely rooted in the historical presence of slave owners and pioneers at the frontier, when the “white” female had to discipline the black/”red” untermenschen while remaining obedient to her husband and the church.
the point is: just like its brothers, racism and capitalism, patriarchy is a very tricky form of domination and hegemony. we must always reflect upon our own society and circumstance as well as that of others, because it is coded in myriads of ways, allowing obamas and hillaries can easily fit into the scheme.
11 April 2008, 2:55 amxenia:
oops. Dye, not die, the hair blond. How Freundian of me.
11 April 2008, 2:58 amDanielle Zora:
Do we need a committed fight for full equality and justice for all? Absolutely. What are we missing in that fight?- some form of collective leadership. Since the Sixties the Women’s movement has been leaderless. and often militantly so. It has had role models and promoted role models for many non caregiving professions- journalists and actors particularly but also lawyers ets. and it had theorists. This marginalization of organizing and political strategizing infuriated me in the seventies. When I went to college in the eighties I was inspired by the theory and was ggrateful for the theorists. Today back in school I am horrified by the homogenization and cooptation of feminist theory. But to me it is the academy’s isolation from real struggle for equality that caused it. In fact the DV movement was not coopted as much as betrayed. in the early 90’s when the DV movement was “professionalized” like the HIV movement was “professionalized” at the milennium. at sanctuary for families in nyc that meant that the activist lawyers that had founded the organization and built the law were marginalized and let go or fired for bogus reasons. There was hardly a peep from the academy. Was there a peep from the academy? We need a fighting, political strategizing organization and not a professional organization like NOW or AAUW.
11 April 2008, 5:08 amStan:
There is that “professionalization” again, which puts me back in mind of Dunbar’s number. Once the management function takes over, the division of labor to include managers creates a managerial center of gravity, so to speak. I saw this again and again working with non-profits. It is followed by the prioritization of the organization over its originally intended mission; and then the little compromises become first cost-benefit trade-offs (usually with regard to acquiring or “not-alienating” isgnificant funders). Then the justifications (which initially appear to be ideological, and will eventually become so)… and the organization has become fetishized, “mainstreamed” by its continued dependence on certain funding streams, and defanged as that dependency grows along with the size of the organization.
This is a paradigm. We have operated for a long time on the notion that there is an ideological weakness at work that leads to these compromises; I am growing into the belief that the compromises are in the genetic code of management itself. That doesn’t mean I eschew leadership, a critical aspect of any movement, which is different from management. One of the issues with leadership is that our movements don’t grow leaders; they grow managers and specialists.
In terms of the work that gets done in the formations and expression of mass movements, and looking at the individuals who comprise them, there is something to be said — I think — for encouraging the development of generalists, which will deepen our bench of real leaders. That’s another weakness in movements… real leaders are so rare (they don’t emerge from specialist-oreinted society very well) that we see singular leaders appear who become irreplacable… and movements can then be decapitated. I think here of the assassination of MLK, of Cuba and Fidel (a generalist — lawyer, writer, fighter, etc), and with trepidation of Venezuela and Chavez (generalist — solider, peasant, “feral scholar”). Venezuela needs a Chavez; but what it needs more is twenty Chavezes, each with twenty more understudies.
We need schools where the students learn biology, music, permaculture, physics, bird-watching, emergency medicine, literature, chess, swimming, orienteering, history, engineering, philosophy, etc etc., and have to do extended practical apps as part of the coursework… open up many many neural pathways, because leaders have multiple perspectives from which to grasp emergent situations, and the ability to communicate and cohere others. Every community has leaders, in every case. How do we encourage the development of so many leaders that the leadership function can pass around within and acoross communities, and replace management?
Rambling on coffee.
11 April 2008, 6:23 amDeAnander:
when the “white” female had to discipline the black/”red” untermenschen while remaining obedient to her husband and the church
Xenia that is a really perceptive and enlightening take on the “armed warrior female” genre of movies and sci-fi that became popular in the 80’s (and was greeted by many feminists including myself as a welcome change from the “weak little incompetent woman” school of female characters in fiction). the connection with colonialism and the frontier seems to me so clear now that you point it out — thanks!
11 April 2008, 11:49 amCharles:
But when this critique was put into practice, the logic of MacKinnon’s critique led to two kinds of campaigns: the civil (as opposed to criminal) anti-porn campaign, and the “wages for housework” campaign (a al Thelma James). In a way, each of these addressed two faces of patriarchy: one, the sexual apsect, and the other, an economic class aspect. They definitely called some major questions, especially on the left, and both campaigns raised a hell of a ruckus among intellectuals and activists.”
^^^^^
“Women’s liberation” is the radical term as opposed to the bourgeois term “feminist”. Women’s liberation is not a liberal term.
What of right to abortion, money for child care, right to readily available divorce, women entering the social labor workforce, pay equity, woman in leading positions of state , church, business and labor, as well as the issues mentioned above ? It is not entirely possible to not use the liberal concept of “right” in struggles in bourgeois society. _Right_ to a job or income is still a correct demand, for example ( See my “For a Constitutional Amendment for a Right to a Job or Income” , which is a Communist, not liberal argument).
What of the riddle that women have longer life expectancies than men in the US ? How is the oppression of women by men not resulting in women dying earlier than men ? What is the comparison of morbidity rates ? Would seem that some other oppression ( capitalism) is killing men faster than women ? Men must be oppressing each other more than they are oppressing women ! Women are oppressed and suppressed and belittled by male supremacy. However, capitalist oppression of men is even greater thereby killing men faster, even as capitalism oppresses women , too. The effect of male supremacist paternalistic belittling and suppression and “sheltering” of women is ,on balance, protecting women’s bodies from the “manly” destruction that men put their own bodies through. Evidently, some male “privileges” are deadly, in the long run. Heavy drinking, warring, running the streets, macho fighting, wage-labor alienation, mortification of the body and soul are fake male “privileges”.
A major step against male supremacy might be had, if men could be shown objectively that some of their “superiority” is physically inferior, self-destructive.
What other measure of destruction of bodies is more “bottomline” and ultimate than life expectancy and morbidity ? As to whose happier, that’s harder to measure, abstract, subjective. We can be sure that if women are not happy, men will not be happy.
11 April 2008, 6:08 pmCharles:
When I asked Caroline why women live longer, she said “because we cry”
11 April 2008, 6:09 pmStan:
The difference in male-female life expectancy is now around 5.4 years, and a goodly part of the difference in the past was cigarette smoking… narrowing now because more women started smoking at a point in the past that is now drawing them nearer en masse to mortality from smoking related illnesses.
There is more pop psychology and pseudo-science associated with this statistic than a possum has fleas.
Mortality rates among young men associated with violence is an indicator of masculinity as a death-cult; but this is not oppression, and it does not show that men have less social power than women. It certainly does not demonstrate a thing about capitalism per se; the gendered gap between male and female longevity crosses class lines in the US, unless we want to look at differences created by overdevelopment and the drops in life expectancy created by inter-national relations (core v periphery). The brunt of the latter, btw, falls on women, who bear the non-monetized “reproductive” economy literally on their shoulders and heads, and get sold into sexual service… often very young.
How, exactly, are they doing that? And how is “feminism” bourgeois? This is a remark that has you treading on very thin “troll” ice, imo.
11 April 2008, 7:24 pmxenia:
the key is also to look at how black and latino women are perceived by white males. there much of the power relation which might be hidden in a middle class white-white relationship comes to fore. i mean, it is significant that when you google “latina” for pictures, only porn comes out. and speaking of porn, there is at least one site i know of which brags that those women will do anything so they can stay in the us (of course, the makers of the site confuse the green card and the citizenship, which betrays their ignorance of the actual process…as if you could get the citizenship just by hopping into bed with someone!)
the older, the poorer and the fatter (in the us, at least. elsewhere, as in india, i have never seen a poor fat woman) women of color are, the more invisible they become…
therefore, we must have feminism, but not of the sort that has flourished in the 1990s, the pomo, disembodied kind that pushed me, as a moneyless, immigrant and slighly handicapped woman, away from it, since it was not relevant to my problems.
12 April 2008, 2:36 amStan:
There are plenty of things that call themselves feminist that affect radical feminists in much the same way that social gospel Christians are struck by the Jesus-warlords of the Right, or how some may be struck by the claim that Tony Blair is a socialist.
One of the key ways to bewilder the public about dangerous ideas and movements is to adopt the name and change the game.
My own faves for this are Camille Paglia and Katie Roiphie, who call themselves feminist, and who have convinced (simply by saying it) the media to repeat this claim, ie, “Camille Paglia, feminist author.”
If feminism is a theory-praxis opposed to the rule of men, and these two are “feminists,” I am the Baron of Saskatchewan. What they are is called “moles” in tradecraft — people who burrow into a movement to disrupt it from the inside.
This was easier, because both are very skillful at taking male rationalizations (like that women “provoke” date rapes) and elaborating them in pseudo-intellectual terms. The Boys Club that runs everything — publishing houses, radio stations, tv talk shows, et al — happily invites them into our cultural echo chambers to propagate propagate, propagate…
They are, of course, hyped by many women who have themselves lived into the male power structures.
It is reactionary… but highly effective. In fact, it is effectively used to paint radical feminist and their allies as “anti-sex” and thereby associate them with the “prudery” (a frequent term of abuse used by men who want sex from unwilling women) of the paternal (as opposed to fraternal - Pateman)patriarchy of a couple generations ago (sometimes automatically and erroneously associated only with evangelical religion). So they have managed to paint radical feminism as reactionary, using guilt by phony association… a very clever flip if ever there was one.
The demagogic notion of “sex-positive” has been more effective, imo, than any other aspect of this molery; and the Paglia-Rophie use of rape as the breaching issue makes very good sense from that point of view.
The radical feminists recognized early on that rape is not merely a legal term, but that it exists on a continuum of male sexual behavior/attitudes where conquest, violation, humiliation, and control are constants… not aberrations. The radfem critique called one liberal article of faith into question: consent. This has been misrepresented consistently as a predicate for feigned outrage (How dare you call all men rapists!!!). What the radfems pointedout is that consent is not a cut-and-dried phenomenon… no sexual encounter between male and female can be uninflected by the reality of male socio-sexual power. That was never to say that “sex is bad,” or that no possibility exists for loving, even respectful sexual, relations between men and women. But most men are not critical or willing yet to be critical about sexuality, especially their own, and male defensiveness became a very powerful ally of the kind of molery practiced by Roipie et al.
Consent is not cut-and-dried; or rather, it is a term of limited utility in understanding sex critically. The liberal term is categorical. You either consent or you don’t. It is a legal abstraction planted like a beacon in a sea of far greater complexity, where male power expresses itself in evry aspect of our lives, and women are obliged to accomodate themselves to it in a thousand little ways each day.
This is where Pateman’s sexual contract comes in: the exchange of protection (by a man from other men) for obedience.
Gotta run.
12 April 2008, 6:05 amDanielle Zora:
again i think we need a robust fight for full equality and justice- this would be a women’s movement- it could again include many non-feminists and could proceed without feminism because there are many ideologies- progressive Christianity , socialistm, progressive environmentalism that could undergird it. i do think women’s liberation is a very radical concept. since i have been out of political debate for so long i guess i was forgetting or confusing the poltical struggle- once i began thinking it through i am full circle. my criticism remains- the liberal bent of feminism means that people underestimate the continuing need for political struggle and that because of that fail to reach out to people beyond ideology- to unite around program- for full free childcare etc. there are so many fights to be fought. instead feminism seems today to be a club with litmus test and vetting processes.
12 April 2008, 6:09 amkathy miriam:
Danielle: “In fact the DV movement was not coopted as much as betrayed. in the early 90’s when the DV movement was “professionalized” like the HIV movement was “professionalized” at the milennium.”
I agree that the problem is professionalization of the DV movement-and that this professionalization fits into a larger pattern of depoliticization. I think this meant cooptation, but the cooptation of the movement involved the betrayal of many individual radical women/activists, as well as the original ideals, and earlier practices of feminist/liberation organizations.
I do also think, along with stan (although I don’t know what Dunbars number has to do with it- I thought that had to do with quantity of people??? ) that the problem with professionalization yes, does have to do with this:
“Once the management function takes over, the division of labor to include managers creates a managerial center of gravity, so to speak. I saw this again and again working with non-profits. It is followed by the prioritization of the organization over its originally intended mission;”
I’ve seen this as well- and yes the acquisition of funding is a key catalyst, maybe one cause– i wouldn’t attribute the whole dynamic of depoliticization or professionalization to this purely economic dynamic (even though it plays a big role). I think, too, that there *is* a mistaken tendency to attribute depoliticization and professionalization to ideological weakness– if what you mean Stan, is weakness in analysis? in overall theory??.
The lack of theory reflected other factors: professionalization as related to processes of legitimacy–legitimacy for individuals, for the organization; instrumental reason–connected to the centrality of programs over politics (hat tip to Nancy Meyer); the triumph of the therapeutic as the flip side and inextricable from instrumental reason; liberal-individualism in conjunction with the triumph of the therapeutic and instrumental reason; the separation of dv from an analysis of *patriarchy*, and this in connection with a critique of capitalism –all of this as connected to the super-refinement of the means in which today women and girls are exploited and dominated at collective levels as well as in the home/private sphere. By “collective” I mean sexual and sexualized exploitation outside of the private domain of the home. I haven’t worked it out but i’m certain that the cooptation of the DV movement and the cooptation of feminism generally *reinforces* the collective and more ambiguous ways that women and girls are today exploited, dominated and controlled by men (and within capitalism).
These are structural processes, not only a matter of ideology- although i’m not sure of the sense in which you’re using the term ideology. And there is a body of writing on this- so there have been people trying to figure out what has happened structurally to progressive movements, including the DV movement. This was the thesis of Piven and Cloward’s book in 1980, Poor Peoples’ Movements, about the downfall of progressive movements- which i’m currently reading or re-reading.
And Danielle, you didn’t hear a peep from the academy about this sell-out of the DV movement (although there are a few academics who have written about the overall process–but not in the radically political terms that are needed) because as you’ve noticed, the academy was busy coopting feminism as well.
Danielle, btw, i’m recently relocated to nyc- and have had a wispy thread of connection to Sanctuary because i have students volunteering there (it’s a long story)- Is the organization, in your opinion, completely sold out? i’m trying to figure out where I might find feminists in nyc!
Anyway, my main point is that there is a larger pattern of depoliticization and backlash which can not be attributed to any single cause and which needs to be thought through and understood in various ways. That is the (or one) big project before progressives, in my not very humble opinion.
12 April 2008, 6:36 amStan:
The signifance of Dunbar’s number is that the 150 thresshold is the point at which relationships exceed the quantity that are effectively negotiated without a specialized-management function. It’s organic because it is still within the number that an individual is evolved to handle (perhaps the size of an ancient band… some biological limit in our frontal lobe that limits our capacity for genuine intersubjectivity). It’s very hypothetical; but Ivan Illich has suggested something very similar in his theses on technocratic control.
12 April 2008, 11:05 ameeekkk:
Stan is talking, it seems to me, about the conscious construction of a ‘complex global microstructure’. It is worth reading the Cetina Knorr essay on this concept as it relates to Al Quaeda too.
http://nettime.freeflux.net/?q=lazarrato
An extract:…. The basic
12 April 2008, 6:27 pmintuition that motivates the concept of a global
microstructure is that genuinely global forms, by which I
mean fields of practice that link up and stretch across all
time zones (or have the potential to do so), need not imply
further expansions of social institutional complexity. In
fact, they may become feasible only if they avoid complex
institutional structures. Global financial markets for
example, where microstructures have been found, simply
outrun the capacity of such structures. These markets are
too fast, and change too quickly to be ‘contained’ by
institutional orders. Global systems based on
microstructural principles do not exhibit institutional
complexity but rather the asymmetries, unpredictabilities
and playfulness of complex (and dispersed) interaction
patterns; a complexity that results, in John Urry?s terms,
from a situation where order is not the outcome of purified
social processes and is always intertwined with chaos. More
concretely, these systems manifest an observational and
temporal dynamics that is fundamental to their connectivity,
auto-affective principles of self-motivation, forms of
‘outsourcing’, and principles of content that substitute for
the principles and mechanisms of the modern, complex
organization.”
Stan:
From Brian Holmes on Knorr Cetina:
I am envious at not having written this, this way. And ditto from Cetina:
The latter I will qualify by one quibble… not an either-or proposition. The capacity to interpret and experiment is the only insurance against “forms” that are reactionary.
But this is a very good articulation of new directions in strategic theory that must be invented and elaborated, then directed by an acceptable moral compass. Al Qaeda may give us an example of its efficacy; but most of us here are opposed to AQ’s desired end-state (as Holmes notes).
(I still think food praxis can produce one of those bifurcations.)
Thanks eeekkk.
12 April 2008, 7:59 pmkathy miriam:
“The activist is not someone who becomes the brains of the
movement, who sums up its force, anticipates its choices,
draws his or her legitimacy from a capacity to read and
interepret the evolution of power, but instead, the activist
is simply someone who introduces a discontinuity in what
exists. She creates a bifurcation in the flow of words, of
desires, of images, to put them at the service of the
multiplicity’s power of articulation; she links the singular
situations together, without placing herself at a superior
and totalizing point of view. She is an experimenter.”
Seriously, what does this *mean*? and how might it translate into thinking strategically about issues such as Trafficking?
I don’t see this as strategic *theory* –i see it as theory about the structure of organization within a movement–which i’m not understanding–please explain further?? dunbar for dummies :-). but/and how does it relate to the breakdown of current institutionalized power –such as the breakdown of various structures of exploitation and existing structures of authority?
I also think that by focusing thought on “What is an activist” rather than the issue, What is to be done– we’re still in the cul-de-sac of identity theory, always remarking on what/who a particular being is, how she lives, how she thinks, what her style is, etc rather than thinking about how to change various sets of forces through activism–and yes, i’m intrigued by how you are conceiving of activism, but not as divorced from the issue of the ends of activism–again, by ends I mean how this activism will oppose and transform/overturn existing structures of authority and power.
13 April 2008, 6:23 amMaybe by discuss the AQ strategy (and yes without supporting its desired end state!) as you understand it in this Dunbar etc framework, it will help?
Danielle Zora:
Kathy- I have no idea and know no one to ask. I was in the women’s movement when I was 17,18, and 19 and left to do workplace organizing with women with a Marxist organization because that is where I got support. I was with them for another 6 or 7 years. ( I am not a great organizer.) When I left them- bitter -I left the full time movement. That was 30-40 years ago.
In 1991 locally the unions had an unemployment office of their own. They helped you write resumes and do a job search. When I said I would like to work in a DV or sexual violence program the guy told me- forget it- it is a closed shop-you need to have the correct contacts from the correct women’s studies programs- you will never get into that system-I think he was right and that is still the case.
15 years ago in NYC - a friend, was stuck in an abusive lesbian relationship. Because she had a 12 year old son she could not go into a shelter. He was developmentally delayed - mentally 6 years old- that did not matter. She however was threatened to have her child removed from her custody if she did not leave the abuse. They went into a city shelter. At that time there was a sexual abuser on staff and that was documented and reported. She get no help from any women’s/anti-violence organizations. SO the argument may have been framed- program over politics but in reality it was bureaucracy over politics because the programs have been and continue to be inadequate.
13 April 2008, 6:41 amLegume Sam:
If you get after people with remarks like –
You’ll eventually get groupthink. It’s your blog. Personally, I’d recommend Mies and Bennholdt-Thomsen’s The Subsistence Perspective as the feminist alternative to “bourgeois.”
13 April 2008, 11:31 amStan:
My troll remark was about name-calling feminists as “bourgeois.” No way will we go there. That kind of stalinist abuse is verboten here.
@ Kathy:
We’ll definitely have to unpack how constructivists threw out the baby with the bathwater here at some point. I really believe there was a baby thrown out; but also bathwater that needed to be dumped.
Hornborg has done a good job of beginning to reconcile these trends; and from my first impression, Cetina started some time back. I continue to believe that consumerism is a more potent force in the identity-swamp than constructivism… because 99% of people have no clue what constructivism is, nor would they get through the first page of, say, Judith Butler.
This description of the “activist” is, imo, a tactical one, not a theoretical one. And it does err somewhat toward the “narrative” bias. Nonetheless, it speaks not to what activists believe, but what effective activists manage to do… leaving us to explore how and why one form of activism is effective, and more importantly, where the actual historical bifurcation points are. Where and how and why do the actual structural disruptions occur? Do activists create them? Or do activists get behind them? Or do activists anticipate them? These are strategic-theory questions.
On trafficking, rather than abstract the issue, let’s research it. Where and how does it take place? Who are the primary actors? Where are the opposition, right now, and at what scales? Are various centers of opposition communicating (networked with) with one another? How much of the opposition is local, how much institutional, and how many bureaucratic NGOs, etc, are in on it (perhaps dragging on the rest or stifling initiative)?
The key to the appication of “swarm” is not merely decentralization and tactical agility; it is (1) sound, timely, concrete intelligence, and (2) communication.
The issues of what-is-an-activist and what-is-to-be-done are not antithetical, or even separate, issues — except in analysis. They are two aspects of the same process.
Before anything gets done, someone has to do it. Old-left and old-school strategic theory lays this out as a linear process… write the mission statement, then systematically make the mission happen. So there is this concrete desired end-state, but “we” begin in the ether. Where are we now? Who are we now? What is already in motion? What is “our” capacity… really?
One of the reasons we have spent so much time past and present asking what went wrong is we start with the assumption that we did something wrong in the steps between formulating the goal and seeing it through (or not). But what we did wrong was, in fact, we started establishing grand goals before we did what the army called our “intelligence preparation of the battlefield.” Without that, we can’t even know what is possible, because we don’t know what “we” have… or are.
Networked communications, if they are not encumbered by centralized command-structures and bureaucratization, are an opportunity, rightly applied, to quantum-shift the actual rules of the game — to go asymmetric. Breaking down a system, through “swarm” or asymmetry, happens through multiple and increasingly unpredictable disruptions.
Attacking trafficking structures themselves, in many different ways, may be far more effective than seeking a policy solution (almost every form of disruption is more effective than seeking policy solutions).
It’s a clear, cool, beautiful day; and I have to do extensive weeding, mulch, and finish a stone walkway.
Hope I’ve been at least semi-lucid.
13 April 2008, 12:26 pm