I blog at Male Submission Art, host Kink On Tap, and support KinkForAll as much as I can, among more things.
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Posts tagged: politics
Leslie Mitchel reviews a biography of John Wilkes
A rather poetic reminder that, as I’ve said before, “the root of radical action is emotion,” or, put another way, “all systems are worth destroying.”
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[P]olitical motivated firings fit into a much broader pattern in American history that […] I call “Fear, American Style.” While people on the left and the right often focus on state repression—coercion and intimidation that comes from and is wielded by the government (politically driven prosecution and punishment, police violence, and the like)—the fact is that a great deal of political repression happens in civil society, outside the state. More specifically, in the workplace.
[…]
There’s a reason so much of American repression is executed not by the state but by the private sector: the government is subject to constitutional and legal restraints, however imperfect and patchy they may be. But an employer often is not.
[…]
On this blog, I’ve talked a lot about what I call […] “the private life of power”: the domination and control we experience in our personal lives at the hands of employers, spouses, and so on. But we should always recall that that private life of power is often wielded for overtly political purposes: not simply for the benefit of an employer but also for the sake of maintaining larger political orthodoxies and suppressing political heresies.
[…]
In the last few months, I’ve had a fair number of arguments with both libertarians and anarchists about the state. What neither crew seems to get is what our most acute observers have long understood about the American scene: however much coercive power the state wields–and it’s considerable—it’s not, in the end, where and how many, perhaps even most, people in the United States have historically experienced the raw end of politically repressive power. Even force and violence: just think of black slaves and their descendants, confronting slaveholders, overseers, slave catchers, Klansmen, chain gangs, and more; or women confronting the violence of their husbands and supervisors; or workers confronting the Pinkertons and other private armies of capital.
[…]
[T]he real bias one sees in mainstream reporting doesn’t come from one’s involvement in outside political activities. It comes from the desire to do one’s job in accordance with the strictures of one’s supervisors and peers, for fear that should you break ranks, you’ll be fired or somehow blackballed from the profession. Most of the time, that internal policeman will keep you in line. But should he fall asleep on the job, the company’s real police will there to toss you out on your ass. Again, Fear, American Style: the state, bound by the First Amendment, does nothing; editors do the job instead.
This explains so much about the pandemic of elitism within some structureless communities, ironically including anarchist ones.
See also:
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Barney Frank Challenges [libertarian] George Will on Marijuana, Dec 18, 2011 (by euthman)
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The anarchists’ way of operating was changing our very idea of what politics could be in the first place.
[…]
At its core, anarchism isn’t simply a negative political philosophy, or an excuse for window-breaking, as most people tend to assume it is. Even while calling for an end to the rule of coercive states backed by military bases, prison industries and subjugation, anarchists and other autonomists try to build a culture in which people can take care of themselves and each other through healthy, sustainable communities. Many are resolutely nonviolent. Drawing on modes of organizing as radical as they are ancient, they insist on using forms of participatory direct democracy that naturally resist corruption by money, status and privilege. Everyone’s basic needs should take precedence over anyone’s greed.
Thank You, Anarchists | The Nation
It is very, very good to see this kind of recognition of anarchist principles and methodologies represented correctly in a mainstream publication. The degree to which such a simple idea, such as “no one is more qualified than you are to decide what your life will be,” and the wide applicability of such an idea, is so often so heinously distorted speaks volumes to the degree of educational repression—that is, intentionally enforced ignorance—we are socialized with. It absolutely horrifies me.
See also:
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While walking in the Mission yesterday, I came across this poster inside Good Vibes, with links added for your convenience:
ANTI-GAY COMPANIES TO BOYCOTT
(Let’s show them that hate doesn’t pay)
- Salvation Army (“practicing homosexuals” are not welcome to work here. Nuff said, don’t support them.) Instead, give your junk to Community Thrift on Valencia & 17th so that you can pick which org. you want the money to go to.
- Gold’s Gym! (owner and CEO gave millions to American Crossroads, a political organization run by Karl Rove that funds many anti-gay politicians)
- Domino’s Pizza (founder Tom Monaghan is a co-founder of the Thomas More Law Center, which advocates in court to restrict access to domestic partner benefits. He also financed a ballot proposal to remove sexual orientation from the non-discrimination ordinance in MI.)
- Cracker Barrel Restaurants (fired 17 people for being “inconsistent with…normal heterosexual values”)
- A1 Self-Storage (owner Terry Caster is the 2nd largest individual contributor to the infamous Prop 8 campaign)
- Cinemark/Century Theaters (CEO gave $10,000 to prop 8)
I was really glad to see The Salvation Army listed first. They’ve long been getting lots of heat for being anti-gay, but The Salvation Army is a sinister organization for many more reasons than that—and I speak from personal experience.
See also:
- PinkPanthers: Boycott these anti-gay companies
- San Francisco Chronicle’s Proposition 8 Contributors Database and LA Times: Tracking the money: Final Numbers (for Prop 8)
- Cinemark/Century Theaters CEO Anti-gay Donor
- Gay Homophobe, by Jonathan Mann
- Gay marriage proponent who urged halt to Prop. 8 enforcement dies
- Same-Sex Marriage Foes Seek Reversal of Ruling by Gay Judge
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If gay marriage is about protecting citizenship, whose citizenship is being protected? Most people in this country — especially those not born rich, white, straight and male — are not full citizens. The not-so-subtle demand to “protect your citizenship” evokes images of George W. Bush’s screeds against “enemies of freedom.” Gay assimilationists want to make sure they’re on the winning side in the citizenship wars, and see no need to confront the legacies of systemic and systematic US oppression that prevent most people living in this country (and everywhere else) from exercising their supposed “rights.” This willful participation in US imperialism is part of the larger goal of assimilation, as the holy trinity of marriage, military service and adoption has become the central preoccupation of a gay movement centered more on obtaining straight privilege than challenging power.
Gay assimilationists have created the ultimate genetically modified organism, combining virulent strains of nationalism, patriotism, consumerism, and patriarchy and delivering them in one deadly product: state-sanctioned matrimony. Gay marriage proponents are anxious to discard those tacky hues of lavender and pink, in favor of the good ol’ stars and stripes, literally draping themselves in Old Glory at every pro-marriage demonstration as the US occupies Iraq, overthrows the only democratically-elected government in the history of Haiti, funds the Israeli war on the Palestinians, and makes the whole world safe… for multinational corporations to plunder indigenous resources.
A gay elite has hijacked queer struggle, and positioned their desires as everyone’s needs — the dominant signs of straight conformity have become the ultimate signs of gay success. Sure, for white gays with beach condos, country club memberships, and nice stock portfolios with a couple hedge funds that need trimming every now and then (think of Rosie O’Donnell or David Geffen), marriage might just be the last thing standing in the way of full citizenship, but what about for everyone else?
Even when the “gay rights” agenda does include real issues, it does it in a way that consistently prioritizes the most privileged while fucking over everyone else. I’m using the term “gay rights,” instead of the more popular term of the moment, “LGBT rights,” because “LGBT” usually means gay, with lesbian in parentheses, throw out the bisexuals, and put trans on for a little window-dressing. A gay rights agenda fights for an end to discrimination in housing and employment, but not for the provision of housing or jobs; domestic partner health coverage but not universal health coverage. Or, more recently, hospital visitation and inheritance rights for married couples, but not for anyone else. Even with the most obviously “gay” issue, that of anti-queer violence, a gay rights agenda fights for tougher hate crimes legislation, instead of fighting the racism, classism, transphobia (and homophobia) intrinsic to the criminal “justice” system. Kill those criminals twice, this logic goes, and then there won’t be any more violence.
The violence of assimilation lies in the ways the borders are policed. For decades, there has been a tension within queer politics and cultures, between assimilationists and liberationists, conservatives and radicals. Never before, however, has the assimilationist/conservative side held such a stranglehold over popular representations of what it means to be queer. Gay marriage proponents are anxious to discard generations of queer efforts to create new ways of loving, lusting for, and caring for one another, in favor of a 1950s model of white-picket-fence, “we’re-just-like-you” normalcy.
The ultimate irony of gay liberation is that it has made it possible for straight people to create more fluid gender, sexual and social identities, while mainstream gay people salivate over state-sanctioned Tiffany wedding bands and participatory patriarchy. Many straight people know that marriage is outdated, tacky and oppressive — and any queer who grew up in or around marriage should remember this well. Marriage still exists as a central site of anti-woman, anti-child and anti-queer violence, and a key institution through which the wealth and property of upper class (white) families is preserved. If gay marriage proponents wanted real progress, they’d be fighting for the abolition of marriage (duh), and universal access to the services that marriage can sometimes help procure: housing, healthcare, citizenship, tax breaks, and inheritance rights.
Sweatshop-Produced Rainbow Flags and Participatory Patriarchy: Why the Gay Rights Movement Is a Sham by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
See also:
- For more on assimilationist versus “separatist” political approaches, “Gay Shame and BDSM Pride: Neoliberalism, Privacy, and Sexual Politics” by Margot D. Weiss
- For my own experiences regarding how San Francisco’s queer and sex-positive communities are privileged shams: “It’s foggy today” and “When ‘sex-positive’ is a euphemism for ‘male gaze’”.
- For more about why “marriage” is bullshit.
- For more about queer resistance to military recruiters: “Queer Counter-Recruitment”.
(via nixvisceral)
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For thousands of years, humanity has governed itself by a politic of power that depends on authoritarian hierarchies. Our identities, our desires, and our power are all monitored by hierarchal systems of oppression, sanctioned and encouraged by the politics of power.
Power politics depends on obedience to those in power, or you die. “My way or the highway,” says the politics of power. “You’re either with us or you’re against us,” says the politics of power.
You never have to answer anyone who demands any either/or of you. Either/Or is the language of bullies. The politics of power has degenerated into global bully-ism.
Democracy is a sort of [trans*] politic: half way between a power politic, and an identity politic. Democracy is a great politic with two major drawbacks:
1) If you’ve got enough money, you can thoroughly corrupt democracy and
2) In order to have a voice in a democratic government, you must be part of an acceptable demographic. None of us in this room has an acceptable recognizable identity.
In the history of humanity, we have governed ourselves using the politics of power and politics of identity. But there has never been a politic of desire. How about that? Never.
(Bullies are easy to spot. Political bullies are also easy to spot. Karl Rove is one example.)
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[H]ow exactly do conservatives get the masses on-board in the first place? Thomas Frank’s “What’s the Matter With Kansas?”, the preferred liberal Rosetta Stone to unlocking the right-wing brain, suggests that non-elite rightwingers simply get “tricked” into supporting conservative policies. The Big Scary GOP demolishes labor unions with one hand, but draws crosshairs on Tiller the Baby-killer with the other. It’s the only way Frank can explain such “irrationality.”
Robin calls bullshit on that. Non-elite conservatives—the Red State bubbas that have cursed this land for so long—reap very real material rewards, but they’re rewards which fly in the face of the cheery “every one’s good at heart” worldview of liberalism.
Conservatism offers them something Robin brilliantly calls “democratic feudalism.” In other words, dominion over your “lessers” in the private spheres of the workplace (middle-management tyrants) and the home (lockin’ down the wife and daughter’s ladyparts): “the most visible effort of the GOP since the 2010 midterm election has been to curtail the rights of employees and the rights of women.” This is the link between the Santorums and the Pauls of the world–one which Reason magazine, the Mises Institute and other appendages of the supposedly “anti culture-war” libertarian propaganda circuit work very hard to obscure.
Conscience of a Radical: Corey Robin’s “The Reactionary Mind” - By Connor Kilpatrick - The eXiled
See also:
- For more of the same: Corey Robin interviewed on RHRealtyCast.
- For a wonderful illustration of Robin’s key point in action: How to stump anti-choice activists with 1 question.
- For more background regarding the class implications of this argument: Antonio Negri.
- For understanding more about the ways in which resources are restricted to “lessers” and its relevance to intersectionality: A Framework for Understanding Poverty and Re-Caste-ing Alternative Sexuality: A Class Analysis of Social Status in the BDSM Scene.
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Catherine MacKinnon’s (198Z, 1987) version of radical feminism is itself a caricature of the appropriating, incorporating, totalizing tendencies of Western theories of identity grounding action. It is factually and politically wrong to assimilate all of the diverse ‘moments’ or ‘conversations’ in recent women’s politics named radical feminism to MacKinnon’s version. But the teleological logic of her theory shows how an epistemology and ontology - including their negations - erase or police difference. Only one of the effects of MacKinnon’s theory is the rewriting of the history of the polymorphous field called radical feminism. The major effect is the production of a theory of experience, of women’s identity, that is a kind of apocalypse for all revolutionary standpoints. That is, the totalization built into this tale of radical feminism achieves its end - the unity of women - by enforcing the experience of and testimony to radical non-being. As for the Marxist/ socialist feminist, consciousness is an achievement, not a natural fact. And MacKinnon’s theory eliminates some of the difficulties built into humanist revolutionary subjects, but at the cost of radical reductionism.
MacKinnon argues that feminism necessarily adopted a different analyt-ical strategy from Marxism, looking first not at the structure of class, but at the structure of sex/gender and its generative relationship, men’s constitution and appropriation of women sexually. Ironically, MacKinnon’s ‘ontology’ constructs a non-subject, a non-being. Another’s desire, not the self’s labour, is the origin of ‘woman’. She therefore develops a theory of consciousness that enforces what can count as ‘women’s’ experience - anything that names sexual violation, indeed, sex itself as far as ‘women’ can be concerned. Feminist practice is the construction of this form of consciousness; that is, the self-knowledge of a self-who-is-not.
Perversely, sexual appropriation in this feminism still has the epistemolo-gical status of labour; that is to say, the point from which an analysis able to contribute to changing the world must flow. But sexual objectification, not alienation, is the consequence of the structure of sex/gender. In the realm of knowledge, the result of sexual objectification is illusion and abstraction. However, a woman is not simply alienated from her product, but in a deep sense does not exist as a subject, or even potential subject, since she owes her existence as a woman to sexual appropriation. To be constituted by another’s desire is not the same thing as to be alienated in the violent separation of the labourer from his product.
MacKinnon’s radical theory of experience is totalizing in the extreme; it does not so much marginalize as obliterate the authority of any other women’s political speech and action. It is a totalization producing what Western patriarchy itself never succeeded in doing - feminists’ consciousness of the non-existence of women, except as products of men’s desire. I think MacKinnon correctly argues that no Marxian version of identity can firmly ground women’s unity. But in solving the problem of the contradictions of any Western revolutionary subject for feminist purposes, she develops an even more authoritarian doctrine of experience. If my complaint about socialist/Marxian standpoints is their unintended erasure of polyvocal, unassimilable, radical difference made visible in anti-colonial discourse and practice, MacKinnon’s intentional erasure of all difference through the device of the ‘essential’ non-existence of women is not reassuring.
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In 1936, the 32nd President of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, addressed the nation in a famous speech that feels as relevant today as it did back then:
For twelve years this Nation was afflicted with hear-nothing, see-nothing, do-nothing Government. The Nation looked to Government but the Government looked away. Nine mocking years with the golden calf and three long years of the scourge! Nine crazy years at the ticker and three long years in the breadlines! Nine mad years of mirage and three long years of despair! Powerful influences strive today to restore that kind of government with its doctrine that that Government is best which is most indifferent.
For nearly four years you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves. We will keep our sleeves rolled up.
We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace, business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.
They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.
Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me, and I welcome their hatred.
I think there are more parallels to draw from here than may at first meet the eye.