Who Benefits From Oppression?

On the face of it, this is an easy question to answer: the oppressors. But unpacking this simple answer requires that we raise several questions that are not as easily answered: Who are the oppressors? Where are they located in the social system? Whom do they oppress, and why? How do they oppress? In what precise relation do they stand vis-a-vis the oppressed?

I don't intend to attempt to offer full answers to any of these questions. I have a more modest goal: to think through a particular strategy for answering them familiar to some on the socialist Left. I have in mind the sort of argument (see here) put forward by Lindsey German (formerly of the Socialist Workers Party (UK)). For a similar argument, see this article at SW.org.

Here's German's statement of the argument I'm going to examine:

I want to reject the concept of patriarchy as at best a muddled term simply meaning women’s oppression (in which case it cannot explain this oppression), and at worst a completely idealist notion which has no basis in material reality. I want to show that it is not men who “benefit” from the oppression of women but capital. I want to look at the way in which the family has changed, and how as it has changed women’s conception of themselves has also changed. Hopefully that will demonstrate that women’s continued oppression is not the result of male conspiracy (or an alliance between male workers and the capitalist class), but of the continuation of class society in every part of the world. It follows that I shall argue the “socialist” countries have no more in common with socialism than they have with women’s liberation.

So the answer that we should expect German to give to our question "who benefits?" is: the ruling class. But is that accurate?

It depends first on what we mean by "benefit". Suppose that we take "benefit" to simply mean money. What German wants to say is that working class men do not procure monetary benefits from living in a society that oppresses women, but the ruling class does. She offers two arguments in defense of that claim. First, a labor market in which men and women are divided, with women forced to accept lower wages and worse jobs, does not benefit working men as members of the working class. That is, this sort of labor market drives down wages across the board, making all workers worse off. Second, the ruling class directly benefits from dividing and conquering the labor market along gender lines, since the strength of a united class would be far more effective in bargaining for a larger share of ruling class profits. Notice that this is a counter-factual claim. That is, it asks us to imagine a contrary-to-fact scenario (i.e. one in which the working class isn't divided, but united) in order to make its point. Since a united working class, one without internal hierarchies and relations of domination, would be much better for all workers, it follows that internal inequalities within the working class are not in it's long-run interest as a class.

Now, for my part, I think both of these arguments are sound. First of all, a divided labor market is worse for workers and better for employers, hence why employers love "two tiered" pension plans, etc. etc. When workers compete amongst themselves for jobs, be it through "legitimate" means (i.e. by "meritocratic" means) or "illegitimate" means (i.e. by means of coercion, power, etc.), capitalists benefit because this increases their bargaining power vis-a-vis labor. When the strength of capital relative to labor increases, wages tend to fall. The converse is true: when the strength of labor relative to capital increases, labor is able to secure a larger fraction of profits. Also, the counter-factual scenario described above does make clear that a genuinely egalitarian and united working class would be the best scenario for the class as a whole.

But does this establish German's answer to the "who benefits?" question? I do not think that it does. Let's stick with the "monetary" interpretation of "benefit" (I'll consider other forms of "benefit" later). Is it in fact true that working class men don't draw any such benefits from the oppression of women? The answer, I think, is no: working class men do benefit from the oppression of women. Let's consider some examples. Take divorce. Studies show that the living standards of women tend, on average, to substantially drop after divorce, whereas men's living standards go up. That trend, German would surely agree, exists because we live in a society in which women are oppressed, thus the difference in monetary benefit from divorce derives from oppression. Yet men consistently come out on top, and thus benefit from it. Were arrangements to change such that men's living standards didn't go up on average after divorce, they would thereby lose a material benefit.

Now, German can reply here as follows: "but this is small potatoes compared to the benefits the ruling class garners from a sexist labor market and a sexual division of labor in the home". And she's right, as far as the claim goes. But replying in this way concedes my point: working class men do benefit, albeit in particular ways that don't mesh with their overall class interests, from the oppression of women. That's in part how sexism reproduces itself over time: some men are reluctant to give up benefits and privileges (however small, in the grand scheme of things) granted to them by sexist social relations. And this is also in part why the divide-and-conquer tactics of the ruling class are effective in some cases. After all, if the divide-and-conquer tactics didn't include some promise of a small benefit (small in comparison to the large overall gains that could be won without divisions), they wouldn't work. To say that men don't benefit at all is to lack an explanation of how the ruling class is sometimes able to successfully divide and conquer on the basis of gender oppression.

Think of it this way. Suppose that a sexist male worker has a balance sheet that adds up all of the relevant benefits and costs that pertain to his status. I agree, along with German, that there should be a large red entry in the "costs" column that makes clear what the worker is losing as a result of living in a capitalist society in which the working class is divided, and thus more easily conquered, by capital. But that doesn't mean that there aren't going to be any small green entries in the "benefit" column. Though they will be canceled out by the large red entry in "costs" column, there are still going to be entries in the "benefit" column.

Or take this example of benefiting from sexism. Imagine a household in which a married man and woman, both employed and both working class, abide by a traditional sexist division of labor at home. The woman works what we might call a "double day", that is, she puts in her paid 40 hrs a week at work, but returns home do her second shift of hard domestic labor for no pay. Suppose she is hard at work washing dishes while her husband relaxes on the couch and reads a stimulating novel. Would we really say that the man isn't benefiting from this sexist division of labor? To be sure, we can imagine a world that was better for both the man and the woman in which domestic labor wasn't privatized and unpaid, but socialized and equitably distributed. This arrangement would grant both parties greater benefits than they (respectively) receive in the status quo. But though this arrangement is a surely goal worth fighting for, it's a counter-factual scenario. The "who benefits?" question, however, pertains to the actual world. And in the sexist world we actually live in, the man on the couch is befitting in the short term, since he enjoys the fruits of his wife's labor while he reclines and reads.

And there are still other examples of benefits. For instance, in a sexist labor market, individual male workers benefit from having more job options available to them. Moreover, they benefit, as individual male workers, from their ability to more easily get promoted, get raises, etc. in the workplace. These benefits are real, material facts about our society. To be sure, qua worker, it is not in the overall class interest of male workers to exclude and subordinate any other members of their class. Each member of the working class is stronger when the class as a whole is stronger. From the narrow perspective of earnings, sexist working class men stand to benefit much more from united working class action than they do from the status quo. But that doesn't mean that men don't, in the mean time, gather various monetary benefits from living in a sexist society. Even though capital benefits long-term from sexism in a way that workers don't, it doesn't follow that no working class men benefit from it. Beyond being false, this claim creates confusion and has the potential to alienate left-wing allies who are drawn to socialist (and, in particular, Marxist) politics in a time of economic crisis.

So, I think the socialist Left can do without the "working men don't benefit from sexism" claim. First off, even from the perspective of monetary benefits, we've seen that the claim is false. Second, when we broaden the meaning of "benefit" the claim is even less plausible. There are innumerable examples here, but think, for instance, of the way that many young girls are socialized to be less confident in answering questions in a math class, whereas boys are socialized to think they should always "speak up" and answer such questions confidently. That isn't straight-forwardly monetary, but it is a benefit that boys enjoy (whether they want to or not) because of sexist gender norms in the socialization process. Saying that men don't benefit at all obscures these facts.

Still, socialists have extremely valuable, indeed essential, points to make in these discussions. It is true that the question "who benefits?" requires an answer that is class-specific. Saying "men as a whole benefit" is imprecise- since men of different classes may benefit in different ways (or, in some cases, some men may not benefit at all). Moreover, it also needs to be said that not every form of womens' oppression generates a direct benefit to men. Take "beauty" norms. Women are pressured to comply with oppressive norms that specify how they are to dress, what they are to look like, etc. Moreover, these norms pressure women into buying all sorts of expensive products, chemicals, etc. in order to live up to the standards placed before them. But, although men don't have to deal with this particular load of shit, they aren't really benefiting from the fact that women do have to deal with it. They are off the hook, sure. But that's more of a "negative" benefit than a positive one. It's not as though mens lives are better because women are forced to comply with all of these oppressive norms. To be sure, mens lives would be worse if they were similarly forced to comply. But just because something would be worse, it doesn't follow that I benefit from not enduring it. I wouldn't say that I benefit from the fact that I'm not being electrocuted right now. It is, to be sure, a privilege not to be oppressed in some particular way. But having the privilege of not being oppressed is not the same as directly benefiting from the continued existence of a form of oppression. This distinction is important. Sometimes this sort of privilege overlaps with certain benefits, but I would wager that it doesn't always overlap.

What, I think, motivates arguments like that put forward by German is the worry that if one admits that working class men benefit from sexism, one must admit that the working class is too fractured and divided to be capable of uniting to fight the ruling class. But that's not so. The idea that it is impossible for the working class to unite emerges from other sources (e.g. for an influential statement of the impossibility claim see Laclau and Mouffe's arguments in favor of this thesis in their Hegemony and Socialist Strategy). Drawing attention to the ways in which some sections of the working class derive benefits from oppressing other workers does not undermine the possibility of working class unity. Nor does it commit us to controversial concepts like the "labor aristocracy" or the like. On the contrary, such a critique of schisms among working class people is a necessary precondition to working class solidarity. Solidarity is an egalitarian idea that presupposes relations of equality and respect; there cannot be solidarity between two groups when one is actively involved in the oppression of another. Socialists have long realized this, and the history of the socialist Left is filled with interventions by Marxists arguing against racism, sexism and other forms of oppression from within the ranks of the labor movement.

Finally, the socialist counter-factual claim discussed above is powerful and can't be re-stated enough: if things were to radically change and the working class did overcome its internal divisions and inequalities... there would be no difficulty in bringing the basic structure of our society under democratic, community control in order to service human needs rather than profit. It is only the basis of having built such a working-class movement that we can really talk about building a socialist society, that is, an egalitarian society based on freedom, equality and solidarity. Any politics that promises full liberation without overcoming the domination of the ruling class is complicit in the continued domination of human beings by the iron laws of profit.

[Postscript: There is also a further complication here that concerns the notion of "benefit". In one sense, "benefit" is analogous to "good for someone". "Good for", of course, could be read (in an Aristotelian spirit) as "conducive to one's flourishing or well-being". Now, upon reflection, few of us would want to say that it is good for someone to oppress another. While they might acquire certain material privileges by means of oppression, they would nonetheless fall short of flourishing. Being oppressive is not a character trait we would associate with flourishing or living well; on the contrary, we understand such behavior to be a vice, something that evinces internal obstacles to flourishing. So, in this sense, we could say that men don't benefit from sexism since it is not good for them to be oppressors. It would be better, even from the perspective of their own well-being, if they weren't oppressive but rather more disposed to want to stand in relations of equality vis-a-vis women. This, of course, probably isn't the interpretation of "benefit" most people have in mind when they discuss the "who benefits?" question.]

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Is Slutwalk Advancing the Feminist Cause?

(photo (via Flickr) by Rick Carroll)

There's an excellent post over at The F Word on this topic. I encourage everyone to read the post and to check out the site (although I have to admit that I haven't yet figured out how the comments thread works over there yet).

Given that I agree with most of the premises that the author puts forward (i.e. that blaming-the-victim is toxic, that women are justified in being angry, that we need to fight back, etc.), I was struck by the fact that she arrived at a different overall assessment of the event than I did. Though the author herself doesn't put the point this way, I think it's fair to say that she concludes that we should answer the above question in the negative. Or, at the very least, she gives us reason to think that the politics of using (or, if you like, re-deploying, reclaiming, etc.) the word "slut" are questionable.

She begins the post by saying a lot of things that I strongly agree with:

Victim blaming is one of the most insidious, abusive, and traumatic experiences a woman can go through. Not only have we been assaulted, had to come out and admit/describe the assault (terrifying in and of itself), but then we are treated as though we somehow instigated, deserved, or imagined the assault. It is sick. I have witnessed it and I have experienced it. No woman should ever be told that she must stay inside in order to ‘avoid being raped’ or that her clothing or her actions or her behaviour or her level of intoxication somehow made her deserving of sexual assault. With this in mind, I can certainly get behind Slutwalk’s message. I am glad that we have had enough, and I am glad that we’re getting pissed off.

But, she suggests, there is more to Slutwalk than the above suggests. One of her worries is that the discussions surrounding Slutwalk (on the facebook discussion threads in particular) seem to avoid the issue of feminism as such. Moreover, she detects a thread of "post-feminism" in the discussions as well. As she puts it:

I saw numerous attacks on radical feminism and radical feminists and I witnessed the reinforcement of negative and untrue stereotypes about feminism (you know the ones: man-hating, misandrist, no-fun, sex-negative, etc). While I do believe the organizers had good intentions, desiring that Slutwalk be inclusive to all, it began to look a lot like the ‘funfeminist’ – NO NO WE’RE THE CONVENTIONALLY ATTRACTIVE FEMINISTS. THE FUN ONES. WE’RE OK. WE LIKE PENISES AND PORN AND LOOKING SEXY kind of feminism that, in the end doesn’t successfully challenge much of anything, and simply repackages sexist imagery in ‘empowering’ wrapping paper.

Again, I agree on all accounts here. This maneuver of reinforcing false stereotypes about second-wave feminism while pandering to the status quo should be criticized and challenged by the Left. This frustrating ideology (what I derisively call "post feminism") attempts to appropriate many of the hard-fought gains of second-wave feminism while caricaturing and distancing itself from the very political movement that won the gains in the first place. Though the author doesn't mention it, there's also a close cousin of this regressive "post feminist" ideology, namely, the "feminism just means whatever individuals want it to mean" view. I've criticized this view elsewhere, but I digress.

The second main point of criticism leveled at Slutwalk concerns the politics of the word "slut". This is an instance of a difficult, delicate political question for which, I think, no general answers are available. That question has to do with whether to appropriate or redeploy originally oppressive terms (e.g. queer) for emancipatory purposes. Personally, my view is that the question of whether "strategically re-deploying" certain words is politically sound can only be answered in concrete, particular contexts. Still, the concrete question of whether to redeploy "slut" in the present context remains.

I must say that I'm conflicted on this question. To be sure, I think that the notion of "re-claiming" the term is wrong-headed. It was never claimed in the first place, so it can't very well be re-claimed at this point in time. The question has to be whether to appropriate it and, in a "Bulterian" fashion, "strategically re-deploy" it in order to disrupt the slut/virgin ideology by exploding it from within. At the very least, it has to be said that the "Bulterian" position has the virtue of recognizing that the social meaning of contested political concepts is itself political, up for grabs, etc. Still, I don't think this concession answers our question. Is using the word "slut" a progressive move?

As I say, I'm conflicted, so my answer is "yes and no". I say no because I worry about the "post-feminist" problems discussed above. Moreover, I'm not yet convinced that it really is effective to simply pick up the word as it is and try to do emancipatory things with it. I'm not convinced that "re-deploying" the concept in this context really will have the effect of disrupting the way that the oppressive slut/virgin dichotomy functions. I'm worried that precisely the opposite will happen.

But I also think that the use of "slut" by Slutwalk has progressive potential, but not because of any Bulterian story about redeployment. It has progressive potential because it completely shifts the burden of argument off the backs of victimized women and onto the sexists who insist on focusing the discussion of sexual violence on what women wear, etc. That is, given its most progressive interpretation, Slutwalk in effect says: "Fine, suppose I do dress like a "slut". Suppose I do it intentionally. Even in this case, it's still absolutely absurd to suggest that I am somehow to blame for being violently assaulted. It doesn't fucking matter what women are wearing -that's entirely beside the point. What matters is shutting sexual violence down by any means necessary." In other words, Slutwalk aims to completely shift the discussion from what individual women are wearing to the social and political problem of sexual violence in contemporary capitalist societies.

Also, one final point of friendly disagreement. Social movements are messy and the politics in them are up for grabs. Not everyone in the anti-war movement, for example, opposes the war for the right reasons, some people are against some wars and not others, etc. In short, the politics in social movements aren't always consistent, progressive, or plausible. So, radicals, feminists, socialists, etc. have to know this going in. We cannot refuse to participate on the grounds that too many in the movement are presently of a "post feminist" persuasion. That's something we have to do our best to change through discussion, argument, and participation in the movement. In fact, the more radicals involved in Slutwalk who are ready to change peoples minds and challenge them to reject facile "post feminist" politics the better. Even progressive movements are sites of political struggle. Dominant and ruling class ideas are present there as well- and it's the job of radicals to participate and agitate within those movements to encourage them to be as confident, ambitious, and radical as possible.

So, while I agree with many of the criticisms of Slutwalk put forward in the post, I think participation is crucial for radicals. There hasn't been much of anything in the way of feminist-esque acticism in the US for too long. Very recently there were some mobilizations by pro-choice groups against the assault on Planned Parenthood. I think one basic task of radicals right now has got to be to help draw the connections between Slutwalk and those recent marches. We have to put forward the argument that the US desperately needs another women's movement that is organized and willing to fight for a complete and total dismantling of gender oppression and sexism. We won't ever win that argument unless we're on the front lines talking with the participants in Slutwalk, many of whom may have never participated in a political event in their lives. Their views are still in the making, and radicals can make a difference in winning new folks to ideas that have been marginalized since the 1960s and 70s.

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From the Archives: Feminism or Feminism(s)?

One more, from 2009. This argument is still relevant in light of the somewhat recent controversy in the feminist blogosphere regarding Jessica Valenti's refusal to speak on a panel with an anti-feminist right-winger. Enjoy!

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In the feminist blogosphere, I sometimes run across the following argument.

"There isn't one, monolithic feminism. There's always already feminism(s) and there are as many diverse feminism(s) as there are people. Feminism(s) mean different things to different people"

I find this kind of patronizing, for one. This line is always laid down as though it said something profound, but the fact of the matter is that it is a half-baked platitude. It's one thing to take note of the political dynamics of the disagreements and contestations coming from the margins, which were aimed at the (largely) white, liberal, middle-class, straight feminist projects that had come to present themselves as the only game in town. But it is quite another thing to propagate the facile conclusion that feminism really just means whatever individual persons want it to mean.

In fact, you can't really understand what those very contestations and interventions (e.g. from black feminists like Angela Davis and bell hooks, revolutionary lesbians like Monique Wittig, feminists writing the wake of colonialism, deconstructive feminists like Butler, etc.) were about unless you unequivocally reject the idea that feminism can mean whatever certain individuals want it to mean. For if it were true that feminism just is the plurality of existing views, norms, and relations of power regarding gender and sexuality, then there wouldn't be much point at all in contesting the way that mainstream feminists were paving over forms of oppression that didn't form a central part of their own experience. If "feminism" just means whatever individuals want it to mean willy-nilly, then the practice of criticizing white liberal feminism from the margins couldn't be intelligible.

That is to say, according to those who sing the timeless praises of "singularity" as such, difference as such, and pluralism as such, etc. it would appear that bell hooks, Monique Wittig, Angela Davis, Patricia Hill Collins, and many others did something seriously wrong. How dare they, you might think, contest or launch political interventions aimed at dismantling certain mainstream feminist theories and practices, when they ought to have left well enough alone and let those myopically white and middle class straight feminists "express their individuality and difference"? How dare they tell those white, middle class feminists what to do! Uh oh, its the 'feminist police'!

This is, of course, preposterous. There is a world of difference between making the totally valid sociological observation on the one hand that there is widespread disagreement about what feminism is and should be committed to doing, and on the other, claiming that there is an endless plurality of things feminism can mean for different people. The latter only obscures the actual concrete political dynamics of what gets to count as feminism by whitewashing important disagreements as simply 'different expressions of plurality'. When Judith Butler wrote Gender Trouble, I doubt very seriously (for more reasons than I can count) that she would have said that she was merely expressing her individuality and adding yet another brand of feminism to the endless shelf of pluralism. Her book caused such a stir because it was a trenchant critique of a certain way of thinking about feminist politics, it expressed disagreements and offered arguments aiming to undermine what others thought feminism entailed.

Notice also, that if the 'endless pluralism' story were right, there would be absolutely no way to identify cynical imposters who called themselves feminists disingenuously. For instance, imagine that Rush Limbaugh decided, without changing anything about himself whatsoever, to simply call himself a "feminist". (This is already happening with Sarah Palin, btw). Could anyone who grasps what the tradition of feminist politics means actually take him at face value? Could we really bear to label his political commitments as 'solidly radical feminist' just because he claims we should? The problem here, of course, is that the 'many feminism(s)'-'endless plurality' story would have no way to contest Limbaugh's claim. For if they were right, they'd have have no reason to want to contest Rush's claims at all. Think about it. He'd simply be expressing what feminism meant to him and proving their point that there really are only feminisms and a wide plurality of views. They'd have no grounds for understanding the politics of what is and is not feminism.

If feminism has to do with liberation from oppression, it cannot mean whatever individual people want it to mean. Meaning is never a matter of individual whim. Pretending that it is, however, is hardly a subversive move, but a thought-act wholly welcomed by contemporary consumer culture. This faux-individualist megalomania is encouraged by existing relations of power, and it is a powerful narrative running through ideological "arguments" about social mobility, debates about redistributive taxation, into the ways that people are encouraged to think of themselves in terms of the various consumer preferences they have, and so on. Buy, buy, buy! Consume, we're told. Give in to your consumerist fantasies and lust after immediately gratifying fixes! And shame on you if you stop to think about what this whole individualist, consumerist picture might amount to... that's to commit the sin of "telling others how to live their lives". "The personal is political" is a feminist slogan. "Everything is personal and nothing may be criticized" is not feminist or radical at all, this is the conservative message of contemporary capitalism. Banal also is this notion of 'if it feels good do it', 'live and let live', etc. These are not emancipatory anthems, but hackneyed advertisement jingles for the status quo.

But in reality, even superficial critical engagement with our culture and society quickly reveals that we are constantly told how to live our lives, how to think about our bodies, how to think about gender norms, how to dress, how to behave, etc. Feminism is a project aiming to uncover and ruthlessly submit these features of contemporary culture to critique (with a view to overturning them).

Feminism is an unremittingly critical political project. At its best it leaves no cultural, social or political phenomenon uncriticized. But pulling this 'just let women do what they want' line is dishonest. Should feminists condone what Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, and the Anita Bryants of the world say? Is Sarah Palin a feminist? Of course not. And we have a name for people who say otherwise: post-feminists.

Feminists who say "just let people believe what they already believe" are no feminists at all. Feminism is supposed to be about criticizing and challenging existing relations of power. It's supposed to be about shredding oppressive norms that have come to appear to many as 'natural'. Anything less is complicit with oppression.

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On the Allegations Against Assange

Julian Assange, the spokesman for Wikileaks, stands accused of sexual assault in Sweden. It is well-known that U.S. officials have been scrambling to find something, anything to charge him for in order to try to stop him from doing what he does.

The mere existence of Wikileaks is a threat to the integrity and continued dominance of the U.S. military-industrial complex. To be sure, the whistle-blower website hardly has the power to topple this punishing machine on its own -for that we'd need a mass movement in the belly of the beast. But it is still a serious threat- a threat to the smooth functioning of the U.S. military machine. It is not for nothing, then, that elites are livid. If I were Assange, I would fear for my life- the U.S. government has a long tradition of carrying out political assassinations.

So in this context, it is a bit unsettling that Interpol has issued an international warrant for Assange based on the allegations he faces in Sweden. Whatever it is that is alleged to have occurred in Sweden, and I'll get to that in a moment, you can bet that Interpol and international power brokers don't really give a shit. They just want to bring Assange down by any possible means, solely because of his political role in Wikileaks.

But it is a separate question whether Assange committed rape. I myself have no idea whether he did or not- but I will tell you that much of the response to the question has been dismissive and sexist. For example, from Counterpunch:

"Ardin has written and published on her blog a “revenge instruction”, describing how to commit a complete character assassination to legally destroy a person who “should be punished for what he did”. If the offence was of a sexual nature, the revenge also must also be sex-related, she wrote. Ardin was involved in Gender Studies in Uppsala University, in charge of gender equality in the Students’ Union, a junior inquisitor of sorts.

In other words, she was perfect for the job."

Perfect for the job, huh? Because she worked in a Gender Studies department and was involved in work enforcing gender equality? That sounds to me like feminist-baiting. The caricature is well-known enough: feminists are always women, they are always "man haters" and they are just out for "revenge". They might as well have just called her a "bitch".

Now, I'm not really interested in Ardin the person, what her politics really are, etc. I'm just noting that she's been impugned for allegedly being a feminist, etc. as in the above quote from Counterpunch. It might turn out that she is a CIA agent, and it would hardly matter for the point I'm making here: there should be nothing illicit or suspicious about being a feminist, fighting for gender equality, and so on.

The other layer of the sexism here has to do with the talk about the legal dimensions of rape. It seems to be a favorite line of many sexists that, somehow, all cases of rape are the fault of the woman, on the one hand, or simply malicious acts of "defamation" waged by bitter women that "hate men" on the other. I've read bits about this issue on several websites that more or less invoked these very tropes.

I've also seen character defenses of Assange to the effect that "he simply couldn't have committed rape... he's a great guy who does a lot of good political work!". That's non-sense. As I note above, he is a great guy who does a lot of good political work, to be sure. But that is not a defense in a court of law for a good reason: it has nothing whatsoever to do with whether he did, or did not, sexually assault someone. They don't call it the ad hominem fallacy for nothing.

I've also seen complaints about the allegations that are so general in their attacks that, if generalized, they would to rule out the possibility of conviction in any rape case whatsoever. That's clearly reactionary. As is well-known, the U.S. legal system is woefully unable to address the problem of rape. It's not surprising, then, that a very small percentage of rapes are even reported, and a far small number ever conclude in a conviction. The system is set up against the interests of women.

As far as I can tell, none of this has anything to do with imperialism, the politics of whistle-blowing, hacktivism or global power plays. That is, none of the business in Sweden, whatever the facts are, has anything whatsoever to do with the politics of Wikileaks.

Now, the powers that be want us to think that it does. They want us to think that the allegations in Sweden are a knock against Wikileaks itself. They want us to, irrationally, let the U.S. war machine off the hook because of something Assange, the man, did or didn't do in his personal life. That's clearly bullshit.

So let's not buy into the imperialist narrative. Whatever did or did not happen in Sweden is a separate issue- let's not shit on feminism because the U.S. war machine sucks. And let's not use this as an excuse to further the oppressive myth that rape accusations are always about some "vindictive" feminist scholar looking to castrate some innocent, angelic man.

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Stop Street Harassment Blog

Here.

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Should we legislate against cat-calling: I say yes

But the suggestion in a recent post by Jill at Feministe is "no". She doesn't give reasons why not in the post, but in the comments thread her reasoning is, in part, that "the problem with trying to ban street harassment is that it’s (a) a First Amendment issue, and (b) a practicality issue".

She also suggests that since we're "talking about things that happen in public spaces, like on the street" there should not be any legislative action, whereas "in private spaces — at your office — or in places like schools, there are different rules, and there should be recourse for harassment."

I agree that the personal is political. But that doesn't mean that the public ceases to be political. The point of politicizing the personal, the private sphere if you like, wasn't in order to drain politics out of the public sphere. If harassment and sexist intimidation should be outlawed anywhere, I would have thought that the public sphere would have been the first place place to start. Public space is supposed to be that space in which we should all be able to comfortably appear as equals, free from domination, intimidation or shame.

So, I disagree rather sharply with Jill's suggestion that because the street is public, it should therefore be a space in which harassment is protected. I would have wanted to draw precisely the opposite inference.

Also, I'm perplexed most of the time when it is suggested that something is a "free speech issue". That seems to me, often, to be a way of avoiding talking about the politics of the situation. To be sure, freedom of speech --the idea that the State shouldn't coercively prevent people from making their reasoned views known in public spaces-- is worth fighting for.

But rather than too quickly assuming that such free speech is a good thing and leaving it at that, I think it's worth asking why we care about protecting the right to free speech discussed above.

There are many reasons one could give here, but the most convincing one for me is that we want the public sphere to be one of openness, free from intimidation, discrimination and domination. So if we're for freedom of speech, our main question, then, must be: how do we best foster public spheres of openness and equality?

It seems to me a deep mistake, and one often committed by liberals, to assume that we achieve this by simply removing the State from the picture. As the second-wave feminist movement uncompromisingly pointed out in the 60s and 70s: when you remove the State you don't get a realm of pure equality and freedom. You get private institutions, organizations, roles, norms, practices, etc. that are structured hierarchically. When you look at the vast majority of non-State social institutions (e.g. churches, schools, clubs, media organizations, workplaces, etc.), you see elements of patriarchy, among other things. This fact about private social institutions was the motivation for the famous feminist slogan that the "personal is political". The idea was that when you looked in places where the State proper did not reach, you nonetheless found power and domination that needed to be dealt with politically, not on an individual-to-individual basis.

So, what we see here is that fostering spaces of openness --the precondition of having freedom of speech-- isn't accomplished by simply removing the State from the picture. Instead, fostering openness is accomplished by reconfiguring basic social institutions and public spaces in such a way that people can appear before others as equals, free from domination, shame, intimidation, etc. For my part, I see no plausible reason not to use every tool at our disposal to accomplish that goal. Excluding the legal or legislative changes from our toolkit strikes me as dogmatic.

For these reasons, I don't see a good reason not to consider a legislative onslaught against street harassment. I'm not convinced that claiming that this is a "First Amendment Issue" means that we should not legislate against harassment. On the contrary, any plausible interpretation of the spirit of First Amendment seems suggest that we should legislate against it.

Moreover, if we cannot structure our own public spaces democratically, then I don't know what democracy is for. Public space is, by definition, space that is open to all of us. But it is not a space where anything goes --violence, sexual assault, oppression, and subordination should not be welcome. If democracy is good for anything at all --it is good for enabling us to collectively decide what norms we want to structure the public spaces we share in common. So its hard for me to see why we shouldn't be able to collectively decide whether or not we want our public spaces to be ones in which harassment and domination is tolerated. To reject this seems to me to reject the role of collective self-rule in a democratic society.

Jill also suggests in the post that "I actually don’t agree with hate speech laws either." Perhaps that is the crux of the disagreement. I would have thought that hate speech was the paradigm of speech that doesn't deserve to be protected. Perhaps the thought is that the political community should be neutral about whether or not something is hateful, and thus refrain from banning it. But for my part, I don't think there's anything neutral about hate speech. Hate speech, as the name implies, is not speech that expresses some reasonable opinion or view that we might disagree with but nonetheless understand and tolerate. It is not "one contender" among many competing views about how to treat others. Hate speech is an expression of oppressive social norms that function to sustain existing inequalities of power. As such, it has no claim to being protected. There's no slippery slope here. If we have a clear idea, more or less, what is hateful and what is not, I don't see why we wouldn't want our laws to structure public spaces in such a way that puts a damper on oppressive speech.

Now some are bound to disagree here because they think that leaving "hate" open to interpretation is dangerous. Because we can't specify what all cases of hate share ex ante in a "fully directive" law, this kind of legislation leaves the door open for abuse. I think objection misses the mark. Lots of laws can't be fully directive, and we wouldn't always want them to be if they could. To be sure, some interpretation and deliberation will be required to parse out serious cases of oppressive street harassment, but is that a problem? I would have thought that laws which, as legal philosopher Seana Shiffrin puts it, "induce deliberation" would have the advantage of sparking public discussion and critical reflection. And since when has it ever been the case that we didn't need to think critically and reflect on how generalized laws apply to specific cases? I don't think the law is ever that simple. The slippery-slope worries here seem rather empty when you think through how unfounded they are.

Perhaps there are better reasons for recoiling from legislative action here, but I cant see what they are.

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WBM Strikes Again

I'm not sure whether I'd recommend reading all of it (it's a waste of time), but skimming for gems like the following might be of interest.

"But if you look at the history of the idea of neoliberalism you can see fairly quickly that neoliberalism arises as a kind of commitment precisely to those things [i.e. anti-racism, anti-sexism, etc.]."

This man is a charlatan. If you want to understand where neoliberalism came from and why it emerged when it did, read David Harvey. To say that it arises "precisely as a commitment to anti-racism" is preposterous, and politically reactionary to boot. It's classic blame-the-victim. Neoliberalism began to emerge in the early 70s as a class project to reconsolidate power and roll-back the gains from the period between 1935-1970. What was happening in 1970 in terms of anti-racist struggle? Well, prominent members of the anti-capitalist Black Panther Party were being murdered in their sleep by the State. In what universe could that, or the eruptions of black rebellion all over the country in the late 1960s, have in fact represented a "commitment to" neoliberalism. It's quite obvious that WBM's not interested in a serious confrontation with historical facts; on the contrary, he's happy to rewrite events to fit his "anti-racists and anti-sexists caused neoliberalism" fantasy.

Here's another gem:

"The truth is, it’s hard to find any political movement that’s really against neoliberalism today, the closest I can come is the Tea Party. The Tea Party represents in my view, not actually a serious, because it’s so inchoate and it’s so in a certain sense diluted, but nonetheless a real reaction against neoliberalism that is not simply a reaction against neoliberalism from the old racist Right. It’s a striking fact that what the American Left mainly wants to do is reduce the Tea Party to racists as quickly as humanly possible. They’re thrilled when some Nazis come out and say “Yeah, we support the Tea Party” or some member of the Tea Party says something racist, which is frequently enough. But you can’t understand the real politics of the Tea Party unless you understand how important their opposition to illegal immigration is."

Wow. The only problem with the tea-baggers is that they are "inchoate" and "diluted". Hmm. Interesting...

I can't even say that 2% of that quote above is true. Maybe 1% insofar as some tea-baggers' angst derives from legitimate grievances (e.g. social misery visited upon them by capitalism) which then manifests itself as racism or xenophobia. But, in a way, isn't that true of WBM as well? Isn't he toeing the classic Right populist line, i.e. "soft" complaints about capitalist inequality coupled with a vitriolic hatred for struggles against racial or sexual oppression?

Also, to say that a group dedicated to liquidating government's role in public life is dedicated to fighting neoliberalism is to wear one's ignorance on one's sleeve. Hasn't WBM read about the Koch brothers and the obvious astro-turf "roots" of the Tea Bagger edifice? Hasn't he paid any attention to real Left movements of late against neoliberalism, such as teachers and students struggling to stop school closings, or this for example?

WBM's point about dismissing the tea baggers as racists reeks of utter disdain for the entire idea of criticizing racism. Of course, there is a facile way of calling a person "racist" in such a way that it seems to just mean "you're an evil person", where that has some important connection to that person's intentions. But all of the politically sharp and critical ways of fighting racism give a more nuanced story here. The manifest content of the Tea Bagger phenomenon is racist; they are in the business of scapegoating and slandering people of color and blaming them for the crisis we're in. Now, what's interesting is that there is a substantial contingent of Tea Baggers who voted Obama; clearly, there are interesting things to say about how the impotence and powerlessness of some of these confused folks is finding an outlet in the false promise of racist hatred. But WBM doesn't pursue this thought; he follows the Tea Bagger thought and gives it an academic veneer.

Also, what he says about immigration is completely inept. The populist attack from the Right against "illegal immigration" is not, as we have seen with SB1070, an attack on the merely "illegal" part. That is already to paint the whole thing in "law and order" terms and basically accept the Right's dubious frame hook, line and sinker. Ask any tea bagger if they think we should make immigration legal and accessible and they'll start whining to you about "amnesty". What they want (ask Joe Arpaio, for example) is for "all those people" to "get out". They want to ethnically cleanse large parts of this country and make it "pure American" again. And many have rightly said that this kind of politics is proto-fascist. The anti-immigrant Right in this country is xenophobic to the core. It's no accident that they often pursue english-only policies, and strongly support police harassment and repression of people with brown skin (whether or not they are documented). And then there are the "Minutemen" who shoot people (women and children included) on the border to stop them from "breaking the law". Perhaps they are renegades against neoliberalism as well?

Now, of course the spike in xenophobia and anti-immigrant (as well as islamophobic) racism has something to do with the crisis. But WBM botches that point (see above) so badly that it verges on an apologia for tea-bagger racism. I remind you that anti-immigrant fascist movements in Europe have also been galvanized by the crisis and have been picking up steam in recent years. These are interesting questions, but WBM has no nuanced understanding of them.

Check out the passage where he claims that Glenn Beck is in fact unconsciously a left-winger who has an "important" position on immigration. Who knew?

Again, his complete lack of understanding of immigration, racism, class and ideology is staggering. Do we need any more proof that this man is not really on the Left? This man's facile scapegoating is politically corrosive, and isn't going to help build the kind of broad movements we need to fight against exploitation and oppression. This is a smug, old white man complaining about things that have never mattered to him: fighting sexism and racism. Of course neoliberalism (and, I might add, even more "friendly" versions of capitalism) are bad. But do we really need WBM to tell us that? And can we really make sense of that claim with all of WBM's Right-wing garbage tacked onto it?

Perhaps he should just stick to writing facile polemics against literary theory to the effect that texts simply mean what their authors want them to mean (making WBM the literary equivalent of Antonin Scalia).

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Nice summary of sex/gender distinction

The following is adapted from Alison Stone's excellent An Introduction to Feminist Philosophy. I thought it was a particularly succinct and clear account of the matters discussed below.

Accept for the moment that there is some biologically specifiable notion of "sex", although we note this notion of "sex" would not be binary, but clustered or continuous. Gender, in contrast, would be precisely that set of "social expectations and norms governing what behaviors and traits are appropriate for male and female individuals."

These social expectations, or norms, "are conveyed to individuals by other people and by being embodied in institutions and in cultural artifacts, such as films and novels. Institutions are humanly created organizations that shape social life, such as the state, law, the family, the health service [haha... not in the USA! -t] and the media. These expectations or norms specify which behaviors are masculine and which are feminine. People and institutions enforce expectations by applying rewards and punishments. For example, if girls are expected to be deferential, then they will be punished or receive negative responses when they behave assertively".

Stone continues: "Masculinity and femininity are social position or roles. According to sociologists, a role is a position within society (e.g. the position of teacher, the position of parent). Each role is defined by a set of norms about how those occupying this role should behave. Each role is defined in relation to other roles: what is expected of teachers depends on what is expected of pupils and vice versa."

Importantly, "individuals are not only expected to perform the actions appropriate to their gender, they are also expected to identify, or understand, themselves as members of that gender."

We may expand upon this provisional definition of gender as follows. Gender "consists of (1) norms which are embodied in social practices and which regulate masculine and feminine behavior, (2) the habitual ways of acting that people acquire because of those norms, and (3) the bodily features that people acquire because of these ways of acting."

The claims above may seem obvious and innocent to many of us, but they are material for forming some pretty radical political inferences.

Stone also explores prominent criticisms of the sex/gender distinction from, for example, Butler and Gatens, but concludes that a suitably revised version of the concept of sex is defensible. (Compare with Butler, who argues that any claim about sex necessarily entails a claim about gender). The conception that Stone has in mind is one that is thin (rather than expansive and deterministic), continuous (rather than discrete, binary), and one that picks out clusters of biological features of bodies because those very features reinforce one another biologically. Here conception thus avoids the sexist error of subsuming bodily features under a purportedly discrete "sex" on the basis of social expectations (rather than biology). Anyway- I'm not going to dwell on these interesting debates (although, incidentally, I'm disposed to agree with Stone) at the moment- I just wanted to share a bit from this excellent introduction to feminist philosophy.

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Hilarious anti-feminist letter in LRB from 1992

The following is a letter to the editor of LRB regarding a book review by G.A. Cohen:

Vol. 14 No. 12 · 25 June 1992

From E.J. Mishan

Much as I enjoyed Professor Cohen’s review of Thomas Nagel’s Equality and Partiality (LRB, 14 May), it was hardly possible to avoid noticing his recourse to ‘she’ and ‘her’ instead of the standard ‘he’ and ‘him’ to indicate either sex. Is this departure from grammatical convention a bid to establish enlightened credentials, or is it part of his private campaign to add the weight of his authority to the promotion of peripheral women’s lib desiderata? The traditional usage of ‘he’ as an alternative to ‘one’ goes back centuries and – notwithstanding the exigencies of fashion – is wholly unambiguous. In contrast, the self-conscious departure from common usage in this respect invariably imparts something of a mental jolt to the reader.

Perhaps the editors will agree that occasional recourse to this practice does nothing to realise the goals of the women’s liberation movement. These goals, in any case, are being realised chiefly through economic forces: with the growth of mass affluence in the West, affordable domestic labour-saving innovations have made housewives all but expendable. And while such innovations push women out of the home, so do other innovations facilitate their employment in industry and commerce.

There is really no call, then, for our hyper-conscientious progressives to subscribe to the more eccentric tactics of those ‘conscious-raising’ zealots scattered along the fringes of the feminist movement.

E.J. Mishan
London NW11

This is hilarious. This guy is really pissed off because G.A. Cohen didn't unreflectively adhere to a traditional, sexist norm of language use.

But I actually agree with some of what Mr. (presumably, right?) Mishan has to say. I agree with him when he writes that "the traditional usage of ‘he’ as an alternative to ‘one’ goes back centuries and – notwithstanding the exigencies of fashion – is wholly unambiguous." This is true. The traditional use of "he" and "mankind" is unambiguous: male pronouns, and perhaps men in general, are alleged to be the appropriate stand-ins for humanity as such. This is why we should unambiguously oppose this practice.

I also find it hilarious that Mishan claims that "this practice does nothing to realise the goals of the women’s liberation movement" (as though he cares). The funny thing is that one frequently hears this refrain from opponents of feminism: "but it doesn't really matter whether or not we say 'mankind' or 'humanity'... so why bother?". My reply here is always the same. If it doesn't matter, if it's not important one way or the other, then why are you so angry and disgruntled that we're departing from traditional practice? It seems to matter quite a lot to the likes of Mishan that I say "him" and "mankind" and so on.

I should note as well that I also agree that "the self-conscious departure from common usage in this respect invariably imparts something of a mental jolt to the reader." This is precisely the fucking point. If it didn't ruffle the feathers of doddering old sexists like Mishan, it wouldn't be worth the effort. The point is precisely to destabilize a traditional practice, "that goes back centuries", which contributes to the reproduction of sexism. The more acute the "mental jolt" that this elicits from misogynist wankers like the author of the letter, the better.

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What is an institution?

Many on the Left (e.g. Marxists, feminists, and so on) have typically wanted to claim that the configuration of power in any particular society is not simply a matter of individual choices and actions. If you want to understand oppression, they'll tell you, it won't do to simply focus on what individual agents choose to do of their own accord. Oppression is not merely a matter of individual choices: oppression has to do with institutions.

For Marxists, if you want to understand a social formation (e.g. capitalism), you cannot do this by simply adding up the sum of putatively undistorted rational choices that individuals make. In contrast, understanding a social formation requires first of all that we understand how the social institutions that constitute it are structured.

Similarly for feminists, if you want to understand the oppression of women you cannot simply look at the actions and choices of individuals. You have to critically examine the institutions (e.g. the family, the church, economic organizations, clubs, unions, schools, etc.) that constitute a sexist society. (Even further: if you want to understand gender as such, you must examine how it is continually produced and reproduced in institutions).

The reason that institutions are of central importance for both views (and I'm not presupposing in the least that they're incompatible... I would want to characterize my own politics as embodying both views), is that both hold that individual beliefs, choices, and actions are shaped by institutions. We cannot understand individual beliefs, actions, desires, self-understandings, ambitions, or motivations unless we have something to say about the institutional context of concrete individuals.

We can easily see from the above why properly Marxist and feminist politics take the strategic forms that they often do. If you think that oppression is a matter of the very institutions that constitute a society, then you aren't going to think that political change is merely a matter of electioneering. Rather, you're going to try to change the way that the relevant institutions are structured and organized. Of course, precisely how one might go about doing that is another question entirely (Marxists would lean toward the answer that our efforts must at the end of the day be directed toward changing the way that production is organized... but again, how we might do that is another question entirely).

But what exactly is an institution?

In ordinary speech, it sometimes seems as though "institution" literally refers to certain buildings. Obviously this is not the sense in which the term interests us here. But on the other end, among sociologically savvy people, we sometimes find that "institution" casts such a wide net that its difficult to see what it picks out specifically at all. Sometimes we speak of the family as an institution in the same breath that we talk about financial institutions. What exactly do we mean by "institution"?

The wikipedia entry for the term is a helpful starting point:

Institutions are structures and mechanisms of social order and cooperation governing the behavior of a set of individuals within a given human collectivity.

Now many people may be tempted to interpret this as pertaining in the first instance to the purview of law and the state. This would be a serious mistake. This state-centric view ignores the fact that the majority of major social institutions in contemporary societies are not tethered to the state at all; in fact, the direction of causal force probably goes more in the opposite direction: the character of the State is largely determined by the structure of non-state institutions. What non-State institutions do I have in mind? Think of the impact that norms embodied in schools, media, film, film-rating organizations, newspapers, TV, music, clubs, sports, churches, families, and so on have in socialization.

Here's an example that I frequently find myself returning to. Some moderate environmentalists today express pessimism that people (as they are today) will willingly choose not to think of cars as the be-all-end-all of transportation. Their problematic is this: how can we convince, by way of giving persuasive arguments, so many people that driving cars is wrong? Thought of in this way, the problem really does seem insurmountable.

But this pessimism belies serious ignorance of history and the way that institutions function. First of all, before the 1950s the vast majority of Americans did not own cars, and the infrastructure of America reflected this fact: communities were walkable, laid out on a grid, and mixed-use buildings were widespread. The hit song "Little Deuce Coup" would not have made sense in 1910. Neither would it have been a hit in the 1930s. Due to the way that institutions were configured at that point in American history, people did not think of themselves or their lives as having any important relation to the personal car. People did not long for personal cars, they did not sit around wishing there were films, songs, toys, and pastimes having to do with them.

But due to complex political and economic changes in the 1950s, institutions were re-arranged in a variety of ways, with the result that the suburban single-family home came to be thought of (for white people at least) as the embodiment of the "American Dream". With the implementation of a national highway system, deindustrialization in major cities, and an array of other reconfigurations, the car began to quickly acquire a significance it had not previously enjoyed.

Today, the "importance" of the personal car is inscribed within many institutions that in the past had nothing to do with automobiles. Just as this importance was not accomplished by way of convincing individual people one by one, present states of affairs will not be changed in this way either.

If most Americans are quasi-addicted to driving cars everywhere and think that their very mode of life is bound up with driving, it's not because of a series of undistorted rational calculations that we might expect any individual, irrespective of time or place, to make. Nor is it because they've sat down, hashed out all of the important moral arguments, and decided after lengthy deliberation that cars are the way to go. The idea of driving is literally woven into the very physical infrastructure of the United States now in a way that it was not 70 years ago. Moreover, the institutional structure of the US is now tightly bound up with the automobile.

If we start to change those institutions, many people will change along with them.

Imagine a world in which we weren't barraged with Car advertisements every 30 seconds on television, radio, and the Internet. Moreover, imagine a world in which neighborhoods were more dense, walkable and closer to places of work, grocery stores, and so on. Imagine a world in which other transportation options were both accessible and the way the majority of people got around. Imagine that culture (films, TV, music and so on) didn't valorize (implicitly or explicitly) the personal car as sexy, powerful, or indicative identity and of social status.

This is no utopia. This is literally what America was like before the 1950s. Now this isn't to say that this period was perfect (nor that we should want to return to the past... particularly to the Jim Crow south). But this example makes rather obvious how influential basic social institutions are on people's consciousness and behavior.

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Adorno on Free Time

To elucidate the problem I would like to use a trivial personal experience. Time and again in interviews and questionnaires one is asked what one has for a hobby. Whenever the illustrated newspapers report one of those matadors of the culture industry -whereby talking about such people in turn constitutes one of the chief activities of the culture industry- then only seldom do the papers miss the opportunity to tell something more or less homely about the hobbies of the people in question. I am startled by the question whenever I meet with it. I have no hobby. Not that I'm a workaholic who wouldn't know how to do anything else but get down to business and do what has to be done. But rather I take the activities with which I occupy myself beyond the bounds of my official profession, without exception, so seriously that I would be shocked by the idea that they had anything to do with hobbies -that is, activities I'm mindlessly infatuated with only in order to kill time- if my experiences had not toughened me against manifestations of barbarism that have become self-evident and acceptable. Making music, listening to music, reading with concentration constitute an integral element of my existence; the word hobby would make a mockery of them. -T.W. Adorno, from his essay "Free Time" (1969)

If you can get past the apparently curmudgeonly veneer of this passage, there is a really interesting argument here. The first thing Adorno notes at the beginning of this essay is that the expression "free time" is itself a recent development, thus asking anything about it in abstraction from concrete developments in contemporary societies is a question without content.

What is "free time" for us? Adorno points out that in order for the phrase to even be intelligible, it must be "shackled to its contrary": free time is the opposite of "unfree time", or time "occupied by labor... [which is] determined heteronomously". In other words, the expression "free time" is meant only to mark off those time intervals in which we aren't working or laboring according to the dictates of some job or task whose imperatives issue from without.

As Marx argued, labor becomes a commodity in capitalist societies, that is, it becomes reified (i.e. it becomes thought of as an exchangeable object, rather than a contingent ensemble of social relations).

But the paradox is that free time, "which understands itself to be the opposite of reification, a sanctuary of immediate life within a completely mediated system, is itself reified like the rigid demarcation between labor and free time. This border perpetuates the forms of social life organized according to the system of profit".

Now, it's important to note here that it hasn't always been this way. Societies have been configured differently in different historical epochs, and the idea of "free time" or "leisure" would not have made sense within these social formations in the ways that it does in our society.

As sociologist James Fulcher points out:

Industrial capitalism not only created work, it also created "leisure" in the modern sense of the term. This might seem surprising, for the early cotton masters wanted to keep their machinery running as long as possible and forced their employees to work very long hours. However, by requiring continuous work during work hours and ruling out non-work activity, employers had separated out leisure from work. Some did this quite explicitly by creating distinct holiday periods, when factories were shut down, because it was better to do this than have work disrupted by the casual taking of days off. "Leisure" is a distinct non-work time, whether in the form of the holiday, weekend, or evening, was a result of the disciplined and bounded work time created by capitalist production.

But there was also another way in which capitalism was implicated in the creation of "free time":

Leisure was also the creation of capitalism through the commercialization of leisure. This no longer meant participation in traditional sports and pastimes. Workers began to pay for leisure activities organized by capitalist enterprises...The importance of this could hardly be exaggerated, for whole new industries were emerging to exploit and develop the leisure market, which was to become a huge source of consumer demand, employment and profit. [see Fulcher's excellent (2004) Capitalism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford UP)]

Now, although we've re-situated the idea of "free time" back into its social and historical context, we've still yet to say anything substantive about it.

The first question to ask is: what role does it play within contemporary societies?

For Adorno, the effect of contemporary capitalist societies is to "hold people under a spell", under "an existence imposed upon people by society" that is "not identical with what they are in themselves or what they could be". Now Adorno doesn't want to claim that we can or should make any simple division between "what human beings are in themselves and their so-called social roles". But the important point here is that the way that human beings behave/act under certain conditions is by no means inevitable, since those conditions could be changed. The crucial thing to note here is that social institutions could be otherwise, they could be organized according to different principles, and as a result we can imagine people in contemporary societies being very different as well. The upshot is that the generalized picture of the consumerist, egoistic subject is deabsolutized: it is not inevitable that people will behave in this way, that their desires be configured in this way, and so on.

Because capitalist processes have begun to colonized the spheres of leisure and culture, Adorno worries that "even where the spell loosens its hold and people are at least subjectively convinced that they are acting out of their own will, this will itself is fashioned by precisely what they want to shake off during their time outside of work."

In short, "unfreedom is expanding within free time, and most of the unfree people are as unconscious of the process as they are of their own unfreedom". "The irony in the expression "leisure industry" is as thoroughly forgotten as the expression show business is taken seriously."

A peculiar development of the colonization of leisure time by the dictates of profit is that consumption itself has become a pastime. Think of the phrase "consumer goods". What are these? They are goods produced for consumption, that is, goods produced for the sake of the activity of consumption. Consumption itself is the purpose of this activity.

The "Teen Talk Barbie" strikes me as the perfect metaphor for the barbarism of this process. First consider that the doll's bodily proportions are perfect distillations of a set of oppressive norms prescribing what a woman's body "should" look like (incidentally, the University Central Hospital in Helsinki, concluded that "Barbie's figure would lack the 17 to 22 percent body fat required for a woman to menstruate"). The "beauty" norms according to which Barbie is fashioned are ubiquitous, and contribute to the reproduction of the idea that women should think of themselves according to certain prescribed criteria.

Moreover, the "teen talk barbie", itself something people are expected to purchase, is programmed to say things like "I love shopping!", "Math is hard!", "Will we ever have enough clothes?".

It's as though, on a scale larger than Barbie dolls, we're called on by inert plastic objects on a shelf to think about ourselves and consumption in ways that are sick.

Happy Holidays! I've got to go get some shopping done before time runs out.

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Sexism, Racism and Liberal Political Thought

Consider for a moment how often we encounter "post-racist" and "post-feminist" ideologies. On the one hand, they acknowledge some version of the claim that history is marked by racism and sexism. On the other, both claim that contemporary societies are no longer encumbered by sexism or racism: we now live in a more or less post-racist, post-sexist social order.

Now to the extent that liberal political thought tends to hang its hat on a private/public distinction, it seems to me that it is bound up with the maintenance of the ideology sketched above. Moreover, the liberal tradition (broadly construed so as not to connote the idiosyncratic American sense of the term) has tended to focus intensely on legal and political institutions in lieu of critically engaging ostensibly "private" institutions such as the family, the workplace, the church, schools, clubs and organizations, culture, media and so on. And insofar as this is true, the relationship between "post" ideologies and liberalism should be even clearer.

We should therefore find it suspicious that the women's liberation movement and what is now called the "Civil Rights Movement" are remembered today as more or less legally-oriented and conventionally political movements. The slogan "the personal is political" couldn't be further from the way that feminism is construed today in many mainstream appropriations of the women's movement: today feminism is described as though it ought to be a politics that prizes "choice" above all else. Thus, "private choices" are once again apolitical: it is the job of post-feminism to shield ostensibly private matters from the political scrutiny they received from second and third-wave feminists.

Today, my sense is that the women's liberation movement is remembered as a movement aiming merely to achieve certain legal changes. The same is true of the way that the Civil Rights Movement (as indicated by its label) is remembered: it was just a movement aiming to eliminate certain racist laws and to enforce voting rights.

But as Angela Davis points out, it wasn't clear during the 1950s and 60s that what was under way was a "Civil Rights Movement". Davis claims that in those days, among her comrades in SNCC it was known simply as the "Freedom Movement". While certain legal reforms were obviously part of the movement's goals, it is far from obvious that this exhausted its aims. In fact, the history of the movement itself suggests that the legalistic re-reading of history is dubious.

Consider first of all that the main locus of disagreement between the ostensibly more "moderate" MLK and the more radical Malcolm X (religious differences notwithstanding) was essentially one of tactics, i.e. not in the first instance one of divergent emancipatory aims. Furthermore, even MLK's politics do not fit within the narrow legalistic reading of the movement: MLK was a staunch opponent of the Vietnam War, American Imperialism abroad and Cold War foreign policy, and he argued forcefully in the last years of his life that the fight against racism was also at the same time a fight against certain socio-economic conditions. We'd need to fundamentally re-think the basic social and economic institutions in capitalist societies, MLK held, in order to have any hope of successfully smashing racism.

But given that this is the case, what does this suggest about the viability of post-racist and post-sexist ideologies? As I see it, there are 3 important conclusions to draw here.

(1) One conclusion that seems clear to me is that these "post" ideologies depend first of all on a re-interpretation of the historical meaning of social struggles. In other words, a condition of thinking that these "post" narratives have any plausibility is that we first of all believe that the goals of the Women's Movement and the CRM were purely legal.

(2) Another conclusion is that the distinction between "de facto" and "de jure" oppression or domination has been obscured by the prevalence of liberal ways of thinking about politics. The point of the distinction is to distinguish between de jure forms of domination that are literally written into the word of law (e.g. aspects of Jim Crow) on the one hand, and de facto forms of domination that derive from non-legal features of social institutions and norms. Thomas McCarthy, in drawing a parallel between what he calls "neoracism" and "neoimperialism" draws the distinction as follows.

"Whereas neoimperialism is a way of maintaining key aspects of colonial domination and exploitation after the disappearance of colonies in the legal-political sense, neoracism is a way of doing the same for racial domination and exploitation after the disappearance of "race" in the scientific-biological sense... just as postcolonial neoimperialism could outlive the demise of former colonies, post-biological neoracism could survive the demise of scientific racism... and just as the shift to neoimperialism required modes of domination and exploitation that were compatible with the nominal independence and equality of all nations, the shift to neoracism required modes that were compatible with the formal freedom and equality of all individuals."(Race, Empire and the Idea of Human Development. (2009: Cambridge UP)

I believe something similar could be concluded about sexism. While some (though not all) de jure forms of sexual oppression have been repealed and replaced by important new legal forms, focusing our attention only at this legal level of analysis makes it impossible to understand gender oppression now or throughout history.

(3) And a final conclusion to draw from this phenomenon is as follows. In order to find the 'post' ideologies compelling we must also have an individualist way of thinking about society and politics. After all, the familiar post-racist claim goes something like this: in the past there used to be explicit, de jure forms of discrimination that were restrictive. But now that these de jure forms of oppression have been lifted, there is no fetter on the ability of individuals (of any gender or race) to "succeed" in making a lot of money if they simply work hard enough.

There are many ways to refute this claim, but here's a rather general way of dispatching it. Now I would not contest the claim that in principle, it is possible that any one individual working-class person of any background to become the next Bill Gates. But conceding this trivial claim about what might be possible does not obscure the fact that it must also be true (for the 'individual' claim to work) that the working class is collectively unfree to leave the working-class. In other words, while it is true in some trivial sense that any one person "could" hit it big, it must also be true in capitalism that everyone in the working-class couldn't hit it big at the same time. Capitalism requires that a large mass of working-class people whose cheap labor make the wealth of a small class of people possible. Massive improbability notwithstanding, it is also conceptually impossible within capitalism for everyone to become Bill Gates all at once, since there would be nobody doing the socially-necessary labor that sustains capitalism.

The result is that focusing on the possibilities that a generic "individual" has for social mobility says nothing of the way that the entire society, writ large, is structured. For if the "individual claim" is only true in a situation in which lots of other people are restricted from leaving an oppressed status, then it amounts to very little in the way of dispelling claims that racism, sexism and class oppression are important features of the present.

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No Benn-Michaels Takedown in LRB

From what I could see, there was basically no critical response to Walter Benn-Michael's most recent, confused screed against feminism and anti-racism in the newest edition of the London Review of Books (BM's tripe appeared a couple months ago). Disappointing. How many respectable publications are going to give him a forum to write polemical trash without being challenged?

In that piece BM actually argued: "anti-racism and anti-sexism have nothing whatsoever to do with Left-wing politics".

Perhaps I wrong here, tactically, about how best to deal with right-wing elements like BM within the Left (very broadly construed). Perhaps, its better not to take the 'bait' and to let his rants fade into irrelevance. But my sense is that his facile, divisive argument infects more of the Left than we'd like to admit. Hence my disappointment that someone on the socialist Left didn't step up to convincingly reject his nonsense in LRB.

The worst part of his tripe is that it obfuscates the issues it raises, making it difficult for others to put forward the the nuanced point that some struggles against racism and sexism have indeed been coopted and defanged by capitalism.

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An argument that bothers me: "There is no feminism, only feminisms"

In the feminist blogosphere, I sometimes run across the following argument.

"There isn't one, monolithic feminism. There's always already feminism(s) and there are as many diverse feminism(s) as there are people. Feminism(s) mean different things to different people"

I find this kind of patronizing, for one. This line is always laid down as though it said something profound, but the fact of the matter is that it is a half-baked platitude. It's one thing to take note of the political dynamics of the contestations from the margins, aimed at the (largely) white, liberal, middle-class, straight feminist projects that had come to present themselves as the only game in town. But its quite another thing entirely to propagate the facile conclusion that feminism really just means whatever individual people want it to mean.

In fact, you can't really understand what those very contestations (e.g. from black feminists like bell hooks, revolutionary lesbians like Monique Wittig, feminists writing the wake of colonialism, deconstructive feminists like Butler, etc.) were about unless you unequivocally reject the idea that feminism can mean whatever certain individuals want it to mean. For if it were true that feminism just is the plurality of existing views, norms, and relations of power regarding gender and sexuality, then there wouldn't be much point in contesting the way that mainstream feminists were paving over forms of oppression that didn't mark their lives in the way that it continued to mark those of others.

Moreover, according to those who sing the timeless praises of singularity as such, difference as such, and pluralism as such, etc. it would appear that bell hooks, Monique Wittig, Angela Davis, Patricia Hill Collins, and many others did something seriously wrong. How dare they, you might think, contest or launch political interventions aimed at dismantling certain mainstream feminist theories and practices, when they ought to have left well enough alone and let those myopically white and middle class straight feminists "express their singularity and difference"? How dare they tell those white, middle class feminists what to do! Uh oh, its the 'feminist police'!

This is, of course, preposterous. There is a world of difference between making the totally valid sociological observation on the one hand that there is widespread disagreement about what feminism is and should be committed to doing, and on the other, claiming that there is an endless plurality of things feminism can mean for different people. The latter only obscures the actual concrete political dynamics of what gets to count as feminism by whitewashing important disagreements as simply 'different expressions of plurality'.

Notice also, that if the 'endless pluralism' story were right, there would be absolutely no way to identify cynical imposters who simply called themselves feminists disingenuously. In other words if Rush Limbaugh decided, without changing anything about himself whatsoever, to simply call himself a feminist can label his political commitments as 'solidly radical feminist', the 'many feminism(s)'-'endless diversity'-'plurality' story would have no way to contest his claim. For if they were right, they'd have have no reason to want to contest Rush's claims at all. Think about it. He'd simply be expressing what feminism meant to him and proving their point that there really are only feminisms and a wide plurality of views.

If feminism has to do with liberation from oppression, it cannot mean whatever individual people want it to mean. Meaning is never a matter of individual whim. Pretending that it is, however, is hardly a subversive move, but a thought-act wholly welcomed by contemporary consumer culture. This faux-individualist megalomania is encouraged by existing relations of power, it is a powerful narrative running through arguments about social mobility, debates about redistributive taxation, into the ways that people are encouraged to think of themselves in terms of the various consumer preferences they have. Buy, buy, buy! Consume! Give in to your consumerist fantasies and lust after immediately gratifying fixes. And shame on you if you stop to think about what this whole consumerist picture might amount to... that's to commit the sin of 'telling others how to live their lives'.

But in reality, even superficial critical engagement with our culture and society quickly reveals that we are constantly told how to live our lives, how to think about our bodies, how to think about gender norms, how to dress, how to behave, etc. Feminism is a project aiming to uncover and ruthlessly submit these features of contemporary culture to critique.

Banal also is this notion of 'if it feels good do it', 'live and let live', etc. These are not liberatory anthems, but hackneyed slogans wholly amenable to the status quo. Feminism is an unremittingly critical political project. At its best it leaves no cultural, social or political phenomenon uncriticized. But pulling this 'just let women do what they want' line is dishonest. Should feminists condone what Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, and the Anita Bryants of the world say? Is Sarah Palin a feminist? Of course not. And we have a name for people who say otherwise: post-feminists.

Feminists who say let people think what they already think are no feminists at all. Feminism is supposed to be about changing existing relations of power. Its supposed to be about shredding oppressive norms that have come to appear to many as 'natural'. Moreover, it is supposed to be about critically confronting societies and the individuals shaped by them.

On a tangentially related topic, I'd like to point out that I've noticed in some recent French theory that there is this agreed-upon, yet unscrutinised, consensus that 'singularity' (whatever that might mean) is a good thing. It's as though Hegel's critique of Romanticism never really sunk in for these people. We are back to hearing about the ahistorical individual as singular fountainhead (ever think about the sexist overtones in Rand's title?), as creator ex-nihilo, as emerging freely as a beautifully unique snowflake unencumbered by social, historical or political constraints. Of course, I'm exaggerating here. But I think the general point is correct.

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