Recently stumbled upon this series of interviews, produced by UCBerkeley. It includes a fairly stacked list of important political thinkers, theorists, activists and intellectuals... including Noam Chomsky, activist/writer Tariq Ali, political philospher Seyla Benhabib, Marxist historian Perry Anderson, radical social scientist David Harvey, Michael Hardt, Martha Nussbaum, with tons more...
Thursday, September 11, 2008
Our emotional-electoral state
Shark Fu at Angry Black Bitch has a seriously incredible post today on her response to election coverage so far. Some parts are so true and so funny, it hurts. The thesis:
I don’t know about y’all, but this bitch has had enough political bullshit tossed my way in the last few months to keep me shoveling for a lifetime.
You can say that again.
I feel like a passerby who can't turn away from the hypnotic sight of a car crash. I feel like a broken-hearted teenager who, burned by the failure of his last attempt (back in 2004), refuses to get involved and get hurt again. I feel, frankly, like I'm getting jerked around. A friend I hadn't seen in a while asked me recently how I was feeling about the election, and I replied immediately, "You know what Noelle, I'm just so sick of being manipulated!!"
It's been that kind of an election, and I place a lot of blame on our media. They're like that girl in high school who would yell a piece of provocative gossip across a row of lockers and watch the student body freak out straight through 7th period. While CNN's (and NBC's, and NYTimes's, and Fox News's) advertising department laughed all the way to the bank, we poor folk have been subjected to manufactured conflict, drama, and tension.
In an election year, the media isn't covering what's actually at stake in our country. They aren't lifting up stories about the disappearing "American dream" of affordable housing, health care, child care, and decent-paying jobs. They aren't reminding anyone that we aren't taking care of military folks like we should, and they certainly aren't questioning the way we use our military might in the first place. And they are definitely, definitely not talking about what would happen in our country -- what is already happening in countries around the world -- if John McCain and Sarah Palin got their wish, and abortion became a crime.
No - instead of substantive coverage, we've mostly got an echo chamber, repeating sound bytes until they become common wisdom, become truth.
As one of Shark Fu's commenters, Rileysdtr, put it: "Nice game-changing speech, Little Sister! Expect a whale of a bounce in tomorrow's polls."
Sigh.
Things I Like on the Internet: The Bead Shop
Check out this post at The Bead Shop, which brings feminism into perspective better than anything I've read in the blogosphere lately.
It’s almost like feminism is some kind of oracle, and we’re frantically waiting for it to tell us more about ourselves. Are we good feminists? Should we wear lipstick? What kind of person are we? A bit like those tests in the teenage girl magazines we read growing up. This especially comes across in my second-favourite argument in feminist discussions, the ‘but my experience was different to what you describe, so that invalidates your whole point’. Yeah, but I wasn’t talking about you, dipshit. Sometimes it’s necessary to generalise in order to make a point, and statistics such as ‘99.9999999999999999999999%’, especially when surrounded by a lot of frustrated expletives and exclamation marks, are not meant to be exact. But anyway, back to the point - what’s so special about feminism that it has to be defended tooth and nail? It’s a tool for us to use, not a spiritual state, and not a wonderful deity that turns us into Pure Light. Feminism isn’t important for its own sake. It’s important because people are oppressed for being women, as well as for certain other things.I can't agree more with this perspective and it reflects a realization I've been coming to time and again lately. My commitment to feminism isn't about Feminism The Movement or Feminism The Theory. My commitment to feminism begins and ends with an overall goal of recognizing injustice and striving to correct it.
It's true that I identify my politics primarily through my feminism, but I'm beginning to think that's more and more because feminism was the initial lens through which I began to think about social justice, and not necessarily because I think feminism is the most important tool through which I should be examining the world. I'm a feminist, but I'm many other things, and in fact it's sometimes difficult to even separate the feminist from the anti-racist and the anti-capitalist. After all, what would be the point of fragmenting the pursuit of social justice, whether in practice or in theory?
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
The Anxious Billionaire, and Other Tales
As someone who's pretty recently entered the U.S. economy and workforce, I'm becoming a tiny bit interested in reading advice about how to spend and save my money intelligently. So, like an idiot, today I clicked on the New York Times' Special Section on wealth and personal finance. Whoops. I forgot that the Times is obsessed with the emotional and financial problems being experienced by the super rich.
Although the number of uninsured Americans recently dropped to 47.5 million - hey, that's just 15.3% of our citizens! -- the Times is discussing people forced to sacrifice their Botox treatments. Although most Americans can barely afford to retire, let alone leave their children an estate, the Times has an article about how to tell your kids about their inheritance. And despite the fact that only 1.5% of American households earn more than $250k, the Times is devoting significant space to folks whose annual income has recently decreased from $10 million to $2 million.
Other highlights include emerging trends in tax evasion, how to collect valuable shit that you can sell later, and the sentence, "What's a high-net-worth investor to do?"
P.S. The woman on the left is Elyse Goldstein. She works as -- you guessed it -- a counselor to the wealthy. And her clients are very, very upset.
Angela Davis & Global Gender Gaps
The quasi-libertarian climate change skeptic John Tierney has ventured into the territory of Our Innate Differences, and it’s a doozy. His recent New York Times column is a roundup of some recent academic studies demonstrating the pesky persistence of personality and achievement differences between men and women in developed countries.
But the real can of worms has been opened by David Schmitt et al in their article, “Why Can’t A Man Be More Like a Woman?: Sex Differences in Big Five Personality Traits Across 55 Cultures”. Schmitt and his colleagues summarize their conclusions in the following way:
Overall, higher levels of human development – including long and healthy life,So. What they’ve found is that gender personality differences in rich, developed countries are actually more pronounced than in poor, developing countries. That’s fascinating enough as it is. The real whopper is, they attribute this difference to the fact that in countries like the U.S., men and women’s personalities are “less constrained and more able to naturally diverge.”
equal access to knowledge and education, and economic wealth – were the main
nation-level predictors of larger sex differences in personality ... It is proposed that heightened levels of sexual dimorphism result from personality traits of men and women being less constrained and more able to naturally diverge in developed nations. In less fortunate social and economic conditions, innate personality differences between men and women may be attenuated.
That’s right ... they went there.
They’re proposing that in a historically patriarchal, racist country like the United States, in which women could not vote until well into the 20th century, in which women still do not receive equal pay for equal work, and in which women are routinely killed by their domestic partners – to name a few issues – women and men’s personalities are “less constrained and more able to naturally diverge” than in, say, a historically patriarchal, racist, post-colonial developing country like Tanzania, in which boys are often sent to school instead of their sisters, in which women perform almost all of the country’s domestic work unpaid, and in which many girls still undergo genital mutilation as a tribal rite of passage – to name a few issues.
Having lived in both countries, I won’t deny that the opportunities provided to most girls and women in the U.S. are infinitely greater than opportunities provided to girls and women in Tanzania. But I don’t think for a second that’s because the United States is a fully enlightened, post-sexist culture in which men can develop freely into breadwinning protectors, and women into nurturing, sensitive caretakers. I’d venture that patriarchy, oppressive gender norms and expectations remain extremely pervasive and powerful here in the Land of the Free.
I believe Angela Davis’ Women, Race & Class (1981) has an important contribution to make on this subject. Davis’s discussion of the gender norms of slaves, compared to the gender norms of middle-class and wealthy whites, is one of the most fascinating I have read. These excerpts come from the first chapter of the book.
The slave system defined Black people as chattel. Since women, no less than men, were viewed as profitable labor-units, they might as well have been genderless as far as the slaveholders were concerned ... Judged by the evolving nineteenth-century ideology of femininity, which emphasized women’s roles as nurturing mothers and gentle companions and housekeepers for their husbands, Black women were practically anomalies. (p. 5)So it was the utter economic oppression of slavery – in a capitalist United States – which creates the canvas of “genderlessness” on which Black gender equality will be based. Gender relations in this case – in all cases – are directly linked to the economic conditions in which they occur.
Women were not too “feminine” to work in coal mines, in iron foundries or to be lumberjacks and ditch diggers ... Required by their masters’ demands to be as “masculine” in the performance of their work as their men, Black women must have been profoundly affected by their experiences during slavery. Some, no doubt, were broken and destroyed, yet the majority survived and, in the process, acquired qualities considered taboo by the nineteenth-century ideology of womanhood. (pp. 10, 11)Again, given the right economic conditions (in this case, violently coerced labor), there is apparently no limit to the physical strength and endurance of a woman. For white women, though, the prevailing wisdom was quite different.
As the ideology of femininity – a byproduct of industrialization – was popularizedOf course, later, when Black people in the U.S. were no longer slaves, our own government attributed Black social problems to the fact that their women hadn’t yet been subordinated to male authority! Go figure:
and disseminated through the new ladies’ magazines and romantic novels, white women came to be seen as inhabitants of a sphere totally severed from the realm of productive work ... “Woman” became synonymous with “mother” and “housewife,” and both bore the fatal mark of inferiority. But among Black female slaves, this vocabulary was nowhere to be found. (p. 12)
The “Moynihan Report” directly linked the contemporary problems of the Black community to the putatively matriarchal family structure ... According to the report’s thesis, the source of [continued Black] oppression was ... a “tangle of pathology” created by the absence of male authortity among Black people! The controversial finale of the Moynihan Report was a call to introduce male authority (meaning male supremacy of course!) into the Black family and the community at large.So what’s all this got to do with present-day Tanzania, present-day America, and Dr. Schmitt’s study?
Listen, y’all. The nurturing, agreeable personalities of first world women living in present-day global capitalism are no more “natural” than the personalities of 19th century women who stayed inside knitting doilies because their ladies’ magazine said so. The physically powerful, “genderless,” enduring female slave is no more a “natural” phenomenon than the uncomplaining Tanzanian woman who rises at five to begin her housework, and collapses back into bed at eleven.
All these things aren’t equal. These women didn’t, and don’t, lead lives of equal freedom and fairness. There is nothing that compared to the violent exploitation of slavery.
But: We must get away from this idea of “natural” personality traits. Calling one woman’s personality natural, and another woman’s personality “constrained,” is a gross oversimplification of the history and politics that govern their existences. It's an all-too-effective way of obscuring the economic and social forces that are actually shaping their lives, their work, their wages, and yes, their goddamn personalities.
Drifting Rightward
In yet another instance of the rightward drift of a campaign that began much further from ‘reformist’ or ‘progressive’ than many of its followers would like to admit, Obama recently embraced a whole slew of conservative assumptions about tax policy.
In the recent statement, Obama said he would “delay rescinding President Bush’s tax cuts on wealthy Americans if the economy is a recession”, because doing so would “further hurt the economy.”
What should ‘progressive’ Obama supporters giddy about ‘change’ take from this statement? The simple, often-repeated neoliberal dogma that: Tax cuts always create growth and tax increases hurt the economy. Reagan, Norquist and Gingrich couldn’t have put it better themselves. Way to totally undermine the rationale for having taxes at all.
In the same statement, Obama went on to assure us that “even if we’re still in a recession, I’m going to go through with my tax cuts…that’s my priority”. Because remember: we can’t talk about how to go about funding irrelevant things like health care, social security, education, national infrastructure, natural disaster relief, etc. The only thing to do is to inject the private sector with some ‘dynamism’ and to find ways to ‘give people’s money back to them’… i.e. regurgitate the policy of the Bush Administration.
Now try this one out. Who said this: “We can get this economy back on its feet… get it going again. Don’t raise their taxes. Americans are hurting in a way that they have not hurt for a long time”… Obama or McCain?
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
The Origins of Private Property
Libertarians, or, to name them more accurately, entitlement theorists, are wont to maintain that the market legitimates the distribution of goods it generates, since the market is a process in which people exercise their legitimately self-owned powers. But every market-generated distribution is only a redistribution of titles which buying and selling are themselves unable to create, and the upshot of market activity is consequently no more legitimate than the titles with which it operates. How, then, do the titles which necessarily precede market activity acquire legitimacy in the first place?
Imagine if the next president attempted to take a particular industry into public ownership without compensation (say a resource-extraction sector like coal), s/he would be attacked for being (among myriad other horrendous things) a thief. That is, such an action would be tantamount to stealing the rightful property of the ‘owners’ of the natural resources in question, violating sacrosanct property rights.
The question of what would constitute a rightful original acquisition of private property enjoys a certain priority over the question of what constitutes a rightful subsequent transfer of it, on any definition of private property, since unless private property can be formed, it cannot, a fortiori, be transferred.
Note that even now not everything around us is privately owned, and most people would agree that what remains privately unowned, such as the air we breathe and the pavements we tread, should not be available for privatization. But the better part of what we need to live is, by now, private property. Why was its original privatization not a theft of what rightly should be held in common?
- G.A. Cohen, on libertarianism (entitlement theory), from an article in New Left Review
But, as Cohen points out in the excerpt above, how did sources of vital natural resources come to be thought of as the rightful property of an individual in the first place? How was this initial seizure not theft? Set aside the difficult questions of how to negotiate (with the aim of social justice) the transfer or redistribution of large holdings of natural resources already deemed private property…How do natural resources become the sort of thing that can be purchased and hoarded by individuals in the first place?
This thought puts an interesting spin on issues like nationalization of energy resources as well as agrarian land reform. Instead of dismissing these measures out of hand because they violate 'property rights', why not instead ask how the titles in question obtained their legitimacy and unassailable legal status? Why not ask, for instance, how the enormous estates of Third World post-colonial oligarchs came to be transfigured into legally sanctioned rock-solid holdings?
Once we throw off the dogma that markets and private property are "natural" institutions, an entire universe of interesting political questions crops up.
Monday, September 8, 2008
Welcome to Pink Scare!
Thanks for stopping by at Pink Scare! We're a group blog dedicated to the empowerment of less-heard voices through radical critiques of politics and culture.
Pink Scare is a feminist blog that will often center strongly on economic and class issues, both in the United States and around the world. We'll be taking a critical look at a broad range of issues, with the intertwined effects of capitalism, race, class, and gender (among other things) at the forefront of our analysis. We aren't above a little American reality television, nor are we afraid to crack open the books and get seriously academic on you.
Here, you'll read about abortion rights, contraception access, women's health, equal pay, and media images of women. You'll read about the various evolutions, erosions, and uprisings of the left from Venezuela to the States to Great Britain. With a heavy sigh, we'll write about U.S. elections and politics; with great joy, we'll tell you about inspirational activists, thinkers, writers, artists and musicians whose work we love.
Keep your mind open, your comments civil, and your own blogging talents sharp! In the coming weeks, we'll be seeking guest bloggers. Women, people of color, LGBTQ folks, immigrants, non-U.S. citizens, and the differently abled are particularly urged to apply. All are welcome.
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