imposs1904
Thread Killa'
Any chance of you editing the ps bit out of the post you were replying to? The original poster edited it himself afterwards when, I guess, he realised it didn't put him in the greatest of lights.
Mark Fisher on privilege, twitter, commentariat, etc.
- Thread starter caleb
- Start date
Any chance of you editing the ps bit out of the post you were replying to? The original poster edited it himself afterwards when, I guess, he realised it didn't put him in the greatest of lights.
captainmission
Well-Known Member
she's also become a marvel villian - http://www.bleedingcool.com/2013/11/07/when-laurie-penny-became-an-iron-man-character-spoilers/
love detective
there's no love too small
wasn't sure where to put this but there is fairly reasonable (if a little reductionist) article on intersectionality in metamute here which says the same thing
summary pretty much nails it
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Generally a good piece but with one glaring error - Bea Campbell was not involved in Beyond the Fragments, so using her picture and her later engagement in anti-working class devil panic cannot be blamed on the - really rather limited and weak focus - on non-class oppression in BTF or as s tick with which to beat others concerned with the same issues in ways different from todays players.
edit: i would have made the second half of the article an expansion of the concluding paragraphs myself (rather than just restating the first part) as that's the key point - that these debates are not part of wider class debates - at least not in this hyper individualised competitive way. And i suspect, only in such a hyper individualised competitive way in public. We know they all piss in the same pot in private.
edit: i would have made the second half of the article an expansion of the concluding paragraphs myself (rather than just restating the first part) as that's the key point - that these debates are not part of wider class debates - at least not in this hyper individualised competitive way. And i suspect, only in such a hyper individualised competitive way in public. We know they all piss in the same pot in private.
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I think the comments to that piece show us that sort of candour really hits a nerve. It was slightly reductionist, and again I wouldn't vouch for every word, but as you said the conclusion there is right on the money. There's nothing like some home truths to get a reaction. No other social system in history has broken down traditional gender roles, sexual identities, traditional ethnic divisions, quite as rapidly as capitalism, and capitalism has in the process demonstrated an ability to absorb the disruption that's caused by this rapid pace of social change very well.
I'd disagree about some important things though, in particular that despite mass immigration Britain is a less racist and more tolerant society than the 70's and 80's in particular. It might be true on the basis of lived experience that more people have interracial marriages and so on, but simultaneously the far-right is the most dynamic and successful it's been since 1945. They have political opportunities now that they just didn't have in the 70's and 80's. This identity stuff is very fertile terrain for them and they've been kicking the left's arses when it comes to mobilising people in large numbers and causing real political change. The tropes they use (nationalism, race, heritage, ancestry etc) are extremely deeply embedded, and are very effective at uniting and mobilising large numbers of people to affect politics. A mention of how the far-right uses it's own reactionary identity politics would've been interesting.
The other sad thing is this sort of thing is that despite holding promises of unity and solidarity intersectionalism doesn't actually function like that. There's no good reason why it ought to be a crude binary between identity and class, and I don't think either side of the argument would consciously make that kind of distinction. After all historically moments of heightened class consciousness and solidarity have been moments of opportunity and progress for gender and ethnic issues too. Pointing this out is tantamount in some quarters to reducing identity politcs to a side-story in the class struggle but I don't see it like that, I see the things as inherent to each other, not as seperate things that then go onto intersect at an individual level of subjective experience.
So even though this shift in politics reflects a genuine weakening of class consciousness I don't see why that would implicitly benefit the identity-focused left either. There's more than that going on here. Thinking about it (and I remember butchers raising a similar point to me in a different thread) this end of history, neo-liberal consensus, "capitalist realism" isn't something new. Did the collapse in Chartism post-1848 benefit the women's movement in Britain? It doesn't get much more "end of history" than Pax Britannica, did women's political movements suddenly experience a great burst of energy and life after the working class had been disciplined and put back in it's place? I'm sure there's other examples of this in other revolutionary societies. Apologies for going on I'm thinking out loud a bit here.
I'd disagree about some important things though, in particular that despite mass immigration Britain is a less racist and more tolerant society than the 70's and 80's in particular. It might be true on the basis of lived experience that more people have interracial marriages and so on, but simultaneously the far-right is the most dynamic and successful it's been since 1945. They have political opportunities now that they just didn't have in the 70's and 80's. This identity stuff is very fertile terrain for them and they've been kicking the left's arses when it comes to mobilising people in large numbers and causing real political change. The tropes they use (nationalism, race, heritage, ancestry etc) are extremely deeply embedded, and are very effective at uniting and mobilising large numbers of people to affect politics. A mention of how the far-right uses it's own reactionary identity politics would've been interesting.
The other sad thing is this sort of thing is that despite holding promises of unity and solidarity intersectionalism doesn't actually function like that. There's no good reason why it ought to be a crude binary between identity and class, and I don't think either side of the argument would consciously make that kind of distinction. After all historically moments of heightened class consciousness and solidarity have been moments of opportunity and progress for gender and ethnic issues too. Pointing this out is tantamount in some quarters to reducing identity politcs to a side-story in the class struggle but I don't see it like that, I see the things as inherent to each other, not as seperate things that then go onto intersect at an individual level of subjective experience.
So even though this shift in politics reflects a genuine weakening of class consciousness I don't see why that would implicitly benefit the identity-focused left either. There's more than that going on here. Thinking about it (and I remember butchers raising a similar point to me in a different thread) this end of history, neo-liberal consensus, "capitalist realism" isn't something new. Did the collapse in Chartism post-1848 benefit the women's movement in Britain? It doesn't get much more "end of history" than Pax Britannica, did women's political movements suddenly experience a great burst of energy and life after the working class had been disciplined and put back in it's place? I'm sure there's other examples of this in other revolutionary societies. Apologies for going on I'm thinking out loud a bit here.
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Even the Graeber is getting hit:
David Graeber@davidgraeber
still getting over being lectured on my "privilege" for having grown up in a Union coop. My mom was a factory worker. Ergo I'm privileged.
David Graeber@davidgraeber
still getting over being lectured on my "privilege" for having grown up in a Union coop. My mom was a factory worker. Ergo I'm privileged.
ItWillNeverWork
Messy Crimbobs, fellow humans.
Wow. That is bizarre. Do we know who it was that accused him of said 'privilege'?
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Not yet, i'm sure he'll have a moan about it later so will pass on if someone else doesn't first.
Fozzie Bear
Well-Known Member
I can't access the Metamute piece now - "page not found"...
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Yes seems to have gone: i can paste the whole thing if you want?
Fozzie Bear
Well-Known Member
Well I'd like to read it, so that would be good... (apologies in advance for taking up space here)
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Going to have to do it in two bits - so can no one post for about 40 seconds please?
Is self-styled revolutionary Russell Brand really just a ‘Brocialist’? Is Lily Allen’s feminist pop-video racist? Is lesbian activist Julie Bindel a ‘Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist’ Is Respect MP George Galloway a ‘rape apologist’? Welcome to the world of ‘intersectionalism’ – or what we used to call sectarianism.
‘My feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit’. This was Flavia Dzodan’s angry challenge to a feminist slogan on a placard on a ‘slutwalk’ march, ‘woman is the nigger of the world’. Dzodan did not like the ‘white feminist’ laying claim to her the oppression suffered by women of colour. ‘Am I supposed to ignore the violence that ensued in the N* word discussion?’ Dzodan asked: ‘Am I supposed to overlook its blatant violence in the name of sisterhood?’ i
Dzodan’s meme ‘intersectional’ was widely taken up amongst radical campaigners and bloggers. Intersectionality seemed to be a way to balance the different claims of oppressed groups. None would be ignored, or folded into the other. Intersectional feminism would not ignore the special problems faced by black women. Nor would anti-racist campaigners ignore sexism. The watchword of intersectionality was that you should ‘check your privilege’ before making any claims.ii
For the radical left ‘intersectionality’ seemed to be a way of ‘achieving effective political unity among the oppressed.’iii Those leftists were embarrassed by their own tradition, which seemed to them to be too mannish. They felt they had ignored questions of oppression, and would make amends through an intersectional approach. The older texts that saw women’s oppression as a footnote to the class struggle were set aside.iv
The meaning of Intersectionality raised its head in a bitter dispute at the annual Radical Feminist conference in London. The Radical Feminists insisted on a ‘women only’ space for their discussion. No-one argued that it was a bad idea to reflect the divisions in society in your conference (because most on the radical left shared the RadFems belief that men exploit women and have no direct interest in fighting for equality). But the RadFems were attacked for the exclusion of transsexuals. Transsexuals were not women, but men seeking to invade women’s space, said the RadFems. The RadFems were guilty of discrimination, said their intersectional critics. Transsexuals identify as women, and therefore they are women, because gender is a social construct, not a natural one. The RadFems were denounced as Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists, or TERFs. In a moment, all of the moral authority of the Radical Feminists (which was surely resented by those outside the group) disappeared in a twitterstorm of moral disapproval.
As is the way with these arguments over who is more righteously oppressed it all got very bitter very quickly, like a Dutch auction. The ‘intersectional’ feminists got the Camden Irish Centre to withdraw its venue for the conference in 2012. When journalists Suzanne Moore and Julie Burchill wrote strident attacks on transsexual demands to be treated as women they were attacked. There was even a protest organised outside the newspaper’s office – and astonishingly the Guardian Media Group agreed to rewrite history by removing the article from their website. The struggle for intersectionality continued with the demand that journalist and Justice for Women founder Julie Bindel be refused a platform at a Manchester University Debating Union event of pornography, because she too was a ‘TERF’ (Bindel withdrew after death threats).v
One radical feminist Emma Brandt complained in turn that ‘liberal feminists “weaponize” trans women against radicals’ – meaning that transsexuals were being used by less resolute feminists to undermine the radical feminists’ authority, which was an interesting counter, but a bridge too far along the intersectionality road.vi
Far from being a formula for political unity, the demands of intersectionality look like a minefield of political correctness. Every protest must first check its privilege. Every statement is held up to the impossible test of balancing every claim. Not unity, but Balkanisation is the outcome. Intersectionality looks more like a formula for sectarianism than joint action. The champions of intersectionality are never happier than when they are taking down someone who is trying to make a radical case, just not radical enough. As Sigmund Freud told Sandor Ferenczi ‘there is no revolutionary who is not knocked out of the field by a more radical one’.vii
That was the climate when comedian and Hollywood Star Russell Brand lent his name to a call for revolution – a revolution against profit and the rape of the planet and for the free movement of labour, which one might have thought would be appealing to the modern radical. Instead Brand’s catapulting of those concerns into the mainstream provoked a hand-wringing ‘Discourse on Brocialism’ from the New Statesman’s Laurie Penny and blogger Richard Seymour. Brand was ‘playing the court jester, and speaking limited truth to overwhelming power’ but only because his ‘wealth and fame… allow him to say such things’. Brand’s flippant aside that he had taken the job of guest editor because he was asked by a beautiful woman was ‘the exercise of a “privilege” of patriarchy’.viii
It was also the minefield that Lily Allen stumbled into when she filmed the video for her song Hard Out Here – ‘a satirical video that deals with objectification of women within modern pop culture’.xi This time it was the Guardian columnist Suzanne Moore (now well versed in the zero-sum game of intersectionality) who laid charges of racial objectification against Allen’s feminist video. Years ago Prime Minister John Major promised that his government would be free of sleaze, a claim to probity that only encouraged the press to dig deeper for evidence of impropriety – which they did. Today it is a law of politics that those who claim the moral high ground are the ones who will fall the hardest, John Major’s law.
Anti-humanists
The Marxist-humanist Peter Hudis recently explained to me that intersectionality cannot work because it only sees common cause coming from the outside, or after the event, as an aggregation of complaints. It is, he says, formalistic. He has a point. Intersectionality seems to argue a common cause but it is only an opportunistic one. Women, blacks, trade unionists, immigrants and Muslims are invited to make common cause against the oppressor.
The intersectionalists are pretty sceptical about unifying themes. Socialism? Brocialism! Brotherhood? Oppression! Behind these snap judgments is a philosophy, the philosophy of anti-humanism. Sex-historian and philosopher Michel Foucault is the best known proponent of this anti-humanism, taught at all leading universities, though the diligent student can turn to Jacques Lacan or Louis Althusser.
The main claim of the anti-humanist philosophy is a rejection of the assertion of a common human essence. All such claims to the anti-humanists are false and ideological supports to oppression. Claiming, for example, that men and women, or white and black are fundamentally the same, in this argument, is to hide the oppression of the one by the other under the appearance of equality. It is true of course that there are many examples of false universals, like David Cameron saying ‘we are all in this together’, or Gordon Brown saying ‘British jobs for British workers’.
On the other hand the claim of an essential human equality has been a resource for progressive movements since the English Revolution of 1640. Brotherhood might sound insensitive today, but it has been the guiding light of workers’ struggles for two centuries. To be really radical, said Karl Marx is to get to the root, and the root is man. Not so for today’s anti-humanists, though. Human liberation is a myth, and the common struggle only a lash-up of those preceding struggles. As we can see, though, that kind of opportunistic intersectionality quickly degenerates into finger-pointing and name calling.
Is self-styled revolutionary Russell Brand really just a ‘Brocialist’? Is Lily Allen’s feminist pop-video racist? Is lesbian activist Julie Bindel a ‘Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist’ Is Respect MP George Galloway a ‘rape apologist’? Welcome to the world of ‘intersectionalism’ – or what we used to call sectarianism.
‘My feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit’. This was Flavia Dzodan’s angry challenge to a feminist slogan on a placard on a ‘slutwalk’ march, ‘woman is the nigger of the world’. Dzodan did not like the ‘white feminist’ laying claim to her the oppression suffered by women of colour. ‘Am I supposed to ignore the violence that ensued in the N* word discussion?’ Dzodan asked: ‘Am I supposed to overlook its blatant violence in the name of sisterhood?’ i
Dzodan’s meme ‘intersectional’ was widely taken up amongst radical campaigners and bloggers. Intersectionality seemed to be a way to balance the different claims of oppressed groups. None would be ignored, or folded into the other. Intersectional feminism would not ignore the special problems faced by black women. Nor would anti-racist campaigners ignore sexism. The watchword of intersectionality was that you should ‘check your privilege’ before making any claims.ii
For the radical left ‘intersectionality’ seemed to be a way of ‘achieving effective political unity among the oppressed.’iii Those leftists were embarrassed by their own tradition, which seemed to them to be too mannish. They felt they had ignored questions of oppression, and would make amends through an intersectional approach. The older texts that saw women’s oppression as a footnote to the class struggle were set aside.iv
The meaning of Intersectionality raised its head in a bitter dispute at the annual Radical Feminist conference in London. The Radical Feminists insisted on a ‘women only’ space for their discussion. No-one argued that it was a bad idea to reflect the divisions in society in your conference (because most on the radical left shared the RadFems belief that men exploit women and have no direct interest in fighting for equality). But the RadFems were attacked for the exclusion of transsexuals. Transsexuals were not women, but men seeking to invade women’s space, said the RadFems. The RadFems were guilty of discrimination, said their intersectional critics. Transsexuals identify as women, and therefore they are women, because gender is a social construct, not a natural one. The RadFems were denounced as Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists, or TERFs. In a moment, all of the moral authority of the Radical Feminists (which was surely resented by those outside the group) disappeared in a twitterstorm of moral disapproval.
As is the way with these arguments over who is more righteously oppressed it all got very bitter very quickly, like a Dutch auction. The ‘intersectional’ feminists got the Camden Irish Centre to withdraw its venue for the conference in 2012. When journalists Suzanne Moore and Julie Burchill wrote strident attacks on transsexual demands to be treated as women they were attacked. There was even a protest organised outside the newspaper’s office – and astonishingly the Guardian Media Group agreed to rewrite history by removing the article from their website. The struggle for intersectionality continued with the demand that journalist and Justice for Women founder Julie Bindel be refused a platform at a Manchester University Debating Union event of pornography, because she too was a ‘TERF’ (Bindel withdrew after death threats).v
One radical feminist Emma Brandt complained in turn that ‘liberal feminists “weaponize” trans women against radicals’ – meaning that transsexuals were being used by less resolute feminists to undermine the radical feminists’ authority, which was an interesting counter, but a bridge too far along the intersectionality road.vi
Far from being a formula for political unity, the demands of intersectionality look like a minefield of political correctness. Every protest must first check its privilege. Every statement is held up to the impossible test of balancing every claim. Not unity, but Balkanisation is the outcome. Intersectionality looks more like a formula for sectarianism than joint action. The champions of intersectionality are never happier than when they are taking down someone who is trying to make a radical case, just not radical enough. As Sigmund Freud told Sandor Ferenczi ‘there is no revolutionary who is not knocked out of the field by a more radical one’.vii
That was the climate when comedian and Hollywood Star Russell Brand lent his name to a call for revolution – a revolution against profit and the rape of the planet and for the free movement of labour, which one might have thought would be appealing to the modern radical. Instead Brand’s catapulting of those concerns into the mainstream provoked a hand-wringing ‘Discourse on Brocialism’ from the New Statesman’s Laurie Penny and blogger Richard Seymour. Brand was ‘playing the court jester, and speaking limited truth to overwhelming power’ but only because his ‘wealth and fame… allow him to say such things’. Brand’s flippant aside that he had taken the job of guest editor because he was asked by a beautiful woman was ‘the exercise of a “privilege” of patriarchy’.viii
It was also the minefield that Lily Allen stumbled into when she filmed the video for her song Hard Out Here – ‘a satirical video that deals with objectification of women within modern pop culture’.xi This time it was the Guardian columnist Suzanne Moore (now well versed in the zero-sum game of intersectionality) who laid charges of racial objectification against Allen’s feminist video. Years ago Prime Minister John Major promised that his government would be free of sleaze, a claim to probity that only encouraged the press to dig deeper for evidence of impropriety – which they did. Today it is a law of politics that those who claim the moral high ground are the ones who will fall the hardest, John Major’s law.
Anti-humanists
The Marxist-humanist Peter Hudis recently explained to me that intersectionality cannot work because it only sees common cause coming from the outside, or after the event, as an aggregation of complaints. It is, he says, formalistic. He has a point. Intersectionality seems to argue a common cause but it is only an opportunistic one. Women, blacks, trade unionists, immigrants and Muslims are invited to make common cause against the oppressor.
The intersectionalists are pretty sceptical about unifying themes. Socialism? Brocialism! Brotherhood? Oppression! Behind these snap judgments is a philosophy, the philosophy of anti-humanism. Sex-historian and philosopher Michel Foucault is the best known proponent of this anti-humanism, taught at all leading universities, though the diligent student can turn to Jacques Lacan or Louis Althusser.
The main claim of the anti-humanist philosophy is a rejection of the assertion of a common human essence. All such claims to the anti-humanists are false and ideological supports to oppression. Claiming, for example, that men and women, or white and black are fundamentally the same, in this argument, is to hide the oppression of the one by the other under the appearance of equality. It is true of course that there are many examples of false universals, like David Cameron saying ‘we are all in this together’, or Gordon Brown saying ‘British jobs for British workers’.
On the other hand the claim of an essential human equality has been a resource for progressive movements since the English Revolution of 1640. Brotherhood might sound insensitive today, but it has been the guiding light of workers’ struggles for two centuries. To be really radical, said Karl Marx is to get to the root, and the root is man. Not so for today’s anti-humanists, though. Human liberation is a myth, and the common struggle only a lash-up of those preceding struggles. As we can see, though, that kind of opportunistic intersectionality quickly degenerates into finger-pointing and name calling.
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butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Haven’t we been here before?
Last year Shulamith Firestone was found dead in her apartment after a history of mental illness. It was a sad end to one of the more original feminist thinkers of her day. Firestone’s Dialectic of Sex (1970) was an angry inversion of Marx’s theory of class struggle that saw the conflict of the sexes as the driving force of human history. Along with Valerie Solanas, author of the S.C.U.M. Manifesto (Society for Cutting Up Men, 1967), Firestone pushed feminism in a radical, and separatist direction. In England feminists Rosie Boycott and Marsha Rowe set up the magazine Spare Rib which, though not as radical as Firestone’s Redstockings collective, was a challenging and inventive answer to the male chauvinist culture of the day.
In time, though, Spare Rib’s editorial collective began to argue. Some thought that feminists should be lesbians and have nothing to do with men. A debilitating game of who is more oppressed followed. Lesbian separatist Linda Bellos recalled the arguments: ‘If you're going to talk about the sisterhood being all-powerful, what version are you talking about?’ Bellos questioned whether ‘What unites us is being women. But we bring to being women our class, race, religion...’x
The divisions amongst the feminists grew. Some hoped that Socialist Feminism would overcome the differences, but it just turned out to be another split. Among the Socialist Feminists Hilary Wainwright, Sheila Rowbotham and Beatrix Campbell wrote a manifesto called Beyond the Fragments, which anticipated much of the intersectionality argument. Wainwright thought that it was wrong to merge the movements. ‘There are good reasons for each movement controlling its own autonomy … women, blacks, gays, youth and national minorities have interests which may sometimes be antagonistic to each other both now and probably in a socialist society’.xi
Where Beyond the Fragments led, though, was not to the promised grassroots movement, but jobs with the Greater London Council as the radical and feminist left retreated from the streets into the committee rooms. The GLC’s struggle against racism and sexism was largely conducted through the agency of disciplinary procedures against its workers and tenants. Feminists in the labour party were more successful in their criticisms of unions than of employers. Beyond the Fragments contributor Bea Campbell played a key role in the demonization of the working class family as a site of abuse. Others, like Labour Minister Ann Clwyd found feminist cause to demonise Muslims in West Yorkshire, and then in 2003, in Iraq.
A depressed left
Today’s radicals have adopted the framework of intersectionality to negotiate the divisions among them. These divisions, they think, are not political, but biological; not differences over strategy or analysis, but the differences between people on the basis of their colour, sex, sexual orientation and assignation. Richard Seymour says intersectionality is ‘the only strategy that will work’. The background to this thinking is the same belief that the interests of women, workers, gays, and transsexuals are fundamentally opposed. Indeed the only sense in which they are allied is in opposition to the external enemy, variously ‘neo-liberalism’, or ‘this Tory government’. The intersectional left has a gloomy, doom-laden view of the present. This is the ‘worst recession since the 1930s’. Austerity measures are hurting everyone, but especially women and minorities. All of this unhappiness is supposed to make the case for an elusive unity.
It is an approach that fails to see the positive things that unite people. Over the last century the social condition of women in the developed world has improved markedly. Women who were pointedly excluded from political power, denied civil and property rights and excluded from the world of work are today enfranchised, property owners and half a greatly expanded workforce. Far from being at odds, surveys of social attitudes find that in their values men and women are becoming more alike, more liberal and self-assured. At the same time legislation on lesbian and gay rights has moved towards effective equality.
Attitudes on race have changed markedly in Britain over the last fifty years. In 1986 around half of those asked disapproved of mix marriages, but in 2011 that number had dropped to just 15 per cent.xii Immigration to Britain over the last twenty years has been high and just over seven million of the population was born abroad, and yet racial tensions are much lower than they were in the 1970s and 1980s.
There is an irony that the radical left is preoccupied with the differences between groups in society, while those same groups in society are much less so. The one dimension along which inequality has clearly increased is not along ethnic or sex lines, but in terms of income distribution, with a super-wealthy elite separating itself off from the mass. Socio-economically the great mass of people are much more united and integrated than they have ever been. Social change and modern technology have created the foundations for a worldwide human culture. The one place that unity and equality are more elusive than ever is on the political plane.
Political discourse has failed over recent times to unite people. Retreating from the lives of the greater mass of people, political ideologies and groupings can only relate to wider groups by playing upon differences and accentuating them. The intersectional left only reflect that failing in a more accentuated form. Intersectionalism is the morbid symptom of a movement in decline, not a strategy for its renewal.
James Heartfield 17 November 2013
Last year Shulamith Firestone was found dead in her apartment after a history of mental illness. It was a sad end to one of the more original feminist thinkers of her day. Firestone’s Dialectic of Sex (1970) was an angry inversion of Marx’s theory of class struggle that saw the conflict of the sexes as the driving force of human history. Along with Valerie Solanas, author of the S.C.U.M. Manifesto (Society for Cutting Up Men, 1967), Firestone pushed feminism in a radical, and separatist direction. In England feminists Rosie Boycott and Marsha Rowe set up the magazine Spare Rib which, though not as radical as Firestone’s Redstockings collective, was a challenging and inventive answer to the male chauvinist culture of the day.
In time, though, Spare Rib’s editorial collective began to argue. Some thought that feminists should be lesbians and have nothing to do with men. A debilitating game of who is more oppressed followed. Lesbian separatist Linda Bellos recalled the arguments: ‘If you're going to talk about the sisterhood being all-powerful, what version are you talking about?’ Bellos questioned whether ‘What unites us is being women. But we bring to being women our class, race, religion...’x
The divisions amongst the feminists grew. Some hoped that Socialist Feminism would overcome the differences, but it just turned out to be another split. Among the Socialist Feminists Hilary Wainwright, Sheila Rowbotham and Beatrix Campbell wrote a manifesto called Beyond the Fragments, which anticipated much of the intersectionality argument. Wainwright thought that it was wrong to merge the movements. ‘There are good reasons for each movement controlling its own autonomy … women, blacks, gays, youth and national minorities have interests which may sometimes be antagonistic to each other both now and probably in a socialist society’.xi
Where Beyond the Fragments led, though, was not to the promised grassroots movement, but jobs with the Greater London Council as the radical and feminist left retreated from the streets into the committee rooms. The GLC’s struggle against racism and sexism was largely conducted through the agency of disciplinary procedures against its workers and tenants. Feminists in the labour party were more successful in their criticisms of unions than of employers. Beyond the Fragments contributor Bea Campbell played a key role in the demonization of the working class family as a site of abuse. Others, like Labour Minister Ann Clwyd found feminist cause to demonise Muslims in West Yorkshire, and then in 2003, in Iraq.
A depressed left
Today’s radicals have adopted the framework of intersectionality to negotiate the divisions among them. These divisions, they think, are not political, but biological; not differences over strategy or analysis, but the differences between people on the basis of their colour, sex, sexual orientation and assignation. Richard Seymour says intersectionality is ‘the only strategy that will work’. The background to this thinking is the same belief that the interests of women, workers, gays, and transsexuals are fundamentally opposed. Indeed the only sense in which they are allied is in opposition to the external enemy, variously ‘neo-liberalism’, or ‘this Tory government’. The intersectional left has a gloomy, doom-laden view of the present. This is the ‘worst recession since the 1930s’. Austerity measures are hurting everyone, but especially women and minorities. All of this unhappiness is supposed to make the case for an elusive unity.
It is an approach that fails to see the positive things that unite people. Over the last century the social condition of women in the developed world has improved markedly. Women who were pointedly excluded from political power, denied civil and property rights and excluded from the world of work are today enfranchised, property owners and half a greatly expanded workforce. Far from being at odds, surveys of social attitudes find that in their values men and women are becoming more alike, more liberal and self-assured. At the same time legislation on lesbian and gay rights has moved towards effective equality.
Attitudes on race have changed markedly in Britain over the last fifty years. In 1986 around half of those asked disapproved of mix marriages, but in 2011 that number had dropped to just 15 per cent.xii Immigration to Britain over the last twenty years has been high and just over seven million of the population was born abroad, and yet racial tensions are much lower than they were in the 1970s and 1980s.
There is an irony that the radical left is preoccupied with the differences between groups in society, while those same groups in society are much less so. The one dimension along which inequality has clearly increased is not along ethnic or sex lines, but in terms of income distribution, with a super-wealthy elite separating itself off from the mass. Socio-economically the great mass of people are much more united and integrated than they have ever been. Social change and modern technology have created the foundations for a worldwide human culture. The one place that unity and equality are more elusive than ever is on the political plane.
Political discourse has failed over recent times to unite people. Retreating from the lives of the greater mass of people, political ideologies and groupings can only relate to wider groups by playing upon differences and accentuating them. The intersectional left only reflect that failing in a more accentuated form. Intersectionalism is the morbid symptom of a movement in decline, not a strategy for its renewal.
James Heartfield 17 November 2013
sunnysidedown
caput mortuum
Interestingly all his comments on the article that were available to view on Disqus have gone as well.
Luckily the response he posted today was copied onto another blog here
I've posted the whole thing below as it's worth a read.
On some responses to the article
.
“You’re an ignorant fuck” and “moronic” (mmmdot) “Sit the fuck down” (JN) “this is bullshit” (Chris) — sadly these are some of the foul-mouthed replies to this piece in the comments section when it was first posted on the Mute site (below).
These respondents thought that there should be no discussion. It was ‘not a ‘debatable’ topic for ‘disagreement.’” (Trudy), while mmmdot offered “you clearly have no fucking business speaking,” and that I should “shut the fuck up and sit the fuck down.” In the spirit of political re-education Chris advised, “allow room for others to help you figure out where you went wrong,” while ana australiana thought “it’s disappointing that this was published.”
These reactions are characteristic of a small-group outlook that is unused to being challenged and prefers instead to restrict talk amongst its own adherents thereby reinforcing its internal value system, however bizarre its conclusions sound outside the group.
For the most part such criticism as the article did receive was criticising the article I did not write. “You are so painfully ignorant on the topic you espouse to know about,” posted Trudy, adding “I know you have done zero research on what intersectionality actually is.” But of course the article was not a history of the term intersectionality, it was an essay on the intersectionality, in particular the way that it had played out in recent debates. There is nothing to stop Trudy, or anyone else writing a history of intersectionality. But taking this piece to task for not being that piece is not any kind of criticism at all.
Most of the replies were ad hominem attacks — that is attacks not on the points argued, but on the author. So JN said “sit the fuck down white man.” Now, in most argument outside of this group the color of the person making the argument is not supposed to be important, but plainly it was here. In this small-group mentality the race of the speaker most certainly is an issue. Most of the posters hold the view that thought is not universal, but embedded, not true for all, but specifically attached to races and groups.
Plainly it was offensive to this group that its ideas should even be addressed from outside the group. According to Trudy, the issue was “most certainly not about Whites who appropriate Black culture, dominate discourse on experiences that they do not have,” and even to write about it was “an appropriation of Black women’s Black feminist/womanist politics.”
In the view that ideas are embedded, ad hominem attacks that are thought of as poor logic elsewhere become legitimated.
Chris thought that Trudy’s was a “critique that comes directly from her experience” and that “as someone who lives it and is targeted on a daily basis, her perspective is more valuable than yours.” Outside of this intellectual framework, arguments and concepts are not better or worse according to the speaker, but according to the argument. But here it is assumed that these ideas are closed to someone who has “no frame of reference (personal or otherwise) to address this topic” (mmmdot). The philosopher Wittgenstein thought that there could be no private languages, not anticipating the development of intersectionalism.
This group of posters were clearly unhappy that their inner realm had been disturbed, and easily offended. Trudy thought that comment on interesectionality was “offensive to anyone who knows even 1% of what this is about.” But not being a sanctioned officiate of the group comment was “unprofessional, offensive, and oppressive.” The very idea that anyone outside the group would pay an interest in these thoughts was seen as a personal attack “meant to offend and to troll.”
Not just offensive, in fact, arguments that failed to reinforce the group’s thinking were experienced as injuries, even life threatening. “What you think of as ‘just words’ are life and death,” thought Trudy. Chris found that “your perspective is damaging.” He went further saying that disagreement with the core ideas of the group would ‘”acrifice their values, commitments, and even PHYSICAL SAFETY.”
Quite how a blog post on Mute’s community site threatened anyone’s physical safety seems hard to envisage — until you take into account the existential insecurity of this belief system. Words, challenges, counter-opinions, that are welcomed in the wider world, to this group are life-threatening assaults on their very existence.
The point of the original post was that the ideas of intersectionality were close to sectarianism. Sadly the responses of those who rejected a critical engagement with the idea confirmed that view.
Luckily the response he posted today was copied onto another blog here
I've posted the whole thing below as it's worth a read.
On some responses to the article
.
“You’re an ignorant fuck” and “moronic” (mmmdot) “Sit the fuck down” (JN) “this is bullshit” (Chris) — sadly these are some of the foul-mouthed replies to this piece in the comments section when it was first posted on the Mute site (below).
These respondents thought that there should be no discussion. It was ‘not a ‘debatable’ topic for ‘disagreement.’” (Trudy), while mmmdot offered “you clearly have no fucking business speaking,” and that I should “shut the fuck up and sit the fuck down.” In the spirit of political re-education Chris advised, “allow room for others to help you figure out where you went wrong,” while ana australiana thought “it’s disappointing that this was published.”
These reactions are characteristic of a small-group outlook that is unused to being challenged and prefers instead to restrict talk amongst its own adherents thereby reinforcing its internal value system, however bizarre its conclusions sound outside the group.
For the most part such criticism as the article did receive was criticising the article I did not write. “You are so painfully ignorant on the topic you espouse to know about,” posted Trudy, adding “I know you have done zero research on what intersectionality actually is.” But of course the article was not a history of the term intersectionality, it was an essay on the intersectionality, in particular the way that it had played out in recent debates. There is nothing to stop Trudy, or anyone else writing a history of intersectionality. But taking this piece to task for not being that piece is not any kind of criticism at all.
Most of the replies were ad hominem attacks — that is attacks not on the points argued, but on the author. So JN said “sit the fuck down white man.” Now, in most argument outside of this group the color of the person making the argument is not supposed to be important, but plainly it was here. In this small-group mentality the race of the speaker most certainly is an issue. Most of the posters hold the view that thought is not universal, but embedded, not true for all, but specifically attached to races and groups.
Plainly it was offensive to this group that its ideas should even be addressed from outside the group. According to Trudy, the issue was “most certainly not about Whites who appropriate Black culture, dominate discourse on experiences that they do not have,” and even to write about it was “an appropriation of Black women’s Black feminist/womanist politics.”
In the view that ideas are embedded, ad hominem attacks that are thought of as poor logic elsewhere become legitimated.
Chris thought that Trudy’s was a “critique that comes directly from her experience” and that “as someone who lives it and is targeted on a daily basis, her perspective is more valuable than yours.” Outside of this intellectual framework, arguments and concepts are not better or worse according to the speaker, but according to the argument. But here it is assumed that these ideas are closed to someone who has “no frame of reference (personal or otherwise) to address this topic” (mmmdot). The philosopher Wittgenstein thought that there could be no private languages, not anticipating the development of intersectionalism.
This group of posters were clearly unhappy that their inner realm had been disturbed, and easily offended. Trudy thought that comment on interesectionality was “offensive to anyone who knows even 1% of what this is about.” But not being a sanctioned officiate of the group comment was “unprofessional, offensive, and oppressive.” The very idea that anyone outside the group would pay an interest in these thoughts was seen as a personal attack “meant to offend and to troll.”
Not just offensive, in fact, arguments that failed to reinforce the group’s thinking were experienced as injuries, even life threatening. “What you think of as ‘just words’ are life and death,” thought Trudy. Chris found that “your perspective is damaging.” He went further saying that disagreement with the core ideas of the group would ‘”acrifice their values, commitments, and even PHYSICAL SAFETY.”
Quite how a blog post on Mute’s community site threatened anyone’s physical safety seems hard to envisage — until you take into account the existential insecurity of this belief system. Words, challenges, counter-opinions, that are welcomed in the wider world, to this group are life-threatening assaults on their very existence.
The point of the original post was that the ideas of intersectionality were close to sectarianism. Sadly the responses of those who rejected a critical engagement with the idea confirmed that view.
Fozzie Bear
Well-Known Member
Thanks for posting those, butchersapron and sunnysidedown
ska invita
back on the other side
i was looking forward to reading those replies...very strange the piece has disappeared. Has anyone seen James Heartfield lately?
*ah, jsut seen theyve been posted above, ta
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
One of the side effects of this approach is that it will allow some radical activists who (and I've met them in the past) don't want to engage with working class people, especially white working class, the excuse not to, and to be justified by these theories as they won't adhere to their ideologies/criteria, etc.
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
A good side effect then.
ska invita
back on the other side
temporarily? or is that it?
Nigel Irritable
Five, Ten, Fifteen Years
Fairly sure he's taking the piss there. I hope this is only a temporary leave of absence for PD and it will be back in the twitter trenches as soon as the Fisher Offensive comes to a close?
ItWillNeverWork
Messy Crimbobs, fellow humans.
Proletarian Democracy?
rekil
to menny cranks
It can be re-activated if someone logs in within 30 days. But at least one new joke is needed.
Fozzie Bear
Well-Known Member
CLEANSE THE SKIES WITH THE WORKERS BOMB.
ItWillNeverWork
Messy Crimbobs, fellow humans.
Who is presently the Dear Leader, btw? Maybe time for a new appointment? I nominate Owen as a front, but that weird slave-driver couple as the real power behind him.
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Make the clouds weep workers rain.
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
They're out on bail.
ItWillNeverWork
Messy Crimbobs, fellow humans.
I think I know who you mean.
The walls have ears and the trees eyes, however. The name of Our Beloved Comrade shall not be spoken.
Last edited by a moderator:
Nigel Irritable
Five, Ten, Fifteen Years
Surely there's some mileage in a Comrade Bala defence fund?
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