brixtonscot
Well-Known Member
3 quotes below which I think are fairly self-explanetary.
While there has undoubtedly been progressive changes in many places ,
eg. Heteronormative marriage and nuclear family is no longer so compulsory , which is very welcome……
have many of the radical aims of the original Women’s & Gay Liberation movements been assimilated and/or contained by Capitalism ?
Sexual Liberation & Power :
As Aldous Huxley wrote in his 1946 preface to Brave New World, a novel about a futuristic dystopia in which sexual promiscuity becomes the law -
"as political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase. And the dictator . . . will do well to encourage that freedom . . . it will help to reconcile his subjects to the servitude which is their fate."
Sexual liberation, despite its apparent eventual successes, might be interpreted, as the philosopher Michel Foucault suggested (with reference to Reich), as having ushered in "a more devious and discreet form of power".
Wilhelm Reich: the man who invented free love
Social Liberal Seduction :
"Of course, there were human gains in this enthusiastic turn by mainstream politicians towards the agenda of social liberalism, from the 1990s onwards: same-sex marriage, an embracing of trans rights, drugs reform (or at least a more tolerant legal attitude towards individual possession), and freer divorce and abortion (all these advances having been made more possible by social movements).
But we should note that this wave of social liberalism – eventually embraced and even championed by the likes of the Cameron-Osborne Tory government in the UK – hid a turn to the right in other policy areas. The Blair government in the UK enthusiastically embarked on a new round of neo-colonial military interventions culminating in joining the ill-judged US invasion of Iraq in 2003.
( and queers would be permitted to join military aggression )
Above all, this new era of social liberalism provided a convenient political smokescreen across the Western world for pillage and despoilation (of people and the natural environment) unseen since the dawn of capitalism. A billion more wage workers were recruited – a doubling of the global workforce – to toil in the sweatshops of Asia. Another two billion were forced off the land, to eke out a marginal existence in the favelas of the global south – while their farms were gobbled up by rapacious agribusiness.
Above all, a new global finance capital emerged bent on reducing the European and American working classes into indebted, obese consumers. Making these exploited multitudes think they were a new generation of liberated individualists free to be anything they wanted to be (while plugged into the internet) is the very essence of the social liberal seduction technique."
George Kerevan : Conter - Shadow Boxers
Identity Politics as a New Imperialism :
European colonialism didn’t just spread pre-and early capitalist property relations to the rest of the world, but it also spread a particular Christian cosmology.
There was only one god, rather than the thousands upon thousands of gods the conquered people knew.
Humans stood outside of nature and in linear time, rather than as part of nature and within animist conceptions of time. By converting the colonial subjects to this newer cosmology, European capitalists were able to re-create the world that created them, over and over again in each new place.
What is happening now is the same thing: identity politics ( including “lgbt” ) allows Anglo-American neoliberalism to recreate itself throughout the rest of the world.
The problem everywhere becomes racism and anti-genderism, not capitalism, meaning that the solution everywhere becomes identity politics, not anti-capitalist revolt.
As such, the core theorists of identity politics become like the early church fathers or the Reformation figures, providing the sacred cosmology for imperialist conquest.
While there has undoubtedly been progressive changes in many places ,
eg. Heteronormative marriage and nuclear family is no longer so compulsory , which is very welcome……
have many of the radical aims of the original Women’s & Gay Liberation movements been assimilated and/or contained by Capitalism ?
Sexual Liberation & Power :
As Aldous Huxley wrote in his 1946 preface to Brave New World, a novel about a futuristic dystopia in which sexual promiscuity becomes the law -
"as political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase. And the dictator . . . will do well to encourage that freedom . . . it will help to reconcile his subjects to the servitude which is their fate."
Sexual liberation, despite its apparent eventual successes, might be interpreted, as the philosopher Michel Foucault suggested (with reference to Reich), as having ushered in "a more devious and discreet form of power".
Wilhelm Reich: the man who invented free love
Social Liberal Seduction :
"Of course, there were human gains in this enthusiastic turn by mainstream politicians towards the agenda of social liberalism, from the 1990s onwards: same-sex marriage, an embracing of trans rights, drugs reform (or at least a more tolerant legal attitude towards individual possession), and freer divorce and abortion (all these advances having been made more possible by social movements).
But we should note that this wave of social liberalism – eventually embraced and even championed by the likes of the Cameron-Osborne Tory government in the UK – hid a turn to the right in other policy areas. The Blair government in the UK enthusiastically embarked on a new round of neo-colonial military interventions culminating in joining the ill-judged US invasion of Iraq in 2003.
( and queers would be permitted to join military aggression )
Above all, this new era of social liberalism provided a convenient political smokescreen across the Western world for pillage and despoilation (of people and the natural environment) unseen since the dawn of capitalism. A billion more wage workers were recruited – a doubling of the global workforce – to toil in the sweatshops of Asia. Another two billion were forced off the land, to eke out a marginal existence in the favelas of the global south – while their farms were gobbled up by rapacious agribusiness.
Above all, a new global finance capital emerged bent on reducing the European and American working classes into indebted, obese consumers. Making these exploited multitudes think they were a new generation of liberated individualists free to be anything they wanted to be (while plugged into the internet) is the very essence of the social liberal seduction technique."
George Kerevan : Conter - Shadow Boxers
Identity Politics as a New Imperialism :
European colonialism didn’t just spread pre-and early capitalist property relations to the rest of the world, but it also spread a particular Christian cosmology.
There was only one god, rather than the thousands upon thousands of gods the conquered people knew.
Humans stood outside of nature and in linear time, rather than as part of nature and within animist conceptions of time. By converting the colonial subjects to this newer cosmology, European capitalists were able to re-create the world that created them, over and over again in each new place.
What is happening now is the same thing: identity politics ( including “lgbt” ) allows Anglo-American neoliberalism to recreate itself throughout the rest of the world.
The problem everywhere becomes racism and anti-genderism, not capitalism, meaning that the solution everywhere becomes identity politics, not anti-capitalist revolt.
As such, the core theorists of identity politics become like the early church fathers or the Reformation figures, providing the sacred cosmology for imperialist conquest.
). Abolish the family appears to be much more about widening the circle of care than anything else, but if you just read the title its easy to misconstrue.
