Thursday 9 August 2018

The Ideology of Gender and Identity Politics



It’s hard to know where to begin with this. It’s wrong and it’s basically the old ‘plague on both your houses’ style of politics.

 

The way I see it is this: gender is an ideology that is used as a weapon of oppressive social control by those who rule - which is mostly men.

 

It is used to oppress others in order to control and exploit them. For women that oppression, prior to capitalism, was primarily centred on their reproductive capacity.  

 

At the heart of the ideology of gender is the far greater role the female plays in species and group reproduction - due to humans’ long gestation, the production of mostly single and utterly dependent offspring etc. What many who live in the insular bubbles of westernized affluence forget is that this is still the reality for the vast majority of humans.

 

That foundational material reality also created and demanded high levels of sociability; the things that mark us out as a species are we are ineluctably social and highly adaptable.

 

The ideology of gender arose once humans moved beyond subsistence into the production of surpluses - and it was accompanied by another great ideology – which enshrined the right, by virtue of belligerence or birth, to oppress and economically exploit, others. 

 

The ideology of an essential, god given, gender difference and of the innate superiority of the male over the female was a compensation to otherwise powerless men. Patriarchal authority in the domestic and personal sphere served to mask the reality of a lack of power in the public sphere.

 

In capitalism, things changed. The market rules. People are nominally ‘free’ to enter the labour market, ie to ‘sell’ their labour as free agents. The value of that labour and the scope of civil and legal rights became and remain points of tension between the buyer and the seller and the various bodies which represent the interests of each.

 

The reproduction of labour - both in terms of the new generation of workers and in terms of the provision of domestic services - remained the province of women.

 

The capitalist ideology of gender drew on more ancient beliefs of women’s role with its innate attributes and essential inferiority, to justify both the hyper-exploitation of women within paid employment, and, where it suited the market, to confine women to the - unpaid - domestic sphere. 

 

This made her and her children dependent on a male wage and in turn made men less able to withhold or withdraw their labour, which was their only weapon in the negotiation of the wage contract.

 

Win, win for capitalism. Lose, lose for women and for poor women especially.

 

The world is still a phallocracy - not simply because of capitalism but because of the millennia of societies dominated by hierarchical, patriarchal religion - mostly monotheistic - which capitalism emerged from, and built on.

 

Capitalism used and still does use, the ideologies of gender and class. The latter was extended from the right to exploit acquired by belligerence or birth, to a right accrued on the basis of ‘merit’.

 

Capitalism also created another powerful ideology - that of race and of inherent racial difference - to justify the hyper-exploitation of people of colour, and most especially of black people, and the vicious forms of oppression that were used to achieve and maintain that hyper-exploitation.

 

It also extended to poor white people - men and women - the illusory compensation of their racial superiority over people of colour. Capitalism added the hierarchy of race to the hierarchy of class and the notion of an innate, god-given superiority of the male over the female. 

 

The quintessence of all this is divide and rule through the promotion of religious and political sectarianism, gender and racial difference.

 

Fast forward to the modern era - to the most rampant and dangerous form of capitalism - which has not, as Marx anticipated, created the conditions of its own demise through its inherent contradictions - but has created the conditions of the entire species’ demise, possibly the entire planet as we know it.

 

And what has this era of massive contradictions and hyper-exploitation of peoples and the natural world also seen? The greatest extension of formal rights and the creation of a large and highly privileged buffer class positioned between the reducing numbers of a super-rich elite and the growing number of a super-poor - many of whom are surplus to the system's requirements.

 

The trans rights issue is the logical outflow of identity politics –which is essentially accommodative and poses no direct threat to the economic status quo.It is another divide and rule tactic based on the promise and the delivery of formal rights and lifestyle choices to all but which have most meaning to those who are in a position to exercise rights and access choices, ie mostly those in the buffer class.

 

This gives the BC a stake in an obviously iniquitous, highly dangerous, unstable and unsustainable economic status quo and it blinds many to both the system’s faults and to the possibility of an alternative, and it offers a life belt to those in the mass who haven’t yet lost any hope of being saved.

 

The Left needs to stop falling into the divide and rule trap. Sectarianism, factionalism and dogmatism are all enemies of the Left and therefore are enemies of the powerless.

 

Social fragmentation - especially fragmentation into competing clumps held together by some vague notion of personal identity- is the enemy of all. When the illusions of freedom and choice, proffered by a profoundly and inherently flawed economic order, become people’s reality, we have a problem.

 

We must of course keep fighting for the rights that neoliberal governments extend but never let that create divisions and divert us away from the ever more pressing issues of a world that is literally teetering on the brink of disaster.

Tuesday 7 August 2018

Free Speech

Everyone technically has free speech in NZ but it's stating the obvious that some people's speech is a lot louder, travels a lot further and carries a whole lot more political weight than others. 

 

Some people who - by any objective measure - talk and write utter rot have not just one, but several platforms from which to assail the nation's sensibilities. Loads of others have no platform at all. Their job is to be spoken at - or to, if they’re lucky.

 

It’s a fine thing, the right to speak freely, a precious thing given the reasons why people who have the power might want to curtail what other people have to say.  It has been fought for, people died for it. Many are still fighting and dying for it. 

 

The right of free speech, like the right of free assembly, gained its significance by being denied.


Freedom of speech is bound indissolubly with the right to know, to be informed, to have access to knowledge.  This is important for both speakers and those who hear the speech.

 

But neither speech, nor the knowledge which informs it, is politically neutral. It can be  used as a weapon to silence, to stereotype, to discriminate against - to harm others. 

 

When the right to speak freely comes up against the right of others to be free from exposure to speech that harms - it’s always going to be difficult. 

 

I acknowledge the far greater impact of racist ideology and rhetoric on those it targets - it damages all of us but it hits people of colour harder and deeper. 

 

On a personal level I have no problem with gagging all racists but on a political level the core question is - who gets to draw the line and where do you draw it? 

 

There really is no easy answer. Those who think there is are being naive or politically infantile. You have only to look at the situation in the UK over amendments to the Gender Recognition Act and the way that the labelling of 'gender critical' arguments as hate speech is being used to close down discussion.

 

Free speech versus hate speech is a difficult one and extremely polarising and professional right wing agitators like Southen and Molyneux revel in the damage it does.  

 

Unchallenged they get to make money out of preaching their ugly ideology to like-minded people. Challenged they get to present themselves as martyrs to the cause of free speech and proof of the essential illiberality of the left.  


Win win. 

 

On an emotional level I'd want to ban them from even entering the country. They offend me way more than the likes of the tattooed putz gurning and gesticulating at a Muslim woman bus driver in the UK. 

 

He’s raw and obvious in his bigotry and awfulness. Molyneux and Southen are carefully packaged, with a telegenic gloss to cover up their feculence. They put a veneer of urbanity and corporatised style over the brutish essence of their message.  

 

They are dangerous and I detest them.

 

And they get to do the other thing that right wing agitators love to do and, having written the rulebook, are very good at - promote division on the Left.  

 

We’ve seen heaps of that over the past few days and some of it on Twitter has descended into spiteful, sophomoric, ad hominem attacks dressed up as valid political comment. Enough already.  It’s not like NZ has a surfeit of left wing activists and commentators. 

 

Not that the smug ones can actually bring themselves to acknowledge there is a ‘Left’ any more or if they do, they can’t reach agreement on what it is.  I’d like to see the loudest critics get off their political backsides and share their vision for the future with the rest of us. 

 

My feeling is this. The Right loves the Left to behave in the same ways that it does.  What they’re not good at is being funny. Let’s face it. Lying, being obnoxious and bigoted - they’re without parallel - but humour? Nah. And because they have no humour, they really hate being the butt of it.  

 

So I say, mock the living daylights out of them. Mock them up hill, down dale, round the corner and back again. And then mock them some more before they have time to draw breath.