A deformed and deforming ideology

It's good to see Marxist feminist theory on social media fighting back against neo-liberal leftism and feminism.

What we need also are Marxist-informed examinations of the roles that gender, as a deformed and deforming ideology, has played, and still plays in the socialisation of women and men into rigid sex roles which both embody and perpetuate relations of male domination and female subordination.

The self centred posturing of a tiny minority of privileged people inside the imperial bubble is not going to change that. In truth, it does the opposite by serving to divert possible opposition, and to distract attention away from the undeniable truth – that outside the well-padded buffer zones, the world still moves to older, and often more oppressive and exploitative rhythms.

Unless we expose the role that individualising ideological constructions are playing in the context of the rampant corporate capitalism which dominates the world economically, and which almost completely controls all discourse – we will never get to grips with either the origins, or the extant realities of the oppression of women, and the economic exploitation of female productive and reproductive capacities.

Neo-liberalism drives forms of extreme individualism that serve to increase the range and severity of alienation, (in both senses of the word), and of nihilism and anomie.

It attacks and undermines all forms of collectivism except where they serve its interests and invariably, any collectives it supports are forced to be in competition with each other.

It appears to build bridges over social divides while actually deepening them, and it has mined the approaches so they can be blown if and when it suits the suits to drive even deeper wedges into any alliances that threaten its hegemony.

It promotes extreme short-termism, and the commodification of literally everything – even intangibles.

It drives insanely high levels of consumerism, promoting a toxic culture that deifies acts of taking and squandering, and denigrates cultures and movements that are based on giving and conserving.

Gender – as an aggregation of culturally-specific patterns of behaviour, beliefs, social rites and rituals is rooted in the foundational reality of species reproduction –which is dimorphic. Because we are not a powerfully instinctually driven species – we don't just learn how to be human, we are also socialised into the ways that our culture arranges the business of reproduction – processes that are both natural and immutable, and intensely social and changeable.

Gender became ideology when the essential complementarity and interconnected-ness of the two parts of the reproductive whole were utilised by a minority of men for their individual or clan (later class) advantage.  

Central to this were moves towards a rigid binary of sex roles, reinforced by religious and political ideologies which cemented ideas about an essential maleness and femaleness.

Limited authority over their females and offspring was tossed like a compensatory bone to men who were also being oppressed and exploited.

The easily observable fact that the bones thrown to men at the bottom of the social heap had usually been so thoroughly gnawed and emptied of marrow they were barely enough to sustain life – was covered over with thick layers of ideology which justified the extremes of both advantage and disadvantage.

The densest layers of that ideology were, and remain, male and class superiority – followed, in the capitalist era, by racial superiority. 

Drilling down to expose the essence of all this always was, and remains the most important project for the Left. 

However, instead of building and wielding industrial weight drilling equipment, neoliberal Leftists either flit round on the margins waving little archaeological trowels and engaging in localised digs, or they have concluded there is nothing worth drilling for, and appearance is the new reality.

The reason I bang on about gender identity being a powerful tool of neoliberalism is, it spreads a dense layer of obfuscation over arguably the most essential of truths.

The extent to which some women have become alienated from their sexed bodies, reaches the extremes in the idea that being pregnant is to be infected with a parasite. 

This should be as worrying as the wave of what has been termed rapid-onset gender dysphoria in adolescent girls in the anglophone world which has resulted in large numbers of young women believing they are better off being approximations of men, or creating a place somewhere on the manufactured gender identity spectrum.

These phenomena have a counterpart in the outcomes of trans-humanist re-writes of Cartesian duality – in which severely alienated people come to see the body as a mere vehicle – a flesh suit or meat sack that can, or even must be surgically, chemically or prosthetically altered at the whim of the individual to match whatever sense of self dominates at any given point. Or, just as worryingly, in an ego-fuelled pursuit of some form of digital immortality.

You have to be either a blinkered ideologue, or so mired in misogyny that your world view can't extend beyond the swamp of your own sexism, or just unaware of even very recent history – not to see the pappy hands of some malignantly narcissistic puppet-masters in all this. 

And I used that gendered term advisedly.