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.

Pass the identity parcel

Some musings on a damp Sunday about the identity politics phenomenon and the way it has become a major focus of the left – which these days is defined more by what its various factions are AGAINST than a broad consensus on what they are all FOR. And who does that benefit?

The most recent and polarising wing of identity politics is our pushy friend, gender identity. Its supporters claim it is the quintessence of progressivism while its detractors claim it is the greatest threat to what they hold dear – from women's sex-based rights and science, to conservative religious beliefs about the heteronormative nuclear family.

I get the sense that gender identity is a practical joker's version of "pass the parcel". As the glossy gift-wrappings are removed, the parcel will get smaller and smaller until what is revealed is a tiny box containing the message, "The joke's on you, suckers."

Why has so much of what passes for the left immersed itself in what must surely be seen as a neoliberal sponsored and promoted theory and praxis which is essentially accommodative, individualist and individualising, and based on the existence of a wholly subjective and thus empirically unverifiable, concept?

Who benefits from the reifying of a bespoke, individualist and individualising sense of a gendered identity, and privileging that over the category of biological sex, a material and collective reality which underpins the millennia-old and still extant oppression of women?

How progressive is the idea of an authentic self, conceptualised as an immutable gendered essence, which inhabits a mutable, inauthentic (ie wrongly sexed) body? (Or in the parlance of the weirdly alienated – flesh suit or meat sack.)

How progressive is it to ignore the fact that states which happily accommodate and promote individualist gender identity demands also serve economic and political interests which have proven themselves to be inimical to traditional forms of collectivism?

Who can take the following exchange seriously, except as a reason to get angry about transactivist airheads giving smug right-wingers an open goal?

TA: Trans women are women.

RW: Okay, so what is a woman?

TA: Anyone who identifies as a woman.

RW: What is it they are identifying with?

TA: A woman.

RW: But what is a woman?

TA: Anyone who identifies as a woman....

And so on, ad absurdum, until most of the progressive forces in our increasingly unstable world have disappeared up their own rear ends, or died of embarrassment.

How is it that otherwise intelligent and aware people are happy to stake their political and academic reputations on such a rickety framework of circular definitions, lazy conflations and stark contradictions? 

It's a puzzle.

Well, no, it's not a puzzle at all. There's no doubt in my mind that the astonishingly rapid move from valid and reasonable demands for equality and dignity from people who suffer forms of psychological distress, to the current epidemic of narcissistic toy-tossing and anomie, has been stage managed, to some degree at least.

It also acts as a salve to the consciences of those liberals who either capitulated to, or colluded with the swingeing attacks on working class collectives and the cruel austerity measures that followed – especially those who picked up their middle-class credentials and sprinted for a place in the political and coordinator classes.

It allows lefties who were outflanked and outmanoeuvred by neoliberalism to feel there is something at least on which they can claim a win. 

And of course it's an opportunity for closet misogynists to indulge in a bit of payback to feminists for actual or imagined slights.

Fact is, it's a mammoth con and the sooner that sodding parcel is finally unwrapped, the better.

More on sports

I spent decades arguing against types of social constructivist essentialism in feminism which ignored/side-lined reproductive biology; I now find myself arguing against forms of biological determinism and essentialism in feminism. Go figure.

Women's sports has become a battlefield – not for equity with male peers but in relation to transgender and intersex athletes' right to compete in women's events.

In the past, women athletes were subjected to inferior status, remuneration, and conditions. Training regimes were based on data drawn from male studies, to the detriment of female athletes. Female sports were almost completely dominated by male coaches, administrators, judges etc all without as much as a peep of protest from most people, including a lot of feminists. 

That so many people have recently developed an interest in women’s sports and issues of fairness and equity is great and long overdue, but perhaps they also need to consider how much of a role the rampant commercialisation and commodification of sports has played and still plays in all this. 

 

“Bread and circuses” is now "fast food and football".

 

Professional and semi-pro sport in the modern era is ALL about money, and in realms where the mighty $ reigns, aided and abetted by toxic nationalism, fairness struggled to survive even before transgender and intersex issues elbowed their way centre stage and complicated things.

 

We know that men on average run and swim much faster; jump and throw much further/higher; lift much heavier weights; punch and kick way more powerfully than women …. because, evolution. 

We also know the more extreme the endurance element in a sport is, the smaller the male APA gets…. also because, evolution. 

 

At the core of that evolutionary, material reality lies the two different roles in reproduction. Fact.

 

There are a few sports in which women have an average performance advantage over men, they’re just not the "blue riband", big money events largely because sports have been and still are designed to showcase male abilities – and in the modern era, to make money, mostly for men.

 

Star athletes – mostly male – are paid obscene amounts of money, and trailing behind them like a school of suckerfish, are a host of agents, PR people, trainers, nutritionists, psychologists, consultants ….  And on a wider front, a vast array of mainly male technocrats, bureaucrats, administrators etc. 

 

As some women’s sports move out of the cinders in terms of financial and status rewards, and with the rise of transgenderism as a political movement, there are now people who were born male, who went through male puberty and competed in male sports, who see a financial and competitive / status advantage in identifying as women and competing against natal females. 

 

These are not elite athletes; they are, to date at least, the also-rans and the has-beens. The financial and status rewards in male sports are simply still too great for an elite male to make the switch.

 

I very much doubt the elite pro bike rider who, as Robert Miller, won stages of the European Grand Tours, would have transitioned to compete as Philippa York in women's races back in the day. 

 

Even with the genuinely gender dysphoric, the switch only happens once an athlete is over the top of the elite male performance hill, or if they were never going to make it up the hill. 

The rewards gap is still too huge and it’s natal male athletes who either no longer make the elite grade, or were never going to make it, who are moving into women’s sports.

 

We know that the post-pubertal physiological and psychological performance advantages accrued by male athletes are not all lost with a lowering of androgen levels – and that an average performance advantage still applies, especially in those areas where the APA is huge, like weightlifting. 

 

Most of the world's elite female super heavyweight weightlifters were out-lifted by a 42-year-old transgender lifter who, even at his male peak was never likely to make it beyond national junior level competition.

 

And with the acceptance of a surgically transitioned trans athlete’s right to add back, on health grounds, synthetic androgens up to the IOC limit of 10 nmols/L, the playing field is completely unlevel – tilted even more against natal females. 

Having presided over the debacle, the IOC has raised its manicured hands, rolled over and waved its be-suited legs in the air and tossed the hot transgender/intersex potato to sporting federations to deal with.

 

And there are no easy answers. The simplistically-minded, ideologically blinkered on the transactivists' side say that it's all down to a subjective gender identity and any male APA a trans athlete has must be viewed as no different from any other naturally occurring physiological advantages. 

The simplistically-minded on the other side look for the solution in DNA, eg the presence of a Y chromosome makes a person male and ineligible to enter women's events. End of story. 

 

Maybe the answer lies in decommercialising and denationalising sport, making it about the individual’s love of sport not national hubris and money.

 

Yeah, I know – like action on climate change, mass pollution, and species extinctions, that ain’t going to happen because ... bread and circuses.

Don't Look Up the Robes of the Elite

The film "Don't Look Up"  irritated the hell out of me on first viewing – so much so, I fast fowarded through it but I watched it again properly and I revised my opinion, somewhat.  

Mark Rylance is an acting genius as is Meryl Streep but I'd rather they hadn't made a US female president a raging narcissist who sends pictures of her fanny to porn stars she elevates to the Supreme Court, etc etc.  

It got way too heavy handed – often slipping from satire into a sort of parodic slapstick. I still can’t decide whether the film makers were being self-consciously heavy-handed – deliberately going beyond satire into cartoonish parody in order to reach those they think they need to reach, i.e. not the already environmentally aware and active, but all those who have been successfully blinded, deafened, and dumbed down by all the plastic shite and disinformation.

 

Did they decide that the target audience needs an apocalyptic beating about the head with the star-spangled obvious because their critical faculties have either not been developed at all or have been corroded by the toxic garbage that is US-style popular entertainment and information media?

 

Were they being doubly ironic? Were they self-consciously and cynically cashing in on the impending environmental catastrophe as much as the Rylance character sought to cash in on a planet-killing asteroid on collision course with Earth?

 

One pretty obvious layer of irony is the title – the injunction “don’t look up” is precisely what all the layers of plastic garbage and fake news are meant to achieve – don’t look up to see what the economic and political elites are actually doing to us and the planet, keep your eyes fixed on the screen and your head filled with ephemera.

 

One thing’s certain, people are watching it, but whether they all get the urgent, allegorical message is another thing entirely – as is whether enough of them will get off their well-padded butts and act. 

 

Another facet that annoyed me was the use of the plot device of a planet-killing comet with all its speed and urgency. The thing with climate change is it's just not that screamingly obvious – yet – and if it were, many people, being what their masters have made them, are as likely to slide into fatalism or nihilism as they are to unite to take the actions needed to save the planet and all who currently survive on her. 

It's a delicate balance – conveying the absolute urgency of acting hard and fast whilst still making people believe that doing so will mean their kids and grand kids will actually have a planet to live well on. 

 

On Public Health

The NZ public hospital system is in crisis. The predicted massive surge of Covid infections, with vulnerable people and the unvaccinated forming the bulk of those needing hospitalisation, could easily tip it into chaos.

If you need any sort of diagnostic procedure or are in need of some sort of elective surgery that is deemed to be non-urgent – and if you don't have insurance or the cash to pay the huge fees of the private sector – you may just have to continue to suffer.

If you are unlucky enough to have a heart attack, a serious accident etc you will be entering a system which has inadequate ICU provision even without a mass of critically ill people with Covid.

THIS is the primary reason for the controls. 

Ardern's government inherited an inadequate public health system and we cannot reasonably blame it for not reversing all the trends of the past forty years – especially not given it has been dealing with a global pandemic for most of its current term – and was hamstrung by a rightwing coalition partner in its first term. 

It's not possible to build, equip, and staff primary health centres and new hospitals in the middle of a global pandemic.

But imagine if all the money that has been poured into wage subsidies, vaccines, tracking systems, PPE etc had been invested in the creation of a proper NHS. One in which there are primary health hubs with a full range of diagnostic equipment and trained staff, a range of auxiliary services, and GPs employed by the NHS, not a privately owned practice with an eye on profit margins. Primary health centres which engage with community health issues, health promotion and disease/injury prevention. 

Well, an old advocate of a socialised, holistic health system can dream.

So, this government gets a bit of a pass – but only a bit and none of those which preceded it do. And let's not forget, National has governed for most of the past forty years of neoliberal asset-stripping and diversion of state funds into private pockets.

That Covid-sceptic, Christian, doctor up north who claims to care so much about his community – owns the practice, i.e., it's a business first, health provider second. He cares so much about his Māori community, his practice doesn't even employ a te reo speaker.

So he, and all like him, can sod off with his posturing in the robes of a defender of democratic freedoms, as can all the other medical people who are choosing, not just to be unvaccinated, but who are trying to persuade others to do the same.

Vaccination is one part of the wider approach to managing this virus. The vaccine gives degrees of protection against the Delta variant but it won't necessarily stop you getting it or passing it on. Nor will it stop other vaccine-resistant variants from emerging.

The biggest danger to the public health strategy is that among the vaccine-resisters, there will be a higher proportion of people who are sceptical about the dangers of the virus, and with that about the need for other infection-prevention and control measures, such as masking, hand washing, social distancing, scanning, etc.

Unvaccinated people are statistically more likely to catch the virus and pass it on, including to people who are highly vulnerable because of known or unknown vulnerabilities. All the evidence points to the fact that an unvaccinated person is more likely to catch and to transmit the virus, to become extremely ill, to need ICU treatment, and to die. It might be their choice, but their choice may well adversely affect other people.

The greatest irony in all this is that the main reason for mass vaccination and control measures like mandates, is the parlous state of the NZ health service. This is not a phenomenon that can be blamed on the Ardern government alone – the erosion of the already compromised principle of free health care (I'm looking at all those self-interested doctors who refused to participate and have leapt on every opportunity since to make money out of the contract culture) – can be laid at the door of successive governments which have enabled the encroachments of the private sector and under-funded the public sector.

Treatment of people with Covid in hospital is massively resource intensive – not just in the ICU – and puts already over stretched and stressed hospital workers at far greater risk of harm. 

Covid-sceptics in Canterbury should be aware that when there is the predicted mass wave of infections as Auckland borders open for the summer exodus – we will see an upsurge down here, not just of mildly sick people, but people ill enough to need to be hospitalised and to be rated in ICU – in a DHB which has now formally closed its waiting lists for any and all non-urgent procedures.

The Canterbury DHB has been upping its triage game over the past year – refusing all diagnostics to anyone not considered by them to be an urgent / acute case. Pretty much the only way into Christchurch public hospital now will be via an ambulance or for life-saving treatment.

And, if you have a heart attack or a serious accident, be prepared to enter a system that will be diverting massive amounts of resources into treating critically ill people with Covid – a high proportion of whom will be vaccine-resisters. A large number of people with Covid will be left to isolate at home and we will see yet more deaths in that scenario. 

So for all those who will now try to blame this government for what is about to happen – if you have never bothered to engage with any of these issues in the past; if you stood by and watched a two-tier health system develop; if you pocketed profits from the sale of publicly owned assets or excused that happening; if you have refused vaccination and/or not taken other infection control measures seriously–-I very politely request that you sod off with your cynical, sceptical, or stupid claims about defending democracy.

US justice - what is it good for?

However hard Jesse Singal tries to spin the outcome of the Rittenhouse trial, using extant state and federal laws, it’s impossible to remove race or class from this situation. 

Would a black kid have had supporters who could quickly raise $2m for bail, and an undisclosed amount for a top flight legal defence? 

US history does way more than suggest that a 17-year-old black kid with an assault rifle who shot three people, killing two of them, would not only NOT have been cleared on all counts, but would most likely have been incarcerated for decades. 

 

The skin colour of his victims is irrelevant because they were deemed to be left wing / troublemakers / mentally unstable young men who contributed to their own demise by a) being there with a presumed ill-intent, and b) chasing an armed man.

 

The fact that Rittenhouse cried and vomited when he turned himself in as logically attributable to the after effects of high levels of adrenaline and fear of what would follow if he were jailed, as it is to remorse. 

 

Those who want to cast Rittenhouse as a Disneyfied, soft-focus, citizen-vigilante, too young to make good judgements, caught up in a terrifying situation and genuinely in fear of his life at the hands of those he saw as the enemy of all he holds dear …. are also logically and ethically obligated to oppose the insanity of laws and a mass popular culture which allows cognitively immature people to legally own, and carry in public, military grade weapons. 

 

A society which has a mass culture that promotes and legitimates the presence of heavily armed citizen-militias, which incarcerates more of its (poor and black) citizens per capita than any other country in its prison-industrial complex, which could house, feed, educate and keep healthy its entire population with the money it wastes on its military-industrial complex.... is a fundamentally flawed society. 

 

The side of US society that Rittenhouse identifies with, sought to protect – the side he inserted himself and his assault rifle into – is also the side that created, and which perpetuates that toxic culture.

 

I’m of the opinion that he should have been found guilty of manslaughter by virtue of his age,  been barred from owning or using a gun for the rest of his life, and been entered into some sort of rehabilitative programme rather than the hell-hole of a US prison – but such a verdict only becomes just if all other neurologically immature US citizens in similar situations, irrespective of race and/or class, could reasonably expect such a response from the courts. 

 

They can’t. And as things stand, they won’t. 

 

And a bit closer to home while we are on the subject of miscarriages of justice  – a  young man, also aged 17, also white and middle class, who drove a powerful car at speeds of up to 180 kph in city streets, who ran into and killed a 19 -year-old Chinese student, who fled the scene and conspired with his mates to lie to the police about his car having been stolen; who, when dobbed in, expressed racist views and sought to deflect from his culpability by suggesting the young woman should not have been in NZ - was charged with, and pleaded guilty to, manslaughter even though his actions were so reckless they met the criteria for murder. He “used his car as a lethal weapon” and “drove at insane speeds” – the Judge’s words – but got a five year sentence, and was out in under two.

The reason for the charge of manslaughter was he was white, middle class, driving a car, and deemed by the cops to be too young to fully comprehend the consequences of driving in that fashion so no jury would convict him of murder.

Second scenario involves five young brown, poor people, the oldest 17 and youngest 12, who staged a classic horizontal crime of robbing a pizza delivery man, also ethnically Chinese. They hit him on the head with a baseball bat, robbed him; took him back to his car unaware that he had a brain bleed, and because no one nearby came to his aid or called for help, the poor man died.

Utterly tragic on every level.

But did the police or the courts consider that those young kids might have been incapable of fully understanding the consequences of their actions – especially in a society in which kids are assailed constantly with images of people being bashed on the head with no resulting brain damage or death? Were they that much more culpable than the car driver that their actions constituted murder?

Aggravated robbery – causing bodily harm or death in the commission of a robbery always carries a heavier tariff because our society places such a high value on protection of property. 

Causing injury or death by dangerous driving is often treated more lightly because of the high social value our society places the right to drive, a value driven by the lobbyists  pushing the huge economic interests of the car and petro-chemical industries. And in the neo-liberal era, there is a greater need to drive because of the erosion of public transport and growth of satellite communities.

It was no accident that those kids were Māori and poor. Nor was it an accident that the media talked up the crime shamefully lurid, tub-thumping, amygdala-exciting terms.

Similarly the trial of Lipine Sila. His reckless actions caused immense harm and ended two young lives, but I have no doubt that had Sila been the scion of a white, affluent Christchurch family and his victims been two working class brown girls, the charge would have been manslaughter plus ABH and he would have got a lighter sentence than life with a mandatory non-parole period of 18 years.  Nor would we have had the local newspaper covering the prosecution case in terms that eventually drove the judge to order them to tone it down – in time for the defence case.

 

Rittenhouse is a victim in a sense. He’s a kid who has bought into the American dream and constructed a scenario in which the angry young people drawn to antifa are his enemy, while heavily armed, right-wing militias are his patriotic allies.

A Perfect Storm

The Nuremberg Code is being invoked by anti-vaxxers in the UK, and picked up by people here in NZ. It's a weird movement that engages in forms of theatrics such as threatening medical staff with prosecutions and capital punishment for violating a code developed to prevent the recurrence of the obscenity of Nazi medical experiments.

Some of those drawn to the movement are genuinely frightened; some are reflexively oppositional, and some are just vexatious shit-stirrers.

IMO, anyone who has swallowed prescription, or over the counter medications, without knowing or even wanting to know their mechanism of action; who fails to question the ethics of NZ allowing TV advertising and OTC sales of powerful medications; who eats foods full of synthetic chemicals without questioning their effects in isolation, let alone in combination with all the other synthetic chemicals they are exposed to daily; who fails to address the wider economic and political context of all of this –  has no business getting all holier-than-thou, or forming wanna-be lynch mobs over Covid vaccination.

We are reaping what our corporate and political masters have sown for hundreds of years – get angry with them, not with each other.

If you want to hurt Big Pharma and the wider petrochemical industry – stop buying all the shit its various branches produce; challenge the symptomatic-pharmacological paradigm that modern medicine is wedded to; start agitating for a proper national health service in NZ –  one which provides high quality, FREE primary health and dental care, not this weird hybrid which pours state and individuals' money into private pockets.

And, start organising to stop the petrochemical giants poisoning the planet, and look to how we can combine to develop ways of living in and with nature instead of devouring it.

Disaster capitalism will always seek to turn a threat into a market opportunity, and Covid is just the latest on a long and ugly list. Those who run the world know there is a perfect storm brewing – one that is of their creation because of their greed and their utter heedlessness of consequence. 

Their sole concern is to weather that storm with their lives and their power intact. They know that forms of authoritarian governance are inevitable in the future and they've been preparing for the point when the ideological controls they prefer become too thin and frayed to be effective any longer – when people realise they've sold their kids' future for a load of actual and virtual junk and ephemera. 

When the lies become exposed and the contradictions become too sharp and jagged to be borne any longer and enough people start to demand structural change – that's when the iron fist of the compliant states' paramilitary and military wings will be utilised to effect control. 

Anyone who thinks the rise of paramilitary police forces globally is to fight crime is living in a cartoon.Their primary function is to protect the corporate criminals and their political stooges.

There is only one way out of the mess the corporate criiminals have created and that is mass organisation. For that to work, there has to be at least a broad consensus of the need for change, what we change to, and of the strategies for achieving and retaining change. 

The start point has to be to stop allowing ourselves to be divided from our natural allies, distracted away from the essentials, and diverted away from what needs to be done.