The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any. – Alice Walker
In 1970 Carol Hanisch published a second-wave feminist manifesto entitled “The Personal is Political”, and its title soon became a big feminist catchphrase. The only problem with that is, it’s a load of crap; usually, the personal is just personal, and declaring it to be political merely holds the door open for increasingly tyrannical intrusion into people’s private lives. The idea that “the personal is political” is borrowed from Marxist dogma and basically means that nearly any problem experienced by an individual woman is the result of “systematic oppression.” If she’s unhappy or has a screwed-up life it isn’t because she’s irrational, poor, uneducated, overly emotional, foolish or unlucky in the genetic lottery, or because she’s made bad choices, or because the world is intrinsically unfair and many people of both sexes are unhappy and have screwed-up lives; it’s because she is oppressed by the Patriarchy. This is, of course, a fundamentally defeatist, paranoid and narcissistic view which removes responsibility from the individual and places it into a social context that encourages permanent class warfare (or in this case, gender warfare). Since the two sexes are different by nature and will always be unequal in one way or another, this provided political feminists with a path to political power; women were essentially told that their situation was hopeless unless they supported the schemes of the feminist leadership in its brave and determined struggle against the Male Overlords.
There are many kinds of power, but the inherent simple-mindedness of second-wave feminism recognized only one type, political power, because it was the one political feminists craved and also the one women in the postwar era had least of. Power had to be portrayed as something entirely external to the individual, which helps to explain how neofeminism was able to take control of the movement so quickly; if women realized that one of the greatest (and biologically speaking, the greatest) forms of power, namely sexual power, was already ours from birth, the Neomarxist catechism would be revealed as absurd and organized political feminism would collapse. So neofeminists intentionally reversed the truth, portraying sex as something men used to control women rather than the other way around. Second-wave feminism had launched itself by proclaiming that a woman could not take power for herself; she had to be empowered from outside (by a benevolent government controlled or at least influenced by political feminists). Neofeminism merely established a dogma designed to cut women off from their own natural powers by alienating them from their own bodies and femininity, the sources of those powers. To use a concrete analogy, the only way to consistently sell baby formula is to dry up women’s own milk or to convince them that nursing is unhealthy, disgusting or morally wrong.
“Empowered” is a deceptively simple word; it seems straightforward enough until you realize its underlying assumptions. To “empower” someone is to grant her power; it automatically implies A) that she hasn’t got any in the first place, and B) that such power is the speaker’s to give. Using the word in an active sense (“we need to empower women”) establishes the speaker or his organization as the intrinsic superior and benefactor of the person or persons so “empowered”, and using the word in a passive sense (“an empowered woman”) robs the person so “empowered” of agency, reducing her to the passive recipient of someone else’s benevolence just as people were imagined to be “granted” rights by a king in archaic political theory. Consider the way bureaucrats from Western nations use the word in reference to the people of developing nations, and you will understand how neofeminists and politicized second-wave feminists view other women.
The word “disempowered” is equally patronizing because it implies that the one so “disempowered” (usually a woman) is a weak, passive, vegetable organism who can be “empowered” or “disempowered” at will by her political masters as easily as one installs or removes batteries from a toy. With all that in mind, take a look at this article by Tracy Clark-Flory from the September 12th Salon:
…a new study investigates the link between a country’s relative gender equality and the degree of female “empowerment” in the X-rated entertainment it consumes. Researchers at the University of Hawaii focused on three countries in particular: Norway, the United States and Japan, which are respectively ranked 1st, 15th and (yikes) 54th on the United Nations’ Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM). To simplify their analysis, their library of smut was limited to explicit photographs of women “from mainstream pornographic magazines and Internet websites, as well as from the portfolios of the most popular porn stars from each nation.” Then they set out to evaluate each image on both a disempowerment and an empowerment scale, using respective measures like whether the woman is “bound and dominated” by “leashes, collars, gags, or handcuffs” or “whether she has a natural looking body.” Their hypothesis was that societies with greater gender equity will consume pornography that has more representations of “empowered women” and less of “disempowered women.” It turned out the former was true, but…the latter was not. “While Norwegian pornography offers a wider variety of body types — conforming less to a societal ideal that is disempowering to the average woman — there are still many images that do not promote a healthy respect for women,” the researchers explain…
All researchers have biases which negatively impact the objectivity of their studies, but it’s rare that any outside of “women’s studies” are so glaringly obvious. These academics are clearly laboring under the delusion that sexual desires are “socially constructed”, revealing a deep ignorance of biology and evolutionary psychology. Furthermore, they clearly accept without question insulting and ignorant neofeminist beliefs about BDSM, have what I can only interpret as bigotry against cosmetic surgery and promote the degrading collectivist notion (perhaps related to the neofeminist gestalt myth) that it is “unhealthy” for men to be attracted to whatever kind of women they’re attracted to because it might make less attractive women feel bad. Flory, who is generally pro-sex and pro-sex work, sees the flaws in these assumptions:
…One explanation might be that…cross-cultural biological imperatives are reflected in pornography. Some of the study’s disempowerment markers could be more a reflection of the gender disparity in porn’s audience. The researchers note, “In a large portion of hardcore pornography…the erect penis is the most important organ” and “women are often used as little more than receptacles for the penis.” Is that because of sexism or because porn viewers, who are largely men, identify with…the male member?
…You can’t so easily equate dominance with empowerment and submission with disempowerment. Take, as one example, that the researchers designate a woman in an “authoritative” position as a sign of empowerment. That formula can be easily upended — clearly, submission feels empowering to plenty of people. It’s also awfully subjective: The popular line within the BDSM community is that it’s the submissive that has all the power, because they’re the ones calling the shots…sex isn’t always empowering or disempowering, equitable or inequitable — it’s much too complicated for that.
The researchers’ appalling ignorance of BDSM is apparent in their interpretation of dominatrix characters as a sign of female “empowerment”, despite the fact that such characters are as much archetypal male fantasy figures as are female slaves. Actors play roles; to assume that an actress playing a dominatrix role is somehow more “empowered” than one in a sub role is as ridiculous as assuming that the actor playing a king in an historical drama must be the star simply because his character is more important inside the fantasy world of the movie. But the most important point to note is the researchers’ patronizing assumption that male porn viewers are so impressionable that their level of “respect for women” can essentially be programmed by the content of their wanking material, and that women are such passive, childlike beings that mere images on a screen can grant them “power” or take it away.
One Year Ago Today
“Imaginary Victims” examines the difficulty trafficking fetishists have in coming up with even a few poster children to represent the phantom multitudes upon which their propaganda depends.
“If she’s unhappy or has a screwed-up life it isn’t because she’s irrational, poor, uneducated, overly emotional, foolish or unlucky in the genetic lottery, or because she’s made bad choices, or because the world is intrinsically unfair and many people of both sexes are unhappy and have screwed-up lives; it’s because she is oppressed by the Patriarchy.”
Well, Maggie, it is a fact that men own most of the property in the world, and make most of the money, so I would say that I agree with SW Feminism in that there is a patriarchy. Meaning that, if she is poor and uneducated, it can be as a result of patriarchy. And I might add that if men are unhappy in their lives, that can also be a result of patriarchy. It’s not just women who are the victims.
“This is, of course, a fundamentally defeatist, paranoid and narcissistic view which removes responsibility from the individual and places it into a social context that encourages permanent class warfare (or in this case, gender warfare).”
Class warfare is not perpetrated on the rich, it is something that is perpetrated on the non-rich (the poor and middle-class) by the rich. So whatever the rich experience from the non-rich, it is a result of the rich’s own class-warfare policies, and therefore their own fault. Example: the refusal to declare a moratorium on housing foreclosures after the housing bubble broke is a direct assault on the middle-class by the rich.
I love your blog, Maggie, and I love the ideas that you come up with. But I really do not want to see you slip into that John Galt/Ayn Rand trap that I see many others have slipped into to the point where they can’t distinguish reality from fantasy.
As an example, look at this poor, deluded fool:
http://biggovernment.com/waroot/2011/06/21/ayn-rand-was-right-wealthy-are-on-strike-against-obama/
The truth of the matter is the rich in this country are richer than they’ve ever been in the past, and that they are thriving under Obama. And as for rich people moving to red-states and overseas, I live in New York City and there are plenty of rich people going about their merry business here, so the whole-mass migration of the wealthy that the deluded fool is talking about does not exist.
I disagree about class warfare being perpetrated by anyone but politicians. Humans are fundamentally greedy; they will usually take what they can get. That’s not “class warfare”, because the rich try to victimize each other just as they victimize everyone else (remember “corporate raiders”?) “The rich” are not a unified class any more than “the poor” are, and casting them as such ultimately helps nobody but the politicians. You want to see where class warfare rhetoric has got us? Look around. It’s the job of government to protect the weak from the strong, but what has actually happened is that strong governments have got in bed with strong corporations to form one vast oppressive machine. Fascism never died; it just got more subtle.
I like this book by David Mamet.
A couple of quotes:
Relative to class warfare;
“We cannot live without trade. A society can neither advance nor improve without excess of disposable income. This excess can only be amassed through the production of goods and services necessary or attractive to the mass. A financial system which allows this leads to inequality; one that does not leads to mass starvation.”
On Multiculturalism;
“The grave error of multiculturalism is the assumption that reason can modify a process which has taken place without reason, and with inputs astronomically greater than those reason might provide.”
On why the Left continually recycles losing policies;
“A subjective system can never be shown to have failed. If its goals are indeterminate, general, and its progress incapable of measurement, how can its performance be faulted?”
Of course, these will have no resonance with ideologues who denounce reason and logic as phallo-centric constructs of male oppression.
OH my God… Maggie you are so accurate it is amazing to read. Yes indeed class warefare and the whole game of who is doing who in is a total fabrication. The rich are not a united group any longer. There is old money, new money, trash money, scam money, drug money, computer money and bankers money etc. There are vast levels of existence that thrive all around at the top and the bottom. The poor truly are not united either. Especially as people’s wealth fluctuates from flop to fabulous these days. It is very important to look beyond the Marxist rant and the Corporate clown games and truly look to the MATH. The inequality of a human existence is all too real in the world. Good or bad it is part of the world. All we can do is arm ourselves with a variety of tools to strive out and through the realms of patriarchy. And let’s not forget Matriarchy! That too is an exhausting world of goo. The messy mother’s of the world messing up their children for us all to bump into. It is all about DESTINY. All levels of situations are living and breeding out there. We may dip in, slum or gad about but no matter what we find our level. It is just that Orwellian sadly. And as far as “playdolls” and scary persons blaming men well we have plenty to shoulder and plenty to be responsible for. Women do too actually. Despite their needs to want to make men a blame for all. Even if we men affect the world stronger, women bring them into the world via their bodies. Females who have children exert a hell of a lot with emo states that kindle huge developmental experiences, The leading of this to an adult life can be just as defining if not more so than that of “Daddy”. Fascism never died for sure it just became redefined as extreme fitting in and extreme paying for it. Welcome to the club the price is your soul sort of thing. “CROSS OVER CHILDREN ALL ARE WELCOME!” sort of thing.
So, if the patriarchy \harms men as well as women why is it called the patriachy
There is patriarchy, but there is no Patriarchy. There’s a huge difference in that capital letter. “Patriarchy” is a form of government; of course it exists and is the backbone of most traditional governments. But the monolithic “Patriarchy” imagined by feminists no more exists than do the Illuminati, the Elders of Zion, the Cult of the Great Old Ones or the Dero.
While patriarchy does give men a lot of power, all the political and practical power, it also limits men and what they can do. Certain roles, behaviors, and personal attributes are assigned to one gender but not the other. Men are allowed to be very assertive about their sexuality, but they’re also often required to be assertive about their sexuality.
Probably the biggest thing is the lack of emotion required of men. While guys might make fun of women for being too emotional the absolute reverse is also a problem. If you try to talk about your feelings with male friends, you won’t have male friends for long. Men are often required to keep up a tough exterior no matter what their real feelings are. Between what feminism has already done for women, and the fear that male power could disappear, these kinds of socially enforced restrictions can be worse for men than women.
Men own most of the property in the world as a result of biology, as Maggie mentioned. In non-industrial countries, men work outside the home and women care for the kids inside the home. Thus, the men are the breadwinners and own the property. Feminists are trying to change this biological set-up — it’s a tough sell, though, to tear women and their offspring apart.
As for the US, women apparently do hold most of the wealth. And when they don’t they have the spending power, which is why most advertising is geared towards women.
And for argument’s sake, let’s say these things weren’t true. Well, you still have a lot of gender inequality the other way: men die younger yet women get entire wings of hospitals devoted to only their health (why not men if they die sooner?). Suicides by men greatly outnumber those by women (esp when it comes to gay men) yet there is no national campaign. Men make up the majority of prisoners, and they’re put there for mostly petty drug offenses by OTHER more powerful men. And men make up the great majority of the homeless, yet it’s women’s shelters that get all the attention and money.
There’s a guy named Glenn Sacks who blogs about men’s issues and before anyone goes on about “the patriarchy,” I’d recommend they look at his blog.
And speaking of “the patriarchy,” I’d recommend reading Camille Paglia, who has made the brilliant observation that if it hadn’t been for men building the society, we’d still be living in grass huts.
Look at the building you’re in. The computer you’re typing on. The Internet itself. Windows. Macs. Who conceived, developed and built them? Men. If women could have, they would have. They didn’t. I think those who blame “the patriarchy” should forgo using all the wonderful conveniences “the patriarchy” has brought us. Let me know if you plan on giving away your car, your stereo or your furniture and plan on moving into a grass hut in a non-patriarchal country somewhere.
This kind of thing makes me groan. We don’t really know what prehistoric man and woman did, let alone what their sexual preferences are. In many pre-industrial societies today women gather most of the food in addition to taking care of the kids.
Also the “Men built society!” notion is particularly silly. Yes most of the physical artifacts were engineered and built by males, but that doesn’t mean women are incapable of it. On average the few women willing to become engineers are better at it than male engineers. If women had to, they’d easily pick up the slack.
But even with a separation of roles it’s stupid to claim that men could survive without women. Men were only able to ‘build society’ because they had wives to care for the kids and other stuff. Women should be glad for men’s work, but men should be equally glad for women’s work.
To any Randroids who are tempted to “go Galt” I say: have at it. Go. Pack your bags and leave this miserable land of overwhelming oppression* and watch from a distance as…
Others step in to take your place. You are no more irreplaceable than anybody else, and whoever replaces you will be a little more humble, you having shown that Galt won’t be missed.
* How’d you ever manage to make a fortune here in the first place?
Thank you, Sailor Barsoom. I enjoy Ayn Rand’s novels as fiction, but taking them completely seriously requires willful blindness. Rand based Howard Roarke on Frank Lloyd Wright, and though I greatly admire Wright’s buildings, I can live, work, shop, and otherwise function in buildings that are nothing at all like his. As for great inventors being irreplaceable, that’s also nonsense; Nicolai Tesla said Thomas Edison stole several of his inventions. Those who choose to withdraw from society will quickly be replaced.
I usually use tis when argueing against the ‘sex is bad’ mindset – it may be fiction, but it is on point
luljp,
Thanks for that.
Its my favorite non sci fi show
Do you remember the episode where Steve and Susan had a fight and Jane tries to reclaim Steve. They show it from Susan’s POV and the from Steve’s POV and in the final scene, the POV’s merge.
I love the last exchange. Susan, “Well, I’m sorry, but doesn’t her voice just grate on you?”
Steve, “It does now.”
One of the all-time best monologues. Moffat is a genius.
women who crave political power, just like men, tend to be fascistic , tyrannical and often try to control and supress both men and women. they are no better than male politicians, many of them are worse,yet in europe 1/3 of the parlianment has to consist of women no matter what,in greece i know male politicians who would be more competent that didnt get into the parlianment because of this.i mean,what makes a woman a better politician than a man just because shes a woman?didnt women start wars?thatcher and golda meir are bright exambles.do they care about the poor more,do they promote social equality through theiir political action ?sure, condoleeza rice and angela merkel are a few of the most caring women i have ever seen,such angels!not to mention that the worst enemies of sex workers,the ones that try to make life harder for all of us both through their laws and their preaching are women.second wave feminism didnt only make many women disregard their own sexuality,but are also preety much responsible for the stigma that sex workers have today. nowadays people are not as religious as they used to be,so you wont find as many people preaching about religious morality,at least in public,without being considered ridiculous.but you will see neofeminists scream about ”reinforcing the the patriarchy”or ”objectification”and people cheer.
The themes are always the same…using hybrid techniques to mar the real but distinct underlying issues.
Maggie is absolutely right, that the innate natural structure of heterosexuality gives women the advantage, as she has said often, “men need women more than the other way around.”
But the muddiness comes in when both men and women try to harness that truth/power for their own gain…if it is done honorably(prostitution, arranged marriages), then that’s one thing. If it is done deceptively(dogma, rhetoric, slavery, unjust legislation, golddigging), that’s something else entirely, but it doesn’t change the truth that nature isn’t fair or “equal” and doesn’t give a damn about being so.
So people that are stupid enough to be convinced that you can make something “equal” when that will never actually be possible deserve the results that they get.
So, people that believe that replacing a patriarchy with a matriarchy will be better, or that life won’t be right until every man that owns a home is matched by a woman that owns a home…or every man that owns a company is matched by a woman that owns a company..
…completely ignore the plain but unavoidable truth that everybody doesn’t WANT the same things out of life. The best you can do is give people equality of opportunity, because there will never be equality of outcomes.
People don’t actually care about life being “fair.” They just mean, “fair to ME.” Which is not actually fairness, but haves & have nots.
Susan
I am fascinated by your comment about foreclosures post housing bust. Because if you are right everything I thought I knew about international finance is completely wrong.
See, I thought that Mortgage Backed Bonds (American based) were a staple of balance sheet assets for major lending institutions all over the world and by suddenly making them essentially worthless (ie making mortgage payments voluntary) lending and commerce everywhere would freeze up and Mr. and Ms. Sixpak would be out of work.
Never mind that this is happening anyway in slow motion. But at least banks get to pretend those loans are collectible – eventually. But openly and suddenly denying them the means to even try to collect??
How would you explain that to the Europeans who trusted their Banks Solvency to those bond funds? That you took about a zillion dollars from them and deliberately disappeared it.
There are options a lot more reasonable than the farcical ones you described here, Rum. In particular, the mortgage-managing banks can recognize that a foreclosure system appropriate for a healthy market can be deeply self-wounding in an unhealthy market. Most did not, and hurt everyone… primarily the holders of these bonds, and those foreclosed-upon, and only to a much lesser extent themselves.
In the event of ambiguity of an opposing argument, it’s generally most helpful and polite to take it to mean the least convenient thing
Hmmm. Is that supposed to be as much fun as it sounds? I wish I could earn a living looking at porn. Reminds me of those brilliant French politicians who somehow got jobs looking at pictures of thousands of topless women so that they could pick a new model for Marianne.
I thought it came from Fascist dogma.
A lot of Fascism actually came from Marxism, from what I’ve heard. Supposedly, Mussolini was a Marxist, or quasi-Marxist, before he developed Fascism.
This is not a subject in which I’m particularly well-versed, however, so bear that in mind.
Mussolini was indeed originally a Marxist socialist, as were a number of other important Italian fascist intellectuals. The big ideological motivation for the break was the failure of Marx’s predictions. It had become pretty clear to an observer not blinded by quasi-religious devotion that the “Iron Law of Wages” was bunk; that the most developed countries were becoming less hospitable to revolution, not more; and the proletariat was being lifted up rather than the petit bourgeois being ground down.
The fascists were largely those people who decided that Marx had been fundamentally wrong in his analysis (rather than seeking excuses), but still couldn’t stomach the idea of liberal capitalism. They then built a new ideology from varying admixtures of Napoleonism, nationalism, corporatism, convenient bits of socialism, and the writings of Hegel and Nietzsche.
“But the most important point to note is the researchers’ patronizing assumption that male porn viewers are so impressionable that their level of “respect for women” can essentially be programmed by the content of their wanking material…”
It boggles the mind that some people think that we are so malleable.
The people who think this would probably be the same people who fifty of sixty years ago would have thought that homosexuality could be cured through electroshock therapy.
BTW I don’t know if you’re a Firefly fan, but a friend of mine on lj sent this link to me – prepare to laugh (bitterly) at the most insane post by a neofeminist. I hope she wore a bib when typing it out, you can practically hear the froth hit her keyboard!
http://users.livejournal.com/_allecto_/34718.html
Yeah, that’s what happens when you insist that a shoe is actually a glove and demand it be treated as such. The neofeminist dogma about sex relations in general and prostitution in particular doesn’t work when applied to history, so neofeminists insist that it’s history that must be corrected (such as by denying the fact that throughout history courtesans were the most educated and respected of women) rather than the catechism they wrongfully call “theory”.
That is without question the biggest truckload of tripe I’ve read in years. How could anyone stand to be in the same room with a person so humorless and blind?
There are a lot of things Maggie McNeill gets fundamentally wrong, which leads to wrong conclusions.
“The personal is political” comes from women realizing that other women have the same problems as them. If some issue affects not just one person, or a few, but most of the people everywhere then a personal explanation no longer suffices. Perhaps ‘political’ is the wrong word, perhaps political solutions are not the best; but if people around the world face the same problem them perhaps a global solution is in order.
You mention biology and evolutionary psychology to explain what we see in porn, but in this instance it doesn’t work at all. The study found differences between the porn on different cultures. To explain this you MUST account for culture. Any theory based on biology and evolution would assume all these different groups to be the same. (Unless you believe different ethnicities are fundamentally different, which has it’s own issues).
I’ve never seen anything in actual feminist discussion implying that feminists wanted to control men or women. Maybe I’m just lucky, but the emphasis has always been letting men and women do whatever they want. Maybe that’s just a 2nd wave vs 3rd wave thing?
Actually Maggie McNeil seems to be guilty of what she sometimes accuses Neofeminists. Neofeminists see patriarchy as a sort of grand conspiracy to manipulate the culture in order to grab power. Here and many other posts she accuses Neofeminism of being a grand conspiracy to to manipulate the culture in order to grab power. Sorry but that’s what I see.
Then you’re “seeing” through a filter. If you don’t recognize the neofeminist need for power, you haven’t read much of their literature. Only third-wave feminists are in favor of free choice; in fact, neofeminists often disparage third-wave feminists by calling them “choice feminists”.
The idea that sexual preferences are determined by culture is ludicrous in the extreme; you seem to imagine that porn springs forth from people’s loins without commercial concerns. The differences between porn are due in part to culture and in part to those commercial concerns, but as the researchers found some things did not change no matter how politically correct the culture; those facets derive from neurology.
As for “the personal is political”, my source for the meaning of the phrase was several feminist websites. What’s yours?
I think much of the wrong doing attributed to the Patriarchy is actually due to capitalism, a system that’s good at turning a lot of people into serfs.
That said, there is a huge imbalance of power in the world, among the sexes.
There’s two types of power- Power to, as in power to make one’s own decisions, and power over. There’s way too much power over in this world, that’s why men are still making decisions in much of the world about what women can and cannot do. There’s not nearly enough power to.
Capitalism also made it possible for us to communicate like this across an ocean. It has its faults, but like democracy there really isn’t anything better and every other system of wealth distribution is worse.
I’m always a little surprised when I see whores knocking capitalism, since our work is capitalism in its purest form; I think those who do misunderstand what capitalism actually is. In its purest form, without tyrannical laws perverting it and entrenching the powerful and suppressing the weak, capitalism is the principle that nobody but you has the right to determine what should be done with the fruits of your own labor. Period. That’s all. To insist that anyone other than the individual should have the right to the fruits of his labor is the same as saying others have the right to tell him what to do, including whom to have sex with and why. If you’re against capitalism you may as well join the prohibitionists, because every argument that individuals should be FORCED to do something, for whatever reason, is slavery, no matter how it’s dressed up.
Tyranny is tyranny, whether the tyrants use swords or beliefs or economics; it isn’t guns or religion or money that are evil, it’s PEOPLE who use those things to infringe on others’ liberty. And as Thomas Jefferson said, “I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”
Maggie, I have to disagree with your statement that “capitalism is the principle that nobody but you has the right to determine what should be done with the fruits of your own labor.” Capitalism allows business owners to keep the fruits of other people’s labor, the employees. For one type of example, the factory workers who actually produce the goods, don’t get to own the goods. Capitalism in its purest form lets employers determine employees’ wages, work hours, and work conditions, which effectively forces those born poor who grow up without access to good education, into slavery; their only “freedom” is the choice of whose slave they will be.
Pure capitalism led to preventable tragedies like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of 1911, in which 168 employees, mostly women and young girls, died because the rich factory owners had refused to spend the money to install a sprinkler system, and had bought a cheap, flimsy fire escape that collapsed when the women tried to run down it, and had locked one of only two exits from the main floor of the factory in order to prevent the women from attending a union organizers’ meeting.
Pure capitalism is as much a form of slavery as explicit slavery is.
I am in favor of taxing the rich to provide basic necessities for the working class, such as public school education and basic healthcare. If this means nobody gets super rich, I’m fine with that.
That’s not an example of pure capitalism; that’s evil people oppressing others FOR THE REASON of their own profit through capitalism. That’s like saying that capitalism causes bank robbery. The laborers DO keep the fruits of their labor, which in this case are wages. Nobody except hermit farmers living far from civilization “keep” everything permanently; they use it to get other things they need. A man who works for an employer is trading his labor for money, just as a whore trades her sexual labor for money; that’s the essence of trade. And trade is the essence of capitalism.
Governments are supposed to protect the weak from the strong; it’s why we create them. I suspect you and I are defining “pure” capitalism differently; I don’t mean absolute laissez-faire capitalism, because that excuses the strong picking on the weak merely because they don’t use physical violence. Governments should protect the weak from being dominated by the strong no matter what the weapon used to dominate them, but if those governments merely reverse the direction of oppression or replace private oppression with governmental oppression, all we’ve done is add a second layer of evil.
Nobody ever said good, fair government was easy; what angers me is that almost nobody even bothers to try.
Maggie wrote: “The laborers DO keep the fruits of their labor, which in this case are wages…. A man who works for an employer is trading his labor for money… that’s the essence of trade….”
The employer, not the employee, decides what the wage will be, and since the employee can’t survive without a wage, it’s not a truly free trade. If the employee grew up without access to good education, which is the norm in America, then his skills and his power to negotiate his salary are severely limited.
Nobody gets rich by himself. Bill Gates is one of the richest people in the world, in large part because his privileged background both provided him with access to excellent education, and gave him the freedom to devote his adolescence and early adulthood to studying, without having to go to work at 16 or 18 for basic necessities.
I’m not asking for general economic equality (which is unachievable by any means other than reducing the majority of the population to poverty). All I’m advocating is a basic social safety net.
America is the richest country in the world, yet according to the U.S. government, 29 percent of Americans live below poverty level. And the U.S. government’s narrow definition of poverty excludes people who can’t afford such “luxuries” as Internet access! The richest 10 percent of Americans own 90 percent of the wealth. I don’t accept that America can afford to spend 42 percent of its national budget on fighting wars but can’t afford to provide a social safety net to its own people.
Businesses can only exert that sort of pressure when there is a cartel (where they all agree to equal wages) or when labor is a “buyer’s market”, as it were. In situations where labor is a “seller’s market”, businesses compete with steadily-rising wages.
However, I do agree with you in part, though I think the money to fund such programs should not be stolen from other citizens but rather raised by government monopolies. Throughout most of history mining was a government monopoly because things under the ground are owned by the nation as a whole. Imagine if the huge profits of oil companies, aluminum and copper mining, etc was government income; add a few more sensible monopolies (such as highway construction and maintenance), a national lottery and a reasonable national sales tax accompanied by a payroll tax (employer-paid) of comparable size, eliminate all victimless crimes and reserve prison ONLY for violent offenses, stop military adventurism and eliminate all the other wasteful government programs (probably half the federal budget), and I have no doubt the personal income tax could be entirely eliminated while increasing the coverage of the safety net by employing the unemployed in those government monopolies.
Maggie, perhaps your plan might work, but would it provide enough revenue? It’s worth investigating. The owners of the oil and mining industry companies are not going to give up their ownership without a huge fight.
I look at the way Western Europe provides a social safety net, and I think it can’t be impossible for that to be done in America. I don’t mean total socialism, just enough of a net to prevent widespread poverty.
“Waiting for ‘Superman'” is an excellent documentary that exposes the truth about the causes of the low quality of the American public school system. Teachers’ unions have made it extremely difficult for school districts to fire bad teachers, especially if they have tenure. The teachers’ unions fight tooth and nail against any attempt to pay or retain teachers on the basis of merit rather than seniority. It’s a real eye-opener about so many of those born poor in America end up unable to escape from poverty.
That’s one of the reasons I hate the “left-right” mythology; one would think the “leftists” would be interested in helping poor children to compete, stopping police brutality and keeping the innocent out of prison. But the leftist catechism since before Marx was cold in the ground is that “unions are good”, so teachers’ unions are allowed to stifle education, police unions are allowed to prevent any housecleaning or firing of bad cops and the California prison guards’ union is allowed to lobby for increased imprisonment…while soi-disant “liberals” stand up and clap.
The guy who made Waiting for ‘Superman’, Davis Guggenheim, is no righty (his movie before was An Inconvenient Truth). I’ve heard liberals like Chris Matthews and Lawrence O’Donnell critique the failure of police departments to do honest investigations and clean out bad cops. Liberals pointed out the the prison guard union was a strong force behind defeating California’s Proposition 19 (legalizing marijuana) due to concerns over job losses (legal pot = fewer prisoners to guard) and called it “the most cynical reason of all.”
The problem isn’t a liberal monolithic “unions are good” unshakable mindset; the problem is money. Just as many Republicans are happy to look the other way on corporations because they fund Republican campaigns, many Democrats are happy to look the other way on teachers’ unions because they fund Democratic campaigns.
Not left, right, or center; not libertarians or collectivists; it’s money.
I totally agree; what I meant was that the “unions are good” crap is used to sell it to the rank-and-file. Sorry I wasn’t clear; I seem to be a bit distracted today.
I’ve noticed that you and I agree more often than not.
I’m… not sure I can disagree with that. It’s certainly an effective sell with some. And of course, it sells it to the unions themselves.
I hope nothing’s wrong, and if it is, I wish you the best of luck.
Oh, no, nothing wrong exactly; I just slept funny last night and I was juggling a bunch of mundane things today besides my blog work.
Well I can understand that! How many times have I typed, “I plead lack of sleep.”
I mean it when I say, “Good night, and sweet dreams.”
You and I are talking about two different levels of so-called capitalism. You’re talking about individual market transactions among free actors. I have something to sell, you want to buy, we agree on a price.
But that’s not really capitalism. In fact, large scale capitalism as it operates today pretty much prevents that from happening. Capitalism is tyranny by the rich, where those with the resources twist the law and society to benefit themselves, where greed is the primary driver of the economy. Look at recent events: A bunch of greedy crooks on Wall Street crashed the economy with their bad behaviour. But because of their power, they weren’t punished, they were bailed out, and the rest of us left to suffer.
We’ve a rotten system, that encourages evil.
No, that IS really capitalism. Large-scale modern capitalism as it operates today is more like feudalism than capitalism; the big players are licensed and granted power to do business by the Emperor and together they arrange things to keep everyone else out of their club.
Yeah, that’s not Capitalism. That’s Corporatism, a form of Oligarchy.
Capitalism tends towards this, but it’s not the same thing.
“every argument that individuals should be FORCED to do something, for whatever reason, is slavery, no matter how it’s dressed up.”
Not in my book. There are a few words, bearing a precise meaning in the context of our country’s specific history, that I do not believe should be diluted through hyperbole. Slavery falls into that rarefied category for me.
Unless you can be sold as chattel, separated from your spouse and children, have your spouse and children separated from you, and be beaten, raped and murdered without recourse, it is not slavery. It may be a degree of constraint, coercion, or unfreedom, but it is not slavery.
YMMV, of course.
In that case, later Roman and much medieval slavery throughout the world isn’t slavery by your definition, whereas some forms of serfdom were.
Indeed, there are many different forms of unfree labor, across time and around the world, and coming up with definitions and boundaries and taxonomies to distinguish them is difficult.
If we were a society that had not practiced race-based chattel slavery in recent memory I might no be so persnickety, but we are, and to me it feels disrespectful to the horror of our form of slavery to use our word for that phenomenon to also cover (and by implication asset the equivalence of) lesser impositions.
Very much a personal lexicographic issue of mine, I freely admit–perhaps it comes from having to reconcile my Southern and Northern heritage, or perhaps just from having spent way too much time thinking about these things in grad school. :-^
Considering my well-known personal persnicketyness (persnickitude? persnickitism?) with words, I can’t blame you with it being a case of pot calling kettle black. 😉
Neofeminism merely established a dogma designed to cut women off from their own natural powers by alienating them from their own bodies and femininity, the sources of those powers.
I have never seen it put quite so succinctly before.
🙂