What patriarchy?

I went to school at the University of California (in the 1980s), and I can tell you: it was an apparatus (as well as training ground) for the corporate state, and oppressive as any institution like it that I know of can be (though it was also the site of some great research and teaching I support), it was not a patriarchy. Our corporate state is not exactly a patriarchy. One thing I learned is that people exercising power can be nastier than your worst nightmares though these liberals (they mostly are) are usually clueless when not insouciant. That the Trump types hate them is small comfort, since that only means the bad cops promise to replace the good cops, the crypto-fascists with liberal faces, after they fire everyone studying history, society, and art, to prove finally that they business and that’s all it is.

It is a boss’s state. It is a police state. It has men and women functionaries, many serving as enforcers in various roles. This role allocation does not necessarily favor the male persons in it more than the female ones, and the language used by them especially in dealing with their subject population (students and workers) is if anything more feminine and maternal than masculine and paternal. What is not tolerated more than anything is any manifestation of strong negative feeling, and young men are objects of this intolerance, as I more than a few times was, more than young women.

Some say this is true of all of California. Henry Miller, who said America is a country of “ladies,” lived in Big Sur, a coastal town famous for hosting the Aquarian New Age resort for psychological spiritualities, Esalen Institute. This is an old story about the state. It was still true when I was there. California über Alles.

I have the funnies stories about this. Women functionaries especially in this dreamy pseudo-utopia that much of the state’s young entrepreneurs of a renovated soul think they are living in (there are plenty of poor people too, actually) have the funniest ways of exercising their peculiar will to pacific and bloodless but concertedly thoroughly if not well intentioned managerial domination, which typically marries what is legislated equally in the documentary instructions that typically fills their apparent effective conscience and in the things they will so carefully and with deadly earnestness proclaim to you as if it were the testament of some god, perhaps that of their corporate heavenly city. The sole downside of the best professors in this world is often that when the chips are down at least for you it at last becomes clear that their real commitment is to their company paymasters and the bureaucracy that is the closest thing they have to a Stalinist state party with an official ideology all are sworn to and many believe with all their hearts. Listen to some of these women (they usually are female, a partly demographic fact of employment in these places except at the highest levels) and some of their goings on will chill your marrow as they did mine. Icy but smiling kapos. Have I whetted your appetite for my forthcoming memoir?

I was left agreeing with many on the Republican right, for what are not entirely the same reasons (and well I know that behind some shared concerns are on their party some very self-interested pockets and strategies for filling them), and basically only that. I told myself then, as, buttressed by readings in history, theory, literature and film that evoke for me a sensibility that is unmistakably on the radical left but has nothing in common that I could ever see, then or now, with the sensibilities and ways of thinking of American liberal-left “progressives,” who remind me most of the lousiest people who often seemed the visible majority at that little company town university in the Bay Area. Universities are places where so much great work is done, so much discovered, to learn or made available so that we can. And they are all run like any corporation.

The corporate state is not my friend. If it is yours, you may be a feminist, an antiracist, or something else, but you are a liberal. Left is not liberal. We’re the only ones against the corporate state. We’re the ones whose sensibility counts the most if you hate this fucking war. The problem isn’t with the people doing the work, although as in the worst prisons and camps where people are warehoused or “eliminated,” which some American police with their medical and psychological accomplices threatened to do to me, it doesn’t exactly help that so many people believe in this system and are so busy enforcing its norms. The problem isn’t we who are the power of work and who generate what is of value, the problem is capital. Capital and its bosses and collaborators. Liberalism is the ideology of the corporate state when the sun shines on its enterprise, just as fascism is that same ideology turned sour when it seems apt not to.