For my anti-feminist feminist friends on the left
Feminism is dead, it died a generation ago and its best partisans know this and delight.
A left wing politics opposes every form of domination because it believes in equal liberty.
Feminism when it matters is a form of this; otherwise, it is of no interest to anyone except leveraging profiteers.
The left did and does oppose patriarchy, because we oppose every form of domination. We demand equal liberty and universal autonomy.
We resist the affirmations of particularities, except when we or someone is being attacked ostensibly because of theirs, often because they are in the way, it being found at the time more profitably useful to just get rid of them entirely. When that happens, we contingently and temporarily affirm people’s right to affirm and defend their forms of life. The question of how any of us should develop our own forms of life remains the question is obviously is.
Progressives too have their idols they expect you to respect, though progressives were never leftists because they do not believe in liberty for anyone except those they represent. In America, there is no equal liberty, only a liberty of thought that is conditioned on it being expressed only where it challenges nothing, and equality of status, mostly affirmed repressively of upstart individuals who “think they are important,” privileged, not subject to the slaves’ enforcement now in their own name of the master’s domination.
I freely and gladly admit that I have hated people who do this when they do, by which I mean I hate their doing that. My anger is frustrated love, because I passionately want them not to. I want that first for myself, but also for them.
Women are not better than men, nor worse. There is no interest on the radical left anymore of empowering women against men, or any subaltern minority group against a formerly dominant one. That is nothing more nor less than a tactic of the American corporate state when its ideological marketing is liberal, which systematically targets the identifiable expressions of pre-WW1 colonialism. Hence the faux radical hatred of the Europeans. The liberal-left today derives much of its energy from this. In fact, they (the American liberals, whose corporate state is globally militarist, but liberal, encouraging local nationalisms abroad, and global inclusiveness in the metropolitan business and finance centers of power, and adapting structures of domination partly dependent on the older forms of explicit colonialism but moving free of them through the adoption of more advanced tactics) won some time ago.
Feminism was a form of nationalism, or identity politics. All such movements start as national liberation movements and end up as oppressive tyrannies. (This was also true of Zionism, which like feminism was promoted by colonialist and post-colonialist corporate imperial states). Feminism destroyed itself, and all that remained that is worth saving is a left-wing politics pure and simple.
Feminism succeeded by becoming the right-wing ideology every radical politics becomes by formulating itself as an identity politics. Feminism succeeded by empowering women in professional and social life. This meant that it promoted a normative femininity. A normative femininity was and is the false alternative to patriarchy misrecognized as the normative masculinity that it also was. Normative femininity is part of patriarchy, which depends upon it. Normative femininity was the conservative undermining of the women's struggle from within. It is what the corporate state sold them. Many became part of it.
Those successful women proudly waving their power are every woman’s enemy. Similar things can be said about things that happened in the black struggle and others. Increasingly, personal identity traits including even those that reference any natural difference whatever, as gender/sex does, are irrelevant.
The left opposes no social group for its intrinsic way of being and asserting its identity, and affirms none. European colonialism was not an assertion of European identity. Europe today has moved into a postcolonial formation like the United States, and liberal Europeans do not worry so much about their culture identity. Germany today does not belong to the ethnic Germans, but to whoever happens to reside in the territory. There was a famous movement to claim otherwise, we know where that led. Just as black nationalists promote the falsehood that colonialism and slavery were a project of ‘white’ people doing ‘whitenesss’ when in fact it was a project of some bandits getting rich with the help of governments that supplied weapons to murder resisters, and liberal feminists promote the falsehood that women were oppressed not by a social structure supported by ideologies but by men doing ‘maleness’, American liberals will never stop saying that Nazism was a project of Germans doing what was implied in their history or language. They say that because ‘we’ Americans won the war, and the victors framed the victory as one of good American liberal culture, which is friendly and polite, against what became defined, thanks to dominant trends in Anglo-American psychological discourse, as the evil that results from hatred, which is now explained as resulting from mental illness. The good liberal has no enemies he could avow except the enemies of the people designated by the state, since liberalism’s commitment to opposing violence is partly an affirmation of the state’s monopoly on the determination of what is friendly or inimical. That is why fascism proceeds from the same assumptions on which liberalism is based. Fascism is a development of the liberal state, not its repudiation. Though the discourse, of enforceable American amicality against all possible articulations of social antagonism, was at its height in the neoliberal period which seems to have been replaced by a new aggressive authoritarianism. In which, which US encouragement, the Israelis have long taken a lead.
Many people on the left actively dislike Europeans and European-Americans, though that culture is now part of everyone’s roots. The culture of the left is hybrid as all global culture today is. Its forms and their roots are partly in the thinking and art developed in what were once centers of imperial domination and partly in other things. Left intellectuals in the global South tend rightly to be uninterested in the Orientalist posturings of white liberal North American university-educated youths searching to excavate exotic foreign antiquities to buttress their own curious if uncertainty sense of self, though we can all appreciate the uncertainties and anxieties, which result partly from precarious employment and other conditions that make possible forms of alliance between very different struggles. Yes, we can learn from everyone everywhere and everything they did. And yes, we welcome everyone in principle, as we want to be totalizingly inclusive. Though that is a liberal, not leftist, politics, and in the end is either repressive or just funny.
Transsexualism is interesting for what it questions, and not very interesting for what it affirms, where it is better regarded as a symptom. Defending people who want to be deviant and modify their manner of being in the world in the most far reaching ways is another question. It is a vital question that comes under the rubric of: Defending our claiming the stakes we do against those who would tell us we must serve them or at least live their way. This follows from the principles of equal liberty and personal (and worker/citizen) autonomy. The experimentation with ways of being in the world that transsexualities perform is interesting, as all such work is. But since it ultimately poses no challenge to the liberal corporate state, it is not a basis of a radical left politics, except insofar as defending subjectivities claiming autonomy is, and it is, though more to oppose fascism that undermine the corporate state.
Though indeed we know little about how we can effectively challenge the corporate state and its forms or create something else, though that is the most vital political question of our time.
Zionism is a form of that state and its enforcement. What isn’t? This question should be asked more, the answers we ‘know’ assumed less.
A plethora of possibilities are put forth as part of the alternative we all affirm when working on this or that project as part of this or that cause. Leaders encourage this. Everyone should be on the same page, affirming each other. Then the marchers will feel good and go into tomorrow’s event with maximum enthusiasm.