From “radical feminism” to today’s militarism

I.
In which “radical” (carceral) feminism confronts today’s landscape of “neofascist” militarism

There is a feminism of the left (perhaps) and one of the center and right (clearly). My thoughts petinent to understanding the latter presuppose reognition of the possibility that some ostensibly left-wing positions are right wing in effect.

Q. "Why were feminists so angry at men (like black people at whites, etc.)?"
A. "So many are bad."

And because of structural oppression, of course. But that is not the question for carceral capitalist liberalism, which targets not structures but people, perhaps because it simplifies the matters by identifying them. The question is not whether it is true (there are certainly lots of awful men, including in the way they treat women) but whether it raises any specifically political question, and one to which an identitarian answer makes sense. What is wrong with these bad men? It may be supposed that these are men who have expectations about other people treat them (e.g., as in all notions of interpersonal justice). They are surely relying upon outmoded expectations we know are wrongful. They are 'entitled', not realizing that in modern society no one is ever entitled to anything. Capital takes that position, especially today: workers have no rights, only property does, and so those who command have the right (to command) and those who are commanded only the duty to obey, and meaningless ‘legal rights’ that exist on paper and that no one takes seriously anymore. Women were manifestly subordinated in the patriarchal familial relations that were once the dominant mode of social authority in part because the capitalist enterprise, which inherited this mode from traditional society, centered the ownership and control of capital in the hands of ruling families. This was dissipated in the twentieth century with the rise of a professional and managerial class and the administrative state in a novel form of capitalist ownership and control that was able to employ many women in positions of professional responsibility and authority. With some serious grievances that now were gaining increasing attention, ideological discourses came to their aid, and middle-class women benefitted, as the smaller number of middle class blacks did, in ways the poor among both groups could not benefit much from. When I was a male student encountering the feminist state at a university in the eighties, I always got a clear sense that the females exercising authority added, to the capitalist and bureaucratic insistence that it can almost never be challenged, the delusion that the man who didn’t readily comply must be wanting something from the woman personally. In any case, it was observable that the women managers were particularly intolerant. Since most people find this claim incredible, I note that I discuss it more detail elsewhere.

Now of course you may discount these remarks as those of a reactionary; for, as everyone knows, the “progressive” Democratic Party consensus could logically only be opposed by advocates of the other faction, which is right-wing conservative Republicans. The Democrats claimed to own the left and the leftists then were caught up in identity politics, according with their own professional ambitions. Such an ideological monopoly serves the function of shielding Liberals from criticism. But the Liberal Democratic “rainbow” ideology lost an election and will like have to be substantially configured if it is to survive at all. Why not admit that some of the neoconservatives were right about how Liberals were wrong, and that in fact that’s pretty much all they were right about? That would after all be one strategy of winning elections, one that avoids the need to formulate a positive program many people could believe in.

Surely the largely truth of anger about injustice is that some people get angry at some other persons when they feel wronged in some way, and that this is specific to no type of person except in an ideology, however sensible that way of thinking might seem to be in according with various unpleasant historical facts. Accordingly, it could of course be that when a woman (or anyone) is angry at (a, some, many, or all) men (or anyone else), what is significant is not the type of actor so much as the type of act. It may be pertinent here to note that most men are not rapists or criminals of any kind and that the subordination of housewives in traditional society, which has been disappearing along with the economy of peasants and farmers, is not an instance of the apocalyptic imagination that some radically styled militant liberal rhetoric appears eager to exploitationally evoke. Feminism became militant in assuming that women are horribly oppressed at the very moment when women were conquering the professions in positions not necessarily of executive decision but certainly of middle management (and quite a bit of social authority and ideological hegemony, belying the claim of those asserting it that they were the perennial, if not ontological, underdogs and victims. The United States today is not a patriarchal or male-dominated society in its structural form and essence; it is a very advanced capitalist society with a visible persistence of the older (pre-capitalist) social formations that capitalism itself always made use of, and that the more progressive elite make a straw man target of to fuel their role in the quarrel. The nature of this system, and of much social power as it is exercised today, is misconceived if this is not recognized.

To a lower middle class male subjected to this without sufficient resources to ignore the claims or decisively refute them, what is a boss who is no longer a member of the class of the boss type? How about: a boss with a different brand of style? Some people want the best style for the boss-ism they wield, are subjected to, or both. Otherwise of us are more annoyed by boss-ism itself.

Something else may be at play also. Why are Americans not only so authenticity-obsessed and creative but also so self-confidently sure of themselves and irascible? One reason is we are used to thinking we rule the world; another is the legacy of slavery. In the American imaginary, it may be the principal historical cause of radical militancy. The problem with criminalizing types of persons is that that potentially liberates the state and those with the ability to use legitimated force into a permanent state of exception of a rule by pure force. Radical victimological rhetoric will then be one way the liberal-left unwittingly aides the rise of fascism, perhaps as we move towards war with most perspicuous cultural tendencies contribute to this drift without recognizing or knowing how to avoid it.

Q. "Why do some men get angry at women?"
A. "They have psychological problems."

That is, people can be treated as having no rights in the sense of claims about justice, and thus as idiots, who as subjects and objects of any will, have concerns that are not public, only private. After all, with the rise of feminism the personal became the only real political anyway. These people then may as well be regarded as infants, who can be studied and subjected to social control by the enlightened personnel of a managerial state. For various reasons, which may appear obvious depending on one's prejudices, this way of thinking about society and its people (a set of objects to be profitably managed) will have a special appeal to many women of the professional class.

After all, if a woman is angry at a man, it may be assumed that she is right and he wrong, while if a man is angry at a woman, it may be assumed that she is right and he is wrong. Our culture has in many ways an emergent normative femininity, and everyone despises the old normative masculinity, recognized as oppressive, identified with patriarchy (which is not the same thing, though the two worked well together).

When the leftist radicalism of the sixties became the militant crypto-conservatism of the seventies, feminism became carceral. And it had to target an enemy.

Q. "What is a bad man?"
A. "A man who transgresses into a space that women inhabit in innocent peace and flourishing freedom."

A "feminist" state would naturally police its territory and the distribution of spaces within it in order to exclude bad men.

Q. “But…. But don’t some bad men violate women? And since this is a social problem, should we not use all the available techniques of social management to address this ancient problem?
Doesn’t it call for radical solutions that go to the root of the problem?”

II.
It may be noted that the state in the late modern period has tended, especially in times of war and national crisis, to exclude a lot of people. Sometimes it kills them.

In most such operations, some kinds of people are targeted. It is not always the same people who suffer, or are killed, or simply allowed to perish in indifference as bombs fall. Those people might be of any gender, age, income, race, religion, ideological identification, degree of affinity or lack thereof with the persons targeted by those engaged in an operation doing so, or bearers of whatever other demographical social category recognized by modern corporate entities and states dispensing goods and services, and using the operationally appropriate methods and tactics.

Since modern nationalism is ideological, in the modern period "politics" typically is. And since modern nationalism was based on forming citizens in identification with predicates of social identity, above all that of the national social ‘body’ identified by the state as constituting the ‘people’ whose society’ it represents, which may reference ethnic, religious, or other identity determinations, or simply the national imaginary ideological project as in the case of the United States with its vaunted inclusive diversity, modern politics makes friend and enemy of social identities that are marked as demographic categories. Hence much of the discourse of feminism in its polemical militant heyday.

Now that the right has successfully attacked the liberal-left in some of the places where it was most vulnerable, the left properly so called, which may be defined by anti-capitalism and a populist anti-authoritarianism (which might rely on some mix of liberal and democratic theory, but could obviously not a purely individualist one), should not mourn the end of identitarian political militancy but, as we resuscitate the democratic idea of the socialist left that was never disproven but only defeated by force (in the Cold War by both sides, through the efforts of the forces controlling capital and governance) celebrate it.

Feminism as we knew it is dead. Its fatal and tragic error is shared by much of the “left” historically. I write about this elsewhere, but briefly, I believe it took a conservative direction when Marxism became (as in Stalinism and Maoism) a moralistic opposition between social groups. Then, after the high point of 1968, the liberal-left abandoned opposing capitalism and spoke of including all the minority social groups. (That is also why most black politics in America is actually very conservative; like the Jewish right, it is used by an elite to defend its interests by appealing to the identity shared by the population it claims to represent). They opposed some foreign wars but with no effectiveness. Today the most prominent beneficiary of identity politics is the Jewish world, its official representative institutions now dominated by the extreme right. This may lead to questioning, and perhaps discrediting, all identity politics and the tendency within Judaism itself to focus on “the people” at the expense of ethical and moral ideas that are by their very nature universal and could be discussed rather than weaponized as causi belli. Yes, American Jews on the left are rejecting Israel and there is no turning back, but of course we are in for a time of extended bitter social conflict. And in this conflict the identitarian tendency that sustains nationalism and militarism will be difficult to resist.

The French recognized their mistake, the Germans mourn their nation’s victims, but America has done neither. American liberals are characteristically blind to what happens in the world. Never mind the bullshit, like:

”How can you say what we are doing is an injustice when my people are the victims, the victims?”

America being what it is, someone might also say:

”When I fuck with you, asshole, do you got a problem with me because I am (fill in field: black, female, gay, Jewish, etc. etc.)?”

Now, is that their problem? It is not ours. I don’t think it was even at Auschwitz.
The essence of Auschwitz is not what some people did to Jews. The essence of Auschwitz is what some people with the power, will, and ability to do so, will do to other people.
And that’s what we mean by “never again.”
Your people are not the victims.