Ishmael's rant at the radical party convention
Attention:
The Abraham and Isaac Company
University Colony, California
cc: Judith Butler
Warning: I ramble.
As you read this you may think I must be one of those angry white men who is obviously a Trump supporter. In fact, I am on the left. I voted and campaigned for my city’s present democratic socialist mayoralty, and I possess other leftist credentials, however questionable anyone exercising an admirable rigor I am humble enough to admire might deem them.
Question to the hive.
What is the status of feminism today if we agree that:
1) Women should not be violated by men.
2) Women in positions of authority often expect men subject to their authority to obey them, and if not are extremely nasty.
I come from a place and time ("friendly fascist" California in the 1980's, a university whose administrative culture was remarkably authoritarian and almost always cloaking this in "left-liberal" terms) where this was often horrible.
Thanks to radical feminism, it was a given that a disobedient man is surely a violator of women in some imagined potentiality. A disobedient white man was surely a racist.
That was liberal university culture.
Every sane person agrees about proposition (1), only liberals think that they are the only ones who do. Conservatives and men who react angrily to female bosses (in California, it helps that getting angry at anyone at any time is considered a crime, and the worst crimes are affective, not actual deeds at all) are responsible for all crimes against women and minorities.
We have something different now.
It is fascinating that "the left" or what passed for it had no effective strategies other than police state ones, that the progressives would use with rhetorical tactics directed almost always against something about your behavior or person other than the actual content of what you had said.
The "conservative" reaction to this was valid and correct in its way. The right also seized on this to facilitate a victory it used for less easily defensible purposes.
The progressives succeeded in ways conservatives disliked by using opportunities made available by the administrative state.
The administrative state is the corporate state. Universities, in America, are absolutely central to it.
The right did not oppose it as it claimed to, but only its uses for agenda contrary to their own. The left within the university was able to achieve success in speech codes, etc., because the corporate state officials found that useful for their purposes.
Today it is easier to doubt that this left was one at all. As was once said of Stalinism. Indeed, it is interesting that the right never distinguishes radically democratic social movements (e.g., wildcat sit-down strikes) from authoritarian forms of government that are associated with agendas favored by intellectuals and politicians affiliated with the left. The right has a stake in this confusion. Because of it, most Americans believe that socialism means Stalin and when the East German, Hungarian, Czech and Polish workers famously revolted (1953, 1956, 1968, 1980 - this is to cite the most famous revolts), that was not a manifestation of 'left' desire, the Soviet tanks crushing them was. This is the opposite of the truth. It is blaming the crushing of revolts on those who crushed them. The explanation for this rhetorical move is partly that the forces of repression image those of revolt in the terms of their own imaginary. That is why fascist discourse often imputes horrible crimes against civilians to "communists" or others on the left. That can be true, but often wasn't. It is what the right thinks of: violent repression and massacres. This reflects the right's own desire.
The left at American universities in the 1980s did not exist. Except in rhetoric. There its success were in the scholarship of many professors and graduate students. That is opposed by the current administration, which happily uses other things (the right uses whatever it can get) to justify what they are doing.
The left was reborn, which is why it is being attacked.
It will always lose if it clings to the interests of the professional and managerial class alone. That class wants two things: to manage (capitalist) society (of which socialism is at best a happier form, and it is happier for most people, though not capital) in the most effective way possible, which includes managing its workers, consumers, debt payers, citizens, and residents; and their own professional success. The left may or may not succeed in implementing its agenda. But its agenda is worthless if it abandons the poor.
The administrators did not care about poor women having access to abortion. (The left does). They did not care about people dying of AIDS (I remember not one major protest over this in the years I spent at Berkeley (1983-90). They did worry about protests. They did worry about their investments. They would defend people with professional positions in the institution in the case of any conflict involving anyone else, including students. Students had almost no rights. That is still true. What has mainly changed is now professors have fewer rights and the universities are run less by them and more by shareholders.
Here’s a proposal that might surprise some people since I can imagine marketing it to people who consider themselves “conservatives” if and when they are honest. My proposal rests on the principles of constitutional liberalism as embodied in the United States official (legal) form of government, the Constitution. I begin with a more obvious lacuna: Most people in prison today in the United States never had a jury trial and were not convicted. They plea bargained because they were bullied by a prosecutor threatening them with a likely conviction on a false charge far more serious than the one of which they were suspected unless they agree to the deal. So they are imprisoned on a business deal. And prisons are big business.
There many of these men (most are male, most are Black) are raped. Few people care about this because they are prisoners, and male rape culture associates victimization with weakness, which is shamed. Men aren’t supposed to be victims; women are.
Women can be perpetrators of rape, and many are. The only difference is that (normally) lacking a penis they cannot do it directly in the normal way that is done by some persons who are men. Women can perpetrate sexual and other violence easily enough merely by indicating some person as a potential victim of this violence and then invoke it. The usual tactic then is of course to blame the intended victim in some way. More than one female person in a position of authority has violated me by accusing me in some way (usually of some kind of disobedience, often confused by them with failure of “politeness,” which some will angrily demand — I learned to expect such hostility if she is black, it was normally exhibited by them, and of course, blamed on me, which is undoubtedly the reflex reaction of most readers of these words. Am I not hostile myself, a bit paranoid even? The truth is I find that situations where I am treated with hostility are ones in which I usually find myself registering the verbal use and doubtless mirroring it back. I’m not socially adept. This will sound irresponsible, but I think it’s their fault, especially when these nastily abusive and vicious people are professional employees. They also Americans, which may be why they are thugs. It is not because they are black. This commonly asserted claim is belied by observing that African culture does not have this extreme aggressivity at all, and that its roots are in the culture of slavery and Protestantism, England, and America’s permanent warfare culture in a society whose defined ethos is of one of violent liberty in defense of property rights people hold bodily in persons, which now of course means that people themselves hold in ways that are expressed in a predominantly physical (not very intellectual) culture where property right in possession of a person bodily is one’s (militantly proud) self-ownership (and don’t tread on or fuck with me man!), and this is supposed to be minority pride justified as the performative expression of the great truth of no longer being enslaved by the latest possible victim of readily enraged refusal of the mere idea of that.
To me, all this argues for being a writer (and declaring for the record that I am not speaking to anyone (lest I be murdered) but only in a literary space and to literary addressees—, and remaining disaffected, because my experience amply shows that what I have tended to encounter that I do not like is (a) factually real, (b) behavior I am right to not like. I do not believe it would be better if I tried to enter an institute studying to be a follower of (a Protestant American imagined rendition of) the Buddha or Christ of Ladies’ Club Good Manners.
My proposal for court procedures is that every one accused of a crime be given a jury trial, and prosecutors not be allowed to ‘offer’ plea bargains based on threats of false charges. My proposal for university justice is similar. It extends to every supposed conduct violation. Every accused person should have a right to counsel which works for them and is as aggressive on their behalf as actual lawyers. There must be a wall of separation between administrative and judicial justice. Putting it that way may invoke a curiosity as to whether administrative justice is not an oxymoron; perhaps it is only administration using the rhetoric of “justice,” social or otherwise. Why does this not happen? It is because universities are run as corporations, even when they are publicly owned, and indeed they are corporations (the University of California is a state corporation run by a “Board of Regents”). They fear financial liability more than they fear anything else, just as they care about their financial interest more than they care about anything else. The biggest obstacle to this is the identification of elite groups within the student population with their own ambitions as corporate or government managerial executives. Why would many among them imagine the university as inimical and not amical in their esteem?
I am a radical democrat. I believe in participatory democracy. That means you should be able to challenge anything and everything. That doesn’t mean work has to stop. It means that if someone says or does something that bears on you (because they have the authority to command your obedience, either as official in a bureaucracy or officer of a company exercising its private property right) you should have a right to immediately and directly challenge them. If the matter cannot be resolved, there should be procedures of judgment that are easily invoked and efficient. You would appeal to the official or committee of officers adjudicating such matters and be able to make your case. Your complaining would not instantly be treated as an enormous horrible unusual problem, undoubtedly indicating that you are a disruptive criminal type who is easily angered. This is my idea of justice. California, it may be justly said, is a place that operates on the opposite principle, and more than any other part of the United States, and it may also be justly said, that is an understatement, and comically so. That however is what I actually believe. You can imagine how my life quickly became hell at that university, though I hasten to add that my particular crazy anarchistic bent was actually exercised, or attempted, fewer than one dozen times in almost as many years and always in a case where something really serious was at stake for me, as I had been treated awfully and it involved someone in institutional authority in a situation where it is obvious enough to any one with slightly democratic ethical and political values, as we can agree than mine were and are, that I had reason to ‘argue’. I note that today in the neighborhood I live (the Bronx) people do often behave this way. More commonly in situations where neither person has official authority over the other, and almost always (alas, not quite always, though I would note that newspaper statistics may be said to exaggerate alarm, which is their marketing-oriented purpose, when they sound it every few murders in a city of almost 9 million persons who are in overwhelming preponderance still living at the time the news item is read by some of us, and I say this notwithstanding the obvious truth that since every life has absolute and unmeasurable value (if not duration), that few is too many. It is not an obvious nor universal and necessary that only bad people terminally infected with bad attitudes, like John McEnroe who would argue with the empire as a good worker in a fascist state where being liberal means being “nice,” would never dare, so help them gods. You can guess how much I came to positively loath California.
I was accused of racism and sexism and it was a lie. I think I am on the left, but not the liberal left. The black and female students who supported what I call corporate liberalism wanted above all their own career success, which they were often nervous about in the way standard in America. Class advancement is a nervous object of desire. Needless to say, if you point this out you will be engaged in having to listen to some ranting narrative about how persons like them are oppressed horribly somewhere, and of course you can’t argue with that because of course it is true. Sad fact that I might wonder at this point if I ought to throw in my own remarks of appreciation and protest that they are genuine. They are. The young woman from the ghetto will doubtless be right (I mean factually correct, whether justified depends more on the rhetorical situation of the claim) if she claims she is in closer touch with some nasty oppression that happens more often to persons like herself than to persons like me. So what.
I admit that after some amount of abuse, I undoubtedly did acquire some sexist and racist sentimental proclivities (or they were heightened, and I chose this, all of which are true enough), and that this is unfortunate (it is) and would be regrettable if it were a contributing factor in my doing anything rightly objectionable. I believe I did not. I also think I know that then and now I would get nowhere with American liberals trying to say this. In each case, the other person was in a position of authority, they threatened me, they were abusive, invoked violence, attributed the possibility thereof to me, and did so falsely. I never hit anyone. I never threatened anyone. I did argue. You don’t do that in California, maybe not in the United States. I am still angry. I grew up thinking I am on the left. That meant opposition to everything involved in the Vietnam War. It meant hating the massive and very invasive police presence in the student and poor white ghetto I had spent several year living in prior to coming to Berkeley. It meant not being exactly patriotic. It meant being anti-authoritarian. I hasten to add I had an abusive stepfather. I am not ashamed that this made me hateful of violent authoritarian behavior. I am not even ashamed to admit that I must recognize not only that many black men and women employed in enforcement capacities and often using threats and violence, and very hostile, angry, or intolerant behavior (this is true, and I am aware of some of its material social causes) seem to me to behave similarly to my violent stepfather, but I also know (this is obvious enough and the kind of thing that is easily verified) that the similarity there is factual and not a product of my imagination. I also know that I should hate this unpleasant behavior, and I do. I insist nonetheless that I was not guilty. I believe this university was at fault. I remained angry, especially because I still encounter this kind of thing. I was brought up with enough exposure to liberal values I am unable to appreciate this and while I can learn to tolerate it in act, in sentiment I choose not to. I do not exactly, entirely, or necessarily blame the people who mistreat others this way. I know they may be treated worse themselves. But if you hit me or threaten official violence (it usually is people in official authority whom I have seen exercising violence), I will not like your doing this. And I am not going to turn the other cheek and pretend to dream of Dr. King’s noble pacifism, at the same that I have never used any physical violence against any person and never will. What I consider I am unable to do is not despise criminal behavior, especially on the part of bosses and their enforcers, and I believe I live in a country where official authority is often and normally criminally violent. Unfortunately, ideologies of race have only made this worse. I therefore consider that my solidarity with anyone who is black, female, gay, or anything else, possessed of any identity property that I myself do or do not, might or might, be said to possess in any actual or possible way, is specific to the person and not general to the class of persons they are claimed as belonging to. This is a problem in the United States because our federal and local governments count persons as belonging to various demographically identified social groups that confer upon them what therefore are officially recognized and mandated (though you may be accorded a liberty right of exception to the normal rule by declining to state) identity predicates that indicate the kind of person you are. This has been part of American Constitutional law since the beginning when the slaves had to be identified as types of persons counted in a quantitatively particular way. I don’t believe in identities, so I think this is absurd. My identity is my name, which indicates my unique person but does not include an ascription of any quality so appertaining. Some will say I am this or that type of person, including by national identity, and that is interesting, though it seems to me that all that really means is that I have the qualities of citizenship (a dubiously valued identity predicate, since it is what enables governments to rule on who is and who is not a proper resident on the territory over which they exercise jurisdiction, and we see the consequences of this today, since non-citizens are subject to violent exclusion and perhaps “elimination,” as New York police once threatened me, as part of an effort to herd me into a psych ward, evidently in part to punish me for having published a translation of an attack on France’s leading liberal Jewish intellectual. …
I was threatened, I was battered, I was harassed. I was also poor. I remember one young man, a clerk in the philosophy department, shouting at me as he got directly in my face (his demand was that I “pay your four dollar fine” and there was undeniably nothing less than hate in his manner of saying this, for this was a place where no hint of disobedience is every tolerated and he must have been unable to conceive the mere possibility that some uppity student might be too poor to immediately cough up four dollars, but I was), and I briefly contemplated gently placing my hand on his chest and asking him to please back away. I immediately realized that if I did that, he would hit me (as a man in the art museum did, with the consequence that his supervisor, who like him was black, had me arrested because a few minutes earlier I had merely hesitated for a few seconds, literally, out of shock really, when she told me I had better leave immediately because of the announcement that said the museum would close in five. minutes. I questioned this while I spent five seconds looking again at the painting I was interested in. But she was black, female, in authority, and this was a university in friendly fascist California...I often wondered later what I need to understand about Black American culture and how it is so authoritarian that would enable me to avoid being treated this way because of this kind of misunderstanding, but later experiences, including in New York where I now live (in peace with my neighbors, though I know in a public institution I must not be surprised if I am assaulted by someone with a badge authorizing them to treat me like their slave, and then, of course, will be accused of having assaulted them, by yet another very angry black man or woman who apparently has this angry ready for me the instant they begin to suspect me of not wanting to be treated like a military recruit or suspected criminal of whatever kind..... And of course these things only can be said, and reliably will be, to indicate that I am some kind of vicious racist by liberals who are scripted to say that in order to defend what is in fact their eager participation as kapos of state violence on the phony alibi of their own victimhood, since they are not victims (of me anyway; of course in their imagination based on real memories that I have stumbled unfortunately onto the territory of - where of course they claim ownership rights) -- in fact, what this sort of situation points to is a kind of misunderstanding.
I am antipathetic and resentful myself, obviously, but I blame capitalism, and I think I live in a fascist state, and so do they. They think I am the cause of their oppression, and I say that's the great liberal lie. Feminism believed something similar, and Jewish identity politics, interestingly enough, also tends to.
These are ideologies that divide people and their function is to facilitate capital's often (in America) very violent domination of those capital dominates, which is everyone, with some exceptionality enjoyed by a group of persons who are an absent presence in almost all such scenes, which is the corporate shareholders.
There was and is a genuine feminist cause, a genuine black American cause, a genuine gay cause. etc. (In all these cases, I propose here starting with: we have a right to life and the government, which should belong to all of the people residing in its territory or otherwise subject to its power, should give us what we need and want to live and to live well by our lights, which we have our right to demand if the government belongs to us, and of course have no rights to expect if it does not belong to us, as of course it does not).
People should not be violated. They often are. The conservative notion of the "progressive" (pseudo-) "liberal left" that the fault is persons who commit crimes is greatly exaggerated.
This is even true of Jeffrey Epstein. The question the Epstein affair should provoke us to ask is not, what causes some people to do this? That is a question for a therapist or friend attending to the convicted criminal of this kind. The question is similar to the one posed by all great historical traumatic events that we are right to call evils. Including the Holocaust. The right question is, what does this implicate? What is a symptom of? I think the Holocaust is a symptom of capitalism's fascist potentialities at their most murderous. Since capitalism itself was not a sufficient but only necessary condition of its possibility, we can concern ourselves with how to avoid future holocausts even without questioning capitalism. But since it is a necessary condition in various ways, it rightly interests historians and their readers, if not prosecutors and those who urge them on (as we sometimes should), to ask what about capitalism may have been among its necessary conditions? With Epstein, it is easier. He was a superrich man who marketed opportunism to many takers, in an environment where that kind of behavior made sense to many of them. We need a society in which it no longer does. Just as we need a society not in which everyone identifiable as a “potential criminal” is imprisoned, but in which these crimes do not make sense to very many people as they recently still have.
Epstein is part of a system where there are privileged people who think they have impunity and can do whatever they like. This is a culture of absolutized liberty that tolerates and often wills its own violence and enjoys, while pretending to turn a blind eye to, its own perversity.
The right wants state violence to be used against criminal violence. This is because its ultimate commitments accord the violence of property owners against the poor legitimacy so long as the property is exercised rightly as such, since that is what distinguishes ownership from theft. A factory that beats up rebellious workers is enforcing order, while the rebel opposing it is a criminal.
Since "radical feminism" enjoyed some of its most prominent successes as a form of policing, it must be said that that form of it is a far right, fascist politics, no more and no less.
I remember that.
Liberals and conservatives fought over identities. This marked the culture wars that marked the neoliberal period (1973-2008). This meant that liberals, who like conservatives do not distinguish themselves from the left proper, because they think the political is a form of governance, whereas in fact politics is contestation. That is how social movements differ from organizations and professional activists (as much as we need them). That is how a strike is different from a labor union (as much as we need them). This is how even socialist governments are limited (that is because they need us and we need them to need us as much as or more than they and we need us to need them).
Because liberals thought they are really fighting conservatives and the banner of the left is their own (this is easy to believe when there really is no organized left, as there largely has not been in this country, though it is a different problem where and when there is), someone like me who was a victim of people working for the corporate state but believing themselves to be privileged morally such that if the person they are confronting is white and male, they have an easy alibi for participating in thuggery - the liberals would attack me. In the neoliberal identity-political era, their tactic was always ready to hand, and (surprise!) the bosses were sure to seize upon and sign off on that claim, the same bosses who will use anything they can use against you, and they are not the friends of those workers either. None of whom I ever wronged. They violated me, but I should get used to it. America is fascist and Americans are often thugs. The usual good advice is what a "student advocate" (their office was nothing of the kind) said to me once: Don't talk to anyone. See, this is a liberal country, not a democratic one. But my name is Ishmael.
I live in a country where people in authority are often angry thugs. I was raised in part by a stepfather who was that, while his wife my mother cheered him own. I never got over it. I encounter such people all the time, and it riles me. I’m still angry. I have always been despised or punished for this anger. I may yet find a way to avoid that. I will not be reconciled.
His elder daughter my half sister has reproached me endlessly for this. Interestingly, she never said that what he did was just, and all I ever wanted when complaining was the mere acknowledgement that it was wrongful, though I suppose my claiming that this family wronged me was a bit much for someone who regards, as American women usually do, the idea of “family” as an ideological principle (along with nation and religion) of what is holy, meaning not so much good as obligating loyalty to, since Protestant Christianity does tend to believe that “love” is an obligation and a principle of mandated belief, and to identify it with obedience, which is what the stepfather made clear to me it, and he, was about, or representing. I think she is worried that I will write about it. I wish her well. I cannot honestly not write about the experiences that have so much defined who I am. Her children (whom I have never met, I gather as protective measure since only bad people dislike their stepparents or continue to resent them) cannot be harmed by my accusing her beloved late father of a crime, and I prefer they know the truth. People you love or honor in memory are more interesting if they have faults, just as an honest patriotic citizen is not one who regards his nation (meaning its government and usually wars) as demanding obedient loyalty beyond criticism but loves it all the more and better for being concerned to correct and learn from its faults and mistakes, the better not to repeat them. We also had an uncle whose property was stolen by a con artist who took advantage of his having had a near-fatal stroke. The family was embarrassed and did not go to the police nor tell the children and grandchildren what happened to protect them (in fact, themselves, and not from harm but “embarrassment”) because that would have meant revealing that our uncle was gay. When does the possibility of speaking about something call for being regulated or policed, and in cases like this is it harmful to speak or to be silent? People are not gods, and fathers and bosses are not kings with divine right. People should be honored for their virtues, criticized for their faults. And to criticize a person for a fault is not to besmirch that person’s sanctity, it is only and precise to criticize the fault. Criticism is not polite, say some, our feelings, identities, etc., must be protected. Maybe this a feature of a culture where public scandals are such a big deal. I remember when a genocidal war was being criticized and the president was finally deposed by the competing political party by accusing him of scandalous behavior. Two million Vietnamese people were killed in often horrendous ways, and the nation survived despite all the protests, but if someone violated company rules, showed bad manners, were impolite, or caused embarrassment, my god, what then? Recent headlines news has aroused passions among readers upset by wars and massacres as well as as crimes and scandals. Alas, a Puritan culture is more troubled by dirty sheets or language than bloodied corpses. Of course, she is right in one sense. I should get over traumatic injuries. I am not sure this is the great moral duty but I do listen to light comic music too sometimes.
America is a nation of warriors and angry people. I dream of a time when children are raised not being ordered to obey but invited to read. A young woman friend complained to me that France has a culture of transgression (I wondered if that’s bad, but I think she was speaking for conquered lands and women who should manage approachers with cards of invite), and I replied, America has a culture of harassment.
Ishmael escaped a father who tried to murder his brother, but legend has consigned him the bastard’s repute and the less felicitous temper and clime. Our government has long promoted the discouraging myth, reassuring to some homeowners perhaps, that the real traumas are all illnesses that call for surveillant management of everyone’s life by teams of doctors employed to profitably drug every imaginable malediction. But who today believes that what they are most traumatized by is not real events that are belong less to their private nature than a public world that is perhaps too easily theorized by merely calling it tyranny, though it is that? Ishmael wasn’t nice, but company secretaries, whose university education is treated as a glorified finishing school for ladies, have to be and I’m a writer. Among the minority of women and men I’ve admired, not one of us was ever much of a proper lady, and I’m even a bit proud that my mother refused to be, obnoxious as she made herself. Savor your trauma, to every mood its song.
WILLIAM HEIDBREDER
FEBRUARY 23, 2026