by
Dawn Foster
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[...] Lord Cromer was particularly keen that veiled Egyptian women should de-jab, arguing that Islam's monstrous mistreatment of women was holding Egypt back from entering the enlightened and idealised version of Western civilisation that bastion of women's rights Cromer claimed to inhabit. Back home, Cromer was the founder and head of the Men's League for Opposing Women's Suffrage. [...]
just, perfect
on Victorian males who use the language of feminism for colonial purposes while of course fighting against feminist demands back home
Obsession with lifestyle--whether aspects of mainstream culture are feminist--turns attention back on the self rather than women's position in society and attendant life chances. As Linda R. Hirschman puts it:
"Choice feminism", the shadowy remnant of the original movement, tells women that their choices, everyone's choices, the incredibly constrained "choices" they make, are good choices. Everyone says if feminism failed it was because it was too radical. But we know--and surely the real radical, Betty Friedan, knew--that it wasn't because feminism was too radical. It was because feminism wasn't radical enough. A movement that stands for everything ultimately stands for nothing.
[...] The obsession with whether or not women identify as feminists assumes that this is a reasonable measure of how many people believe in the general aims and objectives of the ideology. But it is a preoccupation that relies on identity labels more than any analysis of shared values. And any identity can and will be co-opted for political gain: hence we see Nick Clegg [...] posing in a "This is what a feminist looks like" t-shirt [...] Meanwhile, David Cameron was chastised for refusing to wear one, as if a t-shirt sent from Whistles could absolve him of all his policy sins. [...]
I think there are other factors to consider here (like, why did he refuse to wear one? obviously it won't absolve him of anything but the refusal may indicate more worrying truths ... which I think we already suspect anyway) but she makes a good point
Ultimately, all Sheryl Sandberg's vision of leaning in offers is an OK job, and the opportunity to see your children at the same time. In terms of ambition, it's sorely lacking. Both aims are meagre and quite frankly dull, if that's all a dream amounts to. Fighting for equality is often misunderstood as simply being offered the same terms as men on paper. In many ways we already have that. What we don't have is emancipation: the opportunity to be free of social and external shackles that perpetuate inequality and women's lower position. [...]
The historical conjuncture in which theories are formed stamps them with their main characteristics. ‘Classical’ Marxism – initiated on Marx’s death by Engels and notably comprising Kautsky, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg and Otto Bauer – emerged against the background of profound political and economic turbulence, which led to the First World War and the Russian Revolution. Conversely, so-called Western Marxism, of which Lukács, Korsch and Gramsci were the initiators, and to which Adorno, Sartre, Althusser, Marcuse and Della Volpe in particular belong, developed in a period of relative stability for capitalism. The themes broached by these authors, but also their theoretical ‘style’, clearly register the effects of this. Thus, although they all pertain to the Marxist tradition, a gulf separates Hilferding’s Finance Capital (1910) and Lenin’s State and Revolution (1917) from Adorno’s Minima Moralia (1951) and Sartre’s The Family Idiot (1971–72).
In the beginning was defeat. Anyone who wishes to understand the nature of contemporary critical thinking must start from this fact.
From the second half of the 1970s, the protest movements born in the late 1950s, but which were inheritors of much older movements, went into decline. The reasons are various: the oil shock of 1973 and the reversal of the ‘long wave’ of the trente glorieuses; the neo-liberal offensive with the election of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in 1979 and 1980; the capitalist turn in China under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping; the decline of old forms of working-class solidarity; the Left’s ascension to power in France in 1981 and, with it, ministerial prospects encouraging the conversion of leftist militants who had distinguished themselves in May 1968; the definitive loss of credibility of the Soviet and Chinese blocs; and so on and so forth. [...]
Since the 1960s, the United States has been the quintessential country of identity politics. This phrase refers to policies – governmental or otherwise – aimed at promoting the interest, or combatting the stigmatization, of some particular category of the population. Identity politics aim to rehabilitate the ‘identity’ of social groups hitherto discriminated against on account of the negative perception to which they are subject. Identity politics has two important characteristics. The first is that it involves minorities who recognize themselves as such – that is, who do not have the mission of transforming themselves into a majority. In this regard they are opposed to entities like the ‘people’ or the ‘working class’, whose historical role was to coincide, in the more or less long term, with society as a whole. The struggle for recognition of homosexual identity, for example, does not necessarily aim to generalize this identity. It aims to put an end to the stigmatization of those concerned. The second characteristic of ‘identity’ thus conceived is that it is not a (uniquely) economic instance. It contains a decisive cultural dimension.
[...] These theological figures raise the question of how it is possible to continue believing or hoping when everything seems to run counter to belief, when circumstances are radically hostile to it. It is only natural that critical thinkers should feel the need to offer an answer to it. Experiments in constructing a socialist society have all ended tragically. The Marxist conceptual and organizational framework, which dominated the labour movement for more than a century, has collapsed. In such conditions, how is one to continue believing in the feasibility of socialism, when the facts have brutally and repeatedly invalidated the idea? Theology offers plentiful resources for thinking this problem – belief in the non-existent is its speciality – and from this point of view it is understandable that critical thinkers have seized on them.
[...] the concept of exploitation was fundamental. Exploitation is the extraction of surplus-value – that is, the portion of labour performed by wage-labourers for which they are not remunerated by capitalists. It is an economic concept, even if its consequences extend far beyond this sphere as traditionally conceived. This notion, like the representation of the social world that goes with it, tends to assign centrality to economic oppression – that suffered by the industrial working class – and to regard other forms of oppression, like male domination or colonialism, as secondary. This is what Marxists once called the problematic of ‘secondary fronts’, the ‘main’ front being the opposition between capital and labour. Contrary to a current but erroneous retrospective view, ‘qualitative’ themes – this is an important point – were never absent from Marxism and the labour movement. But in it exploitation nevertheless played the role of organizing concept.
on standard Marxism
[...] developed by the Mexico-based Scottish philosopher John Holloway in his book Change the World without Taking Power, published in 2002. The basic idea underlying theories of anti-power is that the transformation of society by the seizure of state power on ‘Leninist’ lines is an illusion, which always results in regimes more detestable than those confronted. On the basis of this assessment, Holloway advocates renouncing seizure of power and changing the world by exploiting the spaces of freedom inevitably produced by capitalism. In line with this idea, and contrary to the Latin American guerrillas influenced by the Cuban model, the Zapatistas have never sought state power. When they go to Mexico City, it is to get their demands heard and occupy the media terrain. A famous saying by Subcomandante Marcos runs: ‘We do not want state power, we want power.’