Misogyny, Traditionalism, and Fascism

[AnyaRupert@xxxxxxx]

Misogyny, Traditionalism, and Fascism

"Feminism is the radical notion that women are people." I'm sure
you've all seen this slogan on buttons and bumperstickers
everywhere. A corollary might be: communitarianism is the
reactionary notion that women must not stray from their
co-joined roles as Pillar of the Hearth and Guardianess of the
Soul of the People.

Louis Proyect and Jim Craven seem to think that crimes against
women don't merit attention on marxmail if those crimes happen
to have been committed by tribal traditionalists. Proyect has
decided that discussion of such things as bride selling, honour
killing, and female genital mutilation are "crap". Craven thinks
such discussion is merely a smear against tribal traditionalism. I
wonder how these men would appreciate having their genitals mutilated
in the name of harmony within the Marxist movement?

Neither of these men is able to refute any of the data I have
presented, preferring instead to smear the character of the
presenter.  This is not surprising.

"Women make their requests to stay in the family home to the
Band Council, Council of Elders or Chief, who have their own set
of rules. The patriarchal structure of most band policies and
procedures entities property rights to the head of the
family.... The patriarchal structure of today's band policies
entitles men to all of these, leaving women with few
resources... Men can have a history of wife assault but their
right to child custody and access is never questioned. This is
especially true for men that have a position of power in the
community." -Aboriginal Women: No Rights to Land or Children,
Mabel Nipshank

It is true that today's tribal politics are warped, distorted,
and in many cases entirely shaped by the needs of the dominant
cultures with which they must find a way to co-exist. And I
trust both Hunter Grey and Jim Craven when they critique the
band councils that act as colonial regimes on the reserves. But
their promotion of family values and amorphous concepts of
community as an untouchable tenet of their spirituality cannot
go unquestioned by Marxists and feminists. Marxists have an
anaylysis of the family as the bulwark of class society, an
opressor of women and children, and we locate the historical
defeat of woman within the processes that lead to class and
family formation in primitive communist society. We also state
that social being determines consciousness.  This means that the
misogynist practices which arose in concomittance with the rise
of family and class in ealy society gave rise at the same time
to sexist apoligia as part and parcel of the ideology
(spirituality) with which early man attempted to explain his
origins and being.

And indeed that is exactly what the pioneers of second wave feminism
found and extensivley documented in works such as kate Millett's
Sexual Politics, Marilyn French's Beyond Power, and Starhawk's When
God Was a Woman. Craven can cry racism all he likes; but, that won't
make the data go away. Marxists can, and should, question the
feminists' interpretation typically given to this data. We don't
believe that men are a caste, or that class is somehow irrelevant to
the patriarchy. But I see no grounds upon which to question the data.
These early feminists did not set out to "smear tribal
traditionalism"; they set out to investigate the thesis that the war
of the sexes is somehow innate. In so doing, they provided a wealth
of confirmation of the thesis set out by Engels in The Origin of the
Family to the effect that the historic defeat of the female sex
occurred in pre-class society alongside the rise of the family and
the state:


    In sexually segregated situations the distinctive quality of
    culturally enforced temperament becomes very vivid. This is
    particularly true of those exclusively masculine organisations
    which anthropology generally refers to as men's house
    institutions. The men's house is a fortress of patriarchal
    association and emotion.  Men's houses in preliterate society
    strengthen masculine communal experience through dances, gossip,
    hospitality, recreation, and religious ceremony. They are also
    the arsenals of male weaponry.  David Riesman has pointed out
    that sports and some other activities provide males with a
    supportive solidarity which society does not trouble to provide
    for females. While hunting, politics, religion, and commerce may
    play a role, sport and warfare are consistently the chief cement
    of men's house comradery. Scholars of men's house culture from
    Hutton Webster and Heinrich Schurtz to Lionel Tiger tend to be
    sexual patriots whose aim is to justify the apartheid the
    institution re presents. Schurtz believes an innate
    gregariousness and a drive toward fraternal pleasure among peers
    urges the male away from the inferior and constricting company of
    women. Notwithstanding his conviction that a mystical "bonding
    instinct" exists in males, Tiger exhorts the public, by organised
    effort, to preserve the men's house tradition from its decline.
    The institution's less genial function of power center within a
    state of sexual antagonism is an aspect of the phenomenon which
    often goes unnoticed. The men's house of Melanesia fulfil a
    variety of purposes and are both armory and the site of masculine
    ritual initiation ceremony. Their atmosphere is not very remote
    from that of military institutions in the modern world: they reek
    of physical exertion, violence, the aura of the kill, and the
    throb of homosexual sentiment. They are the scenes of
    scarification, head-hunting celebrations, and boasting sessions.
    Here young men are to be "hardened" into manhood. In the men's
    houses bo ys have such low status they are often called the
    "wives" of their initiators, the term "wife" implying both
    inferiority and the status of sexual object. Untried youths
    become the erotic interest of their elders and betters, a
    relationship also encountered in the Samurai order, in oriental
    priesthood, and in the Greek gymnasium.  Preliterate wisdom
    decrees that while inculcating the young with the masculine
    ethos, it is necessary first to intimidate them with the tutelary
    status of the female. An anthropologist's comment on Melanesian
    men's houses is applicable equally to Genet's underworld, or
    Mailer's U. S. Army: "It would seem that the sexual brutalising
    of the young boy and the effort to turn him into a woman both
    enhances the older warrior's desire of power, gratifies his sense
    of hostility toward the maturing male competitor, and eventually,
    when he takes him into the male group, strengthens the male
    solidarity in its symbolic attempt to do without women." The
    derogation of femi nine status in lesser males is a consistent
    patriarchal trait. Like any hazing procedure, initiation once
    endured produces devotees who will ever after be ardent
    initiators, happily inflicting their own former sufferings on the
    newcomer. The psychoanalytic term for the generalised adolescent
    tone of men's house culture is "phallic state." Citadels of
    virility, they reinforce the most saliently power-oriented
    characteristics of patriarchy. The Hungarian psychoanalytic
    anthropologist Geza Roheim stressed the patriarchal character of
    men's house organisation in the preliterate tribes he studied,
    defining their communal and religious practices in terms of a
    "group of men united in the cult of an object that is a
    materialised penis and excluding the women from their society."
    The tone and ethos of men's house culture is sadistic,
    power-oriented, and latently homosexual, frequently narcissistic
    in its energy and motives. The men's house inference that the
    penis is a weapon, endlessly equat ed with other weapons is also
    clear. The practice of castrating prisoners is itself a comment
    on the cultural confusion of anatomy and status with weaponry.
    Much of the glamorisation of masculine comradery in warfare
    originates in what one might designate as "the men's house
    sensibility." Its sadistic and brutalising aspects are disguised
    in military glory and a particularly cloying species of masculine
    sentimentality. A great deal of our culture partakes of this
    tradition, and one might locate its first statement in Western
    literature in the heroic intimacy of Patroclus and Achilles.

The above excerpt was taken from the Marxist Internet Archive's
citation of Kate Millett's _Sexual Politics_.

Marx was aware that primitive communism is not the ideal to which
modern communists should ascribe. As I have previously pointed out,
the chapter on primitive communism in his 1844 manuscripts discusses
the levelling effects of competitive envy, an element very prominent
in bible communism (see my post on the Hutterites, in the archives);
and this is born out by reports from Wallace, a Louis Approved
Anthro(Tm), who reports the Iroquois iteration that a chief must have
a skin "seven thumbs thick" in order to be impervious to the envy and
gossip by which peer pressure politics is expressed in pre-class
society.  In the first chapter of the critique of the Gotha
programme, Marx also discusses the reality of natural inequality,
(quantified in economic terms by Sahlins in his discussion of big man
societies).

Marx noted in discussions on the Thermidor that old forms of
abuse of power return in updated versions when new social
formations begin to consolidate themselves. Those of us who have
been following the findings of the theoreticians of second wave
feminism have been able to see that the claustrophobic hothouse
atmosphere of the modern nuclear family is a concatenation of
all the worst politics of late tribal society. We know from
archeology and from mitochondrial dna research that women were
the first slaves. We know that female genital mutilation,
bride selling, and honour killings began in tribal society,
and that their practice today is justified by the need to keep
communities strong through rigid adherence to tradition. We know
that today's nuclear family plays a determining role in the
transmission of authoritarian values (see Shere Hite, or Wilhelm
Reich, for instance.)

As Marxists, we know that reactionary ideologies are promoted by
specific class interests pursuing specific agendas. That the
preponderance of tribal imagery in fascist propaganda in no way
signified an intention on the part of National Socialism (or more to
the point, of their financial backers) to return the German people to
their tribal origins in the forests of Teutonwald is pretty self
evident to even the most casual observer.  The question, of course,
is why  did they use this particular imagery and why did it have mass
appeal. In this post, I want to discuss the question of strong
community and its corollary "the historical defeat of the female sex"
as outlined by Engels in the Origins.

With the very first division of society, that of the cummunal
into the punualan, came at the same time the first crude efforts
of husbanding of communal resources. No longer was the community
an amorphous mass in which each had obligation to all, but was
divided into two groups in accordance with the newly formulated
rules of kinship, which established for the first time that we
should regard our near kin as being most worthy of our
attentions and succor, with lesser kin being less worthy. From
the very first, therefore, it can be seen that culture is a
mechanism for the proscription of individual psychic development
in conformity with the material needs of the birth group. (And
indeed, Jim Craven has explicitely acknowledged that tribal
religion is a force of conformity. How Jim can tout conformity
and call himself a revolutionary at the same time is beyond me.)

I want to be absolutely clear on one point: there can be no form
of family that is not predicated on the subordination of women,
a subordination that arises when the role of sexual intercourse
in reproduction has become established. Due to the vagueries of
fertility, it is never entirely certain that a given act of
intercourse will result in conception (on average, it takes
about 25 tries before pregnancy results). Although it is always
obvious who the mother is, it is not all that easy to determine
paternity in the absence of scientific testing. On the other
hand, there is rarely any doubt as to maternity. Without the
ability to corral woman's presumed profligacy, there is no
reliable way of determining who is a legitmate member of the
self-described community, and thus there is no way of
legitimately denying resources to non-kin. This is why the
curbing of women's sexuality is always a matter of concern for
the whole community.

>From this point of view, it is easy to see why the
race-obssessed Nazis were rather fanatic on the matter of
famlily values. But it would be rather short-sighted to see
crude economic interests as the sole determinor of reactionary
interest in the primacy of family values. The fact is that an
attempt at social engineering was made in complete indifference
to the most cherished tenets encapsulated in the formula Kinder,
Kirsche, Kuche (Children, Church, and Kitchen - the Nazi answer
for the woman question). Special camps were set up where
exemplary specimens of Aryan womanhood could be feted and
pampered while they bore out-of-wedlock babies sired by
exemplary specimens of Aryan manhood. Why not handle the whole
matter of "racial purity" in this manner?

The answer to this question can be found in the secondary role
of the family, one that historically has played a lesser role in
society at large. For the norms of any status quo to function,
it is absolutely crucial that new humans be inculcated with
fundamentals of the ruling ideology at an early age. Bourgeois
social scientists refer to this process as "socialization" and
get all gushy about the nurturing efforts of moms. But let's be
clear about this. Children are too young to entertain concepts
of advanced of philosophy; the techniques of child-rearing in
all cultures typically amount to nothing less than brainwashing.
Values are implanted by non-rational means, by-passing the
intellect and working directly on the emotions at such a crude
level as to rendering them virtually immune from the kind of
rational examination which we learn to perform at a later stage
in life. Thus, our core values present themselves as eternal,
ahistoric givens - unassailable by logic, immutable, absolute.
Thus, the child who fails to accommodate himself to his birth
family is an unnatural child, bad seed, and probably spawn of
the devil.

And the responsibility for the earliest imprinting of cultural
values onto children falls typically upon the shoulders of the
woman who nurses the child in its first few months and years of
existence. When the Stalin regime began dismantling the
extensive system of state-run daycare centres, it is because
they had learned a lesson well known to reactionaries: if you
tie women to the home by burdening her with domestic
responsibilities, you have a ready-made conduit for the
conveyance of authoritarian values into every kitchen. And we
all know that the kitchen is the centre of the house, the centre
from which women conduct their ongoing battles to introduce a
little humaneness into this brutal world. It is a double burden
of purity that woman must bear: she must be sufficiently pure so
as to justify implantation with the male seed; and she must be
morally pure enough to be entrusted with the care of his
children.

It is from mothers that children learn that the giver of life is
male, not female. The father brings home the bacon, the father owns
(or leases from the landowner) the land you live on, the father owns
the roof that shelters you - it is to the father who owns you and not
to the mother who bore you that you owe your life. Second wave
feminists have recorded the transition in thinking, largely expressed
in religous thought, by which humanity convinced itself that life is
given only through the male, and that as the corollary, beneficiaries
have an absolute and divinely imposed duty to be gratefull, and to
perform services as an expression of love. Thus, primordialism
becomes the lynchpin upon which reaction hangs its unholy enterprise.
If the concept of the physical source of life can be immutably wedded
to the concept of soul by non-rational means, the giver of life gains
an unassailable authority, an authority upon which can be raised an
edifice of social power. Thus, the conveyers of the "will of the
ancestors" are able to institutionalize the first form of
authoritariansim, elder authoritariansim. The prime importance of the
gains of the Enlightenment were, as Marx put it, to "free mankind
from the concrete", i.e. from the cloying bonds of religion.

In the Old Testament, in the Book of Joshua, the condition of
being devoted to one's Creator is absolute. Time and again we
see the conquering Israelites in the act of "devoting" defeated
city-dwellers to their gods "with the sword". Here, "devoted"
means "given over wholely." The King James Bible translates this
as "sacrificed", or "killed"; but, newer versions have a more
faithfull interpretation, rendering the Old Hebrew as "devoted".
One can see that the endless round of daily sacrifices required
by the old gods serve to remind petitioners that their lives do
not belong to them, and that every bit of material existence
kept for one's own subsistence is a theft from your god, for
which you must do penance in the form of sacrifice.

The concept of "wholely giving oneself over to" is the lynchpin upon
which all forms of idealized human bonding work their transformative
magic with which they are able to act as a kind of spiritual glue,
allowing bonds of "love" to act as ties that truly do bind. Hegel's
discussion of the master/slave relationship, in his Phenomenology of
Mind, serves to remind us that yes, indeed, victims do participate in
their own victimization - not, as the reactinaries would have it, by
choice, but by necessity. The Book of Ruth, hailed by biblicists as
one of the great love stories of all time, tells of the seduction of
Boaz by the destitute Ruth, done so as to manipulate him into
marriage. It is every young man's nightmare. Us wiley women, it
seems, have an unassailable ability to tie men down to family
responsibilities. In this tale, Ruth has been rendered landless by
the death of her husband, and seeks the first legal rememdy available
- binding herself over to her nearest kinsman-of-means. How different
is this from the slave who binds himself over to his master out of
love? (Ex. 21:5&6)

Where I come from, unpaid labour is called slavery; but, when
women do it, it's called love. In most societies, love is
presumed to be something freely given. And yet historically,
love was the name universally given to relationships of bondage:
the feudal bond of homage and fealty was one of legaliy required
love, the ideal slave was said to perform his duties out of
love, the ox bowed down to his master out of love. Yet this love
is rarely anything but socially enforced:

   "Tantaquidgeon also recognized "the love doctor, usually a woman,
   [who employed two varieties of roots for the magical rite". A love
   doctor was reputed to be able to make a medicine sufficient to
   either bring couples together, keep them together, or break them
   apart.

   The social significance of the love doctor has not been examined
   in the secondary literature. The ability to "match-make" couples
   and separate them determined the fate of many nuptial unions. Such
   an ability had enormous ramifications in the ongoing structure of
   native society. Women love doctors thus complemented mothers in
   controlling the majority of Coastal Algonkian marriage choices, a
   formidable and normally discreetly exercised source of power in
   native Middle Atlantic society."

The above is from the anthology _Women and Colonialization, edited
byy Mona Etienne and Ekeanor Leacock, the latter being a Louis
Approved Anthro(Tm). The author is Robert Steven Grumet.

When Ruth seduced Boaz, it was a career move on her part based on
absolute economic necessity (her husband had died, leaving her
landless and therefore incomeless).  Since she seduced him rather
publicly, he could not escape his obligation to marry her once she
had "lain at his feet". Yet the Book of Ruth is considered to be one
of the greatest love stories of all time.

" 6/14/2002 - At the World Food Summit in Rome this week,
   experts emphasized the critical role of women in mitigating
   world hunger. In most developing countries, women produce 80
   percent of basic foodstuffs including those for consumption
   as well as sale. For example, women in Africa perform 80
   percent of the farm work and women in agriculture represent
   nearly 80 percent of economically active women in India. ...
   According to Vandana Shiva, a member ofIndia's Research
   Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, There is a
   blindness in the worlds approach to tackling hunger and it is
   a blindness that ignores the third worlds knowledge, ignorees
   indigenous knowledge and ignores the knowledge of women.
   Though women are essential to food production in the
   developing world, they continue to face discrimination and
   prohibitive gender inequalities...  For example, women own
   only 1 percent of all land in developing countries.

from www.feminist.org

    "Everywhere in the Indian countryside, you see adult women so
    thin you would worry about them if they were your children,
    trudging barefoot along the dusty roads with eighty-pound jugs on
    their heads. You spot their bright saris dotting fields where
    they bend weeding. But under a broad leafy tree, on a patch of
    grass, twenty or so men are sprawled out talking, in gleaming
    white shirts you know they did not launder themselves. The grog
    shops, being Hindu, sells only soft drinks, but they are
    expensive for these poor people. Only men sit on the boxes that
    serve as seats in this Indian version of a sidewalk cafe....

   IN Burkina Faso, people lose weight during the rainy season
   because the women work such long days in the field they are too
   exhausted to cook (and evidence suggests it is as hard for a man
   to prepare his dinner as it is for him to have a baby). ....

   In 1984, an African woman farmer ironically remarked, "This one
   they call farmer; send in teachers to teach him to farm (while I'm
   out growing the food); lend him money for tractors and tillers
   (while I'm out growing the food); promise him fortunes if he'd
   only raisee cotton (while I'm out growing the food). No, I daren't
   stop working, and I won't abandon that thing I was born for -- to
   make sure my children have food in their bellies. ...

   Producing cash crops often raises family income, yet studies of
   projects that give men new technology to raisee cash crops show
   that despite increased income, the family eats less and poorer
   food. Women's and children's nuttritional levels fall because the
   income belongs to the  men, who use it to throw "prestige feats"
   or to buy transistor radios. ....

   Studies also show that when women have resources or earn income at
   all, children's nutritional levels and well-being improve. ..
   Indians have a saying, "A penny to a woman is a penny for the
   family; a penny to a man is a penny for the man."

The above excerpted from _The War Against Women_, Marilyn
French, 1992.

These prestige feasts, which function in a manner similar to the
potlatch in the Pacific Northwest, serve to reinforce the
charismatic rule of hereditary priests, the big men, or the
caste chiefs in societies that have begun their transition from
primitive community to class, by means of substantiating the
giver's image as a generous guy.  In most cases, the wealth
being redistributed is the result of the collective efforts of
women who, as we now know, have historically done 50-80% of the
world's work. For instance, in the Pacific Northwest, women
gather and preserve the berries used at the winter feasting,
which is almost exlusively carried out in ceremonies conducted
in the men's houses. They gave away elaborate blankets which had
been sewn and embroidered by women. Women may have had exlusive
say over household economy, as with the Tlingit, but potlaches
were almost exclusively a matter for male chiefs.

Throughout history, sexual conquest has been a form of enslavement,
through which the productive output of women has been bound to a
particular lineage group through her "love" relationship to a
socially approved male. It is this relationship that forms the
absolute anchor for the concept of community.

Science does not accept amorphous concepts, and neither does
scientific socialism. We recognize that any advocacy of social
harmony in class society can have nothing but a hegemonizing effect
in the long run and lead ultimately to class collaboration (see
Danielle's post on the peace process in Ireland, for instance).  Even
in the absence of class, however, an abstract concept of society
serves to absolve the particular into the universal, to annul human
individualtion. This is a theoretical difference we have with
communitarians of all kinds, whether specifically reactionary
(fascist, fundamentalist) or not (anarchists, religious communities,
etc.) As I have pointed out in my previous discussions of primitive
communism, peer pressure and the influence of charismatic leaders can
serve to enforce artificial unity.

"What is to be avoided above all is the re-establishing of "Society"
as an abstraction vis-a-vis the individual." -Marx, 1844 Manuscripts

It is not some abstract idea of community to which Marxists are
committed, it is the free development of human potential. The highest
form of this expression can be found in the defence of individual
rights upon which bourgeois democracy was founded. Marxists recognize
that these rights can only be guaranteed when society as a whole is
consciously involved in the process of governance, not by the Ways of
fictive dead people as mediated by their earthly representatives.

Some final thoughts on tribalism from an Israeli refusenik:

   Worse still, I understood that I was raised on two contradictory
   value systems.  I think most  people discover even at an earlier
   age they must choose between two value systems: an abstract,
   demanding one that is no fun at all and that is very difficult to
   verify, and another which calls to you from every corner -
   determining who is up and who is down, who is king and who -
   pariah, who is one of us and who is our enemy.  Contrary to basic
   common sense,  I picked the first. ... I picked the first road,
   and found myself volunteering in a small, smoke-filled office in
   East Jerusalem, digging up files about deaths, brutality,
   bureaucratic viciousness or simply daily harassments. ... We [the
   petition signers] believe there is no room for the tribal code,
   that the tribal code simply camouflages idolatry, an idolatry of
   a type we should not cooperate with. ... Those who let such a
   form of idol worship take over will end up as burnt offerings
   themselves.

   Asaf Oron


Joan Cam+ron



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