Miscellaneous Feminism Thread

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
i havent taken drugs in about a year you cheeky scamp and i havent had a drink in a month. you dont understand the Socratic Method that's your problem.

Maybe I don't, but I understand it more than weird tv presenter turned reptillian establishment nutter. That is an indictment in and of itself.
 

sus

Well-known member
in some ways hes just spelled out what barty was saying with his original 2 posts but hes done it in a way i think only he has the intellectual horsepower, focus, energy, vocabularly, to do. i dont think anyone else here could do it, except poetix. we are all way too thick and wooly minded.

then again i dont think he realises that saying these things will make everybody think hes ben shapiro. thats what barty does know. you dont come out and say these things even if you happen to beleive them.
Well, I know very well you can't say these things to a member (aspiring or actual) of the Brooklyn Culture Mafia. But I like to think a website named Dissensus, populated by folk who claim superiority over Brooklyn hipsters, can be trusted to maintain perspective.
 

sus

Well-known member
Gus is wrong as always, feminism has more to do with pre-Marxian craft union forms of socialism. He hasn't done his homework, instead surrendered to Baudrillards meaningless media studies exegeses.
Please, tell me how what I *actually* said is wrong, rather than pontificate about something I didn't.
 

luka

Well-known member
third doesnt obey the bourgeoius rules of linear debate club formalism hes a free form discourse saboteur. this is the only viable strategy

I think an optimal interaction with @thirdform requires a very acute modulation of your own frequencies. I'm still feeling it out. If you can do it, I think you stand to gain much.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Well, I know very well you can't say these things to a member (aspiring or actual) of the Brooklyn Culture Mafia. But I like to think a website named Dissensus, populated by folk who claim superiority over Brooklyn hipsters, can be trusted to maintain perspective.

Wrong dissensus mate. That was 2004-2005 era dissensus when you were between the ages of 3-6. Shame you didn't come on back then.
 
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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Please, tell me how what I *actually* said is wrong, rather than pontificate about something I didn't.

Feminism is like a union, or confederation of unions. It only seeks to define the boundaries of womanhood. Marxism does not seek to empower the proletariat vis-a-vis ignoble rulers but abolish the conditions that give rise to the proletariat. The working class itself is a problem in marxism, because it is technically capital. Womanhood is not a problem in feminism, only male encroachment onto it. It's why terf ideology is no aberration from the logic of feminism.

Transfeminism tries to legislate this and is successful to an extent but still gets defined in a shop floor antagonism between men and women, which does not fully permit for gender variant men (who still define themselves as being very much men.)

This is what in essence makes feminism middle class. It is an ideology of mastery, not a material grounding of dispossession - feminism cannot see the radicality of being from without.

I'm off to record a mix and read some books. I'll leave the rest of the research up to you.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
It must be said at the outset that many, perhaps most socialists who have sincerely believed they were Marxists, have in fact been Rousseauists. Freud has eloquently described resistances to psychoanalysis; intuitive resistance to Marxism is no less widespread, even among socialists. It is emotionally and intellectually difficult to be a Marxist since it goes against the grain of moral indignation which is, of course, the main reason people become socialists.

ROUSSEAU VERSUS MARX
The main difference between Rousseau and Marx is that Rousseau seeks to replace (stratified, hierarchical, dominated) society with the people (a purely egalitarian and culturally self-sustaining, closed community), while Marx does not want to ‘replace’ society by annihilating ‘rule’ and the ruling class as such, but believes that capitalism (one specific kind of society) might end in a way in which one of its fundamental classes, the proletariat, would abolish itself and thereby abolish capitalism itself. It is implied (it is sous-entendu) that the moral motive for such a self-abolition is the intolerable, abject condition of the proletariat. Far from its excellence – extolled by the Rousseauians – it is, on the contrary, its wretchedness, its total alienation, that makes it see that it has ‘nothing to lose but its chains’, and that it has ‘a world to win’. In the Marxist view it is not the people’s excellence, superiority or merit that makes socialism – the movement to supersede, to transcend capitalism – worthwhile but, on the contrary, its being robbed of its very humanity. Moreover, there is no ‘people’, there are only classes. Like the bourgeoisie itself, the working class is the result of the destruction of a previous social order. Marx does not believe in the self-creation or the self-invention of the working class, parallel to or alongside capitalism, through the education of an independent set of social values, habits and techniques of resistance.
Thus there is an angelic view of the exploited (that of Rousseau, Karl Polányi, E.P. Thompson) and there is a demonic, Marxian view. For Marx, the road to the end of capitalism (and beyond) leads through the completion of capitalism, a system of economic and intellectual growth, imagination, waste, anarchy, destruction, destitution. It is an apocalypse in the original Greek sense of the word, a ‘falling away of the veils’ which reveals all the social mechanisms in their stark nakedness; capitalism helps us to know because it is unable to sustain illusions, especially naturalistic and religious illusions. It liberated subjects from their traditional rootedness (which was presented to them by the ancient regime as ‘natural’) to hurl them onto the labour market where their productive-creative essence reveals itself to be disposable, replaceable, dependent on demand – in other words, wholly alien to self-perception or ‘inner worth’. In capitalism, what human beings are, is contingent or stochastic, there is no way in which they are as such, in themselves. Their identity is limited by the permanent re-evaluation of the market and by the transient historicity of everything, determined by – among other contingent factors – random developments in science and technology. What makes the whole thing demonic indeed is that in contradistinction to the external character, the incomprehensibility, of ‘fate’, ‘the stars’, participants in the capitalist economy are not born to that condition, they are placed in their respective positions by a series of choices and compulsions that are obviously man-made. To be born noble and ignoble is nobody’s fault, has no moral dimensions; but alienation appears self-inflicted.



Read the footnotes Gus and acquire all the materials! Your petty concerns will be rendered moot by the rabithole you are sucked down.

What is certain is that the last flowers have fallen off the chains. The working-class culture which inspired so much heroism and self-abnegation is dead. That culture was modernist in the sense of taking aim at hierarchy and trying to achieve a secular, egalitarian and rights-based society. This the working class mistook for socialism. It is not. It is capitalism. Capitalism could be itself only if and when aided by socialist delusion.
 
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sus

Well-known member
Does it make you happier if I say "Marxism as practiced" cuz theoretical programs and actual institutional operation are very different beasts
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Does it make you happier if I say "Marxism as practiced" cuz theoretical programs and actual institutional operation are very different beasts

Only if you say marxian social democracy. Marxism as practised is an empty formalism, it doesn't hint at what marxism practised actually was. And that was (moralist) Rousseauian social democracy.

K-Punk didn't understand this key differentiation either, he was too trapped in hating archaic toffs rather than seeing accountants as the class enemy.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
third doesnt obey the bourgeoius rules of linear debate club formalism hes a free form discourse saboteur. this is the only viable strategy

I think an optimal interaction with @thirdform requires a very acute modulation of your own frequencies. I'm still feeling it out. If you can do it, I think you stand to gain much.
Or, as @craner succinctly put it, "a chaos demon from the internet".
 

luka

Well-known member
this touches upon something I feel very intensely at the moment: the way experiencing is filtered through modes or moods. planes that you move between, which determine how you resonate with things. what signals you pick up, what signals become scrambled.

how the world is constantly evoking something more than itself but you have to be in the right mode to see it. people walking around the same environments with fundamentally different experiences of it.
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WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
He’s like an even more unhelpful Siri

“David, play ‘The Lowlands of of Holland’ by Steeleye Span”

- “Here’s a playlist selection compiled by The Joooos”
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
I wonder if it's true that TERFery is, so to speak, the truth of feminism. Obviously there have been attempts to say it ain't so, to make it not so, to shake out the contradictions and so on. But what happens if we take a pessimistic view of the matter?

Certainly it's true that TERFs recognise, in their own TERFery, a last-ditch defence of the absolute core of feminism. It could not be more central to feminism, in their eyes, to defend the fusion of female political identity (rooted in women's phenotypical distinctness from men) with female political agency (the possibility of a "women's movement" as such). The two go together in such a way that anything that compromises the integrity of female identity contributes to the politicide of women, shatters the basis on which women as such can have collective political agency. The TERFs are very clear that those are, as far as they're concerned, the stakes of the whole thing. If they lose, it's game over.

Does anyone except TERFs actually want women to exercise collective political agency - as women, as such - any more? Most available trans-inclusive feminisms have plenty to say about the gendered inequity of our social and political systems, the enduring violence of patriarchy, the denial of bodily autonomy, the intesections of gendered oppressions with racial oppressions, and so on. All true and important stuff. But does any of them actually propose that the answer to all this is a women's movement? I think the answer is obviously no - at the level of revealed preferences (how people actually act, what goals they organise towards) if not at the level of stated commitments. Instead, everybody should be a feminist, just as everybody should be anti-racist, and so on. Of course men who call themselves feminists are immediately self-identified as deeply untrustworthy, but equally, no man within a left-wing milieu would ever dream of saying that he is not a feminist.

From time to time I hear muted complaints from women saying, more or less, that they find feminism exhausting. They mean, I think, The Discourse, the way feminism carries itself on social media: the tiresome simplifications, the clout-seeking, the blatant grifts, the shoring up of a position of righteous victimhood at the expense of anyone, male or female, who presents an exploitable vulnerability: uncool enough to be easily mocked, racialised enough to be easily stereotyped into a threat profile. It's morally disorientating, sickening even. Feminism has become this commitment that everybody has to hold, but that nobody actually likes in terms of what it's become: there are rare shining triumphs of measured polemic, of righteous anger against true malefactors, but it's such a slog separating out the good stuff from the dreck. The only ones enjoying their feminism are, again, the TERFs. They have clarity of purpose. They get to stick it to a clearly-identified enemy, all day, every day.
 
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