Quitting porn is about reclaiming your authentic sexuality, aligning your actions with your values, and decolonizing your mind. For organizers, activists, and revolutionaries, choosing to stop using porn will make you feel better, leave you with more energy and time, and is a stand in solidarity with women and girls—which is also a stand with the living planet.
This article will introduce the harms of pornography, share a radical feminist perspective on porn, a radical indigenous perspective on porn, a short interview with Noam Chomsky, and provide some tools to help you stop using porn.
Sexting and Pornography are eroding whole generations from birth. — Native Youth Movement
Critical Media Analysis of Porn
Critical media analysis tells us how the advertising and mass media industries use psychological tricks to encourage us to buy and spend more time watching screens. It works. The global entertainment and media industry is worth more than $2 trillion.
However, few of us apply the same critical thinking to pornography. Like mass media, porn is big business. The size of the industry was estimated at roughly $15 billion in 2018 in the U.S. alone. That’s more revenue than Hollywood, Netflix, the NBA, Viacom, or the NFL.
Porn influences individuals and our entire society. However, this influence is rarely interrogated. Porn production and use largely happens in the shadows. It’s mostly a private habit that people indulge in darkened bedrooms and offices. And unlike other large industries, it’s usually not discussed. We educate young children about advertising and mass media to encourage caution around images that are, by design, manipulative. But young people are rarely educated about pornography.
Human sexuality is a powerful force, and is something that can be beautiful, enjoyable, and important. Pornography, in contrast, is a “super-normal” stimulus.
Our ancestors did not evolve in a world where the internet provided instant access to explicit images and videos. At a biological level, modern internet porn is completely unlike the authentic human sexuality we evolved with, which involves face-to-face communication, desire, relationships, conversations, sex, and so on.
Porn, in contrast, provides a never-ending stream of digital images that has almost nothing in common with real sexuality. This super-normal stimulus is why many men, and a smaller number of women, are addicted to pornography.
Porn is to sex as heroin is to a runner’s high. Rather than nourishing the self and others, as authentic sexuality can, porn leaves users alienated, shameful, disconnected from partners and others around them, and wasting precious time—the only thing we have in life—looking at an image on a two dimensional screen. And like opiates, compulsive porn use is very common.
Why to Stop Using Porn
There are many reasons to stop using porn.
1. Porn harms women.
There are real women (and men) working in the pornography industry. They tend to have very high rates of drug abuse, STDs, mental health issues, physical and sexual abuse, and premature death. More broadly, porn fuels demand for prostitution and for sex trafficking. Tragically, there are many examples of porn depicting trafficked women who are being raped on-camera. Porn is not a fantasy. It is something happening to real people.
2. Porn harms society.
Critical media analysis tells us the images we are exposed to effect us. This is why advertising works. Porn lives inside the minds of the people who watch it, and then filters out into society. Porn also gravitates towards “shock content” as people become accustomed to hyper-normal stimulus. This is why porn so often contains blatant racism, real and faux underage and “teen” content, acts that are not actually pleasurable, BDSM, incest tropes, and outright violence. One analysis of the most popular porn films found that 88% of scenes contained violence against women. The objectification of women, negative body image, and abusive practices normalized by porn have ramifications throughout society and particularly on women and girls.
3. Porn harms users.
There is nothing categorically wrong with masturbation, but porn is not masturbation. It’s masturbation moderated by a patriarchal, capitalist industry. People who use porn don’t actually get anything out of it. They don’t get good sexual education. They don’t strengthen their relationships by building trust and intimacy. They don’t make money or become more enlightened. They don’t even get real, lasting pleasure (users consistently report feelings of shame, depression, and anxiety regarding their habit/addiction). In this sense, porn is similar to a destructive drug addiction. It harms users, yet they crave it and have trouble stopping.
A Radical Feminist Perspective on Porn
Feminists have been speaking out against pornography and the objectification of women for a long time. The great anti-porn organizer Andrea Dworkin wrote that:
“Pornography incarnates male supremacy. It is the DNA of male dominance. Every rule of sexual abuse, every nuance of sexual sadism, every highway and byway of sexual sadism, is encoded in it. It’s what men want us to be, think we are, make us into; how men use us; not because biologically they are men but because this is how their social power is organized. From the perspective of the political activist, pornography is the blueprint of male supremacy.”
A quick visit to any popular porn site confirms this. Whatever facet of patriarchy you are concerned about (sexual harassment, sexual assault, incest and family violence, rape, workplace abuse, exploitation of young women and girls by older men, forced childbearing, sexualized racism and racialized sexism, revenge porn, upskirting, voyeurism, and every other possible form of non-consent, deception, coercion, etc.) you will find pornography catering to and sexually reinforcing those ideologies.
Radical feminists have long argued that the sadistic brilliance of pornography is that is sexualizes domination, objectification, and violence; that it encodes patriarchy within something that feels pleasurable, and thus makes it often invisible. Andrea Dworkin, once again, wrote that “Pornography is the institution of male dominance that sexualizes hierarchy, objectification, submission, and violence.”
The feminist writer Susan Griffin described both the production and consumption of porn as a ritualistic rite to patriarchy with political ramifications rarely understood by those participating in it:
“For above all, pornography is ritual. It is an enacted drama that is laden with meaning, which imparts a vision of the world. The altar for the ritual is a woman’s body. And the ritual which is carried out on this altar is the desecration of flesh. Here, what is sacred within the body is degraded.”
A Radical Indigenous Perspective on Porn
Griffin’s analysis of pornography as a ritual that is conducted on women and girls and broadcast into the minds of hundreds of millions of people worldwide has some similarities to a radical indigenous perspective on pornography.
From the Native Youth Movement Warrior Society [edited for length]:
When two humans exchange their energy it is a sacred union. In our pre-invasion world sex was seen very different than today, very sacred; the most sacred of our ceremonies, the one that is universal. By exploiting sexuality, we exploit our essence as life forms. By colonizing and changing our sexuality they colonize our first and oldest ceremony, so sacred every man and woman had their own and it was only viewed, attended and participated in by them.
It is now controlled by the perverted minds of the colonizer. If they control what arouses people and when, through imagery, they can make a person think about sex and control the oldest part of us. The hind brain is older and stronger than any other portion of the brain. We share it with all other backboned animals.
When hind brain is in charge, accessing neural networks that are responsible for compassion, self-awareness, and emotional intelligence is harder. The place where our deepest love comes from can be quickly overridden by the hind brain. Today most people in the industrial world function in this continued state of narcissism. In other words, they have sexualized our world as a way to control the oldest thought process of survival.
Sexting and pornography are eroding whole generations from birth. While sex is thought of as a curse word in public and our communities, dysfunctional sexuality is a behind-closed-doors addiction. In 2012, the Internet Watch Foundation found that an “estimated 88% of self-made explicit images are stolen from their original upload location and made available on other websites, in particular porn sites collecting sexual imagery of children and young people.” When the person who originally sexted the photo finds out everyone has access to it they can go into depression and there have been manycases of suicide.
Indigenous views of sexuality must be revived as a Sacred teaching for our young ones. The future of Indigenous people is at stake. Body parts are not objects, just as the humans they are part of are not objects, they are sacred life forms that must be treated good and engaged respectfully. Physical appearance is shallow. A person’s mind must be in good health to be healthy.
Noam Chomsky on Pornography
When asked about his stance on pornography, in response to perceived endorsement of Hustler, who had tricked Chomsky into giving an interview for the magazine, Chomsky responded:
Pornography is humiliation and degradation of women. It’s a disgraceful activity. I don’t want to be associated with it. Just take a look at the pictures. I mean, women are degraded as vulgar sex objects. That’s not what human beings are. I don’t even see anything to discuss.
Interviewer: But didn’t performers choose to do the job and get paid?
The fact that people agree to it and are paid, is about as convincing as the fact that we should be in favor of sweatshops in China, where women are locked into a factory and work fifteen hours a day, and then the factory burns down and they all die. Yeah, they were paid and they consented, but it doesn’t make me in favor of it, so that argument we can’t even talk about.
As for the fact that it’s some people’s erotica, well you know that’s their problem, doesn’t mean I have to contribute to it. If they get enjoyment out of humiliation of women, they have a problem, but it’s nothing I want to contribute to.
Interviewer: How should we improve the production conditions of pornography?
By eliminating degradation of women, that would improve it. Just like child abuse, you don’t want to make it better child abuse, you want to stop child abuse.
Suppose there’s a starving child in the slums, and you say “well, I’ll give you food if you’ll let me abuse you.” Suppose—well, there happen to be laws against child abuse, fortunately—but suppose someone were to give you an argument. Well, you know, after all a child’s starving otherwise, so you’re taking away their chance to get some food if you ban abuse. I mean, is that an argument?
The answer to that is stop the conditions in which the child is starving, and the same is true here. Eliminate the conditions in which women can’t get decent jobs, not permit abusive and destructive behavior.
How to Stop Using Porn
There are many ways to stop using porn, but the difficult part is the psychology of quitting. Unlike a drug like heroin or alcohol, porn is barely addictive at the physical level. People quitting heroin or alcohol often need medical support and gradual weaning. Porn is not like that. The addiction is primarily psychological.
Most compulsive porn users are convinced that they need porn, that they like it, or that they’ll feel miserable without it—even though using porn makes them feel shameful and physically depleted. This is the psychology of addiction.
So how can this be overcome? There are a few common methods used by millions of people around the world to stop using porn. These include EasyPeasy, Fortify, Your Brain on Porn, and others.
1. Stop Using Porn with the Easy Peasy Method
“Easy Peasy” is a method adapted from Allen Carr’s 1985 book The Easy Way to Stop Smoking. The method focuses on first transforming your attitude towards porn by seeing it as a drug that has no benefits and embracing a desire to quit. This method is interesting because it emphasizes happiness and contentment to be free of porn, and discourages people from feeling like they are depriving themselves of something by quitting. It involves reading a short book (also available as an audiobook) and is free.
2. Stop Using Porn with the Fortify App
Fortify is a smartphone and web app that is available for free to help people stop using porn. It was created by the people behind “Fight The New Drug,” an anti-porn organization. The app helps prompt you to take certain actions, get support from others, track your progress, and do mindfulness exercises. A free version is available, as is a paid plan with more tools that costs $10 USD per month.
3. Stop Using Porn with Your Brain on Porn
YBOP doesn’t prescribe a single program for quitting porn. Rather, it has a collection of tips and tricks collected over many years and from many people.
Please note: these methods are not explicitly feminist creations; they are self-help methods that are largely apolitical. Many anti-porn communities and forums still contain misogyny. However, don’t let this discourage you from using the resources that are available.
Editor’s note: Feminism is often seen as a “woman issue” and thus as something secondary or unimportant compared to issues of class or ecology. But in this piece, Robert Jensen reminds us that “White supremacy, capitalism, and imperialism have never existed without patriarchy.” Some historians even see patriarchy as the “original oppression” — the template which has led to the world we now find ourselves in.
From the psychology of domination to overpopulation, patriarchy is a powerful, subtle force in our world. If you are concerned about human rights or ecology, as we are, women’s oppression is essential to understand and undermine. Why are we a radical feminist organization? Because this is essential to justice and sustainability.
In an analysis of pornography and prostitution in a patriarchal society, it’s crucial not to lose sight of basic biology. A coherent feminist analysis of the ideology and practice of patriarchy starts with human bodies.
We are all Homo sapiens. Genus Homo, species sapiens. We are primates. We are mammals. We are part of the animal kingdom.
We are organic entities, carbon-based creatures of flesh and blood. Whatever one thinks about the concepts of soul and mind—and I assume that in any diverse group there will be widely varying ideas—we are animals, which means we are bodies. The kind of animal that we are reproduces sexually, the interaction of bodies that are either male or female (with a very small percentage of people born intersex, who have anomalies that may complicate reproductive status).
Every one of us—and every human who has ever lived—is the product of the union of an egg produced by a female human and a sperm produced by a male human. Although it also can be accomplished with technology, in the vast majority of cases the fertilization of an egg by a sperm happens through the act of sexual intercourse, which in addition to its role in reproduction is potentially pleasurable.
I emphasize these elementary facts not to reduce the rich complexity of human interaction to a story about nothing but bodies, but if we are to understand sex/gender politics, we can’t ignore our bodies. That may seem self-evident, but some postmodern-inflected theories that float through some academic spaces, intellectual salons, and political movements these days seem to have detached from that reality.
If we take evolutionary biology seriously, we should recognize the centrality of reproduction to all living things and the importance of sexuality to a species that reproduces sexually, such as Homo sapiens. Reproduction and sexuality involve our bodies.
Female and male are stable biological categories. If they weren’t, we wouldn’t be here. But femininity and masculinity are not stable social categories. Ideas about what male and female mean—what meaning we attach to those differences in our bodies—vary from culture to culture and change over time.
That brings us to patriarchy, radical feminism, a radical feminist critique of the sexual-exploitation industries in patriarchy, and why all of this is important, not only for women but for men. I’m here as a man to make a pitch to men: Radical feminism is especially important for us.
Patriarchy
Patriarchy—an idea about sex differences that institutionalizes male dominance throughout a society—has a history. Though many assume that humans have always lived with male dominance, such systems became widespread only a few thousand years ago, coming after the invention of agriculture and a dramatic shift in humans’ relationship with the larger living world. Historian Gerda Lerner argues that patriarchy began when “men discovered how to turn ‘difference’ into dominance” and “laid the ideological foundation for all systems of hierarchy, inequality, and exploitation” (Lerner, 1997, p. 133). Patriarchy takes different forms depending on time and place, but it reserves for men most of the power in the institutions of society and limits women’s access to such power. However, Lerner reminds us, “It does not imply that women are either totally powerless or totally deprived of rights, influence and resources” (Lerner, 1986, p. 239). The world is complicated, but we identify patterns to help us understand that complexity.
Patriarchy is not the only hierarchical system that enhances the power of some and limits the life chances of others—it exists alongside white supremacy, legally enforced or informal; various unjust and inhumane economic systems, including capitalism; and imperialism and colonialism, including the past 500 years of exploitation primarily by Europe and its offshoots such as the United States.
Because of those systems, all women do not have the same experience in patriarchy, but the pattern of women’s relative disadvantage vis-à-vis men is clear. As historian Judith Bennett writes, “Almost every girl born today will face more constraints and restrictions than will be encountered by a boy who is born today into the same social circumstances as that girl.” (Bennett, 2006, p. 10).
Over thousands of years, patriarchal societies have developed justifications, both theological and secular, to maintain this inequality and make it seem to be common sense, “just the way the world is.” Patriarchy has proved tenacious, at times conceding to challenges but blocking women from reaching full equality to men. Women’s status can change over time, and there are differences in status accorded to women depending on other variables. But Bennett argues that these ups and downs have not transformed women as a group in relationship to men—societies operate within a “patriarchal equilibrium,” in which only privileged men can lay claim to that full humanity, defined as the ability to develop fully their human potential (Bennett, 2009). Men with less privilege must settle for less, and some will even be accorded less status than some women (especially men who lack race and/or class privilege). But in this kind of dynamically stable system of power, women are never safe and can always be made “less than,” especially by men willing to wield threats, coercion, and violence.
Although all the systems based on domination cause immense suffering and are difficult to dislodge, patriarchy has been part of human experience longer and is deeply woven into the fabric of everyday life. We should remember: White supremacy has never existed without patriarchy. Capitalism has never existed without patriarchy. Imperialism has never existed without patriarchy. From patriarchy’s claim that male domination and female subordination are natural and inevitable have emerged other illegitimate hierarchies that also rest on attempts to naturalize, and hence render invisible, other domination/subordination dynamics.
Radical Feminism
Feminism, at its most basic, challenges patriarchy. However as with any human endeavor, including movements for social justice, there are different intellectual and political strands. What in the United States is typically called “second wave” feminism, that emerged out of the social ferment of the 1960s and ‘70s, produced competing frameworks: radical, Marxist, socialist, liberal, psychoanalytical, existential, postmodern, eco-feminist. When non-white women challenged the white character of early second-wave feminism, movements struggled to correct the distortions; some women of color choose to identify as womanist rather than feminist. Radical lesbian feminists challenged the overwhelmingly heterosexual character of liberal feminism, and different feminisms went in varying directions as other challenges arose concerning every-thing from global politics to disability.
Since my first serious engagement with feminism in the late 1980s, I have found radical feminist analyses to be a source of inspiration. Radical feminism highlights men’s violence and coercion—rape, child sexual assault, domestic violence, sexual harassment—and the routine nature of this abuse for women, children, and vulnerable men in patriarchy. In patriarchal societies, men claim a right to own or control women’s reproductive power and women’s sexuality, with that threat of violence and coercion always in the background. In the harshest forms of patriarchy, men own wives and their children, and men can claim women’s bodies for sex constrained only by agreements with other men. In contemporary liberal societies, men’s dominance takes more subtle forms.
Radical feminism forces us to think about male and female bodies, about how men use, abuse, and exploit women in the realms of reproduction and sexuality. But in the contemporary United States, the radical approach has been eclipsed by the more common liberal (in mainstream politics) and postmodern (in academic and activist circles) strands of feminism. A liberal approach focuses on gaining equality for women within existing political, legal, and economic institutions. While notoriously difficult to define, postmodernism challenges the stability and coherence not only of existing institutions but of the very concepts that we use within them and tends to focus on language and performance as key to identity and experience. Liberalism and postmodernism come out of very different sets of assumptions but are similar in their practical commitment to individualism in politics, tending to evaluate a proposal based on whether it maximizes choices for individual women rather than whether it resists patriarchy’s hierarchy and challenges the power of men as a class. On issues such as pornography and prostitution, both liberal and postmodern feminism avoid or downplay a critique of the patriarchal system and reduce the issue to support for women’s choices, sometimes even claiming that women can be empowered through the sexual-exploitation industries.
Radical feminism’s ultimate goal is the end of patriarchy’s gender system, not merely expanding women’s choices within patriarchy. But radical feminism also recognizes the larger problem of hierarchy and the domination/subordination dynamics in other arenas of human life. While not sufficient by itself, the end of patriarchy is a necessary condition for liberation more generally.
Today there’s a broad consensus that any form of feminism must be “intersectional,” Kimberlé Crenshaw’s (1989) term to describe about how black women could be marginalized by movements for both racial and gender justice when their concerns did not conform to either group’s ideology or strategy. While the term is fairly new, the idea goes back further. For example, the statement of the Combahee River Collective, a group of black lesbian feminists in the late 1970s, named not only sexism and racism but also capitalism and imperialism as forces constraining their lives:
[W]e are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives (Combahee River Collective, 2000, p. 264).
Intersectional approaches like these help us better understand the complex results of what radical feminists argue is a central feature of patriarchy: Men’s efforts to control women’s reproductive power and sexuality. As philosopher Marilyn Frye puts it:
For females to be subordinated and subjugated to males on a global scale, and for males to organize themselves and each other as they do, billions of female individuals, virtually all who see life on this planet, must be reduced to a more-or-less willing toleration of subordination and servitude to men. The primary sites of this reduction are the sites of heterosexual relation and encounter—courtship and marriage-arrangement, romance, sexual liaisons, fucking, marriage, prostitution, the normative family, incest and child sexual assault. It is on this terrain of heterosexual connection that girls and women are habituated to abuse, insult, degradation, that girls are reduced to women—to wives, to whores, to mistresses, to sex slaves, to clerical workers and textile workers, to the mothers of men’s children (Frye, 1992, p. 130).
This analysis doesn’t suggest that every man treats every woman as a sex slave, of course. Each individual man in patriarchy is not at every moment actively engaged in the oppression of women, but men routinely act in ways that perpetuate patriarchy and harm women. It’s also true that patriarchy’s obsession with hierarchy, including a harsh system of ranking men, means that most men lose out in the game to acquire significant wealth and power. Complex systems produce complex results, and still there are identifiable patterns. Patriarchy is a system that delivers material benefits to men—unequally depending on men’s other attributes (such as race, class, sexual orientation, nationality, immigration status) and on men’s willingness to embrace, or at least adapt to, patriarchal values. But patriarchy constrains all women. The physical, psychological, and spiritual suffering endured by women varies widely, again depending on other attributes and sometimes just on the luck of the draw, but no woman escapes some level of that suffering. And at the core of that system is men’s assertion of a right to control women’s reproductive power and sexuality.
The Radical Feminist Critique of the Sexual-Exploitation Industries
I use the term “sexual-exploitation industries” to include prostitution, pornography, stripping, massage parlors, escort services—all the ways that men routinely buy and sell objectified female bodies for sexual pleasure. Boys and vulnerable men are also exploited in these industries, but the majority of these businesses are about men buying women and girls.
Not all feminists or progressive people critique this exploitation, and in some feminist circles—especially those rooted in liberalism or postmodernism—so-called “sex work” is celebrated as empowering for women. Let’s start with simple questions for those who claim to want to end sexism and foster sex/gender justice:
Is it possible to imagine any society achieving a meaningful level of any kind of justice if people from one sex/gender class could be routinely bought and sold for sexual services by people from another sex/gender class?
Is justice possible when the most intimate spaces of the bodies of people in one group can be purchased by people in another group?
If our goal is to maintain stable, decent human societies defined by mutuality rather than dominance, do the sexual-exploitation industries foster or impede our efforts?
If we were creating a just society from the ground up, is it likely that anyone would say, “Let’s make sure that men have ready access to the bodies of women in commercial transactions”?
These questions are both moral and political. Radical feminists reject dominance, and the violence and coercion that comes with a domination/subordination dynamic, out of moral commitments to human dignity, solidarity, and equality. But nothing I’ve said is moralistic, in the sense of imposing a narrow, subjective conception of sexuality on others. Rejecting the sexual-exploitation industries isn’t about constraining people’s sexual expression, but rather is part of the struggle to create the conditions for meaningful sexual freedom.
So why is this radical feminist critique, which has proved so accurate in its assessment of the consequences of mainstreaming the commercial sex industry, so often denounced not only by men who embrace patriarchy but also by liberal and left men, and in recent years even by feminists in the liberal and postmodern camps?
Take the issue I know best, pornography. Starting in the 1970s, women such as Andrea Dworkin (2002) argued that the appeal of pornography was not just explicit sex but sex presented in the context of that domination/subordination dynamic. Since Dworkin’s articulation of that critique (1979), the abuse and exploitation of women in the industry has been more thoroughly documented. The content of pornography has become more overtly cruel and degrading to women and more overtly racist. Pornography’s role in promoting corrosive sexual practices, especially among young people, is more evident. As the power of the radical feminist critique has become clearer, why is the critique more marginalized today than when it was first articulated?
Part of the answer is that the radical feminist critique of pornography goes to the heart of the claim of men in patriarchy to own or control women’s sexuality. Feminism won some gains for women in public, such as more expansive access to education and a place in politics. But like any system of social control, patriarchy does not quietly accept change, pushing back against women’s struggle for sexual autonomy. Sociologist Kathleen Barry describes this process:
[W]hen women achieve the potential for economic independence, men are threatened with loss of control over women as their legal and economic property in marriage. To regain control, patriarchal domination reconfigures around sex by producing a social and public condition of sexual sub-ordination that follows women into the public world (Barry, 1995, p. 53).
Why Should Men Care?
Barry is not suggesting that men got together to plot such a strategy. Rather, it’s in the nature of patriarchy to respond to challenges to male power with new strategies. That’s how systems of illegitimate authority, including white supremacy and capitalism, have always operated.
Men can no longer claim outright ownership of women, as they once did. Men cannot always assert control over women using old tactics. But they can mark women as always available for men’s sexual pleasure. They can reduce women’s sexuality—and therefore can reduce women—to a commodity that can be bought and sold. They can try to regain an experience of power lost in the public realm in a more private arena.
This analysis challenges the liberal/postmodern individualist story that says women’s rights are enhanced when a society allows them to choose sex work. Almost every word in that sentence should be in scare-quotes, to mark the libertarian illusions on which the argument depends. I’m not suggesting that no woman in the sexual-exploitation industries ever makes a real choice but am merely pointing out the complexity of those choices, which typically are made under conditions of considerable constraint and reduced opportunities. And whatever the motivation of any one woman, the validation and normalization of the sexual-exploitation industries continues to reduce women and girls to objectified female bodies available to men for sexual pleasure.
If we men really believe in the values most of us claim to hold—dignity, solidarity, and equality—that is reason enough to embrace radical feminism. That’s the argument from justice. Radical feminists have shown how the sexual-exploitation industries harm women, children, and vulnerable men used in the industry. But if men need additional motivation, do it not only for women and girls. Do it for yourself. Recognize an argument from self-interest.
Radical feminism is essential for any man who wants to move beyond “being a man” in patriarchy and seeks to live the values of dignity, solidarity, and equality as fully as possible (Jensen, 2019). Radical feminism’s critique of masculinity in patriarchy is often assumed to be a challenge to men’s self-esteem but just the opposite is true—it’s essential for men’s self-esteem.
Consider a claim that men sometimes make when asked if they have ever used a woman being prostituted. “I’ve never had to pay for it,” a man will say, implying that he is skilled enough in procuring sex from women that money is unnecessary. In other situations, a man might brag about having sex with a woman being prostituted, especially if that woman is seen as a high-class “call girl” or is somehow “exotic,” or if the exploitation of women takes place in a male-bonding activity such as a bachelor party.
All these responses are patriarchal, and all reveal men’s fear of vulnerability and hence of intimacy. That’s why pornography is so popular. It offers men quick-and-easy sexual pleasure with no risk, no need to be a real person in the presence of another real person who might see through the sad chest-puffing pretense of masculinity in patriarchy.
One of the most common questions I get after public presentations from women is “why do men like pornography?” We can put aside the inane explanations designed to avoid the feminist challenge, such as “Men are just more sexual than women” or “Men are more stimulated visually than women.” I think the real answer is more disturbing: In patriarchy, men are often so intensely socialized to run from the vulnerability that comes with intimacy that they find comfort in the illusory control over women that pornography offers. Pornography may give men a sense of power over women temporarily, but it does not provide what men—what all people—need, which is human connection. The pornographers play on men’s fears—not a fear of women so much as a fear of facing the fragility of our lives in patriarchy.
When we assert masculinity in patriarchy—when we desperately try to “be a man”—we are valuing dominance over mutuality, choosing empty pleasure over intimacy, seeking control to avoid vulnerability. When we assert masculinity in patriarchy, we make the world more dangerous for women and children, and in the process deny ourselves the chance to be fully human.
Jensen is the co-author, with Wes Jackson, of An Inconvenient Apocalypse: Environmental Collapse, Climate Crisis, and the Fate of Humanity, which will be published in September 2022 by the University of Notre Dame Press. He is also the host of “Podcast from the Prairie” with Jackson.
Jensen is the author of The Restless and Relentless Mind of Wes Jackson: Searching for Sustainability (University Press of Kansas, 2021); The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men (2017); Plain Radical: Living, Loving, and Learning to Leave the Planet Gracefully (2015); Arguing for Our Lives: A User’s Guide to Constructive Dialogue (2013); All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice, (2009); Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (2007); The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege (2005); Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (2004); and Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream (2001).
This article draws on The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men (Jensen, 2017). Special thanks to Renate Klein and Susan Hawthorne of Spinifex Press. An edited version of this article was recorded for presentation at the online Canadian Sexual Exploitation Summit hosted by Defend Dignity, May 6-7, 2021. Dignity thanks the following people for their time and expertise to review this article: Lisa Thompson, Vice President of Research and Education, National Center on Sexual Exploitation, USA; and Andrea Heinz, exited woman and activist, Canada.
RECOMMENDED CITATION
Jensen, Robert. (2021). Getting radical: Feminism, patriarchy, and the sexual-exploitation industries. Dignity: A Journal of Sexual Exploitation and Violence. Vol. 6, Issue 2, Article 6. https://doi.org/10.23860/dignity.2021.06.02.06
Available at http://digitalcommons.uri.edu/dignity/vol6/iss2/6
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Bennett, Judith M. (2006). History matters: Patriarchy and the challenge of feminism. University of Pennsylvania Press.
Combahee River Collective. (2000). The Combahee River Collective statement. In Barbara Smith (Ed.), Home girls: A black feminist anthology (pp. 264-274). Rutgers University Press.
Crenshaw, Kimberlé. (1989). “Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1, 139-167.
Dworkin, Andrea. (2002). Heartbreak: The political memoir of a feminist militant. Basic Books.
Dworkin, Andrea. (1979). Pornography: Men possessing women. Perigee.
The post describes the many Marxism’s after Marx. It’s long so the introduction lists the contents of the post. There is a mixture of theory and history.
Marxism after Marx historically and geographically – David McLellan
In Marxism after Marx, David McLellan has written the most comprehensive description of the various Marxism that came after Marx. This includes:
1. The German Social Democrats
Friedrich Engels
revisionist controversy
The radicals
Austro-Marxism
2. Russian Marxism
Origins of Russian Marxism
Leon Trotsky
Vladimir Lenin
Russian Marxism in the 1920s
Stalinism
Post-Stalin Communism
3. European Marxism between the wars
Georg Lukács
Karl Korsch
Council Communism
Antonio Gramsci
4. China and Third World
The Making of the Chinese Revolution
Maoism in Power
Latin America
Marxism and Underdevelopment
5. Contemporary Marxism in Europe and the US
The Frankfurt School
Existential Marxism
Italian Marxism
Structural Marxism
British Marxism
US Marxism
Postmodern Marxism
Libertarian Marxism tenancies
Rosa Luxemberg
Council Communists
G.I.K. Group of International Communists
Socialism or Barbarism
Letterist and Situationist International
Early Hegalian Marxism
Frankfurt School
Johnson Forest Tendency
Raya Dunayevskaya
CLR James
Amadeo Bordiga
Operaismo or Workerism
Autonomia
Autonomist Marxism
post-’68ers German Marxists
Open Marxism
Neo-Marxism
Others Marxisms
Political Marxism
Praxis Marxism
Two Marxisms – Scientific Marxism and Critical Marxism
Marxism after Marx historically and geographically – David McLellan
I have used the framework from David McLellan’s book Marxism After Marx for this section.
1. The German Social Democrats
Friedrich Engels worked and supported Marx, they co-authored The Communist Manifesto. After Marx’s death, Engels edited and published the second and third volumes of Capital. Engels published the Conditions of the Working Class in England in 1845 and the Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State in 1884. Following Marx’s death, Engels continued working on several areas include applying knowledge from science to how he viewed the world, historical materialism, and the state. [1]
The revisionist controversy resulted from a crisis of Marxism in the 1890s, which was caused by a recovery of capitalism. Its main proponent was Eduard Bernstein who challenged the Marxist materialist theory of history as too determinist. He also challenged Marx’s theory of value, class conflict, and polarisation (working-class impoverishment vs wealth concentration). The revisionists argued that there could be a gradual transformation into socialism. [2]
The radicals were a pressure group within the SPD (Social Democratic Party of Germany) from the early 1900s. They were mostly outsiders between the SPD and more radical movements. The two insiders were Franz Mehring and Karl Liebknecht. Mehring was a journalist who used historical materialism to analyse society and the SPD. Lieknecht was an anti-war SPD deputy (a member of parliament). The outsiders include Alexander Parvus/Israel Helphand, Antonie Pannekoek, Karl Radek and Rosa Luxemburg Luxemburg wrote a strong critique of Bernstein’s focus on social reforms and disregarding revolution and capitalist breakdown. She also critiques Bernstein in the fields of economics, sociology, and politics. Luxemburg advocated spontaneity and the mass strike over the ‘vanguard party’. Arguably her great work was The Accumulation of Capital where “she argued that capitalism needs to constantly expand into non-capitalist areas in order to access new supply sources, markets for surplus value and reservoirs of labor.” [3]
From 1906 the conservative trade unions and SPD executive made life difficult from the radicals. They became a stronger political force in the SPD during the war with their focus on the mass strike and imperialism. Opposition to the war resulted in a split in the SPD, with the left radicals (now called the Spartacists) and the oppositional centralists were expelled. The Independent German Socialist Party (USDP) was formed and included a broad range on the left from the left radicals to Bernstein. The Spartacus League published on opposition to the war, the cause of the war was imperialist rivalry between capitalist classes in different countries and the need for mass strikes. The Spartacus League had minimal impact on the USDP and formed the Communist Party of Germany in 1919 made up of small and isolated groups. Large street demonstrations in January 1919 – not organised or supported by the League – gave the government an excuse to crush the weak left radicals. [4]
Austro-Marxism was a “Marxist theoretical current, led by Victor Adler, Otto Bauer, Karl Renner, and Max Adler, members of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Austria in Austria-Hungary and the First Austrian Republic (1918–1934). It is known for its theory of nationality and nationalism, and its attempt to conciliate it with socialism in the imperial context.” [5]
2. Russian Marxism
The Origins of Russian Marxism were in a country that only emancipated serfs in 1861 and was an underdeveloped capitalist agrarian society. The most radical revolutionary movement was called the Populists and had a powerful connection to the Russian people. It had two schools of thought: those that believed in the self-emancipation of the people by peaceful propaganda, and those the believed in attacking the autocracy through terrorist acts. Marx’s ideas arrived in the 1880s and most agreed with the sociological analysis and critique of society but not the materialist outlook or belief in proletarian revolution. The first group of Russian Marxists, Group for the Emancipation of Labour, formed in 1883. The Russian Social Democratic Labour Party was formed in 1898. [6]
Leon Trotsky was a “Soviet revolutionary, Marxist theorist and politician whose particular strain of Marxist thought is known as Trotskyism. Trotsky took part in the 1917 October Revolution, immediately becoming a leader within the Communist Party. He was one of the seven members of the first Politburo. He was a prominent figure in the early People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs and later as the founder and commander of the Red Army. After the rise of Joseph Stalin, Trotsky was removed from his positions and eventually expelled from the Soviet Union in February 1929. He spent the rest of his life in exile and was assassinated in 1940 in Mexico City by Ramón Mercader, a Soviet agent. Trotsky’s ideas developed the basis of Trotskyism, a prime school of Marxist thought that opposes the theories of Stalinism.” [7]
Vladimir Lenin was a “Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He served as head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1924 and of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1924. Under his administration, Russia and then the wider Soviet Union became a one-party communist state governed by the Russian Communist Party. Ideologically a communist, he developed a variant of Marxism known as Leninism.” [9]
Russian Marxism in the 1920s focused on how to develop an industrialised socialist economy in a backwards peasant country. The first economic measures in 1917 were relatively moderate: selective nationalisation, eight hour working day, redistribution of nationalised land (Decree on Land) and some workers control.
In 1918 Lenin brought in ‘state capitalism’. This involved a centralisation of the control of the economy by increased labour discipline, wages incentives and managerial authority. There was also a compromise with larger financial interests so the attack on capitalism was suspended.
The start of the Russian civil war in the summer of 1918 made state capitalism ineffective. To survive the Russian government brought in ‘War Communism’. This included the huge increase of nationalisations of all large scale enterprises, runaway inflation causes the government to requisition supplies from the peasants, when the civil war ended demobilised soldiers took on urgent industrial tasks.
The New Economic Policy (NEP) was introduced in 1921 and was a move back to a more market-oriented approach between agriculture and industry. Peasants could keep a fixed amount of their surplus to sell. Small scale enterprises were denationalised.
Socialism in One Country was implemented in 1928/9 by Joseph Stalin, following the failed revolutions in Europe. Russia strengthened itself internally through rapid industrialisation and mass collectivisation of agriculture. Following years of crisis and war, it was promoted as a policy of economic progress. It harnessed nationalistic sentiments so people felt proud of Russias economic independence. [11]
Stalinism was the political regime of Joseph Stalin in Russia from the 1920s until he died in 1953. He introduced a five-year plan in 1928/29 to rapidly increase industralisation and the large scale collectivisation of agriculture. These policies and shortages of food resulted in millions of deaths. Stalin also conducted political purges in the late 1930s and large scale murder of political opponents. Stalin’s theoretical contributions include Socialism in One Country, The History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks): Short Course), ‘revolution from above’ – the introduction of the different economic policies. [12]
Post-Stalin Communism in Russia did little to develop Marxist ideas. There were advances in Eastern Europe. In Poland, a government economics advisor Oskar Lange advocated the “use of market pricing tools in socialist systems and providing a model of market socialism.” wrote several essays critiquing Marxism. Adam Schaff wrote about integrating linguistics into Marxism, alienation, and the slow rate it takes to abolish the state and social institutions under Socialism. In Czechoslovakia, a loosening of Russia’s influences “led the Czechs to rejuvenate their Marxism by drawing on their long democratic and cultural tradition, a process that culminated in the ‘Prague Spring’ of 1968.” Ota Sik described the importance of market relations under socialism and giving worker collectives plenty of autonomy – planning was important but needed feedback from producers. Karel Kosik reinterpreted Marx’s work with a focus on human consciousness. Yugoslavian Marxists were critical of the Soviet Union since 1948 about its bureaucracy, the state, the Leninist party. Yugoslavia saw a revival of Marxist humanist philosophy. [13]
3. European Marxism between the wars
Georg Lukács was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, literary historian and critic. He used the philosophy of Hegel to conceptualise the problems of his time. In History and Class Consciousness he wrote on class consciousness, reification and totality. Later he wrote about Leninism and vanguard-party revolution. He was a supporter and then critic of Stalin. Lukács was supportive of Rosa Luxemburg and workers’ councils. [14]
Karl Korsch was a German Marxist theoretician and political philosopher. He believed the 1918-20 German revolution had failed because of a lack of ideological preparation and leadership of the working class. He supported workers’ councils and focused his research and writing how to build an alternative economic system. He published Marxism and Philosophy in 1923, which attempted to understand the evolution of Marxist theory by applying Marx’s and Hegel’s ideas to Marxism. He identified three phases of Marxism: from Marx to 1848, 1848 to 1900, 1900 onwards. [15]
Council Communism was inspired by the Soviets or workers’ councils during 1917-23 in Russia. Council Communists rejected parliamentary institutions, trade unions and the Leninist party form and vanguardism. They were active in Europe in the 1920s and included Antonie Pannekoek, Georg Lukács, Karl Korsch, Rose Luxemburg, Herman Gorter and Otto Ruhle. [16]
Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) was an Italian Marxist philosopher and communist politician. He was critical of the economic determinism of traditional Marxism so is considered a key neo-Marxist (see neo-Marxism sections at bottom of post). McLellan divides his life into four periods. Up to 1918, he developed his critique of Marxism and was a member of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI). From 1919-20, he was a leader in the Factory Councils movement in Turin and editor of its newspaper. From 1921-26 he was one of the leaders of the Communist Party of Italy (PCI). From 1926-37 (until his death) he was a prisoner and wrote his major theoretical contribution, the Prison Notebooks. McLellan identifies the main themes of the Prison Notebooks to be: the extended role assigned to intellectuals, the importance of the concept of hegemony, which led to different strategies for revolution in the West and East. [17]
“Gramsci is best known for his theory of cultural hegemony, which describes how the state and ruling capitalist class – the bourgeoisie – use cultural institutions to maintain power in capitalist societies. The bourgeoisie, in Gramsci’s view, develops a hegemonic culture using ideology rather than violence, economic force, or coercion. Hegemonic culture propagates its own values and norms so that they become the ‘common sense’ values of all and thus maintain the status quo. Hegemonic power is therefore used to maintain consent to the capitalist order, rather than coercive power using force to maintain order. This cultural hegemony is produced and reproduced by the dominant class through the institutions that form the superstructure.” [18]
4. China and Third World
The Making of the Chinese Revolution – the Communist Party of China or CCP was founded in 1921. It formed an alliance with the Kuomintang or KMT (Chinese Nationalist Party) which then the KMT broke in 1927 and CCP members were targeted and killed. The Communists retreated to the countryside and set up local bases. This is when Mao Zedong recognised the central role of peasants in the revolution as they had more progressive political and economic aims than the workers. In the early 1930s, the KMT made several attempts to encircle the Communists to defeat them. The KMT’s fifth encirclement campaign in 1933 was successful leading to the Communist’s Long March of 6000 miles in 1934 for twelve months to set up a secure base in northwest China. Following this Mao became the undisputed leader of the party. Communist power in China expanded between 1935-49, first with a United Front with the KMT to resist the Japanese invasion. This was followed by the Chinese Civil War 1945-49 with the Communist victory over the KMT. [19]
McLellan describes Mao’s major contribution to the theory and practice of Marxism was his ideas on “guerilla tactics and the strategy to be adopted in a lengthy struggle against a militarily superior opponent.” Mao gave the CCP a philosophical basis in the form of two essays: On Practice and On Contradiction. [20]
Maoism in Power – The Chinese Communist Party inherited a ruined economy and a threat of famine in the cities. With a well-organised party infrastructure, support from the Soviet Union and the goodwill of the Chinese people several financial measures were introduced to fairly distribute tax and bring inflation under control. Large capitalist businesses were nationalised and smaller businesses were left alone. The party introduced the Land Law in 1950, which guaranteed each individual at the age of 16 their own land holding of about one hectare. This involved the execution of hundreds of thousands of landlords. Since 1953, China has organised its society through a series of social and economic development initiatives called Five Year Plans.
Maoism was focused on the Party and the peasantry. The ‘proletariat’ became a reference to proletarian moral qualities that could be presented to the masses as a norm of true collectivist behaviour. Maoism substituted the proletariat with the Party because the peasantry were not ‘sufficiently socialist’, which resulted in the authoritarian nature of the Party. Officially the Party adopted Lenin’s democratic centralism but the highly hierarchical nature of the Party resulted in it being more centralism than democracy. Freedom of discussion was allowed but once a decision was made, everyone had to obey. Mao introduced the ‘mass line’, of consulting the masses and then interpreting their responses within the Marxism-Leninism framework, and then implementing the resulting policies. Government decision making was made at the top of the Party, not through state departments. There was a lot of secrecy about how decisions were made. Mao was not a dictator and had to play other leaders in the party off against each other.
The Hundred Flower Campaign started in 1956 when the Party encouraged people to share their opinions about the communist regime. This was followed by Mao repressing those that were critical of the regime. The Cultural Revolution was a mass campaign that began in 1966 to remove the ‘Rightists’ or capitalists from China and to re-establish the importance of Mao’s thinking. There were problems with the roll out of the campaign – resistance to it and supportive groups splitting into factions and fighting each other. The army had to step in frequently. The Cultural Revolution ended in 1969 with an expanded Central Committee, the majority were new, and a new constitution.
Chinese Marxism was more focused on human and moral factors – the superstructure – compared to the Soviet Union that was more focused on economics and production – the base. Mao believed that ‘class’ was a subjective concept that was determined by a person’s attitude rather than their social origins.
McLellan describes Maoism as a “synthesis of Leninism and China’s economic backwardness with the addition of certain traditional Chinese ideas.” It retains the key Marxist concepts of “class analysis, working-class leadership, the idea of history moving through stages, and a social theory infused by the concepts of dialectical materialism and contradiction.”
He lists the central ideas of Maoism as
China aimed to develop the agricultural sector in harmony with the industrial sector.
to follow the Marxist doctrine of the proletariat, then it was necessary to develop a proletariat or social consciousness into the peasantry.
Mao’s ideas on guerrilla war, developed in the 1930s, involved the active engagement of the peasantry and had wide-spread influence in less developed countries.
Maoism encourages “emphasis on thrift and devotion to the common good.”
Marxists in other Asian countries attempted socio-economic analyses of their societies to develop strategies to gain power. These countries included Vietnam, North Korea, Kampuchea (Cambodia), Japan, India, Indonesia. Asian Marxism has mostly been Marxist-Leninist and violent with the used of guerrilla warfare. Asian Marxism was more focused on the superstructure and consciousness. [21]
Latin America was first introduced to Marxist Communism in the 1920s. It was seen to be protecting the interests of the small numbers of industrial proletariat resulting in the masses being influenced by populist or corporatists ideas such as Peronism. Communist parties were more focused on defending a specific interest group rather than following the Marxist-Leninist route. Alternative versions of Marxism follow on from Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui, who adapted Marxist to national circumstances, especially in relation to the indigenous struggle.
The Cuban revolution 1953-58, lead by Castro, took inspiration from traditional national liberation struggles against Spain and the US, and did not originate from the working class or the Communist Party. The working class did support the rebels, and the Communist Party also supported the rebels once it became clear they would be successful. The Cuban government declared itself socialist when it set up a new revolutionary party (PRS) in 1961. The new government introduced nationalist and agrarian cooperative policies resulting in boycotts from the US and the Cuban bourgeoise emigrating to the US. This combined with the failed US-backed invasion at the Bay of Pigs, resulted in Cuban politics becoming more radical.
McLellan explains that violent revolution was rejected by Communist parties in Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela and Peru. This was supported by the Soviet Union because it wanted to improve diplomatic and commercial relations with these countries.
The revolutionary guerrilla approach of Che Guevara and Regis Debray was based on the Cuban revolution and can be contrasted with the orthodox communist in Latin America, who advocated the classical Marxist process of stages. For them, Latin America needed a ‘democratic’ revolution, followed by a socialist revolution. Therefore, communists should engage in parliamentary and electoral activities.
Liberation theology was developed in the 1950/60s by Marxist Christians and focused on “social concern for the poor and political liberation for oppressed peoples”. It was most significant in Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Peru and Brazil. [22]
The key neo-Marxist text on underdevelopment is Paul Baran’s The Political Economy of Growth, which “expanded on the ideas of Lenin, Luxemburg, and Trotsky by linking them with the claim that the development of the West was directly at the expense of the less developed economies.”
The Frankfurt School was associated with the Institute for Social Research, which was founded in 1923. The rise of Hitler resulted in the emigration of the Institute’s members (most were Jews) to New Year to re-establish in 1936. Max Horkheimer became Director in 1930, resulting in the ideas the Frankfurt School is well known for. Members of the Institute reject Social Democrat reformism and the doctrines of Soviet Union communism. Members re-examined Marxist thought, focusing on the cultural superstructure of capitalist society.
Horkheimer and his collaborator Theodor Adorno were inspired by the Council Communists from the 1920s such as Korsh and Lukács (see above). The Frankfurt School attempted to integrate non-Marxist disciplines such as psychoanalysis. They were influenced by idealist philosophers such as Schopenhauer, Kant, and by ‘irrationalism’ thinkers such as Nietzsche, Dilthey, and Bergson. They saw this irrationality as a “protest against the abstract uniformity that increasingly oppressed the individual in advanced capitalist society.”
McLellan describes how they saw the importance of the economy in capitalist society but failed to integrate their work in economics into their analysis of society as a whole. They did not have a specific programme for social change but did have a commitment to proletariat struggle and valued the importance of praxis. They saw their work as to clarify the opposing forces in society, to raise class consciousness of the exploited and provide them with a weapon in their struggle for emancipation.
Critical Theory is the “reflective assessment and critique of society and culture by applying knowledge from the social sciences and the humanities to reveal and challenge power structures. It argues that social problems are influenced and created more by societal structures and cultural assumptions than by individual and psychological factors. Critical theory has origins in sociology and also in literary criticism.” [24] . Critical Theory was inspired by the Western philosophical tradition especially the Enlightenment.
The Frankfurt school broadened their critique of capitalist society by adding the insights from psychoanalysis (the study of the unconsciousness mind), especially the work of Freud. They also analysed the spread of mass culture and the nature and development of authority. Wilhelm Reich showed the Marxism and psychoanalysis were compatible and that life was regulated by the ‘pleasure principle’ and limited by the ‘reality principle’. So the ruling class, use the reality principle to maintain their power – capitalist society is presented and accepted by many as the norm and unchangeable.
There were several theorists involved in the Frankfurt School, see a list here. McLellan notes Herbert Marcuse and Jürgen Habermas as making the most significant contributions.
Erich Fromm combined Marxism and psychoanalysis and was focused on the “emotional conflict produced by social interaction than in any theory of instincts” – so how individuals relate to the world. His key theme was how people’s feelings of powerless and loneliness are caused by being unable to live an “authentic, spontaneous life under contemporary political and economic arrangements”, which was the basis of authoritarianism.
The Frankfurt School’s analysis of Fascism focused on the “psychosocial mechanism of authority and violence at the expense of detailed examination of economic substructure.” They saw and direct link between capitalism and Fascism – capitalist economies evolved towards monopolies and liberalism evolved towards totalitarianism. Franz Neumann wrote about Nazism that it was a monopolistic economy and a command economy, ‘Totalitarian Monopoly capitalism’. There was still the profit motive and it needed totalitarian political power to support it, so the same people benefited, those who benefited from old monopoly capitalism.
The Frankfurt School made a large contribution to aesthetics or the philosophy of art The focus on culture was reinforced by how the US had achieved conformism through the spread of mass culture, instead of repression. Similar to Fascism, the difference between the private and public worlds had been broken down by creating needs in people to ‘support a particular system of domination’. They were critical of mass culture because it was forced on people and not created by them, serving the interests of domination. [25]
Existentialist Marxism developed in France following the Second World War. It was influenced by Hegel and the publishing of Marx’s early writings. The war had challenged the analytical rationalism of French philosophy. There was interest in Hegel’s philosophy of history, alienation, dialectic and consciousness concepts. Alexandre Kojeve and Jean Hyppolite lectured on Hegel in the 1930s and were very influential on the existential thinkers.
The radical interpretation of Hegel and incorporation of Marx’s early writings were in opposition to the Stalin controlled French Communist Party. The Communist Party held a conservative position in French politics and its philosophy was limited to Stalin’s laws of dialectical materialism. Many of the Marxist thinkers started in the Communist Party and were thrown out for their new thinking. The new perspectives showed that an alternative Marxism was possible. The concepts of alienation and praxis were recovered that had been lost under Stalinism. Marx’s ideas around alienation were felt to be particularly relevant to the complex, highly developed societies that were developing. French social theorists were also reading earlier ‘Western Marxist‘ theorists such as Lukacs, Korsch and the Frankfurt School (see sections above).
Henri Lefebvre was a humanist and saw the idea of praxis as a dialectical relationship between man and nature. Lefebvre most important work was Everyday Life in the Modern World, where he looked at alienation in everyday life.
McLellan describes Jean-Paul Sartre’s work as the best example of combining existentialism and Marxism. He protested on how modern technology treated men as things, wrote about freedom being the core of human existence, was critical of Stalin’s’ description of materialism and was supportive of a workers Party to achieve freedom. McLellan describes how Sartre combined sociology and psychology into a framework of genuine dialectical Marxism. He wrote about the dialectic, comparing ‘dogmatic dialectic’ with ‘critical dialectic’. He wrote about how the social relations of individuals emerged in relation to scarcity.
Two further French revisions of Marxism in the late 1950s and early 1960s were the theorists of the ‘New Working Class’ influenced by the Frankfurt School and Lefebvre: the magazine Arguments (1956–1962), and Socialisme ou Barbarie. Arguments explore Marx’s ideas on philosophy, how to apply the concept of alienation to a society that valued leisure as much as work, and the “cultural superstructure as much as politics or economics. The Arguments group were Kostas Axelow, Fougeyrollas, Morin and Chatelet. Socialisme ou Barbarie was made up of ex-Trotskyist writers, such as Claude Lefort and Cornelius Castoriadis, who analysed the problems of modern bureaucratization. André Gorz and Serge Mallet reassessed class struggle in Western countries. [26]
Italian Marxism since the 1950s has developed in several ways. From the Italian Communist Party in the 1950s/60s, Della Volpe and his followers rejected Hegelian interpretations of Marxism. They focused on philosophy, and methodology or scientific over sociology and economics. He was critical of idealism and Gramsci. We wrote about aesthetics and developed a materialist of aesthetics. Lucio Colletti was also critical of Hegelian idealism, instead advocating scientific materialism. He also valued the concept of alienation. Sebastiano Timpanaro focused on materialism and rejected combining Marxist materialism with psychoanalysis or structuralism.
McLellan writes “more recently, writers such as Badaloni and Lusurdo have produced innovating working, the former using Marx and Gramsci to produce a radical theory of democracy, the latter building on his critical history of liberal thought and practice to reformulate Marx’s political theory.”
McLellan describes the autonomista movement which formed by rejected the Communist Party (PCI) and Trade Union bureaucracy. It reframed workers to be powerful instead of passive, when not betrayed by their leaders as in the summer of 1968. Mario Tronti and others were strongly critical of the “orthodoxy of development of forces of production through determined stages and the gradualism of the PCI.” The argued that the growth of service jobs meant that the “regime of the factory had been extended to society as a whole with the proletarianisation of whole swathes of white-collar workers.” Antonio Negri expanded this to develop a theory of history where instead of the profit motive being the ‘motor force of capitalism’, it was class struggle: “Fordism was designed to overcome the resistance to capital of skilled workers and artisans; but the organized resistance of factory labour to capital led to technological innovation which permitted it to restructure labour away from factories (or overseas) into flexible, part-time, service sectors.” This would result in unwaged and Third World workers building resistance internationally: “with the arrival of immaterial labour and mass intellectuality, the time would soon be ripe for workers to revolt in such a manner as to rupture the self-reproduction of capital and liberate work from it.” [27] (see more on Italian Marxism – Operaismo or Workerism, Autonomia, Autonomist Marxismlist – in libertarian Marxism tenancies)
Structural Marxism developed in France in the mid-1960s. The major thinker is the French philosopher Louis Althusser, who rejected humanist Marxism of Lukács, Sartre and Gramsci, which saw men as the ‘subjects of history’; and the economic focus of traditional dialectical materialism. Structural Marxism identifies Marxism as a science that examines objective structures. The Structural Marxists were seeking an alternative to the base-and-superstructure model that gave equal weight to economic, political and ideological ‘structures’. These were called ‘structural instances’ or ‘regional structures’ and combined to form a ‘social formation’ that related to a mode of production.
Althusser believed that Marx’s work had a scientific conception of history but there were theoretical gaps. Althusser was trying to identify what Marxist philosophy was. He rejected the humanism in Marx’s early work and saw an ‘epistemological break’ between young Marx and mature Marx. He saw Marx’s early work as focusing on alienation, species being and the ‘ideological problematic of the subject’. Marx’s later work resulted in the development of a science. Althusser stated that ‘history is a process without a subject or a goal’.
Althusser argued that each instance or level develops at different rates and times. Althusser described how this complex and uneven relationship between the instances related to each other at a specific time a ‘conjuncture’. He rejected the idea that there was a simple relationship between ‘social forces’ and ‘relations of production’, or between base and superstructure.
Althusser in his essay Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, identified Repressive State Apparatuses (RPAs) and Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) such as trade unions, churches and schools. He described the ISAs as important sites of class struggle.
Nicos Poulantzas applied Althusser’s ideas to the state and classes. He argued against the orthodox communist view that that state is the direct servant of the capitalist or ruling class, with individuals in specific positions of power. Instead, the institutions of the state operate to ensure capitalism continues and to reproduce capitalist society as a whole. [28]
British Marxism began in 1881 with the Social Democratic Federation, set up to promote Chartist ideas, sharing Marx’s ideas. The Independent Labour Party forming in 1893 did not promote Marxism, revolution and class confrontation, instead favouring a gradualist approach to socialism. In the early twentieth century, there were three main Marxist organisation in Britain: British Socialist Party, Socialist Labour Party, and Workers’ Socialist Federation.
The Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) formed in 1920. This did not form from a split in the main social democratic party like in Europe, so attempted to affiliate to the Labour Party but was rejected. The CPGB was encouraged to operate as the left-wing of the Labour Party following The United Front as instructed by Moscow. McLellan states that the CPGB made little progress in the 1930s, although did attract several intellectuals. McLellan describes Christopher Caudwell as the only original pre-war British Marxist but he died young in the Spanish Civil War.
McLellan describes how after 1956 several varieties of Marxism developed in Britain following the different forms of Communism that developing in the world – Soviet, Chinese, Cuban. The New Left formed with the New Left Review as its main publication.
The CPGB remained small and focused on trying to push the Labour Party leftwards, which was not a revolutionary programme. McLellan states that the revolutionary left in Britain has become “synonymous with Trotskyism.”. The largest group being the Socialist Workers’ Party (formally International Socialists), also the International Marxist Group. (I will write future posts on the history and current British Left).
McLellan describes the key thinkers of British Marxism. Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn wrote controversially about Britain’s bourgeois revolutions and why Britain didn’t develop in a ‘normal way’. There is also an older generation such as Edward Thompson, and John Saville. Marxist historians focused on “detailed, empirical, narrative history ‘from below’”, including Gordon Childe, Maurice Dobb, Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton and Eric Hobsbawm.
McLellan describes how Anderson, through the New Left Review was aiming to assimilate European Marxism to the ‘perceived insular backwardness of British culture.” Anderson focused more on institutions, with a more abstract analysis that aimed to provide a “comprehensive theory of the modern bourgeois state as it evolved in the West.” Those at the New Left Review briefly engaged with Althusser’s structural marxism. McLellan describes a clear debate between theoreticians and a “more native empirical approach.”
In the field of literature and culture broadly, Raymond Williams was the main figure and “produced a libertarian version of Marxism which emphasised the cultural possibilities for social change and the capacity for individuals and groups to modify their conditions of existence.” Terry Eagleton is a well known Marxist critic of Williams. The view that culture and ideology as the sites of domination and resistance came from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, run by Stuart Hall. It focused on “ideological struggle around politics and institutions” with Gramsci being the main influence.
McLellan describes British political economy as one of the major areas of Marxist thought. This includes debates of the “labour theory of value, the relations of value to price, and the falling rate of profit.” Rowthron wrote an analysis of the influence of British institutions on the British economy. Then Armstrong, Glyn and Harrison wrote about the importance of overaccumulation in explaining the crises of the 1970s.
There was much analysis of the Soviet Union. Trotsky described it as a ‘degenerated workers state.’ Tony Cliff described the Soviet Union as ‘bureaucratic state capitalism’ – the Soviet bureaucracy controlled the economy and the state, another form of an exploiting class. Hillel Ticktin and the people around the journal Critique did a detailed analysis of the workings of the Soviet Union so were not surprised by its collapse.
The Miliband–Poulantzas debate between Ralph Miliband who viewed the “British state as an instrument serving the interests of the bourgeoisie since it was dominated by them through a network of interpersonal relations”, and Nicos Poulantzas, a structural Marxist, who saw the capitalist state as a system that functioned independently of the ‘mindset of the ruling class’. Bob Jessop then wrote about the transition from the Keynesian welfare state under ‘Fordism‘ – “mass production, mass consumption, and massive semi-skilled labour” to ‘post-Fordism‘ where “permanent innovation and labour flexibility in an increasingly globalised economy means the subordination of welfare to the discipline of the labour market.” Jessop has written extensively about the state and combines European structuralist and British agency approaches that make up British Marxist divisions. [29]
Marxism in the United States started with Joseph Wydemeyer who set up the unsuccessful American Workers’ League in New York City in 1856. The First International had limited influence in the US. By 1872 there were several sections, with Frederick Sorge as secretary. In 1876 the Socialist Party of North America (SLP) was formed with limited success. There was an increase in trade union activity in the 1880s resulting in the formation of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the Knights of Labor. They campaigned for an eight-hour day and worked with the new Independent Labor Party. Daniel De Leon was the leading spokesman for the SLP and an uncompromising Marxist. De Leon rejected the American Federation of Labor philosophy of non-political trade unionism. The SLP split in 1899 when a large number left to set up the Socialist Party, which was more supportive of the trade unions. De Leon was part of founding the International Workers of the World (IWW) in 1905, a proletarian and revolutionary trade union. The IWW evolved along syndicalist lines with a belief in direct action and sabotage. This was in opposition to Marxists so De Leon was ejected in 1908.
The Socialist Party (SP) membership grew to over one hundred thousand by 1912. It President, Eugene Debs got almost one million votes in the 1912 presidential election. The SP was not strongly influenced by Marx according to McLellan, being ideological broad. It had three main tendencies: “a right-wing led by Victor Berger and composed of the municipal reformers of the Mid-West; a centre based on the Eastern seaboard, and led by Morris Hillquit who had left the SLP in 1899; and the left, drawing its strength from the West and led by Debs.” McLellan describes the years before the First World War as a time of a ‘lyrical left’, where socialists ideas combined with many art forms. The war resulted in the repression of socialists that opposed it.
Following the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in 1917 and the formation of the Third International in 1919, a number left the SL to for the Communist Party (CP). A Community Labour Party also formed of mainly native Americans. They had limited success in engaging with electoral and trade union politics. The CP had splits in the 1920s related to positions on the Soviet Union. Followers of Trotsky were expelled and formed two groups: the Workers’ Party (later the Independent Socialist League); and the Socialist Workers’ Party. There was also the independently radical American Workers’ Party founded in 1934. During the 1930s the CP made gains and the SP declined. The SLP remained small. The CP become influential in the new Confederation of Industrial Organisations (CIO) and had almost one hundred thousand members by 1943. After the Second World War, the economic boom and McCarthyism resulted in a decline of the CP and Marxism in general until 1960.
The revival of Marxism took a different form in the radicalism from the early 1960s in the form of the New Left in response to the Vietnam War and increasing understanding of the levels of widespread poverty and misery of workers. There was also the civil rights movement in the south that raised the suffering of people of colour. The feminism movement grew in response to the conformist, patriarchal society of the 1950s. The Old Left rejected the New Lefts humanism, moralism, individualism, idealism and its positions that were more linked with anarchism than the ‘class-based social and political analyses of Marxism.’
The New Left had a student base, the main organisation was Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) (originally Students’ League for Industrial Democracy). The SDS started with agitation for more student power in universities. The SDS developed a “New Working Class’ theory: “students were being trained in knowledge factories to fit the bureaucratic demands of advanced capitalism in which they would be as exploited and alienated as the industrial proletariat of the nineteenth century but at the same time possess a radical consciousness of that situation that would enable them to resist it more effectively.”
C. Wright Mills was very influential on the New Left with the book The Power Elite which describes the relationships and class alliances among the US political, military, and economic elites. He rejected the idea that the working class of advanced capitalist society is a historic agent. Erich Fromm’s work on alienation and Herbert Marcus’s Marxist humanism were influential on the New Left. The SDS evolved from reform, to resistance and then revolution as it was taken over by determined minorities to tackle more complex issues such as Imperialism.
The 1960s also saw a revival of the CP, the Trotskyists, the Maoists and all their youth wings. The most successful was the Trotskyist Young Socialist Alliance set up by the Socialist Workers’ Party. There was also the Johnson-Forest Tendency a radical left Marxist humanist group. The Progressive Labor Party was Marxist Leninist that aligned themselves with black nationalists such as the Black Panthers. At the 1969 SDS convention, the Progressive Labor Party gained control resulting in brief activities by guerrilla groups such as the Revolutionary Youth Movement and the Weather Underground. Following the decision to withdraw from Vietnam the left’s agitation declined.
McLellan describes the growth of interest in Marxist theory in the 1960/70s, with many books and journals being published. These can be grouped into three broad areas: “the theories of the New Left about the nature of contemporary American society, the historiography of the United State from a Marxist standpoint, and, most importantly, the economic studies of American capitalism.” The 1980s saw a revival of American capitalism and interest in how to combine the market and socialism. There were two versions of market socialism: “maximisation and equal distribution of profit while the other centres on workers’ control of the means of production.” The 1980s also saw the development of Analytical Marxism or ‘rational choice’ Marxism: “this approach combines the rigorousness of contemporary Anglo-Saxon analytical philosophy with a conception of society as consisting of self-interested individuals reminiscent of neoclassical economics.”
McLellan describes Fredric Jameson as the “most prominent American intellectual working within the Marxist tradition.” Jameson has produced and important account of postmodernism and Western Marxism. In his book, The Political Unconscious, his ‘basic theoretical work”, Jameson describes his Marxist approach to culture. He has also written about politics and class consciousness, ideology and utopia. McLellan describes how Jameson’s sources are wide-ranging and he writes in ‘broad sweep’ in a sort of ‘grand narrative that has gone our fashion. His later work has a focus on space as important for understanding the globalised world. Here he builds on the work of French Marxist Henri Lefebvre.
US Marxism has seen a lot of interest in globalisation and empire. McLellan describes three significant recent socio-economic developments: a high volume of activity on world financial markets; increase in, and increasingly integrated nature of world trade; globalisation is more than an economic process, it is the transformation and compression of time and space for all those who live in it. McLellan states that the “most globalised of all the accounts of globalisation is that of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri”, in the Empire series of books. For Ellen Meiksins Wood “globalisation is a response to the crisis of overcapacity and overproduction beginning in the 1970s. It is not concerned with free trade or integrating the world market.” For Wood, nothing has come close to replacing the nation-state and its importance for maintaining capitalism. The US reliance on other nation-states and economic decline have resulted in increasing militarism and wars without end.
When considering political economy, the two main questions fro Marxists are explaining the repeating US economic crises and is it in long-term decline. These questions have been considered by Robert Brenner, Giovanni Arrighi, and David Harvey. [30]
Postmodern Marxism (also known as post-Marxism) is described by McLellan as a ‘new mode of social production’ that emerged in the 1970s. He lists four contextual changes that took places in the 1970s that led to postmodernism: increasing impact of electronic communications; the change in the mode of economic production from Fordism to post-Fordism; the defeat of 1960s emancipatory forces by the neoliberalism of Thatcher and Reagan; and in philosophy, structuralism was influential, then the post-structuralists advocated ignoring claims to objectivity and truth.
McLellan describes postmodernism to be in strong opposition to a ‘metanarrative’ – “any view which aims to give a unified, consistent, and objective account of the world by unifying the different narratives in one overarching framework.” He describes how “postmodern thought rejects the legacy of the Enlightenment which attempts to ground its approach to the world ideas of universal applicability – common human nature, reason – which would reveal the way the world actually was. In postmodernism, by contrast, the emphasis is on diversification, particularity, and difference.” McLellan describes how postmodernism has little in common with Marxism. It is the opposite of classical Marxism, where the economic base influences the superstructure. Postmodernism merges everything into a vague cultural superstructure.
McLellan lists the key postmodernist thinkers: Jean-François Lyotard writing on narratives, knowledge, science; Michel Foucault who focused on the origins of psychiatry, modern prisons, history of sexuality, and the concepts of power and anti-system; Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari who wrote about Freud and orthodox psychoanalysis, with the concept of desire being central; Jacques Derrida who focuses on language and concept of difference.
McLellan describes how one of the main features of postmodernism is the focus on difference” “Classical Marxism offered a united front of opposition to capitalism based on the working class, many of the proponents of postmodernism have moved from the revolutionary hopes for global transformation of the 1960s to enthusiasm for single issues and the new social movements of, for example, feminists, ecologists, or anti-racists.”
McLellan describes the best example of the postmodernist approach to Marxism as the book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. They describe Marxism as on ’emancipatory discourse’ amongst many, that is compatible with feminism, anti-racism etc. The Gramsci concept of Hegemony is central.
Gregory Claeys in Marx and Marxism divides Marxism into seven stages:
Marx and Engels’ attempts to form a ‘Marx party’ following 1848.
The growth and German Social Democracy and reformism up to 1914.
The Russian Revolution, Lenin and dialectical materialism from 1917 to 1937.
The Chinese Revolution of 1949.
After 1945, Marxism-Leninism spreading through the Third World.
1950s to 1980s limited development of Marxism in command economics such as Russia. In parallel is a revival of interest in Marx, based on his early writings.
The collapse of the Soviet Union 1989-91, followed by the transformation in China and Vietnam, extreme Stalinism in North Korea, and moderate versions in Cuba and Belarus.
Rosa Luxemberg was a democratic socialist but critical of both ‘bourgeois democracy’ and the centralising tendencies of socialism. She valued international solidarity and the spontaneity of revolutionary action. She was a humanist because she believed in the human potential for social and political transformation. [33]
Council Communists see Council Communism above in McLellan section
G.I.K. Group of International Communists was a left communist dutch group in the 1920s that advocated council communism. It ideas we influenced by the Russia Revolution 1917 and the Germany Revolution 1918. [34]
Socialism or Barbarism (Socialisme ou Barbarie in French) was a French libertarian socialist group from 1948 to 1967. The name comes from Rosa Luxemburg. That had a journal of the same name. The dominant character was Cornelius Castoriadis. The group was critical of Leninism and the idea of a revolutionary party. They advocated workers’ councils.
Letterist and Situationist International – The Letterist International was a radical Paris based collective of artists and cultural theorists from 1952 to 1957. It was set up by Guy Debord after falling out with Isidore Isou’s Letterism group. They went on to join up with other groups to form the Situationist International
Situationist International – the Situationist International was a European organisation made up of avant-garde artists, intellectuals and political theorists from 1957 to 1972. It was based on libertarian or anti-authoritarian Marxism and art movements from the early twentieth century. They were influenced by early Hegelian Marxism (or Western Marxism), the Frankfurt School, Henri Lefebvre, council communist ideas and Socialism or Barbarism. Later they focused on revolutionary and political theory. They attempted to synthesize a broad range of theoretical disciplines to develop a comprehensive critique of twentieth-century capitalism. They agreed with the classical Marxism analysis of the capitalist mode of production, but it needed updating. They emphasised Marxist concepts such as alienation and commodity fetishism. They rejected the claims by advanced capitalism that technology innovation, higher standards of living and more leisure, could outweigh the negative social impacts on people’s everyday lives. A key situationist concept was ‘the spectacle’, a critique of advanced capitalism’s social relations through objects and consumption of commodities. Their way of counteracting the spectacle was through the construction of situations “moments of life deliberately constructed for the purpose of reawakening and pursuing authentic desires, experiencing the feelings of life and adventure, and the liberation of everyday life.” Their two key texts were The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord and The Revolution of Everyday Life by Raoul Vaneigem. These texts were very influential to the May 1968 insurrections in France.
Johnson-Forest Tendency formed in the 1940s within US Trotskyism. The founders were CLR James (Johnson), Raya Dunayevskaya (Forest) and Grace Lee. They wrote a critique of the Soviet Union as a capitalist society, referring to it as ‘state-capitalism’. They were influenced by Humanist Marxism, Hegel, Marx and Lenin, having split from Trotskyism by 1948. In 1950 the published State Capitalism and World Revolution. Splits in the Johnson-Forest Tendency led to new groups Correspondence Publishing Committee 1951-62 and Facing Reality 1962-70.
Raya Dunayevskaya 1910 – 1987 was a Russian who moved to the US and was the founder of Marxist Humanism there. She was also known as Rae Spiegel and the pseudonym Freddie Forest. After splitting from Johnson-Forest Tendency she founded the organisation News and Letters Committees and the Marxist-Humanist newspaper, News & Letters.
CLR James 1901-89 was a Trinidadian historian, journalist and socialist, who wrote under the name J. R. Johnson. He wrote about the history of the Communist International and the Haitian revolution. He moved to Britain in 1932 from Trinidad. Then moved to the US from 1940, where he set up the Johnson-Forest Tendency, he was deported in 1952. He described himself as a Leninist but rejected the vanguard party. Instead, he advocated supporting black nationalist movements.
Amadeo Bordiga 1889-1970, was an Italian Marxist, a founder of the Communist Party of Italy, leader of Communist International (Comintern) and International Communist Party. Following World War 2 he moved to a left communist position. Bordiga developed theories on Stalinism, democracy, the united front, and communism. He inspired several ‘Bordiga groups’ in Italy and France.
Operaismo or Workerism developed in Italy in the early 1960s and emphasises the importance of the working class. It developed in factories as workers were struggling for better wages, working conditions and hours, in the two main left-wing parties PCI (Communist) and PSI (Socialist). Activists were conducting ‘worker inquiries’, analysing the work environment and opportunities for struggle from the worker’s point of view. There was a split in Workerism, with some such a Negri and Bologna rejecting the conservative trade unions and left political parties, who were seen as disciplinary institutions that kept workers in their weak position within capitalism. Others such as Tronti and Asor Rosa returned to the PCI and its associated union confederation Italian General Confederation of Labour (CGIL). This led to a new practice of self-organised labour representation outside the traditional trade unions. They were influenced by the Johnson Forest Tendency in the US and Socialisme ou Barbarie in France. The movement included several journals Quaderni Rossi (“Red Notebooks”, 1961–5), along with its successor Classe Operaia (“Working Class”, 1963–6). There was a series of strikes and occupations of factories by workers and universities by students during the 1960s. The movement was at its height in 1969-70 during the ‘Hot Autumn‘, when there were a series of large strikes in factories in Northern Italy. [35]
Autonomia (Operaia) or Autonomist is the name given for the new youth and student movements that emerged in the early 1970s. The movement was never unified and was made up of changing organisations and shifting alliances in a decentralised network. It was extra-parliamentary and came from the factory, educational and community struggles and included second wave feminism concerns – today this is known as social reproduction theory and was pioneered by Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James. This movement had expanded its critique of capitalism to include all aspects of life, from the struggle in the industrial factory, including occupations, sabotage and strikes, to ‘the social factory‘ and cities where thousands of buildings were squatted between 1969–1975. This social movement gathered around free radio stations and publications in several cities in Italy in the 1970s. The key thinkers and writers included: Antonio Negri, Sergio Bologna, Romano Alquati, Oreste Scalzone, and Franco Piperno. Influential political groups included Potere Operaio from 1967 to 1973 when it merged with the broader movement and Lotta Continua from 1969 to 1976. 1977 saw large demonstrations and the occupations of universities in response to the killing of a Lotta Continua member by police. From 1979 the movement was repressed by the Italian state, which accused it of supporting and protecting the armed Red Brigades. This resulted in thousands of movement activists being arrested or fleeing the country. There is no evidence of a direct link between the Autonomia movement and the Red Brigades. A revival of the movement started in the mid-1980s with the second wave of social centre occupations. [36]
Autonomist Marxism can be described as the theoretical work based on the Operaismo/Workerism and the Autonomia/Autonomist movements described above. A key observation made by Mario Tronti in Lenin in England is the ‘Copernican Inversion’, where he argues that capitalist development of the production process follows working-class struggle instead of going first. Workers are not dependent on capitalism for their existence, they existed before capitalism. Capitalism is dependent on workers, which shows its weakness. The second insight of autonomist Marxism is that it is labour struggles that drive technological development in the production process as capitalists react to worker demands and resistance. For example, workers go on strike and win some demands. In response, capitalists restructure the production process to their advantage making it more difficult for workers to repeat their successes. This links to the concept of class composition and decomposition. When the capitalists change the production process to their advantage and the worker’s disadvantage, this decomposes the workers’ power. The workers then have to find new ways to exert their interests, recompose their power by finding new tactics to interfere with the production process. If they are successful then this will lead to the capitalists restructuring the production process again, starting a new cycle.
Autonomist Marxists argue that the working class can force changes to the way the capitalist system is organised independently from the state, political parties and trade unions. Autonomist Marxists focus on self-organised activities away from traditional left institutions. It promotes “everyday working-class resistance to capitalism, such as absenteeism, slow working, socialization in the workplace, sabotage, and other subversive activities.” [37]
Autonomist Marxists see class struggle as fundamental. And they have a broader definition of the working class than other Marxists. They include manual and office workers, also the unwaged (students, unemployed, homeworkers) who do not normally get trade union representation. Also important are the concepts ‘immaterial labour‘, and the ‘worker inquiry‘ process. They emphasised the Marxist perspective that modern society’s wealth is produced by the collective work of the working class, but very little of this is shared with workers in their wages. Feminist autonomists such as Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Silvia Federici describe the amount of unwaged (but paid indirectly through the male worker’s wage) female labour in capitalist society.
Other key autonomist Marxist thinkers and writers are Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, Harry Cleaver, Nick Dyer-Witheford and Paulo Virno. There are a number o different strands of autonomist Marxism. There is ‘classic’ Operaismo/Workerism of Panzieri, Alquati, Tronti; post-operaismo of Negri, Virno, Lazzarato; autonomist feminism of Dalla Costa, James, Federici, Fortunati;, ‘American” autonomism’ of Harry Cleaver, George Caffentzis. [38]
post-’68ers German Marxists formed in the late 1960s. The main people included Helmut Reichelt, Hans Jurgen Krahl, and Johannes Agnoli. They were influenced by Council Communism, the early Hegelians, and the Frankfurt School.
Open Marxism is based on libertarian socialist critiques of left-wing political parties. It advocates and openness to praxis, combining theory and practice, and understanding history through an anti-positivist method, when studying the social world a scientific method can not be used. It is close to autonomism, somewhere between autonomism and ‘value form theory‘, which comes more from the Frankfurt School. The ‘open’ refers to a non-deterministic view of history, that history can’t be predicted, and that the unpredictability of class struggle is most significant. Open Marxism is influenced by council communism, anarchism, autonomism and situationalism. There have been several open Marxism journals Arguments (1958–1962), Common Sense (1987–1999) and The Commoner (2001–2012). There is the San Francisco-based working group Kapitalistate and the Conference of Socialist Economists journal Capital & Class. There is also the four-volume series titled Open Marxism. Open Marxism writers and theorists include John Holloway, Simon Clarke, Werner Bonefeld, Ana C Dinerstein, Richard Gunn, Kosmas Psychopedis, Adrian Wilding, Peter Burnham, Mike Rooke, Hans-Georg Backhaus, Helmut Reichelt, Johannes Agnoli, and Kostas Axelos. [39]
Neo-Marxism
In Political Ideologies: An Introduction by Andrew Heywood (4th edition from 2007) he describes neo-Marxism as: “an updated and revised form of Marxism that rejects determinism, the primacy of economics and the privileged status of the proletariat.” Heywood argues that neo-Marxism was shaped by two factors: a re-examination of conventional class analysis due to the collapse of capitalism not happening as Marx predicted, and a rejection of the Russian Bolshevik model of orthodox communism. [40]
In Sociological Theory, George Ritzer and Jeffrey Stepnisky describe the following schools of thought forms part of the neo-Marxist tradition: Economic determinism, Hegelian Marxism, Critical Theory, neo-Marxian economic sociology, historically oriented Marxism, neo-Marxian spatial analysis, post-Marxist theory (Ritzer 2011). They all take Marx’s work as the starting point by go in several different directions.
Economic determinism was a limited theory that led to other forms of neo-Marxism developing. Hegalian Marxism by the work of Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukács that rejected economic determinism and focused on human subjectivity. Critical Theory is described above. Neo-Marxist economic sociology aims to update Marxist economic sociology based on contemporary capitalist society. It looks at the relationship between capital and labour, and the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism. Historically oriented Marxism relates to the work of Immanuel Wallerstein and his world systems theory. Neo-Marxist spatial analysis is based on the work of Henri Lefebvre, Edward Soja and David Harvey. Post-Marxist theory includes analytical Marxism and postmodern Marxian theory, see McLellan section above.
Others Marxisms
Political Marxism is focused on how capitalism came into being – the transition to capitalism. Also how to define capitalism: “nature of the system, the structural features that differentiate it from other modes of production, and its relationship to precapitalist (and potentially postcapitalist) social systems.”
Jonathan Joseph in Marxism and Social Theory describes Praxis Marxism, share a humanist perspective, value the importance of history, and are against the mechanical approach of orthodox Marxism. They focus on human subjectivity, class consciousness, class struggle and alienation. Joseph lists the praxis Marxists to be Gramsci, Lukacs, Korsch and Sartre. (Jonathan Joseph, Marxism and Social Theory p4 and CH4)
Two Marxisms
In 1980, Alvin Gouldner in The Two Marxism describes Scientific Marxism and Critical Marxism.
Michael Burawoy describes them:
“Scientific Marxism begins from a rational understanding of society that postulates the determinism of objective structures. It uncovers historical tendencies leading to socialism when conditions are ripe. Concepts reflect real mechanisms; politics are epiphenomenal; ideology is a distortion of the truth. Critical Marxism, on the other hand, starts out from the ubiquity of alienation obstructing the potential for human self- realization. It highlights human intervention against the obduracy of objective structures—history has no pre-ordained end, but is the product of collective mobilization. In the view of Critical Marxism, concepts exist to interpret social processes; politics is an arena for the realization of ultimate values; ideology is a moral force. In revolutionary times Critical Marxism and Scientific Marxism may form a contradictory unity, but in non-revolutionary times they more easily go their separate ways.” [41]
Part one looked at Marxist and non-Marxist concepts of ideology, the challenges of defining ideology, ideology and the political spectrum, and the classical and new ideologies. Based on Political Ideologies: An Introduction by Andrew Heywood (4th edition from 2007) this post describes the classical ideologies of liberalism, conservatism, socialism, nationalism, anarchism, fascism, plus the new ideology feminism.
Liberalism
Heywood describes the central theme of liberal ideology to be a commitment to the individual and the desire to build a society where people can satisfy their interests and achieve fulfilment. Human beings are seen as individuals, invested with reason. Therefore, each individual should enjoy the maximum possible freedom, ensuring a similar freedom for all. Individuals are given equal political and legal rights but they are only rewarded in line with their talents and willingness to work. Liberalism is based on a number of values and beliefs: the individual, freedom, reason, justice, toleration.
Liberals believe in the need for a state, government and laws to protect individuals from others that might be a threat to them. Liberal societies are organized politically around principles of constitutionalism and consent, intended to protect citizens from the dangers of government tyranny. The core features of Liberal democracy are:
constitutional government based on formal legal rules
guaranteed civil liberties and individual rights
institutional fragmentation and a system of checks and balances
regular elections respecting the principles of universal suffrage and ‘one person, one vote’
political pluralism, in the form of electoral choice and party completion
a healthy civil society in which organized groups and interests enjoy independence from government
a capitalist or private-enterprise economy organised along market lines
Heywood explains that there are significant differences between classical liberalism and modern liberalism. Classical liberalism from the nineteenth century has a number of common characteristics. First, it views human beings as rationally self-interested creatures, who have a strong capacity for self reliance. Second, an individual is free by being left alone, not interfered with or coerced by others. Third, it is in favour of a minimal state that maintains domestic order and personal security. Finally, it has a positive view of civil society, that reflects the principle of balance or equilibrium. A good example of this is the classical liberal faith in a self-regulating market economy. Classical liberalism is based on a number of doctrines and theories: natural rights, utilitarianism, economic liberalism, social Darwinism, neoliberalism.
Modern Liberalism, also known as ‘twentieth-century liberalism’, developed in response to the industrialisation and the realisation by some liberals that the unrestrained pursuit of self-interest did not produce a socially just society. Modern liberals believe that the state should help people help themselves. It includes the following ideas: individuality, positive freedom, social liberalism, economic management [1].
Conservatism
According to Heywood, as a political ideology, conservatism is defined by the desire to conserve, with a resistance or suspicion of change. It is characterised by supporting tradition, a belief in human imperfection and an attempt to maintain the structure of society. Conservatives seem to have a clearer understanding of what they are against than what they are for. Conservatives describe their beliefs as a ‘state of mind’ or ‘common sense’ as opposed to an ideology. Its supporters argue that it is based on history or experience, not rational thought. Its central beliefs include: tradition, human imperfection, organic society, hierarchy and authority, property.
The main distinction within conservatism is between traditional conservatism and the ‘new right’. Traditional conservatism defends established institutions and values as they are seen to safeguard the fragile ‘fabric of society’, giving security-seeking human beings a sense of stability and rootedness.
Heywood identifies three forms of traditional conservatism. Authoritarian conservatism is a tradition that favours authoritarianism – a belief in or practice of government ‘from above’, in which authority is exercised over a population with or without its consent.
Paternalistic conservatism is based on the idea that the values that are important to conservatives – tradition, order, authority, property, etc – will only be maintained if policy is developed based on practical circumstances and experience, rather than based on theory. This accepts a prudent willingness to ‘change in order to conserve’. There are two main traditions of paternalistic conservatism: one-nation conservatism, and Christian democracy.
Libertarian conservatism advocates the greatest possible economic liberty and least possible government regulation of social life. Heywood suggests that libertarian conservatives are attached to free-market theories because they ensure social order.
Heywood describes the new right as a combination of two ideological traditions. The first is called the ‘liberal new right,’ or ‘neoliberalism’. This is based on classical liberal economics, specifically free market economics with a critique of ‘big’ government, economic and social intervention.
The second is called the ‘conservative new right’ or ‘neoconservatism’. This is based on traditional conservatism that defends order, authority and discipline. The new right is therefore a fusion of economic libertarianism and social authoritarianism.
Heywood describes the new right as a blend of radical, reactionary and traditional features. It is radical in that it aims to ‘roll back’ interventionist government. The reactionary element relates to the liberal and conservative new right looking back to a past ‘golden age’ of supposed economic propriety and moral fortitude. The new right also prizes the traditional values listed above [2].
Socialism
Heywood describes socialism as in opposition to capitalism and the attempt to create a more humane and socially worthwhile alternative. The foundation of socialism is a view that human beings are social creatures united by their common humanity. Individual identity is formed by social interaction and the involvement of social groups and collective bodies. Socialists value cooperation over competition. Equality, especially social equality is seens as the central value. Social equality is seen to ensure social stability and cohesion, providing freedom because it meets material needs and provides a basis for personal development.
Heywood explains that the difficulties of analysing socialism are due to the term being understood in at least three different ways. First, it is seen as an economic model related to collectivisation and planning and as an alternative to capitalism. The second approach views socialism as an instrument of the labour movement, known as labourism. It represents the interests of the working class and provides a programme for workers to gain political and economic power. In the third approach, socialism is seen as a broader political creed or ideology with a cluster of ideas, values and theories. These include: community, cooperation, equality, class politics, common ownership.
Socialism has a number of divisions and rival traditions, according to Heywood. The divisions have been about the ‘means’ (how socialism should be achieved) and ‘ends’ (the nature of the future socialist society).
The roads to socialism or ‘means’ of achieving it can be divided into revolutionary socialism and evolutionary socialism. Heywood defines revolution as “a fundamental and irreversible change, often a brief but dramatic period of upheaval; systemic change.” Revolution is more than a tactical consideration for socialists, it also relates to their negative analysis of the state and state power. Evolutionary socialists, also known as democratic socialists or social democrats support gradualism, aiming to reform or ‘humanize’ the capitalist system by reducing material inequalities and ending poverty.
For the goals or ‘ends’ of socialism, Heywood describes the different and competing conceptions of what a socialist society should look like. He divides them into Marxist and social democrat.
Marxist
Communists and Marxists support revolution and the abolition of capitalism through the creation of a classless society based on the common ownership of wealth. Marxism is based on the work of Karl Marx and later generations of Marxist thinkers. Their aim has been to develop a systematic and comprehensive worldview that suits the needs of the socialist movement.
Heywood describes three forms of Marxism. The first is classical Marxism: “a philosophy of history that outlines why capitalism is doomed and why socialism is destined to replace it, based on supposedly scientific analysis.” The second is orthodox communism, which refers to communist regimes from the twentieth-century based on the theories of classical Marxism, that had to be adapted to the tasks of winning and retaining political power. The main example is the Russian Revolution, that dominated how communism was viewed in the twentieth-century. The third is modern Marxism, also known as neo-Marxism: “an updated and revised form of Marxism that rejects determinism, the primacy of economics and the privileged status of the proletariat.” Modern Marxism was shaped by two factors: a re-examination of conventional class analysis due to the collapse of capitalism not happening as Marx predicted, and a rejection of the Russian Bolshevik model of orthodox communism.
Social democrat
Social democracy stands for a balance between the market economy and state intervention. Its features include: liberal-democratic principles with peaceful and constitutional political change; capitalism being accepted as the only reliable means of generating wealth; capitalism being viewed as defective at distributing wealth; defects of capitalism can be reduced by state intervention; the nation-state is the meaningful unit of political rule.
Heywood describes how the theoretical basis for social democracy is based on moral or religious beliefs, rather than scientific analysis. Social democracy is primarily concerned with the idea of a just and fair distribution of wealth in society – social justice.
Another form of social democracy is ‘revisionist socialism’, which is based on those that came to see Marx’s analysis of capitalism as defective and thus rejected it. Capitalism was no longer seen as a system of naked class oppression. Instead it could be reformed by the nationalisation of major industries, economic regulation and a welfare state. This is also known as ‘managerialism’.
Since the 1980s reformist socialist parties have gone through another round of revisionism, know as the ‘third way’. It is an unclear term but is broadly a continuation of neoliberalism by parties that were on the left [3].
Nationalism
Classical nationalism is based on the belief that the nation is the natural and proper unit of government. Nationalism is a complex and highly diverse ideology, with distinct political, cultural and ethnic forms. Heywood describes the core feature of nationalism to be its broader connection to movements and ideas that accept the central importance of political life of the nation, not simply its narrow association with self-government and the nation-state.
The political implications have been varied and sometimes contradictory:
“at different times, nationalism has been progressive and reactionary, democratic and authoritarian, rational and irrational, and left-wing and right-wing. It has been associated with almost all the major ideological traditions. In their different ways, liberals, conservatives, socialists, fascists and even communists have been attracted to nationalism; perhaps only anarchism, by virtue of its outright rejection of the state, is fundamentally at odds with nationalism. Nevertheless, although nationalist doctrines have been used by a bewildering variety of political movements and associated with sometimes diametrically opposed political causes…”
Heywood defines cultural nationalism as: “a form of nationalism that places primary emphasis on the regeneration of the nation as a distinctive civilization rather than on self-government.” He defines ethnic nationalism as: “a form of nationalism that is fuelled primarily by a keen sense of ethnic distinctiveness and the desire to preserve it.”
Nationalism has emerged in very different historical contexts, influenced by different cultural traditions, and has been used to advance a wide range of political causes. Heywood describes how nationalism has a capacity to combine with other political doctrines and ideas, which has created a number of rival nationalist traditions. These include: liberal nationalism, conservative nationalism, expansionist nationalism, anti-colonial and postcolonial nationalism.
Liberal nationalism is the oldest form of nationalism, dating back to the French Revolution. Liberal nationalism is a liberating force in that it opposes all forms of foreign domination and oppression, and that it stands for the ideal of self-government. Liberal nationalists also believe that nations, like individuals, are equal, in the sense that they are entitled to the right of self-determination.
Conservative nationalism took shape in the late nineteenth-century and was used by conservative and reactionary politicians to promote social cohesion, order and stability, in response to the increasing international challenge of socialism. Conservative nationalism is maintained by its relationship to tradition and history; it defends traditional institutions and a traditional way of life. It is nostalgic of a past age of national glory and triumph.
Expansionist nationalism is aggressive and militaristic, most clearly displayed by the imperialism of the late nineteenth century by European powers to colonise territories. This form of popular nationalism had a lot of public support, where national prestige was linked the expansion of empire.
Anti-colonial and postcolonial nationalism came about from a desire of ‘national liberation’ by people living in Africa and Asia under foreign imperial rule. Most anti-colonisation movements were based on some form of socialism. In recent decades, postcolonial nationalism has rejected western ideas and culture in favour of religious fundamentalism related to political Islam.
Looking beyond nationalism, there is internationalism. Heywood describes this as a theory or practice of politics based on transnational or global cooperation. There is liberal internationalism based on human rights within nations, national interdependence-based free trade, and where national ambition is limited by supranational bodies. Socialist internationalism treats internationalism as an article of faith or core value, with working class or proletarian class solidarity transcending national borders, especially as capitalism is an international system, and thus can only be challenged by a genuinely international movement [4].
Anarchism
Heywood describes the Anarchist central belief as being that political authority in all forms, especially in the form of the state, is evil and unnecessary. Anarchists therefore want to create a stateless society through the abolition of law and government. The state is viewed as evil because it manages sovereign, compulsory and coercive authority, which are an offence against the principles of freedom and equality. The core value of anarchism is unrestrained personal autonomy. The state is seen as unnecessary, because order and social harmony can exist naturally and do not need to be enforced ‘from above’ by government. Heywood describes the utopian character of anarchist thought, which is reflected in the highly optimistic assumptions about human nature. The broad principles and positions of anarchism are: anti-statism, natural order, anti-clericalism, economic freedom.
In addition, anarchism draws from two different ideological traditions: liberalism and socialism. This has resulted in rival forms of anarchism: individualist and collectivist. Both accept the goal of no state, but promote different ideas of the future anarchist society.
He describes collectivist anarchism developing by pushing socialist collectivism to its limits – the belief that human beings are social animals, well suited to working together for the common good, rather than individual self-interest. This is also called social anarchism, based on the human capacity for social solidarity or ‘mutual aid’. Anarchists have also worked in the broad revolutionary socialist movement.
Heywood identifies a number of theoretical overlaps between anarchism and Marxism: rejection of capitalism, social change through revolution, preference for the collective ownership of wealth and communal organisation of social life, a belief that a communist society would be anarchic, and that human beings have the capacity to run society without political authority.
Heywood also describes how anarchism and socialism differ on two main points. First, anarchists dismiss parliamentary socialism as a contradiction in terms – it is not possible to reform capitalism, and the expansion of the role and responsibilities of the state will only entrench oppression, even if in the name of equality and social justice. Second, collective anarchists and some Marxists have very different conceptions of the transition from capitalism to communism. Marxists believe a revolution will bring a proletariat state, which will then ‘wither away’ as capitalist class conflict dimmishes. Anarchists view any form of state power as evil and oppressive in its own right, with its existence being corrupt and corrupting. Genuine anarchist revolution requires the end of capitalism and state power.
Collectivist anarchism is made up of a number ideas. One is mutualism; “a system of fair and equitable exchange, in which individuals or groups bargain with one another, trading goods and services without profiteering or exploitation.” A second is anarcho-syndicalism, which is a form of revolutionary trade unionism, emerging in France in 1914 and spreading to other industrialised countries. Anarcho-syndicalists reject conventional politics as corrupting, instead believe that working-class power should be utilised through direct action, boycotts, sabotage, strikes, and general strikes. They also organise their unions as a model for a decentralised, non-hierarchical society. This results in a high degree of grassroots democracy, with syndicates forming federations. A third, is anarcho-communism, the most radical form, that requires the abolition of the state. This form envisages that an anarchic society would be made up of a collection of self-sufficient communities, each owning wealth in common. Social and economic life is based on sharing, direct democracy and small scale or ‘human-scale’ communities.
Individualist anarchism is based on the liberal idea of the sovereign individual. When individualism is taken to its extreme, the result is individual sovereignty, which is the idea that absolute and unlimited authority resides with each human being. Any constraint on the individual is evil. It is based on: egoism, libertarianism, anarcho-capitalism.
Heywood states that anarchists reject state power, political power and political parties so have pursued alternative routes to achieving anarchy. One route was revolutionary violence; bombing and assassinations were conducted in the nineteenth century and 1970s. Another route is direct action, which is political action taken outside the constitutional and legal framework, including passive resistance, boycotts, strikes, popular protest. A third route is non-violence or pacifism – the principled rejection of war and all forms of violence as fundamentally evil [5].
Fascism
Heywood identifies the core theme of fascism as being the idea of an organically unified national community, strengthened by the belief in ‘strength through unity’. Individual identity must be absorbed into the community. The ‘new man’ is motivated by duty, honour and self-sacrifice, and is prepared to dedicate his life to the glory of his nation or race, and give complete obedience to a supreme leader.
Fascism is a revolt against the ideas and values that have dominated western political thought from the French Revolution onwards. Values such as rationalism, progress, freedom and equality were replaced by struggle, leadership, power, heroism and war. Fascism has a strong ‘anti-character’, it is” anti-rational, anti-liberal, anti-conservative, anti-capitalism, anti-communist, etc. Fascism embraces an extreme version of expansionist nationalism or ultranationalism, that views nations as rivals in a struggle for dominance.
Fascism is made up for two distinct traditions. Italian fascism was an extreme form of statism that was based on absolute loyalty towards a ‘totalitarian’ state. German fascism or Nazism, was founded on racial theories, presenting the Aryan people as a ‘master race’ and promoting extreme anti-Semitism [6].
Feminism
For Heywood, feminist ideology is defined by two core beliefs: that women are disadvantaged because of their sex, and that this disadvantage can and should be abolished. The feminist view of the political relationship between the sexes is the dominance of men and subjugation of women in societies. By viewing gender divisions as ‘political,’ feminists challenge generations of male thinkers that have been unwilling to examine the privileges and power held by men that have kept the role of women off the political agenda.
The feminist movement has had a diversity of views and political positions. These range from achieving female suffrage, increase in the number of women in elite positions in public life, legalisation of abortion, and the ending of female circumcision.
Heywood describes how feminists have used reformist and revolutionary political strategies. Liberal feminism is essentially reformist; it aims to open up public life to equal competition between men and women, instead of challenge what most feminists view as the patriarchal structure of society.
Socialist feminists argue that the political and legal disadvantages that women face cannot be resolved by equal legal rights or equal opportunities as liberal feminists believe. In their view, the relationship between the sexes is a core part of the social and economic structure, therefore significant social change or social revolution is needed for genuine emancipation.
Radical feminists belief that sexual oppression is the most fundamental feature of society and that other forms of injustice, such as class exploitation or racism, are less important. Gender is seen as the most important social issue. Radical feminists see society as ‘patriarchal’, which is the systematic, institutionalized and all-encompassing process of gender oppression.
Heywood describes some forms of feminism that have emerged since the 1960s: psychoanalytical feminism, postmodern feminism, black feminism, transfeminism [7].
Endnotes
[1] Political Ideologies : An Introduction by Andrew Heywood, 4th edition, 2007, page 23-62
Editor’s note: Gender ideology is another form of postmodern insanity becoming a norm in this insane culture. Disguised as Human Rights, this sect-like ideology is even being embedded into the legal system of many countries. It’s also another example of how this culture, and neoliberalism specifically, destroys any form of identification (as a sex-based class in this case), replacing it with superficial, abstract ideas that have no relation to physical or biological reality whatsoever.
Women in Canada are joining together in increasing numbers to oppose the ever-growing impacts of gender identity legislation, as gender ideology takes root in our country. There are now numerous feminist groups across Canada, advocating for women’s sex-based rights. On May 2, 2021, four of those groups — WHRC Alberta, Alberta Radical Feminists (ABRF), Alberta Women’s Advocacy Association (AWAA), and Canadian Women’s Sex-Based Rights (caWsbar) — gathered in Edmonton, on the steps of the Alberta legislature, to take a public stand in support of our sex-based rights and in protest of the wholesale dismissal of women as distinct group and the insistence that we should redefine “woman” to include men.
The attack on women’s rights is nothing new. Several bills have been passed or are in the process of passing which impede women’s rights and, more broadly, limit the ability of Canadians to question or challenge gender identity ideology and protect kids from dangerous, irreversible medical procedures.
Bill C-16, Canada’s gender identity legislation, passed in 2017, adding gender identity and gender expression to the list of prohibited grounds of discrimination in the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code. The effect has been that males who identify as women now have unrestricted access to women’s spaces like rape shelters, change rooms, and prisons.
In 2020, David Lametti, the Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada, proposed amendments to the criminal code, which would criminalize “conversation therapy.” Bill C-6 is currently going into its third reading, and would prevent therapists, for example, from taking a moderate, exploratory approach to so-called “trans kids,” rather than immediately affirming a child’s self-declared gender and putting them on the path to medical transition.
More recently, the Liberal government proposed a removal of Section 4.1 of the Broadcasting Act, the clause excluding “user-generated content” from regulation by the CRTC, Canada’s public authority in charge of regulating and supervising broadcasting and telecommunications. The reforms, should Bill C-10 pass, will curtail free speech online, ensuring individuals who challenge government-sanctioned ideology cannot speak out about their criticisms and concerns on social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube, a form of censorship feminists are already experiencing in our attempts to remind the public, media, and politicians that human biological sex is important, real, dimorphic, and immutable. If Bill C-10 passes, the platforms women use to connect with each other and advocate for women’s sex-based rights will be forced to censor our words and content, under threat of fines from the CRTC.
Women who speak out about gender identity ideology are threatened with sexual assault, murder, beatings, job loss, social alienation, and silencing, and because trans activists have labelled us “TERFs,” and therefore “hateful,” “bigoted,” and even “Nazis,” this response is passed off as righteous and even progressive. Today in the West, this form of misogyny is accepted and supported. In the 20th century, suffragists faced similar attacks — slander, propaganda, violence. If you look at anti-suffragist imagery, you can see the parallels.
Criticism of trans activism and gender ideology has been labelled “hate speech,” but defences of women’s rights are not an attack on people who believe they are transgender. This response is revealing, though, in terms of the foundation and goals of trans rights activism. Women fought for decades to be considered persons under the law, for our right to sport, access to public toilets, the right to vote, and have autonomy over our own reproductive choices. Many of these efforts are being undone by the work of trans activists who want women to set aside our safety and comfort in favour of the desires, fetishises, and demands of men.
The May 2 rally in Edmonton was not advertised, and for good reason: we were concerned about interference or assault from groups who oppose women’s rights advocacy. We wanted a safe place to peacefully meet up (in compliance with Covid restrictions), talk, and share. So we limited knowledge of the event to our own circles, opting to livestream it to the ABRF and AWAA Facebook pages, later uploading the video to the WHRC Alberta YouTube page. An hour before it started, we shared an event poster across social media.
We were really happy with the turnout, with women coming from Calgary, Cochrane, Lethbridge, and Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Some were afraid to attend in person, but watched online and sent us supportive messages. Some passersby stopped to listen to us speak. Just the opportunity to meet with one another in person was inspiring and galvanizing, as many of us had only known each other from social media and zoom meetings. There is power and energy in women gathering — especially for the purposes of feminist movement building or activism — that is hard to come by in mixed-sex groups. It may sound cliché or contrived, but it is invigorating — women can support and lift each other up in a space where we all know that womanhood is a shared experience of growing up female, not an identity one adopts.
I emceed the event and emphasized that this fight is not a partisan issue, saying:
“This isn’t about being a Liberal or a Conservative, it’s about being adult human females who have experienced oppression on the basis of our biological sex. This isn’t something we can just identify out of. This isn’t a magic trick that will cure the real issues we are faced with. Do not misunderstand: we are explicitly and exclusively pro-woman. Any insistence that we are hateful or bigots or fascist is a deliberate misrepresentation of what we are saying and our goals.”
Thousands of Canadian women have begun calling themselves “politically homeless,” because we are not represented by any party. We seem to be faced with voting against our own interests no matter who we choose.
I then introduced Charlotte Garrett, a teacher who spoke about children’s rights to a complete, accurate education. She said, “If a child is taught that five plus five equals whatever you feel it to be, you are destabilizing material reality; the very ground the child occupies.”
She also spoke about the female experience as an inherited birthright that goes “back and back and back.”
We then played a recording from Kathleen Lowrey, a University of Alberta anthropology professor who was punished for speaking out in defence of women’s rights, who encouraged us all to persevere, saying:
“Resistance to one mode of male aggression leads inexorably to other resistances. That’s why we face so much ferocious opposition for asserting common sense on gender identity ideology. But it’s also why we’re finding so many women swelling the ranks of feminist political action these days. They see what we see. They’re making the connections we’re making.”
Alline Cormier, WHRC Alberta coordinator, followed with a message in French, reiterating the message advocated in The Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights: that women and girls’ sex-based rights exist, are important, and the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women and girls that result from replacing the category of “sex” with that of “gender identity” must be prevented.
The last speaker was Coach Linda Blade, who invoked the Famous Five in her call to courage:
“Like the Famous Five of old, we gather today in this new century to serve notice that we will not stop asking ‘why?’ until we reclaim our sex-based rights. Female persons of today, as well as future generations of Canadian women and girls, have the right to live in dignity and security.”
It is pivotal that we speak out loud about these issues, not just online, where powerful men can shut down our accounts, censor our content, or monitor what we’re saying in secret groups and private messages. We have to be able to talk about these things in public.
The feminist movement began because women talked to each other in person, and realized banding together and getting out in public to speak and fight could make a difference, and it will continue to grow the same way. We have to protect our free speech rights and our spaces. On June 13, we will be holding another rally — this time in Calgary, presented by organizations from across Canada, including Canadian Gender Report, LGB Alliance Canada, We The Females, Alberta Women’s Advocacy Association, Canadian Women’s Sex-Based Rights, Alberta Radical Feminists, and WHRC Alberta. The location and final list of speakers will be announced at a later date. I hope you can take the time to watch, be it online when it is live streamed to the ABRF and AWAA Facebook pages, or in person.
On May 2, I said:
“Today we stand in the footprints of the Canadian feminists who came before us, who demanded that we be acknowledged and protected on the basis of our sex, who fought tooth and nail for the rights that we have today, the same rights being undermined by a new cult-like religion that requires obedience and acceptance of medical experimentation without question and without complaint, under threat of social and professional alienation and blacklisting. We have to stop staying quiet, we have to stand up.”
Any woman who does is not alone. If you reach out, you will find someone. We’re here and there are so many of us. We aren’t the first women to do this and we won’t be the last.
Transcripts of all of the May 2 speeches are available on the AWAA website.
Raine McLeod is a project coordinator and editor based in Calgary and is president of Alberta Women’s Advocacy Association and the founder of Alberta Radical Feminists.
