Anarchocyclist

in the past few days i’ve been reading some really interesting stuff, mainly about gender, power, and democracy. One of these is the PhD thesis of Bob Everton, “This is what democracy looks like!”; Democracy in Action: Communicative Action. I’ll probably go into it in more depth later, once i’m finished, but so far it’s a fascinating walk through the history of democracy in the attempt to illustrate how real democracy differs from representative government (which is what most of us in the western world falsely refer to as “representative” democracy). One thing i really like about it is that Bob made patriarchy a focus of the work; he investigates the archaeological evidence for pre-patriarchal societies (which he refers to as “matrilocal”, and claims that they were not “matriarchal”), and then looks at the effects of patriarchal influence on the downfall of these democracies. Although the work is primarily about democracy, the investigation is always through an anti-patriarchal lens so as not to ignore the issue as so many male philosophers have done in the past.

Right now, i don’t know of any place to find Bob’s thesis online, but i’m going to do my best to make that a reality soon. In the copy that i have, it says “Copyleft pending” on the front page, so i assume it was Bob’s intent to eventually have it circulating freely. I’m going to ask around and see what the status of that “pending” is, and whether there’s already an electronic copy so that i don’t have to type it up myself. stay tuned :) (for those who don’t know, Bob passed away last december, otherwise i’d just go ask him personally…Bob was a big inspiration to me, and provided much of the motivation behind my coming trip to latin america)

The other main thing i’ve been reading lately is the blog of Stan Goff, particularly his articles entitled “Gender and Power”. He’s written a series of articles that i find really informative. They’ve got lots of technical jargon in them, but i think some of the complex issues he’s discussing require some of that. I see his articles as a continuation of my attempt to understand some of the academic theories i found in some women’s studies texts at university. I went through quite a few of them, so i’m fairly confident with the jargon, but i never really felt satisfied with a lot of it. Some of the stuff i’d read in the past just felt to academicky somehow, and seemed to ignore the anarchist principles i followed…but some bits of it would address anarchist principles quite well. Stan’s writing feels like the next step in the theory that i’ve been looking for, although i’m not sure that he’d call himself an anarchist.

One of the more important pieces that i enjoyed was his characterization of power. It seems to me that i’m constantly coming up against arguments that start from the point of view that everyone’s already equal and we just have these internal mental conceptions that are keeping us from having a good society. To nip this in the bud, stan comes right out with a nice definition and explanition of power (in his article on postmodernism) :

My second assumption involves a definition - and that is the definition of power. When I use this term henceforth, I will not be referring to a mental state. I will not be refering to “feeling empowered.” When I refer to power, I am assuming that power consists of the real, structured, material ability to make and carry out decisions against the will of others, and politically, to the legally enforced (which always boils down to physical force as a last resort) entitlement to the materials of nature, the labor of others, and the bodies of others. I’m sure that could be far more thorough, but the main point is that the operational definition of power I am using in this debate is not figurative or psychological. A Haitian peasant woman may feel very powerful in the middle of an intoxicated Gede (a voodoo party — great fun, by the way), where she is experiencing something that feels transcendent, but when the Gede is over and she wakes the next day, her real power is NOT the same as that of the average student at Duke University. She does not have access or entitlement to the appropriation of space and time through technology and money that this student does. She does not have access to the privileges inhering in economic over-development and imperial advantage. She is daily more vulnerable to hunger, disease, accident, weather, and direct unaccountable brutality. Power is real.

The reason i find this so important is that it helps explain what i mean when i talk about white privilege or male privilege or class privilege. Our society is structured such that some identifiable groups of people systemically have more power than others (with power defined above). This is why i commonly refer to “patriarchy” rather than just “sexism”, or “white supremacy” rather than just “racism”. My strategies for fighting these oppressive systems rely on this analysis. If there’s only just individual acts of sexist descrimination, where one person treats another person differently depending on their perceived body type, then one would develop different strategies to fight that than if there were a system that overall gives more power (see above) to one of those identified sex groups. The first, “only descrimination” view treats the condition of men and women equally, but that’s not the reality on the ground. The system around us grants men more power.

Some implications of this are that even though some members of the dominant group might not consciously try to gain privileges over the other, the society allots them certain privileges whether they individually desire them or not. When i talk about male privilege, this is what i mean. You (men) might consciously take advantage of women, or you might fight for women’s liberation as an ally, but either way you still probably have more power (see above) than the women around you. This is not absolute…every man is not more powerful than every woman…patriarchy interacts with capitalism and white supremacy in complex ways, but this method of analysis is still helpful. Just as Stan later points out in one of his articles, theories can still be useful even if they (by themselves) don’t cover all circumstances. Consider Newton’s Laws. we know that at the quantum level, newton’s laws of motion aren’t applicable, but for the vast array of everyday physical circumstances they are extremely useful; you can launch rockets into space using them.

anyway, i think this goes a long way to helping me explain one of the fundamental differences between liberal politics and radical politics. This is why i hate when people ask me if i’m conservative or liberal…the word liberal has more connotations there. I’m anti-capitalist, pro-feminist, anti-white-supremicist, and any number of other labels, but i don’t associate with liberalism. Inherent in liberalism is the idea that each of us is an individualized ‘rational actor’ that makes decisions independent of anything else, somehow magically equal to everyone else in power. This glosses over the material power relations we have with each other, and the intricate socialization we all encounter from day one. Liberal individualism makes us all into atomized consumers in the marketplace, but i think there’s so much more complexity to who and what we are as humans, how we fit into systems of oppression, and how we fight those systems to make a better world.

Ride hard, ride free

This entry was posted on Monday, November 28th, 2005 at 01:12 am and is filed under Front Page, Politics, gender, stuff to read. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.