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Counterpunch is a alternative news site that I’ve followed for many years. I have often picked up on an essay that I found there and added my critique or opinion on the matter. Recently I critiqued a piece that was – ideologically speaking – over the top and I had to give it the Red Pen of Justice treatment. The lambasting was due as the claims made could only hold up in a proper collectivist utopia. When I saw that one of their hardcore left ideologues, Paul Street had mentioned the ‘woke politic’ I was expecting more fodder for the mill of insane leftist politics to criticize.
They’ve set the bar for what passes as journalism pretty low as of late so I was prepared for the worst. And… was pleasantly surprised. Apparently there are limits for some people as to how much cringe-woke insanity they can stomach. The title of the subsection jarred my consciousness :
“Erasing Women and Girls with “Woke” Idiocy”
Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat? Strap in folks, this is going to be a ride.
“And then there’s the hyper- and fake-“woke” identitarian idiocy that pervades and cripples US social movements on the ground. I will never forget the time (in the summer of 2014) I politely corrected a Black Lives speaker who said that the killing of a Black person by “could even happen here in Iowa City” by pointing out that Iowa City had been the site of an incident in which a white police officer had murdered a Black man – the killing of John Deng by a Johnson County Sheriff in July of 2009. A white female graduate student lectured me on how “white men have nothing to say at racial justice rallies.” Six years later on the South Side of Chicago, Black Lives activists would not listen to information I had on the potential to powerfully link up two separate racial justice marches (both protesting Kentucky’s decision not to prosecute the cops who murdered Breonna Taylor) because of my race and gender.”
Paul Street at least aware of what can happen when the what your group looks like is more important the the content of your character. It’s a really quite a shit way to view the world and it bites even most rabid proponents when they do not follow the rules.
“(Idiotic standpoint identititarianism is deeply embedded in the American psyche. Recently I participated with some other white folks in the stoppage of traffic on a major thoroughfare and on behalf of women’s abortions rights in Chicago. Two Black men got out of their cars and attacked us claiming that we would not be stopping traffic for Black people. I informed these gentlemen that we had all been in the streets for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Justin Blake and, before that, for Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, Eric Garner and Chicago’s own Laquan McDonald. After hearing this, one of the two assailants asked me, “so are you saying that you have experienced all the same micro-aggressions and prejudice that I have and go through every day of my life”? I said, “no I don’t think that. I’m not an idiot and I’d have to be an idiot to think that.” He went back to his car before I could tell him that the repeal of abortion rights will inflict special and disproportionate harm on the Black community and Black women.)”
If Paul Street can see the bullshit that is is standpoint epistemology/identitiarianism you know it has to be a problem. For the uninitiated: “standpoint epistemology (and related identity-based epistemologies) are a complicated and widely discredited way to create and justify a kind of gnosticism around critical conceptions of identity and the relevant power dynamics in society. In practice, this typically means it is yet another justification within Theory for only people who agree with Theory to be considered knowledgeable authorities […].”
It’s being used in the leftist activist all the time and it contributes to the inefficiency and infighting that mars all identitarian movements.
“I have recently been confronted by destructive uber-“woke” folly in the form of the loony yet cocksure charge that it is “trans-exclusive” and transphobic to specify females as the target of the war on abortion rights. As a friend writes me, some transgender activists “really believe it’s exclusionary and reactionary to dare to talk about ‘forced motherhood’ and ‘women’s oppression.’ Such madness actually happens.”
This is sheer village idiocy. The Christian fascist war on abortion rights is quintessentially about the patriarchal control and oppression of women and girls. The Republifascist enemy is not remotely thinking about transgender folks when it goes after abortion. Calling activists “trans-phobic” and anti-trans for defending “women’s abortion rights” is reactionary madness. The demand that activist language be changed to “people’s abortion rights” is to erase women in the name of “inclusion.” This is like calling for Black Lives Matter to be changed to “All Lives Matter.”
Wow, you know you’ve gone to far when Street calls you out (rightly) on your bullshit. Of course transgender queer activism has no limits and no sanity. Everything – absolutely everything – is about their oppression and their plight. Those damn females talking about their rights in society are oppressors using their privilege to further marginalize queer trans voices who are *obviously* way more oppressed than those women fighting for their rights to basis reproductive healthcare in society.
“Such hyper-identitarian irrationality has worked its way all the way up to Planned Parenthood (PP). Eager to mess with radical abortions rights activism in accord with its shameful advance surrender to the reversal of Roe v. Wade, PP is down with the preposterous claim that the call for women’s right to an abortion is repressively “gendered” language that oppresses trans people. See this shamelessly stupid PP post on how activists should replace “women” with “people” abortion rights discourse.
In a shameless and transparent hit-job on the radical anti-fascist feminist group Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights’ (RU4AR) recent successful actions at Barclay’s Center in Brooklyn, Dodgers’ Stadium in Los Angeles, and Joel Osteen’s right-wing megachurch in Houston, the liberal zine Jezebel displays extreme identitarian wokeness to rationalize its advance capitulation to the Supreme Court assault on Roe. Jezebel’s Emily Leibert childishly claims that RU4AR’s use of the phrase “female enslavement” is “inappropriate given that the leaders of this group are not Black” (has Emily Leibert ever heard of the great abolitionist leader John Brown?). Leibert says that RU4AR’s “repeated usage of gendered terms …excludes trans and nonbinary pregnant people who need abortion access and care.”
And what are those “gendered” terms, specifically? Answer: “women” and “girls,” half of humanity (!), and “patriarchy,” a supremely significant (to say the least) and longstanding oppression system defense and advance of which is at the very heart of the war on abortion rights.”
Street is quite done with the fuckery on display, but is it too late for him to preserve the brand of activism he supports? Because this sort of identity politics nonsense is what rules the roost in leftist circles. It cares not for the reality of any situation, but rather the power dynamic and the relationship to power to which best interpolate the amount of oppression a group experiences and thus how much ‘authenticity’ said group has when speaking on the issue.
Apparently women (adult human females) do not have enough ‘authenticity’ to speak on the issue of abortion and reproductive healthcare.
“Some anarchists fall for this women-erasing tripe. See this depressing It’s Going Down post, which glories in the replacement of the RU4AR slogan “Not the Church, Not the State, Women Must Decide Our Fate” with “Fuck the Church, Fuck the State, Only We Decide Our Fate.” Reflecting on this article, whose anarchist author digs how his/her/their allies chided a “Maoist” for using the bourgeois word “women,” Chris C of the Communist Workers Group (CWG) writes the following: “I don’t know how any ‘Leftist’ can write an article on abortion and reproductive rights and only mention ‘women’ once. Kind of difficult to organize and mobilize for women’s liberation if one cannot even use the term.”
Well Mr.Street, by saying these words you’ve joined the “far-right” TERF crew who believe that women are adult human females and inhabit a category of human beings that are distinct from men and have their own unique set of issues and concerns when it comes to society.
Welcome. Let’s hope now that you will apply some of your revolutionary zeal to combat the rise of woke identity politics and the cancer that it represents for society.
The massive disparity between the social classes in the US make it difficult to find the equality as set down by their law, in their society.
“1. The United States, by the way, is fundamentally unjust. Even before the Trump Virus sparked a depression and corporate bailout that deepened inequality in the U.S., the three wealthiest Americans’ combined wealth already exceeded that of the nation’s bottom 50 percent. The top tenth of the upper U.S. One Percent already had a shared net worth greater than that of the nation’s bottom 90 percent and median Black household wealth amounted to 6 cents on the white median household dollar. The nation has long been riddled by massive, interrelated disparities of class, race, ethnicity, gender, and power that make an abject mockery of its claim to represent democracy and equality before the law. Exhaustive empirical research shows that progressive majority public opinion is close to irrelevant in the making of “public” policy, which consistently reflects the preferences of the wealthy Few and their giant corporations and financial institutions. You can learn all about this from mainstream researchers and journalists who never identify with “ideologies such as Marxism” or acknowledge that significant socioeconomic disparity and top-down class rule are inherent to the profits system.”
The US would do well to start to manage the current distribution of wealth. A country that is run for the benefit of a small elite is a society that is doomed to fail.
Paul Street pulls few punches as he describes the US Democrats using Sheldon Wolin’s terminology as ‘the inauthentic opposition’. It must be hard for the Democrats to be in opposition to the republicans when you represent the same set of business interests…
“Wolin called it. A nominal Democrat was elected president along with Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress in 2008. What followed under Barack Obama (as under his Democratic presidential predecessor Bill Clinton) was the standard “elite” neoliberal manipulation of campaign populism and identity politics in service to the reigning big-money bankrollers and their global empire. Wall Street’s control of Washington and the related imperial agenda of the Pentagon System were advanced more effectively by the nation’s first Black president than they could have been by stiff and wealthy white Republicans like John McCain or Mitt Romney. The reigning U.S. system of corporate and imperial “inverted totalitarianism” (Wolin) was given a deadly, fake-democratic re-branding. The underlying “drift rightwards” sharpened, fed by a widespread and easily Republican-exploited sense of popular abandonment and betrayal, as the hypocritical and inauthentic dollar Democrats depressed and demobilized their own purported popular base.
Hillary Clinton did nothing to correct that problem in 2016. Quite the opposite. With a colossal campaign finance war-chest fed not just by the usual Wall Street and Silicon Valley suspects but also by many traditionally Republican big money donors who were repelled by Trump’s faux “populism,” the transparently corporate establishmentarian candidate Clinton could barely deign to pretend to be a progressive. She ran almost completely on the argument that Trump was too terrible and unqualified to be president. Making candidate character and qualities her sole selling point was a critical and historic mistake given the angry and anti-establishment mood of the electorate and her own epic unpopularity. So was calling Trump’s flyover county supporters a “basket of” racist and sexist “deplorables” in a sneering comment (one that accurately reflected her aristocratic “progressive”-neoliberal world view) to rich Manhattan campaign donors.
The Democrats would have won the 2016 election and overcome some of their authenticity problem by running Bernie Sanders, “the one guy that didn’t run to Wall Street for money” (Hersh). In something of a tantalizing anomaly for professor Stanley’s rule, Sanders “raise[d] huge sums” but did so from working- and middle-class small-donors (see the remarkable work of Thomas Ferguson and his colleagues on this) and didn’t “represent the interests of…large donors” or “pretend that the bests interests of the multinational corporations” were “also the common interest.” Quite the opposite.
Sanders would have authentically tapped authentic popular anger from the center-left, advancing a policy agenda and anti-plutocratic sentiments consistent with longstanding majority-progressive public opinion in the U.S.
It would have been a winning formula in an anti-establishment election. But so what? The Democratic nomination process was rigged against Sanders for some very good ruling-class reasons. As William Kaufman told Barbara Ehrenreich on Facebook two years ago, “The Democrats aren’t feckless, inept, or stupid, unable to ‘learn’ what it takes to win. They are corrupt. They do not want to win with an authentically progressive program because it would threaten the economic interests of their main corporate donor base… The Democrats know exactly what they’re doing. They have a business model: sub-serving the interests of the corporate elite.”
The reigning corporate Democrats would rather lose to the right, even to a proto-fascistic white nationalist and eco-exterminist right, than lose to the left, even to a mildly progressive social democratic and environmentalist left within their own party.
How else explain their insistence on promoting the ridiculous, right-wing arch-corporatist, imperialist, and dementia-plagued right-wing gaffe machine Joke Biden in the long march to the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries? Again and again, the Democrats’ main cable news networks CNN and MSDNC falsely and insidiously describe Sanders’ highly popular, majority-backed Single Payer health insurance policy plank as an authoritarian big government assault on people’s existing coverage instead of a great democratic human rights demand. The “liberal” media perversely portrays the fiscally viable and existentially necessary Green New Deal as a far-out and dreamy radical scheme from another galaxy. When they’re not just completely ignoring him and his large rallies (probably the main way they undermine Sanders), the corporate media even stoops to painting out Sanders as another version of Trump: old, authoritarian, stubborn, male, and boorish.
But this is timeworn standard operating procedure in the Democratic Party and its allied media, leading agents in what the prolific leading left scholar Henry Giroux calls “neoliberal fascism.” It’s a richly bipartisan disease. In Giroux’s book American Nightmare: Facing the Challenge of Fascism (City Lights, 2018), one sees none of Stanley’s hesitation or reluctance when it comes to forthrightly acknowledging and exposing the central roles of the Democrats and the capitalist order in the creation of the neofascist menace that haunts the United States today.”
Voting is just a small part of the answer. Active, conscious political engagement is the only solution to this political problem. We in Canada share a similar trajectory.
We have a NIMBY problem here. The bad news is that said NIMBY problem is on a planetary scale and my backyard is really everyone’s back yard so to speak. The doom of our time is coming, human driven climate change, and we merrily continue to do that very things that will cause our end. It’s fascinating watching the ecocide play out because if there is one truth to the entire situation it is this – until the elites of our society feel the pain of AGW, nothing will be done – because the current status quo is a just too darn profitable and comfortable to want to change toward a future that might sustain the future of the species.
Of course, from my small balcony in which I view the world, I can point to one system that has been royally screwing the planet since it’s inception – capitalism. And yes, yes, yes, apologists I’m happy I’ve been given the few crumbs of technology and relative stability that make my balcony observations possible but – and it’s a rather large but – would I trade my technology and relatively easy life style for one that works withing the boundaries of the carrying capacity of the earth? Absolutely. It is the adult and responsible course of action; the only hitch is that doing the right thing is rarely a profitable venture and we all know how the ‘right thing’ vs. ‘making money thing’ goes, at least in our current economic paradigm.
Paul Street adds to the argument:
“Other thinkers of an eco-Marxian bent, myself included, narrow the diagnosis. They historicize the climate crisis, situating it in the specific historical context of capitalism. The concept of “the Anthropocene” has rich geological validity and holds welcome political relevance in countering the carbon-industrial complex’s denial of humanity’s responsibility for contemporary climate change, they note. Still, they counsel, we must guard against lapsing into the historically misleading, fatalistic, and often class-blind use of “Anthro,” projecting the currently and historically recent age of capital onto the broad 100,000-year swath of human activity on and in nature. As the Green Marxist environmental sociologist and geographer Jason Moore reminded radio interviewer Sasha Lilley last a few years ago, “It was not humanity as a whole that created …large-scale industry and the massive textile factories of Manchester in the 19th century or Detroit in the last century or Shenzen today. It was capital.”
Indeed, it was not humanity as a whole that built the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL)in 2015 and 2016. It was capital, corralled in the accounts of Energy Transfer Partners, under the supervision of a reckless, eco-cidal and profit-mad billionaire named Kelcy Warren, who funded the DAPL with billions of dollars from across the world’s leading financial institutions.
It was not humanity as whole that hid evidence of Greenhouse Gassing’s deadly impact on human prospects. It was capital on various levels but most particularly in the form of Exxon-Mobil, who (in the greatest climate and environmental crime in history) buried the findings of its very own cutting-edge scientists in the 1970s and 1980s— an offence that that, as Chomsky says, “is almost hard to find words to describe.”
Moore and other left analysts argue with good reason that it is more appropriate to understand humanity’s Earth-altering assault on livable ecology as the “Capitalocene.” It is just a relatively small slice of human history – roughly the last half-millennium give or take a century or so – during which human society has been socially and institutionally wired by a specific form of class rule to relentlessly assault on an ultimately geocidal scale.
It is only during the relatively brief period of history when capitalism has ruled the world system (since 1600 or thereabouts by some calculations, earlier and later by others) that human social organization has developed the inner, accumulation-, commodification-, “productivity”-, and growth-mad compulsion to transform Earth systems – with profitability and “productivity” dependent upon on the relentless appropriation of “cheap nature” (cheap food, cheap energy, cheap raw materials and cheap human labor power) Moore maintains that “humanity’s” destruction of livable ecology is explained by changes that capitalism’s addictive and interrelated pursuits of profit and empire imposed on its behavior within “the web of life.”
It is capitalism and its quarterly earnings obsession with short-term profits, not Rich’s “human nature,” that constantly plunders and poisons the commons and trumps long-term planning for the common good.”
Hurricanes give no fucks about your socioeconomic status.
Our short-sighted nature will be the end of us. Unless…
“This in one of the timeworn paths to societal ruin discussed in a paper published five years ago by mathematician Safa Motesharrei, atmospheric scientist Eugenia Kalnay and political scientist Jorge Rivas in the journal Ecological Economics. Reviewing past societal collapses, they reflected on a potential current global scenario in which:
“[T]he Elites—due to their wealth—do not suffer the detrimental effects of the environmental collapse until much later than the Commoners. This buffer of wealth allows Elites to continue ‘business as usual’ despite the impending catastrophe. It … explain[s] how historical collapses were allowed to occur by elites who appear to be oblivious to the catastrophic trajectory (most clearly apparent in the Roman and Mayan cases). This buffer effect is further reinforced by the long, apparently sustainable trajectory prior to the beginning of the collapse. While some members of society might raise the alarm that the system is moving towards an impending collapse and therefore advocate structural changes to society in order to avoid it, Elites and their supporters, who opposed making these changes, could point to the long sustainable trajectory ‘so far’ in support of doing nothing.”
Is this not the state of “humanity” under the command of capital today, with many millions of disproportionately poor and powerless people already suffering from climate disruption while the wealthy few continue to enjoy lives of unimaginable, environmentally shielded opulence atop a recklessly fossil-fueled planet so vastly unequal that the world’s eight richest people possess as much wealth between them as the bottom half of the species?
It’s “the rich,” not humanity in general, that “are destroying the Earth,” as Herve Kempf noted in the title and text of an important book eleven years ago. At the same time however, it is in fact up to “our species,” yes, humanity, to save itself and other Earthly life forms by engaging in a great mass uprising against those who have plundered and poisoned the commons for private profit. (If there’s another intelligent life form out there that survived the transition to high-tech modernity and developed the capacity to save other species in the galaxy, now would be the time for them to travel through tie and space to lend us a hand. I’m not holding my breath for that!) The best bet we have, my fellow world citizens and common(s)ers, is is eco-socialist people’s revolution here on the planet itself.”
Revolt or die comrades. :/
Bonus Reading: Human Nature and Dynamics There is a good deal of math here, however, also a very readable paper on the collapse of complex societies. It’s a good read and worth your time.
The conclusion of Paul Street’s essay is important in naming the situation the US currently inhabits. “You cannot maintain democracy at home while conducting an authoritarian empire abroad” is the idea that lies at the bottom of the problems plaguing the United States. The notion that there are people, by default, undeserving of the same rights you grant to your citizenry, who don’t deserve the access to the rights/responsibilities (liberty, equalty, happiness) is eroding those very same ideals within the United States itself.
What Goes Around: “Trampling on the Helpless Abroad” Comes Home
A final matter concerns the problem of imperial chickens coming home to roost. Liberals don’t like to hear it, but the ugly, richly documented historical fact of the matter is that their party of binary and tribal choice has long joined Republicans in backing and indeed crafting a U.S. foreign policy that has imposed authoritarian regimes (and profoundly undemocratic interventions including invasions and occupations) the world over. The roster of authoritarian and often-mass murderous governments the U.S. military and CIA and allied transnational business interests have backed, sometimes even helped create, with richly bipartisan support, is long indeed.
Last fall, Illinois Green Party leader Mike Whitney ran some fascinating numbers on the 49 nation-states that the right-wing “human rights” organization Freedom House identified as “dictatorships” in 2016. Leaving aside Freedom House’s problematic inclusion of Russia, Cuba, and Iran on its list, the most remarkable thing about Whitney’s research was his finding that the U.S. offered military assistance to 76 percent of these governments. (The only exceptions were Belarus, China, Central African Republic, Cuba, Equatorial Guinea, Iran, Myanmar, North Korea, Russia, South Sudan, Sudan, and Syria.). “Most politically aware people,” Whitney wrote:
“know of some of the more highly publicized instances examples of [U.S. support for foreign dictatorships], such as the tens of billions of dollars’ worth of US military assistance provided to the beheading capital of the world, the misogynistic monarchy of Saudi Arabia, and the repressive military dictatorship now in power in Egypt… apologists for our nation’s imperialistic foreign policy…try to rationalize such support, arguing that Saudi Arabia and Egypt are exceptions to the rule. But my survey…demonstrates that our government’s support for Saudi Arabia and Egypt are not exceptions to the rule at all. They are the rule.”
The Pentagon and State Department data Whitney used came from Fiscal Year 2015. It dated from the next-to-last year of the Obama administration, for which so many liberals recall with misplaced nostalgia. Freedom House’s list should have included Honduras, ruled by a vicious right-wing government that Obama and his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton helped install in a June 2009 military coup.
The problem here isn’t just liberal hypocrisy and double standards. The deeper issue is that, as the great American iconoclast Mark Twain knew, you cannot maintain democracy at home while conducting an authoritarian empire abroad. During the United States’ blood-soaked invasion and occupation of the Philippines, Twain penned an imaginary history of the twentieth-century United States. “It was impossible,” Twain wrote, “to save the Great Republic. She was rotten to the heart. Lust of conquest had long ago done its work; trampling upon the helpless abroad had taught her, by a natural process, to endure with apathy the like at home.”
“Just a decade after Twain wrote those prophetic words,” the historian Alfred W. McCoy has observed, “colonial police methods came home to serve as a template for the creation of an American internal security apparatus in wartime.” The nation’s first Red Scare, which crushed left and labor movements during and after World War One, drew heavily on the lessons and practices of colonial suppression in the Philippines and Cuba. As McCoy shows in his latest book, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power,the same basic process – internal U.S. repression informed and shaped by authoritarian and imperial practices abroad and justified by alleged external threats to the “homeland” – has recurred ever since. Today, the rise of an unprecedented global surveillance state overseen by the National Security Agency has cost the US the trust of many of its top global allies (under Bush43 and Obama44, not just under Trump45) while undermining civil liberties and democracy within as beyond the U.S.
“The fetters imposed on liberty at home,” James Madison wrote in 1799, “have ever been forged out of the weapons provided for defense against real, pretended, or imaginary dangers abroad.” Those are wise words well worth revisiting amidst the current endless Russiagate madness, calculated among other things to tell us that the FBI, the CIA, and the rest of the nation’s vast and ever more ubiquitous intelligence and surveillance state are on our side.
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