estelle tang: an open letter to all my male friends

A pretty moving and timely open letter from Estelle Tang via the Guardian:

An open letter to all my male friends

For me, part of growing up, maturing, or whatever you want to call it, is becoming more aware of, and sensitive to, these kinds of realities, seeing that things like patriarchy, racism, sexism, etc. exist and permeate our culture and society in negative and harmful ways, realizing that even the most seemingly innocuous things we do or say can and do carry the seeds of patriarchy, racism, sexism, etc. without us ever knowing it because it's hard to see the big picture (i.e., history; the multitude of psychology and cultural mechanisms that are at play; the types of discrimination and violence that still exist, even if only in verbal form; etc.).

Reading something like this, it's easy to say, "Well, that's not me. I'd never do that." But that doesn't mean we don't do or say things that, unconsciously on our part, help to propagate these kinds of attitudes. And even when we are aware of it, it can be hard to admit. I know that I certainly don't like admitting to myself that I've done and said things that were less than enlightened, that I've said racist and sexist shit even though I didn't see it that way at the time.

And even if we don't think and act in this way, do we consistently challenge it when we come into contact with others who do? Sometimes, perhaps. But maybe sometimes we're afraid to confront the person. Maybe we think we're too busy or think it's none of our business. Maybe sometimes we think it's funny. Whatever the case, by not challenging it when we know it for what it is, we give it space to grow. Our non-action helps to preserve an environment that allows this to continue to happen. Reading this, the most important message I get is, "Please help me to create an environment that makes it unacceptable because I can't do it alone."

I think her letter is well worth reading, and her advice well worth following.

happy memorial day

To remember and reflect upon tragic events and those who have died as a result is a humane and worthwhile thing, in my opinion. Wars are themselves supremely tragic events that take the lives of countless living beings, both soldiers and civilians alike; and it's worth remembering all those who have lost their lives in the global carnage we, as a species, are capable of unleashing upon ourselves.

But when it comes to the subject of war, I think we should always be on guard so that we don't allow ourselves be so blinded by our patriotism and the idealization of war heroes that we fall into the trap of blindly supporting militarism and nationalism, or attacking anyone who happens to have a different point of view. As WWII veteran and political activist Howard Zinn once said:

While some people think that dissent is unpatriotic, I would argue that dissent is the highest form of patriotism. In fact, if patriotism means being true to the principles for which your country is supposed to stand, then certainly the right to dissent is one of those principles. And if we're exercising that right to dissent, it's a patriotic act.

For me, today isn't just about honouring the dead; it's also about remembering the toll that war takes on its survivors and the heavy burdens that many bear from their time spent in and around war, physical and mental scars that take lifetimes to heal, if at all—victims of political-economic systems in which the ruling class declares the wars that the working class and poor must fight. As Eugene Debs famously said in his 1918 Canton, Ohio, speech:

They have always taught and trained you to believe it to be your patriotic duty to go to war and to have yourselves slaughtered at their command. But in all the history of the world you, the people, have never had a voice in declaring war, and strange as it certainly appears, no war by any nation in any age has ever been declared by the people. And here let me emphasize the fact—and it cannot be repeated too often—that the working class who fight all the battles, the working class who make the supreme sacrifices, the working class who freely shed their blood and furnish the corpses, have never yet had a voice in either declaring war or making peace. It is the ruling class that invariably does both. They alone declare war and they alone make peace.

War is hell, and many of those who are lucky enough to come out on the other side of it are changed forever. And it both saddens and angers me that the one's who fight our wars are caught in the tangled web of geopolitics and the machinations of plutocrats who treat human lives more like commodities in their lust for wealth and power than people while the victims on the other side are denigrated, or else completely forgotten. They deserve to be remembered too.

what does feminism have to do with it?

One of the things I enjoyed the most about yesterday's panel hosted by KBOO was Johanna Brenner's topic of, "What does feminism have to do with it?" Unfortunately, I think a few people misunderstood where she was coming from, and didn't really understand what feminism is, but I thought it was one of the more important and interesting topics of the evening.

Why is it so important? One of the main reasons, in my opinion, is how easily obscured the existence of patriarchy is. It's hidden in plain sight, as is its considerable influence, despite the fact that evidence of it is literally everywhere. Most people don't seem to understand patriarchy, how it works, where it comes from, and why it's worth struggling against. In Western society and culture, for example, patriarchy can be traced back to the earliest parts of recorded history; and even today, it pervades huge swaths of our culture, religion, politics, and economic relations.

The role of women in public life in ancient Greece and Rome, from where Western society can arguably trace its roots, was practically nonexistent. Their primary roles were as child-bearers and homebodies. Women (at least aristocratic women, i.e., non-slaves and prostitutes) in Greece were hardly even seen in public, and then usually only when accompanying a man. Being single wasn't acceptable. Education was primarily something men received. Gender roles were strictly defined. Men dominated all spheres of life. In Romes, things were slightly better and less restrictive for women, but not by much.

(As a side note, one of the more radical and impressive aspects of Plato's Republic was his argument that women should share in the education and tasks of their male counterparts. This includes arguing for female guardians (soldiers) and rulers at a time when women were 'kept at home' and mostly restricted from public life, which really surprised me.)

Another point of entry for patriarchy in Western society was Christianity. While some aspects can be seen as radical and egalitarian in nature, there are aspects that, when Christianity was adopted by the Roman world, reinforced patriarchy and women's submissive role in society. A few examples are: "Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord" (Eph 5:22); "Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says" (1 Cor 14:34); and "I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet" (1 Tim 2:12).

Fast forward through centuries of male dominated society and you have the birth of America, in which initially only white, male property owners could vote, with women only winning the right vote in 1920, 50 years after blacks and 144 years after the country's founding. And if you think winning the right to vote was the end of gender discrimination, you're sorely mistaken. Women are still battling against rigid gender roles, prejudices, and hierarchies that we've been conditioned over time to subconsciously (and even consciously) adopt and maintain.

These material and ideological pressures, albeit weakened, continue to exert their influence on our society and its structure, informing our perceptions of the world and our conceptions of gender norms. Women are still widely seen as and/or expected to be child-bearers and homebodies, providing the free/uncompensated labour of literally reproducing the labour force and supporting the reproduction of labour power via nurturing husbands and children emotionally and materially (e.g., cooking, cleaning, laundry, etc.). They're still expected to provide a certain kind of emotional labour, even in the workforce. They still make up the majority of 'nurturing' professions like nursing and teaching. They still tend to make less than their male counterparts (roughly $.80 to the dollar according to one study). They're often seen and portrayed as 'bitchy,' 'cold,' etc. if they're assertive and not nurturing/emotionally receptive and giving. The list goes on.

But this doesn't just affect women, it affects all of us. Due to the gender roles imposed upon men and women within our society, neither are free to fully be and express themselves (to say nothing of those who fall outside of this historically accepted gender binary). Men, for example, aren't given as much space as women to be 'caring,' 'nurturing,' etc., it not being 'manly' to show too much affection or emotion. And an argument can be made that the prevalence of male privilege embedded in our predominately patriarchal society and the negative aspects of socially-constructed, male gender norms (what some call 'toxic masculinity') are at least partially responsible for the prevalence of male violence, particularly gun violence.

In addition, a recent study published in the journal Psychological Science found that "both men and women see images of sexy women's bodies as objects, while they see sexy-looking men as people," which I think demonstrates that such a gender bias exists in the perception of both men and women; and the study's conclusion further reinforces my belief that sexism and the objectification of women is a broader symptom of a society that's practiced patriarchy for centuries, as well as corroborating evidence that patriarchal ideology has become so ingrained into our collective psyche that even women are conditioned to objectify women in the same way as men.

Feminism, then, isn't about declaring men to be wholly bad or inferior, nor women to be wholly good or superior. It's about confronting the reality that patriarchy exists and permeates our culture and society and challenging that reality in order to create a more free and egalitarian world. I was once ignorant of what feminism was and why it's such an important movement, but not anymore, and I'm proud to call myself a feminist.

happy earth day

Today is Lenin's birthday as well as Earth Day; and the coincidence is a fitting one I think. While the idea of reducing, reusing, and recycling as consumers may be good for the environment and make us feel good, we need to get real: we need to also rethink capitalism since the present economic structure threatens our very survival as a species. An economic system that depends on continued and uninterrupted expansion (i.e., indefinite growth) isn't an environmentally sustainable system, particularly when the drive for profit is the bottom line.

Let's be honest, things aren't looking so copacetic, from the state of our oceans due to decades of pollution and over-fishing, to the growing accumulation of atmospheric CO2 that's likely the dominant cause of a rising global temperature, which could have a number of negative consequences for us in a matter of decades, from rising ocean levels that can devastate coastlines and islands to changing weather patterns that can seriously impact food production via increased/more serious droughts, etc.

What does this have to do with economics? Well, for one, on a basic, fundamental level, capital only functions as capital when it grows and reproduces itself (i.e., creates surplus value and profit) in a process that arguably requires continually amplifying consumption and increasing overall output, particularly to overcome the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and a shrinkage in the absolute mass of profit created via commodity production. When growth declines, the system falters (along with employment) and things tend to go sideways. And further exacerbating the problem is the fact that, within the context of this system, negative externalities can actually contribute to economic growth.

Moreover, if we truly want to change our collective behaviour in more environmentally sound ways, on an individual level as well as on the broader level of global production and distribution, we need to critically assess and rethink the economic system and social relations that currently underlie our material reproduction and which ultimately coerce both our productive and consumptive behaviour.

Simply recycling and reusing clothes on an individual level, for example, isn't going to reduce our CO2 admissions from 400ppm to 350ppm since most of the pollution is produced by large industries, industrial farming, the military, the harvesting and processing of fossil fuels, etc., not to mention the fact that less consumption by consumers means a slowing and even collapsing capitalist economy (especially in the US, where consumption expenditures account for nearly 70% of GDP).

This, I think, also ties into the problem of conflicts between various industries and public interest when it comes to combating things like pollution and environmental degradation. For one, more environmentally sound policies would potentially make things more expensive, and could also cut into profits and restrict growth; and the companies we're trying to 'persuade' to further limit pollution have powerful lobbying power and put pressure on politicians (if they don't just outright buy them), and attempting to regulate them via legislation often results in inadequate compromises (e.g., weak cap and trade laws that are easily circumvented).

So the solution can't just be shifting to more individual 'green' activities, nor can it solely be through political reforms and regulations, although both can be useful tools; it has to include a fundamental shift in the way we approach production, distribution, and even consumption. Of course it's difficult to imagine things being any other way (TINA is the ideological law of the neoliberal land); but if there isn't a radical shift in human consciousness and/or a socio-economic revolution on an epic scale soon, we might be up shit creek without a paddle.

tricks of the trade

Reading this recent Nature article got me thinking that crises of capitalism don't just take the form of economic downturns and unemployment. They also take social forms, such as the creation of industries that actively seek to produce cheap, addictive, and unhealthy products that are produced solely to make a profit. While it might not seem like a typical crisis, for example, the epidemic of obesity has economic roots.

As authors Stephen Simpson and David Raubenheimer note, "Food manufacturers have a financial incentive to replace protein with cheaper forms of calories, and to manipulate the sensory qualities of foods to disguise their lower protein content." And this trend, they argue, has contributed to the growing epidemic of obesity since, "The paucity of protein relative to fats and carbohydrates in processed foods drives the overconsumption of total energy as our bodies seek to maintain a target level of protein intake" because "the [human] appetite prioritizes protein over carbohydrate or fat." We're eating way too much of the latter and not enough of the former.

Unfortunately, most people fail to connect the economic roots of these kinds of social crises to the mode of production because they're so conditioned by the ideology of 'personal responsibility' to blame the individual for poor choices despite the fact that the very same system puts people into a position where, "The higher cost of protein drives consumers to buy cheaper processed food loaded with fat and carbohydrates — an effect that disproportionately affects people on tighter budgets." Sometimes we simply can't afford to eat well. And even when we can, we often don't have the time and settle for whatever's convenient in our fast-paced, consumer society.

It's a catch-22. The consumer is often treated as a 'rational actor' who makes decisions that provide them with the greatest benefit or satisfaction. But when they act in such a way, such as when they're coerced by the limitations of time and money to purchase greater quantities of processed foods to feed themselves and their family, they're simultaneously making a 'poor choice' despite it being an economically rational one.

us study illustrates the basic marxian concept of base/superstructure relations

An interesting study on the political-economic makeup of the US, which notes, among other things, that, "In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule -- at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose":

Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens

Two paragraphs from the study in particular that caught my eye were:

Analyses of U.S. politics centered on economic elites go back at least to Charles Beard, who maintained that a chief aim of the framers of the U.S. Constitution was to protect private property, favoring the economic interests of wealthy merchants and plantation owners rather than the interests of the then-majority small farmers, laborers, and craft workers. A landmark work in this tradition is G. William Domhoff's detailed account of how elites (working through foundations, think-tanks, and an "opinion-shaping apparatus," as well as through the lobbyists and politicians they finance) may dominate key issues in U.S. policy making despite the existence of democratic elections. Philip A. Burch has exhaustively chronicled the economic backgrounds of federal government officials through American history. Thomas Ferguson's analysis of the political importance of "major investors" might be seen as a theory of economic elites. Most recently, Jeffrey Winters has posited a comparative theory of "Oligarchy," in which the wealthiest citizens – even in a "civil oligarchy" like the United States – dominate policy concerning crucial issues of wealth- and income-protection.

And:

What do our findings say about democracy in America? They certainly constitute troubling news for advocates of "populistic" democracy, who want governments to respond primarily or exclusively to the policy preferences of their citizens. In the United States, our Gilens and Page Testing Theories of American Politics findings indicate, the majority does not rule -- at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.

Reminds me of this famous passage from The German Ideology:

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance. The individuals composing the ruling class possess among other things consciousness, and therefore think. Insofar, therefore, as they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an epoch, it is self-evident that they do this in its whole range, hence among other things rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch.

All you really have to do is replace the word 'ideas' with 'policies' to illustrate the basic Marxian concept of base/superstructure relations, i.e., the idea that a state and its ruling class (political superstructure) are a manifestation or reflection of underlying economic social relations (economic base). In other words, this study offers an empirical example of political inequality as it manifests itself in the US, arising, in the final analysis, out of inherently unequal social relations of production.

For the US to truly move away from its oligarchical political-economic makeup and towards real democracy, it has to fundamentally alter the makeup of its mode of production through a radical economic transformation in which the exploitation, alienation, and commodity fetishism of the present system are gradually eliminated via a more socialized mode of production.

scotus strikes back

Yesterday, the Supreme Court's ruling in McCutcheon v. FEC effectively struck down the overall cap on the "total amount any individual can contribute to federal candidates in a two-year election cycle," according to the New York Times. The 5-to-4 decision is similar to that of the 2012 Citizens United v. FEC decision, which "struck down limits on independent campaign spending by corporations and unions" based upon its perceived infringement of First Amendment rights.

On the one hand, many see any limitations on campaign contributions as an unconstitutional restriction on the exercise of the First Amendment, especially in light of the 1976 decision in Buckley v. Valeo equating money with speech. Just as newspapers aren't limited to the number of candidates they can endorse via editorials, some argue that contributors shouldn't be limited by limits to the number of candidates they can support/endorse with their pocket books. So while the $2,600 per candidate limit on contributions from individuals to candidates in primary and general elections ($5,200 total) still stands, the overall limit of $48,600 by individuals every two years for contributions to all federal candidates and the $74,600 limit on contributions to political party committees have been removed. More money = more freedom, right?

Others, however, like the dissenting Justice Breyer, see this decision as further opening the floodgates of cash from wealthy donors, which will give them (and those they support) an even bigger advantage in each election, raising "the overall contribution ceiling to 'the number infinity.'" The way elections are currently conducted and financed in the US, the average citizen has enough trouble competing with the lobbying power of large multinational corporations and the wealthy, thereby severely limiting their 'voice' in the political process. And this ruling will help the voices (i.e., the $) of the wealthy, whose political views on economic issues often differ from that of the majority of working-class citizens, further outweigh those of average citizens. In other words, it's a victory, via the conservative justices of the Supreme Court, for the interests of the wealthy.

But from another standpoint, one could argue that this decision is not only in line with the intent of the framers of the Constitution, it's the logical conclusion of their intent. Many of the Founding Fathers were critical of direct democracy, mistrusting the will of the majority itself (though not entirely without reason). Like most forms of government centred around private property rights, the basic principle behind the establishment of our form of representative democracy had more to do with the ruling elites wanting to protect the small minority of property owners (including themselves) from the majority of the propertyless than anything else. As James Madison put it in Federalist No. 10, "[T]he most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society."

The only real difference between the Founders and the wealthy elites of today is that the former were primarily holders of landed property while the elites of today are holders of money capital, which for all intents and purposes are the same thing in that both are property in the political-economic sense of the term. What people like Jefferson (who was critical of what he saw as the ascendancy of the aristocracy of banking institutions and monied corporations) and Madison seemed to fail to realize is that having a political-economic system centred on private property rights, which are considered sacrosanct, actually protects and even promotes the rise of a new kind of aristocracy, one based on capital and wealth rather than hereditary nobility and land ownership.

Liberalism (the emerging philosophy of the time that greatly influenced the shaping of the Constitution) links private property to liberty, and through private property rights, secures the liberty of the propertied. Consequently, the greater one's property, the greater one's means of self-determination. Anyone who thinks otherwise and defends the Constitution and the Founders as the 'be all, end all' of democracy would do well to recall that, originally, the representatives in this new republic were elected by a select few, namely white, male property owners—it was their interests that truly mattered and shaped the political and legal superstructures we know today. And as Adam Lioz, a public policy analysis from Demos, points out, "[T]he donor class is overwhelmingly wealthy, white, and male... so we're going to see folks who can have access to those networks of donors have an even greater edge in deciding who can run for office and who wins."

So while rulings like that of Citizens United and McCutcheon may appear to some as moving America away from its democratic roots, what they may actually be doing is moving us back towards our liberal-republican roots, eroding some of the victories won over the past couple of centuries by the poor and disenfranchised in the ongoing fight for equality and universal suffrage. In essence, the game is rigged. To fix these problems, we need to change the rules; and to change the rules, we need, in the words of The Coup, to 'flip this system.'