On Sat, Jan 9, 2021 at 08:44 PM, Philip Ferguson wrote: > > There is a significant section of them who post hideous exhortations for > the rape, stabbing, torture, maiming and killing of gender-critical women, > on their facebook pages alone. There is an increasingly oddball section > of the left that defends this, apologises for it, and is happy to see the > capitalist state used against feminists who hold a materialist analysis of > sex, rather than embracing a postmodernist, Judith Butler-style analysis > in which gender rules and is "performative" (to use a Butlerism). > > It's ugly, it's hideous and it's a sign of the degeneration of chunks of > the left. Fortunately, there is also a section of the left getting > organised to push back and continue to defend/support women's rights. > >
If a word is no longer useful, is even detrimental, to summarizing your body of beliefs, you should discard it. "Left" is that word. What passes for the left today is neoliberal to the core. "The dream of a world free of prejudice, the dream of a world where identities (whether American or hyphenated American) are not discriminated against, is as foundational to the right as it is to the left. And this dream is completely compatible with (is, actually, essential to) the dream of a truly free and efficient market. Here’s where the concept of neoliberalism—the idea of the free market as the essential mechanism of social justice—is genuinely clarifying. A society free not only of racism but of sexism and of heterosexism is a neoliberal utopia where all the irrelevant grounds for inequality (your identity) have been eliminated and whatever inequalities are left are therefore legitimated. Thus, when it comes to antiracism, the left is more like a police force for, than an alternative to, the right. Its commitment to rooting out the residual prejudices that too many of us no doubt continue to harbor deep inside is a tacit commitment to the efficiency of the market. And its commitment to the idea that the victims of social injustice today are the victims of racism, sexism and heterosexism (the victims of discrimination rather than exploitation, of intolerance rather than oppression, or of oppression in the form of intolerance) is a commitment to the essential justice of the market. The preferred crimes of neoliberalism are always hate crimes; when our favorite victims are the victims of prejudice, we are all neoliberals." –Walter Benn Michaels, "The Trouble With Diversity". Fredrick Mullins -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#5358): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/5358 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/79562697/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
