|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The general difference between MIM and other organizations on gender:
by mim3@mim.org January 17, 2006
Recently, moving-lips-without-a-brain Rush Limbaugh had to apologize for using the phrase "blow job" (oral sex) on his show. He blamed Clinton for making blow jobs popular among teens today. Yet the obvious fact that even the sheepish U.$. public perceived is that it was the Republicans impeaching Clinton who made that blow job phrase a daily subject of the television news and newspapers with the hearings in Congress. A pornographic media frenzy reinforced Congressional hearings that may have had no impact otherwise.
It's important to review this topic today, because of the common belief that politics has continued along the same polarized lines seen in the Clinton impeachment. Within the majority camp that sees the Republicans to blame for the Monicagate debasement of the public, there are two views. One sees Monicagate as a power struggle with a faction of the public called the Christian fascists grabbing power. Another view sees Monicagate as the proof that all factions of Democrats and Republicans are pornographic. Roughly speaking, concerning the two views of sexuality, one is intra-bourgeois while the other sees pornography as a system just as imperialism is a system.
According to the Liberal view held by Freudians, Trotskyists, pro-pornography pseudo-feminists, most of Hollywood and of course most Democrats, the attack on Clinton for oral sex or lying about it was an attempt to repress sexuality.(1) As such, Clinton's scandal was tied up with a general reactionary attack on sexuality, most especially the right to choose an abortion--according to left-leaning Liberals. These left-leaning Liberals include that vast majority of parties calling themselves socialist or communist in the united $tates, because we do not have in Amerika many parties able to distinguish from Liberalism. That is apt to happen anywhere in the imperialist countries when the proletarian pole opposing Liberalism disappears or fails to gain enough notice and the remaining political space collapses into Liberalism and fascism.
Those parties that manage some distinction with Liberalism on gender questions are mostly nationalist parties which realize that the dominator nation has repressed the right to reproduction through sterilization. Even this oppressed nationality line does not necessarily escape the language of so-called choice rife in the Liberal paradigm, when the emphasis is on the choice to have children.
In contrast, MIM sees Monicagate not as a sexually repressive act by die-hard Republicans, but as a flamboyantly sexual and Liberal competitive act. We share with Catharine MacKinnon the analysis that the "eroticization of power" is the problem we need to solve. From this analysis flows a different and often uncomfortable strategy and tactics than what the dominant Amerikan Freudian Liberal so-called Left pursues.
We even find the word "repression" to be misleading in this sexual context for some purposes. For example, can we say that the perspective of a five-year-old child on Monica Lewinsky suffers from sexual repression? It becomes meaningless to talk about entire groups of people through the filter that the Amerikan Liberals propose for the world.
A truly repressive act in Monicagate would have required a discipline and unity that does not exist in Congress or Christianity as it exists in the united $tates. The most zealous anti-Clinton activists simply do not have the discipline or social vehicle to be able to squelch or transform sexuality, so instead they join the porn-fest with their own spin.
MIM's view of the Senate hearings confirming Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court and Monicagate is consistent with reference to the effects of pornography: "The O.J., Tonya Harding, Monica Lewinsky, Gary Condit industry should pay. The bottom line is that journalism has to be truth for its own sake."(2) Obviously right now journalism is for-profit infotainment.
The faux nature of much in Amerikan right-wing politics comes in how it echoes the so-called left of Amerika. One example is the call for affirmative action for right-wing Republicans in institutions of higher learning, when the obvious truth is that right-wing intellectuals apply their brains on Wall Street and do not show up often in the ivory towers, if there are right-wing intellectuals.
Likewise, the Amerikan right-wing Republican echoes post-modernism by criticizing television shows stereotyping hillbilly life, where the Amerikan liberal post-modernists tried to draw attention to Latinos, Blacks, Asian-based ethnicities and First Nations. Worst of all there is an outright unity of the know-nothing anarchists, ultrademocrats, post-modernists and right-wing Republicans who really believe that politics is all opinion with no need for factual knowledge. Lazy-democracy- run-wild takes literally Lenin's statement that any cook should be able to run the state, but adds "right now, without any effort." So here is the Amerikan so- called Left making a stink about sexual harassment and discrimination against wimmin, so the right-wing Republican echoes that in his own way: a president is abusing interns.
The National Organization of Women was totally correct when it titled its response to Monicagate as concerning the "aphrodisiac of power." Much less accurate is to portray interns like Lewinsky as victims. The problem is not just interns (or fill-in-the-blank victim of the week) but the entire culture with its underlying power differentials. Monica Lewinskys of the imperialist countries are not digging in for a hard fight to abolish the power difference between a president and an intern--and no such movement has arisen. Nor was Monica Lewinsky going to starve if she had had nothing to do with Bill Clinton. That is part of the lure and confusion of full-blown imperialist country Liberalism. It's unlikely a starving womyn would be able to get close enough to most presidents to offer an exchange of sex for power. Maybe if she did we would see a whole different fight shape up.
Had the U.S. Senate convicted Clinton, Al Gore would have become president. All told, it's hard to see much real power grab there. That does not mean something about Monicagate was not off, wrong and decadent. The public itself recoiled when it realized its Congress had nothing better to do. Yes, we should simply consider the notion that the impeachment was about entertainment, with the usual imperialist fissures underneath. Monica Lewinsky was not going to starve and Al Gore was not going to be much different as president: so this was all really about pornography and how it benefits politicians.
The scary part for the world outside the imperialist countries is that it seems that people conduct themselves this way when they do not "have to"--at least as far as most people in the world are aware of economically. For this reason, MIM has insisted on the independent nature of gender, something we will have to keep looking at as we succeed in abolishing class.
When Newt Gingrich had some time, he wrote a novel titled 1945 which included obligatory sex scenes and a whole sex spy thread. That is not repression of sex. Quite the contrary, the involvement of ex-power-holder Newt Gingrich seemed to add to the fun as far as publishers could see. There may even be stability benefits to the system to see major power-holders humiliate themselves in ways recognizable to the public. Bringing Gingrich "down to earth" is an example of the Liberal approach eroticizing power. What we really need is less "earthiness," fewer examples, fewer lifestyle gurus and a more general understanding of the problem so that we can address it consistently.
Was Monicagate repression or Liberalism? The next big U.$. historical event after Clinton's impeachment to examine the difference of theories is the invasion of Afghanistan connected to the September 11 2001 furor. Many have pointed out the Christian overtones in using crusader terminology like "Infinite Justice," the original name of the military mission. Yet, it seems that supporting the Taliban would be the way to go to suppress sexuality in Afghanistan--if that were the goal. Instead, relations with the Taliban deteriorated and then 9/11 occurred. Amerikans then intervened again on the side of permissive sexuality.
So one example of proof that the Bu$h agenda is not about sexual repression would be the military--sent by a Republican president to attack Afghanistan with Liberal reasons provided by Robin Morgan and the like. Ordinarily self-described "radical feminists" like Robin Morgan would not receive imperialist media play, but after the attack on the World Trade Center, we suddenly heard Robin Morgan's views of the Taliban in the imperialist press. (This is another reason MIM insists on independence of the media. If the imperialists started quoting communists in their media, it would probably be because of a new angle of attack on the Third World. Not for nothing much of the Pentagon is now ex-Trotskyist neo-conservatives.)
Bu$h also ordered the legalization of pornography in Iraq while shutting down anti-U.$. newspapers. That's the continuation of the same agenda: serious political opposition was illegal, but pornography was legal. It's also hard to see how replacing the secular Saddam Hussein benefits a Christian agenda when Shia Muslims are the beneficiaries.
In other words, repress things Bu$h is quite willing, but sex is not one of the things he is trying to repress, at least not systematically. Few people realize how Bu$h has postured against Arab republics on the gay question, calling for Liberal tolerance beyond what those kingdoms would normally consider. Saudi Arabia recently executed three men for being gay, but for some reason the United Arab Emirates broke the camel's back when it arrested 26 gay men at a hotel.(4) The Bu$h administration intervened on the side of the gay men--a little known fact. Whether this is to rally Liberal support to Bu$h's shaky regime or because the United Arab Emirates is part of some larger Washington plan, the Christian fascist base of power in the united $tates does not always rule. In fact, right after 9/11 Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson tried to blame feminists and gays for god's wrath. That also backfired and caused imperialists some difficulty internationally.
Meanwhile, the white military itself leans Republican; yet West Virginia crackers who would usually be found at church and far from any serious bookstores, these same crackers are in Abu Ghraib trying to get Iraqi prisoners to do their best imitation of a nude Bo Derek on a leash. That is not repression of sexuality. Quite the opposite, the point of leashing the Iraqi prisoners was to unleash Amerikan-style sexuality. We can even take it as Amerikans being self-satirical in their boredom. It would be funny except that they killed Third World men and raped Iraqi children during their escapades.
In reality, the alignment of born-again Christians with the Republican Party is an historical accident having to do with a two-party system and intra-imperialist division. The first proof of this is that we cannot really divide the country into a Christian part and a non-Christian part. The Northern white also considers him or herself Christian. It would be hard to trace any difference between Methodist, Presbyterian and other Protestant religions of the North and born-again Baptist religion in the South and Bible Belt. Even harder would it be to trace any political event occurring now as rooted in a difference between northern Christianity and southern Christianity taken as the ideas alone.
What there are, as there was when Catholicism suffered from the attack of the Protestants is different localities with different interests which may express themselves in the finest distinctions in religion. Most notably, different regions have different interests regarding energy policy and related things like public transport. Politicians grab whatever approximate political vehicle they can to get themselves elected and serve their corporate donors which sometimes have regional interests.
The practical difference between seeing Monicagate as pornography instead of a Christian power grab is that MIM's opponents believe Monicagate would have been OK if it benefitted liberal Democrats and not the right-wing of the Republican Party. In other words, the critics see nothing wrong with airing the stained dress in public: it's just that they think a different faction should have aired a different dress.
In a feminist dictatorship, there would be a unity that would allow suppression of pornography completely. One reason that the repression of pornography is an unpopular idea is that right now it would end up benefitting one power-holding faction over another. The public even occasionally perceives the systematic nature of pornography as in the Lewinsky debacle, but only MIM as a party is offering a way out, so the road out is not perceived for the taking.
Currently, the factions of imperialism produce a pluralism that gives rise to pornography, even at the unintentional expense of some politicians' careers. For MIM, pornography is tied into social division that necessarily takes a competitive sexual form eroticizing power.
What is confusing many is that since the rock music industry and Hollywood generally take the Democrats' side of this conflict, many assume that there is no winning the sex war by Republicans and hence the Republicans seek repression. This is incorrect, because there is more than one way to compete for sexual access to other people. Becoming the keepers of the standards of glamorous looks is only one means of competition. When Dan Quayle says that single mothers are a sin against God, he is also taking up a sexually competitive posture, one that worked in the 1988 elections to help George Bush Sr. win the election.
In a society where political factions were not wooing the other side for sexual lifestyle votes, pornography would decrease. That's another way of saying that pornography eroticizes power by creating good sex and bad sex--a basis for faction. There is no solution to pornography within imperialism, because there is no way to eliminate profits from the entertainment industry and pandering for votes in the politician business. As long as there is a possible gain from talking about good sex and bad sex, there will be entertainers and politicians taking advantage. To crush pornography requires a monolithic political will--a friendly unity that is difficult to envision right now.
The elimination of the two party system and the profit-run economy will take most of the wind out of the sails of pornography. Without sickly competitive pluralism, pornography cannot flourish. If there were not imperialist factions, the imperialists would not have bothered with Monica Lewinsky. Ultimately, we cannot expect pornography to disappear in class society. The best we can do is restrict pornography under the joint dictatorship of the proletariat of the oppressed nations, while we work on eliminating the underlying causes of political faction formation in the formation of classes. When money, state power and the various forms of power coming to bear on sex are gone, pornography may also be gone. If not we will have to keep refining our theory of the patriarchy and gender aristocracy until we get it right.
If we review the newspapers of MIM and our competitors, we will see that both are consistent. Our critics favored the Clarence Thomas hearings spectacle because the spectacle attacked a right-wing Republican. We saw it as unprecedented racist pornography. In Monicagate and the Clarence Thomas hearings, we at MIM--by no high-priority emphasis of our own--ended up standing with the majority of public opinion. Again, we at MIM believe we ended up on the same side as the final swing of public opinion, because the white nation realized its own lying adulterous nature in the Clinton scandal and the Black nation realized in the Clarence Thomas hearings that pornographic politics do not benefit it, because of how whites manipulate pornographic politics.(5)
Here MIM diverges from some post-modernists who might agree with us that the media and political circus have become pornography. For some post-modernists, all the pornography is a good thing to stabilize the system. From MIM's perspective, pornography comes with some positive unintended benefits to the revolution, but there is also the possibility that a decline in the civic level of a pornography and drugs addicted society allows fascists to take over. As the pillars of a bourgeois Liberalism weaken with people abandoning concern for politics in favor of pornography, we can see the old bourgeois norms fail to hold and a step backward into fascism occur. An example along these lines would be how few people realize that the president is supposed to get a search warrant from a judge to eavesdrop on Amerikans. In a contented population entertained into political oblivion, the hard-core partisan activists and fascists play a larger role than they would if politics had more even participation in the united $tates.
Notes:
1. "Christian fascist power grab"--in reference to the same forces
involved in Monicagate going strong in 2005
http://cultureauthors.blogspot.com/2005_05_01_cultureauthors_archive.html
The same authors opposing the MIM line hold that the anti-Christian side is the proletarian pole, thus linking Monicagate to the imperialists.
"Starr has used his report, however, to promote the hypocritical puritanism of the right wing and to try to virtually criminalize sexuality." Workers World Party, http://www.workers.org/ww/1998/clinton0924.php September 24, 1998
"The drive to remove Bill Clinton from the presidency for his consensual sexual affair with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky poses a threat to every one of us. At issue is one of the most fundamental democratic rights, the right to privacy—which in practice comes down to the right to a private sex life without meddling or snooping by state and church authorities. The politicians and media are going after Clinton for about the only thing he’s done that isn’t a crime from the standpoint of the working class." --Spartacist League, hard- core Trotskyists
2. http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/bookstore/books/usa/buzzsaw.html
3. "Consensual sex with a White House intern is an abuse of power by the president; but consensual sex is not illegal harassment and it is not an impeachable offense. Nor is it in the best interest of our country for the president to resign.
"Whatever Congress decides to do, in all fairness the only ones who should vote on this issue are members who themselves have never had sex outside of marriage and never lied about their sex lives -- either denying or exaggerating!" (National Organization of Women, reflecting the correct sense of the white nation of itself that adultery is too common to attack.)
http://www.now.org/nnt/03-98/power.html
4. http://www.gay.com/news/election/article.html?2005/12/21/5
5. According to National Public Radio, 71% of Blacks rallied to Clarence Thomas at the last minute of the 1991 hearings considering him for the Supreme Court. See MIM Theory #2/3 for detailed discussion.