When I started to write this blog about the sex vs. gender debate, I was going to write a nice, intellectual piece, fully referenced, stating my position. But as I sat down to write it, I realized there is no clear-cut solution and presumably, most of the discussion has been decided in favor of the gender ideology, ranging from post-modern feminists in the academy, to the queer community, to the communist left.

In a recent antiwar speech in Washington, D.C., Angela Davis, while giving a laundry list of oppressions, mentioned both gender and LGBT, but failed to mention the word “women.” Sonia Sanchez, in the same event, left out categories having to deal with women’s liberation altogether (although in her poetry she did make the pronoun gender neutral).

At the same time, mainstream feminists (what is generally referred to as the white middle class women’s movement) seem content to deal with reproductive issues such as abortion and contraception, rape and wife battering in a piecemeal fashion, with little overriding ideology or causal framework. (One positive note: there is a new coalition of young women, WORD [Women Organized to Resist and Defend] which seems to be trying to fuse the concepts of sex and gender back together – along with race, class and imperialism. I look forward to seeing what their analysis will be since so far they seem to be mainly an activist group).

So what, if anything, do I have to contribute to this discussion? As a second wave socialist/ lesbian/ feminist born to a first wave socialist feminist, I have worked on projects with third wave feminists and raised a son who is active in the gay-rights movement. I believe that my long history in these communities might give me a perspective worth sharing. I also hope younger third wave feminists will not write me off as one of those smug old second wave feminists who thinks she knows everything.

By the rambling nature of this blog, you can probably tell that I am writing in a stream of consciousness “consciousness raising” style, true to my second wave “the personal is political” roots; although I believe this form is also regaining popularity among third wave feminists.

To begin. I came into feminism out of a Left Trotskyist organization about the same time I left my marriage of several years, right into the arms of the feminist movement. Most of the women, it is true, were middle class and white and, as a working class woman, I wasn’t sure I would fit in. I remember the first time I entered the women’s bookstore and one of the women commented on my “bourgie” $26 dollar JC Penney’s pantsuit. I was working as a secretary in the college where I was putting my husband through school. I was required to wear the pants suit to work (along with pantyhose) even though the professors I worked for could wear jeans. It took me awhile to realize that most of the women in the bookstore wore jeans that cost four times what my pantsuit cost.

I relate this story because this was my first exposure to identity politics and downward mobility and the tendency of the community to identify one’s class position by external secondary characteristics, not our actual class position. This foreshadowed a similar tendency in terms of defining the issues of oppression in terms of our sexuality. Nevertheless I stayed because those women still had something I wanted and wasn’t getting in the male-identified Left.

One of the biggest issues we discussed in those first few heady months in the bookstore was what we called “sex role channeling.” Although it was a middle class group of women, most of them came out of the “New” Left and considered themselves some sort of Marxist or Anarchist. They believed that women’s oppression was partly biological due to our reproductive capacity; but that biology did not have to be destiny since there was no reason society could not be economically and socially structure society to eliminate the disadvantages of reproduction, especially with new technologies.

However, they also believed women’s initial childbearing function had led to a society in which all labor was divided by sex (the “sexual division of labor”) which led to a society in which men had control over women. To reinforce their control, men developed a social ideology, patriarchy, in which women were viewed as innately more passive (they were like cattle, or chattel, and could be owned and traded) and men were the aggressors and protectors (and owners).

Because this sexual division of labor began with the first societies, long before capitalism was introduced, most feminists believed this inequality needed to be overcome before one could have a true class revolution.

These ideas were shared to some degree by all the major feminist writers of the time, whatever their other differences, including Simone DeBouvoir (The Second Sex), Kate Millet (Sexual Politics), Shulamith Firestone (Dialectics of Sex), and Robin Morgan (Sisterhood is Powerful). These writers had two things in common:

1. they all believed that patriarchal oppression of women existed before capitalism and had to be addressed before a class revolution against capitalism could be achieved; and
2. that “the personal is political,” that we should trust our personal experiences as much as any abstract theoretical tracks when analyzing our oppression (especially since women’s prehistory had been written out of history – including the Marxist texts – and women had not been allowed, in many cases, to read or write books or theorize anyway).

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The only problem with the “personal is political” approach was that it often theorized that we could transform relations between men and women immediately, by the way we led our personal lives (by whether we wore jeans or skirts).

And we immediately set out to do this.

We stopped using pink and blue to identify babies by sex. Mothers got their daughters trucks as well as dolls, and kitchen sets for their sons along with transformer action figures. Girls were entered into soccer leagues and boys went to movement classes. For adults, we were encouraged to enter any profession. We refused to be slaves to traditional work such as cooking (our potlucks were frequently pretty abysmal since everyone brought chips and dips) and we protested against the traditions of patriarchal marriage and sexual monogamy (some women remember those days with great joy—me–while other women felt that the proliferation of sexual partners made them feel abused and used). While not many women (and not all men)were physically big enough to be firefighters, some were and they broke the sex segregated job barrier. The situation is even clearer when we looked at fields such as the doctor/nurse divide.

In terms of how we presented ourselves, we tried to blur or eliminate sex role signifiers. Interestingly, there were two major approaches to how this was done. Some of us went for the neutral, androgynous look. We took off our makeup and heels, we cut our hair into a short, but not too masculine, style (pixie’s were in). We wore neutral colors and sensible shoes. Since I came out of the Beat movement, I was very comfortable in black turtle necks and jeans and sandals. Interestingly, the second approach which was more visible in the gay community was to transgress stereotypical sex role classifications. At that time, the gay community mirrored the straight heterosexual community to some degree by adopting one or the other of the traditional masculine or feminine sex roles. So they were already more used to transgressing biological barriers. So in an effort to blur sexual identities, some of the women in our community began adopting traits of both sexes (i.e., a woman would not only stop shaving her legs and underarms, but let her beard grow even if she still wore feminine blouses. A man would start wearing makeup and earrings or, if he were really brave, a cheerleader skirt with combat boots.

Two other points about sex role stereotypes. Kate Millet detailed in her book how the stereotypes changed with the times and that the higher up the class ladder you went, the more distinct were the sex roles. With the advent of capitalism, women had long been divided into women of the working class and women of the bourgeoisie. By the time we reached the Victorian Age in the midst of the industrial revolution, the middle and upper class women were secluded in the home under the rationale that they were too delicate and weak to endure the rigors of the outside world. Yet as Millet shows in her book, mine owners in Colorado during that same period were more than willing to use working class women stripped naked to the waist on their hands and knees to haul coal-carts out of the mines because women were smaller and could fit into the mine tunnels (one of my favorite examples). We see the same stereotypes between the Southern Belle and female field slave before the Civil War. So the middle and upper class female sex role stereotype shifted from a passive cow (or chattel or property) to a “feminine” stereotype that was not only passive but frail and childlike, unable to do much of anything.

The second point I wish to make about sex role stereotypes is very different. In our desire to get rid of all non-biological, socially imposed restrictions, we took the blurring of sex lines to their obvious and ultimate conclusion – the bedroom. We decided that there was no logical reason for not having sex with our own sex. After all, not all sex was for reproduction. People had been having sex strictly for pleasure for centuries, so why not? Besides who would know better what gives a woman pleasure than another woman? So a whole lot of new lesbian feminists were born. Some remained lesbians for life, others resumed relationships with men after the heyday of the Amazon sisterhood was over. (Bisexuality was not an option in those days as the gay community was as “straight” as the heterosexual community and frowned [officially] on those who stepped outside the box of the binary sex roles. Bisexuality was considered nonexistent or perverted.)

The main difficulty with breaking down sex role barriers by sleeping with women was that a number of women in the lesbian feminist community saw this as the solution to the problem of sexism. They had found their answer by stepping outside of the exploitative relationships of men and women in the home. And they could still seem like good radicals because this was as big a step as one could take, individually, outside of the mainstream. Unfortunately, it meant they did not feel they had to fight the bigger war for all women; they settled for a personal solution and a little reform work.

This is not to say that separating oneself from male energy for a time in one’s life was not fruitful. Through this process many women lost their emotional dependence on men (and some learned that just changing the sex of their partners might not be enough to make an egalitarian relationship).

So we broke barriers and we did make a lot of changes. Women started wearing pants and took off their high heels, they came out of the home and into the workplace and into previously all male professions. Unfortunately, most of the unpaid work the home remained in the hands of women. They did a study sometime in the late 1970s or early 80s that showed that the actual amount of time the new “Mr. Mommy” spent with his children was 3 hours a week – and that was usually the “fun” time — to take them to play in the park while Mom cleaned the house instead of doing the tough work of cleaning or homework discipline. The situation may have improved but it is still pretty unequal.

I think our failure to fully deal with this very basic issue of who in responsible for the raising and caring of children (and disabled and elderly) also goes to the very basic issue of:

1) would the capitalist society let us change that dynamic when they had such a good deal by not having all that unpaid labor cut into their profit (the jury is still out on whether they actually can make new profit off of work in the home); and

2) “the personal is political” approach can only see it’s own personal perspective and interests. Since most of the movement was middle class (whether radical feminists Marxists in college or the Betty Friedan educated stay-at-home frustrated upper middle class housewife), neither group had to deal with this question immediately as it was not part of their material reality.

Young women in college were not planning to have children anytime soon and could avoid the issue by using contraceptives and, if those failed, could get an abortion, if they could make it legal. By the time they did consider having children, they would have a husband or a great career and could hire an au pair (like their Betty Friedan counterparts), usually an immigrant woman and/or a woman of color. In recent years, however, we have seen that this apparently doesn’t solve all of the problem as many working professional mothers are now talking about the “mommy track.” At the time, while we talked revolution, many women didn’t seem to be as determined, in fact, to fight for a broader social solution as they felt they still had individual options. Now many of them are beginning to realize this may not be the case.

Although the second wave clearly recognized the distinction between biological issues and socially defined or cultural differences and was determined to break them down, the real separation between sex and gender did not begin until the third wave of feminism in the 1980s. Although the word gender had certainly existed before the 1980s and the idea of the difference between biological differences and historical and culturally determined sex roles (gender roles) had certainly been a major concept in the second wave of feminism, it was the postmodern women’s studies professors in academia who finally made the split and prioritized gender over sex as the “locus for struggle.”

According to this body of feminist work, since sex role differences are about gender, not sex, it is gender issues that caused the beginning of the male hierarchy and oppression of women and it is gender that should be the focus of the struggle. This certainly makes sense in many ways. Just as race and class are not biologically determined, if women’s oppression is not biologically determined, we too should view the oppression against women as culturally determined and focus on that.

There is only one problem with that: unlike the race and class paradigm, there still is a real biological difference in that biological women still produce the babies for the next generation and, while we may soon have totally technologically produced test tube babies, we are not there yet.

Every civilization in the world has spent thousands of years institutionalizing the breeding process, usually at the expense of women. This does not mean that deconstructing gender differences is not critical to ending gender and sex oppression, but to do so at the expense of dealing with the underlying biological and material economic realities of most women’s everyday lives is somewhat delusional. It’s kind of like the JC Penney pantsuit and Levis all over again, only worse.

The real mind-bender occurred, however, when the issues of the gay community were conflated with the lesbian feminist model of ending sexism or gender oppression. The gay community, prior to the second wave of feminism, had always been pretty much defined by the male gay community. The main issues for gay men were the freedom to express their sexuality in an open and honest way wherever it took them —by appropriating women’s gender roles or exploring the relationship between sex and pain (S/M) or the acceptance of dominance and submission as natural parts of human sexuality. Lesbian feminism, on the other hand, had a vested interest in breaking down power imbalances between people, especially categories such as dominance and submission.

It is hard to say how much each of these paradigms was, itself, created by the very sex role channeling to which we have been subjected. Women have traditionally been encouraged to repress sexual desire whereas men have been encouraged to be aggressive and adventurous. So, are some women appalled by S/M and the culture of dominance and submission (which is considered natural in the gay male community) because they are repressed and reticent to things accept these as a natural part of animal sexuality, or even if it is, do they want to try to “educate” humans out of this aspect of animal behavior (much as we try to end war and aggression) in the name of equality after centuries of being the dominated sex. Or are these desires of dominance and submission also socially constructed so that men can win wars and “protect” (appropriate)the breeders (women)? These are real questions.

There are still women who argue that rape is “natural” and women should enjoy it – and we certainly have our share of “enjoyable” rape mythology from the times of the story of The Rape of the Sabine Women to historical romances where the pirate comes and “takes” the lady, freeing her from all responsibility for choosing to have sex in a most unladylike unfeminine manner (this is especially the fantasy of the middle class women where sexuality was repressed). Any woman who has actually been raped or read Fear of Flying gets the difference between fantasizing about rape and the real thing. What I am trying to get at is that many of the realities of male ideas of sexual freedom may also have been “constructions” of gender bias over the years and not natural at all. But the gay community (as well as some heterosexuals) has put the issue of natural biological influences on our lives back on the table.

Here I’m going to admit to a personal bias based on my own experience when people say that they were “born” gay or as a woman or that the desire for pain and dominance or submission in a relationship is biologically determined. As a bisexual (yes, a real one) who has wandered all over the map and changed back and forth many times for meaningful relationships, my experience is that things are not definitely fixed or immutable. I kind of go with Kinsey who said we are all gender neutral until around two years old when we begin to develop a preference. That being said, I believe that any man or woman who wants to assume a different gender identity from that they were born with to be all they want to be has my respect since they are breaking the social codes of patriarchy. As long as they are not implying that women have to be passive and submissive because they are born that way.

Meanwhile, all the emphasis on totally environmentally constructed realities which make real biological and economic day-to-day realities – such as trying to figure out if you can afford the hospital price in the maternity ward or that of an abortion or how to get up two hours earlier to take two buses to take your kid to a very expensive daycare so you can get to your low paying job on time – seems slightly unreal, especially when someone turns around and claims innate biological urges such as the urge to dominate as legitimate. Of course there are still other issues, but I think that’s plenty for now.

Ciao,
Your lesbian feminist socialist sister.

P.S. All the books I mentioned are worth reading and not only from a historical perspective but I want to add two other books to the list. One is brand new, Dangerous Liaisons: The Marriages and Divorces of Marxism and Feminism by Cinzia Arruzza; and Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State by Frederich Engels (even if it has some non-verifiable historical and analytical assumptions, it is still the best work analyzing women’s exploitation in the nuclear family under capitalism).

It has been said many times that “sustainable capitalism” is an oxymoron. There are reasons why people believe this. The nature of capitalism has the need for growth built in. If there were any really strong contradictions in Tuesdays SOTU speech they rest right here. The call for economic growth and some sort of action toward addressing the climate change problem are really at odds with each other in their present context. Here is one example of the claim that capitalism is not in harmony with sustainability: Is Sustainable Capitalism an Oxymoron?

The root problem with capitalism is not that individual firms are incentivized to grow, but that the economy as a whole must grow…

When oligopolies are the form of economic structure the need for regulation and the effect of regulation on growth is even more important.On the Need for Regulation of Oligopoly and Oligopsony

This is the important point. Unregulated oligopy, with its extra normal profits, when it becomes extensive, arrests the growth of the entire economy. Indeed, the situation is actually worse, because by continuing to purge the rest of the economy of its normal income, it can cause the rest of the economy’s revenue to be less than its expenses. Thus, the remainder of the economy, the oligopist’s market, may actually be forced into contraction. But this is bad for the oligopist as well.

This is a familiar theme and would be resented by those who detest regulation. Maybe if their wishes are not followed the result is more favorable for growth, but what will that growth do to sustainability?
The nature of oligopolies

Firms often collude in an attempt to stabilize unstable markets, so as to reduce the risks inherent in these markets for investment and product development. There are legal restrictions on such collusion in most countries. There does not have to be a formal agreement for collusion to take place (although for the act to be illegal there must be actual communication between companies)–for example, in some industries there may be an acknowledged market leader which informally sets prices to which other producers respond, known as price leadership.
In other situations, competition between sellers in an oligopoly can be fierce, with relatively low prices and high production. This could lead to an efficient outcome approaching perfect competition. The competition in an oligopoly can be greater when there are more firms in an industry than if, for example, the firms were only regionally based and did not compete directly with each other.

The way these things are discussed in economic theory would lead you to believe that these are just another form of business groupings. Yet is seems clear that they are a natural way for a capitalist system to develop. Read on below and I will try to make this clear.

Here are some of the attributes of oligopolies:

Profit maximization conditions: An oligopoly maximizes profits by producing where marginal revenue equals marginal costs.

Ability to set price: Oligopolies are price setters rather than price takers.

Entry and exit: Barriers to entry are high. The most important barriers are economies of scale, patents, access to expensive and complex technology, and strategic actions by incumbent firms designed to discourage or destroy nascent firms. Additional sources of barriers to entry often result from government regulation favoring existing firms making it difficult for new firms to enter the market.

Number of firms: “Few” – a “handful” of sellers. There are so few firms that the actions of one firm can influence the actions of the other firms.
Long run profits: Oligopolies can retain long run abnormal profits. High barriers of entry prevent sideline firms from entering market to capture excess profits.
Product differentiation: Product may be homogeneous (steel) or differentiated (automobiles).

Perfect knowledge: Assumptions about perfect knowledge vary but the knowledge of various economic factors can be generally described as selective. Oligopolies have perfect knowledge of their own cost and demand functions but their inter-firm information may be incomplete. Buyers have only imperfect knowledge as to price, cost and product quality.

Interdependence: The distinctive feature of an oligopoly is interdependence. Oligopolies are typically composed of a few large firms. Each firm is so large that its actions affect market conditions. Therefore the competing firms will be aware of a firm’s market actions and will respond appropriately. This means that in contemplating a market action, a firm must take into consideration the possible reactions of all competing firms and the firm’s counter-moves. It is very much like a game of chess or pool in which a player must anticipate a whole sequence of moves and counter-moves in determining how to achieve his or her objectives. For example, an oligopoly considering a price reduction may wish to estimate the likelihood that competing firms would also lower their prices and possibly trigger a ruinous price war. Or if the firm is considering a price increase, it may want to know whether other firms will also increase prices or hold existing prices constant. This high degree of interdependence and need to be aware of what other firms are doing or might do is to be contrasted with lack of interdependence in other market structures. In a perfectly competitive (PC) market there is zero interdependence because no firm is large enough to affect market price. All firms in a PC market are price takers, as current market selling price can be followed predictably to maximize short-term profits. In a monopoly, there are no competitors to be concerned about. In a monopolistically-competitive market, each firm’s effects on market conditions is so negligible as to be safely ignored by competitors.

Non-Price Competition: Oligopolies tend to compete on terms other than price. Loyalty schemes, advertisement, and product differentiation are all examples of non-price competition.

Here are some examples in our economy:

Many media industries today are essentially oligopolies.
Six movie studios receive 90% of American film revenues.[citation needed]
The television and high speed internet industry is mostly an oligopoly of seven companies: The Walt Disney Company, CBS Corporation, Viacom, Comcast, Hearst Corporation, Time Warner, and News Corporation. See Concentration of media ownership.
Four wireless providers (AT&T Mobility, Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile, Sprint Nextel) control 89% of the cellular telephone service market. This is not to be confused with cellular telephone manufacturing, an integral portion of the cellular telephone market as a whole.
Healthcare insurance in the United States consists of very few insurance companies controlling major market share in most states. For example, California’s insured population of 20 million is the most competitive in the nation and 44% of that market is dominated by two insurance companies, Anthem and Kaiser Permanente.
Anheuser-Busch and MillerCoors control about 80% of the beer industry.

In March 2012, the United States Department of Justice announced that it would sue six major publishers for price fixing in the sale of electronic books. The accused publishers are Apple, Simon & Schuster Inc, Hachette Book Group, Penguin Group, Macmillan, and HarperCollins Publishers.

In today’s global economy there are far more:The world’s seed oligopoly

PLAYERS: A fistful of transnational firms, the Gene Giants, dominates global seed sales. Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta – all among the world’s top-ranking pesticide firms – lead the pack.

The fossil fuel oligopoly has its special qualities:Capitalism = Corporatism = Oligopoly = Rentier Stagnation

I contend that corporations have always been the main instrument of this drive toward oligopoly, and they have been the only significant modern form of it. It would have been difficult if not impossible for Oil Age economic actors to achieve oligopoly if not for the way the corporate form tilted the playing field and rigged the markets. Cheap, plentiful oil in itself would have been a radically democratizing force. (Who knows? Perhaps textbook “free markets” could even have thrived.) Only a severe artificial restriction on economic freedom could ever have enabled oligopolies to cohere. This artifice was the corporation.

Similarly, modern technology, whatever its other issues, would have been a tremendously liberating egalitarian force if not artificially enclosed and controlled. The corporate form was the main mode of this enclosure.

In all ways legally and politically possible, corporations have monopolized the vast bounty and freedom which fossil fuels and the modern human mind held in potential. Privatization of public commons like the resources of the earth, including fossil fuels, is at one, physical extreme. The radical extension of the IP regime to the point that it constitutes a new enclosure of a potentially infinite public commons is at the other extreme of intellect and spirit. In both cases, and all in between, there’s been little of private individual involvement. In every case I can think of, the corporate form is preferred. Certainly if the genius of capitalism could conceive of a non-corporatized way to compete, someone would be doing it.

Not only is the corporation the most efficient wealth-extracting machine. By design it’s forbidden to do anything but all it can to maximize its extractions. According to the responsibility of management to shareholders, a corporation is required to subvert the rules of capitalist competition. If the more effective expenditure for short-term gain in lobbying for anti-competitive legislation or regulatory treatment, that must be chosen over longer-term research investment. Same for the mergers and acquisitions and offshoring which we know are so destructive and serve no purpose even from the “capitalist” point of view, but which can accomplish a short-term goosing of the stock price.

It’s clear that in reality capitalism always seeks oligopoly; that corporatism is the only viable form of oligopoly under the conditions of the Oil Age and now energy descent; and therefore that capitalism is synonymous with corporatism.

Economic theory is one thing. Actual practice is another. We are witnessing what is being said above in many ways right now. The corporations with successful oligopolies are quite content with what we have. They will only welcome changes (growth) that increases their profit. They will distribute propaganda that projects various myths about the role of government to protect themselves. These groupings of corporations are one reason for limits on growth that are systemic. Changing this is a goal that can only lead to a better situation if the changes are done in an intelligent manner with planning and ongoing monitoring to change course when the outcome conflicts with desired goals. As we make fun of republican obstruction it may pay to ask ourselves if they are really as dumb as we paint them. Clearly profits are high and their world is grinding along very securely. Meanwhile speeches from the Whitehouse seem to speak to a fictitious world.

The economy we have is locked into well established patterns of resource depletion, needless consumption, and deadly waste production. Clearly we do not want that economy to grow. We do not need growth we need change. We need to build a sustainable system and to create jobs for both the unemployed and those who now work in places that are doing us harm. If people are to live a decent life they need to earn wages to make that possible. Excess profits and needless consumption can be eliminated to make this happen. Manufacturing those things we need to last and in a form that is repairable is imperative. Growing food in sane ways locally whenever possible is also a part of such a transformation. Such measures would include green energy sources and life styles that cut back on energy and other resource consumption.

No, it is not possible to ask a sitting president to start such a revolution. Yet if you understand what is really needed the kind of theater we are given in our political world is not even close to satisfying. We need better weathermen to tell the people which way the wind is blowing. And we need them soon.

“Some years ago, reporting the trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem, I spoke of ‘the Banality of evil’ and meant with this … the phenomenon of evil deeds, committed on a gigantic scale, which could not be traced to any particularity of wickedness, pathology or ideological conviction in the doer, whose only personal distinction was a perhaps extraordinary shallowness…., and the only specific characteristic one could detect on his part as well as in his behavior … was not stupidity but a curious, quite authentic inability to think.”

–Hannah Arendt

Whether political theorist Hannah Arendt was correct in her assessment of Adolf Eichmann–and I am inclined to believe she was duped by his testimony in Jerusalem and hence overstated the extent to which he was an example of the banality of evil–she was onto something important with the concept. For while the idea of the banality of evil may have become at times a cliche and, far worse, a facile evasion of moral responsibility, it nonetheless provides a way to understand how Late Capitalism’s Imperialism creates conditions that necessitate self-alienation on the part of the individual as well the social formation as a whole.

Torture doesn’t matter anymore, at least not to the Barack Obama administration. Four years ago, John Brennan, a 25-year veteran of the CIA, was forced to withdraw his name from consideration to be CIA Director (DCI) because of his public support of–and likely participation in–the Bush administration’s programs of torturing terrorism suspects and/or sending them to foreign prisons to be tortured. Apparently wishing to maintain his anti-torture credentials at the time, Obama appointed Brennan to a White House job that did not require Senate confirmation.

Four years later, his human rights record irretrievably tarnished by the illegal drone assassination program, Obama nominated Brennan–who has been running Obama’s drone assassination program from the White House–to be the next DCI. If confirmed, he would succeed Gen. David Petraeus, who resigned following revelations of an extra-marital affair in November 2009.

So, according to Obama, it’s okay to kidnap and torture and kill terrorism suspects without even a hint of “due process of law,” but if you put your dick in the wrong person, you’re unfit to run the CIA.

Obama is, sadly, right: Under the Imperialism of Late Capitalism, only a moral degenerate like John Brennan is fit to run an utterly amoral outfit like the CIA.

By “the Imperialism of Late Capitalism” we mean the forcible opening up of all spatial, ecological and cultural boundaries of peoples and nations to the global flow of capital and goods and services, according to the needs of capital and of Late Capitalism, which itself is wracked by ever-worsening crises that fuel the need for ever-more globalization.

But unlike Barack Obama, whose tolerance for torture and other human rights abuses seems of recent vintage, Brennan’s views were warped from a relatively young age. Born to Irish immigrant parents, John Brennan earned a B.A. in Political Science at Fordham University in 1977 and an M.A. in Government with a concentration in Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin in 1980.

Although Brennan officially joined the CIA in 1980—he tells reporters a story of how his “wanderlust” was piqued by a CIA recruiting ad in the New York Times—some of his activities at Fordham suggest his recruitment dates back to his school days. Bob Keane, a classmate from the 4th grade through sophomore year at Fordham, told reporters that Brennan spent the summer after freshman year in Indonesia with a cousin who was working for the Agency for International Development, and visited Bahrain on the way home. “I wondered if he had even been recruited that early,” mused Keane. In fact, Brennan spent his junior year abroad learning fluent Arabic and taking Middle Eastern studies courses at the American University in Cairo, Egypt, a well-known site for CIA recruitment and training.

At UT, Brennan wrote an M.A. Thesis, “Human Rights: The Case Study of Egypt,” in which he denied the existence of “absolute human rights,” defended censorship in Egypt and indicated an early tolerance for torture. “Since the press can play such an influential role in determining the perceptions of the masses, I am in favor of some degree of government censorship,” wrote Brennan.

Taking his relativistic view of human rights to its logical conclusion, Brennan argued that

“the fact that absolute human rights do not exist (with the probable exception of freedom from torture) makes the [human rights] analysis subject to innumerable conditional criticisms.” (emphasis added.)

Think about that for a moment: John Brennan wrote that, in his opinion, not only are human rights not absolute, freedom from torture is only a “probable exception”–meaning that at the young age of 25, the Jesuit-educated Brennan was rejecting the 200-year-old anti-torture teachings of the Jesuit-educated Cesare Beccaria, the father of modern penology and human rights, who argued that torture is always wrong. Just a few years after his probable recruitment by the CIA, Brennan’s mind was already being warped by the needs of capitalist imperialism.

Working for Bush in the 2000s, Brennan became the embodiment of the banality of evil, helping to facilitate illegal kidnappings and torture in the name of the greater good–in this case so-called “national security.” Under Obama, Brennan has become the chief Angel of Death in the White House, selecting which terror suspects are to be murdered via unmanned drone attacks in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Afghanistan, and elsewhere–and then lying about it later, as when he publicly claimed that drone attacks in Pakistan in 2010 did not cause “a single collateral death” when authorities knew better.

But the tragedy here lies with Barack Obama, who is able to make statements about the horrors of the Sandy Hook massacre while blithely raining down equivalent massacres on schoolchildren in Pakistan and Afghanistan. It is this banality of evil–Obama’s ability to commit evil acts while pretending (to himself and to the world) that he remains a basically decent human being who loves his wife and daughters–that is one of the most corrosive aspects of Late Capitalist Imperialism.

Just as capitalist production alienates the worker, not only from the means of production and the product of his labor, but from his true species-essence as a human being, so too the reproduction of the Late Capitalist system requires acts of moral evil that alienate, not only the doers of these deeds but the entire social formation, from their human essence as creative and moral actors. Because such a reality would be intolerable if faced with honesty, the banality of evil represents a form of social-psychological ideology of denial that perpetuates Late Capitalism and the suffering attendant upon it.

This diary is a part of a series examining the nature of capitalism. I have been itching to explore not just the economics of capitalism but whether capitalism can ever be fair or just or sustainable. As this group is an anti-capitalist group, I felt the need to get beyond discussions of who owns production and distribution systems. I want to examine why anybody would even see capitalism as righteous. In the mainstream political discourse, if one dares to say that she is not supportive of capitalism, one is a heretic. So, what is this thing that we worship? What are it’s values? What makes capitalism so worthy of it’s righteous status in our culture?

I didn’t really know how to dive into the topic from this perspective. I wasn’t interested in starting the examination through an academic lens. I was thinking in terms of having a conversation with one’s next door neighbor when you’re both out weeding in the garden: is capitalism fair?

Perhaps, the exploration will broaden and deepen from here. I’d love to see that. To get things started NY Brit Expat had the wonderful idea of delving into what was niggling at me by asking questions and generating a dialog.

We share that with you today and ask that you join the discussion that we have started:

NY Brit Expat: When you say that the capitalist system itself is not fair and is not just, what do you mean by fairness and justice? What would consititute a fair and just system in your view?

To me, fairness and justice hinge on those that create things actually controlling the thing they create; so workers should get control over the product rather than capitalists. Another issue that should be discussed is how our notions of right and wrong ( ethics and morality) become conditioned by the system itself.

One more point relates to ownership and property rights that are ensured by the system and how this is then justified and no one ever questions these things.

UnaSpenser: to begin with, fairness and justice, to my mind are concepts which stand alone, regardless of an economic system. That is, if there are 10 hungry people in a room and there are 10 servings of dinner available, the fair distribution is to give each person a serving. It doesn’t matter how the meals got there, because food is a basic human need. If someone says, “but I worked harder” or “but I’m worth more” or “but my people contribute more”, then they are moving away from fairness. they are willing to deny someone else the foundation of survival when there is enough there to meet every person in the room’s needs. If someone needs more for a health reason, then, yes, the group may need to figure out how to redistribute to meet that additional survival need. But, “I think I should get more because” is simply selfish and runs off the track of fairness.

fairness is when everyone has the ability to meet their basic needs without being obligated to, or compromised by, others. if someone says, “I can see that you need this meal, but I’ll only give it to you if you agree to pay me later” or “i’ll only give it you if you let me have sex with you”, this is not fair. it is extortion, because the person must eat and cannot survive without meeting your demands. your willingness to make someone suffer or give up autonomy before they can meet the basic needs of life is cruel. fairness is a commitment to doing no harm to others and not impeding anyone else’s ability to thrive autonomously. (one can be interconnected and still be autonomous.)

justice, to my mind, is a state of being where healing and the ability for everyone to function in society, have been restored, to the greatest extent we are able, after a transgression has occurred. the healing can’t be to the fullest extent possible if anyone involved, even the perpetrator, has not received everything we can offer to regain the ability to function in society with fairness. so, justice would focus on returning all relationships to as balanced a state as possible. if things have become imbalanced, justice would demand working toward balance. also, justice is not born from fear. it is born from compassion. transgressions are born from fear. most often, when we make decisions based in fear, we further dysfunction and injustice. our response to a transgression then, must come from compassion for all. compassion which is not extended to everyone is not compassion. it includes treating some as though they are less than sentient than others. if you are treating anyone that you, you have corrupted your compassion and turned it into a tool for your fear.

back in that room: someone steals an extra meal and eats it. justice would demand that we understand why this person committed that transgression. that we work to resolve the issues that led to it so that the transgressor can function without harming or depriving anyone else. at the same time, we would need to figure out how to make sure that anyone who was deprived of a meal gets the needed meal. justice would demand that the one deprived and the transgressor work with everyone else on both the restoration of the transgressor’s ability to be part of society and the restoration of the deprived meal. only this will heal the social relationships. functioning relationships rely on trust. trust is the framework. everybody must work to find out why and address all the spots of corrosion in the framework. for the transgressor to steal a meal, there must have been a fear, a lack of trust which led that person to not care how it impacted others and only think of herself. then, the transgression itself bred more distrust. the framework will start to crumble, as it can only take so many weak spots and still bear the weight of social responsibility. it is the responsibility of everyone to to repair the corroded spots in the society’s framework.

everyone deserves to eat. When it comes meal time, depriving people of a serving, particularly if that person is aware that that everyone else will getting 10% more than needed by depriving her, is cruel and causes harm. if what someone needs is 1 serving, or 10% of the food, and they demand 11%, they are being unfair. if others agree to meet that demand, an injustice is committed by everyone. it isn’t just that someone demanded. even if that person is a bully or holds some kind of power. everyone who acquiesces to an abuse of power is complicit in the injustice.

in capitalism, the foundation of the economic system is this concept of profit. profit means demanding that you receive resources of a greater value than what you contribute. (its gets even more complicated when you start to consider labor structures and that people are demanding to receive resources for someone else’s labor. but, I don’t want to get into that, yet. that’s a symptom of an underlying moral/ethical issue with the basic precept of capitalism.) at the very core of capitalism is this axiom that all we do should produce a profit for us.

there are several problems with this axiom. first, there is a logical concern: it must include the precept that everyone could earn a profit. Otherwise, one would be saying that it’s okay for some people to lose. But, to lose in an economic system means to lose the ability to provide for the basics needs of life. back in that room again: if the person who happens to carry the meals into the room demands so much from me for my meal , that I no longer have the resources to get my critical medications, then I will die. but, this is not a consideration in the capitalist construct. transactions don’t have to take into account the ripple effects. they are only accounted for as independent transactions. the only time this is not true is when enough people gather enough power to demand that some effects be taken into account. in capitalism, power is measured by control of resources. so, those with control over more resources most often hold all the power when it comes to what will be accounted for. in capitalism, if you happen to be the one holding the tray with the meals, you automatically get more power. it doesn’t matter how you landed in that position. It is the rare victory when the “little people” win a dispute over such a thing as the collateral effects of a transaction. this idea that “the market” will correct injustices has already proven itself to be wrong. those with the most resources control “the market.” injustices abound. corporations can be deemed too big to fail. or too big to prosecute. that is because justice is not an ethic in the capitalist system. only winning the game of garnering control over resources.

for capitalism to be considered fair, it must assume that there are enough resources and enough equal access that everyone can pursue an unbounded accumulation for themselves without doing harm to others. yet, what we need for survival are resources from the planet: food, water, medicines, shelter, etc. No matter how large the Earth may feel, it is a limited resource. Access to the limited resources it offers is also limited. If that were not so, people would not be hungry or die from illnesses which can be treated. capitalism might pretend to be blind to this illogic, but that does not change the fact that is based on pursuing an unfair and unjust agenda.

When we see that food is accumulated in some places and lacking in others, we will also see that it is accumulated by those who have won at the profit game and lacking for those who haven’t. Who wins at the profit game? Those more able and willing to have no concern for the well being of others and to continue to demand more resources be given to them than they are contributing. They see people who are hungry, who don’t have warm clothes for the winter, who don’t have homes, who don’t have access to medical care and, still, they demand more for themselves. They start to have a skewed sense of what they are “due” or “need.” They could walk into that room and feel completely comfortable demanding that 90% of the food be given to them, regardless of how that deprives everyone else. What is the characteristic of a person who behaves this way? Someone who has no concern for the well-being of others? A sociopath. What is the methodology they must use to get people to give them more than their fair share? Bullying. Capitalism is sociopathic in nature and to be a leading capitalist, one must be a bully.

We see a disproportionate distribution of food in the United States. While people are starving, the capitalist system will report “good numbers” in their economic analyses. It even has determined that a certain percentage of people unable to provide the basics of life for themselves is “tolerable.” This is because, we know, deep down, that capitalism has to have losers. We train ourselves to believe in “competition” as an admirable, desirable thing, even though we know that in competitions there are very few winners and lots and lots of losers. Losing a baseball game may not seem like something to be concerned about when it comes to fairness and justice. But, we are inuring ourselves to the pain of the losers in all arenas. We are training ourselves to accept and tolerate that life has losers. We don’t care whether that is fair or just. Capitalism is not about that. Capitalism is about turning us all into sociopaths. When you see the nature of the political discourse happening now, you see sociopathy running rampant.

this profit basis for every transaction we complete with our fellow human beings doesn’t take into consideration whether you are taking more than you need, more than what you represent as a percentage of the people in your society, or if you are depriving others of what they need. it is without any morality. the moral code is “getting more for yourself, or your own people, is good” period. it is codified into capitalist laws, that corporations must do what they can to maximize profits for their shareholders. so, when a health insurance company has shareholders, it is their legal imperative to prioritize taking in more resources than they contribute to society, regardless of what this means to the health or suffering of human beings. it is not a system where the incentive is to provide the best care and do the most to reduce suffering. the incentive is to gather in more resources than you give out.

back to our room with 10 people and 10 meals. what is fair about demanding that you get 110% of a serving when you are only 100% of a serving? but, in a capitalist system, one isn’t concerned with a fair distribution of food. one is concerned with making a profit. yes, in a room of 10 people, those people might decide to become a clan, knowing there are other rooms of people out there needing the resources of life and that together they might bully that other group better and maybe everyone in the room could make a profit. but, you can’t extend that model very far, because at some point, you have to be getting your profit by causing someone else to take a loss. so, you can’t decide to include all humans in your clan or else you wouldn’t be able to be capitalists any more. if you are concerned with the well being of everyone, you can’t prioritize profit. you have to shift to a different system of transactions and priorities. you have start operating as a collective.

so, I’ve started to discuss right and wrong. I think we could delve more into that.

I don’t think I’ll get to production control tonight.

PS: I’m adding the comment from our Facebook conversation which you suggested I put here:

if we want to honor the sanctity of life, we should never allow a person to starve, be homeless, or die from an illness which we can treat. that is we should honor the basic human right of those who are living to thrive. that includes those whom we feel have committed transgressions. every life deserves every resource we can provide to return to a state of autonomous, interconnected ability to thrive

NY Brit Expat: Fairness and justice are broader than right and wrong to me; the latter are more individual in terms of individual behaviour; fairness and justice seem more global or universal to me … Isn’t that weird; they seem to me to be more like things that I perceive or don’t on a societal level. In that it is how we as people or society should relate to each other. Right and wrong I can view in a social way, but I often view them as individual behaviourally oriented. I wonder why I think this is so? Actions can, of course, be fair and just, as can decisions. But it is to me a social relation between people in a social context that I view it. So, what makes for a just society? That all are treated equally w/o reference to gender or false conceptions such as race, or w/o reference to property ownership or power relations. Does fairness relate to everyone being covered independent of ability, but with all needs covered?

UnaSpenser: I can see that perspective: that fairness and justice are on a societal level. The examples I gave were meant to illustrate that by metaphor. the 10 people in the room represent a whole society. it becomes a state when they decide to be a clan. the transgressor could be an individual with power or a system within the society/state. the other rooms are other societies/states and the decision to work together with some of them are alliances.

I, too, see the quality of relationships as key to the definition of fairness and justice. probably something along the line of a Buddhist notion of right relationships. one key to that is that no one should have power over another. one may acquiesce leadership in a given moment or for a certain experience, but one should never give up having power over one’s self, one’s time, and one’s ability to thrive. if access to food, clothing, shelter, medical care and education are not always accessible, one is forced to give up autonomy in order to acquire those things. this means giving others power over you, because you are coerced into a subservient position simply to meet the basic needs of life. power corrupts. therefore relationships where someone has power over another become corrupted. this corrupts society.

for me, a fair society is one where all have unfettered access to what they need to thrive, without being left in obligation to, or compromised by, others. (I am purposefully saying ‘thrive’ rather than ‘survive.’ Once can survive with a lot of unnecessary suffering inflicted by others.)

A just society is one in which we address any abuses of power or systems which inhibit that fairness and we return everyone to a state of being able to thrive in society.

I’ll have to think more about right and wrong. I don’t tend to think in those terms. will you tell me more about what you mean by right and wrong, please?

NY Brit Expat: I have always viewed right and wrong in terms of a moral relationship between individuals; that is, I behave in a certain way towards another person rather than how a society itself behaves which I think relates to justness and fairness. But societies can then take the individual moral relationship and use it to describe how we must treat each other … this sometimes takes place in the context of laws and rules. But those do not guarantee fairness and justice in a society which depends upon other things to me. So, a society can guarantee that you have a right of property through the use of law and state power, but that right actually ensures injustice and unfairness in that society.

The question of right and wrong seems to be a different thing; but it does relate in a broader sense as we can have morals underpinning our society to ensure justice and fairness; but this becomes very difficult in a system based upon private property and protection of that property being enshrined in a legal system. We can say that it is right that no one should starve and that it is wrong that some people have many things and some have nothing, but implementing this without threatening the property right becomes very difficult if it is treated as a zero sum game (that is a given amount where anything given to one takes away from the other).

- Agreed. Implementing true fairness and justice when so much unfairness and injustice is already in place and has been for centuries is another question, altogether. If you start off with inequities, you can’t just start by saying fairness requires that each transaction is a zero sum game. One has to start accounting for existing imbalances. One must restore balance first. That is, we must apply justice before we can enact fairness. How do restore justice is always the question that people use to stop the conversation about whether they believe we should work towards justice. It’s often the “get out of jail free” card of social responsibility.

Before even trying to figure out how justice could be restored when there is so much inequity in place, we must at least be able to agree on what justice and fairness are and admit that we are not living it. Without these agreements, we have no starting point for any mapping of a journey towards justice. We need to speak the truth about where we are and we need to agree on where we want to go. We need to commit to that mission. Then we can begin to work together to figure out the stepping stones we must place to take the journey. We can’t leap to building stepping stones, if we aren’t all starting in the same place and seeking the same destination. So, I don’t want to get into the itinerary of the journey, yet.

From UnaSpenser and NY Brit Expat: this is the beginning of a conversation. We invite you to think of it as the two people at one end of a table having started a discussion. As we get to talking more and more of you, sitting at the grand table with us are tuning in and listening. Then, you begin to offer your own thoughts and questions……

This diary is a part of a series examining the nature of capitalism. I have been itching to explore not just the economics of capitalism but whether capitalism can ever be fair or just or sustainable. As this group is an anti-capitalist group, I felt the need to get beyond discussions of who owns production and distribution systems. I want to examine why anybody would even see capitalism as righteous. In the mainstream political discourse, if one dares to say that she is not supportive of capitalism, one is a heretic. So, what is this thing that we worship? What are it’s values? What makes capitalism so worthy of it’s righteous status in our culture?

I didn’t really know how to dive into the topic from this perspective. I wasn’t interested in starting the examination through an academic lens. I was thinking in terms of having a conversation with one’s next door neighbor when you’re both out weeding in the garden: is capitalism fair?

Perhaps, the exploration will broaden and deepen from here. I’d love to see that. To get things started NY Brit Expat had the wonderful idea of delving into what was niggling at me by asking questions and generating a dialog.

We share that with you today and ask that you join the discussion that we have started:

NY Brit Expat: When you say that the capitalist system itself is not fair and is not just, what do you mean by fairness and justice? What would consititute a fair and just system in your view?

To me, fairness and justice hinge on those that create things actually controlling the thing they create; so workers should get control over the product rather than capitalists. Another issue that should be discussed is how our notions of right and wrong ( ethics and morality) become conditioned by the system itself.

One more point relates to ownership and property rights that are ensured by the system and how this is then justified and no one ever questions these things.

UnaSpenser: to begin with, fairness and justice, to my mind are concepts which stand alone, regardless of an economic system. That is, if there are 10 hungry people in a room and there are 10 servings of dinner available, the fair distribution is to give each person a serving. It doesn’t matter how the meals got there, because food is a basic human need. If someone says, “but I worked harder” or “but I’m worth more” or “but my people contribute more”, then they are moving away from fairness. they are willing to deny someone else the foundation of survival when there is enough there to meet every person in the room’s needs. If someone needs more for a health reason, then, yes, the group may need to figure out how to redistribute to meet that additional survival need. But, “I think I should get more because ” is simply selfish and runs off the track of fairness.

fairness is when everyone has the ability to meet their basic needs without being obligated to, or compromised by, others. if someone says, “I can see that you need this meal, but I’ll only give it to you if you agree to pay me later” or “i’ll only give it you if you let me have sex with you”, this is not fair. it is extortion, because the person must eat and cannot survive without meeting your demands. your willingness to make someone suffer or give up autonomy before they can meet the basic needs of life is cruel. fairness is a commitment to doing no harm to others and not impeding anyone else’s ability to thrive autonomously. (one can be interconnected and still be autonomous.)

justice, to my mind, is a state of being where healing and the ability for everyone to function in society, have been restored, to the greatest extent we are able, after a transgression has occurred. the healing can’t be to the fullest extent possible if anyone involved, even the perpetrator, has not received everything we can offer to regain the ability to function in society with fairness. so, justice would focus on returning all relationships to as balanced a state as possible. if things have become imbalanced, justice would demand working toward balance. also, justice is not born from fear. it is born from compassion. transgressions are born from fear. most often, when we make decisions based in fear, we further dysfunction and injustice. our response to a transgression then, must come from compassion for all. compassion which is not extended to everyone is not compassion. it includes treating some as though they are less than sentient than others. if you are treating anyone that you, you have corrupted your compassion and turned it into a tool for your fear.

back in that room: someone steals an extra meal and eats it. justice would demand that we understand why this person committed that transgression. that we work to resolve the issues that led to it so that the transgressor can function without harming or depriving anyone else. at the same time, we would need to figure out how to make sure that anyone who was deprived of a meal gets the needed meal. justice would demand that the one deprived and the transgressor work with everyone else on both the restoration of the transgressor’s ability to be part of society and the restoration of the deprived meal. only this will heal the social relationships. functioning relationships rely on trust. trust is the framework. everybody must work to find out why and address all the spots of corrosion in the framework. for the transgressor to steal a meal, there must have been a fear, a lack of trust which led that person to not care how it impacted others and only think of herself. then, the transgression itself bred more distrust. the framework will start to crumble, as it can only take so many weak spots and still bear the weight of social responsibility. it is the responsibility of everyone to to repair the corroded spots in the society’s framework.

everyone deserves to eat. When it comes meal time, depriving people of a serving, particularly if that person is aware that that everyone else will getting 10% more than needed by depriving her, is cruel and causes harm. if what someone needs is 1 serving, or 10% of the food, and they demand 11%, they are being unfair. if others agree to meet that demand, an injustice is committed by everyone. it isn’t just that someone demanded. even if that person is a bully or holds some kind of power. everyone who acquiesces to an abuse of power is complicit in the injustice.

in capitalism, the foundation of the economic system is this concept of profit. profit means demanding that you receive resources of a greater value than what you contribute. (its gets even more complicated when you start to consider labor structures and that people are demanding to receive resources for someone else’s labor. but, I don’t want to get into that, yet. that’s a symptom of an underlying moral/ethical issue with the basic precept of capitalism.) at the very core of capitalism is this axiom that all we do should produce a profit for us.

there are several problems with this axiom. first, there is a logical concern: it must include the precept that everyone could earn a profit. Otherwise, one would be saying that it’s okay for some people to lose. But, to lose in an economic system means to lose the ability to provide for the basics needs of life. back in that room again: if the person who happens to carry the meals into the room demands so much from me for my meal , that I no longer have the resources to get my critical medications, then I will die. but, this is not a consideration in the capitalist construct. transactions don’t have to take into account the ripple effects. they are only accounted for as independent transactions. the only time this is not true is when enough people gather enough power to demand that some effects be taken into account. in capitalism, power is measured by control of resources. so, those with control over more resources most often hold all the power when it comes to what will be accounted for. in capitalism, if you happen to be the one holding the tray with the meals, you automatically get more power. it doesn’t matter how you landed in that position. It is the rare victory when the “little people” win a dispute over such a thing as the collateral effects of a transaction. this idea that “the market” will correct injustices has already proven itself to be wrong. those with the most resources control “the market.” injustices abound. corporations can be deemed too big to fail. or too big to prosecute. that is because justice is not an ethic in the capitalist system. only winning the game of garnering control over resources.

for capitalism to be considered fair, it must assume that there are enough resources and enough equal access that everyone can pursue an unbounded accumulation for themselves without doing harm to others. yet, what we need for survival are resources from the planet: food, water, medicines, shelter, etc. No matter how large the Earth may feel, it is a limited resource. Access to the limited resources it offers is also limited. If that were not so, people would not be hungry or die from illnesses which can be treated. capitalism might pretend to be blind to this illogic, but that does not change the fact that is based on pursuing an unfair and unjust agenda.

When we see that food is accumulated in some places and lacking in others, we will also see that it is accumulated by those who have won at the profit game and lacking for those who haven’t. Who wins at the profit game? Those more able and willing to have no concern for the well being of others and to continue to demand more resources be given to them than they are contributing. They see people who are hungry, who don’t have warm clothes for the winter, who don’t have homes, who don’t have access to medical care and, still, they demand more for themselves. They start to have a skewed sense of what they are “due” or “need.” They could walk into that room and feel completely comfortable demanding that 90% of the food be given to them, regardless of how that deprives everyone else. What is the characteristic of a person who behaves this way? Someone who has no concern for the well-being of others? A sociopath. What is the methodology they must use to get people to give them more than their fair share? Bullying. Capitalism is sociopathic in nature and to be a leading capitalist, one must be a bully.

We see a disproportionate distribution of food in the United States. While people are starving, the capitalist system will report “good numbers” in their economic analyses. It even has determined that a certain percentage of people unable to provide the basics of life for themselves is “tolerable.” This is because, we know, deep down, that capitalism has to have losers. We train ourselves to believe in “competition” as an admirable, desirable thing, even though we know that in competitions there are very few winners and lots and lots of losers. Losing a baseball game may not seem like something to be concerned about when it comes to fairness and justice. But, we are inuring ourselves to the pain of the losers in all arenas. We are training ourselves to accept and tolerate that life has losers. We don’t care whether that is fair or just. Capitalism is not about that. Capitalism is about turning us all into sociopaths. When you see the nature of the political discourse happening now, you see sociopathy running rampant.

this profit basis for every transaction we complete with our fellow human beings doesn’t take into consideration whether you are taking more than you need, more than what you represent as a percentage of the people in your society, or if you are depriving others of what they need. it is without any morality. the moral code is “getting more for yourself, or your own people, is good” period. it is codified into capitalist laws, that corporations must do what they can to maximize profits for their shareholders. so, when a health insurance company has shareholders, it is their legal imperative to prioritize taking in more resources than they contribute to society, regardless of what this means to the health or suffering of human beings. it is not a system where the incentive is to provide the best care and do the most to reduce suffering. the incentive is to gather in more resources than you give out.

back to our room with 10 people and 10 meals. what is fair about demanding that you get 110% of a serving when you are only 100% of a serving? but, in a capitalist system, one isn’t concerned with a fair distribution of food. one is concerned with making a profit. yes, in a room of 10 people, those people might decide to become a clan, knowing there are other rooms of people out there needing the resources of life and that together they might bully that other group better and maybe everyone in the room could make a profit. but, you can’t extend that model very far, because at some point, you have to be getting your profit by causing someone else to take a loss. so, you can’t decide to include all humans in your clan or else you wouldn’t be able to be capitalists any more. if you are concerned with the well being of everyone, you can’t prioritize profit. you have to shift to a different system of transactions and priorities. you have start operating as a collective.

so, I’ve started to discuss right and wrong. I think we could delve more into that.

I don’t think I’ll get to production control tonight.

PS: I’m adding the comment from our Facebook conversation which you suggested I put here:

if we want to honor the sanctity of life, we should never allow a person to starve, be homeless, or die from an illness which we can treat. that is we should honor the basic human right of those who are living to thrive. that includes those whom we feel have committed transgressions. every life deserves every resource we can provide to return to a state of autonomous, interconnected ability to thrive

NY Brit Expat: Fairness and justice are broader than right and wrong to me; the latter are more individual in terms of individual behaviour; fairness and justice seem more global or universal to me … Isn’t that weird; they seem to me to be more like things that I perceive or don’t on a societal level. In that it is how we as people or society should relate to each other. Right and wrong I can view in a social way, but I often view them as individual behaviourally oriented. I wonder why I think this is so? Actions can, of course, be fair and just, as can decisions. But it is to me a social relation between people in a social context that I view it. So, what makes for a just society? That all are treated equally w/o reference to gender or false conceptions such as race, or w/o reference to property ownership or power relations. Does fairness relate to everyone being covered independent of ability, but with all needs covered?

UnaSpenser: I can see that perspective: that fairness and justice are on a societal level. The examples I gave were meant to illustrate that by metaphor. the 10 people in the room represent a whole society. it becomes a state when they decide to be a clan. the transgressor could be an individual with power or a system within the society/state. the other rooms are other societies/states and the decision to work together with some of them are alliances.

I, too, see the quality of relationships as key to the definition of fairness and justice. probably something along the line of a Buddhist notion of right relationships. one key to that is that no one should have power over another. one may acquiesce leadership in a given moment or for a certain experience, but one should never give up having power over one’s self, one’s time, and one’s ability to thrive. if access to food, clothing, shelter, medical care and education are not always accessible, one is forced to give up autonomy in order to acquire those things. this means giving others power over you, because you are coerced into a subservient position simply to meet the basic needs of life. power corrupts. therefore relationships where someone has power over another become corrupted. this corrupts society.

for me, a fair society is one where all have unfettered access to what they need to thrive, without being left in obligation to, or compromised by, others. (I am purposefully saying ‘thrive’ rather than ‘survive.’ Once can survive with a lot of unnecessary suffering inflicted by others.)

A just society is one in which we address any abuses of power or systems which inhibit that fairness and we return everyone to a state of being able to thrive in society.

I’ll have to think more about right and wrong. I don’t tend to think in those terms. will you tell me more about what you mean by right and wrong, please?

NY Brit Expat: I have always viewed right and wrong in terms of a moral relationship between individuals; that is, I behave in a certain way towards another person rather than how a society itself behaves which I think relates to justness and fairness. But societies can then take the individual moral relationship and use it to describe how we must treat each other … this sometimes takes place in the context of laws and rules. But those do not guarantee fairness and justice in a society which depends upon other things to me. So, a society can guarantee that you have a right of property through the use of law and state power, but that right actually ensures injustice and unfairness in that society.

The question of right and wrong seems to be a different thing; but it does relate in a broader sense as we can have morals underpinning our society to ensure justice and fairness; but this becomes very difficult in a system based upon private property and protection of that property being enshrined in a legal system. We can say that it is right that no one should starve and that it is wrong that some people have many things and some have nothing, but implementing this without threatening the property right becomes very difficult if it is treated as a zero sum game (that is a given amount where anything given to one takes away from the other).

– Agreed. Implementing true fairness and justice when so much unfairness and injustice is already in place and has been for centuries is another question, altogether. If you start off with inequities, you can’t just start by saying fairness requires that each transaction is a zero sum game. One has to start accounting for existing imbalances. One must restore balance first. That is, we must apply justice before we can enact fairness. How do restore justice is always the question that people use to stop the conversation about whether they believe we should work towards justice. It’s often the “get out of jail free” card of social responsibility.

Before even trying to figure out how justice could be restored when there is so much inequity in place, we must at least be able to agree on what justice and fairness are and admit that we are not living it. Without these agreements, we have no starting point for any mapping of a journey towards justice. We need to speak the truth about where we are and we need to agree on where we want to go. We need to commit to that mission. Then we can begin to work together to figure out the stepping stones we must place to take the journey. We can’t leap to building stepping stones, if we aren’t all starting in the same place and seeking the same destination. So, I don’t want to get into the itinerary of the journey, yet.

From UnaSpenser and NY Brit Expat: this is the beginning of a conversation. We invite you to think of it as the two people at one end of a table having started a discussion. As we get to talking more and more of you, sitting at the grand table with us are tuning in and listening. Then, you begin to offer your own thoughts and questions……

Today is the anniversary of the 19th amendment which gave women the right to vote in the United States in 1920. While revolutionary socialist feminists see the suffrage movement as a “reform” within the capitalist structure, even we can’t help feeling the surge of sisterhood as we hit the streets today to celebrate this essential “reform.” The continued and growing gender gap in voting shows that women realize and continue to use this reform to our political advantage. And the outpouring of women in the streets in the past two years brings a renewed visibility and welcome energy to the grassroots fight for the complete liberation of women. And yet…

Why didn’t we fight back sooner? We have to question why this new swell in the women’s movement has occurred only after the attacks against established women’s rights have been so successful. We have to question why we allowed these attacks on our rights and did not challenge the increasing invisibility of women since the height of the women’s movement in the mid 1970s.

The underlying systemic cause of women’s exploitation:
I will argue that there are underlying objective biological conditions (of which we are all aware) that led to the oppression and exploitation of women: and, further, that we have too frequently ignored these underlying systemic and objective causes because they appear to be too overwhelming to address.

First and foremost, women, are still the biological producers of the next generation of the workers who produce society’s wealth. Ever since men first discovered that their sperm had something to do with procreation, men in all societies have been trying to dominate and control the reproductive functions of women in an effort to control society’s wealth.

Second, in the current capitalist society in which we live, there is a need for the capitalist to keep the cost of reproducing the next generation of labor out of the market system because it makes it impossible to get the profits necessary to keep the capitalist owners in riches and the capitalist system going.

These systemic economic conditions of women as exploited, unpaid reproductive labor are never discussed in the current feminist and progressive responses to specific assaults on women’s rights such as the debates over “legitimate” rape or whether the rights of the zygote supercede the rights of full grown human women in the fight over abortion.

Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. In The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), Engels analyzes the origin of the family as the institution in which males systemically dominate and control the reproduction of the next generation of workers. Women are the “property,” owned by men, through which this reproduction could occur.

Under the feudal/patriarchal economic system, the reproduction of workers was incorporated into the economic system of the Manor since the feudal lord had to give the workers sufficient land to make their own food, clothing and shelter so the workers were healthy enough to work for the Lord. But much as the Lord ultimately “owned” the sheep on the feudal land, the Lord also “owned” the workers and any wealth they produced. In regard to female workers, this was exemplified and codified into common law by the custom of First Night Rights in which the Lord (or his surrogate the Priest) had the right to sleep with the serf/worker’s wife before the worker could, to show the Lord’s ownership of the females and any subsequent children they produced. The same held true under slavery where the plantation owners could appropriate slave women at will for sex and reproduction. Women in general were property and had no legal or economic agency of our own.

Male workers ostensibly broke free of their lords with the breakdown of the feudal mode of production and the development of a market economy outside of the Manor. But, since they owned little except their labor, workers were still forced to sell their labor to the new capitalist owner of the means of production to gain access to basic goods to survive (food, clothing, shelter). The female serfs/slaves were also freed from their lords both economically and sexually. There were no more official first night rights (though the Strauss-Kahn rape case makes one wonder how much the rights of the ruling class have really changed in practice regarding the appropriation of women’s bodies).

But a funny thing happened on the way to the capitalist market — female workers were still subsumed under the newly freed male workers/serfs/slaves as the property of the individual male wage worker. This proved a boon to the individual male worker (who now had his own patriarchal ownership of a female worker and her off spring). In its thirst for increase profits and the accumulation of wealth, the ruling class of the Capitalist system allowed the worker to keep his personal property (in the form of women and children) so that the capitalist would not have to pick up the cost of reproducing workers but put that cost directly on the backs of the workers themselves. This also did much to buy off the male worker’s alignment with his class interests and encouraged him to identify with the male capitalist ruling class. The main point, however, is that it was in the economic interest of the capitalist class to keep this vestige of the Patriarchal feudal form of production in the reduced form of the nuclear family with the male worker acting as the Lord.

The importance of this idea was reinforced in an essay by Alexandra Kollantai, the most well known woman socialist thinker in the Russian revolution, in the early 1900s. She again noted that until the State/Government/Community figured out how to socialize the role of reproduction in society, women could never be truly liberated:

“Among the numerous problems raised by contemporary reality there is probably none more important for mankind, none more vital and urgent than the problem of motherhood created by the large-scale capitalist economic system…..Side by side with the problem of sex and marriage, enveloped in the poetical language of the psychological suffering, insoluble difficulties and unsatisfied needs of noble souls, there is always to be found the majestic and tragic figure of motherhood wearily carrying her heavy burden…. The prosperity of national industry and the development of the national economy depend upon a constant supply of fresh labour… the principle of state maternity insurance [is] a principle in sharp contradiction with the present social structure as [it] undermines the basis of marriage and violates the fundamental concepts of private-family rights and relationships…. “(Society and Motherhood 1915).

The cost of reproduction of the working class to the capitalist system. It is difficult to determine the exact cost of reproducing the working class to the capitalist system, but one unpublished grassroots study from the 1970s women’s movement noted that if all costs of reproduction of the next generation were taken into account, it would take approximately 1/5th of the GDP in the United States. Even if this statistic cannot be verified, we do know:

1) a 2007 study from the US Department of Agriculture estimated that the cost of raising each child in a typical nuclear family was $235,000 in 2006 which has in all likelihood increased substantially since then.
2) If we were to provide just preschool childcare for all children in the United
States the Federal budget for childcare would have to increase from $15 Billion to
$85 Billion per year.
3) Citizens in countries such as France that have provided full childcare and maternity leave and many other social benefits for their citizens, pay 75% percent in income in taxes.
4) Women in East Germany, where the Soviet Union had socialized most costs of
reproducing workers, suffered severe economic deprivation with the loss of social
support services after the Soviet Union fell and full scale capitalist relations of production were re-introduced (i.e., women’s full-time employment in the labor market fell from 91% to 62%. and poverty has greatly increased in all families, particularly among single parents).

Whatever you think of the Soviet Union or France or stay-at-home mothers vs. working mothers or abortion vs zygotes, the sheer cost of socializing reproduction of the next generation of workers is so great that the possibility of trying to address this issue might require such a restructuring of our society that we might — well, we might have to have a revolution. And so we rationalize, play with reforms, change the paradigm for women’s freedom, change the terms of the discussion of women’s freedom, continue to ignore the elephant in the room and what it will take to end women’s oppression.

The systemic struggle is just too hard.There are at least two significant ways in which we have rationalized away our oppression (or tried individually to avoid the worst forms of oppression for ourselves at the expense of women as a group).

1) The single issue reformist approach: Since it is too hard to deal with the whole system, we focus on a single issue to win (i.e., the vote for white women in the first wave of feminism, abortion and contraception in the Second Wave, and sexual harassment and rape in the Third Wave). Don’t get me wrong — there is nothing wrong with making reforms so long as we don’t forget the underlying systemic cause of women’s oppression as biological reproducers of society’s laborers.

For example, the question of abortion and contraception, as a single issue, addresses the problem of women’s biological reproduction very nicely — allowing women control over their own bodies as to when and how they have children. The problem is that it addresses the issue of women as individuals and, also, in the negative. It enables us not to have children, but it doesn’t solve the problem of how to have children in a non-exploitive situation. True, it may, for the individual middle class bourgeoisie woman provide a solution — she just has to wait until she has a sufficiently well-paying career or rich husband to hire an au pair to raise her children (usually another woman from a third world country at less than minimum wage for a 24 hour a day live-in job).

Last week, Romney got on the air and discussed the abortion question mentioning the rights of the zygote and religious rights, but never once mentioned women. This invisibility of women that occurs when we limit the question of women’s oppression to a single issue is increasingly common, not only on the right, but the left as well. Angela Davis, in a speech before the Occupy Wall Street General Assembly, was giving a laundry list of oppressed groups and failed to mention women. She did include the LGBT movement (and perhaps she felt that the transition from sex to gender included women in this way) or perhaps she just forgot the category of women, but either way, this increased invisibility of women as an oppressed group is disturbing.

Another area where the single issue approach has limited the deeper awareness is the issue of rape. Rape is simple discussed as a power struggle between men and women. There is no discussion of the fact that, historically, rape was not about women’s loss of agency, but about the damage or loss of one man’s property (women) to another man. This is why the right wing often argues that there can be no rape in marriage. This concept can also be seen in the custom of men in a conquering army raping the women in the conquered community as their right to booty. Or in the 1848 law in Massachusetts where if a wife is raped, the husband can cast her off as used goods. Or why there should be no exception in abortion laws for rape or incest since the being of value in such cases is the potential future wealth which will be created by the potential future worker, not the value of the woman carrying the zygote who is simply a vessel or tool of her male “owner.” While we have clearly come some distance from legal property ownership of women, these issues still color the underlying debate.

2) The conflation of sexist exploitation as gender issues. The shift to the use of gender (a culturally determined concept)instead of sexism as the dominant paradigm for dealing with female exploitation began in the 80s as a less biologically determinist definition by academics. Academic Feminists in the 80s compared sexism to racism. Racism, however, has no functional biological differences that rationally require the original distinction. The gender paradigm, however, fails to deal with the biological/material roots of sex distinctions in reproduction (actually having babies), how thoroughly they have been institutionalized in all world cultures and how difficult they will be to uproot even when we have the technology to do so.

In the 1970′s four of the five major dictionaries included the term sexism and defined it as prejudice or discrimination against women. Only one dictionary (American Heritage) included “any arbitrary stereotyping of men and women on the basis of gender.” Since gender is a socially created category it does not admit a biological basis for discrimination. By the 1980′s the gender definition was almost exclusively used by academic feminists and in recent years has become the accepted definition of discrimination against women. I am not refuting the critical importance of gender (the women’s movement was the first to highlight the importance of gender as separate from biology in overcoming the biology is destiny argument). I am simply saying it is necessary but not sufficient.

The gender concept was further complicated in the LBGT movement when the issue of transgendered people came to the for front in the early 1990s since the transgender analysis stands the biology argument on its head. On one hand, transgender says biology doesn’t matter, it is mutable and on the other it is saying that biology is everything (we are born this way). While this certainly doesn’t question basic transgender civil rights, it does highlight the confusion in the discussion of biology vs. environment in the LBGT and women’s movement.

It is also worth noting here that the gender approach, as it currently is being practiced in the LBGT movement, reflects the gay male culture (and liberal heterosexual culture) of the freedom to do your own thing. This is the assimilationist or civil libertarian approach where we all have the right to our own identities as we define them. The lesbian feminist culture in Second Wave feminism questioned this approach as reformist since it did not challenge the categories of dominance and submission in marriage, the nuclear family or the gay male community and society at large as inconsistent with a movement that was seeking equality. The male identified approach to gay rights has, in fact, won the day and is the current approach promoted by most progressive movements, just as the secondary concept of “gender” has replaced sexism in regard to women’s liberation.

The wholistic rather than the piecemeal approach. This point of this discussion is not to pit one group or approach against, but to recognize that in only fighting the battle piecemeal without looking at the underlying systemic causes of female/sex/gender oppression, or denying objective realities such as the systemic institutionalization of biological differences, we may be in danger of losing the war.