was discussing this with a friend of mine (she’s an anarchist but she actually organizes and shit). she was saying there can be no such thing as revolutionary masculinity because the two things are contradictory. but i’m a marxist so contradictions really butter my bread.
i think in a utopian, communist world gender identity would be completely different, to the point where it might not even be legible to us today, but my question is more about how we get from here to there. basically, can we men find a way to not be shitheads in such a way as to bring about communism, or does that not even make sense
feel free to dunk on me if this is a dumb question
Death to America
I’ve actually been thinking about this since Awoo brought it up in a couple threads earlier today. I think it would be really useful to have something to counteract the Jordan Petersons out there. The right actually is out there trying to recruit disillusioned young men, and succeeding with their bullshit masculinity.
The thing is, there are fellas out there who could do this and already have some fame. Hasan, JT, Hakim, Yugopnik, Felix, Matt Christman, etc. Problem is, these guys either dont seem to want to carry that mantle or they are just disembodied voices behind a podcast mic.
Ironically, the best person we had who could talk these young men out of toxic masculinity was a woman (Contra). But she’s a lib now and only makes videos once every two years with titles like “Spectacle”.
It’s hard to come at this with a “we need to do what the right does, but leftistly” mindset because fundamentally what the right and left offer are incompatible things. JP and co say to young men who are being hurt by the system, “you deserve to be treated like a king and here’s a list of boogeymen to blame for why you’re not”, while Hasan and co say “everyone deserves to be treated equally and here’s a sometimes complex and unfulfilling explanation for the problems you’re having”. Young men who have an expectation of privilege are not going to be especially convinced by the person telling them that they shouldn’t have it, which is why men tend to cling to these kinds of reactionary sentiments.
Comrades, a fucking podcaster or twitch streamer isn’t going to deradicalize young men. We need Marxist theory in childhood education, we need a zero tolerance policy towards rape, we have to rid our culture of all traces of masculinity from gender reveals, gender orientated marketing, any kind of gender segregated sport or workplace, and a heavy promotion of femininity to make up for the millennia of masculinity that dominated our society. I think not naming children would be a first step, so would be abolishing the cishet nuclear family. The current generation will never meet the ideological standards we want so fuck them lets move onto the next one, if they feel alienated or society isn’t working for them fuck them. Equality feels like oppression to the privileged. Maybe we should try to demoralize these young white men from taking any reactionary action instead of listening to every single grievance they have, our politics simply isn’t for them.
Some things can’t be done away with by decree. To abolish is to pull something up by the root if you don’t get the root, the weed will grow back. This is the same mistake the Afghanistani communist party made by trying to outlaw religion, or China with the GPCR. You can’t abolish the nuclear family by outlawing naming babies (silly). You abolish it by creating a more attractive alternative and removing the forces that created it to begin with.
“If the current generation doesn’t meet our ideological standards they’re not worth our time” doesn’t make a lot of sense. So there’s no point organizing until everyone meets some metric of ideological purity? What if a revolutionary moment arrives with no one to guide it? And if you do organize, who will you be organizing? 20 year olds with little experience or technical knowledge? I’m not sure why people look at the GPCR and say “I want only the stuff that failed miserably”.
I’m not sure why you’d want to alienate such a large mass of the population. There’s a lot of young men out there, and it’s not like white men are the only ones struggling with finding a positive masculinity, either. What do you think happens if you openly disdain and antagonize a bunch alienated, reactionary-leaning men? Do you think a few internet poisoned leftists will demoralize them, or will it actively motivate people to turn to the right?
If you’re a Marxist, our politics are human liberation. Not rejecting anyone who doesn’t fit what we imagine a utopian society will be.
We cannot pity men who lost the social benefits of being a man because every loss to them is a gain for everyone else. Are we persecuting them? No, we are saying they have no inherent right to sex, we are saying that no form of masculinity good, we are not saying that femininity is bad, we are no longer okay with men treating women as sex objects, as house slaves, as property, as someone less than equal. We cannot view men as soldiers to fight the class war that we dispose of later because men will not fight the class war, workers will fight the class war. Men are the reactionary force against it because we live in a patriarchal society and that means men control the means of production and they will offer up women as property when there’s no more land, wages, or social mobility to be taken. And do you know why this is predominantly white men? Because black men never had the privileges of the white man in the first place. They were denied the institution of marriage, of the nuclear family, of even participating in capitalism, the black bourgeoisie never had the chance to develop sexism, they had all those moral values placed upon them by their colonizers. Sexism as we know it is a white construct. So maybe instead of trying to get the oppressor seeing OUR humanity through some twitch streamer, it’s THEIR moral imperative to become an ally and recognize without our help. And that’s a very hard thing to do, i know that a lot of the baizuos on the internet doing ecommunism or whatever you want to call to it through prolonged radicalization from different propagandists, and they are fucking rare. Most leftists are not them, and the only way we can make the average young man a leftist is through early education when they are a child, so that’s why I think their a lost cause, I think it would be better to target the right wing propagandists and make it harder for them to speak rather than trying to debate bro them to make the left look cool to their audience.
Im just trying to advocate for cutting losses where they exist.
this is blatantly untrue unless you mean it in a hegemonic or ideological, and not aesthetic way. If you DO mean it in an aesthetic way than what do you think transmasc people are supposed to do? Die?
We aren’t trying to get oppressors to see our humanity, we’re trying to reclaim people who are optimally already being forcibly oppressed by a socialist state to prevent them from hurting people. We aren’t asking kindly, we’re re-educating. They will learn or they won’t… with the consequences that follow
I don’t give a shit about aesthetics, but I think it’s good to remember that MLs, too, believe in the saying that “So long as there is a state, there is no freedom, and we can only talk about ‘freedom’ existing insofar as there is no state” and yet also advocate for the creation of new states at the same time as seeking the liberation of the human race. Statehood cannot simply be abolished in one stroke, it must be systematically destroyed, and the system doing the destruction is itself a state, and that state tends towards its last action being the completion its own destruction.
Something similar can be said for gender. There is no contradiction between holding gender as being fundamentally backwards and yet acknowledging that we live in a gendered world where people – for reasons other than having an inborn gender, as gender is socially constructed – need to cope in different ways, cis and trans identities included. Eventually, there should be no gender and therefore no cis or trans people, but that doesn’t mean telling all of humanity right now to cleanse the entirety of gender from their minds or die.
My point isn’t that gender is some sort of good thing, or even retrievable, but that “masculinity” is often used to refer to superficial aesthetics, of which people can often enjoy presenting as (or not). This wouldn’t go away if we abolished gender.
It might be worth interrogating the connection between aesthetic values and other values, as in Society of the Spectacle in its real meaning and not the flanderized “wot if e’erywun wah jus’ wa’chin’ the telly?” version. Gender is overwhelmingly what makes what we view as gendered presentations appealing, and this is demonstrated by the way that it varies across cultural differences in what gendered presentation is. To use a very obvious example, I would fully expect wearing a skirt to make a transmasc person here and now feel potentially dysphoric, but in medieval Scotland transmasc people were generally probably quite happy to wear kilts in the situations they could get away with doing so. Why? It’s just a slightly different arrangement of cloth! Because it is a signifier for a certain position in a certain framework of social values, not just aesthetic ones.
I don’t think this is true though, because what I’m talking about is masculinity and femininity, not gender. The aesthetics of masculinity and femininity are influenced by and came from gender constructs, there’s no denying that, and what fits under those aesthetics constantly changes and varies based on circumstance and time, and of course these aesthetics can feed into and influence conceptions of gender and other things significantly, but they are still able to be treated as primarily aesthetics.
First of all, with your example, Scotland masculinity is associated with kilts and skirts because of a cultural association and how that aesthetic was constructed. Yes, it came from gender, patriarchal norms, conditions, etc, but the aesthetic itself is only a small part of gender and an aspect that would exist regardless of gender’s existence (as in, if we removed all the material and social pressures for people to be a binary gender, not if we removed it from existence retroactively); Definitely not in the same exact form, but people would still follow aesthetic trends and preferences. And, even if we were to snap our fingers and delete gender, people would probably still identify with and prefer presenting as masculine or feminine or both or neither or whatever new things people create. And of course, what they would perceive as each would vary significantly from person to person.
Case in point: GNC trans people. Trans tomboys and femboys exist, and they are not only valid but very based and cool. These are people who find gender affirmation in feminine aesthetics as a man and masculine aesthetics as a woman. Butch lesbian women exist, too, and consider themselves women despite many of them also explicitly presenting as masculine, as well.
My overall point is that a kind of revolutionary masculinity would not involve trying to rehabilitate reactionary ideas for the sake of appeasing men, by claiming that certain personality traits or behaviors are somehow manly or not manly, but instead a creation of an aesthetic that appeals to those who identify with the aesthetic of masculinity in general right now, but with more revolutionary undertones. Effectively, accelerating the abstraction of the signifier away from the material to then reground a new swathe of signifiers we create in revolutionary movements and material beliefs. That sounds right, idk
I don’t know if I agree, indigenous cultures all developed their own concept of masculinity. Some of which included traits like sharing. A man who hoards to himself instead of giving to others is not considered a real man. Masculinity based on your generosity. That seems cool to me.
Most workers are men though. And men writ large don’t control the means of production, the owning class does. Most men don’t own much at all. You are incoherently mixing Marxism with radfem theory.
Sexism was considered a major issue in the Black Panther Party. And many African societies were themselves deeply patriarchal before colonization. Sexism as it exists currently wasn’t even static in Europe.
Again, most young men are workers, and we appeal to them by advocating for the working class. Will they be sexist? Probably, but that can be neutralized by improving people’s lives generally.
What you’re advocating is that ~50% of workers are inherently unreachable. That’s a losing proposition.
No, they are very slightly under half, not that it matters to the rest of your comment.
I sympathize with what you’re saying and agree with some of it, but it’s a bit idealistic. People’s ideologies are molded by how they interact with the world. Ideas do not sprout from nowhere, so I completely disagree that “conservative generations” must be abandoned for younger ones. Unless you get to the roots of what’s causing reactionary ideology, the younger generation will just be as conservative. Other than that, I firmly believe both the nuclear family and the gender binary will wither away and be sublated, but there’s no swift abolition especially in a pre-revolutionary or mid-revolutionary situation. We’re already seeing the beginning of withering away of these things due to the contradictions of capitalism, and they’ll be completed as communism is built. Besides radical support for queer issues I’m not sure what the strategy here should be.
Yeah abandoning “reactionary generations” would require mass, repeated homicide of billions of people. It isn’t because it’s wrong or something that’s the main issue, though, it just isn’t practical to kill that many people, they literally outnumber you thousands to one.
You might disagree that it wouldn’t require it, but it would, unless you can somehow completely isolate the same billions of people from the “newer generations” socially. Completely, not a single word would be able to pass from the lips of an older person to the ears of a younger one.
You and what army?
Communists and refusing to learn from their historical counterparts, name a better duo. In Iraq, the communists wanted to decree away Islam. Instead, they created pockets of resistance because leading with “We will take away your closely held beliefs by force.” fucking sucks as an opener. Learn from Modern China, who used actual Islamic teachings to explain why ISIS was incorrect. You literally want to be a frothing liberal’s dream of a communist government.
You don’t want results, you want purity. You’d rather have a state fail for the right reasons than succeed on a compromise. Your policy is literally to create disaffected billions because the idea of presenting an healthy masculinity is morally repugnant to you. You are a liberal in all but your goal.
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