Many, including myself, were initially shocked and repelled by Makavejev’s most complex, explosive and assaulting film. In Sweet Movie, Eros and Thanatos are not concepts but forces. Wilhelm Reich, François Rabelais and Jonathan Swift, rather than Sigmund Freud, seem to inspire this never-safe journey, grounded in the senses, a journey which seems like it has land mines placed along the way. Sweet Movie is Makavejev’s furthest and most daring departure from traditional realist narrative. It is a mixture of humour, horror, eroticism, music, colour, defilement, excrement and murder. Once again, the film combines fiction and documentary, but this time the connections collide more harshly.

As we have seen, it takes Miss World and the audience to the commune where the members participate in a “utopia of regression”. In twin narrative threads – deadly adventures in capitalism and totalitarianism – Miss World, prized for her abstinence and virginity, but rejected by her husband, Mr. Dollars (John Vernon), will eventually writhe and drown in a bath of chocolate while making a television commercial; meanwhile Anna Planeta (a blonde-haired Anna Prucnal), prostitute of the revolution, on a corpse-filled boat bearing the giant head of Karl Marx, makes love with Un Marin du Potemkin (A Sailor from the Potemkin, aka Luv Bakunin; Pierre Clémenti), in a bed of sugar, stabbing him with her dagger, his sacrificed red blood curling through the white grains. Whilst Luv is content to die a martyr’s death, like Vakulinchuk (Aleksandr Antonov) in Sergei Eisenstein’s Bronenosets Potyomkin (Battleship Potemkin, 1925), most controversial for audiences today is Planeta’s bridal/maternal striptease for a group of boys enticed onto her barge by candy while Russian Orthodox liturgical music plays on the soundtrack. Read here a movie critique by Lorraine Mortimer.

Despite the attention paid to claims of substantial differences in various types of abilities—including mathematical, spatial, and verbal—between the sexes, it is remarkable that most research finds these differences to be trivial or small (even assuming that they can be measured properly and that all intervening factors can be accounted for). For example, using large national datasets on mathematical performance among children in the United States, sociologists Erin Leahey and Guang Guo found that there was only “a slight, late-emerging male advantage in mathematics among the general population of students,” with “no male advantage until later in high school, where the largest gender difference is 1.5%.” Furthermore, they did not even find large differences among high-scoring students, where it is commonly assumed that males will be most dominant. Using meta-analysis of existing research, psychologist Janet Shibley Hyde and her colleagues have found that not only are differences in mathematical performance across genders typically small, they have generally decreased over time (indicating that they are mutable), often favor women, particularly at younger ages, and that the gender that scores higher differs across ethnic groups. Furthermore, research shows that differences in mathematical performance among children across nations dwarf gender differences within nations.These types of findings have led Hyde to propose the “gender similarities hypothesis,” which holds that men and women are similar on most psychological variables, counter to the widespread, but largely unsupported, assumption that there are substantial gender differences. Read here the rest of the paper “Gender and Mathematical Ability: The Toll of Biological Determinism” by Richard York and Brett Clark

Inevitably, the undermining of familiar institutions, an aspect of modernity that has certainly been intensified in recent years, has had important consequences for people’s sense of identity. There is nothing new about the observation that national and class-based identities (both of which had seemed almost definitively modern) have been upset by the end of the Cold War and various other developments discussed under the heading of ‘globalisation’. Similarly, Bauman notes that while the workplace was traditionally a very important source of personal identity, changes in the economy have rendered it far less reliable. He suggests that the enduring identities once associated with work have given way to looser and more provisional identities, and conceptions of community, that are subject to constant change and renegotiation. Indeed, Bauman points to a more profound transformation of how we understand what it means to be human in the absence of transcendent ideologies (traditional or otherwise) such as have characterised modernity until recently.  Read here  a review of  Baumans’ book identity.

1. Feminism and democratic, progressive and revolutionary currents

Feminism must be declined in its plural, feminisms, as women belong to various classes and cultures and have different political reference points. For example, there is a form of feminism in Italy among right-wing parliamentarians and career women, who lay claim to their share of power with the aid of traditional feminist arguments, decry the dynamics of exclusion and marginalization and demand anti-discriminatory measures.

And yet feminism is always born and reborn on the left, alongside revolutionary, democratic or progressive tendencies: on the margins of the 1789 revolution, in the national revolutions of the first half of the 19th Century, within the movement for the abolition of slavery in the United States, alongside the workers’ movement, in the radicalisation of the 1960s and 1970s, in the global justice movement…

Right-wing feminism has always and only been the effect of picking up ideas born on the left, a sort of cultural fallout that earlier or later has had an impact throughout society as a whole. This phenomenon can be explained by the obvious reason that it has been easier (or less difficult) for women to exert pressure on men on the left in the name of liberation, by exposing their contradictions and using their lexicon and patterns of thought. The concepts of equality, self-determination, liberation, difference, revolution etc. have been nothing else than a feminised version of ideas elaborated by the political currents alongside which various forms of feminism were born or re-born.

This observation does not allow us to have any idyllic vision of the relationships between feminism and male revolutionary, democratic and progressive tendencies. Men’s resistance to feminism has been tenacious, at times explicit and vulgar, at others subtle or even unconscious.

The early socialist movement included feminist men such as Saint-Simon and Fourier and indescribable misogynists such as Proudhon and Lasalle. Engels laid the conceptual bases for an anticapitalist feminism, comparing women to the proletariat and men to the bourgeoisie and locating in production and reproduction the bases of the social organisation of the human species, but afterwards these intuitions were lost in theory and practices. A full-fledged history of misogyny and anti-feminism in the workers’ movement could be written, but in this text we can only touch upon the two most widespread attitudes within today’s anticapitalist left.

In general, few men are so uncouth as to fail to render the expected homage to feminism and to envisage a proletarian, feminist and environmentalist future. However, these recognitions are almost always accompanied by a lack of interest. The ins and outs, differences and complex theoretical elaborations of feminism remain little-known the extent to which gender can represent an irreplaceable framework for the understanding of the logic of human relations remains overlooked.

The other attitude, much rarer to tell the truth, is the paternalism of men who claim to teach feminism to women, to take the lead and set the agenda for their work and discussions. Naturally, we can’t rule out the fact that an given male may know and understand more about women’s politics and feminism than a given female. However, feminism is born, consolidates and renews itself only in the course of women accessing intellectual and psychological autonomy. It may be a slow and tortuous process, but there is no substitute.

Without autonomy, even the feminism of anticapitalist left women is reduced to falling back on what was theorised and practised in separatist milieus. This feminism has proven itself capable of independent elaboration and a more relevant reading of gender-based power relations. At the same time, it has often represented needs and outlooks of academic circles or in any event female milieus with little interest in class conflicts and always exposed to the temptation to depict their own specific interests as the interests of women in general.

2. Patriarchal structures

Understanding feminism means before all understanding the nature of power relations between women and men. Today, there is a post-feminism that denies that oppression still exists, at least in the parts of the world where formal equality has been achieved. The formula “specific oppression” provides some foothold to that current; moreover, this is not the only reason a new one should be found. It is preferable to say that every human society, excluding none, bears the mark of manifest or latent patriarchal structures, which in different ways discriminate, exclude, oppress and commit violence against women.

Patriarchy in the literal meaning of the word is a system of relations in which property and social position are passed down from the father to the male child, almost always to the first-born son. It is obvious in Northwestern societies (but also in some others) that this type of reproduction of social positions no longer exists and reality is less blatant and more complex.

However, the logic of the male genealogy of power, which remains obvious beyond its legal and formal aspects, has an anthropological dimension and two centuries of struggle for emancipation have still not succeeded in doing away with it. The four UN conferences on women have provided data that at the time surprised even the most pessimistic theorists on oppression, revealing (for example) that the percentage of women owning land and real estate in the world does not exceed 3 – 4 %. Moreover, Amnesty International’s data on violence against women have been a bitter surprise and confirmation. But the simplest way to understand patriarchal structures is to follow the thread of a European woman’s existence from birth to death.

In other societies we find selective abortion and more little girls than little boys dying from malnutrition; in our societies patriarchal structures begin to act later. In their first years of life, little girls, in their difficult path towards femininity, encounter a phenomenon which Freud called “castration”, i.e. the discovery that they did not have a penis, leading to a painful feeling of inferiority and conditioning their intellectual abilities and how they viewing themselves and others view them. At first, feminism responded to the castration thesis by arguing that Freud superimposed the male outlook over the female one, but later the issue has proven fare more complex.

If Freud, as some had suspected, only confused little girls’ and a little boys’ lines of sight, he would have created a banal misunderstanding. Then we could not explain the reasons for his great influence on Western thought, and not only Western. The castration thesis is linked to clinical experiments, to tested outcomes that women also see themselves as castrated, lacking and deprived of something. Therefore, castration plays the role of an ideology: it is the viewpoint of those who are “above” in a power relation, interiorised and incorporated by those who are “under”. The inferiority theory does not flow from a male prejudice; it is a reality in the female unconscious. This reality acts every time real and not presumed difference comes into play, the different positions in relation to power. In fact, women do not envy the penis but the phallus, which is power in its diversified and multiple forms, of which the penis is merely the phallic fetish.

Another example. Violence against women has a scope and spread that Amnesty International data has finally made obvious. However, a particular woman may encounter no instance of violence in her life, other than the violence nature inflicts on us through diseases and death. And yet, her life will be deeply conditioned by violence, because the risk of violence entails precautions, lifestyles and psychological attitudes. The extent to which the world has been made to man’s measure is proven by the paradox that the victim is the one who winds up in jail. Patriarchal structures that run through society make the risk of violence one of the main reasons for the segregation of women, especially young women.

Many more examples could be given, for example women’s double working day, that is taking on tasks that were once men’s domain and the absence of any reciprocity; or the overrepresentation of the masculine in the public sphere, which imposes rhythms and ways, counter to those of women’s own existence or again the normative images of femininity constructed and crystallised through millennia of male monopoly over symbolic tradition. It seems that something is changing among the new generations in Italy, but these changes are slow and uncertain

Other effects of these latent structures are more complex, more difficult to pinpoint and define. It is true that we also think with our sex, perhaps less than is assumed by psychoanalysis, but we certainly do also think with our sex. If it is true that men have had a monopoly over culture for millennia, then a disturbing hypothesis is possible. The hypothesis is that every time a woman penetrates particularly structured and formalised fields of knowledge, she must cross a petrified forest of male signs and symbols, in which she will have greater difficulty finding her way.

The very ways women’s presence makes itself felt in politics are the consequences of the existence of patriarchal structures. With their silences, their limited presence and their insecurity, women exercise a criticism of every political arena. The greater the male presence and dominance in a given political body, the more that body has to do with the logics of power.

One might set forth a theorem, formulate a proposition or an equation. Political institutions, the army, the clergy etc. are the most male milieus because they are also those deeply involved in power. For various reasons these institutions can co-opt women: to get out of criticisms and glaring absence of women, to recover credibility or because they need a relationship with the social body.

The most significant example of male and female distribution is precisely the Catholic Church. An institution that builds ties to vast popular sectors, even sometimes feeding the hungry and quenching the thirst of the thirsty, it could not do without women’s energy and their tendency to view themselves as caregivers. Above a Church open to the feminine side, where it extends deeply into society, rises the dome of a power hierarchy rigidly closed to women, the expression of that capacity to conserve the archaic human relations typical of religions.

3. Three key issues for anticapitalist feminism in Italy

Patriarchal structures condition women’s lives and construct gender in rather different ways in different times and locations. The great number of demands – for example those compiled in the platform of the 2000 World March of Women – show the scope of the unresolved problems on a global scale. It is obvious that women in Afghanistan have different problems from those experienced by French or German women and that the central issues in contemporary Italy are not those in the forefront in the decades spanning the 19th and 20th century, which saw the first great wave of feminist movements. It is obvious that in different social milieus, different generations and different women’s aspirations, the obstacles that women must overcome are not the same.

However, we must renounce the chronological illusion and not believe that we have almost secured emancipation. If it is true that, where formal equality has been achieved, more complex tasks await feminism, it is also true that battles already won, problems apparently already resolved and archaic relations can re-emerge to face us. Violence against women is the clearest example and its greater visibility has different and complementary explanations. Nowadays, women more frequently speak out against situations which they put up with in earlier years, public opinion becomes increasingly scandalised by matters that used to be laughed off; men react, as often occurs in power relations, with a combination of backward outlooks and punitive violence.

Anticapitalist left feminism must not only refer to the needs and aspirations of proletarian women; it must take on the demands of the entire female sex. Naturally, since our intervention targets certain milieus, it is obvious that the demands of women workers, immigrants, unemployed women, female students, women in left parties, movements and trade unions will be in the forefront.

Here are some examples of issues on which we have worked in recent years and which must remain a priority in the near future.

a. Criticism of war, militarism and violence. Women’s politics has the instruments for a specific criticism of the military-virile drift produced by permanent war, without falling back on ideas about women’s peaceful nature and female non-violence. Non-violence is the other face of violence: both take the unchanging nature of power relations for granted. Violence is a permanent dissuasive force against those who are challenging them; while non-violence can disarm only one of the two sides, the side that is “beneath”, subject to oppression, exploitation and neocolonial plunder. The most obvious proof of this in Italy has been the spokespersons for non-violence, who are intransigent against the violence of the oppressed and then vote in Parliament for new credits for the Italian military mission in Afghanistan.

More astute feminism has already explained that the supposed peaceful nature of women is to a great extent linked to the need to interiorise an aggressivity that power relations with men have not allowed them to display. Criticism of militarism and violence (above all violence against women) is based on many things other than the idealisation of subaltern status and oppression. Women can exercise it first of all because they do not have to conform to the stereotypes on which the construction of masculinity is based. They are not called upon to exhibit hardness and strength, which are phantasms linked to male sexuality. More than men, they are subjected to the devastating impact of human relations dominated by violence.

Against the violence on which power relations are based (between the sexes, between classes, between nations etc.) our feminism counterpoises above all a society in which this type of relations has been abolished. Therefore, it supports resistance, struggles and radical transformation projects.

It is against wars, militarism, armies and their hierarchical organisation. It does not think that violence is necessarily the proper response to violence; it considers the life of any person a precious thing and thus is not only against the death penalty but also against the cruelty and excesses of legitimate self-defence. However, it does not make non-violence a principle, because it recognises the right of subjects of liberation struggles to defend their own paths.

Our feminism also responds to violence against women above all with a logic of self-defence. Naturally, we don’t mean women’s armed self-defence against men because the relations between the sexes are regulated in a very different way. It does not believe the problem can be resolved via the control of the penis, even if it does consider State protection necessary and for the time being not replaceable by any other form. By self-defence, it means women’s initiatives for the establishment and funding of antiviolence centres, so speaking out does not turn against victims and for metropolitan life to be organised starting out from women’s needs, so women do not have to bear the cost of its irrationality and manifest or latent violence.

Finally, it remembers that women’s politics is only apparently disarmed, as liberation dynamics have often been supported by people in arms in democratic, progressive or revolutionary movements. Resistance to Nazism/Fascism (for example) had an important impact on feminism and women.

b. for secularism and self-determination, against Catholic fundamentalism. We live in a country which the Catholic Church still views as a state entity in which it is exercising its temporal power: it has never resigned itself to the secular state and continues to fight it by all means at its disposal. In recent years, the rise of right-wing forces and political systems stacked in favour of Catholic political forces’ ability to exert blackmail have actually increased the intrusiveness of the clergy with its patriarchal and homophobic implications.

Access to legal and free abortion has been challenged in various ways; it has prevented experimental use of pharmaceutical abortion; it has approved a horrible law, which constitutes the embryo as a legal subject from the very moment of conception. Moreover, we have witnessed a very harsh and often aggressive and racist opposition to any form of recognition of gay and lesbian couples. A short time ago, the ordeal of Piergiorgio Welby, a patient in the terminal phase of muscular dystrophy, concluded with a doctor’s act of civil disobedience. For months, Welby had pleaded to be unhooked from the machine that forced him to survive in pain and would have imposed an even more painful death on him in the short term. His request became a clamorous political cause, in which the Vatican bureaucracy exerted all its powers of pressure and intimidation on judges and doctors.

Catholic fundamentalism (like all other forms of fundamentalism) does not represent a threat only to women and homosexual persons, but to all liberation processes, beyond the appearances and humanitarian and pacifist implications of the Church hierarchies’ political action. They took a stand against war, but afterwards backed the idea of the Italian army’s “peace mission”. They advocate a welcoming stance towards migrants, but then support the right-wing governments that enact discriminatory anti-immigration laws. Moreover, we must never forget that the Catholic Church was one of the institutions that favoured the rise of fascism, and shored the regime up for more than twenty years.

Evidently peace, hospitality and democracy are minor concerns for the Catholic clergy in comparison to those that lead it to privilege relations with the right wing, i.e. control over the daily lives not only of the faithful but of the entire country, over which it aims to exert its temporal power. In recent years, the feminist and queer movements have been the only forces resisting Catholic fundamentalism.

As for feminism, a certain disorientation has meant that for a long time this resistance has been weak. At the most delicate moment, when the law on reproduction techniques was put in the pipeline and then approved by the right-wing government, feminist organisations and groups remained entangled in a discussion in which it was obvious that the more sophisticated arguments of the Catholic forces were getting more attention, as were worries about the alarming implications of scientific research.

The spectre of the scientist who created Frankenstein, archaic fears over the loss of female reproductive powers, well-founded concern about the limits of scientific research and the role of multinationals in the embryo traffic all combined to put a brakes on the initiative. As a result, feminists did not succeed in going much beyond discussions on this issue. This is another reason the referendum on the abrogation of this law was lost. In fact, it was lost for two reasons. The first is the very low turnout at the polls, not sufficient to reach the quorum. The question under discussion was complex, and contrary to abortion, direct experiences involved a very limited number of people. The second is that, while the referendum on the law decriminalising abortion in the first three months of pregnancy followed years of disobedience in practice and arguments rooted in women’s right to self-determination, the referendum on reproductive techniques played out in the few months prior to the ballot, and in this context, the media played the determining role.

Later, direct attacks on access to legal abortions, in which the misogynistic and regressive stance was clearer, set the women’s movement back in motion and in January 2006, a demonstration by hundreds of thousands of women in Milan provided a hard-hitting response. The very same day, the main organisations of the GLBTQ movement, including lesbians, gay men and transgendered people, demonstrated for PACS (recognition of civil unions). And the entire year 2006 was marked by demonstrations, initiatives and struggles on the issues of secularism and self-determination.

c. Defence of women workers’ rights

Paradoxically, the defeats of wage labour and globalisation have opened up new job opportunities for women. This is not a new paradox, but something that has already been seen in some ways in the history of class relations.

Women have been preferred in economies when they first appear on the world market, because these economies relied on productions with a high labour-power factor and thus on low wages, restrictions on trade-union organisation and severe limits on rights. In Europe too, when the workers’ movement remained weak, it had to contend with the problem of female competition to the male work force, which is at least a partial explanation of the misogynist aspects of the workers’ movement during its origins. Defence of women workers’ rights thus also had the motive of reducing employers’ interest in preferring to hire women.

Women have been preferred in the economies of the most developed countries, in which the service sector has grown and where there have been drastic attacks on the rights of wage labour, above all through the broad, molecular casualisation process.

The other side of the coin is that casualised work, impacting all wage labour, has a preference for women, for whom a steady job seems to have become nearly impossible. Laws protecting maternity act in this context as a strong disincentive to hiring for permanent jobs. Not only that, but in a more and more competitive career dynamic, women remain destined to remain behind or choose between a career and childbearing. To tell the truth, in the majority of cases it is impossible to opt for a profession, whatever a woman’s personal life-plans, because being a woman in childbearing years puts limits on the possibilities for partnership in a firm or stable work.

Moreover, there is a crisis in occupational fields such as teaching, which guaranteed modest salaries but working times and rights compatible with the life choices of the majority of women.

Faced with such problems, feminism found itself also in the past dealing with the alternative of demanding specific rights for women, with the risk of increasing difficulties in their getting jobs, or renouncing such rights, putting them sooner or later in unsolvable contradictions.

The issue cannot be solved only from a gender outlook. Protection makes it harder for women to find jobs, when social relations are unfavourable to subordinate classes: it is no accident that fascism was a strong protector of maternity. For that reason, laws that allow women to reconcile work with an existence different from men’s are not enough. It is also necessary to impose forms of hiring that make discrimination impossible. In Italy, in the 1970s, a reform of short-term placement forced employers to bring far more women into the factories than they would have wanted to. But many other measures are possible.

In terms of rights, outlooks and philosophies must also be changed. This means demanding the fewest possible specific rights for women and demanding instead that the measure of equality starts from women’s point of view not mens. From this viewpoint, we refused the European standards repealing the ban on night work for women, demanding that they be also extended to men, except in the exceptional cases in which night work is absolutely indispensable. Or in the case of early pensions for women, we preferred sabbatical years for caregiving tasks, which could be taken by women and men, just as we preferred parental leave for mothers and fathers.

Such criteria obviously no longer apply when it is a matter of the irreducible difference in human bodies. This means there are specific women’s rights such as leaves for pregnancy and childbirth with full income compensation, access to legal abortion without charge, access to assisted reproductive techniques for older women. In this case difference must prevail, as there is no grounds for men having an equal right to decide because it is women’s bodies and lives that are involved and disrupted.

Translated by Marie Lagatta

Lidia Cirillo has been a member of the Italian section of the Fourth International since 1966. Feminist activist and leading figures in the World March of Women in Italy, she also founded the Quaderni Viola (Purple notebooks, a feminist review). She is the author of several feminist works : Meglio Orfane (Better to be Orphans), Lettera alle Romane (Letter to Roman Women), and recently La Lune Severa Maestra (The Moon, a Strict Mistress) on the relationship between feminism and social movements.

Lidia Cirillo

IV Online magazine : IV391 – July-August 2007

This is an edited version of the main document discussed at the September 1/2 annual general meeting of Socialist Resistance in Britain. The document explains why Socialist Resistance is changing its political programme, perspectives and public profile towards being an anti-capitalist, ecosocialist organisation. This is to make explicit a change in it’s perspectives that has been underway for at least a year and now needs to be signaled publicly. At the core of this change is the contention that free-market, privatising neoliberalism has over 20 years arrived at a new and deadly phase – what we call ‘savage capitalism’. The document explains why now only a socialist response that centrally addresses the environmental crisis is adequate to the current period.

1. Introduction: Savage capitalism – wrecking lives, wrecking the planet

Hardly anyone now doubts that humanity is facing an enormous environmental crisis. The recent report by the International Panel on Climate Change, although watered down to meet the objections of the worst polluters, spells out what this means in graphic detail. Billions will face disaster from flooding, desertification, water shortage and other environmental consequences of global warming – unless there is a radical reversal of humanity’s production and consumption consequences. The events of this year’s ‘Typhoon Summer’, in which there have been massive floods in the China, India, Australia, the UK and many other European countries – combined with soaring heatwaves of 40o-plus in southern Europe – can only be explained by climate change, around which there is now a massive scientific consensus.

Climate change may be a result of the industrialisation in general, but has been given a massive boost capitalist productivism, which has greatly intensified during the last 25 years of neoliberalism. To see how this has happened, it is worth looking at the old debate about the ‘collapse’ of work that was supposed to happen as computer technology became generalised.

In 1981 ASTMS (technical and scientific workers’ union –ed) General Secretary Clive Jenkins published a book with the union’s chief researcher, Barrie Sherman (now a Labour MP), entitled “The Collapse of Work”. The basic idea was that with the application of computerisation, productivity would grow massively, leading to a rapid decline in the need for human labour. The question would be – how will we use all that leisure time? How are we going to ensure that the limited amount of work is spread around, and that everyone gets paid? These problems, it was argued, could be easily overcome with a little bit of social engineering.

A quarter of a century on, nothing like this has happened. Computerisation has not led to the collapse of work; on the contrary there are more workers on a world scale than ever before – as Paul Mason puts it in his recent book Live Working or Die Fighting , the working class has ‘gone global’. Even in countries with high levels of employment like Britain, people are working longer and harder. Average hours worked have gone up since 1981. The paradise of short working hours combined with affluence never happened. How can we explain this paradox? Jenkins’ and Sherman’s idea would only have worked if labour is mainly about social reproduction and satisfying human needs. But under capitalism it isn’t.

The authors missed the crucial point – capitalism is about generating ever larger amounts of profits, which requires ever larger numbers of commodities and ever larger inputs of labour to exploit. So, 28 years down the line we live in a society with 42 brands of washing powder available at most supermarkets, 93 different personal bank account options, 72 family saloon car models available, 17 celebrity magazines, 56 brands of mp3 player in the shops (not counting the internet) and 541 different types of telephone you can install for your landline.

Cheap airlines go to 423 destinations from Britain, but domestic rail transport is unaffordable by most people! In return for all this, people work longer and harder, have less secure pensions and a more difficult old age, bad public services and health care, and the poorer sections of society have a much worse quality of life overall. The gap between what is possible under the Sherman/Jenkins scenario and the realities of daily life today is immense.

It is this massive intensification of the production of (often useless and environmentally damaging) commodities that has given an extra twist to the environmental crisis.

All this has happened not only because of the general priorities of any form of capitalism, but because of the present phase of ‘savage capitalism’, stalking the earth with all sense of social responsibility abandoned, increasing amounts of surveillance, violence, war and torture, and aimed at short term profits squeezed from the labour of the poor, rather than the development of social solidarity, peace and the possibility for most people to live a happy life.

It is now obvious that this morbid phase of capitalism has brought upon humanity the biggest ever threat to its existence – the threat of environmental catastrophe.

The overall threat to humanity and the planet we sum up here under four headings – environmental catastrophe, imperialist war and the crushing of the third world, savage capitalism in everyday life and the surveillance- security lockdown state. They are all linked; they all are part of a single system of power and exploitation. ‘Neoliberalism’, with the added ingredient of US-style neoconservatism, has degenerated into a new and more barbarous phase – ‘savage capitalism’.

This new phase of capitalism forces an inevitable conclusion – only by a total transformation in politics and production, in other words a transformation of our social relations, can a sustainable future for humanity be established. We are facing the biggest crisis of human civilisation ever. No previous crisis has ever posed the existence human civilisation so directly. Revolutionary answers are needed, qualitative answers which go way beyond the standard ‘no to’ slogans of daily campaigns, and point the way to an eco-socialist alternative.

For Socialist Resistance this means a turn in our political stance, our campaigning priorities, our forms of organisation and our self-definition.

2. Ecological materialism and revolutionary ecology

Contemporary Marxism has been late in relating to the looming environmental crisis, ceding ground to the ecologists and the Green parties in the latter part of the 20th century – at least as far as the urgency of the situation is concerned. It is now time to reassert that not only is the defence of the environment firmly located in the Marxist tradition, but that it is only through such a critique that a lasting and adequate solution to the ecological crisis will be found.

A key theoretical refounder of this tradition has been John Bellamy Foster in his book Marx’s Ecology. He systematically established that ecological conceptions were central to the ideas of Marx (and indeed of Darwin) in their battles to establish a materialist conception of history in the middle part of the 19th century. That it was the idea that humankind was a part of nature, a product of it rather than divine creation, which established the basis for the relationship between humankind and nature and an ecological as well as an historical-materialist conception of history.

Bellamy Foster consequently contends that: “Marx’s world-view was deeply, and indeed systematically, ecological and that this ecological perspective derived from his materialism”.

From the start Marx’s notion of the alienation of human labour from what it produced was connected to an understanding of the alienation of human beings from nature. Marx pointed out that the commodification of nature under the capitalist mode of production and private ownership led to the “practical degradation of nature”. In his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts Marx points out that the large towns workers had to endure conditions where light, air and cleanliness were no longer part of their existence but rather darkness, polluted air, and raw sewage, constituted their material environment.

It was in Capital that Marx’s materialist conception of nature became fully integrated with his materialist conception of history. As Bellamy Foster points out: “Marx employed the concept of ‘metabolism’ to define the labour process as “a process between man and nature, a process by which man, thorough his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism with nature in a rational way,” completely beyond the capabilities of bourgeois society”.

True Marx and Engels saw the issue of ecology as mainly from the point of view of the degradation of the life of the proletariat rather than a major factor in the revolutionary process itself – which is the concept ecosocialists or revolutionary ecologists have to come to terms with today. The goal, as Bellamy Foster puts it, is to “understand and develop a revolutionary ecological view of that links social transformation with the transformation of the human relation with nature in ways that we now consider ecological”.

The Socialist Resistance ecosocialist turn also bases itself on work done by third world activists, including those clearly identified as part of the radical left, on the question of the environment. Vandana Shiva’s 1992 critique of the Green revolution in India for example is a searing indictment of productivism in a rural agricultural context. Her activism and that of a whole section of the Indian left, particularly feminists, around water and in particular the question of dams has important lessons for us.

Our Latin America solidarity work has allowed us to discuss some of these questions, as Cuba and Venezuela have both attempted to integrate ecological dimensions into the revolutionary process.

3. Capitalist productivism

Revolutionary socialists have always been in favour of the development of the economy, on a global and national basis, to meet the needs of humanity. But that doesn’t mean we favour the production of an increasing number of commodities of any type whatsoever. On the contrary, huge swathes of production under capitalism are socially useless, and either redundant or directly harmful. Some products – like cars – harm the environment directly; others are useless and just use up huge amounts of the planet’s resources.

In the past Marxists have acted as though the production of commodities and the use to which they are subsequently put have no impact on the environment. In fact they can have a huge effect on the environment. The profligate waste of the planets resources in pursuit of an unending cascade of commodities, artificially created ‘wants’ generated by the advertising industry, is criminal. It only exists because that’s the way that capitalism functions. The constant stream of ‘new’ commodities is vital to maintain profits and fight off rival firms.

However, our critique of the so-called ‘commodity spectacle’ does not mean we are against all further economic development, especially in the third world. Neither does it mean that decisive new inventions in the future should not be applied, and the level of technology should remain stagnant. But it does mean that new products have to be justified on the basis of their social usefulness, and not because they are a repackaging of an established product to make more profits.

We cannot abandon industrialisation and go back to the feudal village. But we can reorganise society so that the goods and services produced are socially useful and environmentally friendly. And we can make democratic decisions about the trade off that people want to make between working time and economic development. Maximising economic growth is far from rational because it means that the central priority in the lives of most people is (increasing amounts of) work.

That much production under capitalism is useless is obvious. A classic example is Margaret Thatcher’s ‘great car economy’. No rational person could possibly think that the socially and environmentally most friendly way to organise transport was to centre it on private cars, and leave public transport to fill in the gaps. But that is just what has happened in the last 25 years with catastrophic results to the environment and neglect of public transport.

Huge inputs of socially useless labour time are put into the design of competing yet near identical models, their advertising and sales, the consequences in terms of deaths and injuries on the roads, the production of oil to keep the cars going etc. A fraction of the inputs of labour time and energy could produce a functioning, socially useful and much more environmentally friendly integrated public transport system. But it doesn’t happen because that is not the way that capitalism works. The ‘great car economy’ is a classic example of how human priorities are distorted by the priority of profits.

4. Social dimensions of the environmental crisis – Apocalypse Soon

The recent UN report highlighted the likely outcomes if global warming and carbon emissions are not tackled. It is not a question of whether climate change will occur – we are already in the thick of it. Rather the question is whether starting from today’s position, how can we minimise further emissions of greenhouse gases and how we can manage the effects of global warming as they kick in.

In Britain the discussion of climate change has escalated but the “solutions” proposed remain marginal. The government has come up with a draft Bill which, though proposing statutory target for emissions, falls far short of what is necessary to tackle dangerous and accelerating climate change. Its proposed 60% cuts by 2050 and an interim 26-32% by 2020 are way below what is needed to prevent reaching the 2oC tipping point, when potentially global warming could spiral out of control. Many scientists and environmentalists now agree that reductions in the order of 90% are going to be necessary to reverse the global warming process already underway. Meanwhile airport expansion goes ahead at a great pace and the government tells us that there will be no need for people to restrict their flights.

We are told that in any case Britain only accounts for 2% of world emissions (not an accurate figure of course) and what ever we do will be massively cancelled out by the escalating rate of emissions in China and India – with China completing a new power coal-fired station every two weeks. This ignores the fact that it is the rich countries which have polluted the world and continue to be the main polluters. It also ignores that fact that there is little chance of countries like China and India doing anything serious about their emissions whilst the rich countries carry on polluting just the same.

As the IPCC report makes clear, the effects of desertification, water shortage and drought, crop loss and food crisis, an upsurge in diseases caused by lack of clean water and other environmental effects, will hit disproportionately at “those who are worst placed to deal with it” – ie the poor. The rural and urban poor are the least able to find the resources to quickly modify their lives – to change location, to find alternative sources of water and food, to find medicines and medical care or to get emergency help in case of disaster. It will be the poor who will be the first victims of environmental crisis as the state and the ruling elite mobilises to defend the rich. This is true both in rural and urban areas, in the poor countries and the advanced capitalist countries as well.

In this context, the effects of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans was a highly symbolic warning. It is highly likely that it was a climate change induced event – hurricanes and tropical storms are becoming more frequent and fiercer as the oceans off West Africa and the Caribbean get hotter each summer.

Second, the victims were disproportionately poor. The troops rushed to the city were there to defend order (in the rich areas) and property (ditto). The poor were left to fend for themselves for days on end while hundreds died, while the rich plotted how to use the catastrophe for a class-based eviction of undesirables (ie the poor and black people). The tourist downturn area is restored to its full glory to ensure the tourist economy ticks over, while a huge section of the indigenous population is evicted.

In the third world, the increasing frequency of climate change-induced events, particularly floods, always hits the poor worst – because they live in the flimsiest housing, often in places were are insecure and dangerous – on floodplains, next to environmental squalor, with no adequate drainage and sanitation facilities.

Capitalism always rations resources in short supply towards the rich. Its weapons are military repression and the market – both are brutal killers. Environmental crisis will make security, health, food, water and adequate housing in extremely short supply – and the poor will go the wall unless they fight back. That’s why we shall see increasingly that class struggles in the third world and beyond will take the form of struggles to get and to defend basic resources like food, food and housing. Privatisation will be deepened to make all resources difficult to obtain by the poor – and always available to the rich. For the rich, everything is cheap.

According to Mike Davis’ Planet of Slums, of the world’s 6bn people, one billion live and slums – and the number is increasing rapidly. Subject to the vagaries of environmental damage, especially through floods, and with grave shortages of drinkable water and sanitation, the third world slums are likely to become – even more than today – massive centres for disease and the generation of pandemics. As Mike Davis points out, the first great wave of Avian ‘flu is much more likely to come from Jakarta than East Anglia.

Mark Lynas in his book ‘High Tide’ points out that the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine has estimated that 160,000 people are dying each year from the consequences of climate change – malaria, dysentery and malnutrition. And even that excludes some of the most extreme storm disasters plausibly linked to climate change, notably the tropical cyclone in Bangladesh in 1991, which killed 138,000, as well as Hurricanes Mitch and Andrew in the Caribbean, both hyper-intense category-five typhoons.”

In it infamous document for a ‘worst case’ scenario, the Pentagon projects a world ecological collapse – not in 200 years but in 20 or 30 years. According to the Observer (22 Feb 2004):“A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ’Siberian’ climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.

”The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to its contents.”

The response of the Pentagon is a highly miltarised society, “Fortress America”, whose primary purpose is to keep out those fleeing from the poor countries, and to defend the rich internally from the wrath of the dispossessed poor. It envisages using massive amounts of violence, including nuclear weapons, against anyone who stands in the way of the US gaining the resources it needs from anywhere in the world.

If it is always the poor who will pay the price for environmental disaster, it will be particularly women and children who pay the price. Children because they are more vulnerable to disease, and less able to defend themselves from violence; and women because they have the main responsibility for childcare and child raising in nearly all poor societies – urban and rural, third world and first world. In the third world, it will be overwhelmingly women who have to try to find water, firewood and food for families. Climate catastrophe is not only a class question, it is also a gender question. Lack of food, shelter and water will increasingly force families to sell their children to become bonded labourers , virtual slave (as already happens on a mass scale in India) or sex slaves, as already happens in many countries of the third world.

A world of environmental catastrophe opens up the danger of massively increased militarism, repression and war. Ecological collapse may be survived by the rich minority, but it will devastate the poor. The fight against it is a vital part of the class struggle for socialism.

5. Population growth and the empowerment of women

World population is forecast to rise from a current 6 billion to 9 billion by mid century, if not before. Such levels are unsustainable under capitalism. So the debate about population control is already with us. If Malthusian, misogynist and racist solutions are not to triumph, ecosocialist solutions based on overcoming poverty and empowering women have to be fought for.

Whilst it is true that high birth rates generally accompany poverty and ignorance, most poor women do not actually want to spend their lives in childbirth and rearing. So a central demand of women’s movements in both North and South has always been for access to safe and reliable (preferably free) contraception and abortion. Poor people often have large families as an insurance against poverty in old age. When people become richer, birth rates go down.

Collectivisation of housework has also been a demand of feminists and socialists, and we need to revisit this area, when considering an alternative to capitalist individualism. Domestic violence and violence against women always increases dramatically during any societal breakdown.

A world of environmental catastrophe opens up the danger of massively increased militarism, repression and war. Ecological collapse may be survived by the rich minority, but it will devastate the poor. The fight against it is a vital part of the class struggle for socialism.

6. Savage capitalism in the advanced countries: Treadmill Society

For 25 years the Western countries have been gripped by the policies of neoliberalism. This replaced the Keynesian, mixed economy, welfare-state model of the 1950s and ‘60s. The essence of this system is massive privatisation and marketisation; nationalised industries like the water and energy utilities are privatised, and privatisation to varying degrees sis even introduced in to the education and health systems. Neoliberalism destroys social goods in favour of private goods; through privatisation of utilities and key aspects of social care like homes for the elderly, the financial surplus is squeezed out of workers current incomes and savings – all to the benefit of finance capital to whom all the utilities have huge debts. Mass insecurity is the result: the work process is transformed and labour discipline tightened. People work harder and longer to lead less secure and healthy lives.

This has been rightly characterised by John Bellamy Foster as the “treadmill society” . The devastating effects on the environment of the treadmill society have been described above. But now neoliberalism, as it degenerates into savage capitalism, is preparing another twist of the screw. This is called private equity capital (PEC). PEC constitutes a new and massive threat to millions of workers. Briefly summed up, private equity companies are short term arrangements for borrowing vast amounts of money for a limited time. These huge amounts of money are then used to buy up companies which are said to be ‘under-performing’ (like Sainsbury’s, a target of private equity spivs). Once in the hands of PEC capitalists, the companies are asset stripped, workers fired, those retained pushed onto poverty wages without pensions or benefits, and a huge profit on the borrowed money. PEC evidently builds nothing, contributes nothing and makes nothing – except short-term profits. Gordon Gecko – Michael Douglas’ asset stripping sociopath in Wall Street – is a model of sanity and conscience compared with today’s equity capitalist robbers. Needless to say PEC is warmly welcomed by New Labour, in particular Gordon Brown.

According to the Independent (2nd March 2007) “Gordon Brown praised the private equity industry’s ability to create jobs yesterday despite the scathing attack on the sector from trade unions concerned over job losses…. Mr Brown is the latest Labour politician to address the private equity issue amid a growing storm around the industry. Trade unions and some Labour politicians have lambasted private equity companies for asset stripping, job cutting and a lack of openness over recent weeks as a potential bid for the supermarket chain Sainsbury’s has thrown the publicity-shy industry into the spotlight…. Mr Brown’s defence of the sector comes in the wake of Tony Blair’s public support of private equity investment this week.” PEC mania comes at a time when savage capitalism is preparing for a major assault on the last-ditch redoubts of welfare capitalism – the NHS and education, where the methods of the market, artificial targets and the introduction of private capital are evident.

Neoliberalism has swiveled the priorities of production into luxury production, as more and more companies covet the luxury end of the market where profits are highest. You can see this clearly in the space allocated to ‘first’ and ‘business’ class on airlines, or on trains. Luxury goods – haute couture clothes, watches, luggage, yachts, luxury cars (including SUVs), luxury hotels, luxury mansion, high-value tourism and cruises – all these make much higher percentage profits per unit (often in the hundreds of per cent) than mass production goods. Luxury goods production adds insult to injury as far as the ordinary workers and the environment are concerned. Flaunting an unattainable lifestyle of comfort and ‘style’, these goods are literally socially useless and consume huge amounts of scare raw materials (gold and silver!) and energy.

Savage capitalism is a counter-revolution against the gains of the workers movement in the post-war world. It wrecks the health and lives of millions of the working class and the middle class, and consigns them to the treadmill of insecurity and endless work, and increasingly to a poverty-stricken old age. All this in the interests of the mega-rich, who become richer by quantum leaps as class divisions and social inequality are deepened.

All this is held together by a deepening cultural dumbing down, the erosion of social solidarity and a brain-dead culture of ‘success’ and ‘celebrity’. In a ghastly parody of Any Warhol’s prediction that everyone would become famous for 15 minutes, people now become celebrities for being famous, not for anything they have actually done. On humiliating and idiot TV programmes like Big Brother and Castaway, people compete to ‘win’ – and thus become famous and rich for being…a celebrity. The empty and boring lifestyles of the rich are endlessly celebrated to create a new morality which fundamentally breaks with that of even welfare capitalism – to be rich is worthwhile, to be poor is worthless. The inevitable result is a dumbing down of mass culture and the multiplication of worthless ‘cultural’ commodities – 85 television channels, nothing worth watching.

Our conclusion is that the fundamentals of inequality, power and wealth cannot be addressed in the advanced countries without a revolution in work, education, leisure and culture – not only in equality of reward, but in the nature of what is produced and how it is produced. Getting off the treadmill means leading a more human life with different priorities, different products, different sources of energy – and a different set of relations between people. A human society which defends the environment is incompatible with capitalism.

7. Fake pro-capitalist solutions

However, before turning increasingly to authoritarian solutions, capitalism will also try to mitigate and adapt to climate change, as well as co-opt anti-capitalist opposition. This involves the market, new technology and some rationing and taxation. It centres on the commodification of everything, down to the air itself. This is the meaning, for instance of Kyoto and similar regional and national agreements, which create carbon markets basically advantageous to the imperialist North. We can expect a radical switch to ‘low carbon economies’ through lucrative investment in renewables and energy efficient products. This will include nuclear and all sorts of actually socially and environmentally damaging technology, spun as ways to save the planet.

As climate instability accelerates, corporate capitalism will also be faced with massive insurance bills (Hurricane Katrina is estimated to have cost $140bn), a large part of which will be passed on to workers, but a significant part of which will be paid for by business itself. So we can expect panic measures to include ever more wacky and dangerous techno-fixes, such as giant sulphur screens to block out the sun and silver iodide bombs to divert the storm clouds (to where?). At the same time countries such as Canada and Russia will profit from a short term ‘gold rush’, as the melting ice-caps of the Arctic open up the last remaining fossil fuel deposits.

Measures such as the Clean Development Mechanism will colonise the South with carbon sinks and biofuel plantations, enabling the North to carry on polluting without changing lifestyles ecological profligacy in the North and consequent catastrophe in the South.

However it is necessary to be aware and critical of the role of the Southern elites in this process. Ugandan President Museveni recently called global warming “an act of aggression by the rich (of the North) against the poor (of the South)”. Yet this man is currently allowing the selling off and destruction of his own country’s rainforests and is brutally repressing opposition.

As precious resources are depleted and climate instability increases, so will the current wars in the South become more and more brutal (Darfur writ large). Millions will be forced to flee or submit ‘for protection’ and survival to ruthless warlords. We urgently need to integrate an understanding of this into campaigning work around refugees and asylum.

8. War and imperialism

Savage capitalism is at its most open and overtly brutal in its profligate use of violence. The term ‘imperialism’ to describe the US and British relations with countries of the third world, especially in the Middle East, is now hardly challenged – indeed in the case of people like Niall Ferguson and Michael Ignatieff – openly celebrated. Imperialist military intervention is justified as part of the “war against terror”. But it is clear that American imperialism has gone to war in the Middle East to capture control of the world’s largest known oil reserves and the oil routes, but also to occupy a crucial part of Eurasia, which is regards as central to ensure continued US economic and political dominance worldwide.

Faced with growing competition from Japan, Europe and now China, the United States has in the last 20 years unleashed the one instrument in which it is completely dominant internationally, the military. Today there are more than one million US service personnel stationed abroad. Eighteen years after the fall of the Berlin wall, the ‘peace dividend’ has not materialised, showing in its own way that US military aggression abroad was certainly not a matter of defending US interests against ‘Communism’.

Today US military aggression – supported by the British, giving political cover – is aimed not just at regimes that the US regards as hostile, like Iran, but also against popular movements. In both the Philippines and Colombia US advisors and security ‘consultants’ from military firms like Blackwater, are part of a large scale US military intervention capability. US troops are now ensconced in the Central Asian republics and in the Horn of Africa, as well as their hundreds of bases worldwide. The vast expense of this massive military machine – and Britain’s small scale imitation of it – is itself one of the most irrational uses of resources imaginable, and itself is causing massive environmental damage. Indeed imperialist militarism, savage capitalism and third world exploitation are at the ‘cutting edge’ of environmental damage.

Examples from imperialism’s recent wars are legion. Israeli attacks on the Jiyye power plant in the summer of 2006 led to an oil slick which has probably destroyed Lebanon’s coastal marine life and threatens the whole ecosystem of the eastern Mediterranean.

According to Mark Lynas: “More than 15,000 tonnes of fuel oil has leaked from the Jiyye power plant since it was attacked by Israeli warplanes on 13 July. As if deliberately to hamper any attempts to staunch the flow of oil, Israel then bombed the power plant again two days later, preventing emergency workers from gaining access to the site. An indication of the scale of the disaster comes from satellite photos showing a 3,000-square- kilometre slick along two-thirds of Lebanon’s coastline. The oil has now begun to wash up in Syria.

“None of this will come as a surprise to the Palestinians, who have suffered the environmental consequences of Israel’s scorched-earth policies for decades. The water supply to nearly a million people in Gaza was cut off by bombing last month. Untreated sewage lies in pools on the beach, thanks to Israeli shelling of the Gaza City waste-water treatment plant in 2002. Landfill sites are overflowing and on fire, and two pilot composting plants – constructed with outside help as an alternative to landfill – lie idle, having also been damaged by Israeli bullets.”

The environmental effects of direct military intervention are of course just a small part of the overall environmental crisis for the peoples of the most exploited countries. Much of the most immediate environmental damage comes from extraction industries, notably logging, mining and the oil industry. Much of this is the result of bandit and semi-legal capitalism, which is generally in league with national governments and ‘respectable’ transnational corporations like BP, who drop their respectable mask when confronted with the ‘natives’. Logging in particular is doing the most long-term damage with global implications, particularly the destruction of the Amazon rainforest and the destruction of Siberian forests to feed the demand of Chinese industry for wood, after the Chinese government banned logging in its own country because of a number of high profile disasters caused by logging (flooding and landslips).

The insanity of the military-imperial system is revealed by the massive expenditure and waste of two systems – the US anti-missile shield which over time will cost hundreds of billions of dollars and the Blair-Brown pledge to renew the Trident submarine missile system, which is expected to finally run out at a cost of something like £70 billion.

Today, the bi-partisan policy of the US ruling class that backed the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan has crumbled in the face of the setbacks (quagmire), which the US-led coalition has suffered. However, the debate in Washington is not questioning the strategic importance for the USA of controlling the Gulf region, but how to do it successfully. Nonetheless, the US administration has shown its determination to continue its war effort with the policy of the ‘surge’, but not only in Iraq. In Afghanistan, Palestine, the latent war in the Lebanon, its intervention in Somalia and its very public preparations for war against Iran, indicate its preparedness to broaden the scope of its interventions. (See FI resolution: Middle East in Flames, published in Resistance No 43, March-April 2007.)

The divisions in the imperialist ruling classes are creating favourable conditions for a renewed offensive by the anti-war movements in the imperialist centres and it is urgent that we build/rebuild the movements. We stand for:

An end to all imperialist expeditions and the immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq and Afghanistan;
Against any provocations or attacks on Iran;
For the withdrawal of NATO troops from Lebanon;
For an end to interference in Palestinian internal affairs and for the lifting of sanctions on the Palestinians.

We support all resistance movements against imperialist intervention that do not engage in sectarian killings, in particular Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine, while criticising their religious fundamentalism and their political and social programme. We prioritise establishing links of solidarity with the trade unions (for example, the independent Oil Workers Union in Iraq), and political forces who are constructing progressive and socialist struggles in the region (for example, the Lebanese CP). Our aim is to assist in the emergence of a socialist left in the region, which is democratic, feminist and anti-imperialist.

9. Global injustice – Latin America fights back

Savage capitalism everywhere attempts to further enslave and exploit the countries of the third world. It is not surprising that some of the most advanced examples of revolt against neoliberalism and imperialist exploitation have emerged in the poor countries – particularly Latin America. As we saw negatively with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the existence of positive examples – in life and not just in theories and programmes – is vital for developing opposition movements and an anti-capitalist perspective.

On no continent is neoliberalism so widely rejected as in Latin America, and nowhere has the resurgence of the Left been so powerful. The election of Evo Morales in Bolivia and the evolution of the Hugo Chávez government in Venezuela are hugely ideologically important. Whatever the direction and eventual outcome of these governments, they have already done an enormously important thing – raised the banner of socialism as a mass current with mass credibility again. This is especially important in relation to the younger generations for whom the ideology and reality of socialism has less purchase.

Even the election of moderate centre-left governments, like those of Lula in Brazil, Bachelet in Chile and Tabaré Vázquez in Uruguay are the product of a long period of struggle against neoliberalism and the right. While we solidarise with all movements fighting back against savage capitalism internationally, the central thing about the Latin American developments is that they centrally raise the question of socialism. A central part of our orientation in the next period will be:

Solidarity with the developing revolutionary processes in Bolivia and Venezuela.
Defence of Cuba against the deepening reactionary offensive of imperialism, which will hit crescendo levels when Fidel Castro dies.
Propaganda on the advances made in Cuba, especially in the fields of social welfare, health and the environment, as demonstrations of what can be achieved, even in a poor country, on an anti-capitalist basis.

10. The surveillance- security, lock-down state

Today a new regime of security is being introduced by the major states, in the first place Britain and the United States. Savage capitalism has created a more unstable world and for the ruling class new methods of surveillance and repression. As well as restrictions on civil liberties are needed to deal with it. Terrorism is in reality a small problem and used only as the banner headline behind which the new repressive state mobilises against national and international protest movements.

The real targets are labour movements, global justice and peace movements and movements for national self-determination. Only a small minority of these struggles have a military dimension (Palestine, the Kurdish question), but increasingly movements which use the normal methods of mass mobilisation (which may include civil disobedience) are the victims of paramilitary repression.

The worst examples are still in the third world – for example the struggle in Oaxaca State Mexico in 2006, led by the school teachers, against a hugely corrupt state government. Dozens were killed and disappeared; others committed to indefinite jail with no appeal. However mass movements in advanced capitalist democracies also find themselves increasingly hemmed in by new police powers and restrictions, and sometimes simply by brutal police .

Surveillance of the domestic population is at its highest level ever. Vast new databases and sophisticated computer equipment enables the US government especially, but also governments in other imperialist states, to monitor all email and internet traffic and to build up a detailed real-time profile of the activities of any citizen. There is a secular trend towards the criminalisation of more and more forms of protest, or at least to make forms of protest dependent on the indulgence and toleration of the state – which can easily be withdrawn.

In the United States this has resulted in the Patriot Act, which essentially gives the state the right to illegalise anything, and hold anyone is secret detention for indefinite amounts of times and in secret.

At an international level this has led to the re-legitimisation of torture and the huge secret Gulag of US prison camps and ‘special rendition’, where torture is used or – in the case of special rendition, torture is outsourced to third world regimes.

The security-repressive state goes hand in hand with the new imperialism. In many places (the Philippines, Colombia and Palestine) local repressive states work hand-in-hand with US special forces, private armies like Blackwater and/or the CIA. Savage capitalism has created a vast continent of repression and violence with a daily toll of the murdered, the disappeared and the tortured. This is justified and even celebrated in the ideologically most backward parts of modern society (like video games).

Defending civil liberties and opposing militarism is a crucial part of the fight for socialism and human civilisation today. The move towards mass surveillance and restrictions on civil liberties, including the para-militarisation of the policing of protest is, as we have seen in the Pentagon’s plans for eco-catastrophe, laying the basis for a more total lock-down state if apocalypse happens. The catastrophic results of environmental breakdown, including an outpouring of desperate eco-migration, could only be managed on the basis of military dictatorship.

11. Strategy and the fightback

Our strategic conclusion on planetary crisis should start with the following assumptions:

a) Creating a sustainable civilisation requires a wholesale conversion of production and consumption, and this is incompatible with capitalism. Not only are the corporations and government unwilling to act against short-term capitalist interests, but as we explained above a sustainable environment is contrary to the inbuilt productivism bias of the capitalist mode of production.

b) Environmentalism without class, without anti-capitalism, has massive limitations which invalidate it as a long-term strategy. Indeed the kind of green politics which attempts to counterpose itself to left and right can be positively damaging to the kind of alliances necessary to confront eco-catastrophe.

c) At the same time as trying to elaborate a new Marxism for the 21st century which builds on Marx’s understanding of a materialist approach to the environment in order to meet the challenge of climate change, we continue to put forward a Marxism that is feminist, anti-racist and opposed to homophobia.

In Britain at least some of the programmatic gains in sections of the revolutionary left that were won as a result of the self-organisation of women and of black people particularly have to some extent been lost in a period where the working class as a whole suffered a whole range of defeats under first Thatcherism and then New Labour.

This means that we need to rediscuss some of these questions in and of themselves with comrades who were not part of the same historical experiences and bring our analysis up to date in order to attempt a new synthesis in developing an accessible Marxism for today.

We don’t think there is any contradiction in doing this while at the same time developing an eco-socialist approach – rather we think that these discussions will enrich and complement each other This is important at two levels: giving us a chance to succeed in the synthesis that is necessary in its own right and developing the sort of profile we want through our press, web sites, educational events etc.

d) As is traditional in our politics we do not counterpose reforms to anti-capitalist transition. However we do point out the extremely small gains which are likely to be made on climate change without national and international planning and without a massive social and economic conversion.

e) The decisive force on a world scale for anti-capitalist struggle remains the workers’ movement. A central fight for Marxists is that to win the workers movement to an environmentalist (and hence eco-socialist) perspective. A massive aid to this is the example of environmentally friendly mobilisation and policies of Cuba, and to a lesser extent Venezuela.

Evidently the major forces willing to take to the streets today on the environmental question are in diverse protest movements (and none), and generally not from the workers movement. Huge forces can develop on this issue outside the workers movement. For us – as is normal in our united front politics – an alliance of the workers movements and social movements, on a class struggle and anti-capitalist basis, is what we fight for. However, we do not consider all these forces to be equivalent in strategic terms.

This is not a moral question, but one of hard headed political and social analysis which has been explained well in recent articles by Daniel Bensaid and Martha Harnecker. Bensaid says:

“From a certain point of view, capitalism will indeed be overthrown by an alliance, or a convergence, of mass social movements. But even if these movements, because of their liberatory projects, perceive capitalism to be their enemy (which perhaps is the case for the women’s movement or the environmental movement, not just the workers movement), I don’t think these movements all play an equivalent role. And all are traversed by differences and contradictions that reflect their position, in the face of capital as a global mode of domination.

“There is a ’naturalist’ feminism and a revolutionary feminism, a profoundly anti-humanist environmentalism and a humanist and social environmentalism… .if you consider these arenas are not structured in a hierarchy, but simply juxtaposed, then perhaps you could devise a tactic of putting together changing coalitions (’rainbow coalitions’ on immediate questions). But there would be no solid strategic convergence in such an approach. I think, on the contrary, that within a particular mode of production (capitalism) , relations of exploitation and class conflict constitute an overarching framework that cuts across and unifies the other contradictions.

“Capital itself is the great unifier that subordinates every aspect of social production and reproduction, remodeling the function of the family, determining the social division of labour and submitting humanity’s conditions of social reproduction to the law of value. If that is indeed the case, a party, and not simply the sum of social movements, is the best agent of conscious unification.”

Martha Harnecker says:

“…when one criticizes parties, people think one is betting on the emergence of movements that will lead the struggle. Social movements are sectoral movements and require an instrument for articulation, call it party, sociopolitical movement, front, or whatever. But what’s needed are political instruments that articulate and raise a national proposal, that make an ideological proposal in today’s world, where the wars are fought in the plane of ideas, where the means of communication in the hands of the powerful are almost overpowering We can see what is happening with the media in Venezuela.”

Swiveling our orientation towards ecosocialism however does not alter our fundamental strategy, but it requires its renovation:

a) We maintain our orientation towards the creation of a broad anti-capitalist, ecosocialist party to the left of Labour, as a first step towards resolving the crisis of leadership of the working class and other popular layers.

b) We need to develop an action programme of immediate and transitional demands which incorporate the centrality of the fight to save the environment.

What does it mean to call Socialist Resistance ‘Ecosocialist’ ? To define ourselves by the term ecosocialist does not mean dropping our commitment to anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism, feminism and the rights of the oppressed, anti-racism, etc. Nor does it mean a radical version of the Green Party: rather it is a recognition that capitalism cannot solve the problems posed by climate change and global warming as, by its very nature, it is based on production for profit not need, regardless of the impact on the planet. It is therefore either ‘Ecosocialism or Barbarism’.

12. Anti-capitalist positions on key environmental debates

However, as well as exposing the incapacity of capitalism, especially in its present ‘savage’ or ‘morbid’ phase, dominated as it is by neo-liberal economic strategies, to resolve the ecological problems it has created, we also have to develop our politics on more immediate issues raised by the crisis. But these responses have to be founded on a socialist framework – using Marxist theory and class analysis to pose solutions. For example on the vexed issue of green taxes, all other mainstream parties, including the Greens, have a policy of taxation to try and deal with carbon emissions. The congestion charge, already in place in parts of London (and being introduced in Manchester, Durham and elsewhere), has reduced the number of cars entering the centre of London. But it is clear that the reduction is based on the cars of the poor.

Traveling in central London during the week shows this clearly – only large expensive cars and taxis are on the road. Poor people have been forced, especially since the hike in the cost to £8.00 a day, to take inadequate and overcrowded public transport. It is true that some money raised has gone to improve public transport – but not to reduce fares that are the most expensive of any city in the world.

The congestion charge is a flat tax (like the poll tax) that penalises the poor, and is divisive. The only form of capitalist taxation socialists can support would be steeply progressive taxation intended to drive the large gas-guzzlers off the road. In other words a tax on the rich. Similarly on the question of air travel emissions. The government pretends that these are not very high, but international air travel is not at present counted as part of British emissions. It is true that there is no tax on air fuel as there is on fuel for cars, buses, etc. but the proposal to raise a flat tax on air travel, either on fuel or flights will again hit the poor and we should oppose it.

But we also need an answer to the problem of increasing air travel. The fairest way to reduce emissions would be to ration its use to say one or two flights a year, or to a number of air miles traveled. In addition, so that the rich cannot buy others’ rations, this should be made illegal. No doubt in our present system an illegal market would come into existence, but we have to argue for what is just and fair and in the interests of the working class and the poor, not only what is possible at once. Nor is it not simply a question of justice.

We have to work out ways of uniting as many as possible to what is necessary. Ordinary people will not change their outlook if they feel they are the only ones having to pay. This will certainly be the project of the rich – make the poor pay, both here in the developed world, and in the developing world, but we have to propose an alternative. “Contraction and Convergence” is another controversial issue on the left. Developed by Aubrey Meyer, the theory accepts that the present situation has been created by the industrialised world and that we have to drastically cut back our emissions – the ‘contraction’ bit. The developing world, quite properly also wishes to industrialise and this should be allowed – up to a certain point.

At a fixed point in the future and this must be agreed by international treaty for it to work, the contracting emissions of the developed world will coincide with the increased emissions o f the developing world – this is the ‘convergence’ bit. But this theory incorporates a ‘carbon-trading’ element. That is the rich countries could buy rights of emission from the less emitting developing areas if they produce less carbon than their ration. We should therefore oppose it.

The majority of the more or less organised currents look to capitalist solutions in market mechanisms, carbon trading, supplemented by taxation. The currently operated system is the European Union’s Emissions Trading System (ETS), is the most regressive of all carbon-trading schemes and operates according to the principle laid down at Kyoto. Permits for 6527 million tones of carbon dioxide emission have been allocated to big energy users.

This does not encourage cleaner energy but simply given them a profit bonanza, as the price of permits rose to €27, making the whole distribution worth €177 billion. They have also passed on ‘extra costs’ to the consumer even though they did not have to buy the permits – leading to rising prices. The EU officials have said that they new this would happen and state that the market economy is the only way (i.e., higher prices) that energy consumption will fall.

Most climate change activists oppose Kyoto and the EU schemes Contraction and Convergence (C&C) is seen as an alternative to the EU (ETS) and the Kyoto protocol and is the most widely supported system, but there are other systems that are hotly debated, most of which involve carbon trading and taxation of some kind, but some are more equitable (a key word an the movement) than others. The more equitable systems, for example, Cap and Share (C&S), or Tradable Energy Quotas (TEQs), which involve capping and the distribution of tradable allowance to the population based on the equal ‘right to emit’. However, there is no such human right under capitalism except for those rights claimed by the owners of the means of production.

Our biggest immediate policy difference (there is a big programmatic gulf) with the capping movement is their insistence on tradable allowance. We oppose this because it benefits the big emitters and penalizes the working class (ironically this is often the main objection to a tax perspective by those left leaning Greens).

We should support planned capping (or equitable rationing) without the right to trade (e.g., as in Second World War). The reply, like all reformists of the existing system, is that we are unrealistic because without trading of carbon permits it would be totally unacceptable to big companies and would probably bring the capitalist system down.

Carbon trading (along with taxation) is the premier bourgeois answer to climate change, allowing the rich north and west to buy their way out of trouble while keeping the poor south and east in a pre-or semi-industrialised state. The Stern Report itself, while recognising the failure of the market, nonetheless poses the same mechanism to solve the crisis.

13. Our Demands

Ecosocialists have to start from a class analysis, an analysis that can unite the largest possible number of people to make the rich, not the poor, pay. We support the building of a mass movement, nationally and internationally to impose the types of demand below.

For a unilateral reduction of greenhouse gas emissions in Britain of 90% by 2030, with similar reductions in other developed countries;
For an international treaty to cap global carbon emissions, not because we think this is an easy option, or even likely to be achieved (this depends on the balance of forces), but because it is necessary and can unite the movements internationally against the failures of the capitalist system;
For international rationing of air travel, any market in rations to be made illegal;
Opposition to nuclear energy and the building of any new nuclear power stations;
For a massive expansion of renewable energy;
For subsidies from national and local government:

• to replace the use of cars by providing cheap, accessible and frequent public transport; • to ensure all new buildings are zero-carbon; • to provide insulation, energy conservation, etc. for all homes to make them energy efficient.

On climate change we should campaign around the following transitional and immediate demands which are designed to halt and reverse the global warming process and thus prevent climate chaos and rising sea levels. These should include a 90% reduction in fossil fuel use by 2050, based on a 6% annual target, monitored by independent scrutiny. The industrialised countries, who have caused the problem, must take the lead in this. The most impoverished peoples are paying the highest price for the actions of the advanced countries. There is no point in asking then to take measures not being taken in the industrialised countries. This means:

Cancellation of the third-world debt. There is no point on calling on impoverished counties to tackle clime change if they are saddled with debt.

A massive increase in investment in renewable energy including solar, wind wave, tidal and hydro power (with the exception of destructive mega-dam projects). These should be monitored for anti-social consequences. No nuclear power.

End the productivist throwaway society: production for use and not for profit.

Tough action against industrial and corporate polluters.

Free, or cheap, integrated publicly owned transport systems to provide and alternative to the car.

Nationalisation of rail, road freight and bus companies.

Halt airport expansion, restrict flights and end binge flying. Nationalise the airlines.

Redesigned cities to eliminate unnecessary journeys and conserve energy

Scrap weapons of mass destruction and use the resources for sustainable development and renewable energy.

Massive investment to make homes more energy efficient. Moves towards the collectivisation of living spaces.

Nationalisation of the supermarkets, localised food production and a big reduction in food miles.

No GM crops for food or fuel.

End the destruction of the rain forests.

Defend the rights of climate change refugees and migrants. Protect those hit by drought, desertisation, floods, crop failure and extreme weather conditions.

Renationalise water and protect water reserves. End the pollution of the rivers and the water ways.

14. Tasks

Another document deals with the detailed tactical and organisational consequences of the ecosocialist turn.

However, our strategic approach will be governed by the following guidelines

We seek to build a broad ecosocialist, anticapitalist, current in the labour movement and the left, among young people and among environmentalists, including the Greens.

We fight to win the labour movement to campaigning against environmental catastrophe as a central concern and priority.

We fight to win environmentalists and youth to an understanding that ecological sanity is incompatible with capitalism and that an eco-friendly world means socialism.

Socialist Resistance is a Marxist tendency in Britain involving supporters of the Fourth International and other revolutionary socialists.

International Viewpoint Online magazine : IV392 – September 2007

Extracts from Gender as Performance: An Interview with Judith Butler taken by Peter Osborne and Lynne Segal, London, 1993.

RP: We’d like to begin by asking you where you place your work within the increasingly diverse field of gender studies. Most people associate your recent writings with what has become known as “queer theory”. But the emergence of gay and lesbian studies as a discrete disciplinary phenomenon has problematised the relationship of some of this work to feminism. Do you see yourself primarily as a feminist of as a queer theorist, or do you refuse the choice?

Butler: I would say that I’m a feminist theorist before I’m a queer theorist or a gay and lesbian theorist. My commitments to feminism are probably my primary commitments. Gender Trouble was a critique of compulsory heterosexuality within feminism, and it was feminists that were my intended audience. At the time I wrote the text there was no gay and lesbian studies, as I understood it. When the book came out, the Second Annual Conference of Lesbian and Gay Studies was taking place in the USA, and it got taken up in a way that I could never have anticipated. I remember sitting next to someone at a dinner party, and he said that he was working on queer theory. And I said: What’s queer theory? He looked at me like I was crazy, because he evidently thought that I was a part of this thing called queer theory. But all I knew was that Teresa de Lauretis had published an issue of the journal Differences called “Queer Theory”. I thought it was something she had put together. It certainly never occurred to me that I was a part of queer theory.

I have some problems here, because I think there’s some anti-feminism in queer theory. Also, insofar as some people in queer theory want to claim that the analysis of sexuality can be radically separated from the analysis of gender, I’m very much opposed to them. The new Gay and Lesbian Reader that Routledge have just published begins with a set of articles that make that claim. I think that separation is a big mistake. Catharine MacKinnon’s work sets up such a reductive causal relationship between sexuality and gender that she came to stand for an extreme version of feminism that had to be combatted. But it seems to me that to combat it through a queer theory that dissociates itself from feminism altogether is a massive mistake.

RP: Could you say something more about the sex-gender distinction? Do you reject it or do you just reject a particular interpretation of it? Your position on this seems to have shifted recently.

Butler: One of the interpretations that has been made of Gender Trouble is that there is no sex, there is only gender, and gender is performative. People then go on to think that if gender is performative it must be radically free. And it has seemed to many that the materiality of the body is vacated or ignored or negated here – disavowed, even. (There’s a symptomatic reading of this as somatophobia. It’s interesting to have one’s text pathologised.) So what became important to me in writing Bodies that Matter was to go back to the category of sex, and to the problem of materiality, and to ask how it is that sex itself might be construed as a norm. Now, I take it that’s a presupposition of Lacanian psychoanalysis – that sex is a norm. But I didn’t want to remain restricted within the Lacanian purview. I wanted to work out how a norm actually materialises a body, how we might understand the materiality of the body to be not only invested with a norm, but in some sense animated by a norm, or contoured by a norm. So I have shifted. I think that I overrode the category of sex too quickly in Gender Trouble. I try to reconsider it in Bodies That Matter, and to emphasise the place of constraint in the very production of sex.

RP: A lot of people like Gender Trouble because they liked the idea of gender as a kind of improvisational theatre, a space where different identities can be more or less freely adopted and explored at will. They wanted to get on with the work of enacting gender, in order to undermine its dominant forms. However, at the beginning of Bodies That Matter you say that, of course, one doesn’t just voluntaristically construct or deconstruct identities. It’s unclear to us to what extent you want to hold onto the possibilities opened up in Gender Trouble of being able to use transgressive performances such as drag to help decentre or destabilise gender categories, and to what extent you have become sceptical about this.

Butler: The problem with drag is that I offered it as an example of performativity, but it has been taken up as the paradigm for performativity. One ought always to be wary of one’s examples. What’s interesting is that this voluntarist interpretation, this desire for a kind of radical theatrical remaking of the body, is obviously out there in the public sphere. There’s a desire for a fully phantasmatic transfiguration of the body. But no, I don’t think that drag is a paradigm for the subversion of gender. I don’t think that if we were all more dragged out gender life would become more expansive and less restrictive. There are restrictions in drag. In fact, I argued toward the end of the book that drag has its own melancholia.

It is important to understand performativity – which is distinct from performance – through the more limited notion of resignification. I’m still thinking about subversive repetition, which is a category in Gender Trouble, but in the place of something like parody I would now emphasise the complex ways in which resignification works in political discourse. I suspect there’s going to be a less celebratory, and less popular, response to my new book. But I wanted to write against my popular image. I set out to make myself less popular, because I felt that the popularisation of Gender Trouble – even though it was interesting culturally to see what it tapped into, to see what was out there, longing to be tapped into – ended up being a terrible misrepresentation of what I wanted to say!

[...]It is important to distinguish performance from performativity: the former presumes a subject, but the latter contests the very notion of the subject. The place where I try to clarify this is toward the beginning of my essay “Critically Queer”, in Bodies that Matter, I begin with the Foucauldian premise that power works in part through discourse and it works in part to produce and destabilise subjects. But then, when one starts to think carefully about how discourse might be said to produce a subject, it’s clear that one’s already talking about a certain figure or trope of production. It is at this point that it’s useful to turn to the notion of performativity, and performative speech acts in particular – understood as those speech acts that bring into being that which they name. This is the moment in which discourse becomes productive in a fairly specific way. So what I’m trying to do is think about the performativity as that aspect of discourse that has the capacity to produce what it names. Then I take a further step, through the Derridean rewriting of Austin, and suggest that this production actually always happens through a certain kind of repetition and recitation. So if you want the ontology of this, I guess performativity is the vehicle through which ontological effects are established. Performativity is the discursive mode by which ontological effects are installed. Something like that.

[. . .]

[Butler is then asked about the way in which she apparently ignores biological constraints on bodies, most obviously the fact that male bodies can't produce children whilst female bodies can]. Yes, there will be that exasperated response [to what I do there], but there is a good tactical reason to reproduce it. Take your example of impregnation. Somebody might well say: isn’t it the case that certain bodies go to the gynaecologist for certain kinds of examination and certain bodies do not? And I would obviously affirm that. But the real question here is: to what extent does a body get defined by its capacity for pregnancy? Why is it pregnancy by which that body gets defined? One might say it’s because somebody is of a given sex that they go to the gynaecologist to get an examination that establishes the possibility of pregnancy, or one might say that going to the gynaecologist is the very production of “sex” – but it is still the question of pregnancy that is centaring that whole institutional practice here.

Now, it seems to me that, although women’s bodies generally speaking are understood as capable of impregnation, the fact of the matter is that there are female infants and children who cannot be impregnated, there are older women who cannot be impregnated, there are women of all ages who cannot be impregnated, and even if they could ideally, that is not necessarily the salient feature of their bodies or even of their being women. What the question does is try to make the problematic of reproduction central to the sexing of the body. But I am not sure that is, or ought to be, what is absolutely salient or primary in the sexing of the body. If it is, I think it’s the imposition of a norm, not a neutral description of biological constraints.

I do not deny certain kinds of biological differences. But I always ask under what conditions, under what discursive and institutional conditions, do certain biological differences – and they’re not necessary ones, given the anomalous state of bodies in the world – become the salient characteristics of sex. In that sense I’m still in sympathy with the critique of “sex” as a political category offered by Monique Wittig. I still very much believe in the critique of the category of sex and the ways in which it’s been constrained by a tacit institution of compulsory reproduction.

It’s a practical problem. If you are in your late twenties or your early thirties and you can’t get pregnant for biological reasons, or maybe you don’t want to, for social reasons – whatever it is – you are struggling with a norm that is regulating your sex. It takes a pretty vigorous (and politically informed) community around you to alleviate the possible sense of failure, or loss, or impoverishment, or inadequacy – a collective struggle to rethink a dominant norm. Why shouldn’t it be that a woman who wants to have some part in child-rearing, but doesn’t want to have a part in child-bearing, or who wants to have nothing to do with either, can inhabit her gender without an implicit sense of failure or inadequacy? When people ask the question “Aren’t these biological differences?”, they’re not really asking a question about the materiality of the body. They’re actually asking whether or not the social institution of reproduction is the most salient one for thinking about gender. |In that sense, there is a discursive enforcement of a norm.

[. . .]

It’s not just the norm of heterosexuality that is tenuous. It’s all sexual norms. I think that every sexual position is fundamentally comic. If you say “I can only desire X”, what you’ve immediately done, in rendering desire exclusively, is created a whole set of positions which are unthinkable from the standpoint of your identity. Now, I take it that one of the essential aspects of comedy emerges when you end up actually occupying a position that you have just announced to be unthinkable. That is funny. There’s a terrible self-subversion in it.

When they were debating gays in the military on television in the United States a senator got up and laughed, and he said, “I must say, I know very little about homosexuality. I think I know less about homosexuality than about anything else in the world.” And it was a big announcement of his ignorance of homosexuality. Then he immediately launched into a homophobic diatribe which suggested that he thinks that homosexuals only have sex in public bathrooms, that they are all skinny, that they’re all male, etc, etc. So what he actually has is a very aggressive and fairly obsessive relationship to the homosexuality that of course he knows nothing about. At that moment you realise that this person who claims to have nothing to do with homosexuality is in fact utterly preoccupied by it.

I do not think that these exclusions are indifferent. Some would disagree with me on this and say: “Look, some people are just indifferent. A heterosexual can have an indifferent relationship to homosexuality. It doesn’t really matter what other people do. I haven’t thought about it much, it neither turns me on nor turns me off. I’m just sexually neutral in that regard.” I don’t believe that. I think that crafting a sexual position, or reciting a sexual position, always involves becoming haunted by what’s excluded. And the more rigid the position, the greater the ghost, and the more threatening it is in some way. I don’t know if that’s a Foucauldian point. It’s probably a psychoanalytical point, but that’s not finally important to me.

RP: Would it apply to homosexuals’ relationship to heterosexuality?

Butler: Yes, absolutely.

RP: Although presumably not in the same way…

Butler: Yes, there’s a different problem here, and it’s a tricky one. When the woman in the audience at my talk said “I survived lesbian feminism and still desire women”, I thought that was a really great line, because one of the problems has been the normative requirement that has emerged within some lesbian-feminist communities to come up with a radically specific lesbian sexuality. (Of course, not all lesbian feminism said this, but a strain of it did.)

[. . .]

Lesbians make themselves into a more frail political community by insisting on the radical irreducibility of their desire. I don’t think any of us have irreducibly distinct desires.

[. . .]

The heterosexual matrix [in Gender Trouble] became a kind of totalising symbolic, and that’s why I changed the term in Bodies That Matter to heterosexual hegemony. This opens the possibility that this is a matrix which is open to rearticulation, which has a kind of malleability. So I don’t actually use the term heterosexual matrix in Bodies That Matter.

[. . .]

There’s a very specific notion of gender involved in compulsory heterosexuality: a certain view of gender coherence whereby what a person feels, how a person acts, and how a person expresses herself sexually is the articulation and consummation of a gender. It’s a particular causality and identity that gets established as gender coherence which is linked to compulsory heterosexuality. It’s not any gender, or all gender, it’s that specific kind of coherent gender.

[. . .]

One of the problems with homosexuality is that it does represent psychosis to some people. Many people feel that who they are as egos in the world, whatever imaginary centres they have, would be radically dissolved were they to engage in homosexual relations. They would rather die than engage in homosexual relations. For these people homosexuality represents the prospect of the psychotic dissolution of the subject. How are we to distinguish that phobic abjection of homosexuality from what Zizek calls the real – where the real is that which stands outside the symbolic pact and which threatens the subject within the symbolic pact with psychosis?

[. . .]

RP: Perhaps we could move on to the politics of queer theory, and in particular to the ideas of subversive repetition and transgressive reinscription, which we touched on earlier when we asked you about drag. Alan Sinfield has suggested that the problem with supposedly subversive representations of gender is that they’re always recuperable. The dominant can always find a way of dismissing them and reaffirming itself. On the other hand, Jonathan Dollimore has argued that they’re not always recuperable, but that any queer reading or subversive performance, any challenge to dominant representations of gender, can only be sustained as such collectively. It’s only within critical subcultures that transgressive reinscriptions are going to make a difference. How do you respond to these views on the limits of a queer politics of representation?

Butler: I think that Sinfield is right to say that any attempt at subversion is potentially recuperable. There is no way to safeguard against that. You can’t plan or calculate subversion. In fact, I would say that subversion is precisely an incalculable effect. That’s what makes it subversive. As for the question of how a certain challenge becomes legible, and whether a rendering requires a certain collectivity, that seems right too. But I also think that subversive practices have to overwhelm the capacity to read, challenge conventions of reading, and demand new possibilities of reading.

For instance, when Act Up (the lesbian and gay activist group) first started performing Die-ins on the streets of New York, it was extremely dramatic. There had been street theatre, a tradition of demonstrations, and the tradition from the civil disobedience side of the civil rights movement of going limp and making policemen take you away: playing dead. Those precedents or conventions were taken up in the Die-in, where people “die” all at once. They went down on the street, all at once, and white lines were drawn around the bodies, as if they were police lines, marking the place of the dead. It was a shocking symbolisation. It was legible insofar as it was drawing on conventions that had been produced within previous protest cultures, but it was a renovation. It was a new adumbration of a certain kind of civil disobedience. And it was extremely graphic. It made people stop and have to read what was happening.

There was confusion. People didn’t know at first, why these people were playing dead. Were they actually dying, were they actually people with AIDS? Maybe they were, maybe they weren’t. Maybe they were HIV positive, maybe they weren’t. There were no ready answers to those questions. The act posed a set of questions without giving you the tools to read off the answers. What I worry about are those acts that are more immediately legible. Those are the ones that I think are most readily recuperable. But the ones that challenge our practices of reading, that make us uncertain about how to read, or make us think that we have to renegotiate the way in which we read public signs, these seem really important to me.

[. . .]

Some people would say that we need a ground from which to act. We need a shared collective ground for collective action. I think we need to pursue the moments of degrounding, when we’re standing in two different places at once; or we don’t know exactly where we’re standing; or when we’ve produced an aesthetic practice that shakes the ground. That’s where resistance to recuperation happens. It’s like a breaking through to a new set of paradigms.

RP: What are the relations of this kind of symbolic politics to more traditional kinds of political practice? Presumably, its function is in some way tied to the role of mass media in the political systems of advanced capitalist societies, where representations play a role they don’t necessarily have elsewhere.

Butler: Yes, I agree.

RP: Yet at the same time, it is a crucial part of this role that the domain of representation often remains completely cut off from effective political action. One might argue that the reason a politics of representation is so recuperable is precisely because it remains within the domain of representation – that it is only an adjunct to the business of transforming the relationship of society to the state, establishing new institutions, or changing the law. How would you respond to that?

Butler: First of all, I oppose the notion that the media is monolithic. It’s neither monolithic nor does it act only and always to domesticate. Sometimes it ends up producing images that it has no control over. This kind of unpredictable effect can emerge right out of the centre of a conservative media without an awareness that it is happening. There are ways of exploiting the dominant media. The politics of aesthetic representation has an extremely important place. But it is not the same as struggling to change the law, or developing strong links with political officials, or amassing major lobbies, or the kinds of things needed by the grassroots movement to overturn anti-sodomy restrictions, for example.

I used to be part of a guerrilla theatre group called LIPS – it stood for nothing, which I loved – and now I’m contemplating joining the board of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission. There is nothing to stop me from doing one rather than the other. For me, it does not have to be a choice. Other people are particularly adept working in the health care fields, doing AIDS activism – which includes sitting on the boards of major chemical corporations – doing lobbying work, phoning, or being on the street. The Foucauldian in me says there is no one site from which to struggle effectively. There have to be many, and they don’t need to be reconciled with one another.

[. . .]

RP: We’d like to end by asking you how you see the future of feminism.

Butler: Catharine MacKinnon has become so powerful as the public spokesperson for feminism, internationally, that I think that feminism is going to have to start producing some powerful alternatives to what she’s saying and doing – ones that can acknowledge her intellectual strength and not demonise her, because I do think there’s an anti-feminist animus against her, which one should be careful not to encourage. Certainly, the paradigm of victimisation, the over-emphasis on pornography, the cultural insensitivity and the universalisation of “rights” – all of that has to be countered by strong feminist positions.

What’s needed is a dynamic and more diffuse conception of power, one which is committed to the difficulty of cultural translation as well as the need to rearticulate “universality” in non-imperialist directions. This is difficult work and it’s no longer viable to seek recourse to simple and paralysing models of structural oppression. But even her, in opposing a dominant conception of power in feminism, I am still “in” or “of” feminism. And it’s this paradox that has to be worked, for there can be no pure opposition to power, only a recrafting of its terms from resources invariably impure.

Full version of the interview originally published in Radical Philosophy 67 (summer 1994).

By Peter Wood

Anthropology—hometown to cultural relativists and all-night diner for disaffected intellectuals—may not be where you would most expect to find good reasons to defend traditional American family values. But anthropology, in fact, guards a treasure house of examples of what happens when a society institutionalizes other arrangements.

Want to know what it really means for a society to recognize “gay marriage”? Or for a society to permit polygamy? Or when the stigma on out-of-wedlock birth disappears? Care to know what happens to a human community that tolerates sexual experimentation among pre-adolescents and teenagers? Are fathers and mothers really interchangeable? Anthropology actually has a large amount of empirical evidence on all these matters—and many others that are now on the table in the United States thanks to various advocacy movements.

The Leftist political convictions of many of my fellow anthropologists tend to keep them silent about some of the scientific findings that have accumulated over 150 years or so of systematic ethnographic study. But these findings strongly suggest that the family is a bedrock institution and that the kinds of modifications to the family advocated by gays, feminists, and others who speak in favor of relaxing traditional restrictions on sexual self-expression will have huge consequences.

Let’s take an anthropologically informed look at two of these proposed changes to the family: gay marriage and polygamy.

Institutionalizing Male Homosexuality

It is not especially difficult to find examples of societies that are considerably more relaxed about male homosexual behavior than American society has been, at least until recently. Some societies such as pre-communist China and Vietnam officially disapproved of homosexuality while tolerating large numbers of male homosexual prostitutes. Today’s boy prostitutes in Thailand carry on a trade that was remarked on by Western travelers of centuries past. A fair number of North American Indian societies made room for a homosexual “man-woman” (a berdache, as the French fur traders called him) who dressed and acted the part of a woman. But the berdache was an exceptional creature and did not represent anything like normalized homosexuality.

For that, we have to look to Melanesia, where there are perhaps dozens of very small-scale societies in which male homosexuality is given ritual significance and fully incorporated into the life of the community. This happened for example in the New Hebrides, New Caledonia, and in many parts of New Guinea. Here is one example:

Among the Etoro, a tribe of about 400 living by hunting and small-scale gardening in the Stickland-Bosavi district of Papua New Guinea, from around age 12, every boy is “inseminated” orally more or less daily by a young man who is assigned to him as a partner. Late in his teenage years, an Etoro boy is formally initiated in an event involving many male sex partners, after which he becomes an “inseminator” rather than an “inseminee.” In due course, the former older male partner often marries the younger man’s sister.

Somewhat similar customs are reported for many other tribes in the remote mountains of New Guinea, and these cases collectively serve as proof that it is not beyond human ingenuity to channel homosexual behavior into a social system. But what kind of social system? For the Etoro, it is one that radically discounts the value of women as mothers and wives. Etoro men defer marriage as long as possible and, when they do marry, are concerned mostly with the advantages to be gained from reinforced links with their male in-laws. The Etoro, as it happens, put significant obstacles in the way of heterosexual behavior. Husband and wife, for example, are permitted to have sexual relations only outside the communal household and only under conditions that rule out about two-thirds of the calendar year. The birth rate, unsurprisingly, is very low.

Does the behavior of a small tribe in New Guinea have any bearing on the debates in contemporary America about “respect” for homosexual lifestyles? Perhaps not. After all, requiring homosexual behavior is far from merely permitting it. But the Etoro and similar societies do illustrate something about the logic of homosexual male relations in human societies. When such relations are subject to cultural elaboration they almost always fit into a pattern of initiation into secrets, male exclusivity, and a low status for women.

Why this should be so is a complex question, involving both biology and the underlying nature of human society. A short answer is that heterosexual marriage is shaped by the complicated interplay of marital sex, pregnancy, child-care, and the sustained dependence and interdependence of husband, wife, and children. Male homosexual relations, because they are sterile and because they channel relations of male dominance, are built on a narrower base of sex, subordination, and control.

Can it Work Here?

Vermont already has approved “civil unions,” and as I write it looks very much as though the Massachusetts courts are about to give the United States some form of officially sanctioned “gay marriage.” Many of its proponents say gay marriage is just the extension of a civil right to an unfairly excluded minority, and that liberal-minded argument sounds convincing to large numbers of Americans. I, however, am skeptical. The anthropological record, as I read it, shows that if a society treats male homosexual behavior as a fully legitimate option, it will end up not with a more expansively defined system of marriage, but with a dual-track system in which “marriage” is reduced to a bare transactional relationship, while male homosexuality will flourish according to its own dynamic.

As a social scientist, I am perfectly prepared to admit that American society can normalize male homosexuality and that “gay marriage” moves us in that direction. Other societies have run this experiment, and, in a fashion, it “works.” If America normalizes male homosexuality through gay marriage, our culture is not suddenly going to become exactly like the Etoro, or the Big Nambas of the northern New Hebrides, or other such tribes. Rather, we will follow out the biological and cultural logic of homosexuality in our own fashion. The general results, however, are predictable on the basis of the ethnography: heterosexual marriage will be weakened; the birth rate will decline; the status of women as mothers will further erode; and young boys will be a much greater target of erotic attention by older males.

To say these things, I understand, is to excite vigorous disagreement from those who advocate gay marriage as just a step in the proper expansion of civil rights. The link between homosexual desire and erotic interest in children is especially contentious. Gay activists and their supporters frequently point out that most child molestation is perpetrated by heterosexual males. And they emphasize that homosexuality has no necessary link to pedophilia: a great many gay men are primarily interested in other adult gay men. I grant both points, but we are also left with the stubborn empirical fact that societies that have indeed institutionalized something akin to “gay marriage” have done so in the form of older men taking adolescent boys as their partners. To imagine that we could have gay marriage in the United States without also giving strong encouragement to this form of eroticism is, in light of the ethnographic evidence, wishful thinking.

In any case, the American experiment in “gay marriage” looks to me all but inevitable. We will see for ourselves in the next generation or two who is right.

Plural Marriage

The advocates of making America safe for plural marriage or polygamy are less visible than the advocates of gay marriage, but they certainly exist. A substantial percentage of Americans now believe that the government “has no business” enacting or enforcing laws on what adults do “in the privacy of their bedrooms,” and those who believe this have already ceded that, in principle, polygamy is a legitimate option. What concern is it of the government whether a man has more than one wife or a woman more than one husband, provided that all the partners enter into the relationship of their own free will?

In this sense, polygamy is a good stand-in for the larger attitude that sexual relations and marriage are a “private” matter in which the larger community should have no say. That libertarian ideal applied to sexual relations is based on profoundly false assumptions about human societies. The relations between men and women in the family and between parents and children always have far-reaching social consequences.

In the United States, polygamy is illegal and relatively uncommon but nonetheless practiced by a few. The best-known examples are those 50,000 or so breakaway Mormons who reject the 1890 Mormon-Church edict that ended the practice of polygamy begun by their prophet Joseph Smith. Smith had cited biblical precedent and divine revelation for adopting polygamy, but the institution provided an expedient solution for a movement that initially attracted many more female converts than male. As the Mormons became a self-reproducing community in their own right, polygamy made less functional sense and continued only on the remote fringes of the movement.

Even so, Mormon polygamy follows a pattern thoroughly familiar to anthropologists. In societies where a man is permitted to have more than one wife, typically a minority of men actually do so; the members of that minority marry not just twice but several times; some of the co-wives are often sisters or cousins; the age difference between the husbands and wives is substantial and typically greater with each additional wife; and new wives are often teenagers. Polygamy (technically “polygyny” when it is a man with several wives) in other words is a system by which powerful older men assemble a household of young desirable women. Polygynous marriages almost always are part of a system of arranged marriages in which the women have little or no say about the matter.

That does not mean that the wives in a polygynous household are necessarily unhappy. For every Lu Ann Kingston, the Mormon woman who recently testified about being pressured at age 15 to become the fourth wife of her 23-year old cousin, there are many others who accept the situation and take pleasure in the fellowship of their co-wives. Polygyny, in fact, is a perfectly workable way of arranging human affairs. But it has highly predictable consequences that most Americans would find unacceptable.

We probably don’t want to embrace a system that shunts young girls into motherhood before they have an opportunity to get an education or that leads to fathers arranging the marriages of their teenage daughters.

But surely we are in no danger of heterodox Mormons imposing their system of polygyny on Methodists in New Hampshire or Baptists in Florida? No, we aren’t. But polygyny has a brand-new set of apologists who have emerged all over the country in a little-heralded movement called “polyamory.” The polyamorists might be thought of as a fetid blossom of the Swinging Sixties’ free-love movement. They favor a redefinition of marriage as a combination of any number of men and women who join together in a kind of group family. Polyamorists expect and encourage sexual relations within this tangle to be both homosexual and heterosexual. And they are very far from any thought that their licentious groupings would provide an avenue for the emergence of a patriarch with a retinue of teen-wives.

But that just shows that the polyamorists are too busy groping toward their particular form of sexual self-expressions to understand the consequences of abolishing monogamy. Eliminate the one-man-one-wife rule and, yes, the polyamorists could openly do their thing but so could a lot of other people. Should the polyamorists have their way, plural marriage would, almost of a certainty, emerge in its classic form of rich older males dominating much younger vulnerable females.

This is not a “slippery slope” forecast. It is more definite than that, since we know for a fact that everywhere and at every time human societies have made plural marriage an option, this is what happens. Given a free market and no rules against plural marriage, human beings will find themselves in a hierarchy dominated by older men with multiple younger wives.

But why? Why wouldn’t the polyamorist utopia of coupling, tripling, and quadrupling emerge instead? Or at least some tame version where most people are monogamists, but a fringe avails itself of the new option? The answer lies in something anthropologists don’t like to talk about: human nature. The human sexes accommodate fairly easily to a dominant male hierarchy; human males are biologically primed to seek sexual variety; and the systems of reciprocity on which all human societies are based lend themselves very easily to dominant males consolidating their status by taking young wives.

There is a lot of argument in anthropology over these matters, and, for the moment, I would prefer to avoid a more strenuous attempt to explain why polygamy tends to crystallize in one particular form. What matters is that we have studied many hundreds of human societies, large and small, and in doing so have a pretty clear picture of polygamy as an institution. One version of polygamy, polyandry—the marriage of a woman with more than one husband—is very rare. (Various Himalayan tribes and the extinct culture of the Marquesan Islands in the Pacific provide examples.) But polygyny is common. Ask an anthropologist why and you are bound to hear a lot about the numerous variations and particularities that distinguish one case from the next. But in the end you will still have this essential truth: polygamy is inseparable from older men imposing themselves on young women.

Nor do the consequences stop there. A society in which older men collect younger women creates a series of follow-on problems for itself in matters such as dealing with a large number of youngish widows who missed getting an education and have few marketable skills; disputes over inheritance among the children of co-wives; and a large cohort of young men who find it much more difficult to find wives of their own. Young men competing for an artificially limited number of young women tend to be extra aggressive. Hence it is no surprise that polygynous societies are often violence-prone.

Would the United States be an exception? Possibly. Perhaps our emphasis on “companionship” in marriage and the ideal that spouses love one another would tame the spirit of male domination that polygamy typically unleashes. But I doubt it.

The Libertarian Illusion

Recently, Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) provoked an outcry when he observed, “If the Supreme Court says you have the right to consensual [gay] sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery, you have the right to anything.” Among the replies posted on the Internet, I noted these:

• “Bigamy, polygamy, incest, and adultery—could you please tell me what, in a practical sense, is wrong with these from a ‘public policy’ point of view?”
• “What principled case can be made that any private-between-consenting-adults sexual expression should be off-limits?”
• “If all laws against consensual sex in the privacy of one’s home are unconstitutional or should be—which seems to be the position of Santorum’s critics—I can’t imagine why laws against adultery, incest, polygamy, and (possibly) bestiality should be spared from this sweeping claim.”

As the editorial page of the New York Times saw it, Santorum “equate[d] homosexuality with bigamy, polygamy, incest, and adultery.” Well, no, he didn’t equate these practices, but Senator Santorum did enunciate a context for thinking about the broader implications of treating “sexual expression” as something that ought to be of no concern to society at large.

The anthropological evidence is overwhelmingly on the side of those who argue that large social consequences follow from a society’s decisions about which sexual practices are legitimate. The rules that govern marriage and sexual relations are, directly and indirectly, the basis of family life and have enormous influence over the formation of good (or bad) character in children. Marriage channels the primary relations between the sexes and the generations, and it is the template for most other relations in society. This is true not just in the United States. It is true everywhere. Alter the rules of marriage, and society will reshape itself around the new situation. But it doesn’t necessarily reshape itself in the ways that the reformers hoped.

The sexual privatizers imagine a society in which adults can seek their pleasures without interference and somehow children will get born and properly raised. It is a sheer illusion. A society that doesn’t restrict human sexual relations in effective ways is a society that doesn’t have much interest in reproducing itself. People left to their own sexual whims will sometimes form stable families, but that is the exception, not the rule. The more we treat sex as merely recreational, the less important we make procreation. De-mystifying procreation—making it just another event that may or may not require heterosexual married parents in a long-term relationship—leads to both low procreation and badly raised children. A society that abandons the effort to restrict and channel human sexual urges into approved forms loses control of the strongest emotional/biological force known to our species and invites a progressive dissolution into unconnected or randomly connected individuals.

It is indeed possible to have a viable society that puts a very low value on women’s reproductive capacity. All the society really needs is a reliable way to attract new members. It can do that by raising children, or it can encourage high rates of immigration. Increasingly, it looks like we are choosing the latter.

The dream of unfettered sexual expression is very powerful. The advent of effective birth control and abortion on demand, along with a revolution in attitudes towards pre-marital sex and cohabitation, and the de-stigmatizing of out-of-wedlock birth, divorce, pornography, and homosexuality have gone very far towards creating a popular view that we can create a society in which sexual behavior has no public consequences. But, in the end, this is merely a fantasy.

Forms of “sexual expression” are, at a deeper level, modalities of social relationships that do have very real public consequences. Whatever a society accepts as legitimate “in the bedroom” inevitably becomes a choice affecting the status of husbands, wives, children, and many others. In this sense, every society in effect chooses to have a strong version of marriage in which husbands and wives are bound by public expectations of good behavior or it chooses a weak version in which people work out their dissatisfactions and hurts in private and walk away from the marriage when they can’t. Likewise, a society chooses to respect women as mothers or treats them primarily as income-earners. It chooses to create families that invest love and attention in their children or alternatively to treat children as a luxury good. Society chooses whether children will be the focus of adult sexual interest; and it chooses whether it will cultivate families that care deeply about education or delegate the whole task to strangers, and so on. If we indulge the fantasy that “sexual expression” is only an individual matter of no valid concern to society at large, we choose our high rate of divorce, our ambiguous regard for motherhood, our unhappy children, and our poor schools. It doesn’t seem like an especially good choice.

Of course, you don’t really need an anthropologist to see that a breakdown in social rules governing marriage and the family has disastrous consequences. Consider some statistics: 1.35 million children in the U.S. born outside of marriage in 2001—33.5 percent of the total; 947,384 divorces in 2000, excluding those in California, Colorado, Indiana, and Louisiana, states that don’t count divorces; by age 14, 14-20 percent of American girls and 20-22 percent of American boys are “sexually experienced”; about five million Americans are addicted to drugs, and 52,000 die each year from their addictions; 15 million new cases of sexually transmitted diseases occur in the U.S. each year, a quarter of them among teenagers; about 100,000 American children engage in prostitution, and about 85 percent of street prostitutes report being incestuously molested by a male family-member as a child.

The breakdown in the family is also a sadly familiar part of everyday life for most us. Who doesn’t know a single mom struggling to do her best for her children but inevitably coming up short? Who doesn’t know of couples sundered by the small difficulties that, in previous generations, would have been taken in stride? And you don’t need an anthropologist to sense the transformation of America from a family-friendly culture to a culture of me-first.

But if you want to see where these social trends are leading, anthropology has some answers. Humanity has been experimenting with ways to organize itself into viable social groups for many millennia. Almost any combination of sexual partners has been institutionalized somewhere and often in multiple places. We can and should read that record as a realistic check against the dreams of consequence-free sexual liberation that have seized the imaginations of so many of our fellow citizens.
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Peter Wood is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Boston University and the author of Diversity: The Invention of a Concept.