New Video - How to Use the Redstockings Manifesto
The Marxist-inspired Redstockings Manifesto, published in New York City in 1969, is the best compendium of feminism's core principles that you will find anywhere. If you are confused by the welter of conflicting definitions, just spend time studying Redstockings and analyzing the historical developments of the last half-century, and you will become aware of the striking patterns and paralells between what is written in this document, and what the various forms of feminism have imposed upon the world.
This is as close to "the Real Feminism" as you're ever going to find. And the present video briefly outlines a few ways to put it to practical use.
Read the Redstockings Manifesto online, here:
www.redstockings.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=76&Itemid=103
And archive a personal copy! ;)
posted by Fidelbogen at 9:09 PM
13 Comments:
The thing that fscinates me, and is referred to in The Red Stockings, is how class under socialist thinking moved from am upper class comprised of men and women both, to an upper class comprised by men alone under feminist thought.
But here's the BIG mistake MRAs make in thier assessment of this development: they believe it is socialism that is at the root of feminism, which is the WRONG conclusion. What you find if youi dig through old records is that the old socialist women's groups rejected the idea of males as the upper dominant class, preferring instead to retain the idea that it is capital and capitalist men-and-women that dominate the masses.
Modern feminists -ie. those who propose that men alone constitute a dominating social class- have FAR more agreement with capitalism than socialism, particularly as Capitalism better feeds feminism's narcissistic hunger for material gain.
Of course there are individual socialist feminists, and some feminist theory has a sprinkling of socialist theory, but this is an exception to feminism's more comfortable ideological home in capitalist self-indulgence.
One of the reasons we MRAs go on blindly branding all feminists "socialists" and all feminism "socialism" is that in America the term socialist has taken on a sloppy catch-all definition of "The enemy". Thats right, anyone you hate you simply refer to them as a socialist despite the gross inaccuracy of the claim.
@Anon:
Many feminists use the underlying Marxist template, sea-changed a bit, in casting men as the "capitalists" and women as the "proletariat".
Feminists widely talk about "redistribution" in various forms, which is a socialist concept. What they really mean is "robbing men and giving to women."
But the majority of shallow, mainstream feminists are just fine with keeping the capitalist system in place for the benefit of women.
So I believe it is accurate to say that feminism is analogous to Socialism/Marxism in some ways. . . but not others.
As for people using "socialist" for a general smear word against their perceived enemies: I think that what they are doing in such rhetoric, is reacting to a perceived socialist drift or tendency in society.
This is easy to do when you consider that "socialism" is a fairly broad concept with fuzzy borders.
I am afraid I am going to have to disagree with the analysis of Anon above which, it seems to me is either an attempt at misdirection or, is based on an incomplete knowledge of the subject.
Even though feminism as a political concept developed in the old Soviet Union under communism, it was the Frankfurt School that finally shaped it. In doing so it infused feminism, and many other social and political movements of the day, with its own ideas about Cultural Marxism as a revolutionary weapon. As a result the thinking within Marxist Feminism changed. Moving away from the idea of the class struggle of the workers and women towards a more culturally based attack on the West. It was from this thinking that the whole concept of political correctness developed and this became the socio-political vehicle in which Marxist feminism could thrive.
The Frankfurt School understood that the workers in the West were not going to rise up and cast down capitalism because Capitalism gave them everything they needed to better themselves. Consequently, the workers in the West did not see themselves as slaves to the Bourgeoisie. They reasoned that what was keeping the proletariat in what they considered to be an hypnotic state, preventing them from seeing their own chains, was the culture that Captitalsim created. That culture, they felt, needed to be replaced by a Marxist culture. To that aim, they formulated ways to undermine the capitalist culture. Feminism was a principle tool in that process.
The Frankfurt School identified the pillars upon which the capitalist Western systems were built. These were: small government and a free market economy. A Judeo-Christian based morality and The nuclear family.
They realised that if these pillars could be weakened, or even pulled down, Western society would descend into chaos and Marxism could step into the gap.
That is why Germain Greer said the following:
"Women’s liberation, if it abolishes the patriarchal family, will abolish a necessary substructure of the authoritarian state, and once that withers away Marx will have come true willy-nilly, so let’s get on with it."
She was only parroting Lenin who said, "True emancipation of women is not possible except through communism."
That cultural Marxism has been very sucessful is evident just by looking around us.
A truly facinating study is to follow the money trail of the early feminists in America. It is a trail that will hold some surprises for Americans. However, given the knee jerk reaction of Americans that any attack on their historical figures is an attack on America itself -- a childish concept -- I will not say more on this subject on this very important and thought provoking blog that Fidelbogen has put together. I do not wish to risk bringing him trouble.
"However, given the knee jerk reaction of Americans that any attack on their historical figures is an attack on America itself -- a childish concept -- I will not say more on this subject on this very important and thought provoking blog that Fidelbogen has put together. I do not wish to risk bringing him trouble."
Oh, give it a whirl! ;)
Just for the record, I think there is more to feminism than just the Frankfurt/CulturalMarxist strand. The latter is not, by a long chalk, the sole source of the toxin.
"Just for the record, I think there is more to feminism than just the Frankfurt/CulturalMarxist strand. The latter is not, by a long chalk, the sole source of the toxin."
I was going to respond but I think you've summed the situation well- feminism should not be traced to a single group or source (especially not to reds under the bed). It was developed by individuals and groups from a variety of different political persuasions, and when sufficiently developed was adopted by people a variety of political idiologies.
If there is one political idiology that unites the whole gammut it is chivalry (if we can refer to it as a political idiology).
Fidelbogen, you are correct. Feminism has been of vastly more use to the so-called "Right" than the so-called "Left". I make no comment on the relative merits (or opposite) of the so-called "left" or the so-called "right". Both have some truth about them, both have falsehoods, because both are made up by humans.
Neither "right" nor "left" are nowadays accurate descriptions. For example, the right-leaning conservatives of the 1950's believed in protectionism, tariffs and trade barriers for industry.
Nowadays, that is a left-leaning position, with the "right" thundering on about something called a "free market". Strangely enough, some really "right"-leaning organisations have now figured out that the so-called "free market" is nothing of the sort, especially the farce on Wall St.
Please do not forget, the United States staged a War of Independence against a very right-leaning monarch when it declared independence in 1776.
It's often been said that the "right" and "left" swap positions quite regularly. This is as true of the Feminists as of the debate about the free market.
As to the origins of the Feminists, no-one is more important in that supposedly "left" dishonesty than Simone de Beauvoir. Like most so-called left-leaning so-called intellectuals (she worked in an ivory tower) she had a neat way of pretending to be "leftist" while actually being very "right leaning". If you look at her version of equality, it is extraordinarily top-heavy, where "equality" is suspiciously decided by some sort of credit - credit based upon how much the person has bought into Feminist thinking, a sort of "free-market" thinking. It's also not equality.
This has been a feature of Feminism ever since.
(cont below)
(cont pt 2)
And it is no accident. Feminism is a chameleon, much like a lot of other really bad ideas - it goes under whatever disguise it needs and keeps 'em all ready to be used.
Here an example is needed: any given nation has a sort of political characteristic - for example Britain was once very right-leaning, but is now looked as being somewhat left-leaning. The United States started as being what would be seen these days as being very left-leaning (getting rid of the monarchy is a very left-leaning thing to do, let's face it). Nowadays it is seen as right-leaning.
With Feminism, British Feminism would be thus disguised as a "left" leaning organisation, with all the code-words of the "left".
In the United States, Feminism started as being somewhat right-leaning and then morphed into somewhat left-leaning.
This usually is the hypocrisy of the "rich intellectuals", but in Feminism's case, it goes much, much further. Remember - very few people keep track of such things as consistency. The policies of the "right" of a generation ago (trade protection, tariffs, import restrictions) would be denounced as hopelessly left-leaning by today's "right". So, too with Feminism - it realises that, like a snake in the grass, it has to fit in, in order to inject it's poison without getting whacked on the head.
It was Simone de Beauvoir who first grasped the ideal that "existence precedes essence" - which was the philosophy of her erst-while lover, Jean Paul Satre. Let's face it, outside of philosophy, this is rarely if ever true.
But within Feminism, it reached it's cleverest application: the "essence" of Feminism is secondary to it's existence. This means that what it says it represents never has to be in accordance with what Feminism does, or even really is.
This is why Feminism is supported by such very rich people as Naomi Klein, or Germaine Greer both of which started off at the upper end of the Middle Class and eventually joined the rich class. Feminism pays well, it seems. Is not making a profit a "right" leaning thing to do? I always thought it was.
From the start of Feminism, it depended upon the support from rich people, yet Feminism often presents itself as being from the working class. Nothing could be further from the truth. Once again, existence (as a justification from the idle loathsome rich) precedes essence (Feminism portrays itself as being from the "great unwashed" working class). From the start, the so-called "left" Feminists tried to portray Feminism's struggles as being a sort of "class warfare". If the ordinary Feminists realised how many millionaires the leadership of Feminism actually had, they'd realise they were being mislead at best; downright betrayed at worst. But Feminism was never about "the class struggle", in the same way that Lenin was not about making the former Soviet Union the worker's paradise he claimed - nor did Mussolini either want to or succeed at turning Italy into a free-market corporatist state. Both lied their heads off to gain power.
This is why I find so many commenters who define Feminism as being "left leaning" as being astonishingly poorly informed.
(cont pt3)
Feminism is no more "left-leaning" than it is "right-leaning". Because the existence of Feminism precedes it's essence, Feminism can appear right-leaning when it likes to disguise itself as such; and left-leaning when it suits Feminism to adopt that disguise too. Sometimes Feminism appears as both, at once. I will leave others to draw their own example, but the mere fact we're having this debate on the true character of the Feminists speaks in greater volume then any example.
Feminism is something else. Remember, even Marx was somewhat honest about which side of the "left versus right" divide he stood on; Feminism not so. Whether you agree with their policies or not, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, Pol Pot, Hitler, Mussolini and Franco at least were honest about which side of politics they were on. Yes, all told huge lies to get to power, and after promising every form of freedom to gain that power, they imposed a crushing totalitarianism that even modern people find difficult to comprehend.
What this shows, as others have done in a more eloquent way, is that the "far right" and the "extreme left" mean exactly the same thing.
Feminism grasped this lesson earlier than others, then Simone de Beauvoir worked out how to work with this very useful characteristic of modern life: the tendency for modern people to always associate the destruction of freedom with some form of politics. Mussolinin, Hitler, Franco, King George (the British monarch at the time of the American War of Independence) were "right-leaning"; while Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Chairman Mao and Pol Pot were all "left-leaning",yet everyone tends to think of movements to reduce one's freedom in those terms:
Where on the political spectrum does this person or movement lie?
In America, anyone who is not liked is deemed to be "left" or "socialist"
In Britain and Europe, anyone who is not liked is deemed to be "right" or "conservative".
The reality is that neither of these labels are even vaguely accurate, as both "left" and "right" usually do much the same things.
Whenever the pretend left is not in power, they complain bitterly about "big government" and so on and so forth. When they get into power, they promptly increase the size of the government.
When the so-called right is not in power, it complains bitterly about " big government" - and when in power they promptly increase the size of government.
The Feminists picked up on this decades ago, in the early 20th Century.
If someone accuses the Feminists of being "leftist" (beloved of the intellectuals, these days), well, so much the better for the Feminists to disguise themselves. The intellectuals would be the first to be gotten rid of under any Feminist revolution.
If someone accuses the Feminists of being "rightist" (beloved of the so-called free market, and face it, the advertisers love the Feminists to death - look up Edward Bernays if you don't believe me) , then the Feminists are equally happy to allow others to label them, so the Feminist can disguise what it is they are really up to.
(cont, last part)
My own "take" on Feminism is it's much like the civil war in the Sierra Leone - the "rebels" would fight like demons to take this or that village, only to walk away a few days later. After they had destroyed the place. They did not want to actually gain territory nor conscript followers.
The government troops would use all of their fire-power to seize this or that piece of territory, only to find the rebels elsewhere and the government had to abandon it. The Sierre Leone government, too, did not fight for any traditional objective, it could not.
That civil war went on for years. At the end of it, when the participants were asked why they were fighting, they could not say. Most of them did not know.
Feminism is similar - very few Feminists have heard of Simone de Beauvoir or Margaret Sanger. But both have been the dead-hand that has directed the Feminist movement in the directions it has gone. As Warren Farrell notes: the Feminists truly want a Gender War.
And it is this concept of Total War (such as posited in The SCUM Manifesto) which the Feminists reveal their true character: war-mongering, while proclaiming peace; speaking continually of equality, which demanding Special Privilege; demanding debate while shouting down anyone who tries to debate with them.
In the concept of Total War, not only does the side that wants such mobilise every single last one of it's forces, but it seeks the complete annihilation of the enemy.
In this case, we see once again that the "right" and the "left" are one and the same - Hitler (from the "right") wanted what Pol Pot (from the "Left") actually achieved.
The Feminists want Total War on men. We know this because the Feminists keep telling us. Oh, sure the "moderate" Feminists try to sweep such statements under the carpet, claiming that this or that statement about how Feminism would get rid of all males (Germaine Greer is notorious for them) is only from "the extreme", the "fringe".
If Germaine Greer is the "fringe" then why are her works so central to the Feminists?
Why is "The Female Eunuch" so held in such high esteem by the Feminists?
No, let's face facts: the Feminists are neither from "left" nor "right" - it's not they are apolitical (like the Red Cross), but they have realised that "right" or "left" politics has stopped meaning anything. It's time the Rest Of Us realised the same.
Total Ultimate War is the Gender Conflict the Feminists think they can win. To accomplish this, they are willing to appear to be "leftist" or "rightist" when they are neither.
The Feminists are certainly not honest, but then they realise that such an agenda could never be honestly admitted to: the extermination of all males. But like Pol Pot and Adolf Hitler, the Feminists also realise that they don't have to be honest. The Big Lie has every chance of succeeding, and who needs to fear any rebuttal when Feminism's critics keep trying to put it under this or that political label (ie: "left" or "right")...?
In short, stop trying to figure out which lie the liar believes in; just point out the lie - then Feminism's own internal inconsistencies will tear it apart.
@OzWriter:
To my thinking, the most useful way of framing things is to remember that feminism is, at its core, female supremacism -- with a lot of useful idiots for foot soldiers.
One enduring marker of "left" as against "right" is the position toward "patriarchal" family and marriage. Left-leaning feminists lean heavily against those things. Right leaning "feminists" (who avoid the F-label) want to preserve those institutions in order to establish their own dominance within them.
Also, both "left" and "right" harbor the element of male "women-firsters."
The feminist bird, as a whole, would not fly without both of those political "wings."
Feminism as a whole, is also very clearly a tool of elite (male-dominated)powers. Its primary use is to divide and rule, and to keep the overall male population on lockdown. (i.e. taking out the competition.)
Both "left" and "right" are necessary for THAT plan.
Ozwriter wrote: "No, let's face facts: the Feminists are neither from "left" nor "right"
and
"Feminism is supported by such very rich people as Naomi Klein, or Germaine Greer both of which started off at the upper end of the Middle Class and eventually joined the rich class. Feminism pays well, it seems. Is not making a profit a "right" leaning thing to do?"
While your first statement is a good generalization (feminists as a whole are neither "left" nor "right"), your second statement points to a predominance of the right in feminist ranks- and I'd go so far as to say a clear majority of feminists exemplify the status seeking, financially priviledged, top-of-a-credit-based social hierarchy. While we can say that feminists alternatively wear costumes of the left or right to gain political power, one thing we can say is that feminists have consistently been criticised for belonging to the comfortable middle to upper class. So politically the majority of feminists are class and status seekers, which is why the countries where feminism has thrived have all ministerial positions catering to "The Status Of Women". Or to put the political stance in Fidelbogen's above terms it is an adherence to "female supremacism". These things do not belong to the left. Lets not give these status fat-cats the priviledge of remaining politically undefined.
Man with a Pen said:
"To that aim, they formulated ways to undermine the capitalist culture. Feminism was a principle tool in that process.
The Frankfurt School identified the pillars upon which the capitalist Western systems were built. These were: small government and a free market economy. A Judeo-Christian based morality and The nuclear family.
They realised that if these pillars could be weakened, or even pulled down, Western society would descend into chaos and Marxism could step into the gap.
Yes yes yes yes yes. Not to mention the marginalization and disempowerment of men. IMO, feminism is, more than anything else, a tool for the destruction of the capitalist system. The nuclear family is the core of resistance to the almighty state.
Ozwriter said:"Fidelbogen, you are correct. Feminism has been of vastly more use to the so-called "Right" than the so-called "Left"."
TO his/her credit, ozwriter then goes on to partially make the following important point: there is little difference in practice between the so-called left and right. I and others have pointed out that men are bludgeoned in "conservative" family courts as well as in "liberal" ones. Both of these so-called opposing ideologies worship at the altar of almighty state power. And, as I've stated many times, what is the last bulwark of resistance to the almighty state? The nuclear family, with a man at its head. Destroy the man, destroy the family, government rushes in to the vacuum. Whether we call that government left or right doesn't matter at all in practice. It means subversion, serfdom, slavery. Who cares what uniform the soldiers and policemen wear?
Excellent article, excellent and though-provoking discussion.
Now, a closing thought from one of the resistance sites: Y’all relax, and do your best to prepare. Stay loose, and flexible. There’s always going to be bad stuff, and there’s always going to be good stuff. Roll with it, and be prepared to do and say and be things you didn’t think of before.
Maintain a sense of humor, because the bad guys do too, and it helps them relax before the next round of murder. Believe in yourself, and the freedom you desire. And never, ever, quit. Fight in whatever manner you have to, to get to where you want to be. You can go back to being good later. Your parents did. It made them cynical, and depressed, but nobody gets through life unscathed. If you want your babies to grow up tall, and strong and good and free, have a plan to kill everyone you meet.
And forget all the doomsday talking and we’re-all-going-to-the-gulag-and-die-rallies. Be thankful you got a shot at avoiding that, and then do something about it.
Come on, you apes! Do you want to live forever?
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home