POLEMIC: Against the Patriarchal Fascist Offensive
This polemic was drafted for the inaugural issue of the journal of a political organization of which I was a founding member. Because of what I saw as errors in the manner in which my comrades were leading the org, I left it; because of the same errors, I suspect the inaugural issue of the said journal will never in fact appear. And so I publish it here, instead.
This work was written some months ago; my examples of the patriarchal fascist offensive reflect this, as it has advanced and grown more severe since. But this only further intensifies the urgency of the polemic.
1.Liberalism Is Obsolete for the People
The political rhetoric of liberalism, as the dominant ideological trend in the bourgeois states under conditions of bourgeois “democracy,” takes as one of its key dogmas the notion of universal “individual rights.” The nominal premise is that all individuals have these rights, and that the only just function of a state is to utilize the minimum necessary degree of force in preserving them (this is the classical liberal doctrine of the “Night Watchman State”¹). The supposed universal rights of the liberal view of “human nature” include life, liberty, dignity, free expression, and property. Thus the capitalist political-economic mode, with all its contradictions of exploitation and crisis, is justified, as the capitalist can do whatever they want on their rightful property– up to and including exploit another. The dogma of liberalism is undeniably embedded in the political culture of the US, a bourgeois republic whose founding document proclaims that all (i.e. all propertied white men) are “endowed by their creators with certain inalienable rights…”
It would be foolish to deny that strides in the quest of human liberation have been made under the banner of liberalism. This is the banner of the bourgeois revolution in France, for instance, and it is undeniable that things all over at least Europe are better for human life now than they were in the feudal epoch that preceded the Venetian, Dutch, French, English etc. capitalist revolutions. Yet it is a necessary facet of the progress of the world that things are transformed into their opposites: what was once the revolutionary and liberatory rebellion against the dominant ideology, in its time, becomes dominant ideology, and must be defeated by rebellion. And indeed, the contradictions that lead to liberalism necessarily being negated by a more liberating political ideology are present in it from the beginning: as we see above with the example of “private property” justifying extreme exploitation of workers and theft of the surplus product of their labour, the “rights” of one in the dominant class are often only a pretext upon which they transgress those of others. And of course we know that the emergence of capitalism and its liberal politics in the wealthiest countries was dependent upon and necessitated the invention of a new form of slavery, built on pillaging the poorer ones. The liberal dogma of rights has never gone far for people of color, national or racial minorities, colonized peoples, Queer people and women, or the working class majority.
Today liberalism works for the capitalist ruling class, those that own and control all our resources and exploit the life and labour of the working class majority; it is obsolete for that majority, for the People.
2.The Fascist Offensive Looms
At no point is the inconsistency of liberal “rights” rhetoric in bourgeois politics, and its utter failure to serve the People, clearer than at the onset of the fascist offensive. The rubric by which we can properly understand the fascist enemy was laid out by the Bulgarian communist philosopher Georgi Dimitrov, in the midst of the rise of fascism in the mid-early twentieth century, leading up to World War Two. Dimitrov made clear that fascism is not an aberration or anomaly in history, nor is it a change from the status quo of rule by the big capitalists. What it is is precisely the offensive intensification of rule by the existing ruling class of big capitalists and the state they control, enacted to prevent the overthrow of their class and the ascension of the workers in the event of crisis. The fascist offensive comes with centralized executive power, with hyper-militarism, with Mussolinian corporatist policy, with the scapegoating of certain minority groups in order to create a phony unity of “nation” against a pretended foe as a distraction from the real class division in the nation. Today the capitalist system in the imperialist core countries is in crisis: epidemic crisis, social crisis, climatic crisis, and financial crisis. Its response to this has been the deployment of a new fascist offensive, represented by social forces ranging from thug organizations like the Proud Boys and Patriot Front to genocidal politicians like Michael Knowles, Greg Abbott, and Ron Desantis. We should be clear that this is not by any means yet a fascist country; yet the fascist offensive looms, and has for a number of years, and we will see how it has affected the state of the liberal dogma.
The fascist offensive emerging today is particularly one of patriarchal fascism (though it has other aspects– one of them is the virulent attack on undocumented (or otherwise) immigrants from Latin America). What this means is that the fascism it will create, if successful, and that it is in the process of creating through measures of violence like harassment of drag queens and bills banning transgender healthcare and abortion, is particularly an intensification of bourgeois rule in the form of intensification of patriarchy, which is an aspect of the cultural superstructure by which the institution of capital and its owners, the big bourgeoisie, rule. The principal aspect of patriarchy is the oppression and subjugation of women, utilized by the ruling class to form rigid family-units in which ownership of property is tightly restricted to a (mostly male) elect; its secondary aspects include the oppression faced by Queer people, as we constitute exceptions to the rules of these patriarchal social units. The function of this is the same as that of any other kind of fascism, of course– maintenance of the existing social order and political-economic mode in the face of the crises that plague it, maintaining the present ruling class in their position against any crisis-born revolt.
The offensive of looming patriarchal fascism, now in its early stages, is represented by legal attacks on transgender persons and on Queer culture (drag, certain books, etc.) in states like Tennessee, Oklahoma, Florida, Texas, etc.; it is represented by the harassment of Queer people in the streets by thug organizations (sometimes, as in Wadsworth Ohio, by open neonazis². It is represented also by legal attacks on the reproductive rights of biological females (women or not), encapsulated most of all in the overturning of Roe v. Wade by the anti-people unelected bureaucrats of the Supreme Court, a fundamentally undemocratic institution. Two things are in common to the various tactics of the patriarchal fascist offensive: firstly, their essential function in reinforcing the patriarchal rule that marginalizes and oppresses women and Queer people, maintaining the backward social relations of class society; secondly, a hypocritical weaponization of the rhetorical dogma of “rights” against the oppressed.
Nominally, this country’s liberal political ouvre guarantees all the rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” to all. This is nakedly contradicted, of course, by the passage of laws which functionally deny these rights to transgender youths and children: denied the right to life as themselves, to the liberty to be themselves, and to the pursuit of happiness in living as themselves. Yet, as liberalism’s “fundamental rights” are denied to the oppressed, they are lionized and upheld ad absurdum for those in power: any challenge to the rhetoric of the patriarchal fascists and to their open rallying for “eradication³” of Queer people and for the deprivation of pregnant persons’ bodily autonomy is shouted down as a violation of their trumped-up right to freedom of speech. The reactionaries and the powers-that-be are always entitled to “fundamental rights,” even when their usage of them infringes on the “fundamental rights” of the oppressed– who are allowed “fundamental rights” only when it is convenient and nonthreatening for the state, the ruling class, and the existing social order.
This is how the liberal political superstructure easily decays into fascism when it is necessary to the maintenance of the base capitalist economic order for it to do so. Every liberty allowed to the masses, the working class, and those oppressed by the ruling class and their social order is exactly that: allowed to us when it is to their liking to allow it, and easily taken away when more brutal rule becomes preferable. The bourgeois state upholds its dogma of liberalism in the spring, when the capitalist economy is its boom phase, when the populace is happy and willing to obey, when resources are plentiful and wealth is easily expanded by capitalist investment; come the winter, when the capitalist economy busts, the banks collapse and the scope of production of goods and expansion of capital shrinks, the people grow discontent with their increasingly meagre lot and demand real change, all the contradictions intrinsic from the beginning in the capitalist system sharpen and become visible– then the rhetorical dogma of “rights” becomes nothing more than a weapon of increasingly tyrannical maintenance of the backward order; then the liberties of the people begin to thin and disappear; then the fascist offensive looms.
3.The New Banner: Anti-Fascist Defense and Beyond
We must, of course, defend the oppressed against every fascist offensive, and use all necessary means to prevent the construction of a fascist state of affairs in the country. Yet we must do much more than this, also. Anti-fascist defense is only an aspect of what must, to be permanently successful, be a much more complex project
It is not enough to simply beat the fascist offensive each time it appears under capitalism, then wait for it to appear again. For fascism, as the mode the bourgeois order resorts to under acute crisis, will always recur as crises do– which they must, as part of the perpetual boom-bust cycle of the capitalist economy. The permanent defeat of the fascist offensive is the defeat of the political-economic mode and social order that gives rise to it, which can only mean the construction of a new one, its replacement and negation. Only socialist revolution can permanently end the fascist offensive(s) brought on by capitalism.
The only true defeat of the circumstances in which we find ourselves, and the worse ones that they may give rise to (fascism), is the communistic revolution, the negation of class society. Out of the ashes of a society in which a minority rule over the vast majority, and exercise ownership (entire or piecemeal) of their ability to do productive labour and of all the surplus value their productive labour produces, in which that minority and the repressive state apparatus (which is their tool of class rule) can respond to any challenge by adopting whatever oppressive measures they like up to and including fascist ones– out of these ashes, we must build a better social and economic order, in which the foundations on which fascism can be built will never exist. This must be a mode of living in which the resources and means of production of our civilization are owned in common, and labour upon them to produce new use value for humanity is performed on a basis of egalitarian control by those doing the work, with the fruits of it shared among all and for the good of all.
Liberalism and its dogma of the “rights” of the individual is obsolete, dead, a thing of the past. What liberties can be achieved under its individualist banner already have been, at least in the imperialist core. Yet it has failed to achieve the most essential objectives of liberation: freedom from exploitation and the basic necessities of decent living for all. Moving forward, it is under a New Banner that these liberties (and those liberalism’s banner conquered in some places, in those where it failed to do so) will be conquered, a banner not of vulgar individualism but of the common and collective needs and dignity of humanity. This banner is to be a communistic banner, a banner inscribed with the motto “from each according to their ability and to each according to their need!”
We must abandon the decrepit old banner of liberal individualism, and disdain the fascist banner it increasingly gives its ground to. We must take up the New Banner, the communistic banner of the collective good and life and dignity of all the downtrodden toilers and oppressed peoples of the world.
4.Lessons of the New Banner
Part of taking up the New Banner concerns clarifying our thinking: we must have a clear picture of the problems we face and how to address them. We must understand clearly patriarchy– and thusly all the societal ills it breeds, from the oppression of women and the creation of abusive contradictions within the patriarchal family unit to the oppression of Queer people and the gender-deviant– as a superstructural institution of class society, which exists and is enforced because it serves a function for the ruling classes in their subjugation of all other social strata and principally of the majority class, the class that in fact performs the lion’s share of the productive labour that creates new wealth for society. Namely, it serves to preserve their property relations. The fascist offensive similarly serves them, by preserving their economic order in times of crisis through brute repression and political trickery.
This understood, we see that division or misdirection of the movement against the patriarchal fascist offensive is likewise a trick of the propertied classes, of the big imperialist bourgeoisie and of the state and sociopolitical order of their rule, the class-dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. We must as such be on guard against such divisions and misdirections; we find, furthermore, that there is undoubtedly a particular division and misdirection at work now to stultify and nullify our movement toward a better world: the spurious effort to cleave apart the interests of cisgender women and those of Queer people, especially transgender women, when in fact these two groups, and especially those among them that are revolutionaries and/or proletarians, should be in iron-clad unity against the primary and secondary aspects of bourgeois patriarchy⁴. Bourgeois, big-capitalist-run political actors, like corporate newspapers and well-funded politicians, some posing as “feminist” and some more honestly admitting their status as patriarchal reactionaries, try to turn cisgender women concerned about their own interests against the transgender community with the lie that transgender women are men attempting to infiltrate “female-only” spaces in an effort to harm them. Not only is it objective fact that no such massive tide of false transitioners exists or ever has (and furthermore, while we don’t like to think of it because it is frightening, that a male pervert is perfectly capable of barging his way into a changing room or a bathroom without going through all the bureaucracy a trans woman must in order to have her identity ratified), it is furthermore a fact that this scaremongering in reality depends upon the ideology of patriarchy: it says that women, being weak and helpless, are utterly at the mercy of strange men unless their own men– husbands, fathers, etc. — protect them (i.e., as property). This “feminism” of the “gender-critical” does nothing but reinforce the subjugation of the woman in the patriarchal family unit headed by the male property-owner– it is nothing less than bourgeois patriarchal ideology, explicitly anti-woman and pro-patriarchy!
This kind of division-mongering has been most at play in the United Kingdom, but it is present and a threat in the US and we should expect it to continue to be ever more so as the patriarchal fascist offensive against women and Queer people ramps up– for it is part of that offensive, nothing less. The reality we must understand and propagate understanding of is that attacks on the rights of transgender people and attacks on the reproductive rights of cisgender women (and, of course, anybody else who may require the services of an abortion clinic) are two tactics utilized by a single enemy– a patriarchal fascist offensive– with a single goal– reinforcement of a backward, paternalistic, bourgeois patriarchal culture. All oppressed by bourgeois patriarchy must be united in a common movement against this offensive, and every weapon and tactic it uses.
We must also understand the shape this movement of opposition must take. It is absolutely self-defeating to ignore the role of the class struggle, and the class contradictions that define the shape of social life in capitalist society, in this matter. Can we really say that a bourgeois transgender woman embedded in the political superstructure of the reactionary bourgeoisie, like Caitlyn Jenner, suffers from the fascist offensive as a transgender worker does? No– in fact, Jenner is supportive of the offensive and of its political thugs⁵. The movement against patriarchy, because patriarchy under capitalism is bourgeois, must eschew bourgeois leadership. Taking up the New Banner and abandoning bourgeois ideology, which is obsolete for the People but continues to serve our oppressor, means eschewing any leadership of the existing bourgeois political system. This means eschewing in the Queer sector what is known as “rainbow capitalism” or any other notion that capitalist economic entities or bourgeois political parties like the Democrats can be leaders of our liberation; this means eschewing in the women’s sector the idea that women’s liberation equates to “girlboss”ism, i.e. a few token women joining the ranks of the big bourgeoisie so that they can exploit their fellow women in the proletariat. The leadership of the movement against patriarchy must be a leadership of the most advanced elements of the majority working class, and must ardently understand that class’s essential contradiction against and interest in defeating what gives rise to patriarchy: any form of class society, any economic system in which a parasitic minority class can own the means of production and the social wealth and use it to enrich themselves through theft of the surplus product of labor done by a destitute majority. The final defeat of patriarchy must be nothing less than the overthrow of class society. This means the establishment by working-class led militant revolution in this country, and any and every country, of a political-economy in which means of production and social wealth are owned in common by the proletarian majority, facilitated by a state and sociopolitical order of that class’s control over politics and the economy though democratic bodies of its collective rule. This order will work to unite all humanity into the working majority, giving birth to a post-class, post-scarcity, and post-private-property social order and political economy in which production and distribution of the use values humanity creates is directed freely toward the maximum good of all– Communism. There can be no patriarchy under Communism, for on the road to it the proletarian socialist order in each country must, by means of Cultural Revolution, stamp out and resolve all remaining contradictions of backward class ideology in order to prevent them from rotting the socialist order as they have in the past. Once humanity has achieved Communism, as the trajectory of history through class struggles leads us to believe it will, we will be free not only of class oppression and exploitation, but of all the other oppressive contradictions between people to which it gives birth. This will not, of course, be the “end of history” — it will be the opening of a new chapter, which the human race may at last define on terms directed toward the good of all of us.
☙FOOTNOTES/SOURCES❧
- Though this idea goes back to the earliest liberal philosophers in England, like Locke, it was first given this name by Ferdinand Lasalle, an imperfect but interesting semi-utopian socialist philosopher and contemporary of Marx, in The Right to Revolution.
- https://twitter.com/FordFischer/status/1634647746811506689
- This is the literal term used by Knowles, the génocidaire.
- Notably, the insistence by the bourgeois media, especially in the UK, on an antagonistic division between lesbians and trans women is provably statistically false: statistics show that lesbians tend to be among the most supportive of trans rights. All those oppressed by patriarchy must be united together in their division against it, not divided against each other.
- https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/caitlyn-jenner-says-transgender-girls-women-s-sports-unfair-n1266138
