It's Fascism! New Rules! | Part 6 |by Esmée Streachailt
#3E and Autonomous Women's Movement+
Autonomous Women's Movement+
No, not Plus Everybody!! We don't do that.
Several existing movements are pulling in good directions: Thrutopia, Anonymous, and #3E. They are long-term, deep intervention movements. Something like #HandsOff actions and #50501 movement are short term, meant to respond to the The Emergency, but not the male supremacy that fuels it.
Sure, these movements are also very TQ inclusive. The energy for 'centering' them, however, is lessening. This is good. It means that we can work with integrity.
By working in coalition, we can secure the possibility we need and point out where women's movement has already invented wheels.
#3E and Coalition
In a way the three goals of #3E accomplish a great deal of RadMatFem's negative goals (dismantle patriarchy), and leave lots of room for our positive goals (world building).
- End Impunity – make riches and position no kind of defense for crimes by corporations or persons
- Or for crime syndicates like those that run trafficking rings
- Or for violent/sexual crimes against women and femicide
- End Oligarchy – separate money and political speech, tax the ultra-wealthy, negative income tax for the 99%, draw leadership from the people and from subject experts
- De-feudalize the family
- Democratize elite education
- Publically honor manual labor that supports life and economy
- Emphasize civic debt and responsibility in education
- Councils of Women, other feminist concepts of governance
- End Autogenocide – shift all systems away from profit by harm, people must not be forced to participate in systems that harm them, people must be empowered to heal and to grow.
- Get porn out of ... everything
- Get chemical additives out of food
- Humanize work and resource allocations
- Pay living wages everywhere in the world
- Free women from sexual, labor, reproductive, and marriage slavery everywhere
- UBI/negative income tax schemes to support autonomy from corporate employment
The examples are limitless because the Three E's pretty elegantly encompass a lot of goals.
Taken together #3E means: End Domination Systems and Male Prestige. You may find fuller definitions at Marsh’s blog, please do read them. We have lots to do, everywhere. These movements are more and more openly gleeful about the destruction of women and of femicide. The manosphere that helped prime the younger MAGA and other far right loyal ‘bros’ is happy to put them in harm in exchange for a feeling of power. Young men especially don’t understand how much it is an autogenocide (video, 14:26 onward). Being a misery-making man does not attract company, enjoyment, or women. The industry gives ever more intense experiences, as these endorphin-dopamine triggers always must, priming some young men for ultra-violence (content warning). They’re being farmed for their money, for their life energy, for their very ability to be in life with the rest of us. It’s a crystalized form of autogenocide that also leads to sexual assault and murder. Every authoritarian or fascist regime has its methods for normalizing violence, unlearning human empathy or care. Porn, the manosphere, and this ultra-violent content is how that happens now.
So, in many ways, participating in resistance to the far right will help us save (some) women.
And, we will need to be building autonomous women’s movement all the while. It's BOTH/AND for historical stakes. If we are connecting in the US and globally for the autonomous movement while working with others to get through this time of destruction and churn, then the movement will emerge the stronger and more prepared to build women's worlds.
Smacking the Wall — Historically
The Dark Enlightenment (DE) bros have one thing right: the capitalist Western Liberal Democracy has run its course. It's done. Yarvin and The Oligarchs see that much, but they want to keep the male default, the isolate godlet, and the extraction of labor/resources/reproductive labor, and the male domination. What they don't understand is how fundamental that model of the human being is to the philosophical and political order they hate so much. The Enlightenment is where that individual, isolated, godlet – AKA The Liberal Subject – was created. Their big change is missing … change. … And it's deliberately cruel and violent.
The big change the DE and NRx (Neo-Reactionary) folks want is this: to stop pretending that violence (state, economic, criminal, domestic, sexual) is a bug in the system and elevate the domination ethos to the veneration it deserves. They want 13th century feudal social order, a tightly controlled global economy, and the now available, more direct, intimate surveillance ability than ever before. Who needs the Sheriff of Nottingham when you have Starlink? The new resistance will have to be even more clever than earlier ones.
It's fascism. It's as brutal and base in its delusions of divinity as Camus (video) understood it to be. It's the same old concentration of patriarchy with a 21st century refresh.
Heather Cox-Richardson, the US historian who has been using US history to respond to the MAGA Era to great effect, feels this end approaching. She is reaching for a renewed political order (video, from 1:12:24). In her case, that’s a recommitment to the liberal order, to the ‘center’ in US politics understood as where the Overton Window sat in the late mid-20th century — far, far to the left of where it sits now. This measure of ‘what feels normal and right’ to the majority moves over the political spectrum as the acceptable center of gravity moves as influences motivate it.
The Overton Window measures popularity has been moving to the political right for a long time, and political parties have moved with it. It now sits so far right that the ‘center’ is also pretty far right. About 4 months ago, deporting anyone without due process (much less to a gulag in another country), was unthinkable. But this current administration is dragging the US to a place where these summary deportations are ‘acceptable’ and maybe ‘sensible’ – or at least they become ‘sensible’ not to object because it’s too risky. Part of how these unthinkable actions become ‘sensible’ is that they remain facts, they just do keep happening, and intensifying, no matter how loudly people reject and protest them.
This is how dictatorial/totalitarian oppression works. It's extreme, unthinkable positions, turns them into policy and action only a tiny fraction of people want. It terrifies and bullies the population into compliance. It keeps happening until the people overthrow it.
That’s what I meant in earlier posts by a policy or trend becoming more factual. It’s why I think we have to throw everything we have at this — out front and background and support work —as fast as we can.
What was factual and can be again is what Cox-Richardson observes about the renewal she advocates:
- Reform happens when people are thriving: the US 1960s followed on a period of prosperity, but the 1970s saw a deep contraction and in came the Reagan Republicans – MAGA and NRx do not want people to thrive because when people are comfortable they feel expansive about sharing freedom
(Now, that reform and progress came in the teeth of intense refusal and violence, but that is always how freedom is won, power is taken not given.)
-
Declaration of Independence, but for real this time, as most liberals will say, and they’re right partly because that document’s vision is more radical than we have now and opposed to the NRx values of monarchy and obedience.
-
“When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government”
-
“A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”
-
“And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.”
-
It’s the appropriate scaffolding because we are fighting a return to monarchy in the form of the Dark Enlightenment and MAGA. Many people will give everything, to the last. They will deserve our solidarity.
It's not even a liberal feminist agenda, but working with people who would preserve liberal democracy maintains the conditions in which we can even try to work for a radical materialist feminist liberation of women from every kind of servitude to men's wants and projects.
Getting Through The Emergency
The Accidental Gods and Thrutopia people also feel this end coming. For years they have been exploring alternate systems of meeting needs, organizing work, governance, doing these always with reference to “solving for climate.” In Transformative Adaptation (TrAd) They begin with a hard, clear sense of the problem’s scale:
“Civilisational decline – the ending of this civilisation – is inevitable. That future is already here only it’s not evenly distributed, yet ... some parts of the Global South are already experiencing collapse. The extremely hard task is to help each other morph gracefully into a better civilisation as we undergo [the collapse].
“If we pull this off without collapsing altogether, then we get to keep the best of what we have (including global communications inter-connectivity) while rebuilding community and insuring ourselves against over-dependence on long, uncertain, polluting supply lines. With TrAd-centred ‘glocalisation’ [localisation that connects globally], our world can be the best of both worlds! TrAd goes ‘back to the future’ – it returns us to aspects of traditional life that should never have been abandoned, while keeping those features of life today that ought not be lost and that are completely compatible with One Planet Living.
TrAd has three conceptual pillars:
- Land: meaning water, air, and land that we need to live. Also: place, the particular local ecology and our relation in and to it. As much land as possible should be returned to the commons so that it is not separated from the communities living on and guarding it. Land means a relation between and among humans and our cousins (animal, insect, plant, and fungi).
- Community: actual located physical people together, not the ‘community’ of the internet or a demographic cohort with little else in common. And not the male default ‘liberal individual.’ It means co-liberation from the suicidal systems of capital and domination. It means the time and gestures of being good neighbors, of being always in a process of knowing and supporting each other. (Here I am clearly inserting some of our RadMatFem language.)
In a community, connected to land, we learn the sovereignty and solidarity that indigenous peoples have long lived and that Timothy Snyder names as two of the five forms of freedom (see Sisterhood / Coalition for more).
- Transformation: valuing traditional, age-old wisdom, and not idolizing ‘progress.’ Many left-for-history practices are needed now, and will need adaptation to our present conditions. “The transformation that is needed is … intelligent, deliberate, recognising that we” need to move quickly in our care. Most of this back-to-land, glocal transformation will be led from the ‘bottom-up,’ started by willing and knowledgeable citizens.
As with a RadMatFem vision of life, the Thrutopia folks know that “we can only expect people to care about [these projects] BY taking care of their fundamental needs—for meaning, connection, food and drink…” If we are not meeting needs, people will turn away because needs allow little negotiation. That’s why far right movements appeal to our needs in their rhetoric to gain power and then undermine our ability to meet our needs by isolating us, making chaos of meaning, and creating poverty and mass precarity so that we are dependent on The Authority for our lives. The process of TrAd is Deep Adaptation, it’s nearly as radical and essential as RadMatFem, and I tend to trust these folks they also understand this other key aspect of change-work:
We should drop much of what we think we know, including the rash assumption that we KNOW what the future will hold. A humble, precautious, unknowing attitude to the future is exactly what TrAd cultivates. We need to move into an uncertain future in a way that does not presume that we know that the future will be good ... or bad. TrAd protects against the worst – while inviting and seeking to manifest the best. It could enable us to transcend the ‘environmental’ movement – and start to build an eco-logical future.
There is flexibility there. There is room there to bring the best radical and eco-feminist work back to the ecology movements.
REVOLUTION 2025
US women, find what you need and put it to use.
Our Manifesto
Our manifesto explicitly commits RadMatFem to this resistance, rebellion, and the recovery after.
We are clear-eyed about the source of these oppressive systems and the hierarchies that guide them. What I think we need to do, for now to get through is ally with groups that trend in our general direction, whether they are explicitly feminist or not. Now, I know this has not gone well for feminists before. Left-political men tend to want to address everything other than the sexism, misogyny, and violence that maintain their social prestige and entitlement. So when I say ‘tend in our general direction,’ I mean are rebelling, have a plan for recovery, and that don’t interfere with feminist principles and respect for women. This is a criterion that will vary regionally and across time. Again, think in terms of coalition, not in terms of permanent commitment. It’s important to walk away if everyone gets free at women’s expense.
Women who uphold this feminism are opposed to dominance hierarchies that disrupt the generational transmission of our lineages. Women who uphold this feminism resist the mechanisms of domination, the structural oppressions, that exploit and divide women on the basis of sexuality, age, ability, class, race, and global region.
We are, therefore, anti-racist, anti-fascist, anti-militarist, and anti-imperialist whether overt, covert, economic, or cultural. These orders are all expressions of patriarchy, and as such elaborations of the first oppressive othering: the subjugation of women. That is, as we find women in all nations and communities of the world, we affirm the self-determination and interdependence of all nations and peoples.
We see the present historical phase of patriarchy as one that presses women on two sides with varying intensity across nations. On one side is the left/liberal adoption of gender identity politics, and its collaboration with neoliberal economic interests, that erases women as a social and political class and disenfranchises us economically. On the other side is the right/conservative push for a return to (or maintenance of) patriarchal ‘family values’, the male-led traditional family, a rollback of reproductive rights, a shredding of social safety nets that protect mostly women and our children, and attacks on the rights of same-sex couples across racialized groups. This regressive impulse is often combined with the politics of purity of national identity, sometimes coupled with white supremacy and antisemitism, and an even more robust embrace of neoliberal economics. Both are forms of gender conservatism and have the effect of impinging on women’s sense of self and our agency, lessening our safety in the private and civic spheres.
Spirals Unfold & Enfold ...
Good magic, or witchery, or 'cunning' is the skill of using our intuition, knowledge, and connection to our cousins (other humans, the creatures and aliveness of Earth) to co-operate reciprocally with the emergences of life-force/source/mana/ becoming. To be in the dance of life, literally and for real.
Fascists and other patriarchs can't do this. The entire structure of the patriarchal psyche and social order prevents it. Of the constricted masculinities, the fascist is the most tightly bound in his little world of violent control and paranoia.
My friend Jane calls this 'the groove,' we can call it 'attunement' or 'pattern recognition.' It's something like what psychology means by 'highly sensitive,' we're noticers, and we have a clear understand of what we need to notice. The trick is to act on the sound, vibe, pattern, weird feeling that something wiggled wrong, or right.
We RadMatFems are good at this. The use of several powerful radical feminist frameworks overlapping, and the strange luck of living so far into the radical feminist tradition, gives us a kenning about the spectrum of patriarchy. We can tell when an intensification is coming. If you have followed Jane or THE RADICAL NOTION, you know that we did tell an intensification was coming. Jane call's this the superpower of materialist and structural analysis, "seeing around corners."
So, #3E and Anonymous can be options for longer term allies in many kinds of world building work. #OpStopFascism is establishing a MAYDAY camp on the Washington Mall. This post is publishing on May Day, so this camp goes up about now. Camps on the Mall do not have a safe track record thanks to reactionary administrations, as we learn from the Bonus Army camp (1932) and Resurrection City camp (1968).
So let's all work up some wards for their safety and endurance!!
Members-only page on WDI USA and WoLF's far right collaborations.
Originally posted in the public Facebook group Actual Gender Critical Left.
Medusa Rising and I will never tell our sisters & readers not to work with WoLF, WDI-USA, or FiST. Even they are drifting rightward to my great sadness. You are all free beings, as I am a free being. I will tell you that WoLF and WDI have never worked with left/liberal women's or feminist organizations and do not support the Equal Rights Amendment (see my Long Read on the ERA in TRN on this choice.)
Do magic! Change the logarithm! Shift the vibe! Share this work far and wide!
Join a riot of support for women canceled for wrong-think. Writers, painters, potters, dancers, weavers, women of all creative kinds!! London, Streaming, May 30 & 31.
Dedicate this post to a woman you admire,
nudge us for more like it.
Add your voice to this Gorgon chorus?
( ^-^)ノ∠※。.:*:・'°☆ ( ^-^)ノ∠※。.:*:・'°☆ ( ^-^)ノ∠※。.:*:・'°☆
