#161
Post rating: ~
"The only possible politics of purity is fascism, or a militant activism rooted in the inhibitory and exclusive dimensions of a metropolitanism. Racism, as a regulated, automatic, and indefinitely suspended process of genocide (as opposed to the hysterical and unsustainable genocide of the Nazis) is the real condition of persistence for a global economic system that is dependent upon an aggregate price of labour approximating to the cost of its bare subsistence, and therefore upon an expanding pool of labour power which must be constantly 'stimulated' into this market by an annihilating poverty. If fascism is evaded in metropolitan societies it is only because a chronic passive genocide trails in the wake of capital and commodity markets as they displace themselves around the Third World, 'disciplining' the labour market, and ensuring that basic commodity prices are not high enough to distribute capital back into primary producer societies. The forces most unambiguously antagonistic to this grotesque process are 'exogamic' (or, less humanistically, 'exotropic'); the synthetic energies that condition all surplus value, and yet co-exist with capital only under repression. A radical international socialism would not be a socialist ideology generalized beyond its culture of origin, but a programme of collectivity or unrestrained synthesis that springs from the theoretical and libidinal dissolution of national totality. To get to a world without nations would in itself guarantee the achievement of all immediately post-capitalist social and economic goals. It is this revolutionary requirement for a spontaneously homeless subversion that gives an urgency to certain possibilities of feminist politics, since the erasure of matrilineal genealogy within the patriarchal machine means that fascisizing valorizations of ancestry have no final purchase on the feminine 'subject'. The patronymic has irrecoverably divested all the women who fall under it of any recourse to an ethno-geographical identity; only the twin powers of father and husband suppress the nomadism of the anonymous female fluxes that patriarchy oppressively manipulates, violates, and pyschiatrizes. By allowing women some access to wealth and social prestige the liberalization of patriarchy has sought to defuse the explosive force of this anonymity, just as capital has tended to reduce the voluptuous excess of exogamic conjugation to the stability of nationally segmented trading circuits. The increasingly incestual character of economic order - reaching its zenith in racist xenophobia - is easily masked as a series of 'feminist' reforms of patriarchy; as a de-commodication of women, a diminution of the obliterating effects of the patronymic, and a return to the mother. This is the sentimental 'feminism' that Nietzsche despised, and whose petit-bourgeois nationalist implications he clearly saw. The only resolutely revolutionary politics is feminist in orientation, but only if the synthetic forces mobilized under patriarchy are extrapolated beyond the possibility of assimilation, rather than being criticized from the perspective of mutilated genealogies. Genealogy as the dissipation of recuperative origins (Nietzsche), not as sentimental nostalgia. The women of the earth are segmented only by their fathers and husbands. Their praxial fusion is indistinguishable from the struggle against the micro-powers that suppress them most immediatey. That is why the proto-fascism of nationality laws and immigration controls tends to have a sexist character as well as a racist one. It is because women are the historical realization of the potentially euphoric synthetic or communicative function which patriarchy both exploits and inhibits that they invested with a revolutionary destiny, and it is only through their struggle that politics will be able to escape from all fatherlands. In her meticulous studies of patriarchy Luce Irigaray has amply demonstrated the peculiar urgency of the feminist question, although the political solutions she suggests are often feebly nostalgic, sentimental, and pacifistic. Perhaps only Monique Wittig has adequately grasped the inescapably military task faced by any serious revolutionary feminism, and it is difficult not to be dispirited by the enormous reluctance women have shown historically to prosecute their struggle with sufficient ruthlessness and aggression. The left tends to be evasive about the numbing violence intrinsic to revolutionary war, and feminism is often particularly fastidious in this respect, even reverting to absurd mystical and Ghandian ideologies. If feminist struggles have been constantly deprioritized in theory and practice it is surely because of their idealistic recoil from the currency of violence, which is to say, from the only definitive 'matter' of politics. The state apparatus of an advanced industrial society can certainly not be defeated without a willingness to escalate the cycle of violence without limit. It is a terrible fact that atrocity is not the perversion, but the very motor of such struggles: the language of inexorable political will. A revolutionary war against a modern metropolitan state can only be fought in hell. It is this harsh truth that has deflected Western politics into an increasingly servile reformism, whilst transforming national struggles into the sole arena of vigorous contention against particular configurations of capital. But, as I hope I have demonstrated, such nationalist struggles are relevant only to the geographical modulation of capital, and not to the radical jeopardizing of neo-colonialism (inhibited synthesis) as such. Victorious Third World struggles, so long as they have been successfully localized, do not lead to realistic post-capitalist achievements, and certainly not to post-patriarchal ones, since the conservation of the form of the nation state is itself enough to guarantee the reinsertion of a society into the system of inhibited synthesis. For as long as the dynamic of guerilla war just leads to new men at the top -- with all that this entails in terms of the communication between individuated sovereignties -- history will continue to look bleak. For it is only when the pervasive historical bond between masculinity and war is broken by effective feminist violence that it will become possible to envisage the uprooting of the patriarchal endogamies that orchestrate the contemporary world order. With the abolition of the inhibition of synthesis -- of Kantian thought -- a sordid cowardice will be washed away, and cowardice is the engine of greed. But the only conceivable end of Kantianism is the end of modernity, and to reach this we must foster new Amazons in our midst."

- from Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest by Nick Land

also Butch Lee is pretty rad
#162
Kurdt
Post rating: +++++
didnt read lol
#163
Post rating: +
so i dont think this was addressed yet, but digital play is when you use your fingers right?
#164
[account deactivated]
#165
[account deactivated]
#166
Post rating: ~
"the mods are watching, the posts we are writing/ let's post about sex too much and fake reasons for fighting"
#167
political car tune
Post rating: ~
#168
Post rating: ~

roseweird posted:

but so far i don't agree that the abolition of patriarchy is dependent on the abolition of capital. patriarchy could be disposed with and other capitalist problems remain under a new order. so i am suspicious of an argument that wants to erase these possibilities.



maybe not, but given what history has shown about how capitalism reinforced patriarchy throughout its development, it seems sensible to align the fight against the one with the fight against the other.

and i think the connection between the two is often more immediate than it seems. it's no coincidence that in the u.s. a new wave of reactionary attacks on women's rights was ushered in by an economic crisis. capital has always looked to women's bodies as a territory to be colonized and accumulated as required.

if nothing else, just looking at efficacy, the most effective way to fight patriarchy is to fight capitalism, imo.