LIES is a new journal spearheaded by a feminist collective based in Oakland, Baltimore, Los Angeles and New York City.

LIES is a communist journal against communists.

LIES is a platform for certain conversations and critiques that are difficult, impossible or dangerous if cis men are in the room.

LIES attacks the legacy of racism and transphobia that has plagued feminist organizing and strives to develop new ways of making autonomous feminist practices today that take pointed and militant attacks on white supremacy and transphobia as essential parts of feminist struggle.

LIES came out of our experience within struggles. It seeks to embody and develop in print the practice of autonomy that we needed to save ourselves in the midst of movements squared on patriarchy and fueled by the subordination of everyone but white cis men.

LIES draws its purpose and support from networks and circles of feminist, queer, and trans people, our friends and comrades to whom this journal is devoted.

you can download the first volume, which was published in september, here

Read and Discuss (maybe we can start with the first essay, on sex)

jools posted:

LIES is a new materialist feminist journal that describes itself thus:

LIES is a new journal spearheaded by a feminist collective based in Oakland, Baltimore, Los Angeles and New York City.

LIES is a communist journal against communists.

LIES is a platform for certain conversations and critiques that are difficult, impossible or dangerous if cis men are in the room.

LIES attacks the legacy of racism and transphobia that has plagued feminist organizing and strives to develop new ways of making autonomous feminist practices today that take pointed and militant attacks on white supremacy and transphobia as essential parts of feminist struggle.

LIES came out of our experience within struggles. It seeks to embody and develop in print the practice of autonomy that we needed to save ourselves in the midst of movements squared on patriarchy and fueled by the subordination of everyone but white cis men.

LIES draws its purpose and support from networks and circles of feminist, queer, and trans people, our friends and comrades to whom this journal is devoted.

you can download the first volume, which was published in september, here

Read and Discuss (maybe we can start with the first essay, on sex)

What does this have to do with historical materialism?

To be positionally “against
sex” would be to oversimplify; rather I experience sex as an impasse
in the manner of Berlant, “dedramatizing the performance of critical
and political judgment so as to slow down the encounter with the
objects of knowledge that are really scenes we can barely get our
eyes around.”2 That is, sex here is not as an enemy to be polemically
confronted, but an overwhelming relation demanding examination,
where the pain and weight of gender are more immediate.

What would Marx think if he knew today there would still be so called "marxists" who believed that not all sex is rape?

If we want to use this figure to underscore how far polarized the rich
and the poor are today, fine. But those of us that don’t homogenize
so easily get suspicious when we hear calls for unity. What other
percentages hide behind the nearly-whole 99%?

What about the 16% of Blacks that are “officially” unemployed, double the number
of whites? The 1 out of 8 Black men in their twenties that on any
given day will be in prison or jail? The quarter of women that will
get sexually assaulted in their lifetime? The dozens of queer, trans*,
intersex, and gender-variant folks that are murdered each year, 70%
of whom are people of color?3 Is a woman of color’s experience of
the crisis interchangeable with that of the white man whose wage
is twice hers? Are we all Troy Davis?4 As austerity grinds us down,
who among us will go to prison? Who will be relegated to informal,
precarious labor? Whose benefits will be cut, whose food stamps
canceled or insufficient? Who will be evicted? Who will be unable to
get health care, to get hormones or an abortion?

Don’t get us wrong. We’re not asking for better wages or a lower
interest rate. We’re not even asking for the full abolition of capital —
there’s no one to ask. For now, we are simply critiquing this occupation
for assuming we are there, while we have so far been left out. Because
we know that whatever is next will be something we make, not something
we ask for. For this reason, even if we don’t feel safe there, even
if what little analysis and structure that has emerged thus far makes
clear we are not a part of this movement, we radical feminist, antiracist
revolutionaries are going to keep bringing our bodies and ideologies
to the occupation.

And we do so in the same spirit as those
women of color who continue to support and attend Slutwalk despite
critiquing its white-centered politics: because we see potential here
for building resistance and affecting material change.5

Slutwalk >>>>> Occupy

I agree.

Let us be clear: finance is not the problem. Finance is a precondition and a
symptom, a necessary and contradictory part of capital. Deregulation,
globalization, deindustrialization: none of these words can provide
a substantial explanation for the present context. Each is only a
surface phenomenon, an effect of capital’s self-defeating tendency
to make its own systemic reproduction increasingly difficult. Crisis
and the reconcentration of wealth among capitalists are not only
regular but necessary; the tendency to financialization has many historical
precedents. Genoa in the period 1557-62 looks like the Dutch
Republic in 1780-83; Britain in 1919-21 looks like the US today.

Nobody wears hats anymore.

mustang19 posted:

jools posted:

LIES is a new materialist feminist journal that describes itself thus:

LIES is a new journal spearheaded by a feminist collective based in Oakland, Baltimore, Los Angeles and New York City.

LIES is a communist journal against communists.

LIES is a platform for certain conversations and critiques that are difficult, impossible or dangerous if cis men are in the room.

LIES attacks the legacy of racism and transphobia that has plagued feminist organizing and strives to develop new ways of making autonomous feminist practices today that take pointed and militant attacks on white supremacy and transphobia as essential parts of feminist struggle.

LIES came out of our experience within struggles. It seeks to embody and develop in print the practice of autonomy that we needed to save ourselves in the midst of movements squared on patriarchy and fueled by the subordination of everyone but white cis men.

LIES draws its purpose and support from networks and circles of feminist, queer, and trans people, our friends and comrades to whom this journal is devoted.

you can download the first volume, which was published in september, here

Read and Discuss (maybe we can start with the first essay, on sex)

What does this have to do with historical materialism?

To be positionally “against
sex” would be to oversimplify; rather I experience sex as an impasse
in the manner of Berlant, “dedramatizing the performance of critical
and political judgment so as to slow down the encounter with the
objects of knowledge that are really scenes we can barely get our
eyes around.”2 That is, sex here is not as an enemy to be polemically
confronted, but an overwhelming relation demanding examination,
where the pain and weight of gender are more immediate.

What would Marx think if he knew today there would still be so called "marxists" who believed that not all sex is rape?

If we want to use this figure to underscore how far polarized the rich
and the poor are today, fine. But those of us that don’t homogenize
so easily get suspicious when we hear calls for unity. What other
percentages hide behind the nearly-whole 99%?

What about the 16% of Blacks that are “officially” unemployed, double the number
of whites? The 1 out of 8 Black men in their twenties that on any
given day will be in prison or jail? The quarter of women that will
get sexually assaulted in their lifetime? The dozens of queer, trans*,
intersex, and gender-variant folks that are murdered each year, 70%
of whom are people of color?3 Is a woman of color’s experience of
the crisis interchangeable with that of the white man whose wage
is twice hers? Are we all Troy Davis?4 As austerity grinds us down,
who among us will go to prison? Who will be relegated to informal,
precarious labor? Whose benefits will be cut, whose food stamps
canceled or insufficient? Who will be evicted? Who will be unable to
get health care, to get hormones or an abortion?

Don’t get us wrong. We’re not asking for better wages or a lower
interest rate. We’re not even asking for the full abolition of capital —
there’s no one to ask. For now, we are simply critiquing this occupation
for assuming we are there, while we have so far been left out. Because
we know that whatever is next will be something we make, not something
we ask for. For this reason, even if we don’t feel safe there, even
if what little analysis and structure that has emerged thus far makes
clear we are not a part of this movement, we radical feminist, antiracist
revolutionaries are going to keep bringing our bodies and ideologies
to the occupation.

And we do so in the same spirit as those
women of color who continue to support and attend Slutwalk despite
critiquing its white-centered politics: because we see potential here
for building resistance and affecting material change.5

Slutwalk >>>>> Occupy

I agree.

Let us be clear: finance is not the problem. Finance is a precondition and a
symptom, a necessary and contradictory part of capital. Deregulation,
globalization, deindustrialization: none of these words can provide
a substantial explanation for the present context. Each is only a
surface phenomenon, an effect of capital’s self-defeating tendency
to make its own systemic reproduction increasingly difficult. Crisis
and the reconcentration of wealth among capitalists are not only
regular but necessary; the tendency to financialization has many historical
precedents. Genoa in the period 1557-62 looks like the Dutch
Republic in 1780-83; Britain in 1919-21 looks like the US today.

Nobody wears hats anymore.

did you finish that essay lol

mustang19 posted:

jools posted:

mustang19 posted:

jools posted:

LIES is a new materialist feminist journal that describes itself thus:

LIES is a new journal spearheaded by a feminist collective based in Oakland, Baltimore, Los Angeles and New York City.

LIES is a communist journal against communists.

LIES is a platform for certain conversations and critiques that are difficult, impossible or dangerous if cis men are in the room.

LIES attacks the legacy of racism and transphobia that has plagued feminist organizing and strives to develop new ways of making autonomous feminist practices today that take pointed and militant attacks on white supremacy and transphobia as essential parts of feminist struggle.

LIES came out of our experience within struggles. It seeks to embody and develop in print the practice of autonomy that we needed to save ourselves in the midst of movements squared on patriarchy and fueled by the subordination of everyone but white cis men.

LIES draws its purpose and support from networks and circles of feminist, queer, and trans people, our friends and comrades to whom this journal is devoted.

you can download the first volume, which was published in september, here

Read and Discuss (maybe we can start with the first essay, on sex)

What does this have to do with historical materialism?

To be positionally “against
sex” would be to oversimplify; rather I experience sex as an impasse
in the manner of Berlant, “dedramatizing the performance of critical
and political judgment so as to slow down the encounter with the
objects of knowledge that are really scenes we can barely get our
eyes around.”2 That is, sex here is not as an enemy to be polemically
confronted, but an overwhelming relation demanding examination,
where the pain and weight of gender are more immediate.

What would Marx think if he knew today there would still be so called "marxists" who believed that not all sex is rape?

If we want to use this figure to underscore how far polarized the rich
and the poor are today, fine. But those of us that don’t homogenize
so easily get suspicious when we hear calls for unity. What other
percentages hide behind the nearly-whole 99%?

What about the 16% of Blacks that are “officially” unemployed, double the number
of whites? The 1 out of 8 Black men in their twenties that on any
given day will be in prison or jail? The quarter of women that will
get sexually assaulted in their lifetime? The dozens of queer, trans*,
intersex, and gender-variant folks that are murdered each year, 70%
of whom are people of color?3 Is a woman of color’s experience of
the crisis interchangeable with that of the white man whose wage
is twice hers? Are we all Troy Davis?4 As austerity grinds us down,
who among us will go to prison? Who will be relegated to informal,
precarious labor? Whose benefits will be cut, whose food stamps
canceled or insufficient? Who will be evicted? Who will be unable to
get health care, to get hormones or an abortion?

Don’t get us wrong. We’re not asking for better wages or a lower
interest rate. We’re not even asking for the full abolition of capital —
there’s no one to ask. For now, we are simply critiquing this occupation
for assuming we are there, while we have so far been left out. Because
we know that whatever is next will be something we make, not something
we ask for. For this reason, even if we don’t feel safe there, even
if what little analysis and structure that has emerged thus far makes
clear we are not a part of this movement, we radical feminist, antiracist
revolutionaries are going to keep bringing our bodies and ideologies
to the occupation.

And we do so in the same spirit as those
women of color who continue to support and attend Slutwalk despite
critiquing its white-centered politics: because we see potential here
for building resistance and affecting material change.5

Slutwalk >>>>> Occupy

I agree.

Let us be clear: finance is not the problem. Finance is a precondition and a
symptom, a necessary and contradictory part of capital. Deregulation,
globalization, deindustrialization: none of these words can provide
a substantial explanation for the present context. Each is only a
surface phenomenon, an effect of capital’s self-defeating tendency
to make its own systemic reproduction increasingly difficult. Crisis
and the reconcentration of wealth among capitalists are not only
regular but necessary; the tendency to financialization has many historical
precedents. Genoa in the period 1557-62 looks like the Dutch
Republic in 1780-83; Britain in 1919-21 looks like the US today.

Nobody wears hats anymore.

did you finish that essay lol

I skim. Did you read the whole thing?

yes, because it specifically addresses dworkin, and i don't really see how it contradicts the thing you posted

I don’t let anyone touch my cunt or my tits. I stop touching other people’s. Mostly I just hit and bite and scratch and get hit and bit and scratched but never ever with men. I cuddle with my friends a lot. I ask before I do most hings with other people’s bodies and ask that other people do the same with me or ask them to stop or yell at them a lot maybe with death threats. Waged labor is fucking hard to get and I’m pretty and young so I get a job as a sex worker with a feminist boss who pays me pretty alright. I self-destruct in less scary, less uncontrollable ways. I write essays and read books and talk to
friends and say what’s on my mind as loud as I can and try to avoid people who don’t care to listen. Maybe it’s working because I know I’m not free and still want to die, still want everything in the world to be something else entirely, but I can turn my misery outward and feel like I have enough power to drag down something important with me. I guess if I didn’t have books and a radical scene and shit I’d be drunker and crazier and more anorexic and maybe I’d sink down so forcefully it would make “man” and “woman” and “transsexual” scarier, less stable places to be. I imagine other people will do different
things and say different things and justify their lives in different ways
and I don’t really care. All I want for them is to destroy some things and not get in the way of destroying everything. “Destruction” isn’t quite right; patriarchy destroys enough and confusing destruction with communization is deadly. “Decreate,” “undo,” “make impossible” this shitty world.

by the way there is nothing in any of their theory which justifies being a SEX WORKER as some kind of liberating experience or advocating mindless destruction and being miserable all the time as radical. this is entirely the liberal habit of putting "personal experiences" with everything, even if it directly contradicts the actual theoretical content.

they've abandoned their own theories about patriarchy, gender, and "non-maleness" as fluid, non-essential categories that effect everyone in relation to the means of production for an easy essentialism about cis-white males (I'm sure if I c+p some of the passages in here I would be "called out" for being a cis-white male despite the origin of the ideas). they've also lost actual materialism and communism in all of this abstraction, since they apparently have no problem begging for money in a capitalist process (Kickstarter) and have no sense of irony with the subtitle: EVERYTHING WE WRITE WILL BE USED AGAINST US while begging for money and challenging noone.

I have nothing to say about the theoretical content but a lot to say about the people behind it, maybe you can find something earth-shattering here but all I see are a bunch of delusional depressed people who happen to be honest enough to espouse correct theory even if they don't live up to it.

Edited by babyhueypnewton (Dec. 4, 2012 19:24:22)

First, we interrogate the relative usefulness of categories such as“women,” “not-men,” “feminine,” and “queer;” we contend that these name real material processes generative of specific kinds of subjects or social locations, not something essential or salvageable within us.

it's not clear to me why all cis-men, without exception, must be excluded from the group.

babyhueypnewton posted:

I'm not a communist.

same

jools posted:

your criticism is pretty incoherent; it seems to be more a rationalisation of your discomfort with something so expressly not written for or aimed at you that you're alighting on any possible line of attack.

with the kickstarter, if it got them money, it got them money. should they have gone to an established academic publisher? hit up friends and family? surely that leads to a much more PRobLematic reproduction of the structure of the intellectual rentier class.

and with the inclusion of cismen, well, it's like proving a negative, i think you have to justify their inclusion rather than their exclusion. if they find it useful, so what? what have you got to say that is missing from this without your inclusion?

i don't see why this personal experience interlude or whatever coming at the end of a long piece of deeply relevant material also counts as providing that personal experience "without comment". it comes back to what i was saying about presenting things that are really not meant for you; the problems or perhaps implicit irony are not going to be obvious to you in the same way. and anyway, why is depression a problem? feminism since the very start has often been articulated from a basis of the horrible effects on mental health that patriarchy has, and the fact that the medicalisation of women has meant that anything abnormal women do is pathologised - including political radicalism. if you've spent any time at all talking to an actual irl feminist it's clear just how much of their radicalism is based on a sense of being made insane by their existence. as in, this is often outright stated.

i also don't know why you're calling them a party, there are obvious programmatic elements to what they're doing but they're at basis a journal.

lol you have the balls to call me incoherent while your "critique" is nothing more than a personal attack which ignores any kind of theory. your post has at least four logical fallacies in its short length: personal attack, false dichotomy, burden of proof, and appeal to authority (the authority being "irl feminists" as if this elevates them above theory for no other reason than their existence as women). I already knew talking to you was a waste of time, so this will be my last post here or responding to you at all. For other people, we don't need to see how bankrupt this kind of ideology is, the degeneration of WDDP is more than enough of an example.

babyhueypnewton posted:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/761292355/lies-a-new-feminist-journalCOMMUNISM

ya, a person beholden to communist ideology does not inherently free them from the confines of the material world

jools posted:

mustang19 posted:

jools posted:

mustang19 posted:

jools posted:

LIES is a new materialist feminist journal that describes itself thus:

LIES is a new journal spearheaded by a feminist collective based in Oakland, Baltimore, Los Angeles and New York City.

LIES is a communist journal against communists.

LIES is a platform for certain conversations and critiques that are difficult, impossible or dangerous if cis men are in the room.

LIES attacks the legacy of racism and transphobia that has plagued feminist organizing and strives to develop new ways of making autonomous feminist practices today that take pointed and militant attacks on white supremacy and transphobia as essential parts of feminist struggle.

LIES came out of our experience within struggles. It seeks to embody and develop in print the practice of autonomy that we needed to save ourselves in the midst of movements squared on patriarchy and fueled by the subordination of everyone but white cis men.

LIES draws its purpose and support from networks and circles of feminist, queer, and trans people, our friends and comrades to whom this journal is devoted.

you can download the first volume, which was published in september, here

Read and Discuss (maybe we can start with the first essay, on sex)

What does this have to do with historical materialism?

To be positionally “against
sex” would be to oversimplify; rather I experience sex as an impasse
in the manner of Berlant, “dedramatizing the performance of critical
and political judgment so as to slow down the encounter with the
objects of knowledge that are really scenes we can barely get our
eyes around.”2 That is, sex here is not as an enemy to be polemically
confronted, but an overwhelming relation demanding examination,
where the pain and weight of gender are more immediate.

What would Marx think if he knew today there would still be so called "marxists" who believed that not all sex is rape?

If we want to use this figure to underscore how far polarized the rich
and the poor are today, fine. But those of us that don’t homogenize
so easily get suspicious when we hear calls for unity. What other
percentages hide behind the nearly-whole 99%?

What about the 16% of Blacks that are “officially” unemployed, double the number
of whites? The 1 out of 8 Black men in their twenties that on any
given day will be in prison or jail? The quarter of women that will
get sexually assaulted in their lifetime? The dozens of queer, trans*,
intersex, and gender-variant folks that are murdered each year, 70%
of whom are people of color?3 Is a woman of color’s experience of
the crisis interchangeable with that of the white man whose wage
is twice hers? Are we all Troy Davis?4 As austerity grinds us down,
who among us will go to prison? Who will be relegated to informal,
precarious labor? Whose benefits will be cut, whose food stamps
canceled or insufficient? Who will be evicted? Who will be unable to
get health care, to get hormones or an abortion?

Don’t get us wrong. We’re not asking for better wages or a lower
interest rate. We’re not even asking for the full abolition of capital —
there’s no one to ask. For now, we are simply critiquing this occupation
for assuming we are there, while we have so far been left out. Because
we know that whatever is next will be something we make, not something
we ask for. For this reason, even if we don’t feel safe there, even
if what little analysis and structure that has emerged thus far makes
clear we are not a part of this movement, we radical feminist, antiracist
revolutionaries are going to keep bringing our bodies and ideologies
to the occupation.

And we do so in the same spirit as those
women of color who continue to support and attend Slutwalk despite
critiquing its white-centered politics: because we see potential here
for building resistance and affecting material change.5

Slutwalk >>>>> Occupy

I agree.

Let us be clear: finance is not the problem. Finance is a precondition and a
symptom, a necessary and contradictory part of capital. Deregulation,
globalization, deindustrialization: none of these words can provide
a substantial explanation for the present context. Each is only a
surface phenomenon, an effect of capital’s self-defeating tendency
to make its own systemic reproduction increasingly difficult. Crisis
and the reconcentration of wealth among capitalists are not only
regular but necessary; the tendency to financialization has many historical
precedents. Genoa in the period 1557-62 looks like the Dutch
Republic in 1780-83; Britain in 1919-21 looks like the US today.

Nobody wears hats anymore.

did you finish that essay lol

I skim. Did you read the whole thing?

yes, because it specifically addresses dworkin, and i don't really see how it contradicts the thing you posted

Oh, I see what you mean now. Yes, all sex is rape.

So what if a women rapes a dude, is that even possible or does the cis patriarch still bear some amount of responsibility?