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I'd like to introduce Lierre Kieth
she's been a radical feminist since her mother gave her a copy of
Mary Daly's Gyn/ecology for her 16th birthday
that's pretty cool
she's the author of 3 novels
as well as 2 works of non-fiction
which are for sale on the back table
she lives in Northern California
Well, right now scientists are debating whether a quarter, a third or fully half of all mammals
will be extinct by the year 2050
In fact, some of them are debating whether there will be life at all
on this planet by the end of this century
What is never up for debate, and I mean not ever,
is a culture that devours with an entitlement so profound
it is turning the planet to dust. That dust is not hyperbole.
(Audience Member): Can you talk slower?
So sorry. This is going to be very hard.
I'm from the East Coast. This is how we talk.
And I don't even drink coffee
Okay, well the dust is not hyperbole
Here's China, here's the dust
Here it is leaving the coast into the Pacific and here it is landing in Colorado.
My planet is being murdered and I've got 3 questions:
What is that *** made of? Who's in charge? How do we stop them?
None of that is cognitively challenging
Emotionally daunting? Maybe
Ideologically tough? Okay,
but intellectually this is a no-brainer
There are 3 overlapping systems that have created this feeding frenzy of destruction
Now, the first is called civilization
and that just means people living in cities
but what that actually means is people living in densities
that are too big for the land to support
so that means that the food, the water, the energy all have to come from somewhere else
From that point forward it doesn't matter
what lovely, beautiful, nonviolent values people hold in their hearts
That society is dependent on imperialism and genocide
because no one willingly gives up their land, their water, their trees
but since the city has used up it's own it has to get them from somewhere else
and that's essentially the last 10,000 years in two sentences
Of course history is written by the victors so we all think of civilization like this:
the most advanced stage blah, blah, blah
what it really should say is the most destructive from of human social development and organization
Okay, we're going to back up 4 million years. We'll take this very quickly.
Australopithecine arrives on the plains of Africa and evolves there
2.3 million years ago the genus *** evolves out of the Austrolos
and that's us, that's our genus
*** habilis uses stone tools and has a brain about the size of a chimpanzee
Over the next million years (so it's a long time in the making)
Habilis undergoes a process that's called encephalization
so the cranial capacity doubles
and then *** erectus emerges from that
*** erectus leaves Africa about 1.5 million years ago
They use fire and more complex tools
so those big brains start to come in handy
*** sapiens evolved from that about 400,000 years ago
and by 200,000 years ago you've got humans identical to all of us
you could not tell the difference; if you just gave them my hair cut we would look the same
By 100,00 years ago we're doing something really interesting
We start burying our dead and we're doing it ritualistically
so the skeletons are positioned usually in the "sleeping position"
They're painted with ochre
There are grave goods: objects put in the grave
We don't know what it means but they start doing these things
This is the oldest human burial ever found
It's in a place called Qafzeh which is in modern day Israel
There were 15 skeletons found at this gravesite; this is a woman and a child.
So what happens next is called by some the Great Leap Forward; some people call it The Creative Explosion
but by 50,000 years ago you've got modern human culture
so people are making clothes from hides, they're making jewelry,
we've got musical instruments, there's way more sophisticated hunting techniques,
there's definitely barter going on, and there's art
so what are we painting?
We're painting an awful lot of animals
Lascaux is probably the most famous paleolithic site
Pablo Picasso went to see Lascaux when it was still open to the public
and when he emerged from the cave he said "We have invented nothing."
meaning we have this this huge sweep, 3,000 years of Western Art blah, blach
and of course you always think you're on the peak of the wave
and he looked around and he's like "We didn't invent this, this has been around forever."
these are also from Lascaux These are from Murewa
These are just beautiful paintings
This one I find intriguing: What are they doing?
The 2 people on the right I think are women and the 2 on the left I think are men
I think this is some sort of religious ritual
We'll never know but I just think it's intriguing
and the one animal is faced toward them
Okay, our second most common art project
This is the so-called Venus of Hohle Fels
Now, a lot of us object to this Venus terminology
Venus is the goddess of love, of beauty
so she's the object for the male gaze
this is really trivializing
When these pictures of the sculpture were published
in the journal Nature it ran with the caption "Paleolithic Pin-up"
It gets better! Then Huffington Post picked it up: "Prehistoric ***"
the only good thing is, if you read the comments, women are furious
so for once the comments are worth reading
Anyway they can't even let us escape intellectually from their ***-sick epistemology
This is oldest figurative scultpure ever found . She's about 40,000 years old.
She's carved from the tusk of a woolly mammoth and it probably took hundreds of hours
to carve this little figurine
Probably worn as a necklace, (you can see the hole at the top), as a pendant around the neck
She was found in a cave in Southern Germany
and the oldest musical instrument ever found was found next to her
and it was a flute carved from a vulture bone
and then as usual in the cave there are the remains of reindeer and cave bear and ibex
and all the creatures that were providing nourishment
heres another famous piece - the Goddess of Lascaux
This may be the very first human calendar in fact if you count the marks on the little horn
and here she's got her hand over her womb
so some people think this is probably counting the number of menstrual cycles in a year
We don't know, but this is certainly a good guess.
And I'll give you one hint: the men didn't figure this out. It's usually the women archeologists who get this.
or they'll find these bones that have little marks on them
and it will be like 30 little marks and the next one has 31, the next one has 30
and the men are like, "Oh! We think it's the lunar cycle."
and the women are like, "Oh, a 31-day lunar cycle? We know what this is! They're counting their menstrual cycle!"
So this is the beginning of calendars, of counting time
So the first art we ever made was the megafauna and the megafemales
because that was who gave us life
And i think that this is the beginning of religion
There's a sacredness of awe and thanksgiving
that I think is built into us: body and brain
So these images, this consciousness is so primary that even after the transition
to the neolithic and well into patriarcy people can't give up this images; they keep making them
So neo just means new so neolithic is anything after agriculture
and paleolithic is the time before agriculture
So these are some neolithic images now from what came after the paleolithic time
These are agricultural societies, this is from Catalhoyuk
which is one of the oldest agricultural settlements that's ever been excavated
They've been digging this up since the 60's. They've found so much stuff.
95% of the figurines are animals and 5% are human females
so it's the same template; it's still the megafauna and the megafemales
Fast forward a few thousand years:
now we're into Egypt, so well into patriarchy, militarism
and here she is again as the Goddess Hathor (again the megafauna, the megafemales)
I'm just following this culture as it exploits its way across the Mediterranean
Now we're into ancient Greece, her name is Artemis
but it's still the Megafauna and the Megafemales. (Another Artemis)
A couple thousand years more now it's the Roman Diana
but it's still this giant woman with the big animals
And finally you get into Christianity and still this is the basic image of Western art
It's the nativity, and it's this larger than life woman
you can still see the megafauna in the picture
and it's this dark cave of a stable. (Here's another one.)
You can more easily find images of her with no reference to Joeseph
than you can find images without the animals
This is a story of the megafauna and the megafemales. Here she is again:
Do you see Joeseph anywhere? No, but you see those horned animals in the back
Not even pretending this is a stable, this is a cave
So we have indeed invented nothing and for all that time
For 2.5 million years, our time on this planet, we were not monsters and destroyers
We were participants in this
Loren Cordain, who's an expert in Paleolithic nutrition
He uses this image of a football field
So all of our time on Earth is everything up to that last half yard
That's the paleolithic period. That very last half yard is when agriculture begins
and, in fact, the last one-fifth of an inch is the industrial era
including industrial food and industrial modern agriculture
so half a yard is where the disaster begins
in 7 places around the globe people start to completely change their way of life
to this activity called agricultre
So you have to understand what agriculture is: You take a piece of land,
you clear every living thing off of it,
and I mean down to the bacteria, and you plant it to human use.
In very brute terms that's what agriculture is. That's not agriculture on a bad day.
That's what agriculture is; it's biotic cleansing.
So the first problem: it lets the human population grow to some pretty big numbers
instead of sharing that land with millions of other creatures who do need a home
you're just growing humans on it
so it's a nice way to say mass extinction
the next problem is that we're destroying the topsoil
and soil is the basis of life, or land life anyway
we owe our entire existence to 6 inches of soil and the fact that it rains
So except for the last 46 remaining tribes of hunter-gatherers
the human race has now mad itself dependent on a way of life that is killing the planet
Now this is not a plan with a future. It's drawdown, and it's drawdown in a big way
What you're drawing down is fossil soil
In one season of planting your basic row crop - corn or wheat or soy -
you can blow through 2,000 years of topsoil in one season.
There were farms on the first day of the Dust Bowl in South Dakota where they lost ALL their soil in one day
This is drawdown in a huge measure
Agriculture is also drawdown of fossil water at this point
They have to use oil pumping equipment to get the water out now
which means that the water table is well beyond the depth that normal people can get to it
and this is why people are abandoning their farms in India and Pakistan and all around the world
There simply is no more water. They can't reach it any more.
It's drawdown of species certainly and it's drawdown of entire ecosystems at the end of the day
This is Iraq, one of the places where agriculture first began
This was a cedar forest so thick that sunlight never touched the ground
And this is what it looks like now. You'd be out of your mind to call this place the Fertile Crescent
Iran, 94% of it's degraded
That's a dust storm in the back, that's not a mountain. That's the soil blowing away.
Pakistan: one-third is at risk for desertification
150 years ago that was a teak forest
when you destroy soil you're destroying the basis of life
and Jared Diamond who won a Pulitzer Prize for Guns, Germs and Steel
he said that agriculture is the biggest mistake the human race has ever made
Toby Hemenway calls sustainable agriculture an oxymoron
and Richard Manning uses exactly the same sentence. Manning is worth quoting:
"No biologist, or anyone else for that matter, could design a system of regulations that would make agriculture sustainable
Sustainable agriculture is an oxymoron.
It mostly relies on an unnatural system of annual grasses grown in a monoculture
a system that nature does not sustain or even recognize as a natural system.
We sustain it with plows, petrochemicals and tons of subsidies because there is no other way to sustain it."
What you are looking at in this picture is a clearcut of the grass forest. This was a prairie; it is now a monoculture.
Agriculture is the most destructive thing people have done to the planet
I'm going to say that again: agriculture is the single most destructive human activity
Remember what agriculture is: You pull down the forest, you rip up the prairie, you drain the wetlands
and what should be habitat for millions of creatures doing the basic work of life
it turns into salt and dust
agriculture is carnivorous; what it eats is entire ecosystems
and that's what it has done around the globe
So to state the obvious: no culture which is destroying the basis of life can be called sustainable
really it can only be called insane
So agriculture has run through every continent
Well, all of them except Antartica
(But that's okay, we're going to get that one with global warming)
It's also the beginning of militarism and the beginning of slavery
In the seven centers where agriculture began you have this way of life called civilization
So, people living in settlements big enough that they require the importation of resources
The pattern of civilization is the same:
it's a bloated power center and then you have conquered colonies all around it
and the center extracts what it wants and brings it back to the power center
So, can you find the psychopath in this picture?
Agricultural societies end up militarized, and they always do, for three reasons
first: agriculture produces a surplus; it also requires a surplus
but if it can be stored it can be stolen
and someone has to guard it, and that would be soldiers
Number two is imperialism: since agriculture is inherently destructive
they eventually have to get more land, more topsoil, more water, more trees
There's an entire class of people whose job is simply war
to go out and get the stuff that the power center needs
Agriculture makes that possible, it also makes it inevitable
And number three is slavery
some of those resources would be other human beings
agriculture is back-breaking labor; for anyone to have leisure time you need slaves
we've lost the cultural memory of this because we've been using machines
for about 150 years to do that work
By the year 1800 (that's the beginning of the fossil fuel age)
By 1800, fully three-quarters of the people alive on the planet
were living in some form of slavery, indenture, or serfdom
when the fossil fuel starts to run out we're going to remember exactly how much work is involved in this
So here's a female slave from Egypt
They would have spent probably 12 to 14 hours a day in this position grinding grain
and the evidence in their skeletons tell a very grim story
of the grinding down that took place in their spines and their hips and their knees from doing this 12 hours a day
This is the iconic image that the abolition movement used
How to fit as many human beings as possible into the hull of a ship
It's actually an interesting story: A slaver drew this picture to encourage other slavers to make more money
and the abolition people got ahold of it
and it was so self-evidently horrifying that they printed thousands of these
If you were an abolitionist your job was to hang these everywhere
The idea being that people would join because this was so horrendous
The thing to me that is personally interesting is that
I remember the first time I saw this picture. I was 12 years old and it had that effect on me; it was horrendous.
So, here's why the agriculturists always win
If you're willing to destroy your forest you will win against the people who are living with theirs
because it takes 600 trees to make one of these ships
you will then have to conquer the people living with their forest to take their trees having used all of yours
and honestly that's the last 10,000 years in a paragraph
This is the St. Croix River. The blue part is the part that goes through a more or less intact ecosystem.
The brown (part): that's the river and it's brown because of the soil . That goes through the agricultural areas.
There aren't any new continents; Atlantis is not waiting to be discovered
outside of our past-life regressions
By the year 1950 the planet was pretty well out of topsoil
and what should have happened then was the collapse that is always a part of civilizations
Civilizations last as long as their soil
which is usually between 800 and 1500 years and then the pattern starts over somewhere else
what happened instead was the "Green Revolution" and that was based on fossil fuel
so at this point if you're eating agricultural foods its oil in a stalk
it takes 9 calories of energy to make 1 calorie of food: a completely insane system
It takes the equivalent of 3 to 4 tons of TNT per acre for a modern American farm
Iowa alone uses the energy equivalent of 4,000 Nagasaki bombs every year
when I talk about this as a war against the planet it is not a metaphor; I mean it literally
The very creation myth of Western Civilization tells Men to dominate, to conquer, to go forth and multiply
No hunter-gatherer is told by god to willfully overshoot her land's carrying capacity
and I have to say that no rational person would listen to such a god, but that's what we're up against.
It's been a disaster for the planet, it's been a disaster for human health, it's been a disaster in terms of mass extinction
We have this concept of the diseases of civilization
so the first thing that happens when people take up agriculture: their teeth fall out and their bones start falling apart
They shrink 6 inches pretty much overnight
The two diseases on the bottom are caused by iron deficiency anemia
you do not see these things in hunter-gatherers; you see them all the time in agriculturalists
and that's why an archeologist can look at a bone and tell you literally in 2 seconds were they agriculturalists or not
It's ***-poor nutrition, its back-breaking labor, it's drawdown of entire continents
the ecological footprint is gigantic, mass extinction, ever-increasing population, continuous drawdown
the real problem is not to explain why some people why some people were slow to adopt agriculture
but why anybody took it up at all when it is so obviously beastly
We don't actually know. None of the explanations actually match the facts.
the only explanation that makes even halfway sense to me is the fact that these foods are addictive.
I've seen this in my own life. I know people who've been able to give up cigarettes who can not give up wheat
not for anything, Their health is at risk and they still can't do it.
we don't know, that may be the explanation that actually matches the facts
Alight, that was civilization
On to capitalism, the second system that's destroying the planet
ultimately it sort of like civilization on steroids
capitalism takes living creatures and their homes
it turns them into private property, then converts them to dead commodities
and accumulates those commodities into wealth
It's a pyramid scheme of death
The Occupy Movement has staked its claim on being the 99%
I think that's actually obvious, right?
Capitalism is the 1% stealing from the 99%
the only thing that we should add to that is that 98% of the old growth forests are gone
and 99% of the world's prairies are gone
and that means 99% of the Pasque flowers and 99% of the bison and 99% of the prairie dogs - they're gone
so this is a pyramid scheme of death and the point to me is not to redistribute the wealth
it's to stop the death while there is still something left alive
Now I love this poster; this is the IWW "We rule you, we fool you, we shoot at you"
I just think this is perfect
the only part missing is that the very bottom layer really should be the women and the girls
I think if a feminist drew it, it might look like this
I have not been able to find anybody to translate this yet
I'm not even sure we need a translation to get the general idea
You've got the big guy sitting on the little guy and they're both sitting on the woman
who's doing the basic sustenance work to keep them all alive
On that note I just want to recognize the women who have been working in the kitchen and how hard they've been working [applause]
But we know what this picture means because we also know that poverty has a woman's face
So I'm going to assume that we basically get that capitalism is a problem in this room
which is a nice thing to be able to assume, I have to say. But just briefly, here's why:
The goal of capitalism is the creation of wealth; it's not to provide for human needs
First of all, it's brand new
people have only been doing capitalism for maybe 300 years
In fact there are some economic historians who put the exact year at 1834
because until that point land and labor are not fully commodified but after 1834 they absolutely are
what drives a capitalist economy is a ceaseless quest for more wealth
which means for more investment opportunities
so the wealthy people have capital; they want to invest it in something that will make more profit for them
the only way they are going to do that is if there is an ever-increasing number of investment opportunities
what that means is people have to consume more
every year they have to consume more so that there are more investment opportunities for the wealthy
In fact, if the economy does not grow by about 3% per year it crashes
another way to say that is that all the consumption happening on the planet
has to double every 20 years. Every 20 years.
last time I looked the planet had exactly 197 million square miles and not one inch more
you cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet
so this system is insane and it's consuming the planet to death
Okay, a few other little problems
The profit motive is really bad at distributing goods and investments according to human need
there's no public discussion of what is good or necessary or reasonable
whatever people with money want that's where the investments are made
so the rich are making decisions for all of us about things like food and housing and health care
and the rest of us have no say
oh, I forgot, we're supposed to vote with our dollars...right
Okay, Im not that stupid, and the next time that somebody says this to you
you are allowed to laugh because it's just crazy
If we were to prioritize necessities so food and housing and going to the dentist more than once every 20 years
fair and rational planning would dictate against market forces
in fact, lots of stuff that's really profitable would have to be stopped
Great example: there's plenty of land in India right now
Lots of hungry people in India and lots of land is growing things like tulips and dog food to send to Europe
Very profitable, way more profitable than growing food for hungry people because they don't have any money
By definition you make more money selling tulips to Europe
If you cared about human rights and human needs you'd have to stop the tulips going to Europe
redistribute the land and let the hungry people have their own food
so this is why capitalism is a serious plroblem
If we all had the ability to make equal demands the market might distribute things a little more equally
But we don't because there's vast economic disparity in the world
and capitalism only increases that disparity
Well, doesn't the profit motive maximize efficiency? You're gonna hear this all the time
Well, "yes," if by efficiency you mean simply maximizing profit by minimizing the cost
"no," if efficiency means actually providing for human needs
So, a couple statistics: 22,000 children die every day from poverty and 1.4 million from lack of clean water, something so simple
Again, there's no money in this so the resources don't get directed to it
Well, that was capitalism, on to patriarchy...
[laughter at slide: "How To Recognize The Patriarchy: Look For The Dicks"]
I thought you might need a laugh about now.
So as Mary Daly pointed out, I think in 1978, patriarchy is the ruling religion of the planet
I feel like [someone] pretty well covered this one this morning, so I'd like to skip 3 pages:
Patriarchy takes human beings who are biologically male and creates a class of people called "men"
So men are made by socialization to this thing called masculinity and that's that process
that turns a child into a boy and eventually into a man
and that requires a certain psychology
the psychology requires three things: entitlement, emotional numbness and a dichotomy of self and other
and, of course, that first despised other is always girls, so the worst thing you can call a boy is some version of girl
often a piece of female anatomy warped into hate speech
we all know the words that they use
once that process is in place and that category of "icky female" has been created in their brains
you can then substitute that in a hierarchical society
any group that needs to be subordinated can fill in for female
and masculinity of course is essential to any militarized culture: that's the psychology necessary in soldiers
you're only gonna kill on command if that human impulse to care has been subdued or supressed
and that psychological process of othering is firmly entrenched
Central to masculinity is a violation imperative: men become real men by breaking boundaries
and for that entitled psyche the only reason that "no" exists is because it's a *** thrill to force past it
That is the real brilliance of patriarchy. It doesn't just naturalize oppression;
it sexualizes acts of oppression
so it eroticizes domination and subordination and then it takes that eroticized domination and subordination
and it institutionalizes that into masculinity and femininity
so it naturalizes, it eroticizes and then it institutionalizes
and that's really good
the brilliance of feminism is that we figured that out
So femininity, well thats just the set of behaviors that are in essence ritualized submission
so female socialization is a process of psychologically constraining and ultimately breaking girls
and that process is called grooming and that creates a class of compliant victims
Across history those practices have included foot binding and female genital mutilation
and, of course, the ever popular childhood *** abuse
femininity is really just the traumatized psyche displaying acquiescence
Now, this is not natural and it was not created by god
It is a corrupt and brutal social arrangement
It's become popular in some activist circles to embrace notions from postmodernism
and that includes this idea that gender is somehow a binary
gender is not a binary; it is a hierarchy. [audience voices agreement]
It's global in its reach, it's sadistic in its practice and it is murderous in its conclusion
just like race and just like class
Gender demarcates the geopolitical boundaries of patriarchy
which is to say it divides us in half. That half is not horizontal, it's vertical
and, in case you missed this part, men are always on top
Gender is not some cosmic yin yang; it's a fist and the flesh that bruises
It's a mouth crushed shut and a little girl who will never be the same
Gender is who gets to be human and who gets hurt
and that has to be made very clear because men know what they are capable of
they know the *** that they have built into their sex
so what they say to each other is "do it to her"
not to me, the human being. To her: the object, the thing
so they have to make it very clear both visually and ideologically who she is
So see there she is, unable to walk
or there she is on display or there she is covered and secluded for your eyes only
and how much easier if you can say "God made her this way to lie beneath me"
or if you can say, "nature made her this way, the thing with the hole"
ore if you can say, "she made herself this way, the *** who asked for it"
because we always ask for it
the ***, the battering, the poverty, the prostitution, even the ***, we asked for it
Now, all of those practices in aggregate, those are what Andrea Dworkin named the barricade of *** terrorism
and gender is what demarcates that boundary very exactly
and this is very simple, people, women live inside the barricade of *** terrorism
men live outside the barricade of *** terrorism
in fact, men build that barricade fist by fist and *** by ***
It's exactly those violent violating practices that construct a class of people called women
that is what men do to break us and to keep us broken
and that's what gender is: the breaking and the broken
Noel Ignatiev wrote a book called How the Irish Became White which is very instructive
but he's argued for abolishing the white race which he defines as white privilege and race identity
along the same lines, I'm going to argue that the sex class "men" is simply male privilege and gender identity
and it needs to be abolished if women are ever to be free
we don't have a choice; if you were born female, you were born on a battlefield
You're going to be punished for just saying that out loud
but the grim truth is: you're going to be punish anyway for the sin of being female
right now battering is the most common violent crime in the United States
Thats a man beating up a woman; men do that every 18 seconds
Globally, half of all women will experience life-threatening violence from a man
Half. That is more hatred than I can comprehend
and that battlefield now is such a slaughter that we can't even collect our wounded
So this is where all three of those systems, civilization, capitalism, patriarcy, this is where they merge
in that masculine violation imperative
that imperative includes breaking the *** boundaries of women and girls
it involves breaking the cultural and political boundaries of indigenous people; i think the word is genocide
it involves breaking the biological boundaries of rivers and forests
I want you to see that these two pictures are basically the same
You've got the people who live in their forest, who love their forest, and what happens to them
And then you've got the people who destroy their forest
It involves breaking the genetic boundaries of other species
So, coming to a river near you: transgenic salmon
and ultimately the physical boundaries of the atom itself
Now you put all this together; the entire culture is sociopathic
the entitlement, the ***, the endless endless *** to dominate, you'll never reach the end of it
what we are reaching is complete biotic collapse starting with the least of us
the plankton populations are now collapsing and it's because the oceans are too acidic from all the carbon
There's only so much that can sink into the ocean
I know that plankton are probably a little too small, a little too green
for most people to even know about, let alone really care about,
but you should know that 2 out of 3 animal breaths are only made possible by the oxygen that plankton produce
so if the oceans go down, we go down with them
So what do we do? Well, we fight like hell
You've heard of speed dating, now you're going to get speed revolution
There's a few concepts that you might find helpful as we organize a serious resistance movement to whatever form of patriarchy you decide to take on
Liberals and Radicals: Liberals believe that society is made up of individuals
individualism is so sacrosanct to liberals that being identified as a member of a group or a class is what they see as the harm; that's an insult
For radicals it's totally different. Society is made up of classes to radicals.
in Marx's original version that was, of course, economic class, but really any group or caste
It's made up of groups of people and some of those groups have power over other groups
This is a hierarchy. So being part of a group is not an insult, far from it
Identifying with that group is the first step toward breaking your slave conciousness
and ultimately joining forces with people who share your condition to form an effective resistance movement
so you make common cause with people who share your condition
That's one big difference between the liberals and the radicals
another big difference is the nature of social reality
For liberals, they believe in a thing called idealism
Social reality is made up of ideas, attitudes. It's a mental construct of some sort
and so for them, social change happens through rational argument
through education, through changing people's minds
Radicals are totally different. Radicalism is always materialist.
Society is made up of concrete material instituions
so systems of power, not by thoughts and ideas
So for radicals, the solution to oppression is to take those systems apart brick by brick
you have to make material change
So liberals say, "we have to educate, educate, educate"
and the radicals say that yes, education is part of that program,
but eventually we have to actually stop them
so if you remove power from the equation liberalism makes oppression look voluntary
and it erases the fact that it's social subordination
so people withstand oppression using three psychological methods: denial, accommodation and consent
So here's Harriet Tubman, "I could have freed hundreds more if they had but known they were slaves"
So that's the denial, the accommodation and ultimately the consent
This is the realization to which radicalism will ultimately bring you
These are two of my favorite people from history, here's Christabel Pankhurst
"We know that relying solely on arguments we wandered for forty years politically in the wilderness"
(They were essentially begging men to listen to them.) "We know that arguments are not enough... and that political force is necessary"
Frederick Douglass, who well knew as an escaped enslaved person
"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."
Social change requires force. Now don't misunderstand me, force is not the same as violence
Whether to wage your struggle using violent or nonviolent tactics is a decision that comes much later
I actually have a lot of respect for nonviolence
when understood and used properly it's an extremely elegant technique
so this is not about violence and nonviolence
It's only to recognize that power is not a mistake, it's not a misunderstanding, it's not a disagreement
So justice is not won by rational argument, by some kind of personal transformation or by spiritual epiphany
It's won by taking power away from the people in power and redistributing that power across society
giving the dispossessed what they need
There are three broad categories of response to the situation of oppression
The first is legal remedies to redress specific harms
What's interesting about all three of these categories actually is that all of them can be liberal or radical
and that's an important thing to remember
because often we fall into these dichotomies of: some actions are liberal and some are radical
and it's not really that simple, I think that the ultimate goal is what describes whether something is liberal or radical
not which of these responses you choose to use in your activism
Okay, so the legal response, most activists groups generally are organized around legal responses
and that's for a very simple reason, as Catharine MacKinnon says, "Law organizes power"
So it's one of the most direct ways to reorganize power. The trick is to do that as radicals.
We have to ask the question, does this initiative actually redistribute power?
or does it just change who's at the top of the pyramid?
I remember when I was 18 taking a women's studies class and somebody asked
"How will we know when feminism has reached its goal?"
and the professor said, "When half of the CEOs are women"
My mouth about hit the floor, I didn't know that you could be a liberal and a feminist
It just didn't make any sense to me, I thought all feminists had to be radical
because I had read Andrea Dworkin and Mary Daly and I was all set
I couldn't believe what I was hearing
So does this initiative redefine power, not just who's at the top of the hierarchy?
Does it take away the rights of the oppressors and reestablish the rights of the dispossessed?
Does it let people control the material conditions of their lives?
That's what we're after
Number two would be direct action
Some people bypass, jump over or decide not to go the legal route
and they go right to direct action and there's lots of examples of this through history
The Montgomery Bus Boycott is perfect example
they used their economic power; they didn't use the court system to desegregate the Montgomery bus system
Your basic insurrection would be another example so obviously direct action covers an awful lot of ground
as with legal remedies, though, the goal of direct action can be liberal or radical...or downright revolutionary
The third category is withdrawal
The main difference between withdrawal as a successful strategy and withdrawal as a failed strategy
is whether that withdrawal is seen as adequate in itself
or if the withdrawal is linked specifically to political resistance
Now that difference hinges exactly on that distinction between liberal and radical
Issues of identification, of loyalty to your own, of class consciousness are absolutely crucial to resistance movements
that may, in fact, be our hardest job as radicals is breaking through that psychology of the oppressed
But alone, it's not enough
The withdrawal had got to go beyond the intellectual, the emotional, the psychological
It has got to include a goal of actually winning justice
Withdrawal may give solace but ultimately it will change nothing
and living in a rarefied world of the already converted will not save women or this planet
Gene Sharp is somebody who I think we should know his work pretty thoroughly
if we actually intend to build a serious resistance movement. I think he's really phenomenal.
He's probably responsible for more revolutions than anybody who has ever lived
Except maybe Karl Marx, one or the other would be my two picks
this is a great quote from Gene Sharp, now the people he calls "Utopians" I would call "Withdrawalists" but its the same idea
"Utopians are often especially sensitive to the evils of the world and they crave certainty, purity
completeness; firmly reject the evil as totally as possible, wishing to avoid any compromise with them.
They await a "new world" which is to come into being by an act of God, a change in the human spirit,
by autonomous changes in the economic conditions, or by a deep spontaneous social upheaval--
all beyond deliberate human control.
The most serious weakness of this response to the problem of this world is not the broad vision,
or the commitment of the people who believe in it
The weakness is that these believers have no effective way to reach the society of their dreams."
I would say that sums up my youth
I've heard the phrase "secular millennialism" and that's what he's getting at
We just sort of thought that somehow it would happen; we had no plan
So, a few myths about resistance. Most of these myths are peculiarly American. I think there's two reasons for that
One is that historically speaking we haven't had a real left in this country since the 1930's
So none of us were really trained to think in political terms. We're sort of stabbing around in the dark here
Also because there has been a triumph of individualism
and that's because individualism really bolsters corporate capitalism so, of course that's gotten a lot of help from the bad people
So these are some of the myths that I think a lot of us fall into simply because we don't know better
Myth #1: Resistance movements just happen
I'm going to beg you to read some history; resistance movements don't just happen
there are, in fact, entire volumes about strategy written for resistance movements
Movements take untold hours of organizing across lifetimes of people, usually across generations
there is nothing spontaneous about the process: it takes tremendous dedication, it takes strategic smarts, tons of courage
Believing that resistance will magically happen condemns us to the sidelines
waiting for this great glorious revolution that will in fact never come
Myth #2: Social change happens through personal example: If I live a pure and righteous life, that will inspire others
Any strategy based on individual change is doomed to fail
because social subordination is not an individual condition
it's a group condition, a class condition; it will only change through group effort
but this is where you get all this emphasis on things like your lifestyle, your consumer choices
and on things like your "personal carbon footprint"
am I the only one who's noticed that when you're talking about carbon footprint
that is the only time that men try to prove they're smaller? [audience laughs]
So lets talk about example as a political strategy
Now, by their nature, agricultural societies are imperialist because they're based on drawdown, hopefully we got that covered
But civilizations follow that same pattern: they conquer the region,
and over and over for 10,000 years that's been what's happened
they have invaded the territory of neighboring indigenous people and done their best to take what they want.
Some of those indigenous people embody the values that everyone in this room holds dear.
They're egalitarian, they're sustainable, they're peaceful, they're matrilineal cultures
and in all that time, over all those invasions,
the face to face example of an egalitarian, peaceful society has never once changed the invaders.
It has never once brought on an epiphany in the invading culture, never once in 10,000 years.
the dominant culture will not change because it sees the beautiful nonviolent values we hold in our hearts
and it's not going to change because it sees our life-affirming, free-range compost piles
sorry, but history is literally the story of that dominating culture
coming into contact with sustainable, egalitarian cultures
and simply wiping them out. There are no exceptions. So personal examples...
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