Myths of the Old Order: Who’s afraid of “populism” anyway?

This series of posts will continue to examine myths or tropes that I hear repeated by those trying to make sense of the "New Dark Age" that is our fragmented social reality. If you have an idea for a trope to address, contact me on Twitter @Askews2000.

The neoliberal consensus is dead. What will arise from its ashes, however, remains open for debate. Centrists, lacking the vision discipline historically imposed by a strong left, are being storm-tossed by electorates from Washington to Vienna.  We are told that the charismatic elitism of Macron or Obama is the only thing protecting democracy from a rising tide of populist nationalism. In this narrative, the far right and ‘far’ left (if you can call democratic socialism far left) are riding a wave of anger and disillusionment into political power, and tearing up cultural norms and evidence-based policies along the way.

This blog will attempt to understand and thereby partially allay these fears. Off the bat, let me say that right-wing populism is in fact dangerous -  but because it’s right-wing, not because it’s 'populist'. Right-wing values of hierarchy and social stasis are inimical to individual rights when left unchecked. Stalinists are a political joke in a democracy; modern-day Nazis are not. 

Clutch the pearls

To label someone a populist in elite political discourse is to employ a slur. To argue that Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are somehow the same is to impugn one with the perceived flaws of the other. Australian political commentators love this kind of lazy rhetorical shorthand: when Labour Party policy on trade or immigration, for instance, is described as ‘populist’, it is to imply that such policies are somehow illegitimate, inconsistent or poorly justified. Back in the day, “protectionist” would have sufficed but that epithet has lost much of its power with the demise of the neoliberal consensus. Better now to infer a parallel with the xenophobia and chauvinism of a Bernardi, Hanson or Abbott.

Centrist elites have convinced themselves that policy-making is a matter of rational calculus: assessing costs and benefits and employing policy tools to deliver the most efficient outcome for the largest number of people. Invariably, elite interests are taken to represent the interests of the whole community. Such a worldview must appear natural for individuals unburdened by ideological aesthetics and for whom bargaining and compromise are the [sole] essence of politics. By contrast, when presented with policies they don’t understand in these terms, the centrist’s first instinct is to attribute to those advancing them traits of stupidity, self-interest or malice. Populists, in their reading, are merely selfish entrepreneurs who exploit irrational public grievances for private gain; in Trump’s case, as idiot-savant.

A better view

This, of course, is not true. Populists voters, and their leaders, articulate political vision[s] centered around perspectives and interests that are not part of elite discourse but rational all the same. Those visions simply aren’t intelligible from the perspective of those socialised with a different set of norms. The elite are like the aristocrats who cry “let them eat cake” at a mob of torch-wielding revolutionaries shouting about democracy and liberty. For the establishment, there are both correct ways to articulate political causes (“tone”) and only a narrow range of acceptable claims. To articulate an ‘unacceptable’ political argument or an acceptable one in the ‘wrong way’ is to violate norms. Moreover, to be ignorant of those norms is display unsuitability as part of the 'ruling' class. 

Backlash bias is one of the most important tools in the human psychological toolkit, but its social role is poorly appreciated. Confirmation bias is better appreciated: we tend to weight more highly information and behaviour that agrees with our expectations, and reward those who act in expected ways. Backlash bias is the inverse of this: we experience something akin to shock when confronted with information or behaviour we didn’t expect, and are often willing to call out or punish those who express such behaviours. The backlash we feel is our cognitive way of coding and implementing ‘meta-norms’ – a built-in programme for punishing deviance that ensures the ongoing cohesiveness of a shared set of social expectations or ‘culture’. 

Within both right and left, those who have risen to political and economic influence are socialised with just such a set of political expectations either prior to or as part of the process of acquiring power. The longer they’ve been in power, the less likely it is that those beliefs will tolerate perceived variation. So when the establishment reacts to populist leaders and policies, they are exhibiting a [genuinely felt] moral belief that those leaders and policies are disruptive for the cohesiveness of the community (or in the case of politics, ‘their side’) of which they are of course the self-appointed representatives.

This is made more potent by elites’ presumption of authority over their own ‘team’: elites don’t just embody political norms, but set, control and enforce them through the use of both hard and soft influence. Their understanding of their own community is stratified in such a way as to place them at the top. US Republicans, for example, long presumed that they could set a free-market agenda for an electoral coalition comprised of a lower class of Christian conservatives nd racialized nationalists. Their contemporary hand-wringing isn’t only an emotional reaction to ideological arguments they don’t understand, but a genuine anger and fear at losing control of the political destiny of their own political team to a group of people they see as lesser. 

Getting back in touch with our roots

The return of populism, for that is what it truly is, does not need to cause us such anxieties.

By necessity, political movements specialise as they increase in complexity: delegating authority higher and higher as power becomes centralised and remote from supporters; creating self-perpetuating institutions to manage and exercise that power on their behalf. Every organisation, including political parties and states, must balance the effectiveness of its governance (attaining and exercising power) against its responsiveness to those whose tacit consent it relies on to legitimise its own authority. There may be real limits about how big a democratic state can get, and states are uniquely powerful institutions. Political parties and movements are orders of magnitude weaker than states, with limited resources, poor institutions, and low levels of individual loyalty and commitment.

When an existing group of elites has been in power for too long, they necessarily lose touch with their base, unless active measures are employed to keep the party leaders responsive and accountable. That is the reason why political victories come in alternating waves: each wave brings in fresh blood and fresh ideas. But if complacent enough, elites often try to rig their own institutions to limit the very accountability they need to continue doing their job effectively. So if neoliberalism (on both left and right) had been challenged effectively over the last forty years, perhaps it could have evolved into something acceptable to the voting public. Instead, it assumed a position of ideological hegemony and closed itself to all criticism; now it is overthrown amidst crisis and disorder.

So when a politician becomes a 'populist' in the elite imagination, what he or she is really doing is speaking to marginalised voters about issues they care about in language they understand. I take comfort from the fact the left-wing populists speak of noble concerns: fair work, a decent standard of living, and universal access to health and education. That is the progressive core. Those on the centre-right might want to reconsider which side they’re really on, when their populist id exploits the lowest forms of bigotry and fear.

Liberalism: Pluralism and Rights

Books are never finished, so much as released into the wild. To that end, I have a confession to make: Chapter VII of my book “Politics for the New Dark Age”,  titled “On Liberty”, is my least favourite. The purpose Chapter VII is to make an argument for the importance of so-called “First Generation” civil and political rights, which in Australia are much more poorly secured than people might think. It was (one of) the first bits I wrote, and I relied less on recent research than the Chapters that came after it. The final text is perfectly serviceable, but carries a number of weaknesses that I’d prefer to redress.

Oops, I accidently a positivist

In seeking to justify both the existence and specific content of human rights, I fell back on my legal training to offer a largely positivist account of rights. In other words, these are the rights that all people possess because there exist legal texts from a political authority stating that to be the case. Worse, because I was writing primarily for an Australian audience (who lack a domestic bill of rights of their own) and my own background is in international law, I fell back on treaties or agreements between states such as the twin Covenants and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This ‘legal universalism’ is an extremely weak, politically-contingent variant of positivism: we have these rights and not others because a certain subset of states negotiated these specific wordings in a particular historical and international context.

The problem with a positivist account of rights, of course, is that laws change when political circumstances change. National laws should be adaptions derived from universal ethics, not the other way around. While my account addresses historical preludes to the twentieth century legislative rights 'boom', these forerunners were themselves historically and culturally contingent. While I have no issue with belief systems that stake a claim to universality outside their original cultural context (I’m looking at you, Christianity and Buddhism), a positivist account can be challenged on the basis that the rights it promotes are culturally and temporally contingent and depend on the strength of the institutions that enforce them.

The best articulation I’ve seen of this political version of human rights is from Pablo Gilabert, who has posited that the political content of rights may perhaps be specified by the types of claims that are necessary in the context of the [threats and opportunities posed by] modern state, which is universal enough in 2017 to warrant philosophical consideration. But personally, I’m not convinced of the causality: modern states emerged subsequent to liberal, rights-centred philosophies, not the other way around. Rights and institutions co-evolved. 

Rights, natural or social?

So what grounding should I have used? Whether they admit to it or not, most non-lawyers who think about their individual rights would see those rights arising from ‘natural law’. Naturalist conceptions of rights encompass two broad, but largely contradictory sets of philosophies. On the one hand, the original liberal philosophers such as Rousseau and Locke (and modern religious conservatives) would see rights as the gifts of a supernatural being: we are “endowed with rights” by the “Creator”. Later liberals (including many modern humanists and libertarians) see rights arising from “human” status per se: existence as a conscious individual with biological needs requires certain necessities to be met to prevent harm and suffering.

While it’s attractive to appeal to the abstract concept of ‘human dignity’ (certainly, I’ve leaned on it myself), it’s hard to be clear on precisely where the boundaries of “humanity”, “dignity” or “necessity” lie. While I am sympathetic to the Great Ape Personhood Project and support legal protections for the comatose and permanently impaired, such sympathies are the result of an aesthetic choice (see Chapter 17) rather than naturalistic imperative. The sad truth is that in an anarchist state of nature, individuals have no rights: the only interests they could achieve would be those they had the power to achieve through self-help. An individual alone would have no claim on ‘nature’ or the supernatural for the satisfaction of their rights, moral or otherwise; such claims arise only through interaction with other social individuals.

In other words, rights necessarily arise when an individual enters into social relations with others, and not before. "Politics for the New Dark Age” is underwritten by this type of Rawlsian social contract liberalism, which provides the best (i.e. authoritative and persuasive) account of how individuals might join together as a society, using the thought experiment of the “veil of ignorance”. Rights, in this view, are the minimum conditions under which an individual would freely elect to join a society with others. As Seyla Benhabib (who is rapidly becoming one of my favourite political philosophers) puts it:

“A community of interdependence becomes a moral community only [when] it resolves to settle those issues of common concern to all via dialogical procedures in which all. . . . all those whose interests are actually or potentially affected by the courses of action and decisions [of that community] . . .are participants.”

While a social view of rights can underwrite a positivist or particularist understanding of rights (the conditions I would enter this society are different from the conditions I would enter that society), Rawls’ thought experiment is an abstract representation of all societies founded on a minimal conception of individualism and human equality.

A pluralist conception of rights

Thus, rights are social in nature, innate to social structures, not individuals.  We can plausibly claim that any liberal democratic society constituted on the basis of Rawlsian liberalism will share a common conception of individual rights. That’s a pretty powerful claim philosophically and politically, and gets us a long way towards human rights universalism. But not all actual, existing societies are founded on this basis. While liberalism is a pretty powerful cultural technology, other cultural adaptions may be successful in their environment or survive because of path dependencies in their particular evolutionary histories.

In order to make the final leap to a truly universal application of rights, we have to see rights in a pluralist way. What this means is that even if two societies hold radically different beliefs about the basis on which their societies are organised (which may be neither individualist, humanist nor egalitarian), we should in theory be able to find at least some pramatic rules they share about the treatment of individuals. This is due to material constraints imposed by human biological needs and common environmental problems, which restrict the possible space of viable cultural variation. In other words, the possible range of human cultural and social organisation is not unlimited and cultural differences are not inherently untranslateable. Environment and social structure mediates between biological necessities and cultural variation. 

In his later work, Political Liberalism, Rawls called this version of rights the ‘overlapping consensus’. It brings back into our conception of universal rights something like positivism (because the consensus is established by mutual agreement and recognition amongst societies) and naturalism (because of the scope of observed variation is limited by materialist constraints). Because a pluralist conception of rights is mutually constitutive (i.e. it depends on mutual recognition of the ongoing validity of respective social arrangements), it may also be conditional in the sense that a society that fails to meet certain standards is not longer recognised and treated as a member in good standing of the community of societies.

If there's ever a second edition of "Politics for the New Dark Age", expect to see Chapter VII improved along these lines. Until then. . . . 

What is Socialism? (or “Science Proves Einstein Right Again!”)

This blog is a companion piece to one I posted in September, “Why ‘Libertarian’ Socialism”. That title of course begged the question: what then is socialism? No small amount of ink has been spilled over the “s-word”’s return to acceptable political discourse. My own book, “Politics for the New Dark Age” sits in this tradition but is largely descriptive, rather than normative. It identifies a policy programme grounded in first principles, and loosely describes the result as democratic and socialist. What follows is a first attempt to describe the normative and theoretical core of the ‘new’ socialism.

God dammit, Einstein

When you write anything, one of the first things you learn is that there are few original ideas, and someone smarter once said exactly what you want to say decades before you were even born. As I read Albert Einstein’s 1949 essay “Why Socialism” in preparation for this blog, I realised that the greatest physicist of the 20th century was already way ahead of me. Einstein’s core insight is as follows:

“Man is, at one and the same time, a solitary being and a social being. . . . . The individual is able to think, feel, strive, and work by himself; but he [sic] depends so much upon society—in his physical, intellectual, and emotional existence—that it is impossible to think of him, or to understand him, outside the framework of society. It is “society” which provides man with food, clothing, a home, the tools of work, language, the forms of thought, and most of the content of thought; his life is made possible through the labor and the accomplishments of the many millions past and present who are all hidden behind the small word “society.””

While all Marxists are socialists, the idea of social politics is older and grander than Marx. Einstein goes on, in the same paragraph, to describe the origins and diversity of political personality:

“[T]he existence of these varied, frequently conflicting, strivings accounts for the special character of a man [sic] . . . . It is quite possible that the relative strength of these two [solitary and social] drives is, in the main, fixed by inheritance. But the personality that finally emerges is largely formed by the environment in which a man happens to find himself during his development, by the structure of the society in which he grows up, by the tradition of that society, and by its appraisal of particular types of behavior.”

Here's how I make the same argument in Chapter II of “Politics for the New Dark Age”:

“Socialism as an ideology says that cooperative solutions to social problems tend to lead to better outcomes. Capitalism, as an ideology or set of ideologies, is simply the belief that purely competitive [strategies] lead to better solutions than cooperative solutions or mixed cooperative and competitive solutions. Both capitalism and socialism, in their democratic variants, place the liberal individual at the centre of decision-making. But they come to radically different policy programs because the personality types that underlie their world views see problem solving (and the possibility of trusting others) in fundamentally different ways.”

When I speak, therefore, of ‘capitalism’ and ‘socialism’ I am referring to them as elemental positions – distinct from any specific economic system, set of norms and institutions, class interests or political programmes. They are strategy sets to solve the core social dilemma at the heart of civilization. But socialism and capitalism in this sense also possess conflicting beliefs about the nature of existence and ‘the good life’. We in the modern world have lost any other names for these variations of social contract liberalism, but on some level the same conflict must surely have existed throughout history because the same dilemmas mathematically recur in every society comprised of autonomous individuals. 

Re-stating the case

The following three points, for me, are the core beliefs of any socialist system or programme, whether Marxist or non-Marxist. Firstly, that humanity is first and foremost a social species. Secondly, that the nature of social life creates decision dilemmas for which there are cooperative (i.e. trusting) strategies. And finally, that cooperative solutions to social problems are mathematically, practically and normatively superior to the alternative. Because of these three things, humanity has evolved (biologically, culturally, and technologically) to possess unrivalled potential to achieve whatever social end we desire. Socialists are humanist because we hold that we as a species may use our powers thus acquired for “good”; and that possessing such powers  does not normatively impair any other (i.e. spiritual or environmental) value.

Stated in this way, we on the left can begin to claw back nature from being the rhetorical preserve of the right. For the last 150 years, the right has claimed the mantle of ‘human nature’ for itself, based on a (mis-)reading of Darwinian evolution. Their core critique of socialism has been that it misunderstands what it is to be human. But “survival of the fittest” does not state that every animal is a utility-maximising egoist, or that cooperation is impossible. Quite the contrary. Selfish animals are not innately better adapted than altruistic ones; and social species are often the fittest in their ecologies. If you look for Homo economicus in nature, at best you find the chimpanzee. And social, altruistic humanity is doing a great deal better than chimps.

Here’s what nature really tells us: human nature is both selfish and selfless, competitive and cooperative. We mix survival strategies in proportion to their success: a society structed along either purely socialist or capitalist lines is likely to prove extremely rigid and susceptible to shocks (I’m looking at you 1989 and 2008). “Nature”, at most, justifies a democratic, liberal society where those ideologies can exist in a state of creative tension that allows cultural evolution to continue. 

Thinking like the other side

If we flip the mirror, and look at the other side of politics, what would their argument for capitalist institutions and policies look like? I posit, by analogy, that it would follow the same structure: First, humanity is comprised of egoist, utility-maximising individuals. Secondly, that there are competitive [yet still non-violent] strategies to resolve decision dilemmas between individuals. And thirdly, that competitive self-help strategies are superior, mathematically, practically and normatively to cooperative strategies (viz. neoclassical economics).

While there is a normative case against capitalism as an economic system and political programme, there is also increasing pragmatic and theoretical evidence that the ideology’s core propositions are flawed. The assumption of egotistical, utility-maximising individuals (“homo economicus”) is not only abstract and ahistorical, but totally irrelevant to the way humans actually make decisions. While we are capable of abstract reasoning, humans operate very effectively day-to-day using biologically- and culturally-imprinted decision-rules that often produce more efficient and practical decision outcomes than rational-choice models would suggest they should. When those (irrational) decision rules and social biases are examined, it often turns out that they are efficient when the existence of social life and structures are taken into account (although sometimes they aren't).

And while we can admit that sometimes there are self-help solutions to social dilemmas that are efficient, we should push back against the fundamentalist belief that capitalist competition is the solution to every social problem. Put simply, the market is terrible at providing essential public goods are prices that are accessible to all. Without cooperative institutions to provide those goods (or regulate their provision), a social contract society ceases to exist because it is unable to satisfy everyone's basic human rights. Capitalism's third precept, that competitive solutions to social dilemmas are generally superior, is contestable on mathematical, practical and moral grounds. That’s the case socialists have to make to win the argument.

Seriously, go read Einstein

It’s great. I’ll leave you with one final quote, as a warning against the technocrats (see Chapter IV of my book):

“[W]e should be on our guard not to overestimate science and scientific methods when it is a question of human problems; and we should not assume that experts are the only ones who have a right to express themselves on questions affecting the organization of society.”

Couldn’t have put it better myself.

Book Review: "Outliers: The Story of Success" by Malcolm Gladwell

I am generally sceptical of the myth of meritocracy. That myth is largely how our current Western social institutions legitimise the inequality they produce, and is deployed in even fiercer forms to resist social policies to eliminate poverty. It is thus with some chagrin to report that I have only belatedly read Malcolm Gladwell's 2008 "Outliers: The Story of Success". First, the good news. "Outliers" is extraordinarily well written, compulsive to read, and crafts compelling anecdotes about the true nature of success. It challenges deeply help myths about the supposed genius of our culture's sporting, legal, and entrepreneurial heroes. 

Gladwell sets out to establish three core premises through which he wants to re-write the classical liberal narrative of success as the result of individual genius or talent:

• First, that success is more a matter of opportunity than talent, and opportunities are structured by social forces that are often hidden or obtuse in ways that are unintuitive or coincidental. 
• Secondly, that talent is largely a matter of having opportunities to practice (see #1). Gladwell popularised the so-called "10,000 hour" rule, which posits that extensive practice, not innate talent, distinguishes society's great artists, scientists and musicians from the rest of us. 
• Finally, Gladwell dives into the social and cultural factors that drive people to succeed, and argues that cultures which encourage "hard work" (see #2) produce more success.

For me, Gladwell fails to pull these arguments together into a cohesive whole. He proves his first point, but fails to establish a convincing factual or moral case for the second and third. 

Luck and Evolution

Gladwell is first and foremost a story-teller, and the strength of his arguments rests largely on the persuasiveness of his anecdotes. Fortunately, he leads with his best material. By exhaustively examining the relationship between coincidences such as birthdate and sporting success, Gladwell establishes a prima facie case that the artificial constraints imposed by society (in this instance, grouping players by birth year) create a selective pressure that advantages those born earliest in the selection period. It's not that those born earlier in the year are always going be slightly stronger, slightly taller and slightly faster than those born later in the year. Rather it's that the selection environment takes those minor, random differences and signal-boosts them, offering early opportunities for additional training and practice that mean that by the time these biological or developmental differences cease to matter, they've been supplanted by robust skill-based gradations.

Although Gladwell himself doesn't use evolutionary metaphors, the examples he provides offer compelling example after compelling example about how environment, rather than talent, shapes who succeeds. In Gladwell's narrative, the masters of Silicon Valley rose to prominence not because they're geniuses (most were talented, yes, but not academic standouts), but because they had the good fortune to be born in a time and place where they had opportunities to be ahead of the curve in practicing with a technology that would soon re-shape the entire economy. Gladwell's narrative history of the New York M&A legal scene is similar: the [predominantly Jewish] firms that became titans of Wall Street prevailed not because they were smarter, or better able to judge the financial markets, but because the prevailing cultural norms prevented more established WASP firms from gaining the skills and experience they would need to survive in the new neoliberal order. 

At times, Gladwell seems in awe of the talented individuals (both successful and unsuccessful) he interviewed for the book; but rather than hero worship, he accurately points out there is far more to individual success than general intelligence. Sociability and emotion intelligence matter too; as do the contacts, self-confidence and experience provided by some socio-economic backgrounds over others.  

Uneasy Bedfellows

Gladwell's alternative explanation for the success of these individuals is that practice and experience drive success. The distribution of opportunities to practice (for "10,000 hours") determines who are the standouts in a particular field. Unfortunately, the anecdote-driven nature of this claim undermines its persuasiveness. Gladwell cites a single study of musicians to grant his claim scientific weight, and it's worth noting that subsequent meta-analyses have failed to replicate the result outside the musical profession. 

The lack of a cohesive argumentative throughline becomes a particular problem in the second half of the book. It is here that Gladwell offers his case on what drives people to work hard on a task for the requisite 10,000 hours practice in the first place. Gladwell begins well by introducing the idea of cultural influences on behaviour through the often-cited work on Southerners in the US (Nisbett & Cohen) and the role of culture in airline crashes. But he then argues that some cultures are better equipped than other to produce individual behaviours that reliably produce success. My core problem is that, like so many others working in this space, Gladwell shifts the locus of success from biological to cultural factors without changing the essence of the story being told about why some groups succeed and others don't. 

Gladwell's chapter on "why Asians are good at math" is particularly egregious. Crafting a tale of pre-modern China as a capitalist, entrepreneurial idyll, he argues Chinese culture is supposedly adapted to reproduce behaviours of self-reliance, hard work and risk-taking. Even ignoring the atrocious lumping together of all of Asian economic and cultural history, his claim is also wrong on its historical face. While small-peasant landholding may have been the ideal during some periods in Chinese history, there were equally periods characterised by feudal, despotic or [in the later period, especially] market-dominated land-ownership. A more sophisticated version of Gladwell's argument could point to the emphasis on civil service exams in Confucian governance; the high population densities in the region; or the role of the immigrant experience in pushing parents to over-invest in their child's education. Instead, we get the laziest sort of innate cultural, 'just so' explanations.

Worse, perhaps, is the second-to-last chapter where Gladwell sketches a narrative of how we might equalise success. Like many boosters of charter (for non-American, read: private) schools, Gladwell believes that longer hours, more homework and stricter discipline can create a 'hard work' culture that lifts people out of poverty. While I'm amenable to arguments about extending the school day, by this point it's well understood that private schools are highly selective in taking students who are already gifted and/or driven, poorly serve those who aren't, and perpeutate a two-tiered system of education without actually improving outcomes (an issue addressed in Chapter X of my own book, "Politics for the New Dark Age").

The Takeaways

While I would recommend "Outliers" as a reading experience, I would caution about overuse of its lessons. Gladwell chooses his anecdotes well, but they are ultimately just stories. While Gladwell focuses on understanding success, his book also (unintentionally or not) holds up a mirror to the origins of inequality. So while I while I applaud efforts to shift away from narratives of success rooted in individual merit, I would caution strongly against replacing them with either biological or cultural determinism. Culture is powerful, certainly, but no group is a monolith and every variation has both positive and negative attributes, depending on the skills demanded by society in a given historical moment. The question should not be how to create self-reliant strivers, but why we would want to structure our society so that only strivers succeed in the first place. 

Why I’m a radical feminist (but not THAT kind of radical feminist)

This is a long one. Stay with me!

Once upon a time, as a first-year political science undergraduate at the University of Melbourne, I was taught feminism 101 by Sheila Jeffreys. Jeffreys, perhaps the archetypal “radical lesbian separatist” was and remains controversial figure. But unlike many of my classmates (several young conservative women made a show of boycotting the compulsory course) I found a lot to like in her radical critique of gender relations. I’ve subsequently crossed paths with Jeffreys a couple of times professionally, in ways that have highlighted the problematic aspects of her attitude towards sex workers and trans individuals. 

This is a blog about feminism. While the composition of groups, classes and interests that make up a society is variable, there is one “identity” – gender – which is just about ubiquitous across humankind because it is built on top of a universal biological scaffold: sex* [see below]. While I personally believe we can build ideologies without reference to social identities, I suspect that this cannot be done satisfactorily without addressing gendered inequalities. Thus, while we can [in theory] debate socialism or capitalism without considering differences in race or religion, a separate critique of patriarchy is a necessary co-requisite to any progressive politics.

What follows is my effort to engage with these questions, noting that I am not a woman, am incapable of experiencing the female perspective, and have not seriously engaged with the key texts. In other words, nothing below counts for very much beyond my own perspective. 

Back to Basics

It is now broadly recognised that sex and gender refer in English to two distinct concepts: the former biological, the latter social. Importantly, sex itself is not a simple categorical concept but an index of variations (in primary or reproductive sex characteristics, secondary sex characteristics, endocrinal systems, neural structures etc) which may or may not co-vary in any given individual. While intersex individuals who defy traditional categorisation based on their chromosomes or primary sex characteristics are often considered the 'exceptions who prove the rule', people struggle to accept (as a recent special issue of Scientific American pointed out) that we are all sexual chimaeras to some degree. Each individual mixes stereotypically ‘male’ and ‘female’ biological and cultural traits as a result of our own particular genetic legacy, developmental history and social conditioning. We can take broad averages of particular traits, but the probability that any given individual has one hundred per cent of the biological markers statistically characteristic of their assigned sex is extremely low. 

Gender, on the other hand, is the set of social roles and expectations which are constructed around sex variability. It is likely that unequal social roles based on biological sex at least partially predate society, and even the human species itself; children seem innately tuned to pick up on and reproduce gendered behaviours. Much as minor genetic differences which vary with geography (such as in antibody expression) become associated with visible but unrelated ‘tags’ (such as skin colouration or cultural practices) which are in turn constructed into racialized social hierarchies, gender is a social construct based on superficial difference markers (e.g sexual characteristics) with complex links to ultimately irrelevant biological differences (such as chromosomal make-up or hormone regulation). Our mental desire to categorise reduces all this wonderful diversity into binary [oppressive] social roles with vast consequences: male and female.

I am a radical feminist because I believe that these constructed gender inequalities pre-date all other forms of social oppression (including race and class), and there is a credible argument that gender hierarchies are the model for all other forms of exploitation and hierarchy. I further believe that gender inequality is based first and foremost on the exploitation of reproductive capacity, which is largely (but not exclusively) determined by sex. Children were the original “capital good”: the input and output of all other forms of production. Women controlled that means of production by the contribution of their labour and men constructed elaborate norms and roles to unjustly seize most of that surplus value for themselves. The modern idea of gender is constructed, like Frankenstein’s monster, from a motley set of high-salience but low-information signals in order to build a hierarchical structure that (primarily) benefits men.

Power and Patriarchy

While not every human society is patriarchal, a sufficiently large percentage of them are that it is accurate to describe gendered inequality as being representative of our species. We are neither chimpanzee (enforcing male reproductive rights through violence) nor bonobo (using social sex and uncertain parentage as a social glue), but something in between. Monogamy has deep enough roots in our species to justify the hypothesis that biology heavily weights human cultural outcomes towards equilibrium norms that enforce and reproduce it (i.e. patriarchy). But we retain sufficient behaviourial flexibility to challenge and re-write those norms when conditions allow. As I have written elsewhere, we are behaviorial omnivores who balance precariously between established practice and experimentation with new social patterns. 

I am a radical feminist because (like a good Gramscian) I believe that these patterns of gendered behaviour are the result not only of the formal laws and rules that constitute society but implicit patterns of power between genders that are reproduced regardless of law. In other words, mere legal equality and the reform of discriminatory statutes so as to ensure equality of opportunity between the sexes is inadequate because gendered behaviours are embedded in a something more primal and powerful: cultural patriarchy. Discourses, beliefs and expectations about gendered behaviour will continue to reproduce the patriarchy even, perhaps especially, if laws and expectations are changed along socialist or capitalist lines to promise legal equality.

Over the years, I’ve have had senior colleagues of mine, both male and female, admit out of confidence in my discretion that they prefer to hire male over female staff. On the flip side, I’ve had well-meaning bosses offer to improve working conditions for women primarily by offering more family leave. No matter how far feminism has reformed laws in the global West, so long as expectations of the exploitation of female reproductive labour continue to be reproduced at home and through our culture, these gendered patterns of hierarchy and oppression will continue to find expression.

It’s in this regard that the critique of patriarchy also holds the potential to benefit men. While gendered roles and expectations undoubtedly offer men a privileged position, inhabiting those roles can be stressful (or dare I say, toxic) – especially when they are at odds with the legal structures of society. One interesting piece of research that bubbled up during the whole “Google Memo” fiasco was that gendered behaviourial differences may have increased in the West as formal equality became entrenched. This is not, it turns out, because women have become more stereotypically ‘feminine’, but because men have responded to their reduced relative status by increasing the practice of ‘masculinised’ behaviours. The liberation of both men and women from these stressful and harmful gendered expectations is the only just goal of a radical, emancipatory agenda.

Not THAT kind of Radical Feminist

Radical feminism has a bad reputation. Like all progressive movements, it has been prone to bitter internal sectarianism (e.g. regarding sex work and the place of trans individuals) over the past several decades. Some of these fights can be understood as manifestations of the authoritarian/libertarian axis, as I’ve written previously. Invariably, the losers of these arguments (like their Trotskyist forebears) continued to argue that they, and they alone, represent continuity with “true” radicalism while acting like puritanical asshats. Few take Trotskyists to be true representatives of socialism; nor should we treat TERFS or SWERFS as being truly representative of [radical] feminism. To be clear, if I am to describe myself as a radical feminist, it is as one who is both trans- and sex worker-inclusionary.

Trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFS) like Jeffreys and another Australian export, Germaine Greer, share with all authoritarian radicals the belief that when constructed but flawed social categories (i.e. gender) are abolished they will be supplanted by the "correct" essentialist, ones. Like Marxists who believe in the elevation of intransient class identity over bourgeois interests, they argue the abolition of gender will expose the permanent antagonism between biological (reproductive) sexes. For TERFS, the willing identification with and performance of gender roles (even as a transgression) merely reinforces the patriarchy, much like participation in the market reinforces capitalism.  TERF views have historically been disavowed even by other radicals including Catherine McKinnon, Andrea Dworkin and Gloria Steinem.

Even if the origin of biological sex differences in the brain prove hard to pin down, and gender identity (like all other personality traits) is understood as emerging from the complex interaction of genes, developmental and cultural factors, the left-libertarian instinct must be offering priority to the subjective lived experience of others and trust in their capacity to make (informed) decisions about their own wellbeing. Acceptance of trans- and gender-non conforming people is not only the correct liberal individualist thing to, but also one of the best tools radical feminism has to deconstruct and upend the fixed notion of gender categories that underpins the patriarchy.

In much the same vein, a (slightly larger) fraction of radical feminists take a strongly proscriptionary approach to prostitution and pornography. Sex worker exclusionary radical feminists (SWERFs) have lobbied with conservatives, often successfully (as is the case with the so-called “Swedish model”), for the outlawing of the sex industry. I recognise as a socialist that as both sex and work, prostitution and pornography sit at the intersection of two very potent power relations: capitalism and the patriarchy. The intersection of these oppressions creates opportunities for exploitation, such as sex trafficking, that are unique in their odiousness.

However, the intersection of these patterns of oppression merely means that the democratisation of sex work is more necessary than in any other part of the economy. In prostitution and pornography, worker control of the means of production means first and foremost ensuring the enthusiastic consent of the participants. People, both men and women, may freely choose to be sex workers. The correct approach is not to critique their choices, but to make sure their decision is truly free, and not forced upon them as a result of material necessity (what I call in my book, "Politics for the New Dark Age" ‘decision slavery’)

In the end, therefore, while the left needs to integrate a critique of patriarchy into our everyday work, we must root that critique in the same individualistic and democratic framework that we apply to other forms of hierarchy and exploitation. Progressives, especially men, must be equipped with the tools to fight and win these arguments, and not see them as being somehow separate from concerns about poverty and class.