Last weekend, I decided to take advantage of the fact that I live in Intellectual Oxford and went to a lecture hosted by the Oxford Radical Forum. Sadly, I'd missed the feminism-focused day (although thinking on, this may have been a good thing - attend something like this and it's only a matter of time before someone gets all PoMo on your ass) and had chosen to attend what I now think of as "Why I can never be a Marxist" day.
The lecture itself, given by Gerry Cohen, was great. He's always good to listen to and knows how to engage an audience. It concerned the fact that Marxism *was* dead in its traditionally accepted form, because the working class (which is central to it) no longer exists in the form that Marx had thought it to exist then. Thus, if Marxism was to survive, it had to change its content regarding the working class. This is a terrible summary of the actual lecture, but doing it justice would take more space than is reasonable on a blog.
I began to have misgivings when I walked into the lecture room and found it dominated by SWP leaflets and pamphlets. Never a good sign. Nor that they'd advertised "Jerry" Cohen on the website, who is actually a completely different person. Indeed, the questions after the lecture indicated that:(a) the terrible stories about Marxist meetings are true - lots of people liking the sound of their own voice and getting impassioned about the fact that "we can rise up and defeat capitalism now!" which they can't (b) most of the people there were there to argue rather than actually listen and (c) the pomposity of Oxford Students is unbelievable. Oh the nostalgia...
High points:
(1) When someone took a pamphlet about beating capitalism from the rack and the SWP lady raced after him and told him they weren't free, they cost £1.00, with a completely straight face. Communism for those who can afford it, apparently.
(2) The man who claimed, as a deputy head teacher, he experienced the same exploitation as the workers did in the factories Marx and Engels observed. Yeah, I'm thinking not, theoretically or literally.
(3) The Oxford Radical Forum t-shirts for sale had a design on them that looked like it had been hugely influenced/stolen from the modernist movement, who - incidentally - were the artists of choice for many fascist movements.
(4) Singing "Solidarity forever" and realising that I am deadly afraid of earnestness in all its forms. I can't sit in a room full of middle class students with expensive hair cuts, all singing seriously about the workers without wanting to be swallowed up by a huge hole in the ground. It felt rather like being immersed into a cult, which is rather too much first thing on a Saturday morning when slightly hungover.
Leaving the lecture, I felt like I'd managed to be a horrible, capitalist pig (as I dialed the SO to tell him all about it) and at the same time terribly sad, because somewhere deep inside, I would really love to be earnest and a communist. Sort of. You know what I mean.
Anyway, "solidarity forever" has been going round my head pretty much continuously since that point, especially when coming up against the gross incompetence of FGW. Perhaps there's hope for me yet...
Showing posts with label Philosophy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Philosophy. Show all posts
Friday, March 07, 2008
Wednesday, June 14, 2006
Blogging Block
Alas, for the past couple of weeks, I've not been able to summon up the energy to write. Every subject feels a bit dry and repetitive - not that I'm competing to be original, but I would like to feel that I'm not spewing out complete crap every time I make an entry. So there've been no posts for a while.
I put it down to the end of exams - without them, I feel somewhat directionless. And jobless. The encroaching vision of overdrafts and high interest rates are a little scary, so I'm doing the grown up thing of doing absolutely nothing about it. Hah. I've also been robbed of the opportunity to read interesting feminist literature under the pretense of revision. And of writing long feminist rants about the comparitive merits of Marx and Mill as 19th Century (apparent) feminist thinkers.
As a feminist, I guess I'm more academic than activist (which will probably not come as a surprise to some) but I don't necessarily see this as a bad thing. I will, and do, protest and write angry emails etc, but the theorising keeps me sane. When the nitty-gritty gets too much and there are endless circles around something that is ultimately rather trivial(oh jesus, you know this is coming out wrong!), being able to think about what it would really *mean* to have the kind of society I want is a blessing. And after three years at Oxford, I'm rather good at the academic stuff.
It also keeps things in proportion. The oppression that middle class women in London suffer is different from that of women in China etc. It doesn't mean that middle class oppression is not worth fighting for (we have the means, after all), but that it needs to be remembered that it *is* different. We may all share the fact that we are women, but what it means to be a woman is different in all of these places, and within the same country, in different races, classes, status groups etc. No wonder feminism rarely seems like an united front. Admittedly, thinking too much about this will mean no-one can ever do anything, but it is important. I guess the point is that academia can feed into the activism without detracting from it, as many people seem to believe. I don't see that 'academic' always has to be a pejorative term within radical feminism.
On a lighter note, I really hate the new adverts for anti-wrinkle cream that are aimed at men. Really, women have enough trouble without men buying into this crap as well. For any men out there, we do not notice your wrinkles. At all. We don't think about them. We have more important things to think about, thanks. Christ. And this should show women that men think exactly the same thing about their wrinkles - i.e. they don't.
I put it down to the end of exams - without them, I feel somewhat directionless. And jobless. The encroaching vision of overdrafts and high interest rates are a little scary, so I'm doing the grown up thing of doing absolutely nothing about it. Hah. I've also been robbed of the opportunity to read interesting feminist literature under the pretense of revision. And of writing long feminist rants about the comparitive merits of Marx and Mill as 19th Century (apparent) feminist thinkers.
As a feminist, I guess I'm more academic than activist (which will probably not come as a surprise to some) but I don't necessarily see this as a bad thing. I will, and do, protest and write angry emails etc, but the theorising keeps me sane. When the nitty-gritty gets too much and there are endless circles around something that is ultimately rather trivial(oh jesus, you know this is coming out wrong!), being able to think about what it would really *mean* to have the kind of society I want is a blessing. And after three years at Oxford, I'm rather good at the academic stuff.
It also keeps things in proportion. The oppression that middle class women in London suffer is different from that of women in China etc. It doesn't mean that middle class oppression is not worth fighting for (we have the means, after all), but that it needs to be remembered that it *is* different. We may all share the fact that we are women, but what it means to be a woman is different in all of these places, and within the same country, in different races, classes, status groups etc. No wonder feminism rarely seems like an united front. Admittedly, thinking too much about this will mean no-one can ever do anything, but it is important. I guess the point is that academia can feed into the activism without detracting from it, as many people seem to believe. I don't see that 'academic' always has to be a pejorative term within radical feminism.
On a lighter note, I really hate the new adverts for anti-wrinkle cream that are aimed at men. Really, women have enough trouble without men buying into this crap as well. For any men out there, we do not notice your wrinkles. At all. We don't think about them. We have more important things to think about, thanks. Christ. And this should show women that men think exactly the same thing about their wrinkles - i.e. they don't.
Tuesday, May 16, 2006
Interesting Times...
I've been completely crap at blogging lately - don't give up on me - I will return to regularity as soon as my exams both start and finish!
Anyway, all this extra time has allowed me to ruminate about feminism in a way that is probably deeply detrimental to all my revision. I was reading a book the other day that was talking about prudential morality - i.e. moralities that are based on the premise that we should act according to what it is in our interest to do.
This got me thinking. If it were a woman who happened to be deciding what it was to act according to her interests, what kind of behaviour/needs would she have? Immediately, I thought of security. What women doesn't think that security is in her interests? Dworkin (Andrea) asked us to imagine a day without rape and that kind of world needs security, above anything.
But then I thought - what am I thinking? My whole conceptual understanding of what is in a woman's natural interest, what her basic self interest would be, is based on a framework of a world dominated by men. The only way we can think about the self interest of women is to think of what their interest is *now*. Naturally, would a woman's first interest be security? I don't think it would be, but I have no way of finding out. The whole concept of women and what is in their interest has been created by men. My linguistic framework has been developed in a male-oriented society. My conceptual understanding of these issues is distorted.
In light of this, I think we need to find a new theory of human nature for women. And figure out what *would* be in a woman's self-interest. Assuming she is in fact self-interested, which let's face it, she may not be. Perhaps I shall devote my final week of revision to that...
Anyway, all this extra time has allowed me to ruminate about feminism in a way that is probably deeply detrimental to all my revision. I was reading a book the other day that was talking about prudential morality - i.e. moralities that are based on the premise that we should act according to what it is in our interest to do.
This got me thinking. If it were a woman who happened to be deciding what it was to act according to her interests, what kind of behaviour/needs would she have? Immediately, I thought of security. What women doesn't think that security is in her interests? Dworkin (Andrea) asked us to imagine a day without rape and that kind of world needs security, above anything.
But then I thought - what am I thinking? My whole conceptual understanding of what is in a woman's natural interest, what her basic self interest would be, is based on a framework of a world dominated by men. The only way we can think about the self interest of women is to think of what their interest is *now*. Naturally, would a woman's first interest be security? I don't think it would be, but I have no way of finding out. The whole concept of women and what is in their interest has been created by men. My linguistic framework has been developed in a male-oriented society. My conceptual understanding of these issues is distorted.
In light of this, I think we need to find a new theory of human nature for women. And figure out what *would* be in a woman's self-interest. Assuming she is in fact self-interested, which let's face it, she may not be. Perhaps I shall devote my final week of revision to that...
Monday, April 03, 2006
Platonic Friends
Reading Plato today (as you do when exams draw near), it struck me that there are so many different ways to think about feminism in Plato's Republic. For example, many of the male critics reading Plato were absolutely appalled by the idea that the nuclear family would be abolished and women would take on the same tasks as men. They make desperate pleas to the idea of women's *difference* and that taking away the family robs us of our "special excellences". Reading this does cause the blood pressure to rise somewhat, but as most of them are dead, sustained ranting seems pointless.
On the other hand, Annas points out that Plato only gave women freedom because it served the state and what they were doing at home just wasn't worthwhile. This is much to the distress of many other women, who are inclined to treat Plato as the forerunner of J.S.Mill and applaud his stabs at equality. I'm having some difficulty finding articles on this (or indeed books) which were written after 1980, so I think it would be interesting to see how it would be viewed now. Or perhaps the idea is now so conventional and boring that it's just ignored?
Personally, I'm sticking with the view that Plato couldn't give a hoot about equality (as some of his comments would suggest), but was all for the idea of a well-oiled state machine.
This has been a fairly pointless post, but the academic musings have kept me from dwelling on how I might implode with anger at the facebook group I described earlier (which you can find if you can log into www.facebook.com and search for f*** the f-word). I went through one of their discussions earlier and had to pace the landing to try and calm down. Today's stunning contribution was the advocation of perpetual fellatio to keep men occupied.
Well quite.
I'm also annoyed by the bloody sanitary towel advert that keeps playing over and over again. As though women should walk out in protest about non-stretchy wings (admittedly it can be a problem on occasion and yes it should be sorted, but really.) when there are so many other things to protest about that are that little bit more important. Like rape. Or domestic violence. But anyway. Perhaps this is a topic for another day.
On the other hand, Annas points out that Plato only gave women freedom because it served the state and what they were doing at home just wasn't worthwhile. This is much to the distress of many other women, who are inclined to treat Plato as the forerunner of J.S.Mill and applaud his stabs at equality. I'm having some difficulty finding articles on this (or indeed books) which were written after 1980, so I think it would be interesting to see how it would be viewed now. Or perhaps the idea is now so conventional and boring that it's just ignored?
Personally, I'm sticking with the view that Plato couldn't give a hoot about equality (as some of his comments would suggest), but was all for the idea of a well-oiled state machine.
This has been a fairly pointless post, but the academic musings have kept me from dwelling on how I might implode with anger at the facebook group I described earlier (which you can find if you can log into www.facebook.com and search for f*** the f-word). I went through one of their discussions earlier and had to pace the landing to try and calm down. Today's stunning contribution was the advocation of perpetual fellatio to keep men occupied.
Well quite.
I'm also annoyed by the bloody sanitary towel advert that keeps playing over and over again. As though women should walk out in protest about non-stretchy wings (admittedly it can be a problem on occasion and yes it should be sorted, but really.) when there are so many other things to protest about that are that little bit more important. Like rape. Or domestic violence. But anyway. Perhaps this is a topic for another day.
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