A writer at the Boston Phoenix named Steven Stark has noticed something awry. His article is titled "Dawg Days: the 2008 Campaign Is Turning out to be Our First-Ever American Idol Election."(1) "American Idol" seems to be very democratic, because anyone can tryout and then voters decide who is the best singer. The underlying question raised by "American Idol" is what does the majority find entertaining.

"Today, politics are deemed above the fray by the Sunday-morning talk-show set, but, for the rest of the country, they've been a branch of entertainment for years."(1)

The united $tates is fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in addition to occupying Korea, Boricua and others. The contrasts can be stark. Some are soldiers on the edge of death. Others are spreading a popular photo on the Internet that shows Sarah Palin's face cut out and pasted on a bikini-wearing womyn toting a rifle.(2) Sarah Palin is thus the ultimate girlfriend--one who can wear the bikini, get the beauty contest award and then go hunting and fishing with her boyfriend. She has definitely hit on something there entertaining to a large portion of men, a cultural treasure trove. It's the contrast between that and what a leader really needs to know about foreign policy and war that is so jarring. It's the same contrast in which Amerikans claim to be liberating wimmin from Islam in Iraq and Afghanistan while soldiers distribute pornography CDs; colonial administrators legalize prostitution and pilots bomb wedding parties.

For Obama, the gun-toting is just "false consciousness" by which people avoid their economic interests in fighting the capitalist class. MIM disagrees. Gun ownership is connected to oppressing non-white peoples, but in this case, obviously we are talking about gender, not class.

Steven Stark provides the light-hearted angle on the campaign for president. He left out the fact that this all goes on while war proceeds. It's not just a sick image, because the sickness of Amerikkka is real.

Steven Stark did not say it, but he hit the half-way mark in describing gender oppression. By contrast, Obama is campaigning for "equal pay for equal work" as his class-centered appeal to females. His underlying misconception is economism.

Once we add in the picture of war going on while what Steven Starks points to is also going on, we can say it: Amerikkkans are gender oppressors in general--people entertained by sadistic violence. The Amerikkkans are men oppressing a Third World of wimmin. It is not an accident that the people responsible for U.$. wars entertained the public with Obama and now Palin.

Sex by itself does not sell in the united $tates. It's how we combine it with violence that matters. Lynndie England is Amerikkkan sexuality. So it's no surprise that gun-toting Palin in a bikini is the one we need to boost the ratings of the McCain ticket. No, it is not a distraction from an oppressive class reality. It is what Amerikkkans enjoy. Amerikkkans have the resources to be super-geniuses of foreign policy and war. It's probably good that they are not involved to that extent, but they enjoy themselves with their money in just this way--supporting Palin for vice-president. It's even better than papering over wars with Obama's vague speeches.

Theoretical Review attacking reductionism and economism

We are attaching a "Theoretical Review" (TR) article to this essay. The essay title raised our hopes that someone would describe a material basis for gender oppression. The very title of the article suggested an understanding of the problem.

Instead, the article dismissed the fastest gains for wimmin in history in a matter of a few paragraphs. This was a clue that there would be no comparative historical method used in the article.

One thing we agree with the 1981 Theoretical Review on is its proper use of the words "economism" and "reductionism." TR is better at attacking what it is against than in coming up with something it is for.

In the end, Theoretical Review never succeeded in even defining gender. It was easy to say that gender oppression was not just a tool of the capitalists created to divide the workers and boost profits. Going beyond that to say what gender actually is was more difficult and the Theoretical Review failed to provide a materialist analysis. Demands for day care, maternity leave and even redivision of household chores do not exceed the bounds of the mode of production as discussed by Marx. They are all class-related demands that fail to point to a non-biological substance of gender.

The idea that unpaid housework or reproduction is not already in Marxism is simply false. The simpletons at the party level in the Progressive Labor Party may repeat certain dogmas about sexism over and over again, but it does not make Karl Marx guilty.

The Theoretical Review writers and their opponents both assumed that white so-called workers generated profits for their employers. It was a U.$. chauvinist assumption that made all the rest of their analysis wrong. Both Theoretical Review and the people TR criticized are wrong, because the females they refer to are not only not super-exploited; they are also not exploited.

Jean Tepperman identified certain areas of concern without showing how they are specifically gender concerns and not Marx's old concerns about the mode of production. It's one thing to say wimmin do unpaid work in the home, but it's another to point to the causation of that pattern where males do less unpaid work in the home. Likewise, we can point out that mothers stay with their babies, but not pointing to a social reason for why that occurred instead of having males raise babies upon birth does not advance gender discussion one bit. By failing to penetrate the issue theoretically, Tepperman abandons economism only to take up a backdoor naturalism that asserts a female role in the division of labor: "All societies have a social division of labor based on the women's role as mother."(p. 7)

By contrast, MIM has offered a dialectical historical explanation by pointing out that tribes that went to war with their females on the front-lines gradually lost out in the reproduction struggle against tribes that sent only males to war. There is no presumption that females cannot make war for natural reasons. Instead we offered a demographic argument for the victory of patriarchy. MIM's particular demographic argument would also seem dated and points to the fact that a society that managed reproduction without female child-raising could also succeed.

Tepperman offered a description of life not different from seen in the likes of "Time Magazine" following the surge of white wimmin in the work force. To describe reality of white wimmin working, doing housework and also raising children, we did not need a Marxist or any materialist method. Although factual patterns are important, we must go a step further to eliminate oppression. We must describe the causal forces that created those factual patterns. Once we do that, we may know what the strategic solution is.

In understanding why elections are as they are in the united $tates, we can read Catharine MacKinnon who says that oppressors "eroticize power" or "eroticize domination." Among the oppressed such eroticization is "false consciousness" against the oppressed's own best interests. Through war struggles, Amerikkkans have become gender oppressors as a whole, sexual sadists casually enjoying the domination of other countries in part through careless elections.

Among the world's majority, money concerns might prevent education or political participation, notso with Amerikkkans. If Amerikkka were composed of the world's economic majority, then its entertainment would be different. Class issues would come out in elections for starters. As it so happens, a 5% minority of the world is not so important that it has to discuss real class issues in elections, because the real work is done outside U.$. borders. Nor is the female so enslaved that she has to have children or die, as birth rates prove. So we say there is demographic selection behind entertainment and hence gender dynamics, not Darwinian natural selection.

Relative autonomy: the cases of Louisiana and NATO

A concept that MIM has used for theoretical purposes from the beginning is "relative autonomy." It is useful for breaking with economism In this way, we indicate that gender is both intertwined with and apart from class and nation. In opposing reductionism what is important is how gender is apart from class. We have written articles about "relative autonomy" and the strands of oppression in MIM Theory 2&3. Philistines believe this is a matter of MIM's being "academic." Yet there is never an academic truth about class, nation and gender, not as far as scientific communists are concerned. People who do not know that already are pragmatists, not scientific communist leaders.

In the 1950s Louisiana, the proletariat faced a situation so bad that only apartheid South Africa could be termed qualitatively worse. The Democratic Party had yet to take up civil rights concerns or seat Black delegates properly at political conventions. There was Jim Crow segregation legalized and the progressives stood isolated, a tiny minority just as they were prior to the abolition of slavery. In the 50 years since, the white so-called working class has proved to be a petty-bourgeoisie, not a revolutionary vehicle--as far as anyone who learns from practice is concerned.

Governor Huey Long did not take up the red flag. He did not state dogmatically that there has to be a 51% progressive majority somewhere in Louisiana just in need of polarizing. No, Huey Long started from reactionary forces as they were and as dominant as they were, but he saw one thing, that gender was relatively autonomous.

Truth be known, the Euro-Amerikans wanted both employment discrimination against Blacks and strict separation to prevent interracial dating and marriage. To this day in 2008, it's almost 50/50 on whether interracial dating should be allowed at all. Both of these oppressive desires of the white population stemmed from class and national forces that progressives could not just overcome by putting up posters of their leader's face. Yet there was forward motion because Governor Huey Long recognized theoretically that gender is relatively autonomous. Given the choice between employment discrimination and interracial mixing, the reactionaries would give ground on employment discrimination. The reactionaries feared interracial cross-gender mixing more than anything.

This is something that to this day many rural and exurban Republicans do not know about, because they are Euro-Amerikans living apart from significant numbers of racial minorities. In parts of Idaho or Iowa, racial minorities are exotic. So it is that Democrats ruling big cities have the most opportunity to carry out racial oppression. MIM is no exception in that most of the difficulties for MIM come from Democrats, just because MIMers have not tended to locate in typical Euro-Amerikan Republican places.

Huey Long lived in a situation with a large Black minority.

"In private and in public, Long lampooned blacks as slow-witted 'niggers' and 'coons.'"

"Long sometimes presented himself as a friend of blacks. He boasted to Roy Wilkins, a young NAACP official sent to interview him, that his personal power enabled him to do things 'quietly for the niggers' when others 'would have been murdered politically' had they shown similar concern. He had provided blacks with schools and free textbooks 'so they could learn to read and write and figger.' He had given them free hospitals and clinics. He had even found jobs for black nurses in New Orleans's Charity Hospital by decrying the fact that white nurses risked catching awful diseases by attending black patients."

A little more bluntly and getting to the core of why Long succeeded in breaking down employment discrimination for Black nurses in the depths of a racist hell, a blogger says:

"The brilliant politician included in a speech he delivered on the house floor, in a way that was just sort-of in passing, a story about the poor white nurses that were having to tend to big black men in the hospitals, day and night. The next day black nurses were being hired all over the state."(4)

Huey Long could have gone to a state-wide referendum to end employment discrimination. He would have lost and reinforced oppression. He could have burned flags, and he would have been right to do so. He could have pulled any of a number of stunts thinking that there was a progressive majority about to be set off at any moment.

The lesson of Huey Long is there to learn. When an alleged leader of the proletariat says, "we gotta have a majority," he or she only indicates a lack of qualifications for proletarian leadership. It's not good enough to have this kind of leader who does not study French history or even Louisiana history for what a minority can do. There was also the issue of what separate Black institutions managed to accomplish.

Among followers who are not party membership material, we do not expect a knowledge of the history of social change. Those who have listened to the type of philistine who says we need the Euro-Amerikan majority to go forward should stop and look at what these philistines have been saying for how long.

If there are only reactionary forces around, then we have to look at them more deeply and see if any of those forces have relative autonomy from the other forces. If the reactionary forces do not all stem from the same exact place, then they can be pitted against each other.

What is true about going forward is also true about going backward. When we believe that progressive forces all come from an underlying economic place in the U.$. population, we fail to divide the enemy appropriately. The result is retrogression, because there is no real economic basis strong enough to divide the bourgeoisie and drive history forward.

So for example, U.$. imperialism used to have a problem of being in contradiction with European imperialism. In rushed the "RCP=U$A" and "CP=U$A" liberals to save the day.

It's been a problem that has captured our proletarian organizations again and again. First the "Communist Party" abandoned Stalin, took up Gus Hall and fell more deeply into the Democratic Party. Then the organizations such as the "League of Revolutionary Struggle" re-invented the "Communist Party" maneuver for another generation by taking those confused by Deng Xiaoping and Hua Guofeng into the Jesse Jackson campaign--again the Democrats.

Now we have the "Revolutionary Communist Party" taking up the "Communist Party" road for a third time to destroy our movement from within. It was this organization over many years blasting the "Communist Party" for being revisionist. Yet here we are again, with the astrologists in public saying one thing, while doing another in public--and the underlying reason is the same all these years, that the organizers are too theoretically lazy to come up with something other than majority rule, other than economic issues to unite a supposed working class.

The result of an incorrect theoretical understanding is retrogression.

"The countries most optimistic that an Obama presidency would improve ties were US Nato allies - Canada (69%), Italy (64%), France (62%), Germany (61%), and the UK (54%) - as well as Australia (62%), along with Kenya (87%) and Nigeria (71%). "

"When asked whether the election as president of the African-American Mr Obama would "fundamentally change" their perception of the US, 46% said it would while 27% said it would not."(5)

Notes:
1. Boston Phoenix, 5Sept2008, p. 11.
2. http://www.theimproper.com/Images/Art/sarah%20palin%20bikini%20photo%201.jpg
3. Adam Fairclough, The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana: 1915-1972 (University of Georgia Press, 1995), p. 22.
4. http://arichard.blogspot.com/2006_01_01_archive.html
5. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7606100.stm