Kill the Electoralist (Misogynist) In Your Head

The most recent "discourse" in politics spaces online has revolved around "the left" and its strategy towards dealing with the popularity of Men's Rights Activism or figures like Andrew Tate. This has been a brewing issue for some time now, but the most recent flare up has revolved around this tweet:

I'd like to mostly refrain from commenting directly on the tweet itself, as I'm more interested in the resulting discussion. I will briefly note that I am highly suspicious of what "compassionate" is supposed to mean here, as well as framing feminism as having a problem of lacking in "compassion", a stereotypically feminine trait. In the real world when women do not perform "compassion" in the expected way for men, they are met with violence in myriad forms, and the blame for this violence is placed on the woman for not performing properly. This tweet doesn't express a novel insight into political strategy, but is really just a reaffirmation of a thinly veiled patriarchal threat: "For your own sake, be more compassionate". The premature invocation of feasibility constraints narrows the evaluative field to only encompass the victim's choices, critiquing her for any perceived imperfections. This obviously serves nicely to divert attention from the abuser.

The first strand of the discussion surrounding this tweet that I would like to engage with is the divide I see between a basically reformist mindset and a basically revolutionary mindset. The reformer is essentially a market strategist or an electoralist. Their model of successful societal change is to convince and appeal to as many people as possible to buy what they are selling, or in an electoral setting to convince as many people as they can to vote for their party. Anarchists and anti-party Marxists have historically been critical of this political strategy, and for good reason. It has long been pointed out that this approach inevitably leads to a dilution of the convictions of the party and the people within it as they attempt to appeal to a majority that does not share the same values. This observation has been vindicated by the history of social democratic parties. The endless striving to appeal to the median voter leaves a husk of whatever revolutionary potential there originally was.

To put it back in the context of this post, the median man is a misogynist. If you compromise your feminism in a vulgar attempt to meet him where he is at you will very quickly no longer be preaching feminism. This is the cancer of reform. But beyond just being misguided, this strategy is actively pernicious and serves an important function in maintaining the status quo.

The extent to which your feminist theory is already comfortable to those you present it to in a patriarchal society, it is also likely to not fundamentally change the social order. At every point it will be reassuring to return to the solid ground of the established values that permeate current social arrangements. Between material rewards, comfortable ideological mystifications, and a pacifying psychic state of peace, there are numerous pitfalls that can re-entangle a would-be revolutionary. This path ultimately leads to an endorsement of the hegemonic patriarchal attitudes. Lee Shevek puts it better than I can:

The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions [3]. Meanwhile, "leftists" posture with the appearance of being "progressive" and "pragmatic" while reinscribing the same oppressive conditions for the next generation.

This is related to a recurrent confusion I've noticed floating around the discussion as well. Reformists seem to be deeply committed to a particular reading of the view that patriarchy harms all genders, including men; and deeply repulsed by the idea that patriarchy benefits men and that endorsing feminism would be a "loss" in some sense. Consider the following exchange:

In some contexts it will be appropriate to emphasize that patriarchy is a system of exploitation of one group by another, and in others it will be important to emphasize that it is oppressive to everyone. Both of these aspects are important to understanding it in its totality, but reformists will tend to (over-)emphasize the universalist reading in order to be palatable to the majority. For the reformist, if feminism is not palatable to the majority, the content of feminism must change. Or, as more often tends to be the case with reformers, their feminism was never particularly radical to begin with.

It's important to note that the universalist reading is not strictly wrong, but one does have to be careful about how it is understood. All too frequently this is used as a tool to flatten to the experience and differentiation that occurs within a patriarchal society. It is correct to say that men are harmed by patriarchy, but jumping to this harm immediately misses the smaller scale scope where they do benefit. It will be helpful here to digress slightly and discuss the concepts of "desire" and "interest".

Unreflective men in our society are like the unregenerate alcoholic. He has a desire to dominate the women in his life and lacks a second-order desire to rebuke this desire. In fact, he benefits in all sorts of ways from the satisfaction of his desire to dominate women, and there are plenty of features of society to ensure its smooth continual functioning. Men benefit structurally, interpersonally, materially, and psychically from the oppression of women, even if they do not individually enact particularly violent forms of gendered domination. Privelege and power is conferred regardless of personal behavior, although the option to rape, abuse, exploit, demand servitude, and get away with your shitty behavior is a benefit as well.

It's at this point that some might get uncomfortable that the conceptual tools of "desire" and "benefit" do not provide adequate grounds to criticize patriarchy, and might seek to introduce something like the concept of "interests".

There is a great deal of difficulty with the concept of interests, but broadly it is intended to be more substantive than desires: "true/real interests" versus "contingent desires". As a rough sketch we can say that interests are getting at something like the desires we would cultivate in optimal conditions given perfect knowledge. In this way we can get a more reflective or objective account of what desires we should endorse.

With this new concept we are able make claims of the sort "While yes capitalists materially benefit directly from capitalism and therefore satisfies their desires, socialism is still in the capitalists interests in the broader sense because under capitalism they are still subject to the abstract social domination of the law of value, alienated from species-being, or anything else you like. [Edit: This could be put in terms of different scales of interest relative to various interpretations of the agent's identity. For example one could say that the capitalist as capitalist has an interest in the perpetuation of capitalism, but the capitalist as human has an interest in the overthrowing of capitalism. Similarly, one could say that patriarchal men as patriarchal men have an interest in perpetuating patriarchy, but patriarchal men as humans have an interest in the overthrowing of patriarchy. These different scales of interest seem to be a massive source of miscommunication.]

It is in this spirit that Paulo Freire makes the case that oppressors are dehumanized in the process of oppressing others:

We need not endorse Freire's particular commitments to humanism or rights to see the general point being made: the act of oppressing another is against the oppressors true interests, even if the oppression confers direct benefits. When the oppressed overthrow their oppressive conditions, ultimately everyone's interests will be realized through this action.

bell hooks has similar hope for the specific overthrowing of patriarchy:

hooks is keen on emphasizing the potential there is for counter-hegemonic masculinities to emerge, but that this will involve active effort on the part of men to bring to fruition. However, this activity is not exclusively beneficial to others. Rather it is in men's interests to let go of commitment to patriarchy and the will to dominate the women in their lives.

On both Freire's and hook's perspectives, a sophisticated understanding of oppressors is established with a great deal of differentiation. For example, while both the oppressed and oppressors are dehumanized on Freire's account, it would be a gross misunderstanding to assert that they were dehumanized in the same way, or to flatten everything to the broadest possible point of view where everyone can be seen as a victim. Freire has a careful and detailed approach, and even more complexities emerge when you look at the dehumanization at play in his concept of "sub-oppressors". Similarly for hooks when she says that men have an interest in abolishing patriarchy, this will manifest very differently than the interest women have in abolishing patriarchy. So much of her work is dedicated to showing the specific agency men have in taking responsibility for their own behavior in the perpetuation of oppression, and that this process will involve rejecting the benefits that come along with dominating women. Yes, we all have an interest in ending oppression, but this will involve a great deal of differentiation given the manifold positionalities we inhabit.

To finally bring this full circle to the point of the post, the reformists would like to skip directly to invoking men's "true interest" definition of "benefit", while downplaying or ignoring the differentiation. Additionally, in this process motivated by being maximally palatable, they lose sight of the fact that non-feminist men *do* experience the satisfaction of their desires informed by patriarchal values as benefits. To return to Geuss once more:

Men experience the encroachment of feminism as loss of benefits that they are entitled to. Even if from a more enlightened perspective we might say that it is ultimately in their interests, our sociological account of men in society will be impoverished if our exclusive lens is that of our evaluative judgement and fails to take into account the motivations, desires, and benefits men experience within patriarchy [11].

The electoralist strategy is a failure in bringing about revolutionary change on every level, including the abolition of capitalism, the state, and patriarchy. Allowing this approach to permeate unchallenged throughout all of our political engagement is a recipe for continued subjugation, and is a grave mistake we cannot afford to continue making. Only through abandoning this moribund strategy to the dustbin of history can we work towards realizing a more enlightened set of interests, which includes the abolition of patriarchy.

Edit: (7/18/2023 20:22)

A couple of weeks ago I read Søren Mau's "Mute Compulsion", and one section in particular seemed relevant to the discussion of the differentiation within oppressive systems, which I think have some pretty clear parallels to the point I was making about the nature of patriarchal domination.

In summary,