Nietzsche was no friend of fascists.

Earlier this month, the UCL student union passed a decision to ban the Nietzsche Club, who pitched themselves as a study group for hard-to-far-right students (as many of them as there may be) interested in Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Julius Evola. As someone who is interested in Nietzsche and Heidegger I couldn't help but take some interest in the story. There are two things that came to mind initially:

1. Regardless of how repugnant the society was it did not pose a threat of physical violence to the student body. The ban will not be effective as the Club could just be set up again under another name and there would have to be another ban and so on. This is the impotence of censorship. Censors always fail as they can only act in retrospect and by then there is no use in censorship. If it has already been said then it has little effect in imposing a restriction. The obvious exception is when speech is used to call for violence and that is a criminal matter. If we want to live in a society in which it is unlikely for such instances to arise then we want greater change than banning lists.
2. It is a travesty that Nietzsche is still, in this century, associated with the Third Reich, as if he were some kind of proto-Nazi philosopher. You only have to judge the man by his deeds, not least his written in its proper context and understanding. Nietzsche distanced himself from his own sister due to her anti-Semitism and marriage to a German proto-fascist. Likewise, Nietzsche broke off his friendship with Wagner because of his growing inclination towards Christianity, nationalism and anti-Jewish racism. He had nothing but contempt, scorn and mockery for anti-Semites and regarded himself as a man without a nation. If only Nietzsche had lived into old age and remained sane to the end we would no doubt have record of his disgust at the early rise of Fascism.

There is a third point to be made alongside these. Both the philosopher Heidegger and the composer Wagner were involved in German nationalism. In Heidegger's case, we're talking about the moves he made to try and become the philosopher of the Third Reich in a bid to oppose the technological logic of modern society. His affinity for National Socialism was cultural and intellectual. With Wagner, we have the case of a man who lived long before the rise of Hitler, but he was a nationalist and anti-Semite in his later years. He did not hide these facts. In both instances, we can praise the work of these men without condoning or excusing their prejudices. This is a point worth making, as we would be mistaken if we assumed we would have to discard Nietzsche even if the opposite were the case.

A Dirty Old Man.

The poet and self-described dirty old man Charles Bukowski died twenty years ago. He passed after a battle with leukaemia in which he finished his novel Pulp (1993). He gave up the ghost with a sigh of relief. He was the American equivalent of Céline. He lived his work. It was the end of the Beatniks and the Hippies when Bukowski burst onto the scene, having been crowned King of the Little Magazines, and churned an incredible bulk of poems and short stories from the 1940s onwards. It was a hard struggle, writing from the gutter, mainly for others who found themselves there too.

Other poets such as WH Auden had seen structure, order and stability (not to mention hard work!) as the vital components to the life of a writer, Charles Bukowski was the manifest opposite and revelled in it. The writing was meant to be as alive as you are, so it was meant to sweat and bleed and reek to high heaven. It's all on show. As Nietzsche put it "Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them." He had little time for formal questions, and regarded the matter with scorn, as a retreat for the writer, carving out a minimalist body of work instead. He hated rules and regulations and quickly found enemies and friends. The novels were a fictionalised autobiography centred around Henry Chinaski. It is a portrayal of life in the darkest corners of American society, at times absurdly comic, inexplicable, and it all comes with an authenticity in its gritty texture as each word has to carry its own weight.

A friend of mine told me she feels like having shower after reading Bukowski's prose. As readers we follow the travails of Chinaski through dirt cheap apartments, menial work, drunken brawls, gambling, sexual escapades, and eventually to Hollywood. He opened Post Office (1971) with a real hook "It began as a mistake." And with that he reels you in to read a tale of a dozen years as a postie. He had written the book in about a month, after John Martin came to him and made an unconditional pledge. Martin promised to give Bukowski 25% of his earnings for life - it amounted to $100 at the time - every month if he quits and writes full time. Whether or not they succeeded the money would be there. It was this guarantee of a minimal income that gave him the motivation to leave the post office and start work on a novel. It was also what John Martin needed to build up Black Sparrow Books.

It was in the late 60s that Bukowski became a part of the countervailing forces of American culture and society. He had a column in the LA Free Press and Open City - with a column called 'Notes of a Dirty Old Man'. The Beat Generation was on the wane and Lawrence Ferlinghetti was on the lookout for the next big thing when he came across Bukowski. It should not surprise anyone that he was not too impressed with the Hippies. After all, this is the same poet who loathed Walt Disney for creating Mickey Mouse. He shared this disdain for the Hippie with Jack Kerouac, Much like Kerouac the dirty old man would be hoovered up by the prevailing spirit of Western life. It's almost as if there was no escaping it. The Hudson driven by Jack Kerouac in On the Road (1957) now sits in a museum with the same dust on it. There is Jack Kerouac Alley, just as there is Bukowski Court.

In Factotum (1975) Bukowski rails further against the Protestant work ethic and instead preached the refusal to work: "How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?" He was an individualist who hated rules, but he offered a counter-individualism to the pretences of the 'American dream' and its false promise of paradise by hard labour. He spat on its sunny optimism and expressed antipathy towards society at large. Solitude was the alternative. It was a conservative solution in that it had no care for the problems of society, or of people more generally. The solitary alternative was a kind of isolationism, an active policy of non-intervention with the world and its social ills.

It wasn't just a literary trope as we find if we examine his life. In the days when his father called him Heinrich, the young Bukowski studied at LA City College in the late 1930s just on the onset of the War. Once it had started he had moved to New York City and would explore the East Coast. He worked whatever menial jobs he could - even irking a living in a pickle factory - and filled his spare time with typing and drinking. He was first published at the age of 24 and that same year he was arrested by the FBI on suspicion of draft evasion. Bukowski was held for seventeen days in Moyamensing Prison before going on to fail a mandatory psychological exam. He had escaped conscription. Given the militaristic culture of the US there has been some discussion on whether Bukowski harboured pro-Nazi sympathies in those days. It seems more plausible that the young Bukowski simply evaded the draft because he didn't see any worthwhile effectuality in military service. It doesn't take a Nazi to believe that.

Besides, the most laden prejudice in Bukowski's work is not anti-Semitism by any match. It is misogyny, not racism. If Bukowski had been a fascist it would have been obvious. He had a lot to hide, but he chose not to. He was certainly a male chauvinist. In Post Office Bukowski puts it bluntly "Women were meant to suffer; no wonder they asked for constant declarations of love." Misogyny is certainly a major part of Bukowski's writing. The same year that the book came out Bukowski wrote in a letter to a friend "Never envy a man his lady. Behind it all lays a living hell." We got a glimpse into this 'living hell' in The Charles Bukowski Tapes (1985) in which we can witness him verbally abusing and kicking his wife Linda off of their sofa.

We shouldn't turn a blind eye to Bukowski's misogyny even if we do take pleasure in the unexpected exuberance in his melancholic free-verse. It's charged with a life-affirming spark. Unlike the domesticated version of individuality Hank Chinaski finds more life in the bars than in the sweat and toil of the factory. This was at a time when the US was a major industrial and manufacturing hub, yet it was on its way to deindustrialisation. It's not clear where this man would fit in today. It was a different America where Chinaski roamed free. It's plausible he would have much more company in a post-industrial capitalist society. He writes "The darkness of the room was like sunlight to me." Elsewhere the dirty realist invites us to "go all the way" even at great cost to ourselves.

Mendieta and Misogyny.

An Earth-Body Dynamic.

 

Looking at the work of Ana Mendieta the cogs in my mind wound back four years to Lars von Trier's Antichrist. The reasons for this I will expand upon soon enough. The body of work she amassed could be taken for sanguineous and morbid if her recreation of rape scenes are misunderstood. The shock value of these pieces is appropriate as they were made in response to the rape of her fellow students. It was certainly the right time and place for a female artist to be engaging with the prevalence of sexual violence. The decline of an array of social conventions regarding the place of women in society was at its beginning in the early 1970s. It is often forgotten that what is described as the Feminist movement came about in the wake of 60s cultural revolution in reaction to its ambiguity on the question of women's liberation. So it was a ripe subject for exploration in art.

The depictions of femininity in Mendieta's work are particularly interesting in this regard. It reminds one of Antichrist where we are told nature is Satan's church, the locus of misogyny being found in suggestions of an absent autonomy: women as subjects of various natural forces outside of their own control. In ancient religion we find this is most overt in the aversion to female genitalia and the rituals imposed around the menstrual cycle. All of which feeds into the controls set on sexual conduct. This is not just the case in the monotheist tradition, it is even true of Eastern religion where, for example, we find the Buddha was born out of his mother's side. It then makes sense that Mendieta's work links together the Catholic and pre-Christian pagan traditions of Latin America with a certain conception of femininity. Not coincidentally Mendieta produced art on sexual violence as she was moving in this direction.

Death seemed to feature heavily as a theme, whether in the form of natural decay and peformative destruction in the burning of trees and killing chickens. Mendieta would later move away from performance art, which she disliked for its immediacy; and she was further exploring her Cuban heritage. Ochún (1981) was named after a water goddess in Santería - an Afro-Cuban religious movement based on a blend of folk Catholicism with Yoruba customs - who also the goddess of love, intimacy and beauty. According to Wikipedia, Ochún is said to be generous, beneficent and kind as well as capable of incredible chaos in the few occasions where she loses her temper. The extent to which she romanticised the syncretic cultural heritage of Cuba may be more of a matter of speculation at this point. Such a romanticisation may run as far as embracing this model of femininity. It would be easy to attribute this to her deracination as a Cuban-American.

Unfortunately, we will never know how her work would have developed if she had not died in 1985. Even with all of this in mind, Mendieta's work could be interpreted as a genealogy of misogynist themes. After all an earthly conception of femininity parallels what is to be taken from the traditional organic view of the family and a woman's position in said social unit. In Mother Jungle we find a portrayal of womanhood synthesised with nature comes across as much darker. The imposing dark figure with its jagged features and womb on display seems charged with angst; but this is an almost genderless depiction at the same time (aside from the emphasis on the womb). As Rachel Spence has noted, Ana Mendieta resisted attempts by American feminists to reduce her work to goddess worship. In a way the body of work she produced was far more ambiguous.

Spence notes that Mendieta claimed her work held to a particular culture and time. So it might be taken as a representation of womanhood in terms relative to a certain culture. The art made in a natural environment, carved out of rock and wood may seem to be a more warm-hearted a view of nature. Around this time Mendieta was becoming much more conscious in terms of a two-front struggle in feminism against racism and capitalism. She did describe her work as pre-industrial and situates herself in line with Neolithic paintings. If she had lived she may have become involved in the anti-globalisation movement, which shares this nostalgia for the pre-industrial past. In her work she situates humankind in relation to nature, life and death; and she condemned Robert Smithson for his brutalisation of nature in his invasive land art. Where this trajectory leaves women is another matter.

'This book is dedicated to mankind.'

There are some novelists who can’t be avoided in the charged instability of their prose. We find this in the literature of extremes, and one such recent case is Michel Houellebecq. In Atomised (1998) Houellebecq portrays a vision of late capitalist society as in the thrall of its own decay. The chaos of the market society and its depredations has blown away the traditional order of morality. Sexual liberalism has prevailed to the extent that the very act has become a commodity in a marketplace, but this has left winners and losers. Elsewhere Houellebecq calls for a ‘sexual communism’ and a ‘sexual social democracy’ where the unattractive are not excluded from the exchange centres of pleasure. The cultural revolution of the late 20^th Century did not leave us all unscathed to enter into a new sexual utopia. Even though Houellebecq seems to accept a conservative thesis on culture he is pessimistic at the possibility of any kind of deliverance from this process. The collapse of the old order is irreversible. It may be better to take what pleasure can be procured from its final twitches than to try and turn the clock back as Evelyn Waugh had wanted so dearly. It may be that the analysis has been prompted by the conditions demanding a response of some kind. No wonder then it has been said that Houellebecq uses the language of the Left to launch a right-wing attack on the soixante-huitards, the Hippies and New Age spirituality.

In his nihilism Houellebecq identifies more so with the decay of culture which he seems to disdain. Even as he identifies the descent into hedonism Houellebecq does not call for a return to the conventions of monogamy. He seems to prefer the idea of turning the sexual marketplace into a more democratic mechanism which everyone can enjoy. The pages of Atomised (1998) are littered with philosophical conundrums, scientific theory and the historical pre-conditions for modern society. He focuses a great deal on the emergence of sexual freedom in the 1960s, its origins in the Hippie scene and the spread of the Commune movement around Europe and America. His protagonists Michel Djerzinski and Bruno Clément endure the explosion of new possibilities before even reaching pubescence: abandoned by their Hippie mother, only to drift through the years reared by their grandmothers and then through numerous encounters and non-encounters with members of the opposite sex. It is a deeply tragic tale, but not one without any hint of sentimentality. In the same way that Houellebecq gives the middle finger to a whole host of liberal assumptions and beliefs he cannot get away from this plain of thought. It could’ve been an even more despairing work in some respects.

The love story between Michel and Annabelle stands as evidence of Houellebecq’s sentimentality in that he couldn’t just have them never come together in the first place. Some of the saddest pages tell of Michel and Annabelle growing up, failing to get together as teenagers and ultimately depart on the cusp of adulthood in the middle 70s. Funnily enough, Michel lost Annabelle (not that he had had her yet) to a wannabe rock-star in a communal setting and partly with the help of Bruno. Take from that what you will. Many years later, Michel bumps into Annabelle by chance and falls limply into a relationship with her. She too had been failed by the world in which she was born to. Throughout the relationship Michel remains indifferent even to her affections, only taking enjoyment in their embraces in the most intellectualised way. Even still, this was as close as it came to the two of them making a ‘go of it’ as they should have as twenty-somethings. In a fit of desperation Annabelle had bluntly asked him to procreate with her – for fear that he was going to Ireland to leave her for his research project – and characteristically the good scientist agreed with a murmur. During the sexual act Michel remains distant and envisions a cell splitting, before describing the brink of orgasm as ‘a little suicide’. Afterwards Annabelle finds not only can she not have the child but she has uterine cancer and has to have a hysterectomy. Not too many pages later Annabelle commits suicide and Michel moves on with his research in Ireland only to disappear himself. We might say Houellebecq takes love deadly seriously, just not the prospects of finding and holding onto it in a world like this one.

It was quite something to flick from page to page, but it is revealing of the French poet who is a recovering Stalinist and former agronomist. Houellebecq could have opted for another version where Michel and Annabelle briefly meet again, only for them to never follow each other up. That would have led to the same conclusion, especially as it would still be twinned with Bruno’s doomed love affair with Christiane. Bruno goes mad after Christiane is left paralysed and chooses suicide as he had stopped seeing her. That was a much less sentimental series of events. And yet Houellebecq can’t resist the temptation of Michel and Annabelle coming together; it reminds one of the most overused lines of Tennyson “‘Tis better to have loved and lost/Than never to have loved at all.” Bruno represents the failed attempts at hedonism divorced from the utopianism of the '68 Generation; whereas Michel languishes in an anhedonic and rationalist distance from human relations to prioritise the life of the mind. The dichotomy is set between the unsated and the undesiring to lead us from the 1960s to the 90s. Like the society in which we live the brothers are forever shaped by the events of the 60s. Both of the siblings are heirs to unfettered freedoms. The hedonist Bruno is ensnared in a culture which he cannot extricate himself from and he wouldn’t want to if he could just get laid more. On the other hand, Michel would probably have liked to have been left alone to his scientific inquiry – which was impossible given the obligatory nature of the relations so alien to him – we shouldn’t be surprised that he may have jumped at the opportunity to finally exit this world. By the end of the book there was nothing binding him to this life, he had completed his project and heralded a biogenetic revolution to outmatch the legacy of sexual liberation in expunging its pre-conditions.

It was that legacy which Bruno found himself so entangled with. Never sated by the amount of pornography, prostitutes, masturbation, sex shows, girlfriends and orgies he could ever muster the energy to find. It brings to mind Freud’s point that satisfaction is distinctly unsatisfactory. We can’t just do it, and nor can Bruno, but not want of trying; Houellebecq seems to retain the hope in the market of sexual exchange if only it can be transformed into a more democratic space. Only then will the bulbous and desperate Bruno, with all of his emotional baggage, find a scintilla of contentment. The affair with Christiane may have been a glimpse of such a life, where Clément finds a partner willing to take the lead and indulge in his insatiable appetites in courting nude beaches in search of swingers. Retrospectively we have the incident with Adjila, an Arab student, whom Bruno finds irresistible – to the point of exposing himself to her in a lesson and subsequently being sectioned. The girl standing as the nexus between the man’s sexual voracity, his misogyny and his racial ressentiment; in later interviews Houellebecq (partly defending himself against accusations of racism) draws a distinction between Arabs and Muslims insofar as the former can be assimilated. The author is right to locate in Bruno unending lust in conjunction with an immense dissatisfaction, which lends itself to sexual jealousy and racism ultimately. The obsession with Adjila is not to be disassociated from Bruno’s loathing of a black male student in his class and interprets his behaviour as rivalling him in the capacity to regress to ‘our animal selves’. He even goes as far as penning and trying to publish a racist pamphlet and contemplates joining the Front National.

In the end Bruno gives up on the written word (unlike Houellebecq) and finds some brief fulfilment with Christiane before losing his mind. It is apt that Michel Djerzinski not only diagnoses the condition but provides a cure, not for Bruno but for the human species. The biogenetic revolution amounts to the transcendence of the human species with a new race of clones (who are free of this unceasing desire). It means the end for mankind, but the book stands as an ode to humanity written in the mid 21^st Century partly looking at Djerzinski’s follower and successor Hubczejak. It is wonderfully satirical in this sense, in that the book charts the decline of Western civilisation only to cheer it on, and even welcome the end; then present the record of cultural decay as the only homage humanity deserves. It’s in this darkly amusing way that Houellebecq intends the words “This book is dedicated to mankind.” It is an appropriate frame for the events of the sad lives of Bruno and Michel, as well as the pages on scientific theory, social and cultural issues. It may be backward-looking in some respects, as well as outright reactionary in other moments and even be an extension of Houellebecq’s bitterness over the women in his life. I would contest the claim that Houellebecq should be dismissed for these reasons. As the man himself remarked in a BBC interview “Perhaps the mistake is to think of me in actual fact…” We may do better to bear in mind that we may not be able to prefigure the long-term legacy of a writer like Houellebecq. Somewhere in Atomised Houellbecq writes “Death is a great leveller.”

The Left's disarray over the Assange case.

Over the Assange case the Left has found itself once again divided, once again schismatic, sectarian and ultimately unable to articulate itself in the midst of a state-media consensus on the extradition of Assange to Sweden. The liberal commentariat has reacted with a cretinous apologetics for the government's hysterical threat to raid the Ecuadorian embassy to forcibly seize a whistleblower for allegations he isn't charged with yet. The BBC have set the agenda, the debate has been limited to just two positions: you either take the side of law and order to extradite Julian Assange to face the allegations in Sweden, or you believe that the allegations against Assange are illegitimate. It is the case that there are three main positions on the Left, but only one can be acknowledged by the mainstream media:

- It's about Justice: Assange needs to answer to these allegations given their serious nature, for the sake of a consistent commitment to transparency and accountability he should be extradited. The threat of extradition to the US has been greatly exaggerated by his supporters to justify his refusal to face these serious allegations.

- Bad Sexual Etiquette: The allegations of rape/molestation are illegitimate, possibly cooked up in order to vilify WikiLeaks and detain Assange for revealing secret information. It's purely a political matter, the allegations are a cover to extradite Assange to Sweden and then to the US. We have to stand beside Assange at this time.

- Don't underestimate the US: It isn't the definition, or even what constitutes, rape that we should be debating. The allegations are extremely serious. But it is a matter of the extradition purely. The Swedish government could question him in Britain, possibly by video link, and has the power to veto any extradition to the US that might come up. Yet the Swedish government refuses to do either. Surely then it makes sense for Assange to seek refuge in Ecuador to avoid a similar fate as Bradley Manning.
Of course the only line that the bourgeois media are interested in is that of 'bad sexual etiquette' - it was irresistable - given the hysteria WikiLeaks seems to have provoked even among liberal news outlets. And the Left has been in an almost perpetual state of crisis for a long time. There isn't much of a coherent Left left, though there never was a unified Left. It seems that this is a symptom of the decline and disarray of the Left.

The Ugliness of the Beautiful Game.

The cult of football is alive as ever, especially in Britain where the English pride themselves as the inventors of the beautiful game. It is unclear, at least to me, what is so beautiful about the sight of over twenty millionaires chasing a bladder around a field. Chomsky would remind us of the role sports play in training us to be submissive to authority as well as the tides of irrational jingoism. This shouldn't be taken lightly as it was George Orwell who noted "The nationalist does not only not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them." The rampant flag-waving and patriotic chanting emanates from the delusion that the England team embodies the spirit of the nation. Indeed many are left intoxicated by the ecstasy of these non-events. The power of the mass event should not be understated. It's forgotten that the concerts and music festivals we enjoy today come from the same model of the mass rally which Hitler used in the 1930s.

Peter Hitchens has compared it to Pagan cults, and for good reason, but we shouldn't take football as a Pagan exploit entirely as it is essentially prolefeed. And the aristocratic fans of Paganism are too often forgotten. It used to be that Christianity was for the poor while the ruling-class remained largely Pagan until the 19th Century in Britain. The aristocratic radical Nietzsche wanted to undo Christian values in order to return to the life-affirming polytheism of Ancient Greece. If anything football is not elitist even if it is particularist rather than universalist, it is open to all and for all. And it is the particularism of football - the preference for us over them - that holds a great link with Paganism. The loyalty to the team matters most, it can get you beaten up in some places. The worship of heroes, special clothing, the celebration of "seasons" and singing are all symptomatic; another particularist deed is racism. It isn't a coincidence that the neo-völkisch movements of Scandinavia are Pagan and call for white supremacy and a return to Odin worship in the same breathe.

The emergence of football hooliganism is not a coincidence, the fact that these hooligan elements are typically racists and right-wing extremists is also not a coincidence. The primary base of recruitment into the EDL were these thugs, the ex-BNP leadership itself comes out of hooliganism. This isn't to say that the sport of football is inherently fascistic. For 20 years Kick It Out has campaigned against racism in British football now, which is something that Eastern Europe and a lot of other places lack. But it is the case that there are a great many people who were whinging that the England manager Fabio Capello at the time was not English. There is plenty of talk about the high presence of foreign players in our teams. There is undeniably an element of nationalism that has been harnessed as part of the base of support for football teams. The shirt you were aligns you with a specific team in the same way that the flag links you with a nation, the glory of which reflects back on you.

The race relations of football have been on blunt display recently. Hodgson thought it appropriate to leave Rio Ferdinand out of the Euro 2012 Squad for "footballing reasons" and include John Terry. Even though it was John Terry who called Anton Ferdinand a "fucking black cunt" and will soon be in court for doing so. Kick It Out might condemn Hodgson's handling of Rio Ferdinand. There was the time when Ron Atkinson described a player as a "lazy thick nigger" with Jimmy Hill coming to his defense on the grounds that the comment is just harmless fun in the football culture. We don't like to remember the days when fans lobbed bananas at black footballers. Today in Poland the fans can be seen waving banners with such slogans as "Death to Hook Noses!" For many it matters that England is finally managed by an Englishman. No doubt some will think that the English team will finally be victorious after 46 years, even though we didn't actually win in 1966 - an unacceptable fact to be uttered in the pubs of our weary little island.

Roy Hodgson played for Berea Park FC as part of a white-only league in the years before Apartheid was brought down in South Africa. Of course, Hodgson has since "come out" as an admirer of Nelson Mendela in the years since the end of Apartheid. He states that he played in South Africa for footballing reasons rather than political reasons. This isn't inconsistent as the sport is an institution of continuity around which the masses can huddle while the establishment remains largely the same. It is a part of society's wallpaper, an investment for the business class and a source of national pride for the masses. The managerial function in society to regulate the passions of the masses. The need for an identity marker to derive a higher meaning had to be sated to dull the rages of class instinct. It is no coincidence that the counter-revolution has come to Egypt around the same time that there was an explosion of ultra-violence at a football match. Similarly as social democracy began to be torn apart in Britain in the 1970s and 80s there was a great wave of football violence.

As Terry Eagleton observes "If every rightwing thinktank came up with a scheme to distract the populace from political injustice and compensate them for lives of hard labour, the solution in each case would be the same: football." The game provides mediocre forms of solidarity for the masses who gather around particular teams. This can't be said for high culture, the prolefeed excludes no one in its particularity. The teamwork can be seen as selfless for the most part, though this is undermined by the celebration of the obscene wealth accumulated by the likes of David Beckham and Cristiano Ronaldo. The sport combines intimacy with Otherness in celebrity form, the hero we worship is just like us really and so we could be him one day. The game may have a place carved out for "experts" but it transforms its viewers into experts too. This is why my understanding of the subject is limited to the political and the theoretical. Eagleton goes on to add "Football offers its followers beauty, drama, conflict, liturgy, carnival and the odd spot of tragedy".

Womb Wars.

Since the beginning of 2012 we have heard the usual blather about welfare 'reform' (a most dodgy word in political language) with the defenders of family values reserving a particularly cold place for single-mums. The Conservative Party have pushed for a cap housing benefit at £26,000 on commonsense grounds of "fairness". Of course, this isn't nearly enough for the gutter-press which would like to see the whole benefits system scrapped followed by the swift return of workhouses. It would hit large families hardest even if they have managed to find cheap housing outside of London. There are now pushes in Newham to boot the poor out of London altogether. Clearly the London City-State is just for the ultra-rich to swan around in limousines. The next kick was to single-mothers in a bid to make them pay for trying to get child support from their former partners.

Even though it makes far more sense to cap private rents in London, at least in the short-term, as everyone knows that the rent is too damn high! Of course it isn't enough to cap rents, there needs to be serious public investment in affordable housing. And yet the Conservatives have no time for this discussion. It's just assumed that the problem is that they haven't gone far enough. But there's plenty of ink and phlegm to be wasted on calls for an end to dependency culture. There's even been time to entertain nonsense about morality legislation. We've seen Nadine Dorries, that arch-custodian of the sacred foetus, go after sex education in the wake of failure on her campaign to sledgehammer the right to choose. This is the politics of reaction at work again, it has nothing to do with any moral values. Whenever politicians talk of 'family' you should expect an attack on women to follow.

This is where class and sex converge, where feminism and leftism are conjoined at the hip. Everyone knows the word "proletariat", but not every rascal with a Marxian phrase book know that the term is derivative of the Latin for "offspring". Terry Eagleton reminds us that it referred to those who were too poor to serve the state with anything other than their wombs. Too deprived to contribute to economic life in any other way, these women produced labour power in the form of children. Society demanded reproduction, not production from these women. The proletariat was originally outside the workplace, not within it, just like the single-mother living on benefits. But the work these women endured was a lot more painful than breaking boulders. The average worker is a woman in the world today, as it was in the days of Marx and Engels when Britain was the workshop of the world.

As the workers' movement suffers in this time of regression, so do women. We can see this in America. The Georgia House has passed a 'foetal pain' bill that stipulates women must continue to carry to term a stillborn baby as pigs and cows do. The lot who think its proper that a women should die in back-alley abortion clinics to save a foetus have seen victories recently with 'Let woman die' bills. There are businesses spying on potential employees and judge them in accordance with their use of birth-control. This is the nation partly founded by Aaron Burr who hung a portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft in his office and insisted that his daughter be educated at the same standard as a man. And we expect this of women for no reward. It's not like we recognise motherhood as work, so many of us don't think the raising of children has any worth at all that we support cuts to child benefit. It's just something women do for free, like a lot of wonderful things.

We've seen people like Rick Santorum pop up, an Opus Dei Republican who believes that life begins at erection. The sort of lunatic who is opposed to abortion in cases of rape. This comes from a man with no kind of social conscience at all. He wants to legislate what consenting adults do in the bedroom. The state can intrude into that area, but not emancipate individuals from wage labour. Santorum's rotten mind fixated on the rigidity of hierarchy and the strength of authority. It is no coincidence that Santorum's politics consist of a return to theoconservative values with the state as a nanny for the rich, a bludgeon of the poor and of the foreign. It isn't coincidental, the opposition to the vital freedom, for women, over their rate of reproduction fits neatly into this platform of sadism. It's about making sin fun again for a privileged few in a way.

As noted by Peter Singer if abortion was illegal then it would be poor women who die from botched abortions in droves whereas well-off women can travel to another country in search of the treatment. Think of the number of people who travel to Switzerland in order to commit suicide. Clearly, the value of life only applies to some in the world of Nadine Dorries. The sacred foetus trumps mummy almost every time I'm afraid to say. Of course, when mummy can fly out to another country and hire a doctor to perform the procedure without a coat-hanger then a blind eye will be turned. Furthermore, as women gain greater control over their lives economically then they're less likely to get pregnant. In a society where there are greater opportunities, better education and better pay for women there will be less children born but there will be less abortions too. Primates like Mr Santorum are unable to see this, men like this have no right to claim to be "pro-life".

Umberto Eco on Eternal Fascism.

In the essay Eternal Fascism: Fourteen ways of looking at a Blackshirt, Umberto Eco outlines a list of features that are typical of what he calls Eternal Fascism, it is a force which remains in plainclothes today and won't necessarily come out sporting a Swastika for us to spot easily. It could easily take a far more innocent guise. The world is too complex for history to repeat itself and we have to uncover Eternal Fascism for all to see wherever it may hide. He stresses that the features cannot be organised into a single coherent system and there are contradictions between the different features. Eco also notes that the features are typical of other kinds of authoritarianism. Even one of these features is enough for a fascism to coagulate around it, so we find the reason that there are various differences between the Fascist movements which have come and gone. There are differences between the neo-fascist groups of today and the Fascist movements of the 1930s, the English Defence League is not the same as the British Union of Fascists though it shares certain features.

Umberto Eco rightly refers us to the words of FDR in 1938: "If American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land." It should be noted that the democratic system was never betrayed in the US, as the liberal critics of George Bush accuse him of the destruction of the Constitution. There is some truth to the claims of a debasement of old-fashioned liberal principles of freedom and rights. But the political system in the US was designed not to be democratic, nor to be autocratic, rather it was constituted as a polyarchy. This is what Alexander Hamilton called "moderate government" as the Golden Mean between dictatorship and democracy. To be more exact, the political parties can take turns running the state in the favour of the particular interests in which they are ensnared. It was James Madison who held that the government "ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority." The stagnation of American politics combined with economic turmoil leaves the population angry, fearful and confused - this is ripe territory for Blackshirts!

First comes the cult of tradition. Traditionalism long precedes fascism, it was typical of counter-revolutionary Catholicism in the aftermath of the French Revolution and it first emerged in the Hellenistic era in reaction to classical Greek rationalism. In the Mediterranean basin, people of different religions (most of the faiths accepted by the Roman pantheon) started dreaming of a revelation received at the dawn of human history. The revelation had long been concealed in forgotten languages, from Egyptian hieroglyphics to the Celtic runes and beyond to Asia. We can only persist in the interpretation of the obscure messages. The primeval truth could be procured from these ancient messages, each with a sliver of wisdom, and help compose a new culture. It would be a syncretistic culture in the sense of a combination of different forms of belief and practice, which would require a tolerance of internal contradictions. This is where the combination of Paganism, Christianity and race myths come together in Fascist states. It's also the reason that Fascism seeks to posit itself as the Third Position between capitalism and socialism.

So there can be no advancement of knowledge as truth has already been spelled out once and for all. Umberto Eco takes the example of Saint Augustine, not a proto-fascist at all, but points out that it would be symptomatic of Eternal Fascism to combine Augustine with Stonehenge. From a Marxist perspective we may note the importance of traditionalism to Fascism as superstructural to the economic conditions which fostered the regimes of the 1930s. As Terry Eagleton argues, Fascism is a last-ditch attempt on the part of monopoly capitalism to abolish the contradictions which have become intolerable. The traditionalist feature may imply a rejection of modernism, but the Fascists did not regard technology as a negation of tradition. Rather the Fascists were focused on the construction of an alternative modernity beyond the class struggle with a narrative of blood and soil. The Third Reich was proud of its industrial achievements, though the praise for modernism was only the surface of an ideology based on blood and soil. The emphasis is really on the master race, the sublimity of death and self-abnegation.

Umberto Eco notes that the Fascist finds action as beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, reflection because thinking is a form of emasculation. Action is placed above thought. To be more precise it is reaction rather than action. One of the principle differences between a socialist and a Fascist is that the former acts whereas the latter can only react. This is where the propensity for political violence comes from, it takes the reactive form and often seeks to justify itself along such lines. The violent reaction is always justifiable to defend and secure the fatherland. This is the logic which remains in the background of the kind of 'protests' that the former football hooligans of the English Defence League hold. Originally the EDL were the violent wing of the British National Party and it remains in line with the tradition of fascist groups since the British Union of Fascists took to the streets and raised havoc. It is out of this irrationalism that culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with academics, critical attitudes and intellectualism in general.

So the entire educational system underwent a Nazification in the Third Reich, with the employment of major academics such as Martin Heidegger to purge Jewish teachers and implement the desired curriculum. This suspicion of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Eternal Fascism. Hermann Goering was fond of a phrase borrowed from Hanns Johst "When I hear the word 'culture' I reach for my gun" as well as expressions such as "degenerate intellectuals", "eggheads", "effete snobs" and the description of universities as "nests of reds." The official Fascist intellectuals were mainly engaged in an attack on the rampant decadence of modern culture and charge the liberal intelligentsia with the betrayal of traditional values. The point of Fascist propaganda was to tap into the irrational drives of the masses and utilise them against particular groups. The propaganda techniques to do so were picked up from the American public relations industry, which was based on the ideas of Sigmund Freud as applied by his nephew Eddie Bernays.

To make distinctions is a sign of modernism and to give into the current of depravity which began with the Enlightenment. The rejection of the modern world was dressed up as a kind of anti-capitalism, but it is the Enlightenment which is the source of decay in the modern world and Eternal Fascism rejects it on such ground. The Nazi slogan "Think with your blood!" comes to mind. The scientific community praises disagreement as a way to further pursue greater knowledge, but the disagreements we may have are treasonous for Fascists because it is a sign of diversity. We should remember the nationalist emphasis on unity and purity which opposes such liberal pluralism as a subversive or destructive influence on the nation. Thus the strange fixation on Pagan rituals, leader worship and Nordic blood myths. The rejection of the Enlightenment in Fascism is what distinguishes it from Stalinism. By contrast, Stalinism considers itself a part of the Enlightenment tradition comes in the form of the show trials held as part of the purges. The suggestion of shows trials for Jews in the Third Reich is unimaginable because there isn't even a semblance of a just society in Fascism.

Eternal Fascism seeks consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the fear of difference and of the Other. The subversive influence of an alien race or culture becomes the principle target of Fascism. The point is to stamp out the forces which have undermined the nation and unity in society. It is racist by definition. The Nazi schoolbooks founded an impoverished vocabulary as well as an elementary syntax in order to limit the instruments of critical thought and inquiry which could undermine the regime. Even boardgames and children's books were produced to further anti-Semitic attitudes among the population. George Orwell invented Newspeak in 1984 as the official language of English Socialism. The elements of Eternal Fascism are common to different forms of dictatorship. Newspeak can even take the apparently innocent form of a popular talk show today. With the shock jocks of the Right we find that the words 'socialism' and 'National Socialism' have been emptied out so that Obama can be called a socialist and a Nazi. The meaning of words are intentionally blurred and we see the same thing in Fascism.

The most typical feature of Fascism is the appeal to a frustrated middle-class, which had suffered through the crises of capitalism and intense feelings of political humiliation as in the Weimar Republic. The threat of working-class movements such as trade unions and leftist organisations is also a source of agitation in this instance. The possibility of revolution becomes genuine and the capitalist class begins to get desperate. Eco holds that once the proletarians are petty bourgeois and the lumpenproletariat are marginalised totally from politics then fascism will find its audience in a new majority. The audience have to be humiliated in socio-economic terms as well as political terms, it could be a war but not necessarily. The wealth and force of the enemy is defined in such terms. The Fascist is convinced of his ability to overwhelm the enemy through harsh measures, violence is never out of the question. A continuous shift in rhetorical focus maintains that the enemy is at once too strong and too weak. The inability to evaluate the force of the enemy clouds the capacity of Fascism to win wars.

To people who have been deprived of a social identity, Eternal Fascism offers a clear privilege that we were born in this great country. This is where nationalism comes into the picture, which we might be described as palingenetic (as Eco does not recognise) in that Fascist Italy was the reincarnated second Roman Empire and the Third Reich was the First and Second Reich realised as an alternate modernity. The idea of a rebirth is common, it feeds into a self-pitying and disordered view of the imperial past of the European powers. The nation can only define itself through the exclusion of the Other and the same can be said of the national identity. The Fascist mind is obsessed with an international plot which is taking place and must be stopped for the good of the nation. The people have to feel besieged and under attack in order to flock around identity-markers such as religion and nationality. The plot has to appeal to race hate, the most base instincts of hatred and it relies on the gullible cynicism of the individual to buy into a conspiracy theory in the first place. The plot must be insidious and almost invisible, which is why Jews are perfect given that they are inside and outside at the same time.

Permanent warfare is an inevitably given the nature of Fascism. Life is lived for struggle, pacifism is treason. The consequence of this is an Armageddon complex as enemies have to be defeated, so there must be a last battle or final stand to make and then the movement will have total control of the world. This implies an era of peace and unity afterwards, which stands in contradiction to this doctrine and no Fascist leader has ever succeeded in solving this problem. This doctrine of perpetual war fits in with the popular elitism of Fascism, as it is fundamentally aristocratic and militaristic to the extent of holding contempt for the weak. Each citizen belongs to the best people in the world, but the members of the Party are the best of the citizens and each citizen should join the Party. There can be no patricians without plebeians. The leader knows that the position he holds was stolen and not given to him through the democratic process (though there are exceptions, Hitler being the most infamous), it was the weakness of the masses which allowed him to seize power - this applies even to cases where the Fascists came to power via the ballot box.

The masses need a ruler in this conception, so the view of people differs greatly from the liberal view of human beings as having rights and freedoms - and by extension the political impact of the citizenry in quantitative terms. So the individual often falls in line with the community, as we see with so-called 'safe seats'. Of course, Eternal Fascism rejects the claim of individuals to such rights and the People are a monolithic entity which expresses the common will. No doubt the liberal protection of individuals and minorities from the whims of the majority feeds into fascistic conspiracy theories. No large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Fascist leader becomes their interpreter. As marginalised from the political process, individuals no longer act as citizens but take on the role of the People as a theatrical fiction. Umberto Eco foresees that the future internet version of this populism may take the emotional response of a selected group of individuals as the accepted Voice of the People. The masses are manipulated under Fascism, not disdained as they are in conservative thought.

Out of a qualitative populism, Fascism takes a stand against the "rotten" Parliamentary model and the governments which have been formed as a result of them. There are hints of Eternal Fascism in the doubts raised by politicians of the Parliament's legitimacy, that the government does not represent the Voice of the People as Umberto Eco puts it. Richard Seymour notes that for the Fascist the political system is vulnerable to viruses. So the problem is not capitalism as such but super-capitalism, as Mussolini noted, which should be contrasted with the heroic capitalism of the 19th Century. Of course, heroic capitalism became super-capitalism eventually as it grew decadent. The explanation for the inherent contradictions and destructive capacities of capitalism can be displaced onto a cabal of some kind. It could be the Jews, the Freemasons, the Communists or even a bit of all three as in most cases. This is a very similar logic to the claim that there is a liberal elite which has poisoned American society.

Everyone is taught to be a hero in a strict sense, as the exceptional being which becomes the norm in Fascist ideology. The cult of heroism is joined at the hip with the cult of death. It is not by chance that a motto of the Spanish Falangists was "Viva la Muerte!" which means "Long Live Death!" This motto may have been borrowed from the Iron Guard in Romania led by Corneliu Codreanu who considered Hitler "soft" when it came to the Jews. The view of death maintained by the Fascist is in contrast to the standard views of death, that it is to be faced with dignity and it leads to a better place etc. The Fascist hero craves a heroic death, to the point of impatience, because it is the best reward for having led a heroic life. In this impatience then the Fascist will send other people to die in droves. As a consequence of the impracticality and difficulty of ceaseless war and a heroism based on death the Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters.

The cult of the masculine leader and the heroic death retreats to the bedroom. This is the origin of chauvinist machismo complete with misogyny, as well as intolerance of sexual habits which do not fit into a certain set of standards (from chastity to homosexuality). Mussolini famously said "War is to man what maternity is to woman." Ultimately, even sex is a difficult game to play - the Fuhrer was a masochist in the bedroom who left behind a string of relationships which ended in suicide - and so the Fascist tends to games with weapons as Eco notes "doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise." Plato maintains that the tyrant lives the life of dreams, where there is no conceivable 'crime' that we can commit and we can follow our desires to their end without consequence. The tyrant becomes what he was in his dreams, eating forbidden fruit and killing at a whim. Nothing is off the table, from incest to mass-murder. Dreams become reality for the tyrant. Perhaps these words were prescient of the indulgences of Fascist dictators.

Male Mythology in Gonzo.

The Americans based in Puerto Rico as journalists, businessmen and soldiers are depicted as a horde of corrupt, perverted and sex-crazed sociopaths. There is Moberg who is obsessed with cannibalism (a twisted form of the unfulfilled longing) and Zimburger who is described as "more beast than human". Then there is the reckless Yeamon and the inexplicably unfuckable Sala, between them we might situate Kemp as a kind of "moderate witness" who is never as passive as Sala nor as rebellious as Yeamon. Paul Kemp participates and observes the mayhem, but manages to pull-back from the edge and gets to walk off towards the sunset as it were. This is a standard lesson of literature, the passive will destroy themselves and the rebel will be destroyed by the system. It is being able to participate and pull back from the edge just in time that makes for a great story. Especially when we're talking about Gonzo journalism, the journalist is a participant in his story in the full subjective sense. With all of this mind we should look at when Paul Kemp finds himself on a beach after a night of festivities with a woman called Lorraine:

We talked for a while, drying off as best we could, and suddenly she reached over and pulled me down on top of her. “Make love to me,” she said urgently.

I laughed and leaned down to bite her on the breast. She began to groan and jerk me around by the hair, and after a few minutes of this I lifted her onto the clothes so we wouldn’t get full of sand. The smell of her body excited me tremendously and I got a savage grip on her buttocks, pounding her up and down. Suddenly she began to howl: at first I thought I was hurting her, then I realised she was having some sort of extreme orgasm. She had several of them, howling each time, before I felt the slow bursting of my own.

We lay there for several hours, going at it again when we felt rested. All in all I don’t think we said fifty words. She seemed to want nothing but the clutch and howl of the orgasm, the rolling grip of two bodies in the sand.

Paul Kemp promised to call Lorraine - the lie we all know so well - and never does, as far as we know, whereas Kemp later returns to the US where Chenault waits for him. She had left Yeamon for Paul soon after she reappeared after the incident at the carnival, in which she was almost certainly gang-raped at a party - a trauma never fully explored or resolved in the book, it just happened. After turning up at Kemp's place Chenault asks Paul Kemp to get in the shower with her and then comes a flash of impure Gonzo "I heard a gong somewhere in the back of my brain, and then a melodramatic voice saying, 'And this concludes The Adventures of Paul Kemp, the Drunken Journalist. He read the signs and saw it coming, but he was too much of a lecher to step out of the way.' Then there was organ music, a sort of feverish dirge, and then I was stepping out of my shorts and into the shower with Chenault." It is clear that our hero did not go celibate between the chapters, but the sex scene with Chenault is significant in its difference to the earlier tryst on the beach.

I felt totally defeated. For a while I paced around the apartment, barely hearing her happy chatter, then I gave up entirely and went over to the bed and took off my clothes. I fell on her with such a violence that her smile quickly disappeared and it became a desperate business.

She kicked her feet in the air and shrieked and arched her back and she was still trying when I exploded inside her and collapsed with exhaustion. Finally she gave up and locked her legs around my hips and her arms around my neck, and started to cry.

I leaned on my elbows and looked down at her 'What's wrong?' I asked.

She kept her eyes closed and shook her head. 'I can't,' she sobbed. 'I get so close, but I can't.'

We might reach for the term 'courtly love' to denote the way in which Chenault was pursued by Paul Kemp simply because she was forbidden to him as Yeamon's girlfriend. It began on the plane over to Puerto Rico where he was desperate to see to it that she could sit next to him and ended up getting into a fight with an elderly man over his seat. Keep in mind that the perpetuation of the 'courtly love' structure hints at the ongoing attempts of man to compensate for his reduction of women to mere vehicles for his fantasy.In turn woman comes to inhabit this fantasy as her 'femininity' and she is deprived of her particularity as a woman. As the pursuit moved beyond 'loving' her (for lack of a better phrase) for something in her more than herself - as an object - to seeing her as a subject of lack. If we continue along this Žižekian line we find that this leads us to the conclusion that sexual difference retains the Real which cannot be symbolised and lovers are fated to settle for a relationship that is a "non-relationship".

Then again we might be tempted here to accept the conclusion that the point of the tryst on the beach with the "dark skinned" Lorraine was to stand as the exotic Other with a certain authenticity in contrast to the anemic and inhibited whiteness of Chenault. A racism turned on its' head where Lorraine was an exotic and wild lay on a beach by comparison with Chenault. So the only point of Lorraine was to point us towards Chenault's deficiency, once she has served her purpose on the beach she can disappear. It is only after Kemp beds Chenault that the narrative can reach a conclusion - the return to home - so we might designate Puerto Rico as a vanishing mediator on it's own. But then what might we read into Chenault's disappearance as she heads onwards to New York? A rendezvous in the Big Apple remains a genuine possibility for Paul with Chenault. It is never fully resolved what happened at the carnival, through Paul's eyes it is as if Chenault was "asking for it" in the standard misogynist contours of rape as in some way the fault of the woman.

As Žižek has pointed out there is a sense in which the excessive desire of female fantasy and male fantasy fails in a bid to overcome such an excess. It poses a threat to male identity and the woman has to be erased as it were. One way to escape from the excessive Real encountered in fantasy is to 'make love', not to reenact the fantasy but to escape from it. Perhaps this is the reason that Chenault has to 'disappear' from the narrative in order for it to be able to reach any conclusion. What might that say about her appearance in the narrative as a whole? Effectively she was only present as her desire for phallic enjoyment. In the note she leaves for him to find Chenault writes "I can't stand it anymore. My plane leaves at six. You love me. We are soul-mates. We will drink rum and dance naked. Come see me in New York. I will have a few surprises for you." This is the only space which opens up for Chenault's subjectivity, yet she can only express what we already know and expect of her. There is no active part to play and in actuality woman "therefore does not exist" in the Lacanian formula.

The "Scourge" of Single-Mums.

I am one of the generation deemed scum by so many newspapers and reactionary fuck-pigs. It is a generation raised by women without the hand of a man to slap them around and all the while these women - designated simply as 'single mums' - are faced with a torrent of misogyny and bad faith from a narrative of the gutters. Incidentally the attitude of many single-mothers is not one of entitlement, but of guilt, shame and self-loathing. The narrative of the right-wing media has been that the person on benefits is a parasite on the successful and hard-working, that the families which survive on the crumbs of the state are the froth of the scum which has been amassed at the very bottom of society. These people choose not to work in order to get a free ride on the backs of 'real' workers. Notice there is no mention of the severe lack of jobs in our society, the lack of opportunities, the pervasive inequality and the absence of any policy to create jobs.

One major cultural change which has been accomplished by the Feminist movement of the 1970s is the sense that women have a lot to be angry about and should be angry. We live in a time of the 'token woman' and the widespread dissemination of feminist ideas, at least at the level of a kind of Barbie Doll feminism, whilst the conditions of women's lives worsen and everywhere there seems to be a backlash against the steps forward made in the past. The women who have to raise children on benefits are often treated with scorn and even from working-class people, who are jeered on by middle-class journalists and newspaper editors. The explicit attitude of the gutter press to women is anti-feminist, it is almost as if woman is the guilt of man realised and only if he can cleanse himself of his "dirty desires" can woman cease to exist. We have only to glance at these papers to catch the orgy of misogyny in full motion, where a life on benefits is a 'choice' undertaken by the exploding numbers of women who don't think being a housewife is "rewarding".

The fact that the media is a business for which the aim is to maximise profit by driving down costs and stimulating advertising revenue. Let alone that the media is dominated by middle-class white men and has been for decades. The superfluous population are a cost to be minimised. So the press run endless stories about women living in houses worth millions on housing benefit and child-benefit, as if these crumbs are equal to a house in London that they don't even own. Incidentally housing prices have been inflated in London as council housing has been decimated and the economy has been finance-driven. The average age of the single-mum is 37 and 55% of single-mums had their children within marriage. 33% suffer from disabilities and illnesses while 34% of their children are disabled. No wonder there are working-class people cheering on the government as job centres are set a minimum target of chucking three people a week off of benefits. The disabled are a prime target because they won't kick up a fuss. But neither would most single-mums, the attitude pervasive amongst the superfluous population is apathetic parody of the stiff-upper lip.

As David Cameron rants about "runaway dads" he supports policies which make it more costly for women to pursue them for financial support. The blame is still fundamentally pinned on the woman for opening her legs and seducing the man who just can't help himself. Naturally Melanie Phillips responded by fanning the flames of misogyny and tells us that it is not the father who is the problem it is the single-mum who is just trying get by. Even though it will be single-mums who will be hit the hardest by benefit cuts, losing a month's income every year and three times as much as a childless couple. At the same time, single women will lose a little less than a single-parent on benefits due to the tax and welfare changes. Even though around a quarter of children live in single-parent households, and a high number of them do so below the poverty-line. The statistics will tell you that these children will go onto do badly in school, suffer poor health and may even fall into long-term unemployment themselves.

There is an irony in the obscene lies of the Right against single-mothers on benefits. The term "proletariat" is derived from the Latin for "offspring" which refers to those who were too poor to serve the state with anything other than their wombs. Too deprived to contribute to economic life in any other way, these women produced labour power in the form of children. What society demanded from them was not production but reproduction. The proletariat started life among those outside the labour process and not from within it. Though the labour these women endured was a lot more painful than breaking boulders. We live in a world in which the typical proletarian is a woman, as we can see in sweatshops and agricultural labour. After the decline of heavy industry it was women who staffed the huge expansion in shop and clerical work. Even when Britain was the workshop of the world the industrial working-class were outnumbered by domestic servants and agricultural labourers. In other words the majority of the workforce was female in the 19th Century.

The picture we all carry in our heads of the working-class is of the blue-collar brawny male off to toil away in a factory with lunchbox in hand. But the working-class is not defined by manual labour. The working-class includes anyone who is forced to rent their labour power to capital, languishes under its oppressive disciplines and have little control over the means of production. Thus Karl Marx ranked commercial workers along with industrial workers and refused to identify the proletariat with just "productive" workers, in the sense of those workers who churn out commodities in exchange for a wage. The unemployed are not part of a so-called "under-class" but are actually central to the working-class. The way unemployed women in particular are regularly singled out by the reactionary media along the usual misogynistic lines is the essence of class warfare. This is how the important role of child benefit has been jettisoned over the years, it is not even seen as an investment anymore by the elites and the commentariat.