Barbie Doll feminism.

In a debate earlier this year on feminism Louise Mensch responded to Laurie Penny's suggestion that she may be a feminist but she's not the right kind. Defence for right-wing feminism was fought from the trenches of relativism. There are just different feminisms as opposed to a correct feminism. This is the force of the market on show, the limit of equality is 'sameness' and meandering populist strikes against institutions such as the BBC. The Mensch formula for a feminism of feminisms corners the convergence of class and women's rights in a convenient blind-spot. This helps to sustain a much narrower conception of women's liberation within capitalism. It's less fine to talk about women's rights with class war in mind. It might even get scarier when we start to talk about oppression with its multiple fronts - what about race? You can forget about Africana womanism! The irony is that the leftist Laurie Penny has since reverted to relativism on a different case.

With the explosion of Fifty Shades of Grey onto the shelf of literary history there has been a great deal of thundering criticism against the book. In reaction Laurie Penny found the time to pen a defence of Fifty Shades as porn for women. She made it clear that she couldn't care less about snooty liberal critics who seem so enraged at the prospect of millions of women masturbating. It's just a defence of the likeability of the likeable. There are over 2.3 million women reading Fifty Shades of Grey in Britain, so it's easy to play populist firebrand against the cultural elites. Elsewhere Victoria Coren observes: "Romantic heroes have always been stern and bossy, for obvious reasons: their autocracy relieves the female fantasist from any responsibility for the filth that's going to ensue. She can remain nice, sweet, ladylike and marriageable. If she ends up naked over a tree stump with her pants between her teeth: not her fault! Just following orders!" Thus the appeal of Christian Grey and Edward Cullen.

Sylvia Plath's poem Daddy comes to mind in which she writes "Every woman adores a fascist." Especially as Grey seems to be the poster boy for dangerous signs to look for in a boyfriend: jealous, controlling, stalking, sexually sadistic behaviour, hypersensitivity to any perceived slight, mood swings and relationships with less powerful women. Given that Fifty Shades grew out of Twilight fan fiction, it could be that it is the repressed filth beneath the Mormon veneer of Twilight's chastity. The bondage of Grey is the implied side of Edward's abusive relationship with Bella. It would be ideal for Robert Pattinson to play Christian Grey for this reason, this would swiftly lure the target market of the Twilight films to the Fifty Shades films. For Penny there is no issue here, it's just a matter of defending the fantasies of women - even if that amounts to being spanked by a multi-millionaire. The critics are simply prudes looking to make women feel guilty about their fantasies, about sexual pleasure and masturbation. This fits in with Penny's odd thesis that capitalism hates women's bodies.

The fact that the line "My very own Christian Grey-flavoured popsicle" may soon be one of the most read sentences in history does not confine it to the greats of the literary canon. This is not a position that Laurie Penny would have a problem with. But she seems unaware that the problem is not snobbery, but that this work should be taken for more than it is. If it is just pornography for millions of dissatisfied married women with children, why should it be made into a Hollywood film? It's not a matter of equivalence that the archives of RedTube are not about to be transformed onto the silver screen. The question of what counts as art is totally absent from Penny's argument, never mind what constitutes 'good art'. Instead there is only a reactive position to the critic who yearns for a great novel. Bentham's famous words come to mind "Prejudice apart, the game of push-pin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry."

The defence of this book is a highly bourgeois fixation for a feminist. Especially as we live in a world in which women remain largely subjugated in one form or another. There hasn't been much progress in this world. The practice of wife-selling is long gone in Europe along with the advocacy by doctors of female genital mutilation of the late 19th Century. In many of American prisons women have to give birth in shackles, meanwhile the soldiers of God are still fighting to place more and more limits on the right to choose. It seems everywhere women are still waiting for economic justice, which means more than equal pay. It shouldn't be forgotten that the working-class has long been predominantly female since proletarianization. This is what we might call 'Menschian' feminism - or Barbie doll feminism - can never acknowledge let alone put right. Feminism can be embraced as a liberal populist means of flushing clear the clogged pipes of capitalism. But it is stunted from the beginning.

To be exact Barbie doll feminism is at its core about an equality of 'sameness', a process of colour-blind transcendence which subsumes every group - race, gender, sexuality etc. - and overcomes every boundary by eliminating difference. The only 'difference' which can never be overcome, or even acknowledged, is that of class. The populist battering-ram of bourgeois liberalism emanates as relativism from the mechanisms of capitalism. This process of relativisation is partly what constitutes capitalist ideology, its nihilism is found in its capacity to negate any set of values within reach. The capitalist system can function with a shift away form old forms of chauvinist domination. The machine thrives not just when the cogs are well oiled but when the cogs are actually cleaned to run smoothly. The means of overcoming each barrier secures the system from its overthrow. The ruling-class knows full well that the best way to hold off revolution is through reform.

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".

The Post-Politics of the Selfish Gene.

 

You may have read of the New College of the Humanities which AC Grayling is eager to set up, which will charge £18,000 a year for a course and has £10 million in private capital to back up the scheme. The major selling point being the staff of money-grubbing dons which includes Richard Dawkins, Peter Singer, Steven Pinker and Niall Ferguson among others. These are the intellectuals whom Grayling designates as "pink around the gills and a little bit left of centre", which might just be a sign of delirium on his part. Grayling argues that the decision came in response to the slashing of public subsidies to the humanities and the hike in tuition fees. It looks more like brash opportunism to me, but that would not contradict Grayling's claim. Appropriately, Richard Dawkins will be teaching evolutionary biology and science literacy at the New College as he is the prominent author of several books on the subject including The Selfish Gene.

For those who have been following the latest documentary by Adam Curtis you will know that Richard Dawkins was a student of Bill Hamilton and George Price, he had also been a computer programmer before he studied science. The work of these biologists had led to the conclusion that the human race are basically automata capable of self-reproduction, the actions of human beings are guided by the genetic codes which adhere to a rational strategy of which the aim is to pass on copies of themselves. The individual is only the temporary host to such genes, which calculate our behaviour even in a way which Price understood as the workings of a computer. Hamilton argued that the calculations went as far as to produce altruism as a survival strategy. The radical conclusions of Hamilton and Price brought down the Enlightenment view of humanity as distinct from animals and nature. It also undermined the role of religion in society and thus Dawkins has played a leading role in the rise of New Atheism in the 21st Century.

George Price and Bill Hamilton were each affected by the revelations in different ways. Price was an obsessive rationalist at first and yet he attributed the equations to God and had a religious awakening, which led him to devote his life to helping the homeless and then killed himself in 1975. Hamilton went on to become one of the most famous scientists in the world and was given the highest honours from the scientific establishment. He later traveled to the Congo where he looked for evidence that AIDS was the result of experiments by American scientists on chimpanzees. The chimpanzee version of HIV was then transmitted to humans through vaccinations for polio, Hamilton died of a gastrointestinal hemorrhage in 2000. Importantly, Hamilton always held that Price's religious awakening was superstitious and he would have been better off to continue his work in genetics than helping the homeless.

Years before his awakening George Price had worked for IBM and helped construct the first mainframes of computers, for him the equations of Hamilton could be understood in computing terms. Price was a free-lance science journalist dedicated to smash superstitious myths in order to promote rationality. For him computers and mathematics were the key to saving the world, we can measure happiness and contain Communism with mathematical equations and computer technology. When Price discovered the work of Bill Hamilton he concluded that the human being was simply a soft machine controlled by an on-board computer. The mathematical conclusions of Price explained murder, warfare and genocide as strategies undertaken by the genetic codes which control human behaviour. Some people may even be wired to be murderers, we might kill distant relatives in order to secure close relatives for the sake of our genes.

By the time of his death Bill Hamilton had written a series of books which took the logic of Darwinian ideas like natural selection to an extreme conclusion. He argued that Western scientific innovations should not be utilised to prolong the lives of the genetically inferior. Nothing should be allowed to interfere with the strategies of the genes. We should take a stand against the slide into degeneration and against the scientific establishment, which he thought had covered up its own part in the creation of AIDS. He believed that the desperate struggle of everything to pass on its genes explained everything. For him there was no room for altruism and the weak should be left to die. Hamilton died after he contracted malaria, refused to take the proper medication and instead took aspirin which caused his gut to hemorrhage. As he died Hamilton knew he would live forever as a genetic code which he had transmitted in his life time.

With the particular brand of evolutionary biology, promulgated by these men, Richard Dawkins went on to dismiss the exaggerated notion of free-will and in much more vivid language which the scientific establishment could not marginalise as easily. As a result these ideas were able to seize the public imagination. Dawkins argued that the behaviour of human beings is guided by genetic codes, which are almost like an on-board computer. We are simply machines which are interconnected and constitutive of a higher order. Each of us play tiny roles in a vast strategic game in which different genetic codes compete with one another and have done for centuries. For Dawkins the individual is a machine for passing on genes, he would emphasise it is the selfish gene but not the selfish individual. For it is the selfish gene is the immortal replicator, not the selfish individual and so there is room for plans to do what is conducive to the happiness of the largest number of people.

In spite of the strenuous rationalism of George Price, Bill Hamilton and Richard Dawkins, the three of them had recreated the idea of the soul as the genetic codes of human beings. These codes are immortal and will survive us into eternity with no distinction between good and evil. The existence of the individual is lesser than the genetic code which will surpass us and ultimately carries greater significance than us. At his most un-Christian moment Dawkins declared that we are descendent of a "tiny elite of successful ancestors", we carry the ancient "wisdom" of that elite with us in the form of DNA which is a lot like a computer code which has archived all that was good about the past. For Dawkins our ancestors were "winners" which might explain why he oozes complacency and smugness when he claims that the people alive in the 21st Century are more moral than the people who were alive in the 1920s. It would seem he is devoid of a sense of tragedy or even the most elementary form of moral realism.

It should also be noted that Richard Dawkins adheres to the Enlightenment conception of history as Progress, which Christopher Hitchens and numerous other New Atheists are also ensnared. The Progressive view (in the Herbert Spencer sense) of history was also shared by Bill Hamilton, which would be why he thought there is no need for radical change and we should just leave the "losers" to rot. The obvious moral outlook for Dawkins is utilitarian as he seems to have a bit more compassion than Bill Hamilton, but not enough to see that the New College of Humanities is a thoroughly disgusting proposal. Though it is the bourgeois self-interest proposed by Hamilton which is much more in line with the trajectory of their Darwinian outlook. It is clear that the bio-reductionism of Dawkins' work comes with the Thatcherite project interwoven into it, in a manner which is a lot like a genetic code funnily enough. It would seem that it is not coincidental that the liberals have become obsessed with matters of secularism whilst the radicals have started to look into theology more and more.

We should take note that the Fascist promise of an alternate modernity has changed a lot over the decades and the liberals have managed to shape it along the way. Though not in specific relation to Dawkins, but in relation to the post-political theories of genetics and technocratic liberal ideas favoured by the New Atheists. There is the permissive quality in postmodern nationalism today that claims it wants to restore free-speech by giving you the right to call coffee black which also allows us to call black men niggers. There is also a new affinity for technocracy and evolutionary economics among the radical Right. This would explain the alliance between the EDL and the Tea Party against Islam, let alone the support of the EDL for the spending cuts in Britain. It is clear that these crypto-fascists do not offer a 'social revolution' to buy-off socialism just before it could be killed off with the untermenschen.

In the last twenty-0dd years political struggles have been castrated as politics has been transformed into nothing more than management of society. The end of the Cold War supposedly marked the End of History as liberal capitalism went global. The old politics of grand narratives were then tossed aside, the world was beyond 'big ideas' now and the new politics would be managerial and pragmatic. But the evolutionary ideas of Hamilton and Price remain influential in our society to this day, above all the idea that human beings are automata controlled by genetic codes and we may have embraced that idea because we live in a world in which everything we do either good or bad seems to lead to terrible consequences. We have no idea what to do about the problems in the world in order to provide a comforting answer, a fatalistic philosophy, to excuse our failure to change the world no matter what we do. It also fits in neatly with the ideological constellation of our times.