December 15, 2023
Accidentally deleted my notes, but this is what I read the past few weeks.
How the Irish Became White. I was expecting some pop history but this was a little much for me. Needed more background information on early American political parties to fully understand everything. Kind of a pessimistic read; my takeaway was that Irish immigrants, after a brief period of peaceful coexistence in non-segregated living conditions, realized that they could see economic gains by fighting against their closest competitors: black freedmen. Sure, their economic elite were pro-slavery early on, but the rank and file also proved their appetite for mob violence. And there was little contradiction between this anti-blackness (which makes up most if not all of American "whiteness") and the strides made on behalf of white laborers by trade unions. I'm slotting this into the mental concept of unions not inherently being a force for political good. I see two broad ways to interpret that. One is to believe that economic struggle is closely linked to broader class and identity struggles, and to view things like the white labor movement as local optima. Subgroups pursue these short-term gains at the cost of their full potential; damaging broader class struggle to claw your way up is penny-wise and pound-foolish. The other way to interpret this is the right-wing or post-left way: there are two axes, economic and social, and they are essentially unrelated.
Love's Work. Very good. I will reread this, I think I didn't do it justice this time around. Too short by text and by years.
Right-Wing Women. Good but again depressing. Dworkin uses (mostly) familiar materialist analysis to examine women as an oppressed group1. As a straight man I'm particularly interested in the issue of heterosexual relationships. Dworkin, along with some other radical feminists, says via various theoretical formulations that all heterosexual sex under patriarchy is rape, since women cannot freely consent given the coercion of patriarchy. On a class level, we rightly recognize that even a "good" boss, such a worker co-op, benefits from the overall system of class domination - for instance, the reserve army of labor and the punishment of being unemployed will induce you to work for the co-op for a lower price than you might otherwise command. Dworkin sees women as selling their reproductive and sexual labor. Lower wages for the same jobs, and the last resort of sex work waiting for un- and under-employed women, induces them to "sell" wholesale that reproductive and sexual labor to men through marriage, for a lower price than they might otherwise command. Capitalism makes no room for "good bosses"; sex domination appears to make no room for consent.
Viewing male domination in this way leads me to wonder whether the quest for non-exploitative heterosexual relationships is another example of prefigurative politics, which (despite being vegan) I'm generally pretty down on. The radical feminists say we need revolution, not reform. When we look at class oppression it's easy to see that there can be no meaningful bubbles of communism with capitalism looming over us all. Your commune in the woods still needs to interact with the capitalist world. A socialist country will suffocate under the siege of international capitalism; it's ultimately fruitless to spend effort precisely building the new world in miniature instead of the real thing. So why should we believe otherwise for gender relations? But I haven't the faintest idea what this kind of revolution would look like or how it would come about and Dworkin (at least here) isn't telling. Options for the self-interested heterosexual appear to be various degrees of resignation. Perhaps the idea of free association under capitalism is another one of those impossible libertarian dreams.
As far as right-wing women specifically, Dworkin's explanation is that like the Irish they are choosing short-term gains. Finding a single "buyer" through marriage, and ideologically reinforcing their link to valued reproductive labor via abortion bans, allows them to escape the tyranny of the marketplace: unequal wages in the workplace, the waiting jaws of sex work. It also prevents men from discarding them once they are old. Of course women face real harm in this conservative role - spousal rape and abuse, the same ultimate denial of their personhood, etc. It is interesting to note the compatibility of this view with the manosphere idea of the "sexual marketplace", which we usually reject outright. Of course if they are both describing a real thing they have very different views about it.
I also liked Dworkin's examination of different types of anti-feminism. One type is that which says "women are the ones with the real power, since they can entice men with sex [to do a very limited subset of actions, most of which they already wanted to do]", which requires a such a redefinition of power that makes the concept so vague as to be meaningless.
At some point I'm going to finish the SEP article on coercion, which probably offers some more nuanced frameworks for the consent-under-patriarchy question. One thing that I didn't like about Right-Wing Women is the lack of guidance on how to actually overthrow male domination. I read Refusing To Be a Man looking for something more practical but was sorely disappointed. Some promising examination of male sexuality as shaped by male domination, but plunges into psychobabble (why??? there's already perfectly good materialist explanations, unprovable Freudian stuff is not theoretically necessary and doesn't make good predictions) and does not come up very far for air. I did appreciate its rejection of the idea that men should sit back, say we're waiting for women to take the lead, and thereby let them do all the work.
1Some of the second-wave feminists use "sex-class", I forget if Dworkin does. Being able to work paid jobs, women don't have a uniformly different relationship to the means of commodity production than male proletarians, so they're not a class class. But they do have a uniformly different relationship to social reproduction. Since "sex-class" is unwieldy and I don't want to take a strong position on the sex-gender split in this note (the language is different but I don't know if Dworkin disagrees with the modern taxonomy), I'm going to chicken out and call women a "group".