Editorial intervention from Stan Goff
De Clarke forwarded the latest from Jim Kunstler via Life After the Oil Crash (LATOC), wherein Kunstler manages to drip his “critique” of Senator Hillary Clinton’s presidential candidacy with effortless sexism and racism, and LATOC follows on enthusiastically with references to “bitch-slapping” contests.
We are obliged, then, as a site that echoes some of the themes for which Kunstler and LATOC are known (unsustainability and looming energy crisis), to denounce both for this gratuitious attack on women, and Kunstler’s execreble references to “oriental despots” and obvious reference to Black men as “lumpen baby-daddy’s.”
Kunstler’s cluelessness about gender as a system of social power is apparently as limitless as that of the right-wingers against whom he postures as their intellecutal superior; and LATOC (in an editor’s note by Matt Savinar) not only gives Kunslter’s screed its enthusiastic seal of approval, it includes extensive quotes from Kunstler’s worst pop-Freudian rants about the “crisis” of American “manhood”.
In the past, I have made special and extended efforts to point out the dangers inhering in the neo-malthusian account of the energy crisis. This account is attractive to privileged metropolitan white men like Kunstler and Savinar because it hangs its entire account on nicely disembodied empirical data. Inevitably, this narrow reading of the “energy” issue becomes both racist and masculinist.
Insurgent American emphatically rejects this approach; and with it, we reject and denounce all attacks on any public figures that are gendered. We bow to no one in our opposition to Senator Clinton’s war-mongering, her unequivocal support for the crimes of the State of Israel, her crass political opportunism, and her devotion to the right-wing DLC. All these can be critiqued without resorting to misogynist slurs that are, intrinsically, attacks on all women.
The struggle against patriarchy — in its economic, political, cultural, and psychological dimensions — remains not merely a goal of any revolutionary project, but an absolute and inexorable precondition of the revolution. We will not take shortcuts across the bloodied bodies of women.
Those who recognize the necessity of incorporating an ecological account into revolutionary thought and work must come to understand that the whole trope of “conquering nature” is intimately bound up with the “conquest” of women and all things “female,” (including “orientals”). This is a colonial mentality. We are obliged to assimilate this insight into the very DNA of our practice; and to struggle against it.
Kunstler and Savinar, for shame!
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Posted by stan in Analysis