Thursday 14 June 2012

Real Feminism

Feminism is about women taking control of their own destinies. Your body, your sexuality and your orgasm are the fundamental elements of that control. I don’t see how anyone can deny sex. Making people feel ashamed of their bodies and intercourse have been elements of institutional sexism that’s been in place by men who want to keep women insecure. By taking back our bodies, showing them on our own terms and enjoying porn, we make our physical needs and desires as important as the physical needs and desires of men
Bobbi Starr interviewed by Scarlett Stone

Saturday 21 April 2012

Why Marx was wrong

http://iambinarymind.tumblr.com/post/21436905421

Communism as freedom from natural market forces.

Marx and engels thought (collective) 'Man' could and should control these natural forces that had historically controlled him. They foresaw no problems of coordination, calculation or information. Contemporaries such as bakunin predicted the monstrous totalitarian tyranny this impossible dream would necessitate and enable. Futhermore this economic ignorance spread fast, wide and deep into the worlds intellectuals precisely because of this new quest for total power. Hegelian Marxism and in particular leninism called for a strong state to be created by and operated by these same intellectuals. An ideology that promised total power to those who worked in the dissemination of ideas was bound to infect every 'thinker'. Marxism was created in the 'modern' period and Marx reflected this with his revolutionary 'scientific' doctrine. His was an ideology of man's conquest over the vagaries of nature - if we built structures to harness and avoid the elements then we should also control the natural forces of human action that Marx felt to be degrading. A fundamental misunderstanding, whether through ignorance or deception, of these natural forces led Marx to believe they were not only undesirable but could be controlled. This misunderstanding is due to both religion and the states of his time. Religion because that is the source of Adam Smith's just price theory of labour taken by Ricardo and then Marx. And the state because anti capitalist Marxism was concerned with a particular type of dominant landlords and industrialists only made possible by the collective state itself. Like todays 'geo-libertarians' whose ideology is based on 19th century conceptions of landowners, similarly Marx would not recognise the more widely and naturally dispersed economy of today. What would he make of the self employed capitalist plumber? Who is exploiting him? The world of economic power that both Marx and George reacted against was not a world of natural property. The despotic capitalists and land lords these two influential thinkers so despised were only made possible by the vestiges of the old monarchical near feudal system that capitalism itself was soon to brush aside completely. When George spoke of extortionate land owners he referred to individuals who owned whole counties. Such arrangements were entirely dependent upon state granted privilege. todays 'geo-libertarians' take his words without any consideration for this historical context and use them to advocate coercion against property owners on todays scale of a small suburban semi. Likewise when Marx referred to the evil capitalist exploiting the workers he was speaking of individuals granted similar monopoly privileges to those of the aristocratic landlord. It was only through state granted privileges that 19th century capitalists were able to amass the economic dominance that Marx reviled. It is state interference as justified by Marxist socialism that continues to tilt freedom away from his masses and toward those capitalists he so maligned.