Sylvia Ruhl, Brisbane
Least surprising of the many demographic trends observed in the voting of this year’s US election was the continued rightward shift of young men. This has been promoted by liberals, of all varieties, as a consequence of young men being victimised for simply being male. The perpetrators of this persecution? The feminist movement, social media, the education system, and the various other bogeyman of the family. There is, according to the petty-bourgeois sections of Capital, a “war on masculinity” being waged by these sections of society inflitrated by the “Left”. Of course, this is just the patriarchal order re-asserting itself against the advances of the last century’s women’s movements.
The current movement of young men and teenage boys to become ever more vile and threatening misogynists is part of this shift to remove women’s agency, and to re-strengthen the patriarchy. This has only accelerated after Trump, the American small business owner’s guy in Washington, won last month’s US election. One only needs to hear the teenage misogynist’s newfound mantra of “her body, my choice” that became popular days after Trump’s victory to recognise this. Young men openly deny women’s agency to their own bodies, online and in person, and the only concern of the small capitalist is to bemoan the (rightful) demonisation of masculinity. He would have you side with the foot soldiers of his patriarchal onslaught.
This is not the first time a counter-revolution against women was waged by the petty capitalists as they struggled to reverse gains made by the proletariat. Towards the end of the 15th century and the beginning of the 17th, as feudalism ended and capitalism emerged, the working class of Europe was immiserated as the traditional land-use allotments and entitlements of peasants were smashed. Vast impoverishment of the European working class followed. A state-led campaign against the relative autonomy of women was also waged in this period. In this period, female socialisation was treated with contempt, women were demonised as perfidious schemers who undermine the valiant man. Abortion, earlier considered a relatively minor offence, was by now a crime that carried the death sentence. Sexual violence was rife as the view of women was degraded to that of being a baby-making factory.
To enforce the new bourgeois view of women, and to rob women of their autonomy, was a wave of state-backed violence now referred to as the Witch Hunts. For more than two centuries, hundreds of thousands women were murdered, tortured, and buried alive. Although it is not widely considered a genocide, when considered in this lens, as outlined by Silvia Federici in Caliban & The Witch, it is clear it should be. Great violence was used to reduce the status of women to their role under capitalism, and this was partly reversed (at least in the imperial core) by the women’s movements of the last century. The current wave of misogynist violence and woman-hatred is by no means separate from the small capitalist’s re-ignited war on women. Whether on a given day they are decrying abortion, the local homeless women’s shelter, or “the demonisation of masculinity”, it is all part of the same project to strengthen patriarchy’s rule over the lesser woman.
PARTISAN! 