Feminism and Ecological Crises

SUBHEAD: Love requires us to embrace feminist as well as ecological worldviews, in their radical forms.

By Robert Jensen on 10 March 2015 for Resilience.org -
(http://www.resilience.org/stories/2015-03-10/epic-fail-feminism-and-ecological-crises)


Image above: Feminist and ecologist Dr. Vandana Shiva. From (http://lipmag.com/featured/feminism-101-ecofeminism/).

We humans are an epic fail.

In internet-speak, that term can be used derisively or sympathetically. A failure of grand proportions can be labeled “epic” either to mock or to offer condolences to someone who fails so completely. However, given the speed at which pop-culture fads come and go, I’m told by younger informants that the term is already long out of date and that to invoke it is a sign of irrelevance.

Both the unkind and the compassionate aspects are appropriate here; we should be able both to laugh at, and feel sorry for, the human species. But unlike cultural fads, the ecological reality behind my use of the term remains relevant. Our species is an epic fail, and the scope and depth of our failure expands and deepens daily.

First, let’s acknowledge the irony in all this: Life on Earth is the scramble for energy-rich carbon; lately humans have dominated that competition; and now that domination is undermining life on Earth. We’re #1 for now, and it turns out that being #1 in this fashion means that over the long haul we lose big. And, increasingly, the long haul looks like it’s going to be a short trip. Our grandest failure is the product of our greatest success.

So, our task is to face a simple question that has serious consequences: Is the human with the big brain an evolutionary dead end? If so, what are we going to do with our species’ time remaining?

Homo sapiens’ domination of Earth is coming to an end, not in some imagined science-fiction future but as the result of today’s processes of resource extraction and waste generation. The trajectory of the multiple, cascading ecological crises that define our world cannot be predicted with precision, but the trend lines are clear enough.

Our task is not to figure out how to maintain the illusion of human control of the ecosphere—and it always was an illusion, even when we seemed to be more successful—but instead, borrowing from my friend Jim Koplin, “to learn to leave the planet gracefully.”

There are steps we can take to make our departure from the planet’s center stage more graceful, and we owe such a graceful departure to ourselves and the larger living world.

But before we focus on those steps, we need to spend time analyzing how we got to this point in history. When facing the scope and depth of these ecological crises, many people want to move immediately to discussion of actions that can be taken to “solve” problems, which I believe is a crucial error.

Avoiding the reasons for our epic fail tends to lead to “solutions” that are ineffective or counterproductive. There are problems without solutions, at least solutions that are based on the same assumptions and that work within the same systems out of which the problems arose.

It’s time to think about life beyond solutions, which requires us not only to confront the reasons for our epic fail but also to deal with the despair that inevitably flows from such honesty. That process is as much emotional as intellectual, and is possible only if we have compassion for ourselves and each other, grounded in a love for our specific home places that are part of the larger planetary home.

If it seems odd to inject the idea of love into this harsh analysis, consider Dostoyevsky’s insight that “love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams.” We have many dreadful realities to face, none of which will be resolved by dreaming.

I will argue that such love requires us to embrace feminist as well as ecological worldviews, in their radical forms. This is a tall order in a culture that either rejects feminism or, at best, accepts a watered-down liberal/postmodern version; and either rejects ecological thinking or, at best, accepts a watered-down environmentalist version.

A graceful future for humans is possible only if we have the courage to act on those radical ideas, not with dreams of dramatically altering our species’ trajectory, but because in our efforts we will be graceful and find some sense of grace, not bestowed by a divine being but created by the human spirit.

That is an ambitious agenda for a short talk. But let me delay the argument with a bit of autobiography.

From the intimate to the planetary
My intellectual and political career started with the feminist critique of the domination/subordination dynamic at the heart of the sexual-exploitation industries (pornography, prostitution, stripping). This first political project of my life forced me to deal with patriarchy at the most intimate level of human existence, in the context of human sexual connection.

I had to confront not only the way in which men routinely are socialized to be sexually aroused by the control and degradation of women, but also the particular way that such training had taken root in my own body.

Once this cruelty was visible to me, it became impossible to treat this as a purely academic enterprise. My own life depended on making sense of the pathology of patriarchy.

My intellectual and political career is ending with a focus on the multiple, cascading ecological crises that define humans’ place in the ecosphere today and for the foreseeable future. That means I spend most of my time these days grappling with the domination/subordination dynamic that defines our species’ relationship to the larger living world. All of our lives depend on making sense of the pathology at the heart of our high-energy/high-technology dystopian nightmare.

That’s my career, thinking about the consequences of the worst aspect of human nature—the quest for domination, no matter what the cost to other people or other living things—from the most intimate spaces in our lives to our collective place on the globe.

As you might imagine, I don’t spend a lot of time skipping down the sunny side of the street whistling a happy tune, which is why I’m one of the most mentally healthy people I know. If that seems counterintuitive—that someone focused on the unjust and unsustainable nature of our society, from the personal to the planetary, would make such a claim of psychological stability—just think of all the intellectual and emotional energy I don’t have to spend on denial.

All around us is the evidence of the systematic corrosion of our humanity and the irreversible collapse of our ecosystems, piling up in ways that are impossible to ignore, and yet most people expend enormous energy to keep themselves from these realities. Freed of that (or, at least, mostly freed most days), I need not waste time on the delusional systems that humans create for avoidance.

What do I mean by delusional systems?

On the question of the sexual-exploitation industries, just think about all the arguments—typically influenced by either conventional liberalism or some version of postmodernism (which is little more than liberalism to the nth degree)—asserting that pornography, prostitution, and stripping are vehicles for empowerment and liberation. That’s delusional, which can be demonstrated by asking simple questions:

If we lived in a world with gender justice, within a wider system of meaningful social justice, would people ever imagine the buying and selling of sexual intimacy? Is gender justice imaginable when one group of people (mostly women and girls, and some vulnerable boys and men) can be rented or purchased by another group of people (almost exclusively men) for sexual pleasure?

On the question of the ecological crises, just think about all the arguments—typically influenced by a superficial understanding of science that privileges physics and molecular biology over the far more important work of ecologists—that rely on technological fundamentalism, the idea that we can always invent our way out of our troubles simply because we want to. That’s delusional, which can be demonstrated by asking simple questions:

Given that many of our most intractable ecological crises are the result of the unintended consequences of high-energy/high-technology, why would we invest our hopes in more of the same? Why would we look for solutions to our problems by embracing the naïve assumptions that have deepened the problems?

Since I don’t have to construct and maintain these kinds of delusions, I’m freed up to deal with reality. That is difficult, but that freedom makes it easier to set aside the culture’s obsession with pleasure-indulgence and pain-avoidance in favor of accepting the inevitable grief and the struggling for deeper joy. That is where we live, “the human estate of grief and joy,”[1] to borrow from Wendell Berry, and it is there that we can accept reality and begin to build a different world.

Evolution and emancipation
At the heart of that different world has to be a rejection of the domination/subordination dynamic that has defined human societies for the past 10,000 years or so. If that seems impossible to imagine, remember that over the 200,000 year history of the species, and the several million years of our hominin ancestors, this dynamic has defined only our very recent past.

The band-level gathering and hunting societies that were the norm for most of human history were far more egalitarian than the hierarchies we now take to be normal in human social organizations.

Ecologically, our species’ fundamental break with nature came when we started farming. While gathering-hunting humans were capable of damaging a local ecosystem in limited ways, the shift to agriculture and the domestication of animals meant humans for the first time could dramatically alter ecosystems, typically with negative consequences.

While there have been better and worse farming practices in history, soil erosion has been a consistent feature of agriculture, making agriculture the first step in the entrenchment of an unsustainable human economy based on extraction, which today is taken to its most dangerous levels with extreme energy extraction in fracking, tar sands, and deep-water drilling.

Socially, the development of patriarchy is tied to that domestication of animals and agriculture, when the communal and cooperative ethic of gatherer-hunter societies was replaced with ideas of private ownership and patrimony that led to men controlling women’s reproduction and claiming ownership of women.[2]

Although modern feminism has successfully challenged that institutionalized male dominance on some fronts in some places, such as access to higher education in the United States, the domination/subordination dynamic has proved difficult to roll back in everyday life, especially in sexuality, leading to pandemic levels of sexual violence and increasingly corrosive media.

Political, economic, and cultural systems at the core of contemporary injustices—nation-states in an imperial system, capitalism, white supremacy—are rooted in the same domination/subordination dynamic.

 Capitalism is perhaps the most perverse, given its attempt at a moral justification; because human nature is immutably and overwhelmingly greedy and self-interested, we are told, the world’s economy must be organized around that greed, even if it leaves half the world’s population in misery and the ecosphere on the edge of collapse.

Given that for 95 percent of Homo sapiens history, and 99.9 percent of hominin history, we evolved in cooperative settings in which a very different set of norms defined us, we should be skeptical about claims that white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy and extractivist economies are natural.

But if we are to take seriously evolution by natural selection, then there is another question about human nature that we can’t skirt.

Once humans’ big brain evolved to the point that our cognitive capacities allowed us to exploit the planet’s carbon in new ways through agriculture and, eventually, the industrial model based on fossil fuels, then it’s hard to imagine why humans would not have used that capacity.

When we first used this intelligence to exploit that carbon for short-term gain, we could not anticipate the long-term consequences. Given our success at that exploitation of energy, was all this in the cards no matter which particular population was holding the deck when it started? Without diving into the age-old determinism/free will debate, it seems that we are at this crisis point as a result of forces that were bound to play out this way.

This isn’t an argument for nihilistic indifference to human suffering and ecological degradation, but rather an attempt to understand how we got here, to guide our decisions about the future.

Our ability to exploit each other and the larger living world is one part of human nature, the one that has predominated in our recent past.

But we must now accept that these methods of control and levels of consumption, which are indeed the product of that aspect of our nature, are not only inconsistent with human dignity (which has been readily evident for some time) but now also an impediment to maintaining a large-scale human presence on the planet in a morally acceptable form.

If our goal is true emancipation, not only of specific groups of people who are exploited by others but of all of creation, this conversation is unavoidable.

A state of profound grief

My friend Jim Koplin, the one who wanted us to learn to leave the planet gracefully, did just that on December 15, 2012, at the age of 79, dying as he had lived, gracefully. Jim was the first man I met who was committed to the feminist critique of pornography and sexual exploitation, and it was through my 24 years of conversation with him that I came to understand these multiple, cascading ecological crises (that’s his phrase, which I have been using ever since I first heard it). More than anyone in my circle of friends and comrades, he was willing to face these realities. 

As a result, he woke up every day in a state of profound grief.

I remember him using that phrase in a conversation a few days after the attacks of September 11, 2001. I had thrown myself immediately into the antiwar movement’s organizing efforts to block the U.S. invasions that would come after that attack.

Jim participated on the edge of that movement, but his own work remained focused on long-term community building, efforts aimed not at specific political ends but at creating networks of people with shared values who could be part of the “saving remnant” that he believed was necessary for a dramatically different future.

Jim was not callous about the loss of life on that day, but he also was not afraid to point out that the casualties from the attack were not all that unusual in a world structured by the domination/subordination dynamic. Jim told me that when he woke up on September 12, he didn’t feel appreciably different than he had the previous day.

“I wake up every morning in a state of profound grief,” he said.

I first assumed that Jim was poking at me to make a point, but as we talked I realized he meant it quite literally. I had always known that Jim felt deeply the pain in the world and the pain of the world, in a way that was hard to articulate. This is what it means to face the world honestly, he was telling me, to not turn away from the horror of it all. He also believed we had an obligation to maintain our sanity and stability so that we can act responsibly on behalf of justice and sustainability.

Jim had fashioned a way of frugal living in progressive communities that worked for him, but he always said there was no template for how to live these values in this world. He believed in embracing the grief, not just because it was the right thing to do but because it made possible a fuller embrace of the joy.

When I think of him, I most remember the hours we spent talking about these ideas, which typically would take us, in a single conversation, from quiet despair to giddy laughter. Others often told us that our ideas about these subjects were depressing, but neither Jim nor I ever were depressed by the subject. It was, for us, a way we loved each other and held onto a love for the world.

Pornography is what the end of the world looks like
In lectures I used to give on the subject, I would sometimes suggest that “pornography is what the end of the world looks like,” not to suggest that pornography was going to lead to the destruction of the world, of course.

Rather, I was suggesting that contemporary pornography deadens consumers’ capacity for empathy for and solidarity with others—the things that make decent human society possible. When these aspects of our humanity are overwhelmed by a self-centered, emotionally detached pleasure-seeking, social justice is impossible to imagine.

 Equally impossible to imagine is ecological sustainability; if that same self-centered, emotionally detached pleasure-seeking leads to support for an unsustainable extractivist economy, our collective ability to emphasize with other living things or act in solidarity with life atrophies.

If these capacities are lost, human societies will become increasingly inhuman, and the planet will not indefinitely sustain those societies.

What can we do to change this trajectory? Rather than search for a pithy ending of my own, something I find more and more difficult to pull off as I get older, I’ll go back to Dostoyevsky, and the section out of which the “love in action” line comes:

“If you do not attain happiness, always remember that you are on the right road, and try not to leave it. Above all, avoid falsehood, every kind of falsehood, especially falseness to yourself. Watch over your own deceitfulness and look into it every hour, every minute. Avoid being scornful, both to others and to yourself. What seems to you bad within you will grow purer from the very fact of your observing it in yourself.

Avoid fear, too, though fear is only the consequence of every sort of falsehood. Never be frightened at your own faintheartedness in attaining love. Don’t be frightened overmuch even at your evil actions.

I am sorry I can say nothing more consoling to you, for love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed and in the sight of all.

Men will even give their lives if only the ordeal does not last long but is soon over, with all looking on and applauding as though on the stage.

But active love is labor and fortitude, and for some people too, perhaps a complete science.”[3]

[1] Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, 3^rd ed. (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1996), p. 106.
[2] Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
[3] Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, edited and with a revised translation by Susan McReynolds Oddo (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2011)p. 55.

[A version of this essay was delivered to the International Conference on Masculinities in New York City on March 6, 2015.]

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Green, Red, Black and Female

SUBHEAD: The future of the human species - if there is to be a future - must be radically green, red, black and female.

By Robert Jensen on 7 November 2013 for Truth-Out.org -
(http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/19804-the-future-must-be-green-red-black-and-female)


Image above: Crowd of people photo by James Cridland / Flickr. From original article.

[Author's note: The human species must acknowledge that any future that allows us to retain our humanity will jettison capitalism, patriarchy and white supremacy - and be based on an ecological worldview.

These remarks were prepared for a private conference on sustainability, where the participants critiqued corporate farming, "big ag," and "big pharma" and industrialized medicine. There was agreement about the need for fundamental change in economic/political/social systems, but no consensus on the appropriate analysis of those systems and their interaction.]

The future of the human species - if there is to be a future - must be radically green, red, black and female.

If we take this seriously - a human future, that is, if we really care about whether there will be a human future - each one of us who claims to care has to be willing to be challenged, radically. How we think, feel, and act - it's all open to critique, and no one gets off easy, because everyone has failed. Individually and collectively, we have failed to create just societies or a sustainable human presence on the planet. That failure may have been inevitable - the human with the big brain may be an evolutionary dead-end - but still it remains our failure. So, let's deal with it, individually and collectively.

We can start by looking honestly at the data about the health of the ecosphere, in the context of what we know about human economic/political/social systems. My conclusion: There is no way to magically solve the fundamental problems that result from too many people consuming too much and producing too much waste, under conditions of unconscionable inequality in wealth and power.

If today, everywhere on the planet, everyone made a commitment to the research and organizing necessary to ramp down the demands that the human project places on ecosystems, we could possibly create a plan for a sustainable human presence on the planet, with a dramatic reduction in consumption and a gradual reduction of population. But when we reflect on our history as a species and the nature of the systems that govern our lives today, the sensible conclusion is that the steps we need to take won't be taken, at least not in the time frame available for meaningful change.

This is not defeatist. This is not cowardly. This is not self-indulgent.

This is reality, and sensible planning should be reality-based.

Let's Not Deny, Avoid, Evade
So, for all the hard-nosed logical folks who regularly complain that so many people in contemporary culture deny, avoid, evade crucial issues; that so many Americans slip past science when that science has bad news; that so many other people won't face tough truths, I have a suggestion: Let's demand of ourselves the rigor we demand of others. Let's not deny, avoid, evade any aspect of reality.

Another way of saying this: The "things-can't-be-that-bad" card that so much of the general public plays to trump difficult data is a dead-end, but so is the "we-have-to-have-hope" card that is used to avoid the logical conclusions of our own analysis.

Hope is for the lazy. Now is not the time for hope. Let's put hope aside and get to the real work of our understanding our historical moment so that our actions are grounded in reality.

My thesis:
Our task today is not to scurry around trying to hold onto the world as we know it, but to focus on how we can hold onto our humanity as we enter a distinctly different era of the human presence on the planet, an era that will challenge our resolve and reserves. Call it collapse or the apocalypse or the Age of Aquarius - whatever the name, it will not look like anything we have known.

It is not just the fall of an empire or a localized plague or the demise of a specific ecosystem. The future will be defined by the continuing drawdown of the ecological capital of the planet well beyond replacement levels and rising levels of toxicity, with the resulting social conflict exacerbated by rapid climate destabilization in ways we cannot predict specifically, but that will be destructive to human well-being, perhaps even to human survival.

The thesis, restated: For most of my life, my elders told me that the moral challenge to my generation was how to feed 5 billion, 6 billion, 7 billion, maybe one day, 10 billion people. Today our moral challenge is how to live on a planet of 4 billion, 3 billion, 2 billion, maybe less. How are we going to understand and experience ourselves as human beings - as moral beings, the kind of creatures we've always claimed to be - in the midst a long-term human die-off for which there is no precedent?

What will it mean to be human when we know that around the world, maybe even down the block, other human beings - creatures exactly the same as us - are dying in large numbers not because of something outside human control, but instead because of things we humans chose to do and keep choosing, keep doing?

If you think this is too extreme, alarmist, hysterical, then tell a different story of the future, one that doesn't depend on magic, one that doesn't include some version of, "We will invent solar panels that give us endless clean energy," or "We will find ways to grow even more food on even less soil with declining natural fertility," or perhaps, "We will invent a perpetual motion machine." If I'm wrong, explain to me where I'm wrong.

But, comes the inevitable rejoinder, even if we can't write that more hopeful story today, can't we trust that such a story will emerge? Is not necessity the mother of invention? Have not humans faced big problems before and found solutions through reason and creativity, in science and technology? Doesn't our success in the past suggest we will overcome problems in the present and future?

That response is understandable, but brings to mind the old joke about the fellow who jumps off a 100-story building and, when asked how things are going 90 floors down, says, "Great so far." Advanced technology based on abundant and cheap supplies of concentrated energy has taken us a long way on a curious ride, but there is no guarantee that advanced technology can solve problems in the future, especially when the most easily accessible sources of that concentrated energy are dwindling and the life-threatening consequences of burning all that fuel are now unavoidable.

Reality-Rejection Stories
Necessity may have been the mother of much invention, but that doesn't mean mother will always be there to protect us. The technological fundamentalist story of transcendence through endless invention is no more helpful than a religious fundamentalist story of transcendence through divine intervention. The two approaches, while very different on the surface, are popular for the same reason: Both allow us to deny, avoid, evade. They are both reality-rejection stories.

Our chances for a decent future depend in part on our ability to develop more sustainable technology that draws on the best of our science and on our ability to hold onto traditional ideas of shared humanity that are at the core of religious traditions. Technology and religion matter. But their fundamentalist versions are impediments to honest assessment and healthy practice.

If one agrees with all this, there is one more common evasive technique - the assertion, as one media researcher recently put it, that "disaster messages can be a turnoff." Since most people don't enjoy pondering these things, it's tempting to argue that we should avoid presenting the questions in stark form, lest some people be turned off. We should not give in to that temptation.

First, these observations and conclusions are a good-faith attempt to deal with reality. To dismiss these issues because people allegedly don't like disaster messages is akin to telling people in the path of a tornado to ignore the weather forecast because disaster messages are a turnoff. Just as we can't predict exactly the path of a tornado, we can't predict exactly the nature of a complex process of collapse. But we can know something is coming our way, and we can best prepare for it.

Second, let's avoid the cheap trick of displacing our intellectual and/or moral weakness onto the so-called "masses," who allegedly can't or won't deal with this. When people tell me, "I agree that systemic collapse is inevitable, but the masses can't handle it," I assume what they really mean is, "I can't handle it." The attempted diversion is cowardly.

When we come to terms with these challenges - when we face up to the fact that the human species now faces problems that likely have no solutions, at least no solutions that allow us to continue living as we have - then we will not be deterred by the resistance of the culture. We will work at accomplishing whatever we can, where we live, in the time available to us. Which brings me to the future: green, red, black and female.

Green:
The human future, if there is to be a future, will be green, meaning the ecological worldview will be central in all discussions of all of human affairs. We will start all conversations about all decisions we make in all arenas of life by recognizing that we are one species in complex ecosystems that make up a single ecosphere. We will abide by the laws of physics, chemistry and biology, as we understand them today, realizing the ecosystems on which we depend are far more complex than we can understand. As a result of the ecological worldview, we will practice real humility in our interventions into those ecosystems.

Red:
The human future, if there is to be a future, will be red. By that, I mean we must be explicitly anticapitalist. An economic system that magnifies human greed and encourages short-term thinking, while pretending there are no physical limits on human consumption, is a death cult. To endorse capitalism is to sign onto a suicide pact. We need not pretend there exists a fully elaborated plan for a replacement system that we can take off the shelf and implement immediately. But the absence of a fully explicated alternative doesn't justify an economic system that has dramatically intensified the human assault on the larger living world. Capitalism is not the system through which we will craft a sustainable future.

Black:
The human future, if there is to be a future, will be black. By that, I mean we have to reject the pathology of white supremacy that has for five centuries shaped the world in which we live, and continues to shape us. Do not confuse this with shallow "multiculturalism" - I am not suggesting that by celebrating "diversity" we will magically create peace and harmony. Instead, we must recognize that the existing distribution of wealth is the product of a profoundly pathological system of racial hierarchy conceived of, and perpetuated by, white Europe and its offshoots (the United States, Australia, South Africa).

Female:
The human future, if there is to be a future, will be female. By that, I mean we have to reject the pathology of patriarchy that has for several thousand years shaped the world in which we live and continues to shape us. Again, this should not be confused with the tepid liberal and "third wave" versions of feminism that the dominant culture acknowledges. Instead, we must embrace a radical feminism that rejects the hierarchy and violence on which male dominance depends.

My claim is that we must deal with all these systems in a holistic, integrated fashion, that we will not successfully reject one hierarchal system without rejecting all hierarchical systems. Holding onto any system that depends on one group claiming dominance over another undermines our ability to shape a decent future. We should be dismantling any system based on dominator logic.


Green:
Our quest to exploit the larger living world is based on an assumption that humans have a right, rooted in either theological or secular beliefs, to dominate based on our sense of being the superior species. Whether we believe the big brain comes from God or through evolution, in cognitive terms we certainly do rank first among species.

But ask yourself, within the human family, is being smart the only thing of value? Do we rank each other only on cognitive ability? We understand that within our species, no one has a right to dominate another simply because of a claim of being smarter. Yet we treat the world as if that status as the smartest species is all that is needed to dominate everything else.

Red:
If we put aside the fantasies about capitalism found in economics textbooks and deal with the real world, we recognize that capitalism is a wealth-concentrating system that allows a small number of people to dominate not only economic, but also political decision-making - which makes a mockery of our alleged commitment to moral principles rooted in solidarity and political principles rooted in democracy. In capitalism, domination is self-justifying - if one can amass wealth, one can dominate without question, trumping all other values.

Black:
Although the worst legal and social practices that defined and maintained white supremacy for centuries have been eliminated, the white world never settled its accounts with the nonwhite world, preferring to hold onto its disproportionate share of the world's wealth that was extracted violently.

As a result of that moral failing, the material reality and ideological power of white supremacy endures, modified in recent decades to grant some privileges to some of the formerly targeted populations so long as the dominator logic of the system is not challenged. We have not dealt with this because to deal with it, honestly, would mean a dramatic redistribution of wealth, internally within societies and globally, and an even more dramatic shift in the way white people see ourselves.

Female:
It is not surprising that the foundational hierarchy of male domination has remained so intractable - to acknowledge the existence of patriarchy is to recognize that patriarchy's domination/subordination dynamic, which decent people claim to reject, is woven deeply into the fabric of all our lives in every sphere, including sexuality. Taking the feminist critique seriously shakes the foundation of our daily lives. Again, the system's ability to allow a limited number of women into elite circles, as long as they accept the dominator logic, does little to undermine patriarchy.

This sketch of a radical politics does not mean that every person must always be involved in organizing on all of these issues, which would be impossible. Nor does this short summary of systems of domination/subordination capture every relevant question. But, for those who claim to be concerned with social justice and ecological sustainability, I would press simple points: Everyone's analysis must take into account all these aspects of our lives; if your analysis does not do that, then your analysis is incomplete; and an incomplete analysis will not be the basis for substantive and meaningful change. Why?

If the story of a human future is not green, there is no future. If the story is not red, it cannot be green. If we can manage to restructure our world along new understandings of ecology and economics, there is a chance we can salvage something. But we will not be able magically to continue business as usual; our longstanding assumption of endlessly expanding bounty must be abandoned as we reconfigure our expectations.

That means we have to start telling a story about living with dramatically less of everything. The green and red story is a story of limits. If we are to hold onto our humanity in an era of contraction, those limits must be accepted by all, with the burdens shared by all. And that story only works if it is black and female. Without a rejection of the dominator logic of ecological exploitation and capitalism, there is no future at all. Without a rejection of the dominator logic of white supremacy and patriarchy, there is no future worth living in.

When someone says, "All that matters now is focusing on ecological sustainability" (asserting the primacy of green), we must make it clear that such sustainability is impossible within capitalism. When someone says, "All that matters now is steady-state economics" (asserting the primacy of red), we must make it clear that such a steady state is morally unacceptable within white supremacy and patriarchy.

When someone says, "Talking about sustainability doesn't mean much for subordinated people suffering today" (asserting the primacy of black and female), we must make it clear that attaining social justice within a rapidly declining system is a death sentence for future generations.

Anytime someone wants to narrow the scope of our inquiry to make it easier to get through the day, we must make it clear that getting through the day isn't the goal. "One day at a time" may be a useful guide for an individual in recovery from addiction, but it is a dead-end for a species on the brink of dramatic and potentially irreversible changes.

Any time someone wants to think long term but narrow the scope of our inquiry to make it easier to tackle a specific problem, we must make it clear that fixing a specific problem won't save us. "One broken system at a time" may be a sensible short-term political strategy in a stable world in which there is time for a long trajectory of change, but it is a dead-end in the unstable world in which we live.

To be clear: None of these observations are an argument for paralysis or passivity. I am not arguing that there is nothing to do, nothing worth doing, nothing that can be done to make things better. I am saying there is nothing that can be done to avoid a serious shift, a scale of change that is captured by the term "collapse." What can be done will be worth doing only if we accept that reality - instead of asking, "How can we save all this?" we should ask, "How can we hold onto our humanity as all of this changes?"

When relieved of the obligation to conjure up magical solutions, life actually gets simpler, and what can be done is easier to apprehend: Learn to live with less. Give up on empty talk about "conscious capitalism." Cross boundaries of race, ethnicity, class and religion that typically keep people apart. Make sure that both public and private spaces are free from men's violence. Recognize that central to whatever projects one undertakes should be the building of local networks and institutions that enhance resilience.

We Have Done This
If all this seems like too much to bear, that's because it is. No matter how flawed anyone of us may be, none of us did anything to deserve this. We shouldn't have to bear all this. But collectively, we humans have done this. We have done this for a long time, thousands of years, ever since the invention of agriculture took us out of right relationship with the larger living world.

The bad news: The effects of our failures are piling up, and it may be that this time around we can't slip the trap, as humans have done so many times in the past.

The good news: We aren't the first humans who looked honestly at reality and stayed true to the work of returning to right relation.

The story we must tell is a prophetic story, and we have a prophetic tradition on which we can draw. Let's take a lesson from Jeremiah from the Hebrew Bible, who was not afraid to speak of the depth of his sorrow: "My grief is beyond healing, my heart is sick within me" (Jer. 8:18). Nor was he afraid to speak of the severity of the failure that brought on the grief: "The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved" (Jer. 8:21)

Along with this prophetic tradition, we also must be willing to draw on the apocalyptic tradition, recognizing that we have strayed too far, that there is no way to return to right relation within the systems in which we live.

The prophetic voice warns the people of our failures within these systems, and the apocalyptic tradition can be understood as a call to abandon any hope for those systems. The stories we have told ourselves about how to be human within those systems must be replaced by stories about how to hold onto our humanity as we search for new systems.

We have to reject stories about last-minute miracles, whether of divine or technological origins. There is nothing to be gained by magical thinking. The new stories require imagination, but an imagination bounded by the ecosphere's physical limits. When we tell stories that lead us to believe that what is unreal can be real, then our stories are delusional, not imaginative. They don't help us understand ourselves and our situation, but instead offer only the illusory comfort of false hope.

One last bit of good news: If your heart is sick and your grief is beyond healing, be thankful. When we feel that grief, it means we have confronted a truth about our fallen world. We are not saved, and we may not be able to save ourselves, but when we face that which is too much to bear, we affirm our humanity. When we face the painful reality that there is no hope, it is in that moment that we earn the right to hope.

• Robert Jensen is a professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center in Austin. He is the author of Arguing for Our Lives: A User's Guide to Constructive Dialogue (City Lights, 2013); and We Are All Apocalyptic Now: On the Responsibilities of Teaching, Preaching, Reporting, Writing, and Speaking Out. His many other books can be found here.
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Feminism Pre and Post Collapse

SUBHEAD: A response to Dmitry Orlov on gender, collapse & communities we can all abide.

By Katherine Acosta on 18 September 2013 for the Smirking Chimp -
(http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/katherine-acosta/51695/on-gender-collapse-communities-we-can-all-abide-part-ii)


Image above: "Skywoman" by Haudenosaunee Oneida member Bruce King. From (http://www.esf.edu/nativepeoples/).

Writing, blogging, and “prepping” for collapse has become a cottage industry over the last ten years.

The proliferation of websites, books, articles, and conferences devoted to analysis and speculation about what will happen, learning to grow and preserve food and other survival skills, and storing up supplies, are based on the well-founded fears that inter-connected systems of finance and fossil-fueled industry are heading for implosion and that the environment will become unstable, less habitable and less able to sustain the billions straining the earth’s carrying capacity.

 At the heart of all this activity is the concern: How will we be able to protect and sustain our families and others we love in drastically altered conditions?

Dmitry Orlov, a prominent writer on collapse, now weighs in with a preliminary analysis of “communities that abide”. Orlov has written several books on collapse, including Reinventing Collapse, which compares the collapse of the former Soviet Union with the impending collapse of the United States, and The Five Stages of Collapse.

Turning now to writing about small, self-sufficient societies, he aims to identify some commonalities, or a set of “best practices,” that may be adapted for small-scale post-collapse communities. His goal, he wrote on his blog,

is to give individuals, families and small groups of people (of modest means) viable options for the future that they otherwise wouldn't know existed—options which they will be able to exercise separately from what remains of American society. And the nature of these options will be dictated in large measure by the nature of the conditions that will prevail in as little as a couple of decades.

In late May, he gave a talk on his work at the Age of Limits conference and in subsequent months elaborated on his ideas in a series of posts on his blog. The talk didn’t quite goes as planned, however, provoking what he later described on his blog as a “shit storm” where “feminist rhetoric flew fast and furious” in the Q & A following his presentation.

It seems that all his examples of “communities that abide” were patriarchal and some women in the audience questioned his work. In Part I of this two-part essay, I reviewed the incident and his post-conference response to it. In this second part of my essay, I examine the content of his work on “communities that abide” and provide an alternative model.

Over the course of six posts published on his blog in the weeks following the Age of Limits conference (links below), Orlov discusses three examples of “communities that abide;” the Dukhobor of Canada, the Roma (sometimes called Gypsies), and the Hutterites. (I could not find a transcript or video of his presentation at the conference.)

The essays are rambling and muddled, making it unclear exactly what the criteria were for selecting communities to include in his study and which of the “commonalities” he observed among these communities emerged from his analysis.

One explicit, though non-specific, criterion is endurance – communities that “have been around for awhile – a century at least.” Self-sufficiency – meaning that the society provides for all its members’ needs like housing, nutrition, education, and so on - also appears to be a criterion for inclusion in the study.

Less clear is whether two organizing principles Orlov identifies as important for success, “communist organization of production and communist organization of consumption,” were criteria for inclusion in his study or emerged from the data after he selected his study groups.

Most confusing of all, in Part II Orlov presents a list of characteristics that “winners in the game of survival” are likely to have based on their “commonalities.” How exactly a “commonality” is distinguished from an item on this list, and whether this list is a prediction of what Orlov expects to find, or has identified based on his study group, is unclear.

The list describes communities that are autonomous, separatist, based on a strong ideology which they refuse to question or debate, speak their own languages or dialects, are distrustful of outsiders, nomadic, pacifist, “anarchic in their patterns of self-governance – neither patriarchal nor matriarchal,” and have high birth rates and communist “patterns of production and consumption.”

Reading Orlov, it becomes clear that that his primary interests are collective ownership and management of resources and anarchic forms of social organization. So it’s worth stating here that, broadly speaking, anarchism is characterized by lack of a ruler or a ruling hierarchy, by direct democracy, and by mutual aid. This latter idea was developed by the 19th century Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin, who argued that mutual aid, rather than competition, was the key to evolutionary advancement of a species.

The most striking example of mutual aid Orlov describes involves the Dukhobor of Canada. Orlov reports that this pacifist group fled “Russia for the US, then the US for Canada, to avoid conscription.” (He doesn’t say when this happened, but a quick fact check reveals that they arrived in Canada in 1899, and that their pacifism stemmed from their religious beliefs.)

Orlov quotes from Peter Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid to describe how, having arrived penniless and therefore unable to buy draft animals, “their women would hitch up to the plough 20 or 30 at a time, while the middle-aged men worked on the railroad, giving up their earnings to the commune… [A]fter seven or eight years all 6000 or 7000 Dukhobors achieved a level of well-being.”

Although families lived in individual cabins, their land and buildings were held in common. Orlov provides no information about their internal decision-making processes or self-government, but it is hard to imagine that women capable of pulling a plow – and making that level of economic contribution to the group - didn’t manage to have their voices heard.

Contemporary Dukhobor no longer live and work communally and their population is aging. Fact-checking independent of Orlov indicates that in 2001, 28% of Dukhobors were over 65, compared with 12% of the entire population of Canada.

The second group considered by Orlov in his series on “Communities That Abide” is the Roma. This group also engages in collective labor and property ownership. The Roma, he writes:

will contract to do work as work groups (called kumpania) but never as individuals, and all the earnings are given to the Rom baro who is the self-appointed leader with the responsibility for distributing these earnings according to merit and need. This system is extended to every other type of good that is taken in from the outside.

They must have some private property, however, because Orlov also states that “the Roma all unconditionally pledge a large part of their private property to the common cause, in order to support an extensive system of mutual self-help.” Orlov doesn’t give specific information about the kinds of property that are held in common or those that individuals or families are allowed to hold privately.

Nevertheless, the Roma seek to avoid accumulating wealth and thus the “temptation to re-privatize,” according to Orlov. One way is by “burn[ing] through fantastic sums of money by throwing lavish wedding feasts that last three days.”

The Roma are a diverse people with groups in many countries throughout the world, so it is difficult to make generalizations about them. Some adopt the religion of the countries in which they live, some are no longer nomadic, some Romani groups arrange marriages and others allow young people to choose their mates.

They are generally considered to be a patriarchal culture. Virginity prior to marriage is prized in girls and bride-kidnapping to avoid paying a bride price has been reported among Romani in several countries. Though they appear to practice a degree of collectivism and mutual aid, Orlov presents no information about their decision-making processes.

The third group, and the one Orlov defines as a “success,” are the Hutterites. This group is a branch of the Anabaptists who fled religious persecution in Europe and eventually settled in Canada and the United States. Again, Orlov provides no dates, but apparently they arrived in North America between 1874 and 1879. According to Orlov, the Hutterites practice the doctrine of “everything in common.”

They live in communal houses where each family has a separate room or apartment, but children over a certain age go and live in the Kinderhaus. They take their meals together in a separate communal kitchen and dining hall.

Orlov praises their high fertility, but in fact, their birth rates have been declining for at least half a century. In 1954 they averaged about 10 children per family; by 2010 this had dropped to fewer than five.

Orlov describes the Hutterites as “entirely anarchic” because, while some leaders are elected, “all lines of authority really proceed from the full meeting of the commune, which tends to rule by consensus.” At the same time, he admits that:

[T]heir notion of gender roles is strictly 16th century. The women have no voice (except in prevailing on their husbands) and no opportunity to compete with men. They take their meals at a separate table from the men (the children have a table of their own). It's tempting for some to call the Hutterites patriarchal, except that they have no archon (Greek for “ruler”) and exhibit no hierarchy. Instead, there is gender dimorphism, which exists in many species, human species included.

This is truly pretzel-bending logic. If the women have no say, and the men elect leaders and make other decisions among themselves, then is not one sex ruled over by the other? Here Orlov parts ways with the 19th century Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin who saw equal rights for women and men as central to the anarchist project. Emma Goldman, another 19th century Russian anarchist – and feminist - would certainly have derided Orlov’s claim that Hutterite governance is “anarchic.”

Orlov’s work thus far on “communities that abide” suffers from severe limitations. His selection of communities to study is unsystematic. Aside from endurance and self-sufficiency, he fails to distinguish which “commonalities” he discusses were criteria for inclusion in the study and which emerged as a result of his analysis.

He provides insufficient detail about the internal workings of these communities to enable identification of “best practices.” In particular, he fails to make his case that the examples he presents are “anarchic in… self governance – neither patriarchal nor matriarchal.”

He describes decision-making processes for only one of his three examples, and that one he admits excludes women. Clearly, Orlov needs to go back to the drawing board on this one.

Orlov insists that his aim in studying “communities that abide” is not to advocate any particular type of social organization. He’s merely a messenger, describing ones that;

are uniquely successful in terms of their longevity and outcomes… Please draw your own conclusions. You can run off and join them or damn them all to hell. But please leave me out of it.

But are Orlov’s examples the best that can be found among a dearth of “communities that abide” without large bureaucratic governments and systems, provide for all their members’ needs, and survive hard times? Is Orlov correct in his assertions that such communities “tend to be conservative” with regard to gender relations and that communities based on progressive principles usually do not “outlast the generation of their founders?”

The answer is an unqualified “no.” There are indeed matrilineal societies that have “abided” for centuries, fed, housed, nurtured, and protected their members through good times and bad – and that allowed all members, women and men, a say in decision-making for their communities. They are also, as Orlov wrote of his examples, found right here in North America.

Many of the largest Indian tribes in what is now the United States, including the Navaho, the Cherokee, and the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), are matrilineal societies. (The Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee include the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora nations.)

Recall that an audience member asked Orlov at his talk whether he could find examples of matrilineal societies and Orlov responded that matriarchal societies were rare; they were outliers. It is true that there is no strong evidence in the historical record of matriarchal societies – the inverse of patriarchy – where women rule over men.

But there are many examples of matrilineal societies. Strictly speaking, matrilineal means that lineage is traced through the mother rather than the father. However, many matrilineal societies are characterized by shared power arrangements among women and men. This is true of the Navajo, the Cherokee, and the Haudenosaunee.

Among the Haudenosaunee, women collectively owned and farmed the land. The men cleared new fields and were hunters and warriors. The men also served as chiefs but the clan mothers nominated the chiefs and could remove a bad one.

A contemporary Onondaga clan mother told researcher Sally Roesch Wagner that the “unbroken custom” for nominating chiefs to represent their clans in the Grand Council excludes men who have committed murder or theft, or who have sexually assaulted a woman.

Haudenosaunee means “people of the longhouses.” Extended family groups lived in these longhouses, with young couples joining one of their mothers’ households after marriage.(1) Children were cared for by the extended family group, with young boys trained by their uncles to hunt and fight.

Among the Seneca (the largest of the Six Nations), the women distributed the communally-owned land according to household size and each year elected a woman to organize the work. According to Jensen:

Sick and injured members of these mutual aid societies had a right to assistance in planting and harvesting; and after hoeing the owner of each parcel of land would provide a feast for all the women workers. (2)

Mary Jemisen, an 18th century Irish woman who was captured by the Seneca and lived with them for decades, reported that the work of Seneca women “was less onerous than that of White women… [T]hey had no drivers or overseers and worked in the fields as leisurely as they wished with their children beside them.”(3)

Seneca and other Haudenosaunee women were free to divorce husbands who were absent too long or failed to do their share of providing for the family. A former Adjutant General for Massachusetts, Henry Dearborn, noted in his journal (1904) that Seneca women enjoyed “perfect equality,” with their husbands. They influenced and advised their men and were well-treated in return. Dearborn wrote, “She lives with him from love for she can obtain her own means of support better than he can.”(4)

Traditional Haudenosaunee exhibit many of the “commonalities” Orlov argues are characteristic of “communities that abide.” They collectively owned and managed the resources of the group and collectively organized production.

They had systems of mutual aid such as the obligation to help the sick and injured to work their parcels of land. They are more genuinely anarchic in social organization than any of the groups Orlov describes because women as well as men participate in decision-making processes for the community.

Unlike the groups Orlov describes, the Haudenosaunee are not pacifist; they fiercely defended their land and customs. However, they value nonviolence within their communities – unlike some of the groups Orlov mentioned in his Age of Limits talk. (See Part I here.) Men who have sexually abused women are ineligible to serve as chiefs and violence against women generally is taboo.

Jesuit visitors in the 17th century reported that “Seneca women showed extraordinary affection for their children… and children had great respect for their parents.”(5)

The superior status of Haudenosaunee women relative to their American counterparts was a major source of inspiration for 19th century feminists”. Recall that in the 19th century, American women could not vote and married women were “legally dead,” meaning they could not sign contracts and had no right to own property or to their own earnings. It was legal for men to beat their wives and women who attempted to leave could be brought back by the police. Divorce was not an option.

Feminist historian Sally Roesch Wagner spent 20 years studying the work of early women’s rights activists, including Lucretia Mott, Matilda Joslyn Gage, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

All three had personal experience with the Haudenosaunee that influenced their activism. Mott, after spending a month in 1848 observing Seneca women participate in decision-making as the Seneca reorganized their governance, had her;

feminist vision fired by that experience… [She] traveled that July from the Seneca nation to nearby Seneca Falls, where she and [Elizabeth Cady] Stanton held the world’s first women’s rights convention.

Gage, who published a series of articles in 1875 about the Haudenosaunee in the New York Evening Post, including the observation that “division of power between the sexes in its Indian republic was nearly equal,” had an even more dramatic experience:

Shortly after Matilda Joslyn Gage was arrested in 1893 at her home in New York for the "crime" of trying to vote in a school board election, she was adopted into the Wolf clan of the Mohawk nation and given the name Karonienhawi (Sky Carrier). In the Mohawk nation, women alone had the authority to nominate the chief, after counseling with all the people of the clan.

Stanton, who studied the law with her father, was impressed with the power of Haudenosaunee women to terminate bad marriages.

"No matter how many children or whatever goods he might have in the house," Stanton informed the National Council of Women convention in 1891, the "luckless husband or lover who was too shiftless to do his share of the providing" in an Iroquois marriage "might at any time be ordered to pick up his blanket and budge; and after such an order it would not be healthful for him to attempt to disobey."

Stanton, who was born in 1815, refused to promise to obey her husband in her marriage vows, bore seven children, the youngest when she was 44 years old, and lived to the ripe old age of 86. "According to Wagner:

When called a “savage”… for practicing natural childbirth, Stanton rebutted her critics by mocking their use of the word, pointing out that Indian women "do not suffer" giving birth -- thus it was absurd to suppose "that only enlightened Christian women are cursed" by painful, difficult childbirth.

Some prominent Haudenosaunee men supported the cause of the American feminists and rebuked American men for their treatment of women. Wagner reports that:

[Ethnographer Alice] Fletcher… quoted an Indian man who reproached white men: "Your laws show how little your men care for their women. The wife is nothing of herself." He was not alone in chastising white men for their domination of women.

A Tuscarora chief, Elia Johnson, writing about the absence of rape among Iroquois men in his popular 1881 book, Legends, Traditions and Laws, of the Iroquois, or Six Nations... commented wryly that European men had held the same respect for women "until they became civilized".

A Cayuga chief, Dr. Peter Wilson, addressing the New York Historical Society in 1866, encouraged white men to use the occasion of Southern reconstruction to establish universal suffrage, "even of the women, as in his nation."

There is a pernicious thread in the discourse on collapse that goes something like this: The gains American women made in the 20th century were “frills” made possible by industrial society. Once TSHTF (The Shit Hits the Fan), men and women will revert to their pre-industrial roles and statuses.

Women will be consumed with child-bearing and rearing and household tasks and will therefore have little time for anything else. The chaos and lawlessness that is expected to result from collapse means women will also need male protection from rape and violence.

The implication is that, in exchange for protection, women will naturally submit to some degree of male authority – or what a feminist wit once called, the “protection racket.” These are merely the facts, we are told, and women who object are just not being rational. Those who don’t get with the program may be left behind when times get tough. Per Orlov:

It will be a thorough regression to baseline, which will be hard on people who are used to the idea of endless progress… Many of them will no doubt insist on making a stand for their hard-won social victories, and this, in turn, will make them a poor choice as crew to take along on this journey.

But Orlov is not the first or only writer on collapse to express this point-of-view. James Kunstler has been propagating these ideas for years, both in his nonfiction books, such as The Long Emergency (2005), and in his novels. In the former he wrote that

Reestablished traditional divisions of labor may undo many of the putative victories of the feminist revolution. In the context of new circumstances, these altered relations will come to seem normal and inevitable (p304).

In 2010, at a conference in Colorado, Kunstler apparently came unglued when critiques of his portrayals of women in his novels were read. Several attendees reported his response to Sharon Astyk, one of his literary critics: 

“Fuck those motherfuckers!” When he was finally at the podium he began with, “I’m going to address the woman thing right up front. I’m appalled that educated, intelligent women of the boomer generation are so incapable of imagining a world where a completely different economic status has evaporated the gains of women. You need to get over it.”

 
In July of this year, he returned to this theme in an essay entitled “Reality Does Not Have An Ideology," where he again addressed criticism of his novels:

High and low, far and wide, women denounced my book in formal reviews and casual emails…. It seemed self-evident to me that a lot of this achievement [of feminism] was provisional, depending on larger macro historical trends. That idea alone was greeted… by the sharpest opprobrium, since it was assumed that the political victories of recent decades have become permanent installations of the human condition. I recognize that, as a principle of politics, privileges and rights attained are rarely given up without a fight. But I wondered at the failure of imagination I was witnessing, especially among educated women readers.

The real “failure of imagination” is among people like Orlov and Kunstler who cannot envision post-collapse gender relations different from those derived from Euro-American culture culminating in the 19th century. It also reveals ignorance of history and cultures different from one’s own. The subordination of women characteristic of pre-industrial America is neither natural nor inevitable as the Haudenosaunee example has shown.

Pre-industrial Haudenosaunee women enjoyed status on a par with the men of their culture. They (collectively) owned their means of subsistence and had a powerful role in the governance of their community. Strong cultural sanctions, rather than submission to male authority, protected them against rape and violence.

Certainly, gender roles among the Haudenosaunee were strictly defined. A little girl who wanted to be a warrior or a boy who wanted to farm was unlikely to get their wishes. But one gender was not assigned a lower status relative to the other.

Though gender roles may come to be seen as “natural” they are always to some degree socially constructed – that is, determined by the society itself. To 18th century Americans, it was “unnatural” for Haudenosaunee women to farm and their men to “‘play’ with bows and arrows.”(6)

After conquest, missionaries moved in on the Haudenosaunee, determined to force them into their “proper” gender roles. For women, that meant spinning and sewing; for men, farming like American men. One Quaker woman spent most of her life, half a century, at this task, but never made much headway.(7)

In October 2012, I wrote a warmly favorable piece in response to Orlov’s article “In Praise of Anarchy.” I was inspired by the idea that, although political and economic collapse will produce pain and disruption for many, it also presents an opportunity to build something better. I wrote:

The decline of industrial society and impending collapse of global capitalism is, and will continue to, produce social dislocation and misery, but this rupture with the past also creates the space to build something new; perhaps something more equitable? More freeing? More caring? After all, industrial society produced its own forms of misery: boredom, conformity, stifling of creativity, and alienation to name a few.

So Orlov’s reactionary turn with his patriarchal examples of “best practices” and his ferocious attack on the women who dared to question him is deeply troubling. It betrays the egalitarian ideals of anarchism, a philosophy he claimed to praise.

But Orlov’s views are just that; his opinions. He has not made his case and his vision is not inevitable, nor even probable, in my view. Those of us who can envision something better, most women and men, will work to build it. As for Orlov, and his latest work on “communities that abide,” I wonder, have we reached peak kollapsnik?

Links to Orlov’s articles on Communities that Abide:Communities that Abide--Preamble
(Preamble contains Orlov’s rant against his critics)
Communities that Abide--Part II
Communities that Abide –Part III
Communities that Abide- Part IV

What Comes First?
1)Jensen, Joan M. “Native American
Women and Agriculture: A Seneca
Case Study.” Pp 70-84 in
Unequal Sisters: A Multi-
Cultural Reader in US Women’s
History. Second edition.
New York: Routledge, 1994.
2)Ibid, p72.
3)Ibid.
4)Ibid, p76.
5)Ibid, p71.
6)Ibid, p74.
7)Ibid, p80.

• Katherine M Acosta is a freelance writer currently based in Madison, Wisconsin. She may be contacted at kacosta at undisciplinedphd dot com.

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