Gender And The Fight Against Revanchism

Michael Weiss has delivered the best single take-down of Assange, that criminal fraudster, serial data-grifter and appalling human being, whose sojourn in the Ecuadorian embassy was just one long dodge to avoid appearing in court on charges of sexual assault (the Reporters Committee has the details of Assange's US indictment, which may or may not come to pass -- the short version is, he's no journalist, he's just plain scum).

It is striking how all of the post-2014 revanchisms, from the authoritarian kleptocracy burning down my own country, the United States, to the thugocracies looting Brazil, Hungary, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, all the way to bags of sleaze like Assange, all share one characteristic: they all hate women.

This is no accident. I'd argue misogyny is to contemporary revanchism what anti-Semitism was to the 1930s Fascisms -- the wholly fictitious Other blamed for the dysfunction and misery of a broken economy, rather than the plutocrats who broke the economy in the first place. 

While the revanchisms are terrifying, their failure to gain even the slightest traction among young people all across the world speaks volumes about the depth and scope of today's nascent anti-capitalist resistance. In fact, women such as Sarah Kendzior, AOC and Greta Thunberg have stepped up to lead when we Big Men of the 20th Century Left -- I'm old enough to merit a heaping dose of self-criticism here -- did nothing but deliver tiresome four-hour talks about obscure plenums and make ghastly attempts to pretend some horrible postcolonial despotisms were somehow not the genocidal state capitalisms they indeed were from the very beginning. 

The age of the Big Men is over. And now we know that Karl Marx was more right than he could ever know, because we either end capitalism and create a peaceful, fair, and egalitarian world-commons, or else we go extinct. 

I will do what I can to write the critical analyses and histories the world needs to point itself in the direction of Green Life instead of Carbon Death: star-charts to navigate the storm-tossed seas of Exponential World.