Beyond Marx and Freud
Summaries of Beyond Marx and Freud
by *paragraph
- Culture requires need to heal
- Commonsense is an ideological construct imposed as reality, which acts like poison.
The physical and psychical are not separate.
- mystique of public/private.
Hidden cost to me as public good.
Escaping this protective enforcement system is seen as bad.
- Sharing new reality increases trust in it thus ability to act without patterns of oppressive, exploitative system.
Need options that empower to avoid being merely reactive. To release creative force need life-sustaining alternatives, help of others, in community
- As my standpoint changes, what I see changes; then what is possible changes.
How we see effects what is seen
- What we have in common is hidden by taboos of culture to divide us.
These taboos structure the social/sexual system.
- Social behavior appears biological in closed system.
Validated by divine or biological destiny.
- ”Male/female” and “dyke/faggot” are social constructs.
Need to examine historical development of using biology/nature to make social attributes “inherent.”
Need to analyze historical stages and social functions of these claims.
- What looks like a state of being is a form of social organization requiring collusion of entire society.
Functions of ideal/material constructs of race, sex, class are interrelated.
Power exists as relation among people.
Racism and sexism sustain social norms; prostitution sustains the institution of marriage; homosexuality and incest sustain the institution of heterosexual marriage and family.
Pressure to conform reveals people don’t just obey.
- Denial runs the system.
We don’t know what would happen if heterosexuality were not compulsory.
- Homosexuality acts like a hidden motor which drives the culture.
- Compulsory heterosexuality underlies religion, political, economic theories and systems sustaining heterosexual marriage.
Need not renounce behaviors relegated to “opposite sex.”
- Unequal control turns mutual need into basis of exploitation and persuasion.
Male control as female protection.
- ”Battle of the sexes” breeds civil war, rape as domestic and foreign policy, whose activities have functions and can be resisted.
- This destructive system is raping the earth and its peoples.
The rational, white, conquering is normative.
As women we must resist the Protection Racket.
- Loving women is revolutionary.
Vs Freud et al putting men at the center, need to put women at the center.
First woman everyone (not just males) loves is the mother.
Mother is at center of life-sustaining system at present contained by imperialist, racist structures.
- Female incest unthinkable (while Freud posits female/male incest as basis of human culture and civilization).
- Repression of female is training for subservience.
- Needs of family system scorched into us.
- Powerless mothers act powerfully over children.
- Social relations are learned sexual power system labeled private, and non-kin male-dominated structures that reinforce it are labeled “public.”
Capitalism is the system of appropriations at the expense of human needs and life-sustaining systems of nurturance, socially necessary work for the entire society.
The nature of power and relations of power are obscured. Stealing, exploiting and/or benefitting is considered the prerogative of men in the public sphere. But these benefits are appropriated and enjoyed by private individuals (hidden in this public domain) while the socially necessary labor of reproducing and sustaining the human race done by women is called private and not worthy of payment. Thus public hides function of private and private hides function of public: “men’s work” dominates “women’s” work.
- Capitalism both encourages and destroys social forms of gender organization.
- People (not just men) “marry” their mothers.
Maybe lesbians too enact an incest taboo that Freud attributed only to males.
- Lesbianism is not irrelevant to social change.
We are beginning to release the power of oppression—the hidden and dark becoming strong and beautiful.
