Capitalism and Gender (and Ukraine)

I'm sure I've seen books with this title in the library, but just a simple point here.

Sex is biological, gender is social. Just for simplicity cos they are in some way connected we can use gender loosely for both.

Now in Socialism there are men and women. But the essence of socialism is equality so men and women are equal. They have equal access to resources and tools needed for work and an equal stake in society. Men and women are different, and because of that and indeed through that difference, they can be equal. That is a good example of dialectics actually. A scale with only one side cannot balance and so can never be equal. We need two genders for them to be equal.

In the West right now this is seen as a conservative, dogmatic, static, fascist, totalitarian, divisive, oppressive structure. But actually it is not. Those scales are flat. "Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit" is story about a lesbian girl finding her feet and the title points out that freedom lies in the possibility of being different. For equality to exist there must be difference. But, and this is the fear, difference can be exploited to create barriers, prejudice and conflict.

Liberal Democratic Capitalism has a different idea. At root we are all the same. Every single human being has a human seed of individuality within them from which comes their vote, their freedom to chose and their right to be treated as a human being. That seed is identical in all human beings. There is no quality of it that can be used to distinguish people and act as the seed of prejudice: all humans are the same. We sit as individuals on the scale before all judgement and before any possible inequality.

Such a view separates our "seed" from all other things including our body. It means we do not actually have a gender or sex but rather this is something we can chose. And its the fundamental lack of gender in the conception of freemarket capitalism that leads perhaps to the current debates of which J.K.Rowling most famously got embroiled. Are we free to chose everything? Well as things stand in Western philosophy because we sit as Green Spheres on the axis of all the world's scales we can chose literally anything. How else, does the West argue, could any other thing be called freedom?

And this then ironically is the scale that balances these two world views right now:

On the one hand the conservative world where people are different, but through that difference we see the need for equality and compassion. And the other hand where all people are at root the same free agents with equal right.

Some will see Ukraine as on this pivot also. The Old World of patriarchal fixed societies in Russia and Belarus versus the New World of free dynamic people in the West.

The problem though is that like much that salesmen sell the sales pitch makes the product seem essential, but after a few weeks we realise we don't really need it after all. If the US was really selling something that important don't we think that mankind may have found it already?

I've discussed this so much in the blog probably don't need go again too much. Yes we did find it, but in the West at least it got lost.

That scale of scales is ridiculous. And we're thrown back to Descartes and even Plato. How does mind and body relate? How does individual and gender related? Individual vs society? How do all these apparent different things go together?

And I'm not saying I get all the awesome depth and power of this in anyway. Its a totem for the subtle way that solves this problem, a way that we walk more or less well every day of our lives.

Jim Morrison sings "We are thrown into this world" but at the same time we must add "nothing is thrown." If we look back on our lives we have a messy mass of memories of stuff coming into and out of them. Parents, family, friends, ideas, experiences, beliefs, attitudes. In there will be sex in some way or another, what we like and don't like and how other people behave also. A true mess. And from all that we condense some kind of understanding.

Now contemporary thinking is an equal mess. What is it saying? Is it saying that there is nothing fixed out there, its all customisable and we chose on a sliding scale/scales of grey? Or is it saying that there are fixed options in the catalogue, but we are free to chose which option. Or is it saying that things just are what they are, accept them? Well fact is no one is really saying, or allowed to say anything.

Well lets clear up that one thing. Things can be different, without being apart. The hours of twilight don't last from mid-day to mid-night. We have definite day and night, and then some transition period in between. There is nothing to be afraid of here. Oranges are different from Apples, that is how we have many types of fruit. "Grey" is a load of nonsense. What there is is "Yin-Yang" which is a complexly and hierarchically interwoven opposition of black vs white. I often argue that Jews don't exist just to remove the whole hyped up hysteria surrounding what is just a regular ethnoreligious distinction. I mean does the Indoeuropean Aryan really exist? But once the hysteria has abated then obviously we have actually cultural groups. The world is not a pluralistic sea of atoms who each person having their own religion. Some belong to multiple groups for example some people see themselves as both Jewish and Black but the groups that people get meaning from are not grey: they are distinct entities.

But the fear is that someone who identifies with White will come into conflict with someone who identifies with Black. And the solution is to make everyone "grey." Nonsense. The point is that a Black and a White recognise they both have a skin colour, and having a skin colour means it must be one way or another and so there will be people who are different. This is the essence of equality and freedom.

Skin colour looks like a good example of "grey" in fact. No two people have the same skin colour. But would I form an identity of 1 person, namely myself, who has skin colour coded #356.42.1154 based on the distribution and range of tones that I have? No the Black/White distinction is not really about skin colour its an identity and belongs me to a group. That kind of thing has nothing to do with "grey."

So the same is true with gender. No need for Grey. Whether there is grey I will leave open, but no need for it. The world can be perfectly well constructed with existing identities. Without issue.

And so what is the US bringing to Ukraine that was not there before? The Ukrainians will find out. I know some Western NGO workers in Ukraine. The country was a free and open testbed for their new social ideas. But does Ukraine need all this? It had the seeds for its future already within it. The West cannot bring anything that Ukraine didn't already have. That is the hypothesis. Lets see.