The personal is political. The private isn’t
As Carol Hanisch pointed out in her eponymous 1970 essay, the personal is political. Many of not most or all of the issues and problems women face within the personal sphere are the direct result of the oppressiveness of gendered class relations, which have historically subjugated women as a gender to the patriarchal morés of male-dominant capitalism. The personal sphere of the home and family life are as much a political issue as the politics of class per se. Coming to terms with this fact is crucial insofar as traditional class politics that treat the gendered class relations associated with this area of life reflect a reductionist mentality insofar as they refuse to acknowledge or address the particular problems women faced as a result of their gendered experiences of class and work. There can be no meaningful class solidarity while women are invisible as a gender.
As Hanisch pointed out in evidencing this fact, the issues women face as individuals within a system of gendered class exploitation and control play out for them as individuals at the personal level—from sex and relationships to power dynamics within the home and family, where the performative culture of patriarchy assigns them roles as brood mares for capital and care slaves. Patriarchy embeds itself so deeply into social relations as to constitute the historically specific conditions it alleges are completely authentic and natural in am a priori, circular and generally self-serving manner; in adopting a naturalistic fallacy by associating itself with ‘nature’ (as opposed to being the historically specific social construct that it is), patriarchal ideology and cultural morés shift blame to the victims by invoking the lie that only someone who is unbalanced can be upset about something which is totally natural.
Since there can be no meaningful class solidarity while women are invisible as a gender, coming to terms with these facts is a sine qua non not only of class solidarity, but of social solidarity as well. The failure of social movements to acknowledge the role of gender hierarchies and patriarchy in perpetuating the general insanity and injustice of the world we live in historically appears to have gone no small way towards contributing to its ineffectualness—if not for valuing the contributions of women generally, and making room for their strength and prowess to make itself felt, then for failing to appreciate the role that the subordination of women plays in perpetuating social and class hierarchies generally.
By the same token, class reductionism does not justify identity politics reductionism either. If class reductionism commits an error of reasoning in ignoring gender as it relates to class, so too does identity reductionism commit a similar error in ignoring class as it relates to gender. The problem with the latter fallacy in ignoring the fact of class-based social relations is that it attempts to deals with the reality of their consequences by treating them as an embodied person or thing—a process we call reification. This error of reasoning results in the reification of the hierarchical social relations that produce patriarchy (which in turn reinforce and reproduce capitalist hierarchy) into a problem of gender categories or even individuals, which in turn leads to the vulgarisation of ‘the personal is political’ in the mentality that ‘the private is political.’
With gender politics separated from class politics under this identity reductionism, the problem of patriarchal social relations becomes a problem of ‘men’ or ‘the last man I butted heads with’. The same mentality is evident in the reification of racism as a problem of ‘the last white person I butted heads with’ rather than white supremacy, ‘the last straight person I butted heads with’ rather than ‘homophobia, ‘smug, sheltered, judgmental preppie fuckheads from the suburbs’ rather than ‘ableism,’ and so on. Divorced from social and class context, the issue of social hierarchy and its discontents then becomes an issue of effecting fixes where the legitimacy of the underlying liberal capitalist status quo is a prior assumption; the reification of unjust and irrational social hierarchies into one in of ‘the last person I butted heads with’ suits these purposes insofar as it reflects a ‘just world hypothesis’ where social justice is served by the reified object of derision ‘getting what they deserve.’
In light of the ongoing horrors of patriarchy in particular—epidemics of domestic violence, ongoing deadly violence against women, the widespread prevalence of misogynistic attitudes—it would not appear that the reduction of issues surrounding social hierarchies to single-issue frames, divorced from wider class context and class analysis, has been particularly effective. Indeed, the apparent ‘just world hypothesis’ underlying the approach to dealing with these issues by making ‘the last person I tangled with’ the central focus of identity reductionism strikes a particularly discordant note. Either the world is an inferno of class and patriarchal injustice and oppression, as it certainly seems to be, or it’s a just one where the people I tangle with deserve what’s coming to them. We can’t have it both ways, causality just does not work like that. Maybe the mentality that we can have it both ways says something about how inured by subjective confirmation bias, how self-serving and how incoherent identity reductionist politics divorced from class politics and class analysis actually are.
The fact that the personal is political does not mean that the private is political. The nature of the political is everyone’s business as members of society; the nature of the private is no one’s business apart from those involved. Private relationships can be healthy or toxic, constructive or destructive, but as long as they exist, private relationships are a question of how two people relate to each other. If interpersonal relationships nurture trust, respect, care, compassion and concern, they continue. If one or both parties abuses or neglects the bonds of trust, they end. Whether interpersonal succeed or fail is a question of the choices we make; the nature of these choices characterises the process of negotiating trust and respect within them—again this is the sole business of those involved, and they succeed or fail because those involve hold up their own ends and meet each other halfway, or don’t.
When they don’t, and the private interpersonal relationship becomes ‘the last person I butted heads with,’ this is in no sense a political issue—unless of course we decide to make it one as a way of avoiding not holding up our end within interpersonal relationships. Politicising their breakdown does certainly appear to be a good way of avoiding issues that go unresolved between the persons concerned and rallying those who happen to share confirmation biases where the ‘just world hypothesis’ is concerned to the side of the person looking to avoid having to meet someone else halfway or account for things like abandonment and betrayal are concerned—and worse. Appeals to the ‘just world hypothesis’ can be particularly effective when we’re working from the basic assumption that the world is a just place because we haven’t factored in intersectional class issues into our liberal capitalist social justice politics.
The confirmation bias associated with the capitalist ideological prejudice that the onus is on opponents of capitalist hierarchy to justify their opposition—fundamentally antidemocratic insofar as it reverses the burden of proof on power to justify itself to the individual—is particularly effective on this count. The antidemocratic reversal of the burden of proof on which liberal capitalism depends gives rise to the logic of the ‘false dilemma’, or ‘those who aren’t for me are against me.’ Just as the reification of hierarchical social relations gives rise to a conflation of object and relation, so does the false dilemma conflate criticism and attack; in the hands of liberal capitalists, this turns into the logic of ‘questioning my judgement gives aid to the terrorists.’ In the hands of identity reductionist liberal capitalists, it turns into the logic of ‘questioning my judgement gives aid to the misogynists.’ Within this logic, in both cases the just-world hypothesis assumes the rationality and political correctness of the speaker as a given.
Insofar as the reification of hierarchical social relations into ‘the last person I butted heads with’ gives rise to social dynamics with roots in confirmation bias and reversal of the burden of proof, this tends to beg the question as to the function of identity reductionist politics as such—whether they do function in the final analysis to address the systemic role of social hierarchies in institutionalising and perpetuating injustice and oppression, or whether they function more to be seen to care about addressing such issues. In light of the systemic function of social hierarchies in helping to buttress class hierarchies, it is impossible to address root causes; we might as well dip our heads in a bucket of water because our asses are on fire. Where the politics of identity reductionism are concerned, it would seem as though we just dump the bucket of water over someone else’s head instead. It would seem debatable whether it achieves very much beyond our own short-term emotional gratification, and reinforcing the groupthink on which the confirmation biases rooted in just-world hypothesis depended on by everything we claim to oppose.
