First Worldism underneath the Beyonce controversy
(monkeysmashesheaven.wordpress.com)
Pop diva Beyonce’s “I Am..” tour has so far made 53 million dollars, and generated controversy to boot. In giant posters that pepper the streets, Beyonce sports a revealing, flame covered outfit in the shape of motorcycle handlebars. Tour ads are running on Egyptian and Arab satellite television.
Islamic critics are reportedly saying that her show is an “indolent sex party” and that it promotes “vice and debauchery.” A facebook campaign against her concert has gathered 10,000 supporters. The critics are right on the whole. Beyonce, like most Amerikan pop culture, is pornographic and self indulgent — “sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll.” Behind the controversy are assumptions about Islam, the Third World, and women’s liberation.
First Worldist feminism often portrays two paths for women: First World liberalism or Third World barbarism, Sex in the City or Sharia law. In this controversy, Beyonce’s aptly titled “I Am..” tour has come to represent the former and her Islamic critics have come to represent the latter in the bourgeois media discourse. Lacking from the controversy is materialism. Beyonce, as a cultural artifact, is ripped out of one world and dropped into another. Beyonce’s music, her image, etc. resonates one way in the liberal First World and another way in the Islamic Third World because women live very different kinds of lives across very different kinds of societies. Capitalism-imperialism has created a world divided between exploiter and exploited countries. Women’s advancement in the First World has come to be very different from women’s advancement in the Third World.
The gains made by women in First World, liberal societies are made possible by super-profits taken from the Third World. First World societies have given individuals, both men and women, a greater range of life options. People in the First World have more social and geographic mobility. They are not bound to one way of life. First World women are free to change jobs. She is free to support herself, change locations, opt out of family life, enter into non-traditional sexual relationships, etc. Super-profits have freed women from restrictive traditional roles in the domestic and work realms. Like men, women have gained greater and greater access to leisure time in the First World. The imperialist economies of the First World have blunted the sharpest edges of patriarchal oppression for women.
Women’s advancement in the First World has gone beyond just gaining independence from the worst aspects of patriarchy. In gaining independence, women have gained access to much of the man’s world. Women’s advancement has thus taken the form of women opting into, not out of, the male world. Women are entering the man’s world, not as women, and not as second-class citizens. Rather, they are entering the male world on more and more equal terms with their First World male counterparts. And, with the rise of raunch culture over the past decades, First World women, in greater numbers, no longer see themselves as women, but as “one of the guys.” Women’s “liberation” in the First World is a “liberation” that is achieved by joining the oppressor as the oppressor, not by defeating the oppressor. Thus the contradiction between First World men and First World women, such that it exists, has ceased to be antagonistic. Insofar as gender imbalances still remain between First World men and First World women, it is a small price to pay to enter the male’s world. The reward for First World women is that they gain greater privileges, including gender privileges, over Third World peoples, both men and women. First World women benefit by their participation in the global patriarchy as oppressors. There is more unity than disunity between First World men and First World women.
To advance oneself in the First World, one becomes an oppressor. By contrast, Third World women cannot enter the world of the First World oppressor. In general, she cannot enter his world as anything close to his equal. She can only enter into his social world to be oppressed, for example, as a prop for a sexual fantasy. First World women advance their interests, including their gender interests, by creating inequality on a global scale. By contrast, Third World women must seek their liberation by seeking equality for the vast majority of humanity in the Third World. Many Third World women are still bound by traditional roles, both in domestic roles and in production. They do not have the life opprotunities that First World women have. Survival within the capitalist-imperialist system greatly limits what Third World women can and cannot do. Third World women have none of the mobility that First World women have. Thus Third World women’s liberation is tied to the uprooting of feudalistic and traditional ways of life that often become even more unbearable in the context of capitalism-imperialism.
The First Worldist feminist says that it is either her way or tribal barbarism. She says that Third World women can find liberation through individualistic self discovery and self help, by throwing off the veil and putting on miniskirts, by liberating her sexuality, by joining the hedonistic free for all, by becoming “one of the guys.” However, such is a dead end for the Third World. The real way forward for Third World women is the proletarian revolution, uprooting the old mode of production. For the vast majority of women, they must find a way that breaks the chains of patriarchy, the chains of national oppression, and all other chains.
Gender contradictions in the First World follow a familiar pattern. The super-profit flow into the First World has transformed First World society such that antagonistic contradictions hardly exist, or are severely blunted. Instead, First World populations are more and more homogenous in their alignments, especially in their alignments toward the Third World. To meet this challenge, the Third World must unite to defeat the First World. Social revolution, including gender liberation, must happen within a context of the global people’s war, the struggle against imperialism, the struggle for national liberation, New Democracy, socialism and, ultimately, communism.
Sources
1. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/05/beyonce-egypt-show-called_n_347326.html
Fake Marxists just rehash old dogma. They write as though the enemy were still 1950s Leave it to Beaver land. The First World has changed. It is no longer the 1950s.
Part of being a vanguard is being ahead of the curve, noticing and adapting to social change as it happens or even before. Other so-called Marxists write as though the 1960s sexual revolution never happened, as though the raunch, the ho culture of today doesn’t exist. With these fakes representing “Marxism,” no wonder Marxism is seen as irrelevant.
Contradictions in the First World are less and less sharp. This means that it is harder and harder for revolutionaries to play First Worlders against each other. What MIM used to call “divisor” work wasn’t much of a real possibility even when MIM was writing. Trying to add fuel to the fire of inter-First World conflicts is mostly a waste of time — except, perhaps, when dealing with the internal semi-colonies. Instead, our focus should be on advancing the principal contradiction. Our agitation needs to focus on the Third World versus the First world.