Note: This is the second half of a post that argues that feminism aims to destroy the family and the cultural fabric in favor of a new social order.
Read the first section here.
The Protege: Antonio Gramsci
An Italian, Antonio Gramsci, took Marx's theories and expanded upon them, creating what we now know as 'Cultural Marxism'. He took Marxism's monolithic bloc of aggreived "workers" and broke them up into several smaller constiuencies, each claiming its own variant of oppression, be it sex, race, economic, blue collar workders, or homosexuals. Each had its own particular axe to grind, each had its own reason to be "critical" of the enveloping culture, and each demanded that the wider culture accede to its demands through accomodation or even publicly funded remuneration. Women, usually the largest group in any human population, became the largest "oppressed" constituency in cultural Marxism, and thus swung the heaviest political weight[4]. Gramsci also coined the term "hegemony", and set it in the context of a full-scale culture war in which each oppressed group was to buck the hegemony which was seen as keeping each down in a state of servile oppression. Gramsci defines hegemony thus:
"... Hegemony operates culturally and ideologically through the institutions of civil society which characterises mature liberal-democratic, capitalist societies. These institutions include education, the family, the church, the mass media, popular culture, etc."
In other words, hegemony is the culture. It is the whole system, both tangible and not. From Marx, we know that Gramsci's hegemony is just code for all of Western Civilization, particularly Chritianity, and especially the Patriarchy.™ By attacking the hegemony with the weapon of critical theory, Gramsci hoped eventually so discredit the guiding influences of Christianity and traditions of Western law and English common law, so as to be able to supplant them with with his own "anti-hegemony" or "counter hegemony" of "scientific", atheistic, cultural Marxism. This would best be accomplished via a "slow march" through the cutural institutions (such as the public schools and the universities), where, like a frog in boiling water, the opposition would not know that they were in danger until it was too late.
To accomplish this clandestine overthrow of the culture, however, Gramscian theory needed a vehicle upon which to perch upon. Heeding the maxim that "the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world", the cultural Marxists deliberately targeted the industrialized Western civ family's center of gravity: women. Recruit women as the change agents; they would become the perfect vector by which Gramscian Marxism would infect the whole of the culture.
Gramsci hated marriage and the family, the very founding blocks of a civilized society. To him, marriage was a plot, a conspiracy... to perpetuate an evil system that oppressed women and children. It was a dangerous institution, characterized by violence and exploitation, the forerunner of fascism and tyranny. Patriarchy served as the main target of the cultural Marxists. They strove to feminize the family with legions of single and homosexual mothers and ‘fathers’ who would serve to weaken the structure of civilized society [3]
So we know that the cultural Marxists targeted women, both here and elsewhere (as I document in my piece on female suffrage), in an effort to abolish the traditional family and usher in their new world order. They found willing accomplices in feminists, who happily exploited the power that cultural Marxism provided, and later crowed about this merging of feminism with cultural Marxism. To wit: "Marxism and Feminism are one, and that one is Marxism", "Sexuality is to feminism what work is to Marxism", "Feminism, Socialism, and Communism are one in the same, and Socialist/Communist government is the goal of feminism".[5]
The New Feminist Family: An Import from Bolshevist Russia?
Speaking of socialism and communism, some readers would be surprised to learn that the American family law system, of which no-fault divorce is a prime feature, wasn't an American invention. It was imported from Bolshevist Russia early in the last century. That's right, the same system that the West defeated in the 1980s lives on in our own culture, rotting us from within in the same way that Communism collapsed under the force its own weight. Bolsheviks, when they came to power, attacked the Russian family with zeal, pushing for loosened divorce laws, granting 'consorts' identical property and status rights as wives, and encouraging free love unfettered by any obligation of one party to the other. Chaos soon ensued: men and women both lightly entered into temporary unions only to abandon them with zest. Illegitimate births skyrocketed, and the abortionist was busy. Both men and women could charge each other alimony, and some women found child support quite profitable as they flitted from wealthy man to wealthy man, being impregnated and enriched by each. Orphans clogged orphanages, and the Soviet state could not bear the additional fiscal burden of it all.
Indeed some Russians fretted about the corrosive effects of these reforms:
The opposition to the proposed law seemed to centre around four points: (1) that it would abolish marriage; (2) that it would destroy the family; (3) that it would legalize polygamy and polyandry; (4) that it would ruin the peasants[7].
Their dire predictions look eerily prescient given how they've been realized in the current state of the modern American family. Marriage is tapering off into oblivion, the traditional family now is outnumbered by non-traditional ones, American culture is one marked by serial polyandry and polygyny and soon may feature legalized polygamy, and the middle- to lower strata of American society are disintegrating into ruin.
But these predictions fell on deaf ears. MacKinnon, and feminist scholars like her, were pushing for Russian-style easy divorce as early as 1947[6]. They found their huckleberry 20 years later in then-governor Ronald Reagan, who signed the nation's first no-fault divorce law in 1969. Marxist feminists rammed through the Wisconsin model of child support across the country--itself modelled on Article 81 of the Russian Family Code--soon after. These cultural revolutionaries continued to push the Russian model even after it became clear that the 30-year Bolshevik attack on the family threatened total social collapse within the USSR and had produced 7 million fatherless children by 1947[5]. To date, there has been no repudiation of the failed Russian model in the family law system despte the evidence right in front of us. Instead, it continues to wreak havoc to this day, producing legions of "liberated women" who are "married" to the State and, by 1998, nearly 25 million children lacked a father in the home.
As a result, we no longer have a family law system that honors the Constitution; it has been wholly assimilated by a Bolshevist-cum-Gramscian Marxist "anti-hegemonic" philosophy specifically designed to destroy the family and create as many people dependent on the State as possible. Western "hegemonic" legal traditions upon which our society was founded have been turned on their heads. As I've blogged before, the justice system is fairly shot through with Marxist ideology in the service of Feminism; now we have the dubiously moral practice of rewarding wrongdoing and penalizing, even enslaving, those who have done no wrong, sometimes based on no evidence at all save one person's self-interested accuation, all for the goal of eradicating the independent, nuclear family and increasing the influence of the State on its subjects.
The effect of this Russian import has been catastrophic to our social fabric, posing a dire threat to our society's ability to survive. Divorce, while down slightly from its all time high, consumes nearly 50% of all marriages. Marriage is way down. Cohabiting is way up. Abortion slaughters over 1M fetuses annually. Single motherhood, either by "choice" or by divorce, is skyrocketing. The fertility rate is sub-replacement; even more so when you subtract illegal aliens from the mix. Crime is rampant. Educational achievement is spiralling downward. And just this week, we established an all-time record in incarceration. This is where our society puts disenfranchised men--and the few women who run afoul of Big Sister--who don't fit into the Marxist-feminist picture of the State acting as the ultimate husband for the family. The government discourages competition, after all.
Feminists and other Gramscian fellow-travellers know exactly what they're doing. Their aim is to enlarge the State through weakening the family and other hegemonic institutions. How do we know this? Because their acolytes tell us so:
“[T]he stronger the ‘counter-hegemonic’ strength of unions and left parties, the stronger the welfare state… When we argue for ‘decommodifying’ (i.e., taking out of private market provision) such basic human needs as healthcare, childcare, education, and housing, we have in mind a decentralized and more fully accountable welfare state then [sic] exists in Western democracies.”[5]
The feminist agenda of female "liberation" goes way beyond gender equality. If that was the case, the feminist movement would have ended decades ago when women achieved legal parity with men. Rather, their aim is to create a omnipresent, omnipotent, socialized matriarchal government. To do this, they need to destroy the traditional nuclear family--which has sustained civilizations for millennia--and replace it with a solo, female head-of-household wedded to the State. In other words, a matriarchy, with Big Sister as benefactor. Problem is, in destroying the traditional family, they have threatened the very fabric of society. If 1940s Russia is any indicator, the new social order will not be self-sustaining.
In this way, feminism intentionally, purposefully acts to destroy the family, which in turn threatens to destroy society. Their agenda is clear to those who bother to look.
Feminism delenda est
References:
[1]: Lind, Bill. "The Origins of Political Correctness"
[2]: Lawson, Dominic. "You Can Blame It All On Karl Marx". The Independent (UK), 20 Feb 07
[3]: Borst, William. "A Nation of Frogs"
[4]: Atkinson, Gerald. "Radical Feminism and Political Correctness"
[5]: Wood, Bill. Statement before the US House Ways and Means Committee.
[6]: Mohler, Albert. "No Fault Divorce--The End of Marriage?"
[7]: "The Russian Effort to Abolish Marriage". The Atlantic Monthly, July 1926.
3 huge terms; Bolshevist-cum-Gramscian Marxist says it all.
ReplyDelete