Detoxing Masculinity

Remember how, only a few short weeks ago, it was the seemingly unending, punishing heatwave that was keeping us awake at night? Now that the weather's turned and the darkness is more temperate, it's the terror occasioned by the intrusive, persistent fear of an inevitable, impending nuclear Armageddon that's preventing us from sleeping the 8 hours through. In those long, quiet moments of black darkness and even blacker despair beneath the duvet, the question that loops around my head is; when did the world turn to shit?

I posed that very question on social media and received responses suggesting differing milestones in human history, from Gordon Brown’s election as leader of the Labour Party to Oliver Cromwell’s pogrom against the Diggers. Sadly, the argument that seemed most compelling was Dave Walkden’s assertion that the journey to hell in a hand cart commenced when homo habilis learned how to throw rocks at each other. I must confess I wasn’t in Tanzania or the Mashavera region of Georgia around 2 million years ago, so I don’t have irrefutable proof of this, but I reckon it’s a knocking bet that the first homo habilis to act the hard cunt was a bloke.

Now I’m not saying it’s fundamentally wrong to be male or a man, but it is undeniably wrong to be masculine and downright evil to venerate, fetishise or celebrate any manifestation of the poisonous creed of masculinity that infects our society. You see, my contention is that all the world’s woes and subsequent problems stem from untrammelled toxic masculinity, combining to produce the historical narrative whereby the debased and demotic phallocentric patriarchy have wreaked havoc and destruction on many worthwhile aspects of human civilisation. The sad state of affairs where SI is associated more with Massimo Osti than Guy Debord has its roots in the testosterone-fuelled obsession with acceptable varieties of masculine workerism, under the doctrine of operaismo, specifically the unquestioning adoration of the military practised by authoritarian populists of all political hues, from Blairite Labour to Jaya Frandsen and every intervening point, that has become an epidemic during the 21^st century Global Nuance Famine, first endured by Newcastle United followers in 1997.

Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t commodity fetishism writ large, as the products of our labour still alienate us, regardless of their nature. It’s the worship of work itself that so appals me; a sexualised, subservient veneration of the act of hard, physical labour, whereby the shining torsos of violent, heterosexual men, culturally reduced in the minds of worshippers to synaptic and muscular dominance and aggression, act as the defining iconography of the workerist mindset that glorifies both brutality and power, at micro and macro levels. Toxic masculinity has been there, undermining and destroying human civilisation and harmony, since the dawn of time. It predates Capitalism by a couple of million years, suggesting that many on the left have been focussing their ire on the wrong target for much too long.

Not me of course; I’ve always opposed the grotesque posturing of the Vanguardistas in their eroticised praise for pooled sweat, dripping from the oxters and crotches of strong men, engaged in manual labours. The apologists for capitalism, from Blarites to the lumpen Brexit Falange solemnly declare their faith in the armed forces, that external manifestation of state repression and imperialist excess, while simultaneously denouncing the domestic state apparatus of the police and judiciary as fundamentally corrupt, not to mention the iniquities of the benefits system, and rightly so, but in an undialectical fashion bereft of ideological rigour, for the supposed ills of oppressing only the white underclass and not those from outwith that estranged sector of society.

I wonder whether it is toxic masculinity by proxy that has led to the growth in rampant transphobia by the TERF tendency. I attempted to discuss this phenomenon earlier in the year, with http://payaso-de-mierda.blogspot.com/2018/03/terf-wars.html but wasn’t entirely happy with the results of my ruminations. You, it seems to me that TERFS, in seeking to maintain their hard-won gains, are so implacably opposed to male power that they have unwittingly adopted the tactics and approach of patriarchal alpha males in their denigration of trans females. Instead of supporting trans comrades, who gain the respect and admiration of almost all others on the left, Militant apart, the TERF faction seems to adopt the quasi homophobic, intimidatory tactics of the extreme right, and not just Gail Speight or Ann Marie Waters either; I really see no difference in tone between EDL members talking about burkas to the way TERFS talk about trans women. For reference, see the terrible, hateful transphobic sticker campaign TERFS are now waging against trans rights.

Meanwhile, the Taaffist Tendency are equally incorrect and mendacious in their alleged analysis of social mores. The despicable Democratic Centralist idealisation of their warped understanding and deliberately reductive and inaccurate representation of working class culture and use of soi disant socialist realist versions of the same, function as cultural pornography for CWI inadequates, like a synthesis of Leni Riefenstahl, Morrissey and Akinwale Arobieke, showing the proximity of Leninists to Fascism, especially the art of Franco's followers, because of their queasy glorification of heterosexual alpha male manual workers and implied rejection of white-collar workers, regardless of sex or gender, as being inferior specimens of the proletariat. Remember, Militant are the ones who claimed sexuality was a class issue, whereby gays were de facto middle-class supporters of capitalism. Currently, their website contains no reference whatsoever to oppression faced by LBGTQ+ workers in contemporary society, presumably to ease the grooming of apprentice bricklayer contacts from Pontefract, images of whose defined torsos being dried and powdered in gymnasia satisfy the base urges of these timid Trots. I’m not making this up you know.

 The world today is floundering, not because of the death agonies of late-era Capitalism, but because of the relentless emotional and intellectual destruction wrought by phallocentrism. In 1981, Heaven 17 told us on (We Don't Need This) Fascist Groove Thang that Reagan was a “Fascist god in motion.” They were right then and in recent years, the wheel has completed a full 360-degree revolution, with another unhinged fool in the Great Satan’s dugout. Meanwhile Britain, under the yoke of the Grantham Bathory during Reagan’s administration, is now helplessly drifting in a stagnant pool of Etonian ordure, while the ruling elite shift their largesse abroad. These are tough and unpleasant times to live in England; hate crime, hate speech and hateful attitudes infest and infect every aspect of the country. It isn’t a place of safety.

On the right, the buffoonish bullshitter Farage, whichever temporary Fascist bolthole is giving him succour this week, is finished. He has been since 2016; no amount of posturing, repositioning or publicity stunts will have him taken seriously. Someone should give him a knighthood; let him drink himself to death in the capacious bars of the Palace of Westminster. The serially incompetent Johnson continues a staccato march through every uninhabited nook of libertarian hokum; if he’s the nearest the extreme right have to a theoretician, they are in even greater ideological jeopardy than we all anticipated. Don’t be fooled though; he is not ready for pasture just yet. The purpose to his repeated idiotic public pronouncements is clear; he’s arrogant, deluded and ambitious enough to want to be Prime Minister still. In fact, he probably covets the job more than Theresa May does these days. Johnson’s populist drivel about women in burkas and letterboxes was a crude shot across Rees Mogg’s bows; while Walter Prince of the Plutocrats looked a shoo-in for the next First Lord of the Treasury a while back, there will hopefully be blood on the floor at Smith Square soon. No wonder Ken Clarke is always on the piss eh?

However, there is also the ominous figure of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, fresh from a 4-month stretch in solitary to avoid the sugar and boiling water treatment. His wings may have been clipped by these experiences, but I find that unlikely. The stunted, wife-beating, fraudulent, convicted football hooligan is too much of a megalomaniac to ever learn from experience. I think his relative media silence is on account of some pretty good legal advice telling him to shut his cakehole. If he does return to public strife, and I’m sure he will, he’ll need a new campaign to front. UKIP are finished, the EDL are finished, the FLA are finished, partly on account of Meighan’s sticky-fingered accountancy practises, and Britain First, partly because of the risible tactics and appalling stupidity of those retarded amoebae Frandsen and Goulding, are completely finished. The stop gap Fascist holding pen, the Democratic FLA are supposedly marching in sunderland on September 15^th. As the Mackems are away to their old pals Burton Albion, who relegated them to Division 3 at the end of last season, I’m not sure who they are expecting to attend, especially as Newcastle host Arsenal and you couldn’t imagine two English clubs less likely to support fascism than the Magpies and the Gunners. Because of his imminent retrial for Contempt of Court, I would imagine Yaxley-Lennon will give this fiasco a wide berth and return, in a blaze of social media chicanery, at a later date. We need to remain vigilant; they haven’t gone away you know.

And, with a heavy heart, I turn to the Left in England, asking what is to be done? The news that the 2018 Labour Party Conference is to be held in Liverpool has made my blood run cold. Aside from Maomentum’s insane pronouncements and tactics, presumably including a three-minute hate dedicated to Tom Watson, oleaginous piece of shit that he is, and a centrepiece Petrol Bomb a Synagogue for Jezza night, this gathering has the chance to replicate and then redouble the chaos of the 1968 Democratic Congress in Chicago.

As I always maintain, while I am ideologically, intellectually and emotionally drawn to the Socialist Party of Great Britain and other companion parties in the World Socialist Movement, pragmatism and age have brought me back into the Labour Party. There really isn’t a choice. In a nostalgic way, Labour Party life is remarkably similar to how it was during Michael Foot’s tenure, whereby a weak yet kindly man of impeccable Socialist morals is used as a crash test dummy by cynical forces from both left and right. The devious and deceitful tactics of right-wing members of the PLP and their acolytes in the MSM have somehow brought about the situation where Jeremy Corbyn has been painted as a racist and an anti-Semite, which begs the question as to whether Edward Leer and Alfred Jarry are writing the script for today’s world.

Jeremy Corbyn is not perfect; his latent support for Brexit shows his dated, Bennite roots, which has allowed him to be ideologically kidnapped by the brazen oafs who peddle the dangerous lie of the Workers’ Brexit. His dignified disinclination to get involved in a mud slinging contest with traitors within the Party has resulted in mud sticking. However, and let’s be 100% clear about this, Jeremy Corbyn is a lifelong fighter against racism, intolerance, injustice and prejudice; denouncing the conduct of Israel towards Palestine does not make anyone, least of all him, an anti-Semite. What it does, is make him a compassionate humanitarian which, I’m sure you’ll agree is a pretty good thing to be. I don’t know how much I rate him as a tactician, but as an ideas man, JC is up there with the best.

If we want this world to be worth inhabiting, then those of us on the Left need to unite behind the Labour Party’s leader PDQ. He isn’t perfect, but he’s a good man. It would help if he realised we need a second referendum before the Brexit Dark Age becomes a reality of course. It would also help if all those violent, angry, intimidating, inadequate men stopped using their masculinity and just thought about the need for love and compassion once in a while. Lay down your guns and testosterone and let’s make the world a better place, before it’s too late.