It's Fascism. New Rules. | Part 4 |by Esmée Streachailt
New Rules, Same as the Old Rules, but Different
On one hand I am massively releived that the mobilization needed in the US against this regime is gaining energy and force. On the other hand, I find just nice that so many groups are beginning to move against this regime because it's not clear what they want other than 'those guys out.' That's fair, the chaos and damage has been remarkable, so this is a great start taking on a huge historical demand. Clawing a republic back from fascism is one of the heaviest lifts.
I see the shape the tariffs are meant to make, the forms the government cuts are designed to encase us in, the damage and slow deaths that the ultra-rich are willing to let run their course to clear us our of their way. You smell it. I smell it: the kindling in the pyres is already burning.
Everything is impossible ... until it isn't.
The mainstream is bent on putting the US back together in its old shape, and that's vitally necessary, but it will fail to meet the deeper needs of the moment for women in a femicidial rape culture, for general social progress, policy clarity (like immigration left unaddress for 20 years), and creating ecological viability for our Earth.
The regime has already broken quite a lot of fundamental institutions & functions, norms & values, and social contracts at home & globally. By the time this post drops, we will be nearly 3 weeks into the tariff economy. I have no idea how badly, but the geopolitical fracturing will be intense.
That will make it harder for radfems and RadMatFems to collaborate and build coalition internationally with US feminists. We USian feminists are likely to find ourselves isolated along with this nation as the world moves to contain The Emergency — as they well should!
But to overcome All That, USians need a clearer focus on a goal beyond the removal of this regime. As I have been saying, we need a dream as least as big as the regime's if we want to beat them in the struggle for our world. Their dream is a shiny, space age, 13th century Europe. My dream is a Hyper-Lithic gylany (a matriarchy as many use the term now). But, I know we're all (all, not just feminists) still reeling with the traumas of covid, 2008 and 2020 economic implosions, the already intense and now insane levels of churn in our worlds, and from the constant background radiation of sexualized male/colonialist violence. A FeminaFuturism may be too tall a demand now, but who knows. If things get choppy enough, there could be room to ... run for it. We will see.
Meanwhile, What To Do?
The good news is that we're already doing it!
SPREAD THESE IDEAS FROM THIS WEBSITE, for one thing. SHARE THE MANIFESTO far and wide. Share it with your stories of why you find it moving, or how something in your life connects to one of its claims or credos. It turns out that in Heather Marsh's view (and Marsh's is the anti-Curtis Yarvin, a living rebuke to the Dark Enlightenment), Medusa Rising is behaving in the world-building way endorsed by one of the deepest thinkers of mass movements and ends to oppression of our era. Round of applause for ourselves!!
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Most people end up collaborating with power. They just do. They're are either not brave, not imaginative, not integrated enough, or they are caring for vulnerable family and can't afford to rock the boat, or they are the many, many more people who are too vulnerable to do anything else. For we would be rebels, our work is show them what bravery looks like and create flow-ways that help the timid or vulnerable find their way through to more courage and agency. When I said that RadMatFem is a kind of insurgency and should expect to be treated like one, I was serious.
So. If you're in the US, connect with #HandsOff actions through Indivisible, or throw in with the #50501 &/ #3E movements if they suit you. You may be ready to follow the Anonymous advice: Stop watching the news, become the news. — Less confrontational? Food banks and shelters need donations. Home-bound elderly need meals and company. Funding for these programs (were never sufficient) have been stopped. Parents with little kids want to go to the protest? Babysit for them so they can go. It sounds old fashioned, but schools-churches-civic centers-community associations (like in my case the or the Irish Network DC) often have outreach and other support project you can plug into. Hang out with Quakers. They've been there for every revolutionary moment in our history and they still are. — Use your wild and precious life. There's a way to use who you naturally are to support the resistance and recovery. Just shape your excertions a more deliberately in support of ... well, the duties we owe each other as citizens and cousins in this Earth.
Want to keep your efforts inside the feminist/radfem ecosystem? Great! I want to double down on this too, it's just that we have shake these malevolent, rapacious, psychopathic dandies off our collective backs if we're to have any chance for women's liberation.
As I'm reading the Binding Chaos series and easing into the #3E Movement, I am coming more and more to admire Heather Marsh and her collaborators at Anonymous and other groups. #3E is what I think RadMatFem would best do now because this movement has the best chance to connect us to radfems all over the world. It is an international movment. It is not specifically feminist, but we can connect, collaborate, and modify as we need. #3E stands for: End Impuntiy, End Oligarchy, End Auto-genocide. This Anonymous Central thread on Bluesky explains these concepts. Their methods are very friendly to radical and anarcha- feminists, they're nodal, connected, emergent, not top-down.
Or, End Fascism. Let's not let anyone have impunity against their crimes or the damage they do. Let's not have the oligarchy on steroids that is the NeoReactionary child of neoliberalism (see Part 2).
Let's not have the autogenocide of being made to work against our own interests & well-being in extractive economies, climate chaos, and accelerationism. Of being made to live into a hopeless and deadening future. Other than the weather and plate techtonics we squishy little humans are the most powerful force Gaia ever evolved. We have choices.
One of those choices is to live into the joy of right relation with Gaia and our breathing cousins across species, into rootedness that sparks growth reciprocal with our ecology and each other.
One of those choices (oligarchs will make for us if we let them) is to live in techno-feudal city states (video). Clearly, just no.
I think, and binding chaos offers techniques for how to build in the wake of (however much disaster flows over the bridge during) The Emergency. Marsh has synthesized a good deal more than feminist analysis, but her ideas for building another world strike me as radical, feminist, and, frankly, ancestral.*
Marsh's insight is simple, "Culture changes when a small group of people take joy in a different way to live and other people copy."
Those shows of joy in our rebellion and building that make a new way of life enticing might be small like enjoying the cuisines of other nations and peoples, an 'exosocial' act in Marsh's terminology. Once upon a time in the Midwest there was almost no garlic in meals at all. Or a joy demo might be big like learning to let our human qualities flow as needed without pathologizing them as genders.
I need to be clear, Marsh is thinking far beyond the forms of governance and social organization that we have experienced as liberal democracies. And when I say we need to turn our collective othered backs on the center and go build some new worlds on the margins, she is thinking about how that can look and feel and be guided by what is good for us. Liberal democratic systems were built by and for a white-hetero-male supremacist Enlightenment that grew on the back of a global genocidal colonialism, and I think we have now run smack up against all its limitations. "The system doesn't work for most poeple" is finally no longer controversial or snowflakey liberal 'centering' and is a short-hand for that insight: only about 7000 on Earth are not wholly and completely fucked over the next century. The energies of racism, class oppression, homomisia, and misogyny built into the foundations of liberal democracies at their inception has never been shaken off ... and can't be. A systemic problem is only changed by changing the system, and just-maybe if we are very forceful and have excellent timing, we can use The Emergency as a portal to get to those changes. (Like in the case of SA/MVAWG, you change that structural problem by putting lots and lots more perps in jail for long long times, you change the weight on Justice's scales — in fact, you change what Justice means.)
What Are We Really Figthing? ... Nihilists.
Culture/systems can also change when fascists impose cultural change from above, against law and by ripping up any social contract, creating a collapse in the agency of the people (see North Korea for the most complete contemporary example).
Over at the YouTube I have a little video of me reading excerpts from Albert Camus's The Rebel (30 min, this video is private & exclusive to our little community). The parallels between the early 20th century fash and the 21st century redux are gongingly clear. Mussolini imagined a total technological authoritarianism — and here we are having fed the logarithms these NRx and broligarchs will use as the boot to lay to our necks. That is how autogenocide works: we become the tool of our own breaking. The fact he calls this type of man a "psychopathic dandy" (or dandy psychopaths??) is precious. It's good reason not to collapse.
Psychopathic Dandys adhere to the toxic and unbalanced aspects of a pathological masculinity. RadMatFems know all about that guy. What you'll see as I read in the video is that while many say the Existentialists are nihilists, I am here to tell you that's a lie told to keep you from this truth: The Existentialists are the antidote to nihilism, especially the nihilism that drives the fascist soul to swallow the world in its drive toward a totality it imagines will vivify it. And if you don't want to watch me read and riff on Camus, you can watch Viggo Mortensen read Camus's talk explaining the predicament we are about to experience: how do we re-invent a sense of meaning in the wake of continent-wide and epoch-ending insatiable violence not only to bodies and lives but meant to collapse the souls of the living? He reads it on 28 March 2016, 70 years after Camus first delivered "The Crisis of Humanity" in the same theatre on 28 March 1946. How these dates echo now.
Don't collapse. Don't comply. Don't collaborate with power. These are not a causal chain. Any one of these can lead to the others or render a person despondent and able only to obey. We all have to survive this, and none of us will be cleanly virtuous when it's done, but give either nothing or nothing more than will get us to the next possibility for punching through. Remember, these tech-broligarchs and their real estate con artist patsy run like that: telling the lie that gets you on to the next thing you want to take is as good any truth (Kara Swisher's observation). It's OK to lie to power. It's necessary to lie to despotic power.
Just know what, when, and how much risk is OK in your particular life. It might not be much. It might be your very pulsing life. We can't ask more than one has to give, and we mustn't be the cause of collapse for each other.
Let's remember our lessons from recent justice work: power weighs on different women differently, more and less heavily, more and less intimately, more and less obviously. To demand more of a woman than she can risk will only hasten her collapse. And everything coming at us from this regime — especially the shattering of our government, laws, and institutions — is meant to make all life more precarious, endangered, difficult, frightening, uncertain, and vulnerable to power's whims. It's not just privatizing the weather service, but making the fire/flood/hurricane/tornado updates you really need cost extra. Exhaustion, hopelessness, & helplessness are the goal. That's why this regime is acting exactly like an abusive/controlling partner. The techniques work on the intimate and the national scales.
These men and their allies want us frozen. Like I said in Part 3:
Let's do Freedom Making Actions. Let us deepen our connections so that we increase each other's security and authenticity. Let's loosen some room and cheer for each other's unpredictability, make RadMatFem a kind of laboratory of uprising. Let's protect and increase each other's mobility, ours, our racialized sisters, our students. Let's keep our factuality and sanity intact: our archives, our news, evidence of resistance action. Let's build in our solidarity to meet needs and combine energies to prevent compliance.
These men are showing us they have sadism, but no grit. Solidarity, embedment, togetherness — these are grit.
*Max Dashu, emminent feminist historian of women's world history, commented about this on my first video for our YouTube channel. I was explaining Timothy Snyder's concept of sovereignty/authenticity as one of the essential freedoms. Dashu offered this comment on the native/indigenous origins of this concept of self-in-society. You can read that note at Medusa Rising on YouTube.
You may also find this concept of sovereign-embedded self in the idea of freedom Graeber and Wengrow trace through pre- and historic world civilizations in The Dawn of Everything. They are also following the northern Native American concept of sovereignty. And, not surprisingly to us, it is also vibrating through Gimbutas's theories about the Goddess civilizations, and Raine Eisler's work in The Chalice and the Blade and on parternship societies.
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