Undying Admiration

Before Anne Boyer deleted her Twitter account, she was my favorite mutual. We never met in person, but I admired her poems, and one of our interchanges on there contributed some inspiration and ideas that found their way into my story "Ruins of a Future Empire". However I hesitated to read her breakout success book, The Undying, as it seemed voyeuristic for a "man", as I still believed myself to be, to seek out a book about breast cancer.

As it happens, though, we are all implicated in breast cancer. My mother-in-law had it, and as she stubbornly works herself to exhaustion caring for my father-in-law, who is currently much more ill, my greatest fear is not that he becomes more ill, but that she has a recurrence, and suddenly worsens to a point where she can no longer insist on their capacity to manage on their own. Because my mother-in-law has had it, and because my partner inherited "dense breast tissue" down her matrilineal line, my partner is classified as being of greater risk, and gets imaged regularly. She recently had a scare. It turned out to be artefactual, a flicker of the ultrasound machine misunderstanding itself.

And the time will come, soon enough, for me to join the diagnostic parade. According to a presentation I attended on trans health, for trans women and nonbinary people who had previously been assigned male, the risks of breast cancer appear to reach parity with cisgender women's risks after about five years of HRT. Assuming that I remain on HRT for at least five years--and I have every intention of remaining on HRT--then I should get mammography at the same ages as women of my risk category. Fortunately, I am aware of no breast cancer history in my family, so it would not begin until 50. At the age of 50, my nonbinary gender identity will receive a peculiar sort of confirmation through the androgyny of my routine examinations: A doctor will examine my prostate, and then write a radiology prescription for me to get my tits smashed in between glass plates.

So I have read The Undying, now, and I would urge everyone to. As Anne points out, anyone with breast tissue--including men--can get breast cancer. And we all live in the capitalist carcigenosphere that she describes as no one else has or can.

This post is not so much about Anne Boyer or about The Undying, though, as it is about my own very peculiar experience of reading it. That is, imagining the possibility that the A cups which I waited so long to pursue, that I am so glad to have grown, that fill me with joy whenever they are caressed lovingly by my partner, that they could someday betray me. Having delayed my transition for so long, I want to live, if for no other reason than to have the duration of my joys outlast that of my self-suppression. If continuation of life should at some point require the sacrifice of the portion of my body that most readily symbolizes the reality of my transition, it would still be worth it, but the irony would be agonizing.

A Note about the Palestinian General Strike

This post takes some scattered comments made recently in various formats on social media and attempts to synthesize them into something resembling a coherent argument. I should begin with a necessary disclaimer: It has been a decade since I made a point of routinely keeping up to date on Israel's social statistics and political events. I no longer pretend to be a researcher on Israeli society and the role therein of Palestinian workers. So this post will not contain any detailed quantitative analyses, nor will it attempt to provide a meticulously documented overview of various contending forces and trends within Israeli society. However, though my attention to Israel has waned over the last 10 years, compared to the period before, I remain interested, as a Jew who unconditionally supports the rights of the Palestinian people and therefore politically opposes the State of Israel and the Zionist movement. And the fact that I can read Hebrew sometimes gives me access to information that other such casual observers may have missed.

Many observers, both internationally and within Israel, were surprised at the impact of this Monday's Palestinian general strike on the Israeli economy, which hit sectors such as construction and food production and delivery particularly hard. They should not have been, though one can understand where the misperception of reality and the resulting surprise came from. Many people--myself included--have at times overstated the degree to which Palestinian workers have been excluded from participation in the economy, which is overwhelmingly controlled by Israeli employers in portions of the land under the direct military control of Israel. Palestinians suffer greatly from this exclusion, and therefore it is important to emphasize it, but one runs the risk thereby of overemphasizing it. Thus, for example, I once wrote something characterizing the response of the Israeli state and capital to the last time that Palestinians made extensive use of the strike, the first Intifada, as a "general lockout," in which the State sped up Jewish immigration from Ethiopia and the ex-USSR, while capital shoved the new migrants into the types of jobs that had hitherto been stigmatized as avodah aravit (Arab work). This was accurate, but only for a limited span of time. Thanks to the internationalization of racial-caste barriers the Ethiopian Jews are still largely stuck at that economic stratum, but most of the "Russians" have moved on. Internationally, Israel is running out of marginalized communities of Jews which it can import and exploit.

This is a problem, then, both for the Israeli state and for Israeli capital. Through dispossession of Palestinians, Israeli capital took possession, with the state as an active intermediary, of land and natural resources which were preconditions to accumulation. However land and resources are merely necessary conditions to accumulation, not sufficient. Capital requires labor, and it accumulates especially rapidly when the labor force is sharply segmented and therefore politically weakened in its resistance to accumulation. The degree and modality of this segmentation varies according to historical conditions. Israel is part of the subtype of colonial-settler states and societies. There is, however, no pure, Platonic form of colonial-settler society, and Israel is a particularly messy blend. At one end of the spectrum, one finds societies such as North America and Australia, where the native population is so thoroughly subordinated, so extensively expelled and destroyed, that the survivors of the resulting genocide can play only a relatively small role in the composition of the labor force. The extent to which the working-class of the settler population can be exploited is limited therefore by the material concessions which capital has to make in order to assure that they place their loyalty to the "white race" ahead of their loyalty to the international working class. These concessions did measurably slow the accumulation of capital in Canada and Australia at key moments in history, relative to their imperialist peers. It was less of a brake on the accumulation of capital in the U.S., for two reasons: First, the existence of an enslaved portion of the proletariat, and its demographic and temporal extension through the enforcement of a racial-caste barrier against all Black Americans, enslaved or free, which provided a model for the prolongation of superexploitation following slavery's formal abolition. Then secondly, in part through the operationalization of the racial-caste boundary, the staged and partial admittance of immigrant groups into the contingent and limited benefits of whiteness. The history of immigration and the formation of the U.S. working class is the history of the successive (but sometimes partial or revocable) admission of meticulously defined and re-defined groupings into hegemonic whiteness.

At the other extreme, we find the Apartheid model, exemplified, but never exclusive to, South Africa in the period from 1948-1994. That is, a state in which the native population is classified, segregated, and subjected to innumerable restrictions on where and how they may work, live, and even die and be laid to rest. Every colonial-settler society is, potentially and in reality, at certain moments of its history, an Apartheid state, even in the historical epoch before the Afrikaans word was coined and disseminated world-wide. For example, it can be argued that colonial society in what is now the United States pioneered Apartheid well before that name, with the establishment first of all of a category of hereditary chattel slavery to which laborers both of indigenous and African descent were subjected. It was only after indigenous labor was, in most areas of the emergent polity, genocidally destroyed that the mark of hereditary chattel slavery came to be confounded with the racial-caste mark of Blackness. Through the subsequent elaboration of an global discourse of "race," the indigenous labor of Africa came into the circuits of world capital already branded by irons that had been forged for their enslaved cousins in the Americas.

With this historical understanding of the range of colonial-settler societies, it becomes possible to recognize the degree to which Israel, in its treatment of the indigenous Palestinian population, has heterogeneously mixed and matched elements from both the Apartheid model of settler-colonialism (segregate and exploit) and the American/Australian model (expel, expropriate and destroy). The dynamic tension between these models has enabled Israeli capital to accumulate over the last 73 years with almost unmatched rapidity. (The document in which I argue for this is about 10 years out of date, and I would likely want to revise some of its subordinate conclusions before publishing it, but I do have back-up for these assertions.) The current working class of historic Palestine is complexly and multiply segmented. The most important division has been and remains that between Jews, on the one hand, and Palestinians, on the other, which is at least partly comparable to the Black/white division in the United States, or the African/European division in South Africa. However within each of these two major groupings there are multiple subdivisions that are at least partially recognized and reinforced by state policy, along lines of "race," ethnicity, religion, migration status, and geography. In this respect it is also comparable to both the United States and South Africa, inasmuch as both those countries were always also complex, and complexified, in ways that have been expertly turned into modalities of power. As in these predecessors, however, the complexities ought not to obscure the stark moral difference between those who are oppressed and excluded, and those whose identity depends upon participation in the mechanisms of oppression and exclusion.

And there are also, it must be added, groups that do not fit into the core dichotomy. These groups have proliferated especially in the thirty years since the first Intifada. I refer here primarily to groups of non-Jewish migrants, who can be put to use by Israeli capital as a source of labor comparable to Palestinian workers' in their precarity, but without the risk to profits that arise whenever Palestinians attempt to assert and defend their rights as indigenous people.

There have been two major categories of such migrants. The first consists of refugees and asylum seekers, mostly from various parts of Subsaharan Africa. For these migrants, Israel is more a destination of convenience than a preferred destination, because, unlike EU member states (with the partial exception of Spain, with its colonial enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla on the coast of Morocco), Israel has a land border with an African country, Egypt. The second consists of economic migrants, who are usually employer-sponsored--in other words, guest workers--and who mostly from non-Muslim countries and ethnicities in South Asia and Southeast Asia. The first flow is irregular and subject to militarized interdiction by both Israeli and Egyptian state forces. It was not even possible until after the return of the Sinai Peninsula to Egyptian control under the Camp David Accords and the Taba Agreement of 1989 (which coincided, helpfully for Israel, with the beginning of the subsidence of the first Intifada). The second flow is subject to tight bureaucratic supervision. This is not to say that migrants who enter via this route do not sometimes remain in irregular visa status, of course, as is the case with state-supervised economic migrants throughout the world. With both these groups of migrants--the refugees/asylum seekers and the guest workers--recruited for similar jobs to those available to Palestinian workers, there is of course some element of labor competition among these groups, and between these groups and Palestinians.

However, the same fact that keeps Palestinians in "48" (the original boundaries of the State of Israel) in a subordinate social position despite their Israeli citizenship, and that utterly dispossesses the Palestinians in "67" (Gaza & the West Bank)--namely, the avowedly "Jewish" nature of the state--also keeps both these categories of migrants in a very precarious position.

Let us consider, for example, how difficult it would be for a migrant to marry an Israeli citizen, either for love or for convenience. There is no civil marriage in Israel, due to a political power-sharing agreement with the Orthodox Jewish Rabbinate dating back to 1948, under David Ben-Gurion. Marriage must therefore be carried out by a state-recognized officiant of a state-recognized religion--Jewish, Christian, Muslim, or Druze. Each of these religions have limitations or prohibitions on marriage to someone of another religion. And perhaps the most stringest such prohibitions are those observed by the Jewish authorities in Israel. I don't know the details of what it would take for a migrant to marry an Israeli citizen of Christian, Muslim, or Druze faith, but I do know this: None of those marriages will qualify that migrant for permanent residency or citizenship in Israel. They will remain precarious. To become a citizen, only marriage to a Jew will do, and that is only possible following a conversion to Judaism that has been administered according to Jewish law in its most stringently Orthodox interpretation, as rendered by the Rabbinate. This sort of conversion is no easy matter.

Ironically, the traditional difficulty of conversion to Judaism evolved, not as an exercise in ethnoreligious chauvinism in service to a powerful state, but as a method of Jewish communal self-defense over centuries in "exile." So long as most Jews lived in the power of state authorities that were avowedly Christian or Muslim, and those authorities defined "apostasy" (e.g. conversion to Judaism) as a crime, any desire of non-Jews to become Jews was implicitly dangerous for the community as a whole. To reassure state authorities that Judaism was not a proselytizing religion, a whole host of restrictions proliferated--based of course on Talmudic precedent, but driven largely by matters of political convenience. Since "Jewish Emancipation" (dating, in North America, largely to the American Revolution), and in Europe, to the French Revolution and the partial spread of its juridical accomplishments through the Napoleonic conquests), there have been debates among Jews about whether such stringency is even needed any more. The Reform and Conservative movements have loosened up significantly. But remember, Reform and Conservative Judaism have little legal standing in Israel.

Consider the case of the Lemba people. They are an ethnic group found in parts of Zimbabwe, South Africa, Mozambique, and Malawi, who have traditions claiming patrilineal descent from Jews. Because Orthodox Judaism, and therefore Israel's immigration laws, does not recognize the validity of patrilineal descent, a group of Lemba who had formally converted to Judaism petitioned recently for permission to migrate to Israel. They were denied, however, because their conversion had been performed by a Conservative Rabbi. That stated, the authority of the Rabbinate is not absolute, due to the complexity of the power-sharing agreement with the state and the so-called "Law of Return". There have been other groups of migrants to Israel whose Jewishness, by the terms set by the Orthodox Rabbinate, was dubious--e.g. many former Soviet Jews--but for whom the State found ways of bringing them in as citizens. Comparing the Lemba to the cases of Soviet Jews, some of whom only had patrilineal descent--and some of whom were even practicing Christians!--suggests strongly that Anti-Blackness is a factor in their treatment.

That stated, if this happens with a coherent grouping of people with cultural traditions linking them to Judaism, imagine then how much more difficult it would be for individual migrants, of African or Asian origins, to become Jews, either sincerely or for opportunistic reasons. The traditional religious restrictions on conversion, therefore, serve the Israeli state and Israeli capital, then, as a means of conserving and enforcing the precarity of migrant workers. Therefore, while migrants are in daily competition with Palestinian workers for labor and pay, both groups are oppressed by the same mechanisms of chauvinist exclusion. Another glaring example on this point: It is commonplace, on the part of Netanyahu, other right-wing Israeli politicians, and the media, to refer to refugees and asylum seekers from Africa as "infiltrators". The same Hebrew word, mistanenim, was used after 1948 to refer to Palestinian refugees who attempted to cross the "Green Line" armistice border, in most cases for reasons as innocuous as trying to return home or trying to tend the crops they had planted.

This chauvinist maltreatment, which treats all non-Jews a priori as "infiltrators" is not qualitatively different from what migrants face in most of the world's wealthy nations. But there are many ways in which migrant life in Israel is worse than in many other countries, and migrants have a grapevine of sorts.

Meanwhile, among the Jews of Israel, the Orthodox population is growing faster than the population as a whole. If there was ever a window of opportunity for undoing Ben Gurion's compromise with the Rabbinate, it closed long ago. Thus, so as long as Israel defines itself exclusively and primarily as a Jewish state, the Rabbinate's hold on matters such as marriage & migration is irrevocable. Thus migrant workers, Palestinians of all classes, and any Israeli Jew who chafes under the ingrained conservatism and violence of their society, has grounds to be opposed the Zionist (Jewish-chauvinist) nature of the State of Israel.

The comparative unpopularity of Israel as a destination country, and its internal political reasons for making itself hostile to migrants, means that migrants will never fully supplant Palestinian workers' important economic role. And this is a source of hope, because it means that Palestinian workers still have a great deal of power that has yet to be fully unleashed against the Israeli state and capital, as was shown by the one-day general strike earlier this week. I will not end this essay by pretending to have the answers to how that power can be unleashed or what those workers should fight for. But I don't see anything compatible with human dignity short of a single, democratic state, from the river to the sea. (I'd prefer no state at all, anywhere, but that's my inner Emma Goldman speaking.)

A Note on the Futility of Social Democracy

A difference between political parties in (most) European countries and in the United States: In Europe, political parties are power apparatuses formed with the intentionality of exercising authority within the separate power apparatus of the State. In the United States, however, with State-controlled party registration and regulation, political parties function in effect as part of the State apparatus already. Using the Foucauldian diagram of the panopticon: In Europe, party leaders function as prison guards surveilling social movements, as practice for their hoped-for role of administering the broader surveillance of state power. (The example of Tsipras and Syriza in Greece is instructive in this respect.) In the United States, however, there is no practice period. The difference between party leadership, elected officialdom, and the state bureaucracy is rudimentary and functionalist. Different functions are often co-located in the same person. Parties both surveil and are surveilled.

It is this that indicates the futility of U.S. social democracy, in both its right- and left forms. Right social democracy is the “realignment” fantasy shared by the majority of the Democratic Socialists of America, as well as the CPUSA. In this fantasy, the Democratic Party would not cease to function as part of the state apparatus, but it would do so in a way that is better aligned with the desires captured by the social movements that it electorally exploits—the unionized fraction of the working class, and minoritized racial, ethnic, and gender groupings. Thus the movements must conservatize themselves in order to capture and radicalize the Democratic Party. In the process, the movements have in fact conservatized themselves, as in the case of Labor, nearly out of existence. Left social democracy is represented by those groupings who insist it is possible somehow for a “new” party to give genuine representation to the working class, on the model of European social democracy. In the current atmosphere of DSA hegemony on the left, this tendency is not as visible as it once was, but it can be seen in various DSA minority groupings, in the “left” Greens who want to make the Green Party into an explicitly socialist party (or who insist, based on tortured readings of various GP position papers, that it already is one!), and in a few small groupings, usually of Trotskyist origin, who proclaim the need for a “workers party”. Such groupings do not recognize the degree to which U.S. political parties differ in their relationship to the State apparatus from European ones, and share a utopian view of the European reality that is out of step with the experience of workers’ movements there.

This note is not a general statement on the “party-form.” Such a statement would require both more empirical research (e.g., on the varying relations of parties and states in Latin America and other portions of the “global South”) and theoretical rigor (describing the fundamentally carceral nature of the diagram of power on which various types of party formations are based). But it provides adequate evidence, for those with eyes to see, on the futility of continued reliance on party formations in two important geographical spaces, the U.S. and Europe. Unfortunately, it is a futility that continues to consume much of what passes for “the left.”

Notes for a Post-Foucauldian Research Program in Gender and Sexuality

The Foucauldian equation of Power/Knowledge only works when those with power take responsibility. (Foucault would quibble with the idea of any identifiable grouping “having” power, so let us say, pedantically, those constituted by power as authoritative.) Ignorance can be a tool of heedless authority, a means by which it retains stability. Ignorance can be cultivated, preserved, guarded jealously.

From this it follows that the smooth circuit of power, knowledge, and pleasure which he postulates in Volume 1 of The History of Sexuality is invalid, even within the arbitrary (Eurocentric, Christocentric) civilizational constraints he imposes on that study. The pleasure of knowing does not exhaust the scope of pleasures that can be taken. Pleasure can be experienced in the absence not only of power but even of knowledge. By studying and naming a phenomenon, one has called it into discursive existence, but the means by which that phenomenon participates in power may come about through discursive practices other than the scientific (knowing). Ample historical evidence for each of these points exists in the generation and comprehension of minoritized genders and sexualities.

Further: Within that volume there is a self-contradiction, which may or may not be related to this. On the one hand, he claims that “Power comes from below; that is, there is no binary and all-encompassing opposition between rulers and ruled at the root of power relations….” (Part Four, Chapter Two, “Method”, p. 94) And yet in his periodization of sexuality he argues that “sexuality is originally, historically bourgeois” and speaks of “the proletariat’s hesitancy to accept this deployment and its tendency to say that this sexuality was the business of the bourgeoisie and did not concern it” (Part Four, Chapter Four, “Periodization”, p. 127). This proletariat he describes speaks in an unusually (for Foucault, though not for vulgar Marxists) univocal manner, and does not seem to include, e.g., proletarian women who agitated for birth control technology. If we take seriously the notion that “power comes from below,” then we must consider the possibility that these women were advocating for pleasures (the least of which would be, the pleasure of not having to worry about having yet another child) regarded as unspeakable by the bourgeois knowledge of the time. They advocated for one knowledge—the recognition and regulation of one’s own menstrual cycle—against another—the demographic certainty with which the bourgeoisie hoped that the reproduction of the labor force could be regarded as a matter that “took care of itself,” part of the faux frais de la production.

Thus: A disjunction between power and pleasure, that took the temporary historical form of a quarrel between types of knowledge. One need not adhere to the repressive hypothesis which Foucault so thoroughly and effectively discredits, for the same historical evidence can show how the demands of pleasure were soon enough recuperated into the circuits of power, through the expansion and segmentation of the productive labor force and the commoditization of care work. But one can see here--and in many other places--how inadequate a framework for critical analysis Power/Knowledge is.