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Whereas, in the first order, the NAACP should support reparations for Black people in the United States. We need a race-centered economic empowerment package for African Americans that builds generational wealth and accounts for not only slavery but the decades upon decades of economic pillaging. Colorlines, a publication run by Race Forward. reported that "the U.S. government spends bill ions subsidizing fanning in America, yet Black farmers today receive only one-third to one-sixth of that... and the Southern Rural Development Initiative found that less than I percent of agriculture subsidy payments between 2001 and 2003 went to Blacks, Native Americans and Asian Americans." Worse inequality has only grown since the Great Depression wiped out any gains black people made in the post-civil rights era. Today, without intervention, it would take an African-American household 228 years to build the same amount of wealth as our white counterparts. Second, in determining what form reparations should take, the United States government should be required to atone in the following way: Reparations would involve a national apology, rights to the cannabis industry, financial payment, social service benefits, and land grants to every descendant of an enslaved African American and Black person a descendant of those living in the United States including during American slavery until the Jim Crow era. 1965. Because slavery involved kidnapping, barbarism, and the stripping of language, culture and heritage, many Black people are unaware of their specific African heritage and which country in fact their ancestors were stolen from. The forged documentation, lack of documentation or non-existent documentation, from birth certificates to slave manifest, be it resolved that eligibility for these reparations requires the following: people that were born in the United States or naturalized citizens that have noted their Black heritage on the census, identify as Black on their birth certificate and/or have documentation of enslaved parentage in the United States, documentation of parentage residing in the United States prior to and during the Jim Crow era, and currently identify as Black American or African American. Identification of African-American heritage is both a biological and physical representation of being African-American on a daily basis. Land grant of 40 acres: Each family of 3 or more individuals (parents & children) shall be granted 40 acres of tillable land. No taxes to be paid on the property for 5 years from the date the land is first bequeathed by the government. If taxes are not paid on the land or land is taken for any other reason (criminal seizure), those of African descent are to be given the first right of refusal and opportunity to purchase the land. Publication of land availability must be in place for one year from the date of tax lien is issued on the property. If after one year, no person of African descent (eligible based on the same criteria listed for reparation eligibility), then the land may be sold to an individual of Non-African descent. Social Services: Due to the disparity in life expectancy, that the descendants of enslaved people should be eligible earlier for receipt of benefits from Social Security, access to Medicare and other old age programs including store discounts, after participating in the workforce. The age for inclusion in these benefits distributions should be lowered by the difference in the life expectancy for African Americans as set within accepted insurance mortality tables. That the county including the Congress of the Unites States is aware of these discrepancies in mortality is evidenced by movements initiated during the George Bush, Jr. administration whereas the move to privatize social security was debated, part of the justification for the move was presented as an effort to make the system "benefit" African Americans in wealth creation by having African Americans in particular and all Americans "own" their wealth rather than dying and having less or nothing to leave to their descendants. Whereas, there needs to be a national reckoning, new policies and structures and systemic structural changes, the NAACP submits reparations are the first step in repairing the devastation inflicted by slavery and racial discrimination. Ultimately when the Black community as a whole is excelling the country excels. Therefore, be it resolved, that the NAACP reaffirms and stands in favor of financial reparations to African Americans and those of African Descent in the United States that are descendants of the slavery and the Jim Crow Era.

A neoclassical realist approach might usefully require that ideas are treated as objects with force, that is, as elements of power. However, it should be obvious that the relationship between ideas and power is rather different from the relationship between, say, money and power, or military hardware and power. Whereas material capabilities’ power is largely intrinsic and fixed, the power of an idea is both dependent and variable. Therefore I suggest locations at which ideas may intervene at the unit level: through the specific individuals that hold them; through institutions in which they may become embedded; and through the broader culture of the state. Fundamentally the state is made up of individuals. Individuals construct systems, institutions and bureaucracies; individuals lead and follow; individuals make decisions. On what basis do individuals decide which ideas to hold? The first is the quality of the idea itself – its internal coherence, its congruence with known realities. The second key to success resides in the speaker himself – his intellectual status, his eloquence of advocacy. Thus the power of an idea to persuade others at any one moment in history resides both in itself, and in the power of those who hold it. The causal effect of ideas on policies has tended to be displaced onto the political effects of individuals in IR theory, so that the persuasiveness of ideas is assumed rather than examined, and treated as constant.77 It is however, important to recognise that some ideas are ‘better’ than others, and are more likely to progress into the policymaking arena, where institutional factors may then come into play. This is not to deny the crucial role of forces exogenous to them that push certain ideas to heart of policymaking. Whilst the degree to which ideas generate popular support may provide them with power mediated through public opinion, ideas can take a shortcut to policy success if they have the backing of individuals and institutions that themselves have power. The character of these ‘couriers’ of ideas that may be as important, if not more so, than anything intrinsic to the idea itself.78 At the individual level then, neoclassical realism understands that the ideas held by powerful actors within the state matter. Whilst the intrinsic power of a particular idea makes its progress into such positions more likely, the ideas that will impact most upon foreign policy are those held by those in decision-making positions in the state and those who directly advise them. Thus as Mead notes, ‘It matters who the President is. If Theodore Roosevelt and not Woodrow Wilson had been President when World War I broke out, American and world history might have taken a very different turn.’79 The second location at which ideas may impact at the unit level occurs when individuals with shared ideas coalesce into groups, organisations, and common practices within the state to form institutions that operate in both formal and informal sectors of the policymaking process. The formation of institutions reflects the fact that ideas that are somehow embedded in particular structures are possessed of greater power. Institutions can act as couriers for ideas in three ways.80 ‘Epistemic communities’ of experts have the policy-relevant knowledge to exert influence on the positions adopted by a wide range of actors. The extent of the influence of such groups is dependent on their ability to occupy influential positions within bureaucracies from where they may consolidate their power, thereby institutionalising the influence of the community.81 However, their ability to infiltrate bureaucratic posts will depend – at least in part – on the receptiveness of the existing bureaucratic order to their ideas.82 A second means by which institutions act as couriers is by the encasing of ideas in formal rules and procedures at the creation of the institution itself. Once they have become embedded in this way, those ideas with which the institution was founded can continue to influence policy even though the interests or ideas of their creators may have changed. Thus, ‘when institutions intervene, the impact of ideas can be prolonged for decades or even generations.

Perhaps no statistic better illustrates the enduring legacy of our country’s shameful history of treating black people as sub-citizens, sub-Americans, and sub-humans than the wealth gap. Reparations would seek to close this chasm. But as surely as the creation of the wealth gap required the cooperation of every aspect of the society, bridging it will require the same. When we think of white supremacy, we picture Colored Only signs, but we should picture pirate flags. Perhaps after a serious discussion and debate—the kind that HR 40 proposes—we may find that the country can never fully repay African Americans. But we stand to discover much about ourselves in such a discussion—and that is perhaps what scares us. The idea of reparations is frightening not simply because we might lack the ability to pay. The idea of reparations threatens something much deeper—America’s heritage, history, and standing in the world. The early american economy was built on slave labor. The Capitol and the White House were built by slaves. President James K. Polk traded slaves from the Oval Office. The laments about “black pathology,” the criticism of black family structures by pundits and intellectuals, ring hollow in a country whose existence was predicated on the torture of black fathers, on the rape of black mothers, on the sale of black children. An honest assessment of America’s relationship to the black family reveals the country to be not its nurturer but its destroyer. And this destruction did not end with slavery. Discriminatory laws joined the equal burden of citizenship to unequal distribution of its bounty. These laws reached their apex in the mid-20th century, when the federal government—through housing policies—engineered the wealth gap, which remains with us to this day. When we think of white supremacy, we picture colored only signs, but we should picture pirate flags. On some level, we have always grasped this. “Negro poverty is not white poverty,” President Johnson said in his historic civil-rights speech. Many of its causes and many of its cures are the same. But there are differences—deep, corrosive, obstinate differences—radiating painful roots into the community and into the family, and the nature of the individual. These differences are not racial differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice. We invoke the words of Jefferson and Lincoln because they say something about our legacy and our traditions. We do this because we recognize our links to the past—at least when they flatter us. But black history does not flatter American democracy; it chastens it. The popular mocking of reparations as a harebrained scheme authored by wild-eyed lefties and intellectually unserious black nationalists is fear masquerading as laughter. Black nationalists have always perceived something unmentionable about America that integrationists dare not acknowledge—that white supremacy is not merely the work of hotheaded demagogues, or a matter of false consciousness, but a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it. And so we must imagine a new country. Reparations—by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences—is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely. The recovering alcoholic may well have to live with his illness for the rest of his life. But at least he is not living a drunken lie. Reparations beckons us to reject the intoxication of hubris and see America as it is—the work of fallible humans. Won’t reparations divide us? Not any more than we are already divided. The wealth gap merely puts a number on something we feel but cannot say—that American prosperity was ill-gotten and selective in its distribution. What is needed is an airing of family secrets, a settling with old ghosts. What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt. What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices—more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of yelling “patriotism” while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.

Background The racial wealth gaps in the United States stem from the country’s foundation, when indigenous lands were colonized and reaped for white Americans’ profit by enslaved and uncompensated Black labor. Enslaved Black Americans were denied centuries of wealth accumulation. Post Emancipation, failure to follow through with the 40-acres land grant policy further stymied Black wealth-gathering.6 Simultaneous legal measures like segregation and the collapse of the Freedman’s Savings Bank continued to strip Black people of economic gains. State-sanctioned violence in wealthy Black communities like Wilmington, North Carolina and later in Tulsa, Oklahoma continued economic dispossession, reversing even whispers of prosperity.6 Adding insult to injury, Black Americans were barred from the same structural wealth-gathering mechanisms provided to white Americans, such as the initial Social Security Act, the benefits of the GI Bill, and access to nonpredatory housing loans.7 Indeed, Black Americans were expected to pay into Social Security benefits they couldn’t access, and fight for a country that would explicitly deny them resources afforded to others. More recently, redlining, occupational segregation, and disproportionate incarceration feeds the cycle of racialized wealth dispossession. Redlining forces Black and brown Americans into living on underfunded and often environmentally unsafe areas. This modern segregation removes access to resources such as bank loans (which factor in zip-codes as a risk predictor), well-funded schools, and even nutritionally competent grocery stores. A lack of access to well-funded schools hurt students’ chances of applying for and receiving higher education, which in turn limits entry to well-paying jobs with health insurance and potential savings. Higher police presence in redlined areas and the racially based criminalization of minor offences lead to disproportionately higher numbers of incarcerated Black and brown men. Due to both the stigma of imprisonment and stunted career growth, this results in a loss of income during incarceration and reduced opportunities post-release.7 The cycle of racially driven economic harm is institutionally supported by past and current policies. The consequences are stark: the median wealth for Black families in 2019 was $17,000, compared to $171,000 for white families.6 In other words, Black families have $10 in assets compared to every $100 for white families.8 Similarly, in 2019 a full 19 percent of Black households had zero or negative net worth, compared to 9 percent of white households; that the COVID-19 pandemic has widened this disparity is not an unfounded assumption.6 The idea that this state of affairs illustrates a specific failure of Black Americans to pull themselves up by the bootstraps is both offensive and laughable; how is it possible when they’re constantly denied boots to even wear? As the COVID-19 pandemic has displayed, there is a tangible health-based toll to this systemic racism. Reduced life expectancies, higher rates of premature death (almost 30 percent), barriers to regular healthcare, and continuous exposure to zip code-based environmental toxins are all manifestations of racism and racist policies.8 Public health practitioners are aware of this, though the more palatable phrase “the social determinants of health” is often used to describe these effects; never mind that the social determinants of health are upheld by a legacy of racism. Regardless, these health and economic disparities are driven by structural policies, and therefore require a structural solution for change and rectification. The time to implement change is immediate, with the difference of wealth between white Americans and people of color at its highest point in 25 years.7 The pandemic’s economic fallout is already worsening this divide and will continue to do so unless bold action is taken. Proposed Intervention To help rectify the 300+ years of racial and socioeconomic disenfranchisement, a universal basic income program must be implemented. This intervention refers to a regular provision of cash to a specified population group within a targeted area. Some form of UBI has been promoted since the 1500s, by advocates as varied as Thomas Paine, Milton Freidman, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk. More recently, former Democratic presidential nominee contender Andrew Yang built his platform on UBI, inadvertently becoming the most famous proponent for the cause.9 Similar to Yang’s policy, my recommended proposal is a no-strings attached, monthly payment of $1000 regardless of the recipient’s income. This plan would target all residents of the United States ages 18 to 70, with state and federal governments each shouldering half the costs. The age limits are based on the assumption of full social security benefits remaining intact upon reaching age 62, with eight years of buffer in between. The federal government would provide oversight and distribution responsibility. State governments have the option to increase monthly amounts based on cost of living. The funds can be disbursed as live checks, direct deposits based on IRS information, or mailed “debit cards,” similar to those used by SNAP recipients. The latter method is to help reach the 5.4 percent of Americans who are unbanked and mainly low-income people of color.10 The no-strings attached approach would ensure there are no limitations to use and limit exclusions. UBI payments would include currently incarcerated people; if imprisoned folks still have to pay income taxes, then they should be afforded the payments indiscriminately. This would also be untaxed income for everyone, easing some of the middle-class/upper middle-class squeeze – and helping foment cross-class buy-in. Guaranteeing a steady cash flow will help Black and brown Americans engage in wealth accumulation without the traditional barriers of property- or stock-market based methods. In a more roundabout manner, UBI could assist Americans in formally entering the financial economy, another source of wealth generation. More directly, UBI payments can prevent a descent into poverty, a sobering reality as almost 40 percent of Americans are only one paycheck away from being homeless.11 A regular source of income could prevent entrapment by predatory loans and ease debt burden; Black students in particular hold $25,000 more in student loans than white counterparts.12 Likewise, UBI implementation would have more social and psychological effects as well, including a potential reduction in crime and increased trust in U.S. social institutions. The policy may alleviate stress and anxiety, which can ease the effects of weathering in Black Americans. A guaranteed cash stream can also reduce barriers to healthcare access by promoting utilization, preventing future wealth losses in the form of medical debt.

(New York) – Governments and international lenders like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank should create and support universal social security systems in accordance with their human rights obligations, Human Rights Watch and Development Pathways said today in releasing a question-and-answer document about the subject. Amid intersecting conflicts, economic crises, and climate shocks, governments’ long-term investment in universal social security is more important than ever. Social security is premised on people enjoying their rights at all stages of life, irrespective of their circumstances. It encompasses a web of government programs that provide support in various situations that may affect a person’s ability to earn an adequate income, such as sickness, disability, old age, unemployment, and childrearing. However, more than half of the world’s population lacks access to any form of social security. Even in wealthier countries, significant gaps exist in coverage and adequacy, limiting the effectiveness of social security systems. “Social security is a key tool for governments to reduce inequality and protect people from experiencing poverty, hunger, or homelessness,” said Lena Simet, senior researcher on poverty and inequality at Human Rights Watch. “The compounding economic, food, and climate crises should move governments to build security systems that protect human rights, not cut back on existing programs.” The organizations explain in the question-and-answer document the human rights obligations and responsibilities of governments and entities that influence social spending, and the importance of universal social security to meeting them. They also explain the basics of universal social security, how it can reduce and prevent poverty and inequality and protect human rights, including in times of crisis, and how governments can overcome impediments to providing it. Social security for all members of a society is both a human right and a necessary condition for the realization of other economic, social and cultural rights, particularly the right to an adequate standard of living, which includes the rights to food and to adequate housing. International law obligates governments to provide social security as well as to ensure access to quality public services essential to human rights, such as education, health care, water, and sanitation. Get updates on human rights issues from around the globe. Join our movement today. Have it sent to your inbox. More than four billion people lack access to any social protection, the term often used by United Nations agencies and international development organizations. This lack of coverage is most concentrated in low- and middle-income countries, which face significant financing gaps between their current investments and what is needed to support a basic level of social security. Coverage is lowest in Africa, where merely 17.4 percent of the population are covered by at least one form of social security benefit. Though coverage is higher in Europe and North America, Human Rights Watch has documented the failure of many wealthier nations to realize the rights to social security and to an adequate standard of living, including the United States, United Kingdom, and Spain. The organizations describe in the question-and-answer document how governments can address gaps in social security coverage and adequacy. The also explain why governments should shift away from narrowly means tested targeted programs toward more universal systems. The groups outline how countries can close financing gaps in ways that protect human rights, such as through progressive taxes on wealth and excess profits of large corporations, combating tax evasion and avoidance, and eradicating illicit financial flows. Human Rights Watch also urges wealthier nations to help advance equitable social security financing by promoting a Global Fund for Social Protection that complies with human rights requirements. Governments should address gaps in social security coverage and adequacy and urge creditor nations to commit to rights-respecting debt restructuring processes that enable governments to fund universal social security, Human Rights Watch and Development Pathways said. Powerful international lenders like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank should ensure that their lending programs do not undermine the right to social security, as it may happen for instance by imposing strict limits on government spending as conditions of lending programs. “Universal, rights-aligned social security systems are much more effective than poverty-targeted systems at reducing poverty and achieving more equitable outcomes for all members of society,” said Dr. Stephen Kidd, Development Pathways’ CEO. “And they are more likely to support economic growth and strengthen progressive social contracts, meaning that they are also more sustainable, both financially and politically.”

There are a variety of ways in which one can understand blackness’ relation to value. As I’ve tried to set out in the two previous posts, within the system of global racial capitalism, the position of the black is one of permanent indebtedness. Blackness is the exclusion from the social relations of the credible. It is the inescapable nature of one’s debt, which is one’s blackness. This indebtedness is the means by which the credibility of those who can be creditors or debtors is maintained. The value of credibility requires the devaluation of indebtedness, which is to say, requires seeing debt as a threat. Seeing blackness as a threat. Criminalization is the technique by which this devaluation of indebtedness is maintained. Criminalization is the process of seeing from within the capitalist field of vision. In this range of visibility, blackness is only recognizeable as the threat of indebtedness, which is the threat of poverty. To protect credibility from this threat is the role of the carceral, which says it seeks the rehabilitation of the criminal. This is true, as Moten and Harney show us. The carceral mode of governance is concerned with blackness – which is to say indebtedness, which is to say bad debt -because it is concerned with maintaining the value of credibility. The promise of value, of being recognized as valuable, is what is policed. Do we see people going about their lives as if credibility isn’t valuable? Those are the criminal, the always indebted, the black. Do we see people who understand that the promise of value money offers is paid for with their flesh and blood? Those are the criminal, the poor, the threats. Understanding criminality through racial capital must radical reorient our field of vision, where debt is the horizon, the limit of our thought. To transgress the limit of debt, to inhabit the space where the indebted have been living their non-credible criminal lives, is to make a move that reevaluates the value money promises. This movement is to understand, with Moten, that credit runs only one way (which is toward whiteness and the aspiration for credibility), while debt runs in all directions, to the Ferguson protests, the striking fast food workers, the undocumented laborers, the precarious adjuncts, the disappeared Mexican students, and, and, and … To understand blackness as debt, as criminal, is to understand the value of the double in black thought. That value, as it is given by the racialized economy of credit/debt, is not respected. The double does the work of inflating and undercutting the terms of respectability, the proper, the police. Indebtedness and criminality in black study, then, are ways of naming the fact that there is something happening over where the non-credible criminal lives are cohabitating. They are a way of understanding the value of credibility requires the governance of these non-credible criminal lives, or their destruction. In response to the violence that is the imposition of a violating indebtedness, the indebted criminal black violates property, propriety, and the credibility of whiteness, of the police which protect this credibility, and of the state which governs this credibility.

Revolution within a modern industrial capitalist society can only mean the overthrow of all existing property relations and the destruction of all institutions that directly or indirectly support existing property relations. It must include the total suppression of all classes and individuals who endorse the present state of property relations or who stand to gain from it. Anything less than this is reform. Government and the infrastructure of the enemy capitalist state must be destroyed to get at the heart of the problem: property relations. Otherwise there is no revolution. Reshuffle the governmental personnel and forms, without changing property relations and economic institutions, and you have produced simply another reform stage in the old bourgeois revolution. The power to alter the present imbalances, to remedy the critical defects of an advanced industrial state ordered on an antiquated set of greed-confused motives, rests with control over production and distribution of wealth. If the 1 percent who presently control the wealth of the society maintain their control after any reordering of the state, the changes cannot be said to be revolutionary. The prerequisite for a successful popular revolution is that the victors totally junk the old machinery of state. Lenin stressed in the State and Revolution: “One thing especially was proven by the commune, viz. that the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes.” And again: “the working class must break up, smash the ready-made state machinery, and not confine itself merely to laying hold of it.” The reason is simple enough: A popular revolution means a revolution by and for the popular classes. Its ultimate aim is to bring all classes into one, that is, destroy the class state. Revolutionary change means the seizure of all that is held by the 1 percent, and the transference of these holdings into the hands of the remaining 99 percent. If the 1 percent are simply displaced by another 1 percent, revolutionary change has not taken place. A social revolution after the fact of the modern corporate capitalist state can only mean the breakup of that state and a completely new form of economics and culture. As slaves, we understand that ownership and the mechanics of distribution must be reversed. The problems of the Black Colony and the Brown Colony, those of the entire 99 percent who are being manipulated, can never be redressed as long as the necessary resources for their solution are the personal property of an extraneous minority motivated solely by the need for its own survival. And that extraneous minority will never consider the proper solutions. We have this on record from a voice speaking from inside the Fourth Reich—a Lieutenant Governor of California orating in public on poverty: “One-third of the population will al¬ ways be ill-housed, ill-clothed, and ill-fed. Many urban problems are really conditions that we cannot change or do not want to incur the disadvantages of changing.” His “one- third” statement was a calculated understatement. To the slave, revolution is an imperative, a love- inspired, conscious act of desperation. It’s aggressive. It isn’t “cool” or cautious. It’s bold, audacious, violent, an expression of icy, disdainful hatred! It can hardly be any other way without raising a fundamental contradiction. If revolution, and especially revolution in Amerika, is anything less than an effective defense/attack weapon and a charger for the people to mount now, it is meaningless to the great majority of the slaves. If revolution is tied to dependence on the inscrutabilities of “long-range politics,” it cannot be made relevant to the person who expects to die tomorrow. There can be no rigid time controls attached to “the process” that offers itself as relief, not if those for whom it is principally intended are under attack now. If the proponents of revolution cannot learn to distinguish and translate the theoretical into the practical, if they continue to debate just how to call up and harness the conscious motive forces of revolution, the revolutionary ideal will be the loser—it will be rejected. The principal reservoir of revolutionary potential in Amerika lies in wait inside the Black Colony. Its sheer numerical strength, its desperate historical relation to the violence of the productive system, and the fact of its present status in the creation of wealth force the black stratum at the base of the whole class structure into the forefront of any revolutionary scheme. Thirty percent of all industrial workers are black. Close to 40 percent of all industrial support roles are filled by blacks. Blacks are still doing the work of the greatest slave state in history. The terms of our servitude are all that have been altered. The Black Colony can and will influence the fate of things to come in the U.S.A. The impact of black revolutionary rage actually could carry at least the opening stages of a socialist revolution under certain circumstances—not discounting some of the complexities created by the specter of racism. However, if we are ever going to be successful tying black energy and rage to the international socialist revolution, we must understand that racial complexities do exist. 

In Kautsky’s analysis of imperialism, the economic relations of capitalism are transformed into pure relations of power. Monopolistic profits are made possible either by artificially high prices of commodities or interests on investments exported to foreign colonies or dependent countries. The state is a political instrument in the hands of finance capital, and its economic policy favours cartels and trusts, and finance capital. In Kautsky’s reasoning, imperialism is, furthermore, a pure question of power. The accentuated role of power in Kautsky’s thinking about imperialism resulted from the seemingly paradoxical thesis that imperialism is a product of the economic development of capitalism and yet it is not an economic necessity in developed capitalism (in fact, imperialism is disadvantageous even from the point of view of capital accumulation). Once imperialism is understood to be a result of a relation of power, the thesis becomes theoretically non-contradictory. There are different methods for coping with the problems facing the accumulation of capital, of which imperialism is only one possible alternative, and the choice between different methods is made by the factual power constellation in society. Kautsky’s analysis of imperialism has been shown to be two-sided: On the one hand, imperialism is found to be determined by the natural qualities of the different sectors of production. The relations between industrial and agrarian countries are determined by the natural obstacles of the development of agrarian production; industrial overproduction is a result of natural – and not of any specific social – limits of agrarian production. As such, the contradiction causing imperialism would not seem to be resolvable at all. There are only different methods for coping with it, of which imperialism is only one possible (although historically prevalent) method. And the different methods of coping with overproduction are shown to be dependent on the power relations in society. On the other hand, in Kautsky’s analysis, imperialism is a result of the centralisation of capital, of the formation of trusts and cartels, and of finance capital, which increase the problems of overproduction of commodities and capital, and are able to regulate production. Being especially powerful groups of capital, big, centralised capitalists also force the capitalist state to apply imperialistic methods in its politics. In analysing Kautsky’s conception of the law of capitalist appropriation, it was argued that he understood the capital-wage labour relation essentially as a relation of direct exploitation. To him, freedom and equality were essentially characteristics of an earlier mode of production, simple commodity production, in which the appropriation of commodities and private property were consequently based on the labour of every producer, whereas in capitalism the right to property is based on the appropriation of alien labour and its products. Consequently, Kautsky comprehended the capital relation not as a specific socially mediated relation of exploitation recognising the (formal)freedom and equality of commodity producers, but as a relation of unequal exchange based on direct dominance and power. It could thus be claimed that Kautsky’s theory of imperialism was a logical result of his concept of capital; as a matter of fact, it is in imperialism that the true nature of capitalism is revealed and becomes visible to everyone. In imperialism, the relations of production are in fact replaced by relations of power and dominance. Finance capital is understood to exploit not only wage workers, but all consumers and even other producers by artificially increasing the prices of products and lowering the prices of raw materials. This new method of appropriation of profits is based on political power exercised through the state by finance capital; it is furthermore based on direct repression and violence both at home and abroad. Imperialism reveals the exploitative nature of capitalism at its clearest. Instead of from the capital-labour relation, monopolistic profits predominantly result from the unequal exchange of commodities or from the distribution of the whole national product in the interests of cartels and finance capital. As a result, there cannot be any talk of even the illusions of freedom and equality between the exploiters and the exploited. As already pointed out, there are important similarities and differences between Lenin’s concept of imperialism and that of Kautsky. Lenin did not emphasise the relation between agrarian and industrial countries in his analysis, even though he referred to it as one of the reasons for overproduction. While emphasising monopoly as the economic essence of imperialism, he understood imperialism mainly as a result of the centralisation of capital and the formation of finance capital transforming the functioning of the laws of competition in capitalism. There are not, therefore, any natural or technical conditions for production influencing the rise of imperialism – unless one understands the increasing amount of capital necessary for production to be such a condition. There is an interesting ambivalence in Lenin’s thinking which becomes explicit in his critique of Bucharin: On the one hand, imperialism does not transform the functioning of capitalist laws from bottom to top and consequently does not represent a totally different mode of production. There is more concrete evidence of this in Lenin’s analysis of the monopolistic competition taking place side by side with free competition; free competition is not totally abolished by monopolies. The denial of the possibility of the imperialism as the truth about capitalism 153 ment of capitalism into a general cartel or into ultra-imperialism is a further indicator of this fact. On the other hand, these reservations did not seem to have much influence on Lenin’s general analysis of the functioning and consequences of imperialism. Even Lenin constantly referred to the economic power and dominance of monopolies as the source of their extra-profits. Monopolies maintain artificially high prices and exploit the whole nation. Their foreign investments bring them a highly profitable interest and through them other nations are exploited too. Monopolies further lead to the stagnation of the productive forces. They also represent repression and violence in their own country and in international relations, and are undemocratic by their very nature. Even to Lenin, then, imperialism became practically synonymous with an economic system violating the rules of commodity exchange, the equality and freedom of the commodity owners; imperialism is essentially based on a forced distribution of the surplus product of the whole hemisphere determined by the power of the big capital magnates. Moishe Postone and Barbara Brick, in a totally different context discussing Pollock’s theory of ‘state capitalism’, highlighted a general characteristic of what they understood to be the essence of traditional Marxism. In the conceptions of traditional Marxism, the relations of production are basically identified with the relations of distribution: ‘The ultimate concern of this theory, then, is the historical critique of the mode of distribution’.1 Socialism is simply understood to be a mode of distribution more appropriate to the industrial mode of production – the centralisation and concentration of production has given rise to new possibilities for centralised planning and for overcoming private property. This interpretation of Marxism further takes in an understanding of industrial production essentially as a technical process, a labour process that is not intrinsically socially determined.

Race in this context becomes a cheap and safely predictable alternative to pressing a substantive critique of the sources of this horror in New Orleans and its likely outcomes. Granted, the images projected from the Superdome, the convention center, overpasses, and rooftops seemed to cry out a stark statement of racial inequality. But that’s partly because in the contemporary U.S., race is the most familiar language of inequality or injustice. It’s what we see partly because it’s what we’re accustomed to seeing, what we look for. As I argued in The Nation, class—as income, wealth, and access to material resources, including a safety net of social connections—was certainly a better predictor than race of who evacuated the city before the hurricane, who was able to survive the storm itself, who was warehoused in the Superdome or convention center or stuck without food and water on the parched overpasses, who is marooned in shelters in Houston or elsewhere, and whose interests will be factored into the reconstruction of the city, who will be able to return. New Orleans is a predominantly black city, and it is a largely poor city. The black population is disproportionately poor, and the poor population is disproportionately black. It is not surprising that those who were stranded and forgotten, probably those who died, were conspicuously black and poor. None of that, however, means that race—or even racism —is adequate as an explanation of those patterns of inequality. And race is especially useless as a basis on which to craft a politics that can effectively pursue social justice. Before the “yes, buts” begin, I am not claiming that systemic inequalities in the United States are not significantly racialized. The evidence of racial disparities is far too great for any sane or honest person to deny, and they largely emerge from a history of discrimination and racial injustice. Nor am I saying that we should overlook that fact in the interest of some idealized nonracial or post-racial politics. Let me be blunter than I’ve ever been in print about what I am saying: As a political strategy, exposing racism is wrongheaded and at best an utter waste of time. It is the political equivalent of an appendix: a useless vestige of an earlier evolutionary moment that’s usually innocuous but can flare up and become harmful. There are two reasons for this judgment. One is that the language of race and racism is too imprecise to describe effectively even how patterns of injustice and inequality are racialized in a post-Jim Crow world. “Racism” can cover everything from individual prejudice and bigotry, unself-conscious perception of racial stereotypes, concerted group action to exclude or subordinate, or the results of ostensibly neutral market forces. It can be a one-word description and explanation of patterns of unequal distribution of income and wealth, services and opportunities, police brutality, a stockbroker’s inability to get a cab, neighborhood dislocation and gentrification, poverty, unfair criticism of black or Latino athletes, or being denied admission to a boutique. Because the category is so porous, it doesn’t really explain anything. Indeed, it is an alternative to explanation. Exposing racism apparently makes those who do it feel good about themselves. Doing so is cathartic, though safely so, in the same way that proclaiming one’s patriotism is in other circles. It is a summary, concluding judgment rather than a preliminary to a concrete argument. It doesn’t allow for politically significant distinctions; in fact, as a strategy, exposing racism requires subordinating the discrete features of a political situation to the overarching goal of asserting the persistence and power of racism as an abstraction. This leads to the second reason for my harsh judgment. Many liberals gravitate to the language of racism not simply because it makes them feel righteous but also because it doesn’t carry any political warrant beyond exhorting people not to be racist. In fact, it often is exactly the opposite of a call to action. Such formulations as “racism is our national disease” or similar pieties imply that racism is a natural condition. Further, it implies that most whites inevitably and immutably oppose blacks and therefore can’t be expected to align with them around common political goals. This view dovetails nicely with Democrats’ contention that the only way to win elections is to reject a social justice agenda that is stigmatized by association with blacks and appeal to an upper-income white constituency concerned exclusively with issues like abortion rights and the deficit. Upper-status liberals are more likely to have relatively secure, rewarding jobs, access to health care, adequate housing, and prospects for providing for the kids’ education, and are much less likely to be in danger of seeing their nineteen-year-old go off to Iraq. They tend, therefore, to have a higher threshold of tolerance for political compromises in the name of electing this year’s sorry pro-corporate Democrat. Acknowledging racism—and, of course, being pro-choice—is one of the few ways many of them can distinguish themselves from their Republican co-workers and relatives. As the appendix analogy suggests, insistence on understanding inequality in racial terms is a vestige of an earlier political style. The race line persists partly out of habit and partly because it connects with the material interests of those who would be race relations technicians. In this sense, race is not an alternative to class. The tendency to insist on the primacy of race itself stems from a class perspective. For roughly a generation it seemed reasonable to expect that defining inequalities in racial terms would provoke some, albeit inadequate, remedial response from the federal government. But that’s no longer the case; nor has it been for quite some time. That approach presumed a federal government that was concerned at least not to appear racially unjust. Such a government no longer exists. A key marker of the right’s victory in national politics is that the discussion of race now largely serves as a way to reinforce a message to whites that the public sector is there merely to help some combination of black, poor, and loser. Liberals have legitimized this perspective through their own racial bad faith. For many whites, the discussion of race also reinforces the idea that cutting public spending is justifiably aimed at weaning a lazy black underclass off the dole or—in the supposedly benign, liberal Democratic version—teaching them “personal responsibility.” New Orleans is instructive. The right has a built-in counter to the racism charge by mobilizing all the scurrilous racial stereotypes that it has propagated to justify attacks on social protection and government responsibility all along. Only those who already are inclined to believe that racism is the source of inequality accept that charge. For others, nasty victim-blaming narratives abound to explain away obvious racial disparities. What we must do, to pursue justice for displaced, impoverished New Orleanians as well as for the society as a whole, is to emphasize that their plight is a more extreme, condensed version of the precarious position of millions of Americans today, as more and more lose health care, bankruptcy protection, secure employment, afford¬able housing, civil liberties, and access to education. And their plight will be the future of many, many more people in this country once the bipartisan neoliberal consensus reduces government to a tool of corporations and the investor class alone

Second, even an equal income could disproportionately benefit black Americans. White Americans earn more overall, so a greater percentage of their basic income would be taxed back. More importantly today’s wealthiest Americans benefit either directly from African Americans’ disadvantaged position in our political economy, or indirectly as a result of the cumulative benefits to our nation from centuries of exploiting black bodies. Black Americans either helped build the co-owned wealth of our nation (our infrastructure and banking, legal, and patent systems) or were denied access to our share of it (land, sky, and other natural resources). Even if African Americans receive an income equal to whites, tapping wealth hoarded by racist means and distributing it universally effectively amounts to targeted redistribution.

Third, a basic income would be an improvement on portions of today’s current safety net. Some benefits, such as food stamps, are replete with paternalistic restrictions that rest on racist tropes about recipients and their consumption habits. Others, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), are significantly tied to work, which is problematic when structural racism continues to create so many barriers to black employment. A basic income lacks these flaws.

Reparations demand clear-eyed accountability for acts in the past and our role in them so we may be able to envision other futures. Academic reparations call for community accountability from all of us. Collaboratively conceptualizing a pedagogy of reparations fosters the possibility of a genuinely intersectional, decolonial, global imagination for film and media studies. Reparations are not about benevolence or charity. Reparations are our duty and obligation. I don’t like the word fix, it makes me uncomfortable. ...there is no once and for all fix for anything. The word I like is “ repair”: more tentative, more humble. ... The marines go in there to fix things, they don’t go in there to repair things. Repair can always be undone. —Teju Cole20 Institutions like to forget. A reparative pedagogy is committed to remembering, to witnessing, to repairing. A reparative pedagogy commits to curricula that critique hegemonic colonial, settler, cisheteropatriarchal, ethnocentrist, casteist epistemologies. A reparative pedagogy demands that we recognize and situate our own positionality. A reparative pedagogy asks, what will our classrooms look like when we move from stories of innocence to admissions of complicity? Rather than be defensive, when we start with complicity, we recognize our “proximity to the problems we are addressing.”21 A reparative pedagogy covers a wide range of histories, genres, and media traditions. A reparative pedagogy resists minor curricular reform, the hush money, the reluctant bribe of the one Black or one queer or one non-Western text in the syllabus (e.g., “the infamous “race week” in any Intro to Film/Media course”).22 A reparative pedagogy thinks through the relationship between epistemic violence and state violence. Iyer | A Pedagogy of Reparations 185 Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/fmh/article-pdf/8/1/181/495522/fmh.2022.8.1.181.pdf by Dartmouth College user on 15 July 2023 A reparative pedagogy divests from binaries of form and content, theory and history, aesthetics and political economy, art and geopolitics. A reparative pedagogy recognizes “film’s rootedness in politics, imperialism, and capital” and interrogates purely formal, aesthetic appraisals of media forms.23 A reparative pedagogy divests from the dichotomous, hierarchical logics central to modern, colonial, capitalist thinking about race, gender, and sexuality.24 A reparative pedagogy invests in multidirectional visions, granular and textured histories, global media circulations, labor practices, underrepresented epistemologies.

Missouri Democratic Rep. Cori Bush has introduced new legislation calling for $14 trillion in reparations for Black Americans, in an effort to see the federal government atone for the practice of chattel slavery and hundreds of years of racist policies that followed. "The United States has a moral and legal obligation to provide reparations for the enslavement of Africans and its lasting harm on the lives of millions of Black people," Bush said in a Wednesday news conference attended by Reps. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., and Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., as well as other stakeholders. "America must provide reparations if we desire a prosperous future for all," Bush said. Her resolution is the latest in a long line of congressional efforts by Democrats to compensate Black Americans for centuries of racial inequity. Similar language about reparations has been introduced in every legislative session since 1989. "We know that we continue to live under slavery's vestiges. We know how slavery has perpetuated Jim Crow. We know how slavery's impacts live on today," Bush said, citing the racial wealth gap, voter suppression, infant mortality rates and other negative health outcomes for Black people. "It's unjust and it wouldn't happen in a just and fair and equitable society," she said. "Those are not the natural consequences of human society." "They are directly caused by our federal government's role in the enslavement and exploitation of Africans and Black people throughout our history." While the conversation around reparations has picked up traction in recent years, with about a dozen cities and the state of California considering reparation programs, the concept remains broadly unpopular with Americans. About three-quarters or more of white adults oppose reparations, and so do a majority of Latinos and Asian Americans. Black Americans overwhelmingly support the proposal, and young people in general are more likely to support cash payments to the descendants of enslaved people than their older counterparts. But more than 90 percent of Republicans say they oppose it, while Democrats are split nearly 50/50 on whether descendants should receive compensation.

Our subsequent work together, including at the Special Competitive Studies Project, has confirmed our initial fears. Thanks to a new generation of disruptive technologies and intensifying global rivalries, the likelihood of war between the world’s great powers—and the devastation such a war could wreak—will increase significantly this decade. The best way to deter such a war is for the U.S. military to restore its technological superiority over potential adversaries. We’ve spent the past year designing a strategy that we believe will enable us to do just that. Our window of opportunity is quickly closing. Most Americans alive today have known only a world in which the U.S. military is dominant. For generations, it has been capable of both protecting our homeland against invasion and underwriting an international order that has fostered peace and prosperity on a scale that humanity had never previously experienced.

Our military primacy allowed us to shape the global economy—unlocking trillions of dollars for U.S. companies and citizens—and secure the free flow of commerce that enabled supply chains to function and globalization to flourish. It also allowed us to establish the global data network that powers the digital economy and international communication. Most important, our hegemony has helped protect democracy worldwide against challenges from authoritarianism.

I keep thinking about the comment that Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) made at the first hearing, back on Feb. 28, of the House select committee on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP): “This is an existential struggle over what life will look like in the 21st century, and the most fundamental freedoms are at stake.” The committee chairman was right, but not in the way that he meant.

A leading China hawk, Gallagher claimed: “The CCP is laser-focused on its vision for the future — a world crowded with techno-totalitarian surveillance states where human rights are subordinate to the whims of the party.” While it’s true that the Chinese Communist Party has created a system of “techno-totalitarian surveillance” in China and is happy to sell its surveillance technology to other countries, there is scant evidence that it is conspiring to export its system of oppression globally. Gallagher’s vision is merely an update of the old Cold War paranoia about a supposed Soviet plot to take over the world, which missed the fact that Soviet leaders were driven primarily by defensive concerns about their own security.

This type of social system can be interpreted as the practical realization of the meta-physical. As the practical destiny of the meta-physical, it would also represent its most fully realized form. Operating in such a way, moreover, that subjects themselves, being implicated in it through and through, being produced in it as concepts, would lack the means to analyze it. Except in an after-the-fact way whose delays are yet to be fully measured ...

This practical realization of the meta-physical has as its founding opera- tion the appropriation of woman's body by the father or his substitutes. It is marked by women's submission to a system of general equivalents, the proper name representing the father's monopoly of power. It is from this standardization that women receive their value, as they pass from the state of nature to the status of social object. This trans-formation of women's bodies into use values and exchange values inaugurates the symbolic order. But that order depends upon a nearly pure added value. Women, animals endowed with speech like men, assure the possibility of the use and circulation of the symbolic without being recipients of it. Their nonaccess to the symbolic is what has established the social order. Putting men in touch with each other, in relations among themselves, women only fulfill this role by relinquishing their right to speech and even to animality. No longer in the natural order, not yet in the social order that they nonetheless main- tain, women are the symptom of the exploitation of individuals by a society that remunerates them only partially, or even not at all, for their "work” Unless subordination to a system that utilizes you and oppresses you should be considered as sufficient compensation... ? Unless the fact that women are branded with the proper narne-of the "father"-should be viewed as the symbolic payment awarded them for sustaining the social order with their bodies?

The sacrificial threshold between life and death, therefore, is kin to the threshold at which personal identity is created and undone, including heteronormative identity. Along this threshold, Bataille’s work evinces a veritable excess of differing males and females, masculinities and femininities, which the mobile limits of heteronormativity ambivalently constrain and enable. Given that heteronormativity and queerness both commonly exist in Bataille, they should be understood as representing differing degrees of the subject’s (self-)sacrificial self-differentiation. Sacrificial self-differentiation is analogous to sexed and gendered self-differentiation, or queerness. The degree to which a human subject is “queered” is the degree to which it is self-sacrificial, broaching experiences of eroticism and death. The degree to which it resists sacrifice, conversely, is the degree to which it is a subject that eschews experiences of eroticism and death. Queerness arises in Bataille when characters and subjectivity transgress the sacrificial limits of life and death, selfhood and otherness. Such moments reveal a high degree of sacrificial self-differentiation, an attribute more strongly tethered to Bataille’s female characters and representation of femininity. It is in this way that the feminine is “exceptional” in Bataille. “One knows” writes Bataille in the History of Eroticism, that (my translation) “the ancients identified the possession of a woman with sacrifice. Concerning this, I cannot fail to insist on the fact that women are, more than men, the center of eroticism. They are the only ones that can completely dedicate themselves to it [s’y consacrer]” (Œuvres VIII 337). Heteronormativity, in contrast, exhibits a lower degree of sacrificial self-differentiation, and is more closely linked to Bataille’s more timid and anxious male narrators, if not men lacking “virility.” These differing degrees of sacrificial self-differentiation enable us to explain the apparent antinomy of heteronormativity and queerness in Bataille’s work. These degrees not only clarify his heternormative, sexist tendencies, but also their immanent critique and subversion. In Bataille, typically, men and women provisionally differ in their degrees of self-sacrifice, and thus also in their respective degrees of subjectivity, along a continuous spectrum of genders, sexes, and sexualities. Insofar as men and women provisionally differ in these respective degrees, they likewise provisionally differ in their degrees of queerness. These differences, as I show below, also provisionally structure the heteronormativity between men and women apparent in Bataille’s work. If self-sacrifice itself describes the mode of selfdifferentiation as described above, therefore, heteronormative difference should be understood as provisionally different degrees of sacrificial self-differentiation. In other words, sexed and gendered differences are provisional differences in degrees—not kinds—of subjectivity and self-sacrifice. Whereas Bataille’s men and masculinity provisionally err on the defensive side of a stable subjectivity, women tend toward self-sacrifice and the sacred realm of complete otherness, abjection, and absence. As Bataille famously writes in Madame Edwarda: This God, for all that, is what? A public whore, in no way different from any other public whore . . . God is nothing if He is not, in every sense, the surpassing of God: in the sense of common everyday being, in the sense of dread, horrror and impurity, and, finally, in the sense of nothing. (Edwarda 142) As this passage suggests, God, otherness, eroticism, and nothingness are provisionally feminine things, whereas the subjective experience of these, as revealed by the anxious narrator of this story, is characteristically masculine. In contrast to the “ravishing” Edwarda (L. rapere, “to seize,” “to take away”), the male narrator anxiously reflects upon her fearful absence: “I was alone, as if face to face with a black rock. I trembled, seeing before me what in all this world is most barren, most bleak” (Edwarda 152). Besides explaining the prevalence of heteronormativity in Bataille, these differing degrees of self-difference explain the controversial exemplarity of women as well. The gender divide seems intimately related to a divide provisionally particular to women before or beyond men and their desires. In Bataille, women always traverse the sacrificial threshold between life and death with a facility foreign to men, making them figuratively embody, or rather disembody, the bivalence characteristic of sacrifice itself. In a short essay, critic Phillipe Sollers accurately notes that Bataille’s women signify . . . the compromise that humanity establishes between prohibition and transgression, a compromise which, through marriage, is transpierced by the possibility of erotic violence; not only does she assume the role of (pure) mother and (impure) animal, of respect and the violation of respect . . . but she lends her consistency to a structure of exclusion within which a resistant milieu—a stage (scène)—may be constituted in terms of its potential reversal. (Sollers 89) The “staged compromise” between prohibition and transgression, pure and impure, violation and respect Sollers describes echoes the sacrificial self-differentiation described above. In short, women in Bataille are the compromise, the self-differentiated threshold that challenges the secure limits of identity. In this way, women in Bataille exhibit a greater degree of sacrificial self-differentiation than men or masculine identity, and thus a lesser degree of subjectivity; yet once this is recognized or experienced by men, they too cross the same sacrificial divide provisionally proper to women such that, in the end, self-sacrificial self-differentiation queers all gendered difference. This result is especially apparent in Bataille’s erotic fiction. If queering is the effect of sacrifice on gender, however, and women in Bataille are more intimately linked to sacrifice, it follows that women and feminine identity are provisionally “queerer” than men and masculine identity—even though such queerness, as shown above, ultimately obscures the heteronormative difference that gives rise to femininity and masculinity themselves. In other words, women exemplify sacrifice insofar as they are the primary provisional gender that “ungenders” itself, that queers itself, and becomes the gender that “is not.” Becoming so compels the desire of men—i.e., a desire that compels an analogous inner-lack and openness—setting them along the path of self-sacrifice, which queers them in turn. With both genders commonly lost in erotic self-sacrifice, they exceed all heteronormative difference, yielding to a queer shared sacrificial self-differentiation.

Two subtle negotiations must be made to respond to this question. The first concerns conceiving gender in Bataille as a degree of subjectivity, rather than as a kind of subjectivity. The second concerns the means and ends of Bataille’s critique of the subject, specifically as it relates to his notion of sacrifice as a form of self differentiation. Provisionally, it will suffice to say that gendered identity in Bataille is itself provisional, permitting for tentative differences between masculine subjects and abject femininity, between potent and impotent men, between holy and whorish women that, to varying degrees, commonly herald the sacrificial space of eroticism in which these become a veritable excess of possible genders and sexualities. Ultimately, I argue that queer identity in Bataille concerns the inherently excessive and self-sacrificial quality of identity itself in Bataille, however apparently “virile” or “feminine.” As I argue below, the concept and function of sacrifice in Bataille offers an unexplored entry point into the queer qualities of his work. As a form of self-differentiation, sacrifice and sacrificial experiences demonstrate that, for Bataille, gender and sexual identity are not one. The excess implied in sacrifice always exceeds the limits of gender, sex, and sexual identity. In this way, the implications of sacrifice for gender extend recent discussions in queer and feminist scholarship on Bataille, especially as presented in the work of Shannon Winnubst and Zeynep Direk, who examine the complex implications of Bataille’s eroticism for sexual identity and difference. Much like erotic experience, sacrifice challenges the ostensible sexism and heternormativity that does typify the characters we see in Bataille’s work. We may consider in his fiction, for example, the (sexist) centrality of male narrators and their contrasting female counterparts, like Madame Edwarda, Simone in Story of the Eye, or Pierre’s mother in My Mother. Men seek women, and women seduce men into sex, violence, and transgression. Men are typically the virile subjects of erotic experiences, and women typically the taboo objects of erotic desire. In this vein, we might recall Bataille’s sexist assertion in Erotism: “Not every woman is a potential prostitute, but prostitution is the logical consequence of the feminine attitude. In so far as she is attractive, a woman is prey to men’s desire” (Erotism 131). How might one, then, negotiate the prevalence of sexist heteronormativity in Bataille’s work with the simultaneous and starkly contrasting ambiguities his work also presents for personal identity, whether male or female? To begin, it must be said that heteronormativity in Bataille does not describe a single, unified state of sexual or gendered identity opposed to another. Rather, heternormativity reveals a more ambiguous, prior form of queerness inherent to identity itself that comes to reveal a spectrum of genders and sexualities that polarizes the masculine and the feminine, albeit without dividing them. For example, Bataille’s conceptions of “virility” and “femininity” both ironically challenge heteronormative identity. In Inner Experience, for example, Bataille at once traces and erases the limits of heternormative difference with statements like the following (my translation): “I can capture the self in tears, in anguish (I can even endlessly [à perte de vue] prolong my vertigo and find myself only in the desire of another—of a woman— unique, irreplaceable, dying, in all things similar to me)” (85). As usual, Bataille grasps self-identity paradoxically in experiences of self-loss like anguish, eroticism, and death; yet such self-discovery through self-loss conjoins immediately with the desire of “another,” a woman, who is completely “similar” to him. At once Bataille posits a difference between male and female identity while claiming that self-recognition itself imbricates self and other, man and woman. Otherwise stated, Bataille paradoxically asserts that, in death and desire, “I am other than who I am,” or more subtly “I am gendered other than my gender,” simultaneously challenging and reproducing heteronormative difference in the self-realization of a queer difference within. Redoubling the queer ambiguity of self and other in this declaration of self-discovery is the phrase “desire of another” (désir d’un autre), which may ambiguously suggest in this context both Bataille’s desire of another—i.e., desire for a woman—or another’s desire for him, a woman’s desire. In this way, just as Bataille’s declaration here therefore challenges or queers the boundaries of (male) subjectivity, so does it make possible by implication a desirous female subject, another who desires “him.” Thus in the same movement does Bataille pose and subvert heteronormative identity, betraying varying possible degrees of masculinity and femininity within the same desiring subject. It is remarkable to note how often in Bataille sexual differences advance a concept or experience that itself undercuts the very sexual differences upon which it is based. In his famous essay “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” for example, Bataille promotes the quality of “virility” in the pursuits of myth, art, eroticism, and secret societies, since all express a form of amor fati that, like sacrifice, triumphantly embrace mortality. For Bataille, however, the “virile” challenge to individualism takes place in transcending the material conditions of life that hide the presence of love, myth, and human destiny, those mortal things that give life “human” meaning and valorize “human destiny.” Yet this “virile” man, initially emblematic of universal humanity, is quite intimately wed to heterosexual masculinity, shifting the universal meaning of man (l’homme) to manliness (virilité). The most obvious illustration of this shift is found in sections IX–XII of the essay, in which he talks about the relationship between the lover and beloved. The male lover confronts the beloved woman in a manner analogous to death and destiny. “The woman toward whom a man is drawn, as to his human destiny,” he writes, “no longer belongs to the space that money controls. Her sweetness escapes the real world, through which she moves without allowing herself to be any more imprisoned than a dream” (Visions 228–29). If the man faces his destiny, the woman “incarnates” it, yet not in a manner that would “imprison” her within the living “real world” the lover tries heroically overcome through her. Instead she represents a dreamy portal to destiny, a gateway between the real and transcendent, life and mortal destiny, much like the one sought in self-sacrifice. Staring at the woman is not enough for the man to capture his destiny and achieve true virility; however, this would remain only “an aesthetic emotion” without the “will to possess her and make true what her apparition had seemed to mean.” It is only when this feminine figure of fate, this femme fatale, is “conquered or lost” that the “fugitive image of destiny” becomes realized, and “ceases to be an aleatory figure and becomes reality determining fate” (Visions 230). The fulfillment of the man’s virility lies in conquering or losing the woman, whereby she becomes the reality of human destiny—i.e., his own “virile” destiny. As Bataille explains later in the essay, this virile, erotic pursuit of the feminine figure of fate is analogous to transgressing the limit that separates the profane from the sacred, making it tantamount to a form of transgression and sacrifice: Secrecy, in the domain where [the sorcerer’s apprentice] advances, is no less necessary to his strange procedures than it is to the transports of eroticism (the total world of myth, the world of being, is separated from the dissociated world by the very limits that separate the sacred from the profane). (Visions 233) On the one hand, therefore, virility is a condition seemingly particular to the masculine subject and his (heterosexual) desire; he is the one who pursues, loves, and dies, self-sacrificially embracing destiny through the erotic and fateful pursuit of the feminine. On the other hand, however, virility goes unrealized without the feminine, which provides a gateway to this destiny both figuratively and in fact. While “virility” seems to represent the “human” fulfillment of what is paradigmatically a heterosexual male subject (through its divestiture in virile self-sacrifice), virility is possible only on the condition also of a fateful feminine presence to be “conquered” or “lost.” The sorcerer’s apprentice does not realize his “virile” destiny without the presence of the feminine; yet this presence, paradoxically, he can “realize”—or rather “unrealize”—only in absentia, in the fateful sacrifice of self. Therefore, if the feminine is understood as an absence in Bataille—a vacuous realm of desire, fate, and heroic, self-sacrificial death—so too is, therefore, the virile man. Several ambiguities thus arise from this: does this obligatory pursuit of feminine fate subsume femininity under a virile manhood, or does it rather feminize this virility in some way, such that human destiny would go unrealized without the woman, without femininity itself? Is it not the fate of virility to be tainted with femininity? As the above demonstrates, the man’s amor fati, or self-sacrifice for virility is also, ultimately, the self-sacrifice of virility itself. Being a man necessarily implies also not being a man, the loss of oneself—a type of “loss” always akin to a fateful feminine absence. The virile man that is the sorcerer’s apprentice seeks out femininity as the fulfillment of his self-sacrificial fate, and yet such a fate seems This content downloaded from queerly both, and neither, masculine and feminine. In the virile and erotic pursuit of self-sacrifice, there is a mobile divide not only between life and death, but also between man and woman, the masculine and the feminine.

In Bataille, women and femininity are often exemplars of self-sacrificial death, eroticism, and excess. Through contrast with male characters and the masculine, they structure a heteronormative, albeit provisional, sexual difference from men who, as narrators, illustrate a more stable subjectivity and a lesser degree of sacrificial self-differentiation. This gives rise to Bataille’s sexist heteronormativity. Yet the man’s heteronormative desire for women hews the path toward self-sacrifice, which is first figured as sacred ambivalence but finally so in the form of self differentiation, recounted both in silence and in the excess of narrative voices. Such self-differentiation reveals itself to be the same formerly specific to the feminine, first revealing the “extimacy” of femininity within masculine identity, but finally the prior self-sacrifice that conditions all identity, whether male or female, masculine or feminine. Such is the double-bind of Bataille’s women and femininity. Since they are provisionally “nothing,” i.e., that which “is not,” there where they “are not,” they cannot and do not provide an exclusive or totalizable category under which identity can be securely assumed. The feminine is also somehow not feminine as that which is largely self-differentiating, self-sacrificial, and non-identical. As such, however, it is impossible to ultimately oppose the feminine to men or the masculine—or indeed to anything else—since that to which it would be opposed is always already included by its inherent sacrificial non-identicality, which is also to say its excess of possible identities. By differing from itself, and thus compelling self-sacrifice and desire, it thereby implicates also that which exceeds it—including men and the masculine. For Bataille, sacrifice exposes the process by which identity always exceeds itself, differs from itself, in a queer space where gender and sex, male and female, are never one.

Long before objects were bought and sold, they were given, circulated, and venerated. The intensely meaningful, demanding, and ambivalent nature of gift exchange has long been recognized. In giving a gift, it seems, we give a part of ourselves; something of our emotions, hopes, and fears is embodied or carried along in the giving of a gift. Further, the acceptance of a gift, a remarkably formal process even today, somehow indebts and obligates the receiver, binding him or her to reciprocate. Where giver and receiver are of sim- ilar standing or are relatively equal in power, gifts are received with polite words of thanks, while the giver will often “downplay” the act of giving with words like “It isn’t much but . . . .” Where power relations are deeply unequal, gifts are often given anonymously, as in charitable acts, so that the giving does not humble or obligate the receiver. In mythology, the generous giver is sometimes masked, hooded, or exceptionally elu- sive so as not to confront the receiver with obligations. For example, Robin Hood is an aristocrat who appears poor and so may give to the poor as their equal, while the figure of St. Nicholas/Santa Claus “gives” without actually giving, or even existing, and allows families to give generously but indirectly through an enchanted medium. The children who hope to receive presents from Santa Claus are obli- gated only by a vague, yet significant, request to “be good” in a small reciprocation of Santa’s goodness. Complexity of Gift Exchange However, the force of reciprocity in gift giving is certainly not confined to mythical tales or what might be thought of as “sentimental” occasions, such as holidays and birthdays. The notion of give and take and the “special” relationships this can generate are central to the understanding of power, and of political and military alliances. In the field of new reproductive technologies, we speak of the giving or donation of sperm and eggs; but where the individu- als, biotechnology companies, or nation-states con- cerned seem to be acting solely in economic terms, their activities are widely condemned and sometimes judged illegal. In the realms of everyday leisure and entertainment, the force of giving, sharing, and reciprocating is vitally important. What is given often cannot be measured, certainly not by the abstract system of money: when a friend cooks a meal for you, the “value” of this act cannot be calculated in terms of cost of ingredients, cost of heating and light- ing, and cost of labor devoted to the production of the meal. In reciprocation, you may cook a meal for your friend, but you might do any number of other things, such as listen to their troubles or forgive them for their perceived role in a preceding event: persons, objects, and feelings seem to merge or travel together in gift exchange. The complexity and ambivalence of these reciprocal relations seem to persist even in the most high-tech forms of virtual social networking where photos, videos, and stories are exchanged with an expectation of reciprocation, though the sanctions protecting this expectation are largely eliminated by the distance afforded by the technological medium. To what extent new technologies might curtail, trans- form, or even enhance moral relations of reciprocity is a hotly contested issue that will motivate further research in the humanities and social sciences. In exchanging gifts, then, both parties seem to be drawn into a process that is not reducible to the economic. Indeed, where the economic value of the gift is low, negligible, or irrelevant, the emotional impact of gift exchange may be at its highest—such as in the giving of a kiss or the paying of a compliment. Most forms of gift exchange involve an expectation or even an obligation to “repay” the gift by reciprocation at some point in the future, but not immediately. For example, if you buy a friend a birthday present, you feel snubbed if he or she does not reciprocate at your birthday: the person who has not reciprocated may appear lesser, somehow drained of moral worth. Yet we would undoubtedly feel very uncomfortable if the birthday gift were reciprocated immediately; it would be as if your act of gift giving was cancelled out. The rule seems to be that if you receive, you must give, appropriately and in turn. There is, then, a moral or ethical dimension to gift exchange that is fundamentally irreducible to economic calculation, even as economic or financial value seems to dominate more and more aspects of modern life. Approaches The social meanings and consequences of gift exchange have been studied by philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Jacques Derrida; by soci- ologists and social anthropologists, notably Marcel Mauss, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jean Baudrillard, and Pierre Bourdieu; by economists, theologians, and literary critics; and by feminist scholars such as Luce Irigaray. Many of these thinkers approach gift giving in the broadest possible sense, covering not only the exchange of presents but also the gift of being itself: the gift of being alive, of the giving of life in birth, and the giving of death in sacrifice. For Nietzsche, gift giving is the “highest virtue,” and many thinkers have explored the ethics of gift giving, arguing, in dif- ferent ways, that the gift exchange process involves, implies, or points toward a form of ethical relatedness that is vital for the well-being of individuals and soci- ety but that is, perhaps, being erased, forgotten, or replaced by patriarchal, consumerist, and technologi- cal culture. Gift exchange, then, has been presented as a radical alternative to dominant liberal capitalist modes of economic exchange. Capitalist economic exchange is based on utilitarian and financial calculation that measures all values in terms of an abstract system of money—as general equivalent. The goal is the continual accumulation of capital, owned or invested privately. Gift exchange, by contrast, tends to generate social obligations of collective reciprocity, responsibility, and ethical relatedness. Moreover, these “values” cannot be measured or calculated in terms of monetary equivalence because their meaning cannot be separated from the acts of exchange themselves, which are often ambivalent and are bound to a temporality that is alien to financial calculation, as we observed in the case of birthday presents. The earliest instances of gift exchange are drawn from religion. The obligatory exchange of gifts, sometimes in the form of sacrifice to gods, spirits, or ancestors, was practiced widely in classical civiliza- tion and continued throughout Christian antiquity and into medieval societies. Gift exchange ceremo- nies also feature prominently in the Vedic scriptures of Hinduism and in ancient Chinese law. Though not always obligatory, the tradition of almsgiving, the donation of money, food, or other goods to the poor or needy on request, are important components of Christianity, Islam, and Sikhism. Gifts and sacri- fices were, and still are, given to gods in the hope or expectation of protection, favor, or intervention. Further, gods give of themselves: they make sacrifices and perform deeds that, in turn, obligate and indebt worshippers, making demands on them in a recipro- cal but radically unequal relationship. While many gifts are expensive, none is as costly as a sacrifice: an act of giving that gives life as a gift to the receiver and “gives” death to the giver. Sacrificial giving remains a vital component of many religions. Contemporary academic interest in notions of gift exchange can be traced to Mauss’s hugely influential Essai sur le don (1924, translated as The Gift, 1990). Mauss, following the work of Emile Durkheim (his uncle and the founder of modern sociology), under- stood collective rituals of gift exchange as ancient and near-universal expressions of social “effervescence,” the very energy that binds society. Indeed, the social circulation of gifts and services has been understood as the foundation of human culture, as constitutive of the incest taboo and practice of exogamy through which women were circulated (as “gifts”) among neighboring tribes, forging alliances, deterring war, and preventing incest. For the influential French feminist Luce Irigaray, this circulation of women, as commodities rather than as gifts proper, she con- tends, constitutes the very foundation of patriarchy and the exploitation of women and nature by men. Gift exchange appears to forge social bonds by generating and maintaining relations of obligatory reciprocity between elements of the social system, both intersocial and intrasocial, but these social relations are not equal or symmetrical. Mauss studied the so-called totemic religions of aboriginal Australia, Pacific East Asia, and northwest America, arguing that gift exchange creates and sustains links throughout the “social totality,” not only between tribes and clans but also between ideas: between sacred and pro- fane, living and dead, persons and things. For Mauss, gift exchange consists of three interlocking moments: the obligation to give, the obligation to receive, and the obligation to reciprocate. The ambivalent nature of gift exchange, that it is both happy and festive yet also demanding and solemn, is traced by Mauss to the etymology of the word gift, which in Greek, Latin, and German connotes not only a present or offering but also poison. Mauss suggests that ceremonies such as the potlatch in North America and the Kula of the Trobriand Islands were “both practical and mystical” (1990, 73). Participation is both “self-interested” and obligatory (not freely chosen). Social hierarchy, honor, and prestige are at stake and are contested. These are definitely not societies of communistic equality, Mauss asserts; nor is there a notion of individual freedoms and rights that characterizes modern capitalist societies. Wealth is circulated such that the participants “did not emerge any richer than before” (9), and, Mauss claims, there is no economic advantage in the ceremonies even for the chiefs. The gift objects are living wealth; they generate social meaning and value, and this value actually increases through the act of exchanging. These festivals, for Mauss, demonstrate that the notion of credit and loan predate the emergence of barter and money, so the attempts of both liberal and Marxist thinkers to understand the development of economy from bar- ter to money to credit are, for Mauss, quite simply wrong. As a result of these studies, Mauss proposed a new social democratic program of welfare and a general spirit of generosity distinct from either liberal capitalist or Marxist communist thinking. This was to be fostered by a reformed education system that Mauss hoped would heal modern societies dam- aged by war and egotistic individualism. However, as pointed out by Lévi-Strauss, Mauss did not elaborate on the power differences between members of the tribes, or on the existence of slavery in such societies, and has been much criticized for these omissions. Mauss focused particularly on the potlatch cer- emony practiced traditionally by First Nation peoples of North America, such as the Tlingit and Haida. Recognizing the imprecision and colonial history of the term potlatch, Mauss proposes the term total services and counter services (prestations et contre- prestations totales) to describe systems of social exchange that include the giving of presents but also loans, entertainments, and hospitality in the widest sense. The term potlatch Mauss reserved for “total ser- vices of an agonistic kind” with “very acute rivalry and the destruction of wealth;” such ceremonies are “rare but highly developed” (1990, 7). Among such tribes there is, according to Mauss, honor in destruction; consumption, he suggests, goes “beyond all bounds. . . . One must expend all that one has, keeping nothing back. It is a competition to see who is richest and also the most madly extravagant. Everything is based upon the principles of antagonism and rivalry” (37). The potlatch and its relationship to gift giving, reciprocal social relations, and the possibilities for a new or alternative ethics, have been explored by a number of influential thinkers. For Georges Bataille, dissident French Surrealist and influential theorist of “excess,” the potlatch was a form of “unproductive expenditure” (dépense). Potlatch ceremonies, Bataille declares, provoked intoxication, vertigo, and ecstasy; they had “no end beyond themselves” and fundamentally excluded bargaining and calculation in an open destruction of wealth (1985, 118). The destruction or consumption of wealth had a purpose, however—to defy, humiliate, and obligate a rival clan in a contest for honor or prestige. Honor itself is not a commodity, and the value it possesses can- not be bought or accumulated. In contrast, modern consumer capitalism, for Bataille, is an impoverished social system where “everything that was generous, orgiastic and excessive has disappeared” (124). For Bataille, the rapturous collective effusion of potlatch suggests an alternative ethical relation might be possible in modern Western societies. For Bataille, violence is an inevitable and constitutive feature of any society, and he hoped that violence might be dramatized and expressed in ritual form, rather than “accumulating” or festering into the hatred that pro- motes war. The very destructiveness of potlatch illustrates that there are values higher than commercial and rational calculation. In potlatch-like rituals, even the separateness of individual identities—for Bataille, the condition of narrow and calculative behavior— might be swept away in a convulsive moment. Like Mauss, Bataille supported increased welfare and aid spending such as the U.S. Marshall Plan as a form of gift giving vital for postwar reconstruction. The controversial work of Baudrillard offers one of the fullest explorations of gift and reciprocity in contemporary consumer societies. Baudrillard, deeply influenced by both Mauss and Bataille, argues that consumer societies can be understood in terms of a gift, or potlatch, given by society to individual consumers that cannot be reciprocated and thereby humbles and obligates. In consumer societies, Baudrillard argues, “the commodity becomes once again . . . by virtue of its very excess the image of the gift, and of the inexhaustible and spectacular prodigality which characterises the feast” (1998, 33). For Baudrillard, like Bataille, consumer societies are societies of waste and violence. Examples related by Baudrillard include war and automobile crashes; even advertising and celebrity culture possess “the whiff of potlatch.” However, the essential difference is that, in our current system, this spectacular squandering no longer has the crucial symbolic and collective significance it could assume in primitive feasting and potlatch. This prestigious consummation . . . has been “personalised” and mass-mediated. Its function is to provide the economic stimulus for mass consumption. (46) For Baudrillard, even the violence of 9/11 can be understood as a violent countergift, an attempt to pay back the West with interest for its ambivalent gifts of consumer goods, democracy, and sexual liberation— images, “signs,” or “simulations” of freedom. Derrida also engages in a reading of Mauss and gift exchange, focusing on the temporality of the gift: the interval or term between the moment of giving and the moment of reciprocation. Derrida argues that the gift, at least as present or simple act of generosity, can never take place, precisely because of the ambivalence of the process: that giver and receiver are all too aware that a gift is given and that something is owed. The exchange of gifts is, strictly speaking, impossible because the notion of exchange under- mines the possibility of a gift being a gift. However, this very impossibility suggests, for Derrida, a form of ethical relatedness that exceeds or escapes the ambivalent logic of gift exchange. As an exemplar, Derrida (1995) discusses the Old Testament story of Abraham, on whom God (Yahweh) has placed the terrible demand that he sacrifice his eldest son Isaac. Abraham must give what he values above all else; he must violate his instincts and social morality by making the ultimate sacrifice. Only in accepting God’s demand is he released from the demand, and for reasons he cannot fathom. In this story, Derrida finds a basis for an alternative ethics, one that reaches beyond reason and calculation. Following the philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas, Derrida writes of “the absolute other,” of a uniqueness and incomparable singularity beyond language, beyond definition, beyond calculation. For Lévinas, this absolute other is God. However, for Derrida, we are all, in our unique and fundamental singularity, absolute other to and for each other. We are all capable of absolute sacrifice in an uncalculating ethical response to the demands of the absolute other. According to Derrida, only the gift of death that is sacrifice, the sacrifices involved in giving birth, and the openness to absolute otherness are truly disinterested and suggest an ethics untainted by the calculation of a return or reward.

underlying incentive of an insurance policy against covetous evil spirits.

The notion of patriarchy as a socially dysfunctional system enables feminist philosophers to show why conceptual connections are so important and how conceptual connections are linked to the variety of other sorts of woman-nature-peace connections. In addition, the claim that patriarchy is a dysfunctional social system locates what ecofeminists see as various "dysfunctionalities" of patriarchy-the empirical invisibility of what women do, sexist-warist-naturist language, violence toward women, other cultures, and nature-in a historical, socioeconomic, cultural, and political context.°1 To say that patriarchy is a dysfunctional system is to say that the fundamental beliefs, values, attitudes and assumptions (conceptual framework) of patriarchy give rise to impaired thinking, behaviors, and institutions which are unhealthy for humans, especially women, and the planet. The following diagram represents the features of patriarchy as a dysfunctional social system: Patriarchy, as an Up-Down system of power-over relationships of domination of women by men, is conceptually grounded in a faulty patriarchal belief and value system, (a), according to which (some) men are rational and women are not rational, or at least not rational in the more highly valued way (some) men are rational; reason and mind are more important than emotion and body; that humans are justified in using female nature simply to satisfy human consumptive needs. The discussion above of patriarchal conceptual frame-works describes the characteristics of this faulty belief system. Patriarchal conceptual frameworks sanction, maintain, and perpetuate impaired thinking, (b): For example, that men can control women's inner lives, that it is men's role to determine women's choices, that human superiority over nature justifies human exploitation of nature, that women are closer to nature than men because they are less rational, more emotional, and respond in more instinctual ways than (dominant) men. The discussions above at (4) and (5), are examples of the linguistic and psychological forms such impaired thinking can take. Operationalized, the evidence of patriarchy as a dysfunctional system is found in the behaviors to which it gives rise, (c), and the unmanageability, (d), which results. For example, in the United States, current estimates are that one out of every three or four women will be raped by someone she knows; globally, rape, sexual harassment, spouse-beating, and sado-masochistic pornography are examples of behaviors practiced, sanctioned, or tolerated within patriarchy. In the realm of environmentally destructive behaviors, strip-mining, factory farming, and pollution of the air, water, and soil are instances of behaviors maintained and sanctioned within patriarchy. They, too, rest on the faulty beliefs that it is okay to "rape the earth," that it is "man's God-given right" to have dominion (that is, domination) over the earth, that nature has only instrumental value, that environmental destruction is the acceptable price we pay for "progress." And the presumption of warism, that war is a natural, righteous, and ordinary way to impose dominion on a people or nation, goes hand in hand with patriarchy and leads to dysfunctional behaviors of nations and ultimately to international unmanageability. Much of the current "unmanageability" of contemporary life in patriarchal societies, (d), is then viewed as a consequence of a patriarchal preoccupation with activities, events, and experiences that reflect historically male-gender- identified beliefs, values, attitudes, and assumptions. Included among these real-life consequences are precisely those concerns with nuclear proliferation, war, environmental destruction, and violence toward women, which many feminists see as the logical outgrowth of patriarchal thinking. In fact, it is often only through observing these dysfunctional behaviors-the symptoms of dys- functionality-that one can truly see that and how patriarchy serves to maintain and perpetuate them. When patriarchy is understood as a dysfunctional system, this "unmanageability" can be seen for what it is-as a predict- able and thus logical consequence of patriarchy.'1 The theme that global environmental crises, war, and violence generally are predictable and logical consequences of sexism and patriarchal culture is pervasive in ecofeminist literature (see Russell 1989, 2). Ecofeminist Charlene Spretnak, for instance, argues that "a militarism and warfare are continual features of a patriarchal society because they reflect and instill patriarchal values and fulfill needs of such a system. Acknowledging the context of patriarchal conceptualizations that feed militarism is a first step toward reduc- ing their impact and preserving life on Earth" (Spretnak 1989, 54). Stated in terms of the foregoing model of patriarchy as a dysfunctional social system, the claims by Spretnak and other feminists take on a clearer meaning: Patriarchal conceptual frameworks legitimate impaired thinking (about women, national and regional conflict, the environment) which is manifested in behaviors which, if continued, will make life on earth difficult, if not impossible. It is a stark message, but it is plausible. Its plausibility lies in understanding the conceptual roots of various woman-nature-peace connections in regional, national, and global contexts.