The Identitarian Misrepresentation of History

Throughout time the ruling class of society have worked to misrepresent history in order to both hide the nature of their rule over society and to legitimize that rule. Employing their own Winston Smith’s, or having the leisure time necessary themselves, to produce their dominant framings of historical events and processes. Micheal Parenti both investigated this misrepresentation, and provided a major correction, to the elite-created history of Rome in his book The Assassination Of Julius Caesar: A People's History Of Ancient Rome. Howard Zinn provided the same for the history of the United States with A People's History of the United States. As historian positions became significantly more economically democratized in the wake of WW2, with initiatives such as the GI Bill and the general expansion of the university sector, a whole new area of study was born, Economic & Social History which was in contrast to the official elite-serving history. This reached its peak in the 1970s/1980s before the neoliberal counter-revolution and the elite-funded and directed post-materialist and postmodern “critical” theorist dumbing down of academia. The peak was even reflected in major movies such as Little Big Man in 1970, an utter rejection of the standard Western movie genre. Here is the full movie at dailymotion.com, and the trailer:

For the ruling class, questions of political economy and most especially those utilizing historical materialism must be banished; subsumed under the histories of nations and “great leaders” or more recently under misleading critical race and feminist scholarship. One example is the 1619 Project funded and supported by the elite-serving New York Times, which over-emphasizes the role of racialized slavery in US history while ignoring the overall political economic nature of the US colonies. The 300+ year genocide of the Amerindian population disappears into the background, as does the deeply economic class based nature of relations within the “white” (firstly overwhelmingly British and then extended to new nationalities such as German, Italian and Irish as they were accepted as “white”) population.

With the 50% death rate of indentured servants in the 1700s, and the overwhelming majority of the survivors becoming the poorest of the poor, utterly ignored. Or if mentioned, the messenger being attacked as “racist”. No mention of Bacon’s Rebellion of 1675 to 1676 during which poor whites and Blacks fought side by side against the ruling class of the Jamestown colony; the nightmare of the small colonial elite. This was a major driver of the greatly increased usage of racialized slaves, miscegenation laws, and the economic differentiation between poor whites and Blacks; much copied from the slave plantations of the Caribbean islands. To accept such history would drive a stake through the heart of the argument that “all whites are racist” and instead make visible the political-economic nature of racist practices; with a racist false consciousness created by the ruling class to divide the working people. As detailed here. These two short videos cover the topics of indentured servitude, slavery, the development of the plantation economy within the British colony of Ireland, and the impact of Bacon’s Rebellion.

For a more involved discussion from Bad Empanada:

As feminist scholarship, disconnected from political economy, flourished in the academy and within society more generally the concept of “patriarchy” has been utilized to make class relations invisible. All women, whether they are members of the rich ruling class or the poorest of the poor are deemed to be equally beset by a sex-based conspiracy of all men to subjugate all women that has been in place since time immemorial. In such a view of society a working class women has much more in common with a rich ruling class woman (their joint patriarchal “subjugation”) than with a working class man (who is subject to the very real class-based subjugation that the working class woman is). With the advent of an intersectionality that quickly de-emphasized the study of issues of economic class (derided as being “classist”), the population could be sliced and diced into a myriad of victim groups such as “Black women”, “Black lesbian women” ad nauseam.

As with the false history of race relations, much of feminist history tends to remove the equal suffering of poor men and women and their joint efforts to overcome their class-based subjugation. It also tends to remove much of the agency of women and ignore the role of men in many of the advancements for women’s rights, as well as ignore the lack of rights of many men (e.g. property and other limits on voting rights) until relatively recent times. The equivalent of “all white people are racist” is the saying that “all men are rapists”, a statement that is utterly refuted by actual social statistics that show that only a very small percentage of men are responsible for all male acts of violence; including rape. Made invisible in the background is the mass incarceration of Black men in US society, and the widespread acts of anal rape in US prisons where the victim has no way of escaping the perpetrator. An example of feminist misrepresentations of history is provided below by Janice Fiomengle, ironically through a book written by a feminist which shows female agency, and extensive social protections for women, in the period 1880-1920 in Ontario Canada.

Not surprisingly these “critical” theorists have been extensively supported by the ruling-class-dominated state and the ruling class foundations such as Ford, Rockefeller and Kellogg which provide half of all social science research funding in the US. In addition, US university boards are stacked with members of the ruling class and their courtiers to make sure that cultural hegemony is not threatened by academia. As I have noted before, Gabriel Rockhill has detailed much of the US ruling class post-WW2 project to banish historical materialism from the academy; including CIA-funded cultural institutions and scholarship (the book The Might Wurlitzer: How The CIA Played America by Hugh Wilford is also a very good source). For example, one of the leading early feminist scholars Gloria Steinem, who edited Ms. Magazine and worked with the CIA-front the Independent Research Service, was funded and supported by CIA entities:

Betty Friedan’s famous book The Feminist Mystique of 1963 was also deeply flawed as it relied upon the now debunked research of Margaret Mead (that was used to argue that sexuality was shaped by culture), an Alfred Kinsey who used highly skewed research participants that misrepresented mainstream sexuality, and a Bruno Bettelheim who was exposed as having a history of fabrication. She also utterly misrepresented her own deeply socialist activist past, trying to pass herself off as a middle-class domestic housewife. This article covers these issues in more depth. Unlike Steinem and the more radical feminists though, Friedan did stand against the vilification of men and argued that feminism was compatible with marriage and motherhood. Friedan’s approach, which was compatible with male-female coalition was rapidly sidelined in the movement.

Naomi Wolf’s famous book The Beauty Myth should never have been published given its widespread misrepresentation of basic social statistics, with 18 out of 23 statistics used inaccurate or overdone; many of these errors are still treated as facts in feminist and gender scholarship and teaching. Her utter disregard for the truth has never left her, shown by her colossal error in the recent book Outrages where she utterly misrepresented the sentences given to homosexuals during the British Victoria Era. One has to ask how the hell her first book ever got published by a serious publisher, and even her latest book! Ideological agenda seems to have overcome the need for basic editing and fact checking. We also have 60-something Germain Greer, the writer of The Female Eunuch (which very much focused on individual emancipation rather than group action), publishing a book extolling the pedophilic pleasures of adult women gazing upon young teenage male bodies entitled The Beautiful Boy; an ideologically-loaded “history” of art . Imagine a 60 year old man publishing such a book about “the beautiful girl”; it seems pedophile fantasies and sexual objectification are just fine if its a women doing the fantasizing.

More recently, the disconnection between objective reality and the view that everything is a “cultural creation” and the disappearing of class struggle has become more and more extreme while being fully supported by the capitalist ruling class dominated academy. This was turned into an art form of turgid over-lengthy nearly impenetrable prose by Judith Butler in her book Gender Trouble, which challenged Derrida’s work for intentionally over-complex and confusing prose. I really wonder how many people, even feminist academics, have trudged through this work in full. Real genius is shown by the ability to clearly articulate a position, as Gramsci was able to do even while in agony in his jail cell.

Instead, Butler relied extensively on the non historical materialist “critical” theorists such as Derrida (who focused on the deconstruction of texts), de Beauvoir (author of The Second Sex and a Nazi collaborator, sexual predator of her teenage female students, and pedophilia supporter), Lacan (who developed Freud’s theories) and Foucault (author of books on capital punishment, sexuality and the social construction of power, as well as being a pedophile rapist); copying their turgid writing styles and disconnection from objective reality. Let’s also remember that Freud’s “theories” were the work of man working to save his elevated position by protecting the Austrian high-society sexual predators that his patients were complaining about, and have been significantly debunked by experimental psychology. A short version of “Freud was wrong about pretty much everything”.

That Freud is still taught, not just in psychology but utilized by many in the humanities and social sciences, is an indictment of the academy and of much of “critical” theory. Of course, none of the above theorists had anything to say about capitalist ruling class power and its domination of society through the very hegemonic culture that they studied; all surface appearances and no political-economic depth. Classic bourgeois philosophy and social theory. A takedown of Simone de Beauvoir:

The core argument of Butler’s work was to argue that gender expressions (and even biological sex) are culturally created though the social performance of those roles; rather than perhaps a combination of biology and culture. Kicking off the whole science-denying areas of third wave feminism and queer theory, fully supported by an academy that has celebrated and well-remunerated her work. Educated in the heart of bourgeois progressivism at Yale, studying idealism and phenomenology, and now ensconced at Berkeley. In her latest work she attempts to label gender-critical feminists with the lazy slur of fascist, without actually defining anywhere what a fascist is. Very much in the same way that some extremist Trans-activists utilize the slur of TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) when their arguments are challenged. The beauty of bourgeois progressivism and philosophy whether being of the “critical” or mainstream type is that an academic can spend their whole life ensconced in texts without ever addressing the real issues of societal power and dominance. Perfect for the ruling class that in no way wants such questions raised in academia, or polluting their hegemonic culture. Such questions must remain the elephant in the room that cannot be seen, heard or talked about; academia as the practice of the three monkeys.

A very different feminist activist is Angela Davis who was an active communist as well as a feminist, and therefore integrated historical materialism and issues of class power and dominance within her work and activism. For this she was investigated by the FBI, had her campus appearances and teaching load minimized by university trustees, and was tried for her involvement with the Soledad Brothers. She has been very much sidelined by feminist scholars. This is her attacking “bourgeois feminism”, she does raise intersectionality but an intersectionality that most definitely includes economic class; she derides those feminists that are simply attempting to gain access to the higher rungs of capitalist society.

A more recent ruling class appointee has been the delusional and race-grifting Ibram X. Kendi, celebrated for his book How To Be An Anti-Racist which utterly sidelined issues of class and power; instead framing racism as a purely psychosocial phenomenon with anti-racism put forward as a personal journey of redemption. Racism itself was supposedly to be found in the smallest of interactions, with “micro-aggressions” and in the banal; racism was everywhere! As Tyler Harper notes, after Kendi display his academic and organizational incompetence and grifting:

Regardless of Kendi’s motivations, the pivot from policy to the personal would prove financially profitable and professionally opportune. Now that Kendi’s career seems to be unraveling, his critics have come to take their pound of flesh. And after the deluge of self-help hokum he has produced since Floyd’s murder — not to mention the corporate water-carrying his ideas have facilitated — I don’t begrudge them. But I also think the blame lies not just with Kendi but with the rich donors, CEOs and universities that were eager to purchase their own absolution by bulk-buying anti-racist indulgences.

Even Harper is blind to the underlying ruling class agenda of the divide and conquering of working people, especially after Occupy Wall Street focused so much attention on the capitalist ruling class.

Adolph Reed is a relative island of class awareness, who is fully aware of how class based societies construct identities to divide and conquer the majority to protect the dominance of the ruling class minority. And how the modern concept of race developed out of bourgeois capitalism and the need for social control; a history that the “critical” scholars want to ignore. As he says “it all comes back to class and political economy”.

Christian Parenti also details this very well when he note that Diversity is a ruling ideological project to divide and conquer and the only way to drive real change is through a Rainbow Coalition of working people irrespective of sex, colour, sexual orientation etc.

It is why the US ruling class is happy with race-segregationist organizations such as the Nation of Islam and became very unhappy with Martin Luther King when he started discussing political economy and reaching out to working people generally. The same with Fred Hampton when he reached across racial lines, and why Occupy Wall Street had to be crushed and actively forgotten.