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Biological psychiatrists–nowadays most psychiatrists–are fond of saying You can’t talk to a disease. The communication of so-called schizophrenics makes no sense at all to these doctors who want to control symptoms, such as hallucinations and delusions, with drugs, electroshock, and incarceration.

The idea that these extremes of irrationality are due to a disease is inseparable from the survival of psychiatry as a profession. If schizophrenia is not a disease, psychiatry wold have little justification for using its more devastating treatments. Lobotomy, electroshock, and all of the more potent drugs, including neuroleptics and even lithium, were developed at the expense of locked-up people, most of whom were labeled schizophrenic. The search for biochemical and genetic causes keeps psychiatrists, as medical doctors, in the forefront of well-funded research in the field. The notion that patients have sick brains justifies psychiatry’s unique power to treat them against their will. It also bolsters psychiatry’s claim to the top of the mental health hierarchy. In short, if irrationality isn’t biological, then psychiatry loses much of its rationale for existence as a medical specialty.

60 Minutes Dramatizes Psychospirituality in Schizophrenics

On July 27, 1986, 60 Minutes produced a show entitled Schizophrenia. It was based on biopsychiatric theories, and one of their experts declared, We know it’s a brain disease now. It’s like multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s disease. On the show, vignettes of patients were presented to impress the audience with the bizarre quality of their communications, and hence the absurdity of any psychological meaning or underpinning to their disease.

The first 60 Minutes patient, Brugo, bolsters his identity with spirituality, as well as religion, and declares that he’s not extinct: And I’m Croatian Hebrew, which is Adam and Eve’s kin. And I have been Croatian Hebrew for centuries and cent–upon centuries. And I’m a Homo-erectus man, and I’m also part Neanderthal, and I mean to keep that heritage, ’cause I’m not extinct.

Packed into these few remarks is symbolism about his desperate need for personal value and dignity, his identification with religion and humanity, and perhaps his awareness of primitive impulses stirring inside himself, as well as his fear of personal extinction. Here is more than enough material to stimulate anyone’s desire to communicate with him.

The second patient, Jim, is dismissed by the interviewer because he is convinced he was shot to death when he was a baby. Yet his brief remarks seem like a metaphor for child sexual abuse by a male: I had my head blown off with a shotgun when I was two years old. And–and before that, things happened in my crib. I remember all these things and stuff, but I just remember, you know. I remember all this stuff.

A therapist with experience in listening to people immediately would wonder about what lies behind Jim’s direct hints about terrifying memories from early childhood, not to mention the symbolism of the crib in relation to his present trapped condition. More than one patient of mine has begun with just such anguished fragments of memory before discovering the agony of his or her abusive childhood and its relationship to current entrapments.

Another 60 Minutes patient, Ronnie, clearly is struggling with his own identity and his separateness or isolation from other people. He, too, talks in psychospiritual terms, again with undertones of possible sexual abuse. I thought everybody’s bodies was connected to mine, and their–their spirits were–I was–I was laying in bed and I played–you know how we live, where, you know, like you’re smashing some air for yourself? Well, like, I was smashing every spirit next to me, and the–all kinds of bad things were happening.

Still another patient Lynn, identifies herself with God and with being different, and clearly tells us that her wisdom is more than she can handle. She’s practically inviting us to ask her about the inner knowledge she cannot bear: I’ve got the wisdom of God in me, and I have to learn how to cope with it. Nobody seems to think you’re suoppsed to survive when you’re different. [Crying] But I know–as–like the words in Job said, all I can say was, Have pity on me, my friends. I’ve been touched by the hand of God.

Brain Disease or Psychospiritual Crisis?

The patients’ quotes were selected by 60 Minutes to demonstrate that so-called schizophrenia is a biochemical disease rather than a crisis of thinking, feeling and meaning. Yet people with real brain disease–such as Alzheimer’s, stroke, or a tumor–don’t talk symbolically like these people do.

Instead of metaphors laced with meaning, brain-damaged people typically display memory difficulties as the first sign that their mind isn’t working as well as it once did. They have trouble recalling recently learned things, like names, faces, telephone numbers, or lists. Later they may get confused and disoriented as they display what is called an organic brain syndrome. In fact–and this is very important–advanced degrees of brain disease render the individual unable to think in such abstract or metaphorical terms. The thought processes that get labeled schizophrenia require higher mental function and therefore a relatively intact brain. No matter how bizarre the ideas may seem, they necessitate symbolic and often abstract thinking. That’s why lobotomy works: the damage to the higher mental centers smashes the capacity to express existential pain and anguish. As we’ll find out, it’s also why the most potent psychiatric drugs and shock treatment have their effect.

Objects or Beings?

How are we to approach people who get labeled schizophrenic? Do we think of them as troubled humans struggling in a self-defeating style with profound psychological and spiritual issues, usually involving their basic worth or identity? Or do we view them as if they are afflicted with physical diseases, like multiple sclerosis and Alzheimer’s disease, in which their feelings, thoughts, anguishes, and aspirations play no role? Do we try to understand them, or do we try to physically fix them? Do we look for profound hurts and failed psychospiritual efforts in their lives, or for biochemical aberrations in their brains? Do we wonder about what meanings and values they are seeking–and how they became so helplessly mired down in the process–or do we search for the biochemical imbalances that have twisted their brain processes?

If people who express seemingly irrational ideas are best understood mechanistically, then these people are broken, disordered, or defective devices. If we take the viewpoint that they are persons, beings, or souls in struggle, then an infinite variety of more subtle possibilities comes to mind for understanding and helping those who seem mad, crazy, or deranged.

If we are beings rather than devices, then our most severe emotional and spiritual crises originate within ourselves, our families, and our society. Our crises can be understood as conflicts or confusion about our identities, values, and aspirations rather than as biological aberrations. And as self-determining human beings, we can work toward overcoming those feelings of helplessness generated by our past spiritual and social defeats.

By contrast, the typical modern psychiatrist–by disposition, training, and experience–is wholly unprepared to understand anyone’s psycho-spiritual crisis. With drugs and shock treatment, the psychiatrist instead attacks the subjective experience of the person and blunts or destroys the very capacity to be sensitive and aware. No wonder the treatment of mental patients often looks more like a war against them. It often is.

—Peter Breggin (1991). Toxic Psychiatry: Why Therapy, Empathy, and Love Must Replace the Drugs, Electroshock, and Biochemical Theories of the New Psychiatry. New York: St. Martin’s Press. 23–26.

Prior to the 1980s, most social science research on rape was concentrated on stranger rape — in which a man assaults a woman who is unknown to him, who is targeted at random or opportunistically, in the midst of another crime (such as mugging or burglary). At the time, there little reliable research on date rape and other forms of acquaintance rape. Later research found that acquaintance rape was far more prevalent than previously realized, and far more common than stranger rape — that 90% or more of all rapes were committed by a date, an intimate partner, or another man known to the victim. This passage, from New York radical feminist Susan Brownmiller’s groundbreaking 1975 study Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, summarizes the data that was available in the mid-1970s, and the limitations of that data, which feminists were beginning to investigate and reveal.

According to the task force of the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, half of all rape victims (53 percent) were total strangers to their attackers; another 30 percent were slightly acquainted. Seven percent had a family relationship to their rapists (daughter, sister, niece or cousin) and 3 percent were not related but had a previous close association. (As with most percentage distributions concerning crime, there is always a category called unknown or other.) The task force concluded, If a woman is attacked, then, considerable justification does appear to exist for the fear that the offender will be a stranger.

As I mentioned in Chapter 6, The Police-Blotter Rapist, the statistical profile of rape falls midway between the profiles for assault and robbery. In keeping with this pattern, when interpersonal relationships in these three crimes of violence are compared side by side, we find that strangers commit 21 percent of all assaults, 53 percent of all rapes and 79 percent of all robberies.

Testimony: About five years ago when I lived in Chicago I awoke one night gagged with my hands pinned down by someone who was wearing leather gloves and holding a razor to my throat. I wasn’t quite sure I was awake. I thought I must be in the middle of a nightmare that seemed much more realistic than usual and I couldn’t break it up. I was trying to establish if there really was a person there. And then I did get my wrist cut slightly, so I realized it was real and that I was risking my life and that I’d better hold still and let the man have intercourse with me. He was very fast. He wasn’t wearing any clothes on the bottom half of his body and he ran out the window in that position, just like Romeo on the balcony, onto the fire escape and down.

I got up, turned on the lights and took a bath in alcohol. I was living alone. I had to get out of the apartment. I set off with my coat on and then I realized the man had gotten in my purse and left me without a penny. Apparently he had been in the apartment for some time before I woke up because I saw he had gagged me with my own dishtowel. It was then that I thought to call the police.

Stranger-rape has clearly been the preferred category from the point of view of the police precinct, the category most likely to win the determination of founded. When a woman is raped by a total stranger, her status as victim is clean and untranished in the station-house mentality. In Brenda Brown’s 1973 Memphis study, 73 percent of all founded rapes were committed by strangers, and Brown reported, The closeness of the relationship was a frequently used reason for categorizing cases as unfounded. According to the Uniform Crime Reports, unfounded cases are frequently complicated by a prior relationship between victim and offender.

For this reason it remains difficult to assess the true percentage of rapes committed by strangers. As the women’s movement continues to press a greater understanding of the crime of rape on the general public, women who have been assaulted by men they know will feel freer to report the crime and these reports will begin to be treated with the seriousness they deserve. At the present time, police precincts still operate from the assumption that a woman who has been raped by a man she knows is a woman who changed her mind afterwards.

Susan Brownmiller (1975), Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape. 351–352.

I am happy to announce that the full content of Benjamin Tucker’s Instead Of A Book, By A Man Too Busy To Write One is now available, online, through the Fair Use Repository!

The completion of the online edition adds the following new essays:

1. Part V. Communism.

   1. General Walker and the Anarchists.
   2. Herr Most on Libertas.
   3. Still Avoiding the Issue
   4. Herr Most Distilled and Consumed.
   5. Should Labor be Paid or Not?
   6. Does Competition Mean War?
   7. Competition and Monopoly Confounded.
   8. On Picket Duty.

2. Part VI. Methods.

   1. The Power of Passive Resistance.
   2. The Irish Situation in 1881.
   3. The Method of Anarchy.
   4. Theoretical Methods.
   5. A Seed Planted.
   6. The Home Guard Heard From.
   7. Colonization.
   8. Labor’s New Fetich.
   9. Mr. Pentecost’s Belief in the Ballot.
   10. A Principle of Social Therapeutics.
   11. The Morality of Terrorism.
   12. The Beast of Communism.
   13. Time Will Tell.
   14. The Facts Coming to Light.
   15. Liberty and Violence.
   16. Convicted by a Packed Jury.
   17. Why Expect Justice from the State?
   18. The Lesson of the Hour
   19. Convicted for their Opinions.
   20. To the Breach, Comrades!
   21. On Picket Duty.

3. Part VII. Miscellaneous.

   1. The Lesson of Homestead.
   2. Save Labor from its Friends
   3. Is Frick a Soldier of Liberty?
   4. Shall Strikers be Court-Martialled?
   5. Census-Taking Fatal to Monopoly.
   6. Anarchy Necessarily Atheistic.
   7. A Fable for Malthusians
   8. Auberon Herbert and his Work.
   9. Solutions of the Labor Problem.
   10. Karl Marx as Friend and Foe.
   11. Do the Knights of Labor Love Liberty?
   12. Play-House Philanthropy.
   13. Beware of Batterson!
   14. A Gratifying Discovery.
   15. Cases of Lamentable Longevity.
   16. Spooner Memorial Resolutions.
   17. On Picket Duty.

There are still the usual finishing touches (internal links, details of the front matter, minor points of formatting, etc.) to apply. But this book is basically done, and all 497 pages worth of content are, in any case, available for you to read, cite, and enjoy!

Part IV of Benjamin Tucker’s Instead of a Book, by a Man Too Busy To Write One, on Socialism, is now available in full in the Fair Use Repository‘s online edition of the work. This adds several newly transcribed essays focusing on the meaning of socialism, arguing that Anarchistic Socialism is the most consistent form of socialism and arguing against the common assumption that socialism is synonymous with State monopoly over production. The essays newly available are:

• Socialism: What It Is, which argues that the word Socialism should be proudly claimed, or reclaimed, by Anarchists, in spite of the appropriation of the word by State Socialists. Tucker argues that Anarchistic Socialism is the most consistent form of socialism.
• Armies That Overlap, in which Tucker claims (against the claims of the paper Twentieth Century) that Anarchism and Socialism, properly defined, are neither coextensive nor exclusive; they are two overlapping struggles.
• Socialism and the Lexicographers, which compiles a large list of dictionary and encyclopaedia definitions of the word Socialism in response to State Socialists’ recent attempts to use a dictionary definition to read Anarchists out of the socialist movement.
• The Sin of Herbert Spencer, discussing the apparent class bias in Spencer’s later work, which Tucker interprets as attacking only government privilege for the poor, while remaining silent about government privilege for the rich. Tucker also praises the work of Spencer’s English followers, especially Auberon Herbert, as more consistent.
• Will Professor Sumner Choose? addresses remarks by the liberal political economist William Graham Sumner, arguing that while his arguments against State Socialism are quite telling, consistency demands that he should endorse the radical laissez-faire position of Anarchistic Socialism.
• After Freiheit, Der Sozialist responds to a polemical attack on the German edition of Liberty by a State Socialist newspaper.
• State Socialism and Liberty argues that State monopoly over the means of production necessarily involves tyranny, and that free individual people must be able to withdraw and form their own arrangements at will.
• On Picket Duty discusses arguments from the English Marxist Edward Aveling on the tyranny of State Socialism, the relationship between individualist anarchism and communist anarchism, the relationship between individualist anarchism and laissez-faire classical liberalism, gradualists who see State Socialism as part of a transition to Anarchism, and Terence Powderly’s attacks on Oscar Wilde.

[From comments in response to Catallarchy 2005-12-09: Gang warfare without the warfare.]

Interestingly enough, these kind of displays were a common element of stateless arbitration in medieval Iceland, as well. Here’s Jesse Byock, in Viking Age Iceland:

The absence of pitched battles does not mean that the island inhabitants eschewed all forms of militant show, only that they ritualized the actual use of force. Parties to a dispute that was moving toward resolution frequently assembled large numbers of armed baendr [freeholders]. Sometimes these groups confronted each other for days at assemblies and at other gatherings, such as when a successful party was trying to enforce a judgment at the home of the defendant (féránsdómr). Althought opposing sides often clashed briefly, and a few men might be killed, protracted battles were consistently avoided. It was not by chance that the parties showed restraint. Leaders really had few options if they hoped to retain the allegiance of a large following, since the baendr were not dependable supporters in a long or perilous confrontation. They had no tradition of obeying orders, maintaining discipline, or being absent from their farms for extended periods. The godhar, for their part, were seldom able to bear the burdens of campaigning. They lacked the resources necessary to feed, house, equip and pay followers for more than a brief period.

Rather than signalling the outbreak of warfare, a public display of armed support revealed that significant numbers of men had chosen sides and were prepared to participate in an honourable resolution. With chieftains and farmers publicly committed, a compromise resting on a collective agreement could be reached. (p. 125)

Part III of Benjamin Tucker’s Instead of a Book, by a Man Too Busy to Write One, on Land and Rent, is now available in full in the Fair Use Repository’s online edition. This adds the following new transcribed essays.

There are a series of articles setting out basic principles and defending the occupancy-and-use standard for land ownership, including discussions with Edgeworth and Auberon Herbert:

• The Land for the People
• Basic Principles of Economics: Rent
• Rent: Parting Words
• Property Under Anarchism

Next come a series of discussions on Henry George‘s theories on land tenure and the single tax:

• Mere Land No Saviour for Labor
• Henry George’s Secondary Factors
• The State Socialists and Henry George
• Liberty and the George Theory

Followed by a long debate with the correspondent Egoist, on the abolition of the State and the merits of Georgist theory:

• A Criticism that Does Not Apply
• Land Occupancy and its Conditions
• Competitive Protection
• Protection, and its Relation to Rent
• Liberty and Land
• Rent, and its Collection by Force

Then an exchange with Stephen T. Byington, later a major translator of anarchist works into English, on whether a free market will eliminate economic rent; if so, how; and if not, whether Georgist confiscation of rent is permissible. Tucker makes clear that the notion of liberty that he defends is intimately connected with a defense of private property:

• Economic Rent
• Liberty and Property

And two short articles in which Tucker argues that Georgist land-tax schemes would result in homesteaders being unjustly evicted from their homes due to increasing population in their neighborhood:

• Going to Pieces on the Rocks
• Simplifying Government

Finally, a collection of short remarks from the On Picket Duty columns of Liberty, focusing almost entirely on debates with Henry George:

• On Picket Duty

This is from William Shirer’s 1960 The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, a History of Nazi Germany, as quoted by Randall McElroy at The Distributed Republic (2007-09-30)

Evening had now come, the last of Adolf Hitler’s life. He instructed Frau Junge, one of his secretaries, to destroy the remaining papers in his files and he sent out word that no one in the bunker was to go to bed until further orders. This was interpreted by all as meaning that he judged the time had come to make his farewells. But it was not until long after midnight, at about 2:30 A.M. of April 30, as several witnesses recall, that the Fuehrer emerged from his private quarters and appeared in the general dining passage, where some twenty persons, mostly the women members of his entourage, were assembled. He walked down the line shaking hands with each and mumbling a few words that were inaudible. There was a heavy film of moisture on his eyes and, as Frau Junge remembered, they seemed to be looking far away, beyond the walls of the bunker.

After he retired, a curious thing happened. The tension broke which had been building up to an almost unendurable point in the bunker broke, and several persons went to the canteen—to dance. The weird party soon became so noisy that word was sent from the Fuehrer’s quarters requesting more quiet. The Russians might come in a few hours and kill them all—though most of them were already thinking of how they could escape—but in the meantime for a brief spell, now that the Fuehrer’s strict control of their lives was over, they would seek pleasure where and how they could find it. The sense of relief among these people seems to have been enormous and they danced on through the night.

–William Shirer (1960). The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, a History of Nazi Germany, p. 1132.

Part II of Bertrand Russell’s The Principles of Mathematics, on the theory of cardinal numbers, is now available in full in the Fair Use Repository’s online edition. This Part includes Russell’s definitions of the cardinal numbers and basic arithmetical operators, and discussions of the mathematical treatment of infinite cardinals, the relation of part to whole, and the theory of ratios and fractions. Its completion adds eight new chapters to the online edition:

1. Chapter XI. Definition of Cardinal Numbers.
2. Chapter XII. Addition and Multiplication.
3. Chapter XIII. Finite and Infinite.
4. Chapter XIV. Theory of Finite Numbers.
5. Chapter XV. Addition of Terms and Addition of Classes.
6. Chapter XVI. Whole and Part.
7. Chapter XVII. Infinite Wholes.
8. Chapter XVIII. Ratios and Fractions.

Enjoy!

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Rat, was one of the leading counterculture / New Left newspapers in New York City. In January 1970, a group of women who worked at Rat, fed up with the increasingly aggressive sexism of the paper’s content and internal hierarchies, took over the newspaper and, with the help of women from Women’s Liberation groups in New York, converted it into a feminist newspaper. In the first issue, Robin Morgan (then a member of W.I.T.C.H.) contributed Goodbye to All That. The article has since been reprinted widely in anthologies of radical feminist writing; this copy is based on the reprint that appears in Dear Sisters: Dispatches from the Women’s Liberation Movement. A slightly different version appears, together with a long introduction and explanatory footnotes, in Morgan’s The Word of a Woman: Feminist Dispatches 1968–1992.

Goodbye to All That

So, Rat has been liberated, for this week, at least. Next week? If the men return to reinstate the porny photos, the sexist comic strips, the nude-chickie covers (along with their patronizing rhetoric about being in favor of women’s liberation)–if this happens, our alternatives are clear. Rat must be taken over permanently by women–or Rat must be destroyed. (¶ 1)

Why Rat? Why not EVO or even the obvious new pornzines (Mafia-distributed alongside the human pornography of prostitution)? First, they’ll get theirs–but it won’t be by a takeover, which is reserved for something at least worth taking over. Nor should they be censored. They should just be helped not to exist–by any means necessary. But Rat, which has always tried to be a really radical cum lifestyle paper, that’s another matter. It’s the liberal cooptative masks on the face of sexist hate and fear, worn by real nice guys we all know and like, right? We have met the enemy and he’s our friend. And dangerous. What the hell, let the chicks do an issue; maybe it’ll satisfy ’em for a while, it’s a good controversy, and it’ll maybe sell papers runs an unoverheard conversation that I’m sure took place at some point last week. (¶ 2)

And that’s what I wanted to write about–the friends, brothers, lovers in the counterfeit male-dominated Left. The good guys who think they know what Women’s Lib, as they so chummily call it, is all about–who then proceed to degrade and destroy women by almost everything they say and do: The cover on the last issue of Rat (front and back). The token pussy power or clit militancy articles. The snide descriptions of women staffers on the masthead. The little jokes, the personal ads, the smile, the snarl. No more, brothers. No more well-meaning ignorance, no more cooptation, no more assuming that this thing we’re all fighting for is the same; one revolution under man, with liberty and justice for all. No more. (¶ 3)

Let’s run it down. White males are most responsible for the destruction of human life and environment on the planet today. Yet who is controlling the supposed revolution to change all that? White males (yes, yes, even with their pasty fingers back in black and brown pies again). It could just make one a bit uneasy. It seems obvious that a legitimate revolution must be led by, made by those who have been most oppressed: black, brown, yellow, red, and white women–with men relating to that the best they can. A genuine Left doesn’t consider anyone’s suffering irrelevant or titillating; nor does it function as a microcosm of capitalist economy, with men competing for power and status at the top, and women doing all the work at the bottom (and functioning as objectified prizes or coin as well). Goodbye to all that. (¶ 4)

Run it all the way down. (¶ 5)

Goodbye to the male-dominated peace movement, where sweet old Uncle Dave can say with impunity to a woman on the staff of Liberation magazine, The trouble with you is you’re an aggressive woman. (¶ 6)

Goodbye to the straight male-dominated Left: to PL, who will allow that some workers are women, but won’t see all women (say, housewives) as workers (blind as the System itself); to all the old Left-over parties who offer their Women’s Liberation caucuses to us as if that were not a contradiction in terms; to the individual anti-leadership leaders who hand-pick certain women to be leaders and then relate only to them, either in the male Left or in Women’s Liberation—bringing their hang-ups about power dominance and manipulation to everything they touch. (¶ 7)

Goodbye to the Weather Vain, with the Stanley Kowalski image and theory of free sexuality but practice of sex on demand for males. Left Out!—not Right On!—to the Weather Sisters who (and they know better—they know) reject their own radical feminism for that last desperate grab at male approval that we all know so well, for claiming that the machismo style and the gratuitous violence is their own style by free choice, and for believing that this is the way for a woman to make her revolution…all the while, oh my sister, not meeting my eyes because Weathermen chose Charles Manson as their—and your—hero. (Honest, at least, since Manson is only the logical extreme of the normal American male’s fantasy, whether he is Dick Nixon or Mark Rudd: master of a harem, women to do all the shitwork, from raising babies and cooking and hustling to killing people on command.) Goodbye to all that shit that sets women apart from women; shit that covers the face of any Weatherwoman which is the face of any Manson Slave which is the face of Sharon Tate which is the face of Mary Jo Kopechne which is the face of Beulah Saunders, which is the face of me which is the face of Pat Nixon which is the face of Pat Swinton. In the dark we are all the same–and you better believe it: we’re in the dark, baby. (Remember the old joke: Know what they call a black man with a Ph.D.? A nigger. Variations: Know what they call a Weatherwoman? A heavy cunt. Know what they call a hip revolutionary woman? A groovy cunt. Know what they call a radical militant feminist? A crazy cunt. Amerika is a land of free choice–take your pick of titles.) Left Out, my sister—don’t you see? Goodbye to the illusion of strength when you run hand in hand with your oppressors; goodbye to the dream that being in the leadership collective will get you anything but gonorrhea. (¶ 8)

Goodbye to RYM II, as well, and all the other RYMs—not that the sisters there didn’t pull a cool number by seizing control, but because they let the men back in after only a day or so of self-criticism on male chauvinism. (And goodbye to the inaccurate blanket use of that phrase, for that matter: male chauvinism is an attitude—male supremacy is the objective reality, the fact.) Goodbye to the Conspiracy, who, when lunching with fellow sexist bastards Norman Mailer and Terry Southern in a Bunny-type club in Chicago found Judge Hoffman at the neighboring table—no surprise: in the light they are all the same. (¶ 9)

Goodbye to Hip culture and the so-called Sexual Revolution, which has functioned toward women’s freedom as did the Reconstruction toward former slaves—reinstituting oppression by another name. Goodbye to the assumption that Hugh Romney is safe in his cultural revolution, safe enough to refer to our women, who make all our clothes without somebody not forgiving that. Goodbye to the arrogance of power indeed that lets Czar Stan Freeman of the Electric Circus sleep without fear at night, or permits Tomi Ungerer to walk unafraid in the street after executing the drawings for the Circus advertising campaign against women. Goodbye to the idea that Hugh Hefner is groovy ’cause he lets Conspirators come to parties at the Playboy Mansion—goodbye to Hefner’s dream of a ripe old age. Goodbye to Tuli and the Fugs and all the boys in the front room—who always knew they hated the women they loved. Goodbye to the notion that good ol’ Abbie is any different from any other up-and-coming movie star who ditches the first wife and kids, good enough for the old days but awkward once you’re Making It. Goodbye to his hypocritical double standard that reeks through the tattered charm. Goodbye to lovely pro-Women’s Liberationist Paul Krassner, with all his astonished anger that women have lost their sense of humor on this issue and don’t laugh any more at little funnies that degrade and hurt them: farewell to the memory of his Instant Pussy aerosol-can poster, to his column for the woman-hating men’s magazine Cavalier, to his dream of a Rape-In against legislators’ wives, to his Scapegoats and Realist Nuns and cute anecdotes about the little daughter he sees as often as any properly divorced Scarsdale middle-aged father; goodbye forever to the notion that a man is my brother who, like Paul, buys a prostitute for the night as a birthday gift for a male friend, or who, like Paul, reels off the names in alphabetical order of people in the women’s movement he has fucked, reels off names in the best locker-room tradition–as proof that he’s no sexist oppressor. (¶ 10)

Let it all hang out. Let it seem bitchy, catty, dykey, Solanisesque, frustrated, crazy, nutty, frigid, ridiculous, bitter, embarrassing, man-hating, libelous, pure, unfair, envious, intuitive, low-down, stupid, petty, liberating. We are the women that men have warned us about. (¶ 11)

And let’s put one lie to rest for all time: the lie that men are oppressed, too, by sexism—the lie that there can be such a thing as men’s liberation groups. Oppression is something that one group of people commits against another group specifically because of a threatening characteristic shared by the latter group—skin color or sex or age, etc. The oppressors are indeed fucked up by being masters (racism hurts whites, sexual stereotypes are harmful to men) but those masters are not oppressed. Any master has the alternative of divesting himself of sexism or racism; the oppressed have no alternative—for they have no power—but to fight. In the long run, Women’s Liberation will of course free men—but in the short term it’s going to cost men a lot of privilege, which no one gives up willingly or easily. Sexism is not the fault of women—kill your fathers, not your mothers. (¶ 12)

Run it down. Goodbye to a beautiful new ecology movement that could fight to save us all if it would stop tripping off women as earthmother types or frontier chicks, if it would right now cede leadership to those who have not polluted the planet because that action implies power and women haven’t had any power in about 5,000 years, cede leadership to those whose brains are as tough and clear as any man’s but whose bodies are also unavoidably aware of the locked-in relationship between humans and their biosphere—the earth, the tides, the atmosphere, the moon. Ecology is no big shtick if you’re a woman—it’s always been there. (¶ 13)

Goodbye to the complicity inherent in the Berkeley Tribesmen being part publishers of Trashman Comics; goodbye, for that matter, to the reasoning that finds whoremaster Trashman a fitting model, however comic-strip far-out, for a revolutionary man—somehow related to the same Super-male reasoning that permits the first statement on Women’s Liberation and male chauvinism that came out of the Black Panther Party to be made by a man, talking a whole lot about how the sisters should speak up for themselves. Such ignorance and arrogance ill-befits a revolutionary. (¶ 14)

We know how racism is worked deep into the unconscious by the System–the same way sexism is, as it appears in the very name of The Young Lords. What are you if you’re a macho woman—a female Lord? Or, god forbid, a Young Lady? Change it, change it to the Young Gentry if you must, or never assume that the name itself is innocent of pain, of oppression. (¶ 15)

Theory and practice—and the light-years between them. Do it! says Jerry Rubin in Rat‘s last issue—but he doesn’t or every Rat reader would have known the pictured face next to his article as well as they know his own much-photographed face: it was Nancy Kurshan, his woman, the power behind the clown. (¶ 16)

Goodbye to the New Nation and Earth People’s Park for that matter, conceived by men, announced by men, led by men—doomed before birth by the rotting seeds of male supremacy transplanted into fresh soil. Was it my brother who listed human beings among the objects that would be easily available after the Revolution: Free grass, free food, free women, free acid, free clothes, etc.? Was it my brother who wrote Fuck your women till they can’t stand up and said that groupies were liberated chicks ’cause they dug a tit-shake instead of a handshake? The epitome of male exclusionism—men will make the Revolution—and make their chicks. Not my brother. No. Not my revolution. Not one breath of my support for the new counterfeit Christ—John Sinclair. Just one less to worry about for ten years. I do not choose my enemy for my brother. (¶ 17)

Goodbye, goodbye. To hell with the simplistic notion that automatic freedom for women–or nonwhite peoples–will come about zap! with the advent of a socialist revolution. Bullshit. Two evils pre-date capitalism and clearly have been able to survive and post-date socialism: sexism and racism. Women were the first property when the Primary Contradiction occurred: when one-half of the human species decided to subjugate the other half, because it was different, alien, the Other. From there it was an easy enough step to extend the concept of Other to someone of different skin shade, different height or weight or language—or strength to resist. Goodbye to those simple-minded optimistic dreams of socialist equality all our good socialist brothers want us to believe. How merely liberal a politics that is! How much further we will have to go to create those profound changes that would give birth to a genderless society. Profound, Sister. Beyond what is male or female. Beyond standards we all adhere to now without daring to examine them as male-created, male-dominated, male-fucked-up, and in male self-interest. Beyond all known standards, especially those easily articulated revolutionary ones we all rhetorically invoke. Beyond—to a species with a new name, that would not dare define itself as Man. (¶ 18)

I once said, I’m a revolutionary, not just a woman, and knew my own lie even as I said the words. The pity of that statement’s eagerness to be acceptable to those whose revolutionary zeal no one would question, i.e., any male supremacist in the counterleft. But to become a true revolutionary one must first become one of the oppressed (not organize or educate or manipulate them, but become one of them)–or realize that you are one already. No woman wants that. Because that realization is humiliating, it hurts. It hurts to understand that at Woodstock or Altamont a woman could be declared uptight or a poor sport if she didn’t want to be raped. It hurts to learn that the sisters still in male-Left captivity are putting down the crazy feminists to make themselves look unthreatening to our mutual oppressors. It hurts to be pawns in those games. It hurts to try and change each day of your life right now—not in talk, not in your head, and not only conveniently out there in the Third World (half of which are women) or the black or brown communities (half of which are women) but in your own home, kitchen, bed. No getting away, no matter how else you are oppressed, from the primary oppression of being female in a patriarchal world. It hurts to hear that the sisters in the Gay Liberation Front, too, have to struggle continuously against the male chauvinism of their gay brothers. It hurts that Jane Alpert was cheered when rapping about imperialism, racism, the Third World, and All Those Safe Topics but hissed and booed by a movement crowd of men who wanted none of it when she began to talk about Women’s Liberation. The backlash is upon us. (¶ 19)

They tell us the alternative is to hang in there and struggle, to confront male domination in the counterleft, to fight beside or behind or beneath our brothers–to show ’em we’re just as tough, just as revolushunerry, just as whatever‐image‐they‐now‐want‐of‐us‐as‐once‐they‐wanted‐us‐to‐be‐feminine‐and‐keep‐up‐the‐home‐fire‐burning. They will bestow titular leadership on our grateful shoulders, whether it’s being a token woman on the Movement Speakers Bureau Advisory Board, or being a Conspiracy groupie or one of the respectable chain-swinging Motor City Nine. Sisters all, with only one real alternative: to seize our own power into our own hands, all women, separate and together, and make the Revolution the way it must be made—no priorities this time, no suffering group told to wait until after. (¶ 20)

It is the job of revolutionary feminists to build an ever stronger independent Women’s Liberation Movement, so that the sisters in counterleft captivity will have somewhere to turn, to use their power and rage and beauty and coolness in their own behalf for once, on their own terms, on their own issues, in their own style—whatever that may be. Not for us in Women’s Liberation to hassle them and confront them the way their men do, nor to blame them—or ourselves—for what any of us are: an oppressed people, but a people raising our consciousness toward something that is the other side of anger, something bright and smooth and cool, like action unlike anything yet contemplated or carried out. It is for us to survive (something the white male radical has the luxury of never really worrying about, what with all his options), to talk, to plan, to be patient, to welcome new fugitives from the counterfeit Left with no arrogance but only humility and delight, to push—to strike. (¶ 21)

There is something every woman wears around her neck on a thin chain of fear—an amulet of madness. For each of us, there exists somewhere a moment of insult so intense that she will reach up and rip the amulet off, even if the chain tears the flesh of her neck. And the last protection from seeing the truth will be gone. Do you think, tugging furtively every day at the chain and going nicely insane as I am, that I can be concerned with the peurile squabbles of a counterfeit Left that laughs at my pain? Do you think such a concern is noticeable when set alongside the suffering of more than half the human species for the past 5,000 years—due to a whim of the other half? No, no, no, goodbye to all that. (¶ 22)

Women are Something Else. This time, we’re going to kick out all the jams, and the boys will just have to hustle to keep up, or else drop out and openly join the power structure of which they are already the illegitimate sons. Any man who claims he is serious about wanting to divest himself of cock privilege should trip on this: all male leadership out of the Left is the only way; and it’s going to happen, whether through men stepping down or through women seizing the helm. It’s up to the brothers—after all, sexism is their concern, not ours; we’re too busy getting ourselves together to have to deal with their bigotry. So they’ll have to make up their own minds as to whether they will be divested of just cock privilege or—what the hell, why not say it, say it!—divested of cocks. How deep the fear of that loss must be, that it can be suppressed only by the building of empires and the waging of genocidal wars! (¶ 23)

Goodbye, goodbye forever, counterfeit Left, counterleft, male-dominated cracked-glass mirror reflection of the Amerikan Nightmare. Women are the real Left. We are rising, powerful in our unclean bodies; bright glowing mad in our inferior brains; wild hair flying, wild eyes staring, wild voices keening; undaunted by blood we who hemorrhage every twenty-eight days; laughing at our own beauty we who have lost our sense of humor; mourning for all each precious one of us might have been in this one living time-place had she not been born a woman; stuffing fingers into our mouths to stop the screams of fear and hate and pity for men we have loved and love still; tears in our eyes and bitterness in our mouths for children we couldn’t have, or couldn’t not have, or didn’t want, or didn’t want yet, or wanted and had in this place and this time of horror. We are rising with a fury older and potentially greater than any force in history, and this time we will be free or no one will survive. Power to all the people or to none. All the way down, this time. (¶ 24)

Free Kathleen Cleaver!	Free Kim Agnew!
Free Anita Hoffman!	Free Holly Krassner!
Free Bernardine Dohrn!	Free Lois Hart!
Free Donna Malone!	Free Alice Embree!
Free Ruth Ann Miller!	Free Nancy Kurshan!
Free Leni Sinclar!	Free Dinky Forman!
Free Jane Alpert!	Free Dinky Forman!
Free Gumbo!	Free Sharon Krebs!
Free Bonnie Cohen!	Free Iris Luciano!
Free Judy Lampe!	Free Robin Morgan!
Free Valerie Solanis!
Free our sisters!	Free ourselves!

–Robin Morgan (January 1970)

Part II of Benjamin Tucker’s Instead of a Book, by a Man Too Busy to Write One, on Money and Interest, is now available in full in the Fair Use Repository’s online edition. This adds a number of newly transcribed essays:

Here is Benjamin Tucker’s second exchange with Lucien Penny of the Winsted Press, on the money monopoly and government fiat currency:

• A False Idea of Freedom.
• Monopoly, Communism, and Liberty.
• Pinney His Own Procrustes.

An exchange concerning mutual banking advocate Alfred B. Westrup’s claims that mutual money need not serve as a standard of value.

• A Standard of Value a Necessity.
• A Necessity or a Delusion,—Which?

A discussion on the likely effects of a dramatic increase in the gold supply due to new technology:

• Anarchy’s New Ally.
• Economic Superstition.

A positive but critical review of Hugo Bilgram’s book Involuntary Idleness, and an ensuing exchange over Bilgram’s proposals for government-run mutual banking:

• A Book that is Not Milk for Babes.
• State Banking versus Mutual Banking.
• Mr. Bilgram’s Rejoinder.

A discussion of free banking with Joshua K. Ingalls:

• Free Money.

A discussion with J. M. M’Gregor of the Detroit Labor Leaf on the priority of free banking over other reforms:

• Free Money First.
• Stop the Main Leak First.

And other essays:

• Ten Questions Briefly Answered.
• An Indispensable Accident.
• Leland Stanford’s Land Bank.
• Mutualism in the Service of Capital.
• Edward Atkinson’s Evolution.
• A Greenbacker in a Corner.
• Free Money and the Cost Principle
• Proudhon’s Bank.
• Why Wages Should Absorb Profits.
• A Great Idea Perverted.
• On Picket Duty.