Anthropology 152 Lecture 14 Symbolic Inheritance

October 31, 2022 Anthropology 152 Lecture 14 Symbolic Inheritance By CHARLES BROWN For anthropology, culture-language-Symbolic Inheritance is the unique species characteristic of_homo sapiens_. In a sense, "culture-language-Symbolic Inheritance is another word for "wisdom",from the notion that humans are the species _homo wise_. It is humans’ socially learned practices, customs, language, traditions, beliefs, religion, spirituality , sciences, theories myths , legends that make us "wise" in so many ways, certainly clever and winners _as a species_ ( not just as a few "fit" Individuals) in the struggles and snuggles to survive as a species. Since the advent of civilization, sometimes it's not so clear how wise our culture makes us. Greed, slavery, war, male supremacy, Egoism originate with Civilization ! It is better termed Savagery and Barbarism. Therein lies the central drama of the history of the human species. Nonetheless, clearly in the Stone Age, our having culture-language-Symbolic Inheritance was a highly adaptive advantage over species that did not have culture , stone tools made according to design , scientific knowledge in the stone age (!) standing on the shoulders of dead generations , raising our species fitness. This is evidenced by _homo sapiens_ expanding in population and therefore migrating to an expanded area of living space across the earth , out of what is now Africa to the other continents ( but not vacating Africa ) . Stone Age foraging and kinship organized , peaceful and sharing societies were the mode of life forthe vast majority of time of human species existence, 99% or more.

ANTOINETTE BLACKWELL’S critique of Darwin supports my argument that Human Nature is social ,not selfish, She argues that in human evolution ( what we now call the Stone Age), our nature and culture were inclined to” cooperation” with other humans, not “competition and savage rivalry”.

Furthermore, the Stone Age had sex-gender equity. ****

Darwin’s claim of superiority of men over women is refuted by his own theory that fitness is measured by population growth of a type ; _women play a superior role in perpetuation of the human species_

by CHARLES BROWN Darwin’s claim of superiority of men over women is refuted by his own theory that fitness is measured by population growth of a type ; women play a superior role in perpetuation of the human species. Here’s the direct refutation of Darwin’s claim * that human males are superior to human females . Superior in what sense ? For Darwin the most important superiority would be playing a superior role in raising our species’s fitness , playing a superior role in our being selected for , no ?

Secondly , for Darwin , the ultimate measure of fitness is size and trend of the _population_ **. If it’s increasing , the species is fit; if decreasing toward extinction, unfit or selected against . Women play a superior role to men in reproducing our species population , pregnancy , birth , childcare . Therefore , women are superior to men in Darwin’s own theory of natural selection as applied to the human race; women are more important than men in increasing population; the logic of Darwin’s theory refutes his statement that men are somehow superior to women.

Over 100,000’s of years , our species population has been increasing as compared with other primates and mammals . That’s our claim to Darwinian fame . Women can claim more than half of the credit.

In _The Descent of Man_, Darwin argued that evolution made man “superior” to woman. For Darwin, that superiority largely played out in the intellectual and artistic realm. He wrote: “If two lists were made of the most eminent men and women in poetry, painting, sculpture, music—comprising composition and performance, history science and philosophy … the two lists would not bear comparison.” Spencer echoed Darwin’s sentiments and went further, postulating that in order for the human race to flourish, women must devote their lives to reproduction.“

Ironically, Spencer states the fact that makes women superior to men in raising the Darwinian fitness of Homo sapiens.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/woman-who-tried-take-down-darwin-180967146/

Blackwell made a successful critique of Darwin and Spencer. She asserted that balance and cooperation within the human species played a more important role than competition and savage rivalry in humans successful perpetuation and growth of the human population.

Blackwell chose to highlight balance and cooperation rather than struggle and savage rivalry. She criticized Darwin for basing his theory of evolution on "time-honored assumption that the male is the normal type of his species".[7] She wrote that Spencer scientifically subtracts from the femaleand Darwin as scientifically adds to the male.[6] It was not until one century later[8] that feminists were working from inside the natural sciences, and could address Darwin's androcentricity.[1]”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sexes_Throughout_Nature

Darwin concludes in his book, The Descent of Man, saying that men attain "a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than can women—whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or merely the use of the senses and hands."[2]“https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_and_women

Charles Brown : However, women attain a higher imminence in _reproduction_ , the key practice for perpetuating and increasing the population size of our species - the Darwinian test of fitness. @@@

Some discussions of Darwinian fitness focus on individuals passing on genes . However , Darwin’s theory concerns the increase or decrease in the population of a _type_ or species , a phenotype, not an individual's success . Darwin did not know about the modern concept of genes , but extending his theory to genes , it concerns perpetuation or extinction of geno-TYPES .

That's not philosophically idealistic . It's MATERial , Realism, fact; Females pregnate, birth and childcare the males and the females, both . Those are the key projects

for perpetuation of the species. Perpetuation of the species is the Darwinian test of fitness , being selected for.



Our Mother Nature: Antoinette Blackwell

Blackwell chose to highlight "balance and cooperation "rather than "competition and savage rivalry"; she captures the essence of True Civility.

By Charlie Brown

Antoinette Blackwell was both an Evolutionist and a Creationist ! Shewas the first woman ordained as a Christian minister in the US , and she wrote a General Science textbook agreeing with Charles Darwin's theory of the evolution of species by natural selection. What aninteresting historical character in light of today's debates between Creationists and Evolutionists !

Mother Blackwell was also a suffragette. In 1920, at age 95, she wasthe only participant of the 1850 Women's Rights Convention in Worcester, Massachusetts who lived long enough to vote when at lastwomen had the vote, dammit.

Reverend Blackwell was also an abolitionist against slavery. She wasone of the few white feminists to support the 15th Amendment givingthe vote to Black men, even as no women had the vote. She supported the famous African American leader, Frederick Douglass, in this debatewithin American feminism in the mid-1900's.

A regular Force of Nature was she. I came across Blackwell in reading about Charles Darwin's book TheDescent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. Antoinette Blackwell wrote The Sexes Throughout Nature.

Meanwhile, Wikipedia's items explains how Blackwell argued that therewas natural selection for "cooperation and balance" among humans, all of us members of the same species. Survival of the fittest does not mean survival of competition between humans, survival of the toughestindividual "men". The fittest are those who successfully reproduce ! Reproduction requires , in the first place, cooperation (smiles).

On the primacy of cooperation in natural origins , See Labor Power's Is Human Nature Social or Selfish ? blog http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2014/05/is-human-nature-social-or-selfish-i.html

Antoinette Blackwell's book, The Sexes Throughout Nature, critiques Charles Darwin four years after he published The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex in 1871,[1] and Herbert Spencer, whom the author thought were the most influential men of her day.[2] Darwin had written a letter to her in 1869, thanking her for a copy of her book, Studies in General Science.[3] She also answers Dr. E. H. Clarke and his book Sex and Education which she deplored.[4] Blackwell's book wasrepublished by Hyperion Press in 1976, 1985 and 1992.[5] Parts of the book were first published in Woman's Journal and Popular Science Monthly.[6]Blackwell chose to highlight balance and cooperation rather thanstruggle and savage rivalry. She criticized Darwin for basing histheory of evolution on "time-honored assumption that the male is thenormal type of his species".[7] She wrote that Spencer scientifically subtracts from the female and Darwin as scientifically adds to the male.[6]

Darwin's theories of evolution by natural selection were used to showwomen's place in society was the result of nature.[14] One of the first women to critique Darwin, Antoinette Brown Blackwell publishedThe Sexes Throughout Nature in 1875.[15] She was aware she would beconsidered presumptuous for criticising evolutionary theory but wrotethat "disadvantages under which we [women] are placed...will never be lessened by waiting".[16] Blackwell's book answered Darwin and Herbert Spencer, who she thought were the two most influential living men.[17]She wrote of "defrauded womanhood" and her fears that "the human race,forever retarding its own advancement...could not recognize and promote a genuine, broad, and healthful equilibrium of the sexes".[18]

It was not until one century later[8] that feminists were workingfrom inside the natural sciences, and could address Darwin's androcentricity.[1]Sarah Blaffer Hrdy wrote in her book Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants and Natural Selection (quoting from an excerpt of pages 12–25 in AnthroNotes for educators published by the National Museum of Natural History),

"For a handful of nineteenth-century women intellectuals, however,evolutionary theory was just too important to ignore. Instead of turning away, they stepped forward to tap Darwin and Spencer on the shoulder to express their support for this revolutionary view of human nature, and also to politely remind them that they had left out half the species."[9]


Hrdy added, "Evolutionary biology did eventually respond to these criticisms, yet in their lifetimes, the effect that these early Darwinian feminists—Eliot, Blackwell, Royer, and a few others—had on mainstream evolutionary theory can be summed up with one phrase: the road not taken."[10]

In the Descent of Man, Darwin wrote that by choosing tools and weaponsover the years, "man has ultimately become superior to woman"[19] but Blackwell's argument for women's equality went largely ignored until the 1970s when feminist scientists and historians began to explore Darwin.[20] As recently as 2004, Griet Vandermassen, aligned with other Darwinian feminists of the 1990s and early 2000s (decade), wrote that a unifying theory of human nature should include sexual selection.[15] But then the "opposite ongoing integration" was promoted by another faction as an alternative in 2007.[21]

Nonetheless, Darwin's explanation of sexual selection continues to receive support from both social and biological scientists as "the best explanation to date".[22]v

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sexes_Throughout_Nature

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Descent_of_Man,_and_Selection_in_Relation_to_Sex#Part_II_and_III:_Sexual_selection

Perhaps Antoinette Blackwell's ideas are a basis for cooperation between Creationists and Evolutionists today !

The U.S. is being overrun by a wave of anti-science, anti-intellectual thinking. Has the most powerful nation on Earth lost its mind?

"South Carolina’s state beverage is milk. Its insect is the praying mantis. There’s a designated dance—the shag—as well a sanctioned tartan, game bird, dog, flower, gem and snack food (boiled peanuts). But what Olivia McConnell noticed was missing from among her home’s 50 official symbols was a fossil. So last year, the eight-year-old science enthusiast wrote to the governor and her representatives to nominate the Columbian mammoth. Teeth from the woolly proboscidean, dug up by slaves on a local plantation in 1725, were among the first remains of an ancient species ever discovered in North America. Forty-three other states had already laid claim to various dinosaurs, trilobites, primitive whales and even petrified wood. It seemed like a no-brainer. “Fossils tell us about our past,” the Grade 2 student wrote.

And, as it turns out, the present, too. The bill that Olivia inspired has become the subject of considerable angst at the legislature in the state capital of Columbia. First, an objecting state senator attached three verses from Genesis to the act, outlining God’s creation of all living creatures. Then, after other lawmakers spiked the amendment as out of order for its introduction of the divinity, he took another crack, specifying that the Columbian mammoth “was created on the sixth day with the other beasts of the field.” That version passed in the senate in early April. But now the bill is back in committee as the lower house squabbles over the new language, and it’s seemingly destined for the same fate as its honouree—extinction." http://www.macleans.ca/politics/america-dumbs-down/

How Right-Wingers Are Amping Up Their War on Science and Reality

Republicans are taking their science denialism to striking new levels.

AlterNet http://www.alternet.org/belief/how-right-wingers-are-amping-their-war-science-and-reality

Philosopher Kant

ant stopped teaching in 1796. Some, like Fichte, wrote showing that the jovial joy that had accompanied the philosopher all his life was now gone. Gradually, his mental abilities declined.


The philosopher no longer recognized his friends and could not put together the simplest of reasonings. He died in February 1804.

The philosopher enjoyed literature in the form of satire. If, on the one hand, he showed little interest in music and painting, on the other hand he had a deep liking for poetry. Herder describes him as a jovial man who encouraged people to seek the truth.

It was Heine who said that the housewives in the city of Königsberg updated their watches when Kant went for a walk. The philosopher used to be attached to punctuality. He would wake up at 5:00 in the morning and follow a studied routine. Discipline with schedules was a characteristic of the philosopher.

When seeing Kant physically, many had the impression of weakness. The philosopher was thin, with a small build, delicate and narrow chest and shoulders.

Probably, had it not been for a strict life discipline, which included everything from schedules to eating and resting, the philosopher would not have lived so long. Doctors and close friends recognized such rigors.

Among the philosopher's characteristics, the primacy of order, discipline, repetition. He also avoided travel. Perhaps a trip to the city of Arnsdorf, a hundred kilometers from Königsberg, was one of the longest in his life.

At the time Kant was a professor, Königsberg was a city of about 50,000 inhabitants. It was an important port for East Prussian interests and had a military garrison. The population was basically made up of Russians, Dutch, English, and Poles.

Even though it had the possibilities of a cultural center, the city had a strong provincial trait that earned it jokes, such as the one made by Frederick the Great. He referred to the city as suitable for bear training rather than a stage for the sciences.

The philosopher was recognized and appreciated in his public and private audiences. J. Hammann mentioned that it was generally necessary to be an hour in advance at Kant's lecture halls, so that one could get a seat.

Before the public recognition of his writings, there was the recognition of his colleagues and students.

Kant had problems with the King of Prussia, Frederick William II. In 1794, a royal document blamed the philosopher for twisting essential teachings of Christianity. It was demanded of Kant that he no longer occupy himself publicly, in writing or even speaking in his lectures, with matters connected with religiosity.

For approximately 15 years Kant worked as a free lecturer. That is, the philosopher taught free courses that were paid for directly by the students.

Herder, who took courses with Kant, described him as follows: The words flowed from his lips, he was funny, humorous.

Thoughts on the True Appraisal of Living Things. Universal History of Nature and Theory of Heaven. Summary Sketch of Some Meditations on Fire.

The titles seem strange to many students studying philosophy, even more so when they are told that the author is Kant.

The works show the great interest that Kant had in the sciences, in mathematics, in Newton's physics. Descartes' schemes are emblematic in Kant.

in the UK over the past five years: over 13 million people, a quarter of the adult population, have changed their minds about the whether legal sex change makes sense

"As we said at every one of these recent events, an amazing thing has happened in the UK over the past five years: over 13 million people, a quarter of the adult population, have changed their minds about the whether legal sex change makes sense. According to the British Social Attitudes Survey, 58% supported it in 2016. By 2019 that figure was 53%, and by 2021 it had fallen to 32%. This is because the culture of “no debate” had been changed by individuals bravely exercising their freedom of speech. "

https://sex-matters.org/posts/updates/feminist/

https://take10charles.blogspot.com/2017/01/remix-of-blackwell-concrete-abstract.html

Remix of Blackwell; concrete / abstract symbolling A large portion of human thinking is about "things" we cannot see, hear, touch or feel, but only contemplate through symbols-words. Almost all animal thinking is about things they can sense or memories of things they've sensed as individuals in the past. Through our knowledge of words individual's knowledge is knowledge of what others have sensed. Human individual knowledge is mostly social knowledge; "I" knowledge is "We" knowledge . Most animal knowledge is "I" knowledge. //// Someone said : "We have two kinds of knowledge: 1)Knowledge of matters of fact 2)Knowledge of relations of ideas as in the formal,abstract statements of math and logic." CB:Human's have sense data knowledge of objective reality and knowledge of symbols/metaphor/high abstraction; we know trees and we know forests. Other species only know trees, concrete abstractions. Someone else: "Greetings to the group. A new member. Give me latest. Are we still monkeys?" We have culture/language/metaphor/algebra/ high abstract thinking ; monkeys , chimps nor gorillas do not, can't have it. Homo Erectus had high abstract thinking 1. 7 million years ago. By the way , we also have a common ancestor with bananas ; it's just further back on the "tree of life" in time than the one with chimps. Darwin's less mentioned big principle is that _all_ life is related through the original life forms. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126553081 Neanderthals were early humans , otherwise they couldn't have mated with the other early humans. Bet the Neanderthals dug the other early humans more than they dug other Neanderthals. How else would the Neanderthals fade into the masses ? Had you heard of Antoinette Blackwell's critique of Darwin ?! It is of Descent of Man, which really is the founding text of biological anthropology , though never really labelled such in classes or texts of my memory. Blackwell founds theoretical biological anthropology, in my opinion. And today's bio-anthro is still not where she is theoretically, because it remains masculinist. Always looking for "environmental changes" to explain human evolution. It is sexual selection, by females , not survival selection by the environment , food and predators , that is the main driver of human evolution ! Eve founded eugenics . On Dec 17, 2016, at 4:32 PM, Rowe, Bruce M. wrote: Dear Charles, These are all fascinating ideas! Unfortunately, they are very complex and would need analysis and research on multiply levels. I have actually been interested in concepts like this for a long time. Bipedalism certainly did change sexual communication. Some researchers have suggested that the large gluteus maximus of human is a permanent estrus display. There is the Gestural Hypothesis of the origin of language, which as the name of the hypothesis suggests, postulates that signing evolved in to oral language. . I have listed a few links below that might of interest to you (you might already know of these articles and sites). I have not read all of them but some seem to reinforce what you are saying, some may not. You might want to also look at the current literature on epigenetics and there are a large number of papers on epigenetics and Lamarckism and epigenetics that you might be interested in looking at. http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10539-006-9037-7 http://on-memetics.blogspot.com/2013/11/on-lamarckism-in-cultural-evolution.htmlhttp://on-memetics.blogspot.com/2013/11/on-lamarckism-in-cultural-evolution.html I Gadjev - Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 2015 - Wiley Online Library ... The Dubliner is quite selective about 'Lamarckism' and has a very particular reading and understanding of it ... According to him, Lamarck held 'that living organisms changed because they wanted to ... He also elaborated on the 'classical' Lamarckian example of the giraffe: 'If you like ... Cited by 2 Related articles All 2 versions Cite Save [PDF] airccse.com [PDF] Light will be thrown: The emerging science of cultural evolution C Buskes - 2016 - airccse.com ... Darwinism, Cultural evolution, Cumulative selection, Cultural transmission, Lamarckism ... Yet despite these Lamarckian labels, Boyd and Richerson, as well as many other ... Yet although culture is quite common, even among animals, cultural evolution is remarkably rare. ... Related articles All 2 versions Cite Save More [PDF] arxiv.org Toward an evolutionary-predictive foundation for creativity L Gabora, S Kauffman - Psychonomic bulletin & review, 2016 - Springer ... We know of no writing on Lamarckism (eg, Burkhardt, 2013; Mayr, 1972) that is consistent with the idea that there is no place for ... Lamarckian evolution explains human brain evolution and psychiatric disorders. ... Lamarck, evolution, and the inheritance of acquired characters. ... Cited by 4 Related articles All 11 versions Cite Save [PDF] researchgate.net [PDF] … and cultural evolution can be seamlessly integrated using the principles of communication and problem-solving: the foundations for an extended evolutionary … A De Loof - Functional Genomics, 2015 - researchgate.net ... This is a typical feature of Lamarckian evolution (Solbrig and Solbrig 1979). ... 262 How does “Life” evolve? Mega-evolution It is self-evident that an all-round theory of evolution [the long-sought New Synthesis or Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES)] of biological systems ...Ideas on culture as Lamarckian-like process , and thus a Darwinian neo-teleology; Mother selection in human evolution. I am teaching anthropology at Wayne County Community College in Detroit, Michigan , and we use your book Physical Anthropology . I would like to run a couple of ideas by you. 1) I'm thinking of our culture bearing species as having a LaMarckian-LIKE adaptive ability in that culture allows inheritance of acquired adaptive characteristics by one generation from parent , grandparent and dead generations of the species; acquired by human invention. 2) This creates a Darwinian neo-teleology for Natural History ( replacing the theological teleology with "Man" as the direction toward which natural history tends that Darwin's theory negated); because culture as a LaMarckian-like adaptive process does not depend on a random and coincidental fit between the survival problem posed by the environment and the genetic solution to the problem . What is inherited , extrasomatically, is designed to solve a survival problem posed by the environment . /// On the origin of culture and humanity: Perhaps upright-bipedalism/ ORIGIN OF HANDS was selected for because , NOT BECAUSE HANDS ALLOWED THE INVENTION OF TOOLS FOR HUNTING OR PROCESSING MEAT BUT AS THE FIRST INSTRUMENTS OF LANGUAGE, SOUND MAKERS -MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS. So,Homo Habilis had language as music. Also, dancing or body language . Culture ! Culture as communicating symbolically with music was one selective advantage of hands. No stone tools until Homo Habilis because no use for production . But culture originates with hands as sound communication-music. More importantly music conferred mating -courting advantage on the musician . Especially music and dancing. In general , culture bestows all around superior courting skills, manners. They are the original manners. Finally, and perhaps most importantly , erect posture exposes genitalia of both sexes to sight more than on all fours. It is sexier . So, erect posture gives the ultimate selective advantage compared to on all fours: superior differential fertility ! Beautifying the Beast theory of prettifying trend in morphology among hominins ( hominids with hands): Why this trend of reduction of sexual dimorphism , rough and big and protruding faces ? Because human females were the first scientists of genealogical and reproductive physiology ; noticing a correlation between appearance of their children and which male they let fertilize them . Mother Nature selection or Mother as natural selector . This derives theoretically from Antoinette Blackwell's feminist critique of Darwin's masculinism, validated by modern Darwinisms recognition that differential fertility is more important than differential mortality in determining fitness There are a couple of other "lemmas," . Do you have any criticisms ?

Beautifying the Beast in human evolution : https://take10charles.blogspot.com/2016/12/beautifying-beast-in-human-evolution.html

Beautifying the Beast in human evolution https://take10charles.blogspot.com/2016/12/beautifying-beast-in-human-evolution.html
Dear Prof. I am teaching anthropology at Wayne County Community College in Detroit, Michigan , and we use your book Physical Anthropology . I would like to run a couple of ideas by you. 1) I'm thinking of our culture bearing species as having a LaMarckian-LIKE adaptive ability in that culture allows inheritance of acquired adaptive characteristics by one generation from parent , grandparent and dead generations of the species; acquired by human invention. 2) This creates a Darwinian neo-teleology for Natural History ( replacing the theological teleology with "Man" as the direction toward which natural history tends that Darwin's theory negated); because culture as a LaMarckian-like adaptive process does not depend on a random and coincidental fit between the survival problem posed by the environment and the genetic solution to the problem . What is inherited , extrasomatically, is designed to solve a survival problem posed by the environment . /// On the origin of culture and humanity: Perhaps upright-bipedalism/ ORIGIN OF HANDS was selected for because , NOT BECAUSE HANDS ALLOWED THE INVENTION OF TOOLS FOR HUNTING OR PROCESSING MEAT p;BUT AS THE FIRST INSTRUMENTS OF LANGUAGE, SOUND MAKERS -MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS. ;So, homo habilis Also, dancing or body language . Culture ! Culture as communicating symbolically with music was one selective advantage of hands. . But culture originates with hands as sound communication-music. More importantly music conferred mating -courting advantage on the musician . Especially music and dancing. In general , culture bestows all around superior courting skills, manners. They are the original manners. Finally, and perhaps most importantly , erect posture exposes genitalia of both sexes to sight more than on all fours. It is sexier . So, erect posture gives the ultimate selective advantage compared to on all fours: superior differential fertility ! Beautifying the Beast theory of prettifying trend in morphology among hominins ( hominids with hands): Why this trend of reduction of sexual dimorphism , rough and big and protruding faces ? Because human females were the first scientists of genealogical and reproductive physiology ; noticing a correlation between appearance of their children and which male they let fertilize them . Mother Nature selection or Mother as natural selector . This derives theoretically from Antoinette Blackwell's feminist critique of Darwin's masculinism, validated by modern Darwinisms recognition that differential fertility is more important than differential mortality in determining fitness There are a couple of other "lemmas," . Do you have any criticisms ? Charles Brown Detroit http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2014/05/our-mother-nature-antoinette-blackwell.html?m=1 http://biosex.univ-paris1.fr/fileadmin/Axe_de_recherche_BIOSEX/Blackwell-1.pdf

Abolish male supremacy not binary gender

Abolish male supremacy not binary gender The basic gender binary is an analogy to binary sex in all human societies, indigenous American and all around the globe. Hermaphroditism , homosexual , transvestitism have been incorporated forever, not just since the bourgeois "trans" fad. But third genders don't demolish the basic binary, because biology has an absolute binary - eggbearers and sperm bearers. There are no third types. So , the basic binary pair female-male: woman-man, remains even as third genders are added. The goal is abolish male supremacy, not binary gender. Different combinations and numbers of X and Y chromosomes do not produce a third type of gamete cell, so they all result in one of the two sex cell types if they result in a sex cell type. Sex is ultimately a phenotype , not a genotype.

What movie is today's Republican Party https://take10charles.blogspot.com/2015/07/

https://take10charles.blogspot.com/2021/12/materialism-necessity-and-freedom.html

Materialism, Necessity and Freedom: Rehearsal of the Fundamentals of Marxism Materialism, Necessity and Freedom: Rehearsal of the Fundamentals of Marxism WHY IS HISTORY A HISTORY OF CLASS STRUGGLES ? By Charles D. Brown By the _Manifesto of the Communist Party_ every Marxist knows the A,B,C's of historical materialism or the materialist conception of history. The written history of hither to existing society, since the breaking up of the ancient Communist Stone Age kin group societies , is a history of class struggles between oppressor and oppressed. Classes are groups that associate in a division of labor to produce their material means of existence. Why are class struggles fundamental in determining the whole of society's laws and rules, it's history and culture, the "super-structure" ? Because exploited classes are coerced into producing surpluses for exploiting classes by making supply of the physiological necessities of life, of self-preservation , to the exploited classes conditional upon their producing those surpluses. Not only do exploited classes produce the physiological and derivative material necessities of life for society , but they are denied much of the fruits of their labor , thrown into poverty , unless they supply the bosses, the ruling classes , the slave masters , Lords , Bishops , Bourgeoisie, with super fruits, riches . Ruling classes coerce this exploitation mainly by control of the state power or special repressive apparatus. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels implied this elementary anthropological or "human natural" rationale for this conception of class relations determining substantially the shape of society as a whole in a section titled "History: Fundamental Conditions” , they say: "*life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things. The first historical act is thus the production of material life itself. And indeed this is an historical act, a fundamental condition of all history, which today, as thousands of years ago, must daily and hourly be fulfilled merely in order to sustain human life." Production and economic classes are the starting point of Marxist analysis of human history and society because human life, like all plant and animal life must fulfill biological needs to exist as life at all. It is an appeal to biologic (which I support and imitate , all of the anti-vulgar materialist critiques to the contrary notwithstanding, but that's my other paper). Whatever humans do that is "higher" than plants and animals, we cannot do if we do not first fulfill or plant/animal like needs, physiological necessities. Marx and Engels define scientific analysis as tracing the materially or objectively _necessary_ connections in a phenomenon. Thus, the scientific understanding of human society must be based in the materially necessary connections of human society. Fulfillment of physiological or biological requirments are the materially necessary "connections" for humans. These biological necessary connections exist in all human societies. But it is only in' class divided‘ society that , as said above, surpluses are extorted from exploited classes by ruling classes by employment and threat of deployment of the forces of destruction and violence, standing bodies of armed men , against the exploited and ruled classes less they disgorge the surplus fruits of their labor to the ruling classes. For not only is supply of food, shelter, air etc. biologically and materially necessary for living. The _absence_ of being killed or bodily harmed by armed men is materially necessary to live. Thus, the mode of destruction is as central to the necessary connections of human society as the mode of production. The mode of destruction as critical in ruling class coercion and extortion of the ruled classes is a mode of necessity in human society and history. Thus the mode of necessity in human society consists in both the mode of production and the mode of destruction. On Materialism ( speaking of Mao), there are two levels of the relationship between thought and being: "economics" and "physics". While society remains in the Realm (or kingdom) of Necessity , society during its class divided history, ruling classes control masses by conditioning fulfillment of the _material_ needs of the exploited classes on the exploited classes ' producing surpluses for the ruling , exploiting classes. The materialism (determinism by the material) at this level derives from the coercive use of conditional provision of material needs. In all societies, including those in the Realm (kingdom of ) Freedom ( socialist, communist future and ancient) , all people must , of course, "obey" the laws of physics, chemistry, biology, physiology, objective reality etc. "physics", in the general sense. This is the most fundamental level of materialist theory , most fundamental level of Being. The "higher" (cultural, semiotic. super-structural, social conditioning traditions, "super-natural, aesthetic, artistic, customary , aesthetic. etc.) human activities are limited or negatively determined ( See Marshall Sahlins' _Culture and Practical Reason_ on biological limits of culture) by the productive and destructive activities, the activities that produce biological necessities or deprive human biological necessities . Cultural practices that don’t provide necessities will go “extinct”. However , in human systems of IDEAS, SYMBOLS, LANGUAGE AND CULTURE, because of the arbitrary relation between sign and thing signified a non-necessary connection, there is some lack of basis for science defined as finding necessary connections ( Marx and Engels definition of science) In other words , Arbitrary_ connection is the opposite of _necessary_ connection. This is the sense in which superstructure is not subject to scientific analysis the way that infrastructure is. Idea systems do simulate necessity as rules, such as rules of grammar or cultural rules, including state enforced laws Also in formal logic, "necessary" arises in _modus ponens_, modus tolensor "if-then", if p, then q, q is a necessary > condition of p, i.e.not q,not p. This is arbitrary and abstract necessity. In the Realm of Necessity, ( Marx and Engels used the term "necessity"here precisely to make the point I am making here) there is a science of human conduct based on the things that human must do, i.e. necessity. As Marx and Engels had to explain to "the Germans" in _The German Ideology_, humans have physiological necessities. In meeting these, there arise scientifically discernable necessary patterns in their behavior historical materialism starts with human nature, our human natural species qualities, Feuerbach's "species-being” This is Marx's point in the famous passage in the Intro to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy concerning social being determining social consciousness "At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or - what is but a legal expression for the same thing -with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic-conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic - in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of himself, so can we not judge such a period of transformation by its own consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained rather from the contradictions of material life, from the existing conflict between the social productive forces and the relations of production. " Preface of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface-abs The economic conditions may be articulated "with the precision of a natural science" because in that sector of society biological necessities or needs are met, and as discussed above, thereby necessary connections reside. Necessary connections are the business of science. The rational kernel of the fancy Marxist critique of we vulgar Marxists : Being determines consciousness, but intermitently ; being determines consciousness discontinuously. ("primarily and ultimately"). Meanwhile, in between time, being and consciousness are reciprocally determiining. Being , in the form of class struggle, determines consciousness in history. However, the revolutions which are the points of determination or fundamental change ( of Hegel’s Idea ) by class struggle are intermittent and rare. Most of the time consciousness or ideology is not changing, is not in a revolutionary state of transformation. Most of the time society is in a status quo, a relative equilibrium , is not changing fundamentally. This is somewhat analogous to the punctuated equilibrium of Stephen Jay Gould in natural history, with the punctuations being the revolutions when being determines, asserts itself, like the roof falling in periodically asserts the law of gravity, when contradictions reach a crisis. It is the long equilibria that cause the confusion and make people think that consciousness has determined being in history's revolutionary changes, or the idealist error. Also, there is a sense in which consciousness as a system of ideas does determine people's day to day conduct. When an idea grips the masses , it becomes a material force; and lots of ideas grip the masses. In fact , the masses only act based on ideas that grip them. What revolutions do is change the system of ideas that determines peoples' conduct. And only class struggles change systems of ideas or ideologies. This is the fundamental sense of being determines consciousness or part of the theory of historical materialism. As Marx says "...so can we not judge such a period of transformation by its own consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained rather from the contradictions of material life, from the existing conflict between the social productive forces and the relations of production. " " In big historical changes, Necessity is the mother of invention, the mother of revolution. The necessary connections in economy and class structure periodically, though rarely , break through to "invent" a new superstructure , revolutionary ideas. Necessity is the mother of invention, new ideas. Ideology is the stabilizer of convention. Ideologies are formal logics, based on the principle of identity as their first principle. Formal logics are not "self-changing", they abdure contradictions ( non-identity) tend to sustain convention, avoid invention of new principles. This is why we don't think our way to revolution. This is why dialectical logic , with contradiction as its first principle, is rooted in class struggle , reflecting real or material contradictions. The Second Thesis on Feuerbach - the test of theory is practice . Thus, the most practically reasonable and rational course is for the working class of our era to overthrow capitalism and establish socialism. This would be the optimum for the class self-interest of the working class , collectively and individually in its billions of people. Yet, we are in a lag time, the long lag time of the "equilibrium" before the punctuation of revolution. Irrational ideas, from the standpoint of the working class as a class - for -itself , ideas in the interest of the Bourgeoisie of many types compete with the rational idea of revolutionary class struggle for gripping the consciousnesses , the billions individual brains of working masses. False consciousness, capitalist ideology is determining being, keeping it stuck in capitalist relations of production. Do any of the fancy Marxist theories which interrogate the principle of being determines consciousness have solutions to the riddles of the irrational, anti-class self-interest ideologies, systems of ideas and images which are gripping the masses and blinding them to their historic revolutionary mission ? That is a question on consciousness for today's challengers to materialism who also claim to be Marxist in some sense. An even more fundamental understanding of consciousness must come through an augmented Marxist feminism. As the historically constituted class of oppressed and exploited reproductive or caring laborers, the creators of subjects en masse, women have been the uncredited makers of consiousness in history. This is not just in childrearing , although that is obviously important, but in all caring labor which is critical in shaping and repairing the self. This includes housework, for the house or the home is that shelter where the adult self is itself away from work in the capitalist daily geography of the person.Thus, women's liberation and recovery of women's history is fundamental to the science of consciousness. http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2014/07/for-womens-liberation-comradely.html Materialism, Necessity and Freedom: Rehearsal of the Fundamentals of Marxism A three act play with beginning, middle and end, and non-dogmatic improvisation. Several vulgar parts . Double materialist determination; there are two levels of determination, in materialism attitude toward the relationship between thought and being: 1)"economics" and 2) "physics". 1)"economics" While society remains in the Realm of Necessity , ruling classes control masses by conditioning fulfillment of the _material_ needs of the exploited classes on the exploited classes ' producing surpluses for the ruling , exploiting classes. The materialism (determinism by the material) at this level derives from the coercive use of conditional provision of material needs. 2) "physics" In all societies, including those in the Realm of Freedom ( socialist, communist future and ancient) , all people must , of course, "obey" the laws of physics, chemistry, biology, physiology, objective reality etc. "physics", in the general sense. The first level above is based in the specific biological necessities of the second level. There is a third level of materialist determination in the Marxist thesis. It is also economic. Marx and Engels (Engels and Marx) claim that history is a history of class struggles. The answer to the question "Why is history a history of class struggles ?" is the philosophy of historical materialism. Why is it that economic material relationship of exploiting and exploited classes causes the changes which are called "history" ? The alternatives at the time Marx wrote the thesis were especially Great Men in state and economic power and Big Ideas as in Philosophie of Great Men. Marx in wanting to take a scientific approach to the question, looked to necessity upon the theory that science details necessary connections between things. There is no necessity as strict in the realms of ideas or Great Men as the necessity of biology, and by extension the area of economics of material production of minimal life sustaining necessities or Being or Existence . There still must be made an argument as to why and what changes by class struggle determination in the sense that history is a history of class struggles. What changes through the course of history ? If it were the structure of the relationship between classes, then what about tautology ? So, Big Ideas (or Consciousness) and Great Men _types_ change as the change that is history. However, Being determines consciousness intermittently, rarely in terms of the total time of the many generations of people. Most generations don't experience a fundamental or revolutionary change. And so on the rare, intermittent determinism of the structure of ideas by the Realm proper of Necessity: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/marxism-thaxis/1998-March/007351.html Although biology only limits us partially in a sense because We human beings have culture (super-natures and natures ) this contradiction between biology and culture is still where it is at in generating universals or big generals. Being determines consciousness is still a focal rule of thumb (guide to action) for building a universal, real common interests among huge numbers of people, the masses. My first post-Marx development of species-being is to derive women's liberation organically from historical materialism's premises, as Marx and Engels derive workers' liberation from those species-being historical premises. It is a correction of classical Marxism, but based on Marxsim's own premises. In ways its too vulgar for pomos and fancy marxists. However, the pomos and their old cousins, Frankfurt school, Gramsci, existentialists, et al. all the fancy marxists have taught us something: being determines consciousness discontinuously, intermittmently, rarely. Through most of the actual time of history ( day-to-day life; quotidien), consciousness and being are reciprocally determining. Only rarely, in revolutions, primarily and ultimately does being utterly determine consciousness. Today, that means that the direct naked appeal to the working class' class self-interest is inadequate in itself-necessary but not sufficient in the formal logical sense -to inspire revolution. That appeal cannot be dropped - the vast majority are working class, wage laborers - but must be complemented with appeals to other consciousness, other consciousness determined by being (race and gender are the main forms ) and consciousness that is determined more by consciousness , religion, television , school, peers . Overall one wants to change the world based on interpreting it, changing it through practical-critical activity, a unity of theory and practice still.

Free All Caring and Re-productive Labourers ! https://take10charles.blogspot.com/2014/05/free-all-caring-and-re-productive.html

https://take10charles.blogspot.com/2014/05/free-all-caring-and-re-productive.html Tuesday, May 13, 2014 Free All Caring and Re-productive Labourers ! I named this blog "Labor Power", because its theme will be the working class , the 99%. One form of labor which is not always clearly thought of as labor or work is Caring and Re-productive Labor. By convention, history, prejudice, etc. , it is done predominantly by women. Even wage-labor jobs of the Caring Labor type are done more by women. This will be "Mothers' Week" on the Labor Power blog.For background on Caring Labourers, see my previous blog , The Familial and anti-War, not Commercial or Male Supremacist, Origins of Mother's Day http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-familial-not-commercial-origin-of.html And please let me interrupt this praise of caring laborers in the abstract to praise some real caring laborers, the Mary Mahoney Professional Nurses (MMPN) Detroit , which celebrated its 90th anniversary this past Saturday, May 10, 2014. MMPN is one of the nation's oldest African American nurse associations: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Mary-Mahoney-Professional-Nurses-Detroit/145618148817600 "..the Mary Mahoney Professional Nurses Organization('s)... historic mission is to provide financial aid and scholarships to students of African heritage who pursue studies leading to careers in professional nursing. Proud of our past and embracing our future." https://www.facebook.com/pages/Mary-Mahoney-Professional-Nurses-Detroit/145618148817600 A Mothers' Week salute from Labor Power to the conscious, organized, caring labourers, the Mary Mahoney Professional Nurses Back to the abstraction at hand, a Wikipedia item says this about "care work": "Care work is a sub-category of work that includes all tasks that directly involve care processes done in service of others. Often, it is differentiated from other forms of work because it is intrinsically motivated, meaning that people are motivated to pursue care work for internal reasons, not related to money.[1] Another factor that is often used to differentiate caring labor from other types of work is the motivating factor. This perspective defines care labor as labor undertaken out of affection or a sense of responsibility for other people, with no expectation of immediate pecuniary reward.[2] Despite the importance of this intrinsic motivation factor, care work includes care activities done for pay as well as those done without remuneration. Specifically, care work refers to those occupations that provide services that help people develop their capabilities, or their ability to pursue the aspects of their life that they value. Examples of these occupations include child care, all levels of teaching (from preschool through university professors), and health care of all types (nurses, doctors, physical therapists and psychologists).[3] Care work also includes the array of domestic unpaid work that is often disproportionately done by women.[4] Often, care work focuses on the responsibilities to provide for dependents- children, the sick, and the elderly.[5] However, care work also refers to any work done in the immediate service others, regardless of the recipient’s dependent or nondependent status. Care work is becoming a popular topic for academic study and discussion. This study is closely linked with the field of feminist economics and is associated with scholars including Nancy Folbre, Paula England, Maria Floro, Diane Elson, Caren Grown and Virginia Held" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Care_work Of course, women do much of what is regularly called labor, work, toil, too: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/87/Jean-Fran%C3%A7ois_Millet_-_Gleaners_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg Posted by cb at 7:08 AM Email This BlogThis! Share to Twitter Share to Facebook Share to Pinterest 2 comments: Katte's Kaffe'May 14, 2014 at 5:12 AM Living in Detroit and growing up there in the 60's with caring people, I decided by the age of 9 to go into a field where I could help people. At first, I wanted to be a doctor, because your next door neighbor was one and I loved her dearly. As I got older, I realized there were many ways to care for others. Your blog draws attention to many of the things I've done or want to do to help other people. As a woman, and an African American, I've had to "rise above" the things that often bring one down. My parents were educators and I learned to teach other students in the classroom in elementary. In high school I taught music to those younger than me, one of which came to be President of the City Council in San Diego, an African American who continues to help others, and is now President of the Imperial Valley Red Cross of San Diego. I have worked at a medical school and helped doctors, residents and medical students, even to the point of teaching doctors bloodless surgery. I became a minister to help others have a better way of life. I CARE! It's just that plain and simple. I started a coffee business to help a student in the teaching profession in Ghana who has a school he is helping. I have helped Mom overcome obstacles in her aging, and Alzheimer's to actually teach again at 91, if only repeating what I taught her back to the caregivers who were close at hand. Growing up in the civil rights era, I was surrounded by caring individuals and it rubbed off on me. I truly appreciate your blog and look forward to reading all you write. Thank you Charles for caring so much as to create a forum to learn and share. You are a sterling example to me and I learn so much because you care so much. Again, THANK YOU, for all you do for others, and for caring so much about people, justice and this Earth! ReplyDelete still standing 4 JusticeJanuary 22, 2017 at 6:33 AM I have been a caregiver & the intrinsic reward cannot be measured in dollars! It can also be depleting if one is not careful to incorporate self-catering. Thanks for this topic Charles Brown! It is critically important! ReplyDelete Newer PostOlder PostHome Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom) About Me My photo cb Life is a date with the Earth. Eat, drink and be merry, and save the world ! I'm a what's-good-for-the-goose-is-good-for-the-gander feminist. Peace, love ; live long and prosper. 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China won’t be capitalist world’s low-cost labor hub anymore, Communist Party congress declares

https://peoplesworld.org/article/china-wont-be-capitalist-worlds-low-cost-labor-hub-anymore-communist-party-congress-declares/

Socialism vs. capitalism: Chinese President Xi Jinping is seen at the end of the Communist Party of China's 20th National Congress on a giant screen in a commercial district of Hangzhou in eastern China's Zhejiang province on Sunday, Oct 23, 2022. On the other side of the street stands Gap and other brands associated with global capitalism. | Chinatopix via AP Xi Jinping was elected to a precedent-breaking third term as general secretary of the Communist Party of China at its 20th Congress this past weekend, setting him up to lead the ruling party for the foreseeable future. For anyone getting their news from the corporate press in the West, that is probably the only thing they heard about the meeting in Beijing that ran from Oct. 16 to 22.

But leadership elections were only one aspect of this once-every-five-years event. Probably of more significance for the world were the decisions made by the 2,000 delegates dealing with the next stage of the country’s economic reform and their determination that China lead the way in building a cooperative alternative to the U.S.-dominated international system.

A worker operates a machine for knitting socks in a factory in Funan county in central China’s Anhui province, March 1, 2022. The Communist Party of China says it is now time for the country to move to the next phase of its economic reform, away from low-cost, cheap labor manufactured goods for the outside world. | Chinatopix via AP If the CPC’s goals are fulfilled, China will cease being global capitalism’s cheap labor manufacturing hub and move toward an economy centered on higher value, domestic-focused growth.

The country’s main objective, according to the congress’s final declaration, is to achieve a breakthrough toward a “new pattern of development” premised on “promoting high-quality development; achiev[ing] greater self-reliance and strength in science and technology…and building a modernized economy.”

Supply chain industry data show the transition is already under way. Wage rates in China have increased significantly, even doubled, in the past few years. And even before COVID, a number of the low-cost export industries that once populated China’s southern free trade zones had already begun migrating to other countries as foreign capital sought higher profits elsewhere.

From 2016 to 2022, China’s global share of clothing, furniture, footwear, luggage, and handbag exports all declined. While Wall Street and the business press portray this shift as a policy failure—a case of China “losing” its “manufacturing and export dominance”—the reality is that the CPC never intended the country to permanently remain at the bottom of the world’s economy.

A turn from cheap goods and the low wages and income inequality that go along with them was always part of China’s long-term plan.

“In the past decade, China’s scientific and technological undertakings have undergone historic structural…changes,” Wang Zhigang, the country’s Minister of Science and Technology, said this past June. “We have entered the ranks of the countries of innovators.”

Statistics back up his claim. From 34th place a decade ago, China has risen to 12th place on the Global Innovation Index.

The CPC put scientific and technological development at the center of its agenda at the 18th Congress in 2012, and as the governing party, it dedicated resources to the task. In the ten years since that meeting, China’s research and development spending grew to become second-largest in the world after the United States, expanding from just over a trillion RMB ($153 billion USD) to almost 2.8 trillion RMB ($414 billion USD).

Chinese technology firms already compete with the rest of the world, especially in communications, as illustrated by the debut of 5G networks around the globe following their introduction in China. In other fields such as chemistry, materials science, and physics, China stands at the forefront, though it is still playing catch up in many more.

Most developed countries devote 13-25% of their R&D expenditure to basic research; China is at just over 6%. “We still have a big gap to close,” Liu Huifeng, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Science and Technology, recently told the press.

In his opening report on the first day of the party congress, Xi said that inching away from export-led growth, moving into more advanced economic sectors, and reducing inequality to achieve “common prosperity” must be the hallmarks of the next phase of China’s “rejuvenation.” And pulling it off, he said, will mean sticking to the socialist road.

Higher value, domestic growth will be the goal for the next stage of economic reform. Here, employees work in a research and development lab of Beijing Applied Biological Technologies, a firm that developed COVID-19 molecular diagnostic test kits, May 14, 2020. | Mark Schiefelbein / AP “Marxism works”

Tossing aside naysayers who dismiss the CPC’s adherence to socialism as window-dressing, congress delegates issued a statement declaring, “Our experience has taught us that…we owe the success of our party and socialism [in China]…to the fact that Marxism works.”

Only by integrating Marxism with China’s material reality and culture, and “applying dialectical and historical materialism,” can the CPC chart a plan to meet the challenges facing China, the congress said.

The effort to do precisely that is the story of contemporary China, and it starts in 1978 when party leader Deng Xiaoping initiated economic “reform and opening up.” Borrowing a page from Russian revolutionary V.I. Lenin’s “New Economic Policy” of the 1920s and combining it with China’s own conditions, the government began reforming state-owned industries, liberalizing agriculture, and wooing foreign investment with free market trade zones in order to access the capital and technology the country lacked.

It was all aimed at building up the productive forces and raising workers’ standard of living in line with the historical materialist view that socialism could only be constructed on the basis of a modern and developed economy. As Deng said, socialism was not supposed to be a society of shared poverty, but rather one of common prosperity and people moving ahead together.

Out of that experimentation came the concept of the “socialist market economy,” or “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” The CPC determined that China was only in the “primary stage of socialism,” a period that, because of the country’s underdevelopment, could last a long time.

Reform and opening up has brought undeniable progress. Over 850 million people have been lifted out of poverty, and per capita incomes today are 25 times higher than in 1978. National economic growth averaged 10% per year from 1978 to 2018 (three times the U.S. average), and by purchasing power parity, China is already the world’s biggest economy.

The country secured the capital and technical know-how it needed to lay the foundations of a modern socialist economy thanks to the reform agenda, but along with the success came problems that are endemic to capitalism: massive inequality, the emergence of class struggles between workers and bosses, and ecological degradation.

There have also been bumps on the road toward building a functioning socialist democracy: Tiananmen Square 1989, recent instability in Hong Kong, concerns about the elimination of presidential term limits, and questions about developments in the Muslim-majority region of Xinjiang.

Questions of democracy and the socialist market

Many Western commentators obsessed over Xi’s re-election this week and what they derided as his “unaccountable power,” but they largely ignored the rest of the congress proceedings.

It is indeed undeniable that Xi now stands head-and-shoulders above anyone else in the party leadership, and even those who support Chinese socialism may be wondering what became of the collective approach and the consensus around term limits that had prevailed since Deng’s days.

Mao Zedong’s disastrous Cultural Revolution of the 1960s—which saw the country descend into sectarian chaos for the better part of ten years—left previous generations of CPC members determined to never again allow any one leader the kind of power Mao had exercised. Questions about whether such centralization could be happening again don’t arise purely out of thin air.

For instance, exhortations to members to uphold “Comrade Xi Jinping’s core position on the Party Central Committee and in the Party as a whole” appear no less than five times in the final congress resolution and six times in a statement on amendments to the party constitution. Further, the general secretary’s personal ideological contribution, “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era” apparently merits being declared “the Marxism of contemporary China and of the 21st century.”

Concerns about over-centralization aside, though, the most notable thing about the 20th Congress was that it demonstrated the CPC’s determination to open a new phase in the strategy of economic reform.

Echoing Deng’s maxim concerning common prosperity, Xi told delegates, “Material want is not socialism.” He said China will strive for material abundance and “well-rounded development.” Necessary for doing so, he argued, is maintaining the country’s commitment to a market form of socialism.

Ethnic minority delegates hold their ballot folders on the steps of the Great Hall of the People after the closing ceremony of the party congress. | Mark Schiefelbein / AP

“We must uphold and improve China’s basic socialist economic system,” his report said. “We must unswervingly consolidate and develop the public sector” and “encourage, support, and guide the development of the non-public sector”—including pursuing fresh legislation regarding property rights and the rights of entrepreneurs.

Xi said that the market, rather than a central plan, will continue to play the “decisive role” in resource allocation and that the reform of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) would be deepened, though details of what that means were not forthcoming. The general secretary simply said the ruling party would work to help SOEs “get stronger, do better, and grow bigger,” to aid them in becoming more competitive vis-à-vis private and foreign capital.

The CPC leader’s heavy emphasis on socialism as a required ingredient for China’s success is part of a long-running campaign he’s pushed since taking office. With a crackdown on corruption and a revival of ideological education, Xi has sought to restore the party’s legitimacy in the eyes of the public. He constantly reminds Chinese Communists of their revolutionary responsibilities.

In 2012, a National Ideology Center devoted to research in Marxism-Leninism was established on his initiative, and universities have made the teaching of Marxism a higher priority for students.

Four years ago, Xi instructed party cadres to make time for Karl Marx, not just the market. He encouraged them to again study classic works like The Communist Manifesto. And in the summer of 2021, the government initiated a large-scale regulation effort to rein in stock market speculation and reverse trends toward private monopoly in the economy, especially in the $4 trillion-dollar tech sector.

The current CPC leadership is also determined to never let the disaster that befell socialism in the Soviet Union occur in China. In a 2013 speech that was recently circulated among CPC cadre for the first time, Xi asked party members, “Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate?” He answered that the Soviet Communists’ “ideals and beliefs had been shaken.”

He expressed the conviction that “historical nihilism” was a major factor, that it had destroyed Communist morale. The repudiation of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union’s history in the Gorbachev years brought chaos and amounted to a surrender to capitalism in the ideological competition.

Xi said that to avoid that fate Chinese Communists must constantly remind themselves that “Marx and Engels’ analysis of the basic contradictions inherent to capitalism is not outdated” and that the transition to socialism is a long historical process. “We must prepare for both long-term cooperation and struggle” between the capitalist social system “and ours, along all fronts.”

China’s challenge

The struggle half of the equation won’t be long in coming.

Chinese families tour a pedestrian shopping street at Qianmen, a popular tourist spot, in Beijing, Oct. 3, 2022. | Andy Wong / AP Internally, China still faces a number of immediate challenges: rising unemployment, rescuing a weakened property market that threatens wider economic instability, and managing a strict “zero COVID” policy that continues to bring periodic lockdowns and slow the post-pandemic recovery. Externally, the war in Ukraine weighs on China in the form of global energy chaos and complicated diplomacy with other countries.

As for relations with the United States, Washington seems determined to provoke a new and long Cold War with Beijing.

Earlier this month, the Biden administration released its new National Security Strategy, which decreed that the U.S. will “outcompete China” in the next decade and block China “in the technological, economic, political, military, intelligence, and global governance domains.” The strategy document broadcast the complaints of a U.S. capitalist class long peeved that China won’t phase out socialism and open its major industries to foreign control and privatization.

The result will be a further ballooning of U.S. weapons spending, continued encirclement of China with military bases, escalation of tension around the Taiwan question, and the sowing of division between China and its neighbors—all measures to which China will have no choice but to respond.

Overseeing the transition of a developing economy of 1.3 billion people in a world where the laws of capitalism and powers hostile to socialism still hold sway isn’t an easy mission. The CPC faces the historic task of building a modern advanced economy using market methods while avoiding income polarization and keeping to a Marxist path. Other countries and parties have tried and failed, as the experience of the Soviet Union showed.

China’s ability to navigate that challenge is of great significance to Marxism and scientific socialism the world over. It’s possible that had China not achieved the gains it has in recent decades—if the CPC had fallen at the same time as the USSR and the Eastern European states—then socialism as an ideal might have been forced to wander in the darkness for a very long time. For the sake of progress everywhere, China needs to succeed in its quest to find a path toward common prosperity, socialism, and democracy.

As with all op-eds published by People’s World, this article represents the opinions of its author.

10/26/22 -Anthropology 152- Lecture 13

10/26/22 -Anthropology 152- Lecture 13

What am I getting at on the questions under A) on Test 3 ? Usually the term “Civilization” or Civilized is used to refer to human society that is superior morally and technologically to the Stone Age human societies. The popular image of “cavemen” and Neanderthals is of brutes, savages who drag women around by the hair and presumably force themselves on them. Cannibals who are in regular and frequent conflict with each other .

Civilization is superior technologically in that it has an increasingly more productive social organization and technology. With Civilization population size begins to grow more and is more concentrated than in the Stone Age. So , in that regard , Civilization is superior to the Stone Age on the Darwinian Fitness/Adaptation test, moving further from potential extinction/zero population.

On the other hand, the total population of the Stone Age was growing and perpetuated for approximately 2.5 million years; and it was able to adapt to the full range of environmental types , from arctic to rain forest. Civilization has only existed for about 6,000 years, a tiny fraction of the 2.5 million years of the Stone Age . And , importantly, tragically, “civilized’ technology has gone so far as to invent NUCLEAR WEAPONS. Nuclear war at this stage would probably create a “nuclear winter’, similar to the “winter” created by the comet that hit the Earth and caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. So, by So-called Civilization originating War between members of the same species, and super-destructive war technology, weapons, it has created a potentially UNFIT /EXTINCTION/POPULATION LOSS , in the Darwinian sense, dynamic for the human species. Civilization has 100,000s of years to go before it equals the Stone Age longevity of the human species.

Not only that: War with even less than nuclear destructive potential , with swords, knives, clubs, guns and other weapons USED ON MEMBERS OF OUR OWN SPECIES is morally inferior – real savagery/barbarism- to Stone Age largely peaceful society, in my opinion.

Furthermore, “Civilization’s” slaves work harder at food production than foragers or hunters and gatherers . This claim is based in part on Marshall Sahlins’s thesis in “ The Original Affluent Society” essay with the inference that societies through the 2.5 million years of the Stone Age were basically the same in terms of work time and intensity as Stone Age/Hunter-gatherer societies in the last 500 years; societies that Europeans _observed_ as they conquered the globe in the era of Capitalist Civilization . Civilization has more toil than Stone Age Society (See Lecture 12). A society with more leisure is superior , in my opinion.

“Civilized” society with masters exploiting production surpluses from slaves, greed; and oppressing and capturing slaves with armed force is inferior to Stone Age society where all adults are of equal status

Also, Stone Age society with equal status between women and men is morally superior to So-called Civilization’s Male Supremacist culture.

Along with the inference concerning the nature of Ancient Stone Age society from the thesis of “The Original Affluent Society”, I make the following inference concerning the superior morality of Stone Age Society ( from the Overview Lecture number 1):

Since the advent about 6,000 years ago of so-called civilization, as you have no doubt heard it referred to sometimes, it's not so clear how wise our culture makes us. Therein lies the central drama of the history of the human species. Nonetheless, clearly in the Stone Age, our having culture was a highly adaptive advantage over species that did not have culture , stone tools or controlling fire made through culture or symbolic or imaginary thinking and communication, etc, raising our species fitness, the growth of our population . This is evidenced by _Homo sapiens_ expanding in population and therefore migrating to an expanded area of living space across the earth , out of what is now named Africa to the other continents. Stone Age foraging and kinship organized societies were the mode of life for the vast majority of time of human species ' existence, 95% or more. The first human societies had an extraordinarily high survival need to be able to rely on each other at levels of solidarity that we cannot even imagine. The intensity of the network of social connections of a band of 25 to 100 people living in the ecological food chain location close to the one described in our textbook , Chapter 4, would almost constitute a new level of organic organization and integrity above individual bodies or selves. Ancient kinship /family/culture /symbolic communication systems from around 2.5 million years ago ( the beginning of the Truly Civilized Stone Age) were almost super-organic bodies; the human social group was a harmonious , multi-individual Body, quasi-organism. The Individual human bodies, Selves, were very frail and weak in contrast with the bodies of the field of predators they were prey for .

The dominance of the food chain that humans, ultimately reached even in the Stone Age with relatively _frail_ individual bodies. could only be reached by super-social , super internally-cooperative, super-intra-species harmony . This was only possible with symbolic communication both within a living generation and across generations, It is clear to me that natural selection , in the classical Darwinian sense, elected hominin groups with policies and practices of of "love thy neighbor as thyself " and "charity" over those that might have derived principles of "selfishness and greed", if there were any in the Stone Age before Civilization.

Treating each other better was critical to survival and thriving for the ancient Stone Age.

Concerning my claim that American society is white supremacist (racist), in every statistical category measuring the quality and quantity of life – life expectancy, wealth , income, quality of neighborhoods, academic attainment, etc., whites _on average_ are better off that Black and Brown people. Not every white person is better off than every Black/Brown person ; but on average it is so. The legacy of white supremacist history of slavery and Jim Crow segregation is inherited by today’s white population,

__________________ Survival of the Nice and Fertile

 THIS IS ANTHROPOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY Survival Of The Nicest? A Theory Of Our Origins Says Cooperation-Not Competition-Is Instinctive CB: Darwin’s principle is actually survival of the _fertile_ in the first place ; the fit are more fertile . Fertility success is the Darwinian definition of fitness success Being nice , cooperative is a better way to be fertile .

https://nypost.com/2019/12/31/doing-good-deeds-actually-reduces-physical-pain-study/?utm_source=facebook_sitebuttons&utm_medium=site+buttons&utm_campaign=site+buttons http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2014/05/is-human-nature-social-or-selfish-i.html "

The decisive battle between early culture and human nature must have been waged on the field of primate sexuality…. Among subhuman primates sex had organized society; the customs of hunters and gatherers testify eloquently that now society was to organize sex…. In selective adaptation to the perils of the Stone Age, human society overcame or subordinated such primate propensities as selfishness, indiscriminate sexuality, dominance and brute competition. It substituted kinship and co-operation for conflict, placed solidarity over sex, morality over might. In its earliest days it accomplished the greatest reform in history, the overthrow of human primate nature, and thereby secured the evolutionary future of the species." — Sahlins, M. D. 1960 The origin of society. Scientific American 203(3): 76–87. http://radicalanthropologygroup.org/sites/default/files/pdf/class_text_036.pdf v>

Antoinette Blackwell chose to highlight balance and cooperation rather than struggle and savage rivalry. She criticized Darwin for basing his theory of evolution on "time-honored assumption that the male is the normal type of his species".[7] She wrote that Spencer scientifically subtracts from the female and Darwin as scientifically adds to the male.[6] FIT , physically fit , in the sense of bodily fit for success in the struggle for existence ( the Darwinian term of art for longevity in an individual organism ) surviving , getting enough to eat , not getting eaten , not falling out of a tree or off a cliff , not freezing to death , not overheating to death BEFORE REPRODUCING , BEFORE BEING FERTILE, passing on one’s genes to next generations . In Darwin's theory of natural selection concerning living beings, the "struggle" in the struggle for existence, to live, is not between Individual Selves of the same species to the point of Individual Bodies, somebodies,of the same species killing each other except very rarely. Most of the deaths before passing on genes to the next generation, are due to failures in struggles with some Individual Body of _another_ species., plant and animal, as predator and prey; or struggle against bad weather, heat exhaustion, sunburn It is easy to see how some people get a misconception of Darwinian natural selection because it _is_ posed in most of it prime formulations with a sort of emphasis on the fact of indirect "competition" in the sense that for the typical bodily form of a species to change under Darwin's theory, some members with genes that change species typical traits must more successfully pass them on than members with species typical traits over successive generations until the new trait is universal and the old typical trait is extinct. But this does not necessarily or even conventionally imply direct physical conflict between Individuals of the two types but the same species in the day-to-day struggle for existence to survive as Individual Bodies. This is demonstrated by the famous anthropological micro-evolutionary study of sickle cell genes on pages 44 to 46 of _The Essence of Anthropology_. There is no direct physical competition between the people of the various genotypes with different fitnesses in the different environments in the study. It is not an Individual , but a species, a group of the same type who "evolve", "adapt" or "survive". Individuals must live their individual life long enough to reproduce for the species to survive. However, every individual eventually dies. "Survival" of the individual means living long enough to pass on genes or a geno-type to the future generations. If mutated genes, changed geno-type, are passed on, there is a potential unit of evolution between the parent and the offspring. That is evolution occurs between Individuals of different generations, not in one Individual Self. If the mutated genotype results in a phenol-typical trait that is adaptive in some significant way, it may become an evolutionary change by the species through several individuals.

Male supremacy, greed and war are not in our genes The male supremacist family, private property (classes; greed), and the state ( special repressive apparatus ) arises as a complex together circa 6,000 years ago in Mesopotamia. They are still together in a complex that dominates the human species in 2018. Before that for the about 2.5 million years of the Stone Age ( true Civilization) there was gender equivalence, sharing and peace in the species; that's when we were substantially "hardwired " genetically . So, Male supremacy and class divided society and war are not in our genes. /// Ancestor veneration The difference between humans and all other species is that through symbolic communication , words and culture, dead generations have a certain immortality and are part of the society of living generations . Living generations share the experiences of dead generations . Thereby knowledge accumulates. All humans stand on the shoulders of giants , as the scientist Issac Newton put it . https://www.filmsforaction.org/news/survival-of-the-nicest/?fbclid=IwAR1eZzRTAeGl6NrV4DugDM_HVthON2Wy9khZCKnQ1Y4SbKpo3K2RomlFqEY .

Fossil fuel addiction killing millions

Earth can still be if we just stop screwing it up. “Health at the mercy of fossil fuels” is the headline of the 2022 Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change that was released by the renowned medical journal Tuesday. The seventh annual report tracks 43 health and climate indicators, including exposure to extreme heat. This year’s edition is another grim study of how our “fossil fuel addiction” is killing us. The litany of impacts the Lancet focuses on looks a lot like the lists of possible effects put together in the six scientific climate assessments issued by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change since 1990. The Lancet report is immense, but succinctly, it puts its conclusion up front in Section 1: Climate change is affecting the health of people worldwide directly with increased exposure to extreme weather, and indirectly with impacts on the physical, natural, and social systems on which health depends. Climatic changes are also amplifying the existing threats to food and water security, built infrastructure, essential services, and livelihoods. Top Stories Cartoon: A modern trial by ordeal, for ye accused abortionistsCheers and Jeers: ThursdayAbbreviated Pundit Roundup: Questions about the Prime MinisterFight against carbon capture pipeline unites communities in 5 states'Absolutely f***ing not': Attorneys, advisers reportedly against Trump testifying on live television CLICK TO READ Michigan jury finds three more militiamen involved in Whitmer kidnap plot guilty on state charges 'Absolutely f***ing not':Attorneys, advisers reportedly against Trump testifying on live television 'Absolutely f***ing not': Attorneys, advisers reportedly against Trump testifying on live television But as the Lancet author-doctors also say, there are glimmers of hope if we humans move quickly to stop poisoning ourselves and the planet. If you’re tired of hearing researchers saying that, think about how they feel. A few more words from the doctors: “This year’s report finds that a persistent fossil fuel addiction is amplifying the health impacts of the concurrent crises we face. Despite these health harms, governments and companies continue prioritising fossil fuels to the detriment of peoples’ health. Today, fossil fuel giants pursue plans which would lead to emissions vastly exceeding levels compatible with the Paris Agreement goals. If these strategies are pursued, they would lock the world into a fatally warmer future with catastrophic health impacts. As they cash record profits, the failure to reprioritise funding and invest in a healthy future becomes evident. It doesn’t have to be this way.” Indeed it doesn’t. But cue the whiners who will inevitably complain that the doctors should stick to their field and not go all political on us. Which is always the cry of the business-as-usual crowd while they put their dark money where it will do the most damage. The doctors are merely reiterating somewhat more forcefully than usual the well-known truth: Fossil fuel burning is killing literally millions of us every year: There were 1.2 million premature deaths in 2021 just from airborne PM2.5 (particulates) alone, 11,800 of those in the United States. If that’s not a health matter deserving physicians’ attention, what is? Changes in climate from this burning last year boosted heatwave-related deaths worldwide by 68% in vulnerable populations (adults over 65, and infants up to 1), and 74% in the United States, according to the Lancet report. Agricultural workers were among the most affected. Besides the deaths, the doctors calculated that heatwaves meant the loss of 470 billion hours of work in 2021. That’s about 40% more than in the 1990s. The associated economic loss was estimated at about $700 billion. Compared with the 1950s, some 30% more land is now affected by extreme drought events. ScreenShot2022-10-25at11.27.21PM.png I recommend going to the Lancet Countdown visualization page to see bigger and crisper versions of this and the other charts. If you want to read the whole report, you’ll have to register. The extreme heat, coupled with droughts, has expanded food insecurity to nearly 100 million more people than before, many of them already living on the edge. Epidemiological computer models showed annual heat-related deaths rising from 187,000 a year in 2000-2004 to an annual average of 312,000 in each of the past five years. And then there are infectious diseases. For instance, periods when malaria could likely be transmitted grew significantly longer compared with the 1950s, and so did the likelihood of dengue transmission, the report stated. Said University College of London health and climate researcher Dr. Marina Romanello, executive director of the Lancet Countdown, “Our health is at the mercy of fossil fuels. We’re seeing a persistent addiction to fossil fuels that is not only amplifying the health impacts of climate change, but which is also now at this point compounding with other concurrent crises that we’re globally facing, including the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the cost-of-living crisis, energy crisis and food crisis that were triggered after the war in Ukraine.” Damian Carrington at The Guardian cited the response to the report of U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, who has been a relentless, if frustrated, voice for serious and just climate action: “The climate crisis is killing us. It is undermining not just the health of our planet, but the health of people everywhere—through toxic air pollution, diminishing food security, higher risks of infectious disease outbreaks, record extreme heat, drought, floods and more.” Here’s Carrington: The Lancet report also tracks the fossil fuel system. It found that 80% of the 86 governments assessed were subsidising fossil fuels, providing a collective $400bn in 2019. These subsidies were bigger than national health spending in five countries, including Iran and Egypt, and more than 20% of health spending in another 16 countries. “Governments have so far failed to provide the smaller sum of $100bn per year to help support climate action in lower income countries,” the report notes. The report says the strategies of the 15 biggest oil and gas companies remain sharply at odds with ending the climate emergency, “regardless of their climate claims and commitments”. In this regard, the Lancet Countdown notes: [O]il and gas companies are registering record profits, while their production strategies continue to undermine people’s lives and well-being. An analysis of the production strategies of 15 of the world’s largest oil and gas companies, as of February 2022, revealed they exceed their share of emissions consistent with 1·5°C of global heating by 37% in 2030 and 103% in 2040, continuing to undermine efforts to deliver a low-carbon, healthy, liveable future. ScreenShot2022-10-25at11.31.13PM.png At his substack, The Crucial Years, author and veteran climate activist Bill McKibben noted: “I’ve rarely read a more comprehensive, or more devastating report on the effect of global warming. And its authors are pulling no punches.” He goes on to reinforce the message about fossil fuel companies: My only quibble is that when one says “fossil fuel addiction,” it might summon up an image of the wrong culprit. Humans aren’t addicted to fossil fuels—we’re just as happy getting our power from solar panels or wind turbines. Happier, even. ... This profit—soaring this year thanks to one man, Vladimir Putin—keeps tempting the banks and financial institutions to send more money their way, so they can expand their infrastructure and lock in their dominance decades longer. It’s Big Oil’s that’s addicted to fossil fuel profits—but the side effects are killing the planet. Big Oil is addicted to something else as well: lying. They’ve stopped outright denial of the climate crisis. Now their ads and press releases are all about how supposedly green they are. Bald-faced lying. By their actions, not their words, shall you know them. Now, about those glimmers of hope. An energy transition is underway. But still barely so. Acceleration of what’s already happening is key. Some acceleration is happening, though one with all kinds of contradictions, like the notorious provision in the Schumer-Manchin compromise requiring federal oil and gas leases in exchange for wind and solar leases. Like the stepped-up use of coal in China as it simultaneously invests more than the next three countries combined in green expansion. The following Lancet chart shows the steep rise in the percentage of electricity generated by renewables since the first IPCC climate assessment was written 32 years ago. An encouraging glimmer, to be sure. But that steep climb needs to become even steeper. ScreenShot2022-10-26at12.06.53AM.png Had there not been so much obstructionism, that curve could have been upturned much sooner, and we wouldn’t be so under the gun. But the belated green transition is nevertheless happening all around us now, just as the impacts of climate change are happening all around us. It’s a race, whether we like it or not. And we’re behind. If we manage to speed up the transition, then as the doctors say, we can have healthy energy delivered to people in their homes, reduce energy poverty, and save those millions being killed now with dirty energy. But to do so requires what the doctors prescribe: ditching those fossil fuels faster. That means we have to generate more renewables faster. And that means upgrading the grid to transmit electricity faster, perhaps the hardest task of all. It’s all of a piece, you can’t have one without the others. Given the time frame available to us, getting all that done would be helped with the powers the president would gain from declaring a national climate emergency—after the midterms. This wouldn’t give President Joe Biden carte blanche, of course, certainly not if Congress is under partial or complete Republican control come January. But it could help speed along green programs and projects that Congress wouldn’t be able to block. And if the Democrats maintain control of Congress, then the urgency can be further amplified. How much more evidence is required before the response is equal to the gravity of the situation? We’re already dropping dead. Isn’t that enough? The Lancet report concludes: With countries facing multiple crises simultaneously, their policies on COVID-19 recovery and energy sovereignty will have profound, and potentially irreversible consequences for health and climate change. However, accelerated climate action would deliver cascading benefits, with more resilient health, food, and energy systems, and improved security and diplomatic autonomy, minimising the health impact of health shocks. With the world in turmoil, putting human health at the centre of an aligned response to these concurrent crises could represent the last hope of securing a healthier, safer future for all. Report co-author Dr. Renee Salas, a Boston emergency room physician and professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, said, “This isn’t a rare cancer that we don’t have a treatment for. We know the treatment we need. We just need the willpower from all of us and our leaders to make it happen.” And some arm-twisting.

Spain 'wakes up' to gender contagion Renowned Spanish psychiatrist calls on lawmakers not to make things worse

The gist

One of Spain’s most renowned psychiatrists, Dr Celso Arango, has warned that an alarming surge in young people mistakenly declaring themselves transgender may result in a great deal of harm.

"This is madness, it's going to hurt a lot of people, a lot of young people who have disorders think they're going to fix them by becoming trans — when they're not [trans],” he told the mass market newspaper El Mundo on Saturday October 8.

Dr Arango, head of child and adolescent psychiatry at one of the country’s leading public university hospitals, argued that the national government’s draft Trans Law allowing self-declared sex change in official records from the age of 12 would add fuel to the fire.

“On a day-to-day basis at the Gregorio Marañón Hospital [in Madrid] we are witnessing an explosion, a boom, an exponential increase in adolescents who say they are trans — many for fashion,” he said.

On that same Saturday, the parents’ group AMANDA staged a historic rally in the capital and packed the great amphitheatre of the Madrid College of Physicians, with people brandishing posters such as “Less Surgery, More Psychology” and “Trans Law = Danger for our Children.”

The college issued a statement expressing concern “about the current situation of Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria” and it noted that the parents of AMANDA were calling for a cautious response to their trans-identifying children.

The group — whose name “AMANDA” is a Spanish acronym incorporating a reference to the ROGD concept of America’s Dr Lisa Littman — was founded last year by eight isolated mothers who discovered one another on social media and now represents some 300 parents across Spain.

The group, which calls for exploration rather than medication of gender distress, said the intervention by Dr Arango and the college of physicians was a milestone, and families affected by ROGD had been “given a public voice.”

“For the first time [in Spain], an organisation representing the medical profession has spoken out publicly in favour of a prudent, scientific and non-ideological stance on this issue,” a spokeswoman for the group told GCN.

“And one of the greatest representatives of psychiatry at the European and Spanish level [Dr Arango] has exposed that there is indeed a crisis of social contagion in relation to gender identities that can irreversibly damage adolescents and young people.

“The breakthrough that is needed is for our policymakers to adopt a prudent stance, to understand that in the present context a trans law cannot be passed as a matter of urgency, without listening to the experts and families affected.” — Parents’ group AMANDA

Dr Arango, who is a former president of the Spanish Society of Psychiatry and has an international profile with university appointments in the U.S. and U.K. as well as in Spain, sponsored the October 8 event at the college of physicians.

“Years ago, we would have only one case a year of someone who claimed to identify with the other sex,” he told the audience.

“This last year, the boom is such that we already have 20 per cent of adolescents admitted who declare themselves to be trans.

“It is dangerous to push confused young people towards an irreversible hormonal change. Experience says that until the time of mental maturation, [young] people should be protected from decisions that may affect the rest of their lives.”

Within 72 hours of the October 8 event, the group AMANDA was contacted by 35 new families.

The draft Trans Law allows a change of sex in the official register — with no need for psychological assessment — from the age of 12 with judicial approval; from the age of 14 with parental support (but a judge can override parental refusal); and from the age of 16 independently.

The law enacts a “conversion therapy” ban that purports to protect “gender expression”, “sexual orientation” and “sexual identity”.

This grouping of terms is unclear, but critics say that anything other than the “gender-affirming” treatment approach is likely to be banned. Mental health professionals found guilty of conversion therapy would face a maximum fine of €150,000.

The bill also also targets “LGTBI-phobia”, with “derogatory” speech attracting fines up to €10,000. Critics say this could outlaw good-faith dissent from gender ideology or mere statements of biological reality.

“The main objective of the [Trans Law] is to impose on Spanish society as a whole, by legal imperative, the [quasi-religious] belief that there is a ‘felt sexual identity’ in each person,” says an umbrella group, known as La Confluencia Movimiento Feminista, which defends the rights of girls and women based on their biological sex.

“That ‘felt sexual identity’, completely separate from the [biological] sex of each person, is [proposed as] the source of ‘authentic’ information — prevailing over the material reality of the body — in determining whether a person is a man or a woman.

“The [draft bill] intends that this ‘felt sexual identity" should have legal recognition in the Spanish legal system, replacing the biological category of sex.”

Spain’s lower house of parliament, the Congress of Deputies, has approved use of an emergency procedure to fast-track passage of the draft Trans Law, and delegated the full Congress’s power of approval to the Equality Committee. (The next step would be consideration by the upper house, the Senate.)

Fast-tracking was calculated “to prevent public debate of the bill and make it more difficult for everyone to understand its aim and scope,” said Amparo Domingo, a Spanish representative of the feminist organisation Women’s Declaration International.

The Spanish government led by prime minister Pedro Sánchez of the Socialist Party says urgency is warranted to protect “LGBTI people” from discrimination and to depathologise trans identity.

But his Socialist colleague and former deputy prime minister Dr Carmen Calvo — who is in charge of the Congress’s Equality Committee — has declared her opposition to the self-identified sex change of the Trans Law.

She said the law “could destroy the powerful equality legislation of our country”; legislation which protects females according to biological sex, not self-declared sex.

Dr Calvo, who is legally trained, has the power to call experts to give testimony before her committee.

Video: Amparo Domingo on the politics of Spain’s Trans Law

The detail

Dr Arango said mental health professionals had not been consulted on the draft law by the Spanish government, which presumably saw no need because of its campaign against “pathologisation” of trans identities.

“The fact that I say that trans people are not trans because of a mental disorder — that is, that [trans identity] is not an illness — does not necessarily mean that many people with mental disorders will not say that they are trans without being so,” he told El Mundo.

“The two things are compatible — and they are happening. Let me give you an extreme example: if I have a schizophrenic person whose voices tell them they are trans, what do I do? Do I put them on hormones?”

Dr Arango said the exponential trend in trans identification among young people had only been noticed within the last three years in Spain, and was different from the long-standing condition now known as gender dysphoria or gender incongruence (which involves a sense of disconnect between the body and an inner concept of “gender identity”).

“Knowing the psychopathology of adolescents, this immediate search [by trans-identifying young people] for a response, for gratification [and change] worries me a lot,” he said.

“One of the first things we learn in child psychiatry is to wait before acting.”

“[These young people say], ‘I'm in a body that isn't mine and being trans is going to cure me of all my ills'. It's a classic adolescent, magical, here-and-now solution, frontal lobe disinhibition, doing rather than thinking.

“There is a pattern of, let's say, false cases: an excluded child, with autism, perhaps bullying, adaptation problems, Asperger's, social relationship problems, who suddenly finds a group of people who take him in and support him.”

Dr Arango raised the possibility of profit-driven private clinics responding to the surge in adolescent demand with easy access to hormones that make irreversible changes to young bodies.

He attributed the dramatic rise of “false positive” trans identity to fashion, the yearning for group acceptance and the same ideology underlying the new law allowing self-identified gender to overwrite biological sex in official records.

“Mixing gender with sex, and creating the image that one can choose the sex one has ... No, that's madness. You are either XX or XY [chromosomes]. Live as you want, but sex is what it is, and doctors have to know what sex a person is, because treatment is sometimes different depending on one or the other.” — Dr Celso Arango

Addressing the audience in the college of physicians’ amphitheatre, Dr Arango described what appeared to be social contagion of trans identities at work in his own hospital.

"We have cases of instantaneous transitions on the [hospital] floor itself,'“ he said.

“I’m talking about girls who were admitted with mental health problems, thinking their life was not worth living, feeling that nothing makes sense, not talking about gender dysphoria [and in fact having Austism Spectrum Disorder or Asperger’s], when suddenly they declare themselves trans.

“It is very painful to sit in front of them, ask them what is going on with them, and they tell you that coming out as trans is the only hope they have of being accepted and heard. They ask you not to take away the only thing they have to hold on to, in order to fit in.”

Dr Rafael del Río, president of the ethics committee of Madrid’s college of physicians, called on Spain’s politicians not to legislate in haste but “to act with great caution in the face of transgenderism, given the scant scientific evidence that it involves.”

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The breakthrough events of October 8 took place against a background of a few years of attempts to raise awareness by a number of lawyers, endocrinologists, feminist writers, psychologists and philosophers, according to Dr Laura Redondo, a specialist in judicial and legal psychology.

“It’s important that more people join in, both the general public and professionals,” Dr Redondo told GCN.

She said a key development was the creation of the Alliance Against the Erasure of Women in 2019.

Twitter avatar for @LauraRdondo Laura Redondo @LauraRdondo Hace 4 días comentaba que una compañera psiquiatra alucinaba con el aumento de casos de disforia de género.

Como se ve en los comentarios lo tacharon de invent y me atacaron.

Hoy sale el propio jefe de psiquiatría del GM a decir lo mismo.

¿Hasta cuando se negará esta realidad? Image Image Twitter avatar for @LauraRdondo Laura Redondo @LauraRdondo Una psiquiatra me comenta preocupada que los pacientes que antes venían por anorexia y trastornos somatomorfos ahora vienen por disforia. Que no ha visto nada igual durante su carrera. Lo peor, es que van varias que me lo comentan. Cuando veamos la magnitud real será un escándalo 2:53 PM ∙ Oct 8, 2022 226 Likes 93 Retweets In February 2022, psychologist and feminist Carola López became the first person in Spain to face an accusation of carrying out conversion therapy.

She denied the allegation, which was made under a law in the autonomous region of Andalucía. The maximum penalty was €120,000 and five years’ suspension as a psychologist.

A trans activist group had targeted López’s tweets, including one that said, “If someone is disgusted with their body, the logical thing is to help them accept it with the least invasive treatment possible.”

In a media interview, she said: “What surprises me about all this is that a frequent task of psychologists is to help people to accept their body, to love and respect it in order to be happy and not to feel shame or self-hatred; and for these [trans activist] associations, that is something negative — then I think they will have to close all the psychology offices in the world.”

The Andalusian authorities dropped the case in August, saying the opinions stated by López were protected by freedom of expression.

Dr Redondo said the draft national Trans Law disdained the expertise of Spain’s psychologists and psychiatrists who could help the emerging group of young people coming to regret medicalised gender change.

“These minors try to detransition and find themselves without support, without recognition of the damage and the permanent outcomes [of these medical interventions],” she said.

She said the Trans Law “even vetoes the parents themselves, such that if they try to defend their children from this unscientific and harmful phenomenon, they can be denounced for abuse.”

Video: The group AMANDA explains the ROGD trend, as well as the shifts to caution in Finland, New Zealand, Sweden and the U.K.

Caution, not reaction

“We are not conservative, not far-right, not religious,” one mother from the group AMANDA told El Confidencial last year. “Many of us are feminists. And none of us care if our children are gay, bisexual or whatever.

“If they come out of the closet — and some did before they became obsessed with gender dysphoria — we accompany them. Not all of them have a homosexual orientation. My son, for example, says he is a lesbian woman.

“What we want is for our children not to suffer. And that they don't destroy their bodies, that they don't become sterile, that they don't mutilate themselves, that they don't make irreversible decisions on the spur of the moment in a stage of life characterised by its fickleness.

“But none of us can talk to our sons and daughters about this subject. It is taboo in our homes, and we are afraid.”

Twitter avatar for @Amanda_DGIR Agrupación AMANDA @Amanda_DGIR Huge success of our presentation at the Medical Academy yesterday, with over 400 people attending including over 200 of our families and the support of @Icomem_Oficial and @CALDirector and most of the Feminist Movement. We are deeply grateful and pleased! 1/ #NoHayconsenso Image Image Image Image 8:24 AM ∙ Oct 9, 2022 220 Likes 113 Retweets At the October 8 public debut of AMANDA, families affected by ROGD were joined by health professionals, teachers and feminists.

The group fears that the Trans Law may increase medicalisation of young people.

Its spokeswoman said the national Trans Law referred to laws on medical treatment in Spain’s autonomous regions. When it came to trans treatments, those regional laws were based on protocols such as the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s standard of care.

“Since the latest version of this protocol [SOC 8] has completely eliminated the minimum age of treatment for children, it is to be expected that the use of blockers will skyrocket,” she said.

Tweet: Lioness Mothers v Hormones in Madrid

Twitter avatar for @mjpartera ♀MªJosé @mjpartera Contra las hormonas aquí están las leonas!!!! @Amanda_DGIR @ContraBorrado @FemSocialistas #NoHayConsenso #8OctubreConAmanda #LaInfanciaNoSeToca

11:23 AM ∙ Oct 8, 2022 280 Likes 109 Retweets

Self-diagnosis

Some of Spain’s autonomous regions have already enacted self-declared gender change. In the southern region of Andalucía, the 2014 trans rights law created five gender clinics for children under 14, according to reportage by El Independiente de Granada.

From 2015-21, the official number of first appointments in these clinics rose by 136 per cent to a total of 291 children.

However, journalist Cristina Prieto reported that “the perception of several primary care professionals, who preferred to hide their names for fear of reprisals, indicates that there is a much higher number of cases.”

“The passing of gender identity laws, the pressure of trans activist groups, the support of a large part of the media and the massive dissemination on social networks of queer ideology, which promotes the belief that both sex and gender are a cultural creation and therefore sex can be chosen at will because the importance lies in the gender identity that each person feels, push children to manifest the opposite sex to the surprise of their families and to begin pharmacological treatment with serious consequences for their health,” she wrote.

The trans care protocol in Andalucía reflects the right “not to be forced to undergo treatment, medical procedures or psychological examinations that restrict their freedom of self-determination of gender.

“In other words, the psychological or psychiatric diagnosis is eliminated in order to move directly to pharmacological treatment consisting of puberty blockers and cross hormones if the minor so decides,” Prieto reported.

“The patients themselves self-diagnose and go to the transgender unit to receive medication without any other specialised assessment, while psychology and psychiatry professionals are forced to follow protocols that prevent them from making accurate diagnoses.”

An endocrinologist, speaking anonymously, told Prieto that “hormones and puberty blockers are being given to those who ask for them, without psychological assessment.

“The entrance door to the transsexuality units is endocrinology because the Andalusian law establishes it like this, and the minors, already instructed through social networks, arrive with their own self-diagnosis and with a perfect knowledge of what they have to ask for.”

The group Amanda said there was no orderly national collection of data on youth gender medicine, with treatment delivered by Spain’s autonomous regions. Regional data was often not broken down by sex or age.

GCN sought comment from Spain’s Ministry of Equality, and the LGBT+ group el Colectivo COGAM

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Gender Clinic News is an independent newsletter with global coverage of the debate about medicalised gender change among young people.

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