A great analysis of the shell game involved in many seemingly revolutionary changes in culture and society. Basically the idea that you change the terminology or some of the role players and dress everything up and continue with the same flawed basic structures. Women are not better than men at running things, but putting anyone in charge of a top-down system is asking for autocratic arrogance that sees social position as evidence of merit. Systems create inequality and privilege not individuals. It is not any individuals who created the disparity in power and means in our society but the systems that have evolved over hundreds of years. The Soviet system of socialism was doomed not by socialism by the subterranean existence of power structures that focused all the power in hands of a few individuals. No one person or even small group of people can change large structural political and cultural systems.
The difficulty is that it is the form or structure, not the content, that must be transformed to produce genuine psychodynamic or political transformation. One might believe that they’ve produced a radical transformation by switching from donuts to coffee, but both are still toruses. The structure remains the same. This was the criticism of Soviet style socialism. At the level of content it had changed the nature of distribution, but structurally, in its reliance on the Fordist factory model, it still had the same structure or form of alienation. Similarly, one does not undermine patriarchy simply by putting a woman in charge. Patriarchy is not defined by its content– a particular gender occupying the position of power –but by its structure: an autarch at the top structuring social relations. It’s that structure that has to be addressed, not the organ of a person that occupies a particular point in a…
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Myriad Ways 