I promised I would take you for Teatime at Marshbeck. The first installment was a week ago on Sunday 9th April 2006. This is the second of three installments. The story first appeared in the revised 1983 edition of The Sane Alternative by James Robertson. It is the afternoon of 5th January 2050. It’s difficult now to imagine how things must have been when life for most people was empty of meaning - before they were seized, as we are, by the commitment to develop our potential as persons, in society, as part of planet Earth. Everything must have seemed quite different for them - much emptier, you would think - and yet they used the same words - like sane, humane and ecological - as we do to refer to those aspects of life.’

Emily interrupts, ‘Yes, and human potential is another good example. A lot of people used to think that developing human potential meant escaping to places like ashrams in India or beaches in California. There was even a ‘human potential movement.’ Whereas we now take it for granted that developing our potential as humans means living our ordinary daily lives in creative, productive, enriching ways, including our relationships with other people and the natural world around us.’

Indira chips in, ‘Those old people must have seen what was coming, don’t you think? After all, history makes it pretty obvious that by the early ‘80s a change of direction was taking place. Here in England they had celebrated the bicentenary of the Industrial Revolution - two hundred years of fantastic progress on the material side of life - and all their good writers and thinkers had begun to discuss what post-industrial society was going to be like - the ‘coming age of human growth,’ ‘psycho-social invention and innovation,’ ‘personal self-development in an eco-planetary culture,’ and so on - maybe they still felt a bit awkward with these concepts and phrases, but their vision corresponded more or less to what actually happened.’

‘That’s not correct historically, you know,’ says Eskimo. ‘We tend to remember now only the people who got it more or less right, and whose books and recordings still have something interesting to say to us. But most of the experts and spokespeople seventy years ago were firmly imprisoned in an altogether different set of assumptions.

Take a simple example, which I happen to know about. Many people, like me, have a natural capacity for healing, in the same way as many people have aptitudes for swimming, or music, or whatever. No-one today doubts that most people have some capacity for healing which can be trained and developed with practice. But in the early ‘80s almost all the accepted people in medicine and science, including medical and scientific writers, ignored or rejected it. It wasn’t until about 1990 that they really began to take it seriously and to train healers in a big way. It was then, of course, that they began to conquer the killer diseases of industrial society like cancer.’

‘Exactly the same was true of economics,’ Pik says. ‘You have to put on a different mindset to understand what people then thought economics was about. It’s fascinating to hear and watch the speeches and discussions on the old tapes and videos. Even in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s one of the main aims - this is what ‘full employment’ meant - was that as many people as possible should work away from their homes, and should do their work for people and organisations, and on tasks, unconnected with their own lives. That seems crazy to us, I know. But for people then ‘employment,’ ‘unemployment,’ ‘jobs’ and so on, were passionately important.

‘Some historians of the transformation argue that all the debate and discussion about that kind of economics was just a complex tangle of empty quibbles and sophistries, with which the ambitious and clever people blinded the rest and achieved power and privilege for themselves.

‘But the riots of the 1980s showed that these questions were real and relevant to people’s lives. It must have been a bit like the theological debates (how many angels can stand on the point of a pin and all that) which mattered so much to people six or seven hundred years ago and then seemed such nonsense as soon as the Middle Ages were over.’

'I suppose all this was connected,’ says Herbert, ‘with what we see as the over-masculine psyche of people at that time. I mean, they always wanted to push outwards and spend their energies on someone else’s patch, not on their own - working in jobs outside their home, sending their children out to school, trading with people in other countries, converting people with different beliefs, sorting out other people’s problems instead of their own.

‘It was only about sixty years ago, you know, that people in the so-called ‘developed’ countries realised that putting their own way of living on a permanently sustainable footing was the most effective way of helping people in the ‘less developed’ countries to do the same. When my grandfather joined the Nigerian representatives at the U.N. just over fifty years ago, the old hands were still recalling the panic which had hit the place in the late 1980s when that simple fact began to sink in.’

Late Breaking News! Archduke Ferdinand Found Alive! Wars of Twentieth Century all a Big Mistake!

Meanwhile along the Rye Harbour Road…a little closer in time and space…the cycle path continues to be notable by its absence despite watch-my-lips promises that it would be up and rolling by the end of March 2006. Jim Hollands, the editor of Rye’s Own tells me that the latest delay is due to objections from a lobby group for the disabled. They argue that the new path should be for the use of their mobility scooters…while cyclists should use the road.

Harvard University Press has just published Are Women Human by Catharine MacKinnon. It ends with a rhetorical essay on Women’s September 11th where she makes the point that the same number of women are murdered by men in the US each year (2800) as were killed in the Twin Towers (3000).

There is a big difference between cause and correlation. And comparing apples and oranges seldom makes much sense. One person is killed every minute somewhere in the world by armed violence. But MacKinnon goes on to imply some relevance in the comparison by arguing that violence against women ‘qualifies as a casus belli and a form of terrorism every bit as much as the events of September 11th’. Apparently ‘it’s only because it’s men doing it against women that it isn’t seen as war.’ Hmm!

The North American brand of Fundamental Feminism espoused by MacKinnon and her disciples stresses fixed gendered polarity and women’s need for protection from men’s domination of them. In MacKinnon’s view women’s status as a group relative to men has never been much changed from what it is now…a disempowering view for women as it trivialises a century of practical struggle and a vast array of major advances towards Social Equality.

If Machiavelli had been writing in the mid-20th century instead of the mid-16th his prince would have been instructed to invent Fundamental Feminism to drive a wedge into the movement for Global Justice spear-headed by Socialism and Communism in the aftermath of the collapse of the old order following the diplomatic debacle of the Kaiser War and the incompetence, greed and sheer nastiness of the Great Depression.

This strategy of divide and rule is as old as the Seven Hills of Rome. Even today large areas of the Feminist Movement have a case to answer against the accusation that they are dupes of the One World Police State Project which has as one of its minor tactical manoeuvres the blunting of the leading edge of the movement for global justice by making men and not poverty or the abuse of power…any power…the real enemy of female activists.

As a group English Socialist Feminists has been influenced (to their detriment) by American Fundamental Feminism but have not been taken in. Wiser heads have usually prevailed. Nonetheless the ideas of these militant rights-based foreign feminists have infiltrated the legislative apparatus in Strasburg, Whitehall, Westminster and Millbank. Their intolerance as well as their goals stands in sharp contrast to the tolerance and the dreams of the duties-based attitude of both the Old Gendered Aristocracies and the New English Socialist Feminists.

Men are not women’s enemy…although Patriarchal Fascism certainly is. Noble men and women everywhere need to make common cause not only against poverty and violence but also against fascism and fundamentalism…especially when it hides behind the sort of pseudo-science and false socio-biological truths wielded by American Feminist Fundamentalists to obscure the illogicality and irrelevance of many of their positions.

In America for instance while white middle-class women form campaigns against pornography the real victims of the Republican Party’s Right Wing’s conservative agendas…working class, black and ethnic minority women…are campaigning for welfare and healthcare. Specialisation is one thing…and Adam Smith had a very positive view of it…but the problem here is that much of the middle-class Fundamental Feminist campaigning…through the courts and law schools…actually strengthens the power and appeal of an anti-feminist Moral Right that is threatening to enclose women anew in repressive patriarchal structures…replete with notions of female helplessness wrapped up in the sugary pill of female virtues. This is not the sort of gendered society most of us wish to see. But no doubt Machiavelli is smiling benignly in the wings.

Sonia Holmes won the only place up for grabs on Rye Town Council this year with 266 votes. Christopher Strangeways came in second (155) with Jessica Neame bringing up the rear (137). A sixth of this ancient town’s vote-force of 3000 turned out to place their marks upon the ballot paper. No ballot papers were issued…it was enough to announce your name and confirm that your address was the one the Returning Officer told you it was.

Elspeth Wrenn reckoned she could have voted several times so I asked her to put a cross for Strangeways on my behalf. She refused not on the grounds that it was illegal but because it was wrong. I’m not s sure it isn’t the other way about. Since I live in a post-office box I have no address and having no address means I get no vote.