I decided to do a quick summary of my article Woman Vs. The Nation State for this blog. However, in looking around my hard drive, I discovered a more recent outline of a talk I gave at the 2005 “Visions in Feminism” conference in Maryland. My talk was entitled: “What Would Feminist Government Look Like? Creating Feminist Political Communities.” Of course, my talk's real purpose was to convince women in the workshop that radical political decentralization as a goal and secession as a strategy were the way to go for women, if they wanted freedom and security. Here's a shortened, cleaned up version of the talk.

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We are all familiar with how many feminists contrast patriarchal power over with feminist shared power. I'll talk about some of them below. It is within that context I ask: what would political systems look like if women had an equal say in creating them?? If we were co-creators of our political systems? If our values counted?

I won't get into a debate on what those values may be and where they come from. But I think most of us would safely agree womens' values are NOT.

First and foremost womens' values are NOT about using Military Power to force our will on other peoples, steal their lands and resources, and kill them if they resist. If women had put their collective foot down 5000 years ago when the first groups of males broke off to form the first armed groups for fun and conquest, we'd all be in a lot better shape.

Womens' values are NOT about violence to prove manhood. You see violence to prove manhood everywhere, from the school yards to the football fields to the black bloc window breakers at protests to our violence soaked media to the ultimate institution of male violence – militaries. Right now the ruling nuclear armed males are willing to destroy the world to make sure that other males who might challenge them do not get nuclear weapons. Because of this willingness to destroy, I say that violence to prove manhood is the primary human value.

And womens' values are NOT about accumulating massive amounts of money and power to ensure that we can prove our manhood by getting the best women and supporting them and their children. Right wing males want to make lots of money and power so they can get the best women; left wing males want to make sure right wing males can't use their money and power to get their women. Yes, they disguise these needs and fears in terms of “class analysis” and “capitalist economics” but in the end it's just all about their manhood. Women should not let themselves get sucked into male ideological obsessions with economics and be sensible and pragmatic on economic issues.

So I think we can safely agree on a few things that womens' values are FOR. Womens' values definitely are FOR nonviolence, FOR nonviolent conflict resolution and FOR greater human cooperation. (Though, of course, we still can buy guns to defend ourselves against the occasional intruding rapist!) Women are opposing violence at all level of society from domestic violence, to street violence and rape against women, to police violence against minorities, to activist street fighting with cops to current wars and the institution of war itself.

However, not enough of us recognize and admit that all large nation states, including the United States, were created by violently subduing indigenous people, conquering unwilling communities and provinces and using military force to prevent them from seceding. Not enough of us call for the abolition of militaries and of the large nation states they have created.

Happily, there are active feminists who do so. They call themselves anarchists, libertarians, decentralists, communalists, greens, bioregionalists, pacifists, and wiccans. They know militaries and nation states must be abolished. Some well known feminists have spoken out strongly against the state.

* In her book The Chalice and the Blade Riane Eisler writes of the partnership culture she envisions: ”As the consciousness of our linking with one another and our environment firmly takes hold, we can expect to see the old nation-state as a self-absorbed entity wither away. .. Small social units will be linked in matrices or networks for a variety of common ends, ranging all the way from the cooperative cultivation and harvesting of the oceans and space exploration to the sharing of knowledge and the advancement of the arts."

* Starhawk, in her book Dreaming the Dark, writes of similarly decentralized world where that the human ideal is "...the fully human life lived in the world, involved in community.. Historically, the institutions of domination have established themselves by destroying community--from the enclosure movement and the witch burnings in Europe, to the colonization of Africa, Asia, South America, and Polynesia. This pattern continues with the destruction of Native American communities, traditions, and ways of life in the Black Hills and the Southwest."

* Ecofeminist Ynestra King writes that for women to draw on the "Western democratic tradition" is to "work...with a political legacy that is founded on the repudiation of the organic, the female, the tribal, and particular ties between people...I am mindful that the original citizen in that tradition is male, propertied, and xenophobic..Ecofeminism supports utopian visions of harmonious, diverse, decentralized communities...”

* In her book Cities and the Wealth of Nations noted urban analyst Jane Jacobs calls for the breakup of large nation states on pragmatic economic grounds. "The very policies and transactions that are necessary to win, hold and exploit an empire are destructive to an imperial power's own cities and cannot help but lead to their stagnation and decay." She prescribes the "division of the single sovereignty into a family of small sovereignties" or "the expedient multiplication of sovereignties."

* Lesbian separatist author Sonia Johnson in her book The Ship that Sailed into the Living Room writes “living as I was suggesting would mean anarchy. A very different kind of law-and-order than they recognized, but order nevertheless, the order inherent in self-government--total and effortless, fluid, creative, and lusty...The patriarchs do not live in this knowledge and order and haven't for thousands of years. Because they do not have the spiritual and emotional health that is a precondition for freedom and true power, when they do what they want to do, the rest of us suffer.”

* Robin Morgan, former editor of MS magazine, writes in her book The Demon Lover: On the Sexuality of Terrorism: The State of man seems bent on ignoring this [nuclear destruction] as long as possible in its rush to an ultimate, controlled, thanatotic, orgasmic climax. Norwegian feminist theorist Beirt Ås put it succinctly: `A patriarchal state is one which is either rehabilitating from war, is presently at war, or is preparing for war.'...We live in it, this `State of War'. It saturates our lives. The whole vast grotesque State of being in which we are forced to survive is a State of emergency, a State of terror."

So given this wonderful encouragement, why aren't women organizing to abolish militaries and nation states? Sonia Johnson in her book Wildfire: Igniting the She!volution describes one reason. She compares the male-dominated state to battering husbands who alternately abuse and reward their wives to keep them under control - a variation on the Stockholm Syndrome. She writes: “I have heard women involved in male politics say about our political system almost the same words I have heard battered women use about their abusers: ‘Of course our government isn't perfect, but where is there a better one? With all its faults, it is still the best system (husband) in the world.' Like a battered wife, they never think to ask the really relevant questions: who said we needed a husband, or a husband-state, at all?”

A related reason is that most of us have been co-opted by patriarchy. After women gained the vote in this country, right after the devastation of World War One, they started powerful peace movements that truly frightened the patriarchal establishment. It had to make women dependent on big nation states and the militaries that held them together, so they started or beefed up national social welfare programs. When the new feminist movement exploded in the 1960s they quickly co-opted it by passing laws and regulations to make women dependent on federal programs for their freedom and safety. And millions of women, and most feminists, fell for it.

What is the alternative to militaries and the nation states? And would that alternative be better for women? The alternative to national authoritarianism and war – is political decentralism - self-governing communities that network and confederate regionally, continentally and even world wide. Communities that meet our needs, actualize our visions and reflect our values. In my article Woman Vs. The Nation State I argue that political decentralism will benefit women far more than patriarchal institutions. It will
** increase love and respect for women;
** increase choices for families;
** end political oppression and equalize political power;
** minimize violence and crime;
** break up the big corporations and end economic exploitation;
** improve social welfare;
** and protect the environment.

What's our strategy? How do we do it? We're too busy with paid work and house work and child care and elder care - and, if we have time, relationships!

The Greek Play Lysistrata is about women refusing to have sex with their men until they stop a war. This is the essence of non-cooperation. Considering how much work women have to do in our lives, one of the only successful protests we have time for IS refusing to work! Refusing to vote! Refusing to pay taxes! (I stopped in 1976.) Womens' Strike for Peace remains a great idea.

The ultimate in noncooperation is Secession! Since Bush was re-elected there have been lots of “blue states” and “blue counties” talking about secession. And if Hillary wins in 2008 half the red states and counties probably will secede.

Women must make time to organize local and alternative communities. Luckily, it is on the local political level that women are most comfortable and most active and that really is as it should be. At my site Secession.Net I write in more detail about the main points of secession strategy. (Most of these points are covered in my Issues in Secession article at this blog.)

Think about what your ideal community would look like.

I distributed an “ideal community” sheet at the workshop that I never got around to putting up on a web page. It lists alternative purposes, political structures and processes to help women (and men) think about the kind of community they might choose to live in. These might be: residential feminist coops; full spectrum eco-socialist communities; limited government farm communities; wiccan computer whiz communities; wilderness protection associations with only caretakers as members; multi-racial existing neighborhoods of big cities; brand new cities built from scratch; or even hotels where the only vote you need is to vote with your feet.

Only the imagination limits us. It's time for women to start co-creating our world.

If women are to have any control of our lives we must demand that we have an equal say in creating the world - even if it means starting over from scratch! We have to take responsibility for co-creating a new world or we become responsible for the worldwide devastation our rulers will bumble into one of these days when they are out there proving their manhood. (For example, the nuclear war with Russia we could quickly find ourselves in if George Bush bombs – and probably nukes - Iran!)

Here's the simple truth - if women and men of good will do NOT break up the big nation states and get rid of their militaries the nation states WILL break themselves up through world nuclear war.

Sonia Johnson puts it this way: “What is our primary fear when we entertain the idea of leaving our husband the state? That he will kill us and destroy everything. Though the truth is...that he will kill us and destroy everything if we stay; like the battered women we are, we believe deeply that our presence, our pleading and begging, is what is keeping him from his ultimate destructiveness.”

So get busy women - and like-minded men! Learn about decentralist political alternatives and organize around them. We all know HOW to do it, we just have to believe we CAN do it.

Carol Moore, Washington DC
CarolMoore.Net