This is a historical quirk but, in case you had any illusions about us living in the 20s, the (bourgeois) feminist movement for women to keep their surnames upon marriage kicked off in the 1920s in the US.
There’s a whole essay in here somewhere about how bourgeois feminism was co-opted by capitalism from its very outset, how women became a target demographic for smoking, the colour green, why you have to add eggs into box cake mix, and the Guatemalan coup of Jacobo Arbenz and the Cuban revolution. Oh and Nazis and Sigmund Freud too, of course.
There’s a whole essay in here somewhere about how bourgeois feminism was co-opted by capitalism from its very outset, how women became a target demographic for smoking, the colour green, why you have to add eggs into box cake mix, and the Guatemalan coup of Jacobo Arbenz and the Cuban revolution. Oh and Nazis and Sigmund Freud too, of course.
I want this as a tagline just for the immediate transition from putting eggs in cake mix to the Guatemalan coup. I got whiplash lol
This story itself is a real trip. If I didn’t know it by doing my own reading into all of it, there’s zero chance I’d believe this is anything but some Pepe Silvia-tier rambling.
Oh no, I believe you. I know how that bourgeois feminist wave in the 20s started as a reaction to more revolutionary feminist movements coming out of the socialist nations. I also see how United Fruit could have utilized the advertising wave started by Freud’s brother (in Nazi Germany then America) to bolster support for the silent genocide on grounds of making American women’s lives easier or something.
Oh haha, there isn’t an actual essay that exists out there I was just trying to say that I would be able to write an essay’s worth of stuff on this topic.
Someone already nudged me to write it all out so you can find my sketch of a would-be essay here in this comment.
I need to sleep so I’m going to be a bit brief on this one but here goes:
Edward Bernays is the self-styled “father” of modern PR. This is a half-truth but it’s not entirely a lie. He’s the nephew of Sigmund Freud and he lives in high society in New York. Bernays decides that he wants to apply Freud’s psychoanalytic model to marketing and PR. He literally writes a book titled Propaganda, which would one day find its way onto the bookshelf of none other than Goebbels, who used it as his bible to persecute Jews like Bernays and, of course, Freud himself who fled Nazi Germany at the behest of Bernays.
Anyway, Bernays’ wife is a socialite and she is a key figure in the Lucy Stone League (linked in the comment above) as well as other bourgeois feminist organisations and movements.
Bernays, ever the opportunist and in the employ of a tobacco company, uses this as an opportunity to start marketing to women and in one famous coup of the early PR industry, he staged a situation where a feminist demonstration in New York would have a photograph taken of one of the main organisers smoking - women smoking in public was seen as scandalous at this time - to be published as the lead story in the newspapers, putting cigarette consumption front-and-centre in women’s struggle for equality.
He dubs this the “Torches of Freedom” movement and associates the idea of women smoking closely with the statue of liberty and her blazing torch.
Suddenly it becomes edgy and cool and seriously rebellious for women—upper class women who don’t have the same risk of social backlash—so it becomes a trend, cigarette sales skyrocket, and Bernays starts working on marketing cigarettes to women. This is also an early example of gender division in marketing. There’s the annual equivalent of the Met Gala taking place and so Bernays attempts to associate the colour green—a key colour in Lucky Strike packaging at the time—with this Green Gala held for rich socialites so that it would tie in with the cigarette packaging.
At some point, idk exactly when, box cake mix gets developed but it’s not selling very well. This is at a point where I think all of the ingredients except for water and maybe butter/oil (but maybe not) were already powdered and you literally just add water to make a cake. Bernays, high on the Freudian supply, decides that what needs to happen is that there needs to be some symbolic action of feminity in these instant cake mixes so he instructs the company to remove the powdered egg and change the recipe to call for adding fresh eggs because, like, women and eggs and ovulation and feminine energy and weird shit like that. This works, not for the tortured Freudian symbolic reasoning Bernays held but because women felt like they were still making a cake rather than just making a bowl of cereal. (Not gonna go into the advent of the hearty American bacon and eggs breakfast or the “9 out of 10 [professionals] recommend…” marketing trope, but that’s also tangentially related to this story.)
At some point you have Chiquita (then United Fruit Company) basically running Guatemala as an imperial outpost. Then Jacobo Arbenz, a milquetoast social democrat reformer, gets elected on a very popular platform of land reform - Chiquita maintained an effective monopoly on banana growing in Guatemala by purchasing all of the land and only using a proportion of it to actually grow crops with the rest left fallow. People were borderline starving and they were prevented from primary production to create products to sell because Chiquita owned all the good, arable land so the people of Guatemala were condemned to poverty and hard labour on—you guessed it—Chiquita banana plantations so the US could have cheap bananas and Chiquita could turn a mean profit doing so. Chiquita also grossly underestimated the value of the land for taxation purposes so Arbenz quite cleverly decides that his government will compulsorily acquire the fallow land to redistribute to the people and he compensated Chiquita based on the grossly underreported value of the land.
Chiquita wasn’t having a bar of it.
So they get Bernays to organise a press junket tour of Guatemala so that the newspapers can drum up support for a military invasion of Guatemala to establish what would later become known as a banana republic. (From memory the US political machinery was less interested in committing to war at this point in history, but don’t quote me on that part.) And this strategy works. (I feel like Bernays had some connections to the CIA that he leveraged in this but I forget.)
Anyway, who happens to be in Guatemala at the time of the coup? None other than the man, the legend, the hero of the people himself - Che Guevara. Che has front row tickets to witnessing US imperialism and the lengths that they will go to when their precious bottom line faces a minor speed bump. And this is a deeply radicalising moment for Che because he understands that there is no reform delicate enough, there is no popular support massive enough, there is no cause morally just enough that would stay the US’ hand.
So Che learns that political power comes out the barrel of a gun and this goes on to directly shape his politics, his strategy, and the Cuban revolution itself.
And that’s the story. Some of it anyway lol.
Sources:
Bitter Fruit by Steven Kinzer
The Father of Spin by Larry Tye (honestly not a great book - pretty piss-poor writing tbh but obviously the compelling subject redeems it somewhat)
Idk what else, I think that’s mostly it. I’m missing out on a source for Che’s part of the story but maybe someone will chime in with a good one - surely he wrote about it in The Motorcycle Diaries right?
But also this is why history is so important - I can tell who is familiar with history and who isn’t based on their political beliefs. It boggles my mind that I still regularly encounter people who call themselves socialist and they espouse utopian socialist ideals but they aren’t even aware of political philosophy enough to call it that and I can ask them what happened to the ideas of Fourier and Saint-Simon and Robert Owen but they’ll just blink and stare like I’m speaking a completely different language. But I’m like “Ah! You’re at an early-19th century level of political development and you haven’t even done the reading on this movement yet.”
Or they’ll talk about reformism and you can ask them whatever happened to the Fabian Society in the UK and what lessons we can learn from Allende, and Arbenz (or Sankara, Machel, Bishop etc.) and they won’t have any answers because they’ve never really looked into the thing they’re touting as the solution to all of our problems.
Or they’ll talk about co-ops, which is a terrible thing to do around me because I will ask them for a good example of a co-op. Of course the answer is Mondragon and—without even getting into matters of self-exploitation or trade union consciousness or how this model (arguably) economically hamstrung socialist Yugoslavia and the Spanish Republic during the Spanish civil war and how the Soviets resolved these problems when they emerged in their own country by the dissolution of the worker’s councils—this is when I talk about how Mondragon was founded under the fascist Franco, how it flourished under Franco, and how Franco held it up as the exemplar for the new fascist economic model for Spain and how this also dovetails perfectly into the Italian fascist economic push towards a self-sufficient and corporatist economy.
Usually the best response I get is some cheap complaint about “guilt by association”, despite the fact that I’m not saying “co-ops are bad because Franco liked them and Franco is bad therefore co-ops are bad”.
Of course, they never know about the autogestión movement in Argentina that kicked off at the turn of this century and look how far that movement has come over the course of a quarter century - they have an ancap president who will unleash his state-sactioned, state-funded thugs on you if you dare to protest in the street. I haven’t kept up with the news on worker co-ops in Argentina but I can only assume that no news is bad news, in this case, and I really can’t imagine that workers occupying businesses owned by other people would be tolerated for a single moment under Milei’s regime. Maybe the movement is still clinging on to life in the margins but if so this just illustrates the ineffectual nature of a political program that amounts to establishing worker co-ops and nothing beyond that.
Che learned the lessons that history taught him and he spread this to others in Cuba and beyond. Castro tried to spread these lessons to Allende, and I’d argue that the gilded AK he gave Allende as a gift (which Allende would eventually use on himself as the presidential palace was being stormed by forces under the command of Pinochet) was at least as much of a symbolic warning as it was a present. Castro urged Allende to take the threat of a coup seriously but Allende didn’t listen and, maybe this is me armchair quarterbacking history here which I should know better than to do but, I feel like if Allende spent more time learning about Guatemala he might have taken a different course of action himself.
This is why history is so damn important; the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles etc. etc. but if we aren’t studying history then we aren’t learning what worked and what didn’t from past attempts and so we won’t be able to be effective in the class struggle that we are facing right now.
Often I feel like these socialists and leftists who have a foot in both worlds are the worst type of people to try to agitate/educate/organise because they are so deeply idealistic and you can tell that they arrived at their current political position because socialism seemed pretty cool and, like, what about if we all just agree to get along y’know?
I can lead that horse to water, I can drown the fucken thing, and yet it will still bob it’s head up and be like “But if we elected a socialist president then that would prove that we don’t need a vanguard!!”
Ultimately yeah, but it’s the difference between what an egalitarian world should look like vs how to normalise that choice in a patriarchal hegemony like the UK. Various european countries’ past feminist/egalitarianism movements have resulted in laws that neither men nor women can change their names when married.
? Is this really the feminist stance? I thought it was that women should have the choice of doing what they want with their surnames
This is a historical quirk but, in case you had any illusions about us living in the 20s, the (bourgeois) feminist movement for women to keep their surnames upon marriage kicked off in the 1920s in the US.
There’s a whole essay in here somewhere about how bourgeois feminism was co-opted by capitalism from its very outset, how women became a target demographic for smoking, the colour green, why you have to add eggs into box cake mix, and the Guatemalan coup of Jacobo Arbenz and the Cuban revolution. Oh and Nazis and Sigmund Freud too, of course.
I want this as a tagline just for the immediate transition from putting eggs in cake mix to the Guatemalan coup. I got whiplash lol
This story itself is a real trip. If I didn’t know it by doing my own reading into all of it, there’s zero chance I’d believe this is anything but some Pepe Silvia-tier rambling.
Oh no, I believe you. I know how that bourgeois feminist wave in the 20s started as a reaction to more revolutionary feminist movements coming out of the socialist nations. I also see how United Fruit could have utilized the advertising wave started by Freud’s brother (in Nazi Germany then America) to bolster support for the silent genocide on grounds of making American women’s lives easier or something.
Would love to read the essay if you can find it.
Oh haha, there isn’t an actual essay that exists out there I was just trying to say that I would be able to write an essay’s worth of stuff on this topic.
Someone already nudged me to write it all out so you can find my sketch of a would-be essay here in this comment.
I desperately need this essay
I need to sleep so I’m going to be a bit brief on this one but here goes:
Edward Bernays is the self-styled “father” of modern PR. This is a half-truth but it’s not entirely a lie. He’s the nephew of Sigmund Freud and he lives in high society in New York. Bernays decides that he wants to apply Freud’s psychoanalytic model to marketing and PR. He literally writes a book titled Propaganda, which would one day find its way onto the bookshelf of none other than Goebbels, who used it as his bible to persecute Jews like Bernays and, of course, Freud himself who fled Nazi Germany at the behest of Bernays.
Anyway, Bernays’ wife is a socialite and she is a key figure in the Lucy Stone League (linked in the comment above) as well as other bourgeois feminist organisations and movements.
Bernays, ever the opportunist and in the employ of a tobacco company, uses this as an opportunity to start marketing to women and in one famous coup of the early PR industry, he staged a situation where a feminist demonstration in New York would have a photograph taken of one of the main organisers smoking - women smoking in public was seen as scandalous at this time - to be published as the lead story in the newspapers, putting cigarette consumption front-and-centre in women’s struggle for equality.
He dubs this the “Torches of Freedom” movement and associates the idea of women smoking closely with the statue of liberty and her blazing torch.
Suddenly it becomes edgy and cool and seriously rebellious for women—upper class women who don’t have the same risk of social backlash—so it becomes a trend, cigarette sales skyrocket, and Bernays starts working on marketing cigarettes to women. This is also an early example of gender division in marketing. There’s the annual equivalent of the Met Gala taking place and so Bernays attempts to associate the colour green—a key colour in Lucky Strike packaging at the time—with this Green Gala held for rich socialites so that it would tie in with the cigarette packaging.
At some point, idk exactly when, box cake mix gets developed but it’s not selling very well. This is at a point where I think all of the ingredients except for water and maybe butter/oil (but maybe not) were already powdered and you literally just add water to make a cake. Bernays, high on the Freudian supply, decides that what needs to happen is that there needs to be some symbolic action of feminity in these instant cake mixes so he instructs the company to remove the powdered egg and change the recipe to call for adding fresh eggs because, like, women and eggs and ovulation and feminine energy and weird shit like that. This works, not for the tortured Freudian symbolic reasoning Bernays held but because women felt like they were still making a cake rather than just making a bowl of cereal. (Not gonna go into the advent of the hearty American bacon and eggs breakfast or the “9 out of 10 [professionals] recommend…” marketing trope, but that’s also tangentially related to this story.)
At some point you have Chiquita (then United Fruit Company) basically running Guatemala as an imperial outpost. Then Jacobo Arbenz, a milquetoast social democrat reformer, gets elected on a very popular platform of land reform - Chiquita maintained an effective monopoly on banana growing in Guatemala by purchasing all of the land and only using a proportion of it to actually grow crops with the rest left fallow. People were borderline starving and they were prevented from primary production to create products to sell because Chiquita owned all the good, arable land so the people of Guatemala were condemned to poverty and hard labour on—you guessed it—Chiquita banana plantations so the US could have cheap bananas and Chiquita could turn a mean profit doing so. Chiquita also grossly underestimated the value of the land for taxation purposes so Arbenz quite cleverly decides that his government will compulsorily acquire the fallow land to redistribute to the people and he compensated Chiquita based on the grossly underreported value of the land.
Chiquita wasn’t having a bar of it.
So they get Bernays to organise a press junket tour of Guatemala so that the newspapers can drum up support for a military invasion of Guatemala to establish what would later become known as a banana republic. (From memory the US political machinery was less interested in committing to war at this point in history, but don’t quote me on that part.) And this strategy works. (I feel like Bernays had some connections to the CIA that he leveraged in this but I forget.)
Anyway, who happens to be in Guatemala at the time of the coup? None other than the man, the legend, the hero of the people himself - Che Guevara. Che has front row tickets to witnessing US imperialism and the lengths that they will go to when their precious bottom line faces a minor speed bump. And this is a deeply radicalising moment for Che because he understands that there is no reform delicate enough, there is no popular support massive enough, there is no cause morally just enough that would stay the US’ hand.
So Che learns that political power comes out the barrel of a gun and this goes on to directly shape his politics, his strategy, and the Cuban revolution itself.
And that’s the story. Some of it anyway lol.
Sources:
Bitter Fruit by Steven Kinzer
The Father of Spin by Larry Tye (honestly not a great book - pretty piss-poor writing tbh but obviously the compelling subject redeems it somewhat)
Idk what else, I think that’s mostly it. I’m missing out on a source for Che’s part of the story but maybe someone will chime in with a good one - surely he wrote about it in The Motorcycle Diaries right?
I’d read about Bernays a bit but had no idea that he was connected to that coup or that Che was present. Absolutely wild connections.
Yeah, it’s pretty wild.
But also this is why history is so important - I can tell who is familiar with history and who isn’t based on their political beliefs. It boggles my mind that I still regularly encounter people who call themselves socialist and they espouse utopian socialist ideals but they aren’t even aware of political philosophy enough to call it that and I can ask them what happened to the ideas of Fourier and Saint-Simon and Robert Owen but they’ll just blink and stare like I’m speaking a completely different language. But I’m like “Ah! You’re at an early-19th century level of political development and you haven’t even done the reading on this movement yet.”
Or they’ll talk about reformism and you can ask them whatever happened to the Fabian Society in the UK and what lessons we can learn from Allende, and Arbenz (or Sankara, Machel, Bishop etc.) and they won’t have any answers because they’ve never really looked into the thing they’re touting as the solution to all of our problems.
Or they’ll talk about co-ops, which is a terrible thing to do around me because I will ask them for a good example of a co-op. Of course the answer is Mondragon and—without even getting into matters of self-exploitation or trade union consciousness or how this model (arguably) economically hamstrung socialist Yugoslavia and the Spanish Republic during the Spanish civil war and how the Soviets resolved these problems when they emerged in their own country by the dissolution of the worker’s councils—this is when I talk about how Mondragon was founded under the fascist Franco, how it flourished under Franco, and how Franco held it up as the exemplar for the new fascist economic model for Spain and how this also dovetails perfectly into the Italian fascist economic push towards a self-sufficient and corporatist economy.
Usually the best response I get is some cheap complaint about “guilt by association”, despite the fact that I’m not saying “co-ops are bad because Franco liked them and Franco is bad therefore co-ops are bad”.
Of course, they never know about the autogestión movement in Argentina that kicked off at the turn of this century and look how far that movement has come over the course of a quarter century - they have an ancap president who will unleash his state-sactioned, state-funded thugs on you if you dare to protest in the street. I haven’t kept up with the news on worker co-ops in Argentina but I can only assume that no news is bad news, in this case, and I really can’t imagine that workers occupying businesses owned by other people would be tolerated for a single moment under Milei’s regime. Maybe the movement is still clinging on to life in the margins but if so this just illustrates the ineffectual nature of a political program that amounts to establishing worker co-ops and nothing beyond that.
Che learned the lessons that history taught him and he spread this to others in Cuba and beyond. Castro tried to spread these lessons to Allende, and I’d argue that the gilded AK he gave Allende as a gift (which Allende would eventually use on himself as the presidential palace was being stormed by forces under the command of Pinochet) was at least as much of a symbolic warning as it was a present. Castro urged Allende to take the threat of a coup seriously but Allende didn’t listen and, maybe this is me armchair quarterbacking history here which I should know better than to do but, I feel like if Allende spent more time learning about Guatemala he might have taken a different course of action himself.
This is why history is so damn important; the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles etc. etc. but if we aren’t studying history then we aren’t learning what worked and what didn’t from past attempts and so we won’t be able to be effective in the class struggle that we are facing right now.
Often I feel like these socialists and leftists who have a foot in both worlds are the worst type of people to try to agitate/educate/organise because they are so deeply idealistic and you can tell that they arrived at their current political position because socialism seemed pretty cool and, like, what about if we all just agree to get along y’know?
I can lead that horse to water, I can drown the fucken thing, and yet it will still bob it’s head up and be like “But if we elected a socialist president then that would prove that we don’t need a vanguard!!”
Ultimately yeah, but it’s the difference between what an egalitarian world should look like vs how to normalise that choice in a patriarchal hegemony like the UK. Various european countries’ past feminist/egalitarianism movements have resulted in laws that neither men nor women can change their names when married.