Fraternity

The charge is that the revolutionary slogan distributed patriarchy rather than ending it. Where authority had been concentrated in a figure it became a fraternity of endo-ideals, all of them aligned under endosocialism, and the change was in the number of holders rather than in the relation to everyone else. The final clause is the sharpest part and the easiest to miss. They still claim the right to control the lives of other people and occupy the top strata, like patriarchy, but they now bear no responsibility for governance or any participation in society, which makes the arrangement worse than the one it replaced on the single dimension of accountability. A patriarch was answerable in some measure for what he ruled. A fraternity is answerable to itself. Marsh's second objection is about the word as a goal rather than as a description. Fraternity implies both equality and unanimity of principles, which makes it unsuitable for global collaboration, since collaboration across genuinely different people requires neither. This connects to her general position on organizing by affiliation. A goal that requires everyone to be alike will exclude whoever is not, and the alternative she proposes throughout is collaboration around a specific aim by whoever is affected, which needs no shared identity and no agreement beyond the task.

Fraternity is the least examined term of the French revolutionary triad and has attracted a modest political theory literature asking what solidarity adds to liberty and equality, with some arguing it supplies the affective bond the other two lack. Feminist historians including Carole Pateman have made an argument close to Marsh's, that the social contract replaced paternal right with fraternal right and left women outside both, and Pateman's fraternal patriarchy names almost the same thing. Marsh's addition is the accountability point. Pateman's argument is about who is included, while Marsh's is also about what the new holders stopped owing, which reads the change as a loss of obligation rather than only a redistribution of standing.