Out of defensiveness, some will protest that MacKinnon has “attacked” Engels. But the critique of Engels by MacKinnon happened decades and decades after Engels published OFPPS, and the questions she raises are actually relatively straightforward and should have been expected in any rigorous critique. Those questions should have been raised from inside the Marxist tradition as part of its critical method, which MacKinnon herself uses as a yardstick. Her critique is not constructed as an “attack” on Engels, unless any critique is labeled an attack. It was made necessary by the failure of Marxists to critique themselves on gender, and the propensity to deploy this text in lieu of a serious engagement with the questions raised by radical feminism/womanism.

For those of you who haven’t seen it, Lila Rajiva has done an expose of David Horowitz’s latest effort in his anti-left, anti-woman, anti-gay, xenophobic, anti-Muslim, anti-Black Kulturkampf. See her piece here .

Horowitz’s weird site is here .

“According to Engels, women’s status is produced through social forces that give rise to ‘the origin of the family, private property, and the state.’ He assumes that answering the question, ‘How did it happen that women were first subordinated to men?’ is the same as addressing the question ‘Why are women oppressed and how can we change it?’ He equates the temporally first with the persistently fundamental.

by Joaquin Bustelo

It is dangerous to say these things, so one must be tentative,
but I think we may well be witnessing a world-historic event with the
election of Evo Morales in Bolivia.

It means that the US will now be at war with all of Latin America, even as it remains entangled in a Southwest Asian energy war.

Evo Morales, who leads the MAS (Movement Toward Socialism) in majority-indigenous Bolivia, and has long represented the indigenous coca growers of that landlocked nation, himself an Aymara speaking indigenous person from the Altiplano who herded llamas as a child, will be the next president of Bolivia.

That got people’s attention. But I’m serious.

by Yolanda Carrington

If anyone were to ask me what my mother, Ethel Patricia Ann Bridges Carrington, died of, I would tell them that it was “Black woman’s disease”—heart disease and hypertension. Heart disease is now the top killer of women in the United States, with African Americans like Mom being at the greatest risk.

BY CHARLES BROWN

In an attempt to put this blog to better use, I am posting material from friends and comrades. I’m in the process now of preparing a post on MacKinnon’s critique of Engels. As a preview of that debate, I am delighted to put up a 1997 piece from Charles Brown, an African American comrade from Detroit, who I have had the pleasure of knowing, debating, and commisserating with from the old days of Crashlist, from Marxmail, and from the Marxist-Feminist list. I want to appreciate Charles, yet again, for his activism and his willingness to tackle the tough topics.

by Julian Real

Thanks to Julien for this sensitive, insightful and important post.

In case anyone has been taken in by the cautious optimism of the administration and press on the Iraqi elections — yet another anticlimactic milestone in their disastrous war — check out this analysis by Pepe Escobar, published today at “Asia Times.”