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Why the left should drop Engels on gender - Part 1

17th December 2005, 10:10 am by Stan

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

I have never been at anything done by socialists that purported to address the issue of gendered power that did not drag out Frederick Engels’ book, “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.” It is used at everything related to gender, and almost exclusively in conjunction with material written about gendered power by other Marxists — some of them women. (Feminists not explicitly emerging from that tradition are suspect, and therefore excluded as potentially unclean influences.)

The question then is why does this particular volume have such wieght? It is out of date. It was published before the publication of “The Origin of the Species.” [THIS IS NOT CORRECT - IT WAS PUBLISHED AFTER OOTS, but it is still 131 years ago! -SG] It was predicated on the flawed findings of one proto-anthropologist, Lewis Morgan, who researched the Iroquois Nation in the US after joining an “Iroquois” fraternity.

“Morgan… undertook a study of the Iroquois League in order to duplicate its structure in a secret organization he had joined that came to be called the Grand Order of the Iroquois or, alternatively, the New Confederacy of the Iroquois. Fraternal organizations using Indian custom as symbols have been common in U.S. history.” (from “Lewis H. Morgan and His Contemporaries” [originally published in American Anthropologist, 94:357-375, 1992], by Elisabeth Tooker, Temple University)

There is nothing wrong with Engels using Morgan’s work to do a bit of theorizing that was, by any account, ahead of its time. What is odd is that we still have people using this as if it were somehow applicable to the study of gendered power now, instead of a scholastic artifact. Morgan’s work has been proven wrong on many accounts; but the real problem is that Engels’ own account (which was heavily cribbed from his intellectual partner, Karl Marx, too) is that it simply does not survive any critical review in the light of either feminist studies OR the basic tenets of Marxism itself. I will let someone else explain that further down.

The reason, I believe, that this hoary tome is flopped down on the table in “gender” studies by Marxists is to lay claim to the “woman question” with one of the Church of Class icons. It is a kind of catechism that “proves” gender to be a secondary contradiction to class. The rule of men is an outgrowth, according to Engels — who has not the slightest evidence to demonstrate this — of “property.”

This is an immensely sectarian impulse, born of the transformation of Marxism from a method of inquiry and struggle into a timeless doctrine. It is saying, “We thought of it first, therefore we have the answers.” Or, as Heidi Hartmann and Amy Bridges caustically remarked, “Marxism and feminism are one and that one is Marxism.”

Before anyone gets their underwear in a wad over what I’m saying, I am on record as being a Marxist. I seek the reconciliation of Marxism and feminism, as I have stated more than once. But that means we have to be shriven of our sins, and there are some gender sins there.

One argument between Marxists and radical feminists has revolved around the question of whether economic class preceded male supremacy, or vice versa. Somehow, which “came first” is a matter of grave importance in determining priorities for political action now (a non sequitur, imo).

But I put the blame on Marxists, who relegated the question of women’s oppression to a secondary contradiction, a petit bourgeois digression, a “woman question,” and who now squirm over the not-too-distant leftist past where their struggle was framed in a masculine idiom and their homophobia was legendary. Marxism as a movement tolerated only those women whose critique of male power was exclusively through the lens of class defined as relation to the means of production — an economistic reading that never dealt with men as men oppressing women as women. That’s why it is nearly impossible to find a trenchant Marxist anlaysis of the questions of domestic abuse and rape, and an utter reliance on liberal tenets to describe and critique prostitution and pornography.

Radical feminists made the counter-argument that gender trumps class as a way of bending the stick back. And, ignoring the above non sequitur, rad-fems won the argument. Marxists wanted to represent male supremacy as an aspect of capitalism, and one that would disappear with the disappearance of capitalism. But what radical feminists pointed out — accurately — is that capitalism is but one form of (economic) class society within a much longer and consistent history of male power.

Does that mean that gender, and not class, is the primary contradiction? No. In fact, and I’ve said this repeatedly, Economic class and the evolving forms of gendered power are only separable as analytic categories. But the analysis needed to happen.

The reason we need to abandon Engels in the study of gender is that he and Marx were both WRONG on the whole question. Wrong. Incorrect. Insupportable. And if we use their work to study gender now, we will continue to be wrong.

Marx and Engels naturalized women.

I turn now to Catharine MacKinnon, who along with Andrea Dworkin, has been effectively stalinized (demonized) off the Left’s stage (mostly because of their critique of pornography), with extensive quotes from her book Toward a Feminist Theory of the State.” While white American radical feminists are not above critique, that is not my purpose here. The best critiques of radical feminism have come from inside feminism, from Black, Latina, and so-called Third World feminists — and radical feminists have embraced, not fled from, these critiques. Marxists, for the most part, have evaded answering the rad-fem challenge — one that was offered in a comradely way.

“To Marx, women were defined by nature, not by society. To him, sex was within that ‘material substratum’ that was not subject to social analysis, making explicit references to women or sex largely peirpheral of parenthetical.” (p 13)

[MacKinnon’s footnote: “This chapter does not address the ways in which Marx’s theories of social life are, are not, or can be made applicable to women’s experience or sueful for women’s liberation. It addresses what Marx and Engles explicitly said about women, women’s status, and women’s condition.”]

“Engels, by contrast, considered women’s status a social phenomenon that needed explanation. He just failed to explain it. Expanding on Marx’s few suggestive comments, Engels tried to explain women’s subordination within a theory of the historical development of the family in the context of class relations. Beneath Engels veneer of dialectical dynamism lies a static, positivistic materialism that reifies woman socially to such an extent that her status might as well have been considered natrually determined. Marx and Engels each take for granted crucial features of relations between the sexes: Marx becasue women is nature and nature is given, and Engels because woman is the family and he is largely uncritical of woman’s work and sexual role within it.” (p 13)

MacKinnon then goes on to explain.

“Marx’s theories of the division of labor and the social relations of production under capitalism were at the core of his theory of social life.” (p 14)

It is legitimate to argue, I think, that Marx and Engels work embodied most completely in “Capital” never laid claim to omniscience. They, in fact, disaggregated the English factory from the larger global context as a kind of laboratory experiment. They also disaggregated the production of value at the point of production from the world system, on one hand, and the family on the other. This kind of analytical disembodiment is useful for the study of many phenomena. But their commentary on women and the family does not support the notion that they were agnostic on these issues, and Engels’ later work - OFPPS - made an explicit attempt to pull gender inside the framework developed in “Capital.” So we cannot get away with saying that these two great thinkers cannot be held accountable for what they did NOT do. There errors on gender, on the other hand, do not automatically imply that their critique of political economy is wrong… only that it is incomplete.

“In this context, Marx offered the analysis that differences ‘inthe sexual act’ were the original division of labor. ‘With [the increase of needs, productivity, population] there develops the division of labor, which was originally nothing but the division of laobr in the sexual act, then that division of labor that developes spontaneously or *naturally* by firtue of natural predisposition (e.g. physical strength), needs, accidents, etc. etc.’ [from The German Ideology]”

I will now break McKinnon’s follow-oncommentary down to individual sentences for emphasis of each point.

“The reproductive difference of function between women and men apparently constitutes a division of labor.”

An interesting idea, no?

“It is unclear whether this original ‘division’ then extends to become other divisions, or whether this original ‘division’ is a primary or cardinal example that other division then replicate or parallel or pattern themselves after.

“Marx accounts for neither the viewthat the gender difference of function in reproduciton is more ‘original’ than other differences of function that do not fall along gender lines; nor the view that reproduction is a species of labor; nor the appropriateness or necessity of the extension or duplication of this division throughout society.

“But then the gender division is not his subject; it is merely the ‘origin’ of his real subject, the class division.

“Still one wonders why other differences of function do not constitute or underlie a division of labor, but sex does.

“When discussing the division of labor under capitalism, Marx sees the question of which individual gets which task, or becomes a member of which class, as originally an accident that then becomes hisotrically fixed: an “accidental repartition gets repeated, develops advantages of its own, and gradually ossifies into a systematic division of labor” [from Capital, Vol I]

Interjecting again, here MacKinnon is setting up the debate about which came first — gendered power or economic class power. I would argue that as time goes by, this becomes more and more an academic issue given the changes that are wrought in social systems. But, as in many arguments, especially about gender, the rationalization for existing power becomes Nature, which is then “supported” by an appeal to the origins of power in some version of “history.” Had Marxism abandoned Engels’ history-version arguments when they were transcended by more sophisticated treatments of gender by feminists — as we should have — and had we dealt honestly with the contradictions in Marx-Engels between gender and the treatment of class, feminists would not have been obliged to dive back into the speculative archeology/anthropology of pre-history to show that gendered powr may not only have preceded class power, it may have been the model for class power. The scholastic retreat into pre-history, in my own opinion, was a MALE reaction every bit as much as a Marxist one, to “prove” that class trumps gender. So my criticism of this history-version method of argument is directed at Marxism, because we started it.

MacKinnon again:

“[According to Marx] Which sex gets which task is first a matter of biology and remains so throughout economic changes.

“Disussing woman’s work in the home, Marx states: ‘The distribution of the work within the family, and the regulation of the labor-time of the several memebers, depend as well upon the differences of age and sex as upon natural conditions… Within a family… there springs up naturally a division of labor, caused by difference of sex and age, a division that is consequently based on a purely physical foundation.’” [from Capital, Vol I]

Weeeellll!!! A PURELY PHYSICAL FOUNDATION?!?!?! I emphasize this for three reasons. (1) It was written by the older Marx as part of Capital — so there is no excuse that it was part of the more Hegelian younger Marx or whatever; (2) this becomes the starting point fo Engels treatment of gender in OFPPS; and (3) neither Marx nor Engels would have stood for such nonsensein any treatment of class. In fact, their entire body of work, it might be argued, is a refutation of the “naturalization” of economic class. Catharine MacKinnon, in her critique of Marx and Engels, is USING the Marxist method to critique Marxism’s blind spot on gender! That method is the de-naturalization of social relations.

Continuing with MacKinnon:

“Because women’s role was naturally defined, Marx’s view of the relaitonship of nature t0 labor is instructive. Nature’s produce os ’spontaneous.’ Society produces through the human activity of work: ‘material wealth that is not the spontaneous product of Nature, must invariably owe [its] existence to a special productive activity, exercised with a defininte aim, an activity that appropriates particular nature-given materials to particular human wants.’” [from Capital, Vol I] (MacKinnon, p 15)

Pay attention here, as MacKinnon breaks this down.

“Nature’s forms change naturally or not at all.

“Labor’s organization is social and is therefore subject to human intervention. ‘If we take away the useful labor expended upon them, a material substratum is always left, which is furnished by nature without the help of man [!]. The latter can work only as Nature does, that is by changing the form of matter. Nay more, in this work of changing the form he [man] is constantly helped by natural forces. We see, then, that labour is not the only source of material wealth, of the use-values produced by labour. As William Petty puts it, labour is the father and the earth is it’s mother.’” [from Capital, Vol I] (MacKinnon, p 15)

Marxists who dismiss either the implications of Marx’s claim that gender roles are naturally defined or the overt gendered reference here as historical artifacts are guilty of intellectual dishonesty.

When asked during an interview what he most admired in men and women, Marx replied “strength” and “weakness” respectively. This is not an oversight. Marx and less-so Engels were still captured inside the gender categories of their day. That is not to say that this dismisses the body of their work. Obviously, that’s absurd, and MacKinnon’s and other radical feminist’s engagement with Marxism demonstrates the power and importance of Marxism.

The point is, on the question of gender, Marx and Engels — including the OFPPS — have been bypassed by history and trasncended by radical, (sometimes) socialist, Black, and third-world feminism. It is an abiding curiosity to me that we Marxists are not at all averse to the extensions and modifications of Marxist conclusions, using our method, by Fanon, or Gramsci, or Samir Amin (or even Luxemburg, who herslef never deviated from the Engels doctrine on gender)… but that there has been a perennial Marxist hostility to feminism and its challenges.

Anyone who asks the question about Marxist meetings, listservs, journals, et al, “Why are men still predominating in these discussions?” is either treated like someone who farts at the party, or presented with one tortured explanation after another. The fact is, in my opinion, the account of gender that is given by Marxism is inadequate to reflect the lived experience of gender by women (and queer folk, too, for that matter), and the tone of these discussions is frequently (and un-self-critically) masculine (often even macho).

MacKinnon:

“Mother/woman is, is nature [no typo here]; father/man works, is social. The creative, active, transformative process of work is identified with the male, while the female is identified with the matter to be worked upon and transformed. To the extent that man’s relation to nature has, for Marx, a social aspect — and it does — his relation to woman will have a social aspect. This may be the meaning of Marx’s statement ‘The production of life, both of one’s own labor and of fresh life in procreation, now appears as a double relationship: on the one hand as a natural, on the other as a social relationship.’ [from The German Ideology] (MacKinnon, p 15)

MacKinnon then goes on to give a long list of examples of Marx’s naturalization of women, and his failure to am a critical eye at the domination of women as women by men as men. I want to again say that MacKinnon’s book is in the must-read category. That’s not saying it is omniscient or infallible. But for anyone who wants to study the relationship between feminism and Marxism, especially as it relates to the State, this book is essential.

On to Engels.

MacKinnon: “Whatever one can say about Marx’s [theoretical] treatment of women, his first failing and best defense are that the problems of women concerned him only in passing. Friedrich Engels can be neither so accused nor excused. His ‘Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State’ is the seminal marxist attempt to understand and explain women’s subordination. The work has been widely criticized, mostly for its data, but its approach has been influential. Often through Lenin, who adopted many of its essentials, the approach and direction of Engels’ reasoning, if not all of its specifics, have become orthodox marxism on ‘the woman question.’

“To Engels, women are oppressed as a group through the specific form of the family in class society. In pre-class sexually egalitarian social orders, labor was divided by sex [according to Marx and Engels]. Not until the rise of private property, and with it class society, did that division become hierarchical.” (p 19)

MAJOR point here: Not UNTIL the rise of class, claims Engels — and this is the very basis of his history-version argument — did gender become heirarchical (the preponderance of anthropological evidence now suggests exactly the opposite). The implication being, class predates gender as a system of social power, ergo, class trumps gender as a system of social power (a non sequitur). Gender is effectively swallowed up inside class. This becomes the basis for later referring to gendered power as a “secondary” contradiction, and the promise (betrayed serially) that women would be liberated within socialism.

Engels supports this fallacious reasoning with the now-discredited data and conclusions of Morgan on the Iroquois, with which Engels attempts to fit a gender-stage into the eurocentric “stages” of Marxism… which were “savagery (primitive communism),” triple-stage “barbarism,” slavery, feudalism, and capitalism.

“Before… ‘civilization,’ Engels argued, labor was divided by sex within the clan, often with women in domestic roles, but woman’s social power was equal to or greater than man’s. In pairing marriage, the family form which preceded monogamy, woman was supreme in the household, and lineage was reckoned according to ‘mother right.’ With the rise of private property, the unity of the clan dissolved into antagonistic classes and isolated family units. As production shifted out of the household, leaving women behind in it, and more private wealth accumulated in men’s hands, lineage came to be traced by ‘father right,’ marking what Engels called ‘the world historical defeat of the female sex.’” (MacKinnon, p 22)

End Part One

Category: Class, Gender, General  |  Comment (RSS)

38 Comments

  1. Jonas:

    “On the origin of species” appeared in 1859.

    “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State” in 1884.

    Greetings from Wuppertal (Engels’ birthplace).

    17 December 2005, 4:09 pm

  2. Stan:

    I stand corrected. You are absolutely right.

    17 December 2005, 4:59 pm

  3. Emerson:

    Ok, the 3 main arguments against Engels here is that it is:
    a) Based on material that is out of date.
    b) That Marx and Engels naturalised women.
    c) That the history-version argument is a non-sequitur.

    I can accept A) and C) and I’m not totally convinced about B). Accepting C) does not mean that class is not the “dominant contradiction”.

    But I don’t see how they follow through to changes in one’s position on abolishing womens’ oppression.

    Is there a patriachal structure co-existent but separate from capitalism?

    Do all men benefit from sexism?

    Does it mean that women have to organise autonomously from men?

    Does it mean that even if a socialist society were to arise, one would still have to have another revolution based around womens oppression? Queer Oppression?

    Is it essential to abolish the family and the state as part of abolishing women’s oppression?

    How does it relate to your positions on rape, pornography, prostitution, etc?

    Is rape part of the mechanism that maintains patriachal dominance over women?

    Is pornography the “theory” of rapes’ “practice”?

    Is prostitution essentially rape?
    Do you criminalize prostitution?

    If you accept that women were oppressed in pre-class societies then you either have to accept that the oppression stems from biological differences between the sexes ie. NATURALISING women’s oppression OR you have to accept some sort of primeval conspiracy of men against women that has survived to the present time.

    Even if it was proven definately and absolutely that oppression based on gender arose before class societies - it still wouldn’t change what is the dominant division in society NOW - along class - and how people have to be organised along class lines.

    The main argument in the Origin of the Family is that capitalism requires workers to reproduce themselves at the least cost to capitalists - which means subordinating women to the role of mothers in the nuclear family. (Regardless of fact that capital needs women as part of the workforce, or that the nuclear family is not a widely followed norm).

    This is the main argument you have to contend with if you want Marxists to drop “The Origins of the Family”…

    20 December 2005, 12:03 pm

  4. Stan:

    ***Ok, the 3 main arguments against Engels here is that it is:
    a) Based on material that is out of date.
    b) That Marx and Engels naturalised women.
    c) That the history-version argument is a non-sequitur.***

    I think the main argument is that women experience social domination not only based on productive class, but on their “class” as women. Women are no only subordinated in the realm of class by a bourgeoisie, but as women by men as men. The argument is not AGAINST Engels, but against the refusal of the male-led Left as a whole to acknowledge that women are oppressed as women by men oppressing as men… and that this form of oppression exists within socialist formaitons and states.

    ***I can accept A) and C) and I’m not totally convinced about B). Accepting C) does not mean that class is not the “dominant contradiction”.***

    I thought MacKinnon’s clearest case was that of naturalization, and she provided ample evidence from the primary sources. Both Marx and Engles claimed that until class (by their definition) happened, there was no social inferiority attached to being female… and that what differneces DID exist were NATURAL, ie, not socially constructed.

    ***But I don’t see how they follow through to changes in one’s position on abolishing womens’ oppression.***

    They, but more pointedly, later Marxists follow through by telling women that their oppression AS WOMEN is secondary, by refusing to theorize outside the framework of Marxian class the situations of women, and by making the (specious, imo) claim that women’s oppression will be resolved by socialism.

    ***Is there a patriachal structure co-existent but separate from capitalism?***

    This is the most important question, I think, at least in one respect. And the answer is yes and no. In the real world, all social systems we can identify through analytical disaggregation are ACTUALLY interfused. But it is fairly easy to show overwhelming evidence of men oppressing women in ways that are not explained in Capital.

    ***Do all men benefit from sexism?***

    Yes. Only I won’t call it sexism… that’s a liberal, individualistic, and philosophically idealist term for it. It tends to describe this as bad thinking instead of structural power.

    ***Does it mean that women have to organise autonomously from men?***

    Sometimes.

    ***Does it mean that even if a socialist society were to arise, one would still have to have another revolution based around women’s oppression? Queer Oppression?***

    This is too hypothetical, and therefore completely unanswerable. My contention is that the resolution of gendered power among socialists is a precondition for an effective socialist revolution. The oppression of queer folk is part of that gendered systemof power.

    ***Is it essential to abolish the family and the state as part of abolishing women’s oppression?***

    Again, this is crystal ball gazing. We don’t know hwo changes happen until the conditions are present for the change to be made. And we categorically cannot predict what those conditions will be. Abolition sounds so decree-like. We already know that socialism is not s decree, but a system of production with a specific material basis. Why would we backtrack to a more simplistic formula to talk about how to struggel against patriarchy?

    ***How does it relate to your positions on rape, pornography, prostitution, etc?

    Is rape part of the mechanism that maintains patriachal dominance over women?***

    Absolutely.

    ***Is pornography the “theory” of rapes’ “practice”?***

    Check the blog elsewhere on this question, where it is handled in a far more nuanced manner than simply reducing the phenomenon of pornography to this kind of schema.

    ***Is prostitution essentially rape?
    Do you criminalize prostitution?***

    Same suggestion.

    ***If you accept that women were oppressed in pre-class societies then you either have to accept that the oppression stems from biological differences between the sexes ie. NATURALISING women’s oppression OR you have to accept some sort of primeval conspiracy of men against women that has survived to the present time.***

    No you don’t. This is a false dilemma argument… a very bad one at that. I hope De doesn’t get mad at you. (-:

    Just kidding. But it is a FD argument. And it is hyper-simplified and seems a bit defensive.

    ***Even if it was proven definately and absolutely that oppression based on gender arose before class societies - it still wouldn’t change what is the dominant division in society NOW - along class - and how people have to be organised along class lines.***

    But this is a mere claim. People are equally organized along gender and national lines. There’s my counter-claim. Morte importantly, and here is another fallacious argument, in my view, why would we claim that tactical organization must always be aimed at final strategic objectives… and is class the only lines along which society can be forganized for resistance? No!

    ***The main argument in the Origin of the Family is that capitalism requires workers to reproduce themselves at the least cost to capitalists - which means subordinating women to the role of mothers in the nuclear family. (Regardless of fact that capital needs women as part of the workforce, or that the nuclear family is not a widely followed norm).***

    This strikes me a remarkably eurocentric and schematic and even a bit conspiratorial. Capitalism is an evolving system in its forms. I highly recommend Maria Mies book, Patriarchy and Accumulation ona World Scale, for a more up to date look at how captialism functions with regard to women in the first, second, and third worlds… diffeently. And using Engels still doesn’t address domestic abuse or rape.

    ***This is the main argument you have to contend with if you want Marxists to drop “The Origins of the Family”…***

    I want Marxists to engage the wider body of feminist thought, to become familiar with its insights, and stop reactively trying to use this archaic tome as the last word on gender. I want Marxists to take a hard critical look at their own patriachal practices. I want Marxists to stop naturalizing gender. I want Marxists to recognize that Marx and Engels and Lenin were fallible, worked in a different world, and are now dead… that many smart people came after them, and that their apotheosis turns a perfectly useful method of inquiry and struggle into an ossified and ineffective dogma. I want us to consider the possibility that a lot of people who came along after the holy texts were written were and are just as smart as Marx and Engels, and that lots of them were and are feminists. Most of all, I want us to fight patriarchy as hard as we fight capitalism… together, as an interfused system of capitalist patriarchy.

    20 December 2005, 4:03 pm

  5. Julian Real:

    Hi Emerson.

    Good questions. I think Stan’s answers work well for me, generally, but I will add some stuff of my own.

    Here goes:

    E: Ok, the 3 main arguments against Engels here is that it is:
    a) Based on material that is out of date.
    b) That Marx and Engels naturalised women.
    c) That the history-version argument is a non-sequitur.

    I can accept A) and C) and I’m not totally convinced about B). Accepting C) does not mean that class is not the “dominant contradiction”.

    J: From what perspective are you making that claim? Your statement appears to be tautological, in that your assumptions about gender can only lead to the conclusions you come to. How do you explain patriarchy pre-existing “economic class”, and gender existing, oppressively, in various cultures worldwide, across time, that aren’t European or Western, or, even, don’t have money economies or class division, in the economic sense?

    E: But I don’t see how they follow through to changes in one’s position on abolishing womens’ oppression.

    J: Is it possible that the lens through which you are examining this precludes you seeing that. This is a serious question, and not a criticism of you. I remember my thinking before reading MacKinnon and Dworkin, and other important radical feminist/Womanist work, by, especially, Audre Lorde and bell hooks. I remember how “what I could see” was determined, partly, by the choice of lenses I had through which to do the seeing. I think it is VERY important for men, especially privileged ones beyond gender, to note the lenses they are looking through, and accept that they “are” lenses. That such lenses allow one to see some things well, and other things fuzzily. I am suggesting that is what is happening here, in your view of things related to gender oppression.

    E: Is there a patriachal structure co-existent but separate from capitalism?

    J: There is pain in women’s lives, real human suffering, which does not need capitalism to happen. Rape and battery do not need capitalism to happen, as Stan notes. They cross class, race, ethnicity, national boundaries, eras, and geography, yet, are not natural phenomena; they are cultural-political atrocities. How do you explain that?

    E: Do all men benefit from sexism?

    J: In addition to what Stan said already, I will add this: all men benefit materially, if not humanely, from patriarchy, in ways that women do not. Women suffer in patriarchy, via sexism, misogyny, male supremacy, and male privileges, which vary and shift with time and place, in ways that men, systematically, do not.

    Men who are not survivors of gross sexual abuse, do not generally understand women’s vulnerability to men in patriarchy, a sexual vulnerability, not an economic one, although women can and do suffer from both, entwined. Men benefit materially as men in patriarchy, but not necessarily as humane beings. Women benefit neither materially nor as humane beings, from living and dying in patriarchy.

    E: Does it mean that women have to organise autonomously from men?

    J: I agree with Stan’s succinct answer. What it also means is that anti-patriarchy activists must focus on the core matters of patriarchy that are and are not bound up with economic class. That anti-patriarchy activists also have a responsibility to take up the matter of race/racism, in their activities, as central and core to the work being done, IF ONLY because so many women are harmed by racism, sexually, as well as non-sexually. But one hopes that the humanitarian heart registers racism as sufficiently dehumanising and atrocious to merit sustained radical activist attention, EVEN IF it gets attention because SOME MEN are harmed by it.

    E: Does it mean that even if a socialist society were to arise, one would still have to have another revolution based around womens oppression? Queer Oppression?

    J: As some radical feminists note, socialist revolution would be a liberal reform for women as a gender class, unless patriarchy, as such, is taken down with capitalism. I think this eradication of patriarchy is unlikely to occur ONLY by radically transforming capitalism, for reasons Stan has made, and that are made here in my responses to you.

    E: Is it essential to abolish the family and the state as part of abolishing women’s oppression?

    J: It is essential to take up the matter of (not just white) women’s oppression and the oppression of people of Colour (not just men) as distinct matters of heart-level concern; as distinct areas of activism and resistance and confrontation; as distinct areas of political challenge, to all the institutions and dynamics which keep racism and patriarchy thriving, or, even, maintaining a pulse.

    E: How does it relate to your positions on rape, pornography, prostitution, etc?

    Is rape part of the mechanism that maintains patriachal dominance over women?

    Is pornography the “theory” of rapes’ “practice”?

    Is prostitution essentially rape?
    Do you criminalize prostitution?

    J: I will take these as a bundle. Rape, pornography, prostitution, battery, incest, child molestation MUST be understood, in my view, following these perspectives and sensibilities and sensitivities, as harms which happen independently of class to the degree that they happen disproportionately to women and children BY men, because the men are men and the women are women, and the children are children.

    Of course women also perpetrate some of these harms, usually against children, or other women. Rarely against men, statistically. Confronting R,Pn,Pr,B,I and CM (noting the above global atrocities) which is only to name some of the many more patriarchal atrocities, btw, (especially First World and Western patirachal forms of atrocity) means that what one is confronting is NOT solely how women are exploited as workers, or as oppressed in economically stressful and exploitative conditions, but, rather/and in addition, that women are seen as being constituted, made, through force, to be female by those atrocities, among others. That men are made men by and through their acts of force, or love, against, or with, a “believed” other–called girls and women in English. That this idea of an other, called woman, is not an idea that is separate from the force, patriarchal and otherwise, which renders some humans as such.

    Rape is a key dynamic, a key locus of intimidation, violation, force (in short: terrorism) which makes gender dual and simulataneously hierarchical in relations; humans, in patriarchy, through the act of rape, and other acts, gives lived/experiential meaning to MacKinnon’s famous remark: man fucks woman, subject verb object. It is more than a mechanism. It is a way of having or bolstering identity, of creating meaning in one’s life, of playing out old trauma (see The Trauma of The Gendered Child elsewhere on this blog), of attempting to be human by being inhumane.

    As Dworkin notes, pornography is the practice and rape is the practice. There’s nothing fantasy-like about pornography for the prostitutes and other women exploited in it, by it, and because of it. It’s a fully REAL system of harm and degradation, human harm and human degradation, which men have learned to “enjoy” as their “entertainment”. That it is also fantasy and desire and fun for men means only that women’s suffering is rendered invisible, or erotic, for men, by patriarchal harms which men call sex.

    What underlies those atrocities named earlier (and others unnamed here) is the patriarchal privilege, right, or entitlement, to create two genders through force: to give one gender the means, need, will, and specific methods of having physical access to the other, in ways that are violating, degrading, and exploitive, as well as painful as hell; in ways that result in further lowered social status and further withered self-esteem, as well as a further degraded dignity. These atrocities create, in the psyche and in practice (in the real world of human suffering) a different standard of “being human”.

    The goal of feminism, in the fight against patriarchy, ought not, in my view, center around achieving for women the status and esteem men, relative to women, have. As a feminist once noted, with wry humour, women wanting to be like men means women’s standards of being human are too low, even in imagination.

    Men suffer as humans in patriarchy. But not in the systematised ways, the institutionalised ways, the intimate ways, that women suffer. Men are not made to bleed and hurt during sex, generally, by women using their body parts as weapons against men, such that men, when intimately with women, suffer internal tissue destruction and spirit deflation.

    Prostitution, among other things it also does, creates a population of women and children for men to use as they wish, for men to exploit, for men to target for harassment, rape, battery, and other abuses, at will, such that those populations of used and abuses humans have no recourse, nor claim to a standard of being human that the unprostituted have.

    Prostitutes are disbelieved and rendered mute through the abuse that happens to them, in prostitution, which is part of the function of that system of sexual use. Once used as a prostitute, one’s status is so degraded, that one is effectively silenced, socially/politically/civilly, if not also maimed and killed.

    Prostitution and pornography overlap in these effects, and as real systems (industries, practices) of harm. Incest, child molestation, rape, and battery are factors which make the sexxxism industries possible and profitable, for men.

    The use of another person as a prostitute should be criminalised everywhere; being a prostitute should be decriminalised everywhere. The courts have it all wrong, because the courts are patriarchal, and the laws are made to serve men’s interests, especially the interests of men who have class and race privilege. But all men, should they so desire and will it, have the “right”, the “entitlement” to visually and physically violate women, on the street, in the home, off the computer screen, to name but three popular sites of sexist voyeurism and sex discrimination.

    Pimps, especially corporate ones, should be held accountable for crimes against humanity, in this case, women’s and children’s humanity, primarily. Johns should be arrested for using and abusing people as sexxx things, as person-made-ejaculate-recepticle, or for participating in downright damaging (to the point that if fatal, it might be a blessing) systems of sex trafficking and sexual slavery.

    E: If you accept that women were oppressed in pre-class societies then you either have to accept that the oppression stems from biological differences between the sexes ie. NATURALISING women’s oppression OR you have to accept some sort of primeval conspiracy of men against women that has survived to the present time.

    Even if it was proven definately and absolutely that oppression based on gender arose before class societies - it still wouldn’t change what is the dominant division in society NOW - along class - and how people have to be organised along class lines.

    J: As Stan notes, your arguments make many assumptions about where the harm is in the world, and how it manifests, and against whom, and how that feels to those who know those harms intimately. I would argue your lack of knowledge about these matters is a function of your male privilege and your right (not YOURS, personally, but the collective male “your”) to not recognise this harm as harm, this pain as real, this suffering as human, and this atrocity as real as atrocity, and as significant to address, for any humanitarian movement for justice, as any other atrocity.

    I would argue that because these atrocities happen especially to women, and to women as women, they are not registered by pro-patriarchal Marxists, nor male capitalists, as harm in the same way that labour exploitation and wage-job dehumanisation is registered as harm. This “lack of knowledge—visceral and intellectual, emotional and spiritual—means that men can pontificate while women are punished and pulverised (in systems where women are treated like meat, tenderised like meat, and left to rot like meat). And very few men will call those men out on their “right” to not know a goddamned thing about this world of suffering called “living and dying as a female in patriarchy”. And those men who are called out on it can retreat into their male supremacist worlds, where they only have to take seriously what happens to men systematically—to populations of only men and populations that include men.

    E: The main argument in the Origin of the Family is that capitalism requires workers to reproduce themselves at the least cost to capitalists - which means subordinating women to the role of mothers in the nuclear family. (Regardless of fact that capital needs women as part of the workforce, or that the nuclear family is not a widely followed norm).

    This is the main argument you have to contend with if you want Marxists to drop “The Origins of the Family”…

    J: Patriarchy requires that women are hurt for being women, and are made into women by being hurt. Tell me how socialism addresses THAT problem, and why it doesn’t register for you, if this is the case, as a serious, life-threatening, global problem in need of urgent redress and correction, on the level of radical changes to civilization: on the level of worldview, on the level of identity, on the level of consciousness, on the level of custom, on the level of institutional and interpersonal injury to humanity, in this case, primarily an injury that creates and destroys girls and women, materially and spiritually (as if there was a difference).

    I look forward to your thoughtful reply.

    Julian Real

    20 December 2005, 7:51 pm

  6. Yolanda Carrington:

    Hello Emerson,

    I hope you were listening to the two thorough responses to your questions. Stan and Julian answered you more logically than I ever could, but then again, I’m too emotionally involved to be “objective” (ha).

    Patriarchy is a reality that I live everyday—when I’m catcalled as I walk down the street, when total (male) strangers ask for my name on the bus like it’s a requirement, when some dude calls me a “bitch” in CASUAL conversation, and then tells me he didn’t “mean it in a derogatory way,” when I have to listen to someone make horribly misogynistic comments and I can’t respond ’cause it would be too inconvenient in that particular space—and it’s a reality that every woman I know lives. But men sure have a hard time seeing it, liberal, progressive, radical, even “feminist” and “queer” men. When I try to tell the men in my life how they hurt or offended me, before anything else, I get explanations. They need to explain why I misunderstood or misread what they said, or did.

    Let me ask you this. When the women in your life tell you about their experience, do you listen? Do you believe them? Can you identify with their hurt and anger, I mean, put yourself in their shoes? Does their perspective seem valid to you?

    Can you imagine yourself as a woman?

    My thoughts on Engels and feminist theory.

    Frederick Engels is dead. He was German. He lived during the nineteenth century. He was a man. There is no way that he could articulate the experience of any woman alive today, or in his day, but especially not the experience of a woman of oppressed nationality. Oppressed nationality women are the majority of women in the world. This is 2005. We’re about to go into 2006 (according to the Gregorian calendar).

    What can Frederick Engels know about women and men in 2006?

    Can you listen to the women of Planet Earth 2006? Will you follow their lead on the question of gender oppression?

    Could you follow the lead of a woman?

    Do you believe what I’m saying?

    Only you know the answer to that.

    Yolanda

    21 December 2005, 2:07 am

  7. john steppling:

    Hey stan:
    Im at an internet cafe so this will be (I apologize) very short.
    I think there are some big questions here, worthy of discussion. But I think Emerson asks a lot of germane questions. Class seems to me to supercede gender — not discount it. But I can imagine gender inequality and oppression being done away with while class would still exist (and oppress everyone not in the ruling class) {ok, this is slightly hyperbolic….but}> I cant imagine, to be honest, that if class were resolved (done away with) that gender oppression would continue — though I think this is certainly a topic for more analysis.

    Also, that atrocities are done to women and not registering to male marxists…..is true….but what is the reason these atrocities are committed? Does not class create the conditions for atrocity>?

    MsCarrington’s critique of engles just seems silly (imho). Should we discount all dead (german) white male writers? This is absurd. Living in the 19th century doesnt disqualify one from anything — its only a part of the whole fabric of understanding that writer. Should we stop reading Shakespeare too? Or Pascal? or….well, you get the idea. A Derridean critique was part of a corrective to the dead white male cannon…….by analysing the “missing”….which is valid and did, in fact, serve as a corrective.
    Anyway, i will write more….its an excellent discussion and i particularly want to address what is meant by “naturalizing” women…..I fear there is some mystification on all sides regards this topic.
    Onward and bravo Morales !! (off message).

    21 December 2005, 12:03 pm

  8. Julian Real:

    Hello, John Steppling.

    I will say, in my opinion, your response to Yolanda Carrington’s post was a “dis” and not a response. She asks pertinent questions that you do not wish to engage with, instead sidestepping, the white-male supremacist way, into a discourse that better suits your white patriarchal needs for intellectual abstraction over real-life engagement.

    I find your “response” to her cowardly, and deeply disrespectful. I believe you owe her a sincere apology.

    ARE you willing to listen to women, NOW? Are you willing to regard Yolanda Carrington’s voice and points AS JUST AS PERTINENT to the success of our collective humanity as Engel’s? I recommend you engage directly with what she is saying, rather than patronisingly, condescendingly, and obnoxiously attempting to sidestep her.

    Rude, that’s what I call what you just did. And as you have entered a social forum, of discussion, please do not assume that your efforts at escaping accountability will be enabled here by those of us who are a part of this social forum. They won’t.

    Now, from your response it would appear that your privileges within racist patriarchy are not ones you wish to examine. Please give me evidence to the contrary.

    Julian Real

    21 December 2005, 1:52 pm

  9. Julian Real:

    P.S. Also to John S.:

    The Derridian critique was, in part, as you note, of unowned power and privilege, white and male, expressed literarily, that would not address itself as such, but was there, in the text, nonetheless. It is not coincidental that his understanding, his analysis, his method, as it were, existed during a time of activist feminist challenge to white male power. (He paid attention.)

    Perhaps what is “missing” is your willingness to comprehend what Yolanda is saying here. I will assume you have the humanitarian (and intellectual) capacity to do so, and await its manifestation in the text of your next post.

    Julian Real

    21 December 2005, 2:31 pm

  10. Charles Brown:

    Radical feminists made the counter-argument that gender trumps class as a way of bending the stick back. And, ignoring the above non sequitur, rad-fems won the argument. Marxists wanted to represent male supremacy as an aspect of capitalism, and one that would disappear with the disappearance of capitalism. But what radical feminists pointed out — accurately — is that capitalism is but one form of (economic) class society within a much longer and consistent history of male power.

    ^^^^

    The above demonstrates why Engels thesis in _The Origin_ is cogent today. Engels places the origin of the (male supremacist) family as coincident with the origin of exploitative classes, along with the state ( see the title). In other words, exactly your point above that male supremacy predates capitalism.

    However, the socialist revolution is not only the end of capitalism, but the end of all class exploited society. The communist revolution is the big one. Since male supremacy and class exploitation came in together, they logically go out together. Not only that, Engels’ thesis implies a “connection” between male supremacy and class exploitative society ( and the state; the repressive apparatus , standing bodies of armed personnel mostly men down through the ages, prisons , etc.;)

    Let me say while I’m at it, that I actually majored in anthropology and then went on to get a masters in it and did some ph.d work. At first I thought that Engels book was outdated. Now I don’t think so. Its core thesis is valid and critical: Class society, male supremacy and the state arose in complex together. It is called “civilization”. In Morgan’s terms, this was a transition from _societas_ to _civitas_. The former is organized based on kinship. The latter is based on territory, etc, etc., etc. Also, specifically, there was equality between women and men !

    Most importantly, this means that most of human history has been _without_ male supremacy, class exploitation and the state. This gives a basis for abolishing all three because they are NOT inherent to “human nature”. We can look foreward to a communist society without the three evils of “civilization” , because we humans did it before ( a long time ago) and we can do it again. Human nature , as originally founded 200, 000 years ago was communist, i.e. lacked male supremacy ( had gender equality), lacked exploiting classes and states (war,etc). (I’d even argue that our biolgoical name should be _Homo communis_ or _Homo societas_, because our distinction from apes is the level of sociality we have. Culture is our species’ unique social connection with past generation of our species.)

    At any rate, Engels’ central thesis in _The Origin_ is incredibly important to our movement, because it means that communism _is_ human nature ;class exploitative selfishness and male supremacy are the opposite of our original human nature.

    21 December 2005, 5:02 pm

  11. Charles Brown:

    Marx and Engels naturalized women.

    I turn now to Catharine MacKinnon , who along with Andrea Dworkin , has been effectively stalinized (demonized) off the Left’s stage (mostly because of their critique of pornography), with extensive quotes from her book Toward a Feminist Theory of the State.” While white American radical feminists are not above critique, that is not my purpose here. The best critiques of radical feminism have come from inside feminism, from Black, Latina, and so-called Third World feminists — and radical feminists have embraced, not fled from, these critiques. Marxists, for the most part, have evaded answering the rad-fem challenge — one that was offered in a comradely way.

    “To Marx, women were defined by nature, not by society. To him, sex was within that ‘material substratum’ that was not subject to social analysis, making explicit references to women or sex largely peirpheral of parenthetical.” (p 13)

    [MacKinnon’s footnote: “This chapter does not address the ways in which Marx’s theories of social life are, are not, or can be made applicable to women’s experience or sueful for women’s liberation. It addresses what Marx and Engles explicitly said about women, women’s status, and women’s condition.”]

    “Engels, by contrast, considered women’s status a social phenomenon that needed explanation. He just failed to explain it. Expanding on Marx’s few suggestive comments, Engels tried to explain women’s subordination within a theory of the historical development of the family in the context of class relations. ( Tried ? or succeeded ?- CB) .Beneath Engels veneer of dialectical dynamism lies a static, positivistic materialism that reifies woman socially to such an extent that her status might as well have been considered natrually determined. Marx and Engels each take for granted crucial features of relations between the sexes: Marx becasue women is nature and nature is given, and Engels because woman is the family and he is largely uncritical of woman’s work and sexual role within it.” (p 13)

    MacKinnon then goes on to explain.

    ^^^^^^

    The question to be asked of MacKinnon’s criticism of Marx and Engels’ conception of women is , if they thought that women’s role was naturally in the family and home, why is one of the main socialist programmatic elements bringing women in to social labor ( out of the home) ? The Soviet Constitution ( fully based on the Marxist position) had an Equal Rights for Women provision from the start. The U.S. Constitution still doesn’t have one. Readily available divorce for women was the law from the start in the SU. These facts “interrogate” MacKinnon’s version of Marx and Engels on women.

    Engels’ failed to explain women’s social position ? Did she read _The Origin_ ? Where does she place the origin of male supremacism in history ? Put it this way, by giving male supremacism an origin 9/10’s of the way into human history, Engels and Marx DE-naturalize it; for if it was “in our genes”, it would have originated with the origin of humanity. Engels expicitly and specifically places its origin not at the origin of our species, thereby denatualizing it. He gives a historical explanation of male supremacy, which means we can get rid of it without genetherapy , thank goodness.

    By the way, on the connection of between the origin of male supremacy and class exploitative society, there is some evidence that the first slaves were women.

    21 December 2005, 5:28 pm

  12. Stan:

    Thanks again, Charles, for being engaged here.

    The demonstrable fact that Marx and Engels naturalized women is taken from their writing, but it did not become the basis for codifying that later on. Engels’ approach to the so-called “woman question” succeded in having (some) approaching women’s liberation from the standpoint of (liberal) legal equality, and to the day has little to say about rape or domestic abuse… that is, women oppressed as women by men as men.

    BTW, Stalin created huge incentives-disincentives for Soviet women to “reproduce” and return to the household… and I’m one of the few people that actualy has a few good things to say about the old dictator.

    MacKinnon does not “place” the “origin” of anything, but argues that this is what I called a history-version fallacy. Read part 2. http://feralscholar.org/blog/?p=235 3 and 4 are on the way.

    These are not MacKinnon’s words, but Marx’s:

    “The distribution of the work within the family, and the regulation of the labor-time of the several members, depend as well upon the differences of age and sex as upon NATURAL conditions… Within a family… there springs up NATURALLY a division of labor, caused by difference of sex and age, a division that is consequently based on a PURELY PHYSICAL foundation.”

    That is naturalization.

    Engels goes on very explicity to say that the hypothetical first division of labor between men and women is not inherently exploitative. Only with economic class does he first posit exploitation.

    Again, the historically speculative nature vs nurture dichotomy is a false one. that Engels does not choose a biologicallly determinist fallacy does not mean he has arrived at an accurate geneology of women’s oppression, and it certianly doesn’t mean that his speculations are somehow determinative of how women and their allies struggle against patriarchy now.

    Like I said, go one to part 2.

    Cheers.

    21 December 2005, 5:48 pm

  13. elaina:

    “MsCarrington’s critique of engles just seems silly (imho). Should we discount all dead (german) white male writers? This is absurd. Living in the 19th century doesnt disqualify one from anything — its only a part of the whole fabric of understanding that writer. Should we stop reading Shakespeare too? Or Pascal? or….well, you get the idea. A Derridean critique was part of a corrective to the dead white male cannon…….by analysing the “missing”….which is valid and did, in fact, serve as a corrective.”

    If this critique is “just silly,” then why do so many folks, especially women of opressed nationality and working-class women of all nationalities?

    I am honestly offended at this dismissal of the validity of Yolanda’s statement.

    In other words, John, I think that you are “just silly.”

    We DO have a right to demand investigation of the use of one MAN’s analysis, to classify it as inconvenient to have to dig up what he has to say on the matter when WE LIVE the conditions. Engels is, indeed, dead. Engles has no way of knowing what the fuck is going on in this day and age. Engles can’t fix shit anymore.

    That’s not saying that his analysis can’t be useful. That’s not saying that the dude wasn’t smart. It’s saying that it can’t be the fucking last word.

    And I would put it out there that there is no reductionist “last word.” That’s what I felt when I read Yolanda’s post, and I said “amen” aloud, and my niece, sitting in the decrepit little nasty kitchen of ours looked at me like I was crazy ’cause I was talking to the damn computer again.

    Maybe we “shouldn’t” quit reading Shakespeare, no matter how much we think he’s just a dead conservative white European who didn’t seem to like women very much. I mean he was a good writer, and that absolves his lack of relevance to my fucking lived experience, right????

    Even though I’d rather read Zora Neale Hurston, or Alice Walker, or even Chuck fucking Pahlaniuk because even what that particular white dude writes about is much, much closer to my lived experience than any fairy tale Shakespeare ever farted out loud about. It doesn’t matter about my lived experience.

    I have to find Shakespeare to be “good” because the Big Boys think he’s good. I have to waste time in English lit class if I want to say that I’m well versed in literature I have to be well versed in shakespeare, otherwise I’m not well-versed, no matter what aspect of literature I am ACTUALLY, INDEED, well-versed in.

    So yeah, maybe we can’t just “toss aside” Engles. We can, however, quit using him as a “last word” on the “gender issue,” when the men who benefit from leadership in our organisations feel the need to retain the status quo in “gender issues.” We can stop whooping out his “big book” whenever it’s convenient to stop addressing how anti-woman practice is alive and well in our organizations. THIS is the problem. It DOES have to stop. That’s not just a suggestion, it’s mandatory.

    I apologize for all the cuss words. I get tired of my sisters being dissed and dismissed. It makes me angry. It’s happened to my face, as well, on several occasions. I don’t want to be disrespectful to anyone. But I don’t want my sisters and myself to keep banging our heads against the wall on these issues.

    We got enough headache already.

    21 December 2005, 7:03 pm

  14. Yolanda Carrington:

    Hello Mr. Steppling,

    Although it feels redundant to say this, your last post represented exactly what we’ve all been talking about on this blog. However you felt about Stan and Julian’s critiques, you didn’t call them “silly.” Why am I the only one who’s silly?

    What makes what I have to say silly?

    For the record, I love history, and I love many dead white men from history (just ask Stan). But they ARE NOT WOMEN. Period. They cannot name our experiences with gender. Not back then, and not now. In order to know the consequences, you have to experience the phenomenon. Why is this so hard to understand?

    You get it with class, and I assume you get it with nationality and race. Why can’t you get it with gender? That was the point I was trying to make in my post.

    I am not discounting Engels. He did very important work. He and Marx gave us an important framework for understanding class and history. But I will say this again: He was a man. He was gender-privileged. Throughout his research, his analysis, and his writing, he approached gender from the perspective OF A MAN. And he was a human being, which means he would have made mistakes. He could not articulate the consequences of something he did not experience.

    Why is this so hard to understand?

    You know, an apology would be nice (thanks Julian!), but that’s not what I’m looking for. My deepest hope is that you and all other so-called revolutionary men stop dismissing and discounting women, and start listening. That’s all I ask.

    It’s not that hard, believe me.

    Yolanda

    21 December 2005, 11:06 pm

  15. Josiah:

    To Yolanda and Elaina-

    Have you ever read Patricia Hill Collin’s book “Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment”? If you haven’t you should check it out. She describes exactly what’s going on in this thread:

    “When white men control the knowledge validation process, both political criteria (contextual credibility and evaluation of knowledge claims) can work to suppress Black feminist thought. Therefore, Black women are more likely to choose an alternative epistemology for assessing knowledge claims, one using different standards that are consistent with Black women’s criteria for substantiated knowledge and with our criteria for methodological adequacy.”

    And that alternative epistemology is likely to be dismissed as “silly”, “emotional” and “reactionary” in many “radical” circles that turn out not to be so radical. Stan is a good expection to that. In a world that’s majority-female and majority-non-”white”, nothing could be more relevant than pointing out the irrelevance of Engels to many women from a “standpoint” perspective? His perspective on such things as British colonialism in India, female reproductive rights and the value of indigenous cultures were quite limited. If the “left” is going to encompass multiple groupings across lines of gender and race, there needs to be space for “alternative epistemologies”; and maybe those “alternative” ones should become normative.

    21 December 2005, 11:39 pm

  16. john steppling:

    Well, if saying someone’s opinion is silly is a ‘diss’ then…..ok. But I stand by the comment.

    “Frederick Engels is dead. He was German. He lived during the nineteenth century. He was a man. There is no way that he could articulate the experience of any woman alive today, or in his day, but especially not the experience of a woman of oppressed nationality. Oppressed nationality women are the majority of women in the world. This is 2005. We’re about to go into 2006 (according to the Gregorian calendar). ”

    Now, sounds like we are, indeed, to dismiss engels because he lived in the 19th century…was a man, and ergo, cant understand the issues of today. We have here a catagory mistake. Engels was theorizing….as all philosophers do….and one presumes there is importance in history….and marx would be the first to agree. His living in the ‘past’ seems beside the point…..because obviously anyone who is dead cant comment on ‘today’. So we should only read living authors?

    I never even remotely suggested engels was the last word. Find me a place where I say that or suggest it?

    What I do think is that gender and race are different in catagory from class. People are oppressed because of race..or gender…or sexual prefrence….but people are oppressed within a class tension in a different way. They dont manifest “class-ness”…..being a member of a class IS to be oppressed (or oppressor). An emancipatory politics looks to transform oppression — for everyone….correct? We are arguing strategy….and I suppose theory. The origin of social class (engels and marx again) was connected with the development of the modes of production….of historical modes of production (see, this is why one needs to study history).

    Now also, all oppressed people are denied their humanity….for lack of a better description here….but class is a relation….a tension….which is quite different from race and gender. There will be no class in an emancipated society…but there will africans and women and homosexuals. As eagelton says, you cant have an emancipated serf. And as marcuse said, we really cannot imagine what a non-repressive society will look like.

    So I keep wanting to see how gender eclipses class. I dont so far. As Ive quoted before….the liberation of women comes through the liberation of labor. Why do you think this doesnt work or isnt true?

    Ive read this posting again….though quickly, since my computer is down and im on the clock here….and I still find this rather blurred. Emancipation starts, at least, with class. How the gender issue intersects with that, and at what point, is highly relevant….but it doesnt mean we abandon the essential class analysis….or I dont think we do.

    As for shakespeare….he in some sense created the english language…..as did the king james bible….I find a dismissal of shakespeare as hardly worthy of comment. Now Im not a rich white kid who went to school….I started reading shakespeare in juvinille detention centers (which is why I still cant fucking spell !!)…..but like a great many people on the planet, he speaks to some essential shit. And conservative? Shakespeare? hardly….but then perhaps elaina you need a refresher course.

    As for julian accuses me of being rude. I was not being rude….this is called dialogue and debate. Ive liked a lot of what ms carrington has had to say in the past….just not this time. Sorry. And the quote above seems to me silly. Its unclear and seems (to me) to suggest a confusion about the role of critical thinking. Its interesting, as I live in a former communist country and see daily (as stan points out) how women were better protected under the old system than today. Most women here, or the under class, would agree. Sorry, if I am rambling…but I have to write quick —

    Now finally I want to add a note on tone here. I find, repeatedly, a tone of exclusion….including an inability to take criticism….when “feminist” issues come up. I think stan would go so far as to tell you I am a solid leftist….I work for the liberation of the poor and for equality for everyone….i am not an example of the “racist patriarchy”.
    But its an easy gambit….eh?

    I am addressing the issues and Ive asked several questions.
    Most importantly; the one above about class…and this concept of what is meant by “naturalising”. Since there are bilogical differences…..one must dig down to find the sedimented history of these dynamics and how biology is shaped. And a final final note on the comment about rad fems argument on the long history of male power. I agree…but it doesnt change the central issue of class analysis. I would probably argue that critique anyway, actually, but to me its beside the point. Marx saw class all the way back to pre feudal society — and while much of what he said can be debated…he did address this.

    22 December 2005, 4:51 am

  17. john steppling:

    follow up link that I find related and solid.
    http://www.cddc.vt.edu/feminism/mar.html

    22 December 2005, 8:38 am

  18. Charles Brown:

    Stan, Glad to get in with a bunch of people who are interested in discussing these.

    I gotta go to court on a PPO ( man is threatening to kill my client his wife), but, briefly for now, I was thinking about rape and domestic violence as precisely the point at which the natural impinges.

    As a main example, the reason that the problem/archcrimes of rape and domestic violence are not symetrical, i.e. men are the culprits and women are not equally so is the natural fact of sexual dimorphism. That is, biologically, in our species, in general ( normal curves and all that) males are physically stronger than females. Women beating up men is not a problem because of the general biological difference. If men weren’t generally physically bigger than women , this wouldn’t be a problem. So, there is biological determination on that.

    Again quickly, and I will elaborate later, gender is “overdetermined”. It is culturally determined _and_ biologically determined ( all the post mods, and the rest to the contrary notwithstanding). It is an error in the other direction to throwout the biological issues and only analyze it culturally.

    I’ll respond issue by issue on the quotes of Marx and Engels as we go along.

    22 December 2005, 9:56 am

  19. Emerson:

    “MacKinnon again:

    “[According to Marx] Which sex gets which task is first a matter of biology and remains so throughout economic changes.

    “Disussing woman’s work in the home, Marx states: ‘The distribution of the work within the family, and the regulation of the labor-time of the several memebers, depend as well upon the differences of age and sex as upon natural conditions… Within a family… there springs up naturally a division of labor, caused by difference of sex and age, a division that is consequently based on a purely physical foundation.’” [from Capital, Vol I]”

    This is intellectually dishonest. Here is the actual quote in context from Capital. (Section 4, Fetishisms of Commodities).

    “For an example of labour in common or directly associated labour, we have no occasion to go back to that spontaneously developed form which we find on the threshold of the history of all civilised races.[31] We have one close at hand in the patriarchal industries of a peasant family, that produces corn, cattle, yarn, linen, and clothing for home use. These different articles are, as regards the family, so many products of its labour, but as between themselves, they are not commodities. The different kinds of labour, such as tillage, cattle tending, spinning, weaving and making clothes, which result in the various products, are in themselves, and such as they are, direct social functions, because functions of the family, which, just as much as a society based on the production of commodities, possesses a spontaneously developed system of division of labour. The distribution of the work within the family, and the regulation of the labour time of the several members, depend as well upon differences of age and sex as upon natural conditions varying with the seasons. The labour power of each individual, by its very nature, operates in this case merely as a definite portion of the whole labour power of the family, and therefore, the measure of the expenditure of individual labour power by its duration, appears here by its very nature as a social character of their labour.”

    http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm

    Either MacKinnon or Goff (I don’t have a copy of her book but I plan to chase it up) has made a mistake.
    The phrase “Within a family… there springs up naturally a division of labor, caused by difference of sex and age, a division that is consequently based on a purely physical foundation.[from Capital, Vol I] is NOT Marx’s words, but a misleading reformulation to fit either Stan’s or MacKinnon’s view. Or just a typo…

    The natural conditions Marx is talking about is that of “varying with the seasons”. That “differences of ages and sex” exist shouldn’t be contentious - how those differences effect the distribution of work is another matter. But Marx isn’t dealing with that question here, but he is trying to show (you have to read the whole chapter) how commodities have to be seen first at products of labour and not as a relation ship between “things”.

    Similarly dishonest:
    ““Mother/woman is, is nature [no typo here]; father/man works, is social. The creative, active, transformative process of work is identified with the male, while the female is identified with the matter to be worked upon and transformed. To the extent that man’s relation to nature has, for Marx, a social aspect — and it does — his relation to woman will have a social aspect. This may be the meaning of Marx’s statement ‘The production of life, both of one’s own labor and of fresh life in procreation, now appears as a double relationship: on the one hand as a natural, on the other as a social relationship.’ [from The German Ideology] (MacKinnon, p 15)”

    Again, if you look at the actual quote in context, Marx in the Critique of the German Ideology is making a polemic against an idealist conception of history and historical changes.

    “Marx and Engels each take for granted crucial features of relations between the sexes: Marx becasue women is nature and nature is given, and Engels because woman is the family and he is largely uncritical of woman’s work and sexual role within it.” (p 13)”

    How can anyone who has read Origins of the Family consider that Engels is uncritical of “woman’s work and sexual role within it”?

    What Engels was trying to establish (using what materials there were at the time) is that women’s subordination in the family was not an eternal, “natural” thing but changed in different societies in different material circumstances:

    “Thus, on the one hand, in proportion as wealth increased, it made the man’s position in the family more important than the woman’s, and on the other hand created an impulse to exploit this strengthened position in order to overthrow, in favor of his children, the traditional order of inheritance. This, however, was impossible so long as descent was reckoned according to mother-right. Mother-right, therefore, had to be overthrown, and overthrown it was. This was by no means so difficult as it looks to us today. For this revolution — one of the most decisive ever experienced by humanity — could take place without disturbing a single one of the living members of a gens. All could remain as they were. A simple decree sufficed that in the future the offspring of the male members should remain within the gens, but that of the female should be excluded by being transferred to the gens of their father. The reckoning of descent in the female line and the matriarchal law of inheritance were thereby overthrown, and the male line of descent and the paternal law of inheritance were substituted for them. As to how and when this revolution took place among civilized peoples, we have no knowledge. It falls entirely within prehistoric times. But that it did take place is more than sufficiently proved by the abundant traces of mother-right which have been collected, particularly by Bachofen. How easily it is accomplished can be seen in a whole series of American Indian tribes, where it has only recently taken place and is still taking place under the influence, partly of increasing wealth and a changed mode of life (transference from forest to prairie), and partly of the moral pressure of civilization and missionaries. Of eight Missouri tribes, six observe the male line of descent and inheritance, two still observe the female. Among the Shawnees, Miamis and Delawares the custom has grown up of giving the children a gentile name of their father’s gens in order to transfer them into it, thus enabling them to inherit from him.

    Man’s innate casuistry! To change things by changing their names! And to find loopholes for violating tradition while maintaining tradition, when direct interest supplied sufficient impulse. (Marx.)

    The result was hopeless confusion, which could only be remedied and to a certain extent was remedied by the transition to father-right. “In general, this seems to be the most natural transition.” (Marx.) For the theories proffered by comparative jurisprudence regarding the manner in which this change was effected among the civilized peoples of the Old World — though they are almost pure hypothesize M. Kovalevsky, Tableau des origines et de l’evolution de la famille et de la propriete. Stockholm, 1890.

    The overthrow of mother-right was the world historical defeat of the female sex. The man took command in the home also; the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude, she became the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for the production of children. This degraded position of the woman, especially conspicuous among the Greeks of the heroic and still more of the classical age, has gradually been palliated and glozed over, and sometimes clothed in a milder form; in no sense has it been abolished. ”

    Or that the nuclear family had not always existed:

    “Before the beginning of the ’sixties, one cannot speak of a history of the family. In this field, the science of history was still completely under the influence of the five books of Moses. The patriarchal form of the family, which was there described in greater detail than anywhere else, was not only assumed without question to be the oldest form, but it was also identified – minus its polygamy – with the bourgeois family of today, so that the family had really experienced no historical development at all; ”

    http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/preface2.htm

    In the Condition of the Working Class in England(1845)
    Frederick Engels quotes a letter from a worker describing a friend whom he found at home darning his wife’s stockings while she worked in the factory. The friend explains himself as follows:

    ‘Thou knowest when I got married I had work plenty, and thou knows I was not lazy. And we had a good furnished house, and Mary need not go to work. I could work for the two of us, but now the world is upside down. Mary has to work and I have to stop at home.’

    - Which was describing a situation where women were replacing men in the textile industry in Manchester - they were paid less by the capitalists but worked just as well with the new machinery.

    Engels goes on to say

    “…we must admit that so total a reversal of the position of the sexes can have come to pass only because the sexes have been placed in a false position from the beginning. If the reign of the wife over the husband, as inevitably brought about by the factory system, is inhuman, the pristine rule of the husband over the wife must have been inhuman too.”

    http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/condition-working-class/ch08.htm

    The only quote I can find where Marx seems to naturalise woman is “As William Petty puts it, labour is the father and the earth is it’s mother”

    Or in full:

    “The use values, coat, linen, &c., i.e., the bodies of commodities, are combinations of two elements – matter and labour. If we take away the useful labour expended upon them, a material substratum is always left, which is furnished by Nature without the help of man. The latter can work only as Nature does, that is by changing the form of matter.[13] Nay more, in this work of changing the form he is constantly helped by natural forces. We see, then, that labour is not the only source of material wealth, of use values produced by labour. As William Petty puts it, labour is its father and the earth its mother.

    http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm#054

    And as you can see, what he is talking about is that human wealth doesn’t just come out of human labour by itself, but human labour acting on material objects (whether its ore, wood, flax, etc). There is the unfortunate analogy between the earth as mother - but its William Petty’s phrase, and Marx is hardly alone in symbolising the Earth as Mother (I imagine there would be other feminists who would have done so).

    So YES, Marx and Engels were influenced by the gender conventions of the time and had certain prejudices (for example Engels thought that socialism would allow monogamy to be more real) after all they were only human. But to argue that they have nothing to contribute (or contribute wrongly) to an understanding of womens’ oppression is just plain wrong.

    This is his most famous passage in The Origins of the Family:

    “What we can now conjecture about the way in which sexual relations will be ordered after the impending overthrow of capitalist production is mainly of a negative character, limited for the most part to what will disappear. But what will there be new? That will be answered when a new generation has grown up: a generation of men who never in their lives have known what it is to buy a woman’s surrender with money or any other social instrument of power; a generation of women who have never known what it is to give themselves to a man from any other considerations than real love, or to refuse to give themselves to their lover from fear of the economic consequences. When these people are in the world, they will care precious little what anybody today thinks they ought to do; they will make their own practice and their corresponding public opinion about the practice of each individual – and that will be the end of it.”

    http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/ch02d.htm

    22 December 2005, 12:10 pm

  20. Emerson:

    Sorry about the long post, but it was necessary to show how MacKinnon has misframed Marx. I wish I could make the quotations stand out from my comments to make it a bit clearer.

    To Yolanda and Elaina.

    I agree with you that women’s oppression is deeply real and personal. I agree that left-wing men can be sexist, can act in ways which undermines a woman’s confidence and reinforce that oppression.

    I agree that you have the right to criticise DWEMs (Dead white european men) or anyone else, just like anyone else. Especially if they just dismiss your view or arguement as “silly”.

    But, I do have to respectfully disagree with you around the question of analysis and personal lived experience.

    I do not believe that because I am not black I cannot understand racism or even attempt to conceptualise racism in society (btw, my parents are Taiwanese).
    I do not believe that because I’m not Bill Gates that I cannot understand the pressures that a capitalist faces in trying to stay in the black - or how that has repercussions in the way they act towards their employees.

    However, I do believe that any woman’s experiences are real and valid - but that doesn’t help me choose between different analysis of womens’ oppression made by different feminists (women).

    How does it help me choose between a small-l-liberal feminist who says that the fight for women’s liberation is almost over because women have almost full legal equality, or a radical feminist who says that all men oppress all women and that means there can be no common ground between the two?

    I agree with you that Marx (or Engels) is not the be all and end all. I agree that there is a whole range of issues that they haven’t addressed, or that feminists (or other political traditions) have nothing to say about womens oppression (for example, I’m currently reading Julia Davidson on Prostitution, Power and Freedom).

    But I don’t think that Marx and Engels can be dismissed as flippantly because they are DWEMS just as your views shouldn’t be dismissed because you are a women.

    22 December 2005, 12:54 pm

  21. Stan:

    “Within a family… there springs up naturally a division of labor, caused by difference of sex and age, a division that is consequently based on a purely physical foundation.”

    Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I (New York, Internaitonal Publishers, 1967) I, 351-2.

    That Marx “is trying to show (you have to read the whole chapter) how commodities have to be seen first at products of labour and not as a relationship between “things”.” is not under dispute here. This was at the center of this work. The issue is how women were characterized (1) and how the characterization of women’s speculative historical development is supposed to somehow explain gendr as a system of power that is subordinate to and held completely within Marxist “doctrine.”

    ***”We see, then, that labour is not the only source of material wealth, of use values produced by labour. As William Petty puts it, labour is its father and the earth its mother.

    ***And as you can see, what he is talking about is that human wealth doesn’t just come out of human labour by itself, but human labour acting on material objects (whether its ore, wood, flax, etc). There is the unfortunate analogy between the earth as mother - but its William Petty’s phrase, and Marx is hardly alone in symbolising the Earth as Mother (I imagine there would be other feminists who would have done so).”

    Actually, you\j won’t find radical or materialist feminists doing this at all… because it is a sexist formulation. Man-male = doer, Woman-female = done to.

    This is precisely why feminist attention to epistemology is so critical to overcoming leftist patriarchy… and I suspect why there is such resistance to it, as this attempt to dismiss this is here.

    ***”So YES, Marx and Engels were influenced by the gender conventions of the time and had certain prejudices (for example Engels thought that socialism would allow monogamy to be more real) after all they were only human.”

    That is EXACTLY the point.

    ***”But to argue that they have nothing to contribute (or contribute wrongly) to an understanding of womens’ oppression is just plain wrong.”

    This is a defensive representation of the argument being made here. I do again suggest folks move along to Part 2, where some of this is addressed. These “prejudices” are not merely prejudices, but ideas that are reflections of male power, just as the errors of bourgeois ideology are a reflecton of bourgeois power.

    My argument here is not whether Engels “contributes anything” — which is your formulation, and a sly one indeed — but that MacKinnon and a host of feminists haqve long ago and by orders of magnitude surpassed Engels’ understanding of women’s oppression, often using a dialectical and materialist approach to do so.

    ***”How does it help me choose between a small-l-liberal feminist who says that the fight for women’s liberation is almost over because women have almost full legal equality, or a radical feminist who says that all men oppress all women and that means there can be no common ground between the two?”

    This is fallacious on two counts. It is a false dilemma, and it misrepresents — in a stunningly antagonistic or ill-informed way — what radical feminists say. They do NOT, repeat NOT say that all men oppress all women, or thaqt there can be no common ground between them. This is manipulative formulation that is refusing to engage the actual content of this argument by throwing up smokescreens.

    I correspond with numerous feminist, including those from this “radical” current, and collaborate very closely with a couple of them, including one who was the editor for my last book.

    No one is arguing that Engels was not trying to give a materialist explanation of women’s condition. What we are arguing is that his specific account was unsuccessful… and that doctrinaire Marxists have been resistant to the point of hostility to feminist research and theory that are more successful and far more current. As a proud Marxist, I have no intention of letting it stand when my comrades flop down Engels at every conversation of gender as a way of saying, “We Marxists have the answers, and here is the core of that answer.” We don’t. And it is not.

    And I remain convinced from my own personal experience, as a man who still struggles with the identity and personality I developed with from my socialization as a male, and an amplified alpha one at that, that much of our resistance to these insights is rationalized on the intellectual surface (giving us these painfully drawn notions) but has its source in our emotional attachments to our masculinity (defensiveness being emblematic of that).

    This pushing of Engels on gender by Marxist circles has the flavor of religious fanaticism, as in trying to protect people from subversive or unclean thoughts… here, read what the Good Book says about it.

    22 December 2005, 1:34 pm

  22. john steppling:

    Yolanda:
    See if you can follow this. I didnt say you were silly. I sad I thought that comment was silly. I still do. You may well disagree and it seems plenty of others do. Fine.

    But dont patronize me, and this is the point I was trying to make on tone. I am afraid i dont see the fact of identity (being a woman, male, black, homosexual, etc) as automatic validation — as providing automatic posession of the truth.

    All perspectives are unique. All provide to the greater discourse. The dominant discourse is, in fact, an interesting way to approach a lot of this. But my point is about class (mostly). You can rhetorically repeat “why dont you understand” until you get tired of doing it…..but its simply a rhetorical gambit and little else.

    I respect much of what you’ve written…but just where does an apology enter into this? for saying your comment is silly? Im afraid that is not anything more than my opinion…..for which I see no reason to apologize. There is something creepily authoritarian about asking for it, actually.

    You did clarify some of what I found wrong in the previous post. That said, this is a comments section that is (I think) about debate and analysis. Not about agreement. Now Ive already been called racist and patriachal….which is….well, whatever. Pointless I suppose.

    My question is about class….be nice if that were addressed. Not this absolutist claim to the truth based on identity.

    22 December 2005, 2:02 pm

  23. Charles Brown:

    Yes, of course, it is not uncommon to criticize persistence in the Marxist approach as like a religious approach. Myself, I think of it as the same as a biologist’s allegience to the theory of the cell, evolution, genetics and ecology. Or the physicists’ disciplining themselves to the principles of relativity or quantum mechanics. In other words, it is sort of the opposite of a religious attitude. It is a scientific discipline.

    On Engels and the history of humanity since the breaking up of the ancient communes, we can say the same thing that Lewontin and Levins said about him in their _The Dialectical Biologist_ with respect to biology. Engels got it wrong a lot of the time, but who got it right where it counted. On the issues we debate here, Engels gets it right when it counts. That ain’t a religious statement, but a scientific one, a materialist statement.

    Take anthropology, another science. I have to disagree that the evidence in anthropological science since Engels contradicts his very important claim that pre-class exploitative, pre-private property societies had equality between women and men. I would say that modern ethnology confirms him in spades. This is very iomportant that he is correct on this. For this reason alone, his book is very fresh for 2005, not some old white man’s racist , sexist talk.

    Just to try to demonstrate this point most simply, ethnology has lots of evidence that the old forms of society traced kinship or family lines THROUGH WOMEN. They were matrilineal. Given that kinship is very , very important and central in organizing ancient society ( Morgan’s _societas_), that people traced their family through their mothers demonstrates to some extent the status of women in those societies. The “parental” male was the mother’s brother ,not the biological father.

    Then there are the first European contacts with indigenous American societies, and their noting the equality of status and position of women and men.

    I will try to get some more citations from anthro texts and the like, but it is fairly well settled that Engels is quite correct on this issue of the equality of women and men in ancient society ( i.e. all of human society for the first 193,000 years of the species, the male supremacist family, private property and the state only arising about 7 or 8,000 years ago, though Engels wasn’t aware of these time proportions).

    He is correct to call “civilization” the world historic defeat of the female sex.

    This scientific (not religious) fact knocks out a major portion of arguments such as that of Mackinnon, with all due respect.

    To jump to the issue of natural and cultural determinations of gender, Marx supposedly thinking women are “natural” and men are “social/cultural”, to roughly paraphrase. Nahhh.

    This formulation is not “together” , shall we say. Gender is not a thing. It is a relationship. Male/female. The natural aspects that constitute the gender woman have corresponding _natural_ aspects in the gender man. People are assigned to gender based on their sex. Females get pregnant, have different physiogical functions from males, they are generally smaller physically than males, etc. Males don’t get pregnant. That’s a biological fact about males that impacts their gender role. It’s an absence - they don’t have the child in their “stomach” for nine months- but it is still a natural fact about males that defines their gender. My point here is that , contra Mackinnon, it is not that Marx thinks males are not “natural” and women are (!). It is that woman and men have different physiologies _sexually_ , and this is part of the determination of their genders.

    I already wrote on how a couple of prime gender defining issues of today - rape and domestic abuse - have a significant natural determination to them : because of sexual dimorphism, men are generally stronger than women, and so the fights are unfair. With rape there is an element of the complementary difference between the “shape” or “state” of female and male genitals, that makes it difficult for a woman to force a man to have sex. So, physiologically, besides the greater strength of males in general, the crime of rape is almost exclusively a male crime against females ( or other males), but not of females against males. That’s a very important feminist point or fact or whatever in 2005 , today, right now, not thousands of years ago. It is a biological determination of _gender_. Because gender is not a thing. It is a relationship. Male supremacy is a relationship , not a thing. It is a characteristic of the relationship between women and men.

    I’ll continue to develop this, but for now, I have demonstrated why gender _is_ in part naturally determined. It is not just woman-gender which isnaturally determined , in part, but man-gender as well. And you can be sure that Marx knew it.

    Marx is most likely correct that the original division of labor was based on sex. His reference to original division of labor in the “sex act” is misleading in the sense that it is not just the different functions of genitals in intercourse; but rather, women get pregnant; men don’t get pregnant. That’s a big point of division of labor. Especially back on the savanna in Africa somewhere, 200,000 years ago without any of the modern “conveniences”. Women breast feed and men don’t. Men are physically stronger, in general , than women, so they might be better in fight with a predator or might be a bit better at killing prey. These bare _natural_ differences have a profound impact on the organization of human society, it’s original division of labor.

    These are all scientific, not religious thoughts. This is critical, not dogmatic thinking.

    22 December 2005, 5:06 pm

  24. Elaina:

    It seems by the tone of some of the posts here that my responses will garner more “respect” if I dissect the posts, rephrase what’s said in the passages marked from Engles and Marx, say the same shit about them a bunch of times in more and more emphatic ways, to sound more authoritative, and then rest humbly on my own conception of their “correct” interpretation.

    I’m not gonna do that. It’s been done here.

    I still, after reading everything here, don’t think that Engels is fully correct. I won’t think of myself as a kind of “heretic” for thinking that. I still think that there is a wealth of interpretation of personal experience in the radical feminist body of writing that doesn’t, that CAN’T be heard without proper analysis and CRITIQUE of theory that springs forth from a primarily male experience.

    I’ll repeat it, NOBODY SAID THAT ENGELS IS COMPLETELY WRONG OR THAT THE THEORIES PUT FORTH IN ORIGINS ARE COMPLETELY USELESS.

    “Critical thinking,” in my experience, comes more from dealing on-the-ground with the corrupt effects of living in patriarchy as a poor, working, white woman and dealing on a daily basis with a world that tells me that because I AM who I AM, I am something less.
    “Critical thinking,” as I execute it in my daily life, relates more to telling my boss that no, he can’t touch my ass, without getting fired over it. I have to think critically about how to tell someone that I work with that I won’t tolerate him not doing “women’s work” on the job, because it means that I essentially get paid less than he does, and finding a way to say it that won’t, again, get me fired.

    There are all kinds of “critical thinking.” They don’t always involve cracking a book.

    I will say this: I think that race, gender, and class-based oppressions have been co-evolutionary. I do not, however, see the “natural” dissolution of these problems with the amorphous yet all-encompassing “revolution”.

    I mean, if the men in the movement aren’t willing, NOW, to admit that they are at least in some ways misguided about gender and race, and that they don’t have all the answers, how the hell is it supposed to just naturally dissolve after revolution?

    And I will add that I honestly feel for women who find themselves alienated, in a “revolutionary-movement-culture,” where they’re supposed to prove every bit of the wrong that they experience IN LIFE by referencing something in a book written by a white man.

    I have a lot of other questions, but I have to go now. I am especially interested in what was stated above, in regards to sexual dimorphism. Is the rate, or measure of sexual dimorphism not at all influenced by cultural adaptation? Is sexual dimorphism the same across all cultures? I have a degree, a B.A., in anthropology and have never come across any literature that has a definitive answer to that. If it’s out there, I’d like to know about it, and maybe study on it for myself.

    22 December 2005, 5:24 pm

  25. Charles Brown:

    These are not MacKinnon’s words, but Marx’s:

    “The distribution of the work within the family, and the regulation of the labor-time of the several members, depend as well upon the differences of age and sex as upon NATURAL conditions… Within a family… there springs up NATURALLY a division of labor, caused by difference of sex and age, a division that is consequently based on a PURELY PHYSICAL foundation.”

    That is naturalization.

    ^^^^^^

    I agree it is naturalization. It is just that in my opinion Marx is correct that the original division of labor springs out of the natural and complementary differences between females and males (See above).

    Idealism often falls into forgetfulness that humans are still animals. We are more than animals too, but we are animals. In fact , it is the mark of a religious approach that disregards the animal side of humans. We are an animal species. We have a species-being. We have culture which transcends our natures to an extent, but our culture has not launched ourselves beyond our physical bodies and physiological processes, including our sexuality, reproduction etc. , two sexes. This is true right now as well as 200,000 years ago.

    ^^^^
    Engels goes on very explicitly to say that the hypothetical first division of labor between men and women is not inherently exploitative. Only with economic class does he first posit exploitation.

    Again, the historically speculative nature vs nurture dichotomy is a false one. that Engels does not choose a biologicallly determinist fallacy does not mean he has arrived at an accurate geneology of women’s oppression, and it certianly doesn’t mean that his speculations are somehow determinative of how women and their allies struggle against patriarchy now.

    ^^^^
    Except that the anthropological data, i.e. the non-specualtive approach, seems to back Engels on this, with all due respect. I’ll dig out my anthro texts tonight and this weekend (for Christmas). I already gave the argument from “matrilineality” and early contact with indigenous Americans ( and Africa too; See the Egyptian concept of Maat, Woman/Man Equality principle, and among the Twe, et al) .Pre-class societies that Europeans encountered in conquering the world, did have very equal or equitable relations between women and men. That’s what I was taught in anthropology before I studied Marx and Engels. In other words, Engels is substantially correct on the geneology of women’s oppression. See the intro to the International Publishers’ edition of _The Origin_ by anthroplogist Eleanor Burke Leacock, as another example. There is also Evelyn Reed http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evelyn_Reed

    Yea, that issue is not determinative of how the struggle against male supremacy goes now, sure. It is pertinent though. For example, it establishes that male supremacy is not in our genes. So, that is pretty important in putting a major guideline on the current struggle. For one thing it means it won’t take genetherapy :>) !

    The point is, whatever women’s liberation struggle we shape now ( and it is mainly men who will have to change, no ?) should not discard Engels’ basic start, but rather build on it. Engels doesn’t have major mistakes. He has unfully developed fundamentals that must be retained and complemented. It is sort of like Darwin was complemented by Mendel’s genetics and then DNA theory. You need more than Darwin, but you don’t discard Darwin.

    ON the history of feminism, think of how far advanced the Soviet Union’s law was for its day on women’s liberation issues compared to capitalist countries. In 1917 , they had right to an abortion, readily available divorce, a general provision of equal rights for women, women to have jobs, i.e. out of the home and into social labor _ with free childcare_ (!).
    Think about the women’s movement in 1917 ( look at Angela Davis’ _Women, Race and Class_). What Margaret Sanger was marching for ( minus eugenics !), the SU was making law in its new country. That was extraordinary. It reflected the advanced thinking that Engels book and approach gave to Marxism. Look at Clara Zetkin, Inessa Armand.

    Look at Bebel http://www.marxists.org/archive/bebel/1879/woman-socialism/index.htm
    19 December 2005: Added to the August Bebel Archive (1840-1913):

    Woman and Socialism, 1910 edition of work written in 1879. Bebel was a major Marxist theoretician and wrote a long book on women’s liberation. You don’t have any major bourgeois ,male thinkers writing anything like this, paying this kind of attention to women’s liberation.

    Following Marx and Engels, (male)Marxists made women’s liberation , feminism, an important aspect of the Communist program.

    Compare the demands of feminist of that day with the Marxists’ program.

    What male Marxists should do is _continue_ the initiative of Engels , and develop it. Not discard Engels glorious start for males to be feminists !

    And it is men who have to change in the main. Women make the demands, so men know what to do, what women feel as the oppression. But it is men who have to change.

    Marx said in the “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 “that the measure of the level of development of a society is the status of women, or words to that effect. That makes feminism fundamental to the Marxist outlook.

    22 December 2005, 6:40 pm

  26. Yolanda Carrington:

    Hello Mr. Steppling,

    I can’t speak for anyone else, but Ms. Carrington here is not afraid of dialogue and debate. It is offhand dismissal that I have a problem with. You didn’t just disagree with me, you called my ideas “silly.” Now in a perfect world, this name-calling would be a mere annoyance, but in THIS world, we have male supremacy and misogyny. We live in a world where men regularly demonstrate intellectual “supremacy” over women by condemning their perspectives as invalid, biased, or just plain “silly.”

    I think this is why Elaina and Julian responded as sharply to you as they did. They are well-versed in how patriarchy works, as are most of us who participate on this blog. It appears to me that they recognized a centuries-old patriarchal device in your “critique”—as did I—but then again, I can’t speak for them. If you want to call this recognition “a tone of exclusion” or “an inability to take criticism,” go on ahead, brother.

    Josiah brought up a good point about epistemology and privilege, I think. The “alternative” epistemes of oppressed peoples always risk dismissal from dominant groups, a phenomenon you no doubt understand in regards to class. Does the ruling class have the same ways of knowing as the workers? Would they ever acknowledge those ways of knowing as valid? I don’t think so.

    If I understand you correctly, you believe that gender oppression, unlike class oppression, is based on genuine difference. You also believe that gender oppression will go away once class is abolished, no? Correct me if any of my assumptions are wrong.

    If my assumptions are correct, then you and I are arguing from two different schools of thought. From my research and my own experience (as I have written about on FS), gender is as made-up as class. It is based on the PERCEPTION of difference, rather than real difference, and just like class, it is completely arbitrary, dependent on one’s nationality and culture. If you don’t believe me, just ask any queer person (like me) or transperson. I will also assert that “woman,” “African”, and “homosexual” are fabricated categories, just like “serf” and “master.” Somebody had to create them, didn’t they?

    In light of Stan’s very important and prolific work on this subject, it feels redundant for me to emphasize this next point, but in response to your challenges, I will.

    Men AS MEN oppress women AS WOMEN, whether it’s in a capitalist society, a socialist society, or none of the above. Gender oppression is a form of domination based on perceived essential difference, and there is an entire (distinct and separate from class) ideology that props up the gender system. We can call that ideology “patriarchy,” “male supremacy,” or any other term, but it is an ideology where Man is the “Normal” Subject and Woman is the “Abnormal” Object (or any other superior/inferior dichotomies you can think of). The gender system will not go away when we abolish class oppression. For anyone to assert otherwise would be analogous to proscribing antibiotics for a viral infection.

    I’ma gon’ on and end here, but I have one more thought to add, Mr. Steppling. Actually, it’s a question. Have you talked to the women where you live about their experiences with gender, then and now? I don’t presume to know their lives, but I’ll wager that they experienced life distinctly as women under the old system. I’ll also wager than it wasn’t all good times on the gender front.

    Either way, dear sir, you won’t know for certain until you talk with them. They are the only people who can tell that story.

    I thoroughly enjoyed this debate. Know that. :)

    Yolanda

    22 December 2005, 6:53 pm

  27. Yolanda Carrington:

    One more thing,

    I just saw your latest post, and I understood the first time that you were calling my IDEAS, rather than me, “silly.” That still does not make it okay. After all, the ideas CAME from me.

    “Yolanda—See if you can follow this.”

    Please read that again.

    Sir, if I couldn’t follow this, you would not hear word one from me.

    I am just as smart as you are. Thank you.

    Yolanda

    22 December 2005, 7:31 pm

  28. Yolanda Carrington:

    And John, I never asked you for an apology. Julian suggested that you apologize.

    I wonder if you are reading these posts.

    Yolanda

    22 December 2005, 8:13 pm

  29. Emerson:

    To Stan.

    “This is fallacious on two counts. It is a false dilemma, and it misrepresents — in a stunningly antagonistic or ill-informed way — what radical feminists say. They do NOT, repeat NOT say that all men oppress all women, or thaqt there can be no common ground between them. This is manipulative formulation that is refusing to engage the actual content of this argument by throwing up smokescreens.”

    OK, I admit that was hyperbole. But you still haven’t answered the question of how to choose between different analysis given by different women (on the basis of identity) - and that point is still valid unless you believe that all feminist theorists are the same. That’s another smokescreen on your part.

    And you still haven’t answered my question about the first quote: Is it a typo or has MacKinnon reworded Marx to suit her arguement?

    22 December 2005, 9:17 pm

  30. john steppling:

    Yolanda:
    I enjoy it too….and appreciate when it becomes a genuine debate.
    However, where is there a problem in thinking someone’s ideas are silly? Now, again, i quoted the paragraph i found silly.I think to dismiss someone from serious consideration on a topic because he or she is dead and white or german or whatever is rather to miss the point. That, again, was what i found silly. Why is this such a problem? Julian and Elaina PERCIECED something and they assumed it was patriarchy or whatever…i dont know….but that is what it was….an assumption. There is nothing patriarchal in feeling a particular comment to be silly.

    “You know, an apology would be nice (thanks Julian!), ” Well, sounds like your asking for an apology to me.

    But on to the last post:
    What kind of arrogance is it to assume I dont speak with women? Here or anywhere? See, I find that so bizarre. You can read a lot of my writing at SWANS and at CYRANO’S JOURNAL….though most is on culture and art….some touches on issues here. Of course it wasnt perfect in Poland under communism….but please stop putting words in my mouth….I never said it was….I said in many(most) ways it was better for women in the communist system here. Thats what I said. And its true.

    Now you say men oppress women in any society….its based on a percieved difference. Im not sure I understand this….since there IS a difference. Women bear children for openers….etc./ And I suspect PEOPLE will oppress people….in large measure…anywhere….but under a system in which class is done away with, women will be emancipated through an emancipation of labor exploitation. Now at that point if we live in a society in which repression still exists…and domination…and exploitation…of ANYONE….we could examine why and how. Male domination of women needs to be examined in terms of why it happens? You claim it happens in ALL cultures and societies>? I would have to think about that (Im not sure pre capitalist societies all demonstrated gender oppression)….but WHY does it happen?
    Im arguing for what is probably a pretty orthodox marxist critique…..insofar as historical forces are at work….and I find that to seperate gender issues from the history of material forces is to make a mist