Engels & Gender — Part 3
A note: Out of defensiveness, some will protest that MacKinnon has “attacked” Engels. But the critique of Engels by MacKinnon happened decades and decades after Engels published OFPPS, and the questions she raises are actually relatively straightforward and should have been expected in any rigorous critique. Those questions should have been raised from inside the Marxist tradition as part of its critical method, which MacKinnon herself uses as a yardstick. Her critique is not constructed as an “attack” on Engels, unless any critique is labeled an attack. It was made necessary by the failure of Marxists to critique themselves on gender, and the propensity to deploy this text in lieu of a serious engagement with the questions raised by radical feminism/womanism.
The defense that Engels attempted to explain gender from the point of view of materialism misses MacKinnon’s point. Lamark also attempted a materialist explanation of evolution. But his explanation was wrong.
The perennial regurgitation of Engels as the last theoretical word on gender was not an engagement by Marxism with feminism at all, but a method of dismissal. We can correct this, but the first step is to overcome our defensiveness, and treat these women as the comrades that they are. -SG
Heretofore, this post will be pure MacKinnon (from Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, pages 25-30):
To assert that frequent and varied sexual intercourse necessarily appeared degrading and oppressive to women fails to explain the “origins” of a society in which it is so. Consequence is presented as cause. The explanation for socia change is: virtuous women wanted husbands. (Unvirtuous women, presumably, were having intercourse with the unfaithful husbands.) Men are ready at aqll times for “the pleasures of actual group marriage.” Here we have the sexed men, the firgins and the whores, characters in the basic pornographic script before the dawn of history.
Engels goes on: “Just as the wives whom it had formerly been so easy to obtain had now acquired an exchange value and were bought, so also with labor power, particularly since the herds ha ddefinitely become family possessions … according to the social custim of the time, the man was also the owner of the new source of subsistence, the cattle, and later of the new instrumen ts of labor, the slaves.” Engels connects tings and socialmeanings, relations between things and relations between people, with extraordinary offhandedness. How did wives come to be “obtained,” much less sold? Womenm were sold because herds were family possessions? What can the power of “mother right” have been if the wife was purchased by the husband? Labor power came to be sold “just as” women were sold? How did these social divisions come to be “the social custom of the time”? What made herds considered wealth in the first place? Why did not women own or tend herds? Why were not husbands bought and sold? Could it really be that slavery arose because “The family did not multiply so rapidly as the cattle. More people were needed to look after them; for this purpose use could be made of enemies captured in war, who could also be bred just as easily as the cattle themselves.” Because cattle reproduce more efficiently than people, slavery arose?
In contrast with this approach to explaining the social status of a non-class group [women], Marx asked: “What is a Negro slave? A man of the black race. The one explanation is as good as the other. A Negro is a Negro. He only becomes a slave in certain relations. A cotton spinning jenny is a machine for spinning cotton. It becomes capital only in certain relations. [Hornborg actually confronts this as "machine fetishim" in his book "The Power of the Machine," but MacKinnon's point is still valid in this limited context. -SG] Torn from these relationships it is no more capital than gold in itself is money or sugar is the pric e of sugar.” Yet even Marx was apparently convinced that what makes a domesticated woman is not social relations, but being a person of the female sex. Engels procedes as if one can explain the creation of the social relations of slavery by pointing to the existence of the need for the work the slaves performed.
Engels also notes that “the exclusive recognition of the female parent, owing to the impossibility of recognizing the male parent with certainty, means that the women — the mothers — are held in high respect.” Out of a context that grants specific social meaning to descent and maternity, there is no basis to believe that social respect is a necessary correlate of the only possible system of tracing descent. Mothers’ recognizability need not maek them respected. As a prior matter, it is most unclear why women, a biologically defined group, are “in the house” at all, or, rather, why the men are not there with them. Engels says, “According to the division of labor within the family at that time, it s the man’s part to obtain food and the instruments of labor necessary for that purpose. He therefore also owned the instruments of laobr, and in the event of a husband and wife separating, he took them with him, just as she retained her household goods.” To Engels, this state of affairs does not require explanation. Woman’s place in the household is an extension of the division of labor between the sexes — originally non-explitative and “for purposes of procreation only.” How did it become housework? This question is addressed at most by: “The division of labor between the two sexes is determined by quite other causes than by the position of women in society. Among peoples where the women have to work far harder than than we think suitable, there is often there is often much more real respect for women than among out Europeans.” Engels does not specify the “quite other causes” that determine this division oflabor between the sexes. It does not seem to have occurred to him that the social division of labor might influence the social position of the people who fill the roles, as well as the reverse. He reassures us that the hard-working woman of barbaric times “was regarded among her people as a real lady … was also a lady in charcter.” Just in case anyone is worried that socialism, by having women do real work, would make women unladylike.
No other divison of labor in Engels’ account divides work along the same lines as another human characteristic in the way sex does. Other than the division between the sexes, divisons of labor separate “men” in production. Each advance in the division of labor supercedes the previous historical one. “The division of labor slowly insinuates itself into this process of production. It undermines the collectivity of production and appropriation, elevates appropriation by individuals into the geenral rule, and thus creates exchange between individuals… Gradually commodity production becomes the dominating form.” It would seem that when work is divided between women and men (as it continues to be under capitalism without being superceded) Engels feels no need to explain it, but sees it as justified by unspecified “quite other causes.” But when work is divided between men and women in production, particularly in class society, it lies at the root of the exploitation of one class by another.
Even when Engels grants that women can engage in production — not just socially necessary labor — he cannot manage to conclude that they derive social power from it. To the extent that women have power, it comes from their role as mothers and is exercised in the home. Men are workers, even when women engage in produciton and men are recognizable parents. Men derive neither power nor social position from paternity; they derive these from their role in production. Engels’ analysis of paring marriage precisely tracks liberal theory. A split between work and home is defined in terms of a split between male- and female-dominated spheres, and socil power for women is reckoned not by relation to production but by sex.
Engels’ purpose is to explain how male cominance occurred. Yet it is present before it is supposed to have happened. The picture of pairing marriage that emerges looks like nothing so much as class society under male supremacy: women are “obtained” or sold as wives, they labor in the house; men own and control the dominant means of subsistence, women are sexually possessed. This arrangement does not describe the exceptions to the general rule late to emerge full-blown in class society, but the general condition of women’s life in this period. Although antagonism between men and women is not supposed to have begun until civilization, the relations described here do not look especially harmonious, unless one thinks of them as somehow suitable. One is left wondering how female monogamy, “rather right,” and other oppressive features of class society could make women’s lives subtantively worse and sexual relations newly antagonistic.
With the generalization of privte property and class relaitons, the communal family was replaced by the modern nuclear family. The nuclear family is characterized by monogamy “for women only” for the sole purpose of “mak[ing] the man supreme in the family and to propogate, as the future heirs tohis wealth, childrenindisputably his own.” Only the husband can dissolve the marriage bond. Female monogamy is accompanied by male adultery, hataerism, and prostitution: “the step from paring marriage to monogamy can be put down to the credit of men, and historically the essence of this was to make the position of the women worse and the infidelities of the men easier.” The initial stimulus for monogamous marriage came when (and because) improved labor productivity increased social wealth. Considerable wealth could concentrate in the hands of one man. To guarantee that the man’s children would inherit this wealth, “father right” had to replace “mother right,” a change that Marx said “in general … seems to be the most natural transition.” In Engels’ words, “Thus on the one hand, in proportion as wealth increased it made the man’s position in the family more imortant than the woman’s and on the other handcreated an impulse to exploit this strengthened position in order to overthrow, in favor of his children, the traditional order of inheritance.”
Thus female monogamy arose from the ocncnetration of wealth in the hands of one “man” and from the need to bequeath this wealth to his children. Again many connections between material objects and their social meanings are simply presupposed. Engels assumes that an increase in wealth stimulates private appropriation of that wealth; that private wealth is male owned; that an increase in male-owned private wealth creates a need for its inheritance; and that an increase in wealth by husbands has an effect on relaitons with their wivesin the family. He also assumes that the mother’s power in the home both can and must be overthrown in order to guarantee that inheritance will pass to his children, even though under pairing marriage paternity was traceable becasue female fidelity was demanded. And that descent systems autmatically correlate with power.
Why would an increase in the produced numbers of any object above immediate need constitute of itself an increase in wealth, in the sense of having the social consequences wealth has for the individual owner? If increased productivity created surplus wealth, why was it not communally owned? The existence of more things does not dictate the form of social relaitons their organization will take. [I would argue this point, but not from Engel's perspective, because he and MacKinnon essentially agree on this -- MacKinnon is showing how Engels contradicts himself. Again, see Hornborg on machine fetishism. -SG] Must one assume that people inherently desire to have private possessions? If so, the prosect for socialism under any but subsistence conditions seems dim indeed. Why did not women acquire wealth for themselves? [Of course, they occasionally did, and in Europe this led to witch trials to expropriate them. -SG] Why was the wealth acquired by men not considered owned by the paired unit? Just becasue the man did the labor of tending herds, why did that mean he owned them? Surely a division of labor does not autmatically produce a corresponding division of ownership.
Why does having private property imply a beleif that it is important that someone, specifically one’s “own” children, acquire it on one’s death? A discussion of the social meaning of private property is needed to attach property ownership to fathers through marriage and to children as heirs. Possessiveness of objects, parental possessiveness of children (“his children”), possessiveness of spouses for each other, all require grounding in the meaning of social relations. If, for example, private property ownership reflects positively on personality in a given culture, and if death culturally means the end of personality, one might want to pass on property to someone with whom one identifies. Inheritance becomes a defense against death by perpetuation of the self through the mediation of property ownership, to which end monogamous marriage is (at least for men) a means. Whatever the account, one is needed. Engels proceeds as if the need to bequeath (or own) property is a physical quality of the objects themselves.
Why does an increase in social wealth give menpower over women in the household? Even presumng that wealth is male-owned, why is it relationally signficant between the sexes? Under pairing marriage, women worked in the hosue, where they were supreme as well a ssocially coequal. Passng property on to children did not require that “mother right” be overthrown; wealth could pass through the mother, whose maternity is seldom in question. What changed under monogamy was the importance for social power of production outside the home. The reason for that shift in social meaning and its effect for gender relations within the home remains unexplained.
[End of part 3]
Rafael de Echeandia:
I will be 72 on January 9 and politically quite conservative.
31 December 2005, 8:01 pmThis does not mean I can’t read your articles and evaluate there logic.
I just read your article An Open Letter to Congress etc. in the new “The Southern i” It followed by the introductory comment of Indy Paper Debutsin Hampton Roads.
I have no argument with your right to your views, but the incredibly volatile writing style is the yelling of a maniac undergraduate student. Cool it and represent yourself in a more worldly manner so your readers pro and con can concentrate on substance instead of style.
Stan:
Go give someone else orders, Rafael. I’m several decades beyond undergrad age.
And post your more worldly comments in the appropriate place.
31 December 2005, 10:27 pmTarge Lindsay:
Stan. You are a hero from my point of view. I read Full Spectrum Disorder and reviews of Hard Rain. Your observations re the events in Haiti and how they affected you and your decisions were helpful in understanding what happens in occuppied territories and how the occuppiers denigrate the occuppied.
Your letters to the troops in Iraq were inspiring and persuasive.
Your commentary on the empire and the progression of mistakes in Iraq had me looking for your articles every day. Your insight seemed to be intuitive…at least it showed what you had learned from your experiences as a soldier. Your comment re Bush and the neocons were likewise enlightening.
Your observations that it was going to take some action, not blather, to unseat the powers that be were unsettling, but convincing.
However, since you have concentrated on gender and on Engles so much recently, you are losing me and from looking at the dirth of comments, I suspect that you are losing other what were once avid readers.
Someone once said that leaders need to look over their shoulder now and then to make sure that someone is following.
Hopefully, you will soon finish the scholarly presentations on Engles and the philosophy of Marxism and come back to earth where your readers are.
1 January 2006, 12:22 amTarge Lindsay:
BTW, your articles like the one on Evo Morales is why I started reading you in the first place. Good stuff!
1 January 2006, 2:33 amElaina:
Hey Stan–
Happy New Year from TN.
I got TFTOTS in the mail two days ago. I’m reading and underlining like a madwoman. I’m dizzy between that and the Dworkin and the Manifesto and TOFPPS.
EGAD!!
1 January 2006, 5:17 amStan:
Happy New Yerar back atcha, sister. Don’t strain your eyes with all that studying.
Hi Targe,
I appreciate the accolades. But respectfully, the perspectives contained within the more popular writing I have done are a direct outgrowth of my own engagement with these other issues and ideas. The posts on Engels are pretty substantial, I believe. Obviously, this is a different stratum that other stuff might attract, but hopefully we can walk on both these legs.
If you liked Full Spectrum Disroder, I hope you will like “Sex & War,” the third book coming out (hopefully in Feb), that picks up where FSD left off, studying the relations between imperialism and masculinity.
Never doubt that I will continue to weigh in on the depredations of imperialism. But I will take this opportunity to encourage those who share that interest to look at the posts on “gender” at this blog. This is an important connection. Start with the series on the fallout from Abu Ghraib at:
http://feralscholar.org/blog/?p=67
http://feralscholar.org/blog/?p=66
http://feralscholar.org/blog/?p=65
http://feralscholar.org/blog/?p=64
http://feralscholar.org/blog/?p=63
http://feralscholar.org/blog/?p=62
http://feralscholar.org/blog/?p=61
Then see the piece on the US military and how it responds to the issue of rape:
http://feralscholar.org/blog/?p=165
http://feralscholar.org/blog/?p=166
http://feralscholar.org/blog/?p=167
http://feralscholar.org/blog/?p=168
http://feralscholar.org/blog/?p=169
There is no mention of Engels in any of these, only very topical stuff, but they show how this is anything but in the clouds.
Thanks again for the generous review of other work, and Happy New Year.
Here is an appropriate excerpt from FSD that relates to this, I think, and to the name of this blog:
Nothing so contributes to the reproduction of class in our society, aside from property relations, as the institutionally enforced intellectual division of labor. It dissects knowledge into academic ghettos, and it attempts to freeze working class people out of the intelligentsia altogether.
Credentials!
Capitalism needs its credentialed mandarins, and the mandarins often define even who are the “legitimate†critics of capitalism. Specialization and credentialing are the keys to this legitimation, and the keys to the exclusion of would-be transgressors.
Those of us who lack the credentials must be excluded from the intelligentsia, because the inclusion of our voices, the legitimation of our voices, calls into question the legitimacy of the whole fucking system.
I feel this personally, both as a former enlisted man and as a leftist. As a leftist, I have sometimes encountered powerful pressure to circumscribe my own role, and to limit my own public discourse, to criticism of US military policy… to serve the revolution only as a witness.
Leave theory to the experts. Just like the military [with its officer caste system].
Working class people can and must become intellectuals. We can and must study diligently, debate, self-criticize, re-study, and continually sharpen our ability to play intellectual hardball.
We can’t be lazy about it. It’s always easier to pretend you know something than it is to learn about it. It’s always easier to be cute than it is to be rigorous. It is easier to talk trash than practice the humility of the serious student. We have to work, harder than the bourgeoisie, because we are at war. Perhaps the biggest “war lie†of all right now in the United States is that our ruling class is at war only with external enemies. Look around.
“United we stand.†Who the fuck is “we?†Is the general facing the same situation as the private? Are the moguls of agribusiness sharing hardship with the people whose communities they pollute? Is the vicious preppy prez sharing his privileges with the South Asian family running a fleabag motel for a corporate chain? Is John Ashcroft getting personally involved to gain justice for the community of Tulia, Texas where dozens of Black families were railroaded into prison by racist cops and judges?
We who are doing that labor to become working class intellectuals can never allow ourselves to be intimidated by advanced degrees – just as we cannot become anti-intellectuals. We can never afford to contain ourselves within predetermined specializations. The experience of working class intellectuals will enrich theory. Our stories will keep things real. Our practice will define the future.
And we deserve to be heard.
1 January 2006, 9:56 amLaurent:
About your own R-evolution
By glancing at some of your readers comments, and referring to an earlier post of mine, it looks like you have indeed advanced deep into ever more sophisticated concepts and abstract thinking. This, to the point of confusing and loosing those of your readers, that did not either study academically, or were not exposed to such traumatic succession of events in their life, (like your own) that it would have produced a surge of extraordinary ‘visions’ about the harsh reality of this world, and prompted them to ACT NOW before it all ends up in tears.
Your average net-reader is NOT connected to the reality of our planet. i have been drifting along the West African coast, and whilst staying in Cape Verde, I visited the suburbs of towns. There, Compounds with no tarmac roads, no running water or sewages, no glass windows on houses, but bars and locks and, overpowering human Faeces, Urine and hot moisture saturated red earth scent nearly blinding you, children prostituting themselves to fishermen, with parents turning a blind eye, for a ration of protein – this is the norm – When i shared my outrage with a local French expat friend, he glared at me and replied: Laurent, these people are rich! they live extremely well. You have not see Djibouti, where kids are standing before your eyes, starving, whilst rotting alive, slowly eaten by worms!
Re 72 year old’ Raphael’ lecturing you, never mind his lack of elegance, what you wrote in the open letter to congress is “extremely revolutionary”. Now, by no means this implies that you were wrong or right to write this, (I do not believe in dualism) but the huge forward leap that you required your ‘conventional-unacquainted-with-the-reality’ readers was obviously too much to make, especially for those with aging legs. The old boy has some merit only to care to read your articles…let him yak a bit. Oh well, we should not mind.
- about the congress letter– I was reading it later during the night. I had my baby boy sleeping on my laps. At the end of it, I posed, contemplated him, whilst meditating on your words…I guess you know how I felt.
Still, i’ve looked on history and revolutions…really they never achieved the original goal, systematically replacing one oligarchy with another. (beside, and for example Stan, who instigated the French Revolution?..you know don’t you)
Everybody expect governments to lead, be wise, fair and be kind to their people. That is dualist chritian [patriarchic] thinking. Kindness does not exist as an absolute rule in nature.
I think it will be the other way round. For humanity to succeed, and TRUE civilisation to finally blossom, it will be down to each one of us souls, without the need for collectivist revolutions, to make our own, respective, transition.
The elites, to me, are like the devil’s advocate. They are the teachers testing the pupil. When each one of us, has gained the visions of likes of Stan Goff, then they won’t be a need for revolution. And yes, citizens may, like you, have to meet Hell face to face first, before moving they lazy ass.
- About all the 72 year old Raphael – including my own father.
I have a sort of ‘Raphael’ has a father. HE was well educated, and whilst very conservative, he was ant-racist, and used to be suspicious of those in power, and of the ecclesiastics. Today, I could not even dream of starting a discussion on any controversial issue. Its not the age. It’s a consequence of our march, or lack-of, towards our own Personal R-evolutions. Life does not sit still for a second. Dogma, Education and Media echoing the ‘official’ general consensus, freezes our primal instinct for survival and our ability to remain supple.
Rambling on,
What I am trying to say?
You may have at least 3 classes of readers:
1 – Those academics and Intellectuals, who are fluently versed, and glad to receive, and tackle whatever you present to them.
2- The Left Wings Supporters, that can recite you Kapital at once, and were around before you started to publish.
3 – And a bunch of ‘curious, confused, white-right wing-christian-middle-class guys that are trying to understand what the hell is going on.
So the question is:
1- Do you want to preach to the converted, have big group crying and hugging sessions?
2- Meet like-minded thinkers, and teachers, (if they are any left that you have not surpassed yet) whit whom you WILL elucidate the great questions of this world, whilst everything is falling apart outside the library?
3- or take the bull by the horn, and show him the light
Maybe there is a need for you to publish under three different blogs, as i am sure that your Marxist supporters need you, and that our academics must have news from you.
Furthermore, issues like patriarchy and the military, deserve there own site.
But please, don’t forget the bulls. Bull Fighting is a tragedy, selecting by crossbreeding over generations the nastiest genes from otherwise magnificent peaceful creatures.
Looking back at your childhood, your military career, then your shift to freedom, your contribution in FTW, then your first book, Haiti a Soldier’s memoirs, then moving on to Full Spectrum Disorder, to finally see you featured in SRA….What a change! What a move…what a r-evolution!
Your opinion on Military and Gender is priceless.
To some, you are a Hero Stan. To me, you are a blend of El Che-Colonel Kurtz–a 50’s French Rive Gauche philosopher.
The problem? The pace of your progression, compared to your devoted readers, is ten-fold! You are living everyone standing behind.
Your original writing style was of a revolted, rebelling soldier, spontaneous, human, sometimes clumsy but witty. Full Spectrum was beginning to show two sides: the intense abstract intellectual, and the rebelling soldier, but then, already, I was getting confused: who were you aiming to?
So going back to the Raphaels et all, take my case for example:
I told you: I consider myself a right winger…I have been asking questions, looking into alternatives, now for the last 6 years, spending at least 20 hours per week into it! And I am still not sold on the Karl thing.
Still,
There is a funny article called Left wing, Right wing, Chicken wings, written by Matt Taibbi,
http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/21354/
Really, this is torturing me: where do I stand politically?
So I tried to figure it out, testing the “political compassâ€
http://www.digitalronin.f2s.com/politicalcompass/index.php
By all means, check it out: some of the questions are cheekily formulated…and I would love you to write out a quick review about it…
I got chocked and horrified! to find out the test results:
According to Compas, I am a Left Wing Lebertarian! The only consolation is that Nelson Mendela, Ghandi and the Daila Lama are too. Oh well, I am supposed to feel better don’t’I?
Now, on top of my mid-life crisis, I have to deal with this affliction…I think I’m going to go “covertâ€
My warmest and sincerest best wishes for 2006 Stan.
1 January 2006, 1:23 pmStan:
“You may have at least 3 classes of readers:
1 – Those academics and Intellectuals, who are fluently versed, and glad to receive, and tackle whatever you present to them.
2- The Left Wings Supporters, that can recite you Kapital at once, and were around before you started to publish.
3 – And a bunch of ‘curious, confused, white-right wing-christian-middle-class guys that are trying to understand what the hell is going on.”
I hope that readers live outside these boxes. I’m just this guy, and it’s just this blog. I do whatever it is I do. And it does whatever it does. The real work gets done by the mass organizations.
Happy New Year to you, as well.
I’ll have to carve out some time to check the links.
Thanks.
1 January 2006, 3:09 pmTarge Lindsay:
Thanks, Stan, for taking the time to read and especially to respond to my post above.
Your logic is pretty convincing as much of it as I understand.
After reading the correspondence between you and the commentors in the post below, I am amazed and appreciative at the time you give to your readers.
In fact, I do not see how you can do it.
No need to respond. Thanks again.
1 January 2006, 4:52 pm