>>> rc&am <rcollins at netlink.com.au> 01/22 1:36 AM >>>
hi charles,
Charles Brown wrote:
> Charles: Isn't there much evidence
> that male supremacy or patriarchy (sexism) is
> pre-modern ? just as pre-modern
> as class exploitation ?
Angela: well, kinda. but this is a bit like saying that because societies produced a surplus before capitalism, then surplus-value (capital) has been around for yonks. ______ Charles: Those are sort of rhetorical questions. I would say the answers are "yes". Marx has the category "surplus product"in Capital to encompass both the surplus-value of capitalism and the exploited wealth in feudalism and slavery. All CLASS societies have exploitation in common. This is a transhistorical category ( though not pan human because of the pre-class societies). Another term for it is "private property". Private property, the patriarchal family and the state are transhistorical from slavery through capitalism. Thus, a common substance to the exploitation and oppression of women over the span of history before and including capitalism ("modern" ) is within the Marxist paradigm. ___________
Angela: what we might call the racism of ancient times does not look much like what the racism of today is. it isn't organised in the same way, it doesn't have the same presuppositions. _______
Charles: The category that corresponds best to "racism" or national chauvinism is the state. The conquest of other peoples by armies arises within the complex patriarchal family-private property- state. __________
Angela:
you can't begin t understand sexism if you think it is historically continuous, and i don't think you can defeat it if you make it into something that 'returns from the past'.
Charles: I disagree. Male supremacy cannot be defeated unless we see it as part of the complex patriarchal family- private property-state which originates about 5000 years ago. Just as the proletarian revolution is special because it abolishes not just capitalism but ALL CLASS EXPLOITATIVE SOCIETY, so also is women's liberation, because it abolishes the ancient male supremacy that is of a piece with class exploitative society. The working class is the first exploited class that cannot free itself without freeing all other oppressed and exploited groups by Marx's idea. ______________ Angela; (similarly, like you can't comprehend the nationalism of eastern europe if you believe it is the return of (to) something that has a more or less continuous relation to the past, only to have been freeze-dried by socialism (if you like to think in terms of modernization) or kept back from its fulfilment by socialism (if you happen to think this nationalism is a good thing). the nationalism of eastern europe is unthinkable outside the modern - it's an entirely modern thing, which nonetheless relies for its claims on a certain dream about the past. _______
Charles: No, the current nationalism of eastern Europe is plain old nationalism . I'd say socialism sort of put it in jail for 40 years. But with the destruction of European socialism, imperialism was glad to "free" nationalism and encourage it. Divide and conquer based on national or cultural differences is a method of modern imperialism and the ancient Roman imperialism. ______ Angela: now, 'lm' dreams about the future. they're utopians, and like all utopians they often say some interesting things, but they do so in a way in which the conflicts at the heart of what it means to be gay or lesbian (for instance) in the city is translated into a narrative of the joys of the city, thus pretending that there are no conflicts there - the conflict is implicitly presented as between the pre-capitalist and the capitalist, and anti-gay bigotry as a thing from the past. ________
Charles: Please reiterate this dream sequence. (Run that by me one more time). Are you saying anti-gay bigotry has modern origin ? Just as you say male supremacy and surplus-value do ? ________ _______
Angela:
this is a dream, as zizek would say, of eradicating the antagonisms which are actually the condition and constitutive principle. and, before you think this is pomo stuff (zizek is not a pomo, but only is to those who think non-anglophone philosophy today is all pomo), ______
Charles: You know what I am finding now ? NOBODY is a postmod. I think they must have been a dream. _______________ Angela:
here's the fat, hairy guy:
"... in the selfsame relations in which wealth is produced, poverty is produced also; that in the selfsame relations in which there is a development of the productive forces, there is also a force producing repression.... the humanitarian school, which takes to heart the bad side of present-day production relations. It seeks by way of easing its conscience, to palliate even if slightly the real contrasts ... The whole of this school rests on interminable distinctions between theory and practice, between principles and results, between idea and application, between content and form, between essence and reality, between law and fact, between the good side and the bad side. The philanthropic school ... denies the necessity of antagonism ... it wants to realize theory in so far as it is distinguished from practice and contains no antagonism. It goes without saying that, in theory, it is easy t make an abstraction of the contradictions that are met with at every moment in actual reality. this theory would therefore become idealised reality ... they want to retain all the categories which express bourgeois relations, without the antagonism which constitutes them and is inseparable from them." [marx, 'poverty of philosophy', progress press, 1978, pp115-16] _____ Charles: Yes, I was just reading this for another discussion. Could you be more specific how it applies to the issues here.
I am certainly in favor of highlighting the antagonisms of bourgeois categories, unity and struggle of opposites, unity and struggle of theory and practice, transformation of categories into their opposites, etc. in short dialectical materialism, Marxism-Leninism , etc., etc.
Charles
angela