"Mr P.A. Van Heusden" wrote:
> On Thu, 17 Jun 1999, kelley wrote:
>
> >
> > marxist explanations of inequality: gender inequality is embedded in and a
> > tool of a more fundamental system of class oppression and exploitation.
> > women are oppressed, exploited, dominated by men b/c it's functional for
> > capitalism:
Peter, your reply to this is excellent, with the qualification that I'm beginning
to wonder if we should not save our breath to cool our porridge when faced with attacks on marxism that begin, "marxist explanations of X," which are, so far as I can tell, almost invariably followed by a travesty of what the most untutored marxist has ever claimed.
While Engels's work is of course inaccurate in most of its details and most of its explanations (but still a splendid work), it is exactly opposite to kelley on this: it claims, in effect, that male supremacy was the origin of class society as such, and hence ultimately of capitalism.
(The splendidness of Engels's book lies in its asking all the right questions even while giving mostly wrong answers. It remains to this day unsurpassed in its posing of those questions. Attacks on it for its answers are thus wholly beside the point.
In particular, he brings out magnificently the problem: there was a time when things were not as they now are: how did this come about? This simple query, for example, is the query that Judith Butler spends 294 pages in *Bodies that Matter* trying to hide from. The whole book is about how to dodge this question.)
> reserve army of labor, depresses wages, women perform the bulk
> > of unpaid "reproductive" labor in the home which, for many marxist
> > theorists, is not really productive labor. on proyect's marxism list there
> > was debate about unionizing sex workers. sex workers were said to be
> > parasitic labor,
Exactly: there was a *debate*; various things "were said." Anti-marxism could not exist without the continuous aid of the passive voice.
> not 'real' labor because it merely provides sex etc rather
> > than contributing valuable social goods/services to the economy. [stems
> > from rosa luxembourg's claims that the reproductive (childbearing, rearing,
> > housework, sexual and emotional comforts/nurturing) labor performed by
> > bourgeois housewives renders women "the parasite of a parasite" --b.s. to
> > that one, i say].
"Stems from": Peter's answer is correct, but it needs to be added that this is impossible partly because all too few current marxists are familiar enough with the great Rosa's writings for either her contributions or her errors to affect anyone.
>
> I think this description of Marxist Feminism relies more on perjorative
> descriptions of the field than on what (at least today) makes up Marxist
> Feminism. (For people wanting a good description of M-F, have a look at
> http://csf.colorado.edu/soc/m-fem/index.html, or Martha Gimenez's essay
> at http://www.cddc.vt.edu/feminism/mar.html)
I would also recommend (by Martha) "Population and Capitalism," *Latin American Perspectives* IV (Number 11, Fall, 1977), 5-40; I will post the bibliography of several other important essays by her when I can find them among my clutter of papers.
> Firstly, Rosa L. was
> certainly not a feminist (I think she might have been offended if someone
> had called her one), and thus quoting her views on women is about as valid
> (for describing M-F) as quoting any other non-feminist Marxist - e.g.
> Gramsci.
Gramsci held that the wives of workers were petty bourgeois because they did not exchange their labor against capital and worked in isolation. Talk about blaming the victim! Of course most anti-marxists make an exception of the great Gramsci, whose Prison Notebooks can be twisted for idealist purposes.
> Secondly, the kind of 'instrumentalist' Marxist description of
> women's oppression - as if it were a tool to be (fairly arbitrarily)
> picked up whenever the time seems right - is not necessarily accepted by
> modern proponents of M-F (e.g. Lisa Vogel).
Actually, Marx's and Engels's early remarks on male supremacy made it more or less impossible to use an instrumentalist analysis (though one has to constantly remake this point in intra-marxist debates). (Remember Marx, "the slavery inherent to the family"). Kelley must think marxists believe class society was born with capitalism.
>
>
> Finally the comments of some people on a Marxist list about sex workers
> are hardly a criterion for judging either Marxism, or Marxist-Feminism. In
> particular the 'productive labour' debate often starts off on the wrong
> foot by confusing what for Marx was an analytical catagory (productive vs.
> non-productive labour) with a value judgement (useful vs. non-useful
> work). Any so-called Marxist who argues that non-productive labour is not
> 'real' labour is a poor Marxist, and an even poorer friend of the working
> class.
This elementary error has always baffled me. It would seem not to be beyond the reach of a reasonably bright 10th grader to understand the distinction you make (and all but the most unmarxist marxists make). It is rather elementary that, there being more things in the world than there are words in any language, many words must perform double or quadruple or ... duty, and everyone except anti-marxists more or less honors this aspect of language, who immediately leap to the comforting conclusion that by "unproductive" marxists mean worthless. Of course it is the opposite. On the whole unproductive labor is of more human worth than is productive labor. A mob hitman is a productive laborer (he creates surplus value), while someone nursing an ill person for free is unproductive labor.
I would only add that seeing Marxism as essentially a functionalist or pragmatic doctrine is probably an occupational disease of sociologists, pro- or anti-marxist. Martha Gimenez is an honorable exception. I hope to take up in a later post a suggested marxist approach to the actual nature of male supremacy under capitalism and the central importance of the struggle against it *within the class* to the class struggle itself. This topic has arisen again and again on all the marxist lists, with the most radically opposed views being expressed in the debates. To speak of "the" marxist position on women's oppression is childish.
Thanks again Peter for a concise and clear handling of these issues.
Carrol
>
>
> Peter