firstly, my comments about m-f were directed toward a specific variant of m-f that emerged early on in second wave feminist theory and were eventually found inadequate. because they were inadequate they spawned other analyses of women's oppression, capitalism: particularly socialist feminist, black feminist, and third wave feminist theories. if you'd read carefully, the examples of authors i provided made this clear.
I never claimed Rosa Luxemborg as a m-f, rather i referenced a quote that MacKinnon, an m-f, used as one of the starting points of her analysis. [1982, p 7 "Feminism, Marxism, Method and the State: An Agenda for Theory" in Keohane et al _Feminist Theory: A Critique of Ideology" That claim, as C.M has said, was the basis for the construction of her m-f analysis of women's condition.
I did make it clear that m-f sees gender oppression as the basis of class society but i did not expand on this a great deal because i was writing to a marxist and i figured he already knew this. the work of m-fems in the 70s and early 80s started from marx and engel's theory, critiquing, strengthening and elaborating it--particularly since m&e were working with limited and inadequate historical records, and what m-f's saw as a faulty model of the relationship between gender and class dynamics in contemporary society [firestone, rubin, hartmann, barrett, nicholoson and others]
the claim that gender and racial oppression is functional for capitalism is raised by charles all the time on this list. why don't you attack him? what is meant by that is not that it is a functional prerequisite but rather that it has a acquired a material basis in the relations of production and reproduction of contemporary capitalism.
why don't you explain to me how gender inequality is NOT integral to and does NOT perform the functions i cited: depressing wages, workplace segregation, etc.
whether the traffic in women was an historical prerequisite for class society is really quite irrelevant, ultimately. we need to analyze what's going on now and why. i would still contend that the claim that gender oppression is fundamental to and a model of all other forms of oppression is problematic for a number of reasons which i detailed in a post on firestone not too long ago. it is precisely this claim that troubled women of color, lesbian feminists, etc because the argument tended to suggest that eradicating gender oppression was fundamental to eradicating other forms of oppression.
raising the argument that took place elsewhere re sexworkers unions was merely a concrete example of how, even today, marxist-feminist analyses continue to see reproductive labor as secondary to and derivative of the more fundamental and more important productive labor. is this not why marxist feminists once advocated the socialization of reproduction? they sought to socialize, that is bring women's reproductive labor in the world of paid labor, based on m&e's claims. heidi hartmann, a key theorist in the critique of m-f and the theoretical development of what i called socialist feminism writes:
"First, early marxists, including Marx, Engels, Kautsky, and Lenin, saw capitalism drawing all women into the wage labor force, and saw this process destroying the sexual division of labor [oh how wrong they were, m.a.]. Second, contemporary marxists have incorporated women into an analysis of everyday life in capitalism. In this view, all aspects of our lives are seen to reproduce the capitalist system and we are all workers in the system. And third, marxist feminists have focused on housework and its relation to capital, some arguing that housework produces surplus value and that houseworkers work directly for capitalists. While the approach of the early marxists ignored housework...the two more recent approaches emphasize housework to such an extent they ignore women's current role in the labor market. Nevertheless, all three attempt to include women in the category working class and to understand women's oppression as another aspect of class oppression. ...While our 'problems' have been elegantly analyzed, they have been misunderstood. The focus of marxist analysis has been class relations...While we believe marxist methodology can be used to formulate feminist strategy, these marxist feminist approaches discussed above clearly do not do so; their marxism clearly dominates their feminism."
carrol thinks my characterization of early m-fem was 'gross'. well i direct you to read those early works and show us how they didn't characterize 'reproductive' labor as secondary to 'productive' labor.
the typology characterized contemporary marxist feminism as aligning more with socialist feminism--precisely to distinguish it from the inadequacies of marx and engel's writing on the topic. it is not anti-marxist, this classification, but rather an attempt to mark the distinction that hartmann notes above.
i think carrol that it's your job to detail what marxist feminism is. i have no obligation to prove myself to you. you tend to find everything inadequate anyway. it hardly seems worth my effort. i find attacks on those who are sympathetic to or who consider themselves marxists extremely unforunate and really quite destructive. my encounters with this sort of rhetoric only makes me want to distance myself from such positions to the point that i'm altogether ready to say, 'forget it' because not only to i have to fight the dominant ideology in the academy in order to get my work accepted, i also have to fight marxists. nonsense.
unfortunately, the only decent marxist feminist i ever worked with--zillah eisentstein--is a rare breed in academia. most others are non- or avowedly anti-marxists because of their association with marxist and socialist politics in the 60s and 70s. contemporary feminists, women in their 20s and 30s, are even rarer. you might want to reconsider how why you feel it necessary to dismiss everything that you don't agree with point by point. what good does that do. why not a more sympathetic, internal critique?
kelley