>I'm tired of leftist homophobia being couched in the sort of rhetorical
>nonsense posted below. Imagine if someone -- because the left did to its
>detriment -- said, let's not talk about the national question (racism) or
>the woman question because it detracts from narrow straight-jacketed
>interpretation of the "class" struggle.
Yes, it has been stated it here, not a few times, that the woman question is a distraction from the real issue: class. In fact, early on in the life of this list, the absence of discussion, despite 6 women posting nearly daily, was so obvious that one woman was moved to entitle a post "Ignore this it's about women and feminism."
Indeed, there have been bitter debates about it, including one very long debate ignited when someone said, "I can understand how race is socially constructed and I can envision a society in which race doesn't matter; I just can't say the same for gender."
I have basically given up, even though I've had women write to thank me for being such a vocal commentator on the topic. I'm sure they've written Jenny, Yoshie, Diane also. My observation of this list's operative dynamics haven't given me much hope. Most lefty men here are ignorant of feminist issues, often get the claims of feminist writers wrong (mouthing what antifeminist disinfo).
I do not mean to deride those men who do a lot to advance feminist ideas, it's not that they are absent. Do we talk around the topic? Sometimes--like when someone dares bring up porn flicks or something like that--and not a few people on the list will note that they think it's not a "real" topic deserving of list attention -- in spite of Doug's OWN claims about what he thinks this list ought to discuss: economics AND culture.
At 11:19 AM 7/4/2004, Carl Remick wrote:
>>From: joanna bujes <jbujes at covad.net>
>>
>>The bearded one said that the U.S. had to solve the race question before
>>it could do anything.
Capital, Volume 1: ``
In the United States of North America, every independent movement of the workers was paralysed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.''
(he wrote in _past_ tense}
Better Marxist scholars here will correct me if I'm wrong, but I think this is an example of de-historicizing an analysis of race/racism--turning it into a "product not a process." You seem to suggest that Marx would necessarily care about it the same way(s) we care about it today. This, below, isn't offered as a simplistic suggestion that Marx was a "racist." Rather, it's to suggest that maybe this famous line is more about how to advance class struggle in the 'correct' direction:
http://www.americancivilwar.org.uk/articles/art_marx.htm
On Slavery
It may be an uncomfortable fact to some of Marx's more modern adherents that his doctrines showed no presentiment of what we now call racial equality. Indeed he was typically Victorian in the assumption that his doctrines applied to a 'civilised' - that is, the western, industrialised world. His attitude to race is even more evident from his unhappiness when one of his daughters married a Creole political activist. He confided in Engels that his son-in-law suffered "...a blemish commonly found in the Negro tribe - no sense of shame ... in making a fool of oneself." (24)
Whatever his private attitude to race, Marx had a very clear view about how abolition would be the first step for enabling slaves in America to be effectively mobilised by the Union to overcome the old order, which he saw represented not only by the Confederate states themselves but also those pro-Union 'border states' in which slavery was still legal. Without abolition, he argued practically, the Confederacy would be able to mobilise all of its able-bodied men into military service. He was impatient with Lincoln's diplomacy for keeping the Northern 'border states' in the war on the Union side, advocating force be used to make abolitionism a declared Union war aim, while simultaneously transforming the struggle into "revolutionary waging of war". Marx must have felt fully vindicated when the first black troops entered into the Union service shortly after the Emancipation Proclamation (January 1863). He also hailed the thaw in Britain's relations with the US in the wake of the Trent Incident, to the extent that the two countries signed a treaty in 1862 for jointly suppressing the slave trade. (25)
"We're in a fucking stagmire."
--Little Carmine, 'The Sopranos'