Re: AUT: Re: Why Women Do the Drudgework

[Harald Beyer-Arnesen <haraldba@xxxxxxxxx>]

Katha and Laura, I will below try to answers to your response
to my remarks on the need for an increased aggressiveness.

        To my claim:

        2) To be lasting, the emancipation of women must have as
        its basis women's own capacity to enforce it.
        Or in other terms, the "average" woman must become more
        agressive, something which within capitalism also means
        that more women will have to see the inside of a prison.

        Katha responded:

        I think you're taking an awfully romantic view of crime
        and incarceration here. the US is imprisoning more and
        more women, but it's hard to see how their crimes represent
        an emancipatory urge: low level drug dealing, usually under
        the direction of a boyfriend  or other man; prostitution,
        also a male-run business; child abuse or murder, often,
        again, with a drug or violent boyfriend angle -- or mental
        illness. I think you'd have a hard time making the case that
        physically aggressive women achieve more liberation. In US,
        many poor inner-city women are very aggressive -- they carry
        weapons, they belong to gangs, they hit their kids, fight each
        other, they hit men back who hit the (black women and black
        men kill each other in equal numbers, while white women are
        much less likely to kill than be killed by white men. In both
        races, though, the women are usually defending themselves
        against abuse).
        But are  inner-city  women more liberated than white--or
        black -- middle-class  women? hardly. Less, in many ways.

        and Laura:

        Emancipation? Are you sure it is what you ment? if the
        answer is yes than......NO, thanks. I prefare to stay
        out of the "average", and fight for a better (communist)
        way of achieving *emancipation*


No Katha, I am not romantasizing. I am de-romantasizing what
the emancipation of women qua women could possibly mean within
capitalism. It is hard to see how such an emancipation could
take place without being reflected in the social power relations
as a whole. This means more women bosses, entrepenurs, generals,
soldiers, police, prison guards, torturers, bureaucrats, exploiters
and oppressors: you name it,? and also more women behind bars.

Secondly (Laura and Katha) aggressiveness does not neccessarily
imply physical violence, nor is there anything negative with a
certain degree of aggressiveness, on the contrary it is at the
very foundation of any freedom worthy of its name. Still, it is
very unlikely that an increased general level of aggressiveness
among women would not also take more destructive forms. Most
likely this increased aggressiveness in its constructive and
destructive forms would be reflected in the criminal statistics,
with among other consequences that the typical woman criminal
would no longer be the shop-lifter.

In the last instance equality within capitalism always means
the equal opportunity to become an oppressor and exploiter,
and also to be oppressed and exploited on equal terms.

I hope the above was somewhat helpful of making clearer how I
think about these things.

Harald









  in solidarity,
  Harald Beyer-Arnesen
  haraldba@xxxxxxxxx



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