AUT: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Class and other social divisions

["cwright" <cwright@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>
> Interesting theory that of Carol Pateman as rendered by you. (I have
> not read her myself.) Whether an adequate theory or not, I would still
> consider "individualist patriarchy" as a contradiction in terms.

Yeah, it could get that way.  I was really just trying to give a very quick
idea of where my thoughts were coming from in using the word patriarchy, a
term I have never been comfortable with, but which I have found more
meaningful over the years.  Not much more to it than that.

> While I am all for calling a spade a spade, I am sceptical of
> calling every thing a spade. Maybe this is another one of those
> discussion on the meaning of terms but for me at least the term
> patriarchical society implies much more than the relationship
> between men and women, in similar ways that capitalism implies
> more than exploitation, which surely did not arise with
> capitalism. Thus I also find Commie00 defintion of unpaid work of
> women (or men for that) as waged,  less than enlightening.
> It completely takes away what distinguishes it from the housework,
> cooking, cleaning, the looking after small children, old and sick
> that actually already is or becoming waged. (It also makes me
> wonder why you call yourself a marxist, commie00.)

Except for the last sentence (a bit tart there Harald), I would have to
agree.  To collapse unwaged work into waged labor because it is indirectly
connected to wage labor seems really to miss the point.  I also don't think
that patriarchy came with capitalism, but that capital took up pre-existing
oppression of women and radically reorganized that oppression.  Part of the
notion of enclosure should, IMO, include the separation of the home from the
workplace and community (in other words, there was not really a separate
concept of home/community/workplace pror to capital.)  That enclosure
involves the gendering of household labor (a double move), but it also
involves the expansion of women's subordination into all spheres of life.  I
am using Pateman to try and think through that second aspect.

> Among the things that patriarchical society implies is the importance
> given to personal relationships of power throughout society as a whole.
> That also imposed on the patriarchs certain codes of honour and obli-
> gations linked to the whole ("natural") order of "the world," that the
> commodity economy tends to undermine. Patriarchical society defined
> as much particular hierarchical relationships between males as
> between male and female.
>
> That what has emerged is "a significantly different set of social
> relations from previous forms" is precisely why calling them both
> a spade tends to be stupefying. At least that is what I think.

This is just a note, but due to the use of the word 'spade' in the US as a
racial slur, I avoid that particular phrase, regardless of its meaning as an
agricultural term as well.  However, you may be right, patriarchy may be
more confusing than enlightening.  Sometimes it is a fine line between
recognition of a long linneage of women's oppression and analytical clarity.

> At last, to not be misunderstood. As many other things, patriarchical
> societies have come in degrees, and in many different concrete
> manifestations. Nor could all pre-capitalist societies aptly be described
> as patriarchical.
>
>         "Basically, in a world where all men are equal (per the social
>         contract, as Pateman is critiquing the social contract theorists),
>         all men are equally patriarchs over each and every woman.  A
>         kind of competitive, individualist patriarchy comes into being,
>         in which patriarchal right is built into the social contract as
>         EVERY MAN'S right.  A novel kind of equality and a novel kind
>         of patriarchy."
>
> There is a certain truth in the description above. What it leaves
> out is that this individualism has also served as the basis for a
> total critique of all particular rights of male as male. I could also
> be said with some truth, and to stick to terms used above here,
> that all male increasingly    however much a general real
> inequality still very much remains  also are becoming EVERY
> WOMAN'S right in some parts of the world.

No doubt.  This is why I argue against the idea of historical laws that
never change.  Clearly, a variety of struggles, some explicitly about
women's power, others impacting that power, and so on have modified what
could have been constituted as the oppression of women.  I find it
worthwhile to consider this idea of (de/re-)composition as applicable to all
social relations and understanding that each one involves an antagonistic
relation that is both a mediation and mediated and therfore susceptible to
struggle and transformation.

Cheers,
Chris



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