Re: MarxFem/MatFem I (fwd)

[Martha Gimenez <gimenez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 14 Jul 1998 23:48:08 -0700
From: brumback@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Reply-To: MatFem@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
To: MATERIALIST FEMINISM <MatFem@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: MarxFem/MatFem I

Martha defines socialist feminism as:

"...critical of capitalism and Marxism, so much so that
>avoidance of Marxism's alleged reductionisms resulted in dual
>systems theories postulating various forms of interaction between
>capitalism and patriarchy."

To my mind, the need for an understanding of how class and gender oppression
are related is today even greater than there was in the 70's. Since then,
much research has been done on the ancient gathering and hunting societies,
which Marx regarded as not fully human since they did not have classes,
private property, a fully developed division of labor, and abstract thought.
Engels (I believe) wrote that upon the accumulation of an agricultural
surplus, there developed private property and from there, the patriarchal
family and "civilization." (I know I am truncating all this brutally. Sorry.)

Today, based on the mass of anthropological research that has emerged in the
past 20 years, some of us believe that the story is much more complicated:
that male domination and class society developed simultaneously -- that
there were series of successive stages in which gender and class dominance
were intertwined -- that they supported and complemented each other in
mutual co-evolution, i.e., segregated work patterns and childrearing
practices eventually led to institutionalized male dominance, while informal
leadership groups and castes eventually led to classes. (Also wildly
truncated.) Further, many anthropologists believe that animals, not
agricultural surplus, were the first form of private property, which would
suggest in our schemata here that the first patriarchal societies were
pastoral, not agricultural, a speculation which also is supported by a great
deal of anthropological data.

Also, it is believed by many anthropologists that (at least) some of the
gathering and hunting peoples for a while (at least) enjoyed a very rich and
abundant diet by working only two or three days a week -- they didn't
accumulate a "surplus" at all because they didn't need it. (This view is
reinforced by the accounts of environmental conditions on the North American
contintent at the time of European contact.) And yet, without such surplus,
indigenous peoples were able to develop art, literature and history
(mythology and ritual), language, and science, i.e., aspects of culture not
including sex and class domination.

One glaring fact (if you will) from all this challenges a basic tenet of
Marxism: that the history of all society is the history of "class struggle."
If we accept that at least some of the first societies of homo sapien were
egalitarian, which it seems even Engels does (i.e., his "primitive
communism"), then the history of all society is not the history of class
struggle. For some societies, i.e., those which started out as egalitarian
in property relations as well as in gender relations, history includes the
time which existed (1) prior to class struggle and (2) during the period of
transition from egalitarianism to class and gender dominance.

So, I would be unwilling to accept Martha's suggestion that we subsume
materialist-feminism within Marxist-feminism on the grounds that no
substantial difference exists between the two. I think the category of
materialist-feminism, or feminist-materialism (my preference), serves nicely
to embrace those theories which attempt to analyze women in terms of the
actual conditions of their lives, i.e., from a materialist perspective, but
which do not necessarily accept every point of the materialist perspective
of Marx.

Regards,

Nancy