Re: MatFem/MarxFem

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

Charles replied to Martha:
>Thank you for this essay.
>
>I feel in substantial agreement with your critique of the history of these
>schools of thought (after being informed as to what they have been by your
>post). It doesn't seem necessary to retreat one iota from Marxism's
>militant class struggle in order to elevate the status of feminist gender
>struggle - feminist augmented marxism.

I too would like to thank Martha (belatedly) for her essay. I found the
distinction Martha made between materialist feminism and marxist feminism
(and their respective genealogies) very helpful + informative.

That said, I wonder if there may not currently exist the social &
ideological conditions necessary for clearly differentiating marxist
feminism from all other feminisms that owe parts of theory to historical
materialism. To begin with, we don't have a strong and thriving mass-based
feminist movement; we have activists, intellectuals, & organizations that
can be called feminist (when broadly defined). But, together, they don't
quite amount to a mass movement. Secondly, among many younger women, there
appears to be much ambivalence as to claiming feminism (of whatever
political leaning) as their political identity (even when their words &
actions testify to intellectual & practical legacies of feminism); they are
afraid of being seen as what the media have portrayed feminists to be. (The
recent article in _Time_ is a good example of the media bashings of
feminists.) Thirdly, despite much advancement in feminist knowledge (of
both empirical and theoretical varieties), feminist knowledge has not
exercised as much influence among male leftists (marxists included) as it
should have. Given such circumstances, what are we to do?

Charles wrote regarding Landry and MacLean:
>I think "race , (racism -CB), imperialism and colonialism" are already
>categories of Marxism and Leninism. So, there seems to be some misunderstan
>ding of what they are adding to Marxism or what a new "materialism" ,
>feminist or otherwise, would be filling in as inadequate in Marxist
>materialism.

Race, racism, imperialism & colonialism have been categories of Marxism and
Leninism. But even among marxists, there is a lack of agreement as to what
these concepts mean, what they can (or cannot) explain, and so on. There
are still those who argue that only the narrowly defined economic (the
sphere of production and exchange through the market) should count as
'material,' which I think (and I know you guys would agree) doesn't exhaust
the material of historical materialism.

Further, there are still debates as to the historical relationship between
colonialism and capitalism; for instance, those who argue, like Robert
Brenner and Ellen Wood, that the transformation of the English countryside
through the enclosure, etc.--dynamics internal to the nation (or what is to
become one)--as having the main (or sole) explanatory siginificance for the
emergence of capitalism and those who say, like Jim Blaut, that 'Europe's
post-1492 interaction with the rest of the world,' among them the conquest
of the 'new world' & the slave trade, as the 'true cause of the rise of
capitalism' do not have an identical theoretical framework. And these
differing theoretical frameworks have implications for different
understandings of the emergence and development of race and racism.

Moreover, how do we understand the relationships of sex/gender/sexuality to
the changing dynamics + requirements of production and social reproduction,
while paying attention to the processes of racialization? In my view, there
is much to be done in order to modify and reconstruct marxism and marxist
concepts to comprehend history and present conditions.

>However, in my opinion the
>specific (and narrow) area of potential for augmentation of Marxist
>materialsim on its own terms is to recognize the historical determinations
>of the labors that have been historically gendered female. Just as Marx
>and Engels changed historical science by replacing the big man theory of
>history with the struggle between big men and little men theory of
>history, and this was demonstrating a "material base", similarly we know
>that it was big men struggling with little PEOPLE; and a battle of the
>sexes (genders) was going on too. And that latter materially affected the
>creation of human subjects from pregnancy to adult intimate relationships
>to all caring labor which continuously shapes and "massages" our identities
>and subjectivities through our lives. To me this is the material base,
>roughly speaking, of the profound effect of historically constituted
>female gendered labor in making history. Subject creation is as materially
>fundamental to history as object making in production. Human labor-power,
>so important in Marx's labor theory of value, is created in caring or
>reproductive labor in the main.

Reproductive labor (broadly defined) and its intersection with productive
labor are of absolute importance for feminists to understand. And I too
think it important to emphasize the production of subjects and
subjectivities (and how they get sexed and gendered) as one of the most
important areas for our knowledge production.

I would like to add that how subjects and subjectivities get racialized is
also of significance. For instance, for enslaved women and later
working-class women of color, caring + reproductive labor have been
profoundly alienated labor, unlike the experiences of white women, even
many white working-class women. Slave women's own children were alienated
from them to be turned into commodities. And both as slaves and later as
working-class women, they have often performed a significant amount of
reproductive labor for other more privileged people's children. Labor of
women of color has been often cheap enough for not only bourgeois but also
petit-bourgeis & working-class white women to be able to employ them.

Also, the history of early industrialization shows that in many cases,
women workers were often preferred as industrial workers, especially in
textile but not limited to it. They were only later expelled or
marginalized when protective legislations came into being. Remembering this
as well as the history of slavery complicates our knowledge of the
formation of gendered division of labor.

Lastly, we should also consider gendered aspects of landlessness, since in
many places, women were not allowed to have rights to property ownership
(or exercise them if they did) while men were. Meera Nanda says this is
still the case in rural India. This must have many implications when
feminists try to understand the history as well as continuing processes of
capitalism's drive to alienate land from peasants and tenant farmers.

Yoshie