Feminism and Marxism, was Re: Prostitution and the left

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Louis Proyect wrote:

> I think this discussion/debate would be a lot clearer if two of the leading
> principal's were here, which is about as likely as a snowfall in hell. One
> is Harry Cleaver, a adherent of 'autonomist Marxism' and the other is Doug
> Henwood, LM fellow-traveler and postmodernist. In a debate on PEN-L around

This is nonsense. The context of the discussion is in fact the whole history of

feminism and of marxist attempts to incorporate the "woman question" into
marxist historical understanding and political theory. To haul Henwood and
Cleaver into a discussion which would be exactly the same had they never
been born seems almost deliberate obstructionism.

But in whatever distorted form it is well past the time for this list to begin
to confront the complex of issues involved. For historical background
(in addition to the many sources being cited by Yoshie) I recommend
in particular the following:

FORUM: What Comes After Patriarchy? Comparative Reflections on
Gender and Power in a "Post-Patriarchal" Age, in Radical History
Review 71 (Spring 1998), pp 52-95 and the various studies cited by
the participants in the Forum. In addition the issue has a review by Heidi
Tinsman of two important books: Steve J. Stern, *The Secret History
of Gender: Women, Men, and Power in Late Colonial Mexico* (Univ.
of North Carolina Press, 1995); Susan K. Besse, *Restructuring Patriarchy:
The Modernization of Gender Inequality in Brazil, 1914-1940* (U. of N.
Carolina, 1996).

An important point: Perhaps *the* defining feature of all anti-marxist
feminisms
is a refusal of history, usually marked by the premise of some overarching
entity called "Patriarchy." What all purely "patriarchal" theories hold in
common
(even when they explicitly deny it) is the assumption that male supremacy is
beyond history and that its roots are in an undifferentiated and unexplained
male domination of women. In other words, the premise of an abstract
Patriarchy reduces to the incoherence of "the cause of male supremacy
is male supremacy."

Engels got a huge proportion of his facts wrong, and his work is also marred
by some unanalyzed assumptions of his period, but his *Origins* still remains
*the* source for marxist thought on gender oppression because Engels grasped
the primary point that "origins" do not explain but rather *need to be
explained*
historically. We have currently two rampaging and overt bourgeois feminists
posting to the marxism-feminism list, and the posts Yoshie is now sending to
marxism have as their context nothing that either Doug or Cleaver has ever
said but the attempt to uncover the ahistorical and metaphysical foundations
of bourgeois feminism -- and in particular the assumption that runs through
bourgeois feminsim that the origin of male supremacy is *also* an explanation
of male supremacy.

I cite some further works that are highly useful for various aspects of this
discussion.

Stephanie Coontz, *The Social Origins of Private Life: A History of American
Families 1600-1900* (Verso 1988). This book is absolutely central to any
discussion of the history of the family and of the transformation in the mode
of male supremacy in the last two centuries.

Thomas Laqueur, *Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to
Freud* (Harvard, 1990). See also the review of this book by Stephen
Jay Gould in the NYRB.

Barbara Jeanne Fields, "Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States
of America," NLR 181 (May/June 1990), pp. 95-118. Many of the
issues Fields touches on arise in very similar form in discussions of gender
-- she is particularly good in skewing the practice (against which much
of Marx's *Poverty of Philosophy* was directed) of the use as explanation
of the very facts needing to be explained -- an error endemic to discussions
of gender, race, sexual preference, disability.

Finally Martha Gimenez has written extensively on the issues separating
marxist feminism from other varieties of feminism, and I will be forwarding
a number of posts from her to this list.

Carrol