Specificities of Marxist-Feminist Analysis (was racism and genderoppression)

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Margaret wrote:
>Just as an example, consider the British Empire.  Was it a sexist
>system or was
>it not?  I will venture to assert that it was.  But who reigned over this
>empire at its height?  Who was the super alpha male?  Queen Victoria.  And who
>got the empire going?  Elizabeth.  But it was still a sexist system,  severely
>exploitative of biological women even more than of biological men, and headed
>up by a series of monarchs, two of whom happened to be women.

Nobody here is claiming that imperialism has not been sexist.  What
we are questioning is as follows:

1. the claim that sexism _causes_ imperialism;
2. the claim that women _of all classes_, by virtue of our gender,
have been more oppressed than men _of all classes_.

Neither 1 nor 2 is true.  With regard to 2, a sensible claim is that
women are more oppressed than men _of the same class_.  Bourgeois
women are oppressed by bourgeois men, but bourgeois women (especially
now that bourgeois women can _own private property_ independently of
men, unlike at the beginning of capitalism) have power over _both_
men and women of the working class.  As for 1, while it may have been
true that the sexual division of labor was at the origin of all
divisions of labor (as both classical Marxists & radical feminists
argue), this fact tells us little about _which_ social relation
exercises the primary influence upon all other social relations &
_shapes them according to the requirements of its reproduction_.
Marxist-feminists (unlike other feminists) analyze the post-feudal
oppression of women (after the transition from patriarchy to sexism;
from oppression justified by customs & divine sanctions to
oppressions justified by ideologies of biological determinism,
meritocracy, & the "opposite sexes" with separate spheres; from the
political ideology in which neither social nor political equality is
admissible to that in which political equality is proclaimed while
social inequality gets reproduced) as being *fundamentally shaped &
incessantly transformed* by the changing requirements of the
reproduction of capitalist relations of production (which _explains_
*changes* in household structures, in gendering of the labor market,
in social reproduction of labor power, etc.).  Hence the
Marxist-Feminist insistence that capitalism must be abolished as a
necessary though not at all sufficient condition for the abolition of
oppressions based upon gender, race, disability, etc.

Yoshie