Re: Cuban Women: Randall's Reassessment

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> >Women's emancipation, in the end, has to be self-emancipation of
> >women.  The word "rehabilitation" already negates *self*-emancipation
> >& suggests top-down & technocratic direction.  Men can not emancipate
> >women, not even under socialism, just as middle-class feminist
> >reformers can not emancipate working-class women under capitalism.
> >*Women* under socialism have to take *leadership* in their own
> >emancipation.
> >
> >Yoshie
>
>All this is well and good. The Cuban government can be criticised on all
>sorts of grounds. What I hope we will put behind us is any kind of notion
>of socialist brothels run by Marxist versions of Tracy Quan in places like
>the Philippines or the Congo.
>
>Louis Proyect
>Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/

It is up to women under socialism who oppose sexist & other
oppressions -- not up to our contemporary feminist entrepreneurs,
bourgeois moralist reformers, and male leaders of socialism -- to
decide.  In other words, it is _not_ for _you_ to decide, harsh as
this may sound.  Women under socialism may decide to abolish
prostitution, and I'd salute them; women under socialism may want to
make sex work (as _work, not as a commodity_) a part of socialist &
feminist economy, _both for men & women_, and I'd applaud them too.

Engels, for one, knew that he was not in a position to decide:

*****   What we can now conjecture about the way in which sexual
relations will be ordered after the impending overthrow of capitalist
production is mainly of a negative character, limited for the most
part to what will disappear.  But what will there be new?  That will
be answered when a new generation has grown up: a generation of men
who never in their lives have known what it is to buy a woman's
surrender with money or any other social instrument of power; a
generation of women who have never known what it is to give
themselves to a man from any other considerations than real love or
to refuse to give themselves to their lover from fear of the economic
consequences.  When these people are in the world, they will care
precious little what anybody today thinks they ought to do; they will
make their own practice and their corresponding public opinion about
the practice of each individual -- and that will be the end of it.
_The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State_ (1884)
*****

Part of the new may or may not be _work of sex that is not based upon
sexism & exploitation_.  We do not know, since we are not of "a new
generation" with an experience of growing up without being subjected
to capitalism, sexism, bourgeois moralism, etc.

The Cuban government used to try to abolish prostitution, and
prostitutes were offered an ambivalent program: take what we offer,
or else we will imprison you or treat you as "sick."  Now that
economic requirements of Cuban socialism have changed, the Cuban
government in effect tolerates it (if not encourages it like some
Asian governments do), though it may still pooh-pooh it
ideologically.  This attitude has been typical of actually (and
formerly) existing socialist countries' *treatment of women in
general*, not just of prostitution.  Emancipation of women -- from
equal involvement into labor, social programs for child care, to
reproductive rights & freedoms such as the right to abortion &
contraceptives -- has been motivated less by anti-sexism than
political & economic necessities of the nations -- hence the changes
in treatment of women depending on perceived necessities of the
nations.  The nations' independence & perceived well-being have been
maintained at the cost of set-backs for women (the Thermidor in the
family, as Trotsky put it).  Early insights of women like Kollontai
had to be buried by men like Stalin.

Marxists are right to disagree with bourgeois feminists who seize
upon this fact as proof of the impossibility or undesirability or
both of socialism.  _At the same time_, we must recognize that
women's emancipation can be neither instituted by technocratic fiats
from above (certainly not by men) nor subordinated to the exigencies
of national defence & socialist economy.  The Thermidor in the
family, though it was temporarily convenient for male leaders, in the
end helped to erode the foundations of socialism from within & below.

Yoshie