Re: To Bon Moun re M's comments: in marxism-digest V1 #4856

["bon moun" <sherrynstan@xxxxxxx>]

> COMMENT:
> no fair!
> (i) M was a product of his time as much as anything else;
> (ii) This & the commentary by Engels to the same questions - was all in
the manner of a
> joke - or is that completely politically incorrect now? Even if the
answer is "no" - at
> least point out the sense in which these comments were made;
> (iii) M made clear his unequivocal support of the liberation of women.

Nonsense!  I wasn't judging Marx, so it's not a question of fairness.  I
was pointing out that marxism is not a scholastic exercise based on holy
texts.  My point is precisely that he was a product of his time, and he had
the prejudices of his time, as did Engels and Lenin, Victorian prejudices
at that.  This is a discussion among folks who are not anticommunists, so
there's no reason to be defensive.  Marx made a central contribution to
revolutionary theory, but he was not a christ.  He made errors given the
information he had, and he made errors based on assumptions that weren't
disproven until after his time.  His remarks about women were perfectly
consistent with the equation of women with "nature" by Engels in OFPPS, and
this is an error.  It is an error based on a prejudice, one that Marx and
Engels had enough information to challenge in their own time had the
dominant epistemology - including a failure to critically examine
"masculinity" - not so clouded their views.  The implicit foundation of the
marxist failure until very recently to grasp the issue of women's
emancipation, and not merely in a legalistic and economistic, but in a
social and cultural way, is our failure to divest of biological
determinism, and that failure is reinforced by male myopia and privilege.
No revolutionary theory that consistently demotes the emancipation of half
the planet's population to a "woman question" deserves to be followed by
that half of the population, and it won't.  Not any more.  There is a very
good reason why many feminists still hold marxism at arms length.  We don't
listen.  We get defensive.  We go after them with a macho style of
argument.  Those are not marxist things, though many marxists do them.
They are male things, born of privilege, and defending that privilege
jealously.  Ask yourself why so few women participate in this list.  This
stubborn refusal to acknowledge our failure to recognize the errors built
on biological determinism reminds me of Stalin's insistence on Lamark's
version of evolution because it squared more easily with his notion of
dialectical process. (And I'm not stalin-bating.  I'm one of the few folks
on this list that still believe he was an extraordinary leader, who also
made terrible errors, but that's a different discussion that I won't
indulge here.)


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