Re: marxism-digest V1 #4857

["bon moun" <sherrynstan@xxxxxxx>]

> Bon Moun: You refer to an: "equation of women with "nature" by Engels in
OFPPS":
> Do you have the reference? Thanks, Hari Kumar

Marx explicitly defines women into nature in more than one instance.
Engels, to his credit, attempts to socially define women, but in attempting
to do so, he fails to divest of premises that return women to the realm of
nature.  It is more subtle in Engels' OFPPS.

Mies:

"Engels, strongly influenced by evolutionist thinking, separates these
earliest stages as pre-history, from the actual human history, which,
according to him, begins only with civilization.  This means it [history]
begins with fully-fledged class and patriarchal relations.  Engels is not
able to answer the question how humanity then jumped from pre-history to
social history; morever, he does not apply the method of dialectical
historical materialism to the study of these primitive societies which have
'not yet entered history.'  He thinks [implies] that the laws of evolution
[nature!] prevailed up to the emergence of private property, of family and
the state... every materialist feminist would happily agree that a
materialist analysis must deal with the two kinds of production
[appropriation of the material world and reproduction of humanity]...
Engels himself gives up this materialist conception immediately when he
deals with the 'production of human beings', which according to him is
determined by the 'development of the family', whereas the production of
themeans of subsistence is determined by the development of labor.  This
distinction is not accidental because throughout the book Engels follows
this line of thinking... Only when it comes to private property and the
monogamous patriarchal family does Engels bring in economic and historical
materialist explanations...  'With the ptariarchal family we enter the
filed of written history'...  The monogamous patriarchal family 'was the
first form of the family based not on NATURAL [my caps] but on economic
conditions'..."

For all their insight, Marx and Engels did not account for the fact that
the "line" between pre-social and social is itself socially constructed,
and so we end with a pseudo-anthropological apology for the biological
reduction of women's subjugation.  It is this biological determinism that
was left long after Marx and Engels were dead, and that persists today, as
an ill-criticized premise lurking in the marxist cosmology.  Women are
"defined into nature."  Consider how we think of childbirth and nursing--as
somehow not social labor, as something primal and natural--and how we
consider the traditional roles of men, then consider in how many respects
childbirth and nursing involve choices, conscious appropriation of
material,  social networks and division of labor, etc.  The subordinated
status of that work has much more to do with our perception of it as
"natural" than the actual charactersitics of the work itself.  Yet this is
thought of even by some marxists as a somehow purely biologically
determined division of labor.  What the ecofeminists and marxist -feminists
have done is extend and enrich historical materialism by debunking this
error, using our own method.


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