Re: Moderator's note and Bourgeois Feminism (Brumback)

["Mohammad J Alam" <alam.m@xxxxxxx>]

Anyone who thinks the dismissal of Carrol was unjustified must be out of
his mind.

The vitriolic, condescending, almost hateful nature of her post to Nancy
Brumback is entirely inexcusable. Of course, her comments about the Marxism
List itself beg the question of why the hell he/she would even want to be
on it--but that question is of course no longer relevant.

Furthermore:

"The point is that when marxists use the cliche "bourgeois
feminism" to put down the struggles of women, they are being scabs, not
that they are being immoral."

And being a "scab", of course, is not at all "immoral" from the proletarian
viewpoint...Carrol simply adds a pinch of his/her bitterness into the same
expression all the while denouncing its original version.

Cliche terms that are over-used in conversation, and accurate class-based
categorizations of social movements are hardly analogous, let alone
identical. For any thinking person, the term "bourgeois" is not some
epithet or insult, but a description of a phenomenon in class terms.

This applies no less to gender than it does to nationality: no one here is
praising Arafat even though he represents an "oppressed nation"; no one
here is deluded into believing that this bourgeois collaborator--or any
other puppet from surround Arab regimes--are revolutionaries whose
"struggle" is to be defended. And most importantly none of these
characters, regardless of their level of pseudo-revolutionary rhetoric,
which is so empty that it often implodes into anti-Semitism, *are*
progressive or do bring us closer towards socialism.

So much nonsense has been asserted about the "failure" of Marxism to take
into account a hundred and one supposedly separate, independent struggles,
because of dogmatism and doctrine. This is only true to the extent that no
meaningful political expression of oppression from any sector of the
proletariat and peasantry has ever *been* separate from the class question.
The real problem is not that the Marxist has failed to throw himself at the
feet of every bourgeois feminist/nationalist/racial movement, but that the
leaders of these movements have failed to connect themselves with the
oppressed class as a whole. And this is natural, since they do not
represent this class "as a whole", or in part.

To state that every political movement with a specific
gender/nationality/racial alignment is not bourgeois is only to state the
obvious. The Black Panthers and the Cuban revolutionaries are but two
examples that attest to this.

But this does not mean, as Brumback suggests, that Marxists have to fawn
over every movement because it is "black", etc. For example:

"Would anyone on this list argue that african-americans should *not* get
together, on their own with no whites present, to define their own problems
and strategize their own struggle?"

Blacks are not animals just released from the zoo, who have yet to "get
together", who we as Marxists must simply observe like tourists. The fact
of the matter is, there are no conspiratorial political organizations out
there that blacks happen to join in on, "with no whites present". There is
only a thing we call reality: blacks who join the bourgeois class and rape
the proletariat with their white brothers, and blacks who are in the ranks
of the proletarian class alongside whites.

There was no magic force of great Marxist tyranny that all of a sudden
suspended the movement of black nationalism as a *separatist* movement--no,
that has dwindled away into irrelevance all by itself, as the insanity of
parties like the Nation of Islam and New Black Panther Party has been made
clear to everyone. Progressive black nationalist movements largely
disbanded decades ago in the face of changing political and material
conditions.

"I do hope not, because african-americans are the one "race"
in america that was ripped away from their own culture and brought to
america where they were enslaved by whites who wanted to define them in
terms of how they could serve white culture."

A lecture on the plight of American blacks is not really necessary--no one
is ignorant of this. It is the question of what flows from this
historically, and thus politically, which is at stake. That blacks have
faced intensified oppression relative to whites in the working class does
not mean they are cordoned in a separate sphere, that they have not been
exposed to and raised in America under concrete class conditions for 400
years. If this was the case, there would be no Al Sharptons and Colin
Powells.

"To attract black nationalists  to the marxist movement, marxists must,
must, must let the blacks define their own reality -- they must not try to
define it for them!"

What "defines their own reality" for blacks, and anyone else, are their
material conditions. If the NBPP, a black separatist group, wants to chant
anti-Semitic slogans and praise Saddam Hussein in an anti-war rally as they
have done--that is the "reality" of a few lost souls--or in your
words--"strategized their own struggle". Marxists do not define other
people's realities, they identify people's conditions based on social
relations from a historical perspective. We think capitalism is
exploitative and oppressive, and seek to replace it with a system that
works for the majority of humanity.

"Because if they do try to tell blacks (or any other persons of color for
that matter) who they are and what they're about, that in itself is violent
and racist act!"

Marxism is not a cult of white-supremacists who run around telling dark
people what to do; it is always a tendency among white 'radical' liberals
to moralistically over-dramatize the issue of "persons of color" in an
obsessive manner. Yes, I am dark-skinned--this does not mean that Marx
predicting the concentration of capital into a monopoly system, and
Bukharin expressing the need for coordinated production for the development
of all workers (including me) is "violent and racist".

The whole following paragraph which grafts this already-incorrect
projection onto gender relations--in which case it becomes even more
incorrect--puts forth the same argument: "don't tell anyone what to do!".

I suppose we all just sit here in respectful silence as time innocently
passes by--god forbid we note any historical trends leading to barbarism
and work to emancipate the human race or anything.

"i've heard the term "self-determination" applied to black nationalists
by marxists who do support their separatist cause. How long will it be
before you apply the same term to women?"

I've also 'heard the term', "liquidate the Trotskyists" applied to the FI
by marxists who do support Stalin: so what? What is the actual concrete,
precise, political *content* of your demand on behalf of women in relation
to class? The *right* to self-determination of an historically oppressed
nationality is related to gender in what way, specifically? Not only is the
analogy wholly inapplicable, but the demands themselves are vague or
non-existent.






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