Gender and Class

[nancybrumback@xxxxxx]

To: "'marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx'" <marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: RE: marxism-digest V1 #4874
From: "Craven, Jim" <jcraven@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 31 Jul 2002 16:30:59 -0700
Reply-To: marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sender: owner-marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

You quoted Hari Kumar:

<<But let me repeat - what is primary - class antagonism/contradiction or
gender contradictions?

You replied:

<<I believe that we can and do differentiate forms of
oppression and can, to a certain degree, differentiate (qualify) degrees of
oppression. ... But I will never agree that any woman on this list for example, 
or
any typical white middle class woman, is likely more oppressed in form or
degree than an average Indian Reservation male (with an average life
expectancy of 47 years old versus 71 years old for an average white female)
which is what we would likely expect if gender trumped class or "race" in
oppression. Similarly, Colin Powell's kids are nominally African-American
but I would never agree that any of them suffer more oppression--in kind or
degree--than an average white worker or poor Appalachean white which is what
we might expect if "race" trumped class in forms and degrees of oppression.

me back to you:

What you say here is at least logically true, but if and only if oppressions
are ranked in a hierarchal order, i.e., if one kind of oppression was more
"primary" than another.

The first problem with your reasoning is that oppression alone does not a
revolutionary make. Oppression is not a more than or less than situation
between groups. There is a relative scale of oppression that depends on
historical and material conditions -- from zero oppression to maximum
oppression, being ground into the ground so bad that you only barely get
through one day, only to get up in the morning and have do the exact same
thing that you did the day before. If you're at the zero end of the scale,
you don't have any reason to revolt. If you're at the max end of the
scale, you are not physically able to revolt. Only if you're in the middle,
the relatively oppressed part, do you have both the reason and the
wherewithal all to revolt. And then other conditions must come into play
as well, such as identifing yourself not primarily as a member of your
family but as a part of a historical process that started before your
lifetime and will go on after your lifetime. It is the specific conditions
of one's oppression that make or do not make the revolutionary.

The second problem is that oppressions do not exist in ranked order to
start with, just as the various subgroups in capitalism do not exist in
ranked order either. Oppression depends on the historical and material
conditions impacting the human beings in these subgroups at every moment of 
history in every part of the globe. These historical and material conditions 
are shaped profoundly by the relationship of the group to political and 
economic power.

And yes, whoever said that you can't compare gender groups with "racial"
groups is absolutely right -- please forgive my sloppy thinking.

But you can analyze the relations that gender and race groups have to
economic and political power. In terms of gender groups, their relation
to power is realized in the family, because that is where the gender
relations begin.

Now the family is not the state, the church, or the school, but like all
these others, the family is an *institution* of capitalist society --
in fact, the classes of capitalist society are made up of families!
So it is through the family that the relation of women to the
capitalist class exists. Marx taught that a society is an organic and
interconnected whole, where each part of the whole plays its part. In
capitalist society, the family is expected to provide for the
material needs of the people. Can you imagine what would happen to the
profits of the capitalists if they had to pay for the production and
maintenance of generations of workers? This is one of the reasons why
I believe that the unpaid labor of women in the family must represent
a large part of surplus value.

Also in capitalist society, the family plays the role of domesticating the
people, making them obedient to authority so they will accept their place
in society as workers.

But in socialist society, it is society itself which is expected to
provide for the material needs of the people. In the transition from
capitalism to socialism, not only must the loci of power change -- the
institutions also must change. Engles (?) talked about the "withering
away of the state"; i feel that the family too must "wither away" and
be replaced by the institutions of socialism that will take care of
the material needs of everyone: community-controlled day-care centers,
cafeterias, house-cleaning and laundry services, hospitals and health
clinics -- all free of charge to the people -- in addition to a
guaranteed income and place to live.

So it's not about one being more important than the other -- the family
or the class. They are the part and the whole -- that is their dialectical
relationship. The family is part of the class, playing its role in the
preservation of the class. And the class is composed of its social
institutions, with all their various roles to play, including the
family with its own particular role.

more later,

nancy

PS. Thanks to Chris, who posted his observations about the family, and
jogged the above up out of dense layers of memory.




~~~~~~~
PLEASE clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.