Re: Gender and Class

[Nicholas Siemensma <nsiemensma@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

 --- nancybrumback@xxxxxx wrote: >

> 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.

This is dodgy territory, at least in expression.  A
"scale of oppression" seems to me the result of a
certain brand of academic thinking: weird conceptual
constructions using very spatial metaphors which turn
"society" into a fetish.

> 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.
> So it's not about one being more important than the
> other -- the family
> or the class.

I think the problem is this: treating "class" as a
badge worn by a group of individuals - perhaps the
cliche of grimy males in overalls like me! - who you
can observe as a discrete entity, line up to be
counted away from OTHER GROUPS of individuals wearing
badges that say "gender" or "race."  Then you end up
saying: "Well, all these oppressed ought to join
together to fight the oppressers, and no particular
sector of the oppressed (ie. class) should take
priority over the others because they're all oppressed
in different ways, and each group and person should
fight using their own existential politics to win
freedom from their own specific form of oppression
(sexism, racism, or class domination)."  This is the
ideology of people who use terms like "subaltern" (and
if this word and the entire notion of alliance, etc.
has echoes of Gramsci, it's very superficial).
But class isn't the kind of category you can attach to
some people, while leaving "race" for others and
"gender" for others.  These last two categories, as
you've pointed out in a number of posts, are very
closely related to individual or existential
experience and subjectivity, and that's why you think
they should be defended for political action:
everyone's got a libidinal relation to gender, race
etc, so people are likely to become politically
mobilised about these "personal" things.  Fine, that
may be so, or maybe not.
But implicit in this notion is a recognition that
class is a very different category: more material,
more impure and mixed, larger and involving the
production of objects and thus necessary relations,
transcending the individual subject and his/her
particularity, UNIVERSALISING in a way that enables
collective political organisation in a revolutionary
form.  This is why people involved in class politics
are always accused of trying to "master" or "dominate"
others - not because workers are all males or white or
whatever, but because class is a universalising
category and collective social fact that ties (in a
way gender can't really do) directly into the most
scarily universalising thing of all: the mode of
production.
You claim that gender can do that, Nancy, and I partly
agree: unpaid women in the home are an important part
of subsidising a working capitalist order.  But to tie
the oppression of those women into an understanding of
the entire mode of production, and thus revolutionary
politics, you have to make a detour and trawl through
the mud of class, wage labour, etc.
So it's not simply a matter of "respecting
difference," or some rubbish like that, which is just
simple pluralism and liberal tolerance.  The
Laclau-Mouffe idea of politics - outlined in that book
which I read a few years ago, and I now regret wasting
what little time I have to read on such a load of shit
- isn't "wrong", it just isn't as strong or durable as
class politics or likely to threaten fundamental
social relations in a revolutionary way because it
isn't organised around the totality.  It's still a
valuable form of politics, though.  In fact, the
examples given in a couple of posts, such as various
anti-imperialist revolutions and feminist battles
against concrete forms of sexism, were effective when
they embodied real class contradictions.  This is
because class relations are dualistic, and so are
gender and racial oppositions, so the latter can be
used as a vehicle for class struggle.  It's important
to remember this paraphrase, when advocating a (sorely
needed) feminist politics: there are no women IN
GENERAL, only real women in concrete situations.
And sheer POLITICAL theory and its inherited wisdom
tells you about the advantages for political
organisation afforded by wage labour and its necessary
spatial organisation (ie. worker's residential areas
along with the worksite itself).  If this same spatial
concentration of your "political subject" also occurs
along racial lines, which is often the case, that's
because of basic underlying class relations (of
imperialism or the racial division of labour); and I'm
unaware of any single-sex communities that offer the
same advantages of spatial relations for politics.
Anyway, the point of all your writings, and it is a
good point that you should stick at, is that Marxists
have traditionally been insensitive to gender and race
issues, and that Marxist political movements have paid
the price for this.  That's important to harp on.
Not, however, if it attributes this failure to a
fundamental flaw in the Marxist apparatus, which
doesn't exist.

Marx taught that a society
> is an organic and
> interconnected whole,

I know what you mean, but the entire point of
dialectical thinking is that society is not organic,
but antagonistic.  Organic society is for
conservatives, atomistic society for liberals, with an
interconnected but conradictory society for Marxists.

Nick

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