An actual theory of class and gender

[nancybrumback@xxxxxx]

Louis Proyect wrote: "We need history. We need data. We need theory."

Sometime within the past two or three weeks, I posted what i considered
to be a theory of how gender intersects with class in the class war. It
was contained in two separate posts. For some strange reason, I cannot
find either post in the archives, but I do remember that Jim Craven
responded to one of them with the "class trumps gender" phrase, a
meaningless statement since the example given was already a workers'
struggle in my opinion. Since I can't quote myself, I will restate the
theory.

Class and gender are interconnected in our society in this way: Classes,
both the ruling class and the working class, are made up of families.
The role of the families of the ruling class is to insure that both
possession and control of the means of production are passed down from
generation to generation while being kept within both family and class.
In the working class, the role of the family is to assume responsibility
for raising each new generation at no cost to the ruling class. This is
one of the reasons why I think that surplus value includes more than
just the value of workers in capitalist production. If the ruling class
had to pay the costs for bringing up each generation of workers, what
would happen to their profits? As it is, the working class family
helps to uphold class society by absorbing much of the "externalized cost"
of capitalist production. (The exploitation of nature is another source
of these "externalized costs," and that is another issue that needs
examination.)

But the working class family upholds the ruling class in more ways that
just economically, e.g., socializing workers to be obedient to authority,
teaching each generation to do the same thing in the same way and at the
same time as everybody else, thus insuring that the ruling class will
continue to rule. The working class family, along with the church and
the state, also upholds the ruling class by teaching workers that they
are responsible for their own poverty and generalized failure to
thrive. Also, that the hierarchical relations of capitalist society are
"natural," that they have always been and will always be. That you can't
fight city hall. That you have no power. The family is joined in this
process of delivering the social conditioning necessary to the private
ownership and control. Other institutions of capitalism join in: the
church, the school, and the military, the state, and all the other
institutions of capitalist society.

Such an interconnection of class and family is consistent with Marx's
theory of infrastructure, structure, and superstructure. In capitalist
society, the infrastructure includes the technology of production and
the relations of production, i.e., the ownership and control of
technology by the ruling class, and the ownership of nothing but their
own labor by the working class which of course they must sell to the
capitalists in order to be able to buy the necessary means of
subsistence.

In order for capitalist society to cease to exist, not only its
infrastructure but also its structure and superstructure must cease
to exist, because all of these "layers" interact with one another
and uphold one another. Thus, the struggle to end capitalism requires
not only the replacement of the infrastructure of capitalism with the
infrasture of socialism (public ownership and local control of the
means of production in my opion), it also requires replacing the
capitalist family (patriarchal, nuclear) with the social relations
of socialism (public ownership and local control of the means of
sustenance in my opinion: free 24-hour day care centers, a guaranteed
wage, free housing, free education, health care, and social services,
free cafeterias, free housecleaning, maintenance and gardening services.
What would happen if the working class (including its women) would
suddenly move against the capitalist class, with its power to
stop the means of production to prove a point, while forwarding the
above demands which add up to the nuclear family becoming a choice
for people instead of a necessity? We would be seeing the beginning
of the end of capitalism.

So, like the DSP, i think that the class struggle cannot be
accomplished without the full integration of women's issues, and the
feminist struggle cannot be accomplished without the full integration
of class issues.

Now, to me, the above is a theory integrating class struggle with
the feminist struggle for choice, while at the same time integrating
the feminist struggle for choice with the class struggle. I do hope
someone responds to my claim for theory as posted here, because no
one responded to it when it was posted a few weeks ago -- except the
DSP.

nancy

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