Re: [Spivak & Marxism-Feminism (was Re: And another thing)]

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

Hi Martha:

At 3:25 PM -0600 7/19/00, Martha Gimenez wrote:
> > On Wed, 19 Jul 2000, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> > ....   snip ....
> > >
> > > Sure, men in poor nations must bear their own share of political
> > > responsibility.  Liberal feminists in the West carping about sexist
> > > guys in the Third World won't change things for better for Third
> > > World women, though.  What will help feminists in poor nations
> >                        ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> > > definitely is for us to challenge imperialism.  Remove the external
> > ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> > > forces of capital (economic, political, & military) that distort the
> > ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> > > social formations in poor nations.
> > ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>
> The statement I have underlined assumes that left to themselves, the
> social formations of poor nations would be more egalitarian as far as
> gender relations is concerned.  But those nations are what they are partly
> because of their own heritage of inequality based on precapitalist modes
> of production and mostly because of they way their mode of incorporation
> in  world capitalism has shaped their development during the last 400 or
> 500 years.  There is a danger in romanticizing non/pre-capitalist
> institutions and demonizing capitalism  As Marx pointed out in the
> Manifesto, capitalist development was progressive in relationship to the
> past by doing away with all sorts of peternalistic and oppressive
> relations.

I don't think pre-capitalist social formations were more egalitarian
than capitalist ones (perhaps with the exception of some
pre-Columbian indigenous peoples in North America).  Besides, no one
in the world now lives in a pre-capitalist social formation.  When I
said the "external forces of capital," I meant to refer to the most
obvious forms of imperialism, such as the SAPs, embargoes on
countries like Iraq, Washington's support for reactionary social
forces, etc.  (Since socialism is not in the cards right now in the
West, fighting against obvious forms of imperialism is all we can do
by way of international feminist solidarity, I think.)

> In this sense, the fight against
> > the Structural Adjustment Programs of the IMF, to take just one
> > example, is a feminist fight, though this may not be obvious.  In
> > other words, create material conditions under which feminists in the
> > Third World can fight a good fight for themselves.
>
> Isn't the assumption underlying this statement that all women are
> feminists?

No, I don't think all women are feminists (though I believe many more
can & will be under better economic conditions).  But the fight has
to be led by feminists in their countries, not by feminists in the
West.

> Doesn't feminism assume a kind of
> individualist philosophy that presuposes a degreee of individuation and
> separation of the interests of individuals fromm the interests of their
> families and kinship groups which is still unevenly developed in most of
> the world?  If so, the fight against SAPs of the IMF might further the
> maintenance of the hold that kinship and family ties have on individuals
> which, because of gender inequality, takes a heavier toll on women.

Capitalism in rich nations has had the effect you describe,
dissolving kinship & family ties to a certain extent; and to the
extent that urbanization has occurred, women in poor nations have
also begun to have fewer children & become less tied to kins &
families, unlike women in rural subsistence agriculture.  And indeed,
_in the long run_, it is better for women to be exploited by
capitalists than oppressed by family patriarchs, in that working in
factories gives women a material ground for fighting back, whereas
women isolated in each family, uneducated & unemployed, can't assert
their own interests against men in their lives.  So, if countries in
the periphery can develop in the same fashion as rich nations have,
we may see more of the same effect: "everything solid melts into
air," perhaps.  But I don't think that the SAPs are good for _even_
capitalist development in nations on the periphery.  Further, I
rather doubt that capitalism needs many more of South Koreas &
Taiwans; the path toward a promising sort of capitalist development
seems practically blocked for most countries (hence the rise of the
informal sector, what is often called "ethnic" wars, etc.).  Under
the harshest regimen of international debt servitude, poor women in
poor countries probably see more of the pernicious amalgamation of
the worst of familial oppression _and_ capitalist oppression (like
young women being sold to prostitution by their parents; women
feeling obligated to work as domestics without any rights in foreign
countries in order to send back most of their money to their families
at home, etc.).

Yoshie