Re: Socialism and Women's Leadership in the real world of America.

[Waistline2@xxxxxxx]

Leadership selection procedures of socialist and social democratic
parties and states have seldom been very clear.  I'm afraid that the
myth of egalitarianism works against women in formations on the Left.
Leftists say we are all equal, masses are better than leaders, it
doesn't matter who the leaders are, etc.  It all sounds nice, but it
just ain't true.  Part of what needs to be done is to make leadership
a political problem requiring serious thought (eschewing usual
meaningless complaints of "betrayals," etc.).

Comment

 

I appreciate the subtly and complexity of the social process being described.  The Women Factor is not a theoretical problem facing us in real time, it is a practical problem involving a complex of a million million intimate and very real interactions constituting daily living.  

 

I am not against a presentation conceptualizing the historical role of women through a primary lens whose framework is: 1). the specific changes in our living mode of production; at each distinct quantitative juncture in the expansion of our industrial system.  and then . . . THEN!, 

 

2).  . . . its accompanying - (corresponding) economic relations

 

3).  . . . through an overlapping lens that is

 

4).  . . . the social position of women as proletarian rather than an abstract proletariat, devoid of gender or the biological sex difference that makes women women and men men.  

 

Such an approach generally draws charges of "Feminism" in the negative sense and a failure to understand the value relations on the one hand: and economic determinism on the other. The fact of the matter is that the labor of women as an appendage to the labor of men in the society laboring process, has always been the condition of her own enslavement and the condition of keeping the wages of the man at its lowest. No man could work in the early factory system without a system of enslaving and gearing the labor of women to the home. This labor still remains to be compensated for and some form of reparations is not out of the question.

 

I am confident at being able to prove to anyone, that the washing machine accelerated the liberation of women, much more than a thousand years of pious suggestions, soul searching and revolutionary proclamations by men as rulers of the economic life of society.  The question here is whether one understands what it meant to wash clothes for the family before the washing machine and the infrastructure of electromechanical process. Washing clothes and cooking means the women doing this work, as a society sector, have no time for anything else.

 

America was ready for a woman President back when Shirley Chisholm threw her name in the hat. The issue is not "why vote for a women President, if she is no different and just as reactionary as any man." Whose lens is this that understands the social logic this way? Obviously this is the lens of the oppressor mentality parading as "progressive" and "revolutionary."

 

"You black guys are just as spoiled and rotten as the white guys. Why vote for you?"

 

To begin with a black guy was going to be elected any fuc*ing way, with or without your vote. The question is  . . . "why vote at all," not,  "why vote for a white guy with the same politics as a black guy," because when every thing is equal, we discover that such a concept has no reality.

 

The issue of leadership spoken of above is a practical question requiring an effort to summarize and synthesize our collective experiences in the offices, factories, bedrooms, homes, sexual relations and boardrooms.  

 

Here's my contribution: the organic dynamic of interactivity of men and women as the revolutionary process - the dialectic, is this: those who must lead if the revolution is to succeed are the least prepared to lead. The women - the most downtrodden of the world proletariat in every corner of the market, must quickly develop self confidence, must educate themselves, must quickly and boldly step forward to make their indispensable contribution to humanity or the revolution cannot win . . . period.

 

I cannot define the concrete meaning of "quickly." Developing "self confidence" does not mean that same as that of the men such as I, that were socialized in the last phase of industrial expansion on the industrial model of schools in the Midwest of America.

 

I do know that this dynamic - dialectic, of who is prepared, played itself out during the period the upsurge of the African American Peoples Movement and its impact within the industrial trade union movement, which is not the meaning of the labor movement. In the trade unions the blacks often brought into office was barely equipped in many instances to weld the administrative apparatus of the union at the lowest and highest levels and often insecure with dealing with the "white membership" and engaging in contest with a strata of union officials more than less Slavic in auto . . . but not exclusively.

 

There are cultural things involved and the historical ethnic character of neighborhoods formed on the basis of our factory ssytem, but the overarching reason is because of the historical disconnect or the second class citizenship status that kept blacks out of the industrial sector and then leadership in the industrial trade unions. We entered industry on a curve of history behind virtually all of the European immigrant groups. Consequently, blacks tend to be less proletarianized than whites in the base line meaning of "industrial proletatiat" as a sector of society. Women are less proletarianized than men in the same meaning.

 

This experience is personal and intimate and almost drove me crazy. How this experience played itself out with my first wife, who consistently proved to be a better leader trade union leader than I, measured by real votes and not ideological categories, is a story - herstory, waiting to be told.

 

I think I wrote about this on Pen-L in an article called "Forever Young" and named the actual women that altered a certain flow of history in the industrial trade union movement. Then again, I was never much of a trade union official anyway.

 

Men tend to not take women serious in politics and business because of their privilege position in history and then use the excuse of women's "lack of understanding" as an excuse, when in fact, we have been the fundamental impediment to this knowing in the first place. This question is extremely complex because higher paid workers tend to be men and the worse paid workers women and you cannot unite a higher paid worker with a lower paid worker outside a condition where the higher paid worker is and understands he is being pushed in the bottom of the proletariat. Then this awareness creates conflicting tendencies which tend to be more reactionary than progressive.

 

In other words I do not object to a view that cast women as a class category. I only seek understanding for the specific when such a relationship is spoken of.

 

More is involved than washing the dishing, taking care of ones children consistently and being a loving husband, because the meaning of "loving" is being redefined in real time by women.