Pre-Post Poll: Thoughts On Marxist Feminism?

79 thoughts on Pre-Post Poll: Thoughts On Marxist Feminism?

1. From what I’ve read it’s got lots to do with moral right and wrong. For instance, income difference for women compared to men. Marxist Feminism is therefore a stand against what differentiates women from men in areas that diminish women’s accomplishments in society ranked by income.

2. By Marxist do you mean stemming from the writings of Marx himself, or do you include his successors?

3. It’s my understanding that Marxist feminism deals with women’s unpaid economic contributions to society. I remember reading an essay that discussed the use value versus exchange value of the work done by men versus women. (I can’t remember the name, but it was written when women typically stayed at home with the family). It pointed out that men often worked at jobs in which they made things that the companies sold, while women spent equal time doing work that was consumed by the family: cooking, making clothes, cleaning, etc.

   Also, I believe that Marxist feminism is typically socialist, with the view that capitalism is inherently oppressive to disadvantaged groups, and since women are often disadvantaged, women cannot be truly liberated within a capitalist system.

   In one essay from my feminist theory course, an author noted that the Marx discussion of the working class as oppressed by the capitalists and exploited for labor excluded the women in society, who were at a lower position than the working class men. She made alot of interesting points, and I will look up the author.

   Great post. I look forward to seeing other replies, and please feel free to correct me if any of this is incorrect. I’m always happy to learn, especially on economics topics.

4. One simple explanation of Marxist feminism is that adds class awareness to as another factor in multiple layers of oppression.

   More over both Engels “Origin’s of the Family”” and various other early Marxist writings were among the first to view the oppression of women as class based within the structure of the family.

   That is to say the unpaid labor of women enabled greater exploitation of men who were out in the paid labor field.

   Having read about how the labor movements as well as radical women like Rosa Luxembourg and Emma Goldman were suppressed and labeled as red I have the gut feeling that issues have a long history of intertwining.

   That and the way every movement for social justice in the US has been labeled as “Red” because often times the strongest supporters of those movement have actually been either red or black in their political leanings cause me to think Marxism requires less dismissal and greater study.

   Particularly given the oppressive arc that so called free market capitalism seems to be taking the world.

5. I’ve always been taught to be slightly wary of Marxist feminism, because it has a tendency to try and amalgamate two systems of thought which may not be entirely complementary. Perhaps somebody who knows more about dual systems theory could enlighten me as to how the arguments have been refined in more contemporary academia, but my own understanding is that there’s always been a certain degree of friction between Marxism (treating class as the central determinant of social standing) and Feminism (obviously giving primacy of place to sex). In particular, Marxists seem very resistant to the idea of patriarchy. Ellen Willis I think wrote a very entertaining piece (will link if I can find it again!) about how she got very frustrated with the New Left movement, who would rant about class oppression while simultaneously laughing off the idea that (shock horror!) sex oppression may also play a part.

   Another thing that really struck me when reading up about Marxist Feminism is that most of it stems not from Marx, but from Engels – it’s him that makes the original link between workers’ control over production and women’s control over reproduction. But again, his writing never really jumps out as ‘feminism’ per se – it’s arguably a lot more about co-opting women into socialism (something socialism’s always been very good at!)

   On the other hand, Marxist feminism (or at the very least, socialist feminism) deals a lot more readily than liberal forms of argument do with certain questions. For instance it’s a lot easier to argue against something like pornography from a socialist standpoint, I would say, because it has a far greater emphasis on the moral health of a whole society than it does on protecting and enabling the ‘free’ choices made by individuals. Clare Chambers’ ‘Sex, Culture and Justice: The Limits of Free Choice’ is a REALLY fantastic recent book that deals with this, and owes a lot to socialist theory in my humble opinion.

6. The essay I referred to is “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union” by Heidi Hartmann.
   She points out that both a feminist and marxist critique is needed as “society can be best understood once it is recognized that it is organized and both in capitalistic and patriarchal ways.”

7. @Suzan
   #3

   Oops, forgot about Engels’ Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, which is worse because I own an unread copy.

8. A purely Marxist analysis (simply put) largely centers around the accumulation of wealth in a capitalist society as being tied to the exchange value of commodities, as opposed to their use value. The exchange value of a given commodity is determined by the labour time that goes in to the production. The goal of the majority of people within a capitalist society is to sell their labour time in order to earn the money that they need to purchase the products necessary to live. The goal of capitalists, on the other hand, is to extract socially necessary labour time from workers while paying them as little as possible in order to allow them to reproduce themselves as workers, thereby ensuring the continued availability of labour power. Capitalists make money, not to earn a living, but for the sake of making more money, extracting surplus value by paying workers much less than the actual value based on how much they produce. The fundamental class struggle, for Marx, is between the owners of the means of production and everyone else.

   The role of women within this system is largely ignored by Karl Marx. Engels has linked women’s inferior position to the institution of private property. Because oppression is linked to private property, many Marxists, like Engels, believe that class is the fundamental factor in oppression, and that the abolishment of private property will end sexism (Hartmann- see “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism”). However, capitalism alone does not explain why it is women, and not men, who end up in subordinate positions in society. So, capitalism creates a hierarchy of workers, but it is gender and racial hierarchies that determine who fits where within this hierarchy, which is why Marxism alone is insufficient in analyzing women’s oppression in the paid workforce.

   Radical feminist analyses are no more useful than Marxism alone at studying women’s oppression in the paid workforce. Catherine Mackinnon offers a strong critique of Marxism in Towards a Feminist Theory of the State, stating that Marx “bitingly criticized theories that treated class as if it arose spontaneously and operated mechanistically yet harmoniously in accord with natural laws… Yet this is exactly the way he treated gender.” While criticizing Marx for treating gender as a natural category, radical feminists often projected male and female characteristics as they appear in the present back into all of history. This contrasts directly with Marxist arguments, who allege that the fundamental area of analysis is class.

   In contrast to Marx’ theorizing, Heidi Hartman has a rather famous quote that “men have more to lose than their chains.” Men benefit from a privilege that could continue to exist even after a revolution towards communism if other vectors of oppression such as gender, race, sexuality, ableism, and agism (to name a few) are not acknowledged. It needs to be understood that the Marxist struggle against capitalism cannot be successful if feminist issues are ignored. This is why Marxist feminism is important (of course, in combination with other theories and standpoints), especially when studying the position that women, or a particular group of women, hold in society.

   I especially like it because it always seems like a battle cry… don’t just complain about the inequalities, try to enact change in whatever way you know how.

9. I really appreciate the prior comments on this thread. I learn so much from everyone here. 🙂

   I myself gravitate towards an ideal of radical egalitarianism, and my justification is the Sermon on the Mount as preached by Jesus. I see all believers as part of the Body of Christ, which is not exclusionary and open to all. Jesus’ teachings infrequently take a single-gender perspective and his own followers came from all walks of life and included both men and women.

   And as for class conflict, I recognize that true liberation for women is complicated by socio/economic status. It is much easier for women from more privileged backgrounds to learn how they are held back and limited. I find in a more working class setting, the problem that has no name is very much still in effect. There may not be an understanding of specific terms and pithy commentary, but the feeling of repression and dissatisfaction certainly is present.

10. I have to say that while I support socialism in theory, applied socialism tends to go terribly awry. It doesn’t take into account pre-existing social norms and cultural mores, so the results for women vary by country. For example, Sweden is a very good place to be a woman, while China and Bolivia are not good places for women.

11. Marxism is a failed concept. I wouldn’t recommended it for any group.

    When actual revolutions were carried out in the name of Marxism, they always ended with the establishment of dictatorial rule. The repressed became the oppressors; some were always more equal than others.

12. Lots of smart comments in this thread, especially those that acknowledge both the benefits and the limits of Marxist feminism.

    My short answer is that Marxist anything [critique, feminism, literary theory] is [critique, feminism, literary theory] that studies culture from the point of view of production. Like, in what way do the cultural formations we have enlist and train people into the service of ongoing capitalism? (There’s a bit of anthropomorphism of capitalism there, but it can be useful.) So Marxist feminism, as some above commentors have suggested, is a critique of the way labor is gendered, how value accorded to certain kinds of labor changes because of gender, etc.

    But since I first read Marxist feminists in a survey course that traced the historical development of modern feminism, I usually think of it as referring to a specific point in time – the late 60s and early 70s. To be really short and oversimple, Marxist feminism was kind of the flagship of 2nd wave feminism – the philosophy that marked the re-emergence of a vocal and conscious effort to end sexist oppression. But it got very problematic very quickly, because in the same way that traditional Marxism didn’t adequately address womens’ work, many Marxist feminist writers of those decades didn’t adequately address the intersecting oppressions of race and sexuality. That’s why you get the Lavendar Menace and Cohombee River Collective around that same time period, early 70s.

    So I think one of the most interesting questions for this study group would be, How do the texts you read account (or fail to account) for intersecting oppressions? Maybe you can read some of the early writers, and compare to contempoary feminists who self-identify as Marxist feminist. A quick Wiki search didn’t turn up many suggestions for me – sorry – but I hope to hear how this develops.

13. *Lavender
    *Combahee
    Pardon my spellfail.

14. Am very interested in this question but have started with basic marx resources for myself – but would be very interested to see detailed analysis/resources on Marxist Feminism specifically and also ‘Materialist Feminists’ (ie Christine Delphy(?) – and how contemporary ‘Material Feminisms’ might relate?

    “material feminism: the “conjuncture of several discourses—historical materialism, Marxist and radical feminism, as well as postmodern and psychoanalytic theories of meaning and subjectivity.” (wikipedia)

    Sounds great. Even so, I am often coming across the fruitless polarized debate about whether the patriarchy (Radical) or capitalism (Marxist/Socialist) is prioritized as the root of women’s oppression given that we currently live in patriarchal and (globalized) capitalist system. But the Marxist Feminist being also anti-capitalist must most clearly fight to change this underlying system of oppression rather than ie Liberal feminism which works for the integration of (some) women into positions of power in the current and vastly inequitable system. While this is undoubtedly important part of the struggle one invariably comes to question whether this is enough. Radical feminism too, like Liberal feminism are in my experience more ambivalent about such an end – the move beyond capitalism and its structure of exploitation. Sorry if this all sounds a bit reductive as i’m sure its much more nuanced and complicated.

    – – –

    David Harvey: Reading Marx’s Capital – chapter by chapter –
    http://davidharvey.org/reading-capital/

    Brendan Mcooney: Kapitalism 101 –
    http://www.youtube.com/brendanmcooney#p/u/3/dGT-hygPqUM
    Videos include:
    Law of Value 1. Intro / 2. The Fetishism of Commodities / 3. Das Mud Pie / 4 etc.

    Richard Wolff: Capitalism Hits the Fan
    http://www.rdwolff.com/content/capitalism-hits-fan-movie

15. I’m all for including class analysis in one’s feminist outlook, but given how miserably and terribly Marxism has failed when applied, can’t we do better than a Marxist analysis?

    Surely there is -some- good system of class analysis that’s better suited to contemporary conditions, isn’t historicist (that inevitable march towards socialism and then a classless, stateless society? It, er, wasn’t inevitable), and isn’t linked to some of the most brutal massacres, famines and dictatorships in human history?

    Also, if we’re going to link feminism to economic theory, how about economic theory that at least -sort of- works? Something social-democratic or democratic-socialist in nature? Surely Marx isn’t the only economist who takes class into account, and Marxism can’t be the only system under which the unpaid-for and unrecognized contributions of homemakers can be recognized and factored in.

    Also, what others have said about large parts of the Marxist left being historically very hostile to feminism. Wasn’t homosexuality supposed to be a “bourgeois deviation?”

    Seriously, feminists, we can do better than Karl Marx.

16. “Something social-democratic or democratic-socialist in nature?”

    I think you are on to something here. A democratic socialism is probably about a good a system as would come to hope, considering the other alternatives.

17. I don’t think it’s entirely fair to point to Mao/Stalin et al and call them the natural end point of Marxist theory, any more than it is fair to point to the Tokyo gas attacks and call it the work of Buddhism.

    Nowhere in my readings of Marx do I remember seeing anything that could accurately be interpreted as “round up anyone with glasses and put them in jail”, or “kill millions of your own population”. Marx gets a bad rap, especially in America I think, but his writing was instrumental in the thought of many politicians and philosophers of thought who would later go on to become architects of the contemporary world. It’s hard to discuss the welfare state, for instance, without acknowledging Marxism at least implicitly.

    I think Tanglethis makes a really interesting observation about intersecting oppressions, and Marxism’s potential role in addressing a feminist readership that seems increasingly fractured. One of the great strengths of a Marxist/socialist influenced feminism, as far as I can see, is that it makes a fair attempt to soothe divisions between groups that have become very focused on asserting their differences, not their points of commonality. As a publicly oriented (as opposed to liberal feminism’s privately oriented) theory, it does carry a sense of “well we’re all in this together”

    My particular difficulty with it is that it does so primarily by obfuscating those differences (which are often valid) in the name of community. So you end up with a community that is perhaps more peaceable to those on the inside, but simultaneously excludes a lot of individuals who don’t accord with the status quo. Moreover, there’s a an added impetus to improve society – this isn’t absent in liberal thought, of course, but when you place public good above private choice, you’re more likely to ride roughshod over those choices, which is a very risky thing.

    I think this is the aspect of socialism you maybe want to examine if you want to explore why women frequently get the short end of the stick in purportedly Marxist societies (for instance, does a woman have individual reproductive rights, or are those rights couched in terms of the society as a whole?)

18. Old criticisms (some justified/some misreadings) of Marx have not deterred a new generation of contemporary Marxian thinkers to reconsider aspects of his work today because ie his book Capital has become with the recent turn of events prescient and more relevant, not less. His ‘value theory of capital’ contains within it a question of the ‘subject of capital’ and a question of subjectivation within capitalism which is part of the debate, and philosophical tradition in which the ‘materialism’ of feminism is also rooted ie in not only analysing the material conditions of womens lives but in effecting a transformation of these conditions.

19. “Marx gets a bad rap”

    I think the point that Panorama Island and myself were trying to make is that every time Marxist groups seized power it turned out to be a disaster. That’s because marxism doesn’t work in practice. The state never withers away; classes don’t vanish.

    “I think this is the aspect of socialism you maybe want to examine if you want to explore why women frequently get the short end of the stick in purportedly Marxist societies (for instance, does a woman have individual reproductive rights, or are those rights couched in terms of the society as a whole?)”

    Biologist E.O. Wilson summed it pretty well: ” What I like to say is that Karl Marx was right, socialism works, it is just that he had the wrong species. Why doesn’t it work in humans? Because we have repro­ductive independence, and we get maximum Darwinian fitness by looking after our own survival and having our own offspring. The great success of the social insects is that the success of the individual genes are invested in the success of the colony as a whole, and especially in the reproduction of the queen, and thus through her the reproduction of new colonies.”

    Hence, socialism can only be taken so far in human society with any kind of success.

20. Marxist feminism is simply feminism that stems mainly from marxist theorists and whatever was a big influence on Marx. For me, that includes later marxist theorists like Guy Debord, Teodor Adorno, Roland Barthes, Louis Althusser… as well as a large dose of Hegel (although Hegel himself was no feminist, saying that women were to men what animals were to plants, his dialectics are incredibly useful for feminist analysis). For me there’s a lot of Edward W. Said in there too.

    In fact, as a West European, I find it very difficult to envision feminism as separate from marxism. Theoretically, the connection runs a lot deeper than just adding class to a list of interacting oppressions, in fact to have such a list is quite un-marxist. Personally, I tend to focus on bourgeois femininity or ‘cultural hegemony’ (not a term I like very much, but being rather poorly read I don’t know a better one) and the ways it affects women the world over.

    One criticism of marxist feminism I read very often is that we think the only type of oppression is class-based, and all the others are secondary. In fact, class has a much broader meaning for marxism than I generally see on feminist blogs.

    One important thing is anti-individualism and anti-essentialism, so that anything that focusses on ‘women being themselves’ or ‘I am woman, hear me roar!’ will appear very bogus to marxist feminists, as well as any stuff about finding your true soul, or whatever. People are a product of their situations – if women are largely in crap situations, they don’t get to be fantastic people. So you won’t find us claiming that there were many fantabulastic women composers throughout history (classical music, is, like, way bourge anyway) only men won’t acknowledge it because they’re dickheads. After all, music is a skill that has to be learned, so if women don’t get to learn it… obviously, if some 16th century chick fought against all that and composed some fantastic polyphonic stuff that remains unacknowledged, she is a badass and should be acknowledged. But that’s not a priority.

    So what are priorities? Well, a decent standard of living and equal opportunities for all. At the moment, obviously, women are second-class citizens in some very concrete, material ways.

    Anyway, you’ll have to excuse me if this is a bit of a muddle as I have an absolutely splitting stress headache right now. Feel free to pop by my blog if you want to see some marxist feminist ramblings written in a marginally less brainfucked state. Only don’t bother if you want to tell me to go back to Russia: I’ve heard it before.

21. although Hegel himself was no feminist, saying that women were to men what animals were to plants, his dialectics are incredibly useful for feminist analysis

    Other way round, women were to men what plants were to animals. Argh! Sorry. I was out running in the midday sun today, head = baked.

22. I’m not sure I can think of a whole host of examples of a Marxist group seizing power, Holy. The Bolsheviks in 1917 were conspicuously divorced from the Mensheviks in that they explicitly rejected many of the finer points of Marx/Engels’ theory. Mao had a bee in his bonnet (to put it mildly) about intellectuals, and places like North Korea are not so much Marxist states as they are thinly disguised dictatorships, by all accounts.

    Also, I don’t know if it’s helpful to talk in binary terms when it comes to Marxism. Raymond Geuss makes a point of laying out the huge breadth of ideas covered by the catchall ‘Marxism’: you could be referring to Marx’s own ideas (which naturally altered over time); to those of his contemporaries; to those of the people he influenced. You could even use the term to describe aspects of political philosophy *predating* Marx himself which appear to touch upon many of the same ideas.

    I’m not a Marxist myself, especially in regards to feminism, for the reasons I’ve already mentioned above. In particular, the wider implications of the anti-individualism that Jen talked about worries me greatly. But to lump poor old Karl with mass murderers and dictators just because of the political grandstanding of the latter strikes me as grossly unfair.

23. I agree with Richard Dawkins when he says that human beings tend to work in competitive, and even greedy, ways – but that competitiveness and greed are not therefore good or right (the common mistake that right-wing fans of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology tend to make). They’re simply facts that human beings have to contend with in our struggle for a kinder, more just and equitable world.

    The big problem with Marx and other radical revolutionary thinkers, as I see it, is that they don’t understand how people change, and don’t really account for the more frustratingly glacial elements of human transformation, or our appalling inability to realize when we’re making mistakes and hurting others (see the “homosexuality as bourgeois deviation” idiocy I referenced earlier). Revolution requires people to be both willing and able to change in many different ways, all at once, very quickly, and it requires us to be very far-sighted at the same time. It’s kind of like saying that running ridiculously fast will make you much stronger. It will – and eventually you’ll trip on a rock and crack your head open, or you’ll simply pass out from exhaustion and dehydration, not having paused long enough to rest and drink some water.

    People don’t change like that. It’s true that we can and do change quickly in some ways – look at how quickly we’ve taken to the Internet, and how much it’s transformed us! – but in other ways, we do not. This is the reality that feminists (and anti-racists, and vegetarians and vegans, environmentalists, trans activists, etc.) face.

    It is undoubtedly correct to say that we owe a lot to Karl Marx for things like the welfare state and unionism, and it is also true that Marx never advocated Gulag camps, killing people who wear glasses, humiliating and destroying the lives of classics scholars, taking political prisoners, collective punishment by mass starvation, massive militarism, et cetera et cetera, yaddity ya.

    However, left radicals do still have history, and not just theory, to contend with; if self-labeled Marxist movements have tended to deviate tremendously from what you see as “real Marxism” and devolve into mere despotism, it is not enough to simply condemn Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Enver Hoxha, Kim Il Sung and their buddies as “not Marxist.” You must account, -somehow-, for -why- so-called Marxist movements always end up in such a bloody mess. One can say that Marx is correctly applied in a very gradual fashion – I’ve heard the same thing said about Anarchism – and that people aren’t ready for it yet. That’s a perfectly valid viewpoint, but it leaves you with nothing more than a historicist theory, not really applicable to real-life, here-and-now situations. It leads one into theorizing instead of taking action.

    There are oodles of women out there suffering, being abused, underpaid, denied rights. Neither starting another extremely-likely-to-fail revolution nor sitting at your Mac and postulating about what might happen 300 or 500 years from now will help those women to gain their rights and realize their own agency.

    And yes, the anti-individualism in Marxism disturbs me. It is fundamentally at odds with my civil libertarianism, which is one of my core values. I suppose this is just a matter of fundamental value difference; I really am a liberal at heart.

    —

    All that being said, I do think that class analysis has an important role to play in feminism, and Marx has surely held a central position in the history of class analysis. I think we need theories that are not just beautiful and enticing, but directly actionable, though. Marxism does not strike me as actionable. Those who have tried have failed terribly, or else have simply taken up the name of Karl Marx as a pretty shroud with which to mask their monstrousness.

24. I think the point that Panorama Island and myself were trying to make is that every time Marxist groups seized power it turned out to be a disaster. That’s because marxism doesn’t work in practice. The state never withers away; classes don’t vanish.

    I shuddered when I saw this post, because I knew this was going to get trotted out. How’s that capitalism thing working out? Oil gushing unchecked into the Gulf of Mexico, giant recession, wars everywhere, still STILL in 2010 how many children, how many people die of simple poverty? Simple neglect? Charity will not fix this. If capitalism was called “Friedmanism” or “Greenspanism” this argument might sound quite different. Part of the problem is that most know very little about Marxism and about the history of communist and socialist states other than what they’ve been taught by those with an agenda.

    As far as Marxist Feminism, the only way capitalism works, insofar as it it does, is for women to work the second shift. Which is why the most virulent capitalists skew so hard right and why they’re so anti-feminist – the whole thing falls apart if mommy isn’t feathering the nest. Sarah Palin is the perfect symbol because though she has some of the attributes of the bourgeoisie, the elites of the RP know full well that their base can’t afford that lifestyle (paid help) – again, second shift.

    I hope we get into reproduction/means of production stuff because that is crucial and fascinating.

25. re: Edward O Wilson:
    “…Among Wilson’s fiercer critics these objections harden into the accusation that sociobiology is merely another right-wing ideology. Wilson describes it as “the systematic study of the biological basis of social behaviour and advanced societies”. But for some Marxists and feminists it is pseudo-science, a reactionary attempt to show that the unequal distribution of power in society is natural and unalterable.”
    http://www.newstatesman.com/200307140012

26. iris,

    Wilson a neo-conservative? You forget that most of the radical right opposes evolution-which stands at the heart of Wilson’s work. That’s something marxists, communists, and the religious right have in common: a distaste for evolutionary theory.

    Socio-biology does not call the distribution of wealth and power inevitable. No one from Wilson to Pinker writes such things. Pick up one of their books and you’ll see.

    Marxism embraces the blank slate theory in all its outcomes; that is, it advances the idea that mankind has no inherent structure, everything is created by culture. That flies in the face of everything we know about how the mind works today.

27. Thanks everyone for contributing — I’m enjoying the knowledge pooling.

    Just to switch gears a little bit: it seems like most folks are speaking from a place of intellectual/theoretical knowledge. I’d also love to hear if anyone has experiential, applied, or even literary knowledge or associations. Have you or people you know incorporated Marxist ideas into organizing? Into art? Are there self-identifying Marxists around your neighborhood? (or in your own crew?) How do they seem to you?

    That might sound a little creepily McCarthyist, I realize (“Do you, personally, know any members of the Communist Party? What are their names? What are their habits?”…), but I’m just trying to bring us a bit more into the realm of practice and direct experience, rather than theoretical and historical argument.

    For example, most of the Marxists I met before moving to the Bay Area were academics. Most were men, most were overbearing, and most seemed to take everything very seriously. They read a lot and did a lot of organizing. Here in the Bay I’ve met many more women and queer Marxists and Marxist feminists. There’s a fair amount of sectarianism, as far as I can see, but also a number of cooperative and collaborative efforts. I’ve found many of them to be warm, genuine, and good at listening, which I’ll admit surprised me at first.

    To add another non-theoretical example (but one that might still speak to the question of “anti-individualism”), there’s a scene in pro-feminist woman novelist Carson McCullers’ The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter where Doctor Copeland, a Black Southern physician in the 1930s or so, hosts an annual Christmas party at his home for the town’s entire Black community, and gives a speech outlining some basic Marxist thought. Toward its end he says:

    Each year at this time we illustrate in our small way the first commandment from Karl Marx. Every one of you at this gathering has brought in advance some gift. Many of you have denied yourselves comfort that the needs of others may be lessened. Each of you has given according to his best ability, without thought to the value of the gift he will receive in return. It is natural for us to share with each other. We have long realized that it is more blessed to give than to receive. The words of Karl Marx have always been known in our hearts: ‘From each according to his ability; to each according to his needs.’

    I don’t know how central that idea is to Marx’s body of work as a whole (and from what I understand he didn’t invent it, but popularized it), but I do think it’s one of the most inspiring articulations of healthy individualism that I know. Certainly very far from the flattened, mechanical, ‘treat everyone exactly the same’ notions I had about Marxism and communism growing up.

28. How’s that capitalism thing working out

    It’s destroying the planet. I have no grand defense of capitalism. What I do have is an awareness that all the so-called Marxist groups that seized power in the twentieth century-or waged long terror campaigns like Che, the Shining Path, and FARC, failed utterly. We know plenty about the former communist states as most of their archives have opened and countless people have carefully documented their failings.

29. I’d also love to hear if anyone has experiential, applied, or even literary knowledge or associations. Have you or people you know incorporated Marxist ideas into organizing? Into art? Are there self-identifying Marxists around your neighborhood? (or in your own crew?) How do they seem to you?

    I learned the most about socialism, which I learned the minimal amount I know now from a Marxist view, from my husband and a few short readings. When I first started learning about feminist theory, I started with bell hooks Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. I always associated feminism with Marxism because of the similarities between capitalism, which Marx was clearly against, and patriarchy, which feminists are fighting against. I was disappointed, though, when I started to read Marx and found only anti-feminist sentiments or an utter lack of recognition for women as an equal class of people.

    My peers and I tend to fall toward the Marxist/socialist category of people, in terms of what we talk about. We tend to take part in more “hippie”-ish activities intentionally, are environmentally conscious, and spend hours discussing ways we should “redo” our lives and create a sort of commune-like environment in which to live. It’s very hippie and not 100% Marxist, but most people are familiar with, and fond of, most Marxist principles that I know, and are, at minimum, accepting of feminism. All the women I talk to in any of these groups identify as feminists; their boyfriends tend to be merely supportive, but many are also actively engaged.

    On the other hand, the majority of us do all of this in-between going to our corporate jobs where our bosses are paying us as little as they can get away with and giving us as much work as they can get away with, doing something completely intangible, and losing the ownership of our labor. That’s what we hate, but we’re either not motivated enough to change that, or we don’t know how.

30. On the other hand, the majority of us do all of this in-between going to our corporate jobs where our bosses are paying us as little as they can get away with and giving us as much work as they can get away with, doing something completely intangible, and losing the ownership of our labor. That’s what we hate, but we’re either not motivated enough to change that, or we don’t know how.

    Mmmm. Thanks for this thoughtful and personal example, April. Well put and resonant for a lot of us, I’m sure.

31. This is one angle:

    http://thedelphiad.wordpress.com/2010/06/13/women-as-the-opiate-of-manhood/

32. Hey Dominique, interesting article! Have you read the piece by Marx where that famous phrase, “religion is the opium of the people,” comes from? A friend gave it to me recently and I was blown away at how differently it comes across in the original context. There’s a tremendous empathy and understanding to the words that perhaps gets lost when we isolate them and cite them in a drug-shaming culture. (Drugs make us docile, irrational or suggestible, rather than drugs are a balm used for soothing pain and self-medicating.) I’d always thought of it as a condescending and dismissive description, but after reading it in its original home my understanding changed a lot.

    Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

    You can see the whole thing here.

    Thanks again — I just wanted to raise that since it’s something I wouldn’t have known unless someone told me.

33. Marxist feminism explains so much about oppression. A Marxist feminist perspective elucidates how the capitalist system uses sexism to maintain stability, i.e. produce even more capital for those on top. It is also interesting to contemplate the economic reasons for gender-based oppression. The whole idea of women staying home or working the second shift to subsidize the husband’s wages. Now this situation is increasing less applicable for families but the general idea still applies. Women still do the same work for only three-quarters of the pay. The whole way “women’s work,” paid and unpaid, is constructed and valued gets at the heart of a lot of feminist issues.
    One thing I find confusing about Marxist feminism is how little it seems to relate to traditional Marxism. Marxism feminism is not feminism with a class perspective. It is the idea that sexism actually keeps the class system in place. Pretty rad idea when you think about it.

34. In response to the question of whether I have done any organizing or art relating to Marxist feminism, I can’t think of any good, clear examples. However, for a WONDERFUL story of women organizing I will recommend the book Storming Caesar’s Palace by Annelise Orleck. For someone interested in social action and change, this is quite honestly a page-turner. You won’t get a lot of Marxist theory in this book, but this book so clearly demonstrates the systematic oppression of poor black women with capitalism and how a small group of it managed to overcome through organization.

35. I find it interesting that you interpret this as “healthy individualism” – would you mind elaborating a little? I can see how it would demand different actions from different individuals in order to conform with the rule, but the conforming part of it is the same for everyone. Doesn’t Copeland acknowledge that himself when he refers to it as “the first commandment of Karl Marx”?

    The best evocation of the problems in Marxist theory that I know of in literature probably comes from Milan Kundera. He doesn’t write explicitly about the communist regime he fled, but there’s always this heavy presence lurking in the shadows, and a few choice sections really sum up the grim side of things.

    Case in point: in his first novel ‘The Joke’, the protagonist is kicked out of his university and sent to what is essentially a labour camp, because he lampoons the party in a mock postcard he sends to his girlfriend (who promptly turns him in – I should mention at this point perhaps that Kundera is definitely NOT the shining light of feminism). So the criticism is that Marxist society is all well and good until somebody finds themselves outside the dominant group.

    Take the quotation you mentioned at the top. As a mantra to follow on an individual level, it’s admirable (but really I see it as more of a rearticulation of basic utilitarianism, which was obviously buzzing around way before Marx). But when it becomes the moral code of your society, I think you’re going to come up against stumbling blocks. Like, how does that society treat somebody it doesn’t see as giving according to their means? Does it dispossess them forcefully? Who makes that decision?

    On a sidenote, if you want to have a look how Marxist (or purportedly Marxist) societies treat their own literature, take a wander over to http://www.sovlit.com/

    It’s a huge repository, so make of it what you will – the one that originally caught my eye is called ‘The Forty-First’. It’s about a female Red partisan sniper who gets trapped on a desert island with a White officer where they fall in love. Then at the end (SPOILER) she shoots him because he’s a bourgeois pig and she has to fulfill her class destiny. It would be very easy to take a feminist reading of it and say that she escapes the shackles of class AND marriage etc etc, but what jumps out at me more is that she only does so by fulfilling the ambitions of her Red (presumably male) leaders.

    Moreover the fact that LITERALLY ALL OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE from this period is (by law) purely fixated on the glorification of the state. From a country that brought us Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and the like, I think it’s a pretty tragic situation when individual artistic accomplishment is seen as bourgeois and self-indulgent.

36. HTML catastrophe! That post was supposed to block quote the “from each according to his ability; to each according to his needs” and then everything else is my own rambling…

37. I don’t think it’s true that ‘every time Marxist groups seized power it turned out to be a disaster.’
    I lived in Nicaragua for a while, a few years ago, and knew a lot of Sandinistas. From what I learned there from people who lived it, the Nicaraguan revolution did some amazing things (teaching an enormous percentage of the population to read, in about 8 months, for example– literacy rates went from below 50% to 87% in that time period), until they had to focus all their energy on the Contra war that the U.S. led and funded.
    The Sandinistas made a lot of mistakes, but they also did a lot of good for Nicaragua, and could have done a lot more, had the U.S. not done its best to crush their revolution.

38. I have to say I find myself stumped as to how to respond to Marxism and it’s various manifestations. This discussion has a lot of interesting points and counterpoints, but a lot of folks seem really stuck on assessing large scale political movements and Marxism in academia, both of which are really “heady” in my view.

    To be honest, one of the issues I’ve had with much of economic theory over the past few centuries is how much it tends to reinforce people as economic entities. We’re “consumers,” or “workers,” or any number of other things, but it all comes down to some form of materialistic take on life.

    I’ve always been a big picture, systemic, holistic type of guy. And I think part of problem that comes when anyone adheres too much to most modern economic theories as guideposts for how to understand life, and act in the world, is that they end up cutting off part of their/our humanity. The less tangible, commodify- able parts of life, be it artistic expression, small scale communities, spirituality and/or religion, the intrinsic value of healthy ecosystems – none of these are really well addressed if you think about it. And if you want to address oppression, all of these areas have been avenues of oppression and outright destruction on the part of oppressive groups and individuals.

    From what I have read of Marx, he was a great analyzer of the many pitfalls of the capitalist system. And yet his response seems to be in reaction to that system, and not developing something that moves beyond a binary that’s caught in trying to address what to do with material wealth in society.

    And from what I’ve seen of groups and individuals that declare themselves Marxist and are out working for “revolution,” there’s a lot of great class analysis, lots of wonderful and useful critique of corporations and government’s ties to them, and also a really deep lack of considering humans in their totality. I’ve met plenty of these folks doing work in the anti-war movement, and I just can’t identify anymore with calls to “liberate workers” and “crush the ruling class and petty bougeois.”

    Life is more than economics. And we are all in this together – in other words, I find it disappointing that more often than not, there is a stated desire to oppress or eliminate those who are currently oppressed. We have enough of that crap coming from our uber-capitalist leaders. Seems to me it’s time to figure out a different way that addresses people as people, and understands our relationship as one amongst many species on this planet.

    So, I’d never argue to toss Marx out, but I suppose I would say that it’s really important to consider the limitations of his economic model, and many of the others out there.

39. @exholt: I appreciate your contributions but I un-approved your comment because of the use of snark (“Nice use of diversionary rhetorical tactics”), which breaks guideline #1 of my comment threads. (Here.)

    Please feel welcome to re-submit without snark, and focusing on building on positive points you see in the thread. (Don’t have to agree with the OP, of course!)

    Thanks.

40. I lived in Nicaragua for a while, a few years ago, and knew a lot of Sandinistas. From what I learned there from people who lived it, the Nicaraguan revolution did some amazing things (teaching an enormous percentage of the population to read, in about 8 months, for example– literacy rates went from below 50% to 87% in that time period), until they had to focus all their energy on the Contra war that the U.S. led and funded.

    If it is coming from the Sandinistas, I’d approach their comments with some skepticism as they were the dominant ruling party and thus, benefited much from the Communist system.

    I’ve heard similar comments from a tiny minority of Mainland Chinese classmates who espoused the great benefits of the Cultural Revolution and how Great Leap Forward “wasn’t such a bad thing”. Upon further probing, they were all invariably children of powerful party members or opportunistic political hacks who benefited greatly from their families’ highly privileged positions which were derived from their oppression of those labeled “bad elements” and missed the privileges and power they had in the Maoist “good old days”.

    What’s more revealing is how the vast majority of their fellow Mainland Chinese classmates tended to roll their eyes and openly disdained them for their BS. Since all of them had parents and grandparents who lived through and suffered through those periods without the privileges of being a privileged member of the Maoist state and/or politically opportunistic enough to mouth some political slogans/chants, they knew how much the “good old days” were only that for the privileged party members favored by Mao and opportunistic political hacks more than happy to persecute and destroy the lives of others, including their own friends and family members in their quests for greater privilege and power.

41. I shuddered when I saw this post, because I knew this was going to get trotted out. How’s that capitalism thing working out?

    The fact capitalism has serious shortcomings does not necessarily mitigate or absolve Marxism of its own demonstrated shortcomings…

    As a scholarship student who attended a private undergrad college populated by doctrinaire Marxists and Maoists, I saw this type of diversionary tactics employed plenty of times when Marxist/Maoist classmates were confronted by actual historical realities of what Marxist-Leninism/Maoism wrought upon societies whose “vanguard” leaders adopted what turned out to be such totalitarian and socially and economically destructive ideologies ideologies. That or they’d do the equivalent of plugging up their ears with their fingers and saying “La La La La I can’t hear you!!!”
    🙄

    It was quite ironic, amusing, and sometimes quite disgusting to see ignorant snotty Marxist/Maoist classmates mostly from highly sheltered upper/upper-middle class near all-White suburban backgrounds act as if they knew so much more about Marxist-Leninism/Stalinism/Maoism’s effects on the societies whose “vanguard” leaders adopted them than the very people who actually lived and suffered through such regimes.

    My Physics prof great-aunt, her agricultural scientist husband, and two daughters were among those who lived through and suffered the effects of Maoist policies such as the Great Leap Forward which ended up starving millions and the Cultural Revolution when those labeled “intellectuals” such as my great-aunt who was a physics Prof and her family were persecuted by Maoist political hacks and enslaved into forced labor camps by them. Kind of ironic considering they made it a point to stay in China after the Communist took over and contributed their scientific research and educational skills to the then new regime. 🙄

42. >>although Hegel himself was no feminist

    Is this Hegel or Engel? The context makes it hard to be sure.

    If we’re talking Hegel, then Marx, Bakunin, Stirner et al. were part of the Left Hegelian circles, which was *subverting* Hegelian theory into a revolutionary creed when Hegel himself had made a quite conservative philosophy, and as such it would not be surprising if he was no feminist.

    To simplify (a lot, maybe not rendering the ideas justice), Hegel’s philosophy was that all that is real is rational, and vice versa. As such it was used to justify existing conditions. The Left Hegelians turned that onto its head, by showing systems that they claimed irrational and thus demonstrating they weren’t real, i.e. they were based on delusions, thus providing a justification for radical/revolutionary action. This was probably an important factor in Marx’s decision to work on showing the inherent irrationality of the capitalist system in Das Kapital.

43. For myself, as an anarchist I mostly have affinities to materialist feminism in general, though I’m not wedded to Marxist feminism in particular.

44. It seems quite important to disentangle stereotypes that have been mis-attributed to Marx from what he has actually written. One can then go on and disagree with things he has actually written, or recognized the dated character of aspects of it or appropriate for Feminism what is useful to our contemporary times. But propping up straw-men to easily knock down seems a pretty pointless pursuit.

    – – –

    This interpretation of Marx in the Introduction of (How to Read) Marx by Peter Osborne, has been useful for me. It also gives an underlying sense of how the endeavor of Feminism relates to the philosophy of Marx in terms of the necessary and ongoing analysis of the contradiction between ‘appearances’ that have been ie ideologically naturalized and the material conditions of ie women’s lives.

    – – –

    “Many have assumed that the collapse of international communism consigned Marx’s writings to a merely archival significance. Yet Marx was never the theorist of ‘actually existing’ state socialism, or of national liberation. This was the task of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Guevera. Marx was – and remains – first and foremost a critical analyst of capitalism, a theorist of its social dynamics and the conditions needed to overcome it… ie What distinguishes the concept of capitalism from the notion of a ‘market society’? What does it mean to be subjected to value? What developmental tendencies are inherent within the social form of capital?…

    In his writings, Marx strove to connect theoretical abstractions to experience, since it is as elements of experience that, ultimately, abstractions acquire truth. Conceptual abstractions transfigure the experiences they relate to – much like novels and works of visual art transfigure the experience of their readers and viewers. These are ‘phenomenological’ and ‘existential’ aspects of Marx’s thought. Marx engages his readers via the way the world appears to them, then traces these appearances back to fundamental features of human existence, so as to demonstrate their ultimate practical significance.”

    – – –

    Re: Marx’s criticism of ‘crude’ communism:

    “Marx conception of communism was not primarily that of a particular type of political party, let alone a state, but of a society without class antagonisms, without classes:

    ‘an association in which the free development of each is the condition of the free development of all’…

    …

    “The negation of property by propertylessness (practically, the moral act of giving up ownership – asceticism, for example) has no progressive political content for Marx since it leaves the institution of property intact. It will be either a solely individual act or a universal impoverishment, since no alternative system of production and distribution of goods to the existing one is proposed. What Marx called ‘crude communism’ makes the converse error: it describes a situation in which private property is generalized, to everyone, collectively. …

    His opposition has two main planks, opposition to crude communism’s reduction of what is held socially in common to a form of private ownership; and its associated failure to recognize the historical character of human needs. As a result, crude communism both puts into common ownership things that are not appropriately owned at all – the community of women as universal prostitution was Marx’s powerful example – and it ‘negates the personalities’ of men and women by reducing objects of ownership to the lowest common denominator in order that everyone can share in them. This results in what Marx called ‘an abstract negation of the entire world of culture and civilization.’ This sounds familiar, it is the popular stereotype of communism as a general social-levelling, of which Marxism has often been falsely accused by its enemies. Yet for Marx this would not be emancipation, but the culmination of envy, a type of resentment. From Marx’s point of view, it is not really communism at all, but a version of ‘the vileness of private property’ itself. This popular stereotype of communism is thus the precise opposite of Marx’s view. For Marx and Engles:

    ‘Communism deprives no one of the power to appropriate the products of society; all it does is deprive them of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropriation.’ “ p 73/77

45. “From what I have read of Marx, he was a great analyzer of the many pitfalls of the capitalist system.”

    That was Marx’s greatest gift. He made some incredibly astute observations about capitalism and where it was likely headed in the future.

    As for the Sandinistas…they did do some positive things, but they also suspended habeas corpus and used totalitarian tactics against their enemies. But as far as communist groups go, they were angels.

46. [opps here it goes again, with closed html tags and a minor change.]

    It seems quite important to disentangle stereotypes that have been mis-attributed to Marx from what he has actually written. One can then go on and disagree with things he has actually written, or recognized the dated character of aspects of it or appropriate for Feminism what is useful to our contemporary times. But propping up straw-men to easily knock down seems a less fruitful pursuit.

    – – –

    This interpretation of Marx in the Introduction of (How to Read) Marx by Peter Osborne, has been useful for me. It also gives an underlying sense of how the endeavor of Feminism relates to the philosophy of Marx in terms of the necessary and ongoing analysis of the contradiction between ‘appearances’ that have been ie ideologically naturalized and the material conditions of ie women’s lives.

    – – –

    “Many have assumed that the collapse of international communism consigned Marx’s writings to a merely archival significance. Yet Marx was never the theorist of ‘actually existing’ state socialism, or of national liberation. This was the task of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Guevera. Marx was – and remains – first and foremost a critical analyst of capitalism, a theorist of its social dynamics and the conditions needed to overcome it… ie What distinguishes the concept of capitalism from the notion of a ‘market society’? What does it mean to be subjected to value? What developmental tendencies are inherent within the social form of capital?…

    In his writings, Marx strove to connect theoretical abstractions to experience, since it is as elements of experience that, ultimately, abstractions acquire truth. Conceptual abstractions transfigure the experiences they relate to – much like novels and works of visual art transfigure the experience of their readers and viewers. These are ‘phenomenological’ and ‘existential’ aspects of Marx’s thought. Marx engages his readers via the way the world appears to them, then traces these appearances back to fundamental features of human existence, so as to demonstrate their ultimate practical significance.”

    – – –

    Re: Marx’s criticism of ‘crude’ communism:

    “Marx conception of communism was not primarily that of a particular type of political party, let alone a state, but of a society without class antagonisms, without classes:

    ‘an association in which the free development of each is the condition of the free development of all’…

    …

    “The negation of property by propertylessness (practically, the moral act of giving up ownership – asceticism, for example) has no progressive political content for Marx since it leaves the institution of property intact. It will be either a solely individual act or a universal impoverishment, since no alternative system of production and distribution of goods to the existing one is proposed. What Marx called ‘crude communism’ makes the converse error: it describes a situation in which private property is generalized, to everyone, collectively. …

    His opposition has two main planks, opposition to crude communism’s reduction of what is held socially in common to a form of private ownership; and its associated failure to recognize the historical character of human needs. As a result, crude communism both puts into common ownership things that are not appropriately owned at all – the community of women as universal prostitution was Marx’s powerful example – and it ‘negates the personalities’ of men and women by reducing objects of ownership to the lowest common denominator in order that everyone can share in them. This results in what Marx called ‘an abstract negation of the entire world of culture and civilization.’ This sounds familiar, it is the popular stereotype of communism as a general social-levelling, of which Marxism has often been falsely accused by its enemies. Yet for Marx this would not be emancipation, but the culmination of envy, a type of resentment. From Marx’s point of view, it is not really communism at all, but a version of ‘the vileness of private property’ itself. This popular stereotype of communism is thus the precise opposite of Marx’s view. For Marx and Engles:

    ‘Communism deprives no one of the power to appropriate the products of society; all it does is deprive them of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropriation.’” p 73/77

47. Marrrkat,

    Marxist feminism explains so much about oppression. A Marxist feminist perspective elucidates how the capitalist system uses sexism to maintain stability, i.e. produce even more capital for those on top. It is also interesting to contemplate the economic reasons for gender-based oppression. The whole idea of women staying home or working the second shift to subsidize the husband’s wages. Now this situation is increasing less applicable for families but the general idea still applies. Women still do the same work for only three-quarters of the pay. The whole way “women’s work,” paid and unpaid, is constructed and valued gets at the heart of a lot of feminist issues.
    One thing I find confusing about Marxist feminism is how little it seems to relate to traditional Marxism. Marxism feminism is not feminism with a class perspective. It is the idea that sexism actually keeps the class system in place. Pretty rad idea when you think about it.

    I was going to give the example of a family I know who are not very well off, the father is alcoholic, the mother has a very hard time, and I knew the kids, a boy and a girl, when they were really young, well long story short, the two kids were really neglected for various reasons. I remember attempting to teach the little girl to read, and she could do it but clearly had attention span problems and no one to help her through them (I was a teenager myself at the time so did what I could, think it helped that she just saw me as an older kid actually), anyway, the boy is doing okay because he went into a skilled trade, he’s actually bought some of the family property and looks after his uncle, but the girl has been from crap retail job to crap waitressing job, from one dodgy boyfriend to another… she basically never had a chance: the skilled trades are not generally open to women, unless they’re excentric bourgeois women or have some other means of support or connections. That’s definitely the kind of situation that a marxist feminist analysis is applicable to – while mainstream feminism would see the solution as infusing her with enough cojones and fem-machismo to pull herself up out of there on pure willpower, marxist feminism would look at the broader societal problems that put her in that situation in the first place, and I think, probably would have a more compassionate view of her situation.

    Actually, this applies to the situation of most working women – a problem I’ve found in feminist action I’ve participated in is that it’s mainly occupied by professional women or women who don’t have to work due to their family background or academics, and there’s a definite replication of the workplace dynamics where the fee-earners have intellect, whereas the unskilled staff have sass and smarts and generally more feminine qualities. Having been a legal secretary for some years (I’ve moved on a bit now), in law firms you’re assumed to be intellectually unqualified to handle anything – on the other hand, the fee-earning staff won’t touch secretarial skills with a barge pole and feign ignorance regarding every aspect of them (and in the case of the women, I can’t exactly blame them, particularly if they’re young, because it probably represents quite a looming threat to them, and in their place I wouldn’t risk being mistaken for a secretary either). On the other hand, if you’re around secretaries or other women in the traditionally female unskilled jobs (secretarial, receptionist, cleaning, caring… when I say ‘unskilled’ of course I mean in terms of the status of the job, not of the skill involved), they often don’t believe they have any intellectual capacities at all. I know I occupied the multilingual position in the call centre I worked in a while back, and the main difference between myself and the other girls was that I’m cocky enough to speak the languages I know. They all spoke at least two languages – everyone here speaks French and at least a bit of German or Alsatian.

    I’d also like to address the point of anti-individualism, because for me that’s hugely important, that you don’t have a defined self, you’re a place where a bunch of stuff happens. I feel that very strongly as someone who grew up with two cultures and two nationalities – everytime you try to define your identity you’re lying, or that’s how I feel about my own anyway – both the culture and then there’s the whole ambiguous area of sexuality: as soon as I try to define that I’m just completely turned off the whole thing, might as well go to a nunnery. It’s not possible to be yourself: your actions and your situations define you – there’s no essence of you somewhere deep down that would exist wherever or whenever you were born. Hence why women don’t get to participate equally in society. Actually, it’s especially dangerous for women because we’re presented with this series of roles we have to pick from to find which one is the real us. People are a lot more complicated than that.

    As for Kloncke’s question about an approach to art, the whole concept of art is quite un-marxist. I mean, you have crafts where you make stuff that’s used in everyday life – and then, when you divorce these things from their everyday use and instead infuse them with mystical qualities – creativity, etc. and somehow the essence of an artist gets trapped in there (again, the anti-individualist thing) it somehow becomes art. This doesn’t mean a marxist wouldn’t make music, movies, books, pictures, and so on. Just from an anti-art perspective. Actually, good points of reference there are the movies of Jean-Luc Godard, or you could read some of Cornelius Cardew’s writing on music to find out more. Actually, the narrative is something that doesn’t go down too well in marxist cinema – and of course individualism and personality cult isn’t something that goes down well in marxist music: you’re not expressing yourself through something you create, you’re using tools (i.e. your instruments) to make an almighty racket. I find it interesting, I don’t know if he was a marxist, but when you see Steve Reich interviewed, he’s all ‘yeah, it was just a cool sound is all’, but you see performances of his stuff and it’s like ‘fucking hell, steve reich, that genius, must channel his wonderful personality’, and not just that but all this art school performance going into it. When all along, the whole point was the sound itself – not that it’s a work of genius, just that it’s some cool stuff this old rich guy did with tape loops and shit.

    I also want to address the opposition that’s appearing in this thread between academia and practical stuff, because I don’t like to see academia characterised as something impractical. Sure, it’s elitist now because of the capitalist structure of the western academic world, but education is something vital and useful and should not be elitist. It’s similar to how laws aren’t decided on outside of their context – they’re not written and applied just because some guy said so, there’s a bunch of legal frameworks that apply, and they sort of need to be programmed in – you don’t just get to decide what applies and what doesn’t (I’m saying this from my limited understanding of law). You don’t read Adorno or Althusser because they’re geniusses and they say stuff you agree with. Ideally, in fact, a good theorist should make you throw the book across the room in disgust. The intellectual exercise that leads to these books is vital for everyone. The fact that rich white dudes have been the main guys to be involved in that exercise thus far is a sign that things need to change. But the exercise itself isn’t elitist or impractical or un-utilitarian. Theory is a necessary part of practice, and certainly isn’t in opposition to it. I’d say it’s a form of practice. It’s not something you ‘translate’ necessarily. Maybe that’s where a lot of socialist revolutions have gone wrong.

    Then again, a lot of these things – individualism, the narrative – are incredibly specific to western capitalist cultures. It seems terrifying to be against them, if you’re a western capitalist. Although, personally, just as I don’t like to necessarily agree with people and don’t expect to agree with a good writer, if something is scary then there’s a chance that you should look at it a little more closely. Certainly, all the times I’ve looked for safety and an easy life are the times when I’ve come closest to the kind of state of living death that women are very vulnerable to, housewifery. It’s not for nothing Betty Friedan – a communist in her younger days – addressed middle-class housewifery, because that’s where what are practical problems for most women get translated into psychological, ideological problems and mysticism. My greatest criticism of feminisms now that take into account class as one more factor of oppression – well, sure, that’s better than ignoring it. But sometimes it can be a way to avoid addressing – since these tend to be middle-class feminists – what Friedan called the feminine mystique, because that would lead to destroying a whole bunch of the ideas that we think of as making up our selves.

    Anyway, hope that was more clarifying than confusing, on average. Feel free to ask questions, pelt me with stuff… although by the way this stuff has gone down in other feminist comment threads in the past, I’m kind of grateful for Kloncke’s Dhamma comment policy at this point!

48. I think that’s really well said, especially about anti-individualism, because the question of where the “self” actually comes from has been a HUGE challenge to contemporary liberal theorists (at least from my own perspective). Foucault’s work on the creative (rather than repressive) aspect of power in particular calls classical liberalism out on a lot of its assumptions (free will, independent agency).

    That said, I still think any political system that doesn’t put the individual front and centre is inherently more open to abuse than one that does. It’s easy to forget in all the rhetoric of Marx and his successors that the individual is the only entity that can actually experience pleasure and pain and joy and anguish etc. – when you talk of the moral health of a ‘society’ you’re taking a metaphor for the collected experiences of real individuals. So if Marxism is meant to provide better experiences for women, I think that can only be measured by the ACTUAL experiences of ACTUAL women. And Marxism (as well as all social-oriented systems as far as I can see) is very good at telling actual women that they’re doing it all wrong…

49. Paul S.K.,

    I think that’s really well said, especially about anti-individualism, because the question of where the “self” actually comes from has been a HUGE challenge to contemporary liberal theorists (at least from my own perspective). Foucault’s work on the creative (rather than repressive) aspect of power in particular calls classical liberalism out on a lot of its assumptions (free will, independent agency).

    That said, I still think any political system that doesn’t put the individual front and centre is inherently more open to abuse than one that does. It’s easy to forget in all the rhetoric of Marx and his successors that the individual is the only entity that can actually experience pleasure and pain and joy and anguish etc. – when you talk of the moral health of a ’society’ you’re taking a metaphor for the collected experiences of real individuals. So if Marxism is meant to provide better experiences for women, I think that can only be measured by the ACTUAL experiences of ACTUAL women. And Marxism (as well as all social-oriented systems as far as I can see) is very good at telling actual women that they’re doing it all wrong…

    I think it’s very important to prioritize human rights, and the concept of the individual is going to be necessary for this, on some level.

    Actually, there’s one contrast I find interesting here: I’ve been involved in feminism for a couple, nearly three years now, and there’s a lot of emphasis on the self and finding who you really are. My work at the moment is in international private law, and I work with all these politically very neutral people focusing on people’s legal identities – physical and moral persons and all that sort of thing. What I’ve found with feminism is that it focusses a lot on the, for me, harmful, self-description (for instance if I put a tagline on my blog calling myself a white middle-class bisexual pansexual whatever commie badass weight-lifting feminist dyke who likes chocolate with hazelnuts in it – as though those were all coordinates to a chart leading to the galaxy of me) (shudder!). Actually, the practice of blogging is quite a problem because it’s quite difficult to avoid building a personal brand in that way ‘I’m really interesting! Here is my list of adjectives and here are some records I like!’. Whereas my work – though I’m hardly an expert yet – focusses on the more legal aspect of identity, for instance having your birth registered, all the basic rights you miss out on if it isn’t or if the data on there doesn’t reflect the truth – say if you’re in Germany and the guy your mum is married to is considered to be your father even though he technically isn’t; or if you have several nationalities and because of naming laws in different countries you’re actually called something different depending on which country you move to; or say you’re a trans woman but your birth certificate has your birth name, or you only get to legally be a woman in certain countries… well that’s part of it. There are all these privilege lists based on elements of identity and self in the progressive blogosphere, and sure, they’re partly correct. But they’re assuming you’re already you. Imagine you’ve been born outside of marriage in a country that doesn’t register such births, or say you’re a little girl in an orphanage in China for instance and you don’t even legally exist, how much that’s going to change your existence and your life before any of the other stuff even comes into play. As the song says, natural’s not in it. Hence, anti-individualism and anti-essentialism – there’s no essence of you. On the other hand, even as an anti-individualist, anti-humanist, anti-essentialist, etc., obviously people need to be legally acknowledged as inividuals in terms of their human rights.

    That said, those rights have to be applied to everyone equally on a collective basis, not based on individual factors such as how cool you are or how much you deserve it. That’s important for stuff like habeas corpus for instance, or just believing that prisoners don’t lose their human rights because they were naughty in some capacity. Or, you don’t become more entitled to a decent standard of living because you pull more weight in terms of capital, for instance.

50. Actually, I was wondering how to address this last bit more specifically:

    “So if Marxism is meant to provide better experiences for women, I think that can only be measured by the ACTUAL experiences of ACTUAL women. And Marxism (as well as all social-oriented systems as far as I can see) is very good at telling actual women that they’re doing it all wrong…”

    because I’ve often found feminism very black-and-white, for-and-against on various issues, and that sympathising with one set of women’s experiences means considering another bunch of bitches to be getting it all wrong and to be the whole problem.

    [I think I may be doing that right now but let’s continue on that train of thought anyway]

    Like with the reproductive rights debate, I think – and I remember writing about this extensively about two years ago and being bludgeoned with some very theatrical fiery rhetoric from the local anarcho-leftists so you may have a point – there’s a need to be compassionate about the reasons why some women are anti-abortion, for instance. Also, we need to try and know more about what women go through physically and psychologically when they experience these things – say they’re pregnant and thinking about an abortion. Because at the moment it’s like there’s a debate, and then there’s all these millions of women, each struggling all by herself. It’s like there’s no real collective effort to chart the territory so these women would feel less alone and maybe it would become a much more humane experience. I think people in activist movements that I’ve known have been more interested in being correct and not being a terrible person for thinking a certain thing than in doing something useful to the women struggling with the actual problem. Of course, there are going to be as many moral dilemmas as there are different cases, and a step towards improving things would be to acknowledge that. I know women who are pro-life because they had terrible gynaecology back in the 40s or had stillbirths and miscarriages – I’m not saying you have to agree, but I think women are still left to experience stuff all by themselves and then there’s these big binary, right or wrong, pride or shame, moral dilemmas they’re forced to be a part of. If the debates aren’t working towards improving the reality, charting the territory, what’s the point of them?

    I’ve actually found expressing marxist ideas in feminist spaces has got me accused of hating women or condoning all sorts of stuff that hurts women, but that’s often because I’m unwilling to praise the ‘right’ women and criticise the ‘wrong’ women. Of course, I do notice I find it hard to make a point without criticising at least some women… though that’s not strictly true: I’m criticising the feminism, I’ve got lots of time for anyone who’s hard-working and sincere about it though. I’m criticising the fact that it’s replicating the feminine mystique it’s allegedly seeking to destroy. I suppose that’s very hegelian of me. Then again, you don’t invite Hegel into implicitly women-only spaces where people are already debating over whether trans women should be allowed, I guess. Although that’s confusing, cause if you’re a sensitive middle-class dude in a ‘this is what a feminist looks like’ T-shirt you’re probably going to be let in based on having scraped knees from begging for cookies. But that’s just a bunch of chivalry and powerplay at work.

    Anyway, I’m rambling too much and should probably get some sleep.

51. One last one before I go get some sleep, and hopefully I don’t go off on too many tangents.

    Nathan,

    And from what I’ve seen of groups and individuals that declare themselves Marxist and are out working for “revolution,” there’s a lot of great class analysis, lots of wonderful and useful critique of corporations and government’s ties to them, and also a really deep lack of considering humans in their totality. I’ve met plenty of these folks doing work in the anti-war movement, and I just can’t identify anymore with calls to “liberate workers” and “crush the ruling class and petty bougeois.”

    Life is more than economics. And we are all in this together – in other words, I find it disappointing that more often than not, there is a stated desire to oppress or eliminate those who are currently oppressed. We have enough of that crap coming from our uber-capitalist leaders. Seems to me it’s time to figure out a different way that addresses people as people, and understands our relationship as one amongst many species on this planet.

    First of all, the capitalist system is self-destructive, and most of the most sincere marxists I’ve ever met would never dream of joining a group and working towards a revolution. In a way, they fulfill a narrative – I mean, like Zizek mentioned about anti-war protesters where Bush pointed to them and went ‘see, we’re fighting so people can still do this’. The other tricky thing with protest groups is that they’re vindicated by stuff not going the way they’re demanding. One thing I repeat over and over again is that the trouble with feminist as an identity is that, once sexism is stamped out – let’s say theoretically – then your feminist identity falls apart. A protester relies on the existence of some big bastard wanker for his existence as a protester. To a large extent, we as products of western capitalist society will disappear with capitalism – at least, we’ll be completely different people. This gets especially delicate – and a little fucked-up when you have feminist as an identity fighting against violence against women. Just think of the implications: once women stop being beaten up, that feminist identity vanishes. So, do those people really want to eliminate violence against women? Or on the contrary, are they relying on it?

    Anyway, that was a bit of a tangent.

    And, ‘destroy the ruling class and the petty bourgeoisie’ – yes, well, that’s why anti-inividualism, anti-identity. The ruling class, the bourgeoisie. Not the people making up those categories. Worst that will happen to them if an ideal marxist future comes to pass is that they’ll have to have equal living standards to the rest of us, they won’t have their status as ruling, or as petty bourgeois. Only fair, don’t you think? Heck, I’m from a very petty bourgeois background, and I don’t see the lifestyle doing anybody much good.

    That said, it’s twelve thirty at night, I should not be dropping pieces of yoghurt-swaddled wholemeal pancake down my cleavage while pontificating about marxism on the internet.

52. There’s a lot of interesting stuff here that’s been said so far. i think a lot of it says a lot more about the posters and the feminist blog community than it says about marx.
    “Communism is the declaration of the permanence of the revolution, the class dictatorship of the proletariat as the necessary transit point to the abolition of class distinctions generally, to the abolition of all the relations of production on which they rest, to the abolition of all the social relations that correspond to these relations of production, and to the revolutionizing of all the ideas that result from these social relations.” – This is what marx proposed for the world, not some strictly economic mumbo-jumbo or bullshit reforms and definitely not an eternity of arm-chair criticism of the way things are. (the quote is in marx’s “the class struggle in France”). This has some obviuos implications for the liberation of women. here are some links to things happening today from a living, breathing marxist framework regarding women –
    *A DECLARATION: FOR WOMEN’S LIBERATION AND THE EMANCIPATION OF ALL HUMANITY
    http://revcom.us/a/158/Declaration-en.html

    http://www.abortionmorality.net/
    Abortion, Morality and the Liberation of Women, a talk with Sunsara Taylor, writer for Revolution Newspaper, and Sue Wicklund, a wonderful abortion provider.

    http://revcom.us/a/170/Revolution_we_need-en.html
    a statement that’s the center of a campaign going on right now spearheaded by the Revolutionary Communist Party.

53. “Worst that will happen to them if an ideal marxist future comes to pass is that they’ll have to have equal living standards to the rest of us, they won’t have their status as ruling, or as petty bourgeois.”

    Given the way things have tended to go in the world when it comes to power struggles, for every non-violent “revolution” there have been a dozen violent ones. I’m not holding my breath that if something like what Marx and others proposed occurred that it will somehow land in the non-violent category.

    Also, the word “permanence” from that Marx quotation cited above triggers for me, as a Buddhist, a whole lot of questions. Like the idea that there is some kind of “ideal end state” people are aiming towards. That’s a nice story, but I don’t believe such stories anymore. There’s no ideal end point. Things might be vastly better, but there will be something else to deal with that comes with the changes made for the “better.” This certainly doesn’t mean that people should just give up and stop trying to end oppressive conditions. It’s more about realizing that with every set of changes will come a different set of challenges.

54. Hey y’all. Still enjoying everyone’s viewpoints. This by Mark stuck out to me:

    i think a lot of it says a lot more about the posters and the feminist blog community than it says about marx.

    First I want to emphasize that my original question was a very open one — What are YOUR understandings, experiences, associations with Marxist Feminism — and I did that on purpose. There are no right or wrong answers to this question.

    At the same time, bringing us back to guideline #4 of our Dhamma Comment Guidelines (“Be Honest(ly)”), I think that in addition to honoring what we know, we also need to recognize what we don’t know.

    Taking myself as an example: the first time I encountered Marx’s actual work (Capital, Vol. 1) was in college. (Social Theory 101, basically, with Locke and Habermas etc etc and for diversity, Simone deBeauvoire.) I’d heard of him, of course, and had vague ideas. But by the time we reached him in the syllabus, the white male teacher’s assistant leading my section had already pulled me aside multiple times to instruct me not to bring my political opinions into the class, where we were supposed to be encountering the thinkers “on their own terms.” (And of course my way of “bringing my political opinions into the class” wasn’t by spouting off, but simply asking questions about how the readings could relate to our lives, and specifically to the lives of oppressed and marginalized groups.)

    So by that point I was so turned off by the class, and felt so shut down, that I didn’t even read Marx or pay any attention whatsoever.

    Then, when most of the real-life Marxist dudes I met treated me in much the same way my TA had (interested in debating “serious issues”; not particularly interested in my questions or experiences), I pretty much wrote off Marxism as dogmatic, patriarchal, and, as nathan said, dangerously reductive of human experience.

    And Marx’s texts? Still hadn’t read ’em! (Except the Communist Manifesto, which I treated more as a historical curiosity than a real idea; certainly not applicable to me.)

    And this is not to say that my experience of Marxism was wrong or invalid. After all, Marxism isn’t just ideas, but a method that people put into practice. And I think my experience is a great example of why serious Marxists need to see how patriarchy — including its manifestations in their own groups — undermines their own work! (Same goes for the non-Marxist Left, really.)

    But being honest with myself this year (back to Guideline #4) gave me insight into how little I really did know about Marx’s thought — which allowed me room for more reading and conversation. And to learn, for instance, that Marx was not a vulgar materialist or class reductionist (saying that all human life is basically, or most importantly, economics), but that these are common negative tendencies within Marxist groups.

    So yes: whether our developing understandings of Marxism are accurate or inaccurate, complete or incomplete is one thing, and we should be able to suss that out rigorously and honestly. But at the same time, as feminists we can recognize the ways that the very process of coming to that understanding are constrained and informed by gender and patriarchy. Which means that no one has an understanding of Marx that is only, purely, and independently “about marx,” and not “about [the communities we’re from].”

    Hope that makes sense. Holla. 🙂

55. To a large extent, we as products of western capitalist society will disappear with capitalism

    Good luck with that and all.

56. So yes: whether our developing understandings of Marxism are accurate or inaccurate, complete or incomplete is one thing, and we should be able to suss that out rigorously and honestly. But at the same time, as feminists we can recognize the ways that the very process of coming to that understanding are constrained and informed by gender and patriarchy. Which means that no one has an understanding of Marx that is only, purely, and independently “about marx,” and not “about [the communities we’re from].

    Yeah, that actually makes total sense.

    John, first of all it was a theoretical position, that we’re entirely products of western capitalism, so if it theoretically disappeared it we basically would. I’m not saying it’s going to anytime soon. Or am I? It’s not like it’s eternal, and it’s not like it’s been there for very long to boot, and it’s not like it’s not inherently self-destructive or anything. Don’t you think it’s a little arrogant to believe that the way we specific western capitalists live now is going to be around forever just because it’s what we think of as realistic at this point?

    (Anyway, with the dhamma comment guidelines, I thought that comment was rather snarky? Can’t see any other way of looking at it, anyway.)

57. @ Jen
    and then there’s these big binary, right or wrong, pride or shame, moral dilemmas they’re forced to be a part of. If the debates aren’t working towards improving the reality, charting the territory, what’s the point of them?

    This is a very good point. I don’t know if it’s human nature or more of a cultural thing, but people tend to think in binary oppositions- things are black and white. I remember talking to my professor. I brought up a point and said something like “well that’s good right…but, well, this part isn’t…so…is it good or bad?” And she responded, “well, good for some, not good for others…it can be both, you know.” Which is true-it can be both.

    So…I think we can use the same for capitalism. It’s not good for everyone all the time. It’s not bad for everyone all the time. The same can likely be said for every other economic system. The need to label everything as either evil and horrible or good and perfect is problematic.

    There is some opposition, as another pointed out, between the radical/socialist feminism and the liberal. One is working to eradicate the hierarchy, while the other is trying to climb to the top. In my humble opinion, I believe in trying to help women gain equality in the system- so I guess move up. Because I grew up with no money, (still don’t have much yet) and I believe that economic stability is better than economic instability. Eating is better than starving, and having a home is better than not. So I would rather work with the system we have than to work with a system that (to me) would take an entire revolution.

    …that was probably not very well said. Hope it made sense to someone. Going to bed now 🙂

    Alot of people have made good points. Jen, I hopped over to your blog. Kloncke, thanks for this post- I’ve learned alot.

58. “A protester relies on the existence of some big bastard wanker for his existence as a protester. To a large extent, we as products of western capitalist society will disappear with capitalism – at least, we’ll be completely different people. This gets especially delicate – and a little fucked-up when you have feminist as an identity fighting against violence against women. Just think of the implications: once women stop being beaten up, that feminist identity vanishes. So, do those people really want to eliminate violence against women? Or on the contrary, are they relying on it? ”

    (sorry can’t figure out how to do blockquotes)
    I do think that we will be different people after the end of capitalism, but I disagree with this argument. I’ve identified as an activist and an organizer for a long time, but more me this identity has more to do with positive ideas of peace and justice rather than just being against violence, patriarchy, etc.
    Protesting, and other tactics, are a response to ongoing oppression, but for me, the decision to take action stems from convictions and beliefs that make inaction in the face of particular oppressions unbearable.
    Movements for social change definitely try to use and frame setbacks strategically. That doesn’t mean those movements don’t also grieve those setbacks, personally and collectively. I don’t know any activists that get excited about losing- in my experience, it’s heartbreaking and frustrating every single time.

    My friends and I actually have talked a lot about what our lives might be like ‘after the revolution’ and the different choices we would get to make with our lives, things we haven’t gotten to do because so much time and energy gets taken up by organizing.

    I identify as a marxist (among other things), and I haven’t studied Marx that in depth in school. But I really hate capitalism.

    In response to Exholt, the people that I lived with weren’t part of the Sandinista leadership. They were poor and working class. I can’t speak to the Chinese revolution, because I don’t know as much about it, but the Sandinista revolution was pretty different from other communist revolutions. The Sandinistas did some bad, but were much better for the country than the dictator they deposed.
    Also, the Sandinistas had an interesting relationship with the Nicaraguan women’s movement. The women’s movement, to a large degree, grew out of the Sandinistas’ organizing, but many Nicaraguan feminists went on to critique the Sandinista party for not doing enough for women and being hypocritical on women’s issues.

59. And Marx’s texts? Still hadn’t read ‘em! (Except the Communist Manifesto, which I treated more as a historical curiosity than a real idea; certainly not applicable to me.)

    kloncke,

    Have you looked at the The Marx-Engels Reader? It was the collection of Marx and Engels’ works that I read in a month over winter break in order to gain enough background in order to take the advanced Marxist theory seminar course as a challenge and to fulfill the advanced seminar requirement for my poli-sci minor.

    Here’s a link: http://www.amazon.com/Marx-Engels-Reader-Second-Karl-Marx/dp/039309040X

60. @Jen, yep, I hadn’t seen John‘s comment yet. @John, we’re setting snark aside for my threads; please see the comment guidelines here and feel welcome to re-submit any genuine, helpful (as you honestly define it), and non-snarky comments. Thanks!

    And everyone, please remember some of the more challenging guidelines, like getting friendly with silence (i.e. taking time to digest — there’s a LOT of material accumulating here), and honoring your body. On that note, time for bed here in SF! G’night!

61. The following is why for me, there could be no end to ie marxist-feminism because interpretation of our current conditions and the ‘revolution’ of changing the world *is* a permanent (dialectical) movement – as Marx saw it.

    ‘revolutionary’, practical-critical activity’ is P.Osborne noted in [How to Read Marx], not an occasional or aberrant occupation. Marx understood it as part of what it means to be human… changing the world is both the point (telos, end) of human activity and the appropriate perspective from which to understand it.

    Don’t forget Marx conversely also explored the ‘revolutionary’ expansionary capacity and processes of the form/structure of capitalism. ie he notes in this famous passage from the Communist Manifesto:

    – – –

    Marx is a thinker of transindividuality

    – Not what is ideally ‘in’ each individual (as a form or substance), or what would serve, from outside, to classify that individual, but what exists between individuals by dint of their multiple interactions.

    – he rejects both the individualist point of view (primacy of the individual and, especially, the fiction of individuality which could be defined in itself , in isolation, whether in terms of biology, psychology, economic behavior or whatever) and the organicist point of view… the holistic point of view: the primacy of the whole, and particularly of society considered an indivisible unity of which individuals are merely functioning members…

    – – –

    – ‘the subject’ is practice – the subject is nothing other than practice, which has always already begun and continues indefinitely

    – the condition of existence of the proletarians (what we today term SOCIAL EXCLUSION) are in contradiction with the principles of that society

    -Marx set up the permanent possibility of representing the proletariat to itself as a ‘subject’… by means of which the world, or the transformation of the world, is once again ‘interpreted’

    – the subject relates to all fields of concrete experience (science, morality, law, religion, aesthetics) and makes possible their unification, is linked to the ideal that humanity moulds or educates itself, to the idea that it gives itself laws, and, therefore, finally to the idea that it liberates itself from various forms of oppression, ignorance or superstition, poverty.

    The above is cobbled together from The Philosophy of Marx, Etienne Balibar.

62. [opps trying once again the html blockquote seems to have disappeared my quote.]

    The following is why for me, there could be no end to ie marxist-feminism because interpretation of our current conditions and the ‘revolution’ of changing the world *is* a permanent (dialectical) movement – as Marx saw it.

    ‘revolutionary’, practical-critical activity’ is P.Osborne noted in [How to Read Marx], not an occasional or aberrant occupation. Marx understood it as part of what it means to be human… changing the world is both the point (telos, end) of human activity and the appropriate perspective from which to understand it.

    Don’t forget Marx conversely also explored the ‘revolutionary’ expansionary capacity and processes of the form/structure of capitalism. ie he notes in this famous passage from the Communist Manifesto:

    The bourgeoisie [the class of modern capitalists] cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninteruppted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguished the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable predudices and opinions are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
    The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeois over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.
    The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country…

    – – –

    Marx is a thinker of transindividuality

    – Not what is ideally ‘in’ each individual (as a form or substance), or what would serve, from outside, to classify that individual, but what exists between individuals by dint of their multiple interactions.

    – he rejects both the individualist point of view (primacy of the individual and, especially, the fiction of individuality which could be defined in itself , in isolation, whether in terms of biology, psychology, economic behavior or whatever) and the organicist point of view… the holistic point of view: the primacy of the whole, and particularly of society considered an indivisible unity of which individuals are merely functioning members…

    – – –

    – ‘the subject’ is practice – the subject is nothing other than practice, which has always already begun and continues indefinitely

    – the condition of existence of the proletarians (what we today term SOCIAL EXCLUSION) are in contradiction with the principles of that society

    -Marx set up the permanent possibility of representing the proletariat to itself as a ‘subject’… by means of which the world, or the transformation of the world, is once again ‘interpreted’

    – the subject relates to all fields of concrete experience (science, morality, law, religion, aesthetics) and makes possible their unification, is linked to the ideal that humanity moulds or educates itself, to the idea that it gives itself laws, and, therefore, finally to the idea that it liberates itself from various forms of oppression, ignorance or superstition, poverty.

    The above is cobbled together from The Philosophy of Marx, Etienne Balibar.

63. [opps trying once again the html blockquote seems to have disappeared my quote.]

    The following is why for me, there could be no end to ie marxist-feminism because interpretation of our current conditions and the ‘revolution’ of changing the world *is* a permanent (dialectical) movement – as Marx saw it.

    ‘revolutionary’, practical-critical activity’ is P.Osborne noted in [How to Read Marx], not an occasional or aberrant occupation. Marx understood it as part of what it means to be human… changing the world is both the point (telos, end) of human activity and the appropriate perspective from which to understand it.

    Don’t forget Marx conversely also explored the ‘revolutionary’ expansionary capacity and processes of the form/structure of capitalism. ie he notes in this famous passage from the Communist Manifesto:

    The bourgeoisie [the class of modern capitalists] cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninteruppted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguished the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable predudices and opinions are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
    The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeois over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.
    The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country…

    – – –

    Marx is a thinker of transindividuality

    – Not what is ideally ‘in’ each individual (as a form or substance), or what would serve, from outside, to classify that individual, but what exists between individuals by dint of their multiple interactions.

    – he rejects both the individualist point of view (primacy of the individual and, especially, the fiction of individuality which could be defined in itself , in isolation, whether in terms of biology, psychology, economic behavior or whatever) and the organicist point of view… the holistic point of view: the primacy of the whole, and particularly of society considered an indivisible unity of which individuals are merely functioning members…

    – – –

    – ‘the subject’ is practice – the subject is nothing other than practice, which has always already begun and continues indefinitely

    – the condition of existence of the proletarians (what we today term SOCIAL EXCLUSION) are in contradiction with the principles of that society

    -Marx set up the permanent possibility of representing the proletariat to itself as a ‘subject’… by means of which the world, or the transformation of the world, is once again ‘interpreted’

    – the subject relates to all fields of concrete experience (science, morality, law, religion, aesthetics) and makes possible their unification, is linked to the ideal that humanity moulds or educates itself, to the idea that it gives itself laws, and, therefore, finally to the idea that it liberates itself from various forms of oppression, ignorance or superstition, poverty.

    The above is cobbled together from The Philosophy of Marx, Etienne Balibar.

64. a few links that might also be of interest:

    Women and Socialism: Learning from History
    http://socialistresistance.org/?p=903

    The coming decade of austerity will hit the oppressed hardest including women, especially working women. As the resistance to austerity cuts develops, the question of how oppressed groups in society can fight against their oppression, and on what basis, could come to the fore as it did during the 1970s. Jane Kelly examines what the left can learn from women’s struggles of the 70s and 80s.

    Feminism – a 21st Century Manifesto
    http://counterfire.org/index.php/features/78-womens-liberation/3901-feminism-a-21st-century-manifesto

    There have been very great changes in women’s lives in the past few decades – but there is still much to fight for. Here is my manifesto for a 21st century feminism. (Lindsey German)

65. “And to learn, for instance, that Marx was not a vulgar materialist or class reductionist (saying that all human life is basically, or most importantly, economics), but that these are common negative tendencies within Marxist groups.”

    I’d be interested to learn more about this. I’ll admit that others on this thread are clearly more steeped in Marx’s actual work than I am.

    “Marx is a thinker of transindividuality

    – Not what is ideally ‘in’ each individual (as a form or substance), or what would serve, from outside, to classify that individual, but what exists between individuals by dint of their multiple interactions.

    – he rejects both the individualist point of view (primacy of the individual and, especially, the fiction of individuality which could be defined in itself , in isolation, whether in terms of biology, psychology, economic behavior or whatever) and the organicist point of view… the holistic point of view: the primacy of the whole, and particularly of society considered an indivisible unity of which individuals are merely functioning members… ”

    It’s interesting. Reading this, I wonder if things like this are why some people almost instantly link Buddhism with Communism. It’s not what Buddha taught, but certainly has similiarities to what Buddha taught. And the political links – that Communism was adopted in China, Vietnam, Burma – are really interesting to consider.

66. I would just like to point out that I don’t see “being feminine” or “being compassionate” as useful qualities for women at all. They are dangerous qualities and should not be encouraged.
    That said, I still can’t see Marxism as a very useful philosophy. It’s natural for humans to be selfish, and in it’s own way, Marxisim is as unnatural as pacificism is. Occasionally, people can accomplish useful things using those philosophies as guideposts, but more often than not, it ends up being destructive to either the individual or society as a whole.
    Personally, I think monarchy is the most natural system for humans. If you had to label me, I’d be a progressive neo-feudalist.

67. Hey Kloncke, is this study group still going on in the Bay Area? If so, I’d love to attend. I’ve been hungry for this kind of in-person discourse for quite a while.

68. Hell yes, Pedal! We just met yesterday in Dolores Park so our next meeting will be on July 11. But this Wednesday evening we’re also doing a little mini-action intervention with a Capital, Vol. 1 East Bay reading group (two of our folks attend it, and there’s been some patriarchal dynamics lately that are driving women away from the group), and you’d be welcome to that, too. Why don’t you email me at katie (dot) loncke (at) gmail (dot) com and we’ll talk? Yay! 🙂

69. I just want to say that it is terribly disappointing to see non-violence and compassion being linked with weakness and being considered dangerous. It’s a major misunderstanding of both in my opinion, and one of the reasons why people can continue to justify warfare and oppression around the world.

70. We live in a violent world. Pacifism is only a good idea when the press is around- otherwise it just gets people beaten up or worse and accomplishes nothing. Women get snared by compassion all the d*mn time- the best way to survive is to harden one’s heart, otherwise the predators will swallow one whole.

71. Seeing the wide variety of worldviews among us feminists — even as readers of this one particular site — is totally fascinating to me.

    Let’s please keep in mind, though, that debating on this thread will necessarily be unproductive because the topic is enormously broad and ill-defined/understood — which is part of the point! Debate has its place, but it’s not what this post is for. We could devote an entire blog to defining and redefining pacifism and non-violence — and Marxism, for that matter! This post is more of a mirror for our community, giving us a sense of where we’re at as a specific feminist group, on this particular topic, at this moment in time. (Including both knowledge and – more important – curiosity.) And where we might individually identify with someone else’s opinion or experience; as well as where we might strongly dis-identify.

    In other words, even though I’m not a regular contributor to this blog, I hope that raising the question of Marxist feminism can open up the possibility for more (and more specific) conversations in the future. No need to hash it all out right here.

    So please, friends, remember guideline #5 and Get Friendly With Silence. 🙂 In other words, practice patience.

    And the flip side of that: if you want to see more, fruitful debates about Marxism/pacifism/individualism on Feministe, let the regular editors know! And write your own stuff and link to it here. (Thanks to folks who’ve done that already.)

72. It seems to me that it would be very important to explore the issues around non-violent action on a blog like this, given that many folks on here appear to be socially engaged already.

    Why? Because there’s really no way to breakdown oppressions without breaking through patterns of violence in my view.

73. nathan, I agree with you 100% — non-violence is a hugely important topic for precisely this community. I’m hoping to have a post up on that subject in the next few days before my stint here is over. I’m not trying to squash discussion about it, but I do think it deserves its own thread. Partly because, when Subject X gets debated by only a couple of people in a tangent to a post about Subject Y, I think it’s sometimes hard for others to feel welcome or comfortable chiming in, without worrying about further derailing.

    Does that make sense? I’m with you, I just don’t prefer it when threads turn into clearinghouses for All Important Ideas. So thanks for raising it as a topic you’d like to see us explore — I’ll definitely take a cue from that.

    If anyone has a request for a post topic (though I don’t imagine you would cuz most of y’all don’t know me from Assata! :), I am all ears and appreciate suggestions.

74. “After the widely condemned police brutality during the G20 Summit in Toronto, crowds gathered for a protest in front of Police Headquarters in Toronto on Monday, June 28, 2010. There, Judy Rebick gave a brief history of protest in Canada and reminded us why it is important.”

    http://rabble.ca/rabbletv/program-guide/2010/06/features/watch-judy-rebick-reminds-us-why-protest-powerful-and-necess

75. Sorry for the mini derail. I’d just like to point out that, as far as I’m concerned, Marx’s one fundamental mistake was that he forgot that he was dealing with people. He thought he was dealing with rational beings-a mistake many philosophers make. People, in the aggregate, are fundamentally irrational.
    (He can be excused, as nearly every philosopher made that mistake. The exception being Descartes, who engaged in fruitless mental masturbation, and Arendt, who was trying to understand a devastating, irrational event using philosophy.)

76. PoliticalGuineaPig.

    For those who read Marx closely he is not primarily considered Utopian, he sets up an argument that basically says Capitalism is not rational or transparent and his endeavor is to begin to show how capitalism operates and is built upon exploitation and the profit drive. And he opens up the potential for us to build upon this critique for the specificity of our times.
    Its really not a dissimilar impetus to feminism – ie exposing structures of oppression that subjugate the ‘socially excluded’ such as women within social, economic, scientific, cultural spheres etc…
    You can disagree with his recommendation that: “conscious and planned production by freely associated men and women, in other words, communism, is recommended as a condition for the transparency of practical relations of everyday life”
    But it doesnt discount what is important in his work and it seems a bit much to criticize him for what you consider to be the irrationality getting people to work together – when clearly we are already cooperating on many levels but still with a tremendous amount of inequity – and that’s what needs to be overcome.

    Marx’s notion of the ‘Commodity Fetish’ deals with what is the irrational illusionary core of Capitalism and shows that ideological distortions are not just errors of reason, false abstractions but also real and have to be contended with. These masked social processes are not just immaterial but also have objective consequences.

    “In using fetishism as a critical term, Marx is applying to the commodity-form the Enlightenment ideal of a world rendered transparent by scientific knowledge. Similarly, the metaphor of the hieroglyph, with its enigmatic or riddle-like character, identifies the commodity form as something to be subjected to interpretation, a puzzle to be solved. Capitalist societies, Marx is saying, fail to live up to the Enlightenment ideal of rationality they claim to represent, because they are opaque to their members. The social relations of cooperation that structure the total labour of society are hidden behind a ‘veil’ of the merely quantitative relations between products. In this respect, the concept of commodity fetishism performs an internal critique of capitalism’s aspirations to be a rational social form. Enlightenment, Marx was saying, cannot come about with capitalism, because capitalism produces social illusion as a result of its ‘elementary’ social form, the commodity….

    The religious reflections of the actual world can vanish only when the practical relations of everyday life between people, and between humanity and nature, present themselves in a transparent and rational form. The social life-processes, which is based on the material processes of production, does not strip off its mystic veil until it becomes production by freely associated men and women, and stands under their conscious and planned control. (Capital Vol. 1 p 173)

    Conscious and planned production by freely associated men and women, in other words, communism, is recommended as a condition for the transparency of practical relations of everyday life. Elsewhere in Marx’s writings, communism has more to do with freedom: the development and enjoyment by individuals of the potentialities of the species. But the relationship between freedom and social transparency remained unexplored.

    The transparency of social relations is only one of several criteria that Marx used to make political and historical judgments about different societies. Nonetheless, its limits are worth keeping in mind when thinking aoubt the power of the commodity fetishism as a critical, rather than analyitical or interpretive category in Marx’s investigation of capitalism. When he wrote about commodity fetishism Marx wrote not of a desire for commodities but a displacement of the desire to know.

    Block quote from How to Read Marx, P.Osborne, p 20

77. RSA Animate – Crisis of Capitalism

    In this short RSA Animate, radical sociologist David Harvey asks if it is time to look beyond capitalism, towards a new social order that would allow us to live within a system that could be responsible, just and humane.

    http://comment.rsablogs.org.uk/2010/06/28/rsa-animate-crisis-capitalism/

78. One more animation for the pessimists amongst us to enjoy. For those that voice we are only or primarily competitive, greedy, self-serving and incapable of solidarity, as well as, those trying to justifying this ideology in sociobiology by implying that there is some consensus on the matter, and that therefore Marxist-Feminist values ‘flies in the face of everything we know about how the mind works today’:

    Empathic Civilization:
    Bestselling author, political adviser and social and ethical prophet Jeremy Rifkin investigates the evolution of empathy and the profound ways that it has shaped our development and our society.

    http://comment.rsablogs.org.uk/2010/05/06/rsa-animate-empathic-civilisation/#comments

    that’s the last post me now. ciao.

79. I’m a bit late to this discussion, but as a member of the marxist-feminist study group mentioned in this blog, I want to offer up some thoughts.

    For me, this study is not a battle over the primacy of either class or gender oppression, but a study of the ways that capitalism impacts and distorts our social relations, and particularly our gender social-relations. I want to understand my personal experience as a “reproductive laborer” within capitalism to help me contribute to building a new kind of society with new kinds of social relations.

    I am trying to figure out the way that “reproductive labor” is recuperated by capitalism. How is it that the activities that bring us joy and fulfillment – the feeding and caring for our loved ones and communities – gets turned into the labor that capitalism feeds off of? A caregiver in the home ends up producing and reproducing the worker who is needed by capitalism – instead of us care-giving for our own social benefit. It’s a feminist issue to the extent that this care-giving is generally left to women, though the question affects the entire working class. In the case of reproductive labor, we have to look at how we can “own the means of production,” instead of having the fruits of our labor (our children, our husbands and wives, our sense of well-being) absorbed by capitalism.

    It’s easy to see wage inequality as a problem – but what about wages themselves and how the wage-system distorts our social relations?

    This is why I am not 100% excited by the idea of “wages for housework,” for example. I don’t think the solution to the fundamental problem of all our life-giving activities being indirectly used to create profit for capitalists is to turn it all into waged work. Instead, how can our life-sustaining work (ALL of it – from building houses to growing food, to changing diapers, to teaching, to cooking, to cleaning, to reading bedtime stories) be “un-capitalised”? I’d like to see it removed from being “waged” or “unwaged” altogether, frankly. That sounds trite, and I don’t really need a study group to figure out that for this to happen capitalism has to be killed, but I think we are trying to find revolutionary methods to implement a new kind of society, and getting an idea of what that new society should look like when it comes to the work we do to survive, thrive, and care for each other is a crucial task for us.

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