File spoon-archives/marxism-feminism.archive/marxism-feminism_1997/marxism-feminism.9710, message 34


From: cbcox-AT-rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu (Carrol Cox)
Subject: M-FEM: The Left, the working class, and theory. Was: Fem.mail.lists
Date: Wed, 22 Oct 1997 11:37:27 -0500 (CDT)


Patricia Howard-Borjas writes:
> 
> My experience has taught me that the esoteric nature of both 
> feminism and Marxism in the US is related 
> to the sad plight of leftist politics.

	I think that this is a statement of what needs to be explained
rather than being an explanation. "The sad state of leftist politics" is
an accurate observation, but that is all.

	One can move one step up the analytic ladder by substituting
"the sad plight of working class struggles." As a number of studies
over the last few decades have shown, Marx himself emerged 
primarily from the struggles of the european working classes
in the early decades of the 19th century, that his theories were
in the first instance efforts to make sense of those struggles 
(while his purely "theoretical" sources, Ricardo and Hegel,
were subordinate or  secondary sources of his thought).

	Jerry's question was unfocused. One does *not* worry
about explaining "value theory" to that cafeteria worker until
she implicitly at least *asks* for an explanation, and she will
ask for an explanation as she finds herself in the midst of
struggles that need to be better understood in order to move
forward. Isn't that, actually, the way most of the members of
this list themselves came to marxism, out of our discovery that
the struggles we were involved in simply no longer made sense
in isolation, that they needed to be linked to something of
more exlanatory power?

	It may turn out that at least some cafeteria workers will in fact
find a need to go on to understand value theory as Jerry understands (or
thinks he thinks understands) it. But not until she first understands it
as Doug suggested in his response to the original question, and as she
finds in herself and her context the need to explain it to other workers
like herself, that is, to know it more deeply in order to teach it at the
level at which she first herself grasped it. 

	Really, practice is in principle and in empirical fact prior
to theory, and establishes the basis for theory. And as I have 
recently argued on another maillist, before "the left" can be ept
or inept it has "to be." And at the present time in the U.S.A. (and I
expect in most places, though I won't argue the matter) there are
"lefists" but no "left." When (if?) more powerful working class
struggles arise, and "leftists"  find themselves in positions 
where they can be / are part of those struggles, then both the
sophistication *and* the contact with practice of left thought
will increase.

	In the meantime we do what we can. In central Illinois
possibilities for political activity are opening up, and the
various activities of the 60s, 70s, 80s left a core around 
who can begin to relate to those possibilities, and I am on
this and other maillists to confirm, correct, expand somewhat
what I have learned in earlier struggles. My present practice
does not offer much worth reporting on *at present*; when it
does, it will enter into my maillist exchanges.

	On this list in particular, there is still an immense
amount of undigested experience from the 70s and 80s that needs
to be evaluated, developed, criticized; that is, practice in
the realm of women's emancipation has run too far ahead of
theory, and so there is substantive thinking and debate that
this list can provide, without immediately visible relevance
to *present* practice.

> <snip> discussion around, e.g., women and the non-welfare state 
> on this list than what I have found on WMST-L; 
> no one has yet answered our colleague's question about where to go.

Yes. Perhaps here some members of the list are accumulating
experience which will need to be critiqued. I may be, but not quite
yet. I would be glad to hear others comment on it.

Carrol


   

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