File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/97-03-18.151, message 13


Date: Sun, 16 Mar 1997 14:45:31 -0500
From: hariette-AT-easynet.co.uk (Hariette Spierings)
Subject: RE: M-I: my alleged homophobia



>
>There will never be a revolution if women don't feel empowered to be
>part of the working class movement. If we get shit on verbally, and
>the crap beat out of us physically, no-one goes anywhere. Parts of the
>bourgeoisie does their best to demean and abuse. If working class leaders
>like Mark Jones contribute -- situation hopeless.
>
>Clarification please, Mark. This is too depressing.
>
>Thanks;
>Gay Harley
>Toronto, Ontario



The working class itself is not "empowered to be part of the working class
movement".  The working class is COMPELLED to be part of the working class
movement by the inapelable force of its necessary class interests.  Now come
some and ask to be "empowered" so that they may condescend to become part of
a movement to which everyone else must struggle to be a part of.  

Isn't this bourgeois feminism in a nutshell?  Asking special privileges.
The original people fighting for the rights of women, specifically insurged
as a movement precisely denying the need for any special position for women
in society and asserting women's equality with men.  They abhorred
condescencion as well as bogus chivalry.  

Now some people have become "professional women" in the sense of having set
themselves the promotion of "womanhood" as a professional task.  They are
sometimes the very people who are the most prone to use sex as a political
battering ram.

Women ought to be conscious of being part of a mass of human beings of such
magnitude as to be "holding half the sky", and as such to be ready to
struggle for playing a full role in the movement of all labouring humanity.
Some of these "professional women" (many of them males), however, first
demand to be "empowered" by others instead of empowering themselves before
they may deign to grace us with their presence in the trenches of this
movement.  What sort of volapuk is this? 

Here we have one person who thinks the situation of the workers is hopeless
if sexist positions are to be found among some Marxists. I do not think so.
There are good Marxists who have also short-comings on this or that issue,
which we should all contribute to help them rid themselves of by means of
criticism. 

However these "professional women" - here in this list - have closed their
otherwise sharp and critical eyes to the absurd allegations from their own
quarters about "testosterone" flying in the list, an ANTI-MALE statement
which has been also used to attack Marxist positions recently and in an
insidious way.  
That is fine for them and others, so inured they have become to demagogy and
to the political trafficking with allegations of sexism that they cannot
longer recognise their own.

There is no reason for sexism to exist, even less among people who aspire to
be free and are in fact fighting for freedom. Our movement upholds the
principle ennunciated by Shelley:  How can man be free if woman be a slave?

However that fact will not make sexism (as a remnant of bourgeois
chauvinism) dissapear from any form, movement or class, within class divided
society, and a struggle has to be conducted against the roots of those
ideas, at all times and even then when social classes would dissapear.  

But for me, ALL SEXISM is equally pernicious for the working class at
present since - besides enshrining ideas of exploitation and oppression - it
introduces political and social elements of separation and division in
favour of the class enemy. That too must be recognised, and no compromises
on that account are possible.

The thing however is that serious and deep rooted as it is, the
contradiction embodied in the problems of sexism is a contradiction among
the people (who themselves belong to all sexes and inclinations) and should
still be handled by criticism, as severe and necessary as this may be.  

Nevertheless, those who are SELECTIVELY picking only one type of sexism to
criticise now, are doing so with only one result:  To obscure the
antagonistic contradictions between those standing for the proletarian cause
and those defending the cause of the imperialist bourgeosie in this list.  A
contradiction that can only be resolved by the complete annihilation of one
or another trend in the here and now.

And to do that, amounts to, if unintentional, to naive foolishness, and if
intentional, to counter-revolutionary deception.  And the last, really more
than the sharpest criticism, needs to be seen as unnaceptable and to be
repudiated in full, before taking to task any unwarranted sexist language
>from any quarter - and as I have pointed out and shown, in this list such
language is not only coming out from males - ocurring at a heated moment of
debate. 

Let us keep FROM ALL SIDES OF THE SEXUAL DIVIDES in this list, to the debate
of the issues at hand and resolve what has to be resolved first, and then,
ALL sexist attitudes should be equally criticised too.  



Adolfo Olaechea



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