File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/97-03-28.125, message 44


Date: Thu, 27 Mar 1997 00:20:51 -0500 (EST)
From: Andrew Wayne Austin <aaustin-AT-utkux.utcc.utk.edu>
Subject: Re: M-I: Gender, Race, and Sexuality in Late Capitalism



On Wed, 26 Mar 1997 Braderr-AT-aol.com wrote:

> Andrew:
> 
> And what of the fathers?  I assume that they, as these white women, must work
> in order to survive (and not merely as some exciting new passtime found in
> exploitation).  Are the fathers not bourgeois men taking advantage of both
> their partners/wives AND the women of color (it still remains true that
> childrearing is overwhelmingly alloted to women of all classes, with only the
> very wealthy being able to send their children to boarding schools or hire
> nannies who are in turn mostly women)?  

I have a lot of opinions regarding the intersection of gender and class. I
try to stay focused and answer the topic that is at hand, and my
understanding of the controversy was whether there was or was not
bourgeois/liberal feminism. I was agreeing with Siddharth that there was,
and I gave a specific example to demonstrate the contradiction of liberal
feminism and its disjuncture with class-based politics (one that was
subsequently misrepresented in a strawman). That's all. I am happy to at
any time expand the discussion to the role of men in exploiting women. All
hierarchical structures of domination are targets of my wrath. But they
must (at least they should) be linked to class. Because I am a Marxist,
and because my method of analysis is class-dialectical, I tend look for
that thread. This does not mean that extra-economic forms of coercion
shouldn't be met at every corner. Looking for class doesn't mean ignoring
everything else--another irritating strawman that Marxists very often get
beat on with whenever they criticize liberals. What I object to is
conflating liberal (and radical) feminism with Marxist, or even socialist
feminism. Generally, only Marxist feminism is class-based. The problem is
one of co-optation. The civil rights movement and the women's liberation
movement have been co-opted (and even commodified) by white male
capitalists because they were insufficiently class-based. In fact, they
very often distance themselves from Marxists in an attempt to gain
legitimacy from the dominant power structures. "We're not commies, we just
want an equal opportunity to compete." That is the problem with identity
and fractional politics; they play right into the divide and conquer
strategy of the bourgeoisie. So don't assume because I do not list every
point of domination, every point of oppression and exploitation, in every
one of my posts that somehow I don't consider all these points, I do; but
if we are ever going to have unity we have to, among other things (like
repudiating Stalinism unequivocally) adopt the class line first and
foremost. 
 
Comradely,
Andy Austin



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