Date: Mon, 31 Mar 1997 11:46:44 +0000 From: Mark Jones <majones-AT-netcomuk.co.uk> Subject: M-I: Feminism Again Feminism, Priorities, People's War I'm following up remarks made by Doug Henwood, who I believe is a subscriber to LeninList. Since this is where the thread now is, I reply here not on another list. Incidentally I note Olaechea's rejoinder to Tufecioglu's report on the March 8th Celebrations in Turkey. Since Adolfo covered most of the ground there is little to add, except that it still astonishes me that a woman whose politics are practically indistinguishable from Hillary Clinton's should moderate a Marxist list. The essence of Tufecioglu's politics is meliorative. It is predicated on the idea that reforms are possible. It is therefore mystificatory. It is also predicated on the idea of gradualism and even trickle-down (of the benefits of reforms).And it is also laden with thinly-disguised misanthropy. For Tufecioglu, it is the Turkish working man who is the enemy at least as much as capitalism. Adolfo rightly points to the obvious self-interestedness of career-feminists and salon-marxists like Tufecioglu, who parades her daring presence in Turkey as if this involved personal risk. It does not. Tufecioglu is a middle-class woman, and a professional market-researcher, not a revolutionary. Turkey is not yet Somalia, for that matter. Hundreds of thousands of English tourists go there and the worst that happens to them is they get diarrhoea. Turkey is affiliated to the EU. It is a member of NATO. In fact, for someone with Tufecioglu's politics it is an ideal jumping-off point for a richly-rewarding career in the mushrooming, rank undergrowth of UN, USAID, Fulbright and N-number of other NGOs, charities, foundations etc, whose role and function have been well-characterised by Doug Henwood himself. I have not a shadow of doubt that that is where Tufecioglu's future lies, ie as far away from the Turkish working class as it is possible to get. In the first ever British Labour Government in 1924 the minister of labour was a man called Burns, if memory serves, of whom legend records that when asked, now he was a minister with a chauffeur driven Daimler, 'if he still believed in the emancipation of the working class', was supposed to have replied, 'Yes, but one by one, starting with me.' That is Tufecioglu's position in a nutshell. As for equating the struggle for women's rights with national and ethnic questions, which she did, and which according to her is a recent discovery for the left, these matters were dealt with long ago. It was always the position of Lenin that any oppressed group has the right to organise around the specifics of its own oppression, and that that is exactly where all working-class self-organisation begins: not with the slogan 'All Power to the Soviets!' but with contesting the specific ways into which people are locked into exploitation and oppression: by means of gender, race, class, social origin and many other specifics. A peasant carries the social burden of the peasant, regardless of gender. On his or her shoulders stands every other parasite class, except the workers. To tell a female peasant that she must organise on the basis of being a woman and not a peasant is simply a mischievous piece of trickery, which evidently slips down the throats of the Jefferson salon-set easily enough but, as we now know, does not wash in places like Turkey, where people like Tufecioglu have no political basis in the left. And the nationalities question to which Tufecioglu refers, was analysed by Stalin even before Red October. As for Henwood, whose posting to another List I quote: Adolfo wrote:> Now Queen-Beerisha, in order to give a veneer of marxist babbling to her> >pro-imperialist stand speaks with forked tongue. Henwood: > Adolfo, this sort of talk is vile and reactionary. The only things it > accomplishes are to narrow your base of support and make you look like like > a bigoted raver. The language is reminiscent of Mein Kampf and the juvenile > and scatological eruptions of the American neo-Nazi Tom Metzger. > It is a real disappointment to see this kind of thing. What on earth is vile and reactionary about telling a truth about Tufecioglu which is virtually self-evident to anyone with even a glimmer of reading in Marxism-Leninism? Her latest maunderings about 8 March are so crassly, vulgarly indiscreet they do not need deconstructing, they simply need reading, to see where she is coming from. And going to. Henwood responds to me in an earlier posting: > Mark Jones wrote: > > >This means first of all that the social emancipation of > >women is at root a class not a gender issue. So women's issues > >cannot be dealt with separate from or in priority to > >working class issues. > Henwood: > The Marxian thing to do would be to look at how workers' labor is > partitioned by sex. You can't do that without noticing that men and women > have been positioned very differently in the social division of labor. So > how can't "women's issues" be "separate from ... working class issues"? > Clearly there's a sex-specific division of labor. As for "priority to" - > Marxists look at the social totality, aiming to eliminate exploitation and > create a classless communal society. Sex relations are an essential part of > that - there's no question of "priority" about it. It is a shame that, like all the other coy hedge-warblers in the Jefferson bushes, Henwood too refuses to address the central issues which ought to concern all workers, even and especialy women: I mean the attack by late capitalism on fertility, procreation and birth, the attempt to commodify the genetic make-up of future humans, the rabid and uncontrolled development of genetic modificatory techniques, ex-vitro embryology, cloning, genome-deconstruction etc. Evidently it is much easier to waste time calling someone 'Vile! Reactionary!' for making a few well-aimed and justified jokes. Here too, Henwood shows a complete and surprising (given that in my posting I spelt the whole thing out, I thought) lack of awareness of the entire, multifarious and rich history of Marxist discussion on gender-class issues, and he makes points which belong in a High Schol social studies seminar, not worthy of someone of his status, for Henwood in fact is an excellent and gifted Marxist economist and what's more a man with a profound knowledge of psychoanalysis, social-psychology and related domains. So all in all, I conclude that this posting is just a leg-pull. He criticised me for attacking Tufecioglu's position which is the position generally of the 'social eroticisers', the 'positive discriminators' and 'affirmative actioners', namely that gender issues can be separated from and given a logical and political priority to class issues. That is what Tufecioglu believes. Or else what actually does positive discrimination mean? But you only have to read Tufecioglu's stuff to see that that is the sum total of her political vision. Henwood says, and I have difficulty believing he meant this: I think his keyboard must have been on autopilot: Henwood: The Marxian thing to do would be to look at how workers' labor is > partitioned by sex. You can't do that without noticing that men and women > have been positioned very differently in the social division of labor. So > how can't "women's issues" be "separate from ... working class issues"? Does this mean that the sexual division of labour is logically prior to the social division of labour? Is he saying that the capitalist division of labour can only be analysed ab initio on a gender basis? Nonsense. What is prior, both logically and historically, is not gender but labour, because until labour appeared as an isolable category, there was no way even to think about a 'sexual division of labour'. If you say primates have a 'sexual division of labour' then that is simply anthropomorphising primates, which do not have any kind of division of labour (no amateur zoology please). When capitalism emerged, from the beginning it imposed its division of labour on its mass of wage slaves according to its own needs, and incorporated people into its labour process on the grounds of ethnicity, religion, class origin as well as gender. But it always sought and still seeks to make labour completely undifferentiiated and general. That is the extent of its emancipatory mission, and the current drive to remove gender altogether as a factor in the historical and material constitution of the working class, which is what embryology, foetal engineering, genome deconstruction etc is all about, is just a continuation of capital's long-term faustian project. Both aspects need to be kept in mind: the determination by capital to fixate the specific differences between individuals, on the basis of race, class, gender, geographical origin etc and to incorporate these specific differences as specific forms of exploitation, to intensify exploitation by utilising the potentialities of these differences And at the same time, to dissolve all specific differences and create one pool of general undifferentiated wage-labour. Women's issues cannot be separated from working class issues, they are the essence of them, as are race and other working class differentia specifica. Marxian value theory, which is the heart of Marxism, actually begins with the proposition that unremunerated domestic labour was the historical precondition for the emergence of capitalism. The essence of marxian value theory is the analysis of the unequal exchange between capital and labour, in which capital buys labour-power at its intrinsic cost of production, and then extracts more value from labour-power within the labour-process than it originally cost. I do not argue that women's unpaid domestic labour is source of all value. But it is one of the factors. That is why gender is an issue within working class politics. But gender cannot have a logical or historical priority. Just as the determining last instance of capitalism is not the individual firm or even the whole mass of individual firms, but the analytical and real existent, 'capital-in-general', meaning the overall process of capitalist social reproduction, so the emancipatory historical subject, ie the proletarait, must not be fragmented, analytically or politically, into a mass of little groups with their own inviolable priorities (that's pomo thinking, Doug. It's also counter-revolutionary). As Proyect likes to say: There you have it: Gays, Lesbians, Turkish women, Turkish bath attendants, you name it. They all have their problems, they all have a priority, don't they? This is Hillary-speak, Tufecioglu-speak. Not Marxism. The only level of historical action which counts is that of the proletariat as a whole, and the only way that the working class AS A WHOLE can make its apearance historically is in the form of its own revolutionary party, the working class party which is not a sect but the armed fist of the entire class. But I've lost you right there, Doug, I know I have, because the next sentence begins with the words 'People's War', and that phrase has long ago been expunged from the Jefferson salon's political lexicon. Mark --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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