File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/97-03-31.182, message 73


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



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