File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1997/marxism-thaxis.9712, message 325


Date: Thu, 11 Dec 1997 01:19:43 +1100
From: Rob Schaap <rws-AT-comserver.canberra.edu.au>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Men and Feminism (was All Work...)


G'day Doug,

>Why is a gender-neutral class society unimaginable? In the
>First World over the last 20-30 years, we've seen a reduction in gender
>differentials at the same time we've seen an intensification of class
>differentials. What is the theoretical limit on that continuing to happen?

A testing question, Doug - and one that crossed my mind as I tapped out
those last uncompromising words (Ebert makes a big call in introducing her
theme, but doesn't seem to pursue all its components).  My response is, I
admit, simple orthodoxy pushed to a heterodox degree: The theoretical limit
seems determined by our central category: class.

Gender differentials have ballooned from a very low base, and I'm sure
there's a *very* familiar class distribution within women's
wage/security/conditions.  The relative good fortune of pb/'middle class'
women in the labour market in the few decades of generalised female wage
labour would, I suspect, show up in the short term as a rapid convergence
of gender aggregates.  If I'm right, the time must come when gender
differentials flatten and you get what marxists would expect.  Once women
are generally proletarianised (I'm using the strict sense of 'proletarian'
here), their stats would reflect the distribution that pertains amongst
their brothers.

It's a bit (implicitly) Kautskyite of me, but I've always subscribed to the
view that men and women were not in the same class while the latter were
not generally engaged in wage labour - and on comparable terms at that.  A
woman who depends on her man is not in the same class position as her man.
Her being is not his being and consequently her thinking is not his
thinking.  She relates to the world differently, and is related to
differently, than is her man.  So, at the risk of upsetting Louis,
capitalism is only now showing signs of creating a grave-digging class of
sufficient proportions and cohesion to fulfill that function.

Maybe the downside of this trend (increasing heart disease, alcoholism,
suicides etc among women - I even speculated as to rising alienation among
women on M-Fem, but to an uninterested or skeptical house) has an upside
then - men and women converging in objective material terms.  I take
Marxism as positing such a development as guaranteeing/allowing (depending
on whether we read him as a determinist economist or not) the all-important
'class for itself' stage.

One other thought:

There is gender and then there is sex.  So far, women have had wombs and
breasts and men haven't (a transcendental material truth and thus, in
itself, not a gender issue, but one of sex).  When 'work' was mainly to do
with consistent, repetitive, reliable and sustained deployment of brawn,
pregnancy and nursing commitments (functions of sex) doubtlessly made of
women a second-rate commodity on the shop floor.

The nature of commodity labour has changed in the first world, the extended
family has been replaced by commodified child care (yet another effective
bias to the largely middle class female progress in the labour market), and
the gender aspects of parenthood (ie. those not essentially determined by
sex) are being blurred to order (blokes can 'mother' toddlers and older).

What's more, technological developments are afoot to do for and to
femininity what sperm banks had done for and to masculinity.  Maybe the sex
category itself may prove to be as historical as gender.  Frozen eggs,
frozen sperm, surrogate wombs, maybe even artificial wombs ... well, the
limits of sex itself suddenly seem a bit rubbery.

It all gets rather blurry after that ...

All in all, not as useful a response as Yoshie's but a reiteration of
something I still reckon worthy of a chat.

Cheers,
Rob.


************************************************************************

Rob Schaap, Lecturer in Communication, University of Canberra, Australia.

Phone:  02-6201 2194  (BH)
Fax:    02-6201 5119

************************************************************************

'It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have
lightened the day's toil of any human being.'    (John Stuart Mill)

"The separation of public works from the state, and their migration
into the domain of the works undertaken by capital itself, indicates
the degree to which the real community has constituted itself in
the form of capital."                                    (Karl Marx)

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