File spoon-archives/marxism.archive/marxism_1995/95-04-30.000, message 555


Date: Mon, 24 Apr 1995 09:20:25 -0700 (PDT)
From: Kenny Mostern <kennym-AT-uclink2.berkeley.edu>
Subject: Re: Third worldism



Thomas Meisenhelder:

> Two small questions:  1) How does third world feminism deal with the
> interaction of gender and class?  What about the women of the domestic
> capitalist class and ruling political bloc?  2)  I think you're too hard on
> hte international solidarity movements --a lot of very good organizing and
> educating was accomplished through/in these groups.  Think of the progress

Thanks for your nice post.  Briefs answers:

(1)  I referred to "the structure of third worldist feminists arguments", 
not to any coherent body ofwork called "third world feminism".  Clearly, 
there is massive disagreement on many issues of the interrelationship of 
gender and class among people who think of themselves as third world 
feminists; additionally, at this point (entirely different from the 
mid-1970s, when this position was first articulated), a substantial 
amount of the analysis of third world feminists is bourgeois and does not 
acknowledge class issues at all.  Having said that, a particularly fine 
place to begin any investigation of these questions is Mohanty and 
Russo's collection *Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism*.  For 
U.S. stuff the obvious place to start is Angela Davis' *Women, Race, and 
Class*, though I imagine it is old hat for many people here.
	In general, and in spite of a dozen or so important recent 
authors, this field is wildly undertheorized.  The best work on the 
class/gender quetsion, collected largely in the *Women, Class and the 
Feminist Imagination* (which I've seen mentioned on this list before), 
was done in the 1970s and early 1980s, before feminism became so 
anti-marxist.
	A piece I just read that I am especially impressed with, which is 
only specifically feminist in its conclusion, but which articulately argues 
the basic structure I've been suggesting:  Arif Dirlik, 
"Post-Socialism/Flexible Accumulation:  Marxism in Contemporary 
Radicalism", *Polygraph* 6/7 (1993).  (I had a hard time finding 
*Polygraph*, which is published at Duke.  Perhaps Jon Beasley-Murray 
knows Dirlik, who's also at Duke, and get him to download the article.)

(2)  I wasn't suggesting that solidarity work was useless, or less that 
the movements of the 1980s were useless--I was writing specifically about 
the late 60s-early 70s, and specifically about a moment which people 
involved in the movement perceived as revolutionary (for better or 
worse).  Since not all eras are revolutionary eras, it is not possible to 
discuss marxist strategy the same way in all eras.  (Precisely because 
marxism opposes itself to utopianism, we *must* avoid the idea that if 
Stalin, or the Black Panthers, or whoever had merely pursued the theory 
properly all of history would be different.)  In that context, I would 
look at the excellent solidarity work of CISPES and the anti-Apartheid 
movement as nonrevolutionary (but not therefore irrelevent) action in 
nonrevolutionary times.  Kind of like what I'm doing right now.

Kenny Mostern
UC-Berkeley Ethnic Studies Graduate Group

Against:  racism, sexism, homophobia, capitalism, militarism
For:  the truth--and the funk!



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