From: cbcox-AT-rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu (Carrol Cox)
Subject: Red Feminism
Date: Sun, 3 Mar 1996 22:23:31 -0600 (CST)


Since this list is so overwhelmingly male, it occurred to me that one
way to partly redress that fact is simply to quote from important
female Marxists. The following are the final paragraphs from Teresa
Ebert's "Critiques for a Red Feminism" From *Transformation* 1:

    How is making discourse or the matter of the body the ground
  of politics and social analytic any less reductive than the
  economic base? Yet, while economic reductionism is to be
  avoided at all costs according to ludic theories, a discur-
  sive reductionism or a theological matterism is widely
  embraced as a complex, sophisticated, and open multiplicity.
  The issue here is not whether "reductionism" is negative: it
  is not--ask any rigorous scientist (Weinberg, "Two Cheers
  for Reductionism"). To articulate the relations connecting
  seemingly disparate events and phenomena is in fact a necessary
  and unavoidable part of effecting knowledge of the real.
  Rather the qeustion is why are some reductions--particularly
  those connecting the exploitation and gender division of
  labor to the accumulation of capital--suppressed and rendered
  taboo in ludic (socialist) feminism while other reductions--
  such as the discursive construction of sex/gender or a
  matterist resistance to performance--are championed and

  championed and widely circulated? The answer, of course, does
  not lie in the "logic" of the argument, although that is the
  way it is commonly represented. On a purely epistemological
  or logical level both moves establish a necessary relation
  between two phenomena. Instead, the answer is in the
  economic, social, and political interests these two forms
  of "rductionism" support and the power of bourgeois ideology
  to discredit historical materialist knowledges.

    Thus what is at stake in this displacement of the economic
  by discourse is the elision of issues of exploitation and the
  substitution of discursive identity politics for the struggle
  for full social and economic emancipation. Marx and Engels'
  critique of the radical "Young Hegelians" applies equally to
  the ludic cultural materialists:
    they are only fighting against "phrases." The forget, however,
    that to these phrases they themselves are only opposing other
    phrases, and that they are in no way combating the real
    existing world when they are merely combating the phrases of
    this world. (German Ideology)


    This is not to say that the conflicts over ideology, cultural
  practices and significations are not an important part of the
  social struggle for emancipation: the issue is how do we explain
  the relation of the discursive to the non-discursive, the e
  relation of cultural practices to the "real existing world"--
  whose objectivity is the fact of the "working day"--in order
  to transform it? Obviously this relation is a highly mediated
  one. But for the ludic materialists the relation is so radically
  displaced that it is entirely suppressed: mediations are taken
  as autonomous sites of signification and consequently the actual
  practice of ludic cultural analyhsis is confined entirely to
  institutional and cultural points of mediation severed from the
  economic conditions producing them. The analysis of "mediations"
  becomes a goal in itself, and the operation of "mediations" is
  deployed to obscure the "origin" (surplus labor) and the "end"
  (class differences) that in fact frame the "mediations." It is
  only in the context of historical materialism that one can point
  up the politics of this erasure of "origin" (arche) and "end"
  (telos) in poststructuralist theory. In ludic feminism the
  arche and telos are erased as if they were merely metaphysical
  concepts. My point is that the erasure of arche and telos serves
  a more immediate and concrete purpose: it makes it impossible
  to connect the "mediated" to other social practices; and
  consequently the inquiry into and analysis of the "mediations,"
  themselves, take the place of knowledge of the social totality
  in which mediations are relays of underlying connections. For
  historical materialist feminists, however, cultural and ideological
  practices are not autonomous but are instead primary sites for
  reproducing the meanings and subjectivities supporting the unequal
  gender, sexual and race divisions of labor, and thus a main arena
  for the struggle against economic exploitation as well as cultural
  oppression. The untimely time of red feminism has come.

    (Teresa Ebert develops the argument of this essay in greater
  detail in her book *Ludic Feminism and After*)

      Carrol Cox
      (Note: the entirety of this posting is quoted from Ebert; I
happen to agree with much that she says, but I quote it here as hers,
not mine.)


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