This might interest some of you. I just posted it on Marxism-Feminism.
Cheers,
Hugh
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Just a thought, but couldn't Margaret's hard line re extermination (of men)
(sheeps-clothed in the irony that is always the weapon of the powerless)
combined with the admission that her closest and dearest actually belong to
the exterminables (are men), constitute some kind of echo of rather
unpleasant things from the past? Margaret herself caught the whiff of
Holocaust and shuddered a bit. "Some of my best friends are...."
>But we seem to agree that the fundamental division in the human race - the
>first *class* division, in the political economic sense - is between males
>and females.
Depends how you define class, politics and economics -- and gender.
>And we certainly agree that female human beings are far more
>often the victims and far less often the perpetrators of violence than are
>male human beings.
Well, here we have the pattern of the dysfunctional family. Who scapegoats
who? RD Laing in the Divided Self etc shows very clearly that when the
family as a whole is dysfunctional it (in a very dialectical and Hegelian
fashion by the way) focuses and channels the "bad" into a sacrificial
family member, who serves to explain all the shit and is most useful as
part of a *permanent* symbiotic setup -- we always good, you always bad. If
the scam succeeds then the "bad" victim internalizes the shit role and
can't exist without the "good" environment as a foil. A real polarized
relationship of mutual necessity, like capital and wage-labour, you can't
have one without the other. Which is demonstrated the second the scapegoat
actually walks away into the wilderness, by killing herself/himself, say,
or by succeeding in breaking the spell (terribly difficult). Before you can
say symbiosis, a new scapegoat is anointed. This is of course seen in
racist behaviour all the time, as one target scapegoat group after another
is set up and then discarded as necessity dictates.
The thing is, that this relationship is not eternal and not fatalistic. The
problem is that changing one pole demands changing the other. To abolish
the exploitative behaviour of capital, you have to abolish wage-labour at
the same time. To abolish the scapegoat, you have to abolish the oppressive
majority.
To free gender-trapped women (WOMAN) you have to free gender-trapped men (MAN).
Seeing the thing as a polarity indicates of course the inadequacy of
proposing to end the problem by just removing one of the poles -- eg by
destroying MAN. If the root cause of the bad polarity is still there, WOMAN
will just divide up into two poles and -- bingo! -- you'll have
institutionally-trapped "good" WOMAN and institutionally-trapped "bad"
WOMAN. The MAN will be gone, but the scapegoat will remain.
Now here's something to chew on.
Plato (in the dawn of commodity-producing societies, the first coins were
struck in Lydia I think only a couple of centuries before he lived) has
this great myth about human beings being the result of a division of a
perfect whole into two imperfect entities, man and woman. These imperfect
halves spend their lives searching for the other half of their whole. They
find it, and fusion takes place. Amor vincit omnia -- Love conquers all.
Dante (child of an enclave of bourgeois banking and merchant capitalism in
an ocean of feudalism) and Goethe (completely bourgeoisified, he grew up in
Frankfurt for Christ's sake, decadent and transitional feudalism of the
German princedoms) mythologize the world and emotional and intellectual
striving in the pursuit of Beatrice and Gretchen (Margarethe, now there's a
coincidence!). Goethe's slogan says it all: "Das ewig weibliche zieht uns
hinan" -- "the eternally female draws us onward" (sounds better in German).
The reward is Heaven, eternal bliss.
Well, for my money they went and polarized the whole of humanity here. The
goal for Plato is an illusory fusion. It is clear that the inevitable
failure to attain this leads people to frustration and cynicism in relation
to their emotions and desires. For Dante and Goethe, spiritually empty and
unworthy MAN is complemented, made whole, by spiritually full and worthy
WOMAN.
Not only is this dualism, of course, the old madonna/whore thing, but it is
a stunning example of the power of alienation over humanity's
self-perception. In a commodity-producing society, fetishization is rife.
This process goes way beyond emptying labour and enriching commodities. It
is the process behind religion -- I empty myself of all that's good, and
project it all into something I create myself, like a god or a juju, and
then worship what's good in me as if it belonged entirely to the thing,
myself just remaining a worthless husk. And it's the process behind
Romantic Love. My own life is a worthless piece of shit as a result of this
fetishization process, but it can be transmuted into gold if I can lock
into a symbiosis with the other pole into which I've transferred all my
worth. Dream on, of course -- and that's precisely what we do in the
movies, books, art and what we choose to label life itself.
The thing to chew on is the link between this fetishized fusion ideal, or
the worship of the glorified other, this alienating dream of symbiosis, and
philosophical idealism. The empty, reactionary, hateful real worlds of
slave-owning, feudal and capitalist society are all justified by the same
individuals (eg Plato, Dante, Goethe) who give us such wonderful writing,
such grace and beauty. But (as Baudelaire imagines it in his poem La
Charogne (the carcase)), the beauty is the phosphorescence of decay, and
Plato's totalitarian slave-owning Republic, Dante's mediaeval world of
horrors and intolerance and Goethe's world of service to the Arch-Duke of
Weimar devoted to hindering the advance of the French Revolution, are the
real-world counterparts in all their frustration, cynicism and ugliness of
the fetishized, alienated longing for something better that drove the
artist in these MEN.
Abolish the alienation, and you abolish the polarities. No more Platonic
fusion (where the desire for sexual fusion is of course the mainspring of
the desire for existential fusion), no more Beatrice and no more Gretchen.
No more idealism. No more idealistic philosophy. No more Kant. The
dialectic remains, but the idealism is gone.
And how do you abolish the alienation? You abolish the commodity. No more
value determined by impersonal social forces beyond the control of
collective humanity. Instead distribution of labour as needed by a
conscious plan produced by cooperating direct producers. What you see is
what you get. For a change.
And since polarization (WOMAN-MAN), worship of the glorified other (WOMAN)
combined with vilification of the demonized other (MAN), and emptiness,
frustration and cynicism in relation to the everyday life of society (WOMAN
must walk over corpses to get social status otherwise denied HER, SHE must
exploit HER sisters if this is necessary for HER own emancipation, etc) are
all integral parts of non-Marxist feminism, maybe we should chew a little
bit on what a revolutionary Marxist emancipation of women might look like,
ie one without these features of fetishism, alienation and idealism.
Have a nice chew.
And a riproaring, materialist Saturday night to every body, where we enjoy
ourselves as concrete individual human beings and affirm others in the
process! Shame the Carnival is over and Lent is upon us...
ciao4now,
Hugh
Men seem bent upon keeping women subordinate - even men
>on this list, although surely not all men (of is this just wishful
>thinking?) My post about why-don't-we-kill-all-the-guys was kind of
>intended to point to the irony of the whole situation. It seems that you
>and Yoshie were the only ones who got it.
>
>>older men with fifteen other "wives.' The state could CERTAINLY insist
>>that homeschooling be harder to push kids into, that such schooling
>>actually take place (with tests), etc. In Israel, the secular govt has
>>accomodated the fanatics to an amazing extent -- all politics, of
>>course.
>
>This gets us into a whole 'nother argument, though. The state can be just
>as bad as the family, it can reproduce patriarchal structures, so that
>women seeking state protection against family oppression can just be
>jumping from the frying pan into the fire. (Since people are always citing
>references on this list, I recommend Veena Das, _Critical Events_, OUP
>India 1996).
>
>
>MT
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