At 21:01 15/10/2006, Carrol wrote:
"michael a. lebowitz" wrote:
>
>
> Still, let's get back to your original question--- the
> absence of women in the leadership of societies attempting to build
> socialism. Was/is there something systemic that thwarts the emergence
> of women as leaders in these?
Actually, Yoshie's discussion of patriarchy (and its disappearance) is
not getting away from the original question at all. (Unless history
isn't relevant to politics.)
Sorry, Carrol--- here's Yoshie's original point:
I remain a partisan of socialism, but there is one thing that makes me
doubt the excellence of socialism: virtual absence of women leaders in
hitherto existing socialist states and movements. Rich social
democratic states (Finland, Germany, Norway) have had female heads of
state, rich liberal states (UK, New Zealand) have had female heads of
states, post-socialist Eastern European states have had a female head
of state (Ukraine)....
I think pursuing that question (i.e., why?) is potentially more
fruitful than a discussion over whether patriarchy has taken on
different forms vs whether it has been superceded by sexism-- a
discussion which, in the end, may turn out to be little more than the
result of differing taxonomies.
michael
We live in a generically male-supremacist
society, but that male supremacy does NOT take the form of patriarchy.
As Yoshie points out, the point of the rule over women under patriarchal
institutions is that the patriarch rules over a productive (not merely
consuming) household of men and women. (There was a valuable issue of
Radical History Review about 6 years ago on the condition of women in
Mexico, and central to the analyses was the shift from patriarchal to
sexist modes of domination over women as economic and demographic
conditions changed. That analysis would not have been possible if the
writers had merely identified male dominance with patriarchy rather than
recognizing that modes of domination change.)
The concepts that get tied to Patriarchy simply get in the way of an
adequate analysis of how male supremacy operates in present conditions,
and thus of how it can be fought.
Carrol
Michael A. Lebowitz
Professor Emeritus
Economics Department
Simon Fraser University
Burnaby, B.C., Canada V5A 1S6
Currently based in Venezuela.
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