* From: Yoshie Furuhashi Thank you for posting Stan's essay. A couple of comments on some specific points Stan makes:
On Primary Contradiction Stan writes: "The Marxist doctrinal belief that the working class represents the potentially liberatory force within the primary contradiction - a notion that is, in my view, plain mysticism posing as a 'scientific doctrine' - of bourgeois-proletariat, attempts to override the demonstrable fact that patriarchy is an older, deeper, and more durable 'contradiction,' that the most turbulent and transformative struggles of the 20th Century, while often under the leadership of Marixists, had a primarily national character, and that they were more often carried out by majority-masses of peasants, not proletarians." ^^^^^ CB; On this issue, Stan has some essays on his blog on why the left should drop Engels on gender. However, it is already the thesis of Marxism, by Engels' book _The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State_, that patriarchy is an older contradiction than the class contradictions of _capitalism_, as the private property that arises in a complex with the patriarchal family that Engels refers to is _not_ capitalism, but slavery, of course. Engels writes of the origin of the male supremacist family long before capitalism arises. Marxism is rich in analyses that argue that the "patriarchal" contradiction changes with the change in the form of private property. Clara Zetkin and others analyze how the oppression of women changes with the rise of capitalism. So, Stan weakens his analysis by ditching classic Marxist theory in this regard. I wrote this to Stan on his blog a while ago. Also, Stan seems not to have noticed that Marxist-Leninists, with their symbol of the hammer and sickle, were quite aware that poor peasants and cross class alliances of the masses of working people (not just proletarians) were critical in all the revolutions of the twentieth century. Lenin, Mao, Ho et al. weren't quite as dead in the head as Stan would have one think. They didn't accidently lead the successes by integrating workers and peasants.
