________________________________
M-TH: Longer version of paper for women's liberation
Date: Tue, 07 Dec 1999 17:11:04 -0500
From: "Charles Brown" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <Leninist-international@buo319b.econ.utah.edu>,
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: M-TH: Longer version of paper for women's liberation
Reply-to: marxism-thaxis@buo319b.econ.utah.edu
For Women's Liberation: A Comradely
Critique of the Manifesto and Historical
Materialism
(For Angela Y. Davis)
By Charles Brown
To me _The Manifesto of the Communist Party_ remains
extraordinarily
persuasive of the historical epoch of which we are today still a
part. The argument of the Manifesto is convincing in
However, The Manifesto shows cowardice , and more bourgeois than
communist finesse in dealing with marriage, the family, patriarchy
and monogamy. Marx and Engels say the bourgeoisie accus Marx
and Engels dodge the dialectical requirement that they present an
affirmative, not just negative aspect, to their critique of bourgeois
society's form of the family. They defer to the What is
the Communist proposal for the next form of the family ? Given Marx
and Engels'' dialectical, evolutionary-revolutionary perspective on
every other institution, presumably for th To me this all
demonstrates the European taboo on public (and much private),
revolutionary discussion and critique of reproductive institutions
and practices ( the mode of reproduction) is Marx and
Engels did creep up on telling the truth about the revolutionary
direction of the develop nt of the family. Many years after the
Manifesto, in _The Origin of the Family, Private
" Feuerbach starts out from the fact of religious self-alienation,
of the duplication of the world into a religious world
and a secular work consists in resolving the religious
world into its But that the secular basis detaches
itself from itse itself as an independent realm in the
clouds can only be by the cleavages and
self-contradictions within this The latter
therefore, in itself be both understood in its contradiction and
revolutionised in practice. Thus, for instance, _after the
earthlyfamily is discovered to be the
secret of the holy family, the former must then itself
be destroyed in theory and practice_" (emphasis added,
C.B)
So, Marx knew that monogamy would be revolutionised
and "destroyed". He just did not shout it, the way he did
"expropriate the expropriators" and the like.
Let us examine the issue a little more deeply. By the
Manifesto
every Marxist knows the A,B,C's of historical materialism or the
materialist conception of history. The history of hit
In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels asserted an elementary
anthropological or "human nature" rationale for this conception. In a
section titled "History: Fundamental Conditions, th
"*life involves before everything else eating and drinking,
a habitation, clothing and many other things. The first
historical act is thus the production of material life
itself. And indeed this is an historical act, a
fundamental condition of all history, which today, as
thousands of years ago, must daily and hourly be
fulfilled merely in order to sustain human life."
Production and economic classes are the starting point of Marxist
analysis
of human society because human life, like all plant and animal life
must fulfill biological needs to exist as lif Yet , it is
fundamental in biology that the basic life sustaining processes of a
species are twofold. There is obtaining the material means of life
and subsistence or success of survival of Thus, having
premised their theory in part on human biology, our "species-being",,
Marx and Engels are logically obligated to develop historical
materialism based, not only on the logic of In The German
Ideology, they did recognize reproduction as a "fundamental condition
of history" along with production. However, they give reproduction
or , at least, "the family" a subord "The third
circumstance which, from the very outset, enters into
historical development, is that men, who daily remake their own life
begin to make other men, to propagate their kind: the
relation between man and woman, parents and
children, the family. The family, which to begin with is
the only social relationship, becomes later, when increased
needs create a new social relations and the increased
population new needs, a subordinate one*" My thesis
in this essay is that the mode of reproduction (in the broad sense,
including, but not limited to social institutions called "the"
family) of human beings remains throughout human Not only
that. In the above quoted passage, Marx and Engels give reproduction
a "subordinate" ,"fundamental" condition of history status by the
following sleight of hand: in part population Another passage
in The German Ideology demonstrates the same sort of magical rather
than scientific use "Only now, after having considered four
moments, four a primary historical relations, do we find that
man also possess In this long paragraph (only partially
quoted), we see Marx and Engels's early formulation and explanation
of the "According to the materialistic conception,
the determining
factor in history is , in the final instance, the production and
reprodu This formulation and the change in it from that in _The
German "reproduction creates subjects", I mean "reproduction" in a
broader
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