Class conscious leftists and Marxists in here, let's discuss "Proletarian Feminism" and how Feminism relates to class struggle.

Egalitarianwhistle · 2019-08-16T20:18:12+00:00

I have mixed feelings when I see stuff like this. https://www.google.com/amp/s/abcnews.go.com/amp/Politics/top-us-defense-firms-led-women/story%3fid=56564622

PostmodernHomosexual · 2019-08-17T01:28:19+00:00

I've had similar thoughts myself but haven't taken the time to sit down and type them out or make a post. It seems on the farther left (left of liberalism) there's very little willingness to criticize Marxist or proletarian feminism. I'm guessing partly because people just haven't thought about it and they appreciate criticism of liberal feminism (and to a lesser extent radical feminism) from the proletarian feminists. Another reason people who may have some desire to question proletarian feminism don't want to is that there are of course social costs to making these kinds of criticisms. I listened to a lecture from Andrew Kliman where he says the more liberal take that wages have not risen any since the 70s is false based on his analysis, that wages rose it's just that all the wage increases since then have went to women. Later, among fellow leftists who listened I commented that this should be incorporated into how leftists engage with feminism (especially in light of the fact that younger women are now out earning their male peers) which was met with the response from other leftists that feminists just want "equality" and believing otherwise is falling for right wing lies (it's kind of sad they haven't come up with a better response after all this time).

I still say probably the best feminism if I have to pick is Marxist/proletarian feminism. They occasionally will even speak up with mild criticism of the excessive manbashing among radical and liberal feminists as Jenny Turner does in her essay in London Review of Books:

More prevalent, however, was what Didion called a ‘studied resistance to the possibility of political ideas’ – who, in any case, ever heard of a radical-feminist movement taking its understanding of historical change from a man? The entire Marxist tradition was repressed, leaving a weird sinkhole that quickly filled up with the most dreadful rubbish: wise wounds, herstory, nature goddesses, raped and defiled; sisters under the skin, flayed and joined, like the Human Centipede, in a single biomass; the fractal spread of male sexual violence, men fuck women replicated at every level of interaction, as through a stick of rock.

That said, you're right it's time leftists got over out squeamishness when it comes to questioning woman centered forms of identity politics.

serpentineeyelash · 2019-08-17T05:52:35+00:00

By the same anti-idpol logic, isn’t any kind of male advocacy also an identitarian movement that objectively works to smooth over economic class distinctions through class collaborationism? There is certainly truth to the view that identity issues are pushed to distract from economics, but it’s also true that there are many real identity issues. To get the left to consider male advocacy as legitimate, we need an extra argument that distinguishes between feminism and, say, black identity politics, and distinguishes between male identity politics and white identity politics.

Ultimately it comes down to the assumption that the gender system privileges men more than women. And in a materialist/Marxist context, it comes down to the assumption that the male breadwinner role is an economic privilege – that a husband’s role as “head of household” makes him the boss of the relationship, and that he is exploiting his wife for reproduction, childrearing, and other domestic labour, because she was born with a womb.

To really challenge that assumption, we have to make the case that this is not the only way of looking at it. Maybe it’s the other way around, with the wife exploiting her husband as a worker in the public sphere because he was born without a womb, and maybe women always had covert forms of power which meant men were not really "the boss" of most households. Or maybe both perspectives have some validity, with men and women having advantages and disadvantages that are difficult to compare.

The argument that is brought forth by feminists against this is that the Patriarchy is inherently connected with Capitalism, and that one can not exist without the other, thus feminism is inherently a class issue. I fail to see how this is true at all. The justifications for this belief are always incredibly shoddy and half-assed.

The origin of this argument seems to be the radical feminist Shulamith Firestone (drawing on Simone de Beauvoir). Her argument that sex is the most fundamental class distinction was based on the observation that evolved sex differences in reproductive roles led to a sex-based division of labour as human society developed. Most feminists today seem to have dropped the biological basis of her argument, which is why it no longer makes any sense.

Again, the point we must make here is that women are not the only and not necessarily the primary victims of that division of labour.

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