Can a good look at Leninism and Stalinism help us improve on “Feminazi”?

 

Davd Martin,

September 2011

 

Feminism began (a rather unfriendly Feminist told me 30-40 years ago in Thunder Bay, Ontario) with a “Marxist class-analysis of gender relations”. Feminists, she said, viewed men as a bourgeoisie and women as a proletariat. I don’t recall her going on to assert “the dictatorship of the proletariat” as the Bolsheviks did, but it may have occurred to her. Other things she said indicated that she considered me—and men in general—unworthy of equality with her gender.

Marx foresaw the bourgeoisie shrinking (through financial competition) to a tiny minority, too small to hold power over a huge proletariat (which huge proletariat then took over.) In fact, the first “communist” government took power in Russia, where at the time there were: A small pre-industrial ruling class, a smaller, separate bourgeoisie, a rather small proletariat, and a peasant majority… which history that Thunder Bay Feminist knew, or ought to have known.

The Russian Marxist-Leninists who took power were known as the Bolsheviks—a word meaning, approximately, “the majority party”. They claimed that name based on winning one particular vote; and they were skillful enough at propaganda that they managed to make Bolshevik their name. Two parallels with Feminism can be argued: Women do outnumber men [though not on as fluctuating a basis as votes in an assembly], and Feminists have been deadly skillful at propaganda and politicking. Trey Pennington and Tom Ball are two of their better-known victims.

“The dictatorship of the proletariat” in Russia and “her satellites” turned out to be a dictatorship of the bureaucracy (Djilas, 1957; Komarov, 1980). The average Soviet or Yugoslav proletarian probably was better off under [bureaucracy wearing the name of “communism”] than a pre-Soviet, Russian serf; and maybe as well off as a pre-Soviet, Russian peasant with enough land to feed his family but too little to think of having serfs of his own1. The bureaucrats lived and dictated, not as a proletariat but as a ruling class.

This is a blog and not a book, so the details of the analogy between Feminism and Bolshevism are too many “to go over”. It does seem “obvious” to me, that Feminism rules through political intrigue and a bureaucracy which is more a ruling class than a representative of the population. It distorts facts in a manner reminiscent of Soviet-bloc “intellectualism” and government prose: This site and other men’s sites have seen dozens, perhaps hundreds, of refutations of Feminist-promulgated invalid statistics, especially as to wage levels and gender violence. Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn, Djilas himself, were treated not that differently from how men are treated who challenge Feminism today. Marx may or not be amazed at how his vision has been warped; I am more than 90% sure he is disgusted—and i’m not even an admirer.

I don’t even believe Marx, from his house-arrest somewhere between Purgatory2 and Heaven, really approved of Lenin. (Nor do I believe Jesus approved of the Inquisition and the sack of Constantinople—bureaucracy is, my best guess anyway, inherently inclined toward evil. Distance bureaucracy from public control and you invite worse than mere “trouble”.)

There are important flaws in the analogy. Marx’s notion of the bourgeoisie shrinking though competition that evicts bourgeois “losers” into the proletariat, doesn’t work with biological gender3.

Women do constitute a majority of the adult population in many modern States, thanks largely to medical advances that have made death in childbirth and lactation, extremely rare. Men contributed immensely to those advances, and applauded them—we have been friendly to women most of the time, and with very few exceptions, we have been unfriendly only with good cause. A Bolshevik bourgeoisie is not so friendly to the proletariat… nor so nearly as large.

Those flaws must not be crucial, because the parallels are disquieting. Having beaten the Soviet system in the economic “cold war”, the West finds itself today, arguably “more Soviet than the Russians”—subject to a bureaucratic ruling class that shamelessly misuses “gender equality” as Soviet bureaucrats and propagandists once misused “the dictatorship of the proletariat.”4 What must the old “anti-Communists” be thinking? Some of the old “communists”, such as Djilas, Komarov, and Solzhenitsyn, warned us, not about Feminism perhaps, but definitely about bureaucracy.

In the “Soviet bloc”, those who had Party membership were privileged, and those who had important Party offices and connections were very privileged. There isn’t a major Feminist Party—at least, not yet—in Canada or the US; but there are elite networks within Feminism who get more of the benefits than ordinary women get, and who (one might infer from horror stories including Tom Ball, Timothy Emerson, and Vladek Filler) persecute enemies (the Soviet officials once sent theirs to Siberia.)

Bolshevism fell. Russia may not be a perfect democracy today—but neither is Canada or the USA. (Switzerland may well be the nearest thing to a perfect democracy among “nation-states”, and Finland seems to do better than North America.) If we take notice of the substantial analogy between oppressive Bolshevism 25-75 years ago, and oppressive Feminism today, we might learn some useful ways to restore the democracy and freedom which Jefferson, Adams, Franklin and the rest, had in mind (as had the men of Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden, as had Gabriel Dumont and Louis Riel).

At the least, i believe the analogy gives a valuable warning, and a valuable guide to attitude for us men.

References:

Djilas, Milovan 1957, The New Class. NY: Praeger.

Komarov, Boris 1980. The Destruction of Nature in the Soviet Union. White Plains, NY: M. E. Sharpe

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels., 1888 Manifesto of The Communist Party. English text edied by Friedrich Engels. Project Gutenberg e-text Transcribed by Allen Lutins with assistance from Jim Tarzia.

Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch. The Cancer Ward. The First Circle.

Wikipedia article, “Karl Marx.” Accessed September 26, 2011.

Notes:

1. The word kulak, as best this non-Slav can tell, includes both “big peasants” who exploited the landless and those with too little land; and smallholders who were independent of exploitation but had only enough to live in modest security.
2. I doubt Purgatory exists—Orthodox Christianity regards it as a pagan importation made by Augustine of Hippo. Augustine was a Platonist before becoming Christian, and Orthodox scholars generally believe he mistakenly treated some of his early Pagan beliefs as Christian. However, Purgatory is a very handy, well-known image for where a merciful God might put an abrasive atheist who loved the poor, rather than throw him into Hell. Since i do serve Jesus Christ partly for His strong emphasis on love and mercy, i imagine Marx’s Purgatory as resembling the house-arrest where Hitler wrote Mein Kampf (and better deserved than by Hitler, who i might imagine in Hell continuing his battle with Stalin, this time in their own bodies…?)
3 Homosexuals born boys, aren’t women; and even “trans-sexuals” are anatomical contrivances who lack ovaries and uteri. We have not seen men becoming a tiny fraction of the human population in the States where Feminism has prospered (though a few Feminists have advocated reducing men to a small minority, i know of none having said it will occur by competition among men—certainly not by men turning other men into women.)
4. “The dictatorship of the proletariat” never actually existed. Might the same be true of gender equality, or at least of stable, enduring gender equality? I’m not going to judge, certainly not today.