Leaving liberal feminism

[SandorClegane]

liberationcollective.wordpress.com/2015/03/03/leaving-liberal-feminism/

Has anyone else read this? I loved it. I really identify with the authors experience.

Thanks for posting that link - I hadn't read it before and found it really interesting. I've never identified as a liberal feminist (my early exposure to feminism was before that really got going in a mainstream way, I think); but I think that's also because the version of feminism I absorbed was also very influenced by Marxism. Radical feminism takes a great deal from the insights of Marxism (not that Marxusm has always been hospitable to feminism, but that's another story).

But of course liberalism per se is quite hostile to Marxism, because it doesn't fit with the pre-eminent emphasis on the agency of the individual as a primary force. So it would make sense that liberal feminism is an individualist feminism, essentially of the status quo. It doesn't really recognise the analysis of class that is the focus of Marxism - and maybe that is the central problem. One of the key tenets of Marxism is that ideological discourses work to persuade and cement people within their class position by making them complicit with their own oppression. In feminist terms, this means that women as a class often subscribe to the things that harm them. Women's choices are not always feminist ones, because they take place in a structure of oppression which works to ensure many women make choices that are actively harmful to the interests of women as a class (though those choices may be variously good or not for those individual women).

If anything, intersectionality ought to teach us exactly this: that I as an individual might make a choice that works for me or even advantages me, but that this choice might well also be thoroughly within and contribute to a structure that harms women overall. But in liberal feminism liberalism can't recognise the second part of that, because the key thing about liberalism is that the individual is never blinded in the choices he or she makes. So you get intersectionality being instead a kind of empty gesture, a round of privilege checking that doesn't really go anywhere.

We are really resistant at the moment to recognising that classes of people can be complicit in their own oppression; NOT because they actively choose to be so, but because they are ideologically blinded to the operations of privilege that work upon them. Marxism aimed to give people the tools to see where the economic interests of capital were acceded to by workers because they were ideologically naturalised as right and proper parts of life. Radical feminism aims to do that too for women - to be able to say that some choices made by women are not actually freely chosen, and even if they are are not free of harm or the structure of oppression. (I might not be racist myself, but I might make choices that are fully in keeping with and even help shore up a racist social structure, for example.) Liberalism in all forms is very resistant to this being pointed out.

Just musing on these things...sorry for the long rant!

Talking only about intersectional feminists as if it's white women identifying as such is disrespecting. You have seen and hopefully heard from black(as political class) women on recent threads.

If feminism is to be inclusive it should start here on MN with the right language.

I'm not really sure what point you are making, ZuluInJozi - intersectionality is an idea rather than a type of feminism. There is nothing intrinsically objectionable about it per se - in fact it ought to be useful in precisely those situations that radical feminists feel liberalism doesn't really take account of. Intersectionality should ideally work as a reminder of where individual interests intersect with class positioning, and it should help us to speak about classes rather than or as well as individuals. But a kind of inverted game of "privilege top trumps" doesn't say or do much at all to help collective action.

Is there some approved version of the "right language"? What is it? Are people on this thread using the "wrong" language in some way?

toddlerwrangling Is your idea of feminism still influenced by Marxism?

Possibly you will say the ideals of Marxism have been warped in the practice but it's hardly been a success has it?.

ZuluInJozi's post I don't understand at all.

I did mention race in my post explicitly, though.

StillLost all second-wave political movements drew on elements of Marxism (and parts of the first wave as well). It's from Marxism that class analysis and terms like ideology ulltimately come, all of which have been constructive for feminist thought. Radical feminism in particular draws heavily on Marxist class analysis. Do you think that is a bad thing?

If you want a society which is run on Marxist economic and social principles yes, that is a bad thing.

You cannot only mention class but tiptoe on race and socio-econimc class.

It's got to be clear, it's known that black, Asian and Latino women do not fall under other class but socio-economic and to imply that we do is insulting.

Still, it sounds like you are confusing Marxism with communism. Marxism (for example as it appears in Capital), is first of all a descriptive and analytic tool, which gives us terms in which to talk about economic and social structures. Marx goes on to develop these into a utopian political worldview in The Communist Manifesto; but whether you like that worldview or not does not invalidate the initial analysis (unless you want to claim that capital, labour, value, class, ideology, and so on don't exist?)

Quite a lot of feminist thought sees women's oppression as being absolutely and intimately intertwined with the historic ownership of property and capital - ie. that male ownership of women as an economic and symbolic asset (and therefore of her children, allowing property rights to pass to her male children), is what is the absolute cornerstone of patriarchy. Thinking of women as a labouring class (whose status as property meant that her labour could be appropriated by men) is absolutely central to feminist thought. It's also central to ways of understanding the history of racial politics too; since white Europeans' ability to extract labour from other races forms part of a structural class oppression.

Zulu when I use the term "class" above I'm not writing specifically about socioeconomic class, but in the abstract, meaning class as any collective group (including race, sex, economic position, any identity-based community, relationship to the means of production). This is a reasonably standard way of understanding the idea of "class" in the abstract sense.

Sorry for not being clear earlier, I'm annoyed because I want the sky to be blue in March in Johannesburg

Sorry Zulu, didn't mean that to sound dismissive - just trying to clarify that when I'm writing about class position that includes race and isn't limited to socioeconomic class.

Still - here's a useful analogy to explain what I mean:

-You're a capitalist. You own factories, property, machinery; but you still need labourers to realise the value of your assets. You make a profit by paying the labourers less than you can sell your goods for. In slavery, you conveniently own the labourers anyway, so you don't have to pay them at all as such (just provide for their basic needs, food, housing etc.)

-You're a patriarch. You want to "own" children (not least to pass your assets onto). But you need someone to do the hard physical work of bearing, feeding and caring for them. Conveniently, you can also own someone else to perform that labour for you (and pay for it by just providing for her basic needs, food, housing etc.)

That's why very early 19thc women's rights movements saw a clear structural relationship between slavery and the condition of women - and why feminism has historically been very interested in labour theories of value, particularly as they are analysed in Marxism as part of an understanding of classes.

After all, you can't get closer to the ultimate means of production than women.

toddler agreed then

Sorry for final post - pressed send too soon...

Of course though in Marxist analysis the capitalist and the labourer are structurally interchangeable: you could switch their individual positions about and the structure would remain the same. Where feminism departs from this is in the fact that the patriarch and the woman are not interchangeable - the patriarch can never bear children himself: he always has to conscript the woman.

So for radical feminism the structural oppression of women is an oppression based on labour and ownership but literalised in biology - it's woman's biology that is at the root of her economic and structural enslavement. Liberalism of all sorts would prefer to reject this, because it challenges the narrative that individuals are solely responsible for rethinking their own social conditions.