A Marxist view of the Left's treatment of 'gc' women

[ArabellaScott]

This is from a fairly well read independence blog.

'The rise of individualism and the centering of individual wants as human rights at the expense of collective needs represent both the extension of a consumer society and the guarantee of its reproduction. It means nothing is safe if anything can be appropriated, if anything can be claimed to belong to those who simply want it or feel it, without situating that want within the social relations within which it is embedded.'

www.barrheadboy.com/left-censorship-and-exclusion-against-gender-critical-women-a-marxist-critique/

it is not just about getting into female spaces and absolute treatment as females - it is about exploiting the power to dominate, control and direct those spaces and the language of those spaces to male 'woman' benefit and away from female benefit or even recognition of female needs, which have become a dirty secret for fear of anger from the powerful new entrants. And to dominate, control and dictate to females within those spaces, along with punishing females who do not perform the required cartwheels on command, which is increasingly including the right to behave unacceptably and in ways that females find intimidating and distressing with demands that females do not look, or show distress, or try to avoid - in fact requiring victims to behave nicely as commanded.

This is such a good, satisfying post, @nilsmousehammer I think it’s a shame for it to languish in a Mumsnet thread.

Oh, I was quite enjoying Onna's input! I didn't find it rude tbh just a bit abrupt, but I don't mind that.

I have giant holes in my knowledge & understanding of politics or history or feminism really so appreciate info/views.

😂

I haven’t yet rtft or rtf article. I am immediately a bit put off by the self-ad hom-ing. Ie- I am such a socialist because of my working class credentials, followed by - I have a PHD, but I hold others in academia in contempt because they are middle classed.

I am veh sorry to say, that since you have a PHD, you are no longer working class. You are now ~ gulp ~ one of those contemptible middle class elite people! 😬 Yikes!

When someone puts my nose out of joint so early on in an article by exposing their own internal contradictions they’re clearly wrestling with, without transparency about it, it does make me sigh, stop reading and think ‘ah, maybe I’ll come back to that later’.

I am finding all your comments more valuable.

I enjoyed it too!

As a Marxist who has spent 12 years reading Marx I'd be very interested to know where Marx proposes dormitories. The rest of this incoherent rambling doesn't warrant attention.

Marx never set out out any blueprint for future society.

I have read the piece linked. Lots of theoretical issues with it. But interesting that she at least tries to take on the left liberals love affair with trans ideology.

I'm GC too. Women are subjugated and exploited due to biology, this is a material fact. Under capitalism women are exploited for their unpaid labour. Gender, performance of gender, stereotypes, conformity to gender ideals only serve to reinforce this. The neoliberal subject is feminine exploited for paid and unpaid labour, the worker is feminine, the work is increasingly feminised labour and the consumer is feminine. Couple that with the objectification of the feminine, and we see an increasing psychological disturbance where men seek to not just fuck as, work us into the ground, exploit us for our biology but also to 'embody us' to become us. But the fact remains that we are women precisely because of our biology, and no one can change sex. Men have fetishized our subjugation, it's no longer enough to fuck us, they want to be 'us' Traps, cotton ceilings, demanding lesbians date them and that other men should desire them. Many playing with dolls, altering language to morph reality, displays of the ultra feminine, not to mention femboys, BDSM......Men have made a sexual fetish of our subjugation, but since the neoliberal subject is feminine they have coopted the oppressed status because its seen as desirable in two ways. As through the 'camera obscura' to be both oppressed and oppressors, the subject and object of their own gaze, and the ultimate neoliberal subject. There is value in subjugation precisely because unpaid labour is labour (creates value) and because it transcends capitalism, (Fragment on machines, Grundrisse) as capitalism increasingly looses its grip on value creation. At some point value can no longer be realised in economic terms, and this process started around 30 years ago.

We have solutions. Radical feminism seems to have taken off the Firestone. Cybernation. If man is liberated from labour, then so too must women be liberated from labour. Or perhaps more human we could simply start to value women's work whether that paid or unpaid. Its simply not enough to gain equality between one man and one women. ALL women must be equal with all men, and therefore the struggle must coalesce around class.

@MiniTheMinx

As a Marxist who has spent 12 years reading Marx I'd be very interested to know where Marx proposes dormitories. The rest of this incoherent rambling doesn't warrant attention.
I suppose in all your reading, you somehow skipped the Communist Manifesto then to call discussion of Marx calling for the abolition of family “incoherent rambling” I mean, it is incoherent rambling but I’m paraphrasing Marx’s incoherent rambling.

Under capitalism women are exploited for their unpaid labour.
Women have been exploited for unpaid labour since year 0, tens of thousands of years before even the hint of capitalism existed. Capitalism has nothing to do with it. Get rid of capitalism, and what will you have? Women exploited for their unpaid labour.

The neoliberal subject is feminine exploited for paid and unpaid labour, the worker is feminine, the work is increasingly feminised labour and the consumer is feminine. Couple that with the objectification of the feminine, and we see an increasing psychological disturbance where men seek to not just fuck as, work us into the ground, exploit us for our biology but also to 'embody us' to become us.

That's interesting as a possible focus and lever for why this ideology has gained so much ground so quickly.

There's the idealised ideal of the 'feminine' as an impossible beauty standard, a willingly submissive pornified sex partner, an unconditionally loving mother, housekeeper, all-seeing organiser, endlessly patient care-giver - and all of this paid for in 'esteem', or attention, or kudos or fame. Shared by the neoliberal media as aspirational Insta adverts and narratives.

That bears little relation to actual women, whose lives are bounded by arse-wiping, floor cleaning, nose-blowing, ego-bolstering, man-pandering, image-maintaining, romance-yearning, health issues that are ignored, dv, the threat of harassment and abuse, tight budgeting, time-sucking drudgery.

(I mean, it's not all bad. We've got cheaper car insurance.)

But males fall for the former aspirational ideal for 'femininity' while failing to recognise the latter as women's actual embodied daily reality. Conveniently, they have no understanding of any of the biological issues that women mostly don't really want to talk about in company anyway. And so can continue to pursue this impossible dream largely free of risk. Often they have superficially heard and then paraphrased women's struggles wrt risk of assault, abuse, etc and fetishised them (Andrea Long Chu, etc).

Greer wrote well about this in the Female Eunuch but much of what she said would get you locked up for hate crime, now.

Here's a fucking horrifying look at dismantling the family:

'Gestation was work already, before it got commodified as commercial surrogacy. So how do we build a politics that bridges these two workplaces, and build solidarity between paid and unpaid gestators?'

www.thenation.com/article/archive/want-to-dismantle-capitalism-abolish-the-family/

Don’t forget Marx appealed specifically to women by claiming that family was a patriarchal tool of oppression keeping women from the workforce. His proposed society was one where family was illegal. Men lived with men, women with women in large communal dormitories with shared kitchens, dining, etc. children would be raised in state run homes with the State as father and mother. Of course, being the sexist twat he was his communal utopia included women being sexually available to the men with no consideration for consent or emotion.

I don’t recall Marx ever saying anything of the kind. Could you provide a quote where he says this?

You are welcome to criticise Marx all you like, just do it on the basis of what he actually wrote.

Marx’s statements in the Communist Manifesto are pretty much the opposite:

“On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution.”

He is saying that the bourgeois family in reality is a system of property relations, not loving family ties, whereas the proletarian family has been destroyed by capitalism. This is a description of how he sees the existing society. He’s not proposing this as a goal:

“The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parents and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all the family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour.”

And on women being sexually available:

“The bourgeois sees his wife as a mere instrument of production. He hears that the instruments of production are to be exploited in common, and, naturally, can come to no other conclusion than that the lot of being common to all will likewise fall to the women. He has not even a suspicion that the real point aimed at is to do away with the status of women as mere instruments of production.”

(My emphasis)

'Arguably the most infamous demand of The Communist Manifesto is the “abolition of the family.” The family, Marx and Engels noted, was where patriarchy and capitalism worked in tandem to produce willing, alienated workers, where women became little more than “instruments of production” for the men who lorded over them. Radical queer politics in the 1960s and ’70s added to their critique of the bourgeois family when activists challenged the heteronormativity of familial relations. That demand, however, has since almost completely vanished from the leftist imaginary.

Sophie Lewis, a feminist theorist and geographer, takes up this forgotten struggle in her work. Her new book, Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family (Verso, 2019) specifically links family abolition to a radical reconceptualization of pregnancy itself. The act of carrying a child to term, she insists, is work—labor that has long been exploited and overlooked by the academy—and so is mothering.'

from the article I linked above.

A crucial dividing line in the question of women’s unpaid labour is who you view as the benefactor. Is it specific men, the husbands? Men in general? Or capital?

More from the Manifesto
”Bourgeois marriage is in reality a system of wives in common and thus, at the most, what the Communists might possibly be reproached with, is that they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalised community of women. For the rest, it is self-evident that the abolition of the present system of production must bring with it the abolition of the community of women springing from that system, i.e., of prostitution both public and private.”

Here- “openly legalised community of women” [that are sexually available for free] as marriage is considered “private prostitution” and the current family system is a “hypocritically concealed” community of women. Women are still chattel to Marx. He just wants us to go from private property to public property.

There’s more in his various letters. I will need time to find the specific references regarding communal living, but it’s an expansion on what the impact of abolishing all private property would result in happening.

Sorry, uneducated person here - what is 'capital' in this context?

It's an interesting point! What if it potentially benefits all of us perhaps in different ways? No arrangement or interaction is going to be entirely positive or entirely negative. So I guess we try to balance it up?

Capital as in the capitalist class.

Unpaid labour is crucial to something called the reproduction of labour power. That means that after a day’s paid work is done, you need to eat, wash, sleep etc – everything that’s necessary to enable you to get up and go to work again the next day. All the shopping, cooking, washing contributes to that.

It’s a tricky one because obviously the dinner needs to be made and the clothes washed whether neither of you "go to work", one of you "goes to work" or both of you "go to work".

In the old days the reproduction of labour-power was tacitly acknowledged in the “family wage” idea, the idea that the man’s wage alone ought to be enough to support his wife and children too.

If a man comes home exhausted and his wife cooks him a meal, who is really benefiting – the man, or his boss, because he’s been able to work harder and longer than he otherwise would?

@BlackForestCake

The orthodox view of Marx espousing communal living with no family units and no private property whatsoever…not even a chicken to lay you eggs. Comes from several letters. This is one that I was able to find quickly between rushing around today.

Excerpts from Marx-Zasulich Correspondence February/March 1881

“Third Draft” In this letter he clarified a few things and runs us through his analysis of “the genesis of the capitalist system”

Marx:
“If you go back to the origins of Western societies, you will everywhere find communal ownership of the land; with the progress of society, it everywhere gave way to private ownership…”

“I shall consider this line of reasoning only in so far as it is based upon European experiences. As regards the East Indies, for example, everyone except Sir H. Maine and his like is aware that the suppression of communal land ownership was nothing but an act of English vandalism which drove the indigenous population backward rather than forward.”

“We must now consider the most characteristic features differentiating the ‘agrarian commune’ from the more archaic communities:
(1) All the other communities rest upon blood relations among their members. No one may join unless they are a natural or adopted relative. These communities have the structure of a genealogical tree. The ‘agrarian commune’ was the first social group of free men not bound together by blood ties.

(2) In the agrarian commune, the house and its complementary yard belong to the individual farmer. By contrast, communal housing and collective habitation were an economic base of the more primitive communities, long before the introduction of agricultural or pastoral life. To be sure, there are some agrarian commune in which the houses, though no longer sites of collective habitation, periodically change owners. Personal usufruct is thus combined with communal ownership. Such communes, however, still carry their birth-mark, being in a state of transition from a more archaic community to the agrarian commune proper.

(3) The cultivable land, inalienable and common property, is periodically divided among the members of the agrarian commune, so that each on his own behalf works the fields allocated to him and privately appropriates their fruits. In the earlier communities: work was done in common, and after a portion had been set aside for reproduction, the common product was distributed in accordance with consumption needs.

Clearly, the dualism inherent in the constitution of the agrarian commune was able to endow it with a vigorous life.

Emancipated from the strong yet narrow ties of natural kinship, the communal land ownership and resulting social relations provided a solid foundation; while at the same time, the house and yard as an individual family preserve, together with small-plot farming and private appropriation of its fruits, fostered individuality to an extent incompatible with the framework of the more primitive communities.

It is no less evident, however, that this very dualism could eventually turn into the seeds of disintegration. Apart from all the malignant outside influences, the commune bore within its own breast the elements that were poisoning its life. As we have seen, private land ownership bad already crept into the commune in the shape of a house with its own country-yard that could become a strong-point for an attack upon communal land. But the key factor was fragmented labour as the source. of private appropriation. It gave rise to the accumulation of movable goods such as livestock, money, and sometimes even: slaves or serfs. Such movable property, not subject to communal control, open to individual trading in Which there was plenty of scope for trickery and chance, came to weigh ever more heavily upon the entire rural economy. ere was the dissolver of primitive economic and social equality. It introduced heterogeneous elements into the commune, provoking conflicts of interest and passion liable to erode communal owner­ ship first of the cultivable land, and then of the forests, pastures, waste ground, etc. Once converted into communal appendages of private property, these will also fall in the long run.

As the latest phase in the primitive formation of society, the agrarian commune is at the same time a phase in the transition to the secondary formation, and therefore in the transition from a society based on communal property to one based on private property. The secondary formation does, of course, include the series of societies which rest upon slavery and serfdom.

Does this mean, however, that the historical career of the agrarian commune is fated to end in this way? Not at all. Its innate dualism admits of an alternative: either its property element will gain the upper band over its collective element; or else the reverse will take place. Everything depends upon the historical context in which it is located.….”

A family home with its own yard (kitchen garden) and ability to keep the fruits of your labour as private property were according to Marx, the seeds of destruction of the historical agrarian commune. Marx obviously feels that society has chosen poorly by developing from the historic agrarian commune into a capitalist society and espouses the ‘collective element’ getting the “upper hand” which means communism- including collective habitation (communal living), no family units and no private property.

Lol - there are still Marxists!?

Capital as in the capitalist class.

I though capital in Marxism was the surplus value of labour accumulated by the bourgeoisie and the social power such accumulation gives them over the proletariat. Hence according to Marx, capitalism is a system for generating capital though exploitation of the working class.

If a man comes home exhausted and his wife cooks him a meal, who is really benefiting – the man, or his boss, because he’s been able to work harder and longer than he otherwise would?

So the Marxist answer to this would be the pig capitalist benefits because the bourgeoisie business owner would accumulate more capital due to the wife’s unpaid labour increasing the productivity of the husband’s paid labour.

(This is of course all 1880s sex stereotyped….)

Well, at any rate, it is a good article you posted OP, great arguments that would have been improved by weeding out the Marxism. Lol!

Thanks for patient explanations, all.

Two moustachioed gents sitting on the verandah, one says :

'I say old chap, have you read Marx?'
'Yes, these wicker chairs are the devil.'

Why did Karl Marx dislike Earl Grey tea?
Because all proper tea is theft

^^