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Woman as Reason
May 2001
Women's liberation and MARX@2000
by Maya Jhansi
I went to the Socialist Scholars Conference in New York last month and was
able to attend two sessions on the women's movement. The first session was
called "The Political Economy of Gender," while the other took up the
international women's movement. Although both panels were organized by the
same person, it seemed that the former was more theoretical, with a lengthy
talk by the German feminist Frigga Haug. The other panel turned into a
heated debate about the role of the UN in the contemporary women's
movement, with the panelists holding the UN responsible for the
demobilization of women's liberation as a revolutionary and vocally
political movement.
Both panels circled around the question of how to move beyond this and
create an anti-capitalist feminism. However, neither tried to contextualize
the women's movement within the Left. For example, while the critique of
the UN at the second panel was necessary, nobody really asked why it is
that the contemporary women's movement is having such a difficult time
speaking in the language of revolution. This led to strange nostalgia for
the bipolar world when, some in the audience argued, it was easier to
figure out who was Left and who was not. It is just such failures of the
Left that have led, I think, to the situation we are in today.
There is a book I found that actually addresses this problem, though the
author doesn't see it as a problem. It's called MARX@2000 by Ronaldo Munck
(St. Martin's 2000). In it, Munck, like others, reasserts the importance
and relevance of Marx for all the struggles of the new millennium, such as
the environmental movements and the women's movement. But the Marx that he
is calling for is very much in keeping with the temper of the times
today--he calls for a "hybrid Marx," which would "be in keeping with the
global postmodern era in which we live." The struggles of the next few
decades, he writes, "will most definitely not be called socialist. As a
provisional label to think the new democratic alternative to barbarism,
postmodern socialism may be a convenient way of exploring the horizon of
possibilities." This "discursive, hybrid, postmodern socialism," he says,
"could learn a lot from feminism, especially its "crossfertilization" with
deconstruction and postmodernism.
Munck has a long chapter on the Women's Liberation Movement titled "Unhappy
Marriage: Marxism and Women." "It is probably not coincidental," he writes
revealingly in the opening of the chapter, "that when the 'crisis of
marxism' was noted in the 1970s, feminism was increasing in theoretical
stature and political influence. While marxism tried to incorporate, even
domesticate, women under the 'woman question' label, feminism was setting
its own agenda." The chapter goes on to discuss Engels, not Marx, as the
source of the "marxist" engagement with gender. Quoting Michele Barret, he
advocates the view that Marx's "treatment of the issue [of gender] is now
widely regarded as scattered, scanty and unsatisfactory."
Although Munck is critical of Engels, he so distorts Marx that the
criticisms of Engels remain pointless. At one point he says, for example,
that "Marx simply assumed that the wage labourer was a male," though there
are "scattered" references to women's labor. Furthermore, he accuses Marx
of "tacitly accept[ing] the precepts of sexist society." This is, of
course, patently wrong. Not only did the early Marx make the transformation
of Man/Woman relations (inside and outside the factory walls) central to
his vision of freedom, he also spent considerable time analyzing the gender
specificities of women's labor in the factory in Capital. Indeed, women
workers are present and central to Marx's chapter on the Working Day.
However, disproving Munck's veritable caricature of Marx's views on gender
through textual evidence would probably not change his mind. It is clear
that getting Marx right is not Munck's object.
This is related to Munck's larger agenda of grafting Marx's thought onto
deconstruction. Quoting Susan Hekman's argument that Derrida is important
to feminism to displace binary logic and deal with difference, Munck argues
that deconstruction could help us "de-demonize capitalism." Where
mainstream "marxism" presented capitalism as an all-consuming, totalizing
system, discursive analysis could reveal capitalism to be a "paper tiger."
With this new hybrid socialism, he argues, we could challenge the
phallocentric logic of multinational corporations, deconstruct their power,
in a word, deflate them. This view that "capitalism" could be deflated
through discursive means is patently absurd. Capitalism is hardly a "paper
tiger," as the havoc it wreaks on the earth and on people's lives and
cultures shows. Besides, why is Munck appropriating old Maoist rhetoric to
describe something that is supposed to be so "new"?
Munck is right that the historical emergence of the women's movement in the
1970s coincided with the decline of the Left. But, what Munck has failed to
realize is that this problematic has become both a theoretical and
practical barrier within the women's movement. Feminists need to rethink
the relationship of women's liberation to Marx, so that we do not fall into
the same blithe reiterations of post-Marx Marxism as Munck has. Ironically,
the MARX@2000 he presents to us, for all of the "innovative" hybridity he
sees, is basically the same vulgar Marx put forward by post-Marx Marxism.
Until the women's movement confronts Marx in and for himself, it will not
be able to move "beyond" anything--let alone capitalism.
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