- cross-posted to:
- menby@hexbear.net
- cross-posted to:
- menby@hexbear.net
thanks to @iridaniotter@hexbear.net for telling me abt this essay! its been posted on HB before, but not in a while.
read feminist theory you libs! uphold TC69 thought!
thanks to @iridaniotter@hexbear.net for telling me abt this essay! its been posted on HB before, but not in a while.
read feminist theory you libs! uphold TC69 thought!
Comment with small things:
Obviously there is some conflict between the ideas of economic marriage and love marriage. The system is in motion; the superstructure shifts focus from 3 to 4 as women become proletarianized. I would have liked to see some exploration.
if women are the oppressed class, doing reproductive labor without any control over it, why wouldn’t women be the revolutionary class? this is like axiomatically saying that lumpens, not proles, will be the revolutionary class that brings about the abolition of the proletariat. some people think so but without an argument I’m not convinced
Nitpick: we opened the piece by saying that gender is a superstructure and reproductive labor divisions are the base, and by explicitly repudiating people who think that sex is the material base of gender. So gender isn’t “assigned to biology” in these multigendered systems, it’s assigned to labor roles.
I don’t think this is consistent with the idea of labor role as base and gender as superstructure. Gender can’t spread via people internalizing the superstructure and identifying as a man or woman. In this framework gender must spread (or rather maintain itself) by people carrying out the role of gender. I think this section is inconsistent with the one on baking, which is better. People identify as “bakers” not because they think of themselves as a baker and then seek out jobs at a bakery, but because they are economically coerced into wage labor and they end up at a bakery. As the authors write, the superstructural identity of “baker” will wither away once baking is not a job. People really do think of themselves as having a gender. But some Brits think of themselves as “upper crust” and some Indians think of themselves as “Brahmins”, and the way to class abolition is not people deciding not to identify as working-class anymore. It’s a basal change caused by oppressed people engaging in class struggle and winning. The authors say things like “If everyone says “no” to gender, everyone ceases to accept it, then gender is lost. We find similar strategies among resistance to other class systems.” We must be clear that saying “no” to gender has to mean more than just refusing to perform cisgender identity, it has to mean tearing down gendered division of reproductive labor. And if the authors agree, I wish they’d have written more about the specifics of what reproductive labor actually is and how the masses can fight male control of it.
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My understanding of reproductive labor is limited, but it isn’t just birth and childrearing, it’s also stuff like housekeeping which enables wage laborers to work. Both expansion and maintenance of labor. Although queer people engage in that sort of thing (we all do to some extent) more than lumpen are economically productive, the reason I made the comparison is numbers. Lumpen are only a small fraction of society and capitalism tends to maintain a constant reserve army of labor, in contrast to the ever-increasing share of proletarians. Artisans would have been a less loaded example, a small class of laborers that doesn’t have much power (except that nobody thinks artisans will lead the revolution). My problem is the authors don’t really explain why the fraction of queer people might expand until they are doing enough reproductive labor to take the reins. They just handwave “gender’s process of decay”.
gender forms its own base/superstructure that is informed by the base/superstructure of society at large. the base/superstructure of labor, gender, race, nationality, ability etc. are all informed by the capital mode of production that forms the base of society. women are part of the revolutionary class, the authors arent excluding them
It seems like the authors directly contradict that. There’s the section I quoted, but they also just don’t talk about anything that women will do as a gender class to tear down the gender class system. Some antifeminist communists pay lip service to feminism by saying “of course we’re feminist, women are part of the revolutionary proletariat”. As you pointed out, the “totality” stuff is pretty tacked on and the bulk of the specifics are about how gender accelerationism is going to bring about gender abolition.
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