A Critical Approach to Marx and Feminism
Young women who have never heard of Dworkin, Firestone, or Atkinson, are being exposed to the idea that feminism was cooked up by a cabal of Jewish overlords in order to separate them from their children. If their only exposure to ‘feminism’ has been Buzzfeed videos extoling the virtues of pornography, they will be suspectable to this sort of crypto-fascist rhetoric given feminism appears as their enemy.
Social theorists say we are entering a new age. Neoliberalism will soon deliver us, they predict, a neo-feudal age — which they variously call neo-patrimonialism, re-patrimonialism, or the re-feudalization of capitalism. This new age will be one of ‘parceled sovereignty, new lords and peasants, hinterlandization, and catastrophism’, or, more simply, the ‘Reformation into reverse’. In... Continue Reading →
Lesbophobia is, like lesbianism itself, invisibalised in favour of more respected social forms. The wider amorphous ‘homophobia’ serves today as a catchall for any anti-gay sentiment, but it only really captures what gay men face: prejudice and discrimination based on their sexuality i.e same-sex attraction (to other men). Anti-gay prejudice experienced by men is pure... Continue Reading →
Today, many lesbians are choosing to avoid lesbophobia and misogyny by identifying as men and transitioning to replicate a ‘male appearance’. Of course, it is not possible to change sex, but the appearance of men’s secondary sexual characteristics can be mimicked through surgery and maintained by continuous hormone use. An obvious example is the actress... Continue Reading →
The ongoingcMegan Markle controversy reached new heights this week after her tell-all interview with American TV show host, Oprah Winfrey. After facing years of mounting hostility, Meghan is now considered an element hostile to the Royal family and has found herself the subject of a very British denunciation. In speaking publicly, Meghan is guilty of... Continue Reading →
A significant contributing factor to the current trend of conceptualising ‘gender’ as a standalone form of oppression is a lack of familiarity with its application throughout history as the intense ideological enforcement of material female oppression. Here, it is useful to explore periods of history where the significance of sex (as opposed to gender) is... Continue Reading →
Communists often hail the work of Alexandra Kollontai, holding her up as a decorated Marxist feminist and member of the Soviet Central Committee. In reality, Kollontai’s favour with the majority male leadership of the Soviet Union was highly dependent upon her compliance, and she spent much of her political career combatting the Communist Party’s disregard... Continue Reading →
The great significance of Friedrich Engels’s Origin of the Family, Private Property & the State is that it is one of the first Marxist analyses of development of family and origins of women’s oppression (the first was August Bebel’s Women & Socialism, 1879) — a subject in which most men were uninterested. A Short Summary... Continue Reading →
Part III: We cannot abstract labour from its social context ‘value converts every product into a social hieroglyphic.’ Marx, Capital Vol I In light of the enormous sex disparity between producers and consumers within the sex industry(majority female sellers; majority male buyers), prostitution and other 'sex work' cannot be considered outside of its historical, material,... Continue Reading →
Women’s economic dependence on men historically ensured that women married. Marriage was, and is still today, seen as aspiration for women and a way to access material wealth and secure basic sustenance. Though in the last half century due to the women’s movements of the 1960s and 1970s, women’s ability to sustain themselves economically has... Continue Reading →