Against the Chauvinist Line
As we indicated in our introductory post, it is necessary to draw a line of demarcation between the proletarian feminist position and other incorrect positions within the movement. To begin this process of delineation, we will first address the erroneous line held by some within the German milieu of the ICM, which contains several theoretical missteps and ultimately results in strategic misdirection on the gender question.
We begin with a Marxist analysis of the woman question, which then serves as a basis for critique of the German line. Catalina Adrianzen, founder of the People’s Women’s Movement of Peru and a brave communist fighter, summarizes the Marxist view on the woman question in Marxism, Mariategui, and The Women’s Movement. Adrianzen begins with a broad summary of the Marxist understanding of human beings, stating that:
Marxism, the ideology of the working class, conceives the human being as a set of social relations that change as a function of the social process. Thus, Marxism is absolutely opposed to the thesis of “human nature” as an eternal, immutable reality outside the frame of social conditions; this thesis belongs to idealism and reaction.
There are several parts of this statement that must be analyzed:
- Adrianzen foregrounds the dialectical principle of the universality of struggle and transformation. Human beings are not static, but are subjected to change on the basis of shifts within social processes. There is not an eternal human essence which transcends social relations in a given historical moment. In other words, since human beings are constituted by social relations, when social relations change, so does humanity.
- And she correctly asserts that any view that claims a fundamental and unchanging nature at the core of humanity is idealistic and reactionary.
Adrianzen then applies this analytic to the question of gender. She writes:
Just as Marxism considers the human being as a concrete reality historically generated by society, it does not accept either the thesis of “feminine nature,” which is but a complement of the so-called “human nature” and therefore a reiteration that woman has an eternal and unchanging nature; aggravated, as we saw, because what idealism and reaction understand by “feminine nature” is a “deficient and inferior nature” compared to man.
If “humanity” is socially and historically contingent, it follows that the category of “women” or gender is also mutable. Adrianzen insists that there is no feminine nature which eternally defines women, but more importantly, she also demonstrates how this belief in an immutable unchanging foundation for womanhood is a product and key component of patriarchal ideology.
Expanding further on this question, Adrianzen writes:
For Marxism, women, as much as men, are but a set of social relations, historically adapted and changing as a function of the changes of society in its development process. Woman then is a social product, and her transformation demands the transformation of society.
Adrianzen demonstrates the socio-historical contingency by way of the scientific perspective of materialist dialectics, which alone allows complete understanding. She foregrounds class relations, particularly via an analysis of the structures of property, family and State, as developments in the condition and historical place of women are directly linked to those three determinant factors as we argue in our own explication of Engels and Marx.
From our perspective, the two dominant revisionist lines on the gender question both diverge from this dialectical standpoint. The German line rejects contingency and embraces idealist immutability. The Swiss embraces contingency but abandons the materialist focus on the social processes which produce the contingency of gender (NB: we will be engaging with the Swiss position in a later document).
If Marxists want to change the social conditions which produce the oppression of women, we must understand the social and historical processes that create womanhood – property, the family, and the state. Consequently, the task at hand is to smash capitalist social relations themselves, not an abstract notion of patriarchy or a fundamental man-woman contradiction. Adrianzen’s formulation allows us to reassert a core point we have made above: the oppression of women is a consequence of the class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.
Now that we have established a theoretical grounding, we will turn towards a direct critique of the line advanced in “KLASSENSTANDPUNKT: The Ideological Decay of Imperialism,” which is available both on the Dem Volke Dienen as well as the CI-IC blog. While the Klassenstandpunkt document offers a generally correct critical approach to postmodern philosophical trends and the struggle against idealism, it nevertheless contains serious theoretical errors we will enumerate below.
This document begins by attempting to trace the development of “discourse analysis,” specifically in relation to Foucaldian postmodernism. The writers note that Foucault built on previous iterations of so-called critical theory to develop an approach to historical inquiry which treats “discourse” as theoretically primary, thereby contributing to the broader development of poststructural philosophy in general. They write that poststructuralism “is about using discourse to discover abstract and objective rule structures in language or in the use of signs.” We cannot afford to drift too far into an analysis of poststructuralism or its relation to earlier structuralist thought, but largely agree with the assertion that the development of discourse theory and poststructuralism exemplify a displacement of concrete analysis of the material world by a fixation on linguistics. The German authors correctly assert that the poststructuralist linguistic turn is an idealist revolt against materialism. They write:
The social practice of class struggle is separated from theory. ‘Language creates reality’ means in the beginning there is theory not practice, the Marxist epistemology is turned upside down and this is simply pure idealism.
That postmodernism emerged as a response to Marxism is certainly true, and we unite with this assertion of the Klassenstandpunkt authors as well as Comrade Siraj of the EBULF, who similarly argued in Postmodernism Today that “Post-modernism is the outcome or result of the ideological and objective crises in the period when the prospect of revolution receded to the background and the militant working class movement in Europe was largely assimilated by the states.”
After describing the emergence of postmodernism, the Klassenstandpunkt authors turn their attention to a particular iteration of postmodern philosophy: gender theory, which they attribute to the work of postmodern philosopher Judith Butler. They claim that “Gender-Theory is no longer about patriarchy, but about sexism, i.e. the question of gender as an idea, not a material reality. The term “sexism” is a substitute for patriarchy.”
Judith Butler is undoubtedly an arch-idealist of contemporary continental philosophy and has contributed much to postmodern theories of gender. However, it is incorrect to say Butler’s work focuses on sexism rather than patriarchy. Butler’s writing does abandon a materialist focus on patriarchy as a product of social processes, but it does not offer the standard liberal view of women’s oppression as merely a product of “sexist” attitudes. Butler focuses instead on gender as a performative reality which is grounded in discourse, drawing eclectically on Derrida, Foucault, and Beauvoir, and argues that the discursive construction of gender operates as a material reality; it is this gesture which divides her work from materialism.
While the Klassenstandpunkt authors misidentify Butler’s approach to gender, they are correct that Butler contributed to a view that treats gender as historically contingent, based in discourse, and articulated by diffuse and amorphous notions of “power” which Butler imports from Foucault. This focus on gender as “constructed” by discourse is obviously at odds with the Marxist perception of gender developed in Adrianzen’s work. While both affirm the notion that gender is contingent, this contingency is grounded in completely different realities. For Adrianzen, contingency is caused by gender’s operation as a set of social relations composed of material realities of property, family, and state. In contrast, Butler’s contingency is grounded in ever changing discourses and in the subversion of gender through individualistic performative reiterations of gender which call into question its essential and unchanging nature. We will dive further into the differences between the Marxist and postmodernist views in the next section of this text, but for now it is sufficient to say that postmodern views of gender (what the Klassenstandpunkt authors refer to as gender theory) do diverge fundamentally from Marxism, even if both share in common an abstract notion of contingency.
Unfortunately, the line on gender put forward by the Klassenstandpunkt authors ultimately fails to understand the divergence between Marxism and postmodernism correctly, supplanting both with their own form of idealism as a result.
In a section titled “The Rollback of The Women’s Movement,” they attempt to extend their criticism of postmodernism to contemporary trends within gender politics today.
In order to respond directly to their claims we will quote this section in its entirety:
The harmful and reactionary influence of postmodernism or identity politics is also leaving its clear mark on the women’s movement. In the emergence of the progressive women’s movement, especially in the 1960s, one of the central points was the negation of the traditional role of women. One should no longer wear a bra, shave one’s legs, accept “female” role models or ideals of beauty. Although this movement was strongly influenced by the petty bourgeoisie, the communist parties also had their influence here. Postmodernism then says that all this, the role of women in society, gender itself, are all constructs. As described above, Gender-Theory emerges, in which the question of an allegedly constructed gender plays an important role.
This leads to a problem in identity politics today, because if there is no biological sex, what defines what a woman is? The answer that identity politics arrives at is: woman is whoever is or looks “female” (or simply claims to be a woman). The struggle of the women’s movement used to be that these differences in appearance should not exist. You can see this in how “flirtatious” the women comrades were in the Cultural Revolution. They had the same cap and the same jacket as the male comrades, a slightly different haircut perhaps and sometimes a skirt, but that was it. And that was a good thing. They then also did the same jobs as the men and were in no way inferior to them. This is the Marxist understanding of women’s liberation. Today with identity politics, a woman is defined by whether she moves, dresses and makes up like a woman. A transsexual man who claims to be a woman is celebrated as a woman because he is “feminine” and moves, dresses and makes up like a woman. This has negated the whole struggle for women’s liberation of the last decades, thus plays a backwarded role in the women’s movement. On top of that, one idea of identity politics is that a marginalised minority can take degrading and stigmatising terms and reinterpret them to their liking, “positively occupy” them. This leads to the fact that suddenly there are people in the women’s movement who claim that when women call each other “whore” or “bitch” all the time, instead of slapping pimps and patriarchal pigs on the head, this is part of women’s liberation. This postmodernist position, which emerges from Discourse Analysis and grants language the ability to create reality, is then also expressed in gender language acrobatics with all their asterisks, colons and Internal-I What does this lead to? To a change in the situation of women? To the destruction of patriarchy? Unfortunately not, because that requires the struggle against the imperialist system. What it actually leads to is the eternal academic discussion about which spelling would be the most “inclusive” in order to make women “visible”, but in reality it does not advance the fight against imperialism and patriarchy one step, but instead the women’s movement is further fragmented and those who do not use the proper “gender” become the preferred target of moral apostolic rebukes. If women are to become truly “visible”, then they themselves must ensure this in direct militant action, guided by the ideology of the proletariat.
Finally, to summarize: To realise its idea, postmodernism has given birth to identity politics. Better said, identity politics is the next step in the increasing decay of bourgeois idealism in its “left” manifestation, as an expression of the ideological decay of imperialism, in a long strand of increasing decay. It is idealist because, in the tradition of Discourse Analysis and postmodernism, it puts the idea first and not the actually existing material reality of human society, which is being transformed by the class struggle. Today, when alleged communist groups, organisations and parties adopt aspects of this bourgeois idealism, it is nothing other than revisionism. For they smuggle bourgeois points of view into the ideology of the international proletariat and thereby reject it as a self-contained, harmonious system, all-powerful because it is true. True because it is confirmed in practice over and over again.
Before turning towards a criticism of this section, it is worth noting that this section does correctly reject certain postmodern and idealist positions. The idea that gender is purely a matter of how one looks, is perceived, or what one claims to be is of course ultimately idealist and subjectivist. This idealist view assumes that gender is an amorphous social phenomena which exists intersubjectively through perception and subjectively through self-identification, a position at odds with the Marxist view that gender is a set of social relations. Marxism, instead, demonstrates that gender is produced by material forces operating at the level of the economic base. It is not merely a set of individual choices or behaviors.
Although the German comrades are correct to criticize this idealist conception of gender, their criticism does not uphold a Marxist analysis in which gender is understood as contingent upon the social relations of a given society. Instead, they make several contradictory claims about the basis of women’s oppression, each of which contains idealistic misdirections in its own right.
The Klassenstandpunkt authors do not locate the genesis of women’s oppression within the economic base of society. While the authors gesture broadly towards the need for “a change in the situation of women” and “the destruction of patriarchy,” they do not explain what sort of change this entails or how patriarchy can be destroyed – indeed, because their position has no theory of the material basis for patriarchy, the comrades seem to be unable to identify how we might end it. The document does vaguely point to “the struggle against the imperialist system” as the means for overcoming patriarchy, but this does not explain the relation between patriarchy and the imperialist system. Absent such an explanation, this line rings as nothing more than empty sloganeering.
Throughout this section, the Klassenstandpunkt authors offer us a brief glimpse of what a non-postmodern struggle against patriarchy might look like. First they suggest that the women’s movement originally struggled against notions of traditional femininity. They write that:
In the emergence of the progressive women’s movement, especially in the 1960s, one of the central points was the negation of the traditional role of women. One should no longer wear a bra, shave one’s legs, accept “female” role models or ideals of beauty.
This demonstrates a major theoretical deficit. The struggle outlined here is not a struggle against the material conditions which produce patriarchy, but rather a superstructural struggle against the ideologies and norms of gender.
We might forgive this superstructural focus inasmuch as the authors are explaining bourgeois feminist struggle within the broader women’s liberation movement. Unfortunately, the authors maintain this incorrect orientation in their analysis of communist struggle against patriarchy as well. In writing on the cultural revolution, they focus solely on the way that the communists struggled against gendered differences in appearance and occupation, writing:
[Women] had the same cap and the same jacket as the male comrades, a slightly different haircut perhaps and sometimes a skirt, but that was it. And that was a good thing. They then also did the same jobs as the men and were in no way inferior to them. This is the Marxist understanding of women’s liberation.
“Women’s liberation” will not be achieved by changes in dress, appearance, and occupation alone. To dismantle patriarchy, we must smash capitalism and eradicate the material conditions which create women as a coherent social group; ideological struggle against the superstructural expressions of those conditions (struggle of the type undertaken during the Cultural Revolution, a historical sequence whose radical historical significance our comrades do not seem to grasp!) can only succeed as a consequence of the political struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeois state.
Adrianzen tells us that women as a social group are a product of specific social relations. These relations are not manners of dress, appearance, “flirtatiousness”, or any other superstructural aspects of gender, but are rather property, the family, and the state. The Klassenstandpunkt document completely mystifies these relations in its fixation on superstructural struggle. This is a particularly ironic commitment, given their correct diagnosis of the same idealism at the core of postmodernism. That is, rather than focusing on the social relations which give rise to the existence of women as a social phenomenon, the German line focuses on a fundamentally superstructural understanding of womanhood which frames the “women’s movement” as a movement against traditional gender roles, not a movement against the social relations of capitalism and the bourgeois class state.
There is a second error which emerges from the German line regarding the question of social construction. The Klassenstandpunkt authors broadly dismiss the notion of social construction by failing to explain what the postmodernists mean by the term and what is incorrect in their formulation of construction. They write, “Postmodernism then says that all this, the role of women in society, gender itself, are all constructs. As described above, Gender-Theory emerges, in which the question of an allegedly constructed gender plays an important role.”
Let us adopt an attitude of philosophical rigorousness and seek truth from facts, which the Klassenstandpunkt authors fail to do.
What do postmodernists mean when they say that “the role of women in society, gender itself, are all constructs”? The postmodernists argue that women’s role within society, and the social phenomena of gender in general, is constructed on the basis of discourse and discursive norms. According to Judith Butler, women’s role within a society is determined not primarily by economic and material conditions but by a set of norms which are entangled in diffuse structures of “power” and regulate human action. Because these norms operate at the level of discourse – that is, in the realm of the ideal rather than the material – Butler’s theory of gender cannot identify whose class interests are served by gender norms. Gender, for the postmodernists, is abstractly constructed as a self-generating process that exists purely within the linguistic realm. By placing gender on a plane of pure abstraction, postmodernism erodes our ability to connect the struggle for women’s liberation to the struggle against capitalist imperialism.
This is the actual mistake of the postmodernists, not the idea that women’s roles in society (and gender itself) have changed throughout history, that they are, as a result, “constructed.” After all, Adrianzen explains that gender’s contingency and changing structure shows us that it is possible to overcome patriarchy in the first place. If the oppression of women is constituted by social processes within class society, then patriarchy can be overcome through the defeat of capitalism. Proletarian feminists must assert that gender is a changing social and historical process created by class society, such that to end patriarchy, we must end capitalism.
If “construction” refers to the notion that something is contingent and shaped by fluctuating historical processes, this is not a threat to Marxism. In fact, such a view is inherent to the dialectical outlook, which understands that history is shaped by material processes in a system of complex social relations. Marxism does not assert that things have an unchanging internal essence; rather they exist within processes and systems of social relations. On the other hand, we reject the postmodernist idea that social phenomena are continuously constructed via discourse. Unfortunately, the Germans equate these two possible readings of “construction” and treat it with the utmost philosophical superficiality.
This philosophical laziness thus leads the Klassenstandpunkt article to offer a particularly mystified view of women’s oppression. For them, struggle against patriarchy and oppression by patriarchy both exist at the level of superstructural norms and behavior alone. Consequently, the authors approach the question of women’s oppression with the same error as the postmodernists. Contingency as a concept is rejected altogether, and this rejection thus throws out the entirety of the materialist analysis advanced by Marxists like Adrianzen. The reader is thus left without any dialectical materialist theory of patriarchy in the first place.
This brings us to a third principle error: the attempt to ground a theory of patriarchy within women’s own biology. The German comrades insist that postmodernism is flawed chiefly on the basis of its rejection of biological sex and biological sexual difference, which they frame as the inversion of the reduction to discursivity. For, to them, without this ground, there is no way to think of the oppression of women in the first place!
Here we can immediately assert that the idea that biological sex “defines what a woman is” diverges from the Marxist perspective. Marxism, when tasked with defining what a woman is, responds simply that women “are but a set of social relations, historically adapted and changing as a function of the changes of society in its development process.”
The attempt to supplant this definition with a biological definition is itself an idealist mystification which, ironically, naturalizes patriarchal oppression. Comrade Anuradha Ghandy showed in Philosophical Trends In The Feminist Movement that past bourgeois radical feminists have engaged in this same form of mystification by putting forward a crass biological materialism in place of dialectical materialism. She writes:
In their understanding of material conditions they have taken the physical fact of reproduction and women’s biological role as the central point for their analysis and concluded that this is the main reason for women’s oppression. Marx had written that production and reproduction of life are the two basic conditions for human existence. Reproduction means both the reproduction of the person on a day to day basis and the reproduction of the human species. But in fact reproduction of the species is something humans share with the animal kingdom. That could not be the basis for women’s oppression. For in all the thousands of years that people lived in the first stages of human existence women were not subordinated to men. In fact her reproductive role was celebrated and given importance because the survival of the species and the group depended on reproduction
This criticism is important for two reasons. First it shows that the idea that women’s oppression is grounded in biology is simply ahistorical. Women’s reproduction historically precedes the emergence of patriarchy and does not consistently result in patriarchal domination throughout the animal kingdom. The definition of womanhood as biological sex thus attempts to create an immutable definition of womanhood which simply cannot explain the emergence of patriarchy. Second, such a definition offers an ideological naturalization of patriarchy by grounding it within biology itself. This very definition is what pushed radical feminists like Firestone to argue for an overcoming of biology through artificial gestation as a basis for women’s liberation. This bizarre notion demonstrates the flawed strategies which emerge from this definition.
A purely biological view of womanhood mystifies the way that class relations themselves produce women’s oppression and falls into a sort of vulgar materialism. Adrianzen notes that the power of Marxism is precisely its ability to overcome such vulgar materialism. She writes that:
The Marxist position also implies the overcoming of mechanical materialism (of the old materialists, before Marx and Engels) who were incapable of understanding the historical social character of the human being as a transformer of reality, so irrationally it had to rely on metaphysical or spiritual conditions, such as the case of Feuerbach.
A rejection of mechanical materialism is a prerequisite for theorizing women’s oppression, because such a rejection asserts that women can transform reality in order to achieve liberation in the first place. Therefore, we must also reject the biological mystification which emerges from the German line.
Ghandy again offers us a way back to the proper Marxist view precisely in her reject of a biological definition of womanhood. She writes “Marxism understands that some material conditions had to arise due to which the position of women changed and she was subordinated. The significant change in material conditions came with the generation of considerable surplus production.” Here finally we see a return to a materialist position which is sorely lacking in the Klassenstandpunkt document. Ghandy continues to oppose the radical feminists by stating that “Their solutions are focused on changing roles and traits and attitudes and the moral values and creating an alternative culture” This same criticism can be applied to the Klassenstandpunkt authors, who center the struggle against gender roles and gender stereotypes rather than the particular social relations which produce and construct the patriarchal system of gender in the first place.
Ultimately, however, it is not enough to insist that the German line is merely engaged in mystification here. We must go further and insist that it has allied itself with chauvinism and reaction, due to its crass materialism and reductive superstructural emphasis. The purely biological definition of women as the Klassenstandpunkt document does not merely misdirect the struggle, but actively aids the defenders of patriarchy. Ghandy explained this best when she argued that this argument:
gives the biological basis of male female differences more importance than social upbringing. This is in fact a counter-productive argument because conservative forces in society have always used such arguments (called biological determinism) to justify domination over a section of the people. The slaves were slaves because they had those traits and they needed to be ruled, they could not look after themselves. Women are women and men are men and they are basically different, so social roles for women and men are also different. This is the argument given by reactionary conservative forces which are opposed to women’s liberation.
Such biological essentialism, in addition to its flimsy theoretical basis, also leads to the Klassenstandpunk authors to a chauvinistic position with regards to transgender people as a social group. Because the German comrades understand gender on a purely superstructural level, they are incapable of grasping the material conditions which constitute transgender people as a social group.
As we have argued elsewhere, transgender people constitute a social group which is under attack by the reactionary wing of the bourgeoisie. The very conditions – ie, the family-form and its ideological expressions – which generate the exploitation and oppression of women are also conditions which produce the oppression of transgender people. As a result, transgender people ought to be allies of the proletarian feminist struggle, which is also to say, allies of the proletarian class struggle against capitalism and in the fight for proletarian dictatorship. We must be able to draw transgender people into the communist movement by analyzing and demystifying the conditions which produce their oppression while concretely demonstrating that only the defeat of capitalism can lead to securing their democratic rights. This is a unified struggle which requires solidarity rather than division.
Due to their refusal to engage with the material conditions which produce gender, the German comrades are incapable of understanding the need to incorporate transgender people into the fight against capitalism. In fact, their superstructural focus causes them to see transgender people as a threat to the struggle for women’s liberation in general, because their conception of women’s liberation does not extend beyond the fight against gender roles and norms (which they claim that transgender people reinforce). This is an absurd conclusion; the struggle for women’s liberation is first and foremost a struggle against the bourgeois class state and their exploitation by the bourgeoisie, not against the superstructural norms which emerge from those social relations. The question of the relationship between transgender people and women’s liberation must be posed not in terms of how trans people relate to gender roles, but in terms of how trans people relate to the struggle against capitalism!
Because the German comrades treat the struggle for women’s liberation as an entirely cultural affair, separate from the broader struggle against capitalism, no consideration is given for the fact that transgender people as a group have their own liberation tied up with an end to capitalism, which ought to make them allies in the struggle against capitalism. By missing this basic fact, by avoiding the question of the material basis for women’s oppression, they mistakenly drive a wedge where there should be solidarity.
The hegemony of this and similarly chauvinistic positions within the antirevisionist trend has driven many transgender people into the hands of liberal NGOs or the anarchist ultraleft, who tend to be the only groups interested in organizing them, allowing a petit-bourgeois electoralist orientation to dominate within transgender politics. For Marxists to allow this co-opting to go uncontested is a failure to unite all progressive elements under the banner of the communist struggle, a task which Lenin clearly set out over a century ago.
While the Klassenstandpunkt comrades are correct that we must reject and struggle against postmodernism, we cannot allow ourselves to substitute non-Marxist theories of patriarchy and gender in its place. Cultural feminism, petit-bourgeois radical feminism, and mechanical materialist theories are no better than postmodernism for the proletarian feminist struggle. They serve the same fundamental role of mystifying gender and aid reactionary attacks against women as a whole. We must instead provide thoroughly materialist analyses of the exploitation and oppression of women as a group and of the oppression of transgender people as a group. We have attempted to provide such an analysis in previous documents, one which necessarily concludes that the liberation of women and the liberation of transgender people is bound up with the struggle against capitalism. The proletarian class struggle thus offers a basis for unity, rather than needless division. We therefore conclude that the Klassenstandpunkt line must be rejected and a proletarian feminist line must be developed and advanced!