GirlWritesWhat addresses the NY State Libertarian Party Convention
“Saturday, 27 April 2013: My address to the NY state libertarian party convention
Hi, everyone. Firstly, I want to thank Gary for inviting me to speak here, and thank all of you for being open to the different perspective I’m hoping to present to you.Some of you–maybe all of you–might be asking yourselves, what on earth is an anti-feminist gender theorist doing speaking at a libertarian party convention. What the heck does gender, or feminism, have to do with libertarian politics and philosophies? The answer to that question is at once extremely complex, and very, very simple….” More
It amazes me to read a good number of comments by men in response to that presentation, comments that unabashedly promote Marxism, in response to Karen Straughan’s observation that feminism is communism in panties. Here is my take that I posted as a result of that:
It would be a great thing if all of the Marxists who are coming out of the woodwork were to consider that it may be possible to take feminism out of Marxism, but it is not possible to take Marxism out of feminism.
Heidi Hartmann once described the relation between Marxism and feminism as analogous to that of husband and wife under English common law: “Marxism and feminism are one, and that one is Marxism.” (Source: http://tinyurl.com/cm2llzv )
I was born into and grew up in the national-socialist Hitler regime, and Das Kapital, by Karl Marx, was required reading in high school then [I had the habit of reading my older brother’s text books]. Have no illusions that a socialist regime has anything good to offer to the common man. Far too many people have had that reality rammed down their throats, and no one who ever lived under socialist oppression would be inclined to say anything different. That doesn’t change even when Marxism puts on the cloak of feminism.
Igor Shafarevich, a world-renowned mathematician who took on the role of a historian when he examined the role of socialism throughout history and the never-ending, futile quest for a socialist utopia explained it very well and in excellent detail in his book, The Socialist Phenomenon. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn summarized the context of that book very well in his foreword to it.
We should never forget that Betty Friedan was a Stalinist scholar and for much of her life a functionary of the Communist Party of the USA.
As to Karen Straughan’s observation that feminism is communism in panties and how Marx and Engels promoted women’s rights, Bolshevism did the same. So do the Marxist feminists when they quote verbatim from Marx and Engels, and so did Mao Zedong, who put that sentiment into words for the Chinese common people, as quoted in Chapter 31,”Women”, of The Little Red Book:
“A man in China is usually subjected to the domination of three systems of authority [political authority, clan authority and religious authority]…. As for women, in addition to being dominated by these three systems of authority, they are also dominated by the men (the authority of the husband). These four authorities – political, clan, religious and masculine – are the embodiment of the whole feudal-patriarchal ideology and system, and are the four thick ropes binding the Chinese people, particularly the peasants. How the peasants have overthrown the political authority of the landlords in the countryside has been described above. The political authority of the landlords is the backbone of all the other systems of authority. With that overturned, the clan authority, the religious authority and the authority of the husband all begin to totter…. As to the authority of the husband, this has always been weaker among the poor peasants because, out of economic necessity, their womenfolk have to do more manual labour than the women of the richer classes and therefore have more say and greater power of decision in family matters. With the increasing bankruptcy of the rural economy in recent years, the basis for men’s domination over women has already been undermined. With the rise of the peasant movement, the women in many places have now begun to organize rural women’s associations; the opportunity has come for them to lift up their heads, and the authority of the husband is getting shakier every day. In a word, the whole feudal-patriarchal ideology and system is tottering with the growth of the peasants’ power.”
–“Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan” (March 1927), Selected Works, Vol. I, pp. 44-46.
[The Little Red Book, Chapter 31. WOMEN, Full text
Look it up. It’s only a little more than one page.]
Does it really surprise anyone that Erin Pizzey reported time and again that the redfems she came in touch with during the late ’60s and early ’70s had posters of Che Guevara and Mao on their living room walls and copies of ‘The Little Red Book’ on their coffee tables?
How does taking feminism out of Marxism make Marxism any less destructive and oppressive? A male version of Marxism isn’t any better than a feminist one. The results are the same.
