History of Feminism
In reply to the discussion: Capitalism and sexual assault: Toward a more comprehensive understanding [View all]
F4lconF16
(3,747 posts)You define it as overly deterministic when in reality it is significantly more complex. Marxism seeks not to provide a direct prediction of the future of society or establish what a fully socialist society would look like, but instead tries to establish a theoretical framework in order to better understand the mechanisms and machinations of capitalism. While Marx's theories were severely limited by a lack of social and political history, the underlying questions he asked were valid, and the majority of his conclusions were correct, in my opinion.
Second, you "doubt the ability of the economic system to influence other things". This is a critical flaw in modern liberal ideology, and my most significant criticism of the modern Democratic Party. There is not an economic sphere of influence, a political one, a gender one, etc. These concerns are all very highly interconnected. For instance, look at the economics of racism: economic structure very directly affects the oppression of a group of people. It is imperative that we begin to understand various intersectionalities if we are to try and address large-scale concerns. We can no more separate feminism from the structure of capital ownership than we can the economics of slavery and imprisonment from the black experience in the United States (and black feminism, for that matter).
As such, I'd argue that economic concerns are of direct importance to any social movement. Read some of MLK's later writings, and you will see that he begins to understand this. Black liberation, women's liberation, LGBTQ liberation--all of these are fundamentally tied to economic conditions as well as being social movements.
A particularly good article on intersectionality can be found here, again from the ISR:
http://isreview.org/issue/91/black-feminism-and-intersectionality
A quote from that article (actually the Combahee River Collective’s defining statement from 1977):
More:
Marxism is necessary because it provides a framework for understanding the relationship between oppression and exploitation (i.e., oppression as a byproduct of the system of class exploitation), and also identifies the strategy for creating the material and social conditions that will make it possible to end both oppression and exploitation. Marxism’s critics have disparaged this framework as an aspect of Marx’s “economic reductionism.”
But, as Marxist-feminist Martha Gimenez responds, “To argue, then, that class is fundamental is not to ‘reduce’ gender or racial oppression to class, but to acknowledge that the underlying basic and ‘nameless’ power at the root of what happens in social interactions grounded in ‘intersectionality’ is class power.”55 The working class holds the potential to lead a struggle in the interests of all those who suffer injustice and oppression. This is because both exploitation and oppression are rooted in capitalism. Exploitation is the method by which the ruling class robs workers of surplus value; the various forms of oppression play a primary role in maintaining the rule of a tiny minority over the vast majority. In each case, the enemy is one and the same.
See also my post below for links on the history and entanglement of women's liberation and economic struggles.
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