History of Feminism

Yes, capitalism steals the excess value from what the workers do, the "fruits of their labors," as Marx said. However, it seems likely somebody or some group will be willing and able to do the same thing under any economic system. I recognize this would be impossible once the dictatorship of the proletariat was established, but therein lies the problem when theory meets practice. When capitalism is overthrown, the dictatorship of the proletariat will not be established right away. Instead, someone must hold it as a public trust by establishing some other form of dictatorship to serve in the interim. This "transition period" has been the downfall of every attempt at a Marxist state, and the attempts have varied widely enough that one should have succeeded by now, although it can be argued that "real" Marxists were not allowed to build the government in the Soviet Union, Cuba, El Salvador, etc.

I do agree that class is fundamental, but class is not unique to capitalism. I don't know when the idea of class was first promoted, but it has been transformed into economic class here in the US, even though other class artifacts persist. I suppose one could say that capitalism's great evil is that it absorbed other notions of class and translated them into economic terms, giving rise to the notion that the poor deserve to be poor, any worthwhile human being can pull herself up by her own bootstraps, people on welfare are bums, and such nonsense.

On the other hand, feminist concerns are most effectively addressed (at least so far) in capitalist states where there is effective political regulation of the means of exploitation. The problem we have in the US is that we label any attempt to regulate business (or anything else) as socialism or communism. A large percentage of our population is convinced Obama is a socialist, which is the same as a communist, which is the same as a fascist, and so on. Most of our population greatly enjoys the benefits of a regulated capitalist welfare state, but have no idea they live in one. This is a problem because capitalism must be reined in or destroyed, and most of our citizens fail to understand we have a good life here because we imposed humanistic concerns and socialist ideals upon our capitalistic economic system, at least when we could stand to listen to their whining about how it was killing them. Since 1980 or so, we have completely failed to regulate at a an adequate pace, as illustrated by the growing wealth gap, various financial debacles, bailouts, etc.

Of course, the Marxist contention is that you can't really regulate capitalism. Regulations are just an artificial imposition of socialist concerns on a system that will always find a loophole or a work-around. The only real solution is to get rid of capitalism and replace it with socialism. But our notions of socialism are very confused, and vary widely among those who identify themselves as socialists, Marxists, communists, etc. This is where my criticism of Marxism as overly deterministic come in. Marx predicted the revolution would arise among the industrial workers, not among the rural peasants, and the logic of his prediction is unassailable, but it didn't work out that way. Some of my Marxist friends think there is too much reliance on Hegel, dialectical materialism, and other deterministic notions presented as non-deterministic.