Contents:
The Peasant War Illustrated Edition. Theories Of Comparative Political Economy. The Tragedy of Social Democracy. The True Story of Courage over Chernobyl. Marx for a Post-Communist Era. Marx, Capital, and Education. An Innocent Life in Communist China. The Politics of Equality. The Academic System in American Society. Social Change Theories in Motion. Social Change And Political Transformation. The New Great Transformation? Unit 3B Introducing Political Ideologies. The Polish Solidarity Movement. Selected Speeches and Writings of Nelson Mandela: The End of Apartheid in South Africa.
The Tao te Ching in Five Translations: Side by Side Versions of the Taoist Classic. Eyewitness Accounts of the First World War: Classic Treatises on the Art of War. Essential Writings of Friedrich Engels: Autobiographies of Three American Slaves. At the Edge of the Abyss: EssentiaL Writings of Christian Mysticism: Medieval Mystic Paths to God. With the Dakota Sioux Indians: Rise and Fall of the Leninist State: A Marxist History of the Soviet Union. Keeping and Caring for Monitor Lizards and Tegus. State of the Union: Selected Writings From Yugoslav Communism. Writings of Rosa Luxemburg: The Intelligent Design Movement in America.
Beginner's Guide to Keeping Venomous Snakes. This, however, appears to be an abuse not essentially pertaining to capitalist production. The process of maintaining individual and productive consumption, i. To feminists, however, the study of family roles and gender divisions within the family are absolutely critical.
Hence the structural difficulty of surviving either as an unmarried or woman worker. Capitalists, just as Marx, tend to ignore the vital economic role played by the nuclear family. This social structure thus molds the attitude of capitalist society to the gender roles carried out by women within the family. Feminists have long pointed out that family relationships have a vital effect on economic structures. Husband, wife, children and relatives all worked in the fields and performed other chores in order to produce food, clothing and other necessities.
In this situation, the necessities of life are collectively produced by the family members, and the economic position of each member of the family is roughly equal to that of the others although the overall social position of women is very different. In capitalism, however, commodities are purchased rather than produced, and therefore, within the family unit, wages are pooled rather than labor. As a result, production is collectivized outside the family, in the factory, rather than inside the family, as in the family-worked agrarian plot. And, because of gender structures, the head of this household is almost invariably male.
Marx assumed that the basis for capitalism lay in the fact that the means of production, capital, were owned by a small portion of the population, and that the large mass of people, with no means of production of their own, were forced to sell their labor power to the capitalists to make a living. Now, however, we can see that, because of patriarchical gender relationships, the male head of the household not only sells his own labor power, but also that of his wife and daughters, and that he retains control over the wages earned by the rest of his family.
Marx never examined the patriarchical components within the capitalist family, and abstracted from gender differences in all of his economic analyses. Had Marx lived to investigate the role of patriarchy in maintaining bourgeois society as thoroughly as he did the economics of capitalism, his conclusions may have been quite different.
It therefore fell to feminism to accomplish the analysis of gender roles in social and familial structures. Feminists have pointed out that the family unit is vital in instilling patriarchical ideas of authority and gender roles, in men and women alike.
From the beginning, he is sensitive to the hierarchy of power. He knows that in every way, physically, emotionally, economically, he is completely dependent on, thus at the mercy of, his two parents, whoever they may be. Firestone views the basis of the family in capitalist society as essentially sexual and economic—a husband pays wages, in the form of the economic necessities of life, to a wife in exchange for sex and housework.
Even if the woman has a job of her own and can support herself economically, Firestone points out, when she has a child and must leave work, she again becomes economically dependent on her husband. The only way to end patriarchy, Firestone concludes, is to end the family structure which produces and propagates it.
The emancipation of women, Marx concluded, would result from the integration of women into the workplace and their subsequent organization alongside male workers to fight the class enemy. As Engels puts it: With the transformation of the means of production into social property, there will disappear also wage labor, the proletariat, and therefore the necessity for a certain statistically calculable number of women to surrender themselves for money. When these people are in the world, they will care precious little what anybody today thinks they ought to do; they will make their own practice and their corresponding public opinion about the practice of each individual—and that will be the end of it.
Then, women would get their emancipation. Implicit in this notion is the conclusion that, meanwhile, the women should shut up! In a letter to radical feminist Clara Zetkin, Lenin heaped criticism upon her practice of holding meetings to discuss the liberation of women from male domination. They are said to be the main objects of interest in your political instruction and educational work. I could not believe my ears when I heard that! Such issues only divide the working class, they say, and delay the coming of the socialist revolution which will liberate women.
This implies, on the one hand, that the working class must take upon itself the task of fighting against all forms of oppression and exploitation, and place itself at the head of all the oppressed layers of society, and on the other, must decisively reject all attempts to divide it—even when these attempts are made by sections of the oppressed themselves. When socialists have admitted the necessity for feminist actions, they have most often, like Lenin, attempted to run these movements themselves, for their own ends.
One of the largest Leninist groups in the United States today, the Revolutionary Communist Party, says little about feminist revolution, but says a lot about the role feminists can play in the socialist revolution. Needless to say, feminist radicals have come to view the Leninist solution to patriarchical relationships as a non-solution. On the whole, moreover, Leninist and socialist practice has not been much more sympathetic to feminist concerns than its theory. Other Leninist parties have paid lip service to ending sexism, but have continued to stack their decision-making bodies with men and a few token women, a practice followed by ruling parties in the USSR and elsewhere.
In , Stokely Carmichael of the Student National Coordinating Committee refused to accept a position paper discussing the role of women in the Movement. That was their role. In the aftermath of the revolutions in Russia, China, Cuba and elsewhere, however, it became clear that the Leninist contention that sexism would disappear after the revolution was at best wishful thinking and at worst a deliberate fraud. In those Leninist nations which had overthrown capitalism and instituted state control over the means of production, the social roles of women remained virtually unchanged. However, economic and political realities soon forced the Bolsheviks to reverse this trend.
To survive, the Soviet Union had to begin a massive program of industrial expansion, and this necessitated a social order of strict centralization and regimentation. Everything in the Soviet Union was tied to the single goal of increasing industrial output through the Five Year Plans. Thus, the Soviet Government launched a massive campaign to provide communal facilities such as day care centers and central laundries, providing a central pool to do these things and freeing the majority of women from these tasks.
Under the pressing weight of the industrialization program, however, the attempt to free women from household tasks was re-directed. Now, women were to be freed from household tasks not so they could participate freely in communal society, but simply so they could be moved out of the house and into the factories.
To further increase the number of hands available for the industrialization program, the Leninists passed laws which outlawed abortions and made divorces more difficult to obtain. A propaganda blitz was begun to convince Soviet women to have as many children as possible.
However, women continued to be politically and socially subservient to men. In Nicaragua, the bastion of Latin machismo, the Sandinistas responded to feminist concerns with a half-hearted campaign to talk husbands into doing their share of the housework. Others were not so charitable. Shulamith Firestone has been the sharpest feminist critic of Marxism and socialism. In this view, every aspect of modern society can be looked at as a result of the patriarchical position of men over women.
The debate over this proposition has not ceased to rage. The socialist-feminists accept the various feminist criticisms of Marxism, but also assert that feminist struggles must be viewed in their social and economic context. It is true, they say, that capitalism makes use of gender roles to serve economic ends, but it is also true that sexism predates capitalism by a considerable length of time; capitalist economic inequalities can therefore be viewed as merely the latest method used by males to keep females in a subordinate social position. As Hester Eisenstein, one of the earliest socialist-feminists, says: Ought one to castigate feminism because it is insufficiently revolutionary and geared to the concerns of the working class?
A feminist analysis that failed to take account of the effects of class, and of the impact of the needs of a late monopoly capitalist economy on the position of women domestically and internationally, would be less than adequate as a tool either of analysis or prediction. These feminists did not question the structures or assumptions of bourgeois society—they simply wanted to play a larger role within it. Anthony never considered that Blacks did not have equal voting power until , and that poor working class men have very little political or economic power compared to the wealthy captains of industry.
Because most early feminists were white, well-educated and wealthy, they tended to view all social relationships from this viewpoint.
Many feminists, being from wealthy families, dismissed the labor movement and the struggles of working people. Anthony went so far as to encourage educated women to take jobs as strikebreakers and scabs if it helped them to enter male-dominated trades. It did not help that, at the time, nearly all labor unions disqualified women from membership.
Many suffragettes called for property qualifications for voting, which would have allowed wealthy women to vote but not poor working class men.
Such feminists were unable to see the social divisions between poor women and rich, since such an analysis would have undermined their own privileged social position. And, because most early feminists were white, they tended towards indifference or open hostility towards the civil rights movement and the fight for African-American liberation. Today, such open hostility has disappeared, but many feminists continue to cut themselves off from the other progressive movements. It is difficult to understand how the act of allowing a woman to become a corporate manager, a government bureaucrat or a military general as easily as a man would be an improvement on the existing social situation.
Because, even today, most feminists are white, they have tended to equate the social struggles of women with the social struggles of African-Americans or Latinos, and thus fail to acknowledge that many women are African-American or Latina, and that racism has as much an impact on their lives as sexism. The needs and outlooks of a Black woman in Nigeria, however, are not the same as those of a white woman attorney in Manhattan.
With this understanding has come a greater awareness of the interconnections between feminism and socialism. It is now possible to recognize that the feminists and the socialists have approached a common problem—how to build an egalitarian society—from two different but complementary points of view. The two outlooks, as we have seen, have much to say to each other. Both Marxism and feminism have, in the past, tended to view themselves as the primary social justice movement, with all others being secondary to it.
By looking at modern society through both of these lenses, however, we can grasp a greater understanding of how bourgeois society reproduces and propagates itself, and how both class conflicts and gender roles aid in this process. Feminism attacks the social roles which are assigned to men and women without studying the social and economic forces which make these gender roles necessary to the ruling class—this study was undertaken by Marxism. At the same time, Marxism ignores the effects of gender roles and familial structures on class conflicts, and ignores the sexual and familial forces which make these economic structures necessary.
Marxism thus finds its complement in the analysis of radical feminism. Both outlooks challenge the basic assumptions of bourgeois society. Marx saw through this illusion, and declared that individuals in our society are in fact differentiated into distinct economic classes, which are unequal and unfree. Feminism further points out that there is yet another way in which social individuals are differentiated into classes or divisions—some of the members of society men are free, while others women are not.
Those who wish to overthrow the existing social order must, therefore, pay attention to the manner in which both of these divisions, class and gender, interact and support one another, and how they prop up the bourgeois social order. If the current hegemony of the capitalists is to be overthrown, Gramsci concluded, then each of the social relationships which support it must be broken and replaced with new, egalitarian ones.
A vital part of this system of social hegemony, Gramsci pointed out, were gender roles and familial institutions. The focus of the feminist revolution must be the family. As Kate Millett points out, the family structure is an important part of the bourgeois social order: Marxist sociology has tended to concentrate on work relations rather than family relations. It is forgotten that the worker came from a particular family, and that we conceive the world through the relationships of the family, through eyes which grew accustomed to other human beings first in the family.
The bourgeois family is not only the most efficient mechanism for distributing consumer commodities, but also serves a crucial role in maintaining and preserving capitalist relationships. In essence, the family unit has been moved from an economic and productive role to one of social and sexual control. The traditional capitalist family serves as a way to preserve the division of labor and the concentration of wealth. Wealthy families can prepare themselves for such privileged economic roles as stockholders, executives and financiers, and can pass on their accumulated wealth to the next generation.
Working class families, by contrast, rarely advance in economic position, and have little wealth to pass on to their descendants. Within the working class, traditional family and gender roles play a large part in determining economic position. An unmarried woman is paid the minimum wage at a dead-end job, on the assumption that she only needs a bare minimum to stay alive until she marries and has children. The head of a family cannot summarily reject a job which is dangerous or unfair, since he must have a source of wage income if he is expected to fulfill his role as husband and father.
On the other hand, he cannot become too militant in fighting for his interests against those of the boss, since he can then be fired and lose his source of wage income. If he is to feed his family, the worker must give in to the authority of the owners. The traditional housewife, at the same time, is forced into a position of economic dependence on her husband.
Not only does this reinforce and expand the social and economic obligations of the husband forcing him to give in to the existing social order , but it also prevents the woman from becoming economically and, as a result, socially, independent. The traditional family also locks the woman into a limited number of social relationships, restricting her horizons to her family and thus impeding the development of a wider social point of view. All of these things help keep women in a subordinate social position.
The emancipation of women did not become possible until women gained actual rather than merely theoretical access to education and jobs. As a result of this and other socio-economic changes, the structures and relationships of the traditional nuclear family have been evolving, and this process of evolution will have a far-reaching impact on other social relationships. To shift or disrupt it, as has begun to happen in recent years, is potentially to shift and disrupt much else, from personal identity and sexual mores, to family arrangements, child-rearing customs and educational patterns, and from religious ideology to political and economic structures.
The current movement of women into the workforce is providing the economic means for their emancipation. For the first time, women have the potential for real access to enough economic resources to allow them to live free of the economic constraints of the patriarchical family—women can now earn enough to live without being financially dependent upon their husbands. This economic independence vanishes, however, as soon as a woman has children and can no longer work. This liberation of women cannot take place within current patriarchical familial structures or gender roles.
Accordingly, traditional bourgeois family structures and gender roles are being increasingly challenged on many fronts, as feminists fight for the independence and self-determination of women in all aspects of their social lives. There are four basic areas identified by feminists in which radical changes need to be made in order to bring about a feminist revolution. In the sphere of reproductive rights, the goal is to provide women with complete freedom of choice in reproductive matters, free from the interference of men.
It also includes the right of access to contraceptives and the ability to decide when or whether a woman chooses to have a child. By allowing a woman the opportunity to reproduce independently of men, feminist advances in these areas undermine the restrictions of a patriarchical family consisting of a husband, a wife and their offspring.
Another area that has been targeted by feminist revolutionaries is that of the social integration of women and children. This fight is also necessary to preserve the economic independence of women who choose to have children. Struggle also centers around issues such as divorce laws, child custody, marriage practices and child care.
The traditional family structure is also being undermined by the movement towards sexual freedom. If women are to be truly independent of familial and gender restrictions, they must have access to sufficient resources to allow them to be economically independent of the family structure. This fight begins with issues such as equal pay for equal work, equal opportunity for economic advancement, and an end to sexual harassment on the job.
Hegemony and Counter-Hegemony: Marxism, Capitalism, and Their Relation to Sexism, Racism, Nationalism, and Authoritarianism Paperback – August 1, Hegemony and Counter-Hegemony: Marxism, Capitalism, and their Relation to Sexism, Racism, Nationalism, and Authoritarianism - Kindle edition by Lenny.
In the end, this fight will produce far-ranging changes in economic and social structures. In the final stages of the feminist revolution, the economic independence of women demands a pooling of economic resources on the social level rather than within the nuclear family, so that each individual is capable of economic independence whether they are a part of a family structure or not. It is in this area that socialism and feminism overlap—social distribution of resources cannot take place without the social production of resources.
The National Organization for Women, founded in , is one of the largest feminist organizations in the world, but it is mild, liberal and reformist in nature—i. Such an organization, the radical feminists realize, is incapable of emancipating women. Many of the liberal reforms being proposed by NOW, in fact, will, without an accompanying change in social institutions, be detrimental to the very women they claim they are helping. A good example is the movement towards easing divorce laws. In a society in which most women are economically dependent upon the wages of the male, divorce is a hollow right.
Easier divorce laws can, within existing social circumstances, mean nothing more than a quick re-marriage, since most women cannot remain economically independent on their own. Once again, NOW is demonstrating its traditional concern for the educated upwardly-mobile women who have the means of economic independence, while ignoring the vast majority of working class women.
This cannot be accomplished without drastic changes in the social and economic spheres, changes which go far beyond mere legalistic reforms. The deep-ranging social, political and economic changes which are necessary for a true feminist revolution cannot, it is obvious, be carried out within the framework of existing patriarchical relationships and institutions. This, then, raises the same question that has faced the socialist movement for so long; how can the movement organize itself to reach its goals without depending upon existing institutions to accomplish this?
There is only one alternative. If women cannot achieve liberation through existing relationships and institutions, they must organize alternative even illegal social relationships and institutions to take their place. One is the movement towards single-parent families and unmarried couples living together. In the space of a few years, people have built up a huge network of alternative lifestyles that exist alongside of and in competition with the out-dated traditional marriage institution, and which have forced widespread changes in the legal, social and economic structures of industrial society.
Such an aggressive construction of alternative social relationships lies at the heart of the feminist revolution. To win social control of economic resources and thus economic independence for women , women must organize in the workplace. If women are to safeguard abortion rights and obtain reproductive freedom, they must organize a network to provide this—legally or illegally. If restrictive relationships are to be left behind, then new progressive ones must arise in their place. The success of the feminist revolution and the establishment of egalitarian gender relationships not only undermines patriarchy, but also all of those oppressive social relationships which are reinforced by patriarchical institutions.
Since bourgeois society is dependent upon an interconnecting web of social relationships, the collapse of any one brings with it the possibility of creating a crisis that could collapse the entire structure. If we are to take advantage of this possibility, however, we must continue to examine the human relationships which make up the bourgeois social order.
Of all the social inequalities in modern bourgeois society, the repression of lesbians and gays is the most obviously visible. Unlike women, African-Americans or disabled people all of whom have at least nominal legal protection against discrimination , gays and lesbians have no protection under the law. They can be discriminated against in matters of housing and employment; they can be expelled from military service. They cannot form legal marriages, cannot designate each other as legal next of kin, and cannot will estates to each other.
In ancient societies such as Greece or Rome, homosexuality particularly sex between men and boys was viewed as healthy and normal. These restrictions—forbidding anal or oral sex and masturbation—were based on strict separation of sex and love; sex was a simple procreative act, while love was an emotional bond which was above any mere desires of the flesh. Thus, the regulation of sexual behavior had less to do with controlling personal relationships than it had with controlling procreative activity.
With the rise of the nuclear family, coinciding with the rise of industrial society, homosexuality was specifically condemned. The nuclear family became the basic unit of the new social order, and its patriarchical and economic relationships were a pillar supporting social stability. Homosexuality flew in the face of this social institution, and was therefore vigorously repressed. In recent times, issues of homosexuality fueled by the AIDS crisis have been framed largely by the right-wing Christian fundamentalists.
In essence, homophobia and heterosexism serve the same purpose for bourgeois society as religious codes did in feudal society—to maintain the existing social structures. In feudal society, political and economic power was wielded by the Church, through the doctrines of Divine Right. In this outlook, the universe was fixed in an immutable order by the grace of God, and any attempt to change or alter the existing social order was not only a political crime against the king, but a sin against God and the Church.
Those who challenged this accepted view were condemned as heretics and executed by the religious authorities. The process of transforming the methods of social control can be clearly seen in the history of anti-gay repression. In the Middle Ages, those who openly practiced homosexuality were assumed to be witches or agents of Satan, and were burned as heretics.
But even if homosexuals were proven to have certain sexual preferences because of their nature, what would that prove? People who are prematurely bald are sick, in a stricter sense of this word, than homosexuals could possibly be. In the area of gay and lesbian liberation, medical science has served a patently political role—to repress gays and lesbians and to safeguard existing social institutions.
Indeed, they are doing just the opposite; they are increasing social pressure on him. The role of the medical establishment in the repression of homosexuals became even more visibly apparent after the onset of AIDS. Now, instead of merely viewing homosexuality as a sickness, the medical establishment was able to use a real sickness as a pretext for attacking homosexuality. Sexually transmitted diseases have always been used as a method of controlling social behavior and reinforcing existing sexual and familial structures. People who left the constraints of the socially-sanctioned nuclear family, by frequenting prostitutes or by promiscuity, ran the risk of syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia or, in the case of women, pregnancy, which in this instance functioned as a disease.
And, because sexually transmitted diseases are easily treated with antibiotics, not much research into new cures was ever carried out by the medical establishment. As a result, little research was carried out on AIDS for a period of several years. It was not until the virus began to enter the white male heterosexual world, through blood transfusions and sexual contact, that AIDS began to receive serious attention.
The Religious Right was quick to realize the social and political significance of the disease, and seized on AIDS as a convenient ideological tool in their defense of the existing social order. Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and their ilk declared that AIDS was a punishment from God, a plague visited upon the homosexual sinners as a punishment for their evil ways. The fire and brimstone began to flow. For the most part, the Marxist Left has always ignored the gay and lesbian movement. Marxist involvement with gay and lesbian issues dates back to , when August Bebel, a Socialist member of the Reichstag, urged the repeal of the Prussian anti-sodomy laws.
Marxists Rudolph Hilferding, Karl Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein were among those who signed petitions to repeal the anti-gay laws. At the same time, the radical feminists also looked upon the lesbian movement with suspicion. After such protests, some feminists gave in. While Leftists and liberals of every political stripe accepted that gays and lesbians deserved the civil rights to do whatever they wished, most organizations did virtually nothing to help them in this struggle, and, by limiting the struggle to a mere fight for civil rights, all of them ignored the deeper issues raised by the gay liberation movement.
Several Left organizations were openly hostile to gay liberation. The Communists, for the most part, viewed the gay struggle as a hedonistic distraction, and asserted that homosexuals should drop their sexual fight and join the working class movement—quietly. Too much attention to sexuality is petty bourgeois, claim sectarians, baffled by the persistence of this topic. And besides, the workers are too busy for sex. Many Marxists had trouble viewing gays and lesbians as an oppressed class, and many more simply viewed the oppression of gays as unimportant or secondary.
Today, Marxist-Leninist groups still cannot relate to the gay liberation struggle. As for homosexuality, this too is perpetuated and fostered by the decay of capitalism, especially as it sinks into deeper crisis. This is particularly the case because of the distorted, oppressive man-woman relationships capitalism promotes. Once the proletariat is in power, no one will be discriminated against in jobs, housing and the like merely on the basis of being a homosexual. But at the same time, education will be conducted throughout society on the ideology behind homosexuality and its material roots in exploiting society, and struggle will be waged to eliminate it and reform homosexuals.
In , the RCP was expelled from an anti-war coalition in San Francisco because of its anti-gay stance. Other Leninist groups may not be as openly anti-gay as the RCP was, but they have proven to be just as isolated from the gay and lesbian movement. As gay activist Sushwan Robb says: Those on the left that rejected the most blatantly homophobic views often held positions that nevertheless seriously belittled the issues of lesbian and gay rights.
For instance, some accepted homosexuality as a personal lifestyle for someone else but denied that it was an issue fit for political action, and insisted people keep their sexuality hidden. Others accepted the validity of political struggle for queer rights, but as an issue based on individual rights, and therefore a low priority. In the aftermath of the Revolution, the Soviets repealed the Tsarist anti-homosexual laws and announced that gays would no longer be discriminated against or repressed.
Mass arrests took place in Moscow, Odessa and Leningrad, targeting artists, actors and musicians. In Cuba, Fidel Castro considered homosexuality to be a decadent evil of capitalism, and took steps to remove gays from leadership positions. Cubela responded by joining the CIA-organized attempts to overthrow Castro. By the time of the Bay of Pigs invasion, Cuban gays were being viewed by the ruling Popular Socialist Party as dangerous counter-revolutionary threats.
Neighborhood CDRs Committees for the Defense of the Revolution were formed to keep an eye out for gays and other counter-revolutionaries. These UMAP camps lasted for only two years, but produced deep enmity towards the regime among the Cuban gay community. The Cubans even screened gays and lesbians from the Venceremos Brigades, the North American solidarity groups that travelled to Cuba to help with the coffee and sugar harvests. Of all the leftist revolutionary groups, only the African National Congress has been open in its support of gay and lesbian liberation. The constitution prepared by the ANC included a clause specifically acknowledging the rights of gays and lesbians, the only constitution in the world to do so.
Rebuffed and disillusioned by the feminists and the socialists, the gay and lesbian community was forced to act alone. Police raids on bars had been a fact of gay life for decades, but this time, to the utter shock of the police, the gays fought back. Cars were overturned, police officers were roughed up, and the gay liberation movement was born.
If we are liberated, we are open with our sexuality. Come out, come out, come out. Get used to it. Until the post-Stonewall movement, gays and lesbians were largely isolated from each other and had virtually no collective social, economic or political power. Now, however, the gay community has gained a greater sense of its identity and potential strength. Real liberation demands the acceptance of homosexuality by the straight world, and the full and free participation of gays and lesbians in all social relationships.
Since the onset of the AIDS crisis, gay and lesbian activists have focused tremendous energies on expanding AIDS research and education, and these efforts have been vital in uniting and radicalizing the gay community. The more moderate gay activists have focused their attention on working within the system, and are attempting to introduce anti-discrimination laws to give gays and lesbians the same legal protections enjoyed by women, Blacks and other minorities. Such legal and legislative remedies, however, cannot form the basis for a real liberation of lesbians and gays. Anti-discrimination laws have not greatly improved the positions of women or African-Americans, and there is little reason to believe it would do much better for gays.
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A critical examination of the relationship between Marxism and other social justice movements, including feminism, anti-racism, gay liberation, environmentalism, anarchism and Native activism. This liberation of women cannot take place within current patriarchical familial structures or gender roles. If then we wish to make use of the little we have to improve our lot, it can only lead to a greater awareness of the power we wield as a group. However, the gay community is subject to as much division among racial, gender and economic lines as any other social grouping. Taken together, all of these various social constructions make up the total mode of production, as well as the means by which the ruling elites maintain and protect their positions of privilege. On the other hand, Marx praised the American Civil War as a crusade to abolish slavery, and even wrote a letter to Abraham Lincoln congratulating him on his actions to free Black slaves.
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