R. Mars
In our second critical engagement with ideological deviations on the women’s question we take on an older article. “On Proletarian Feminism” was a speech made by the former Red Guards Austin and published later in the book Documents of the U.S. Maoist Conference for Line Struggle. The book is misnamed “Line Struggle,” instead of the correct conception of Two-Line Struggle. A corrected title would still not suit the book. Anyone reading it is struck by the lack of two-line struggle in it, as there is no counter position printed to any of the positions taken in the book. We do our part now by countering the miserable position contained in “On Proletarian Feminism”. For our purposes we will refer to the speaker as Comrade Krix.
Mr. Krix begins with a remarkable definition of woman, he says “As I use the term ‘woman,’ whom I’m mostly referring to are the people who face a certain type of oppression. Not everyone I’ll be talking about when I say ‘woman’ identifies as a woman, and not everyone who identifies as a woman faces what I am talking about. Not everyone who faces it is assigned female at birth (AFAB), and some AFAB people don’t face it. I am going to use the term ‘woman’ to discuss neither anatomy nor identity, but what oppression someone faces.”
Hiding behind the pseudo-erudite language and nauseating ambiguity of Mr. Krix’s manner of speaking is the ultimate rejection of a materialist concept of what a woman even is. In Krix’s rat trap of a mind, a woman is only the victim a certain type of oppression, nothing more. And this is how he muddles things up. A bourgeois woman, a peasant woman, a proletarian woman then must all have this same unqualified “oppression” in order to be considered, at least by Mr. Krix, as a “woman.” While pandering to every fad formula of the ruling class, Krix has not managed even a bit of Marxism in this definition.
Sex, as in the female sex is not “assigned at birth.” This is a fantastic form of idealism. Female is a biological condition, not a social condition (as womanhood is). It can be detected well before birth and is assigned by nothing other than chance and inevitability in the gestation of a fetus. The term reminds one of the postmodern malady of “speaking things into existence.” What comes after the sex has been developed (not assigned), and how society responds to the sex of a child is another matter. Nonetheless, no other factor in what goes into the making of a woman can be considered by Krix. Woman as a combination of factors, biological, economic, and social, with social being the principle (i.e. the determinant historical factor) is lost on Krix. He views women through only the negative lens of experiencing oppression: A one sided subjectivism; a false definition setting up the premises of a false argument. If woman is a social product as Marxism has always held, then this product is the result of complex and changing social relations of and inflicted upon the female sex.
Before class society, Krix says “there was non hierarchical, non-oppressive division of labor based more or less on reproductive anatomy, where those who could bear children collected food near the settlement, and looked after children at home (!), while those who could went hunting and collected food that was further away from the settlement.”
Remember, following Krix, this historically inaccurate portrayal of an imaginary society contains no women. Women are for him, nothing other than oppressed creatures with no affirmative defining aspects (this is a significant deviation from Marxist doctrine which identifies the loss of mother right as the defeat of the female sex). The first problem with Krix’s backward reasoning above is that he cannot divide pre-class society into different stages of development, which is itself a denial of human evolution and the evolution of society. The second problem is that his thesis instead relied heavily on the assumption that the radical feminist view of the sexual division of labor (and that it predates division of labor proper) is actually correct, and the third problem is his reliance on a very poor (that is to say opportunist) reading of Engels.
Engels breaks pre-class society down into stages, what he considered encompassed in pre-historic society as follows: Savagery and Barbarism, each containing no less that three stages: a lower, a middle and a higher. His focus is on production, specifically charting the development of human society as a historical materialist by looking at production in the real sense.
Krix, as a theorist, does not actually examine science or discoveries. He does not seek truth from the facts, but seeks factoids to support his preemptive conclusion. In this manner he cannot bother contending with the fact that woman (or those who he refuses to call women because they are not yet oppressed) did in fact engage in hunting, gathering, sport and animal husbandry etc. especially among the nomadic tribes of North America. Women comprised and estimated 50 percent of hunters, as predicted, in society without the oppression of women, women had parity in productive tasks and childcare was far more socialized. One of example of this is finding the remains of a teenage female hunter dating back about 9000 years ago in Peru. Ten other women hunters were found alongside male counterparts at the site of Wilamaya Patjxa.
After Savagery and Barbarism, according to Engels, comes Civilization. This is Engel’s own summary:
“Savagery– the period in which man’s appropriation of products in their natural state predominates; the products of human art are chiefly instruments which assist this appropriation.
“Barbarism– the period during which man learns to breed domestic animals and to practice agriculture, and acquires methods of increasing the supply of natural products by human activity.
“Civilization– the period in which man learns a more advanced application of work to the products of nature, the period of industry proper and of art.”
We have established that the role of women in the first period of pre-class society actually looks nothing like Krix’s concoction. We see his argument overemphasizing the role of biological difference in pre-class society. What about the second stage? We know from recent discoveries made by bone analysis proves that 7,000 years ago there was again parity between men and women in terms of agricultural labor, as the skeletons prove heavy and not light (child rearing) duties were carried out by women. A study by Northwestern University researcher Lee T. Gettler suggests that men in this age also took part in child rearing. Society was not, as Krix insists “based more or less on reproductive anatomy.”
Krix says “there were very few restrictions on sexual partners. You were ‘born married’ to a specific group of people, and there were no restrictions or prohibitions on having romantic/sexual relationships with anyone in that group you were married to.”
In Krix’s hands, the existence of promiscuity (to use Engel’s term) leads to a pure ahistorical idealism. Poor Krix. Here’s what Engels says:
“A system of consanguinity which was in contradiction to their actual family relationships. There prevailed among them a form of monogamy easily terminable on both sides, which Morgan calls the ‘pairing family.’ The issue of the married pair was therefore known and recognized by everybody: there could be no doubt about whom to call father, mother, son, daughter, brother, sister.”
Engels is working off old (but current to him) anthropological discoveries, but what is absolutely correct is that marriage (if you can call it that generally) predates class society, and only in the minds of pornographers and Mr. Krix was it an absolute sexual free-for-all. In reality these “sexual freedoms” Krix is so fixated on are a myth because all freedom is bound by necessity. In pre-class society the principal contradiction was between humans and nature, and nature was always imposing its necessity on human society. In other words, pair-bonding systems were an evolutionary response to conditions imposed by nature, and lacking class these were not based on subordination or oppression. Engels is correct that such early forms of marriage could be dissolved upon the will of those in them, but of course necessity will still impose itself upon this freedom.
Polygamy itself (not to mention sexual anarchy) posed health risks. It is no secrete that the earliest evidence of hunter gatherers found in Africa exhibited very low levels of polygamy and based themselves on courtship marriages. Yet another of Krix’s assertions do not line up with material reality.
Krix does not issue any remarkable disclaimers or definitions of what a man is. We are to assume that if woman according to Krix is defined by experiencing a certain form of oppression, then man would have to be defined as lacking this sort of oppression. In order to lack it, it would have to exist—so both concepts are nullified by Krix’s sorcery. Never the consistent theorist, at the start of the speech he refers to those capable of bearing children and those incapable of it as the only division. He does not qualify these as men and women or even male and female. Suddenly and without explanation he begins using the terms men and women to demarcate while still talking about pre-class society. On pages 37 and 38 of the book we can read that he said this:
“Only the mother of a Child was certain, and anyone whom the woman was allowed to have a sexual relationship with was considered the child’s father…
“…women had equal power to any man in romantic relationships” and:
“…a man’s possessions at this point were never inherited by his biological children.”
Krix first tells us that there is no way of knowing anyone but the mother, and then with certainty that the man’s possessions were “never” inherited by his children. If we have no idea who the father was, how can we be so sure that his “biological children” were excluded from inheritance? It is ridiculous to even speak of inheritance without private property, without classes. We only point this out due to the utter self-contradiction rife in all of Krix’s crude attempts at history and theory. Further, how is Krix defining man and woman now? What is it that distinguishes them in the early form of human society? As long as Krix is pandering to the appropriate sections of ruling class intellectuals, he does not need to meet any other standard.
In Krix’s speech, the development of class society is not linked in any way to the decomposition of the primitive communal society. Instead he treats it merely as a matter of convenience, or more precisely as the peaceful development of human society reminiscent of Khrushchev’s peaceful transition. In Krix’s view, the sexual division of labor is still determining things: “All the most productive new methods (for instance cattle driven plowing) were on the men’s side of the division of labor.” The sexual-division of labor thesis does not properly belong to Engels as some would have it, but to feminism, particularly radical feminism which posits this as the origin of class rather than the other way around as held by Engels. For his part, in both The Origin of the Family and The Role Played by Labor in the Transition From Ape to Man, Engels is more concerned with the man/nature contradiction in the framework of natural selection leading up to class society, a society which determined the oppression of women as its first act. To understand Engels, and to not be confused by charlatans like Krix one must understand historical materialism, the process in which one mode of production enters severe decomposition while the new mode of production is already in its womb and fighting tooth and nail to be born. Stalin had this to say:
“The slave system would be senseless, stupid and unnatural under modern conditions. But under the conditions of a disintegrating primitive communal system, the slave system is a quite understandable and natural phenomenon, since it represents an advance on the primitive communal system.”
Krix is very concerned with sexuality and communication, much more so than he is with the mode of production. He often follows the teachings of various forms of feminism: cultural feminism, radical feminism and postmodern feminism (not to mention queer theory) on this specific issue. This is evident in all manifestations of what we could call the Krix line and its various iterations in the US Maoist movement, past and present. In his miserable obsession with opposing what he calls “monogamy,” he does not grasp that Marxism considers the form of false (and forced) monogamy (as contrasted with the voluntary one-on-one pairing discussed before) to be authentic only in its formal appearance. Meanwhile Marxism has always exposed the fact that its main problem is not that it is monogamous but that it is not, i.e., it is promiscuity only for the man.
While Krix, in his overemphasis on intercourse constructs the pre-class society as one of orgy, or a sexual free-for-all, Marx and Engels had quite a different view. Engels never tired of pointing out the discoveries, supported by evidence found around the world among very different peoples, that the actual marriages contradicted the system of marriage, and he quoted Marx to this effect: “‘the same is true of the political, juridical, religious, and philosophical systems in general.’ While the family undergoes living changes, the system of consanguinity ossifies; while the system survives by force of custom, the family outgrows it.” What we see is the dialectical process of change pertaining to the family, and it offers much better understanding than Krix is capable of.
While it is incontestable that forms of promiscuity permeated early society, there also existed voluntary terminable forms of individual pairing (the latter corresponding to higher stages of development within the epoch). Neither of these would go away completely with the invention of class society and its oppressive character. They would instead become distorted and concealed by the new system which was in contradiction with itself as well. Nonetheless, the first act of class society was the domination of women by men. August Bebel wrote in 1879 that “Woman was the first human being to come into bondage: she was a slave before the male slave existed.” this view is directly following Engels.
Krix understands this correctly in one aspect and incorrectly in another. Following bourgeois academic trends, he cannot see the emergence of patriarchy as the existence of paternalism outright, the domination of the father figure over all of society. He can only view it in the aspect of male domination over the female sex. He misses that the king has a patriarchal relationship to his serfs, be they men or women. The oppression of women is included in the emergence of patriarchy but in no way limited to it. It is bound to the very condition of a class society in which the dictatorship of the minority is used over the majority. Under this kind of dictatorship the majority become financially dependent on the minority due to who controls the means of production, and this has significant consequence for women as the first humans to be enslaved. In his deviation Krix places the question of sexual intercourse above the question of mother right.
Patriarchy is not a system of its own. In Krix’s poor reading of Marxism, Mariategui and the Women’s Movement he says that: “The fundamental reason that patriarchy exists at any given time is because private property exists.” This statement is objectively true, but what Krix is implying is that patriarchy forms its own system which will exist as long as private property exists. In fact patriarchy conforms to pre-capitalist class society and capitalist society does away with it in the proper sense, only preserving its vestiges where useful. Or as Bebel wrote: “Under the existing conditions, the admission of women into all industrial occupations can have for its only effect that competitive struggle of the working people become ever sharper, and rage over more fiercely. Hence the inevitable result—the lowering of incomes for male and female labor, whether this income be in the form of wages or salary.” And this is precisely why the vestiges of patriarchy and not patriarchy in the strict sense are preserved by the capitalist mode of production.
By treating patriarchy as absolute and not understanding how things develop, Krix conceives only of different types of patriarchy existing in all forms of class society. He cannot really grasp the Marxist view that although patriarchy proper can be overcome, that women can be admitted into the ruling class proper or as administrators of the ruling class, even serving as heads of state, heads of corporations, professional career women etc., that this can do nothing to emancipate the sex generally.
Krix’s thesis is that patriarchy is defined only as the oppression of women, and women defined only by being oppressed, and that it is a condition which will exist in all forms of class society. We criticized all of this in our last polemic against him. His thesis negates the Marxist thesis of the emancipation of women through socialist revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat. He puts the same idea forward back in 2018 when he said this:
“…we can draw out a crucial principle that has continued to apply long after the founding moment of private property, and which will continue to apply to the very end of class society: Because the social economic unit of the family is a prerequisite for private property, and because therefore private property’s stability depends on the private families stability, wherever there are political-economic forces seeking to stabilize class society (including those that continually reproduce liberal/bourgeois democracy) or to renew or strengthen it (as in fascist movements or in the counter-revolutionary coups that restored capitalism in the Soviet Union and China), those forces always manifest in the form of patriarchal ideas and movements.”
We beg forgiveness to our readers for having to reproduce here this comrade’s rambling incoherent way of speaking. Know that we must endure it in order to confront the political positions contained therein. Our readers can already spot the theoretical fallacy in the Krix concept. He tells us that the oppression of women will persist as long as there is private property, and to this we agree. He also tells us it will, somehow for this reason, also persist until the very end of class society! This is anathema to us, because socialism represents the abolition of private property, and class struggle continues under it. How does Krix make his argument here? By treating the matter not as it is, as he admits it is, but as a question of “ideas” and “movements.” Ideas and movements do not need private property to exist. His whole thesis falls into shambles.
Krix, after all, is mired in Trotskyism. It lurks beneath the surface of his theoretical and political approach then and now, and it is clear in his lip-service to socialism combined with a failure to recognize that socialism has existed not only in one country but in several.
Had Krix been capable of reading more carefully he would abandon this silly talk about “the very end of class society” and accept what was plainly written by our comrades in Peru:
“…the condition of women is sustained in property relations, in the form of ownership exercised over the means of production and in the productive relations arising from them. This thesis of Marxism is extremely important because it establishes that the oppression attached to the female condition has as its roots the formation, appearance and development of the right to ownership over the means of production, and therefore that its emancipation is linked to the destruction of said right. It is indispensable, in order to have a Marxist understanding of the woman question, to start from this great thesis, and more than ever today when supposed revolutionaries and even self-proclaimed Marxists pretend to have feminine oppression arising not from the formation and appearance of private property but from the simple division of labor as a function of sex which had attributed less important chores to women than those of men, reducing her to the sphere of the home. This proposal, despite all the propaganda and efforts to present it as revolutionary, is but the substitution for the Marxist position on the emancipation of women, with bourgeois proposals which in essence are but variations of the supposed immutable ‘feminine nature.’”
Quoting Chairman Mao Zedong: “TRUE EQUALITY BETWEEN MEN AND WOMEN CAN ONLY BE ACHIEVED IN THE PROCESS OF THE SOCIALIST TRANSFORMATION OF THE WHOLE OF SOCIETY.” [capitalization original]
And quoting Mariategui:
“In the same measure as the socialist system replaces the individualist system, feminine luxuriousness and elegance will decay… Humanity will lose some luxurious mammals; but will gain instead many women. The clothing of the women of the future will be less ostentatious and expensive; but the condition of this new woman will be dignified. And the axis of feminine life will progress from the individual to the social. … A woman, in sum, will be less expensive but will be worth more.”
Either Mr. Krix is in denial that socialism is a class society or he is in denial that it is capable of and essential to the emancipation of women. In our previous polemic we point out that it is through mobilization in state administration, production and society, combined with the continuation of the socialist revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat, which will bring about full equality between men and women, and this is only possible with their emancipation having been realized by socialist revolution and securing the proletarian dictatorship.
When comrade Krix concedes that “bourgeois women and proletarian women have irreconcilable interests,” a statement to which we agree, we have to ask again about his definition of women as only those facing a “certain type of oppression.” We are left to wonder if bourgeois women are actually women according to his weird definition.
We find a loose definition of what Krix calls “proletarian feminism”: “Proletarian feminism means staunchly insisting(!) that what promotes the interests of working class women is struggling for a proletarian dictatorship over bourgeois men and women, to use revolutionary violence to destroy the bourgeoisie as a political force and destroy the political-economic soil(?) it grows out of.”
Turns out there is nothing different in essence here than regular old scientific socialism, only re-branded to be called “proletarian feminism” for some unexpressed reason. Even though this is the name of the speech, nothing new is said about it. Old things are said and said wrong, this is typical of Krix and his jargon. He cannot maintain the correct use of terms and has to give into frustrating invention. His thesis is in need of correction. The society and its classes come from the mode of production and not so-called “political-economic soil.” Political economy is the study of the mode(s) of production. Worst of all is that Krix’s silly conception does not proceed beyond his stupid intellectualism into social practice. Proletarian feminism means only “insisting” on certain political positions in a theoretical sense. To be a socialist means not insisting, but forcing a real thing into existence. We find that when one considers matter as arising from study and the only defining attribute is insisting on a theoretical position, one has wallowed too much in the mud of idealism.
To expose why Mr. Krix’s so-called “proletarian feminism” is nothing but an eclectic rerun of radical feminism, let’s look again to when he said that before class society there was a “division of labor based more or less around reproductive anatomy,” meaning that the sexual division of labor predated the general division of labor. It is significant for Marxism that the division of labor actually appeared first. Krix’s insistence that prehistory was divided along reproductive lines converges not with the works of Marx and Engels, Bebel, Anuradha Ghandy or any other Marxist, but with radical feminism specifically and feminism generally.
According to Ghandy the same radical feminist approach we found with Krix gets things backwards, “…the radical feminists have ‘stood Marxism on its head,’ so to speak,” she wrote. “In their understanding of the material conditions they have taken the physical fact of reproduction and women’s biological role as the central point of 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 prior 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. …
“Marxism understands that some material conditions had to arise due to which the position of women changed and they were subordinated. The significant change in material conditions came with the generation of considerable surplus production. How this surplus would be distributed is the point at which classes arose, the surplus being appropriated by a small [section of the people] in the community. A woman’s role in reproduction, the cause of her earlier elevated status, now became the means of her enslavement.” [Philosophical Trends in the Feminist Movement, Scripting the Change translation]
The most significant convergence between the Krix theory and these various bourgeois “feminisms” is the central role played by sexuality and intercourse. Ghandy points out that “Since the man-woman relations are the fundamental contradiction for radical feminists they have paid a great deal of attention to the sexual relationships between them.” In fact this is true for all varieties of Krixite thinking too: overemphasis on sexual relationships and attempts to center the question of sexual relationships in categorizing and sorting the human panorama.
Krix does not follow radical feminism exactly or precisely. This is why we call it an eclectic rerun. What he does is grab bits and pieces of feminism generally then shamelessly brands it proletarian. It is clear that he has read the same authors we have: Engels, Bebel, Ghandy, the PCP etc., but it is equally clear that he has read them as a feminist and not as a proletarian. His ideology is bourgeois and not proletarian, so instead of understanding the feminists as a Marxist he stamps his bourgeois prejudice onto his readings and confirms his presuppositions opportunistically with selection. In our view this is a criterion of revisionism.
Bebel put the question of the division of labor which led to class society like this: “Along with an increasing division of labor, there came about, not merely a division of functions, but also a division of occupations.” As the division of labor increases, special training and occupations emerge and men gradually take a greater control over productive labor and women are slowly pushed into reproductive roles. This division of labor allowed not only surplus and commerce, but allowed the first act of class based oppression to be committed against women. Wealth and power becomes concentrated. “The more numerous these powers” Bebel wrote “all the greater was the wealth in the products and herds. These struggles led, first, to the rape of women, later to the enslaving of conquered men.”
This is a fundamental question to the Marxist approach to history: what compels human history forward, what is its motor force? Marx and Engels establish without a doubt that this is class struggle. History as a subject of study and record emerges after class society emerges. Less is known about prehistory regarding human society. Engels treated Morgan with the admiration of a pioneer of science and not as a final authority. Comrade Stalin made it clear that while there are other factors: geography, biology and so on, they are not the determining ones. In other words they do not represent the principal aspect in human social development. So we cannot go in for any confusion arguing about which came first, but which is determining. Geography had its say before production and so did biology, but it is production itself which overrules these and determines society. There was almost no division of labor between productive and reproductive labor in primitive society, and there was no division of labor between the sexes either. The fact that the female could give birth gave her an exalted status, in a semi religious or crude religious manner as well as an equal social status (Engels denounces the idea that this was a “Matriarchal” society). Men and women hunted, men and women gathered, men and women carried out early agriculture, men and women conducted child care etc. It was when production develops, when the division of labor goes from nearly non existence to emerging specializations that women become the first victims of class society, the first slaves of the new epoch of slavery. This is the historical materialist conception.
Above, Krix tells us that “bourgeois women and proletarian women have irreconcilable interests,” and that women are only defined by a certain oppression (even though he also tells us that the sexual division of labor based on reproductive anatomy predates the division of labor in production). When he finally gets around to identifying the oppression in question, he reconciles things with the bourgeoisie. Let’s get into his rambling oration.
“…the central reason patriarchy exists,” says Krix, “is to control women to make sure they go into the power (?) not of some group of people in general but one individual.” We are not quite sure what it could possible mean to “go into the power of” but are quite sure this stinks of postmodernism. While individual women do come under the control of individual men throughout the history of class society, the important thing is that the working women, that is the ones belonging to the toiling classes are at all times under the dictatorship of the exploiters. That is, they are under the domination of a group. The “some group of people” Krix speaks of is in fact called the slavocracy, the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie etc. Through a diffuse power theory (à la Foucault) our poor Jiminy has the idea that men who posses control over their wives also hold power and can bring someone into it!
“…the oppression over women,” Krix says, “is not most fundamentally to accomplish some specific task, but actually to create a total power to restrict all of her activities.” This is “not most” logical. It treats the oppression of women as an irrational hatred for the female sex, or according to Krix, anyone “feminine.” In reality the oppression of women is to accomplish specific tasks, as we have pointed out here and in our last polemic. These include lowering wages of men and women, reproductive labor and preserving its privatization, etc. What is more, these specific tasks which shore up capitalism prove that the oppression of women is not in the material (strategic) interests of working men, whereas Krix’s “total power” concept remains unhinged.
Krix tells us “control is achieved” through “virtually every means of control available.” This is pure tautology. What he gives us as examples are the things facing every women not specific to their class. Lets have a look. “…the control is achieved ideologically,” he says. “religion and ideas about morality,” he adds. We of course agree with Krix in so far as opposition to the myth of the deficient feminine nature is concerned, and of course that the superstructure of capitalist society is oppressive and stifling.
After a long treatise expressing a variety of superstructural aspects which foist a deficient feminine nature upon women, Mr. Krix says something remarkably detached from reality. When specifically considering “Black and indigenous women” who he classifies as “oppressed nation women,” he concludes that they “experience a variety of qualitatively more (?) intense aspects of this experience, all of which again have the effect of reducing their ability or willingness to use violence.” We have to ask has Krix ever met a Black or indigenous woman? For Black women in the US, generally the reality they exist in makes them no stranger to violence. The same is true for most indigenous women. Domestic violence, defensive violence and fighting is unfortunately a facet of life among the most poor strata of society. These women’s relationship to violence is not that of a demure character imagined by Krix but a burden they carry. This condition does not reduce ability or willingness to use violence. Krix is foisting a deficient femininity on women who do not possess it. These women in fact represent some of the most capable fighters, who do not flinch when it comes to using necessary defensive violence. He is detached from the people and their material conditions. Communists need not break the resistance to violence, but need to direct it strategically it against the class enemy. Ironically Krix’s approach to these women is paternalistic and patriarchal, something of the would-be-father figure trying to build his child’s confidence to throw a punch. It is stupid and insulting to women.
“This [superstructural deficient femininity] is the substance of the oppression,” Krix says, “even if it is less of the substance for many people in many places. The fact is, virtually no woman anywhere on earth can avoid dealing with a significant amount of oppression of this type for long. Even bourgeois women face this substance of oppression, including the abuse, sexual violence, beauty standards, ideological conditioning, and countless other aspects of it—again, all having the effect of driving her fundamentally into the total control of one individual man, whose right to own her—and build a family upon her—society recognizes and upholds.” This position in no way advances the theory of the radical feminists nor the cultural feminists. It is hung on the hook of culture, obfuscating production and centering the man-woman contradiction and contradictions between individuals in society over the contradictions of society between classes. Krix cannot take the facts to Marxist conclusions. While the backward society inflicts harm upon its people, and disproportionately moreso upon women, women themselves are not defined by a so-called “substance of oppression.” Women have no basis for unity between antagonistic classes, and in fact class differentiates more than sex.
Without oppression, women would still be women after all, they were women before oppression existed. Socialist women were women still, but women of a new type. This is the socialist viewpoint. The reason Marxists insist on focusing on production and not overemphasis on the superstructure (which arises from production) is because it is the only scientific way of understanding the resolution. For Krix, the resolution, as we will see is a purely military viewpoint, which we can call feminist putschism.
“…In almost every conceivable way,” Krix claims “in almost every conceivable space, in almost every conceivable moment, the ability to wield violence is effectively stripped from women, not just overtly, but as subtly and thoroughly as its possible to imagine….this is the character of women’s oppression.”
The “ability” to wield violence is an objective fact. In capitalist society regardless of its laws, it is reactionary violence which is celebrated and revolutionary violence which is condemned. We encounter romanticism of the serial killer and the ultimate horror of the “terrorist.” Krix cannot but invert the feminist trend which considers violence inherently masculine. He agrees in essence with this position and just mirrors it to indicate that a reluctance to engage in adventurism and putschism among the sensible working women attests not to their logic but to their status as submissive. It is a hateful view of women. Women are not only able but quite willing to use violence. It is a myth promoted by people like Krix which says they are not. Look at every uprising and every riot: Women are the first to fight and the last to stop fighting. Often it is the working women who are the most measured and confident in these battles. Women as fighters are also more even tempered and less prone to acts of adventurism, less inclined toward putschism. Wielding organizational violence is prohibited by the state, primarily through repressive forces which are propped up by ideological constraints which say that all challenges to bourgeois power will be doomed. This is only overcome by the development and construction of the Red Army led by the Communist Party in the furnace of class struggle. It cannot be extended to express the special quality of women’s oppression or speak to their “ability.” Only people’s war will realize the ability of the people to conquer power. This applies to men and women alike. It is a pessimistic and defeatist part of bourgeois ideology which views the idea that oppression results in inability to resist, rather than provoking resistance as necessary.
Why do proletarian women have the not only the ability but the willingness to use violence when the situation demands it, and tend away from violence in the form of striking a pose? This has to do with the processes of class experience and class struggle, processes that a purely military viewpoint obstructs. Women are forged as fighters not by the propagandist and certainly not by the pseudo-intellectual, but first by life and second by organization. In time, the rod becomes more mocked than feared. Our doubts are traitors.
Putschism (or the tendency to strike a pose) is not unique to Krix. It’s a consistent deviation of anti-revisionists in the US who respond to the base standard of opportunism among the left. In this respect it is a leftward deviation associated with amateurishness. For right opportunists like our Jiminy such reflexivness is jumped upon to lend themselves operative cover. Their “leftism,” (that is to say the ultra-left sloganeering, the striking of poses, the overemphasis on doubt and their fetish for violence) is all a mask for what is essentially tailing behind bourgeois ideology while giving it a radical dressing. The pose is struck by these rightists in the form of issuing orders they cannot enforce and which have no potential for being carried out. They have no regard for how social change is accomplished and simultaneously demand immediate change. Or in Krix’s terms, “completely reverse the aspects of this oppression, not just eventually but immediately…”
Such seemingly left-wing but ultimately empty posturings do absolutely nothing but weaken real movements, and this is how the do-nothing intellectualism is pretending to be Maoism becomes operational. We point this out not only because it is the overall deviation expressed by the piece in question, but to highlight that the problem of left and right putschist theory is evident in the published works of RGA and it represents errors that we and others are obliged by history to correct.
For petty-bourgeois intellectuals there is an alienation from violence. It is done consistently in their name and seldom effects their manner of living. For the proletarians, and especially the poor, violence is a part of their manner of living. There is no separation and hence they clamor for the organization of revolutionary violence to confront the type of violence (poverty, prison, crime, police terror, and so on) which is inflicted upon us as a consequence of our position in capitalist production.
For Maoists, the military line is centered in the political line. Krix reverses this formula with the idea that women are unable to use violence and sees the task as being one of compelling violence. Of a feminist ideology which changes their conception of violence, etc. Contrary to this, we argue that the task is political. This task includes the question of revolutionary violence. It serves to “unleash” the existing “fury of women as a force for proletarian revolution.” For Krix, the slogan might be something to the effect of intellectually compelling women to engage in violence in the interest of women. Nonsense. These are two very different tasks. He says “Only such a policy of reclaiming and wielding violence against class and gender enemies can begin to substantially and materially repeal the psychological effects that violent indoctrination that (?) suppresses women’s politicization.” First, the policy of a small group is utterly ineffective at reclaiming anything other than through empty symbolic gestures. Secondly it cannot lead to politicization. We remind the comrade that the First Military School of the Communist Party of Peru was not based around some foolish “reclamation” of violence. It contained no guns but books. Politicization comes before violence can be realized in a revolutionary manner. Smiting enemies is not how you find politics. Politics is how you find the correct enemies to smite.
In Krix’s view, a small band of putschist women is the answer (a political line we can see manifested in movement practice). The revolutionary line can only be the mobilization of working women on a mass scale in proletarian revolution; bringing organization where it lacks; developing combatants, militants and leaders interacting with and bringing their revolutionary program to the masses who carry it out. This is what mass work means, it does not mean putschism.
Putting the violence before the politics, as a means to reach politics, is an anarchist distortion of Maoist theory of politics in command. This leads to serious theoretical mistakes peddled by Krix and those like him. It confuses the entire fundamental question of Maoism: that of political power for the proletariat.
Krix says “We are talking about policies that require deep changes to the relations of production even now, before People’s War has been initiated, changes that involve the dislocation of the ruling class’s order everywhere red power extends.” This is the most utopian and vulgar notion of “building power” that one can imagine, dearest Jiminy. “Red power” cannot and will not exist without seizing it by force of arms, by the armed forces led by the Communist Party which mobilize the masses and led them in war against the old-state and its ruling class. Your fantasy that red power can exist before peoples war is initiated is a revisionist thesis. It’s as backwards as your conception of violence. By prescribing the impossible, to establish red power then initiate peoples war, our shame-faced revisionist essentially argues for reaching a prerequisite which will remain ever elusive before people’s war can be initiated, just like the impossibility of generating violence before politicization. This is rank and vulgar adventurism which justifies tailing behind the masses in promotion of a fool’s idea of obtaining power without war.
In Krix’s imagination, everything comes before the initiation of people’s war, because he is ultimately opposed to the seizure of power by the proletariat and the dictatorship of the proletariat. For him, red power and cultural revolutions can just take place without armed struggle setting the conditions for them. If it were at all possible to have red power and carry out cultural revolution without people’s war, the people’s war would be unnecessary. Krix, like all phony Maoists, considers peoples war only a defensive maneuver. This is not the seizure of power by force of arms, but the passive-defense of a non-violent accumulative power which can be constructed through charity and education. It is a slimy deception, one to cast reformism as revolutionary practice.
There will not be, nor can there be “deep changes to the relations of production” nor can their be “a dislocation of the ruling class’s order” without people’s war and the conquest of power (be it incrementally or totally). Is this clear?
Krix’s imagination runs away from him as soon as he utters the nonsense we have already quoted above. His argument goes like this “When we seek to fully incorporate women into every part of public industry and destroying unwaged reproductive labor…” the bourgeoisie will retaliate, leaving no option but self-defense. Women will not be fully incorporated into “public industry” nor will reproductive labor be socialized until socialism is accomplished by the establishment of the proletarian dictatorship, which through exercising its dictatorship will by no means be reduced to defensive violence. Krix has always promoted the concept that such “power” can be “built” through “mass work.” This is a revisionist thesis weather or not in includes formal recognition of violence.
Krix never falls far from the bourgeois intellectual and Trotskyite tree which bore him. In a remarkably destitute understanding of Maoist philosophy he tells us that “the contradiction between working class men and women [he does not specify working class women, radical feminist that he is] can and not uncommonly does turn antagonistic.” This, comrades, is identity politics dressed as Maoism. The contradictions among the proletariat is non-antagonistic. It can be resolved without military means. He is speaking here of “patriarchal chauvinism” and of course domestic abuses and things of the this nature. When working class men enact reactionary violence in collusion with the old-society they are not acting on the contradictions among the proletariat. They are acting on behalf of the bourgeoisie and hence it does not remain an inter-proletarian contradiction but becomes a class contradiction. The same can be said for strike breakers working for a security firm. Is their conflict with the striking worker a contradiction among the people or between the classes? Krix cannot understand Marxism as a class analysis and instead requires an analysis of the relationships between individuals on the individual level.
Misunderstanding Condemned to Win, he quotes “It [working men’s control over working women in the domicile] is nothing but a poisoned carrot on a stick controlled by the class enemy… reproducing class relationships in a microcosm.” He takes this to indicate that to politicize women they must instilled with confidence to react violently towards the masses of backward men who are deceived by the old society, missing the point that the relationship described in Condemned to Win is one in which the working man only has an illusion of control and is himself a misguided and exploited have-not.
In his first disclaimer, as well in his conclusion about who to recruit to women’s formations, we have twice now heard Krix say that “not all AFAB people face women’s oppression.” Some don’t face it he says. What a strange and self-defeating theory he has produced. There is then, some other non-violent process that does not require socialist revolution which provides a way out of women’s oppression for the female sex according to Krix (at least on an individual basis). Everything comes down to a problem of femininity identity and others’ perceptions which can be changed without war, or “before the initiation of people’s war.” Hypothetically, a woman who lived her entire life in deep disguise driven to this decision by her conditions would certainly not escape the oppression of women. First, oppression itself if not understood by Marxists as a limited personal experience. We can understand this with the oppressed nation, the entire nation is oppressed, this means even those who have never encountered a soldier or lost loved ones directly and lead idyllic lives (if you can imagine such a thing) still represent part of the oppressed nation (whether they align with national interests or go against them in service of oppression). Individual personal experience can shape ones views, but it is not the stick with which we measure. This is why the Marxists have always argued that the emancipation of women is realized through socialist revolution, there is no other way to end the oppression of women, which affects the entire social order and is far more encompassing that an individual’s direct experience.
For Krix, a woman is only one who experiences a certain type of oppression, and there is a way for people born female to avoid this kind of oppression without waging war. Please tell the women of the world what this is so they can carry it out tomorrow and stop being oppressed!
Accepting the legalese “Assigned Female at Birth” in an effort to seem progressive (many of his own postmodernists would prefer he use the term “gender identity”) has stamped a mark of confusion on Krix’s theory which did not exist for Marxists of the past and does not exist for ones of the present outside of the imperialist countries academic circles. No one had to really argue about who qualifies to join organizations like Movimiento Feminino Popular (MFP). This is an entirely imperialist malady. Male and female are not the same as saying man and woman. We might as well conclude with another scientific fact. Everyone is female in the womb until they become male. After 6 or 7 weeks’ gestation, difference and indifference interact. Children maintain sex indifference until puberty. Medical fact is understood that these are general biological conditions and not absolute, but it is the malady of postmodernism which divides a thing beyond comprehension.
Ghandy summed up the problem with comrades like Krix very well in her critique of radical feminism:
“Since they do not have any concrete strategy to overthrow this society, they shift their entire analysis to critique of the various superstructural aspects—the culture, language concepts, and ethics—without concerning themselves with the fact of capitalism and the role it plays in sustaining this sex/gender relationship. … They are focused on changing the roles and traits and the attitudes and the moral values and, thereby, creating an alternative culture.”
We find in Krix’s theory of “proletarian feminism” only a combination of Marxist terms (not Marxism) with radical feminism. This is akin to the deviation which holds proletarian cultural revolution as valid anytime rather than a continuation of the socialist revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat. In summing up the weaknesses of the various feminist trends, Ghandy listed some of the very weaknesses which Krix preserves and promotes. These are: seeking roots of women’s oppression in their reproductive role; focusing on the family as the basic structure in society in which the oppression of women is rooted; concentration on changing the roles men and women are trained to play; overemphasis on sexuality; overemphasis on personality. We have summarized these in our own words.
To fully understand the issue we must return to Marxism, Mariategui and the Women’s Movement, in which the comrades write:
“…More than ever today, when supposed revolutionaries and even self-proclaimed Marxists pretend to have women’s oppression arising not from the formation and appearance of private property but from the simple division of labor as a function of sex which had attributed to less important chores for women than those of men, reducing her to the sphere of home. This proposal, despite all the propaganda and efforts to present it as revolutionary, is but a substitution for the Marxist position on the emancipation of women, with bourgeois proposals which in essence are but variations of the immutable ‘feminine nature.’”
And in regard to Krix’s reversal of violence and politics based largely on his overemphasis of superstructure we remember that women’s “economic participation and the development of the class struggle pushes forward the politicization of women.”
The essence of the thinking, politics, and practice of Jimmy Krix is an impersonation of Maoism, one which considers everything that is in reality only possible through war to be obtainable without war. In this, the question of political power is not held as fundamental, and the entire revolution is compromised into reformist dead ends: impossible reforms and an imaginary war to defend them. This speech as well as others (such as What Maoism Has to Offer the World and Why we Think its Dope which was published in print by a faction of RGA) represent the worst aspects of the efforts to unite under Maoism. These deviations should be swept away and exposed, even if only a few still stick to them.
We are not yet satisfied with our treatment of Mr. Krix. We hate the ideas of Jiminy Krix, no matter what venue they appear in: wherever we find them we will hit them.
image: 1931 Soviet poster calling on women shock workers to strengthen the shock brigades of socialist construction, Valentina Kulagina
