Thursday, June 29, 2023
POLL: How do you feel your pay + benefits compare to your workload? Let us know! We're eager to hear your perspective -Jamika@Fight For $15 /hour
POLL: How do you feel your pay + benefits compare to your workload? Let us know! We're eager to hear your perspective -Jamika@FF15stop2quit
Guys, surrender in the Battle of the Sexes; what’s good for the goose is good for the gander
"The direct, natural, and necessary relation of person to person is the relation of man to woman. In this natural species-relationship man’s relation to nature is immediately his relation to man, just as his relation to man is immediately his relation to nature – his own natural destination. In this relationship, therefore, is sensuously manifested, reduced to an observable fact, the extent to which the human essence has become nature to man, or to which nature to him has become the human essence of man. From this relationship one can therefore judge man’s whole level of development. From the character of this relationship follows how much man as a species-being, as man, has come to be himself and to comprehend himself; the relation of man to woman is the most natural relation of human being to human being. It therefore reveals the extent to which man’s natural behaviour has become human, or the extent to which the human essence in him has become a natural essence – the extent to which his human nature has come to be natural to him. This relationship also reveals the extent to which man’s need has become a human need; the extent to which, therefore, the other person as a person has become for him a need – the extent to which he in his individual existence is at the same time a social being."
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/comm.htm
post-Fordism and geographical scattering of the points of production
https://www.mail-archive.com/marxism-thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu/msg07154.html
post-Fordism and geographical scattering of the points of production c b Tue, 13 Oct 2009 05:20:36
https://www.mail-archive.com/marxism-thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu/msg07154.html
[Marxism-Thaxis] post-Fordism and geographical scattering of the points of production
CB: The leaps in communication and transportation through computerization, satellites, robotics, containerization allow the scattering of the points of production geographically, globally.
In _Capital_ Marx's analyzes the fundamentals of modern industry , machinery and cooperation here: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch12.htm
Part IV: Production of Relative Surplus Value
Ch. 12: The Concept of Relative Surplus-Value Ch. 13: Co-operation Ch.
14: Division of Labour and Manufacture Ch. 15:
Machinery and Modern Industry
The modern factory system that Marx analyzed there concentrated workers in one location , co-operation the classic Leninist giant factory site, and employed machinery ; both cooperation and machinery increased the rate of surplus-value, relative surplus value.
The cyber developments in communication and transportation of the last 35 years allow the negation of co-operation ( big factories, and industrial cities and regions, like the US Midwest) _without loss in production of surplus value_ .
This is a dialectical negation in that one aspect of the united contradiction negated the other ; machinery is negating cooperation. Machinery developed through comuperiztion, robotics, satellites, containers, just in time production, et al, such that it allowed the negation of the other fundamental aspect of the contradiction, co-operation ( concentration of workers in one plant and industrial cities , like Detroit where Henry Ford of "Fordism" was, and regions, like the US midwest.) The points of production can be scattered around the globe without loss of production of surplus value, and with the added benefit of separating workers from each other. Recall that Marx emphasized that the concentrations of workers in factories and certain cities was important in their sensing their potential power and helped with communist organization. The capitalists are glad to scatter them and separate them from each other.
I'm thinking computers in truck driver cabs is an advance in the unity of mental (symbolic) and physical labor in one worker, and thus an overcoming or negation of ye olde antagonism between predominantly mental and predominantly physical labor ( workers of the head and workers of the hand). Overcoming this antagonism, this original specialization, is considered an achievement of the coming communist society. So, were cb radios, but this is even a bit ( in the computer language puny sense) more than cb radios.
It increases the socialization, division of labor ( in Marx and Durkheim sense; organic solidarity) and cooperation of labor. Labor is already highly socialized in capitalism in the 1800s, early 1900's, mid 1900's. This increased the interconnectedness of workers , in their technological location, so increases the socialization of the labor process.
Walmart's increased efficiency is increased socialization and cooperation , too. Just like the Fordist assembly line and truck and train connected factories with telegraph communication , then telephones were.
These electronic communication systems increase cooperation of labor that is not face to face or within one building , plant, or city. It allows the points of production to be more scattered geographically/in space relative to prior levels of development of the means of production which are communication systems. Computers allow the likes of just-in-time delivery. World cars, for example, are produced from computer coordinated globally scattered points of production.
Workers of the whole globe, unite ! Hardt/Negri's Commonwealth as reviewed in WSJ c b cb31450 at gmail.com Fri Oct 9 11:04:19 HST 2009 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Voyou voyou1 Yes, and nothing in H&N's argument goes against this. The idea of a shift from Fordism to post-Fordism doesn't mean that the economy is shifting from widgets to symbols. It means that changes in symbolic forms of production have an affect on widget-based production. The way in which the number of people involved in industrial production has expanded is an example of this, as the ability of western companies to use manufacturing labor in non-western countries was enhanced by various developments in symbolic labor (the logistical ability to manage longer supply chains, for example). The paradigmatic post-Fordist company isn't Microsoft, it's Walmart, which directs the production and distribution of material goods from all around the world. ^^^^^^^ CB: The leaps in communication and transportation through computerization, satellites, robotics, containerization allow the scattering of the points of production geographically, globally. In _Capital_ Marx's analyzes the fundamentals of modern industry , machinery and cooperation here: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch12.htm Part IV: Production of Relative Surplus Value Ch. 12: The Concept of Relative Surplus-Value Ch. 13: Co-operation Ch. 14: Division of Labour and Manufacture Ch. 15: Machinery and Modern Industry The modern factory system that Marx analyzed there concentrated workers in one location , co-operation the classic Leninist giant factory site, and employed machinery both to increase the rate of surplus-value, relative surplus value. The developments in communication and transportation of the last 35 years allow the negation of co-operation ( big factories, and industrial cities and regions, like the US Midwest) _without loss in production of surplus value_ . This is a dialectical negation in that one aspect of the contradiction , machinery, developed through comuperiztion, robotics, satellites, containers, just in time production, et al, such that it allowed the negation of the other fundamental aspect of the contradiction, co-operation ( concentration of workers in one plant and industrial cities , like Detroit where Henry Ford of "Fordism" was, and regions, like the US midwest.) The points of production can be scattered around the globe without loss of production of surplus value, and with the added benefit of separating workers from each other. Recall that Marx emphasized that the concentrations of workers in factories and certain cities was important in their sensing their potential power and helped with communist organization. The capitalists are glad to scatter them and separate them from each other. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hardt/Negri's Commonwealth as reviewed in WSJ c b cb31450 at gmail.com Sat Oct 10 16:01:35 HST 2009 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- shag carpet bomb At 02:20 PM 10/9/2009, Eric Beck wrote: >On Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 1:03 PM, Voyou
Wednesday, June 28, 2023
Posie Parker women’s liberationist sings Amazing Grace https://www.youtube.com/live/pocfRKDk1-w?feature=share
These Women will win : new ,improved Women’s Liberation Movement ! https://www.youtube.com/live/gMYdxdXBtEE?feature=share
Tuesday, June 27, 2023
The World Economy Is Changing—the People Know, but Their Leaders Don't By: Richard D. Wolff
MIDWESTERN MARX
6/23/2023
The World Economy Is Changing—the People Know, but Their Leaders Don't By: Richard D. Wolff
0 COMMENTS
Picture
The year 2020 marked parity between the total GDP of the G7 (the U.S. plus allies) and the total GDP of the BRICS group (China plus allies). Since then, the BRICS economies grew faster than the G7 economies. Now a third of total world output comes from the BRICS countries while the G7 accounts for below 30 percent. Beyond the obvious symbolism, this difference entails real political, cultural, and economic consequences. Bringing Ukraine’s Zelenskyy to Hiroshima to address the G7 recently failed to distract the G7’s attention from the huge global issue: what is growing in the world economy vs. what is declining.
The evident failure of the economic sanctions war against Russia offers yet more evidence of the relative strength of the BRICS alliance. That alliance now can and does offer nations alternatives to accommodating the demands and pressures of the once-hegemonic G7. The latter’s efforts to isolate Russia seem to have boomeranged and exposed instead the relative isolation of the G7. Even France’s Macron wondered out loud whether France might be betting on the wrong horse in that G7 vs. BRICS economic race just under the surface of the Ukraine war. Perhaps earlier, less-developed precursors of that race influenced failed U.S. land wars in Asia from Korea through Vietnam to Afghanistan and Iraq.
China increasingly competes openly with the United States and its international lending allies (the IMF and the World Bank) in development loans to the Global South. The G7 attack the Chinese, charging them with replicating the predatory lending for which G7 colonialism was and G7 neocolonialism is justly infamous. The attacks have had little effect given the needs for such borrowing that drive the welcome offered to China’s loan policies. Time will tell whether shifting economic collaboration from the G7 to China leaves centuries of predatory lending behind. Meanwhile, the political and cultural changes accompanying China’s global economic activities are already evident: for example, African nations’ neutrality toward the Ukraine-Russia war despite G7 pressures.
De-dollarization represents yet another dimension of the now rapid realignments in the world economy. Since 2000, the proportion of central banks’ currency reserves held in U.S. dollars has fallen by half. That decline continues. Every week brings news of countries cutting trade and investment payments in U.S. dollars in favor of payments in their own currencies or other currencies than the U.S. dollar. Saudi Arabia is closing down the petrodollar system that crucially supported the U.S. dollar as the pre-eminent global currency. Reduced global reliance on the U.S. dollar also reduces dollars available for loans to the U.S. government to finance its borrowings. The long-term effects of that, especially as the U.S. government runs immense budget deficits, will likely be significant.
China recently brokered the rapprochement between enemies Iran and Saudi Arabia. Pretending that such peace-making is insignificant represents purely wishful thinking. China can and will likely continue to make peace for two key reasons. First, it has resources (loans, trade deals, investments) to commit to sweeten accommodations between adversaries. Second, China’s stunning growth over the last three decades was accomplished under and by means of a global regime mostly at peace. Wars then were mostly confined to specific, very poor Asian locations. Those wars minimally disrupted the world trade and capital flows that enriched China.
Neoliberal globalization benefited China disproportionally. So China and BRICS countries have replaced the United States as the champion of continuing a broadly defined global free trade and capital movements regime. Defusing conflicts, especially in the contentious Middle East, enables China to promote the peaceful world economy in which it prospered. In contrast, the economic nationalism (trade wars, tariff policies, targeted sanctions, etc.) pursued by Trump and Biden has struck China as a threat and a danger. In reaction, China has been able to mobilize many other nations to resist and oppose United States and G7 policies in various global forums.
The source of China’s remarkable economic growth—and the key to BRICS countries’ now successful challenge to the G7’s global economic dominance—has been its hybrid economic model. China broke from the Soviet model by not organizing industry as primarily state-owned-and-operated enterprises. It broke from the U.S. model by not organizing industries as privately owned and operated enterprises. Instead, it organized a hybrid combining both state and private enterprises under the political supervision and ultimate control of the Chinese Communist Party. This hybrid macroeconomic structure enabled China’s economic growth to outperform both the USSR and the United States. Both China’s private and state enterprises organize their workplaces—their production systems’ micro-level—into the employer-employee structures exemplified by both Soviet public and U.S. private enterprises. China did not break from those microeconomic structures.
If we define capitalism precisely as that particular microeconomic structure (employer-employee, wage labor, etc.), we can differentiate it from the master-slave or lord-serf microeconomic structures of slave and feudal workplaces. Following that definition, what China constructed is a hybrid state-plus-private capitalism run by a communist party. It is a rather original and particular class structure designated by the nation’s self-description as “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” That class structure proved its superiority to both the USSR and the G7 in terms of its achieved rates of economic growth and independent technological development. China has become the first systemic and global competitor that the United States has had to face in the last century.
Lenin once referred to the early USSR as a “state capitalism” challenged by the task of making a further transition to post-capitalist socialism. Xi Jinping could refer to China today as a hybrid state-plus-private capitalism similarly challenged by the task of navigating its way forward to a genuinely post-capitalist socialism. That would involve and require a transition from the employer-employee workplace structure to the democratic alternative microeconomic structure: a workplace cooperative community or a workers’ self-directed enterprise. The USSR never made that transition. Two key questions follow for China: Can it? And will it?
The United States also faces two key questions. First, how much longer will most U.S. leaders persist in denying its economic and global declines, acting as if the U.S. position had not changed since the 1970s and 1980s? Second, how can such leaders’ behavior be explained when large American majorities acknowledge those declines as ongoing long-term trends? A Pew Research Center random poll taken among Americans between March 27 and April 2, 2023, asked what they expected the situation of the United States to be in 2050 compared with today. Some 66 percent expect the U.S. economy will be weaker. Seventy-one percent expect the United States will be less important in the world. Seventy-seven percent expect the United States will be more politically divided. Eighty-one percent expect the gap between rich and poor will grow. The people clearly sense what their leaders desperately deny. That difference haunts U.S. politics.
Author
Richard D. Wolff is professor of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a visiting professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University, in New York. Wolff’s weekly show, “Economic Update,” is syndicated by more than 100 radio stations and goes to 55 million TV receivers via Free Speech TV. His three recent books with Democracy at Work are The Sickness Is the System: When Capitalism Fails to Save Us From Pandemics or Itself, Understanding Socialism, and Understanding Marxism, the latter of which is now available in a newly released 2021 hardcover edition with a new introduction by the author.
This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
Archives
June 2023
May 2023
April 2023
March 2023
February 2023
January 2023
December 2022
November 2022
October 2022
September 2022
August 2022
July 2022
June 2022
May 2022
April 2022
March 2022
February 2022
January 2022
December 2021
November 2021
October 2021
September 2021
August 2021
July 2021
June 2021
May 2021
April 2021
March 2021
February 2021
January 2021
December 2020
November 2020
October 2020
September 2020
August 2020
July 2020
SHARE
0 COMMENTS
Leave a Reply.
DETAILS
All ORIGINAL Midwestern Marx content is under Creative Commons
(CC BY-ND 4.0) which means you can republish our work only if it is attributed properly (link the original publication to the republication) and not modified.
Proudly powered by Weebly
Photos used under Creative Commons from U.S. Secretary of Defense, ben.kaden
Survival of the fittest ; fittest or selected for means species population growth
Article Talk wikipedia
Language
Watch
Edit
For other uses, see Survival of the fittest (disambiguation).
"Survival of the fittest"[1] is a phrase that originated from Darwinian evolutionary theory as a way of describing the mechanism of natural selection. The biological concept of fitness is defined as reproductive success.
Charles Brown , i.e. population increase or decrease
In Darwinian terms, the phrase is best understood as "Survival of the form that will leave the most copies of itself in successive generations."
Charles Brown Exactly the Type, Genotype
Not "survival" of individuals, because all individuals are mortal , and eventually don't survive. Perpetuation of a genotype through reproductive mating producing fertile offspring ; many fertile offspring . Darwin says rarity is often a precusor to extinction .
Charles Brown , i.e. population increase or decrease
In Darwinian terms, the phrase is best understood as "Survival of the form that will leave the most copies of itself in successive generations."
Charles Brown Exactly the Type, Genotype
Not "survival" of individuals, because all individuals are mortal , and eventually don't survive. Perpetuation of a genotype through reproductive mating producing fertile offspring ; many fertile offspring . Darwin says rarity is often a precusor to extinction .
2008: Obama announced the most anti-war foreign policy doctrine in decades
So it was a legitimate surprise when Obama articulated a unified, tightly focused vision of America's role in the world. And while it's not a vision that will thrill many foreign policy hands, including perhaps some of those in his administration, it is the clearest Obama foreign policy doctrine he's made in years: no war, no militarism, no adventurism. With the possible exception of Jimmy Carter's 1977 Notre Dame speech, it may well have been one of the most dovish foreign policy speeches by a sitting US president since Eisenhower.
Not doubt thyself . Where does Marx , Engels or Lenin doubt themselves in > a published work ?
Charles Brown wrote:
>>
>> Why, then, was one of Marx's favorite mottoes, 'Doubt Everything'?
>>
>> ///
>>
>> Not doubt thyself . Where does Marx , Engels or Lenin doubt themselves in
> a published work ? The classic Marxist texts are all in very certain and
> _authoritative_ voices, not as Engels calls it , shamefaced materialist
> self-doubt. Marx ruthlessly criticizes all that exists _in objective
> reality_not in his own subjectivity of his intellectual maturity. Hell Im
> older than Marx was when he died. I'm long past the youthful necessity to
> investigate a variety of philosophies , arts and sciences. I gave up
> philosophical agnosticism 35 years ago after subscribing to it in college
> for 15 years . Also, as a lawyer , Doctor of jurisprudence , I assume
> certainty of social theories all the time. Jurisprudence is the model for
> science. Scientists get "law" , their central concept from guess who ?
> LAWyers.
Hasn't the Marxist paradigm always taken account of the fact that all labor is a combination of mental and physical labor , with some labor being predominantly physical and other labor predominantly mental ? In _Capital_ Vol. I, Marx uses the Bible as an example of a commodity. Predominantly mental laborers can be wage-laborers as much as predominantly physical laborers. Thus, though the information technology revolution may increase the proportion of mental to physical labor in some sense overall, doesn't Marx's fundamental analysis of commodity production and wage-labor remain valid with respect to information? Seems to me that the revolution in communication and transportation permits a geographical scattering of the points of production relative to the periods of the Industrial Revolution and Fordist organization of production or division of labor. This is changing the international division of labor as you mention, such that we have "world cars" and the like. However, most new information workers are objectively new proletarians, n'est-ce pas ? Most do not own the basic means of production. They do not own the basic information technology that they use in their work. The basic CAD/CAM technology, automated machinery, critical trade secrets in information technology, satellites, etc. are still the private property of a tiny elite. The end product of the work of the information workers is still a commodity, analyzable as Marx analyzes commodities in _Capital_. Marx and Engels noted this trend of proletarianization of predominantly mental workers in _The Manifesto_. Charles Brown
From: "Charles Brown" CB: Fetters , as in chains binding: The best current reading of "productive forces" might be with respect to the contradiction between the social nature of production and the private nature of appropriation under capitalism *. Globalization, Monopolization and "centralizing"" ( i.e. the "center of the circle" metaphor, which is a way of referring to the whole; the whole circle is equidistant from its center and so the center of the circle represents the whole) of capital are the ultimate or limit of private appropriation. At the same time, the most recent scattering of the points of production / productive forces around the globe is the furthest step yet in history of the socialization of labor, the division of labor into a more fully world wide web. Marx predicts that the world wide web of labor will burst asunder the integument, the fetters binding it for the private expropriators.
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/2007/2007-July/013469.html
[lbo-talk] Fetters , integument: on metaphor for literature class
Eubulides paraconsistent at comcast.net Tue Jul 17 20:25:19 PDT 2007 Previous message: [lbo-talk] Fetters , integument: on metaphor for literature class Next message: [lbo-talk] Congestion pricing goes down Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] Search LBO-Talk Archives
Limit search to: Subject & Body Subject Author Sort by: Reverse Sort ----- Original Message ----- From: "Charles Brown"
CB:
Fetters , as in chains binding:
The best current reading of "productive forces" might be with respect to the contradiction between the social nature of production and the private nature of appropriation under capitalism *. Globalization, Monopolization and "centralizing"" ( i.e. the "center of the circle" metaphor, which is a way of referring to the whole; the whole circle is equidistant from its center and so the center of the circle represents the whole) of capital are the ultimate or limit of private appropriation. At the same time, the most recent scattering of the points of production / productive forces around the globe is the furthest step yet in history of the socialization of labor, the division of labor into a more fully world wide web. Marx predicts that the world wide web of labor will burst asunder the integument, the fetters binding it for the private expropriators.
================ What is private about Microsoft or Toyota or Google? Indeed, after Morris Cohen and some of the Legal Realists' redescriptions of property, let alone the actual juridical changes in the structuring of corporations, what is private about capitalism? When terms like State and collective are as polysemous and vague as they are despite the articulations of legal theorists, economists, sociologists, philosophers etc. over the last 20 decades, why should any one engage in obeisance to the utterly unstable and subsequently destabilized binary of public/private as it existed when Marx wrote up his various hypotheses? Recommended: All Organizations Are Public: Comparing Public And Private Organizations by Barry Bozeman Previous message: [lbo-talk] Fetters , integument: on metaphor for literature class Next message: [lbo-talk] Congestion pricing goes down Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] More information about the lbo-talk mailing list
[lbo-talk] Fetters , integument: on metaphor for literature class
Eubulides paraconsistent at comcast.net Tue Jul 17 20:25:19 PDT 2007 Previous message: [lbo-talk] Fetters , integument: on metaphor for literature class Next message: [lbo-talk] Congestion pricing goes down Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] Search LBO-Talk Archives
Limit search to: Subject & Body Subject Author Sort by: Reverse Sort ----- Original Message ----- From: "Charles Brown"
CB:
Fetters , as in chains binding:
The best current reading of "productive forces" might be with respect to the contradiction between the social nature of production and the private nature of appropriation under capitalism *. Globalization, Monopolization and "centralizing"" ( i.e. the "center of the circle" metaphor, which is a way of referring to the whole; the whole circle is equidistant from its center and so the center of the circle represents the whole) of capital are the ultimate or limit of private appropriation. At the same time, the most recent scattering of the points of production / productive forces around the globe is the furthest step yet in history of the socialization of labor, the division of labor into a more fully world wide web. Marx predicts that the world wide web of labor will burst asunder the integument, the fetters binding it for the private expropriators.
================ What is private about Microsoft or Toyota or Google? Indeed, after Morris Cohen and some of the Legal Realists' redescriptions of property, let alone the actual juridical changes in the structuring of corporations, what is private about capitalism? When terms like State and collective are as polysemous and vague as they are despite the articulations of legal theorists, economists, sociologists, philosophers etc. over the last 20 decades, why should any one engage in obeisance to the utterly unstable and subsequently destabilized binary of public/private as it existed when Marx wrote up his various hypotheses? Recommended: All Organizations Are Public: Comparing Public And Private Organizations by Barry Bozeman Previous message: [lbo-talk] Fetters , integument: on metaphor for literature class Next message: [lbo-talk] Congestion pricing goes down Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] More information about the lbo-talk mailing list
US is the most authoritarian country in the world
https://youtu.be/ELDa8ENWGg0
Open main menu
Wikipedia
Search
The New Jim Crow
Article Talk
Language
Watch
Edit
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness is a book by Michelle Alexander, a civil rights litigator and legal scholar. The book discusses race-related issues specific to African-American males and mass incarceration in the United States, but Alexander noted that the discrimination faced by African-American males is prevalent among other minorities and socio-economically disadvantaged populations. Alexander's central premise, from which the book derives its title, is that "mass incarceration is, metaphorically, the New Jim Crow".[1]
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
The New Jim Crow cover.jpg
Author
Michelle Alexander
Country
United States
Language
English
Subject
Criminal justice, race discrimination, race relations
Genre
Non-fiction
Publisher
The New Press
Publication date
2010; new edition 2020
Media type
Print
Pages
312
ISBN
978-1-59558-643-8
Dewey Decimal
364.973
LC Class
HV9950 .A437
Overview
Edit
Though the conventional point of view holds that systemic racial discrimination mostly ended with the civil rights movement reforms of the 1960s, Alexander posits that the U.S. criminal justice system uses the War on Drugs as a primary tool for enforcing traditional, as well as new modes of discrimination and oppression.[2] These new modes of racism have led to not only the highest rate of incarceration in the world, but also a disproportionately large rate of imprisonment for African American men. Were present trends to continue, Alexander writes, the United States would imprison one third of its African American population. When combined with the fact that whites are more likely to commit drug crimes than people of color, the issue becomes clear for Alexander: "the primary targets of [the penal system's] control can be defined largely by race".[3]
This ultimately leads Alexander to argue that mass incarceration is "a stunningly comprehensive and well-disguised system of racialized social control that functions in a manner strikingly similar to Jim Crow".[4] The culmination of this social control is what Alexander calls a "racial caste system", a type of stratification wherein people of color are kept in an inferior position. Its emergence, she believes, is a direct response to the civil rights movement. It is because of this that Alexander argues for issues with mass incarceration to be addressed as issues of racial justice and civil rights. To approach these matters as anything but would be to fortify this new racial caste. Thus, Alexander aims to mobilize the civil rights community to move the incarceration issue to the forefront of its agenda and to provide factual information, data, arguments and a point of reference for those interested in pursuing the issue. Her broader goal is the revamping of the prevailing mentality regarding human rights, equality and equal opportunities in America, to prevent future cyclical recurrence of what she sees as "racial control under changing disguise".[1] According to the author, what has been altered since the collapse of Jim Crow is not so much the basic structure of US society, as the language used to justify its affairs. She argues that when people of color are disproportionately labeled as "criminals", this allows the unleashing of a whole range of legal discrimination measures in employment, housing, education, public benefits, voting rights, jury duty, and so on.[5]
Alexander explains that it took her years to become fully aware and convinced of the phenomena she describes, despite her professional civil rights background. She expects similar reluctance and disbelief on the part of many of her readers. She believes that the problems besetting African American communities are not merely a passive, collateral side effect of poverty, limited educational opportunity or other factors, but a consequence of purposeful government policies. Alexander has concluded that mass incarceration policies, which were swiftly developed and implemented, are a "comprehensive and well-disguised system of racialized control that functions in a manner strikingly similar to Jim Crow".[6]
Alexander contends that in 1982 the Reagan administration began an escalation of the War on Drugs, purportedly as a response to a crack cocaine crisis in black ghettos, which was (she claims) announced well before crack cocaine arrived in most inner city neighborhoods. During the mid-1980s, as the use of crack cocaine increased to epidemic levels in these neighborhoods, federal drug authorities publicized the problem, using scare tactics to generate support for their already-declared escalation.[7] The government's successful media campaign made possible an unprecedented expansion of law enforcement activities in America's urban neighborhoods, and this aggressive approach fueled widespread belief in conspiracy theories that posited government plans to destroy the black population. (Black genocide)[citation needed]
In 1998, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) acknowledged that during the 1980s the Contra faction—covertly supported by the US in Nicaragua—had been involved in smuggling cocaine into the US and distributing it in US cities. Drug Enforcement Administration efforts to expose these illegal activities were blocked by Reagan officials, which contributed to an explosion of crack cocaine consumption in America's urban neighborhoods. More aggressive enforcement of federal drug laws resulted in a dramatic increase in street level arrests for possession. Disparate sentencing policies (the crack cocaine v. powdered cocaine penalty disparity was 100-1 by weight and remains 18-1 even after recent reform efforts) meant that a disproportionate number of inner city residents were charged with felonies and sentenced to long prison terms, because they tended to purchase the more affordable crack version of cocaine, rather than the powdered version commonly consumed in the suburbs.[8][9]
Alexander argues that the War on Drugs has a devastating impact on inner city African American communities, on a scale entirely out of proportion to the actual dimensions of criminal activity taking place within these communities. During the past three decades, the US prison population exploded from 300,000 to more than two million, with the majority of the increase due to drug convictions.[10] This led to the US having the world's highest incarceration rate. The US incarceration rate is eight times that of Germany, a comparatively developed large democracy.[11] Alexander claims that the US is unparalleled in the world in focusing enforcement of federal drug laws on racial and ethnic minorities. In the capital city of Washington, D.C., three out of four young African American males are expected to serve time in prison.[12] While studies show that quantitatively Americans of different races consume illegal drugs at similar rates,[13][verification needed] in some states black men have been sent to prison on drug charges at rates twenty to fifty times those of white men.[14] The proportion of African American men with some sort of criminal record approaches 80% in some major US cities, and they become marginalized, part of what Alexander calls "a growing and permanent undercaste".[15][16]
Alexander maintains that this undercaste is hidden from view, invisible within a maze of rationalizations, with mass incarceration its most serious manifestation. Alexander borrows from the term "racial caste", as it is commonly used in scientific literature, to create "undercaste", denoting a "stigmatized racial group locked into inferior position by law and custom". By mass incarceration she refers to the web of laws, rules, policies and customs that make up the criminal justice system and which serve as a gateway to permanent marginalization in the undercaste. Once released from prison, new members of this undercaste face a "hidden underworld of legalized discrimination and permanent social exclusion".[17]
According to Alexander, crime and punishment are poorly correlated, and the present US criminal justice system has effectively become a system of social control unparalleled in any other Western democracy, with its targets largely defined by race. The rate of incarceration in the US has soared, while its crime rates have generally remained similar to those of other Western countries, where incarceration rates have remained stable. The current rate of incarceration in the US is six to ten times greater than in other industrialized nations, and Alexander maintains that this disparity is not correlated to the fluctuation of crime rates, but can be traced mostly to the artificially invoked War on Drugs and its associated discriminatory policies.[18] The US embarked on an unprecedented expansion of its juvenile detention and prison systems.[19][20]
Alexander notes that the civil rights community has been reluctant to get involved in this issue, concentrating primarily on protecting affirmative action gains, which mainly benefit an elite group of high-achieving African Americans. At the other end of the social spectrum are the young black men who are under active control of the criminal justice system (currently in prison, or on parole or probation)—approximately one-third of the young black men in the US. Criminal justice was not listed as a top priority of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights in 2007 and 2008, or of the Congressional Black Caucus in 2009. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) have been involved in legal action, and grassroots campaigns have been organized, however Alexander feels that generally there is a lack of appreciation of the enormity of the crisis. According to her, mass incarceration is "the most damaging manifestation of the backlash against the Civil Rights Movement", and those who feel that the election of Barack Obama represents the ultimate "triumph over race", and that race no longer matters, are dangerously misguided.[21]
Alexander writes that Americans are ashamed of their racial history, and therefore avoid talking about race, or even class, so the terms used in her book may seem unfamiliar to many. Americans want to believe that everybody is capable of upward mobility, given enough effort on his or her part; this assumption forms a part of the national collective self-image. Alexander points out that a large percentage of African Americans are hindered by the discriminatory practices of an ostensibly colorblind criminal justice system, which end up creating an undercaste where upward mobility is severely constrained.[citation needed]
Alexander believes that the existence of the New Jim Crow system is not disproved by the election of Barack Obama and other examples of exceptional achievement among African Americans, but on the contrary the New Jim Crow system depends on such exceptionalism. She contends that the system does not require overt racial hostility or bigotry on the part of another racial group or groups. Indifference is sufficient to support the system. Alexander argues that the system reflects an underlying racial ideology and will not be significantly disturbed by half-measures such as laws mandating shorter prison sentences. Like its predecessors, the new system of racial control has been largely immune from legal challenge. She writes that a human tragedy is unfolding, and The New Jim Crow is intended to stimulate a much-needed national discussion "about the role of the criminal justice system in creating and perpetuating racial hierarchy in the United States".[22]
Court cases discussed
A
Alexander v. Sandoval, 532 U.S. 275 (2001)
Armstrong v. United States, 182 U.S. 243 (1901)
Atwater v. City of Lago Vista, 532 U.S. 318 (2001)
B
Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U.S. 79 (1986)
Brownfield v. South Carolina, 189 U.S. 426 (1903)
Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954)
C
California v. Acevedo, 500 U.S. 565, 600 (1991)
City of Los Angeles v. Lyons, 461 U.S. 95, 105 (1983)
Cotton v. Fordice, 157 F.3d 388 (5th Cir. 1998)
D
Department of Housing and Urban Development v. Rucker, 535 U.S. 125 (2002)
Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (How. 19) 393 (1857)
F
Florida v. Bostick, 501 U.S. 429, 441 (1991)
Florida v. Kerwick, 512 So.2d 347, 349 (Fla. App. 4 Dist. 1987)
G
Gibson v. Mississippi, 162 U.S. 565 (1896)
Gideon v. Wainwright, 372 U.S. 335 (1963)
H
Harmelin v. Michigan, 501 U.S. 967 (1991)
Hutto v. Davis, 454 U.S. 370 (1982)
I
Illinois v. Caballes, 543 U.S. 405 (2005)
Illinois Migrant Council v. Pilliod, 398 F. Supp. 882, 899 (N.D. Ill. 1975)
L
Lockyer v. Andrade, 538 U.S. 63 (2003)
M
McCleskey v. Kemp, 481 U.S. 279, 327 (1989)
McLaurin v. Oklahoma, 339 U.S. 637 (1950)
Monell v. Department of Social Services of the City of New York, 436 U.S. 658 (1978)
Miller El v. Cockrell, 537 U.S. 322 (2003)
N
Neal v. Delaware, 103 U.S. 370 (1880)
O
Ohio v. Robinette, 519 U.S. 33 (1996)
P
Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896)
Purkett v. Elm, 514 U.S. 756, 771 n. 4 (1995)
Q
Quern v. Jordan, 440 U.S. 332 (1979)
R
Rucker v. Davis, 237 F.3d 1113 (9th Cir. 2001)
Ruffin. v. Commonwealth(Virginia) (Note: the index cites this as “Ruffing” and an endnote states “Puffin” research and a best guess indicates the intent was “Ruffin”.)
S
Schneckloth v. Bustamonte, 412 U.S. 218 (1973)
Skinner v. Railway Labor Executive Association, 489 U.S. 602, 641 (1980)
Smith v. Allwright, 321 U.S. 649 (1944)
State v. Rutherford, 93 Ohio App. 3d 586, 593-95, 639 N.E. 2d 498, 503– 4, n. 3 (Ohio Ct. App. 1994)
State v. Soto, 324 N.J.Super. 66, 69-77, 83-85, 734 A.2d 350, 352-56, 360 (N.J. Super. Ct. Law Div. 1996)
Strauder v. West Virginia, 100 U.S. 303, 308 (1880)
Smith v. Mississippi, 162 U.S. 592 (1896)
Swain v. Alabama, 380 U.S. 202 (1965)
T
Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1 (1968)
U
United States v. Brignoni-Ponce, 422 U.S. 873 (1975)
United States v. Carolene Products Co., 301 U.S. 144, n. 4 (1938)
United States v. Clary, 846 F.Supp. 768, 796-797 (E.D.Mo. 1994)
United States v. Flowers, 912 F. 2d 707, 708 (4th Cir. 1990)
United States v. Lewis, 921 F. 2d 1294, 1296 (1990)
United States v. Martinez-Fuerte, 428 U.S. 543 (1976)
United States v. One Parcel of Real Estate Located at 9818 S.W. 94 Terrace, 788 F. Supp. 561, 565 (S.D. Fla. 1992)
United States v. Place, 462 U.S. 696 (1983)
United States v. Reese, 92 U.S. 214 (1876)
W
Whren v. United States, 517 U.S. 806 (1996)
Will v. Michigan Department of State Police, 491 U.S. 58 (1989)
Y
Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 118 U.S. 356, 373-74 (1886)
Defining "incarceration"
Edit
Alexander states in the book: "I was careful to define "mass incarceration" to include those who were subject to state control outside of prison walls, as well as those who were locked in literal cages."[23] The scope of Alexander's definition of "incarceration" includes people who have been arrested (but not tried), people on parole and people who have been released but labelled as "criminals". Alexander's definition is intentionally much broader than the subset of individuals currently in physical detention.
Reception
Awards
Notes
References
External links
Last edited 1 month ago by Citation bot
RELATED ARTICLES
Michelle Alexander
American lawyer (born 1967)
Crack epidemic in the United States
Drug epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s
Race and the war on drugs
Wikipedia
Content is available under CC BY-SA 4.0 unless otherwise noted.
Privacy policy Terms of Use Desktop
FELLAS ! SURRENDER IN THE BATTLE OF THE SEXES , BECAUSE WHAT'S GOOD FOR THE GOOSE IS GOOD FOR THE GANDER
FELLAS ! SURRENDER IN THE BATTLE OF THE SEXES , BECAUSE WHAT'S GOOD FOR THE GOOSE IS GOOD FOR THE GANDER
AS BIG DADDY KARL MARX SAYS :
The direct, natural, and necessary relation of person to person is the relation of man to woman. In this natural species-relationship man’s relation to nature is immediately his relation to man, just as his relation to man is immediately his relation to nature – his own natural destination. In this relationship, therefore, is sensuously manifested, reduced to an observable fact, the extent to which the human essence has become nature to man, or to which nature to him has become the human essence of man. From this relationship one can therefore judge man’s whole level of development. From the character of this relationship follows how much man as a species-being, as man, has come to be himself and to comprehend himself; the relation of man to woman is the most natural relation of human being to human being. It therefore reveals the extent to which man’s natural behaviour has become human, or the extent to which the human essence in him has become a natural essence – the extent to which his human nature has come to be natural to him. This relationship also reveals the extent to which man’s need has become a human need; the extent to which, therefore, the other person as a person has become for him a need – the extent to which he in his individual existence is at the same time a social being.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/comm.htm
http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2023/06/in-preface-to-origin-of-family-private.html
http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2014/08/men-must-surrender-in-battle-of-sexes.htm
http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2023/06/httpswww_25.html
Labor Power August 14, 2014
http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2014/08/men-must-surrender-in-battle-of-sexes.htm
Men must surrender in the Battle of the Sexes Reform in woman-man power relations in the US
"Men must surrender in the Battle of the Sexes " - John Henry
http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2014/08/men-must-surrender-in-battle-of-sexes.html
In the US, in the last fifty years, feminism has won significant victories in the law of divorce and child care, material child support from men to women enforced by the state power, thereby making significant advances in a critical area of "the personal being political" or woman-man equality of power. I'd say of the main political movements, the women's liberation movement has made the most gains in the US in the recent decades. Readily available divorce or no-fault divorce is a cornerstone 'personal is political" or "personal relations are power relations" plank of the women's liberation movement.
It was in the first Constitution of the Soviet Union back in 1918 or so. It was recently attained in the US fifty or sixty years after being won in the Soviet Union. Divorce at the will of the woman ( or man) is an extraordinary and qualitative change of the bourgeois institution of marriage. It becomes the basis for child support to the woman mainly and at the will of the women when coupled with overwhelming majority of awards of custody of minor children to the mother. This combination of legal elements is a basically a radical reform in woman-man power relations in the US.
The first progressive act of the Obama administration was to pass a pay equity for women act. This is a long term main goal of the working class or materialist women's liberation movement, equal pay for equal work. Clara Zetkin, historical leader of the working class or materialist women's liberation movement
http://www.marxists.org/archive/zetkin/
Clara Zetkin Internet Archive
Zetkin, Clara (1857-1933) A prominent figure in the German and international workers' movement, most notably in the struggles womens workers' movement. From 1895, a National Executive member of the German SPD, and on its left-wing; member of the Bookbinders Union in Stuttgart, and active in the Tailors and Seamstresses Union, becoming its provisional International Secretary in 1896, despite the fact that it was illegal for women to be members of trade unions in Germany at that time. As Secretary of the International Bureau of Socialist Women, Zetkin organised the Socialist Women's Conference in March 1915. Along with Alexandre Kollontai, Zetkin fought for unrestricted suffrage, and against the 'bourgeois feminist' position supporting the restriction of the vote by property or income. Zetkin and Rosa Luxemburg led the left-wing and waged a fierce struggle against revisionism as well as the center represented by Kautsky. During the War joined the Spartacists along with Luxemburg and Liebknecht. A founding member of the German Communist Party in 1918 along with comrades including Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. Became a delegate to the Reichstag from 1920; secretary of the International Women's Secretariat and member of the Executive Committee of the Communist International from 1921, but lived in Russia from 1924 until her death in 1933.
Writings: Only in Conjunction With the Proletarian Woman Will Socialism Be Victorious, October 1896
The Workers’ International Festival, May 1899
May Greetings from Stuttgart, May 1900
Social-Democracy & Woman Suffrage, 1906
For Adult Suffrage, May 1909
German Socialist Women’s Movement, October 1909
A Greeting from Abroad, May 1913
August Bebel Obituary, August 1913
German Women to Their Sisters in Great Britain, December 1913
The Duty of Working Women in War-Time, November 1914
The Women of Germany to the Women of Great Britain, January 1915
Rosa Luxemburg (intro to the Junius Pamphlet), May 1919
Karl Liebknecht, September 1919
Rosa Luxemburg, September 1919
Hail to the Third Socialist International!, 1919
In Defence of Rosa Luxemburg, 1919
Through Dictatorship to Democracy, 1919
The Situation in Germany, 1920
' Lenin on the Women’s Question A May-Day Message from Germany Clara Zetkin in Moscow Fraternal Greetings to the Communist Unity Convention, 1920 The Struggle Against New Imperialistic Wars, 1922 Organising Working Women, 1922 The Russian Revolution & the Fourth Congress of the Comintern, 1922 From the International of Word to the International of Deed World Wide Field of Activity of the Comintern To the Congress of the German Communist Party Fascism, August 1923 Reminiscences of Lenin, 1924 From My Memorandum Book (An Interview with Lenin on the Woman Question) 2 hrs · I LOVE Bernie Sanders Bernie Sanders's photo. cb at 9:09 AM Share 1 comment: W Reply ‹ › Home View web version About Me My photo cb Life is a date with the Earth. Eat, drink and be merry, and save the world ! I'm a what's-good-for-the-goose-is-good-for-the-gander feminist. Peace, love ; live long and prosper.
AS BIG DADDY KARL MARX SAYS :
The direct, natural, and necessary relation of person to person is the relation of man to woman. In this natural species-relationship man’s relation to nature is immediately his relation to man, just as his relation to man is immediately his relation to nature – his own natural destination. In this relationship, therefore, is sensuously manifested, reduced to an observable fact, the extent to which the human essence has become nature to man, or to which nature to him has become the human essence of man. From this relationship one can therefore judge man’s whole level of development. From the character of this relationship follows how much man as a species-being, as man, has come to be himself and to comprehend himself; the relation of man to woman is the most natural relation of human being to human being. It therefore reveals the extent to which man’s natural behaviour has become human, or the extent to which the human essence in him has become a natural essence – the extent to which his human nature has come to be natural to him. This relationship also reveals the extent to which man’s need has become a human need; the extent to which, therefore, the other person as a person has become for him a need – the extent to which he in his individual existence is at the same time a social being.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/comm.htm
http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2023/06/in-preface-to-origin-of-family-private.html
http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2014/08/men-must-surrender-in-battle-of-sexes.htm
http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2023/06/httpswww_25.html
Labor Power August 14, 2014
http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2014/08/men-must-surrender-in-battle-of-sexes.htm
Men must surrender in the Battle of the Sexes Reform in woman-man power relations in the US
"Men must surrender in the Battle of the Sexes " - John Henry
http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2014/08/men-must-surrender-in-battle-of-sexes.html
In the US, in the last fifty years, feminism has won significant victories in the law of divorce and child care, material child support from men to women enforced by the state power, thereby making significant advances in a critical area of "the personal being political" or woman-man equality of power. I'd say of the main political movements, the women's liberation movement has made the most gains in the US in the recent decades. Readily available divorce or no-fault divorce is a cornerstone 'personal is political" or "personal relations are power relations" plank of the women's liberation movement.
It was in the first Constitution of the Soviet Union back in 1918 or so. It was recently attained in the US fifty or sixty years after being won in the Soviet Union. Divorce at the will of the woman ( or man) is an extraordinary and qualitative change of the bourgeois institution of marriage. It becomes the basis for child support to the woman mainly and at the will of the women when coupled with overwhelming majority of awards of custody of minor children to the mother. This combination of legal elements is a basically a radical reform in woman-man power relations in the US.
The first progressive act of the Obama administration was to pass a pay equity for women act. This is a long term main goal of the working class or materialist women's liberation movement, equal pay for equal work. Clara Zetkin, historical leader of the working class or materialist women's liberation movement
http://www.marxists.org/archive/zetkin/
Clara Zetkin Internet Archive
Zetkin, Clara (1857-1933) A prominent figure in the German and international workers' movement, most notably in the struggles womens workers' movement. From 1895, a National Executive member of the German SPD, and on its left-wing; member of the Bookbinders Union in Stuttgart, and active in the Tailors and Seamstresses Union, becoming its provisional International Secretary in 1896, despite the fact that it was illegal for women to be members of trade unions in Germany at that time. As Secretary of the International Bureau of Socialist Women, Zetkin organised the Socialist Women's Conference in March 1915. Along with Alexandre Kollontai, Zetkin fought for unrestricted suffrage, and against the 'bourgeois feminist' position supporting the restriction of the vote by property or income. Zetkin and Rosa Luxemburg led the left-wing and waged a fierce struggle against revisionism as well as the center represented by Kautsky. During the War joined the Spartacists along with Luxemburg and Liebknecht. A founding member of the German Communist Party in 1918 along with comrades including Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. Became a delegate to the Reichstag from 1920; secretary of the International Women's Secretariat and member of the Executive Committee of the Communist International from 1921, but lived in Russia from 1924 until her death in 1933.
Writings: Only in Conjunction With the Proletarian Woman Will Socialism Be Victorious, October 1896
The Workers’ International Festival, May 1899
May Greetings from Stuttgart, May 1900
Social-Democracy & Woman Suffrage, 1906
For Adult Suffrage, May 1909
German Socialist Women’s Movement, October 1909
A Greeting from Abroad, May 1913
August Bebel Obituary, August 1913
German Women to Their Sisters in Great Britain, December 1913
The Duty of Working Women in War-Time, November 1914
The Women of Germany to the Women of Great Britain, January 1915
Rosa Luxemburg (intro to the Junius Pamphlet), May 1919
Karl Liebknecht, September 1919
Rosa Luxemburg, September 1919
Hail to the Third Socialist International!, 1919
In Defence of Rosa Luxemburg, 1919
Through Dictatorship to Democracy, 1919
The Situation in Germany, 1920
' Lenin on the Women’s Question A May-Day Message from Germany Clara Zetkin in Moscow Fraternal Greetings to the Communist Unity Convention, 1920 The Struggle Against New Imperialistic Wars, 1922 Organising Working Women, 1922 The Russian Revolution & the Fourth Congress of the Comintern, 1922 From the International of Word to the International of Deed World Wide Field of Activity of the Comintern To the Congress of the German Communist Party Fascism, August 1923 Reminiscences of Lenin, 1924 From My Memorandum Book (An Interview with Lenin on the Woman Question) 2 hrs · I LOVE Bernie Sanders Bernie Sanders's photo. cb at 9:09 AM Share 1 comment: W Reply ‹ › Home View web version About Me My photo cb Life is a date with the Earth. Eat, drink and be merry, and save the world ! I'm a what's-good-for-the-goose-is-good-for-the-gander feminist. Peace, love ; live long and prosper.
For women's liberation: a comradely critique of the Manifesto
http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2014/07/for-womens-liberation-comradely.html
Labor Power
Wednesday, July 30, 2014
For women's liberation: a comradely critique of the Manifesto
http://www.politicalaffairs.net/for-women-s-liberation-a-comradely-critique-of-the-manifesto/
FELLAS ! SURRENDER IN THE BATTLE OF THE SEXES , BECAUSE WHAT'S GOOD FOR THE GOOSE IS GOOD FOR THE GANDER
by: Charles Brown July 29 2014 tags: Marx, Engels, Origins of the family, caring labor
By The Manifesto of the Communist Party, every Marxist knows the A,B,C's of historical materialism or the materialist conception of history. The history of all human society, since the breaking up of the ancient communes, is a history of class struggles between oppressor and oppressed. Classes are groups that associate in a division of labor to produce their material means of existence. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels asserted an elementary anthropological, or "human nature", rationale for this conception. In a section titled "History: Fundamental Conditions" they say:
"... life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things. The first historical act is thus the production of material life itself. And indeed this is a ... fundamental condition of all history, which today, as thousands of years ago, must daily and hourly be fulfilled merely in order to sustain human life."
Production and economic classes are the starting point of Marxist analysis of human society, including in the Manifesto, because human life, like all plant and animal life must fulfill biological needs to exist as life at all. Whatever, humans do that is "higher" than plants and animals, we cannot do if we do not first fulfill our plant/animal like needs. Therefore, the "higher" human activities are limited by the productive activities. This means that historical materialism starts with human nature, our natural species qualities.
Yet, it is fundamental in biology that the basic life sustaining processes of a species are twofold. There is, in the first place, obtaining the material means of life and subsistence, or survival, of the living generation ("production"). But just as fundamentally there is reproduction or success in creating a next generation of the species that is fertile, and survives until it too reproduces viable offspring. Whoever heard of a one generation species? In fact, one test of two individual animals being of the same species is their ability to mate and produce viable , FERTILE offspring. We can imagine a group of living beings with the ultimate success in eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things. But if they do not reproduce, either they are not a species or they are an extinct species (unless they are immortal). Thus, having premised their theory in part on human biology, our "species-being", Marx and Engels were obligated to develop historical materialism, the theory of the Manifesto, based not only on the logic of subsistence production, but also on the logic of next generation reproduction.
In The German Ideology, they do recognize reproduction as a "fundamental condition of history" along with production. However, they give reproduction, or at least, "the family" a subordinate "fundamental" status when they say:
"The third circumstance, which from the very outset, enters into historical development, is that men, who daily remake their own life begin to make other men, to propagate their kind: the relation between man and woman, parents and children, the family. The family, which to begin with is the only social relationship, becomes later, when increased needs create new social relations and the increased population new needs, a subordinate one..." My thesis in this comradely critique is that the mode of reproduction (in the broad sense, including, but not limited to social institutions called "the family") of human beings remains, throughout human history, equally fundamental with the mode of production in shaping society. This is true even after classes arise, even with the "new social relations" that come with "increased population." For there to be history in the sense of many generations of men and women all of the way up to Marx, Engels and us today, men had to do more than "begin to make other men." Women and men had to complete making next generations by sexually uniting and rearing them for thousands of years. Otherwise history would have ended long ago. We would be an extinct species. An essential characteristic of history is its existence in the "medium" of multiple generations. Thus, with respect to historical materialism, reproduction is as necessary as production. The upshot is women's liberation must be put on the same footing with workers' liberation in the Marxist project.
Not only did Marx and Engels in The German Ideology give reproduction a "subordinate" fundamental status compared with production. They did it by the following sleight of hand: in part population increase or the success of reproduction somehow makes reproduction less important in "entering into historical development" as a "fundamental condition" (or "primary historical relation" in another translation, or "basic aspect of social activity" in another).
This is quite a misogynist dialectic, given that "men" are in the first premise and the third premise, but women only are mentioned explicitly in the latter. It is also an idealist philosophical error, because the theory now tends to abstract from the real social life of individuals in reproduction. Another passage in The German Ideology demonstrates the same sort of magical rather than scientific use of "dialectic" with respect to reproduction, and in this case the impact on the materialist philosophical consistency of their argument is more direct and explicit. They say:
"Only now, after having considered four moments, four aspects of primary historical relations, do we find that man also possesses "consciousness". But even from the outset this is not "pure" consciousness. The "mind" is from the outset afflicted with the curse of being "burdened" with matter, which here makes its appearance in the form of agitated layers of air, sounds, in short, of language. Language is as old as consciousness...language like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men...Consciousness is, therefore, from the very beginning a social product, and remains so as long as men exist at all. Consciousness is at first of course, merely consciousness concerning the immediate sensuous environment and consciousness of the limited connection with other persons and things outside the individual who is growing self-conscious... This sheep-like or tribal consciousness receives further development or extension through increased productivity, the increase in needs, and, what is fundamental to both of these, the increase in population. With these there develops the division of labor, which was originally nothing but the division of labor in the sexual act, then the division of labor which develops spontaneously or "naturally" by virtue of natural predisposition (e.g. physical strength, needs, accidents, etc.) Division of labor becomes truly such from the moment when a division of material and mental labor appears. From this moment onwards consciousness can really flatter itself that it is something other than consciousness of existing practice, that it really represents something without representing something real (as the semioticians' signifier is arbitrarily related to what it signifies-C.B); from now on consciousness is in a position to emancipate itself from the world and to proceed to formation of "pure" theory, theology, philosophy, morality, etc."
In this paragraph, we see that Marx and Engels's early formulation and explanation of the origin of what Engels later famously dubbed the fundamental question of philosophy (materialism or idealism?) is rooted in the "second" original division of labor. For some reason, the "first" original division of labor, which gives women equivalent complementary status with men, just disappears and is replaced by a productive division of labor, between "men's" minds and hands. And to make it worse, once again, the "reason" the reproductive division of labor disappears as an ongoing fundamental determinant throughout history is its own success in creating a population explosion. This seems to be an error of substituting a negative and destructive dialectic in thought for what is the most fundamentally positive and fruitful dialectic in human history--reproduction. Here is a key connecting point: then Marx and Engels (whom I love dearly) substitute for the reproductive division of labor a productive division of labor as the fundamentally determining contradiction of historical development. This division of labor, between predominantly mental and predominantly physical labor, becomes the root of development of classes, the importance of which is declared in the first sentence of the Manifesto.
Yet, Marx and Engels commit the same error of abstraction at one level that they criticize at the next level: the error of mental laborers in abstracting from the concrete reality of physical labor. In addition, they keep depending on "population increase", which is another name for reproduction and "the sexual act", to explain the origin of increased "productivity" and "needs". These, in turn, seem to be the "premises" for the division between material and mental labor (and are because of the role of material surpluses in making possible the creation of the class of predominantly mental laborers). Thus, we might say that the original idealist philosophical inconsistency of Marxist materialism is abstraction from reproduction. For a fuller historical materialism, the theories of workers' liberation and women's liberation must be integrated. This may be done on the basis of Marx and Engels's fundamental logic carried out more consistently. Feminism, therefore, is derived from, not added on to, the original premises.
By 1884, with the impact of anthropological studies (and perhaps greater interaction with women in his maturity) in the Preface to the First Edition of The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Engels says:
"According to the materialistic conception, the decisive element of history is pre-eminently the production and reproduction of life and its material requirements. This implies, on the one hand, the production of the means of existence (food, clothing, shelter and the necessary tools); on the other hand, the generation of children, the propagation of the species. The social institutions, under which the people of a certain historical period and of a certain country are living, are dependent on these tow forms of production; partly on the development of labor, partly on that of the family."
The change in this formulation from that in The German Ideology supports our fundamental thesis in this essay: that reproduction is an equally fundamental, not a subordinate, process with production in shaping society from its origins to modern (and post-modern) times. But Engels's formulation in The Origin is after Marx's death and late in their heroic joint project in developing Marxism. Thus, the main classic writings of Marxism, and Marx and Engels's political activity, focused on production and political economy, not the family and the other institutions of reproduction. The Origin's is the best scientific formulation of the materialistic conception of history, even when we consider that "the family" is, in later stages of history, surrounded by larger social institutions, as asserted in the passage from The German Ideology, quoted above.
Even under capitalism, many of the social relations and institutions that are quantitatively greater then those in the "nuclear" family (See anthropologist G.P. Murdock on the "nuclear" family) are part of reproduction, such as school and training, as well as medical services and recreation. More importantly, reproduction and production have qualitatively different functions, both fundamental in constituting the existence of our species, our species-being. In other words, not only are reproductive relations not quantitatively less important in determining history, but from the beginning, from the true original division of labor as in the sexual act, reproduction has had a qualitatively, necessarily complementary relation with production in creating history. From the standpoint of our uniquely human character (our culture), it might be said that production makes objects and reproduction creates subjects.
Thus, problems in dealing with subjectivity in the history of Marxism (see my "Activist Materialism and the ' End ' of Philosophy") may in part be remedied by rethinking Marxism based on equating and even privileging reproduction over production in interpreting and acting to change the world.
This becomes especially important when we consider that there is now for Marxism a scientific, materialist, truth-seeking and urgent need for intellectual affirmative action in using empirical study of reproduction to re-explain history to compensate for the sole focus on production. Reproduction has always been scientifically coequal, as demonstrated by Marx and Engels's clipped comments and "admissions" quoted previously. They never refute their own words about the importance of reproduction in historical materialist theory. They simply (and uncharacteristically) fail to develop one of their own stated fundamental materialist premises. Living Marxists must creatively redevelop historical materialism based on this compensation.
Dialectical materialism holds that the relationship between subject and object is dialectical, of course. It is "vulgar" materialism that portrays the subject as one-sidedly determined by the object. Reproduction and production are complementary opposites, and their unity in struggle is the fundamental motive force of history today as in ancient times. However, when I say "reproduction creates subjects", I mean reproduction in a broader sense than only sexual conception and birth. Reproduction includes all child-rearing, from the home through all school and any other type of training. It is all "caring labor" as defined by Hilary Graham in "Caring: A Labour of Love" (1983). Reproduction is all of those labors that have, as a direct and main purpose, making and caring for a human subject or personality as contrasted with those labors of production which have as a direct purpose making objects useful to humans. Reproduction includes affirmative self-creation.
A wikipedia item gives a fuller definition of what I call "caring labor". "Care work is a sub-category of work that includes all tasks that directly involve care processes done in service of others. Often, it is differentiated from other forms of work because it is intrinsically motivated, meaning that people are motivated to pursue care work for internal reasons, not related to money.[1] Another factor that is often used to differentiate caring labor from other types of work is the motivating factor. This perspective defines care labor as labor undertaken out of affection or a sense of responsibility for other people, with no expectation of immediate pecuniary reward.[2] Despite the importance of this intrinsic motivation factor, care work includes care activities done for pay as well as those done without remuneration.
Specifically, care work refers to those occupations that provide services that help people develop their capabilities, or their ability to pursue the aspects of their life that they value. Examples of these occupations include child care, all levels of teaching (from preschool through university professors), and health care of all types (nurses, doctors, physical therapists and psychologists).[3] Care work also includes the array of domestic unpaid work that is often disproportionately done by women.[4] Often, care work focuses on the responsibilities to provide for dependents--children, the sick, and the elderly.[5] However, care work also refers to any work done in the immediate service of others, regardless of the recipient's dependent or nondependent status. Care work is becoming a popular topic for academic study and discussion. This study is closely linked with the field of feminist economics and is associated with scholars including Nancy Folbre, Paula England, Maria Floro, Diane Elson, Caren Grown and Virginia Held" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Care_work
Under capitalism with alienation, production's impact in making subjects is primarily "negative" or indirect. Conversely, reproduction indirectly makes objects, in the sense that the subject, the human laborer, who is the direct and "positive" purpose of reproduction, is the possessor of labor power, the active factor making objects in production (directly). Production makes objects; reproduction creates subjects. This conception of reproduction is consistent with Marx's basic reasoning in Capital. In his famous development of the concept of the labor theory of value (beyond Adam Smith and Ricardo) and surplus value, he asserts that human labor is the only source of new value in the production process. The human laborer and the means of production (tools and raw materials) all add exchange value to a commodity. But the means of production add no more value to the commodity than the values added to them by a previous human laborer in the production of the means of production. The human labor power is the only element in the process that can add more value to the commodity than the values that went into producing the labor power itself. The labor of a worker in one-half day (or now one-quarter of a day) produces enough value to pay for the necessities creating the worker's labor power for a full day's work. The value produced by the worker in the second half of the day is the surplus value exploited by the capitalist. The creation of the worker's labor power is done in reproduction, in the broad sense we have been using that concept here. Thus, reproduction is the "only source" of the only source of new value. Subjectivity is the "source" of the unique ability (over the means of production) of the human component in the production process to produce more value than went into producing it.
Subjectivity is the source of a sort of Marxist "mind over matter." Reproduction is the source of subjectivity. In relation to the discussion of the primacy of reproduction as the original division of labor (as Marx and Engels said) over the division of predominantly material and predominantly mental labor, we might deduce that it was (and is) within reproduction that the mind and matter are non-antagonistically related as opposites (when "men" were simultaneously theoreticians in their practice as mentioned in "The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844").
Sociology and common experience teach that historically, women have been the primary reproductive laborers - from childrearing to housework, from elementary and high school teaching to nursing. Beyond pregnancy, women's "assignment" to reproductive roles is historically and ideologically caused, not biologically or genetically caused or necessary (see, for example, Not in Our Genes, by Richard Lewontin, et al.). But as a result, women are, historically, an exploited and oppressed reproductive class, whose defining labor is as fundamental to our material life as that of the productive laborers on whom Marx and Engels focused. Thus, the materialist conception of history and the new Red Feather Manifesto, must be modified, and women's liberation put on equal footing with workers'(women's and men's) liberation in the Marxist project. It is especially incumbent on male Marxists to be and to be known as champions of feminism and Women's Liberatiin
---- Charles Brown is a political activist in Detroit, Michigan. He has degrees in anthropology, and is a member of the bar. His favorite slogan is "All Power to the People!" The Dialectics and Materialism of Reproduction: The relationship between systems of reproduction and modes of production is probably the least developed and understood aspect of historical materialism. The reason Marxism is a real social science and not a faux bourgeoisie social science is its starting point, the basic biological processes of production and reproduction. The two systems are complementary and produce/reproduce not only the surplus the ruling classes live off of, but also the working classes who produce the surplus. How the two systems intersect is what produces exploited and oppressed social classes. This is true of women who experience double exploitation, once as workers and again as subordinate members of hierarchal and patriarchal systems of reproduction. The author speculates on why the greater emphasizes on production over reproduction. But it is more imperative that Marxists work for systems of reproduction that advance women’s/worker’s liberation. The Manifesto proclaims Marxist intentions to radically change the world. But the focus is on radically transforming bourgeoisie politics and economics. Socialism will replace capitalism. A real worker’s democracy will replace bourgeoisie democracy. Then why not also proclaim the future of the family, marriage, inheritance and other institutions of reproduction to be gender equality? The bourgeoisie wants to hold as sacred monogamous patriarchy. They accuse communists of wanting to replace patriarchy and fantasize about what will replace it. Engels, from the research of the American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, concludes the origins of the family begin with matriarchy not patriarchy (see E.E.W. Clay’s comments below.) So why are exploitive systems of patriarchy so sacred? Faux bourgeoisie social science has these kinds of built in class prejudices. 19th century bourgeoisie intellectuals, namely Malthus and Ricardo, had nothing but contempt for assumed working class reproductive and sexual behavior. Malthus rejected the poor laws, a living wage, and charity/welfare for the underclasses, and he insisted their numbers be held down with the ‘positive checks’ of war, disease, hunger because these classes lacked ‘moral restraints.’ Are these not the same whacky arguments of 21st century Right-Wing conservatives? Communists should proclaim a future of gender equality in both spheres of production and reproduction and forever end exploitive class divisions. NT Posted by Nat Turner, 08/07/2014 10:17am (3 days ago) The present writer logged a lengthy comment yesterday, that now seems "lost in cyberspace" (however it did, before its lost, appear in the RSS feed). As written in that comment, brother Charles Johnson has a logical point in many ways, his premise solid. As also written there, we can all agree on his conclusion that: "It is especially incumbent on male Marxists to be and to be known as champions of feminism." So much so, we must fight for female male equality and in sharing drudgery in domestic, subjective and reproductive work, including child care, as pointed out by brother Brown. In the middle of Brown's essay he writes: "For a fuller historical materialism, the theories of workers' liberation and women's liberation must be integrated. This may be done on the basis of Marx and Engel's fundamental logic carried out more consistently. Feminism, therefore, is derived from, not added on to, the original premises." Origen of the Family, named in Brown's essay, developed from the work of American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan-and the genius of Karl Marx-it is part of the original premise-along with Engel's The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man, both of which place labor (not sexuality) as the touchstone to the historical process that is historical materialism. In this process, matrilineal descent and matrilocal property were discovered as historical fact. "Labor Omnia Vinci", which is why we will continue to see the bold and genius leadership of a Elizabeth Flynn, a Claudia Jones, a Shirley Graham Du Bois, and an Angela Yvonne Davis. To take from Sterling Brown's poem "Strong Men"-Strong women, "keep coming". As our W. E. B. Du Bois would say, women are men-despite men's self absorption and male God(gods), our self-debasement as men-as we condone oftentimes, the failing attempt to exploit and oppress women. Posted by E.E.W. Clay, 07/30/2014 11:07am (11 days ago) Marx did write the following in 1844: "In the approach to woman as the spoil and hand-maid of communal lust is expressed the infinite degradation in which man exists for himself, for the secret of this approach has its unambiguous, decisive, plain and undisguised expression in the relation of man to woman and in the manner in which the direct and natural species-relationship is conceived. The direct, natural, and necessary relation of person to person is the relation of man to woman. In this natural species-relationship man’s relation to nature is immediately his relation to man, just as his relation to man is immediately his relation to nature – his own natural destination. In this relationship, therefore, is sensuously manifested, reduced to an observable fact, the extent to which the human essence has become nature to man, or to which nature to him has become the human essence of man. From this relationship one can therefore judge man’s whole level of development. From the character of this relationship follows how much man as a species-being, as man, has come to be himself and to comprehend himself; the relation of man to woman is the most natural relation of human being to human being. It therefore reveals the extent to which man’s natural behaviour has become human, or the extent to which the human essence in him has become a natural essence – the extent to which his human nature has come to be natural to him. This relationship also reveals the extent to which man’s need has become a human need; the extent to which, therefore, the other person as a person has become for him a need – the extent to which he in his individual existence is at the same time a social being." https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/comm.htm cb at 5:21 PM Share 2 comments: peggyNovember 19, 2020 at 2:52 PM I insert here 6 years later (Nov 19, 2020) my, apparently heretical to Marxist comrades and feminist sisters alike, view based on logic alone. While yes, I know reproduction (flora as well as fauna) is bi-sexual, and for humans a sperm must fertilize an egg by a male penis entering a female vagina, I also know human gestation is 9 months. I'm willing to 'low that primates or maybe at least hominoids that mutated into homo sapiens had deduced that technology of reproduction is male/female penis/vagina. But I for one strongly suspect it took eons of guesses, observations, calculations and false myths which I call pre-scientific poetic hypotheses to yield a faith, a belief, a religion so to speak, that the seed of life is RAMmed up and planted in the EWEr, uterus. There is pretty good evidence that even after some societies adopted this hypothesis/myth/genesis faith, while interacting, exchanging, trading, and warring with people who did not share their sacred cult, they remained matrilineal. And that is one of many reasons I am grateful to thousands of generations of Jews for transmitting hints about the genesis of the discovery of the technology of reproduction, the emergence of class differences within matrilineal societies between clans exchanging equitable amounts of different forms of labor as marriage contracts, and for suggesting how because the productivity of different forms of labor develops unevenly, the mati-clan/cult to whom credit is due was not the one due to benefit from it; hence the evolution of patri-monies and patriarchy-archies to "restore justice" And yet despite all the sons begotten from sons begotten from sons, thanks be 'ab Ram," Jews remain matrilineal. It's not just jokes about Jewish mothers, and shiksa wives, you really aren't Jewish if your mother isn't. Reply peggySeptember 24, 2021 at 7:47 AM Thanks, Charles, for bringing this back to my attention. I'm grateful for your 2014 comradely critique of the Communist Manifesto. I wish more comrades read it. I'd forgotten my comment last year. Nov 19, coincidentally is my mother's birth date. I still amuse myself playing with the sounds of the English words in which the ancient myths she read me were written. Reply ‹ › Home View web version About Me My photo cb Life is a date with the Earth. Eat, drink and be merry, and save the world ! I'm a what's-good-for-the-goose-is-good-for-the-gander feminist. Peace, love ; live long and prosper. View my complete profile Powered by Blogger.
Labor Power
Wednesday, July 30, 2014
For women's liberation: a comradely critique of the Manifesto
http://www.politicalaffairs.net/for-women-s-liberation-a-comradely-critique-of-the-manifesto/
FELLAS ! SURRENDER IN THE BATTLE OF THE SEXES , BECAUSE WHAT'S GOOD FOR THE GOOSE IS GOOD FOR THE GANDER
by: Charles Brown July 29 2014 tags: Marx, Engels, Origins of the family, caring labor
By The Manifesto of the Communist Party, every Marxist knows the A,B,C's of historical materialism or the materialist conception of history. The history of all human society, since the breaking up of the ancient communes, is a history of class struggles between oppressor and oppressed. Classes are groups that associate in a division of labor to produce their material means of existence. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels asserted an elementary anthropological, or "human nature", rationale for this conception. In a section titled "History: Fundamental Conditions" they say:
"... life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things. The first historical act is thus the production of material life itself. And indeed this is a ... fundamental condition of all history, which today, as thousands of years ago, must daily and hourly be fulfilled merely in order to sustain human life."
Production and economic classes are the starting point of Marxist analysis of human society, including in the Manifesto, because human life, like all plant and animal life must fulfill biological needs to exist as life at all. Whatever, humans do that is "higher" than plants and animals, we cannot do if we do not first fulfill our plant/animal like needs. Therefore, the "higher" human activities are limited by the productive activities. This means that historical materialism starts with human nature, our natural species qualities.
Yet, it is fundamental in biology that the basic life sustaining processes of a species are twofold. There is, in the first place, obtaining the material means of life and subsistence, or survival, of the living generation ("production"). But just as fundamentally there is reproduction or success in creating a next generation of the species that is fertile, and survives until it too reproduces viable offspring. Whoever heard of a one generation species? In fact, one test of two individual animals being of the same species is their ability to mate and produce viable , FERTILE offspring. We can imagine a group of living beings with the ultimate success in eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things. But if they do not reproduce, either they are not a species or they are an extinct species (unless they are immortal). Thus, having premised their theory in part on human biology, our "species-being", Marx and Engels were obligated to develop historical materialism, the theory of the Manifesto, based not only on the logic of subsistence production, but also on the logic of next generation reproduction.
In The German Ideology, they do recognize reproduction as a "fundamental condition of history" along with production. However, they give reproduction, or at least, "the family" a subordinate "fundamental" status when they say:
"The third circumstance, which from the very outset, enters into historical development, is that men, who daily remake their own life begin to make other men, to propagate their kind: the relation between man and woman, parents and children, the family. The family, which to begin with is the only social relationship, becomes later, when increased needs create new social relations and the increased population new needs, a subordinate one..." My thesis in this comradely critique is that the mode of reproduction (in the broad sense, including, but not limited to social institutions called "the family") of human beings remains, throughout human history, equally fundamental with the mode of production in shaping society. This is true even after classes arise, even with the "new social relations" that come with "increased population." For there to be history in the sense of many generations of men and women all of the way up to Marx, Engels and us today, men had to do more than "begin to make other men." Women and men had to complete making next generations by sexually uniting and rearing them for thousands of years. Otherwise history would have ended long ago. We would be an extinct species. An essential characteristic of history is its existence in the "medium" of multiple generations. Thus, with respect to historical materialism, reproduction is as necessary as production. The upshot is women's liberation must be put on the same footing with workers' liberation in the Marxist project.
Not only did Marx and Engels in The German Ideology give reproduction a "subordinate" fundamental status compared with production. They did it by the following sleight of hand: in part population increase or the success of reproduction somehow makes reproduction less important in "entering into historical development" as a "fundamental condition" (or "primary historical relation" in another translation, or "basic aspect of social activity" in another).
This is quite a misogynist dialectic, given that "men" are in the first premise and the third premise, but women only are mentioned explicitly in the latter. It is also an idealist philosophical error, because the theory now tends to abstract from the real social life of individuals in reproduction. Another passage in The German Ideology demonstrates the same sort of magical rather than scientific use of "dialectic" with respect to reproduction, and in this case the impact on the materialist philosophical consistency of their argument is more direct and explicit. They say:
"Only now, after having considered four moments, four aspects of primary historical relations, do we find that man also possesses "consciousness". But even from the outset this is not "pure" consciousness. The "mind" is from the outset afflicted with the curse of being "burdened" with matter, which here makes its appearance in the form of agitated layers of air, sounds, in short, of language. Language is as old as consciousness...language like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men...Consciousness is, therefore, from the very beginning a social product, and remains so as long as men exist at all. Consciousness is at first of course, merely consciousness concerning the immediate sensuous environment and consciousness of the limited connection with other persons and things outside the individual who is growing self-conscious... This sheep-like or tribal consciousness receives further development or extension through increased productivity, the increase in needs, and, what is fundamental to both of these, the increase in population. With these there develops the division of labor, which was originally nothing but the division of labor in the sexual act, then the division of labor which develops spontaneously or "naturally" by virtue of natural predisposition (e.g. physical strength, needs, accidents, etc.) Division of labor becomes truly such from the moment when a division of material and mental labor appears. From this moment onwards consciousness can really flatter itself that it is something other than consciousness of existing practice, that it really represents something without representing something real (as the semioticians' signifier is arbitrarily related to what it signifies-C.B); from now on consciousness is in a position to emancipate itself from the world and to proceed to formation of "pure" theory, theology, philosophy, morality, etc."
In this paragraph, we see that Marx and Engels's early formulation and explanation of the origin of what Engels later famously dubbed the fundamental question of philosophy (materialism or idealism?) is rooted in the "second" original division of labor. For some reason, the "first" original division of labor, which gives women equivalent complementary status with men, just disappears and is replaced by a productive division of labor, between "men's" minds and hands. And to make it worse, once again, the "reason" the reproductive division of labor disappears as an ongoing fundamental determinant throughout history is its own success in creating a population explosion. This seems to be an error of substituting a negative and destructive dialectic in thought for what is the most fundamentally positive and fruitful dialectic in human history--reproduction. Here is a key connecting point: then Marx and Engels (whom I love dearly) substitute for the reproductive division of labor a productive division of labor as the fundamentally determining contradiction of historical development. This division of labor, between predominantly mental and predominantly physical labor, becomes the root of development of classes, the importance of which is declared in the first sentence of the Manifesto.
Yet, Marx and Engels commit the same error of abstraction at one level that they criticize at the next level: the error of mental laborers in abstracting from the concrete reality of physical labor. In addition, they keep depending on "population increase", which is another name for reproduction and "the sexual act", to explain the origin of increased "productivity" and "needs". These, in turn, seem to be the "premises" for the division between material and mental labor (and are because of the role of material surpluses in making possible the creation of the class of predominantly mental laborers). Thus, we might say that the original idealist philosophical inconsistency of Marxist materialism is abstraction from reproduction. For a fuller historical materialism, the theories of workers' liberation and women's liberation must be integrated. This may be done on the basis of Marx and Engels's fundamental logic carried out more consistently. Feminism, therefore, is derived from, not added on to, the original premises.
By 1884, with the impact of anthropological studies (and perhaps greater interaction with women in his maturity) in the Preface to the First Edition of The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Engels says:
"According to the materialistic conception, the decisive element of history is pre-eminently the production and reproduction of life and its material requirements. This implies, on the one hand, the production of the means of existence (food, clothing, shelter and the necessary tools); on the other hand, the generation of children, the propagation of the species. The social institutions, under which the people of a certain historical period and of a certain country are living, are dependent on these tow forms of production; partly on the development of labor, partly on that of the family."
The change in this formulation from that in The German Ideology supports our fundamental thesis in this essay: that reproduction is an equally fundamental, not a subordinate, process with production in shaping society from its origins to modern (and post-modern) times. But Engels's formulation in The Origin is after Marx's death and late in their heroic joint project in developing Marxism. Thus, the main classic writings of Marxism, and Marx and Engels's political activity, focused on production and political economy, not the family and the other institutions of reproduction. The Origin's is the best scientific formulation of the materialistic conception of history, even when we consider that "the family" is, in later stages of history, surrounded by larger social institutions, as asserted in the passage from The German Ideology, quoted above.
Even under capitalism, many of the social relations and institutions that are quantitatively greater then those in the "nuclear" family (See anthropologist G.P. Murdock on the "nuclear" family) are part of reproduction, such as school and training, as well as medical services and recreation. More importantly, reproduction and production have qualitatively different functions, both fundamental in constituting the existence of our species, our species-being. In other words, not only are reproductive relations not quantitatively less important in determining history, but from the beginning, from the true original division of labor as in the sexual act, reproduction has had a qualitatively, necessarily complementary relation with production in creating history. From the standpoint of our uniquely human character (our culture), it might be said that production makes objects and reproduction creates subjects.
Thus, problems in dealing with subjectivity in the history of Marxism (see my "Activist Materialism and the ' End ' of Philosophy") may in part be remedied by rethinking Marxism based on equating and even privileging reproduction over production in interpreting and acting to change the world.
This becomes especially important when we consider that there is now for Marxism a scientific, materialist, truth-seeking and urgent need for intellectual affirmative action in using empirical study of reproduction to re-explain history to compensate for the sole focus on production. Reproduction has always been scientifically coequal, as demonstrated by Marx and Engels's clipped comments and "admissions" quoted previously. They never refute their own words about the importance of reproduction in historical materialist theory. They simply (and uncharacteristically) fail to develop one of their own stated fundamental materialist premises. Living Marxists must creatively redevelop historical materialism based on this compensation.
Dialectical materialism holds that the relationship between subject and object is dialectical, of course. It is "vulgar" materialism that portrays the subject as one-sidedly determined by the object. Reproduction and production are complementary opposites, and their unity in struggle is the fundamental motive force of history today as in ancient times. However, when I say "reproduction creates subjects", I mean reproduction in a broader sense than only sexual conception and birth. Reproduction includes all child-rearing, from the home through all school and any other type of training. It is all "caring labor" as defined by Hilary Graham in "Caring: A Labour of Love" (1983). Reproduction is all of those labors that have, as a direct and main purpose, making and caring for a human subject or personality as contrasted with those labors of production which have as a direct purpose making objects useful to humans. Reproduction includes affirmative self-creation.
A wikipedia item gives a fuller definition of what I call "caring labor". "Care work is a sub-category of work that includes all tasks that directly involve care processes done in service of others. Often, it is differentiated from other forms of work because it is intrinsically motivated, meaning that people are motivated to pursue care work for internal reasons, not related to money.[1] Another factor that is often used to differentiate caring labor from other types of work is the motivating factor. This perspective defines care labor as labor undertaken out of affection or a sense of responsibility for other people, with no expectation of immediate pecuniary reward.[2] Despite the importance of this intrinsic motivation factor, care work includes care activities done for pay as well as those done without remuneration.
Specifically, care work refers to those occupations that provide services that help people develop their capabilities, or their ability to pursue the aspects of their life that they value. Examples of these occupations include child care, all levels of teaching (from preschool through university professors), and health care of all types (nurses, doctors, physical therapists and psychologists).[3] Care work also includes the array of domestic unpaid work that is often disproportionately done by women.[4] Often, care work focuses on the responsibilities to provide for dependents--children, the sick, and the elderly.[5] However, care work also refers to any work done in the immediate service of others, regardless of the recipient's dependent or nondependent status. Care work is becoming a popular topic for academic study and discussion. This study is closely linked with the field of feminist economics and is associated with scholars including Nancy Folbre, Paula England, Maria Floro, Diane Elson, Caren Grown and Virginia Held" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Care_work
Under capitalism with alienation, production's impact in making subjects is primarily "negative" or indirect. Conversely, reproduction indirectly makes objects, in the sense that the subject, the human laborer, who is the direct and "positive" purpose of reproduction, is the possessor of labor power, the active factor making objects in production (directly). Production makes objects; reproduction creates subjects. This conception of reproduction is consistent with Marx's basic reasoning in Capital. In his famous development of the concept of the labor theory of value (beyond Adam Smith and Ricardo) and surplus value, he asserts that human labor is the only source of new value in the production process. The human laborer and the means of production (tools and raw materials) all add exchange value to a commodity. But the means of production add no more value to the commodity than the values added to them by a previous human laborer in the production of the means of production. The human labor power is the only element in the process that can add more value to the commodity than the values that went into producing the labor power itself. The labor of a worker in one-half day (or now one-quarter of a day) produces enough value to pay for the necessities creating the worker's labor power for a full day's work. The value produced by the worker in the second half of the day is the surplus value exploited by the capitalist. The creation of the worker's labor power is done in reproduction, in the broad sense we have been using that concept here. Thus, reproduction is the "only source" of the only source of new value. Subjectivity is the "source" of the unique ability (over the means of production) of the human component in the production process to produce more value than went into producing it.
Subjectivity is the source of a sort of Marxist "mind over matter." Reproduction is the source of subjectivity. In relation to the discussion of the primacy of reproduction as the original division of labor (as Marx and Engels said) over the division of predominantly material and predominantly mental labor, we might deduce that it was (and is) within reproduction that the mind and matter are non-antagonistically related as opposites (when "men" were simultaneously theoreticians in their practice as mentioned in "The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844").
Sociology and common experience teach that historically, women have been the primary reproductive laborers - from childrearing to housework, from elementary and high school teaching to nursing. Beyond pregnancy, women's "assignment" to reproductive roles is historically and ideologically caused, not biologically or genetically caused or necessary (see, for example, Not in Our Genes, by Richard Lewontin, et al.). But as a result, women are, historically, an exploited and oppressed reproductive class, whose defining labor is as fundamental to our material life as that of the productive laborers on whom Marx and Engels focused. Thus, the materialist conception of history and the new Red Feather Manifesto, must be modified, and women's liberation put on equal footing with workers'(women's and men's) liberation in the Marxist project. It is especially incumbent on male Marxists to be and to be known as champions of feminism and Women's Liberatiin
---- Charles Brown is a political activist in Detroit, Michigan. He has degrees in anthropology, and is a member of the bar. His favorite slogan is "All Power to the People!" The Dialectics and Materialism of Reproduction: The relationship between systems of reproduction and modes of production is probably the least developed and understood aspect of historical materialism. The reason Marxism is a real social science and not a faux bourgeoisie social science is its starting point, the basic biological processes of production and reproduction. The two systems are complementary and produce/reproduce not only the surplus the ruling classes live off of, but also the working classes who produce the surplus. How the two systems intersect is what produces exploited and oppressed social classes. This is true of women who experience double exploitation, once as workers and again as subordinate members of hierarchal and patriarchal systems of reproduction. The author speculates on why the greater emphasizes on production over reproduction. But it is more imperative that Marxists work for systems of reproduction that advance women’s/worker’s liberation. The Manifesto proclaims Marxist intentions to radically change the world. But the focus is on radically transforming bourgeoisie politics and economics. Socialism will replace capitalism. A real worker’s democracy will replace bourgeoisie democracy. Then why not also proclaim the future of the family, marriage, inheritance and other institutions of reproduction to be gender equality? The bourgeoisie wants to hold as sacred monogamous patriarchy. They accuse communists of wanting to replace patriarchy and fantasize about what will replace it. Engels, from the research of the American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, concludes the origins of the family begin with matriarchy not patriarchy (see E.E.W. Clay’s comments below.) So why are exploitive systems of patriarchy so sacred? Faux bourgeoisie social science has these kinds of built in class prejudices. 19th century bourgeoisie intellectuals, namely Malthus and Ricardo, had nothing but contempt for assumed working class reproductive and sexual behavior. Malthus rejected the poor laws, a living wage, and charity/welfare for the underclasses, and he insisted their numbers be held down with the ‘positive checks’ of war, disease, hunger because these classes lacked ‘moral restraints.’ Are these not the same whacky arguments of 21st century Right-Wing conservatives? Communists should proclaim a future of gender equality in both spheres of production and reproduction and forever end exploitive class divisions. NT Posted by Nat Turner, 08/07/2014 10:17am (3 days ago) The present writer logged a lengthy comment yesterday, that now seems "lost in cyberspace" (however it did, before its lost, appear in the RSS feed). As written in that comment, brother Charles Johnson has a logical point in many ways, his premise solid. As also written there, we can all agree on his conclusion that: "It is especially incumbent on male Marxists to be and to be known as champions of feminism." So much so, we must fight for female male equality and in sharing drudgery in domestic, subjective and reproductive work, including child care, as pointed out by brother Brown. In the middle of Brown's essay he writes: "For a fuller historical materialism, the theories of workers' liberation and women's liberation must be integrated. This may be done on the basis of Marx and Engel's fundamental logic carried out more consistently. Feminism, therefore, is derived from, not added on to, the original premises." Origen of the Family, named in Brown's essay, developed from the work of American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan-and the genius of Karl Marx-it is part of the original premise-along with Engel's The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man, both of which place labor (not sexuality) as the touchstone to the historical process that is historical materialism. In this process, matrilineal descent and matrilocal property were discovered as historical fact. "Labor Omnia Vinci", which is why we will continue to see the bold and genius leadership of a Elizabeth Flynn, a Claudia Jones, a Shirley Graham Du Bois, and an Angela Yvonne Davis. To take from Sterling Brown's poem "Strong Men"-Strong women, "keep coming". As our W. E. B. Du Bois would say, women are men-despite men's self absorption and male God(gods), our self-debasement as men-as we condone oftentimes, the failing attempt to exploit and oppress women. Posted by E.E.W. Clay, 07/30/2014 11:07am (11 days ago) Marx did write the following in 1844: "In the approach to woman as the spoil and hand-maid of communal lust is expressed the infinite degradation in which man exists for himself, for the secret of this approach has its unambiguous, decisive, plain and undisguised expression in the relation of man to woman and in the manner in which the direct and natural species-relationship is conceived. The direct, natural, and necessary relation of person to person is the relation of man to woman. In this natural species-relationship man’s relation to nature is immediately his relation to man, just as his relation to man is immediately his relation to nature – his own natural destination. In this relationship, therefore, is sensuously manifested, reduced to an observable fact, the extent to which the human essence has become nature to man, or to which nature to him has become the human essence of man. From this relationship one can therefore judge man’s whole level of development. From the character of this relationship follows how much man as a species-being, as man, has come to be himself and to comprehend himself; the relation of man to woman is the most natural relation of human being to human being. It therefore reveals the extent to which man’s natural behaviour has become human, or the extent to which the human essence in him has become a natural essence – the extent to which his human nature has come to be natural to him. This relationship also reveals the extent to which man’s need has become a human need; the extent to which, therefore, the other person as a person has become for him a need – the extent to which he in his individual existence is at the same time a social being." https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/comm.htm cb at 5:21 PM Share 2 comments: peggyNovember 19, 2020 at 2:52 PM I insert here 6 years later (Nov 19, 2020) my, apparently heretical to Marxist comrades and feminist sisters alike, view based on logic alone. While yes, I know reproduction (flora as well as fauna) is bi-sexual, and for humans a sperm must fertilize an egg by a male penis entering a female vagina, I also know human gestation is 9 months. I'm willing to 'low that primates or maybe at least hominoids that mutated into homo sapiens had deduced that technology of reproduction is male/female penis/vagina. But I for one strongly suspect it took eons of guesses, observations, calculations and false myths which I call pre-scientific poetic hypotheses to yield a faith, a belief, a religion so to speak, that the seed of life is RAMmed up and planted in the EWEr, uterus. There is pretty good evidence that even after some societies adopted this hypothesis/myth/genesis faith, while interacting, exchanging, trading, and warring with people who did not share their sacred cult, they remained matrilineal. And that is one of many reasons I am grateful to thousands of generations of Jews for transmitting hints about the genesis of the discovery of the technology of reproduction, the emergence of class differences within matrilineal societies between clans exchanging equitable amounts of different forms of labor as marriage contracts, and for suggesting how because the productivity of different forms of labor develops unevenly, the mati-clan/cult to whom credit is due was not the one due to benefit from it; hence the evolution of patri-monies and patriarchy-archies to "restore justice" And yet despite all the sons begotten from sons begotten from sons, thanks be 'ab Ram," Jews remain matrilineal. It's not just jokes about Jewish mothers, and shiksa wives, you really aren't Jewish if your mother isn't. Reply peggySeptember 24, 2021 at 7:47 AM Thanks, Charles, for bringing this back to my attention. I'm grateful for your 2014 comradely critique of the Communist Manifesto. I wish more comrades read it. I'd forgotten my comment last year. Nov 19, coincidentally is my mother's birth date. I still amuse myself playing with the sounds of the English words in which the ancient myths she read me were written. Reply ‹ › Home View web version About Me My photo cb Life is a date with the Earth. Eat, drink and be merry, and save the world ! I'm a what's-good-for-the-goose-is-good-for-the-gander feminist. Peace, love ; live long and prosper. View my complete profile Powered by Blogger.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)