delicious

A class-reductionist, or so I’ve been told in a discussion on feminism and women’s rights throughout history. As if there aren’t enough -isms and -ists out there already, that one was completely new to me. My point in the discussion was that feminism in the workforce and specifically capitalist feminism is just plain silly. I don’t see the point in fighting for equal wage oppression under the ruling class. That’s where I was so neatly labeled (could have been the third Emma Goldman quote that spurred it).

It was explained to me that a “class-reductionist” is someone who boils all of society’s ills down to class-conflict or merely the fact that classes exist. The fact of the matter is that it’s true. Whether you consider it Marxist or not there is class oppression and classes are there whether people want to see them or not. With the fragile state of the American economy and Bush’s subsequent decimation of the middle class it’s become a social taboo to discuss classes in this country. People look at you like you’re some kind of conspiracy spouting psycho while priests exclaim how “It’s in the Bible! It’s meant to be!”. I would also contest that the people who refuse to admit class-war is a reality are the people who know themselves to be a lower class than they’d like themselves to be in.

I guess the real arguement is whether or not female oppression comes from classism, but that’s a very complicated discussion. Parecon states that they are seperate oppressions that intersect and interact, but I don’t agree with that. There was oppression of women in feudal times as well as pre-feudal times. Some people would like to simplify it down to male chauvenism or sexism, but I don’t agree with that either. Emma Goldman said “No social revolution without female liberation, no female liberation without social revolution”, but I think the goal of the revolution specifically has to be women’s rights and the destruction of the class system or else it’s doomed to failure. Women’s oppression just changes each time there is a revolution.

The only hope for humanity is the inception of a truely classless society. It’s already been proven they work. The Iriquois nation in North America and Canada was a real classless society where women lost power only after european imperialists came over. They were also pre-industrialist, pre-bourgeois. It would stand to reason that the modern class system came with the bourgeoise revolution.