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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   27928 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

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My understanding, roughly, is that classical Marxism, to the extent that it acknowledges patriarchy as a concept at all, holds that patriarchy and gender-based oppression are downstream of economic class.

If there's a difference between our understandings here, I'm not seeing it. So far, so good.

Today I don't think there is an ideologically coherent 'mainline Feminism'.

I would disagree quite strongly. The terms "Patriarchy", "Sexism", and "Misogyny" seem like stable, highly politicized tokens of a highly coherent ideological structure. Likewise "reproductive rights", "women's rights", "women's safety", etc, etc. There can be lots of disagreement over lots of things, even very important things, without an absence of a unifying foundation. As you say:

If I were to generalise, I would say that what makes a person or position 'feminist' today is 1) it is primarily interested in the position of women in society, and 2) it holds that women, as group or class, are in some way disadvantaged, and some sort of collective action is necessary to ameliorate those disadvantages.

..To which one might add additional precision: women as a class are seriously disadvantaged due to the nature and structure of society, and this sum of disadvantages can only be resolved by fundamentally deconstructing and rebuilding the nature of society. Patriarchy in Feminist ideology is isomorphic to Capitalism in Marxist ideology, in much the same way that the Greeks worshiped Ares and the Romans worshiped Mars.

Within that broad heading, there are both Marxist and non-Marxist feminists, and the line can be blurry. Moreover, because Marx is such a massively influential figure in the history of sociology, philosophy, etc., if you search for traces of Marxism in almost any school of social analysis, you're going to find some.

bell hooks is my go-to central example of modern Feminism as an ideological structure. Googling "bell hooks on Marx", first result:

The Black Marxist Feminism of Bell Hooks

This book explores bell hooks' trajectory of work and cohesiveness of thought about the meaning and meaningfulness of black womanhood in terms of a Black Marxist feminism, which uniquely confronts the dimensions of feminism and womanism; the relations between the secular and the religious; the problems of gender and sexism; and the structural and systemic issues of oppression, domination, white supremacy, and capitalism. In making sense of black womanhood in its philosophical, social, cultural, institutional, and historical complexities, hooks' Black Marxist feminism constructs an intersectional theory about what hooks describes as white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. In this sense, hooks' Black Marxist feminism conceptualizes the ways and means by which white supremacist capitalist patriarchy imposes intersectional predicaments upon black womanhood, drawing foundationally on Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels, working within the purview of a host of Marxisms in Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, Karl Kautsky, Nikolai Bukharin, and Georgi Plekhanov, and speaking to the Marxist proclivities of Cedric Robinson, Cornel West, Charles W. Mills, James H. Cone, Stuart Hall, and Angela Y. Davis.

Okay, but this is commentary about bell hooks, not hooks herself. So let's skip several repeat results, and we find:

Challenging Capitalism and Patriarchy: An Interview with bell hooks (apparently republished from "Third World Viewpoint" via the Espresso Stalinist). Pertinent Excerpts:

...I think that what we see globally is that there have been incredible struggles to combat capitalism that haven’t resulted in an end to patriarchy at all. I also think that when we study ancient societies that were not capitalist we see hierarchical systems that privileged maleness in the way that modern patriarchy does. I think we will never destroy patriarchy without questioning, critiquing, and challenging capitalism, and I don’t think challenging capitalism alone will mean a better world for women...

...I think that strategically, we have to start on all fronts. For example, I’m very concerned that there are not more Black women deeply committed to anti-capitalist politics. But one would have to understand the role that gender oppression plays in encouraging young Black females to think that they don’t need to study about capitalism. That they don’t need to read men who were my teachers like Walter Rodney, and Nkrumah, and Amilcar Cabral.
I think that as a girl who grew up in a patriarchal, working-class, Black, southern household there was a convergence of those issues of class and gender. I was acutely aware of my class, and I was acutely aware of the limitations imposed on me by gender. I wouldn’t be the committed worker for freedom that I am today had I not begun to oppose that gendered notion of learning that suggests that politics is the realm of males and that political thinking about anti-racist struggle and colonialism is for men.
I’m very much in favor of the kind of education for critical consciousness that says: Let’s not look at these thing separately. Let’s look at how they converge so that when we begin to take a stand against them, we can take that kind of strategic stance that allows us to be self-determining as a people struggling in a revolutionary way on all fronts...

Absolutely. I think Marxist thought–the work of people like Gramsci–is very crucial to educating ourselves for political consciousness. That doesn’t mean we have to take the sexism or the racism that comes out of those thinkers and disregard it. It means that we extract the resources from their thought that can be useful to us in struggle. A class rooted analysis is where I begin in all my work. The fact is that it was bourgeois white feminism that I was reacting against when I stood in my first women’s studies classes and said, “Black women have always worked.” It was a class-biased challenge to the structure of feminism...

Absolutely. In my newest book, Killing Rage: Ending Racism, one of the big issues I deal with is the degree to which capitalism is being presented as the answer. When people focus on the white mass media’s obsession with Louis Farrakhan, they think the media hate Farrakhan so much. But they don’t hate Farrakhan. They love him. One of the reasons why they love him is that he’s totally pro-capitalist. There is a tremendous overlap in the values of a Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam and the values of the white, Christian right. Part of it is their pro-capitalism, their patriarchy, and their whole-hearted support of homophobia.
Farrakhan’s pro-capitalism encourages a kind of false consciousness in Black life. For example, you have a Rapper like Ice T in his new book, The Ice Opinions, making an astute class analysis when he says that “People live in the ghetto not because they’re Black, but because they’re poor.” But then he goes on to offer capitalism as a solution. This means that he has a total gap in his understanding if he imagines that becoming rich within this society–individual wealth–is somehow a way to redeem Black life. The only hope for us to redeem the material lives of Black people is a call for the redistribution of wealth and resources which is not only a critique of capitalism, but an incredible challenge to capitalism.

I would not generalize that modern, mainline feminists consider their critique to be a refinement of Marxism.

Would you say bell hooks considers her critique to be a refinement of Marxism? For the many, many feminists who draw on bell hooks as an inspiration, and who likewise employ formulations about Capitalist White Supremacist Patriarchy and Late-stage capitalism, would you say that they also appear to consider their critiques to be a refinement of Marxism?

...In any case, we apparently agree that there are Marxist feminists, and I hope I've demonstrated that these are often central examples of most workable definitions of "feminist". Can you provide some clear-cut, central examples of prominent Feminist theorists or intellectuals who are not Marxists?

I think you're assuming a more stable ideology behind some key feminist terms than actually exist. I don't think, for instance, that using the terms 'patriarchy', 'sexism', or 'misogyny' necessarily implies that the user subscribes to a particular "highly coherent ideological structure". The latter two, in fact, are regularly used by non-feminists. 'Sexism' and 'misogyny' have clearly understood general meanings (discrimination based on sex and hatred of women) and are obviously compatible with a wide range of feminist beliefs, including those more or less influenced by Marxist thought. 'Patriarchy' is a bit more specific but I think that among feminists it does admit of different interpretations - 'patriarchy' is a word for a general social bias in favour of men, and anything past that is the subject of debate internal to feminism. This is why the word 'patriarchy' itself is contested and opposed by some feminists; 'kyriarchy' is an alternative that some prefer.

I don't see here a coherent ideology 'isomorphic to Capitalism in Marxist ideology'. To Marxists, capitalism means a form of political and social economy organised around the interests of owners of capital. To feminists, patriarchy means the idea that society favours men over women. These seem meaningfully different, and if the Marxist understanding of capitalism is more more specific than the feminist understanding of patriarchy, that's because Marxism is a much more narrow tradition with a single ideological forefather and body of canonical work, whereas feminism has neither. There is no feminist Marx; there is no feminist equivalent to Capital.

Thus you take Bell Hooks as one representative example. I'm a bit surprised because my first thoughts as to some of the most influential authors and texts shaping modern feminism were Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex and Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch. I submit that de Beauvoir and Greer are more important and influential feminist thinkers than Hooks, at least. Are these particularly Marxist texts, in your view? Do they describe a Marxist or quasi-Marxist philosophy? There's obviously some Marxist intellectual influence there (de Beauvoir was quite familiar with Marx), but there is as much by way of resistance as there is by way of agreement - de Beauvoir disagrees with some of Marx's central claims!

At any rate, yes, there are certainly Marxist feminists, and there are feminist Marxists. But I don't think that shows that feminism is descended from Marxism, a form of Marxism, isomorphic to Marxism, or anything like that. It is equally true, for instance, that there are both Christian Marxists and Marxist Christians (I find this baffling, but it nonetheless appears to be the case), and yet nobody tries to tell me that Marxism and Christianity must be closely related in this way.

(Well, I suppose maybe Nietzscheans. Slave morality and equality and so on. Or Randians/Objectivists, for whom both Marxism and Christianity are forms of altruism. Nobody who I think is worth taking remotely seriously tries to group together Christianity and Marxism.)

There is no feminist Marx; there is no feminist equivalent to Capital.

Feminism is redistributionist at its core, though. It just looks really weird because men don't understand women, and understanding women takes way more words to write down. They have a 200,000 year head start on their complexity and selection pressure has been high with respect to hiding their resource-extraction behaviors from the gender that most often takes the time to seriously analyze this sort of thing.

Redistribution looks like traditional communism when men do it because their biological specialization [and inherent worth] is based on labor (so equality of outcome means a good laborer and a bad laborer receive the same economic capital). When your biological specialization is something else, the character of redistributing what that is will be entirely different (perhaps one where equality of outcome means a pretty woman and an ugly woman receive the same social capital- efforts to establish equality of outcome won't focus on labor, or if it does it's just a side effect of technology-enabled gender equality).

Nobody who I think is worth taking remotely seriously tries to group together Christianity and Marxism.

Only in the sense that Marx (as far as I can gather; I haven't taken the time to properly read his work) is pointing at (intentionally or not) what the wiser Christian communities were doing at the time. And neither of those approaches scale, for the same reasons- they don't account for the wicked.

What is feminism redistributing? Reproduction? Family? Male attention? Social status?

All of the above?

Social status?

Yes. Also jobs, influential positions in institutions, government contracts, and public resources.

That sounds like, well, everything. Those are exactly the same things that, for instance, conservatives seek to obtain. Does that make conservatism a form of Marxism?

There is a sense in which feminism, among other priorities, seeks to redistribute various goods in society towards women, on the premise that the current distribution favours men in a way that is both unequal and unjust. But to say that that shows some connection to Marxism obviously proves too much. Any movement advocating any action whatsoever is going to demand some kind of redistribution, because action is inherently redistributive - action requires resources, and resources need to be distributed from somewhere.

So I don't think I understand ThisIsSin's point. Feminists advocate certain things, yes, and doing those things would involve some level of redistribution. But that is true of every movement. Pointing this out establishes absolutely nothing about feminism, either as a neutral claim about ideological lineage, or about its desirability or undesirability.

Those are exactly the same things that, for instance, conservatives seek to obtain. Does that make conservatism a form of Marxism?

There is a sense in which feminism, among other priorities, seeks to redistribute various goods in society towards women, on the premise that the current distribution favours men in a way that is both unequal and unjust. But to say that that shows some connection to Marxism obviously proves too much.

I agree, but you'll notice that the comment I was responding to didn't say "Not all redistribution is Marxism." It said "What is feminism redistributing? Reproduction? Family? Male attention? Social status?", implying that it's ridiculous to say feminism redistributes anything material, or worse that the opposition to feminism stems from a desire to force them to reproduce. The implication itself would have been bad enough, but the immediate change of the argument upon the slightest amount of questioning is even worse.

Any movement advocating any action whatsoever is going to demand some kind of redistribution, because action is inherently redistributive - action requires resources, and resources need to be distributed from somewhere.

You're the one proving too much. Even within feminism, there were postulates that didn't require redistribution, like lifting restrictions on access to bank accounts, various trades, or property.

Well, if we go up-thread, I have been reading this whole conversation as being about whether it makes sense to describe feminism as downstream of Marxism, a species of Marxism, cultural Marxism, etc.

In that context I made the point that feminism is a much broader stream than Marxism, and much less ideologically coherent - Marxism has a clear central thinker, Marx, canonical texts, and so on, while those are more up-for-grabs in feminism. I then noticed that the most prominent or influential feminist texts of the 20th century that I can think of don't seem particularly Marxist.

ThisIsSin replied by saying "Feminism is redistributionist at its core, though", which I took in context as disagreeing with me. I don't think ThisIsSin was saying "feminism, like all political and social movements, is redistributionist" - I think he was saying, "actually, Olive, I think this is a significant similarity between feminism and Marxism".

In that context I think it was reasonable to ask what kind of redistribution he was talking about, and then to suggest that redistribution alone is not enough to constitute a significant similarity to Marxism.

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