Feminists, Postmodernism and Marxism

Originally posted 2017-10-09 14:43:38.

Feminism is not about equality and has not been since the 1960s. So-called ‘second wave’ feminists abandoned all pretence of that. Instead it became about women having power; not just equal power but total power. Specifically, power over men.

Feminism is fundamentally anti-democratic, because it is rooted in Marxism, which is against democracy. However, this form of Marxism is not identical to the original materialist one; it has been modified because women rank social power more highly than material wealth.  So the original economic form of Marxism was modified using another philosophical system, this time called Postmodernism. This ranks everything and everyone in terms of social power.

The New Marxism for Feminists

As a result of its adoption of Postmodernist power thinking, which also denies the possibility of absolute or even approximate definitions of forms, feminism threw up a multiplicity of power groups where Marx only saw two — the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. In Marx, the proletariat is always oppressed, never the oppressor and vice versa.

The original form of Marxism was never appealing to many women because of its insistence on materialism, on money rather than power. Further, Marx’ solution left women in the position of being — as feminists saw it — of being ‘oppressed’ by men. Feminists do not want an ‘equal voice’. They want dominion over men and Marx, while giving them their core idea of the destruction of the nuclear family,  did not and never intended to put women in a position of authority over men.

That was never good enough for the likes of Gloria Steinem. If there were to be a dictatorship of the Proletariat, women wanted it to be run by them and not men. In no way did it serve Feminist ends to exchange ‘oppression’ under bourgeois men for that under proletarian men. What was needed was a system that could assure that women, of whichever social class, were dominant.

Enter Postmodernism. The chief architects of their noxious pseudo-philosophy recognised that, in the 20th century, the first generation of Communist revolutions had been a disaster, with massive loss of life and untold human suffering. How could this be twisted such that their nihilistic end, the destruction of modern European culture could be destroyed, now that the original attempt was so sullied? In the parts of the world where Marxism had been tried, people were far worse off than in the Capitalist West. This was not politically acceptable and something had to be done. Further, in the post-war era, workers across Europe and the USA were enjoying life. They had plenty of money and job security. They could afford homes and decent health care, new cars and to send their kids to school. They were going to be hard to persuade to stage a revolution that would destroy all of that.

The Solution: Feminists

The answer was to get their wives and daughters to do it.

In essence Postmodernist political thinking does away with the implicit correlation that Marx saw between social class — bourgeois and proletarian — and wealth, rich and poor. For Marx, power could be expressed in purely materialistic terms — via the ownership of the means of production, which was then used to exploit the poor and enrich the rich. Postmodernist thinking focusses on ‘oppression’, which is a subtle inversion. What is oppression? It is the condition of perceiving that someone else has more than you do in terms of material wealth, status or social power. It removes objective, measurable differences — such as whether or not one owns the factory — and replaces them with subjective notions of how one feels about that. At a stroke, with this device, Post-modernists were able to split up society in new ways.

Working-class women in the USA were as happy or as unhappy as their blue-collar husbands; when the economy went well, they had good lives, were well fed, they and their kids were secure. When it went badly, their husbands were laid off, the parents went hungry and the kids went to school in hand-me-downs. Both parents were equally affected and, not surprisingly, formed a united front. As anyone who has lived in a nuclear family knows, the effect of adversity is to promote unity. Men and women come together to struggle through.

Working in Factories

Feminists often make much of the fact that women worked in factories and did other work usually done by men, during both WW1 and WW2. They omit to mention that the women who did this were not trying to subvert society or replace men; they did it to help men. Their husbands, bothers and sons were overseas fighting and dying and women, though they could not be with them, were doing everything they could to support them. The truth of this is clear when we see how quickly and happily they went back to their homes when the men came back. But no feminist will ever mention that.

In order to foment revolution, one must first sow the seeds of discontent. European populations in the 1950s, 60s and 70s were remarkably homogeneous. I didn’t see black man till I was 14 and he was a US serviceman from a nearby base. Until the 1970s, most people in the UK had never seen a Pakistani. Within this undiverse society, while there was plenty of well-paying work, there was little scope to spread revolution. Yes there were strikes (all the time), but, since the workers invariably got most of what they wanted, this had become a parlour game and remained so until the 1980s.

 

Once we understand the world in terms of power relationships, we destroy the homogeneous proletariat. In the US, there were already significant minorities of blacks, other Americans, and Asians, but in Europe this had not happened.

As a consequence of American pressure, European nations were obliged to give up their Empires. Carelessly, they had given citizenship to the indigenous people of many of these territories and suddenly there was an influx of exactly the kind of immigrants the Communists wanted to see — poor, without skills, without money, influence or power. These would soon become the targets for political machinations.

However, the most promising group, which might be persuaded to disrupt society was, by far, women. If they could be persuaded that they were being cheated, they might be formed into a backbone of Revolutionary power. To this end, women were deliberately encouraged to join socialist and Communist groups and, most particularly, to read Communist literature. This became especially current in the 1960s, in part, in the USA, as a result of the Vietnam war.  But here was another reason.

The Nuclear Family as ‘Slavery’

 

At the same time they were bombarded with messages saying that men had cheated them. That being ‘housewives’ was a form of slavery and that the nuclear family itself was an instrument of enslavement. That being a mother was shaming and that looking after children was a form of exploitation. This is directly from the pages of Communist literature, and women fell for it.

But that still left the thorny problem of the fact that women were not given a voice in Marx’ or indeed Engels’ work. Men always spoke for them. But if it were exploitative for men to suggest that women should be responsible for home while men went out to work, then surely it were also unreasonable for men to speak for women in the very movement that purported to ‘liberate’ them.

Postmodernism was the answer. It allowed the Proletariat to be divided up; and how would it be divided? Along lines of power. At a stroke, Identity Politics became a reality. This posits a hierarchy of oppression, with the most ‘oppressed’ being seen as the most worthy and so of highest status.  If women could be persuaded that it was a form of slavery, rather than a benefit, to stay home and spend the money, then they could be offered higher status than men within Identity Politics. Men would of course, deny this as absurd — which it is — and the schism necessary to foment discontent and ultimately revolution might be provoked.

The new form of Marxism, with its emphasis on power relationships rather than material wealth or ownership of the means of production, we now call Cultural Marxism.

Revolutions

Revolutions have always been led by the educated elite and this one was to be no different. The very first places to fall were the Universities and colleges, where intellectuals were trained. By the 1990s these had already been dragged into the Post-modernist swamp and by 2010 they had lost all right to be called ‘centres of education’. This was made immeasurably worse by misguided policies on both sides of the Atlantic that attempted to get more and more young people into these institutions, partly in order to reflect better unemployment figures  for a student is  a benefit, whereas an unemployed teenager is a liability. Mainly, however, the thinking was that the more people could be inculcated into Post-modernist thinking by the now completely-corrupted higher education system, the more votes there would be for the Left-wing parties that supported the idea. This drove literally millions more into the arms of the Cultural Marxist bourgeois elite — who assiduously set about infecting them with the disease by which they themselves were already afflicted.

For all this to work, however, women had to be persuaded that they should be miserable. This is where the feminists played their trump card: they appealed to women’s social sensitivities. They knew that women were not motivated by money but by the social benefits it could bring. They knew that women naturally are cooperative and so protective of their own; but they needed to persuade women that somehow, men were cheating them. One woman might have stood for it, but cheating the whole of the sisterhood would not be tolerated.

This was engineered by placing a derisory value on happiness and contentment. Women were happy at home, bringing up their children. They had  been doing it for a very long time. Within the Home-group matriarchy, they had absolute power. But Feminists presented male goals — career, financial wealth, status outside the home — as being more valuable than domestic values and argued that men had engineered things so that women were ‘trapped’ in the home — when in fact the whole of society was set up to protect and sustain women and children! Motherhood was now of no value and, instead, only career mattered. Women must never stay at home to look after their children; instead they must work  and pay others to look after them– if they were so careless as to have them at all. But the main lie that was used was that women, by doing exactly what they most wanted to do, had been robbed of their social power by men.

Historically, power distribution between men and women has been on the basis of equivalence, not equality; that is how our species is evolved to be. Humans live to be happy, but this is not easily quantifiable. Marx avoided the issue by focussing on materialism — because he was a man.

Feminists are the Panzer Corps of Marxism today

But if women were to be the panzer corps of the revolution, they had to be made to feel that they were unhappy. There was no chance of getting comfortably-off, secure women who had enough to feed their kids well, to buck the system for economic reasons; contrary to  the notions of some anti-feminists, women are not greedy. They just want enough and — most importantly — to have their power respected.  Feminists went full-bore on the message that men were not respecting women’s power; that they routinely demeaned them. That a man who as much as looked at a women was  violating her power over her body and thus violating her.

The evolution of this is seen in the changing definition of rape. Originally and rightly, an act of penetrative sex performed against the women’s will by the use of a man’s superior physical strength, the threshold quickly dropped. Buying a woman a drink and taking her to bed is now seen, in many jurisdictions, as tantamount to rape; the idea that women have responsibility over their bodies as well as power, has gone out the window. A man who has several drinks too many and drives home, has an accident and arrested, cannot hide: he is guilty. Yet if a women voluntarily gets drunk and then has sex, and later claims to regret it, this somehow becomes rape — even if she was an enthusiastic participant in the act of sex itself.

A Sexist Ideology

Feminism, through its adoption of Post-modernism,  rejects science and eschews reason and logic. Objective reality, in Post-modernism, has no special value. It is simply one ‘narrative’ or explanation, alongside as many others as there are viewers.

True Marxist cult ideology is a materialist religion, effectively, promising a Heaven-on-Earth Utopia to those who live by its rules. (And, usually, who help in killing or violently dispossessing those who don’t.)

However, while Marxists have often seen themselves as pro-women — voir Engels, Marx himself and Lenin — their cult ideology has never fitted comfortably with female understanding of the world. This is because women do not think in terms of material wealth, as men do, but in terms of power, both in personal and in relative terms.

Inconsistency

 

Of course, the glaring logical inconsistency is one that should make us laugh: if women and men are exactly the same in every way, why would women be any better at running society than men are?