I am unfortunately not at a point yet where I can write my own additions to this piece but I wanted to start venturing into gender and gender roles because there are a lot of marxists who repeat, no doubt because it seems to make sense on the surface, that gender is a social construct or that it should be abolished. A lot of it is Butlerian in nature and I highly recommend Leslie Feinberg who was positioned against the butlerian view of gender.
The sense of self is completely omitted in the Butlerian view of gender (as a performance), in that as a (cis) man if I acted (performed) like a woman and put on women’s clothes, then that theory states I would be a woman. But I would not feel like one, because I know I’m not a woman. And if I lived in a false reality that forced me act like a man all my life from childhood to the point that I also believed I was a man (say in the same way you can make someone believe the sky is red if you berate them enough), then what explains that trans people specifically are able to “break out” of this mold? A lot of common (in marxist circles) feminist theory is unfortunately completely dismissive of trans people, trans men especially - if gender is a construct to pit oppressors and oppressed then why would anyone “choose” to be part of the oppressed group? Everyone ought to perform as men if that were the case. As for gender abolitionism, the author makes the case in their essay :)
Thanks for replying and I am enjoying the civility.
I would argue that this is only true if we consider patriarchy the same as misogyny. Liberals do. Marxist-leninists shouldn’t. And I would argue because it stems from liberal conception of liberation is rooted in hyper-individualism rather than the correct understanding of patriarchy as a structural concern.
Let’s again make the abstract concrete. You can see how the above plays out in real life in bourgoisie society. It is not uncommon for liberal feminists to do the following: they equate a non-white man who is part of an ethnic demographic that is oppressed under white supremacism is part of the patriarchy if he is a misogynist (or for some for just being a man) and then you will see liberal feminists end up using white supremacist racist tropes to describe men of people of colour as inherently violent/dangerous etc even if the liberal feminist themselves are non-white. This is categorically wrong, but why?
Let’s take the US for example. The black person is not in charge of the patriarchy that suppresses them as a group. The black man is often actually targeted for state violence because he is a black man. They are victims too of that patriarchy.
The same can be applied all over the world: the Palestenian man or boy in Palestine under Israel or the Dalit man under hindutva patriarchial society etc are not agents who rule the patriarchial society - they themselves are also victims of the same patriarchy. Palestenian men for example are targeted because they are plaestenian man. How many times have seen in media, in order to attain sympathy from the reader, explain that the Israelis are killing/torturing women and children, ie excluding the adult palestenian male with the subtext that a level of brutality against the latter is more acceptable. Do we really think the Palestenian man is then part of that patriarchal superstructure, here manifested in genocide, just because he is a man? Of course we shouldn’t.
Conflating the violent misogyny of the individual with the patriarchal structure that enables it ends up effectively absolving the superstructure of its sins which means one could be amplifying the patriarchal society often manifested above as white supremacism while nominally one says they stand for say women’s rights - effectively whitewashing the oppression of patriarchy just so one can uphold the few - one ends up with liberal feminism, TERFs etc rather than the marxist conception of true liberation which submlimates all of the above. We should understand that patriarchy, inherited from feudalism before it, in our society amplifies capitalist exploitation and immiseration.
It’s got so bad some marxists are now no longer using the term feminism to equate with women’s liberation.
And I need to read more Kollantai.