Chapter 4 Chapter 3 Economic Monism: The Historical Materialist View of Women

Chapter 3 Economic Monism: The Historical Materialist View of Women The theory of historical materialism reveals some very important truths.Humans are not animals, but a historical reality.Human society is an unnatural formation—in a sense it is opposed to nature.It does not passively obey the natural existence, rather it takes over the control of nature according to its own will.This kind of action beyond duty is not an internal subjective behavior, it is accomplished objectively in practical activities.Therefore, woman cannot be regarded only as a sexual organism, because among the various biological properties, only those properties that can show concrete value in activities are of importance.A woman's sense of self is not exclusively determined by her sexuality: it reflects a situation determined by socioeconomic organization, which in turn indicates the stage of technological development reached by humanity.Biologically, as we have seen, woman has two main properties: her grasp of the world is less extensive than man's, and she is more enslaved by the species.However, these facts take on an entirely different value.Never in human history has the grasp of the world rested on a naked body: the fingers of the hand already herald the imminent appearance of tools for enhancing power.We find from evidence left over from prehistoric times that man has always been armed.In the age of wielding sticks to catch desperate beasts, the frailty of woman's body did pose a distinct disadvantage: just the slightest physical effort required to wield a tool was beyond her reach, and it was enough to make a woman helpless.On the other hand, however, technology can eliminate the physical inequality between men and women: only need can make abundant physical strength superior, and excessive physical strength is no better than moderate physical strength.Thus the control of many modern machines requires only partial physical resources.If the minimum required is not beyond her ability, she is equal to the man in this labor.Of course, much of the energy displayed today can be controlled at the push of a button.As for the burden of motherhood, it takes on a variety of importance depending on the customs of the country: if a woman is forced to conceive multiple times, if she is forced to bring up her children without help, the burden is devastating of.But if her childbearing is voluntary, and if society assists her during pregnancy and cares for the welfare of the child, the burden of motherhood is insignificant and can be easily offset with proper adjustments in labor conditions.

Based on this point of view, Engels reviewed the history of women in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.He pointed out that this history depends mainly on the history of technological development.In the Stone Age, the land was owned by all members of the clan, and the imperfection of the primitive plow limited the potential of agricultural development.Therefore, women's physical strength is competent for gardening.In this primitive division of labour, the sexes constitute to some extent two classes, between which there is equality.Men hunted and fished, women stayed at home.But housework also included productive labor such as pottery, weaving, and gardening, so women played an important role in economic life.With the discovery of copper, tin, bronze and iron and the advent of the plow, the scope of agriculture expanded.Cultivating forest land and farming land is labor-intensive.Men then turn to the labor of other men, which keeps some men in slavery.Thus private property arose: the man became the slave or the master of the land, and also the owner of the woman.It was "a world-historic failure for women".This is to be explained by the breakdown of the old division of labor as a consequence of the invention of new tools. "The same cause that formerly guaranteed the dominance of the woman in the home - that she was confined to domestic labor - now guarantees the dominion of the man in the home; and the domestic labor of the woman loses its significance in comparison with the labor of the man for the means of subsistence. —The labor of the man is everything, and the labor of the woman is an insignificant accessory.” Thus, the right of the mother gives way to the right of the father, and property passes from father to son, and no longer from woman to her clan.From this we can see that the emergence of the patriarchal family is based on private ownership.In this type of family, the woman is in the vanquished position.Sovereign men indulged in immorality and licentiousness, which included adultery with slaves, prostitutes, or polygamy.Wherever local customs create reciprocity as far as possible, wives retaliate by infidelity—marriages come to fruition naturally through courtship.This is the only way a woman can resist being kept as a slave in her home.It was economic oppression that created the social oppression that kept her in the vanquished position.Equality cannot be re-established until both men and women have equal rights in law; but this political entitlement requires all women to participate in public service. "Women's emancipation is only possible when women can participate in production on a large and social scale, and housework takes up only a small amount of their time. This can only be achieved by relying on modern large-scale industry. Modern large-scale industry not only allows A lot of women's labor, and a real demand for such labor...”

The fate of woman is therefore closely bound up with the fate of socialism, as Bebel pointed out in his great work on women."Women and proletarians alike are followed," he said.Both are also liberated by economic development as a result of the social upheavals brought about by machines.The woman's problem was reduced to a problem of her labor capacity.A woman is empowered when technology matches her abilities, and loses power when she loses her position to take advantage of it.In the modern world, women have regained their equal status with men.In most countries, the resistance created by the ancient patriarchal system in the capitalist system is preventing the concrete realization of this equality; when this resistance is broken, the day of equality will be achieved.According to Soviet propaganda, this has become a reality in the Soviet Union.Once the socialist system is generally established all over the world, there will no longer be a distinction between men and women, but only laborers based on equality.

The theoretical system summarized by Engels is obviously a step forward than those we have examined before, but we are still disappointed—some of the most important problems have been ignored.The turning point throughout history was the transition from public to private ownership, but how this transition occurred is not specified.Engels himself said in "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State," "We know nothing about it now." Not only was he ignorant of historical details, he didn't even offer any explanation.Likewise, it is not clear that private property necessarily involves the enslavement of women.Historical materialism takes for granted facts that remain to be explained: Engels assumes, without discussion, that there is a bond of interest linking persons and property.But where is the origin of this interest, that is, the origin of social institutions?Therefore, Engels' exposition is not profound, and the truth he reveals seems to be accidental and subsidiary.Indeed, it is impossible to understand what these truths mean if we do not go beyond the limits of historical materialism.It is impossible for historical materialism to solve the problems we have raised because they concern the whole of man, not the kind of abstract human economics.

For example, it seems obvious.The concept of "private" can only be understood by reference to the inherent conditions of the living.For private property to emerge, the subject must have from the very beginning a tendency to consider himself fundamentally an individual and to insist on the autonomy of his existence and separateness.We can see that this affirmation is always subjective, internal, and ineffective if the individual does not possess the practical means to realize it objectively.Without the proper tools, he would not have felt any power over the world in the first place, but he would have felt himself lost in nature and community, passive and threatened, the plaything of obscure forces.Only when he agrees with the clan can he dare to consider his own totem, supernatural power and the earth as the reality of the group.The discovery of bronze enables men to discover that they are creators through the experience of hard production and labor.Being able to master nature, he no longer fears it, and by removing obstacles, he acquires the initiative to establish himself as autonomous, the courage to realize himself as an individual is too great. Such a will would not have achieved such success.The lessons of labor are not etched in the mind of the passive subject: in shaping and mastering the land, the subject also shapes and masters himself.

On the other hand, affirming the individuality of the subject is not enough to explain private property: every conscious individual, through challenges, struggles, and one-on-one duels, elevates itself to the status of sovereignty.For the challenge to take the form of a chauchishi [Indians exchanging gifts on religious festivals] or a formal exchange of gifts, i.e. economic competition, and then to have clan chiefs and then clan members claiming private rights to property, human beings There must be another inherent tendency.As we saw in the previous chapter, the existent can successfully discover himself only through estrangement, through alienation; , but also belong to himself.The clan encounters its own alienated existence in the totem, the supernatural force, and the territory it occupies.When the individual gradually differs from the commune, he demands that the individual be embodied.The supernatural power is individualized first in the clan chief and then in each individual.At the same time, everyone wants to own a piece of land, tools and crops.Man finds himself in these possessions that are his, because he lost himself in them before.Therefore, it is understandable that he attaches as much importance to property as he does to his own life.So a man's interest in his property is an obvious relationship.But we think that this cannot be explained by tools alone: ​​we have to grasp the man's attitude towards tool use as a whole, which implies an ontological basis, a basis of being like him.

For the same reason, it is impossible to infer from private property that women are oppressed.Here again the inadequacy of the Skelesian view is evident.He sees clearly that the physical weakness of woman is the real key to her inferiority only in relation to tools of bronze and iron.But he did not see that it was only from a certain point of view that women's limited ability to work constituted a specific disadvantage.Precisely because man is a transcendent, ambitious being, he manifests a new sense of urgency with each new tool: once he has invented bronze tools, he is no longer content with gardening—he longs to Cultivate and cultivate large tracts of land.This desire does not arise because of the bronze tool itself.Woman's impotence leads to her ruin, because man sees her in the light of his design for enrichment and expansion.But this design still does not explain her oppression, since the division of labor between the sexes can mean a friendly alliance.Any form of servitude cannot be explained if the proper relation of man to his fellow man is that of friendship.but it is not the truth.The phenomenon of enslavement is the result of man's imperialist consciousness, which always wants to exercise its sovereignty in an objective way.If human consciousness had not contained the inherent category of the other, and the inherent desire to dominate the other, the invention of bronze tools would not have led to the oppression of women.

Engels also fails to clarify the specific nature of this oppression.He tries to reduce the antagonism between men and women to class conflict, but he does so half-heartedly because the argument simply doesn't hold water.Of course, the division of labor according to sex, and the oppression it entails, is reminiscent in some respects of the social division of labor according to class, but it is impossible to mix the two.First, class differentiation has no biological basis.Moreover, the slave in hard labor has realized that he is in opposition to his master.The proletariat always tests its own conditions by insurrection, and thus becomes the master again, a threat to the exploiters.The goal of the proletariat is its own demise as a class.I have pointed out in the preface how different the position of woman is, chiefly because common life and interests unite her and man, but also because he finds her an accomplice.She doesn't want revolution, and she never thinks about her own demise as a woman—all she wants is to eliminate some of the consequences of sexual difference.

What needs to be pointed out is that women should not simply be regarded as people engaged in labor.Because her reproductive function is as important as her productive function, both from a socioeconomic standpoint and from a personal life standpoint.It is true that at certain times it was more useful to produce offspring than to plow.Engels ignored this point and only talked about the abolition of the family in a socialist society-this solution is of course abstract.We all know how frequently and how thoroughly Soviet Russia made adjustments in family policy in accordance with the changing relationship between the immediate needs of production and those of reproduction.But in this regard, the abolition of the family does not necessarily emancipate women.Examples such as Sparta and the Nazi regime demonstrate that a woman can be oppressed by men despite her direct attachment to the state.

True socialist ethical principles are concerned with upholding justice without suppressing liberty, with imposing individual obligations without eliminating individuality.And according to this principle it will be found that the situation of women poses a very embarrassing situation for it.It is impossible to fully equate pregnancy with a mission, a job, or service like military service.Requiring women to bear children interferes more with a woman's life than adjusting her civic occupation—no country has ever dared to institute compulsory sexual intercourse.Sexuality and maternal obligations involve not only a woman's time and physical strength, but also her fundamental values.Rational materialism tried in vain to ignore this theatrical aspect of sex, since it was impossible to bring the sexual instinct under the canon.Indeed, as Freud said, the sexual instinct may not contain negative factors that satisfy the sexual instinct.To be sure, the sexual instinct does not allow itself to be integrated into society, because in the sexual impulse there is the rebellion of the moment against time, of the individual against the general.If one tries to command the communal instinct, one risks killing it, since one cannot dispose of active spontaneity as one can dispose of inert matter, much less by violence, as a possible privilege may be acquired. get.

It is simply not possible to directly force a woman to bear children: all one can do is to place her in a situation where her only way out is motherhood—laws or social conventions that require marriage, birth control and abortion, and divorce .These ancient patriarchal precepts are exactly what is being revived in Soviet Russia today.The patriarchal concept of marriage was restored in Russia.In doing so, it had to ask again and again for women to be sexual objects: a recent statement demanded that female citizens of the Soviet Union pay close attention to their attire, to use cosmetics, to use the art of flirting to control their husbands, to incite their lust.These circumstances make it clear that it is impossible to see woman as a mere productive force: for man she is a sexual partner, a progenitor, an object of love, an Other with which he explores himself.Totalitarian or dictatorial regimes, invariably but in vain, try to prohibit the spread of psychoanalysis and declare that individual, personal dramas are contrary to the order established by the faithfully integrated citizen; sexual experience remains a An experience whose commonality is always stripped away by its individuality.And with democratic socialism, which aims at the abolition of classes rather than of individuals, the question of the fate of the individual will retain all its importance—and therefore sexual distinction will retain all its importance.The sexual relationship that connects a woman to a man is not the same as the relationship that a man provides to a woman.The bond that binds woman to child is a special, unique bond.Woman was not created only by tools of bronze, so machines alone will not kill her.Fighting for every right and every opportunity for comprehensive development for women does not mean that we should turn a blind eye to her special situation.In order to understand this situation, we must look beyond historical materialism, which sees only economic elements in men and women. So, for the same reason, we accept neither Freud's sexual monism nor Engels' economic monism.Psychoanalysts would interpret all of women's claims to society as phenomena of "masculine protest."Marxists, on the other hand, see her sexuality as an expression of her economic situation in a somewhat convoluted way.But the categories "clitoris" and "vagina" are no more suitable for a comprehensive understanding of a particular woman than are the categories "bourgeois" and "proletarian."The fundamental principle of existentialism is the basis not only of the whole individual drama but also of the economic history of mankind, and only by virtue of it can we understand in its entirety that particular form of existence which we call human life.The strength of Freudianism lies in the fact that the existent is the body: as a body as opposed to other bodies, the experience of the existent embodies his existential situation.Likewise, what is correct in the Marxist view lies in the fact that the ontological wishes of the existent, that is to say, the design that the existent makes for becoming, takes the form of the material possibilities offered, especially by technological development. a specific form of expression.But sexuality and technology alone explain nothing unless these desires are integrated into the whole of human reality.So, in Freud, the injunctions of the superego and the dynamics of the ego appear to be accidental; so, in Engels' account of family history, the most important developments seem to arise according to the mysterious fate of recurring partylessness.We are trying to reveal women's right, and we will not deny some contributions made by biology, psychoanalysis, and historical materialism; He is concrete.The value of physical strength, penis, and tool can only be determined in the world of values; it depends on the basic design by which the existent strives for transcendence.