One of Tony Greenstein's most popular articles ever:
Tony discusses the issue more completely in a follow-up:
When "feminism" focuses entirely on "the Patriarchy" and ignores other forms of oppression, which are greater problems in the lives of most women in the world, it can become merely another form of capitalist or imperialist cheerleading. (I have previously called this Feminist Imperialism.)
The correct view, which Communists have long promoted, is that of Intersectionality. We all face different kinds of oppression, which include oppression by Capital, classism, racism, and sexism. We must all work together to eliminate ALL forms of oppression. That is the central goal of Communism: to eliminate all Oppression. It is not surprising that anti-Communist capitalist and imperialist apologists masquerading as "feminists" argue something different.
Tony spells this out:
...many western feminists who understand their own oppression as women but fail to see the interconnections with the oppression of other women for whom gender oppression is not the totality of their oppression. Today this is often called 'intersectionality'.Western feminism operates on the basis that there is an all-encompassing system of oppression called patriarchy, an oppression of women by men. By definition it fails to account for the division of women by class, race, ethnicity, colour etc. Women living under the heel of imperialism or colonialism are thus not only oppressed as women but as racial or ethnic minorities.
For women such as Ahed Tamimi or her mother Nariman, the primary oppression they experience is not that from the males in their family circle but from Israeli soldiers, regardless of their sex.
Who for example could doubt that for Rohinga women the experience of being driven out of Burma, often with Israeli arms, is more immediate than their relationships with men? One is literally a matter of life and death. Or for example that the primary experience of Jewish women in the camps of Nazi Germany was not the oppression of Jewish men but the Nazi state and its guards, regardless of their sex? There is no evidence I have seen that female Nazi guards shared any sisterhood with Jewish women.
The relationship between feminism, racism and imperialism has been a vexed one for over 30 years. When the issue of Zionism first manifested itself in the pages of Spare Rib, the magazine of Women's Liberation, at the time of the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, it split the editorial collective in two. An article ‘Women Speak Out Against Zionism’ caused an explosion of fury amongst Zionist feminists who asserted that support for the Palestinians and Lebanese was ‘anti-Semitism’ (shades of the Labour Party today!).
No comments:
Post a Comment