#leacock

As Marx pointed out, it was the expansion of the European market into the world market that transformed mercantile Europe into capitalist Europe. Historically, then, capitalism has been inseparable from racist brutality and national oppression throughout its history. Yet few Western scholars have chosen to explore all the ramifications of this connection. Marx unveiled the mystery of commodity production and the fetishism of money; he revealed the process whereby direct relations among people, as they labored to produce and to exchange the goods they then consumed, were transformed by the emergence of commodity production for profit, so that people's very labor became an alien force against them. In other words, Marx analyzed the nature of exploitation itself as a principle, and as a principle it was and is colorless, raceless, and sexless. However, in the course of organizational failures and confusions in advanced capitalist countries, exploitation somehow became defined as centrally of whites and of men. Seduced by the divide-and-rule ploys that are constantly generated from the competitiveness inherent in capitalist structure and that are consciously reinforced by the servants of the powerful as well, scholars and self-styled revolutionaries, white and male, accepted the bribe of pitiful involvement in personal and petty oppression, and, bemused, analyzed society in their image, including the very nature of exploitation itself. The unifying power of the concept was destroyed by the hardening into dogma of a pernicious dichotomization, whereby the exploitation of the industrial worker, white and male, was pitted against the compounded exploitation and cruel oppression of the nonwhite as well as the nonmale. The theoretical separation of class exploitation from other forms of oppression contributed to the tragic undermining of a revolutionary socialist movement in the United States following World War II. Black revolutionaries were forced to divide themselves in two, to dichotomize the oppression of their people through ritual statements that their exploitation as workers was more fundamental than their oppression as blacks. Thereby the special and powerful anger of black people was defined as inherently counterrevolutionary, I remember a black woman comrade, years ago now, saying, "I don't care what they say, first am a Negro [the term 'black' being then still a term of abuse], then I am a worker" Her third identity, powerfully adding to the totality of her oppression, hence her potential as a revolutionary, that of a woman, she did not even express, so submerged then was such identification in the idiocies of a theoretically sterile organizational politicking. To pit national or racial oppression against class exploitation is a sophomoric sociological enterprise; it is not Marxist analysis. That people of color can fall across class lines—a few of them—has befuddled our thinking insofar as we are metaphysical and not dialectical. Class exploitation and racial and national oppression are all of a piece, for in their joining lay the victory of capitalist relations.

Marx indicated that the oppression of women in a society was the measure of its general oppression. One can add, the strength of women’s involvement in a movement dedicated to opposing a social order is a measure of the movement’s strength—or weakness.

While there is still [1971] a great deal of abstract argument about the correct position on women's liberation, there is also a growing recognition that it is fruitless to debate the extent to which various parts of the women's movement can or cannot be linked with revolutionary goals, and there is a growing commitment to developing concrete tactics of program and organization around situations where women are in motion on basic issues. It might seem that Engels' discussion of family arrangements that have long ceased to exist in their pristine forms is somewhat esoteric and of little relevance today. However, it is crucial to the organization of women for their liberation to understand that it is the monobamous family as an economic unit, at the heart of class society that is basic to their subjugation. Such understanding makes clear that child-bearing itself is not responsible for the low status of women, as has been the contention of some radical women's groups. And more important, it indicates the way in which working-class women, not only in their obviously basic fight on the job but also in their seemingly more conservative battles for their families around schools, housing and welfare, are actually posing a more basic challenge than that of the radicals. By demanding that society assume responsibility for their children, they are attacking the nature of the family as an economic unit, the basis of their own oppression and a central buttress of class exploitation. Therefore, while some of the activities of middle-class radical women's groups can be linked with the struggles of working-class women, such as the fight for free legalized abortion, others are so psychologically oriented as to be confusing and diversionary. The self-declared women's movement in this country [the US] has historically been middle-class nad largely oriented toward a fight for the same options as middle-class men within the system, while the struggles of working-class women have not been conceived as fights for women's liberation as such. This has been true since the close of the Civil War, when the women's movement that had been closely concerned with the fight against slavery and for the rights of women factory workers broke away on its "feminist" course. Today there is more widewpread awareness that all oppressive relations are interconnected and embedded in our system as a whole, and that only united effort can effect fundamental change. However, there has been little clear and consistent effort made to achieve such unity. For example, the committees formed by professional women to fight job discrimination are generally prepared to admit forthrightly that their battle is ultimately inseparable from that of working-class and especially Black working-class women, but they have done virtually nothing to find ways of linking the two. And it is commonplace to point out that, despite basic differences between the oppression of women and the oppression of Blacks, there are marked parallels of both an economic and a social-psychological nature--not to mention the fact that half of Black people are women. But again, there has been no solid commitment to building organizational ties between the two movements around specific issues. The theoretical differentiation between the symptoms and the causes of women's oppression can help clarify the issues around which united organization must be built, and can help remove the blocks hampering the enormous potential a women's movement could have for unifying sections of the middle and working classes and bridging some of the disastrous gap between white workers and Black, Puerto Rican, and Mexican American workers. However, in this effort it is important to be wary of a certain suspect quality of many white middle-class women (akin to that of their male counterparts) to be attracted and exhilarated by the assertiveness of the struggle for Black liberation, and to neglect their responsibility to find ways of also building an alliance with white working-class women and men.

The categorization of successive levels in the integration of matter, as a step towards understanding, is taken more for granted in the natural than in the social sciences. To a greater extent than in the social sciences, the natural sciences have been able to disentangle themselves from a metaphysical attempt to put the “things” of this world in their rightful place and the disillusionment that follows when this does not work. For example, it is taken for granted that the existence of forms intermediate between plants and animals does not invalidate the categories “plant” and “animal” but illuminates the mechanisms that were operative in the development of the latter from the former. Discovering that a whale is not a fish deepens the understanding of mammalian processes. Rather than calling into question the category of “fish,” the discovery indicates the functional level more basic to the category than living in the sea. The fact that some hunting, gathering and fishing societies have achieved institutional forms generally found only with the development of agriculture does not invalidate the significance of distinguishing between food gathering and food production. Instead an examination of such societies deepens the understanding of why the distinction is significant and clarifies some of the reasons why on the whole there are rather marked differences in social organization between hunter gatherers and simple agriculturalists.

Barbados. Let’s talk about Officers Leacock, Griffith, Babb and Clarke with Patricia Benedict.