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Women's Oppression and Liberation
Marik, Soma
http://solidarity-us.org/atc/199/womenss-oppression/Date Written: 2019-03-01 Publisher: Against the Current Year Published: 2019 Resource Type: Article Cx Number: CX23492 On the role of Marxism in the feminist movement in India. Abstract: -- Excerpt: With the worldwide collapse of older, organized, often large Marxist (or socialist) working class parties, a left-liberal segment became more influential even within the old left. We think of the left's orientation to the Democratic Party in the USA (where no mass workers’ party has existed for some 80 years now) - or the example of India where the left, in order to halt the fascist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) [extreme Hindu nationalist - ed.], sees no option but to rely on the rightwing liberal Indian National Congress. One consequence has been the acceptance of intellectual currents that reject Marxism's contributions to the principles of emancipation. Another consequence of the collapse of class politics is the rise of an ideology that conceives of the struggle for liberation as separate for each gender, race or other "identity"-based segments of the population. These separate oppressions at best forge moral alliances, rather than an objectively rooted unity. A secondary but not unimportant reason lies in the creation of an opposite ideological claim that Marxism indeed promotes women's liberation, Dalit [lower caste - ed.] and other oppressed people's emancipation, but must be hostile to feminism, Dalit (or Ambedkarite) politics, etc. as all being variants of "bourgeois/petty-bourgeois politics." Subject Headings |