Frigga Haug — Thirteen Theses of Marxism-Feminism

Didn't know that Marx was a feminist? Then you don't know about his wife, Jenny von Westphalen Marx. She was an aristocrat become social and political activist. Jacobin has the story of her life.

... we are in union with Marx, “to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, forsaken, despicable being”....

The German term Marx uses that is translated "man" here is Menschen. While it is correct to translate Menschen as "man" in the generic, non-gender specific sense, the German term means "human being" without specifying gender.

These are hardly "radical" proposals, as sopme would like picture all feminists, Marxist and otherwise.

They also indicate that Marx was very much a libertarian* and anarchist* who was concerned with gender issues as well as class issues as sociological phenomena that need to be addressed by political activists. Marx himself was only peripherally an economist. He was a philosopher that would have become an academic if times had been different, a free-lance journalist by profession, an independent thinker, and a political activist that was also married to a political activist.

* Of course, Marx was not a Libertarian (anarcho-capitalist) in the American sense.

International Marxist-Feminist Conference
Thirteen Theses of Marxism-Feminism
Frigga Haug, sociologist

See also

The Real Movement
It would be interesting to know what the average Marxist makes of this statement by Nick Land
Jehu

See also

Progress in Political Economy
Towards a queer Marxism

Bret Heino

Cora Currier — Every Right to Be Angry: Two New Books on Women’s Rage Are Timed Perfectly for the Brett Kavanaugh Debacle

This is not going away anytime soon.

One aspect of the new "civil war" between traditionalism and liberalism is emancipation of the repressed with women in front.

"The should know their place" is so 20th century. Women are seeing themselves as the new "Negroes."

On the blogs and in social media, many men are freaking out that their male privilege is under attack by "rabid feminists aka "feminazis." It's mostly right wing men, supported by some right wing women, but hardly exclusively. There are lots of men that consider themselves "liberals" are turning out to be selectively liberal.

The Intercept
Every Right to Be Angry: Two New Books on Women’s Rage Are Timed Perfectly for the Brett Kavanaugh Debacle

Cora Currier

See also

Site moderator rejected submission for Donna Strickland, the first female physics winner in 55 years, in March...

The Guardian
Female Nobel prize winner deemed not important enough for Wikipedia entry

Leyland Ceccoalso

also

The Texas Trubune

A Texas yard sign depicted a GOP elephant with its trunk up a girl’s skirt. Police seized it.

Kristine Phillips, The Washington Post

Charlotte Edmond — Justin Trudeau wants to raise his sons as feminists. New research backs him up

Why is this important in economics? First, women now control a signficant slice of the pie, and secondly, women have an increasingly strong political voice to match their growing economic power.

This is chiefly a political battle between liberals and traditionalists. Identity politics is here to stay.

Economics is strong influenced by policy.

On the programme, scientists argue there is no obvious neurological explanation for the gender divide, with no significant difference between male and female brains. Both are highly plastic and largely influenced by childhood experiences.

World Economic Forum
Justin Trudeau wants to raise his sons as feminists. New research backs him up

Charlotte Edmond

Julie Matthaei — The Women’s March on Washington and the Coming of Age of Feminism

"Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, 

Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned." 

— spoken by Perez in Act 3, Scene 2, The Mourning Bride (1697) by William Congreve

Signs of the Fourth American Spiritual Awakening?

Dollars & Sense blog

The Women’s March on Washington and the Coming of Age of Feminism
Julie Matthaei

American men have been totally emasculated by the Feminist movement

American men have been totally emasculated by the Feminist movement. They are portrayed or, act, like little girly wimps. I just watched a commercial where a young boy was learning how to ride a bike and it was the mom running behind him while the dad stood there, woman-like, snapping photos. I taught all my kids how to ride bikes. I ran behind all of them, but I digress. This is how men are portrayed in America. This is how they are. Either like girly wimps or dopes. The woman is supposedly the one who wears the pants and has the balls and the brains. Bruce Jenner is the ultimate symbol of what the sexes have become in America: a guy, with balls and a dick, who calls himself a woman garnering all kinds of accolades from society on behalf of his "woman-ness."

Laurence Cox and Alf Gunvald Nilsen — The twilight of neoliberalism: can popular struggles create new worlds from below?

If the ideologists of neoliberalism want to present it as the natural order of humanity, a more sober historical assessment points out that it has lasted about as long as Keynesianism did before it – a few decades.

In our new book We Make Our Own History: Marxism and Social Movements in the Twilight of Neoliberalism we condense four decades of research and activism into an argument about how ordinary people can understand the nature of the world we live in and find ways to push beyond the neoliberal orthodoxy of the last few decades.
We start by asking how we can get beyond the theologies of university economists – impervious to the failures of their ideas and their costs in human lives – and the opinion politics of angry right-wingers on the Internet. We look at how people in struggle learn about the world through attempting to change things (and in the process overthrow apartheid, dictatorships or empires) and develop movement-based theories such as Marxism, feminism or ecological thinking. Often these forms of thought become taken up into the university, and popular movements have to “reclaim, reuse and recycle” them for their own purposes, in attempting to break out of the limits which the powerful and wealthy want to set on them. 

We Make Our Own History rethinks humanist Marxism as a theory of collective action, including the ways in which social movements from below can develop from localised struggles over individual issues to far-reaching projects for social change (a welfare state, an end to patriarchy, an ecologically sustainable society). It also looks at the history of movements from above – those which can draw on the resources of capital, the state or cultural power to impose themselves. Rather than see these as unstoppable, we show how complex the process of constructing power has been, how at every stage of the way popular resistance has shifted the terrain, and how short-lived all historical forms of capitalism have been. If the ideologists of neoliberalism want to present it as the natural order of humanity, a more sober historical assessment points out that it has lasted about as long as Keynesianism did before it – a few decades – and is just as vulnerable to the collapse of the alliances which sustain it.…

Yet any attempt to shortcircuit the slow development of popular agency, whether through opinion politics or intellectual critique which discuss structures in isolation from the kinds of agency which sustain them – and the kinds of agency needed to overcome them – is doomed to failure. The most effective orientation for change is one which starts from dialogue with practically situated struggles – those that people have to engage in to sustain their lives – and supports their extension in alliances across space but also across the social world, into far-reaching projects for change which are grounded in a wide range of differentsituations. These processes of external struggle, internal learning and alliance-building are what matter most, and there is no short-cut (in universities, parties or shouting at the computer screen) that can usefully avoid them. 

Human beings make our own history, but not just as we please: neoliberalism, like all other forms of capitalism before it (and in the bigger picture like every form of class society), had a beginning and will have an end. The key question in this crisis is whether movements from below are able to develop together in a way that enables them to set the direction for what comes next.

Open Democracy

The twilight of neoliberalism: can popular struggles create new worlds from below?
Laurence Cox and Alf Gunvald Nilsen

Chris Dillow — Patriarchy as an emergent process

 "Feminism" as in feminist philosophy, feminist literary criticism, feminist politics, feminists economics is a big deal if only because owing to the emergent liberation of women as part of the liberal revolution of the 18th century it is an emergent trend. However, since WWII and the entrance of women to the workforce that trend has been accelerating as more women become more self-sufficient and have more opportunities.

This is about institutionalism influenced by cultural factors and cultural change. It's here to stay and men had better get used an increasingly strong push for women's rights, on one hand, and a revision of intellectual history and current practice on the other, as difficult as it is for some men to acknowledge event that women have a place at the table, let along anything significant to say.

As Akerlof and Kranton say:

In every social context, people have a notion of who they are, which is associated with beliefs about how they and others are supposed to behave. These notions...play important roles in how economies work. (Identity Economics, p4)

Stumbling and Mumbling
Patriarchy as an emergent process
Chris Dillow | Investors Chronicle

Naomi Wolf — The brain science of the vagina heralds a new sexual revolution

Finally, women have the neuroscientific knowledge to liberate their bodies from patriarchy's social control and culture of shame

The Guardian | On Making Change
The brain science of the vagina heralds a new sexual revolution
Naomi Wolf

Why is this is a big deal? The Feminist Movement that began in Sixties the was the extension of a trend begun by the Women's Suffrage Movement of the 19th century that eventually succeeded in getting women enfranchised. Since then women have also taken their places on the political scene, many serving in legislature, ministries, and as a prime ministers. It has also been helpful that Britain has been rule by a queen for much of recent memory.

However, since the inception of feminism or "women's lib," the women's movement has been not only a political force but a source of personal empowerment for a great many women. It is not by accident that the Sexual Revolution took place in this context as well.

Women's suffrage is now called "first wave feminism," and the feminism that began in the Sixties, "second wave feminism." "Third wave feminism" began in the 1990's and continues into the present. The firsts and second wave were spearheaded by white Western women and their expressions were culturally defined. Third wave feminism is global and encompasses many views of femininity. The basic aim of this wave of feminism is to throw off patriarchy finally and permanently, globally.

Feminism is a dialectal response to a traditionally imposed master-slave relationship, in which women (and children) were treated culturally and even legally as men's chattel. Quite predictably, there is also a dialectically response to that also, with people like Rush Limbaugh leading the debate from the masculine side and sounding like a "male chauvinist pig" in femi-speak.

Naomi Wolf's work needs to be read in this context. It is significant in that it brings to light scientific research showing that feminism is not "just" anti-traditional and countercultural. It is based in physiological psychology, and it is not going away. This trend is a big deal, and any cultural entity that stands in the way of it is on the wrong side of history. Beware GOP, and proceed at your own risk.

The rise of the woman is no mystery to business people, since they are well aware that the majority of purchases of consumer goods are now either by women or heavily influenced by women. Women are now also taking their places in management and the professions. This trend is having profound cultural and institutional influences economically, as well as socially and politically as women increasingly find themselves and come into their own power.