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by mim3@mim.org
"In order to establish and consolidate the capitalist ownership system and its distributive relations, the bourgeoisie had to establish interpersonal relations based on capitalist principles."
("Interpersonal Relations with Socialist Principles," Fundamentals of Political Economy, Shanghai)
"In the past, the exploiter coerced the laborer to labor in order to exploit the surplus value of the laborer." ("Socialist Production according to the General Line")
"[The worker] received week's wages after he toiled for a week. On the surface, it looked as if all his labor had been compensated and that it was an 'equivalent exchange.' In fact, the form of wages concealed the exploitation of the worker by the capitalist."
("Wages Conceal the Exploitative Relation of Capitalism")
(All boldface above mine)
The quotes above are from a textbook on political economy called the Fundamentals of Political Economy published in Shanghai just before Mao died. Whether it is exchange at the marketplace called "shopping" or exchange between workers and capitalists called "wages," Marxism repeats over and over again that the individual consent to the exchange conceals the coercion of labor out of labor-power. The whole difference between Liberalism/naive empiricism and Marxism is that Marxism looks underneath social relations.
Both commonly discussed components of rape are thus part of the discussion of class that Marx already detailed--force and consent. That's why when we read Capital or the Fundamentals of Political Economy we should also quake in our boots regarding sex: Marx already said that the apparent consent of exchange conceals coercion. We appear to agree to pay so much for our gallon of orange juice at the store and we agree to our wages, so "what is to complain about?" is the Liberal line.
Marx does not care if the individual worker is happy after a day at work or is glad to have a contract or thinks wages are great. In the case of millions of workers Marx described in some specific mathematical cases in Capital, those workers are still exploited whether they know it or not. Exploited workers happy as individuals simply have "false consciousness." So it is with sex.
Catharine MacKinnon ended up being a social-democrat. She is a reformist who used Marx's insights to clarify her own mind. Just as social-democrats seek reform of capitalism and often read Marx too, MacKinnon seeks reform of patriarchy. By denying "all sex is rape," MacKinnon following a social-democratic analogy emphasized (relative to harder line anti-Liberals) consent as the key to sexual relations. Following Marx and Lenin more directly, MIM does not emphasize wage struggles in the class struggle as the goal and we do not get involved in subjectively contradictory struggles over sexual consent either. Had MacKinnon put class struggle first, she'd be saying wages are her battle--drawing the line on the "going rate" in the exchanges between men and wimmin or between workers and capitalists.
This article responds to a letter we received from a long time reader of our website.
MIM takes a very subtle view on gender and sex which is sometimes too subtle for me to completely comprehend, e.g. all sex as rape not just because it is violent but because sex appropriates womyn's property. Further, Dworkin ties directly to MacKinnon who was a key catalyst in the development of MIM's line.
Catharine MacKinnon never specifically said that Marxist-Leninist-Maoists should uphold "all sex is rape" to be consistent. It's just that when we see her use social-democratic language on rape we know what position is left for us Marxist-Leninist-Maoists. We who are the real opponents of Liberalism should have realized as clearly as we realize the power of the theory of imperialism that even the language in framing gender relations is the same as the language Marx used to frame class struggle. The words, "force," "coercion" and "consent" are in fact exactly the same for both gender and class.
That's why MIM is concerned. If someone does not understand the MIM relationship to the
"all sex is rape" line, it is likely that the class struggle is not correctly understood either.
To recapitulate:
1. MIM is to MacKinnon as Lenin is to social-democrats.
2. MIM is revolutionary anti-Liberal and MacKinnon is reformist focusing on the gender equivalent of wages. She wants to classify more sex as rape than there is now. For her, the "all sex is rape" line might as well be the same as asking for infinite wages per hour. For her, MIM and the threat of "all sex is rape" line is a bargaining position she nods to to scare the patriarchy into reform. (For MIM, that's a recipe for moral degeneracy symptomatic of imperialism's moribund character.)
3. Happily exploited workers like the proletarian migrants crossing the Arizona desert have false consciousness. Couples happily in love in the sexual sense have false consciousness.
4. Proletarian migrant workers who try to work out their worker conditions at the individual level, because they do not know what classes are or believe they are above them are Liberals. Sexually active people who believe there is no systematic patriarchy--just people individually in love or "hooking up"--are Liberals.
5. MacKinnon/Dworkin are also parallel to the social-democrats in their nationalism. Mao abolished pornography, but the Amerikans and I$raelis did not. We would say all that MacKinnon and Dworkin end up doing is refining the notion of good sex and bad sex for a variation of romance culture excitement---raising the stakes for men to participate and thus heightening arousal via the state for the men not convicted of rape.
The thing Marx is concerned about is going on underneath apparently agreeable relations and that thing called "exploitation" cannot disappear with individual efforts. That's why there is a revolution according to Marxist theory to change the conditions of a group simultaneously through political means.
The appeal of ultra-left liberalism ranging into the Dworkin positions and more Liberal ones is that it seems psychologically that Marxism is difficult and amounts to "waiting" for revolution; even though revolutionaries do more political work than reformists. When we tell them that their sexual relations are stamped with oppression no matter what, critics of Marxism become indignant, especially when we tell them that there is no way to escape in the short run. However, Liberal or ultra-left Liberal expression chiding Marxism for its patience is just a dodge, a cover for an unwillingness to struggle. Reformism has not worked in eradicating the problem though it has had plenty of time to succeed. Once again, Mao got the job done: all the "do it now" reformism has not added up to as much progress. MIM has summed up the problem this way: "within capitalism, men cannot be reformed, only revolutionized."
Another flaw in the reformist-subjectivist approach is that it opens itself to another line of Liberal attack that does not apply to those of us going through the revolutionary door to the future. For MacKinnon, the goal is to put an increased minority of men in prison for sex. Yet if the problem is that much individual, we might ask why quitting an exploitive job is not an option for a worker. Likewise, we might ask what gives any womyn or any man the right for subjective reasons to guarantee prison. If the romance culture is to come with an increasing risk of imprisonment, it stands to reason it should be given up individually. However, the remainder who do not give it up simply jump through more hoops eroticizing power more than ever and proving to the world how important their romances are.
Engels and Lenin raised the notion that the most reformists could do is turn wage-workers into new petty-bourgeoisie, the labor aristocracy. That labor aristocracy would then become a prop of the capitalist system and join in the exploitation of proletarians. MacKinnon allows for this possibility theoretically but hardly mentions it, the same way we see our revisionists today bury Lenin on the labor aristocracy. When we talk about biology not being the substance of gender, we are making an argument similar to saying that workers can become bourgeoisified.
Lately, we stress that if the MIM line "all sex is rape" is distasteful to our reader and MacKinnon and Dworkin are also distasteful, our reader should consider that s/he is not a Marxist. Most Trotskyists are in fact more Liberal on gender and art than MacKinnon. MacKinnon calls herself "post-Marxist." That is accurate and responsible thinking. We wish the people focussing on the class struggle were so smart. Out of 1000 criticisms MIM receives for its line on gender, only a handful will actually come with a theory. Most of the criticisms we receive are the equivalent of cuss words, because the critics generally are Liberals and discover so only in confrontation with the MIM or MacKinnon line.
Whether it is her reformism driving her subjectivism or vice-versa, there is no doubt there is a somewhat coherent package that MacKinnon offers. That's what makes her one of the few authors worth discussing on the Amerikan gender struggle. MacKinnon wants to take individuals more seriously than MIM does. She wants to take more wimmin individuals claiming to have been raped seriously, but she does so with an argument about gender conditions as a whole. The result is subjectivism, because MacKinnon realized that the individuals she wants to take seriously may not have any discernible commonality. In other words, she uses a sledgehammer of great interest to us at MIM to kill a flea. The flea ends up being a disproportionate share of oppressed nationality men because of how national oppression and racism work inside u.$. borders. The history of lynching is the most blatant proof that people can think they are being "just" when actually they carry out racism or national oppression. MacKinnon's plea for subjectivism is white nationalism and racism, because she trusts the subjectivity of white wimmin, cops and judges. The revolutionary Marxist approach stresses going through the door of the anti-rape struggle together as a group, because Marxism is the anti-thesis of individualism and subjectivism.
Postscript:
We received the following reply to the above article.
That leaves the question what people who figure out that all sex, like all economic exchange, occurs with coercion (accept these wages - or else...). Most people asking that question would be Freudian in one way or another. I don't think I am, but you know more about that than me. I'm looking at the questions materially. At least subjectively, I notice that my sex drive is physical. Not enough sleep=no sex drive. No sex (including masturbation) in weeks=very horny.Now I would say that this problem could be solved with masturbation. However MIM noted that the mental health of progressives is important.
So what solution does MIM have?"
The above questions should go to MacKinnon and more Liberal people. The questions have Liberal sub-reformist presuppositions. The bourgeoisie can afford to quit its jobs, so there is a parallel to the question above in the class struggle. We have no problem asking Liberals Liberal questions and we do so to ask them to check themselves. For itself, MIM has already answered the question above. There is no solution in the short-run. The solution is to become revolutionized.