Porn, Feminism & the Meese Report
Feminist theory is not just flawed thinking; it is the product of a middle-class view of the world. In the prosperity of the 1960s, radical feminism was marked by its extreme utopian nature. Demands like “smash sexism” and “abolish the family” abounded—with absolutely no program that could win them. Since feminists rejected Marxism and with it the one class that actually has the power to revolutionize society, their utopian maximalist rhetoric dissolved inevitably into the most pragmatic minimalism. In fact, because the reformist strategies of the ’60s—above all the overwhelming support of feminists for the Democratic Party—failed to bear ample fruit, a fertile ground for cynicism was laid. The root of the current feminist support for the thoroughly capitulatory Dworkin is the cynicism born of defeat.
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Communism vs. Feminism
A workers’ state can begin to lay the material basis for an alternative but it requires time. Religion and the bourgeois family will wither away; they cannot be “smashed” or obliterated through legislation or fiat. Likewise, pornography is reactionary and sexist, but men will not stop using it, or change sexist behavior, because of moral dictates. As class society disappears under the revolutionary workers’ state and as the division of labor becomes transformed, the cultural sexism rife among the masses can be successfully fought and will disappear into the garbage pail of history where it belongs.
Any failure to stress the need to overthrow capitalism in order to achieve liberation is also a capitulation to backwardness. As communists we align ourselves with the most oppressed sectors of society and join in united actions with feminists and other reformers for defense against attacks on women and gays. But we state as well that only the socialist revolution can provide a lasting defense and genuine human liberation.
Feminists reject the centrality of the class struggle and the fight against capitalism. The cross-class alliance of all women they call for would inevitably result in the domination by middle-class interests. Having rejected the working class, the one class that has the power to bring about necessary, fundamental changes, even the best-intentioned feminist must capitulate in one way or another to the powers-that-be. That is why the “second wave” of feminism has repeated the history of the first, increasingly calling on the state for protection. The 19th century feminists, in fact, took much longer to collapse into the reactionary “social purity” campaigns; the early movement’s longer span reflected an ascending capitalism that could offer a lot more.
While working-class men do not suffer the special oppression of women, they too are exploited by capitalism. Therein lies the basis for a common struggle against this system, the only way out for the working class as a whole. Many men involved in revolutionary struggle will recognize that their material interest lies in the fight against the oppression of women. The real “privileges” that capitalism affords working class men are small compared to the value of the sexual division of labor and sexual oppression for stepping up exploitation and lowering the social wage.
No genuine communist, however, waits until after the revolution to attack male chauvinism, nor do we treat it as some quaint habit of the unenlightened. To do so would keep politically conscious women from the revolutionary cause. If communism did not mean the triumph and liberation of all the oppressed it would be a lie. To laugh off or to accept sexism means to adapt to backward bourgeois consciousness. The fact that sexism cannot be eliminated overnight is no reason to postpone the struggle against it, a crucial aspect of the fight for socialism.
Although there are feminists who oppose the analysis that porn is central to women’s oppression, only the communists explain the source of this oppression and how to get rid of it. One of the chief tasks of a workers’ state is to free women from domestic labor through the collectivization of kitchen, laundry, child care and other oppressive tasks and to eradicate the sexual division of labor. The short-lived Bolshevik revolution in backward Russia made more changes in women’s lives than the entire history of feminism. The reversal of these gains under Stalinism was an essential part of its counterrevolutionary restoration of capitalism.
The experience of socialist revolution would already represent an enormous advance in consciousness. The great resources of the workers’ state would be used in the struggle against sexism in culture and politics. For the first time women would have the resources through their state to make their free speech a reality. In contrast, the bourgeois-democratic right of free speech is largely a myth under capitalism. Oppressed groups such as women do not have the power and money to counter the “free speech” of the capitalist media, which maligns and degrades them daily.
A workers’ state would have the weapon of censorship at its disposal—although it would generally be a defensive weapon of last resort. If the same sort of offensive imagery were being used against the oppressed or to threaten the workers’ state, the workers could well use their state to ban it as a stopgap measure. In that case the imagery is viewed for its political content; whether it is “art,” “erotica,” or “pornography” neither protects nor condemns it. The question of censorship would have to be weighted in each case from the point of view of the defense of the working class and the oppressed, unlike now.
Free speech is maintained by capitalism as a disposable luxury, to be cast aside when property is endangered. It must therefore be defended, but not to create illusions that women and other oppressed sectors can really have a say over the bourgeois media.
The revolutionary workers’ state can empower women; capitalism can only enslave them. It would be utopian to ponder what genuine sexual liberation will look like; we don’t know. But we do know that when people have the material basis for really free, non-oppressive relations, they will begin to have them. Feminism, starting with promises that are impossible under capitalism, can only end in despair.
Related:
Ms. Cat’s Chronicles 