{"id":2343,"date":"2017-03-28T11:28:05","date_gmt":"2017-03-28T19:28:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/?p=2343"},"modified":"2017-11-08T21:40:06","modified_gmt":"2017-11-08T19:40:06","slug":"the-masculinity-of-marxist-theory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/2017\/03\/28\/the-masculinity-of-marxist-theory\/","title":{"rendered":"The masculinity of Marxist theory"},"content":{"rendered":"

It is an\u00a0exaggeration to say\u00a0that all Marxist theory people are men. But\u00a0the historical\u00a0masculinity of that little world \u2014 let’s face it \u2014is hard to underestimate. I’m not talking about political Marxists here\u2014 though if we look at France, for instance, the Trotskyist Nathalie Artaud<\/a>\u00a0is essentially invisible compared to the Communist-backed\u00a0Jean-Luc M\u00e9lenchon<\/a>, though both are running for president. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

(An aside for French analysts \u2014 obviously my claim is not that this political difference is entirely determined by gender, just that the gender difference here is symptomatic. Obviously, the French far right is doing pretty well this year with a\u00a0woman candidate.)<\/p>\n

In any event, I have long been struck by the usually-unmarked masculinity of Marxist theory, in both the United States and France. To draw on my personal experience in the academy, I might mention dominant male figures like\u00a0Terry Turner, an activist\u00a0Marxist-structuralist anthropologist who taught me an introduction to\u00a0Marx’s work in college, or Moishe Postone, who has long led\u00a0an intimidating Marx seminar at the University of Chicago. In these sorts of seminars, you’re not likely to hear much about gender, and the presumption\u00a0of\u00a0universal reason usually seems to lodge just a little too comfortably in the figure of the male teacher. It’s the usual critical theory paradox: ostensibly emancipatory ideas get drenched in the conventional authority of male power.<\/p>\n

Now of course I’m not<\/em> saying that there are no\u00a0important women Marxist theory people \u2014 Nicole Pepperell’s work<\/a>\u00a0comes to mind, or Kathi Weeks’ recent\u00a0The Problem With Work<\/a><\/em>.<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>A little farther back, the 1970s socialist-feminist theory world\u00a0was one of the most important moments in Marxist theory, with books like\u00a0The Dialectic of Sex<\/em>\u00a0and The Politics of Housework<\/em>.\u00a0(Though it is not always clear\u00a0that most male Marxists have read those books…) And I emphasize that\u00a0I’m not necessarily singling\u00a0out the Marxist theory part of the academy as being the worst possible\u00a0case of masculine power. (Though that would be a depressing comparative analysis which I haven’t undertaken.)<\/p>\n

But.<\/em><\/p>\n

The masculinism of Marxist theory continues in the present. And it is a problem.\u00a0\u00a0A not-just-historical problem.<\/p>\n

As a case in point, consider this new essay in the New York Review of Books, “The Headquarters of Neo-Marxism<\/a>” by a political philosopher, Samuel Freeman<\/a>. Freeman’s essay\u00a0is a review of three books about the Frankfurt School, all three written by men (Stuart Jeffries, the German Stefan M\u00fcller-Doohm, and Peter Gordon). The reviewer\u00a0is a man. Every single person mentioned\u00a0<\/em>in the review is male, except for Hannah Arendt in a footnote<\/em>. And a quick look at\u00a0Freeman’s\u00a0five\u00a0other<\/em> book reviews in the New York Review of Books shows that he has only ever deigned to write about fellow\u00a0male authors.<\/p>\n

Gender avalanche. Is that a thing?<\/p>\n

Perhaps I should note that\u00a0Freeman himself is not a Marxist. I hadn’t heard of him before I read this review, but he seems to be a Rawlsian, to judge by his book publications. Rawls’ work, not incidentally,\u00a0got\u00a0denounced by at least one card-carrying Marxist philosopher<\/a> as “an ideological rationalization of mid-twentieth century American welfare state liberalism” \u2014 and not surprisingly, Freeman’s\u00a0seemingly\u00a0favorite member of the Frankfurt School is Habermas. This on the grounds that “as John Rawls said to me, he is also the first major German philosopher since Kant to endorse and conscientiously defend liberalism and constitutional democracy.”<\/p>\n

Freeman predictably goes on to write\u00a0\u2014 in a non-class-conscious way that is\u00a0entirely out of keeping with this\u00a0topic\u00a0\u2014 that “We may sometimes lament capitalist excesses and be bothered by the emptiness of consumerism, but few of us condemn capitalism as a moral corruption of the self that prevents us from realizing true human values or from knowing the truth about ourselves and our social relations.” It is only in the last paragraph that he concedes that the current Trump-Republican program might push us back towards thinking about a Frankfurt School-esque analysis of authoritarianism and capitalism.<\/p>\n

OK, so Freeman isn’t “really a Marxist” (the gist\u00a0of his essay is essentially\u00a0“Marx + Frankfurt School for Dummies,” incidentally, with a strong liberal bias). It would nevertheless be pointless to draw too strict a line between the “official Marxists” and\u00a0people like Freeman who seem to want to become\u00a0public spokesmen for Marxism<\/em>, as the latter role is already a form of participation in\u00a0the marxian universe of discourse. And it’s that entire social\u00a0universe of Marxist\/marxian theory<\/em> that is way less feminist and more masculine than it should be.<\/p>\n

In Freeman’s defense… Actually, I’m having a hard time thinking of much to say in Freeman’s defense. It’s 2017. Nothing about feminism is really settled (and\u00a0philosophy qua discipline has immense problems with sexism and sexual violence<\/a>) but I\u00a0find it a lamentable\u00a0commentary on Freeman that he didn’t seem to notice<\/em> the blatant masculinism of his own discourse, or of the Marxist tradition he is commenting on. And it’s a sad commentary\u00a0on the New York Review of Books,<\/em> moreover,\u00a0that their editorial process\u00a0evidently does not preclude\u00a0publishing texts like this.<\/p>\n

Total self-consciousness is manifestly impossible.\u00a0That doesn’t make minimal<\/em> self-consciousness\u00a0an unreasonable\u00a0standard to insist on, whatever one’s gender.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It is an\u00a0exaggeration to say\u00a0that all Marxist theory people are men. But\u00a0the historical\u00a0masculinity of that little world \u2014 let’s face it \u2014is hard to underestimate. I’m not talking about political Marxists here\u2014 though if we look at France, for instance, the Trotskyist Nathalie Artaud\u00a0is essentially invisible compared to the Communist-backed\u00a0Jean-Luc M\u00e9lenchon, though both are running […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[485,489,499],"tags":[623,624],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2343"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2343"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2343\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2504,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2343\/revisions\/2504"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}