https://rsmtoronto.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/brave-new-world-philosophical-trends-in-the-feminist-movement-by-avanti.pdf

Anuradha Ghandy, aka Avanti, was an Indian communist who organized with the Communist Party of India (Maoist). The CPI(M) is a large maosit / naxalite group with over 30k militant comrades. The CPI(M) was formed in 2004 as a combination of various organizations associated with the histric CPI (Marxist-leninist). This essay is an important essay in the Naxalite movement that summarizes strands of feminist theory, some proletarian and some anti-proletarian. Avanti wrote this to explain exactly how a communist party should be feminist, and how women and feminism can endorse organization and violence.

She gives a succinct and correct summary and critique of liberal and radical feminism. She makes the standard critiques of liberal feminism, and claims that radical feminism verges away from materialism and into idealism at certain times. The strands of radical feminism which claim gender and patriarchy are the fundamental antagonism of society are not properly materialist since, for this to be correct, the definition of the material base would have to be understood in a context so large that the base/superstructure model would lose it's analytic power.

She opposes eco-feminism on the grounds that this form of environmentalism aspires to move back to feudalism, rather that revolutionary socialism. She opposes the radical feminist claim that women should separate from men, with the goal of cultural separation and intensification of "feminine" attributes since these oppose the socialist organization of women and these "feminine" attributes hamper women's ability to engage in violence. Universal cultural claims about feminist attributes also tend to be eurocentric, and thus are irrelevant for the CPI(M).

I think she makes a bit of a shallow summary of postmodernism, but the critiques are accurate: that (e.g. Foucauldian strategy) lacks a historcial perspective on power relationships and thus tends toward insurrectionary anarchism instead of collective socialism.

Although she never references Angela Davis, a lot of this feels like a summary of Davis's "Women Class and Power": for example, the points about how Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B Anthony were actually reactionary, the history of the split between feminist suffragettes and abolitionists, etc. Overall a pretty good summary of the relationship between marxist and feminist praxis.

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Pub: 11 Dec 2020 22:44 UTC
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