Masculine Dominance and the State

Abstract

The speech from which this article has been developed was given at a session of the Winnipeg Marx Centenary conference1 entitled 'Women and the Economic and Political Crisis'. That a crisis exists in the world economic and political order there can be no doubt. There can also be little doubt that there is a crisis in the organised Marxist movement defined in general terms as composed of the far Left groups, the Communist and parts of the Social Democratic Parties, and important parts of the socialist networks which exist in mass movements and institutions. The causes of Marxism's crisis are both historical and contemporary. Historically speaking, Marxism is only now beginning any large-scale recovery from its Stalinist deep-freeze as far as its own capacity to generate the kinds of answers demanded by the questions posed by the class struggle today is concerned. In the meantime, its liberatory potential has been tarnished in the eyes of millions of people, and insofar as it continues its association with the bureaucratic regimes of the transitional societies, that potential will continue to be dulled. There are a number of contemporary problems which also present major obstacles to Marxism's overall capacity to provide revolutionary solutions. The one I want to single out in this discussion is the crisis between the genders that has hit and rocked the Marxist movement, from the smallest local study group to the largest workers' party, during the preceding decade and continuing into the eighties. These two crises are distinct problems, but they overlap in important ways historically, and need to be addressed together in the period to come. One of the most crucial areas of both anti- Stalinist and feminist concerns is the enormous set of issues regarding the nature and role of the state. In this article I want to tackle the general problem feminists have described when they talk about Marxist categories obscuring relations of masculine dominance by a specific discussion of the state, and the ways in which it acts as an organiser and enforcer of male supremacy. Socialist feminists have been developing a body of scholarship and theory over the last ten to fifteen years that has until now barely been engaged by most Marxist men. It is in the spirit of the positive gains that can flow from such an engagement that this article is offered.