… there are more men than ….
(c) 2018, Davd
A rather unfriendly Feminist told me some 40 years ago, that Feminism began with a “Marxist class-analysis of gender relations”. Feminists, she said, viewed men as a bourgeoisie and women as a proletariat. I don’t recall her going on to assert “the dictatorship of the proletariat” as the Bolsheviks did, but it may have occurred to her. Other things she said indicated that she considered me—and men in general—unworthy of equality with her gender.
Marx foresaw the bourgeoisie shrinking (through financial competition) to a tiny minority, too small to hold power over a huge proletariat (which huge proletariat then took over.) This does not parallel the sex-demographics of Canada, the USA, nor any state i can name.
The Russian Marxist-Leninists who took power were known as the Bolsheviks—a word meaning, approximately, “the majority party”. They claimed that name based on winning one particular vote; and they were skillful enough at propaganda that they managed to make Bolshevik their name. Two parallels with Feminism are:
‣ Women do outnumber men [though not on as fluctuating a basis as votes in an assembly], and
‣ Feminists have been deadly skillful at propaganda and politicking. Earl Silverman and Tom Ball are two of their better-known victims.
“The dictatorship of the proletariat” in Russia and her “satellites” turned out to be a dictatorship of the bureaucracy (Djilas, 1957; Komarov, 1980). The average Soviet or Yugoslav proletarian probably was better off under [bureaucracy wearing the name of “communism”] than a pre-Soviet, Russian serf; but not as well off as a Canadian or US union worker of the same time. The bureaucrats lived and dictated, not as fellow proletarians but as a ruling class (Djilas, 1957).
This is a blog and not a book; the details of the analogy between Feminism and Bolshevism are too many “to go through properly”1. It does seem apparent that Feminism rules, to the extent it does, through political intrigue (including shaming of their opponents somewhat reminiscent of Stalinist purge trials, and exploitation of privilege won through political intrigue) and through a bureaucracy which is more a ruling class than a representative of the population. It distorts facts in a manner reminiscent of Soviet-bloc “intellectualism” and government prose: The phrase “politically correct” is an example that became common during the reign of the same J. Stalin.
This site and other men’s sites have seen dozens, perhaps hundreds, of refutations of Feminist-promulgated invalid statistics, especially as to pay levels and gender violence. During the “Cold War”, Western and especially American media wrote heaps of scorn on “bogus Soviet statistics.” Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn, and Djilas himself, were treated not that differently from how men are treated who challenge Feminism today. I do not have a causal theory to proffer as the explanation, but it seems there are parallels between Feminism and Marxism in taking and using power, closer than the parallels between either and the shrinking bourgeoisie theory Marx originally propounded.
Marx’s forecast of the bourgeoisie shrinking though competition that evicts bourgeois “losers” into the proletariat, does not apply to biological gender. Men who are not bourgeois are the great majority of men, and while there are now stories of men “changing their sex”, they are extremely few; and there are also proclamations that those not “female born”, are not real women.
Women do constitute a majority of the adult population in many modern States, thanks largely to medical advances that have made death in childbirth and lactation, extremely rare. Men contributed immensely to those advances, and applauded them—we have been friendly to women most of the time, and with very few exceptions, we have been unfriendly only with good cause.
If there is a plausible near future “social path” whereby women will become an overwhelming majority of the population, and men a tiny minority, it cannot involve men becoming women as Marx envisioned members of the bourgeoisie becoming proletarian. Sex change is expensive and few men have shown any desire for the change. The high, increasing suicide rate among men is more plausible, but it is not credible that suicide will reduce the male part of the population to the tiny minority Marx posited.
In fact, the first “communist” government took power in Russia, where at the time there were: A small pre-industrial ruling class, a smaller, separate bourgeoisie, a rather small proletariat, and a peasant majority… very unlike the huge industrial proletariat and tiny bourgeoisie of classic Marxist theory.
A few Feminists have advocated more plausible “social paths”: Selective abortion of male fetuses, and the killing and castration of boys and men so as to reduce the male fraction of the population to one tenth or fewer.2
The Soviet state lasted some 7-8 decades, less than half the duration Glubb [1978] found for a full imperial life cycle, but about the same as a full human lifetime. It was founded on Marxism for propaganda purposes, but was far from the Marxist script of industrial proletariat and shrinking bourgeoisie. It might parallel Feminist political activities better than it parallels a genuine Marxist class analysis.
It seems that the classic Marxist class-analysis has yet to be lived out in a real, industrial society… and that the process it posits is impossible as between the sexes. Feminism, you might say, is Soviet in its falsity.
A few References:
Crankshaw, Edward, 1966. Khrushchev: A Career. New York: Viking Press
Douglas, Tommy, ca. 1944. “Mouseland”. Wikipedia states that one Clarence Gillis first told the story, but that it is customarily identified with Douglas. [accessed July 30, 2018]
Djilas, Milovan 1957, The New Class. NY: Praeger.
Glubb, John Bagot, 1978. The Fate of Empires. Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons Ltd.
Komarov, Boris 1980. The Destruction of Nature in the Soviet Union. White Plains, NY: M. E. Sharpe
Martin, Davd, 2011. “Feminists as Bolsheviks: Can a good look at Leninism and Stalinism help us improve on ‘Feminazi’?”
The Spearhead website, September 28.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels., 1888. Manifesto of The Communist Party. English text edited by Friedrich Engels. Project Gutenberg e-text Transcribed by Allen Lutins with assistance from Jim Tarzia.
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch. The Cancer Ward. The First Circle.
Wikipedia article, “Karl Marx.” Accessed September 26, 2011.
Notes:
* This is a blog, less rigorously documented than academic “journals” might require; and not a comprehensive survey of the foundations of Feminism. The “Marxist class-analysis of gender relations” refuted here is often enough asserted to be one of those foundations. Readers who differ with what they see here are invited to offer corrections, with suitable documentation.
1. This blog parallels substantially one published in 2011 on the now inactive Spearhead website. I cite it among the references, but provide no url because that site can no longer be accessed. This is not, however, simply an edited version of that blog.
2. I know of none having said it will occur by competition among men—certainly not by men turning other men into women.
