By definition, can communism be racist or patriarchal?

[PhantomRei]

So supposedly, communism is a classless society. If so, then logically that should include gender and race, right?

[Ostrinski]

Of course. Gender and racial hierarchy as we know them today are the result of bourgeois jurisprudence and hegemony. Chauvinism in all its forms is structural. Social constructs cease to exist when they cease to be socially perpetuated, and they cease to be socially perpetuated when they cease to serve a function.

[Omsk]

By definition, can communism be racist or patriarchal?


No.

[Don't pay attention to the "National-Bolshevism and National Communism.]

[Blake's Baby]

Gender and race aren't classes. But for that very reason, because class cuts across gender and race, communism can't be racist and sexist. We don't want 'liberation for all workers, actually, only the female south Asian ones'. That would be bizarre and pointless and stupid and wrong and really... I mean, what?

[Franz Fanonipants]

by definition: no

[Ocean Seal]

No by definition it cannot be racist or sexist. However, that does not mean that communism will annihilate racism or sexism upon inception.

[Mr. Natural]

Communism, as described by Marx and Engels in the Manifesto: "we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all."

Communism will eliminate social splitting--classes to racism and patriarchal formations.

[PhantomRei]

"Gender and race aren't classes."

Pulling out my Firestone:



Engels did observe that the original division of labour was between man and woman for the purposes of child-breeding;
that within the family the husband was the owner, the wife the means of production, the children the labour; and that reproduction of the human species was an important economic system distinct from the means of production.

But Engels has been given too much credit for these scattered recognitions of the oppression of women as a class. In fact he acknowledged the sexual class system only where it overlapped and illuminated his economic construct. Engels didn't do so well even in this respect. But Marx was worse: there is a growing recognition of Marx's bias against women (a cultural bias shared by Freud as well as all men of culture), dangerous if one attempts to squeeze feminism into an orthodox Marxist framework-freezing what were only incidental insights of Marx and Engels about sex class into a dogma.

Instead we must enlarge historical materialism to include the strictly Marxian, in the same way the physics of relativity did not invalidate Newtonian physics so much as it drew a circle around it, limiting its application-but only though comparison- to a smaller sphere.


All past history [note that we can now omit 'with the exception of primitive stages'] was the history of class struggle. These warring classes of society are always the product of the biological family unit for reproduction of the species, as well as of the strictly economic modes of production and exchange of goods and services. The sexual-reproductive organization of society always furnishes the real basis, starting from which we alone can work out the ultimate explanation of the whole superstructure of economic, juridical and political institutions as well as of the religious, philosophical and other ideas of a given historical period.

[Kronsteen]

It's a good question.

If communism is rooted in the collective ownership of the means of production, plus the organisation of industry to serve need instead of greed...then the social structures arising out of that will indeed be more egalitatian and more accepting.

But the potential for hate and stupidity wouldn't have been surgically removed from the human mind, any more than the potential for greed and lying. People will still naturally vary a lot in their psychological makeup, and 'memes' will still spread.

What I'm saying is: There will still be individual jerks and arseholes undercommunism, people will still create bad ideas, and bad ideas will still be able to gain a following. So it's possible for an idea like sexism to gain a following - even though both the economics and the culture are oriented against it.

In fact, there's no reason in principle why a communist society couldn't become completely corrupt. In which case, we'd need another revolution to reset it.

So we're not looking at an eternal utopia. Just a much better culture than the one we have. Which I think is worth the struggle.