Since equality, not love, is the goal of Marxism, love cannot exist in a Marxist utopia

Marxism and the Gender Revolution

by Paul Krause 

The gender revolution is fundamentally Marxist. Whether people are consciously aware of it or not, the root of gender ideology is Marxist, and its gambit is the construction of the egalitarian society through the obliteration of the division of gender. And the gender revolution is another prong in the full-throated attack on the family.

Most people are familiar with Karl Marx as having written The Communist Manifesto and possibly Das Kapital. Fewer are familiar with Marx’s The German Ideology; but The German Ideology lays the groundwork for the materialist dialectic and the movement to communism. 

It is mentioned only once, but Marx’s brief comment notes what the starting point of inequality is: the sexual division of labor that is the result of the biological division between male and female. 

Speaking about how the division of labor began in ancient tribal societies and developed from there, thus sparking inequality which comes from this division of labor, Marx says, “there develops the division of labor, which was originally nothing but the division of labor in the sexual act, then that division of labor which develops spontaneously or ‘naturally’ by virtue of natural predisposition.”

The genus of inequality, the division of labor, is “the division of labor in the sexual act.” It is this division of labor in the sexual act that recognizes the distinction between male and female, which establishes the consciousness of division from which all later divisions of labor and growing inequality flow. If the sexual act and the division between genders is the very root of all inequality, the only means by which this inequality can be negated is through the androgenization of human nature, wherein the sexual difference between man and woman is abolished.

Feminist readers of Marx, like Simone de Beauvoir and Shulamith Firestone, seized on this supposedly profound insight in Marx. 

Beauvoir articulated the view, as found in her book The Second Sex, that maleness is the metaphysical given and the “creation” of femaleness subjugated women to men as the inferior other. 

In The Dialectic of Sex, Firestone linked the oppression of women to the “sexual division of labor” wherein the female was like the proletariat controlled by the capitalist male. Firestone, who dedicated her work to Beauvoir, stood in agreement with her hero that until women could separate themselves from men and seize control of the sexual means of reproduction, it would be impossible for an egalitarian and liberative society to emerge.

Firestone wrote, “In the case of feminism the problem is a moral one: the biological family unit has always oppressed women and children, but now, for the first time in history, technology has created real preconditions for overthrowing these oppressive ‘natural’ conditions, along with their cultural reinforcements. In the case of the new ecology, we find that independent of any moral stance, for pragmatic—survival—reasons alone, it has become necessary to free humanity from the tyranny of its biology.”

In this respect, the gender ideologues, beginning first with the Marxist feminists of the mid-1900s, were truer readers of Marx than any of his economistic readers of the late nineteenth century who founded the various communist and socialist parties inspired by Marx’s economic writings. Marx’s male readers only focused on the economic dialectic of capitalist-proletariat; none paid attention to the real genus of the material dialectic and the root of inequality which is not capitalism, agrarianism, or slavery but the sexual act in and of itself. How did this happen?

The German Ideology, although written around 1846, wasn’t published until 1932. It remained one of Marx’s unpublished writings—like the Economic Manuscripts of 1844—and was not available to readers until its publication in the early 1930s. The classical Marxists of the economic variety were readers of The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital but were missing the very genesis of the Marxist ideology which remained unknown until 1932. The feminist readers of Marx who read The German Ideology were subsequently able to have the total vision of Marxism and its full understanding where the political-economic Marxists of classical Marxism and their instantiated parties did not.

Marx’s new readers included sexually abusing pederasts like Michel Foucault and his ilk who aligned themselves with the radical feminists in the gambit for the new Marxism which was, in this new light, the authentic Marxism which everyone from Eduard Bernstein, Vladimir Lenin, and Leon Trotsky had missed. 

The new Marxism—that is, the authentic Marxism—now revealed thanks to the publication of The German Ideology, makes war not against capitalism or economic forces per se, but on what caused the forces of economic production to lead to division—and therefore inequality—in the first place: gender and the family. (Doesn’t this sound familiar today?)

To the gender Marxist, there must be an all-out war against all sciences, disciplines, and institutions that uphold the gender distinction between male and female because, insofar as this division between the sexes lives, inequality will thrive because the division between male and female entails that there is a “natural predisposition” to different wants and talents that serves to divide humans, which leads to the unequal distribution of labor, which is the genus of inequality.

After commenting on how the origins of inequality were in the sexual act, Marx wrote, “With the division of labor, in which all these contradictions are implicit, and which in its turn is based on the natural division of labor in the family and the separation of society into individual families opposed to one another, is given simultaneously the distribution, and indeed the unequal distribution…the first form, of which lies in the family, where wife and children are the slaves of the husband. This latent slavery in the family, though still very crude, is the first property, but even at this early stage it corresponds perfectly to the definition of modern economists who call it the power of disposing of the labor-power of others.” 

Therefore, the family must be destroyed by gender ideology. The very notion of family implies ownership and distinction rather than universality and equality. 

Moreover, the family unit is the first structure that engenders inequality. For family is the manifestation of the original sexual division of labor. Return to what Firestone said regarding the family always oppressing women and children. It is lifted straight from Marx—the newly discovered Marx of the twentieth century. 

The war on gender is a war against the family because the sexual division of labor, which is the root of all inequality according to Marx, is first instantiated by the family which then influences the state and its laws.

The dream of egalitarianism requires, from the Marxist disposition, the eradication of the gender division because it is the gender division that is the root of all inequality. This is where the new gender ideology comes full circle. The very nature of gender enforces the inequality that stemmed from the sexual division of labor. 

The aim of gender ideology is the eradication of gender because the eradication of gender is the first stepping-stone to overthrowing the sexual division of labor, which is the cause of all inequality and oppression in the world according to Marx and his faithful interpreters. It dismantles the building block of the oppressive family unit which instantiated this original sin of gender division long ago. So long as nature remains, that division remains; and so long as that division remains, inequality exists. And this entails the overcoming of nature because nature has a division of the sexes.

Insofar that family is that “original cell” of social life, as the Church maintains and the most venerable of ancient philosophers knew (like Aristotle and Cicero), that also means the assault on the family—which the war on gender is—is conceived as a liberating holy war. So long as families exist, the sexual division of labor exists. If families and the sexual division of labor exist, equality cannot be achieved. Anyone who allies themselves to the gender revolution allies themselves to the destruction of families and the teachings of the Church.

The dream of the self-making self and the dream of a world free from the inequality wrought by the gender division is orthodox Marxism. The (un)intended consequence of this war is that without the family there is no first order of affectivity; so, love dies in the modern world as well because love is intensely particular and borne from that sexual division of labor and the family that Marxism seeks to eradicate. Since equality, not love, is the goal of Marxism, love cannot exist in a Marxist utopia either. Yet we know that love is needed now, more than ever. Without families, however, love will wither away.

Paul Krause a teacher, writer, and campus minister. He is the author of The Odyssey of Love: A Christian Guide to the Great Books (Wipf and Stock, 2021).

Read more here  -  Source: www.crisismagazine.com