Articles tagged “Gender”

We publish below a dialogue between Rinita Mazumdar and Heather Tomanovsky on Tomanovsky’s essay, “Marx, Gender, and Human Emancipation,” which originally appeared on this website. We would be glad to consider more contributions to this discussion – Editors

The revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, and the uprising in Libya have exhibited a post-Islamist and post-nationalist character.  After challenging both the political and the economic order, they face dangers from old forces like the military and the Islamists (Egypt) or of violent repression (Libya) – Editors

From the series Our World, Our Times

A look at Vietnam today: the land question, the status of women,  attempts to build independent unions, state repression, political dissent, and possibilities of revolution. – Editors

Marx’s writings on gender and the family are significantly more substantial and more valuable than is usually acknowledged.  Marx showed considerable insight into the gender relations of his own time, pointing to the need for a total transformation of society that would necessarily involve new relations between men and women, albeit with some problematic elements as well.  –Editors

It is argued that today’s crisis is best confronted through a return to Rosa Luxemburg’s key contributions to Marxist philosophy viewed through the Marxist Humanist lens of Raya Dunayevskaya, with a particular emphasis on the relationship of theory to practice. This chapter originally appeared in Gender Activism: Rosa Luxemburg Annual Seminar, Institute for Social and Economic Research, Rhodes University, South Africa, 2008 (http://www.ru.ac.za/iser).  –Editors

Celebrating the Centenary of Raya Dunayevskaya  (1910-1987)

Video of meeting at Loyola University Chicago featuring presentations by Peter McLaren (UCLA), David Schweickart (Loyola University), Sandra Rein (University of Alberta), Ba Karang (West Africa), Kevin Anderson (University of California, Santa Barbara), and Peter Hudis (Loyola University). We have also posted the written texts or summaries for some of the presentations.

A student active in the support movement for Palestine discusses the dialectics of revolution and of national liberation in Marx, Lenin, and Luxemburg based upon a reading of Dunayevskaya’s work.  This is connected to a critical assessment of the Palestinian national liberation movement since the First Intifada of 1987.  Gender, globalization, fundamentalism, and the brutal Israeli occupation are discussed.

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My Story, Part 1

“You should know more about Islam.” I was at an anti-war event organized by my friend D., and was being admonished by a smug, white, almost-retired Marxist professor, the kind that’s all too common in the Rogers Park neighborhood, an area known for its vaunted progressive politics. He’d just been introduced to me, with my noticeably Muslim first name, and had promptly asked me to clarify some point about Islam. I’d told him I didn’t know, a response which drew the aforementioned words from him. I wanted to sear Mr. Marxist (henceforth to be known as Mr. M.) with angry barbs. D. and I both started to tell Mr. M that I’m an atheist, and I also wanted to turn the tables on him: How dare you, I wanted to say, assume anything about me, based on the color of my skin and my name? And even if I were Muslim, why should I know more about Islam? You’re white, so you must be, oh, a Protestant? But I didn’t, mostly because he was quite old, approaching 80 perhaps, and I was afraid of giving him a heart attack. And, I’ll admit, because I didn’t want to “make trouble” in what was partly a social setting.

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Radical change is never accepted easily. With the current discussion on health care reform, we have an opportunity to dismantle three basic dysfunctional tenets of the current system.

The first tenet is that access to health care is a privilege and not a basic human need that our society as a whole values for everyone. Second, for most people, access to health care services is dependent on a person’s employment status. And third, insurance companies and employers are in control of the kinds of health care to which we have access.

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The German Ideology (1845), often seen as the most materialistic of Marx’s early writings, has been taken up mostly by structuralist and orthodox Marxists, but this work is especially important in terms of understanding Marx’s views on gender and the family to Marxist-Humanists as well.