ther than the workers creating their own needs, they produce whatever capital needs to make a profit.
This alienation from labour, the conscious, creative aspect of humans which marks us off from the animal world, results in the estrangement of one human being from another. This is the real problem with pornography: sex is something alienated from real human relationships. The sex act is portrayed in an alienated, objectified form for a passive, anonymous viewer - as if it is a mirror reflecting the distorted lives of women and men under capitalism.
For Marx, В«the whole of human servitude is involved in the relation of the worker to production, and all relations of servitude are nothing but modifications and consequences of this relation. В»Put simply, all the oppression and horrors we see around us arise from the basic fact of exploitation of the working class by capital and the particular way that is carried out. Because of this alienation, everything is turned into a commodity: the ability to work, everything we need to survive, even leisure and sex (ie in the form of pornography, advertising which uses sexual exploitation of women, and prostitution). The feelings of powerlessness workers experience are based on the reality of exploitation and their actual lack of power. This leads them to accept the domination of capital and along with that the dominant ideas of capitalism. This then explains why both men and women by and large accept sexist ideas - not some malignant desire by men to dominate women.
Alienation permeates all of life and all classes, though in different ways depending on their degree of social power. To understand its manifestations this philosophical theory must be concretised.
And to understand society, or any aspect of it we have to understand the totality of all the social relations which make it up. The parts of society cannot be understood abstracted out of that totality, but only as parts of the whole. So to understand women's oppression and the resulting unequal relationships of women and men in the family, we have to find how they are part of the class society we live in. That is why I began with the way capitalism moulded the family, and how changes in the way production is organised brought changes and contradictions in women's lives. To say that class is fundamental to an understanding of family violence is not to simplistically В«reduceВ» women's oppression to class, but to situate that oppression in capitalism, to show how gender oppression intersects with class oppression. They do not just В«intersectВ» as separate aspects of society. Class exploitation gives rise to oppression and so they are fundamentally linked. p> Ale question is frequently posed: why is it that men are the perpetrators of violence rather than women? Marxists and feminists agree the primary reason is because of the unequal relations between the sexes. However, it is worth remembering that most violence is actually carried out by men against other men. Under capitalism, people's lack of control over their lives makes them frustrated, at times angry, at others passive and apathetic. Anger among workers can lead to trade union organisation and class actions such as strikes. But at an individual level, it can lead to lashing out at fellow workers. The divisions caused by sexism and racism create easy targets for this lashing out. This may mean at times attacking migrant or black workers who can be mistakenly blamed for unemployment or simply seen as inferior and easy victims. To call the relationship of the attacking worker one of В«powerВ» over the migrant or black is to miss the point of the real source of the violence: alienation, or lack of power.
It is easier to see the difference between the actions of the worker and those who possess real power if we look at racism and the ruling class. Ideologues such as Geoffrey Blainey actively campaign to have racist ideas accepted. He actually does have influence: access to journals, the media etc. At the time of writing, there is a conscious campaign by employers to convince workers that immigrants are the cause of unemployment, not the system of exploitation. Unlike workers, employers and governments have the means to propagate and establish these ideas as the accepted wisdom. The ruling class also gains from their acceptance: workers turn their anger against other workers instead of the government or the bosses. Workers lose from racist attacks, because it is more difficult to unite against their exploiters.
In the family, women are on the receiving end of alienated behaviour. Here, there is a whole ideology which lays the basis for it: women as sex objects, as bound to satisfy their husbands 'every demand, doing the housework and child care as well as working for a wage. When Marxists argue that it is the <...
