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Miriam
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Subject: [blind-democracy] ‘The fashion world became a capitalist gold mine’
‘The fashion world became a capitalist gold mine’
https://themilitant.com/2021/03/06/the-fashion-world-became-a-capitalist-gold-mine/
March 15, 2021
Above, portrait of high society bourgeois soiree. Inset, members of United
Steelworkers of America Local 8888 picket in February 1979 in successful battle
for union recognition against Newport News, Virginia, shipyard bosses. “The
woman question cannot be divorced from the class question,” Evelyn Reed writes
in Cosmetics, Fashions, and the Exploitation of Women.
PAINTING BY AVTANDIL MAKHAROBLIDZE; INSET, MILITANT/JOHN COBEY Above, portrait
of high society bourgeois soiree. Inset, members of United Steelworkers of
America Local 8888 picket in February 1979 in successful battle for union
recognition against Newport News, Virginia, shipyard bosses. “The woman
question cannot be divorced from the class question,” Evelyn Reed writes in
Cosmetics, Fashions, and the Exploitation of Women.
Cosmetics, Fashions, and the Exploitation of Women by Joseph Hansen, Evelyn
Reed and Mary-Alice Waters is one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for March.
This Marxist classic on women’s emancipation began as a
1954 debate in the Militant over the relation of big-business marketing of
cosmetics and fashions to the oppression of women. The excerpt is from the
chapter “The Woman Question and the Marxist Method” by Evelyn Reed, a leader of
the Socialist Workers Party. She joined the second wave of the fight for
women’s liberation in the 1960s and ’70s, authoring several books on the
origins of women’s oppression. Copyright © 1986 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted
by permission.
BY EVELYN REED
The class distinctions between women transcend their sex identity as women.
This is above all true in modern capitalist society, the epoch of the sharpest
polarization of class forces.
The woman question cannot be divorced from the class question. Any confusion on
this score can only lead to erroneous conclusions and setbacks. It will divert
the class struggle into a sex struggle of all women against all men.
Historically, the sex struggle was part of the bourgeois feminist movement of
the last century. It was a reform movement, conducted within the framework of
the capitalist system, and not seeking to overthrow it.
But it was a progressive struggle in that women revolted against almost total
male domination on the economic, social, and domestic fronts.
Through the feminist movement, a number of important reforms were won for
women. But the bourgeois feminist movement has run its course, achieved its
limited aims, and the problems of today can only be resolved in the struggle of
class against class.
The woman question can only be resolved through the lineup of working men and
women against the ruling men and women. This means that the interests of the
workers as a class are identical; and not the interests of all women as a sex.
Ruling-class women have exactly the same interest in upholding and perpetuating
capitalist society as their men have. The bourgeois feminists fought, among
other things, for the right of women as well as men to hold property in their
own name. They won this right. Today, plutocratic women hold fabulous wealth in
their own names. They are completely in alliance with the plutocratic men to
perpetuate the capitalist system. They are not in alliance with the working
women, whose needs can only be served through the abolition of capitalism.
Thus, the emancipation of working women will not be achieved in alliance with
women of the enemy class, but just the opposite; in a struggle against them as
part and parcel of the whole class struggle.
The attempt to identify the interests of all classes of women as a sex takes
one of its most insidious forms in the field of female beauty. The bourgeois
myth has arisen that since all women want to be beautiful, they all have the
same interest in cosmetics and fashions which are currently identified with
beauty. To buttress this myth, it is claimed that fashion beauty has prevailed
throughout all ages of history and for all classes of women. As evidence, they
point to the fact that even in primitive society, women painted and decorated
their bodies. To explode this myth, let us briefly examine the history of
cosmetics and fashions.
In primitive society, where there were no classes, no economic and social
competition, and no sexual competition, the bodies of both women and men were
painted and “decorated,” and it was not for the sake of beauty. It was a
necessity that arose out of certain primeval and primitive conditions of labor,
which I shall explain in detail in future articles.
It was necessary at that time for each individual who belonged to the kinship
group to be “marked” as such. These “marks” were not merely ornaments, rings,
bracelets, short skirts, etc., but actual gashes, incisions, tattoo marks, etc.
as well as different kinds of painting.
These marks indicated not only the sex of each individual but the changing age
and labor status of each individual as he matured from a child to an elder.
These marks identified the kindred members of the same group or labor
collective. Since primitive society was socialist, these marks also expressed
social equality. …
Then came class society. The marks that signified, among other things, social
equality under primitive socialism, became transformed into their opposite.
They became fashions and decorations that signified social inequality: the
division of society into rich and poor, into rulers and subjugated. Cosmetics
and fashions became the marks of social distinction between the classes and the
apex of this social distinction is found in the French Court before the French
Revolution. …
But as capitalism developed, there arose an enormous expansion of the
productive machine and with it the need for a mass market. Since women
represent half the population, profiteers in “beauty” eyed this mass and lusted
to exploit it for their own purposes. …
The fashion world became a capitalist gold mine with virtually unlimited
possibilities. All a big businessman had to do was to change the fashions often
enough and invent enough new aids to beauty and he could become richer and
richer. That is how, under capitalism, the sale of women as commodities was
displaced by the sale of commodities to women.
Correspondingly, natural beauty became more and more displaced by artificial
beauty; namely, fashion beauty. And that is how the myth arose that beauty is
identical with fashion. …
Beauty has no identity with fashions. But it has an identity with labor.
Apart from the realm of nature, all that is beautiful has been produced in
labor and by the laborers. Outside the realm of nature, beauty does not exist
apart from labor and never will. For the beauty of all the products of labor,
and of all the arts produced in and through labor, are incorporated within
these products and these arts.
Humanity itself, together with the beauty of humanity, was produced in and
through the labor process. As [Frederick] Engels pointed out, when the humans
produced, they produced themselves as humans. They cast off their apelike
appearance and became more and more beautiful. When the capitalist social
disfigurement of exploited labor is removed, the true beauty of labor and of
the laborers will stand forth in their true dimensions.
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Charles Bukowski “For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are
answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big
answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and
discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I
am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and
our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We
are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will
tremble to take us.” ― Charles Bukowski