Date: 07-05-95 (17:58) Number: 20312 of 20312 (Refer# NONE)

To: pnews-l@sjuvm.stjohns.edu

From: IRFAN ERDOGAN

Subj: on women

On women question

Joanna asks interesting questions (message 40279). I like to add some of my critical comments:

Women question (not women's question, because it is also my problem as a man and as a human being) can be approached only within individual\personal and gender lines, because it is very productive for the establishment based on exploitation of the atomized individuals competing for finding an owner of capital who wants to hire him\her for a fee that goes down as the competition gets fierce (unemployment increases and layoffs mount up). This is the fact of life organized under the present system. It is productive also for the establishment of new businesses geared toward the consumption by women. There are so many so called liberated\free women and feminist oriented magazines that are full of quick solutions to women question through buying, consuming and buying again (includes sex and perceiving and using man as a consumable product.) I recently saw, in PNEWS, a call for articles for a women's magazine that excludes men by asking men not to send anything (Is it because of the lesbian argument that reduces relationship between men and women to sex and claims that only women can understand women? Is it because of, holding up in air, in a classroom, an exagerated robber sexual organ of man, claim "you don't need this"?) Any women's movement, magazine or organization that excludes "enemy-men" is not for women in general, but for specific women with specific expectations occupying specific position in society. Setting women against men is another outcome of sick solutions of a sick social formation. If there are only few women in business and politics and men hold the upper hand, it is not because of MEN but it is because how the society is structured and reproduced by men and women through daily hegemonic agendas and participation. If you (women) want to keep this oppressive structure and capture a leading position and become one of the oppressors, you've come and have a long long way to go baby! Here, women, full of anger and feeling of revenge, loose their humanly qualities and strive for being another oppressor and exploiter.

Women question cannot be approached within the class struggle perspective, because it is counter-productive for the establishment. When you include women question in the class struggle, the bourgeois and burgeois radical feminism and women's protests change their mode of understanding of the problem, solution, organization and operation: Women set their liberation agenda for not against the "oppressor-monster-men" and for not grabbing a position in the oppressive structure, but for liberation of human beings from the yoke of capitalist and imperialist supported rape all over the world. Thus, women question becomes the part of human question and finds its answer in the struggle to reorganize the human society where there is no place of exploitation and oppression of women at home and at work. Here women regain their freedom and humanity. And the organization of family looses its fascist character and becomes an institution of freedom and equality, bringing up mentally healthy human beings to the society. (As contrary what dominant ideology claims, in order to fall back to the starting point and justify the view that only solution is to work with the desirable alternatives provided by the system,) this is not an impossible dream or an utopia, but the question of the mode of social organization and production relations.

Irfan erdogan

irfan.erdogan@consultant.com