Alain Soral on Feminism, Transcribed

 Below is a transcription from this video of Alain Soral on YouTube.

Soral describes feminism in Marxist class war terms. 

You have to clearly differentiate feminism from women and feminimity. Feminism is a political movement, which, somewhat on the Marxist model which claims history is class warfare, here it claims history is the war of the sexes, and that in fact the point of history would be to free women from the oppression they are subjected to by men. So it's a view of the world that I call victimary communitarianism, with a mono-determinist aspct to it, which is to say 'women are alienated by men and they ahve to free themselves from masculine oppression."

That's the first serious definition of feminism. 

Feminist demands, which are legitimate, are often manipulated to make them servants of commercial and wage worker society, whcih is the same thing since you need wages to consume. So in fact, the feminist demands for emancipation were used to turn them into wage workers, to make them wage workers and consumers. It was a two step process.

This started in the United States, with what's called the theory of the new woman, which consisted of getting women out of the home, which is a non-mercantile role, without direct buying power, and then making them feel guilty, and at the same time forcing their consciousnessness into thinking that being a housewife is an alienation, a suffering, a form of humiliation, and in the end make her shift from her husband's sphere of influence to her employer's, which is pretty ambiguous. 

Since after all you realize that in the end, women end up -- thanks to the feminist struggle, they end up with a dual alienation, which is to endure both the husband and the boss. That's what soome call the double shift, to be both mother and housewife, and wage worker. And it often, especially in the working class, made their situation worse and not better. 

Which brings us to another assessment, which is that in the end, feminism doesn't trasncend class warfare, because really the point of feminist emancipation has often been the interest of upper class women, and they've rarely identified it as such. In reality 3/4ths of feminist militants are bourgeois women, who are trying to escape their housewife role, dependent status, or mother role, to go towards civil society, which is a plus for them since it means having interesting professions. They can be lawyers, researchers, run a bookstore, etc., whereas for the workign class women, it's not only caring for the household and the children, but on top of that, beign an assembly line worker.

And what's pretty interesting is that for the working class, emancipation, instead, is escaping production constraints and the wage system, to become a provided-for woman or housewife, which is a luxury, and so one ambition for working class women is to escape the worker's obligation to produce. Whereas, for the bourgeoisie it's escaping boredom, the *bourgeois housewife's boredom.* to attain a more interesting social life, and interesting professions, which means that there is an opposition in terms of class between the bourgeois woman's ambitions in terms of emancipation, and the working class woman's ambition.

And feminism rarely identified this inconsistency. It's pretty easy to see that most feminist leaders are women of the bourgeoisie, so this matches the liberal bourgeois woman's ideas. 

So that's the work I've done, which I don't think is questionable, but was questioned a lot, usually without or in terms of the presumed intent. Machismo, disdain of women, etc. 

It's possible for a woman to be a wage worker if someone is taking care of her children, which means that often what we forget is that behind liberated feminist woman, there's another who hs a dual alienation, which is the maid, for instance, or the babysitter who takes care fo the feminist's children, and of her own children, so in reality women's emancipation often happens at the expense of other women, doubly alienated, which is left unsaid. 

Because the probelm with all at once giving birth, raising little kids, and workign too, is that it multiplies work time, and that days don't stretch, and that there is no ubiquity in women anymore than in men, so really how do you manage what of your toddlers when you have to work 8 hours a day? That's the question. Now some women can afford to paya babysitter and go to work, which means that they have to earn more than the babysitter, but for working class women, a babysitter would cost more than the wages they make themselves, so this isn't a free choice, it's a matter of social class. 

And it often ends up, at least in the working class, with the double shift, because in reality the right to work is a scam, it's an obligation to work. Almost no couples today can get by on just one salary, in the working class (which show's its social regrssion in this way), you need, in working class or poorer white colar families, two salaries for the home to get by.

So a woman who stops working is a luxury today in the working class... So what feminism considers a fruit of their struggle, the "right" to work for wages, is actually an obligation. It's an obligation, and it's also what consumer society wants since with its ever-expanding markets it has an interest in expanding wages and buying power, the capacity to consume, so in reality what feminists consider the fruit of their struggle was the hidden will of consumer society, to put women on the market for wages and consumption. That's why feminists which have always been very few, were always very pampered by media and power. Unlike real social struggles, where sex doesn't matter, because in fact they unnowingly played in the hands of mercantilism and consumer society, that's why I say that feminists in hindsight reveal themselves as being the useful idiots of mercantilism and consumer society, and generalized wage work.

Wherever feminism rises, usually is where class warfare, and awareness of class warfare, regresses. And that's where feminism is rather ambiguous: the more liberal, bourgeois, and "bobo" (Bourgeois Bohemian), the bigger the disparity between rich and poor gets, and the more you see feminists, and the more power they are given, 

It's a consistent observation, so, I think unfortanately feminists play the role of the useful idiots or even worse in this matter.

I have a lot of respect for many women, which are never feminists by the way. Marguerite Yourcenar mocked feminists because she sees the catch-22, women of a superior intelligence, who are aware of their being and who want to fight for their freedom, have always denounced the lies, the naivety, the stupidity of the strictly feminist struggle. And even feminist icons such as Mrs. Halimi, she wrote a book, not too long ago, where she basically admits that she did it all to annoy her father and that it's basically a bourgeois oedipal affair, and often feminism is just an oedipal and bourgeois settling of scores, the most blatant example being Simone de Beauvoir. 

Simone de Beauvoir is proof that feminism is bullshit, completely. Her relation to her family, to Sartre, to the left, to men, it's naive on such a level which is only equaled, in the end, it's petty, mean, and dishonest. And I'd like for people interested in this issue to have the honesty and analyze, in hindsight, what Simone de Beauvoir represents when it comes to philosophical production, political commitment, her socialite ambiguity, it's far from brillaint. I'd rather think of Louise Michel. 

The analysis is absolutely fantastic -- of course, one need not to agree with it or with whatever conclusions that you think Soral would propose, but it points out a problem with feminism that many can easily imagine.