Letters
Editors: You don't have to go to Duluth or Boston to get a noncommercial magazine with a feminist editorial slant (see "Beyond Buying and Posing: Teen Feminist Magazines," Dissent, Fall 1998)....
...Call 212-2423270, ext...
...KEITH HEFNER New York, N.Y...
...Why Professor Lerner feels compelled to repeat that misrepresentation is something of a mystery...
...Subscriptions to NYC cost $10 per year for seven issues...
...Noting that Seneca Falls and the Communist Manifesto arrived on the historical scene in the same year, Lerner contrasts the subsequent accomplishments of nonviolent, legalistic, and gradualist feminism with the empty failures of violent, state-terrorist, and revolution-obsessed "communism...
...While the importance of Marxism in both theory and practice has been widely acknowledged, both by its supporters and by its enemies, feminism, the movement for justice for half the human race, has consistently been treated as minor, a "special interest...
...Off the Mark on Marx Editors, I am disappointed that distinguished historian Gerda Lerner, in "The Meaning of Seneca Falls" (Dissent, Fall 1998), felt it necessary to misrepresent the historical project of the left in her effort to preserve the lessons of the 1848 Seneca Falls Women's Rights convention...
...The problem is that Lerner has constructed a straw dog that owes more to the outdated mindset of the cold war than it does to feminist analysis...
...DISSENT / Winter 1999 127...
...And Marx's specter, properly understood for what it was and is, contributed and contributes significantly to improved working-class living standards and democratic rights throughout the world, largely through peaceful means...
...In a lengthier discussion of the subject of Marxism as a social movement I might have added, that it also caused reformist movements for social change and social democracy...
...You can get one right here in New York—with the added bonus that it's well written, and teens read it with enthusiasm...
...Marx envisaged the classless society as necessarily and desirably a stateless society and entertained the possibility of gradual, nonviolent transition to socialism despite his painful knowledge that ruling classes regularly used brutal repression to keep working men and women in their place...
...Maxine Phillips Replies: Keith Hefner publishes a very good magazine/newspaper for New York teens—New Youth Connections, but I focused on national magazines aimed at girls...
...I was therefore not concerned in my article in entering a debate on Marx' and Engles' intentions and purposes in writing the Communist Manifesto nor did I wish to go into a discussion of the various schools of Marxism and their validity...
...PAUL STREET DeKalb, IL Gerda Lerner Replies: My main purpose in framing my article on Seneca Falls within this comparative form was to counteract a tendency which pervades historical scholarship and media writing, namely, to minimize the importance of feminism as a movement for social change...
...In that sense, I stand corrected...
...I simply stated historical facts as to the outcome of the movement launched by the Communist Manifesto, which, I believe, was fairly characterized as having caused "revolutions, wars, tyrannies, and counterrevolutions...
...Both sides of the cold war found it useful to claim that the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China embodied 1848's "specter of Communism...
...For Manifesto authors Marx and Engels, desirable social transformation on the model of a classless and post-economic society (the real specter of "communism") was possible only in countries with highly developed forces of production and needed to emerge in a number of the most industrialized advanced states at the same time...
...Lerner's failed "communism" refers in fact to the doomed antidemocratic projects of Stalinism and Maoism, neither of which was remotely capable of embodying nineteenth-century European radicals' vision of the good society...
...I do not agree that it is cold war logic to regard the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China as having followed Marxist doctrine...
Vol. 46 • January 1999 • No. 1
