Feminism and Astrology
Feminism and Astrology
I don't understand why there are so many people who consider themselves "Marxist feminists", but at the same time are distracted by astrology.
The origin of feminism is working class, and as a working class movement, it is materialist. I don't know if they at least know what dialectical materialism is, since they don't see such an abysmal contradiction between astrology (pseudoscience) and feminism (materialism).
They remind me of the liberal “feminist” Gloria Steinem.
And the same with some anarchists.
What do you think about it?
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i think shunting off non rational belief into a category of "bullshit not worth exploring or interrogating" is kind of, i dunno, itself ignorant? you can at least take the approach of people who study these matters academically, and separate your ego and emotional responses from the equation and seek to actually, not just approximating marx fourth hand, actually try to understand the phenomenon before jumping to this kind of shit.
astrology fits this category for me - it's not remotely productive for anyone to silo yourselves off from understanding for a lack of "getting it" - you're not omniscient, there's shit you don't know. Human tendencies towards these phenomena, whether imaginal or real, and you already know what you think about that, are not something to just go "lol i dont get it fuck all that noise" because you wanna actually reach people and find common cause with them, you refusing and even being hostile to this shit is gonna lose people who might, despite your assumptions, be radically useful.
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I know it is difficult to know everything in depth, but it is easy to know when something is so irrational that it is even harmful to the movement itself (in this case, feminism).
In fact, it is anti-materialist to say "lol i dont get it f*ck all that noise" when you don't know about a subject, since you are ignoring its history, the material conditions that produced that thought, idea, subject, etc.
I think such people distracted by astrology, sperituality and manifestation, are a problem within the movement. They are not radically useful. Capitalism wants you to be distracted by it, to believe that you, individually, can change the outside with your mentality, and not the outside (your material conditions) to your way of thinking.
You can make all of the same points about tv, video games, movies, fiction books, playing sports, religion, and on and on. Why is the distraction more associated with women the one you think needs called out?
I think you have to accept that people will get distracted by useless bullshit and deal with things as they are. I know astrology people that contribute to the community in various ways (mutual aid and such) despite believing in all kinds of woo.
It's simply not your call or place to say something is "harmful to the movement" when you're not a part of it, you can't speak or know about it from experience. Saying stuff like that is a very easy way of getting dismissed entirely by basically every member of "the movement", as I am doing now, i truly do not care about the topic of astrology.
Maybe go talk to feminists that like astrology and calmly ask questions, and maybe ask yourself why you care so much about something of such little consequence for a movement that is, materially speaking, probably in contradiction with your own position and benefits in the current system and will naturally tend to be seen as uncomfortable to you.