Marxism and Domination (review)

200 the minnesota review beneficial for us to work together to rid ourselves ofthe excesses of this destructive force. If the work ahead of us is immense, the rewards are correspondingly great. The writings contained within this volume and those that are already proceeding from it have the profoundest implications for radical theory and practice. The contributors to the book explore an experience that has been repeatedly valorized in our time: the experience of difference. As women, as members ofminority races, and as lesbians, they respond to a call that has all too frequently been addressed to "woman" alone: "The task of woman remains, however, to inscribe in the sodai body not so much difference itself as a multiplicity of differences" (Josette Feral, "The Powers ofDifference," in TheFuture ofDifference, ed. Hester Eisenstein and Alice Jardine [Boston: G. H. HaU, 1980], p. 88). Having learned theory "in the flesh" third world lesbian feminists deconstruct in practice those boundaries designed to keep us all in place; they live, as Cherrie Moraga puts it, "between the Unes"—a phrase which wonderfuUy suggest the women's refusal to be silenced as weU as thdr resistance to the categories that a white patriarchal language has evolved in order to explain the world in radst and sexist terms. Living between the Unes means rejecting separatist ideologies and working on a variety of fronts to challenge radsm, sexism, and homophobia wherever it is found. But it involves more than rejection; it also entails affirmation, of which, there is plenty in this volume, as the writers probe thdr history and traditions, seek to come to terms with thdr mothers' lives, and renew thdr commitment to spirituality—to thdr "women's blood," in the words of Luisah Tdsh, the vaginal blood used in traditional charms and speUs to overpower men. "Of course there is a great taboo against it. As long as they (men) are involved. That's like Superman outlawing Kryptonite; of course he will." This Bridge Called My Back wiU undoubtedly arouse intense emotions, even anger, expecially in white feminists who may feel that thdr good intentions absolve them from some of the harsher charges of radsm. But such emotions have the potential to spark urgently needed debate that will hopefuUy enable us all to cross over together. TANIA MODLESKI Isaac D. Balbus. Marxism and Domination. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1982. 417 pp. In Marxism and Domination, Isaac Balbus provides provocative critiques of both classical Marxism and contemporary "neo-Marxism," arguing that neither can provide adequate perspectives on liberation, or a strategy to overcome patriarchical, technological, or political forms of domination. In fact, after laying out what he considers the defidendes in classical Marxism in Part I and the problems with neo-Marxism in Part II, Balbus breaks with Marxism completely providing his own theory of domination and Uberation in Part III. Although most of our review wiU be concered with Balbus' theory, we shall begin by commenting on his analysis of classical Marxism and neo-Marxism. In an unnecessarily reductive reading of Marx, Balbus tends to identify Marxism tout court with the economistic, scientist«: Marxism ofthe Second International andespecially Soviet Marxism and its offical ideology of "Marxism Leninism." Although he doesn't characterize Marxism in these historical terms, he presents it as a form of economic reductionism that reduces aU sodai phenomena to the mode of production. He argues that classical Marxism does not provide an adequate account of patriarchical domination, ecological problems, or participatory democracy. In Part II, Balbus indicates how the deficiendes in classical Marxism led "neo-Marxists," such as Wilhelm Rdch, Herbert Marcuse, JuUet Mitchell, and Jürgen Habermas, to attempt to synthesize Marxism with Freud, feminism, ecology, or democratic poUtical theory to overcome this problem. Balbus believes that neo-Marxist attempts fail predselv to the reviews 201 extent that they remain implicated in primary Marxian "instrumentalist" presuppositions concerning the mode of production, the primacy of labor in human life, and the theory of dass struggle as the means to sodai change. However, he does not indicate that the tradition of neo-Marxism, or "critical Marxism," provides another way ofinterpreting Marx as a dialectical, humanist, and critical theorist. Indeed, this traditon...