Date: Sun, 30 Mar 1997 13:53:37 +0000
From: Mark Jones <majones-AT-netcomuk.co.uk>
Subject: M-I: Forwarded from LeninList


On Feminism

There is no such thing as 'proletarian feminism'.  

This has always been the Bolshevik position. 

This means first of all that the social emancipation of
women is at root a class not a gender issue. So women's issues
cannot be dealt with separate from or in priority to
working class issues.In the Soviet context that meant the clear
subordination of women's issues to the need to defend the gains
of the working class, to defend the gains of October.

If this approach is correct then it has obvious relevance today 
to our political practice.
 
This does not mean that we blindly endorse Stalin's approach
towards women's organisations in  Soviet Russia. 
Despite Lou Proyect's assertion on M-Int, I do not seek to 
glorify Stalin, merely to address the historical record from a 
Marxist-Leninist viewpoint and not from some other, anti-
working class, anti-Marxist-Leninist viewpoint. 

It is well known that Stalin closed down Zhenotdel, the 
Women's Department of the CPSU(B). The context was a 
swing away from the libertarian dimension of the great 
cultural-revolutionary wave which swept all countries after 
1919, not only Russia. Coincident with the first Five Year 
Plans, the Soviet leadership turned its back on the great 
social and libertarian experiments associated with such 
names as Alexandra Kollontai. 

The first workers' housing constructed in the brand-new 
city of Magnitogorsk, pride of the first 5-Year Plan, 
included provision for all the functions of (traditionally-
female) domestic labour: nurseries, kindergartens, 
laundries, communal restaurants and much else besides. At 
the same time the (German-designed) 'super-blocks', which 
I have personally inspected in the legendary 'Sotsgorod' 
(Socialist City) housing developments begun in 1929 and 
meant to provide housing for Magnitogorsk's new 
steelworkers, did *not* include *family* accommodation. 
Each worker, male or female, had their own separate living-
space. 

Abortion on demand, the 'abolition of the family', the 
identification of the family, extended and nuclear alike, 
with bourgeois culture, with patriarchy and paternalism: all 
of these revolutionary values were inscribed into the very 
architecture of Sotsgorod.

Within five years there had been a complete 
transformation. Adultery was made a criminal offence. The 
family was reincarnated as the central institution of Soviet 
life. Denunciation to the NKVD by fellow family-members 
was still encouraged and the inviolability of the family as a 
separate social space that was wholly (theoretically) exempt 
>from the scrutiny of Party and State, did not come until 
much later. 

Nevertheless, it is obvious that the recuperation of the 
family by the party under Stalin's leadership was a 
fundamental mutation away from the intoxicating visions 
of personal and social freedom which were birthed or given 
furious immediacy by Red October and soon incorporated 
in the theoretical work of Wilhelm Reich and Andre Breton 
and other 'social eroticisers'. For many years -- until 1931 
anyway -- this cultural revolution was a legitimate, and perhaps 
the main legacy, of Bolshevism in the eyes of many of its 
proponents, within and outside the Soviet Union. 

The echoes of it reverberated in Soviet life until the end, and 
one of the paradoxical and tragic consequences of the loss 
of the cocoon of socialist values has been to precipitate 
post-Soviet Russian women into a new moral universe 
where the socialist freedoms they enjoyed have transmuted 
into what is often unbridled promiscuity, sexual exploitation

There has been a surrender of female sexuality 
on a mass scale to the control  of men, who have experienced 
a parallel and for man, an intoxicating growth in 
personal power, in the possibility of subjugating women.

They (Russian men) tend to exercise this control over women
with the anarchic freedom only possible in a world still 
devoid of bourgeois hypocrisy,  bourgeois civil 'values'. There 
could be no more intense and actual evidence for the survival 
of socialist values in the USSR until the final collapse, than that.

And no sharper reminder of the fate of women in late capitalism:
for the lucky, articulate, middle-class or privileged few, 
the right to be sheltered by the phony, hypocritical and, in the mouths
of feminists,  nauseatingly-sententious bourgeois politics of
'political correctness', of 'affirmative action', the deceit of 'human
rights
and 'women's rights' . Or for thge vast immisretaed mass of the 
world's women, an unprecedented loss of freedom, of new
and vicious forms of wage-slavery, of indentured prostitution, leavened 
by the disgusting chicanery of NGO and charityy-sponsored ;women's
co-operatives', where desperate women perform gruelling manual 
drudgery as the price of avoiding child-saling, prostituion etc.

Meanwhile the [bourgeois] feminists, who bleat endlessly about
their personal predicament, are totally oblivious to the astonishing
assault
on gender and sexuality which even now the men in white coats are
inventing behind high walls and electric fences.

I hope that those who characterise me as a Neanderthal 
Stalinist have  read attentively the foregoing account of Bolshevik
policy. Because I now immediately go on to say that Stalin 
was right to reverse the family policy inaugurated by Kollontai 
and her co-workers under the umbrella of Zhenotdel, as 
she herself came to acknowledge.

Why was Stalin right, and why is this not an irrelevant historical
question, as Proyect insists?

Because any attempt to continue with those policies would 
have irredeemably wrecked the whole Soviet experiment, 
and that is a lesson for our own sense of political priorities.
 
The fate of that social architecture in Magnitogorsk,
which assumed the proletarians of the future would not live
in families, proves this beyond question. 

It was precisely the experience of Magnitka which proved
 the complete hopelessness of such social experiments if one also 
intended to defend the Revolution, to defend the 
gains of October. Herein lies the tragedy at the heart of 
Soviet history.

In fact it was not Hitler or Stalin or Trotsky or Gorbachev or even 
Madeleine Albright who destroyed the USSR.

 It was the need to build steelworks and Urals defence industries, and 
to do so under the sign not of Kollontai or Wilhelm Reich 
or Freud or even Marx or Lenin, but of  Frederick Winslow Taylor, 
Henry Ford, and later of Robert Oppenheimer.

The cruelties inflicted with especial severity on Soviet 
women were the necessary price to be paid for victory in 
World War 2. People at the time, i.e., as early as 1930, 
understood this with complete clarity. A greater cruelty was 
soon to be inflicted upon Soviet men (97% of all Soviet 
men aged 18 in 1941, were dead by 1945. Think about it). 
But without the earlier sacrifice of Soviet women the 
Germans would have won the war.

The sacrifice of Soviet women consisted of (a partial list): 
-- loss of self-esteem; 
-- loss of relative social position; 
assumption of the 'double burden'; 
-- reintroduction of patriarchal values in its most pernicious form,
i.e., 
uncontrolled working class male hypocrisy; 
--loss of control over their own fertility (abortion was made illegal); 
-- reintroduction and rigid enforcement of marital slavery; 
-- dumbing down and philistinising of the great cultural gains 
of 1917; 

and much more. 

Note however that the cultural gains of October which 
remained consistent with the need to defend the Revolution 
by militarising it, were never lost. Only now, in the wake of 
the collapse of the USSR, has the veil been reintroduced in 
Central Asia, and has the Russian woman been definitively 
thrust back into the futility of the kitchen and the 
humiliation of the bed.

Now, where does this leave  the question of feminism?

1.       The Bolsheviks were consciously, militantly and 
resolutely opposed to feminism. Feminism is and only can 
be, bourgeois. The criticisms made by Olaechea and others 
on LeninList of bourgeois feminism are surely correct from a 
Bolshevik viewpoint.

No doubt we shall return to this point again and again. But there can 
be no better starting-point for analysing the baleful poltiical
consequences of [bourgeois] feminism than Olaechea's own recent 
remarks, which have drawn down on his head 
howls of outrage from people who perhaps should know better.

2. The Bolsheviks were in favour of sexual freedom, an end 
to domestic servitude, an end to the obscurantism of 
marriage, an end to the bourgeois family, an end to all 
hypocrisy in personal relationships even and especially the 
most intimate ones, which are and remain a province of 
slavery, prostitution, property transmission, the 
transmission-belt of the bourgeoisie as a class from one 
generation to the next. 

[Bourgeois] feminism is rootedly a 
variant of female slavery. Proponents of 'affirmative action' 
are equivalent to ancient Romans who sought to end 
slavery by individual acts of manumission. 

There is only one path for working class men and women to take 
and that is to join together in a proletarian revolutionary politics. 

But the form of that politics is now not about such things as the 
double-burden or the availability of birth-control, as it was 
for the Bolsheviks, but the implications of :
--  foetal engineering, 
-- ex vitro embryology, social 
-- social control of DNA-based evolution, 

and similar matters which I have consistently raised on the Jefferson
lists 
and which will be analysed on in the Leninlist.

3.      The Bolsheviks were strict egalitarians and 
consciously fought against the fetishising (and/or 
eroticising) of gender-differences. They politicised the 
personal and were the first to do so successfully. 

4. The Bolsheviks put politics in command of this realm as 
every other, recognising that otherwise civil society could 
not be liquidated, and that the liquidation of civil society 
was the absolute prerequisite of the transition to socialism: 
crucially, without the liquidation of the family as a social 
institution and the basis of bourgeois civil society, the 
revolution would always be in danger. 

5.      The failure to liquidate the family was the most 
fundamental and in the end the most lethal failure of the 
Bolshevik revolution. 

But this was an enforced defeat: it was a step backwards 
taken to defend the revolution, just as NEP was, just as the 
liquidation of left-oppositions was. The failure of the 
Bolshevik cultural revolution to take real root 
foredoomed the Soviet Union to become an empty shell 
encrusted with military hardware. But this failure was pre-
ordained in the absence of World Revolution (Mirovoya 
Revolyutsiya).

Thus, the west's policies of 'encirclement' and 'containment' 
struck at the heart of Bolshevism from the first. Every 
attempt by the Party to overcome or transcend the baleful 
consequences of this defeat failed. The material and social 
bases of the October Revolution simply were not strong 
enough to make the thing viable in the long term.

All of these adverse subjective and objective (material, 
psychological, external and internal) factors conspired to 
slowly drain the revolution of its real content. 

The enormous loss of life from 1918 to 1945 effectively 
decapitated the Russian working class and stole from it any 
residual chance of a reflux of revolutionary vitality after 
1945. The Hitler War bled the Soviet working class white.

I am sure that, just as Kollontai supported Stalin until her 
death, any honest revolutionary would have done the same, 
would have accepted the tragic consequences of the initial 
weakness of the revolution. Kollontai's predicament was 
tragic, but tragedy is a proletarian and not a bourgeois fate 
in this epoch and we have no choice to accept that 
Revolutions which fail or only partially successful, are 
essentialy tragic outcomes of the hsitrocial process and are 
bound to be endures as such by their creators.

Blame Ebert and the failures of the Sparticists.
Blame the 'miracle on the Vistula'.
Blame Woodrow Wilson and the Fourteen Points.
Blame the indescribably awful interwar foreign policy of 
the British.

In the end however, we should blame no-one. We should 
rather, continue to try to emulate the  unprecedented 
achievements of the Bolsheviks, who took 
the burden of emancipation on their shoulders and were 
ready to pay any price, even the most tragic, which not 
only did they pay, they knew from the beginning, they 
would have to pay. 

It is right to be revolutionary, right to 
struggle with all we have and are, that our dignity and 
human dignity in general can only be sought and found in 
this struggle, wherein lies all the true comradeship  and 
sororality we shall ever find. That to be a communist is the 
best and noblest thing there is, even if we suspect our 
hopes will remain dreams inherited by a future generation, 
as the Bolsheviks themselves well knew.

Revolution would still be the inescapable destiny of 
humankind if for no other reason than that humanity can 
only discover itself through its endeavour to slough off the 
hypocrisy and sham freedoms of this world, through 
revolutionary comradeship and shared sacrifice and 
struggle. 

But this is not the only reason why proletarian revolution is 
inevitable.

The world is a much more incendiary place today than it 
was in 1917. The falsity and hollowness of late capitalism, 
the glittering surface, is just a thin crust over a boiling, 
volcanic magma.

Take this very question: the question of feminism, of sexual 
freedom, of gender difference, of the double-burden, the 
differential exploitation of women in the reproduction of 
the only commodity which capital still cannot produce, the 
commodity labour-power, which is also the only value-
producing commodity (this concept, the central Marxist 
concept, defines in itself the entire parasitism of capitalism, 
and also shows how the fate of women and the nature of 
the domestic burden are not merely relevant to Marxism, 
they are at the very heart of value theory) -- and see how 
this question has evolved and becoming completely 
symptomatic, florid with symptoms, of the general crisis of 
late capitalism.

 For the whole period since 1917 international
reaction waged and still wages a bitter counter-offensive and
in no sphere is this more vigorous than the sphere of the 
family, gender and sexuality. Today capital is launching a
vast new many-pronged offensive in this sphere whose goal is 
nothing less than the Faustian dream of eliminating live labour 
>from production, of overcoming its instrinsic parasitism by learning
how to produce the commodity labour-power.

We have to analyse our tasks as revolutionaries in the light 
of ex-vitro embryology, of the deconstruction of the human 
Genome, of human sexuality, of mind/brain difference, 
of the already-envisaged Huxleyian artificial 
wombs, of the commodification of human characteristics 
and human subjectivity: of the onrush of cloning, memory-
download and other technologies whose impact on 
humankind are, in the hands of capital, insupportable, 
intolerable, a total, in-your-face, outright onslaught on the 
essence of what it is to be human. 


-- 
Regards,
Mark Jones
website: http://www.netcomuk.co.uk/~majones/index.htm
email: majones-AT-netcomuk.co.uk


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