Date: Sun, 22 Mar 1998 15:28:29 -0500
From: "Charles Brown" <charlesb-AT-CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us>
Subject: M-TH: Nancy's program and practice



 Nancy,
    The following is meant to develop a  marxist concept of freedom of the individual , and not based on bourgeois individualism. It is to be taken in the context of our discussion on this list and in last week's seminar discussions, your essays , mine , etc.

                 Intimacy and the Individual Person


      Freedom and liberation communism must formulate a Bill of Womens' Rights The womenist and feminist critiques of Marxism must be popularized more widely and brought to bare on the policy and structure (including affirmative action in leadership) of any revolutionary organization.

     Perhaps an especially communist contribution for empowering women is to persuade masses that accomplishing communist intimacy rights are a prerequisite for complete fulfillment of private and individual rights (e.g. the U.S. Bill of Rights; rights that were advances of the bourgeoisie era). 
      Women have had, in the total span of human history, closer to equal power to men in intimate relationships (I'll explain my hypothesis on this if you want -C.B.) most important for reproducing individual persons, than women have had power in the relations of production. Thus, historic male supremacy has begot repression in intimacy by women struggling against male supremacy, and by women having what little power they do have in intimate relations, and being able to "strike back" in the intimate realm.  I mean that women's liberation , thereby, will be a world historic liberation of especially intimacy.  And individual and private  happiness and rights , as the bourgeoisie have conceived of them, can only be liberated by communist intimacy liberation.

      With apologies to Hegel for plagerism, but I can't quote him because I don't know where he says it or if this is exactly what he says: I have a notion that Marx's theory of alienation suggests a positive, silverlining, in the clouds of class history and the alienation resulting from class exploitation. It is the creation and development of the individual person and personality.  The image briefly is that the self must "go outside " of itself, identify with another self , look back at the self as through the eyes of the other and return to itself for deeper self-consciousness, including internal dialogue (Compare "Oh would some power the gift give us / To see ourselves as others see us"  in To a Louse, by Bobbie Burns). Dialogue enlightens monologue (See The Riddle of the Self by F.T. Mikhailov, International 1980). In history, this process is a contradictory by product of the horrors of alienation,self-estrangement, and loneliness in which the worker is forced outside of herself by the exploitation process.
    This implies, as suggested above, that intimacy , closeness to someone else, is a prerequisite for fulfilling privacy.  Introspection without intimacy is sterile.

     Intimate relationships between men and women have been critical intimate relationships for history, in part because of the material importance of reproduction, and in part because of the riddle of the self is solved through a unity and struggle of opposites , and men and women are biological, dialectical complements. Marx seems to deal with this when he says:


      The direct natural, and necessary relation of person to person is the relation of man  to woman, . In this natural species-relationship,man's relationship to nature is immediately his relation to man, just as his relation to man is immediately his relation to nature - his own natural destination. In this relationship, therefore, is sensuously manifested, reduced to an observable fact, the extent to which the human essence has become nature to man, or to which nature to him has become the human essence of man.  From this relationship on can therefore judge man's whole level of development.  From the character of this relationship follows how much man as a species-being, , as man, has come to be himself and to comprehend himself; the relation of man to woman is the most natural r relation of human being to human being. It therefore reveals the extent to which the human essence in him has become a natural essence - the extent to which his human nature has come to be natural essence -the extent to which his human nature  has come to be natural to him. This relationship also reveals the extent to which man's need   has become a human need; the extent to which, therefore, the other  person as a person has become for him a need - the extent to which he in his individual existence is at the same time a social being (Emphasis in original, if it goes over e-mail. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844)  End of quote.


    Thus, the critical block to liberation of intimacy (and derivatively reproduction  and liberation of the individual person and personality, a major cure for all forms of insanity) is male chauvinism.  In this regard, Marxism and all 2,500 years of European philosophy best listen and sing along with  Muses such as Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday and Aretha Franklin who teach to liberate intimacy, desires,joy and the heart ! ( See earlier post on Angela Davis Blues Legacy and Black Feminism; Hear, e.g. Dr. Feelgood, by Aretha Franklin)
     So, freedom-and -liberation communists have got to learn how to dance, sing and have fun to carry out revolutionary persuasion of the people. Oh ! Don't throw me into that briar patch (See Br'er Rabbit).


Charles B.

  



        


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