Date: Mon, 14 Nov 1994 15:21:05 EST From: tgs-AT-cunyvms1.gc.cuny.edu Subject: Luxemburg, the Bolsheviks, Patriarchy Rebecca and Larry, Rebecca, you wrote an interesting post a little bit ago, in which you brought up two ideas I would like to discuss. The first was your schematization of Marxist thinkers as thinking economically about women's oppression, whereas the rad-fem thinkers think about domestic and other social and psychological oppressions. I resist such schematization. Engels's The Orignins of Family, etc.; Reich's The Origins of Compulsory-Sex Morality, Michele Barratt's The Anti- Social Family, can hardly be seen as treatises on value theory. But I think you have a point with the idea that by focusing on domestic/social oppression (exclusively), the rad-femmers might have just stumbled on something positive to contribute, despite their general invidiousness and irrationalism. As I said to Phil, I'm not for hounding anybody out of either the university or the debate. 2nd point: you mentioned Luxemburg as a field of feminist inquiry. Why?-- because she is female and a Marxist, she makes a good females-only role model? That's the way it sounds like--perhaps that is not your intention. I don't like the idea of seeing her this way, because a) she's a role model of mine, and I'm not giving her up b) she herself would not countenance it. And while both RL and Zetkin wanted to strictly subordinate feminism to class struggle, Luxemburg was not even that interested in feminism, to begin with. But I do think that Luxemburg is very interesting for feminism--not particularly because of her gene pool. Because her critique of the Russian Revolution points up what I consider to be the Bolsheviks unconsious reproduction of patriarchal attitudes toward power. I realize full well, Larry, that the Bolsheviks consciously and heroically strove to combat all sexism and sexist discrimination. But their ideology of a one-party state, which can be shown well before the civil war, is clearly patriarchal. As Montesquieu shows in the Persian Letters, there is a deep psychological connection between despotism and the domination of women. In the Bolsheviks' hands, their despotism was meant to dominate, to "lean on," in Trotsky's words, the peasantry, which were conceived as "formless"--as "weak-minded", as was traditional with the Westernist strand of Russian socialist thought (Chernyshevsky is the prime example: his own What is to be Done is very explicitly anti-sexist,yet he believed just as much in a permanent one-party dictatorship)--an attitude typical the way in which men conceive women under patriarchy. This unconscious reproduction of patriarchy (given the B's explicit attacks upon sexism, I wouldn't call it sexist.) is further given away by Lenin's treatment of Zetkin's ideas on sexual experimentation for women as so much "dirty glass" sexuality. And it's shown by the Bolsheviks condescending attitude toward Luxemburg. Lenin called her "Our Beloved Rosa"--patronizing--while he and the rest consistently dismissed her critique with spurious excuses--she never published it, she renounced it in practice during the German revolution, etc.. Luxemburg's critique is, I think, anti-Patriarchal as well as anti-despotic. Her critique is based upon the concept of mass democratic, public "spirit," which counters all the repressive ideas of the Bolsheviks justifying the repression of their political opponents because of the need for purity in this emergency, etc. As Luxemburg discusses, the Bolsheviks are not only Jacobin and bourgeois in their concept of proletarian dictatorship, they are also quite compulsive. They seek to solve the problems of bureaucratic corruption--with more bureaucracy. Spirit, as a concept, as a force in revolutionary politics, is her answer to this urge to dominate and dominate some more. Tom the wild-eyed Luxemburgist idealist ------------------
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