Date: Thu, 17 Nov 1994 15:39:52 -0500 (EST)
From: Alex Trotter <uburoi-AT-panix.com>
Subject: Enlightenment, leftism, nationalism



Perhaps I was using inaccurate terms earlier in floating 
the notion that Enlightenment thought was inherently male, as if that 
were an essence. Maybe the term "masculinist" would have been more 
appropriate. (If there's feminism, then there can be masculinism as 
well.) The freemasons who were in many ways the spearhead of the 
Enlightenment were a self-conscious "brotherhood." The American 
revolutionaries said "all men are created equal"; the French 
revolutionaries had "liberty, equality, fraternity" as their slogan; both 
spoke of the "Rights of Man." This proclaimed an abstract universalism 
that concealed particular interests based on class, race, and sex. But it 
was precisely the universalist rhetoric that implied that *everyone* 
truly could be equal. Mary Wollstonecraft was one of the first to call 
them on it by asking, well, why not the rights of woman as well as the 
rights of man. Subsequent movements to enfranchise women, blacks, 
workers, and so on were largely the project of post-Enlightenment 
liberalism, not of the Enlightenment itself. Once the bourgeoisie had 
conquered political on top of economic power, philosophy started giving 
way to ideology.
	The workers' movement also took on ideological characteristics, Marx's 
critique of ideology notwithstanding. (If the proletariat is indeed the 
universal class, the germ of the human community, why should it need an 
ideology of any kind, even socialist ideology?)
	The "new social movements" that Rebecca champions have likewise 
remained trapped in the synoptic of ideological representation. What real 
contributions have "60s nationalisms" made to human freedom? I assume 
you're thinking of the 'young nations' that emerged from colonialism in 
Africa and Asia, the Cuban revolution, black nationalism and radical 
feminism in the USA, etc. Surely you would have to admit that they've all 
degenerated miserably, to the point that none of them can claim any 
superiority to marxism. The world has more flags than ever before, and 
we're no closer to the end of capital and the state. Do you seriously 
believe that workers, not bureaucrats, ever had real power in Cuba or the 
Socialist Republic of Vietnam or in the "liberated" nations of Africa 
(where, for example, Kwame Nkrumah had a 40-foot statue of himself 
erected outside the parliament building in Accra)?

The suggestion to talk about Rosa Luxemburg in connection with marxism 
and feminism does sound interesting. I have read the Dunayevskaya book 
and thought it had some useful things to say, especially since it touches 
on Marx's (not Trotsky's) concept of "permanent revolution" and his very 
late work in the _Ethnological Notebooks_. It does seem odd to me, 
though, that Rebecca can reconcile Luxemburg and Marx, profound critical 
thinkers that they were, with the awful leftist ideology of Love & Rage, 
with (last time I checked) its tedious anti's--anti-racism, anti-sexism, 
anti-imperialism. Does L&R know what it's *for*?

--AT 



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