No
Woman, No Revolution, Part 0
Introduction to “No Woman, No Revolution”
The efforts of women of the privileged
classes to acquire rights that were increasingly being gained by the male
members of their class, notably the right to own property and the right to
vote, are called feminism.
This struggle existed even under
feudalism, and it grew stronger as the bourgeois class began to assert itself
and to become hegemonic. The feminists put forward reformist demands that
bourgeois society was able and often willing to concede to bourgeois women.
This course, “No Woman, No Revolution”,
is not designed to present a history of feminism, but rather to pick up
the story at the point where a contradiction arises between bourgeois feminism
and the interests of the women of the proletarian class.
This contradiction manifested itself in
the second half of the nineteenth century, as a consequence of the proletarian
revolutionary movements associated in the first place with Karl Marx and
Frederick Engels. This is found, not only in the realm of theory, but also in
the world of practice, notably in the First and Second Internationals.
This course has been worked on for many years. It now provides a
strong view of the historical development of revolutionary thought about women,
and of revolutionary organisation among women, from the mid-nineteenth century
to the present.
The roots of the course are in the last decade of Karl Marx’s
life. The German Social Democratic Party was founded in 1875, Bebel published
his “Women and Socialism” in 1879, and Marx was studying Morgan’s “Ancient
Society” prior to his death in 1883. Engels took up Marx’s manuscript and
worked it into a book, “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and The
State”, published in 1884, which is our first and still our greatest text.
In the first place the course follows the pioneering development
of thought within the parties of the proletarian interest, from the time of
Karl Marx, who died in 1883; Frederick Engels, who survived Marx by 12 years
until 1895; and Clara Zetkin, who was born in 1857, was already active in the
labour movement in 1874 (the year that Charlotte Maxeke was born) at the age of
17. Zetkin lived until 1933.
It proceeds via the work of Rosa Luxemburg and Alexandra
Kollontai, to a high point with Vladimir Lenin, and to the setback (for women)
that was the 3rd Congress of the Third International (the Comintern).
The course then picks up the story in South Africa, where in the
same decade that saw the foundation of the ANC, the ICU and the CPSA, Charlotte
Maxeke [pictured above] established the Bantu Women’s League in 1918, the
fore-runner of many liberatory and revolutionary women’s organisations.
The course problematises the relationship between attempts to
found a mass-membership, dedicated women’s organisation in South Africa, led by
the working women; and the countervailing determination of the liberation
movement, the ANC, and its Women’s League, to tolerate no possible rival.
The course examines theoretical works dealing with structure and
structurelessness, gender and patriarchy, and the close relationship between
bourgeois feminism and bourgeois post-modernist philosophy.
The course finishes with writings from the SACP (Jenny Schreiner
and Blade Nzimande) and speeches from the ANC (Jacob Zuma).
International Woman’s Day (8th
of March each year) was proposed by Clara Zetkin, a contemporary and
comrade of Alexandra Kollontai, at
the Second International Women's Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark in
1910. The first International Women’s day was observed in 1911.
Feminism had a considerable history by that time. In 1910 the
campaign for votes for women was at its height in some countries. But the
bourgeois feminism of those days was being challenged by the revolutionaries,
as it still is today. This course, “No Woman, No Revolution”, is motivated by
revolutionary considerations like those of Zetkin and Kollontai.
A successful revolution that mobilised only half of the available
support would be inconceivable. The half of the population that is female must
be as fully involved in any revolution as the men are, or else there will be no
revolution. Our series is designed to problematise the question of women as a
force in South Africa’s revolution, in the specific conditions pertaining in
this year of 2014. It will focus on the necessity of organising working women
as a mass.
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