No Woman, No Revolution, Part 9a
Is freedom female?
What’s Freedom got to do with Women?
This course, “No Woman, No
Revolution”, problematises the necessity of involving women, who are more than
one-half of humanity, in any possible proletarian revolution against
capitalism.
The proletarian revolution,
as much as the National Democratic Revolution that precedes it, is a struggle
for freedom, conforming to the slogan “Power to the People”.
In that sense, the entire 16
courses of the Communist University are “about” freedom. Communism itself is
all about freedom. The revolutionary Christopher Caudwell called freedom “the
good that contains all other goods”. One could presume that there are no
opponents to this view. Countless writings praising freedom, and works of art
like the colossal Statue of Liberty in New York, USA, seem to deny the
possibility of any other view. Freedom is for women as much as for men.
But in fact, as soon as the
appeal to freedom becomes effective in securing support for the struggle for
socialism, bourgeois thinkers and writers find ways to abandon it, and even to condemn
it.
We now come across this
phenomenon – the refusal of freedom – in the matter of women’s power in
society, just as we have come across it elsewhere in relation to the liberation
of Africa from colonialism.
For an example of the latter,
the first President of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, discusses the “negritude” that the
first President of Senegal, Léopold Sédar Senghor believed in, as follows:
‘Senghor has,
indeed, given an account of the nature of the return to Africa. His account is
highlighted by statements using some of his own words: that the African is
"a field of pure sensation"; that he does not measure or observe, but
"lives" a situation; and that this way of acquiring
"knowledge" by confrontation and intuition is “negro-African";
the acquisition of knowledge by reason, "Hellenic". In African
Socialism [London and New York, 1964, pp.72-3], he [Senghor] proposes “that we
consider the Negro-African as he faces the Other: God, man, animal, tree or
pebble, natural or social phenomenon. In contrast to the classic European, the
Negro-African does not draw a line between himself and the object, he does not
hold it at a distance, nor does he merely look at it and analyse it. After
holding it at a distance, after scanning it without analysing it, he takes it
vibrant in his hands, careful not to kill or fix it. He touches it, feels it,
smells it. The Negro-African is like one of those Third Day Worms, a pure field
of sensations... Thus the Negro-African sympathises, abandons his personality
to become identified with the Other, dies to be reborn in the Other. He does
not assimilate; he is assimilated. He lives a common life with the Other; he
lives in a symbiosis.”
‘It is
clear that socialism cannot be founded on this kind of metaphysics of knowledge.’
Kwame Nkrumah, “African Socialism Revisited”, 1967
In similar fashion to
Senghor, when confronted with the possibility of freedom and power, the
philosopher Judith Butler rejects it. For
Butler, power is an unwanted, male imposition. Similarly, for Senghor,
subjective freedom is “Hellenic” and therefore to be rejected because it is
identified with the colonial oppressor.
We have seen three
contradictions that are active in the world of feminism. One is between the
bourgeois and the proletarian feminists. The second is between the organised
and the structureless. The third is between the search for freedom, and its
contrary: rejection of autonomy.
All of these contradictions
are related. As in others among the CU courses, we have to conclude that the
resolution of such contradictions requires philosophy, and not just any
philosophy but the most powerful, avant-guard kind of philosophy.
James Heartfield’s 2002 work, “The Death of the Subject Explained” is
a strong book that deals with the fundamental question of all philosophy: the
relation of mind to matter. In it, Heartfield debunks all kinds of
anti-rational, anti-humanist philosophy, including post-Modernism, and in the
attached extract, he counters the anti-humanist feminism of Butler and others.
Humanist simply means acceptance
that the combined ability to observe, think, plan and act is the unique
attribute of human beings, and also the source of human morality.
The very first words of
matured Marxism – Karl Marx’s 1845 “Theses on Feuerbach” – deal with this
fundamental question of subject and object, mind and matter. The first sentence
of Thesis 1 on Feuerbach is:
“The main
defect of all hitherto-existing materialism — that of Feuerbach included — is
that the Object, actuality, sensuousness, are conceived only in the form of the
object, or of contemplation, but not as human sensuous activity, practice, not
subjectively.”
Suffice it to say that Marx
here shows his principal concern, which never wavered or varied, namely: the
priority of human freedom. So long as we remain Marxists, we would have to
insist on freedom as our goal, as the goal of humanity, and as the goal of
women.
Whereas bourgeois feminists
like Butler and others quoted by Heartfield have ended up opposing freedom.
On this kind of feminism
Heartfield concludes:
“What began
as a criticism of the monopoly over freedom exercised by men has turned,
paradoxically, into a criticism of freedom as such.”
We can also say, paraphrasing
Nkrumah: ‘It is clear that revolution
cannot be founded on this kind of metaphysics of knowledge.’
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: Heartfield,
On Feminists on The Subject, 2002.
