No Woman, No Revolution, Part 9b
Women’s
Power
During this course we have looked at the “woman’s question” in a
practical way. Especially we have said that it is a revolutionary necessity
that the women should be organised en
masse in order that they should become a collective “Subject of History”.
But we have not extensively examined this thing called “Subject of History”
during this particular course.
Simply, being a “Subject of History” means having the power to act, as
in the revolutionary slogan “Power to the People!” It means being free. It
means having “agency”.
The item linked below is “Postmodernism and Hindu Nationalism” by Meera
Nanda [pictured]. This piece of writing can help readers to understand
how, in a triple context of philosophy, national liberation and feminism, the
crucial or pivotal point of struggle is usually exactly this question of agency.
Meera Nanda is a secular rational humanist philosopher in general, and
an expert on Hindu nationalism, bourgeois feminism and anti-humanist
postmodernism in particular.
Postmodernist philosophy, reactionary nationalism and mystical feminism
all bear down upon the concept of freedom, attempting to crush it. All try to
return the people in general, and women in particular, to a condition of relentless
bondage and victimhood of circumstances.
What is common to all of these aspects, whether in India or in South
Africa, is the evacuation of popular agency and the refusal of the mass Subject
of History following the liberation struggle, which in the case of both India
and South Africa promised precisely this thing - freedom - above all other
things.
In India the promise was named “Swaraj” and in South Africa,
“Power to the People”. Independence and national sovereignty were supposed to
be inseparable from mass popular agency, and vice versa.
In practice, political independence co-existed with bourgeois
dictatorship and neo-colonialism, and these latter factors trumped and negated
the mass popular power, including organised women’s power.
Revolutionary organs of people’s power were dismantled. Golden Calves
were raised up in place of the slogans of popular power. These substitutes were
the slogans of bourgeois nationalism, national mystique, women’s solidarity
versus men, and the cult that holds inanimate things (the earth, the
environment) to be not only opposed to, but also more valuable than, humanity.
In all cases the best remedy for such errors will be as prescribed by
the SACP: Educate, Organise and Mobilise.
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: Postmodernism,
Hindu nationalism, Vedic science, Nanda, 2004, Part 1 and Part 2.
