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NEWS & LETTERS, December 2004Woman as ReasonSeeking needed new beginningsby Terry Moon Women have been reacting to Bush's reelection and four more years of driving women back to the dark ages. Many have been demoralized, with some talking of retrenching, or the need to compete with the Republicans in projecting "our morals," to counter theirs. While many liberals are seriously considering moving further to the Right (or to Canada), some women still think the Democratic Party is the answer, while others may be driven to the politics of desperation. What is clear is that a great many women are harboring a fierce anger and looking for effective ways to fight back. Given that reality, the important question is: How do we make new beginnings in such retrogressive times? Will grounding ourselves in women's revolutionary history unseparated from a revolutionary philosophy help us make this needed new beginning? I would like to explore this by discussing the category Raya Dunayevskaya, the founder of Marxist-Humanism, created at the beginning of the modern Women's Liberation Movement (WLM): "Woman as Reason as well as Revolutionary Force." The category Woman as Reason developed from its first articulation in 1969 where Dunayevskaya proclaimed the "newness" of the WLM as those who "not only refuse to stop short of total freedom, but refuse to wait for 'the day after' the revolution to obtain it." Dunayevskaya showed that the women's liberationists critiqued the Left not only on the question of male chauvinism, but of narrowing the concept of revolution, showing women's critique was from a revolutionary perspective. In 1969, as throughout her life, Dunayevskaya grounded "Woman as Reason" in Marx's philosophy and the philosophy of Marxist-Humanism. CRITIQUE OF THE LEFT FROM THE LEFT In the 1969-70 article where she first articulated Woman as Reason, Dunayevskaya scolded the Left for thinking a "preoccupation with male chauvinism is to the detriment of 'socialist politics.'" That attitude, she said, "leads, of necessity, to degrading the very concept of revolutionary socialism to a variety of reformism." In a scathing analysis she takes the Left apart for being so weighted down with the elitist concept "of the backwardness of the apolitical women" that they are "led inexorably to vulgarize Marx's greatest discovery: Historical Materialism." She concludes that though "Material conditions, it is true, determine consciousness, not vice versa…. History is a process, is dialectics. Every unit is invested with its opposite. The future is inherent in the present. The forces opposed to the existing society not only fight it, but gain the consciousness both about the significance of their fight and an intimation of a direction toward that future." While here there is not space to trace out the entire development of this rich and complex category, these beginnings were deepened throughout Dunayevskaya's life. Naturally, she included revolutionary women who comprehended philosophy and grasped the power of dialectical thought, but she did not restrict the category to that. This is revealed in its expansiveness, including going back into history. This category was so important to her that in 1983 she added a paragraph to her work, ROSA LUXEMBURG, WOMEN'S LIBERATION AND MARX'S PHILOSOPHY OF REVOLUTION, after publication. Immediately after writing "Social revolution does come first, provided it is not—indeed revolution cannot be—without Women's Liberation or behind women's backs, or by using them only as helpmates." She added: "Quite the contrary. History proves a very different truth, whether we look at February 1917, where the women were the ones who initiated the revolution; whether we turn further back to the Persian Revolution of 1906-11, where the women created the very first women's soviet; or whether we look to our own age in the 1970s in Portugal, where Isabel do Carom raised the totally new concept of apartidarismo [non-partyism]. It is precisely because women's liberationists are both revolutionary force and Reason that they are crucial. If we are to achieve success in the new revolutions, we have to see that the uprooting of the old is total from the start." REVOLUTION: TOTAL FROM THE START Important for our age of retrogression is that Dunayevskaya shows again and again that women's liberation reveals the need for revolution to be "total from the start." Over and over she shows this is rooted in Marxism, as revealed in her insistence that: "[T]here is no doubt of the fact, the profound fact, that Marx's whole new continent of thought that began with revolution—so total and deep a revolution as to begin with the Man/Woman relationship as the most basic one of all that needed total reorganization… When Marx stressed that that relationship needed uprooting in all class societies (indeed, I am ready to say in all previous societies), it is proof of how total was Marx's concept of tearing society up at its roots." What was the crucial "missing link," to Dunayevskaya was "philosophy in relationship to revolutions both in theory and in fact. That is what is meant by dialectics of revolution." Because that was so, she challenged the women's movement to "turn to Marx—the whole of Marx," and, at one and the same time, challenged the Left "to see how very pivotal the Man/Woman relationship is as concept," and not "attempt to reduce Women's Liberation to 'an organizing idea.'" As we face the brutality of Bush's continuing attacks on women's freedom, we need such a total philosophy if we are to fight him on our own ground of total liberation. Without such a total vision, we end up taking the ground of the Right and we compromise without ever revealing the totally new society based on new human relationships that we are for. |
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