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NEWS & LETTERS, January-February 2005Woman as ReasonHelen Macfarlane and Marxismby Anne Jaclard Helen Macfarlane: A Feminist, Revolutionary Journalist, and Philosopher in Mid-Nineteenth Century England by David Black (Lexington Books, 2004, 179 pp, $18). Since contemporary feminism began nearly 40 years ago, the concept of recovering women’s lost history has not only played a major role in feminist scholarship, it has also acted as an impetus to the movement itself. We are empowered by learning about women as agents of history and not just its objects. We are inspired in our own endeavors by learning about invisible women who held radical ideas concerning the organization of society on completely different, human grounds. Helen Macfarlane is such a woman. Some feminists, however, write "herstory" as if it had no relation to so-called "male" history and ideas. It is questionable whether one can completely detach any women from earlier and co-existing ideas, but if there are places and times where one can, England in the mid-19th century is not one of them. A DIALECTICAL RELATIONSHIP On the contrary, this intellectual biography is exciting because it explicates the dialectical relationship--the two-way road--between Helen Macfarlane and the world-changing ideas of her time. The 1848 European revolutions, English workers’ struggles, feminism, Hegelian philosophy, Marx’s first publications--Macfarlane swims in them all. She pushes forward the development of radical ideas and combats reactionary ones. Her work is not only fascinating but extremely relevant 150 years later. Macfarlane was the first person to translate Marx’s COMMUNIST MANIFESTO into English. (The book does a real service by appending her little-known translation.) She was also the first Britisher to translate and comment on Hegel’s works. Yet Macfarlane was in fact nearly lost to history. No one even published her name on her translation of the Manifesto, including the American edition published by the feminist Victoria Woodhull. Thanks to David Black for researching what little can be found about her--mainly, her prolific writings of 1849-50--and for illuminating her work by putting it into historical and intellectual context. We learn that Macfarlane was an activist and journalist in the most radical branch of the Chartist workers’ organizations, led by George Julian Harney. She was in Vienna during the 1848 revolutions that swept Europe. She translated and wrote about Hegel, who had revolutionized philosophy and laid the ground for Marx’s philosophy of revolution. She repeatedly wrote that women were entitled to full equality. She wrote about the economic and political developments in England that informed Marx’s analysis of class struggle in the COMMUNIST MANIFESTO, and she worked with him in England when he first lived there. In 1851, after Macfarlane and Marx had broken with Harney, Marx wrote that she had the only "original ideas" in Harney’s publications, and deemed her "a rare bird." Aside from such brief mentions, almost everything we know about Macfarlane comes from her 1849-50 work: 12 substantial essays she wrote under the name Howard Morton, and her translation of the COMMUNIST MANIFESTO. She was probably born in Scotland and educated to be a governess. Chartist archives mention her work on behalf of immigrant workers. Tragically, there is no record of her after 1851; perhaps she died young. MACFARLANE AND RADICAL THOUGHT But we know a lot about her from her essays and from the social movements she participated in. This short volume includes chapters on the radicalization and later demise of Chartism, on other political and religious tendencies of the time, on Marx and Macfarlane, on Macfarlane as a feminist Antigone, and on "The Legacy of Hegelian Marxism." Thus we see her work as part of the battles of ideas contending at the birth of Marxism, and also, although Black does not discuss this, at the birth of feminism as a movement. The period was pivotal for women; in 1848, women’s equality became an idea whose time had come. Although individuals had written earlier feminist tracts, suddenly the idea was expressed in revolutionary movements. Just five years before, when Flora Tristan agitated among French workers to form a Workers’ Union with complete equality for women, most other socialists (Utopian socialists) treated her like a kook. But 1848 brought forth a feminist content within the European revolutions: in France, Germany, Austria, Hungary and Italy, women formed clubs to demand equal rights and joined in all aspects of the uprisings, including the fighting. In the U.S. the same year, the abolitionist movement gave birth to the women’s rights movement. One of its first acts was to send a solidarity message to imprisoned French revolutionary women. Since 1848, it would be difficult to find a social movement in the Western Hemisphere or Europe that lacks a feminist dimension. So much had women changed the world that, in 1849-50, Macfarlane almost casually insists on women’s equality, as she advocates a society "where freedom and equality will be the birth right of every human being…without poor, without classes….A society...not only of free men, but of free women." What ties together all Macfarlane’s ideas for the author--and presumably for her--is her grasp of the Hegelian dialectic. Black tells us, "Macfarlane was not only the first ‘British Marxist’: she was also the first British commentator on Hegel’s philosophy and the first translator of any of his words into English." He cites Hegel’s compelling "Idea of Freedom" and its "externalization" in the Age of Revolutions as having influenced Macfarlane to view history as a movement toward freedom. Readers unfamiliar with English working class history may have trouble keeping straight all the contending groups and people described in this book. But they are worth reading about because they too left a legacy. Every anti-Marxist left tendency today, and many so-called Marxist ones, have parallels if not roots in the period. The idea that inequality arises in the market leads people today to advocate all kinds of schemes for the redistribution of wealth as the key to transforming society, just as the Utopian socialists did. Marx exposed the falsity of the premise by showing that capitalist relations are rooted in the mode of production. Yet we still hear well-meaning people every day making impossible demands of a system that is incapable of being substantially and permanently reformed. MEANING FOR TODAY Perhaps the most valuable lessons of Macfarlane’s work emerge from her attempt to work out a revolutionary direction in a counter-revolutionary period. She held fast to Marx’s new ideas at a time when others were going off in all directions. The 1848 revolutions had been defeated, leading the British as well as European movements to splinter. In opposition to Marx’s attempt to unite exiled leaders into a World League of Revolutionary Socialists, moderates established the Central European Democratic Committee in 1850. Its program rejected "the cold and unfeeling travail of the intellect" in favor of the "instinct of the masses." Marx considered this an abandonment of revolutionary theory and a demand for the masses to act without thinking, a call for them to "have no thought for the morrow" and "strike all ideas from the mind." He strongly criticized the program for acting as if "the riddle of the future will be solved by a miracle." (MARX AND ENGELS COLLECTED WORKS, Vol. 10, p.529-31). The parallels to debates today are unmistakable. We are living in a period of extreme retrogression, with capital and its handmaiden, imperialism, seemingly in command everywhere, with the world’s dominant ideologies limited to religious fundamentalisms. We could not stop the war in Iraq, we could not stop Bush’s re-election. In the left and social movements, some demand to work on "the riddle of the future," but others abandon all idea of a real alternative, and in despair and desperation retreat to "resistance" or beg for reforms. They render the possibility of social transformation an illusion by saying that the masses have to bring forth the future without developing ideas about it now, thus denying the power of ideas in the revolutionary process. It is noteworthy that this book is the third published in Lexington Books’ "Raya Dunayevskaya Series in Marxism and Humanism," the first two being works of the philosopher Raya Dunayevskaya herself. Helen Macfarlane fits right in with Dunayevskaya’s dialectical approach to history and her concept that women are capable of being "thinkers as well as revolutionaries." Macfarlane was such a woman. Imagine what even greater contributions she might have made had she continued to work with Marx and the revolutionary movements of her day! (For more on Helen Macfarlane, see Helen Macfarlane and the Idea of Freedom) |
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