Woman as Reason

Election opens breathing space

by Terry Moon

In the U.S. mid-term elections women won. We won by helping to sweep the Republicans from power; by defeating parental consent laws in California and Oregon; and, importantly, we defeated the fanatical anti-abortion law in South Dakota that had no exceptions, even if a woman's health was in jeopardy.

Every one of these victories means women's lives will be saved. So degenerate has capitalism become that this election was a question of life and death. Bush scoffed at the credible report that over 500,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed because of his war. He tried to hide the reality of the two, eight, ten or more U.S. soldiers killed day after day as Iraq slides into misery and chaos. The war was the Republicans' downfall. While weeks after the election, we can still be joyful, what has to be faced is that the election did not create a new world, but only a breathing space for the women's movement to take advantage of. To begin that process, we have to look hard at how that vital victory in South Dakota was won.

THE BATTLE IN SOUTH DAKOTA

Rightfully mistrustful of a Supreme Court stacked by Bush to rule for his right-wing agenda, South Dakota feminists took the fight to the voters. Knowing that defeating this fanatics' law was crucial, the South Dakota Campaign for Healthy Families took the pragmatic approach. Rather than putting forward the principle that women have the right to control our own bodies, they spoke to voters about how the law is too narrow and extreme, as it outlaws abortion in cases of rape, incest, and if the woman's health is in danger.

On the one hand, the feminist victory in South Dakota showed that anti-abortion fanatics are beyond the pale. Their gold standard--that life begins at conception and the resulting fetus trumps the woman in all circumstances--will not hold. On the other hand, feminists backed away from the principled stand that our bodies are ours, and for women to be free we, not the church or state, must control our bodies and lives. That feminists downplayed what we stand for before the election means that what is key now is what happens after the election.

The defeat of so many Republicans is a victory, but it is emphatically not the deep, lasting, and total change needed for us to be free. We have Bush for two more years doing as much damage as possible; there is a reactionary Supreme Court, ensconced for decades and now deciding whether to make late term abortions illegal; and there is the war in Iraq, killing hundreds each week. But most importantly, the election did not come close to challenging capitalism, and it is capitalism that Bush and his ilk personify. That reality reveals that we cannot create a human society by softly stating that the right wing is too extreme. We must not make a virtue of necessity; the philosophy of pragmatism cannot set our course.

WHAT PHILOSOPHY NOW?

What makes the question "Where do we go from here?" difficult, is that 30 years of retrogression has clamped on us more tightly than ever the mind-forged manacles that make it hard to see that it is possible to transcend capitalism--that capitalism is an historical stage, like feudalism, and cannot last forever. In the 1960s and early 1970s, women's liberationists felt in the marrow of our bones that we could destroy this sexist, racist, homophobic, capitalist society. It is not that we must recapture that feeling, but that we recognize the necessity of a philosophy of liberation to help us change forever our oppressive reality. That is why we must be critical of how we achieved that victory in South Dakota, because pragmatism does not lead to the new, only to surviving what is.

Today the revolutionary project has been so discredited that Marx, while known, is studied in an academic way. But Marx was a revolutionary and his philosophy, re-created in our age as Marxist-Humanism by Raya Dunayevskaya, is a philosophy of liberation. It not only tells us what capitalism is, it shows us that it can be transcended. This election revealed a hunger for a world based on ideas, values, and human relations that are at odds with capitalism's reason for being--its self-expansion at all costs, environmental and human.

This means the breathing space created by the election has given us space to put forward what is necessary to transform our society into a truly human one: a revolutionary movement founded on a total philosophy of liberation, which for our age is Marxist-Humanism. The need for a totally new society, one based on new human relations, is screaming to be articulated and worked out. We can never again allow ourselves to be forced into a situation where we end up fighting on the ground of our enemy, of saying "this law is too extreme," when what we mean is this law is an abomination and we must have total freedom.

Let's take this space the election has made, rescue Marx from the ivory towers of academia, and work out our concept of a new society, one beyond capitalism, one of new, unalienated human relations.