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NEWS & LETTERS, December 2007 - January 2008Woman as ReasonFeminism, pacifism, capitalismby Anne Jaclard For millennia, pacifism has been associated with women on the basis of biology. Bearing and nurturing children is supposed to make us abhor war, while men are supposed to be prone to it. The ideology that biology is destiny, not only for women but also for war, has persisted from the time of ancient Greece, like the play "Lysistrata," right through the 20th century. The suffragists really believed that winning the vote would lead to women voting out war. During the Cold War, pro-Soviet women's organizations pushed for the U.S. to disarm and be friendly to the Soviet Union on the grounds that "we're all just mothers." WITHIN ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT The Women's Liberation Movement of the 1960s and '70s changed all that. It burst out from within the anti-Vietnam War and Black freedom movements, when women who were inspired by those movements' visions of changing society became frustrated by the sexism within their own organizations. Women began to expand and develop new concepts of how deep the changes must be; they raised fundamental issues about the nature of capitalism, and its opposite. Some branches of the women's movement adopted biologically based alternatives. Some looked to Marx to explain the nature of the break from capitalist society that would make possible the reorganization of all human relations. But over the years, most rejected Marxism and settled for what turned out to be short-lived reforms of capitalism. Today the idea that women are by nature opposed to war is played on ironically in anti-war women's organizations. Code Pink, a pacifist organization with 150 chapters around the country, asks everyone to wear pink to demonstrations. Doubly stereotyped older women calling themselves the Raging Grannies use their assumed vulnerability to make news. Following their arrests for sitting-in at the Times Square recruiting station, where they demanded that they be signed up and sent to Iraq in place of their grandchildren, they managed to put the war on trial and won acquittal. BEYOND DISSATISFACTION While such tactics may be good for publicizing the idea that the war in Iraq is bad, polls show that two-thirds of Americans already oppose it. Voters turned out the Republican majority from Congress, without effect on Bush's continuation of the war. Clearly something more than widespread dissatisfaction with this war is needed to build a movement massive enough to stop it. Biologism has been a noose around humanity's neck, not only by keeping women from developing their minds, but also by substituting for better ideas about the social-economic causes of the horrors of existing society. In this "post-feminist" age, what ideas have replaced "biology is destiny"? Whether they appeal to our better "nature" or to morality, most anti-war groups say or imply that the problem, at root, is one of ethics and correct consciousness. They consequently limit their appeals to engaging in tactics designed to persuade others to become pacifistic, rather than to overthrow a system to which war is intrinsic. Theirs is no solution. The system has to be uprooted. The limitations of pacifism, as well as the limitations of much of the Left's simplistic anti-U.S., pro-"resistance" positions, have contributed to the anti-war movement's failure to grow. BEYOND MORALITY What is needed is not to probe and challenge the nature or morality of women or men, but to probe and challenge the nature of society, and to develop the revolutionary impulses of the early women's movement that were truncated by its rejection of Marx. This is not accomplished by blaming the war on "greedy capitalists" who want the oil and lucrative contracts in Iraq. Even less is it accomplished by the so-called leftists who condemn U.S. imperialism while giving support, or at least a free pass, to "the resistance," including to Islamist militia who are killing civilians and creating refugees by the hundreds of thousands. These militias want to impose theocratic rule that would imprison women in the kitchen and worse, and they are being fiercely fought by the Organization of Women's Freedom in Iraq (OWFI). Marxist-Humanists have concluded that the way to build the anti-war movement into a force that can stop this war is to demonstrate what we are for, and to appeal to the U.S. public to join in supporting Iraqi women, workers, unemployed, youth, GLBT people and religious and national minorities, who are not so different from us. News and Letters Committees is not the only group supporting women in Iraq. Code Pink and some other women's organizations have taken up the causes of the women's movements in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. But few groups are working to make people-to-people solidarity the basis of the anti-war movement. One group is The National Organization for Iraqi Freedom Struggles, NO-IFS (no-ifs.org). We invite women to support its position and to fight to make these ideas central to the anti-war movement. FUNDAMENTAL CRITIQUE In fighting both the U.S. occupation and the political Islamists, women's organizations like OWFI in Iraq and RAWA in Afghanistan have opened the door to a critique of the capitalist system that nourishes both imperialism and religious fundamentalism. Capitalist-imperialism and religious fundamentalism are not opposites, but are symbiotically related. Capitalism's inherent instability and frequent crises underlies its failure to improve people's lives in vast areas of the world, paving the way for anti-revolutionary religious appeals to the poor. The same weaknesses in capitalism compel the U.S. drive for single world mastery (See the Marxist-Humanist Perspectives in the August-September N&L). In short, to be "practical" about stopping war, we need to challenge the capitalist system itself. We invite women not only to become a new kind of activist in the anti-war movement, but also to work on analyzing this capitalist world and working out a theoretic basis for a new society. If we allow the anti-war and feminist movements to remain separate, if we do not articulate a third way besides capitalist-imperialism and fundamentalism--socialist revolution--then we relegate women's freedom to an impossible beyond. |
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