No Woman, No Revolution, Part 9a
Is freedom female?
What’s Freedom got to do with Women?
This course, “No Woman, No Revolution”, problematises the
necessity of involving women, who are more than one-half of humanity, in any
possible proletarian revolution against capitalism.
The proletarian revolution, as much as the National
Democratic Revolution that precedes it, is a struggle for freedom, conforming
to the slogan “Power to the People”.
In that sense, the entire 16 courses of the Communist
University are “about” freedom. Communism itself is all about freedom. The
revolutionary Christopher Caudwell called freedom “the good that contains all
other goods”. One could presume that there are no opponents to this view. Countless
writings praising freedom, and works of art like the colossal Statue of Liberty
in New York, USA, seem to deny the possibility of any other view. Freedom is
for women as much as for men.
But in fact, as soon as the appeal to freedom becomes
effective in securing support for the struggle for socialism, bourgeois
thinkers and writers find ways to abandon it, and even to condemn it.
We now come across this phenomenon – the refusal of freedom
– in the matter of women’s power in society, just as we have come across it
elsewhere in relation to the liberation of Africa from colonialism.
For an example of the latter, the first President of Ghana,
Kwame Nkrumah, discusses the “negritude” that the first President of Senegal, Léopold
Sédar Senghor believed in, as follows:
‘Senghor has, indeed,
given an account of the nature of the return to Africa. His account is
highlighted by statements using some of his own words: that the African is
"a field of pure sensation"; that he does not measure or observe, but
"lives" a situation; and that this way of acquiring
"knowledge" by confrontation and intuition is “negro-African";
the acquisition of knowledge by reason, "Hellenic". In African
Socialism [London and New York, 1964, pp.72-3], he [Senghor] proposes “that we
consider the Negro-African as he faces the Other: God, man, animal, tree or
pebble, natural or social phenomenon. In contrast to the classic European, the
Negro-African does not draw a line between himself and the object, he does not
hold it at a distance, nor does he merely look at it and analyse it. After
holding it at a distance, after scanning it without analysing it, he takes it
vibrant in his hands, careful not to kill or fix it. He touches it, feels it,
smells it. The Negro-African is like one of those Third Day Worms, a pure field
of sensations... Thus the Negro-African sympathises, abandons his personality
to become identified with the Other, dies to be reborn in the Other. He does
not assimilate; he is assimilated. He lives a common life with the Other; he
lives in a symbiosis.”
‘It is clear that
socialism cannot be founded on this kind of metaphysics of knowledge.’
Kwame Nkrumah, “African
Socialism Revisited”, 1967
In similar fashion to Senghor, when confronted with the
possibility of freedom and power, the philosopher Judith Butler rejects it. For
Butler, power is an unwanted, male imposition. Similarly, for Senghor,
subjective freedom is “Hellenic” and therefore to be rejected because it is
identified with the colonial oppressor.
We have seen three contradictions that are active in the
world of feminism. One is between the bourgeois and the proletarian feminists.
The second is between the organised and the structureless. The third is between
the search for freedom, and its contrary: rejection of autonomy.
All of these contradictions are related. As in others among
the CU courses, we have to conclude that the resolution of such contradictions requires
philosophy, and not just any philosophy but the most powerful, avant-guard kind
of philosophy.
James
Heartfield’s 2002 work, “The Death of the Subject Explained” is a
strong book that deals with the fundamental question of all philosophy: the
relation of mind to matter. In it, Heartfield debunks all kinds of
anti-rational, anti-humanist philosophy, including post-Modernism, and in the
attached extract, he counters the anti-humanist feminism of Butler and others.
By humanist is simply meant the acceptance that the combined
ability to observe, think, plan and act is the unique attribute of human beings,
and also the source of human morality.
The very first words of matured Marxism – Karl Marx’s 1845
“Theses on Feuerbach” – deal with this fundamental question of subject and
object, mind and matter. The first sentence of Thesis 1 on Feuerbach is:
“The main defect of
all hitherto-existing materialism — that of Feuerbach included — is that the
Object, actuality, sensuousness, are conceived only in the form of the object,
or of contemplation, but not as human sensuous activity, practice, not
subjectively.”
Suffice it to say that Marx here shows his principal
concern, which never wavered or varied, namely: the priority of human freedom. So
long as we remain Marxists, we would have to insist on freedom as our goal, as the
goal of humanity, and as the goal of women.
Whereas bourgeois feminists like Butler and others quoted by
Heartfield have ended up opposing freedom.
On this kind of feminism Heartfield concludes:
“What began as a
criticism of the monopoly over freedom exercised by men has turned,
paradoxically, into a criticism of freedom as such.”
We can also say, paraphrasing Nkrumah: ‘It is clear that revolution cannot be founded on this kind of
metaphysics of knowledge.’
