Voices of revolutionary feminism, or of revolutions forgotten and devoured from within …
Anarchists always had great difficulties with the post-WWII anti-colonial movements and “third world” revolutions. Anarchists seemed to have been left by the wayside, as literally tens, hundreds, of thousands of people struggled against colonial rule, authoritarianism and “neo-colonialism”. Yet, what is also forgotten or ignored is that many anarchists were actively involved in these struggles, only to be pushed aside or persecuted after the victories of the “revolutionary forces”. In many instances, those anarchists were women.
We share, briefly, one such story, from nicaragua …
The Commune was the biggest festival of the nineteenth century. Underlying the events of that spring of 1871 one can see the insurgents’ feeling that they had become the masters of their own history, not so much on the level of “governmental” politics as on the level of their everyday life. (Consider, for example, the games everyone played with their weapons: they were in fact playing with power.) It is also in this sense that Marx should be understood when he says that “the most important social measure of the Commune was its own existence in acts.”
Guy Debord, Attila Kotányi & Raoul Vaneigem, Theses on the Paris Commune
The principle of authority is so built in to every aspect of our society that it is only in revolutions, emergencies and “happenings” that the principle of spontaneous order emerges. But it does provide a glimpse of the kind of human behaviour that the anarchist regards as “normal” and the authoritarian sees as unusual. … It could be seen in spite of commercial exploitation in the pop festivals of the late 1960s, in a way which is not apparent to the reader of newspaper headlines. From “A cross-section of informed opinion” in an appendix to a report to the government, a local authority representative mentions “an atmosphere of peace and contentment which seems to be dominant amongst the participants” and a church representative mentions “a general atmosphere of considerable relaxation, friendliness and a great willingness to share”. The same kind of comments were made about the instant city of the Woodstock Festival in the United States: “Woodstock, if permanent, would have become one of America’s major cities in size alone, and certainly a unique one in the principles by which its citizens conducted themselves.”
Colin Ward, Anarchy in Action
In 1970, Anarchy magazine (nº 116, October), published three short essays under the theme of “Instant Anarchy”. The first of the three was a piece by Graham Whiteman entitled the “Festival Moment”, in which we are offered an anarchist reading of the woodstock music festival (and of festivals in general).
As this week marks the 50th anniversary of woodstock, we thought that there could be no better way to celebrate the occasion than to recall the anarchy of the event and to shake up its current status as a “historical monument” a little.
Voices of revolutionary feminism; or the revolution that lies beyond all control …
Rebellions and revolutions, overwhelm established identities, overflowing the confines of established social norms and roles. If insurrections begin in a place and time, they become insurrections precisely in undermining social expectations.
If the destruction of “patriarchy” demands open rebellion, then will it not also bring down sex and gender identities, thereby liberating human desire?
If we have little interest in the scholasticism and the baroque arcana of contemporary marxist theoretical debates, the wealth of marxist theory can be neither dismissed nor ignored. And debates around marxist inspired feminism are a case in point.
Without wishing to over simplify, and in the wake of our post on “autonomist feminism“, we wish to share a contrasting marxist analysis of gender that focuses on what may be called the structural dimensions of capitalism, rather than the subject centred or political dimensions of the same, as autonomist feminism does.
The “structural” analyses go under various names, among which may be included different schools of marxist communisation theory and marxist value criticism theory. (We will ignore the question of whether such theories are more properly described as “post-marxist”).
If “autonomist feminism” begins from the concept-reality of “wage labour” to understand the social and political construction of the female sex and gender as subservient subjects, the more structural analyses begin with the commodity form (exchange value). Under capitalism, it is the latter which structures social relations, and therefore the categories of sex and gender are to be understood as consequences of commodity production under patriarchal capitalism.
The production of commodities and their consequent fetishisation in social life marginalises and destroys use values, the usefulness that things, activities, relations possess independently of economic relations. Something is made valuable or is valorised, regardless of how useless it is. And social and economic life is governed by a logic of exchange value production, and not the creation of useful things.
One difficulty however emerges – capitalism’s central contradiction, marxists often contend – in relationship to the commodity that is labour, or labour power. If human working activity is commodified under capitalism, if it is reduced to the abstract value of exchange (a value measured exclusively by the labour time necessary for its production), it retains a necessary use value, namely, all of that which constitutes the usefulness of the labourer in the making of a commodity. And if, in turn, commodities must be produced for the production and upkeep of labour power, the latter’s production is never reducible to commodities. It also requires care; a summarising term for all of the differing human and social relations required for producing a reasonably effective and efficient worker.
The production and reproduction of workers, which is to say the reproduction of capitalist social relations, is a necessarily non-commodifiable activity. (If under contemporary capitalist social relations, a great deal of what was formerly given in care must now be bought, a total commodification of care is impossible, except at an overwhelming cost – which would amount to either complete slavery or mass death. The former would no longer be capitalism and the latter can only be tolerated at a relative scale, in elaborated necropolitics). But as non-commodifiable, it is not literally speaking labour, that is, it produces no value, in the sense of exchange value, producing rather the useful humans required for the production of value.
A residue of non-value haunts the human, the making of useful humans for capital, and because this activity is also social, categories of human beings are entirely or partially relegated to it, categories identified by gender, race, ethnicity, and the like. In other words, patriarchal sex and gender identifications under capital are a consequence of capitalist social relations, and because non-value producing activity – however necessary to the reproduction of capitalist social relations – is not “valued”, then those who engage in it are in turn “produced” as inferior agents within capitalism.
Patriarchal oppression is therefore not the consequence of patriarchal political machinations, or of men, but of the subservience of society to the commodity form. The task of a revolutionary feminism then is not to seek wages for labour that goes unpaid, but rather to undermine and destroy the social relations of capital that force “women” (and other “identities”) to engage in non-socially validated activity, and thus be the object of capitalist patriarchal sexism.
Without deciding between the two tendencies or schools, autonomist feminism and structural marxist feminism, what divides them is the interpretation of “value” (commodity exchange value) as the structuring concept of capitalist social relations and the role of politics in shaping the conditions of commodity production.
Contrary to what is affirmed by their apologists and their differing politics – wages for housework versus the destruction of wage labour and the commodity form – it is not entirely clear whether the two are actually opposed. Wages for housework feminists, for example, never imagined that such wages would destroy capitalism – they served or serve rather to unmask the “naturalisation” of the role of women -, while it is unclear what a complete or total opposition to capitalism would involve. If the “cracks” of capitalism open up spaces of political opposition to capital, it is obvious that what fills the cracks may not necessarily be anti-capitalist; but whether what does is anti-capitalist or not cannot be foretold from the beginning. And it seems blind to ignore that the conditions that make commodity production possible are in fact inherently political – “primitive accumation” is not a thing of the past, but an everyday task of political appropriation.
Two share, two articles from “structural marxist feminism”.
Hence we must refuse housework as women’s work, as work imposed upon us, which we never invented, which has never been paid for, in which they have forced us to cope with absurd hours, 12 and 13 a day, in order to force us to stay at home. We must get out of the house; we must reject the home, because we want to unite with other women, to struggle against all situations which presume that women will stay at home, to link ourselves to the struggles of all those who are in ghettos, whether the ghetto is a nursery, a school, a hospital, an old-age home, or asylum. To abandon the home is already a form of struggle, since the social services we perform there would then cease to be carried out in those conditions, and so all those who work out of the home would then demand that the burden carried by us until now be thrown squarely where it belongs-onto the shoulders of capital. This alteration in the terms of struggle will be all the more violent the more the refusal of domestic labor on the part of women will be violent, determined and on a mass scale. The working class family is the more difficult point to break because it is the support of the worker, but as worker, and for that reason the support of capital. On this family depends the support of the class, the survival of the class – but at the woman’s expense against the class itself. The woman is the slave of a wage-slave, and her slavery ensures the slavery of her man. Like the trade union, the family protects the worker, but also ensures that he and she will never be anything but workers. And that is why the struggle of the woman of the working class against the family is crucial. To meet other women who work inside and outside their homes allows us to possess other chances of struggle. To the extent that our struggle is a struggle against work, it is inscribed in the struggle which the working class wages against capitalist work. But to the extent that the exploitation of women through domestic work has had its own specific history, tied to the survival of the nuclear family, the specific course of this struggle which must pass through the destruction of the nuclear family as established by the capitalist social order, adds a new dimension to the class struggle.
Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, Women and the Subversion of the Community
Voices of revolutionary feminism …
One of the most important contributions to contemporary feminism emerged in the late 1960s, in italy, with Lotta Feminista and the Wages for Housework movements (the latter would also spread to north america), which, inspired by operaismo/workerism, placed the reproduction of capitalist social relations at the centre of theoretical criticism and political militancy.
If marxism traditionally focused on the centrality of wage labour, of labour as commodity, in the structuring of relations of social production under capitalism (with the practical consequence that the factory was seen as the principal site of political, class conflict), the italian feminist critique of the period attributed equal importance to the reproduction of labour outside the factory, a reproduction necessary for the very possibility of commodity production; a labour which as unwaged (consequently judged to be “unproductive”) was assigned to “marginal” populations, most notably women (along with the slaves, the colonised, racial and ethnic “minorities”, and the like). And it was in this subaltern place of reproduction that modern sex and gender identities would be constituted.
If patriarchy predates capitalism, the latter appropriates patriarchy its own ends, such that a revolutionary feminism can only be anti-capitalist.
We share below four articles. The first serves as an introduction to radical italian feminism of the 1970s. This is followed by articles co-authored and authored by three central figures of the Wages for Housework movements: Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James and Silvia Federici.
We close with a video recorded interview with Selma James and talk by Silvia Federici.
We share two articles, a first on women in the spanish revolution and a second on the spanish anarchist organisation Mujeres Libres. And we close with the spanish film, Libertarias (1996).
… this ill-got thing you call morality, sealed with the seal of marriage … [is] … the consummation of immorality, impurity, and injustice. … every married woman … is a bonded slave, who takes her master’s name, her master’s bread, her master’s commands, and serves her master’s passion; who passes through the ordeal of pregnancy and the throes of travail at his dictation, not at her desire; who can control no property, not even her own body, without his consent, and from whose straining arms the children she bears may be torn at his pleasure, or willed away while they are yet unborn. It is said the English language has a sweeter word than any other, — home. But … beneath the word … [is] a prison …
Voltairine de Cleyre, Sex Slavery
Voices of revolutionary feminism …
Voltairine de Cleyre is one of the most important writers within the anarchist tradition, and in her own lifetime, her writing fed and was fed by an unwavering political militancy.
An early critic of the place and domination of women in early capitalist society, she saw very clearly, when still quite young, that general human oppression and exploitation could never be brought to an end without the emancipation of women from patriarchal social relations.
We share below an essay on the anarchist feminism of Voltairine de Cleyre.
In this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. They don’t love your eyes; they’d just as soon pick em out. No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it. And O my people they do not love your hands. Those they only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty. Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face ’cause they don’t love that either. You got to love it, you! And no, they ain’t in love with your mouth. Yonder, out there, they will see it broken and break it again. What you say out of it they will not heed. What you scream from it they do not hear. What you put into it to nourish your body they will snatch away and give you leavins instead. No, they don’t love your mouth. You got to love it. This is flesh I’m talking about here. Flesh that needs to be loved. Feet that need to rest and to dance; backs that need support; shoulders that need arms, strong arms I’m telling you. And O my people, out yonder, hear me, they do not love your neck unnoosed and straight. So love your neck; put a hand on it, grace it, stroke it and hold it up. and all your inside parts that they’d just as soon slop for hogs, you got to love them. The dark, dark liver–love it, love it and the beat and beating heart, love that too. More than eyes or feet. More than lungs that have yet to draw free air. More than your life-holding womb and your life-giving private parts, hear me now, love your heart. For this is the prize.
Toni Morrison, Beloved
I never asked Tolstoy to write for me, a little colored girl in Lorain, Ohio. I never asked [James] Joyce not to mention Catholicism or the world of Dublin. Never. And I don’t know why I should be asked to explain your life to you. We have splendid writers to do that, but I am not one of them. It is that business of being universal, a word hopelessly stripped of meaning for me. Faulkner wrote what I suppose could be called regional literature and had it published all over the world. That’s what I wish to do. If I tried to write a universal novel, it would be water. Behind this question is the suggestion that to write for black people is somehow to diminish the writing. From my perspective there are only black people. When I say ‘people,’ that’s what I mean.
Toni Morrison
Is there no context for our lives? No song, no literature, no poem full of vitamins, no history connected to experience that you can pass along to help us start strong? You are an adult. The old one, the wise one. Stop thinking about saving your face. Think of our lives and tell us your particularized world. Make up a story. Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created. We will not blame you if your reach exceeds your grasp; if love so ignites your words they go down in flames and nothing is left but their scald. Or if, with the reticence of a surgeon’s hands, your words suture only the places where blood might flow. We know you can never do it properly – once and for all. Passion is never enough; neither is skill. But try. For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don’t tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear’s caul. You, old woman, blessed with blindness, can speak the language that tells us what only language can: how to see without pictures. Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.
Toni Morrison, The Nobel Lecture In Literature, 1993
It is so difficult to convey the words of a writer who mastered them, and spoke them, wrote them, from the place of where she lived, and the place of her parents, grandparents, and that of “her people”; a place of horrific violence, racist and sexist, that destroyed whole communities, families and individuals. Yet this place was also one of great resilience, courage and resistance, of love. And thus Toni Morrison told the stories of the most silenced of america.
The origin of the Anarchafeminist Manifesto is in Norway. The Anarchafeminist Manifesto is the summary of the feminist political program unanimously agreed upon by the third congress of the Anarchist Federation of Norway, 1—7 of June 1982. The manifesto was first published in Norwegian in “Folkebladet” (IJA) no 1 1983 pp. 4—5. Soon after the “Manifesto” was published in CRIFA-Bulletin no 44 mars—avril 1983 in French (p. 12) and English (p. 13). Later on the French version was used as the basis for a translation to English that was published on the Internet. The “Manifesto” is also translated to other languages. Anarchafeminst greetings from Anna Quist, co-writer of the “Anarchafeminst Manifesto.” Translated from French (Bulletin C.R.I.F.A. No 44 mars—avril 1983 p. 12).(The Anarchist Library)
Women and a revolution betrayed: Nicaragua
Voices of revolutionary feminism, or of revolutions forgotten and devoured from within …
Anarchists always had great difficulties with the post-WWII anti-colonial movements and “third world” revolutions. Anarchists seemed to have been left by the wayside, as literally tens, hundreds, of thousands of people struggled against colonial rule, authoritarianism and “neo-colonialism”. Yet, what is also forgotten or ignored is that many anarchists were actively involved in these struggles, only to be pushed aside or persecuted after the victories of the “revolutionary forces”. In many instances, those anarchists were women.
We share, briefly, one such story, from nicaragua …
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