Socialism, Feminism, Meaning and Understanding

Posted in Mike Wood's blog on ,

A few weeks ago I was at a meeting in Leeds, entitled “Socialist Feminism and the Fight for equality”, publicising Feminist Fightback,. The meeting quickly became a debate on whether socialists need to be involved in the feminist movement, and whether they need to describe themselves as feminists. Comrades from Workers Liberty argued that yes, they do, and comrades from Workers Power argued that no, they didn’t.

The argument from the members of Workers Power was that socialism meant opposition to all forms of oppression, and that as such being a feminist was superfluous. Socialism automatically included campaigning for equality for women, and would automatically resolve the problem if it were to be achieved. What’s more; the feminist movement has been almost universally bourgeois throughout its history and socialism actually goes beyond feminism in its liberation of women. This, I think, betrays a misunderstanding of the meaning of words and the way in which we use them as Marxists.

What does socialism mean? How can you begin to answer that question? What kind of answer would satisfy us? It seems laughably insufficient to simply get a dictionary and find how the word is defined. Why is it any less ridiculous to look at the way Marx, or Lenin, or Trotsky use the word and define that as the true meaning? If we were to do so it would only show what they thought the word meant, or how they thought it should be most effectively used. It would not necessarily say what the word meant to everyone who read their work at the time, let alone those who have read it since. Would this get us any closer to understanding the true meaning of socialism? No, because there isn’t one.

Words and concepts do not have independent existence outside of reality. We have invented them as a way of describing and communicating our experience of the world and they are useful insofar as they do that. There is nothing that ties a particular sound to any particular concept or phenomena. There is no way to settle the argument of what socialism means as it does not mean any one particular thing. It means something to us as Marxists, and it means another thing to society in general. The history of the word is even more complex; it existed before Marx and Engels used it, and it has been applied to an incredibly diverse range of ideas and societies since then. We cannot say that those ideas and societies are not socialism, although we can certainly say that the kind of socialism they represent is not one that will liberate humanity. As Marxists our task is to attempt to change the meaning of a variety of words as we try and achieve hegemony for a certain set of ideas. We do not argue for our meaning of the word socialism as the “true” meaning, merely as the best meaning politically.

Classless society is not inevitable, however capitalism does inevitably collapse. The conscious actions of the working class are necessary to ensure that a society based on human need can be created, and if those actions fail then the consequences are barbarism. History seems to teach us this much. The working class will not spontaneously reach the level of consciousness necessary to achieve this, and therefore the conscious actions of revolutionaries to attempt to change that consciousness is required. A large part of this rests on attempting to change the meanings of various words, chief among them being socialism. I would argue that all of our demands as Marxists are, or should be, pitched at this goal; they aim to demonstrate the underlying tensions in capitalist society and demonstrate through doing so what is truly required for human liberation. In other words they change the meaning to people of words such as “liberation” or “equality”. For a revolution to be successful the working class must consciously use those words in a very different sense from the one they use them in now, and we aim to accomplish this.

Engels argues in Anti-Duhring that definitions are not of much value for science, from a materialist point of view. If everything is understood as an historical phenomenon then it becomes impossible to clearly define something, and definitions can be more accurately understood as labels, of varying degrees of usefulness. Everything is in the process of ceasing to exist in its current form; everything is in the process of becoming something else. Dialectics implies that there is no one clear moment where a phenomena cease to be itself and becomes something else, yet nevertheless a change occurs over time. An acorn is not an oak tree, and it is useful to describe the two with different terms. However there is no moment where the acorn unambiguously becomes an oak tree, and as such, in a sense, it is impossible to define “acorn”.

In the “Brief Lives” storyline of Neil Gaiman’s “Sandman” Dream and Delirium of the Endless embark on a quest to find their long lost brother Destruction. When they find him Dream and Destruction discuss their purpose, and Destruction comments that possibly the Endless help set out the boundaries of existence. Destruction defines creation, Delirium defines rationality, Destiny defines choice, Death defines life, Desire defines hatred, and Despair defines hope. When Dream then asks what it is he defines, Destruction replies that is possibly reality. Definition tells us what a phenomenon is, and therefore must draw the boundaries of that phenomenon, i.e. tell us what it isn’t, however if the phenomenon is continuously becoming what it isn’t then defining it becomes much harder. The boundaries of a phenomenon are largely established by the relevant scientific conventions, not by any features of the phenomenon itself. The definition is decided socially, whether the society in question is a scientific community or whether it is broader than that. Definitions in this sense do not help us understand things very well in themselves, but they are necessary for communicating what understanding we have and attempting to increase that understanding in dialogue.

In a materialist sense an accurate definition of an object does not delineate what it is and what it is not but instead describes the historical movement of the object in question. If we were to define socialism in this sense then it would not be defined as Workers Power wish to define it – a set of pure ideas and goals. Instead socialism would be seen as a real historical movement, arising due to concrete historical forces and developing in certain directions. The reality of the socialist movement is that it has not taken women’s liberation very seriously, and therefore to argue that “true” socialism would do so seems misguided.

For most of the twentieth century the word “socialism” has been associated not with liberation but with oppression. Those who argue from the idealist viewpoint of Workers Power’s comrades, i.e. that ideas have a definite objective existence over and above reality and can be defined in opposition to it, would presumably argue that Stalinism had nothing in common with socialism. This approach, however, has nothing in common with Marxism. In the Communist Manifesto Marx attacks a variety of different forms of socialism, all of which he considers reactionary to one degree or another, but he stills labels these ideas as socialism. In The Two Souls of Socialism Hal Draper describes socialism from below and counterposes it to socialism from above, in which category he includes Stalinism, reformism, and anarchism. Although Draper is a staunch critic of all of these systems of thought he nevertheless includes them under the heading “socialism from above”. He did not seek to argue that they were not socialism merely because they did not fit with his idea of socialism. This isn’t to say he was soft on Stalinism, it just means that he recognised that socialism had a real meaning beyond any pure definition of it. Stalinism is what most people take the meaning of the term “socialism” to be. We can’t just ignore this and feel contented that they are incorrect, but we must attempt to change the meaning of the word in any way we can.

Workers Power say that the revolution must be a feminist revolution. All that they really mean by this is that their revolution must be a feminist revolution, in other words they merely say what revolution they are in favour of. This is completely circular. If the revolution is feminist then it is ours, if the revolution is not feminist then it is not, and we have no reason to concern ourselves with it. All very enlightening as to their position, however, to paraphrase the Critique of the Gotha Programme, it does not actually help us achieve their revolution any time soon. The fundamental for Marxists is to try and make the actually occurring revolution and “our” revolution one and the same. To make the revolution one that will liberate humanity, and to make it, in this instance, a feminist revolution as well as a socialist one. Workers Power seem to think this can be accomplished without talking about feminism, which is, to put it politely, a bold strategy.

Saying you’re a socialist feminist makes a statement about the kind of socialism you are in favour of, and also about the kind of feminism you are in favour of. Both words help clarify the other as individually they are vague, more so than most words in this case. We use these words not because we feel they summarise the entirety of our politics but because we can use them to usefully communicate our politics to people and change their understanding of both terms. When Marx described himself as a scientific socialist he did not mean that the socialist revolution would be unscientific and must necessarily be supplemented by a scientific conception. He was instead attempting to use the words to point out flaws in the existing socialist movements and change peoples perceptions of both words together. This is the way in which I would describe myself as a socialist feminist.

If you were to put together all the isms we were in favour of the list would be long. I am a materialist, Marxist, Communist, socialist, historicist, feminist, anti-racist, etc… No one word sums up all these things, certainly not “socialism”. Nevertheless they allow us to summarise our politics on the issues in question, and help us intervene in the respective movements. There is no point using the word “socialist” to describe your politics, secure in the knowledge that it encompasses the entirety of your world outlook, and nothing more, as you have defined it so, if the word you say and the word people hear are, to all intents and purposes, different. Some kind of clarification is inevitably necessary, and the exact nature of that depends on who you are talking to and why.

A workers movement with a program of consciously remoulding society to eliminate oppression will not just appear one day. If it comes to exist at all it will grow out of the existing workers movement, which presently views socialism as authoritarian for the most part, and can often be quite reactionary with regard to women’s liberation. This growth from one set of ideas to another will not happen by itself; it will not happen merely due to the ideal nature of the workers movement as the gravedigger of the capitalist class. It will happen due to the conscious actions of people who intervene in that movement to change those ideas. Describing myself as a socialist feminist is therefore not about separating myself from socialism but about attempting to create the movement to achieve it.

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