Feminist movement -a revolution sans arms

by Izeth Hussain

(March 27, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Feminism and World Revolution - I have argued earlier that a revolution can take place without a revolution, meaning a mass revolution. There have been very few mass revolutions in history, but revolutionary processes go on without them. Western Europe had the French Revolution in 1789, and no mass revolution thereafter. It was initially opposed by the forces of reaction gathered together in the Holy Alliance, but it was found after some decades that the whole of Western Europe came to share broadly the same economic, social, and political system. There was no linear progression towards it, every country did not follow the same trajectory, but at the end of it all every country rejected the Old Regime just as France had done. They had their revolutions without a revolution.11-3

Developments during the Russian revolution have led to some confused thinking. The February Revolution was certainly a mass revolution, but thereafter the October Revolution of 1917 in which the Bolsheviks seized power amounted actually to a coup d’etat. However, it would be mistaken to stop at that point, without taking count of the prolonged Civil War that followed. I would argue that civil wars as well as other wars - the prolonged ones, not just sporadic affairs - serve the same purposes as mass revolutions as they usually bring about changes of a revolutionary order. It becomes arguable therefore that the Bolsheviks came to power as the consequence of a prolonged mass revolution.

What went wrong? It was not Marxism or socialism that went wrong. It was a peculiar version of Marxism, namely Marxist-Leninism, that flopped and flopped irretrievably in the Soviet Union, China, and elsewhere. According to orthodox Marxism communism has to supervene on the completion of the bourgeois revolution through a simple process of the proletariat taking power from the bourgeoisie. That meant that a communist revolution was conceivable only in highly developed industrial societies, not in backward societies such as Russia - though Marx himself came to have illusions about that possibility towards the end of his life.

Perhaps it had to be expected that someone would conceive the notion of achieving a communist society without waiting for the completion of the bourgeois revolution. Lenin conceived the notion of the vanguard party which would bring that about. He did not understand the drive for power in humanity, and what would happen when absolute and total power is handed over to a group or an individual. Rosa Luxemburg, a greater revolutionary than Lenin, foresaw exactly what would happen when she wrote something like the following: the dictatorship of the proletariat would pass into the dictatorship of the party, which would pass by stages into the dictatorships of the Central Committee, the Politburo, and finally of one man. Accordingly Stalin seized absolute and totalitarian power to establish his Gulag Paradise. That model of revolution has failed everywhere. So-called Communist systems in China, Cuba, and elsewhere are kept going only by accommodating capitalist forces through the market.

A mass uprising

However, it is that model of revolution that prevails as the only authentic one not only among Marxists but among others as well. There has to be a mass uprising, accompanied by much violence with reactionary miscreants being taken away in tumbrels to be guillotined, power has to be assumed by a party or group to safeguard and promote the Revolution, traitors have to be given short shrift, and so on. But none of that has been happening in the case of the feminist movement though it can only be regarded as one of the greatest revolutionary movements of all time, perhaps the greatest. We can safely assume that male dominance over females was established in pre-history when man became a hunter. At that point man went out to hunt, woman minded the children, kept the home fires burning, and did some food-gathering on the side. Muscle-power became the determinant in the unequal man-woman relationship that has lasted to this day. The revolutionary change now taking place does not have behind it the usual signifiers of revolution, and I must note that feminist ideological writing is notable for its paucity. There are Virginia Woolf’s A Room of one’s Own and Three Guineas - the latter displaying some original thinking in my view - and there is Simone de Beauvoir’s great polemical tract The Second Sex. The rest of feminist theory belongs to the field of literary theory.

What is the explanation for the power of feminism which is coming to have a global sweep? Part of the explanation is obviously economic. Every underdeveloped country wants economic development, and every developed country wants further economic development, a process that requires the fullest utilization of the labour power available in a country. That means that the female cannot be confined to the home to serve the needs of her family, which was the traditional role to which she was confined all over the world. She has to be pushed into the market to serve the productive needs of her society, and that of course entails a profound revolutionary change in the man/woman relationship. I must add at this point that I believe that it was in Britain during the First World War that women of all classes were forced to work in factories in positions that were traditionally reserved for men - an example of the way that war brings about changes of a revolutionary order, to which I referred above.

Inferior position

The feminist movement can be seen also in another perspective. It can be argued that when man became a hunter a new phase in the evolution of humanity was inaugurated, one in which muscle power was the determinant in assigning the female a subordinate and inferior position. Today we are in the era of the knowledge-based economy in which muscle power becomes marginalized, and the subordination of females is no longer required for the purposes of the economy. In fact today’s high-tech warfare can be carried out as effectively by females as by males. Should an Arab country become too uppity in its enthusiasm for democracy, we can well imagine it being bombed right back into the Stone Age by the Amazon Brigade of the Yanko-Zionist Imperial Forces. No sensible rationale can be found for keeping females in an inferior position. A revolution is going on that cannot be understood in terms of the paradigm of a failed Marxist-Leninism.

Feminism in Sri Lanka - The feminist movement should be seen as part of a global revolutionary process that includes much else such as notably the human rights movement and the wider ecumenism . The process will be a very uneven one, with parts of the Islamic world remaining horrifyingly backward in its treatment of women for some time to come. We in Sri Lanka have imagined that it will be a smooth progression for our feminists because Mrs. Bandaranaike was the first female Prime Minister in the world, a silly notion that we must get out of our heads. We have had queens in the past such as Anula, like Britain and Russia, but everywhere the females remained the subjugated half of humanity.

The case of the Islamic world is particularly instructive. When Benazir Bhutto first stood for election as Prime Minister some influential Pakistani theologians - a peculiarly horrible lot - held that it was unIslamic for a female to assume the powers of an executive leader. The Moroccan sociologist, Fatima Mernissi, undertook research on the subject and established in her book Forgotten Sultanas that a large number of females had exercised power as leaders in the Islamic world. The difference however was that females unlike males could not become Khalifas and be endowed with religious authority in addition to exercising secular power. But the secular power of the Khalifas was for the greater part of Islamic history not much more than nominal. Therefore there was no actual difference in the power exercised by males and females in the Islamic world. Of course, despite all that, the females remained the subjugated half.

What matters for female liberation is not the holding of exalted positions by a few females. What matters is the position of a society in the spectrum going from hierarchy at one end to equality at the other. In Sri Lanka the hierarchical drive is very powerful, more powerful than in caste-bound India because the factors making for equality there are absent in Sri Lanka. That is why in the international ranking for female representation in politics China is 55th, Bangladesh is 65th, and Sri Lanka is at 122. Myanmar which is under the heel of a moronic, brutal, utterly unprincipled, and almost universally execrated army gang, is at 124. None of that applies to Sri Lanka, where the explanation is the power of the hierarchical drive.