There are a few of A.’s points that we can agree with, and it may make sense to state the points of agreement prior to taking up the areas where we disagree, and the methodological question.
- In A.’s introductory paragraph, we can agree with all the wording except womanist and pagan as a description of our orientation. While we strive to overcome patriarchy and the influence of patriarchy on the workers’ movement, we do not identify with one gender over another, nor do we seek to replace patriarchy with matriarchy.
- We agree with points 4 and 6.
- Although our educated guess is that many Pagans would not agree with the definition of Paganism in point 7, we agree with the content of this point without adhering to the word Paganism itself.
- We agree with point 8, and even though much of the rest of the material is alien to our method, we hope that comrade A. stands by point 8 and continues to engage in the battle against capitalism with us. Similarly, we agree with point 18.
- We agree with the critique of the life negating aspects of patriarchy outlined in point 9, with two caveats. First, although our view is that patriarchy predated capitalism by about 9,000 years, we do not see capitalism as the spawn of patriarchy. Second, we believe that capitalism, as much as patriarchy, is responsible for the life-negating alienation described in point 9, and that its effects are felt by working class and oppressed men as well as by women.
A.’s attacks on dialectical materialism and Eurocentric Marxism are not backed by any solid argument. There is no substance to these attacks. If the comrade claims to have good reason to disregard them, she might try to dissect the method and show us where it is wrong, but she has done nothing of the kind. As the core of the Marxist method is dialectical materialism, it is prudent for her to declare her opposition to being considered a Marxist. Indeed she is not.
If we were presented with this idealist manifesto from any political activist other than a comrade, we would happily let them go their own way, as they have nothing to offer the working class and ultimately only speak to a petty bourgeois layer of women with very little to offer for the liberation of humanity. A. is not the first with this subjectivist program for abstract liberation, and where it has cropped up before we have not seen it successfully applied to the class struggle or to the struggle for women’s liberation.
We utilized the method of dialectical materialism in the Marxist Pamphlet Series document on Women’s Oppression and developed a program for women’s liberation there (available on our website, here). This document has stood the test of 18 years. When A. joined the organization she said she agreed with this document. She must therefore show where this document is wrong methodologically and in its programmatic approach, rather than dismiss it with the wave of a hand. Many of the questions raised in the 21 points of comrade A. are answered in that document. In particular is a reference to Lenin who explains clearly that creating model community organizations to share housework and liberate the woman in the home was one of the key tasks of the nascent workers state.
As for the rest of the program propounded by A., it has nothing to offer the working class. It does not state at all that the goal of the program is the emancipation of the working class, and that the emancipation of the working class is tied dialectically to the emancipation of women. The working class is not emancipated until women’s drudgery is abolished. Through the socialization of the home and family, and the rise of the commune and communal work, both women and men can be elevated beyond the small family which enslaves them both, in different ways, and requires women, primarily, to provide unpaid labor to the ruling class by reproducing and sustaining the commodity of labor power. Nor does A.’s program advance a method for workers to overcome those forces which have prevented them from achieving self-emancipation. Such forces include the union bureaucracy, the social democrats, the reformists, and even the anarchists and feminists, all of whom have dissuaded the working class from independent political action.
The revolution that starts on the picket line and in the general strikes throws up communal institutions of social production, led by the working class women, which free the class itself to do the work of the class. For example, the communal kitchen, laundry, and child care center free the working class women to work alongside the men to win the strike and prepare for the next battle. These new institutions of communal life begin on the picket lines and in the union halls and factory committees, and contribute significantly to the formation of workers’ councils, workers’ militias, and working class community appropriation of the schools and other social institutions.
The institutions of the emergent egalitarian socialism are apparent in the forms of struggle that the working class of all genders create to defend and advance the aims of the class. From these institutions develops not only the form, but also the consciousness, of the commune as the social organ of production and decision making. With the advances in consciousness made by the working class though its struggles, misogyny and patriarchy are defeated in the praxis of the battle itself, as proletarian women step forward though their organizations and take their role in the leadership of the revolution through their determination and experience.
The womanist philosophers have characterized the role of women in nurturing as a form of gifting, which is the non-alienated form of consciousness that should, in their minds, model the new economy. But we do not see that concept as inherently womanist. If you choose to use the term gifting to describe the nurturing role of women that is fine, but empathy and compassionate action also have a materialist basis. Nor are these exclusively women’s role, even for early humanity. Indeed when the male hunter dragged the woolly mammoth back to camp piece by piece it was also a form of gifting; indeed, the nutrition it provided was a form of nurturing that the entire tribe needed.
Ultimately, a gifting economy is a Stone Age method of clan sustenance. If we go back to the Stone Age, we can all exchange a necklace of shells for a piece of meat. For the lovey-dovey day-dreamers, this is a fantasy or a fairytale that they do not want to let go. Millions of new age spiritual people who believe in some sort of hazy socialism want to believe in a life of love and freedom in a hazy undefined non-scientific socialism: life in a fairytale.
In the 21 points it is argued that the capitalist society needs to be replaced with the gifting economy, which, it is argued, is inherently womanist. This is an idealist notion that ignores the reality that there are intrinsic limitations in such an economy. One HWRS comrade has a friend who makes his living gifting massage at the farmers market; the massage is free, but the recipient is invited to gift back at $1 per minute, and if you drop off a fish or a box of fruit, that’s cool too. So yes, individuals may be able to support themselves in this way within the framework of a society that includes more organized forms of production and exchange. But can that translate into the type of production needed to feed, cloth, house, educate, and maintain the health of nearly 7 billion people? And if you have nothing to gift with but a smile or a sneer, how are you to eat? Will the gift be produced socially or individually? If production in a gifting economy is done by individuals, and if you gift someone with a car and someone gifts you with a house, isn’t that barter? And how would one gift social needs, for example a hospital or school? Today only philanthropists can make such gifts but they are produced by workers in a for profit system. In a post capitalist economy the production of socially necessary goods will be done by the commune of workers and will be the common property of all to be shared by all; hence socialism has no need for the gift.
We do not raise primitive communism above its stage in prehistory to something we aspire toward. Nor do we subscribe to the myth of an exclusively matriarchal period in human history. Although matriarchy has existed in some places and times in human societies (and indeed, some animal groups, such as elephants, are matriarchal), we see the basis for varying forms of human organization as a reflection of the material conditions of groups of humans at varying points of time. We do not agree that the original primitive communism was matriarchal for millions of years. Rather, with a natural division of labor (which we will look at later), all adults in the society had a role in both production and decision making. Even among the feminist anthropologists, it is generally agreed that the predominant state of affairs was egalitarianism rather than matriarchy. After we look at a few pages from Engels, we will go more deeply into the materialist basis for early social formations.
The lessons of anthropology and prehistory revel that humanity can live in harmony with nature, but that as we become self aware and develop tools and division of labor, we naturally start to lose the direct connection with source which we had prior to our descent from unconscious animal to emerging human (and we begin to materially impact nature, destroy the natural environs with many unintended consequences, even during the early period of lower barbarism: forest clearing, animal husbandry, and agriculture) . We also recognize that during the early years of humanity, despite the apparent harmony with nature, humanity was afflicted with dangers and hazards which challenged us to develop both divisions of labor, new skills, and historical/institutional knowledge.
Much speculation about pre-history is based on what the modern feminists/spirituality call goddess worship based on the unearthing of figurines of fertility figures. The celebration of fertility and in some cases the emergence of the goddess as a totem among the pantheon of spirits which were worshiped or revered does not provide proof that primitive communism was matriarchal. As woman with child is vulnerable and the child requires protection and is easily lost to the wild, the cold, and the pangs of childbirth, it is natural that “the fertile one” would be revered and protected. Even if the man is destroyed in the hunt or in other situations, the woman as the holder of the future of the clan in her uterus is elevated by material conditions to be protected by the remaining men. The loss of each child could easily mean the destruction of the entire clan, so it is easily understood that there is a materialist basis for the worship of women’s reproductive capacity. For that reason it may be understood that figurines celebrating the pregnant one and the milk giver were produced, gifted, and possibly worshiped as part of the Shaman’s work to maintain the clan and reinforce inherent human ethics necessary to sustain group unity, such as empathy and compassion (although in reality men are as essential as women for human race to continue then people may not knew it).
In other words, the special role and protection for woman was not because the woman was a god or elevated to a superior position to men, but because she had the sole ability to reproduce as long as one man was still alive in the tribe. Indeed when modern anthropologist found primitive cultures which had not been contaminated by influence from class based societies they found that divisions of labor existed between men and women, young and old. Men and women had roles in the commune that were different, but one was not elevated above the other.
The claim made by some current advocates of feminist based spirituality that in pre-history human spirituality was exclusively or primarily centered on a woman-based energy that celebrated fertility of the woman and of nature does not account for the evidence (cave paintings, etc.) of a co-existing male-based spirituality which celebrated the hunt and the animal spirit to which the male dedicated himself in the process of carrying out his part of the division of labor.
From the abundance of tools of the hunt (arrowheads etc) found in archeological sites we can surmise that at least as much labor was put into the production of the tools of the hunt as into the production of fertility totems which may have been produced to pray for successful childbirth just as arrow heads were produced to assure a successful hunt. Just as the woman was celebrated for her fertility the spirit of the animal was celebrated - as was the phallus, emblems of which are also found in many prehistoric archeological sites.
Class society, with its expropriation of the surplus from the women, arose from the advent of agriculture, and the control of the land and the herd by the male farmer and shepherd was contemporaneous with the birth of patriarchy and the end of an egalitarian and natural division of labor which is now elevated to and celebrated as the golden era of matriarchy.
Engels was wrong on the timing and he did not fully understand the complex interaction with nature that brought about the development of agriculture and the domestication of animals. There was no way he could, without the modern scientific tools of today’s archeology and paleontology. Yet his dialectical materialist method of human evolution was brilliant and way ahead of his time.
Let’s look at some of Engels’s insights. First we quote from the description of the period of “savagery” (Engels was a product of his time, and his 19th century terminology, offensive to today’s ears, must be understood in its historical context), the early period of emergence from the trees through the invention of the bow and some primitive tools, but prior to pottery and animal husbandry.
“(a.) LOWER STAGE. Childhood of the human race [Australopithecus]. Man still lived in his original habitat, in tropical or subtropical forests, and was partially at least a tree-dweller, for otherwise his survival among huge beasts of prey cannot be explained. Fruit, nuts and roots served him for food. The development of articulate speech is the main result of this period. Of all the peoples known to history none was still at this primitive level. Though this period may have lasted thousands of years, we have no direct evidence to prove its existence; but once the evolution of man from the animal kingdom is admitted, such a transitional stage must necessarily be assumed.
“(b.) MIDDLE STAGE. Begins with the utilization of fish for food (including crabs, mussels, and other aquatic animals), and with the use of fire. The two are complementary, since fish becomes edible only by the use of fire. With this new source of nourishment, men now became independent of climate and locality; even as savages, they could, by following the rivers and coasts, spread over most of the earth. Proof of these migrations is the distribution over every continent of the crudely worked, unsharpened flint tools of the earlier Stone Age, known as "palaeoliths," all or most of which date from this period. New environments, ceaseless exercise of his inventive faculty, and the ability to produce fire by friction, led man to discover new kinds of food: farinaceous roots and tubers, for instance, were baked in hot ashes or in ground ovens. With the invention of the first weapons, club and spear, game could sometimes be added to the fare. But the tribes which figure in books as living entirely, that is, exclusively, by hunting never existed in reality; the yield of the hunt was far too precarious. At this stage, owing to the continual uncertainty of food supplies, cannibalism seems to have arisen, and was practiced from now onwards for a long time. The Australian aborigines and many of the Polynesians are still in this middle stage of savagery today.
“(c.) UPPER STAGE. Begins with the invention of the bow and arrow, whereby game became a regular source of food, and hunting a normal form of work. Bow, string, and arrow already constitute a very complex instrument, whose invention implies long, accumulated experience and sharpened intelligence, and therefore knowledge of many other inventions as well. We find, in fact, that the peoples acquainted with the bow and arrow but not yet with pottery (from which Morgan dates the transition to barbarism) are already making some beginnings towards settlement in villages and have gained some control over the production of means of subsistence; we find wooden vessels and utensils, finger-weaving (without looms) with filaments of bark; plaited baskets of bast or osier; sharpened (neolithic) stone tools. With the discovery of fire and the stone ax, dug-out canoes now become common; beams and planks arc also sometimes used for building houses. We find all these advances, for instance, among the Indians of northwest America, who are acquainted with the bow and arrow but not with pottery. The bow and arrow was for savagery what the iron sword was for barbarism and fire-arms for civilization – the decisive weapon.
Next let’s consider the rise of animal husbandry and agriculture, and the period Engels referred to as “barbarism.”
“Horticulture, probably unknown to Asiatic barbarians of the lower stage, was being practiced by them in the middle stage at the latest, as the forerunner of agriculture. In the climate of the Turanian plateau, pastoral life is impossible without supplies of fodder for the long and severe winter. Here, therefore, it was essential that land should be put under grass and corn cultivated. The same is true of the steppes north of the Black Sea. But when once corn had been grown for the cattle, it also soon became food for men. The cultivated land still remained tribal property; at first it was allotted to the gens, later by the gens to the household communities and finally to individuals for use. The users may have had certain rights of possession, but nothing more.
“Of the industrial achievements of this stage, two are particularly important. The first is the loom, the second the smelting of metal ores and the working of metals. Copper and tin and their alloy, bronze, were by far the most important. Bronze provided serviceable tools and weapons, though it could not displace stone tools; only iron could do that, and the method of obtaining iron was not yet understood. Gold and silver were beginning to be used for ornament and decoration, and must already have acquired a high value as compared with copper and bronze.
“The increase of production in all branches – cattle-raising, agriculture, domestic handicrafts – gave human labor-power the capacity to produce a larger product than was necessary for its maintenance. At the same time it increased the daily amount of work to be done by each member of the gens, household community or single family. It was now desirable to bring in new labor forces. War provided them; prisoners of war were turned into slaves. With its increase of the productivity of labor, and therefore of wealth, and its extension of the field of production, the first great social division of labor was bound, in the general historical conditions prevailing, to bring slavery in its train. From the first great social division of labor arose the first great cleavage of society into two classes: masters and slaves, exploiters and exploited.
“As to how and when the herds passed out of the common possession of the tribe or the gens into the ownership of individual heads of families, we know nothing at present. But in the main it must have occurred during this stage. With the herds and the other new riches, a revolution came over the family. To procure the necessities of life had always been the business of the man; he produced and owned the means of doing so. The herds were the new means of producing these necessities; the taming of the animals in the first instance and their later tending were the man's work. To him, therefore, belonged the cattle, and to him the commodities and the slaves received in exchange for cattle. All the surplus which the acquisition of the necessities of life now yielded fell to the man; the woman shared in its enjoyment, but had no part in its ownership. The "savage" warrior and hunter had been content to take second place in the house, after the woman; the "gentler" shepherd, in the arrogance of his wealth, pushed himself forward into the first place and the woman down into the second. And she could not complain. The division of labor within the family had regulated the division of property between the man and the woman. That division of labor had remained the same; and yet it now turned the previous domestic relation upside down, simply because the division of labor outside the family had changed. The same cause which had ensured to the woman her previous supremacy in the house – that her activity was confined to domestic labor – this same cause now ensured the man’s supremacy in the house: the domestic labor of the woman no longer counted beside the acquisition of the necessities of life by the man; the latter was everything, the former an unimportant extra. We can already see from this that to emancipate woman and make her the equal of the man is and remains an impossibility so long as the woman is shut out from social productive labor and restricted to private domestic labor. The emancipation of woman will only be possible when woman can take part in production on a large, social scale, and domestic work no longer claims anything but an insignificant amount of her time. And only now has that become possible through modern large-scale industry, which does not merely permit of the employment of female labor over a wide range, but positively demands it, while it also tends towards ending private domestic labor by changing it more and more into a public industry.
“The man now being actually supreme in the house, the last barrier to his absolute supremacy had fallen. This autocracy was confirmed.”
As these quotations imply, class society was not created because men wanted to oppress women and develop privileges out of this oppression – this is a petty bourgeois feminist view. The reason why class society became patriarchal has nothing to do with men’s wishes to oppress women; rather, it was because of complex interactions between humans and nature. First it is important to note that every huge leap in human evolution – every period of great change in human economics, society, and even (at an earlier stage) physiology – involved nature and most likely climate change. Droughts forced humans to discover fire, and severe droughts forced humans to develop agriculture and class society.
About 10,000 years ago a sudden and unexpected ice-age started because the water from a huge lake in North America broke into the Atlantic ocean, disrupting the flow of the Gulf Stream and causing a sudden new ice age in Europe and cold droughts in the Middle East. At this point the Middle East was covered with rich forests with nuts and many edible plants and grasses. By then people already knew a lot about wild plants including the understanding that plants grow from seeds and seeds can be collected and sowed. But as long as life was OK with plenty of animals and nuts to eat, people did not attempt to propagate the wild grasses. It was the devastation from the droughts that forced groups like the Natufians, the first known farmers in human history, in areas in Palestine and Syria to seriously experiment with the wild grasses and start propagating them near water.
In general severe and long conditions of scarcity force leaps in human evolution. The severe droughts also dramatically reduced the population of animals to hunt, forcing human to domesticate animals. Observing the habits of animals and using primitive fences (or rather cornering the animals in places filled with grass and food for the animals) and know-how and “street-smarts” allowed humans to first corral and later domesticate some grazing animals. With increasing levels of better techniques ( with the development of the “productive forces”) early people use them together with intimate knowledge of the animals’ habits. That includes knowing individual animals and in particular the herd leaders. This knowledge was used by people in the domestication process. Certain corridors of land in the middle-east had reliable water supplies and a relatively high water table, which enabled foragers to shift wild grains from their natural habitats into well-watered areas near streams and lakes. Up till then humans were nomads, but agriculture and the domestication of animals made permanent settlements, with growing villages that became incipient class societies.
Women’s oppression developed only because of the way class society developed, as humans struggled to master nature and in the process created surplus value, not because men are mean. The division of labor between men and women existed for tens of thousands of years without men oppressing women. But as agriculture and animal domestication arrived this division of labor evolved. Because men in general have greater upper body strength, men were the ones who did the back-breaking labor of digging water tunnels and channels for irrigation and cultivating the crop. Women, beside the regular domestic duty of rising children and harvesting the crop, were relegated to the oppressive jobs of grinding the grain as they watched the children. Over time a village developed surplus grain, which was the first surplus value of an incipient class society. That how ownership and private property developed, ultimately resulting in women also becoming considered property. Since men owned the fields of grain and cultivated grasses, those men who produced more surplus grain became better fed and clothed and the concept of chieftanship started to evolve. The men with surplus grain, and their families, became the people who ran the show, and a son started to inherit the surplus grain, and ultimately the land that produced it, from his father. In order to ensure that their possessions would end up in the hands of their true biological offspring, men began to have an interest in controlling women’s reproduction and sexuality.
That is how patriarchal society developed:
- It became patriarchal because men were more suitable for the back breaking jobs of creating water channels and corralling the animals.
- Because surplus value created private property, with the ownership of the fields of grain and animals, such ownership started to be passed from father to son. With the development of private property women became (over thousands of years as class society evolved) the property of men.
- Women became the first “working class” or group of the oppressed as they were grinding the grain using primitive stone-aged grinders that wore down the women’s bones. (These are facts. Female skeletons with bones worn or broken in a way that was caused by grinding grain have been found in archeological excavations of sites from this era.) Thus it was class society and its emphasis on rank and property that created women’s oppression, not the “nature” of men. The surplus value of grain and meat, and the social rank and privilege enjoyed by those who could accumulate surplus value, created the greed of humans in class society, and hence the intense exploitation and oppression of women developed, as a means of maintaining surplus value and ranking (which later became clearly defined classes) within the family, clan, tribe, and village.
The petty bourgeois feminist’s method on human evolution is an idealist/moralist method. Men’s oppression of women is mystified with anti-male bias: women oppression started because of the inherent nature of men, claim the feminists. Against such a petty bourgeois moralist method, we, the dialectical materialists, explain how women’s oppression derived from a dialectic combination of the state of nature at the time: severe droughts that forced humans to make an evolutionary leap, with the state of human evolution at the time.
The notion that matriarchal society in nature is always good and superior is not based on scientific evidence, nor does it make sense from the evolutionary point of view that nature “thinks” that one sex is better than the other. Nature created the unity of opposites of the sexes. But this constantly undergoes change and evolution. Nature never carries out the dogmas of the feminists. For example, it is very true that bonobo society (a matriarchal society), where females makes all the decisions and have access to food before males, is an egalitarian society. Bonobo society’s values and social interactions are more sexually egalitarian, as well as peaceful, than they are in human class society. But bonobo society depends on an existence in an environment rich with easily reached plant-based food sources. Chimpanzees, who are close genetic cousins of bonobos but live in less food-rich environments, have a male-dominated society in which rape, infanticide, and warfare are practiced, and hunting for meat – by males – is an important supplemental food source. The difference is not one of genetics, but of the dialectical relationship between the environment and the evolution of the social culture.
Nature often creates divisions of labor between the sexes, but exactly how the division of labor is created and expressed depends on the specific geological and climatic state of the planet that created specific dialectical complex division of labor between the sexes. For many animal societies the definition of patriarchy or matriarchy is meaningless. Take for example the lion pride. A superficial observation gives the impression that it is a patriarchal society. The lions can have sex with any lioness in heat, and the lions are the first to have a bite from the kill. But in reality the lion pride is not dominated by any of the sexes. They just have different division of labor. The lions defend the pride from dangers while the lionesses really run the show. The females raise the new army of lionesses to bring food to the table. They decide everything about the movement of the pride, and its technique of raising cubs and hunting. The lions don’t really have a privileged life. They keep on fighting and getting injured, and they die a terrible death after they get deposed by younger male(s); and lions live a much shorter life (average of 9 years) than a lioness (average of 15 years).
So life in nature is complex and rich and it has nothing to do with the feminist subjective dogma about it. The petty bourgeois feminists cannot produce a clear-cut proof that prehistoric human societies were exclusively or even primarily matriarchal. The truth is that we don’t know much about pre-historical homo sapiens sapiens. There is very little archeological data to show anything. It is true that we can find statues of fertility goddesses. But this is not a proof that the society was matriarchal. During a period of 20,000 years (30,000 years ago to 10,000 years ago) we know that humans drew incredible pictures of animals in caves. They admired these animals as much as they admired the statues of fertility of goddesses. Since men did the hunting of these animals, should we rush to conclude that these were patriarchal societies? In fact we know that today few groups of humans live in a manner close to that of these pre-historical societies. One is the bushman tribes in Africa. The men admires the animal that they hunt and they feel compassion toward it. They express this compassion after they kill the animal by “telling” it that they killed it just because they need to eat. The bushman tribes have no classes and neither of the sexes dominates the other. They are neither patriarchal nor matriarchal, but communal.
Not only is the idea that pre-history humans had a matriarchal society not proven, but the conception that humans in pre-history had a matriarchal paradise is total bullshit. Humans had a harsh life, much harsher then the life of the most oppressed today. They were often hungry and cold, and many were killed by large predators. Most humans then were very lucky if they survived after the age of 20-25. Primitive communism was free from social class distinctions, private property, and women’s oppression. But life was closer to the life of an hungry animal than the life of the struggling workers today, much less that of the petty bourgeois consumers whose feminist sector created a magical and mystical picture of pre-historic humans which has nothing to do with the reality of their lives.
The 21 points rejects the real evolution of life and it rejects the material world and the dialectics. The basis for dialectical materialism is that the world outside of us is objective, in other words, it exists independently of us. This is the most basic of the basics. Matter in this planet and the universe is different than the way people perceive it subjectively; it has a life of its own that can be observed only objectively and scientifically.
Being objective does not render a person devoid of life. On the contrary it gives the person life and joy that the subjective person can never have. The subjective person reflects in his/her subjectivity the values and everything that is wrong in class society. That why the subjective person is filled with negative alienating feelings such as: hate, fear, insecurities and deadening anxiety. Bourgeois society molds these feelings to create a subjective person who cannot see the real material world, but rather he/she transforms the objective world in her/his imagination into the rubbish of magic, religion, and subjective delusions. On the other hand, positive feelings such as joy and productive relatedness to the world allow a person to see the world as it is. For example, when a person is happy and in a good mood he/she can see another person as he/she is without gross subjective distortion and at the same time feel compassion because they are not mired in the self centrality of their fears, anger, and insecurity. Thus, without the typical bourgeois subjectivity the objective person can feel more compassion and love than the subjective person in capitalist society (who looks at social interactions and nature through the glasses of negative feelings). The more capitalistic conditioned negative feelings the person has, the more subjective and unloving the person is. (For more on the subject, see Objectivity as a Requirement for Love, a chapter from Alienation in the Post Cold War Era (opens in new window).)
The denial of the objective world provides the philosophical core for the petty bourgeois subjectivist. Such a person ultimately denies the class struggle and the socialist revolution as a historical necessity. The 21 points endorses the concept that a women’s revolution based on anarchism can provide communism to the masses without a state. What the anarchists fail to explain is how communism can arrive instantly without a stage in which the revolutionary workers defend the revolution against the counterrevolution, using the state power of truly democratic Soviets(workers councils). The 21 points blame “Western” “Male” Marxism for creating the Stalinist state, and they imply that there is no need for the period of the dictatorship of the proletariat after the revolution (anarchism). Anarchists are what Trotsky called liberals with guns. The anarchists refuse to defend the workers’ revolution and the workers’ state against the counterrevolution, and in reality they end up supporting the counterrevolution (as happened in Spain in the 1930s). At the height of workers power during the civil war in Spain all that was needed was for the CNT to declare the workers state based on the emergent workers councils but the Anarchist leaders stood down ultimately conceding the revolution and assuring the victory of the fascist Franco.
We ask A., what we should do after the revolution? Will we just let happiness and romance flourish? And what about the Detroit cops who are still on the loose, the rest of the cops in the country, some of the soldiers, and the counterrevolutionary mobs (that include reformists and the entire old ruling class with their vast weapons and vast experience)? Should we allow them to smash the revolution?? Don’t we need a state (armed bodies of workers i.e. workers militias) to defend ourselves from the counterrevolution and its massive violence and brutality? The dictatorship of the proletariat is necessary so that there can be a form of state to defend the revolution. The state will start to wither away after the defeat of the counterrevolution, when there is no materialist basis for its need.
A. knows that if we don’t build defense guards against the cops, the cops will keep brutalizing the community. In the same way that today it is a historical necessity to create workers defense against the cops, the dictatorship of the proletariat is a historical necessity, not a choice. The Bolsheviks had to fight many armies of counterrevolution. A state is an armed body of people that defends one class’s property relations against the other. Only reformists and liberals (anarchists with guns) think that there will be no need to create a workers’ state to defend the revolution and the initial stage of planned economy. With such views these reformists and anarchists end up betraying revolutions. The anarchists in Greece are still waiting for the spontaneity of the masses to provide the revolution, while they do not call for Soviets, or democratic assembly of workers, unions and youth as a spring of dual power or a an incipient workers’ state in a revolutionary situation in capitalist state in crisis. Thus the narrow time line created by the masses’ upsurge that opens the road for a socialist revolution is running out and the workers will suffer a historical defeat via the imposition of the most dramatic attacks on the workers for decades.
Stalinism has nothing to do with the dictatorship of the proletariat and it is not a result of a patriarchal Western Marxism. Stalinism is a mortal enemy of Marxism and dialectical materialism. The Stalinist ideology is a bourgeois ideology; that is why the Stalinists restored capitalism. We suggest to A. that if she considers herself a worthy opponent of Marxism, she should read The Revolution Betrayed by Trotsky and critique it from her anarchist feminist perspective. This is a Marxist book that consciously used dialectical materialism to explain the rise of Stalinism. A. needs to show us what is wrong with Trotsky’s book and what is wrong with dialectical materialism, using her own “dialectics”, that is, her own methodology.
Marxism is not about Marx. It is about the dialectical materialist method that expresses and explains how matter acts in the universe. Marx just happened to be the first to apply this method to human economics and politics in a systematic and scientific way. We believe that mastering and applying this method is the obligation of every serious revolutionary and socialist who is fighting for the liberation of the workers and the oppressed.
CR and DW for the leadership of HWRS