Women, Resistance and Revolution (10 page)

Although ‘man’ is used in the generalized sense of human being, there is still no concept of an historical agency of women. Woman is still the other, part of the world outside as perceived, grasped, controlled by man. It is not clear how woman is going to act from her specific form of prostitution. She appears as an indication of the state of society, not as a social group in movement, developing consciousness in history. The female is rather a representative symbol of man in relation to nature.

This is not to say she is denied any benefit from communism. Apparently she will share ‘the real appropriation of human nature’ possible in a communist society. Her body will be no man’s private property. Marx believed that by removing the economic dependence of woman upon man under private property, a new, truly human relationship would be possible under communism. He was emphatically opposed to the ideas of ‘crude communists’ who argued communism meant community in women. He argued against this as substituting private for public property. He saw that in both cases the human development of woman herself was denied. Engels repeated this idea very clearly in his
Principles of Communism
, the draft for the
Communist Manifesto
, written in 1847:

Community of women is a condition which belongs entirely to a bourgeois society and which today finds its complete expression in prostitution. But prostitution is based on private property and falls with it. Thus communist society, instead of introducing community of women, in fact abolishes it.
²

Of course community of women was the bogy of the bourgeoisie:

The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production. He hears that the instruments of production are to be exploited in common, and naturally can come to no other conclusion than that the lot of being common to all will likewise fall to the women. He has not even a suspicion that the real point aimed at is to do away with the status of women as mere instruments of production.
³

In the
Communist Manifesto
Marx and Engels thus ridicule the fears of the bourgeoisie. They also mock their hypocrisy and double standard of morality. Bourgeois man uses all women as his objects, and regards his woman as his property.

In
The Holy Family
Marx connects the hypocrisy of bourgeois man with his inability to understand the way in which he exploits women. He comments on the manner in which the hero of Eugene Sue’s
Mysteries of Paris
treats a servant girl. He is sentimental about her fate but can’t go on to ‘grasp the general condition of women in society as an inhuman one’.
⁴
The ‘fall’ of a particular woman is seen as the result of individual misfortune – an historical accident. Rudolph assumes women possess an abstracted moral choice, quite removed from their actual social situation. Thus he teases Fleur de
Marie with the need to become ‘honest’. She replies literally and with realism: ‘Honest! My God, what do you want me to be honest with.’
⁵
Similarly the priest who converts Fleur de Marie does not allow her to develop from herself, he merely provides her with a false Fleur de Marie who she can pretend to be. This false alternative fails to solve her social situation and does not connect her degradation to the inevitable prostitution of the little girls who sell matches in the streets of Paris. Both Rudolph and the priest have too great a stake in the society which exploits Fleur de Marie and the match girls to make such connections.

These arguments develop from the climate of utopian socialist thought, but they are considerably more sophisticated in the way in which they are presented. They are quite inseparable from Marx’s general ideas of alienation, and his conception of a communist society. The persistent theme of prostitution is not surprising in the context of the mid-nineteenth century. All human beings in class society met as the prostitute met her client. Just as the prostitute gives the substitute of love for money, the worker hands over his work and his life for a daily wage. The existence of such commodity exchanges made a mockery of other human relations. But the prostitute herself was a living reminder of the hollowness and corruption behind social relations.

Of course the prostitute pre-dated capitalism and prostitution continued among women in the countryside, but the growth of large industrial towns and the massing of the working class in particular compartments and areas of the city meant that the nature and scale of prostitution changed. Its causes were very clearly economic. It became a necessary way of supplementing their wages for large numbers of urban working women. Morally and socially it was an unanswerable indictment of laissez-faire and the ‘free market’. Just as the bourgeois responded to the industrial working class in terms of projected fears for his own position – they are the beast, the savage with horny hands, wild, primitive sensual natural man – the prostitute became the symbol of his class and sex guilt. She was the spectre haunting his comfortable parlour. She was the lie to his much boasted sanctity of the family and of religion. Her syphilis stalked his hypocritical monogamy, mocked his connubial rights and penetrated the holy fastness of the crinoline. The degradation of one group of women was inseparable from the false reverence kept for the wife of
the bourgeois. Bourgeois man located in the prostitute, who was often seen as synonymous with the lower-class woman, all the sensuality denied to his own women.

‘Nymphomania’ was actually used in the 1840s to describe any woman who felt sexual desire, and such women were seen as necessarily abandoned, women of the streets, women of the lower classes. Just as the white slave-owner suckled by black women sought them for orgasm rather than his white wife, the nineteenth-century urban bourgeois continually pursued his wet nurse. He retained of course the noblest, most spiritual filial devotion to his own mother, as a being apart and above physical sensation. Conversely the bourgeois in revolt tended to impute an idealized ‘natural’ sensuality on the prostitute as upon the lower-class woman. Their degradation was transferred in the minds of these romantics into innocent delight. From the cult of woman as emotion and sensuality came such ideas as those of ‘crude communism’. They were the equivalent to the romantic idea of a lost state of nature personified in the noble savage, the peasant, or later the worker.

In rejecting an idealized Fleur de Marie Marx thus makes a significant break with romantic socialism. He indicates the possibility of an actual Fleur de Marie realizing actual human appetites and propensities in a real communist society. But unfortunately Fleur de Marie never organizes. She knows no solidarity. She is symptomatic of oppression, not the agent of her own liberation. Prostitution is seen as a particular cultural expression of exploitation, a specific form of alienation. It is not simply an affair of individual prostitutes, but a statement about women’s condition, and thus about social relations in general. The transformation of the relation of man to woman is thus an essential feature of communist society, but still the action of women themselves does not emerge as an essential part of this process. As to the exact nature of the transformation in the future communist society, both Marx and Engels were too great respecters of history to delineate. Communist human relationships and culture are open only to conjecture before the material conditions for their creation exist. There can be no answer, Engels wrote many years later in 1884 in
The Origin of the Family
, until there is ‘a generation of men who never in their lives have known what it is to buy a woman’s surrender with money or power; a generation of women who have never known what it is to give themselves to a man from
any other consideration than real love, or to refuse to give themselves to their lover from fear of the economic consequences’.
⁶

These earlier statements in the 1840s were undoubtedly over-optimistic in seeing prostitution and the degradation of women in a direct relation to strictly economic factors. Our subsequent experience has shown that the phenomenon of prostitution continues to survive long after there have been changes in the structure of institutions and the removal of immediate economic necessity in the nineteenth-century sense. However, Engels’s later comment shows that he saw economic transformation only as an essential precondition, and the cultural and psychological aspects of prostitution as needing to be worked out subsequently. What we are bound to ask now is whether the connection between change in the institutional structure
can
lead to the cultural changes envisaged, without the mobilization of Fleur de Marie at the point of her own prostitution, before the revolutionary transformation of society. This becomes rapidly an argument about the cart before the horse, in which it is not clear whether Fleur de Marie is pulling or being pulled into history.

In
The German Ideology
(1845–6) Marx and Engels created a basis for a more concrete study of women’s condition as an historically changing aspect of the material situation. The assumption is again that the particular relation of human beings to nature affects not only their own nature, but the way in which they relate to one another. The extent to which man can modify nature historically will be reflected in his consciousness of other human beings. ‘… Man’s consciousness of the necessity of associating with the individuals around him is the beginning of the consciousness that he is living in society.’
⁷
With this association arises division of labour, ‘originally nothing but the division of labour in the sexual act’.
⁸
The distinction is made here between division based on sex, natural predisposition, physical strength, accidents, and a formal institutional division, based first on mental and material activity, then on the ownership of property. The determining factors in historical change are seen as the production of material things to enable human beings to live; the creation of new human needs in the process of satisfying old ones; and in the process of reproduction. ‘The production of life, both of one’s own in labour and of fresh life in procreation, now appears as a double relationship; on the one hand as a natural, on
the other as a social relationship.’
⁹
It would follow then that a study of the social relations of reproduction is as essential for historical understanding of the human condition as the study of the social relations of production. Instead Marx went on to examine the latter and subsequent Marxists have followed him. However, Engels in
The Origin of the Family
took up this idea again.

‘According to the materialistic conception, the determining factor in history is, in the final instance, the production and reproduction of the immediate essentials.’
¹⁰
He went on to say this had two sides, the production of the ‘means of existence’ and ‘the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species’.
¹¹

From this Engels attempted to work out social stages relating to various modes of production and reproduction. He connected changes in the family to changes in the ownership of the means of production. He argued, for example, connections between ownership of the means of production, such as cattle, and the position of woman in relation to man in society. He believed that human society had passed through an era of matriarchy and that women had never regained the ascendancy they enjoyed then.

The study of geology, archaeology, prehistory and anthropology was still relatively new and had only developed really from the 1860s as anything more than a rather dilettante pursuit. It had faced similar opposition to Darwinian concepts of biological evolution because it provided an alternative to Genesis, and a chronology which made nonsense of the theological calculations of biblical scholars. At the time Engels was writing there was considerable argument about how to classify the new discoveries made through excavation. There was also controversy about whether anthropological evolution could be observed as corresponding to biological evolution. Arguments about alternative utopian futures had even earlier produced an alternative account of the past. Utopian socialists in the 1830s and 1840s quite often produced their own versions of human evolution. They frequently argued an anthropological golden age and provided their own ideas of Eve’s part in the Fall. Because of this feminism and socialism were often connected in popular imagination with the horrors of evolution.

Coming out of the utopian socialist tradition but utilizing the new methods of study, Lewis H. Morgan published his
Ancient Society
in 1877. It was subtitled ‘Researches in the Lines of Human Progress
from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization’. Morgan drew on studies of American Indians and worked out a progressive sequence of man’s anthropological evolution. This was particularly interesting to Engels because he and Marx had been exhaustively studying anthropological data in an effort to document the interaction between human beings with nature in the period before recorded history. Subsequently anthropologists have found that Morgan’s sequence is over-simplified and that Engels was arguing a case from insufficient data. The fact that Engels thought it possible to reach conclusions about early societies from evidence about contemporary primitive societies also affects his conclusions. Unfortunately, an academic controversy, opposition to the evolutionary school, and political issues, the general dismissal of any attempt to find historical connections between man in relation to nature and in relation to society, have confused the issue. Engels provided a valuable synthesis of existing anthropological material at the time, which gave Marxists at the end of the century a much more sophisticated understanding of mankind’s early history than that available in the utopian socialist movement. However, to try to defend his classification, regardless of new evidence, would be to miss the point. Many of Engels’s conclusions can be endlessly discussed in the air because so much is ultimately unverifiable. The fact that his anthropological data is inadequate does not mean that the ideas he expresses and the attempt to integrate his Marxism with an anthropological study of the family should be ignored. To dismiss’ his anthropology as simply outdated is comparable to the complacency which says of Marx’s
Capital
that the economics are old-fashioned. Having understood the limits of
The Origin of the Family
, the most important question, that of method, remains. The arguments against Engels very quickly become arguments against any attempt to discover historical pattern and any factors for change. This is the equivalent of the approach to history which argues about the length of a king’s nose and ignores the economic circumstances which could allow his nose to be important. Not only have liberal anthropologists failed to consider the problem of the interaction of modes of reproduction and production, and the relation of this to the position of women and change in the organization of society; but Marxists themselves have ignored the important point about reproduction, as part of the material world, being a determining factor in history. Only comparatively recently has the
social situation of the child in the family become a part of an effort to develop a Marxist psychology which can communicate the process of the individual’s early consciousness of society, the family. As the separation of production-work and reproduction-childbearing and the family have become physically separated in space, and the period of reproduction reduced by contraception, there has been a tendency in sociology to study these areas in isolation. Similarly Marxist sociology has tended to concentrate on work relations rather than family relations. The worker’s consciousness is seen as developing only at the point of production. It is forgotten that the worker came from a particular family, and that we conceive the world through the relationships in the family, describe it in language first learned in the family, and through eyes which grew accustomed to other human beings first in the family. The implications of study of the social relationship of reproduction are of immense importance for a theory of consciousness. Many of the questions raised in
The German Ideology
as well as
The Origin of the Family
need to be re-examined, not as dogma, but in relation to the new knowledge and experience gained since they have been written. The Women’s Liberation Movement directs attention to precisely these areas which have remained in theoretical obscurity within Marxist theory.