"Life itself becomes too dear,
So vast are one's dreams."
-Louise Michel
"A work is never beautiful, unless it in some way
escapes its author."
-D.H. Lawrence
I. YESTERDAY, TODAY AND TOMORROW
We have reached a turning point in our work which can by
no means restrict itself only to Luxemburg and Marx. We
must go both backwards and forwards in history and cover
the globe. I dare say, since life itself began, woman has
had to struggle; and in order to see the dialectic of
development, both of our age and other historic periods,
we will need to gather disparate strands that may, at
first, look quite disconnected. I trust, however, that at
the end a direction will manifest itself.
The phrases referring to "since life itself
began" and "global" may seem too pompous
but what I have in mind is quite simple. I'm referring to
the never-ending rebellion whether we begin in 1647 with
the first Maid's Petition to Parliament for "liberty
every second Tuesday"(1); or whether we jump to 1831
when, in the very year Nat Turner led the greatest slave
revolt in the U.S., a Black woman named Maria Stewart-the
first woman to [do so] publicly, white or Black- spoke
out in Boston(2):
"O ye daughters of Africa, awake! awake! arise! no
longer sleep nor slumber but distinguish yourselves. Show
forth to the world that ye are endowed with noble and
exalted faculties...How long shall the fair daughters of
Africa be compelled to bury their minds and talents
beneath a load of iron pots and kettles?...How long shall
a mean set of men flatter us with their smiles, and
enrich themselves with our hard earnings: their wives'
fingers sparkling with rings and they themselves laughing
at our folly?"
Other "firsts" crowd into mind, whether we are
referring to Flora Tristan who was the first to call for
an International of working women and working men in
1844, the year that Marx discovered a whole new continent
of thought; or whether we look at the 1848 revolutions in
Europe and see that what looked of much lesser
importance, the First Woman's Rights Convention at Seneca
Falls, New York, actually opened up a whole new force for
revolution. That women did hear that call became clear in
1851, when Jeanne Deroin and Pauline Roland sent
greetings to the Second National Woman's Rights
Convention in Worcester, Massachusetts from the St.
Lazare prison in Paris, to which they had been sentenced
for their activities in and after 1848. On behalf of the
Convention, Ernestine Rose declared: "After having
heard the letter read from our poor incarcerated sisters
of France, well might we exclaim, Alas, poor France!
where is thy glory? where the glory of the Revolution of
1848?"(3)
The Black dimension is the most exciting of all. Not only
did it inspire the creation of the 1848 Woman's Rights
Convention, but it did so through its own activity; that
is to say, when the white middle-class women in the
antislavery societies saw the Sojourner Truths and
Harriet Tubmans(4) as orators and travelers and thinkers,
while their own work was reduced to auxiliary tasks, they
recognized what it means to be Reason as well as Force.
This became especially crucial in 1867 after the Civil
War in the U.S., when even the most revolutionary
Abolitionists, like Frederick Douglass and Wendell
Phillips, refused to help collaborate with the women's
fight for suffrage on the grounds that this was the Negro
year. Sojourner Truth hit back at her own leader,
Frederick Douglass, calling him "short-minded."
Not only did she separate from her Black male colleagues
and align with the white women, but it became clear that
"short-minded" was more than an epithet.
Rather, it was a new language-the language of
thought-against those who would put any limitations to
freedom.
In four years, the world had, indeed, become witness to
the greatest revolution of men and women for a totally
new, classless society-the [1871] Paris Commune. Why, may
we ask, did it take nearly a century to learn all the
facts of the breadth of women's actions, and why, even
then, did it take a woman to write THE WOMEN
INCENDIARIES?(5)
Nor should we forget...that the American labor
struggles,(6) with very active participation by women,
had been continuous since the very first National Labor
Union was established in the U.S. and affiliated with the
First International. However, it was not until 1908, when
the infamous Triangle [Shirtwaist] Fire took the lives of
143 women working in that sweat shop, and Rose
Schneiderman organized no less than 120,000 in the
funeral march-not just to mourn but to declare solidarity
with all unorganized women workers-that it first
reverberated to Europe. By 1911, Clara Zetkin's proposal
to the Second International for an International Woman's
Day became reality.
Rosa Luxemburg becomes central here, but if we try to
begin at some alleged high point on what was considered
to be the "Woman Question," we will blind
ourselves both to Luxemburg's multi-dimensionality and
the newness that our age brought to the concept of
women's liberation. Let's, instead, see what ground she
laid in a letter that was, in the main, devoted to the
anti-war work from which the revisionists stayed far, far
away. In this letter [from prison] to Mathilde Wurm,
seemingly out of nowhere, there suddenly appears a
reference to the queen of the Amazons (and evidently, not
as she is known in Greek legend as the one who was killed
[by Achilles, but as] told by the famous German
playwright, Heinrich Von Kleist, who had Penthesilea not
only kill Achilles, but eat him). All this appears in a
letter where she is so furious at her friend's defense of
the revisionists' position on the war that she writes:
"I'm telling you that as soon as I can stick my nose
out again I will hunt and harry your society of frogs
with trumpet blasts, whip crackings, and bloodhounds-like
Penthesilea I wanted to say, but by God, you people are
no Achilles. Have you had enough of a New Year's greeting
now? Then see to it that you stay HUMAN... Being human
means joyfully throwing your whole life "on the
scales of destiny" when need be, but all the while
rejoicing in every sunny day and every beautiful cloud.
Ach, I know of no formula to write you for being
human..."(7)
It's this need to throw your whole life on the scales of
destiny, it's this passion for revolution, it's the
urgency to get out of prison confinement and open
entirely new vistas, it's this need "to be
human" that has characterized the whole of
Luxemburg's vision, in the struggle for a new society. It
has put the stamp on all she ever did, and ever longed to
make real. And it is this which put so totally different
a mark on her concept of women's liberation which was
called the Woman Question in her day, that it makes it
possible for our age to first understand it fully; in a
great measure, more fully than she herself was conscious
of...
The Black Dimension
When the 1907 Congress [of Russian Marxists]* referred
back to the 1848 revolution, it was naturally mainly for
purposes of debating the question of Marx's analysis of a
revolution he participated in, as well as the theory of
revolution that preceded the actual [revolution]-the
COMMUNIST MANIFESTO. Peculiarly enough, it did not extend
to the concept of permanent revolution that Marx
projected in his 1850 Address to the [Communist League]
after the defeat of the 1848 revolution. This is the more
curious because Trotsky had projected his own theory of
permanent revolution and Lenin referred at one point
disparagingly to it in 1907. What none talked about was
what was "in the air," be it 1848 or 1907, that
is to say, the ramifications of an ongoing revolution
into countries not experiencing it.
And yet, that is precisely the point that is of the
essence to us today. Take the ramifications of the 1848
revolution, not as discussed in 1907, but in the period
it happened. The very first women's liberation movement
took place in the U.S. in Seneca Falls in 1848. Though
none there, either, discussed a European proletarian
revolution, revolution was in the air in the deepest
possible manner in the U.S. both as a struggle for
freedom against slavery, and as the beginning of a
women's liberation movement. And there is no doubt that
the inspiration for it came precisely from the Black
dimension towards the middle-class women who were working
in the anti-slavery movement, and moved to extend that
towards their own very different type of liberation. And
because [the] Black dimension was so crucial to any
freedom struggle in the U.S., no matter what struggle you
were engaged in, the Black dimension was the inspiration
force, be it in the Abolitionist movement, in women's
rights, or for that matter in the great literature of the
day.
By 1860 when John Brown attacked Harper's Ferry, Marx
considered it a WORLD signal for freedom, and, indeed,
began leaving the library for actual activities which led
to the establishment of the First Workingman's
International. The point is that everything, most
especially the theory of revolution, so deepened that
whether it was his greatest theoretical work itself,
CAPITAL, the organizational work of the First
International, or woman as Reason as well as force, in
the participation in his organization, it became a
multifaceted total philosophy of revolution. In a way, an
important way, this was prefigured** in the Taiping
Revolution in the 1850s. That is to say, from
Eurocentrism, Marx's world view was extending to Asian
society, both Indian and Chinese. Even more important
than global extension, as if that were narrowed to
geography, was the concept of the forces of revolution,
whether that be what he called a "second edition of
the peasant revolution" as against the misused and
most popular phrase, "rural idiocy"; a greater
appreciation of artisans, or pre-capitalist society[;]
and a greater hatred for capitalism as against playing up
in the COMMUNIST MANIFESTO the revolutionary features of
capitalism when it overthrew feudalism.
It is fantastic, for example, for the [Women's Liberation
Movement] today to so soon forget that not only the
inspiration but the actual tactics of revolt for the
activist '60s came from the Black dimension. And while
not that direct a relationship to the development of the
Marxist movement in Europe in the 1907 period, it is a
fact that both the Black dimension and the [Women's
Liberation Movement] that had begun as early as Marx's
day and had come to a tragic climax in the famous
Triangle fire, was made an international holiday by the
first German socialist movement under the direction of
Clara Zetkin. And yet we find no hint of any of this in
either the discussions in the 1907 Congress or in the
further development of Rosa Luxemburg. It is not as
unconnected as it would appear to be, with the fact that
she had what to this writer is a fantastically wrong
position on the National Question. We will see this
reappear again in 1917 when, though she hails the
[Russian Revolution] as the greatest daring act, chooses
to criticize the Bolsheviks [who were] actually carrying
out instead of just believing in the principle of
self-determination of nations. On the other hand, she
herself turned to great new activity in women's
liberation both during the suffrage campaign and in
getting the greatest support for her anti-war activity
among the women revolutionaries.
The reason that it is important before we get to the
greatest period of [Luxemburg's] self-development,
theoretically, organizationally, practically, and in the
development and rejection of friendships-1910Ð1918-is
that it's no abstract matter to talk about what is
"in the air." There is, in fact, no other way
to listen both to the voices from below, to anticipate
both the subjective and objective developments, rooted in
the economic and political crises of the day...
***
Notes for "Women's liberation, then and now"
1. Sheila Rowbotham, WOMEN, RESISTANCE AND REVOLUTION
(New York: Pantheon, 1972), p. 15.
2. BLACK WOMEN IN 19TH CENTURY AMERICAN LIFE, edited by
Bert James Loewenberg and Ruth Bogin (University Park,
Pa.: Penn State University Press, 1967).
3. FEMINISM, edited by Miriam Schneir (New York: Random
House, 1972).
4. See especially Earl Conrad, HARRIET TUBMAN (New York:
Paul S. Erikson, 1943), and NARRATIVE OF SOJOURNER TRUTH,
an Ebony Classic (Chicago: Johnson Publishing Co., 1970).
5. Edith Thomas' THE WOMEN INCENDIARIES was published in
France in 1963 and in the U.S. in 1966 (New York: George
Braziller) but is long out of print; and there never was
a paperback edition.
6. Union WAGE (Berkeley, California) issued two pamphlets
in 1974 by Joyce Maupin-Working Women and Their
Organizations, 150 Years of Struggle and Labor Heroines,
Ten Women Who Led The Struggle.
7. This letter, written Dec. 28, 1916, is included in
Briefe an Freunde, edited by Benedikt and Kautsky,
(Hamburg: EuropŠische Verlagsanstalt, 1950), pp. 44Ð6.
Notes for "The Black Dimension"
* In 1907, all the Marxist tendencies convened the Fifth
Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party to
discuss the then-ongoing, first Russian Revolution of
1905.
** A "?" appears above "prefigured"
in the original text.
WORKING WOMEN AND THEIR ORGANIZATIONS, 150 YEARS OF
STRUGGLE and LABOR HEROINES, TEN WOMEN WHO LED THE
STRUGGLE