From The Archives Of Women And Revolution-
Feminism vs. Marxism: Origins of the Conflict
Markin comment:
The following is an article
from an archival issue of Women and Revolution that may have some historical
interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger
militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect
the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a
series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois
society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of Women and Revolution during Women's History
Month and periodically throughout the year.
*******
Workers Vanguard No. 982
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10 June 2011
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Feminism vs. Marxism: Origins of the Conflict
From Women and Revolution, 1974
(Young Spartacus pages)
We reprint below an article with minor corrections from the
Spring 1974 issue of Women and Revolution (No. 5), which was the journal
of the Spartacist League Central Committee Commission for Work Among Women from
1973 until 1996.
Contrary to an opinion still subscribed to in certain circles,
modern feminism did not emerge full-grown from the fertile womb of the New Left,
but is in fact an ideological offspring of the utopian egalitarianism of the
early nineteenth century, which was in turn a product of the
bourgeois-democratic revolution. It is noteworthy that the most original
theorist of utopian socialism, Charles Fourier, was also the first advocate of
women’s liberation through the replacement of the nuclear family by collective
child rearing. Since utopian socialism (including its solution to the problem of
the oppression of women) represented the ideals of the bourgeois-democratic
revolution breaking through the barriers of private property, it was
historically progressive. However, with the genesis of Marxism and the
recognition that an egalitarian society can emerge only out of the rule of the
working class, feminism (like other forms of utopian egalitarianism) lost its
progressive aspect and became an ideology of the left wing of liberal
individualism, a position which it continues to occupy to this day.
Women in the Bourgeois-Democratic Vision
Without question, the most important bourgeois-democratic work on
women’s liberation was Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of
Woman written in 1792. Wollstonecraft was part of a circle of English
radical democrats which included William Blake, Tom Paine and William Godwin,
whose political lives came to be dominated by the French Revolution. A year
before she wrote her classic on sexual equality, Wollstonecraft wrote A
Vindication of the Rights of Man, a polemic against Edmund Burke’s
counterrevolutionary writings. A few years after, she was to attempt a history
of the French Revolution.
While informed and imbued with moral outrage as a result of her own
experiences as an unmarried, middle-class woman (she worked as a school teacher
and governess), Vindication is essentially an extension of the principles
of the Enlightenment and French Revolution to women. The first chapter, entitled
“Rights and Duties of Mankind,” sets the theoretical framework. Vindication
rests heavily on analogies between the basis for the equality of women and
general social equality.
For a contemporary reader, Vindication seems a highly
unbalanced work. While the description of the role of women continues to be
relevant, Wollstonecraft’s solutions appear pallid. Her main programmatic
demand, to which she devotes the concluding chapter, is uniform education for
girls and boys. Even when she wrote Vindication this was only a
moderately radical proposal. In fact in the very year that Vindication
was written, a similar educational program was proposed in the French Assembly.
Yet generations after the establishment of coeducation and the even more radical
reform of women’s suffrage, Wollstonecraft’s depiction of women’s role in
society continues to ring true.
Although Wollstonecraft was one of the most radical political
activists of her day (shortly after writing her classic on women’s rights, she
crossed the Channel to take part in the revolutionary French government),
Vindication has an unexpectedly moralizing and personalist character.
Like many feminists of our day, she appeals to men to recognize the full
humanity of women and to women to stop being sex objects and develop themselves.
And there is the same conviction that if only men and women would really believe
in these ideals and behave accordingly, then women would achieve equality.
The emphasis on individual relationships is not peculiar to
Wollstonecraft, but arises from the inherent contradiction within the
bourgeois-democratic approach to women’s oppression. Wollstonecraft accepted the
nuclear family as the central institution of society and argued for sexual
equality within that framework.
By accepting the basic role of women as mothers, Wollstonecraft
accepted a division of labor in which women were necessarily economically
dependent on their husbands. Therefore, women’s equality was essentially
dependent on how the marriage partners treated one another. In good part,
Vindication is an argument that parents and particularly fathers should
raise their daughters more like their sons in order to bring out their true
potential. But if fathers reject education for their daughters, there is no
other recourse. Here we have the limits both of bourgeois democracy and of
Wollstonecraft’s vision.
Charles Fourier and the Abolition of the Family
The status of women in the nineteenth century represented the most
acute and manifest expression of the contradiction between capitalist society
and its own ideals. It was this contradiction that gave birth to utopian
socialism. Early in the nineteenth century it became apparent to those still
committed to the ideals of the French Revolution that liberty, equality and
fraternity were not compatible with private property in a competitive market
economy. As the most incisive of the pioneer socialists, Charles Fourier, put
it:
“Philosophy was right to vaunt liberty; it is the
foremost desire of all creatures. But philosophy forgot that in civilized
society liberty is illusory if the common people lack wealth. When the
wage-earning classes are poor, their independence is as fragile as a house
without foundations. The free man who lacks wealth immediately sinks back under
the yoke of the rich.”
—Beecher and Bienvenu (Eds.), The Utopian Vision of Charles
Fourier
And when Fourier applied the same critical concepts to the status
of women, he reached equally radical, anti-bourgeois conclusions. The importance
that Fourier attributed to the condition of women is well known:
“Social progress and changes of period are brought about by virtue
of the progress of women toward liberty, and social retrogression occurs as a
result of a diminution in the liberty of women…. In summary, the extension of
the privileges of women is the fundamental cause of all social progress.”
—Ibid.
What is of decisive importance about Fourier’s concern for women’s
oppression is that he put forth a program for the total reconstruction of
society that would end the historic division of labor between men and women. In
Fourier’s projected socialist community, children were raised collectively with
no particular relation to their biological parents, men and women performed the
same work and total sexual liberty was encouraged. (He regarded heterosexual
monogamy as the extension of bourgeois property concepts to the sexual
sphere.)
Fourier’s intense hostility to the patriarchal family in good part
derived from his realization that it was inherently sexually repressive. In this
he anticipated much of radical Freudianism. For example, he observed, “There are
still many parents who allow their unmarried daughters to suffer and die for
want of sexual satisfaction” (Ibid.).
Despite the fantastic nature of his projected socialist communities
or “phalanxes,” Fourier’s program contained the rational core for the
reorganization of society needed to liberate women. He was uniquely responsible
for making the demand for the liberation of women through the abolition of the
nuclear family an integral part of the socialist program which the young Marx
and Engels inherited. Engels was more than willing (for example, in
Socialism, Utopian and Scientific) to pay homage to the primary author of
the socialist program for women’s liberation.
Utopian Egalitarianism and Women’s Liberation
While not giving the woman question the centrality it had in
Fourierism, the two other major currents of early nineteenth-century socialism,
Owenism and Saint-Simonism, were also unambiguously committed to sexual equality
and opposed to legally enforced monogamy. The political life of the early
nineteenth century was characterized by the complete
interpenetration of the struggle for women’s liberation and the general
struggle for an egalitarian society. Those women advocating women’s rights (no
less than the men who did so) did not view this question as distinct from, much
less counterposed to, the general movement for a rational social order. Those
women who championed sexual equality were either socialists or radical democrats
whose activity on behalf of women’s rights occupied only a fraction of their
political lives. The most radical women advocates of sexual equality—the
Americans Frances Wright and Margaret Fuller and the Frenchwoman Flora
Tristan—all conform to this political profile.
Frances Wright began her political career as a liberal reformer
with a tract in favor of the abolition of slavery. She was won to socialism by
Robert Dale Owen, Robert Owen’s son, who immigrated to the U.S. to become its
most important radical socialist in the 1820-30’s. Wright established an Owenite
commune in Tennessee modeled on the famous one at New Harmony, Indiana. In
1828-29, she and Robert Dale Owen edited the Free Enquirer, a newspaper
associated with the New York Workingman’s Party which championed universal
suffrage, free public education, “free love” and birth control.
Margaret Fuller, whose Women in the Nineteenth Century was
the most influential women’s rights work of her generation, was a product of New
England Transcendentalism and had edited a journal with Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Like Wollstonecraft, Margaret Fuller approached the woman question from the
standpoint of religious radicalism (the equality of souls).
Fuller was associated with the Transcendentalist commune, Brook
Farm, about the time it was transformed into a Fourierist community or
“phalanx,” the year before she wrote her classic on women’s equality. Shortly
after that she went to Europe and became involved in the democratic nationalist
movements that were a mainspring in the revolutions of 1848. In that momentous
year, she went to Italy to run a hospital for Guiseppe Mazzini’s Young Italy
movement.
The most important woman socialist of the pre-1848 era was Flora
Tristan. She began her revolutionary career with a tract in favor of legalized
divorce, which had been outlawed in France following the reaction of 1815. (As a
young woman Tristan had left her husband, an act which resulted in social
ostracism and continual hardship throughout her life.) Her work on divorce led
to a correspondence with the aging Fourier and a commitment to socialism. Among
the most cosmopolitan of socialists, Tristan had crisscrossed the Channel
playing an active role in both the Owenite and Chartist movements. Summing up
her political situation in a letter to Victor Considerant, leader of the
Fourierist movement after the master’s death, she wrote: “Almost the entire
world is against me, men because I am demanding the emancipation of women, the
propertied classes because I am demanding the emancipation of the wage earners”
(Goldsmith, Seven Women Against the World).
In the 1840’s the ancient French craft unions, the
compagnons, were transforming themselves into modern trade unions. This
process produced an embryonic revolutionary socialist labor movement whose main
leaders were Pierre Joseph Proudhon, Auguste Blanqui and Etienne Cabet. Flora
Tristan was part of this nascent proletarian socialist movement. Her The
Workers Union, written in 1843, was the most advanced statement of
proletarian socialism up to its day. Its central theme was the need for an
international workers’ organization. (Marx met Tristan while he
was in Paris and was undoubtedly influenced by her work.) The concluding passage
of The Workers Union affirms: “Union is power if we unite on the social
and political field, on the ground of equal rights for both sexes, if we
organize labor, we shall win welfare for all.”
The Workers Union devotes a section to the problems of women
and its concluding passage indicates the integral role that sexual equality had
in Tristan’s concept of socialism: “We have resolved to include in our Charter
woman’s sacred and inalienable rights. We desire that men should give to their
wives and mothers the liberty and absolute equality which they enjoy
themselves.”
Flora Tristan died of typhoid in 1844 at the age of 41. Had she
survived the catastrophe of 1848 and remained politically active, the history of
European socialism might well have been different, for she was free of the
residual Jacobinism of Blanqui and the artisan philistinism of Proudhon.
Contemporary feminists and bourgeois historians tend to label all
early nineteenth-century female advocates of sexual equality feminists. This is
a wholly illegitimate analysis—a projection of current categories back into a
time when they are meaningless. As a delimited movement and distinctive ideology
feminism did not exist in the early nineteenth century. Virtually
all the advocates of full sexual equality considered this an
integral part of the movement for a generally free and egalitarian society
rooted in Enlightenment principles and carrying forward the American and
particularly the French Revolutions. The American Owenite Frances Wright was no
more a feminist than the English Owenite William Thompson, who wrote An
appeal of one half the Human Race, Women, against the pretentions of the other
Half, Men, to keep them in Civil and Domestic Slavery. Flora Tristan was no
more a feminist than was Fourier.
In the 1840’s, a Transcendentalist radical like Margaret Fuller, a
nationalist democrat like Guiseppe Mazzini and a socialist working-class
organizer like Etienne Cabet could consider themselves part of a common
political movement whose program was encapsulated in the slogan, “Liberty,
Equality and Fraternity.” In its most radical expression, this movement looked
forward to a single, total revolution which would simultaneously establish
democracy, eliminate classes, achieve equality for women and end national
oppression.
This vision was defeated on the barricades in 1848. And with that
defeat, the component elements of early nineteenth-century radicalism (liberal
democracy and socialism, trade unionism, women’s equality and national
liberation) separated and began to compete and conflict with one another. After
1848, it seemed that bourgeois society would continue for some time and that the
interests of the oppressed, be they workers, women or nations, would have to be
realized within its framework. Feminism (like trade unionism and national
liberation) emerged as a delimited movement with its own constituency, ideology
and organization only after the great catastrophe of 1848 had temporarily
dispelled the vision of a fundamentally new social order.
Marx Against Utopian Egalitarianism
It is sometimes written that Fourier regarded socialism more as a
means of overcoming women’s oppression than class oppression. This is a
post-Marx way of looking at politics and not how Fourier would have viewed it.
He would have said that he projected a society which would satisfy human needs
and that the most striking thing about it was the radical change in the role of
women. As opposed to the materialist view that different political movements
represent the interests of different classes, utopian socialism shared the
rational idealistic conception of political motivation characteristic of the
Enlightenment—i.e., that different political movements reflect different
conceptions of the best possible social organization. The idealism of early
socialism was probably inevitable since it was produced by those revolutionary
bourgeois democrats who maintained their principles after the actual bourgeoisie
had abandoned revolutionary democracy. The social base of early socialism was
those petty-bourgeois radicals who had gone beyond the interests and real
historic possibilities of their class. This was most true of German “True
Socialism” which, in a nation with virtually no industrial workers and a
conservative, traditionalist petty bourgeoisie, was purely a literary movement.
It was least true of English Owenism, which had intersected the embryonic labor
movement while retaining a large element of liberal philanthropism.
By the 1840’s a working-class movement had arisen in France,
Belgium and England which was attracted to socialist ideas and organization.
However, the relationship of the new-fledged socialist workers’ organizations to
the older socialist currents, as well as to liberal democracy and the political
expressions of women’s rights and national liberation, remained confused in all
existing socialist theories. It was Marx who cut the Gordian knot and provided a
coherent, realistic analysis of the social basis for the socialist movement
within bourgeois society.
Marx asserted that the working class was the social group which
would play the primary and distinctive role in establishing socialism. This was
so because the working class was that social group whose interests and condition
were most in harmony with a collectivist economy or, conversely, which had the
least stake in the capitalist mode of production.
Marx’s appreciation of the role of the proletariat was not deduced
from German philosophy, but was the result of his experience in France in the
1840’s. Socialism had manifestly polarized French society along class lines, the
main base for socialism being the industrial working class, the propertied
classes being implacably hostile and the petty bourgeoisie vacillating, often
seeking a utopian third road.
For Marx the predominance of intellectuals in the early socialist
movement was not proof that the socialist movement could be based on universal
reason. Rather it was necessarily a phenomenon partly reflecting the
contradictions of the bourgeois-democratic revolution and partly anticipating
the new alignment of class forces: “A portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to
the proletariat and in particular, a portion of bourgeois ideologists, who have
raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical
movement as a whole” (Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto).
The propertied, educated classes could not be won to socialism on
the basis of rational and democratic ideals even though objectively those ideals
could only be realized under socialism. Along the same lines, women of the
privileged class and the ruling stratum of oppressed nationalities cannot in
general be won to socialism even though objectively sexual equality and national
liberation can only be realized under socialism.
Closely related to the question of the class basis of the socialist
movement is the question of the material conditions under which socialism can be
established. Reflecting on pre-Marxist socialism in his later years, Engels
quipped that the utopians believed that the reason socialism hadn’t been
established before was that nobody had ever thought of it. That Engels’
witticism was only a slight exaggeration is shown by the importance of communal
experiments in the early socialist movement, indicating a belief that socialism
could be established under any and all conditions if a group really wanted it.
The primacy of voluntarism for the early socialists again reflected the fact
that their thinking was rooted in eighteenth-century, individualistic idealism
which, in turn, derived from Protestantism, an earlier bourgeois ideology.
In sharp and deliberate contrast to the utopians, Marx asserted
that inequality and oppression were necessary consequences of economic scarcity
and attempts to eliminate them through communal escapism or political coercion
were bound to fail:
“…this development of productive forces (which itself implies the
actual empirical existence of men in their world-historic, instead
of local, being) is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it
want is merely made general, and with destitution
the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily
be reproduced....” [emphasis in original]
—Karl Marx, The German Ideology
Marx’s assertion that inequality and oppression are historically
necessary and can be overcome only through the total development
of society, centering on the raising of the productive forces, represents his
most fundamental break with progressive bourgeois ideology.
Therefore, to this day, these concepts are the most unpalatable aspects of
Marxism for those attracted to socialism from a liberal humanist outlook:
“...although at first the development of the capacities of the
human species takes place at the cost of the majority of human individuals and
even classes, in the end it breaks through this contradiction and coincides with
the development of the individual; the higher level of individuality is thus
only achieved by a historical process in which individuals are
sacrificed....”
—Karl Marx, Theories of
Surplus Value
Surplus Value
“...it is only possible to achieve real liberation in the real
world and by employing real means,...slavery cannot be abolished without the
steam-engine and the mule and spinning-jenny, serfdom cannot be abolished
without improved agriculture, and...in general people cannot be liberated as
long as they are unable to obtain food and drink, housing and clothing in
adequate quality and quantity. ‘Liberation’ is an historical and not a mental
act, and it is brought about by historical conditions, the development of
industry, commerce, agriculture, the conditions of intercourse....”
—Karl Marx, The German Ideology
It is evident that “women” can replace “individuals” and
“classes” in these passages without doing damage to their meaning, since Marx
regarded women’s oppression as a necessary aspect of that stage in
human development associated with class society.
Marx’s programmatic differences with the utopians were encapsulated
in the concept of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” which he regarded as one
of his few original, important contributions to socialist theory. The
dictatorship of the proletariat is that period after the overthrow of the
capitalist state when the working class administers society in order to create
the economic and cultural conditions for socialism.
During the dictatorship of the proletariat, the restoration of
capitalism remains a possibility. This is not primarily due to the machinations
of die-hard reactionaries but arises rather out of the conflicts and tensions
generated by the continuation of global economic scarcity.
This economic scarcity is caused not only by inadequate physical
means of production. Even more importantly it derives from the inadequate and
extremely uneven cultural level inherited from capitalism. Socialist
superabundance presupposes an enormous raising of the cultural level of mankind.
The “average” person under socialism would have the knowledge and capacity of
several learned professions in contemporary society.
However, in the period immediately following the revolution, the
administration of production will necessarily be largely limited to that elite
trained in bourgeois society, since training their replacements will take time.
Therefore, skilled specialists such as the director of an airport, chief of
surgery in a hospital or head of a nuclear power station will have to be drawn
from the educated, privileged classes of the old capitalist society. Although in
a qualitatively diminished way, the dictatorship of the proletariat will
continue to exhibit economic inequality, a hierarchic division of labor and
those aspects of social oppression rooted in the cultural level inherited from
bourgeois society (e.g., racist attitudes will not disappear the
day after the revolution).
These general principles concerning the dictatorship of the
proletariat likewise apply to the woman question. To the extent that it rests on
the cultural level inherited from capitalism, certain aspects of sexual
inequality and oppression will continue well into the dictatorship of the
proletariat. The population cannot be totally re-educated nor can a
psychological pattern instilled in men and women from infancy be fully
eliminated or reversed.
The rejection of the dictatorship of the proletariat as a necessary
transition period to socialism is the central justification for utopian
egalitarianism (including radical or “socialist” feminism) in the era of
Marxism.
The Battle over Protective Labor Legislation
Feminism was one of the three major extensions of utopian
egalitarianism into the post-1848 era, the other two being anarchism and artisan
cooperativism (Proudhonism). In fact, during the later nineteenth century
radical feminism and anarchism heavily interpenetrated one another both as
regards their position on the woman question and in personnel. The decisive
element in common among feminism, anarchism and cooperativism was a commitment
to a level of social equality and individual freedom impossible to attain not
only under capitalism, but in the period following its overthrow. At a general
ideological level, feminism was bourgeois individualism in conflict with the
realities and limits of bourgeois society.
During their lifetimes, Marx and Engels had two notable conflicts
with organized feminism—continual clashes in the context of the struggle for
protective labor legislation and a short faction fight in the American section
of the First International. While the question of protective labor legislation
covered a great deal of ground at many levels of concreteness, the central
difference between the Marxists and feminists over this issue was also the
central difference between Marxism and utopian egalitarianism—i.e., the question
of the primacy of the material well-being of the masses and the historical
interests of the socialist movement vis-à-vis formal equality within bourgeois
society.
The feminist opposition to protective labor legislation argued and
continues to argue that it would mean legal inequality in the status of women
and that it was partly motivated by paternalistic, male-chauvinist prejudices.
Marx and Engels recognized these facts but maintained that the physical
well-being of working women and the interests of the entire class in reducing
the intensity of exploitation more than offset this formal and ideological
inequality. Writing to Gertrud Guillaume-Schack, a German feminist who later
became an anarchist, Engels stated his case:
“That the working woman needs special protection against
capitalist exploitation because of her special physiological functions seems
obvious to me. The English women who championed the formal right of members of
their sex to permit themselves to be as thoroughly exploited by the capitalists
as the men are mostly, directly or indirectly, interested in the capitalist
exploitation of both sexes. I admit I am more interested in the health of the
future generation than in the absolute formal equality of the sexes in the last
years of the capitalist mode of production. It is my conviction that real
equality of women and men can come true only when exploitation of either by
capital has been abolished and private housework has been transformed into a
public industry.”
—Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence, Letter to
Guillaume-Schack of 5 July 1885
Thus Engels recognized in feminism the false consciousness of the
privileged classes of women who believe that since they themselves are oppressed
only as women, sexual inequality is the only significant form of oppression.
Guillaume-Schack’s conversion to anarchism was not accidental, for
the anarchists also opposed protective labor legislation for women as an
inconsistent, inegalitarian reform. Writing a polemic against the Italian
anarchists in the early 1870’s, Marx ridiculed the “logic” that one “must not
take the trouble to obtain legal prohibition of the employment of girls under 10
in factories because a stop is not thereby put to the exploitation of boys under
10”—that this was a “compromise which damages the purity of eternal principles”
(quoted in Hal Draper, International Socialism, July-August 1970).
Woodhull versus Sorge in the First International
Because of the catch-all nature of the First International, the
Marxist tendency had to wage major internal factional struggles against the most
characteristic left currents in the various countries (e.g., trade-union
reformism in Britain, Proudhon’s cooperativism in France, Lasalle’s state
socialism in Germany and anarchism in Eastern and Southern Europe). It is
therefore highly symptomatic that the major factional struggle within the
American section centered around feminism, a variant of petty-bourgeois
radicalism. In the most general sense, the importance of the Woodhull tendency
reflected the greater political weight of the American liberal middle class
relative to the proletariat than in European class alignments. Historically
petty-bourgeois moralism has been more influential in American socialism than in
virtually any other country. This was particularly pronounced in the period
after the Civil War when abolitionism served as the model for native American
radicalism.
The relative political backwardness of the American working class
is rooted primarily in the process of its development through successive waves
of immigration from different countries. This created such intense ethnic
divisions that it impeded even elementary trade-union organization. In addition,
many of the immigrant workers who came from peasant backgrounds were imbued with
strong religious, racial and sexual prejudices and a generally low cultural
level which impeded class—much less socialist—consciousness. In general the
discontent of American workers was channeled by the petty bourgeoisie of the
various ethnic groups into the struggle for their own place in the
parliamentary-state apparatus.
The American working class’s lack of strong organization, its
ethnic electoral politics and relatively backward social attitudes created a
political climate in which “enlightened middle-class socialism” was bound to
flourish. Not least important in this respect was the fact that the liberal
middle classes were Protestant while the industrial working class was heavily
Roman Catholic. Indeed, an important aspect of the Woodhull/Sorge fight was over
an orientation toward Irish Catholic workers.
Victoria Woodhull was the best-known (more accurately notorious)
“free love” advocate of her day, ambitious and with a gift for political
showmanship. Seeing that the First International was becoming fashionable, she
organized her own section of it (Section 12) along with remnants of the New
Democracy, a middle-class, electoral-reformist organization, led by Samuel Foot
Andrews, a former abolitionist. The Woodhullites thus entered the First
International as a radical liberal faction, with an emphasis on women’s rights
and an electoralist strategy.
Section 12 rapidly retranslated the principles of the First
International into the language of American liberal democracy. Needless to say,
it came out for total organizational federalism with each section free to pursue
its own activities and line within the general principles of the International.
Section 12’s political line and organizational activities (its official paper,
Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, preached spiritualism among other things)
quickly brought it into conflict within the Marxist tendency, led by the German
veteran of the 1848 Revolution, Friedrich Sorge. Section 12 was able to cause
much factional trouble, not only in the U.S. but abroad, because its radical
liberalism fed into the growing anarchist, electoral-reformist and federalist
currents in the International. The Woodhullites were part of a rotten bloc which
coalesced against the Marxist leadership of the First International in 1871-72.
Woodhull enjoyed a short stay in the anarchist International in 1873 on her way
to becoming a wealthy eccentric.
The immediate issue of the faction fight was the priority of
women’s rights, notably suffrage, over labor issues particularly the eight-hour
day. That for the Woodhullites what was involved was not a matter of
programmatic emphasis, but a counterposition to proletarian socialism was made
explicit after the split with Sorge: “The extension of equal citizenship to
women, the world over, must precede any general change in the
subsisting relation of capital and labor” [emphasis in original] (Woodhull
and Claflin’s Weekly, 18 November 1871).
After splitting with the Sorge wing, while still claiming loyalty
to the First International, Section 12 organized the Equal Rights Party in order
to run Woodhull for president in 1872. The program was straight left-liberalism
without any proletarian thrust. It called for “...a truly republican government
which shall not only recognize but guarantee equal political and social rights
to men and women, and which shall secure equal opportunities of education for
all children” (Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, 20 April 1872).
The general political principles of the Woodhullites were clearly
expressed in their appeal to the General Council of the First International
against the Sorge wing:
“It [the object of the International] involves, first, the
Political Equality and Social Freedom of men and women alike.... Social Freedom
means absolute immunity from the impertinent intrusion in all
affairs of exclusively personal concernment, such as religious belief,
sexual relations, habits of dress, etc.” [emphasis in
original]
—Documents of the First International, The General Council;
Minutes 1871-72
This appeal was answered by a resolution written by Marx, which
suspended Section 12. After cataloguing the organizational abuses and rotten
politics, Marx concluded by reasserting the central difference between
democratic egalitarianism and proletarian socialism—namely, that the end to all
forms of oppression must run through the victory of the working class over
capitalism. Marx called attention to past International documents:
“…relating to ‘sectarian sections’ or ‘separatist bodies
pretending to accomplish special missions’ distinct from the common aim of the
Association [First International], viz. to emancipate the mass of labour from
its ‘economical subjection to the monopolizer of the means of labour’ which lies
at the bottom of servitude in all its forms, of social misery, mental
degradation and political dependence.”
—Ibid.
While the Marxist case against the Woodhullites centered on their
electoralism, middle-class orientation and quackery, the role of “free love” in
the socialist movement had a definite significance in the fight. While including
personal sexual freedom in their program, the Marxists insisted on a cautious
approach to this question when dealing with more backward sections of the
working class. By flaunting a sexually “liberated” life-style, the Woodhullites
would have created a nearly impenetrable barrier to winning over conventional
and religious workers. One of the main charges that Sorge brought against
Section 12 at the Hague Conference in 1872 was that its activities had made it
much more difficult for the International to reach the strategically placed
Irish Catholic workers.
The historic relevance of the Woodhull/Sorge faction fight is that
it demonstrated, in a rather pure way, the basis of feminism in classic
bourgeois-democratic principles, particularly individualism. It further
demonstrated that feminist currents tend to be absorbed into liberal reformism
or anarchistic petty-bourgeois radicalism, both of which invariably unite
against revolutionary proletarian socialism.
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