Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism. Zillah R. Eisenstein

issues, we must continually ask how we can use these issues to build our collective strength. The mode of analysis developed by the women’s movement suggests several criteria with which to evaluate particular strategies. First, we must ask how our work will educate ourselves and others politically, how it will help us to see the connections between social institutions. Second, we must ask how a particular strategy materially affects our daily lives. This involves asking: How does it improve our conditions of existence? How will it affect our sense of ourselves and our own power to change the world? How will a particular strategy politicize people, make people aware of problems beyond individual ones?⁴⁹ Third, we must ask how our strategies work to build organizations—to build a collective individual which will increase our power to transform social relations as a whole. Fourth, we must ask how our strategies weaken the institutions which control our lives—patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism. Our strategies must work not simply to weaken each of these institutions separately but must attack them on the basis of an understanding of the totality of which they form parts.

      In all this, however, we must remember that there is no “ready made, pre-established, detailed set of tactics which a central committee can teach its … membership as if they were army recruits.”⁵⁰ In general, the tactics of a mass party cannot be invented. They are “the product of a progressive series of great creative acts in the often rudimentary experiments of the class struggle. Here too, the unconscious comes before the conscious….”⁵¹

      Most important, a feminist mode of analysis makes us recognize that the struggle itself must be seen as a process with all its internal difficulties. We must avoid, on the one hand, developing a narrow sectarian outlook, and, on the other, abandoning our goal of revolution. We must continue to base our work on the necessity for change in our own lives. Our political theorizing can only grow out of appropriating the practical political work we have done. While the answers to our questions come only slowly and with difficulty, we must remember that we are involved in a continuous process of learning what kind of world we want to create as we work for change.

      Notes

      1. See, for example, Sylvia Wallace, “The Movement Is Out of Relations with the Working Class,” unpublished paper, 1974; Charlotte Bunch, “Beyond Either/Or: Feminist Options,” Quest: a feminist quarterly 3, no. 1 (Summer 1976).

      2. V. I. Lenin, What Is To Be Done? (New York: International Publishers, 1929), p. 28.

       3. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. Quinton Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), p. 365. Gramsci adds that “the identification of theory and practice is a critical act, through which practice is demonstrated rational and necessary and theory realistic and rational.”

      4. Ibid., p. 327. See also p. 244.

      5. I should perhaps note here that I am speaking as a participant as well as a critical observer. The experience I use as a reference point is my own as well as that of many other women.

      6. Feminists are beginning to recognize the importance for the movement of conscious theorizing—for critical analysis of what we have been doing for most of the last decade. Among the current issues and problems being reevaluated are the significance of service projects, the importance of leadership, new possibilities for developing organizational structures, and our relationship to the rest of the left.

      7. George Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass: M.I.T. Press, 1971), p. 1.

      8. On this point, see especially Barbara Ehrenreich, “Speech by Barbara Ehrenreich,” Socialist Revolution 5, no. 4 (October-December 1975).

      9. On this point, compare Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, ed. Dirk Struik (New York: International Publishers, 1964), p. 140, and Gramsci, Selections, p. 324.

      10. This is not to say there have been no problems or that beginning with personal experience always led women to think in larger terms. Some groups have remained apolitical or have never moved beyond the level of personal issues; others have become so opposed to any organizations other than personal organizations that they are immobilized. Problems about the “correct line” are also part of the current debate in the women’s movement. On current problems, see Bunch, “Feminist Options.”

      11. Gramsci, Selections, p. 330.

      12. Ibid., p. 43.

      13. Marge Piercy, “A Shadow Play for Guilt,” in To Be of Use (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1973), p. 17.

      14. Gramsci, Selections, p. 351.

      15. Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, ed. C.J. Arthur (New York: International Publishers, 1970), p. 121. This method also overcomes the passivity characteristic of much of American life. See, for example, Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb, The Hidden Injuries of Class (New York: Vintage, 1973), p. 165, and Stanley Aronowitz, False Promises (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973), p. 112.

      16. See Gramsci, Selections, p. 360. See also Lukacs, p. 19.

      17. Ibid., p. 352.

      18. See Nicos Poulantzas, Classes in Contemporary Capitalism (London: New Left Books, 1975), p. 21.

      19. Marx and Engels, German Ideology, p. 59.

      20. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, p. 141. See also Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1973), p. 162.

      21. Gramsci, Selections, p. 349.

      22. Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” p. 121. See also Gramsci, Selections, pp. 352, 360.

      23. See Lukacs, History, p. 175.

      24. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House, 1954), p. 20.

      25. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, p. 119.

      26. As Lukacs pointed out, grasping the totality means searching for interrelations. It means elevating the relations among objects to the same status as the objects themselves. (Lukacs, p. 154. See also pp. 8, 10, and 13.)

      27. Marx and Engels, German Ideology, p. 114.

      28. Lukacs, History, p. 39.

      29. Karl Marx, Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy, trans. T. B. Bottomore (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1956), p. 232.

      30. Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (New York: International Publishers, 1973), p. 125.

      31. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1963), p. 668.

      32. Gramsci, Selections, p. 424. See also Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” p. 122.

      33. Lukacs, History, p. 22.

      34. Ibid., p. 178. See also Gramsci’s contention that “for a mass of people to be led to think coherently and in the same coherent fashion about the real present world, is a ‘philosophical’ event far more important and ‘original’ than the discovery by some philosophical ‘genius’ of a truth which remains the property of small groups of intellectuals” (Selections, p. 325).

      35. Ibid., pp. 225, 307.

      36. Ibid., p. 340.

      37. The women’s movement is debating a number of other important issues: race, lesbianism, power, etc. In this particular context, the role of class seems a useful example. I hardly need to add that what I have to say is simply a very general outline of the directions in which feminist theory can guide our analysis. For a range of approaches to the issue of class see Sennett and Cobb, Hidden Injuries of Class; Aronowitz, False Promises; Poulantzas, Classes in Contemporary Capitalism; C. Wright Mills, Power, Politics, and People (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963); T. B. Bottomore, Classes in Modern Society (New York: Vintage, 1966); or Richard Parker, The Myth of the Middle Class (New York: Liveright, 1972).

      38.