FEMINISM, CAPITALISM AND THE CUNNING OF HISTORY

FEMINISM, CAPITALISM AND THE CUNNING OF HISTORY

I would like here to take a broad look at second-wave feminism. Not at this or that activist current, nor this or that strand of feminist theorizing; not this or that geographical slice of the movement, nor this or that sociological stratum of women. I want, rather, to try to see second-wave feminism whole, as an epochal social phenomenon. Looking back at nearly forty years of feminist activism, I want to venture an assessment of the movement’s overall trajectory and historical significance. In looking back, however, I hope also to help us look forward. By reconstructing the path we have travelled, I hope to shed light on the challenges we face today—in a time of massive economic crisis, social uncertainty and political realignment. [1]

सर्वहारा संस्कृति क्या है और क्या यह संभव है?

लियोंन त्रात्सकी

हर शासक वर्ग अपनी संस्कृति का निर्माण करता है, और उसी से चलते अपनी कला का भी. इतिहास हमें क्लासिकीय पुरातन(classical antiquity) और पूरब की गुलामी-व्यवस्था से पैदा होने वाली संस्कृतियों का ज्ञान देता है. वह हमें मध्ययुगीन यूरोप की सामंती संस्कृति और वर्तमान की और बुर्जुआ संस्कृति ( जो अभी दुनिया पर राज करती है) के बारे में भी बताती है. इससे यह निष्कर्ष निकलती है कि सर्वहारा वर्ग को भी अपनी संस्कृति और अपनी कला का निर्माण करना पड़ेगा.

पर सवाल सतही स्तर पर जितना सरल दिखाई देता है उससे ज्यादा कठिन है. वे समाज जिनमे गुलामो के मालिक ही शासक वर्ग हुआ करते थे वे कई सदियों तक अस्तित्व में रहे. वही बात सामंतवाद के बारे में भी कहा जा सकता है . बुर्जुआ समाज भी- अगर उसकी गिनती उसके खुली और कोलाहलभरी अभिव्यक्ति के समय यानि कि पुनर्जागरण (Renaissance) के समय से किया जाये - पांच शताब्दियों से अस्तित्मान है. हालाँकि उन्नीसवीं सदी तक या फिर ज्यादा सटीक रूप से कहे तो उन्नीसवी सदी के द्वितीय भाग तक उसकी पूर्ण विकास नहीं हो पाया था. इतिहास बताता है कि एक नए शासक वर्ग के अनुरूप एक नयी संस्कृति की निर्माण में काफी समय लगता है और वह अपनी पूर्ण अवस्था में तभी पहुचती है जब वह वर्ग अपनी राजनेतिक पतन की और अग्रसर होने वाला होता है.

hobsbawm, labour

Farewell to the Classic Labour Movement?
Eric Hobsbawm

A hundred and twenty-five years after Lassalle, and a hundred years after the founding of the Second International, the socialist and labour parties are at a loss as to where they are going. Wherever socialists meet they ask one another gloomily about the future of our movements. I think it is perfectly justified to ask such questions, but—and this should be emphasized—they are not confined to the socialist parties. All the other parties are in the same position.

Eric Hobsbawm

Identity Politics and the Left

My lecture is about a surprisingly new subject. [*] We have become so used to terms like ‘collective identity’, ‘identity groups, ‘identity politics’, or, for that matter ‘ethnicity’, that it is hard to remember how recently they have surfaced as part of the current vocabulary, or jargon, of political discourse. For instance, if you look at the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, which was published in 1968—that is to say written in the middle 1960s—you will find no entry under identity except one about psychosocial identity, by Erik Erikson, who was concerned chiefly with such things as the so-called ‘identity crisis’ of adolescents who are trying to discover what they are, and a general piece on voters’ identification. And as for ethnicity, in the Oxford English Dictionary of the early 1970s it still occurs only as a rare word indicating ‘heathendom and heathen superstition’ and documented by quotations from the eighteenth century.

In short, we are dealing with terms and concepts which really come into use only in the 1960s. Their emergence is most easily followed in the usa, partly because it has always been a society unusually interested in monitoring its social and psychological temperature, blood-pressure and other symptoms, and mainly because the most obvious form of identity politics—but not the only one—namely ethnicity, has always been central to American politics since it became a country of mass immigration from all parts of Europe. Roughly, the new ethnicity makes its first public appearance with Glazer and Moynihan’s Beyond the Melting Pot in 1963 and becomes a militant programme with Michael Novak’s The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics in 1972. The first, I don’t have to tell you, was the work of a Jewish professor and an Irishman, now the senior Democratic senator for New York; the second came from a Catholic of Slovak origin. For the moment we need not bother too much about why all this happened in the 1960s, but let me remind you that—in the style-setting usa at least—this decade also saw the emergence of two other variants of identity politics: the modern (that is, post suffragist) women’s movement and the gay movement.

E H Carr

(an interview with Perry Anderson)

The Russian Revolution and the West

You have now completed ‘A History of Soviet Russia’, which covers the years from 1917 to 1929 in fourteen volumes, and commands the whole field of studies of the early experience of the ussr. In the widest historical retrospect, how do you judge the significance of the October Revolution today—for Russia, and for the rest of the world?

Let us begin with its significance for Russia itself. One need hardly dwell today on the negative consequences of the Revolution. For several years, and especially in the last few months, they have been an obsessive topic in published books, newspapers, radio and television. The danger is not that we shall draw a veil over the enormous blots on the record of the Revolution, over its cost in human suffering, over the crimes committed in its name. The danger is that we shall be tempted to forget altogether, and to pass over in silence, its immense achievements. I am thinking in part of the determination, the dedication, the organization, the sheer hard work which in the last sixty years have transformed Russia into a major industrial country and one of the super-powers. Who before 1917 could have predicted or imagined this? But, far more than this, I am thinking of the transformation since 1917 in the lives of ordinary people: the transformation of Russia from a country more than eighty per cent of whose population consisted of illiterate or semi-literate peasants into a country with a population more than sixty per cent urban, which is totally literate and is rapidly acquiring the elements of urban culture. Most of the members of this new society are grand-children of peasants; some of them are great-grand-children of serfs. They cannot help being conscious of what the Revolution has done for them. And these things have been brought about by rejecting the main criteria of capitalist production—profits and the laws of the market—and substituting a comprehensive economic plan aimed at promoting the common welfare. However much performance may have lagged behind promise, what has been done in the ussr in the past sixty years, in spite of fearful interruptions from without, is a striking advance towards the realization of the economic programme of socialism. Of course, I know that anyone who speaks of the achievements of the Revolution will at once be branded as a Stalinist. But I am not prepared to submit to this kind of moral blackmail. After all, an English historian can praise the achievements of the reign of Henry viii without being supposed to condone the beheading of wives.

Nancy Fraser

FEMINISM, CAPITALISM AND THE CUNNING OF HISTORY

I would like here to take a broad look at second-wave feminism. Not at this or that activist current, nor this or that strand of feminist theorizing; not this or that geographical slice of the movement, nor this or that sociological stratum of women. I want, rather, to try to see second-wave feminism whole, as an epochal social phenomenon. Looking back at nearly forty years of feminist activism, I want to venture an assessment of the movement’s overall trajectory and historical significance. In looking back, however, I hope also to help us look forward. By reconstructing the path we have travelled, I hope to shed light on the challenges we face today—in a time of massive economic crisis, social uncertainty and political realignment. [1]

Perry Anderson

Trotsky’s Interpretation of Stalinism

Trotsky’s interpretation of the historical meaning of Stalinism, to this day the most coherent and developed theorization of the phenomenon within the Marxist tradition, was constructed in the course of twenty years of practical political struggle against it. His thought thus evolved in tension with the major conflicts and events of these years, and can be conveniently periodized into three essential phases. [*]