Re: AUT: Patriarchy

[Cornell C Womack <ccwst7+@xxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, 1 Feb 1998, Katha Pollitt wrote:

> Luther Blissett cites, approvingly, Indian feminists who argue that
> capitalism produces feminism,(which is historically true,) at once
> posing the question of women's freedom and thwarting its realization. He
> mentions recent instances of Sati, which he blames on urban bourgeoisie
> rather than local villagers.  (it would be interesting to know more?
> How do these far-off citydwellers persuade rural families to incinerate
> widows?)  He goes on to generalize that the bourgeois revolution in
> general offers "abstract freedoms" with no real substance.
>   No real substance?  None at all? For anyone? the feminists of India
> (or elsewhere) wouldn't exist without the bourgeois revolution, which
> gave us such radical ideas as  choosing your own mate, education for
> women, Being able to challenge religious, parental, and aristocratic
> authority,etc. These all seem to me real and substantial benefits to
> humanity, a big improvement on  the hierarchical and fatalistic ideas
> they replaced. (the thing about India, it seems to me, is the bourgeois
> revolutionary ideas haven't penetrated far enough: they still have
> arranged marriages, serfdom, castes, dowries, religious wars etc.)
>   if it weren't for the bourgeois revolution, most of us on this list
> would be miserable peasants like our ancestors.


I understood Luther's intervention as a critique of the very real limits
of Bourgeois revolution which while creating space for improved social,
political, economic participation, nonetheless was predicated upon a
definitive end to the application and dissemination of those
possibilities. One must contend with another point of abstraction as well,
that being the actual roots of the ideology of the  Bourgeois revolution.
Many of the ideas that came out of the enlightenment have been
historically portrayed as emenating not from the material practices of the
working classes, but from the minds of great thinkers. We are thus
fooled into conflating two very different ideas of freedom.  I  understand
the abstraction that Luther referred to as those
ideas of freedom that while providing a measure of material relief, have
at the same time created the ideological/material conditions for the
supression of practices that attempt to bring about a more radical
freedom. The bourgeois revolution contains a logic of repression that is
anti-democratic at its foundation.

Cornell Womack



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