Review

REVIEW

Picking up the fragments Elizabeth Wilson (with Angela Weir), Hidden Agendas: Theory, Politics and Experience in the Women's Movement, Tavistock, London 1986, pp227, pbk £6.95. Elizabeth Wilson is a polytechnic lecturer, a member of the Communist Party and an influential writer on sexual politics, culture and welfare. This book includes a collection of her articles over the past 15 years, with a new introduction. The focus of the key articles is on the way the women's liberation movement, which set out in the early seventies with "consciously revolutionary objectives, has today lost all direction and momentum. Wilson concentrates her polemical fire on those who have attempted to reconcile Marxism and feminism in the hybrid "socialist-feminism': "The socialist-feminist theory of the past decade has argued itself into a depressingly deterministic position in its attempt to theorise subjectivity; the practical correlate of this has increasingly been a rather pallid reformism.* Wilson launches a rearguard defence of the old women's movement against the combined influences of Beatrix Campbell and Neil Kinnock. She sets out to 'reinfuse socialist-feminism with some of the political sharpness it had in its early days. How then does she explain the degeneration of feminism?

Review 116 The price of diversity Wilson provides a partly autobiographical account of the British women's movement. She describes how feminism gave her an introduction into socialist politics in terms which will be familiar to many women: "The politics of "the personal is political" helped me escape-but not so much into women's culture as intosimply—politics.' I and many more into the women's What attracted Wilson movement was its emphasis on the validity of every woman's personal experience, its consciousness-raising groups and, later, its encouragement of 'confessional writing'. "Yet', she concludes, 'the very act of voicing the subjective failed in the end to cement all women in sisterhood.* Proclaiming the diversity of individual experience, by the late seventies the women's movement had disintegrated. In her introduction, "Women, Heroines and Feminist Intellectuals', Wilson discusses the destructive schism between radical feminism and socialist-feminism. She rightly points out that the radical feminists' insistence on the essential distinctiveness (or even superiority) of women leads to a celebration of biological characteristics and innate qualities—an outlook typical of bourgeois ideologues and clerical reactionaries. At the same time, Wilson notes the tendency of socialist-feminists to drift towards the simplistic notions of their radical sisters: 'Gradually, socialist-feminism became almost indistinguishable from radical feminism in emphasising the contradiction between men and women as primary and labelling any analysis that foregrounded class and political economy as "economistic" or "orthodox": The result was that socialist-feminism became little more than a pale version of radical feminism, incorporating a feminist critique of the left. Wilson is particularly critical of the tendency of socialistfeminists in recent years to take refuge in the writings of the Utopian socialists of the nineteenth century. She rightly dismisses this as a nostalgic retreat into the past, which leads inevitably to a 'corrosive

Review 117 pessimism' and an attitude of resignation towards the political problems of the present. Two bestselling books sum up the shifting outlook of the socialistfeminists. Beyond the Fragments, written by Sheila Rowbotham, Lynne Segal and Hilary Wainwright in 1980, expressed the women's movement's attachment to libertarian modes of organisation and its repudiation of the chauvinist traditional left. Two years later Sweet Freedom, by Anna Coote and Beatrix Campbell, concluded that the movement's objectives could be best pursued inside the most undemocratic, chauvinist and traditional organisation of the British left—the Labour Party, These positions of Wilson's erst while sisters were the targets of her critical pen in Feminist Review in 1980 and in a lengthy polemic in the New Left Review in 1984. Both articles are included in Hidden Agendas.

By 1984 the conflict within feminism had become part of a wider conflict on the left. Wilson's New Left Review piece was written in conjunction with the pamphlet entitled Class Politics, produced by a clique of Communist Party intellectuals opposed to the takeover of the party by the trendy Marxism Today circle. It denounced the convergence of Communist Party historian Eric Hobsbawm and his fellow Eurocommunists-and the socialist-feminist fragments— with the rightward-moving Labour Party of Neil Kinnock.

What was the left alternative for women and for the working class? Wilson and her Class Politics colleagues offered the Communist Party and the Morning Star, left-wing union leaders and radical Labour councils, and the old left alternative economic strategy of the seventies. The almost pathetic inadequacy of this perspective (which even lost out in the internal Communist Party power struggle) reflects weaknesses in Wilson's wider analysis of the crisis of the women's movement.

Personal and political Despite her often perceptive account, Wilson is in a weak position to combat right-wing influences on the women's movement because she shares some of their basic prejudices. The most important of these are her approval of the slogan 'the personal is political' and her

118 Review attachment to the principle of the "autonomous organisation of women. In her New Left Review article, Wilson tries to rescue the slogan that originally drew her into the women's movement from the way the slogan was subsequently interpreted.

*In arguing that the personal is political the carly women's movement was not suggesting a laissez-faire approach, or "do your own thing". Quite the reverse-personal struggle to alter your way of life was believed to be a product of, and carried out in relation to, a political movement of women and to be a political challenge to a society where male power and privilege were hegemonic. The kitchen and the hearth were to be turned into battle fronts, not left as isolated discourses where life might be more rationally and harmoniously ordered."

This passage reveals the confusion about the relationship between individual development and collective struggle that paralysed the early women's movement. "The personal is political' slogan expressed the idea that every woman could challenge her oppression by coming to grips with the experience of being a woman, through sharing experiences with other women, and through personal confrontation with fathers, lovers, husbands and employers. This approach was popular because for every woman the experience of oppression is an intensely personal experience to which a personal response seems most appropriate. However, 'the personal is political' offered an illusory solution.

Although women experience male domination in a variety of apparently isolated and random ways, often in the privatised, secretive world of the family, our individual oppression is part of a wider social reality. Women are denied equal access to work and education, forced to bear the burden of work in the home and subjected to sexual degradation and exploitation because of the special role that women and the family play in modern capitalist society. This role cannot be changed by women raising their consciousness of oppression in small groups, by relating sympathetically to other women or by fighting on the domestic

Review 119 battle front. For some women, these activities can provide some respite from the pressures and brutalities of male chauvinist society.

But in general these very activities simply reinforce women's sense of isolation, atomisation and impotence. By endowing individual survival strategies with the character of a strategy for women's liberation, 'the personal is political' slogan ratified the fragmentation capitalism imposes on women. The disintegration of the women's movement, as lesbians, heterosexuals, black women, white women, Jewish women, disabled women, etc, all pursued their own sectional preoccupations, was the inevitable result of this celebration of subjectivity.

Because of the way capitalism encourages every man (and even more every woman) to fight for themselves, people are forced to try to find their own ways of getting by and having a decent life within the system. The problem is that, for workers and for women, the system puts up powerful barriers to individual fulfilment. If the only way you can make a living as a worker is through soul-destroying labour, which provides only enough money to keep you going from one week till the next, the scope for personal growth is limited. If, as a woman, you are forced to work in menial jobs for a pittance and then have to go home to look after your husband, children, and elderly parents, your prospects are even worse. Within this framework only a very restricted development of individual potential or awareness is possible.

The only way towards a fuller realisation of individuality is through challenging the system that stunts human potential-and that requires more than the efforts of isolated individuals. It requires the collective organisation of the working class, including women. It is only through acting together as a class that individuals can overcome the atomisation of social life under capitalism. By taking an active part in challenging the oppressive structures of capitalist society every individual can gain a wider awareness of their own position in the world and can achieve a real development of their individuality. The sort of changes that can really make a difference to women's lives-better jobs, better pay, better childcare facilities, better welfare services for the sick and elderly, free access to contraception

120 Review and abortion- can only come about when these issues are taken out of the private personal realm and made a central public focus of the class struggle. Recognising the damage done to the cause of women's liberation by the individualistic interpretation of the 'personal is political slogan, Wilson now attempts to redefine its meaning. She asserts that it was originally understood as an adjunct to collective struggle, not as an alternative to it. This smacks of wanting to have your cake and eat it. Given the fact that neither the Communist Party nor the British women's movement engaged in any serious "political challenge to a society where male power and privilege were hegemonic", it was inevitable that the self-indulgent interpretation of the slogan would prevail. This brings us to the second premise Wilson shares with those who have shattered the women's movement and betrayed its hopes.

The myth of autonomy *We support the existence of an autonomous women's movement' declare Wilson and Weir in their major survey of the British women's movement. The commitment to autonomy is a central feminist principle. As Wilson rightly insists, 'the autonomous women's movement does not simply represent an organisational principle. It also represents a difference and a distance between feminism and organised political groups.'

The fetish of autonomy particularly distinguishes feminism from the Marxist approach to the struggle for women's liberation.

Autonomy follows directly from the feminist theory of patriarchy.

This identifies women's oppression as the result of male-dominated institutions and deeply established attitudes that are independent of capitalist society. Divorcing women's oppression from capitalist social relations, feminists argue that the struggle for women's rights is separate from the wider anti-capitalist struggle. The socialistfeminists' conviction that women should organise separately from the working class movement indicates their acceptance of the autonomy of women's oppression.

Feminist organisations put the pursuit of the individual concerns

Review 121 of their members before the wider goal of social change. The autonomous organisation of women, in practice in small-scale local groups, is ideally suited to the limited objectives of sharing experiences without attempting to undertake collective action against the system. Structureless and diffuse discussions can contain diversity and help to preserve the fragile consensus of sisterhood.

Hostility to leadership, expertise and an efficient division of labour is consistent with a style of organisation which seeks only to offer some solace to the victims of oppression.

A revolutionary organisation, by contrast, puts the objective of changing the world before the goal of making its members feel more comfortable in the world as it is. Its concern with giving a lead in the wider class struggle means that it is constantly striving to transcend the limitations of individual experience by urging individuals to look at the world from the standpoint of the working class as a whole. Whatever their personal experience, anybody can take part in fighting oppression and making a revolution, provided they accept the discipline necessitated by this project. Rather than indulging the sort of narrow individualism fostered by the capitalist system, a revolutionary party combats this petty outlook and seeks to replace it with a wider sense of individual development through collective anti-capitalist struggle. For women, a revolutionary party offers, not an escape from a hostile world, but a means of transforming it. The concept of autonomous organisation thus runs against the interests of both the working class and women. In practice it acts to prevent the clarification and resolution of political differences, thus ensuring that the women's movement remains under the domination of the all-pervasive prejudices of the middle classes. Yet on this point too, Wilson wants to have her cake and eat it. She writes that she now 'questions the whole concept of patriarchy, but still sticks by her faith in autonomy. Perhaps this reflects an entirely understandable lack of confidence in the capacity of the Communist Party to play the role of a revolutionary party in relation to women.

Wilson's attempt to reinfuse socialist-feminism with some of the political sharpness it had in its early days' is a doomed project.

Although in its early days the British women's movement had great

122 Review spirit, energy and determination, political sharpness was never its strong point. The Revolutionary Communist Party aims to revive the struggle for women's liberation in Britain by putting the fight for women's rights at the centre of the struggle for working class power.

Wilson's attachment to the debilitating tenets of feminism and her allegiance to a party that, as she puts it, regards revolution as a long process rather than an explosive moment means that her contribution to this process must lie as a chronicler of past failures rather than as a herald of future victories.

Kate Marshall

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