Who went to this conference? Well, the aforementioned ‘activists’, an ALP senator or two, some Canberra ALP whiz-kids (one of whom remarked ‘we’ve only come here to see what you people are saying’), a few union and ACTU officials (two of whom, Heffernan and Jolly, gave papers that were right out of tune with the conference: the former had to resort to claiming that of those present only he had a hotline to the horny-handed sons of toil, while Jolly spoke blithely of the heroic ACTU’s coping with the current machinations of Capital – his listeners weren’t believers), but apparently the great majority were students and academics, from most parts of the country.
It’s an understandable shame that the lines of communication between the middle-class Left intelligentsia and workers are so manifestly down (it’s an accidental joke: the only linesman present was Albert Langer). But again, the liberation of the Sydney University Economics Department wasn’t the appropriate clarion call. And that’s what the conference was really celebrating. It was a great time for meeting people, except at the deafening party, though one wonders whether the four ‘internationals’ were strictly necessary considering the expense. Perhaps they were; after all, the Australian ballet always dances around Fonteyn …
The End Of Anti-Communism – Anti-Communists at a Conference
(adapted, from the Bulletin, 29.9.73)
The thought crossed our minds, as we sat in the Association for Cultural Freedom’s conference on the decline of anti-communism, whether this would be the last meeting of the Association. If the finding of the conference was yes, and anti-communism was finished, was the Association (which depended so heavily on anti-communism as a reason for existence) also finished?
The conference, brought together by Professor Owen Harries, had a great line-up of stars of stage and seminar – both goodies and baddies. Dr Frank Knopfelmacher, Professor Henry Mayer, Dennis Altman (Homosexual Oppression and Liberation) and Donald Horne were among our favourite performers, but the other speakers had their fans. Even the audience was filled with performers – Alex Carey and W. C. Wentworth, to name only two opposites – and visiting intellectual celebrity Norman Podhoretz (Making It).
Dr Knopfelmacher led off with an analysis of the types of anticommunist – a taxonomy – but said right at the beginning that he did not want people coming up afterwards asking him what category he placed them in. He had three general types and six sub-groups, which led him to some remarkable combinations, including ‘latent, pre-exilic, patriotic, conservative’ anti-communists.
He saw four key reasons for the decline of ‘sustained, rhetorical, moralistic, evangelical anti-communism’.
One reason was ‘polycentrism’ of communism – because there were now many different types of communist governments it was difficult to mount a single, generalised campaign. The persistence of communism was his second reason; the fact that it didn’t ‘go away’ had led the United States, for instance, into an acceptance of communism as a fact of life. The Catholic Church also had changed its attitude and accepted ‘dialogue with the communists’. Dr Knopfelmacher said that the catholics seemed to think that if anything lasted long enough it must be part of the human condition and have some good in it. He blamed, lastly, the acceptance of a theory that ‘change from within’ would occur in communist countries, that consumerism and other factors would make the communist countries closer to the west and thus more acceptable.
Dr Knopfelmacher disregarded these reasons and for him the communists remained ‘unmitigated bastards’. He saw no possibility of any change for the better in the USSR in the next twenty-five to thirty years. Any hope of change in the USSR was purely ‘theological assumption’ and not based on fact.
When Dennis Altman got up to speak as an anti-anti-communist, he said he felt a ‘distinctly unpleasant tone’ about the seminar, which confirmed his strong doubts about the Association. He had been tempted not to speak at all and criticised the Association for not having invited a communist to speak.
His strong doubts about the Association’s concept of ‘cultural freedom’ came from their not concerning themselves with the freedom of minorities in their own country; for instance, he asked, ‘As a homosexual, where do I fit in?’
He described the damage done to life in Australia by anti-communism of the type described by Dr Knopfelmacher. It had distorted reality; it had been used by conservatives to conceal an appalling lack of ideas and policies; it had led to the ignoring of marxists’ scholarship in many fields of inquiry; and it had to bear heavy responsibility for the degradation of political debate in Australia.
‘Anti-communism has a close resemblance to communism,’ he said. It had simplistic patterns of thought; it missed the complexity of human reality; it was puritanical; it distrusted hedonism, was highly manipulative, and was blind to the injustices in its own sphere of political influence. Anti-communism was a case of ‘selective indignation’.
We considered it a brave paper delivered to some explicitly hostile people.
By the end of the second day the right-wing anti-communists had sat through some heavy fire and uncomfortable self-analysis. Especially after Donald Horne traced the history of anti-communism back to 1906 (before there was a communist party). His analysis revealed it as anti-socialism dressed up as a foreign conspiracy. This went down like a prawn head.
The right-wing, hard-line anti-communists made something of a comeback at the end of the last session with a grand parade of classic anti-communist rhetoric.
‘Communism is a cancer living on the organism of democracy,’ said W. C. Wentworth, who was permitted a lengthy off-the-floor speech in which he said bitterly that ‘half the people in this room are apostates’ running away from their responsibilities. He castigated Donald Horne for saying that the Liberals had ever cynically used the expression ‘kicking the communist can’. Donald Horne in reply said that he’d heard it used by the former prime minister William McMahon.
The ALP, the trade unions, homosexuals, the women’s movement and even Lend Lease (for cooperating with the builders’ labourers union) were attacked by other speakers as cracks in the wall of anti-communism. Some of the language used and remarks made about, for instance, homosexuality were uncivil and insensitive.
But, we told ourselves, this is more like the old hysteria of anti-communism as we knew it. The cool, often comic, analysis of the guest speakers was not.
Almost in the closing minutes of the conference John Russell of the Storeman and Packers Union rose and let another skunk into the room by reminding the hard-line anti-communists that democratic socialists were also anti-communist. This was fiercely applauded by some in the audience, which revealed yet another division.
We saw another effect of anti-communism which had not been listed by Dennis Altman: that the labelling of all dissent as pro-communist during the fifties and sixties drove rebellious youth – including ourselves for a while – to an emotional identification with the communists, not as a theory or political system but as a banner of nonconformity and as an ally against the oppressively conformist society.
Like the Communist Party, the anti-communists had discredited good causes and, not least of all, anti-communism itself.
The conference reminded us that, as libertarian anti-communists, we had nothing in common with many of the anti-communists in the room. That they had wildly different meanings for ‘cultural freedom’ to us. Most certainly they did not want anything to do with long-haired, homosexual anti-communists. In fact, we felt that some of the anti-communists were more of a threat to liberty because they held positions of power within the country.
All anti-communists are not necessarily friends and not necessarily even allies.
Developing a Dialogue – Feminists at a Conference
Glynn Huilgol
(from Nation Review, 29.8.75)
Two major issues, unrelated to the formal program, caused dissension and heart-searching at last weekend’s Canberra conference on Philosophical Aspects of Feminism.
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The conference was held at the instigation of the philosophy students of ANU, and appeared to be primarily intended to allow members of that department a platform from which to offer reflections on this year’s issues. As well, the general philosophy department at Sydney University was quite well represented. Other speakers came from other places, but as individual representatives of their departments and schools.
Christine Pierce, from New York’s state university, was guest speaker and allocated two time slots. Evelyn Reid was billed as another star attraction but, although she attended some of the sessions, she unfortunately did not feel up to speaking: this was an especial disappointment since she had selected for her scrutiny a February assertion in the House of Reps by none other than W. Wentworth: ‘It is, unfortunately, physiologically irrefutable that a man’s sexual life is longer than that of a woman. This is one of the things that is in human nature …’ Some fun could have been had by all in the public contemplation of this particular lex biologica.
It was a three-day conference, Saturday to Monday. While Christine Pierce had the opening time slot at 11 o’clock on Saturday morning, after lunch intimations of disaster spread rapidly. Kim Lycos of ANU had taken the floor with a paper that purported to be a review of Juliet Mitchell’s Psychoanalysis and Feminism. He committed three major sins. First he omitted to take any cognisance of the fact that Mitchell’s book had been greeted by outcries of anguish by British feminists. Second, he never once mentioned penis envy, which is the lynchpin of Freudian theory on the biological, and therefore the inevitable and transcultural, deficiencies of the human female. Third, he was excruciatingly boring: the tedium of his exposition was matched only by the frustrations of his audience.
Thus arose the first major issue: should feminists, gathered from all over Australia to discuss feminist philosophical issues, spend time listening to a man? Carole Ferrier, Queensland’s editor of Hecate, hearing the murmurings of discontent, asked the chairperson to allow discussion on the program for Sunday. For two more men were scheduled to speak on Sunday morning and it seemed that, even at a conference of feminists, the men were obtaining prime time. Many people could not stay for the Monday sessions. Many would therefore have heard more men than women by the time they left for home.
Jennifer Bowen was not happy with the idea of changing the program. The time to have discussed the matter, she thought, was when the program was being drawn up. Nevertheless she yielded to pressure, and a rather acrimonious debate ensued. An hour of juggling time slots and speakers did at last produce a schedule acceptable to everyone. The conferees went to dinner happy in the thought that the two men had been relegated to Monday.
On Sunday Merle Thornton from Queensland and Anne Summers from Sydney took the freed time slots. On Sunday, therefore, we heard only women. So it was not till Monday that it became apparent that some of the conferees objected not just to men having the prime time, but to having men speak at all.
Paul Thom, of ANU, was laying before us Aristotle’s theories concerning the biology of reproduction. A child was the consequence of the conjunction of menstrual blood and semen, said Aristotle, putting the imprimatur of his authority upon a notion that was held as a truism not only by ancient Greeks but by a considerable proportion of the population of modern Bengal. While in Bengal this theory was not linked with male supremacist arguments, in Aristotle we find it written that the child has but one parent, for it is the semen that gives shape to the passive menstrual blood. Women supply but the matter of the child; men supply the form and the spirit. Semen is produced from blood through the vital heat possessed only by men. The normal product of conception is a male child but if something goes wrong, a female is born. And so on. Thom’s dry presentation of these now extraordinary notions invited and obtained laughter.
Two students from Flinders irritated most of the roomful of people by carrying on a loudly whispered conversation. One rose to her feet to issue a challenge. Did people realise what was happening to them, she asked. Here was this man being very clever, no doubt, but intimidating into passivity all the audience. This was an object lesson, she said, in the techniques by which men bedazzled and confounded women. The audience, not liking to be characterised as passive, reacted with hostility. If you don’t like it, they said, then go out. Three women left the room. Paul Thom finished delivering his paper.
The discussion that followed suggested that the audience had been actively listening, rather than passively sitting, and that they found the content of the paper interesting and not threatening. The whole episode was rather frightening, all the same. For the objection to men was shifted from resentment at the male’s perceptual inadequacies, and therefore legitimate exclusion from the formulation of feminist issues, to the theory that men are too clever for women to deal with. The first objection is an intellectual objection; the second is anti-intellectual and expressive of extreme insecurity.
On Saturday the objection was to men having starring positions; on Monday the objection was to hearing anything a man had to say, no matter how pertinent or interesting, and no matter how agreeably he had acceded to the notion that he should speak to a half-size audience on the last day. If women can’t deal with men on an intellectual level, after the power and status symbols are gone, then they will be confined to a cultural ghetto and their impact on society at large will be zilch.
Those who had defended Paul Thom’s right to be heard were then thrown into doubt once more by a paper given in the afternoon by Bill Godfrey-Smith. The paper was entitled ‘The sovereignty of man – an historical perspective’. It transpired it was not satirical! Mr Godfrey-Smith was heard to make remarks like ‘women in civilised societies have never been the equal of men’, and that 18th-century France, with its salons and high culture, had in fact been an ‘age of debauchery’. Moreover, he said, ‘to understand the problems of women in our civilisation one should begin with John Stuart Mill rather than Freud’ – so much for women’s writings! It didn’t even occur to him that a male may be suspect as a guide to the plight of the female. (Furthermore, he gave no credence to the by now well-established judgement that The Subjection of Women is to be credited more to Harriet Taylor than to Mill.)
The second major issue confronted at the conference came out of the two papers on academic feminism. This issue had been central to a conference in Adelaide at the end of June. Essentially the proposition is that feminism has been ‘co-opted’ by the universities. The establishment of courses dealing with women’s issues in an academic context is perceived as a threat to the movement. Women who applaud courses in sex roles run by sociologists, who attend courses run by historians in the herstory of 17th-century women participants in the puritan revolution, who approve of work done in courses set up in biology or psychology departments on sex differences (or similarities), who participate in English department courses on women in literature – all such females are deluded. For only philosophy departments are capable of generating independent space for women’s studies. Courses in the women’s studies area should have as their primary outcome the commitment of the students who take them to the feminist cause. In fact it was said at another point that commitment to feminism ought to be a prerequisite for enrolment. So a course is not even to function like a novitiate.
This commitment to feminism is linked with a commitment to socialism, so that any woman who holds that the situation of women can be understood and combated independently of understanding and combating capitalism is automatically denied her ticket as a feminist. The solidarity of women is not the goal, but the solidarity of a revolutionary minority elite who hold the ‘right’ opinions. This ignores the fact that the potential solidarity of women is created not by their own commitment, but by the universality of the stigmatising stereotypes of women that are embedded in and pervade our culture. Members of the audience did not fail to draw the parallel with christian sectarianism, although the direct linkage seems more likely to be with left sectarianism.
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entment at the speakers’ ‘holier than thou’ attitude and their willingness to sit in judgement on their fellow females was voiced, and it was argued from the floor that this exclusionist approach served to intimidate the vast majority of women from reconsidering their situation. If they must give up the little they have managed to salvage from a male supremacist society before they are allowed to work for the betterment of female self-images, social roles and public esteem, then courses with a feminist orientation become little more than converse among the converted, and mutual reinforcement among an ever-narrowing group. It was reported by others from Sydney University, who were less certain of their own possession of Absolute Feminist Truth, that quite a number of women had been obliged to drop the courses they had undertaken in general philosophy’s feminist offerings – because they were not toeing the party line with sufficient accuracy.
Ultimately, it would seem that if the university is said to be irretrievably tainted as the purveyor of bourgeois accommodations to an anti-feminist capitalist society, then women will have opted out of the only institution capable at this point of time of generating an intellectual comprehension of the situation of women. Propagation of the movement will depend entirely upon small cells of converts who are willing to devote the whole of their lives to the movement. The success of such a strategy will depend heavily upon the number of women in the community who have sufficient independence of situation to be able to devote their energies almost exclusively to designing and implementing a social revolution.
Days of Wine and Rage Page 30
