Days of Wine and Rage

by Frank Moorhouse

  If any objective judgement were to be made of this program, it would be difficult to exempt it from the charge of being yet another example of how deeply masochism has been embedded in the psyche of the female. For its hopes of success cannot be rated much above zero. And once more we have the spectacle of a number of women dedicating themselves to a hopeless cause with total selflessness, while the mass of women continue to lead their lives within the prison bars of male-defined cultural norms.

  Sexism is Insidious

  (a letter to Nation Review, 5.9.1975)

  As one of the three women who walked out of Paul Thom’s paper at the recent Canberra conference on philosophical aspects of feminism, I would like to comment on Glynn Huilgol’s remarks.

  I am not sure whether I found Paul too clever to deal with, as she suggests. Perhaps I did. I think I did have the fear that if I stayed I would sit back and laugh with the rest. Certainly his sexism was very insidious. Even so, I would not have had the courage to walk out if one of the Flinders women had not made the first move.

  Her interruption of the speaker, and the hostile reaction it produced, made my action possible.

  My main interest here is with Glynn’s comment that the walking out was, ‘expressive of extreme insecurity’ – as though this were somehow a bad thing. Apparently our feminism is to be intellectual only – we can talk about oppressive structures but we mustn’t feel oppressed by them, because if we do we might challenge them, and we couldn’t have that.

  The scene I rejected was very oppressive. It was academic, and therefore authoritarian, competitive and elitist; it was structured in the traditional way with the expert out front lecturing to the audience (a method of communication that many feminists reject), and the speaker was a male of considerable charisma and acting ability entertaining his audience as much by his eye-rolling, eyebrow-raising, voice inflections and facial expressions as by what he actually said.

  It was a male exerting his psychological power over women, i.e. being sexist, in the very act of giving an intellectual rejection of sexism. I found the contradiction painful.

  Not so long ago I would have felt pretty secure in that kind of scene, pretty much ‘able to handle it maturely’. But now I think that handling it maturely consisted in submitting to it, without noticing very much what it was doing. It consisted in living my life (as Glynn put it) ‘within the prison bars of male-defined cultural norms’. As long as you do that, you can feel nice and secure. But as long as you feel so secure in your prison, able to think and act rationally and maturely within it, there is no way you are ever going to get out of it. Getting out of it is painful – it involves feeling angry and confused, acting irrationally, doubting the validity of your own perception. It involves rejecting the accepted ways of relating to men and at the same time having to go on relating to them at all sorts of levels – social, professional, business, emotional and, for me, sexual. It isn’t surprising that women who are still comfortable in prison react angrily to women who are trying to break free of it. Put-downs like ‘you must feel very insecure to act like that’ are an expression of their own fear of being confronted with the reality of the iron bars.

  I felt a bit schizophrenic at the conference. On the one hand, we need to talk to men about feminism – in fact, from just talking to men, we need to love them. And what better way of talking to men about feminism than at that kind of conference? On the other hand, the conference was a reinforcement of oppressive male values, and the danger is that in participating in these events we become what we practise.

  Two other things (briefly) from Glynn’s article. Firstly, the papers on academic feminism did not say that only philosophy departments could give ‘good’ feminism courses. They were on the contrary very critical of such philosophy courses. Secondly, I do not at all understand how the potential solidarity of women can be created by ‘the universality of the stigmatising stereotypes of women that are embedded in and pervade our culture’, rather than by women’s commitment to change. The stereotypes themselves don’t create sisterhood; they create suspicion, antagonism and competitiveness. It is the discovery of the stereotypes as oppressive, together with the growth of commitment to changing them, that can create solidarity and sisterhood.

  Julie Maddox

  Carlingford, NSW

  TAKING POSITIONS

  In selecting the marxist pieces, I’ve tried to give the flavour of these very productive groups. I have chosen not to try to explore the differences which exist among the marxists but I have tried to present their current influences and their concerns. They have developed a characteristic language, often involving immense compression of past thinking into single words. This causes outsiders trouble in comprehending marxist theoretical writing (which is not really meant for outsiders, anyhow). Much of the writing is dressed in a combativeness intended to demonstrate the writer’s revolutionary credentials to his fellow marxists. There is also a moral fastidiousness which comes from the feeling that many socialists have that they live in a tainted society, that there are few activities within the society worthy of appreciation. Much of the analysis then becomes elaborate moral exercises in discrediting the motivation and nature of activities and discrediting other analyses. This can close them down to experience and interfere with perception.

  But the seventies showed that the marxists often ask the right questions, even if they give unsatisfactory answers. There is also a provincially over-excited response to foreign thinking from whatever country or person happens to be fashionable. This affects political theorists and activists across the political spectrum.

  Three valuable books which came from the left were, for me, Tim Rowse’s Australian Liberalism and the National Character, Michael Sexton’s Illusions of Power, and John Docker’s Australian Cultural Elites.

  The marxists are about the only theoretically productive political groups in Australia. They are also aware, from time to time, of their problems. To quote from the journal Arena: ‘we need to get away from mandarin socialism, jargon theoreticism, and marxology’. It is a beautiful example of language being precisely what it describes.

  For many decades now the left has set itself the aim of ‘isolating the problems, finding the correct methodology, escaping from incorrect categories and then giving a comprehensive account’. It has also concerned itself with then ‘getting an equally informed, evenly raised consciousness and agreement among the intellectuals and transferring this consciousness and critique and data to other classes’.

  The left sustains four important theoretical journals: Arena, Australian Left Review, Intervention, and Australian Independent, together with newspapers and newsletters.

  The quotations from editorials of Intervention that follow show some of the dilemmas of the marxists, their concerns, and at the same time the disappointments which face all serious magazine editors.

  Towards an Australian Marxist Intelligentsia

  (from the editorials of Intervention, 1972–5)

  ‘Intervention’: the first issue, 1972

  The revolutionary left has never been very strong in Australia. While particular historical circumstances have imposed practical limitations, a continual and profound source of weakness has been the absence of revolutionary theory.

  Australia has been a capitalist economic formation from the outset of its colonisation, yet it generated an industrial proletariat relatively late in its development. The first avowedly marxist party did not emerge until 1920. Its creators had read little Marx (and no Lenin until 1926!), and their communism amounted to little more than an enthusiasm for the victory of the bolsheviks. This theoretical immaturity was revealed, and at the same time reinforced, by the subsequent subjugation of the Australian left to Stalinist theory, and political practice fixed the Communist Party of Australia in a barren orthodoxy which was incompatible with any viable revolutionary theory. The disintegration of this orthodoxy in the 1950s and 1960s led to the fragmentation of the CPA as its members sought in var
ious ways either to dispel the nightmares of its past or to recapture the unequivocal certainties of those bygone days.

  The 1960s also saw the rise of a new left, characterised in its initial stages by the double rejection of both ‘advanced industrial society’ and official marxism. The single most important factor in the growth of this new left was America’s and then Australia’s increasing involvement in a war of aggression in Vietnam. The inadequacy of a merely moral objection to this war and the realisation that the American and Australian policies were not isolated and aberrant propelled many in the direction of the marxist critique of imperialism and capitalism. Yet the discovery of marxism was made in diverse and contradictory ways.

  One serious obstacle to this discovery was the absence of any viable intellectual tradition in Australia and the absence of a marxist intelligentsia. The handful of intellectuals who aligned themselves with marxism had in general failed to link their political standpoint with their theoretical endeavours. The abstract nature of their efforts was never overcome. The few who appreciated the political necessity of a unified theoretical practice had found it impossible to sustain their attempt in the face of hostility from the communist leadership and harassment by the bourgeoisie. Thus when the new left turned to marxism it faced the old left intellectuals across an enormous gap, for the theoretical tools available to these intellectuals were found to be inadequate to present reality. But in spite of this breakthrough, the new left has not yet fulfilled its potential. Progress has been impeded by hasty and attenuated assimilation of various overseas theories, notably trotskyism and maoism; and there has been a similar process of uncritical absorption of theoretical influences such as the Marcusian stream in the American new left. Consequently, the new left in Australia has fragmented into its present condition of increasingly isolated and all too often dogmatic sects.

  With this history it is not surprising that the Australian revolutionary left has still not developed a knowledge of the workings of Australian capitalism and its distinctive characteristics. Indeed, most of the left do not appear to recognise that this is a crucial task. Perhaps characteristically, it took an overseas marxist to force the problem to our attention. James O’Connor wrote in Arena 24:

  There appears to be a problem of ‘locating’ Australia in the hierarchy of the world capitalist system. Australia certainly is not underdeveloped in the sense that India, Brazil and Nigeria are underdeveloped. It is certainly not developed in the sense that the United States and EEC are developed. In short, the categories bequeathed to us by Paul Baran in his classic study, The Political Economy of Growth, do not seem to be much help. There is no room in the current marxist world-view for countries such as Australia, which on the one hand have high per capita incomes and on the other do not have an integrated industrial base. I conclude that we will have to modify the categories, fortunately not without help from others.

  While we have reservations about aspects of this statement, we do believe that O’Connor has pointed to an important problem – the exceptional character of Australian capitalism – and the immediate task of this journal is to explore and define these exceptional characteristics. Further, we believe that the marxist framework is indispensable to the achievement of this task. A successful socialist strategy implies a mastery of the events of today and the anticipation of those of tomorrow. A valid interpretation of events necessitates a correct theory, for without theory revolutionary practice can be little more than pragmatic adjustment to events. To be dominated by events means to compromise with them – the beginning of the slippery slope to opportunism. The conscious avoidance of compromise through a blind rush into activism only begets the same result, for here a lack of theory means a lack of realistic assessment of the resources at one’s disposal and that of the adversary. Such consequences of the disregard for theory have dogged the history of the left in Australia. This editorial committee stands by the proposition that an understanding of social reality, of capitalist society, is a necessary condition for a successful socialist strategy.

  Such claims are not novel. They have been emphasised time and again by the great revolutionaries such as Lenin and Gramsci. But as we have indicated, the insights they provided were not taken up and practised in Australia. Hence the question must be posed: why are we able to take these insights and why do we see it as important to launch the journal now? The answer to these questions involves a consideration of marxist political and theoretical history over the past fifty years.

  The isolation of the Russian revolution and the ascendance of Stalin ultimately brought about the transformation of the theories of Lenin and Marx into ideologies, that is, into distorted visions of reality. In Italy the fascist judge’s pronouncement on Gramsci – ‘We must stop this brain from functioning for twenty years’ – abruptly ended his theoretical and political influence. With the Comintern dominated by dogmatism, the marxist theoretical debate was silenced in the international communist parties and only a few figures like Korsch and the members of the Frankfurt school kept alive the best in socialist thought. Through their philosophical sophistication these representatives of western marxism formed a viable opposition to the crudities of stalinism. But paradoxically, the death of Stalin, which thawed the bolshevik orthodoxy, also revealed the weakness of its opposition. For at this point, western marxism found itself literally in mid-air. Having assumed a revolutionary proletariat as an epistemological basis, the seeming quiescence of the working class during the fifties left such a marxism stranded in a philosophical vacuum, searching for a ‘new revolutionary subject’ and asserting a purely negative critique of capitalism. The embattled marxists who had been faced by the crude stalinist distinction, ‘bourgeois science, proletarian science’, had introduced and emphasised the young Marx and presented marxism as a humanism. Such an interpretation was naturally attractive to a number of communist intellectuals who rejected stalinism. This diluted form of marxism, ‘lived as a liberation from dogmatism’, was taken up by the revisionist wings of western European communist parties and itself transformed into orthodoxy. A response to the populism and eclecticism inherent in this newly legitimate but equally inadequate marxism became inevitable.

  The past decade witnessed a resurgence of marxism. Internationally it has been spanned by the revolutions in Cuba and Vietnam, the magnificent explosion of student militancy and increasing working-class revolt, plus the revival of notions of workers’ control, soviets and the struggle for the liberation of women. (If we wish to trace this development through bourgeois theory, it could be characterised as the shift from the optimism of the pluralistic and consensus theories of the 1950s, which pronounced the end of ideology and celebrated the stability of capitalism, to the cynical technocratic and elitist theories elaborated in the 1960s.) This wave of revolutionary political activity spawned numerous periodicals and journals concerned with discovering marxism and thereby re-animating the marxist theoretical debate. Both as a consequence of this activity and critical for its development, at least in the English-speaking world, has been the translation over the last decade of all the crucial marxist theoretical texts (to name only two: Lukacs’ History and Class Consciousness and Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks). The stage is set for solid theoretical struggle and for the production of correct knowledge, as the plea of ignorance of texts can no longer be sustained. The political developments of the last decade have also established the conditions for re-opening and elaborating leninism and for revivifying the debate around marxism as a science, a debate which has been raised quite outside of the sterile stalinist opposition of ‘bourgeois science, proletarian science’. It is here that we would emphasise the importance of Louis Althusser.

  Our statement that the stage is set for the development of a closer understanding of capitalist theory makes full recognition of the problems this raises and of the work it demands. A successful socialist theory implies some minimum criteria: the understanding of reality must be objectively true for the theory must provide s
cientific knowledge of society. Such knowledge is not pure or contemplative but is always guided by the criterion of political intervention. As such it is a revolutionary praxis that attempts to effect the theoretically derived alternatives inherent in society. Furthermore, a successful intervention entails change not only in the structures and institutions of society but also in the social relations, practices and beliefs that sustain them. In short, such intervention implies knowledge of the totality of the social situation.

  ‘Intervention’: the fifth issue, 1975

  The reader may have already noticed that Intervention is appearing with a new subtitle: ‘An Australian Journal of Marxist Analysis’. The reason for this is that our original aims in setting the journal up have not been fulfilled. As we explained in the editorial to the first issue, we intended the journal to be devoted to a specific task: that of analysing the history and structure of Australian capitalism, a task that would produce knowledge of practical, strategic use for the socialist movement in Australia. However, it seems that the marxist left is too small, too fragmented and too isolated for a journal to be sustained on such a basis alone. We are, therefore, choosing to widen the scope of the journal. While we would still prefer articles on the history and current development of Australian capitalism in Australia, we shall no longer attempt to make this the focal point of each issue. Articles on broader issues, on philosophy, social theory, aesthetics and the history of countries other than Australia shall be welcome.

  Of course, we shall continue to adhere to the general theoretical direction that inspired the journal. We see Intervention as being specifically marxist in orientation. But we view marxism as a scientific theory rather than a dogma; not a set of eternal truths above and beyond criticism, but a theory subject to normal criteria of logical consistency and empirical testing, the strength of which lies in the explanatory power of the basic concepts of historical materialism.