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FEMINIST THEORY AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF REVOLUTIONARY STRATEGY

Nancy Hartsock

A number of writers have detailed problems of the left in America. They have pointed out that it has remained out of touch with large numbers of people, and that it has been unable to build a unified organization, or even to promote a climate in which to debate socialist issues. The left has been criticized for having a prefabricated theory made up of nineteenth-century leftovers, a strategy built on scorn for innovation in politics or for expanding political issues. Too often leftist groups have held that the working class was incapable of working out its own future and that those who would lead the working class to freedom would be those who had memorized the sacred texts and were equipped with an all-inclusive theory that would help them organize the world.

While such a list of criticisms presents a caricature of the left as a whole, it points to a number of real problems,¹ and overcoming them will require a reorientation. Here I can only deal with one aspect of the task: the role of feminist theory and the political practice of the women’s movement as a model for the rest of the left.

I want to suggest that the women’s movement can provide the basis for building a new and authentic American socialism. It can provide a model for ways to build revolutionary strategy and ways to develop revolutionary theories which articulate with the realities of advanced capitalism. Developing such a model requires a redefinition of theory in general in the light of a specific examination of the nature of feminist theory and practice, a reanalysis of such fundamental questions as the nature of class, and a working out of the implications of feminist theory for the kinds of organizations we need to build.

Theory and Feminist Theory

Theory is fundamental to any revolutionary movement. Our theory gives us a description of the problems we face, provides an analysis of the forces which maintain social life, defines the problems we should concentrate on, and acts as a set of criteria for evaluating the strategies we develop.² Theory has an even broader role, however. As Antonio Gramsci has pointed out, “One can construct, on a specific practice, a theory which, by coinciding and identifying itself with the decisive elements of the practice itself, can accelerate the historical process that is going on, rendering practice more homogeneous, more coherent, more efficient in all its elements, and thus, in other words, developing its potential to the maximum.”³ Thus, theory itself can be a force for change.

At the same time, however, Gramsci proposes that we expand our understanding of theory in a different direction. We must understand that theorizing is not just something done by academic intellectuals but that a theory is always implicit in our activity and goes so deep as to include our very understanding of reality. Not only is theory implicit in our conception of the world, but our conception of the world is itself a political choice.⁴ That is, we can either accept the categories given to us by capitalist society or we can begin to develop a critical understanding of our world. If we choose the first alternative, our theory may remain forever implicit. In contrast, to choose the second is to commit ourselves to working out a critical and explicit theory. The political action of feminists over most of the last decade provides a basis for articulating the theory implicit in our practice.⁵ Making the theory explicit is difficult but necessary to improve the work feminists are doing.

The Nature of Feminist Theory

Women who call themselves feminists disagree on many things. To talk in such unitary terms about a social movement so diverse in its aims and goals may seem at first to be a mistake. There is a women’s movement which appears on television, has national organizations, and is easy for the media to reach and present as representative of feminist thought. But there is a second movement, one harder to find, that is made up of small groups and local organizations whose members work on specific local projects, a movement which came together around the immediate needs of women in a variety of cities, a movement whose energies have gone directly into work for change. It is these groups that form the basis for my discussion of feminist theory. These groups were concerned with practical action—rape crisis centers, women’s centers, building women’s communities, etc. In coming together as feminists to confront the problems which dominate their lives, women have built a movement profoundly based on practice. Indeed, one of the major tasks for the women’s movement is precisely the creation of revolutionary theory out of an examination of our practice.⁶

All these groups share a world view that differs from that of most socialist movements in advanced capitalist countries, and that is at the same time surprisingly close to Marx’s world view. It is this mode of analysis, with its own conception of social theory as well as the concrete theories we are developing out of it, that are the sources of feminism’s power and the reason I can argue that through our practice, feminists have become the most orthodox of Marxists. As Lukacs argued, orthodoxy in Marxist theory refers exclusively to method.⁷

At bottom, feminism is a mode of analysis, a method of approaching life and politics, a way of asking questions and searching for answers, rather than a set of political conclusions about the oppression of women. Women are applying that method to their own experiences as women in order to transform the social relations which define their existence. Feminists deal directly with their own daily lives—something which accounts for the rapid spread of this movement. Others have argued that socialist feminism must be recognized as a definite tendency within Marxism generally; in contrast, I am suggesting that because feminists have reinvented Marx’s method, the women’s movement can provide a model for the rest of the left in developing theory and strategy.⁸

The practice of small-group consciousness-raising—with its stress on examining and understanding experience and on connecting personal experience to the structures which define women’s lives—is the clearest example of the method basic to feminism. Through this practice women have learned that it was important to build their analysis from the ground up, beginning with their own experiences. They examined their lives not only as thinkers but, as Marx would have suggested, with all their senses.⁹ Women drew connections between their personal experiences and political generalities about the oppression of women; indeed they used their personal experience to develop those generalities. We came to understand our experience, our past, in a way that transformed both our experience and ourselves.¹⁰

The power of the method feminists developed grows out of the fact that it enables women to connect their everyday lives with an analysis of the social institutions which shape them. The institutions of capitalism (including its imperialist aspect), patriarchy, and white supremacy cease to be abstractions; they become lived, real aspects of daily experience and activity. We see the concrete interrelations among them.

All this means that within the feminist movement, an important role for theory has been reemphasized—one in which theorists work out and make “coherent the principles and the problems raised by the masses in their practical activity.”¹¹ Feminism as a mode of analysis, especially when consciousness-raising is understood as basic to that method, requires a redefinition of the concept of intellectual or theorizer, a recasting of this social role in terms of everyday life.

Because each of us is a potential theorist, intellectual, and activist, education comes to have a very different role in the women’s movement than it does in the rest of the left today. The kind of political education feminists are doing for themselves differs fundamentally from what I would call instruction, from being taught the “correct political line.” Education—as opposed to instruction—is organically connected to everyday life.¹² It both grows out of and contributes to our understanding of it.

Personal and Political Change

“If what we change does not change us/we are playing with blocks.”¹³

Feminist emphasis on everyday life leads to a second area of focus: the integration of personal and political change. Since we come to know the world (to change it and be changed by it) through our everyday activity, everyday life must be the basis for our political work. Even the deepest philosophical questions grow out of our need to understand our own lives.¹⁴ Such a focus means that reality for us consists of “sensuous human activity, practice.”¹⁵ We recognize that we produce our existence in response to specific problems posed for us by reality. By working out the links between the personal and the political, and by working out the links between daily life and social institutions, we have begun to understand existence as a social process, the product of human activity. Moreover, the realization that we not only create our social world but can change it leads to a sense of our own power and provides energy for action.

Feminism as a method makes us recognize that human activity also changes us. A fundamental redefinition of the self is an integral part of action for political change.¹⁶

If our selves are social phenomena and take their meaning from the society of which we are a part, developing an independent sense of self necessarily calls other areas of our lives into question. We must ask how our relationships with other people can foster self-definition rather than dependence and can accommodate our new strengths. That is, if our individuality is the ensemble of our social relations, “to create one’s personality means to acquire consciousness of them and to modify one’s own personality means to modify the ensemble of these relations.”¹⁷ Clearly, since we do not act to produce and reproduce our lives in a vacuum, changed consciousness and changed definitions of the self can only occur in conjunction with a restructuring of the social (both societal and personal) relations in which each of us is involved.

Thus, feminism leads us to oppose the institutions of capitalism and white supremacy as well as patriarchy. By calling attention to the specific experiences of individuals, feminism calls attention to the totality of social relations, to the social formation as a whole.¹⁸ A feminist mode of analysis makes it clear that patriarchy, capitalism, white supremacy, forms of social interaction, language—all exist for us as historic givens. Our daily lives are the materialization at a personal level of the features of the social formation as a whole. The historical structures that mold our lives pose questions we must respond to and define the immediate possibilities for change.¹⁹

Although we recognize that human activity is the structure of the social world, this structure is imposed not by individuals but by masses of people, building on the work of those who came before. Social life at any point in time depends on a complex of factors, on needs already developed as well as on embryonic needs—needs whose production, shaping, and satisfaction is a historical process. Developing new selves, then, requires that we recognize the importance of large-scale forces for change as well as that the people we are trying to become—fully developed individuals—can only be the products of history and struggle.²⁰

This history and struggle necessitates the creation of a new collectivity closely linked to the creation of new individuals, a collectivity which fundamentally opposes the capitalist concept of the individual. The creation of this new collectivity

presupposes the attainment of a “cultural-social” unity through which a multiplicity of dispersed wills, with heterogeneous aims, are welded together with a single aim, on the basis of an equal and common conception of the world, both general and particular, operating in transitory bursts (in emotional ways) or permanently (where the intellectual base is so well rooted, assimilated, and experienced that it becomes passion).²¹

Clearly, we can only transform ourselves by struggling to transform the social relations which define us: changing selves and changed social institutions are simply two aspects of the same process. Each aspect necessitates the other. To change oneself—if individuality is the social relations we are involved in—is to change social institutions. Feminist practice reunites aspects of life separated by capitalism and does so in a way which assimilates the intellectual aspect to passion. As Marx said: “The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.”²² This process of self-changing and growing in a changed world leads us to a sense that our lives are part of a number of larger processes and that all the aspects of our lives must be connected.

The Importance of Totality

By beginning with everyday life and experience, feminism has been able to develop a politics which incorporates an understanding of process and of the importance of appropriating our past as an essential element of political action.²³ We find that we constantly confront new situations in which we act out of our changed awareness of the world and ourselves and in consequence experience the changed reactions of others. What some socialists have seen as static, feminists grasp as structures of relations in process—a reality constantly in the process of becoming something else. Feminist reasoning “regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence.”²⁴ This mode of understanding allows us to see the many ways processes are related and provides a way to understand a world in which events take their significance from the set of relationships which come to a focus in them. Thus, we are led to see that each of the interlocking institutions of capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy conditions the others, but each can also be understood as a different expression of the same relations.²⁵

Since each phenomenon changes form constantly as the social relations of which it is composed take on different meanings and forms, the possibility of understanding processes as they change depends on our grasp of their role in the social whole.²⁶ For example, in order to understand the increased amount of wage work by women in the United States we need to understand the relation of their work to the needs of capitalism. But we must also look at the conditions of work and the kind of work prescribed for women by patriarchy and white supremacy as different aspects of the same social system. As feminists, we begin from a position which understands that possibilities for change in any area are tied to change occurring in other areas.

Both capitalism and socialism are more than economic systems. Capitalism does not simply reproduce the physical existence of individuals. “Rather it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part … [and this coincides with] both what they produce and how they produce.”²⁷ A mode of life is not divisible. It does not consist of a public part and a private part, a part at the workplace and a part in the community—each of which makes up a certain fraction, and all of which add up to 100 percent. A mode of life, and all the aspects of that mode of life, take meaning from the totality of which they form a part.

In part because of shifts in the boundaries between the economic and the political and because of the increasing interconnections between the state apparatus and the economy (through means as varied as public education and government regulation of industry), it becomes even more necessary to emphasize that one can only understand and penetrate, and transform reality as a totality, and that “only a subject which is itself a totality is capable of this penetration.” Only a collective individual, a united group of people “can actively penetrate the reality of society and transform it in its entirety.”²⁸

Feminism and Revolution

If all that I have said about feminism as a method rooted in dealing with everyday life holds true, what is it that makes this mode of analysis a force for revolution? There are three factors of particular importance: (1) The focus on everyday life and experience makes action a necessity, not a moral choice or an option. We are not fighting other people’s battles but our own. (2) The nature of our understanding of theory is altered and theory is brought into an integral and everyday relation with practice. (3) Theory leads directly to a transformation of social relations both in consciousness and in reality because of its close connection to real needs.

First, how does a feminist mode of analysis make revolution necessary? The feminist method of taking up and analyzing experience is a way of appropriating reality. Experience is incorporated in such a way that our life experiences become a part of our humanness. By appropriating our experience and incorporating it into ourselves, we transform what might have been a politics of idealism into a politics of necessity. By appropriating our collective experience, we are creating people who recognize that we cannot be ourselves in a society based on hierarchy, domination, and private property. We are acquiring a consciousness which forces us, as Marx put it, “by an ineluctable, irremediable and imperious distress—by practical necessity—to revolt against this inhumanity.”²⁹ Incorporating, or making part of ourselves, what we learn is essential to the method of feminism.

Second, I argued that a feminist mode of analysis leads to an integration of theory and practice. For feminists, theory is the articulation of what our practical activity has already appropriated in reality. As Marx argued, as struggle develops, theorists “no longer need to seek science in their minds; they have only to take note of what is happening before their eyes and to become its mouthpiece.”³⁰ If we look more closely at the subject about which Marx was writing on this occasion—the British working class—we find that by the time Marx wrote these words that group had already developed theory out of its practice to a considerable degree. A variety of trends had emerged, and ideas about organization and politics had been diffused over a wide area. Isolation from experienced national leadership, and the overimportance of personalities created problems, but the facility with which English working-class people formed associations is impressive. They used a variety of forms taken over from Methodism, friendly societies, trade unions, etc. By the time Marx wrote, it was clear that most people understood that power came from organization.³¹

In looking at history, one is especially struck with the number of false starts, the hesitancy, the backtracking that went into making what we would today recognize as class consciousness. Forming theory out of practice does not come quickly or easily, and it is rarely clear what direction the theory will finally take.

Feminists, in making theory, take up and examine what we find within ourselves; we attempt to clarify for ourselves and others what we already, at some level, know. Theory itself, then, can be seen as a way of taking up and building on our experience. This is not to say that feminists reject all knowledge that is not firsthand, that we can learn nothing from books or from history. But rather than read a number of sacred texts we make the practical questions posed for us in everyday life the basis of our study. Feminism recognizes that political philosophy and political action do not take place in separate realms. On the contrary, the concepts with which we understand the social world emerge from and are defined by human activity.

For feminists, the unity of theory and practice refers to the use of theory to make coherent the problems and principles expressed in our practical activity. Feminists argue that the role of theory is to take seriously the idea that all of us are theorists. The role of theory, then, is to articulate for us what we know from our practical activity, to bring out and make conscious the philosophy embedded in our lives. Feminists are in fact creating social theory through political action. We need to conceptualize, to take up and specify what we have already done, in order to make the next steps clear. We can start from common sense, but we need to move on to the philosophy systematically elaborated by traditional intellectuals.³²

A third factor in making feminism a force for revolution is that the mode of analysis I have described leads to a transformation of social relations. This is true first in a logical sense. That is, once social relations are situated within the context of the social formation as a whole, the individual phenomena change their meanings and forms. They become something other than they were. For example, what liberal theory understands as social stratification becomes clearer when understood as class. But this is not simply a logical point. As Lukacs has pointed out, the transformation of each phenomenon through relating it to the social totality ends by conferring “reality on the day to day struggle by manifesting its relation to the whole. Thus it elevates mere existence to reality.”³³ This development in mass political consciousness, the transformation of the phenomena of life, is on the one hand a profoundly political act and on the other, a “point of transition.”³⁴ Consciousness must become deed, but the act of becoming conscious is itself a kind of deed.

If we grant that the women’s movement has reinvented Marx’s method and for that reason can be a force for revolution, we need to ask in what specific sense the women’s movement can be a model for the rest of the left. At the beginning I outlined a number of criticisms of the left, all rooted in the fact that it has lost touch with everyday life. The contrast I want to draw is one between what Gramsci recognized as “real action,” action “which modifies in an essential way both man and external reality,” and “gladiatorial futility, which is self-declared action but modifies only the word, not things, the external gesture and not the [person] inside.”³⁵

At the beginning of this paper I suggested that education took on a new significance for the women’s movement because of the role of personal, everyday experience in constructing theory and transforming reality. Feminists are aware that we face the task of building a collective will, a new common sense, and this requires that we must participate in a process of education in two senses. We must, first, never tire of repeating our own arguments and, second, work to raise the general intellectual level, the consciousness of larger numbers of people in order to produce a new and different understanding of everyday life.³⁶ The women’s movement is working at both these tasks—the first by insisting that every woman can reconstruct the more general feminist arguments on her own, the second by turning to the writings of more traditional intellectuals for whatever guidance we may find there.

Marx applied his method systematically to the study of capital. Feminists have not yet really begun systematic study based on the mode of analysis we have developed. Here I can only mention some of the questions which are currently being debated in the women’s movement—issues on which there is not yet a consensus but whose theoretical resolution is inseparable from practical, daily, work for change.

Issues for Feminist Theory

The Nature of Class

Marxists have devoted a great deal of attention to the nature of class.³⁷ Most Marxist theorists agree that there are problems with traditional definitions of class. If to be working class means to have nothing to sell but labor power, then the vast majority of the American population falls within this definition. If to be working class means to contribute directly to the production of surplus value, then far fewer of us fall into that category. A number of modifications of these traditional ideas have been presented. Some writers have argued that there is a “new” working class, that what is important now is the possibility for alliances with sectors of the “new petty bourgeoisie,” that knowledge and its possession (science) have become productive forces, or that the working out of the division of mental from manual labor with its attendant ritualization of knowledge is critical to the working out of class boundaries.³⁸ In this maze of theories about the nature of class under advanced capitalism, a feminist mode of analysis can provide important insights into the nature of class as it structures the concrete existence of groups and individuals.

Because feminists begin from our own experience in a specific advanced capitalist society, we recognize that the lived realities of different segments of society are varied. While it is true that most people have only their labor power to sell (for wages or not), there are real differences in power, privilege, ability to control our lives, and even chances for survival. By focusing on people’s daily lives we are learning that our class is not defined by our relationship to the mode of production in the simple sense that if we sell our labor power (for a day or a lifetime) or are part of the family of someone (presumably male) who does, we are working class. Being working class is a way of living life, a mode of life not exclusively defined by the simple fact that we have only our labor power to sell.

Class distinctions in capitalist society are part of a totality, a mode of life which is structured as well by the traditions of patriarchy and white supremacy. Class distinctions in the United States affect the everyday lives of women and men, white and black and Third World people in different ways. A feminist mode of analysis leads us to ask questions which recognize that we already know a great deal about class (in fact, in our daily activity we act on what we know), but need to appropriate what we know to make it into explicit theory.

One’s social class is defined by one’s place “in the ensemble of social practices, i.e., by [one’s] place in the social division of labor as a whole,” and for that reason must include political and ideological relations. “Social class, in this sense, is a concept which denotes the effects of the structure within the social division of labor (social relations and social practices).”³⁹ Feminists writing about class have focused on the structures produced by the interaction of political, ideological, and more strictly economic relations, and have done so from the standpoint of everyday life and activity.

Some of the best descriptions of class and its importance in the women’s movement were produced by the Furies, a lesbian/feminist separatist group in Washington, D.C. When the Furies began, many members of the collective knew very little about the nature of class. But the collective included a number of lower- and working-class women who were concerned about ways middle-class women oppressed them. As one middle-class woman wrote:

Our assumptions, for example, about how to run a meeting were different from theirs, but we assumed ours were correct because they were easiest for us—given our college educations, our ability to use words, our ability to abstract, our inability to make quick decisions, the difficulty we had with direct confrontations…. I learned [that] class oppression was … a part of my life which I could see and change. And, having seen the manifestations of class in myself, I better understood how class operated generally to divide people and keep them down.⁴⁰

In the context of working for change, it became clear that

refusal to deal with class behavior in a lesbian/feminist movement is sheer self-indulgence and leads to the downfall of our own struggle. Middle class women should look first at that scale of worth that is the class system in America. They should examine where they fit on that scale, how it affected them, and what they thought of the people below and above them…. Start thinking politically about the class system and all the power systems in this country.⁴¹

What specifically did the Furies learn when they looked at the way class functioned in daily life? First, they learned the sense in which we have all, no matter what our class background, taken for granted that the “middle class way is the right way.” Class arrogance is expressed in looking down on the “less articulate,” or regarding with “scorn or pity … those whose emotions are not repressed or who can’t rap out abstract theories in thirty seconds flat.” Class supremacy, the Furies found, is also apparent in a kind of passivity often assumed by middle- and especially upper-middle-class women for whom things have come easily. People who are “pushy, dogmatic, hostile, or intolerant” are looked down on. Advocating downward mobility and putting down those who are not as “revolutionary” is another form of middle-class arrogance. What is critical about all of this is that “middle class women set the standards of what is good (and even the proper style of downward mobility which often takes money to achieve) and act ‘more revolutionary than thou’ towards those who are concerned about money and the future.” Middle-class women retain control over approval. The small, indirect, and dishonest ways of behaving in polite society are also ways of maintaining “the supremacy of the middle class and perpetuating the feelings of inadequacy of the working class.”⁴²

These accounts of barriers created by class differences within the women’s movement lead us toward an understanding of several important points about the nature of class. They lead us to see first that class is a complex of relations, one in which knowledge or know-how is at a premium, and second, at a deeper level, that what is involved in the daily reality of class oppression is the concrete working out of the division between mental and manual labor. Class, especially as it affects the lives of women, is a complex of a number of factors in which political and ideological aspects as well as strictly economic factors play an important role. Theorists have focused too closely on the domination of men by production pure and simple. Looking at the role of class in women’s lives highlights the importance of other factors as well, such as the role of family and patriarchal traditions. For both women and men class defines the way we see the world and our place in it, how we were educated and where, and how we act—whether with assurance or uncertainty.⁴³ The process of production must be seen to include the reproduction of political and ideological relations of domination and subordination. It is these factors that lead to the feelings described as “being out of control,” “feeling like you don’t know what to do,” and feeling that you are incompetent to judge your own performance.⁴⁴

At bottom, people are describing the way it feels to be on the “wrong” side of the division between mental and manual labor. Indeed, the division between mental and manual labor is precisely the concentrated form of class divisions in capitalism.⁴⁵ It is critical to recognize that mental labor is the exercise of “political relations legitimized by and articulated to, the monopolization and secrecy of knowledge, i.e. the reproduction of the ideological relations of domination and subordination.”⁴⁶ Mental labor involves a series of rituals and symbols. And it is always the case that the dominated group either does not know or cannot know the things that are important.⁴⁷

By calling attention to life rather than theory, the women’s movement has called attention to cultural domination as a whole—has begun a political analysis that does not take place in isolation from practical activity. By noticing the real differences among women in terms of class—confidence, verbal ability, ease about money, sense of group identity—we are developing new questions about class. While we have barely begun the task of reconstructing the category of class, we are learning that it is important to pay attention to the mechanisms of domination as a whole. By looking at class as a feature of life and struggle, the women’s movement has established some of the terms any revolutionary movement must use: Until we confront class as a part of everyday life, until we begin to analyze what we already know about class, we will never be able to build a united and large-scale movement for revolution. In this task, we need to recognize the decisive role of the division between mental and manual labor in all its complexity for the formation of the whole mode of life that is capitalism.

Organizations and Strategies

Feminism, while it does not prescribe an organizational form, leads to a set of questions about organizational priorities. First, a feminist mode of analysis suggests that we need organizations which include the appropriation of experience as a part of the work of the organization itself. We need to systematically analyze what we learn as we work in organizations. While the analysis of our experience in small groups was valuable, we need to develop ways to appropriate our organizational experience and to use it to transform our conception of organization itself. Some feminist organizations are beginning to do this—to raise questions about the process of meetings or about the way work is done and should be done.⁴⁸

Because so many of us reacted to our experience in the organizations of the rest of the left by refusing to build any organizational structures at all, we have only begun to think about the way we should work in organizations with some structure. We need to build the possiblities for change and growth into our organizations rather than rely on small groups. This means that we need to systematically teach and respect different skills and allow our organizations to change and grow in new directions. We need to use our organizations as places where we begin to redefine social relations and to create new ways of working which do not follow the patterns of domination and hierarchy set by the mode of production as a whole.

A feminist mode of analysis has implications for strategy as well. We can begin to make coalitions with other groups who share our approach to politics. We cannot work, however, with people who refuse to face questions in terms of everyday life or with people who will not use their own experience as a fundamental basis for knowledge. We cannot work with those who treat theory as a set of conclusions to be pasted onto reality and who, out of their own moral commitment, make a revolution for the benefit of their inferiors. A feminist mode of analysis suggests that we must work on issues which have real impact on daily life. These issues are varied—housing, public transportation, food prices, etc. The only condition for coalition with other groups is that those groups share our method. So long as those we work with are working for change out of necessity, because they, like us, have no alternative, there is a real basis for common action.

As we work on particular issues, we must continually ask how we can use these issues to build our collective strength. The mode of analysis developed by the women’s movement suggests several criteria with which to evaluate particular strategies. First, we must ask how our work will educate ourselves and others politically, how it will help us to see the connections between social institutions. Second, we must ask how a particular strategy materially affects our daily lives. This involves asking: How does it improve our conditions of existence? How will it affect our sense of ourselves and our own power to change the world? How will a particular strategy politicize people, make people aware of problems beyond individual ones?⁴⁹ Third, we must ask how our strategies work to build organizations—to build a collective individual which will increase our power to transform social relations as a whole. Fourth, we must ask how our strategies weaken the institutions which control our lives—patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism. Our strategies must work not simply to weaken each of these institutions separately but must attack them on the basis of an understanding of the totality of which they form parts.

In all this, however, we must remember that there is no “ready made, pre-established, detailed set of tactics which a central committee can teach its … membership as if they were army recruits.”⁵⁰ In general, the tactics of a mass party cannot be invented. They are “the product of a progressive series of great creative acts in the often rudimentary experiments of the class struggle. Here too, the unconscious comes before the conscious….”⁵¹

Most important, a feminist mode of analysis makes us recognize that the struggle itself must be seen as a process with all its internal difficulties. We must avoid, on the one hand, developing a narrow sectarian outlook, and, on the other, abandoning our goal of revolution. We must continue to base our work on the necessity for change in our own lives. Our political theorizing can only grow out of appropriating the practical political work we have done. While the answers to our questions come only slowly and with difficulty, we must remember that we are involved in a continuous process of learning what kind of world we want to create as we work for change.

Notes

1. See, for example, Sylvia Wallace, “The Movement Is Out of Relations with the Working Class,” unpublished paper, 1974; Charlotte Bunch, “Beyond Either/Or: Feminist Options,” Quest: a feminist quarterly 3, no. 1 (Summer 1976).

2. V. I. Lenin, What Is To Be Done? (New York: International Publishers, 1929), p. 28.

3. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. Quinton Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), p. 365. Gramsci adds that “the identification of theory and practice is a critical act, through which practice is demonstrated rational and necessary and theory realistic and rational.”

4. Ibid., p. 327. See also p. 244.

5. I should perhaps note here that I am speaking as a participant as well as a critical observer. The experience I use as a reference point is my own as well as that of many other women.

6. Feminists are beginning to recognize the importance for the movement of conscious theorizing—for critical analysis of what we have been doing for most of the last decade. Among the current issues and problems being reevaluated are the significance of service projects, the importance of leadership, new possibilities for developing organizational structures, and our relationship to the rest of the left.

7. George Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass: M.I.T. Press, 1971), p. 1.

8. On this point, see especially Barbara Ehrenreich, “Speech by Barbara Ehrenreich,” Socialist Revolution 5, no. 4 (October-December 1975).

9. On this point, compare Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, ed. Dirk Struik (New York: International Publishers, 1964), p. 140, and Gramsci, Selections, p. 324.

10. This is not to say there have been no problems or that beginning with personal experience always led women to think in larger terms. Some groups have remained apolitical or have never moved beyond the level of personal issues; others have become so opposed to any organizations other than personal organizations that they are immobilized. Problems about the “correct line” are also part of the current debate in the women’s movement. On current problems, see Bunch, “Feminist Options.”

11. Gramsci, Selections, p. 330.

12. Ibid., p. 43.

13. Marge Piercy, “A Shadow Play for Guilt,” in To Be of Use (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1973), p. 17.

14. Gramsci, Selections, p. 351.

15. Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, ed. C.J. Arthur (New York: International Publishers, 1970), p. 121. This method also overcomes the passivity characteristic of much of American life. See, for example, Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb, The Hidden Injuries of Class (New York: Vintage, 1973), p. 165, and Stanley Aronowitz, False Promises (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973), p. 112.

16. See Gramsci, Selections, p. 360. See also Lukacs, p. 19.

17. Ibid., p. 352.

18. See Nicos Poulantzas, Classes in Contemporary Capitalism (London: New Left Books, 1975), p. 21.

19. Marx and Engels, German Ideology, p. 59.

20. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, p. 141. See also Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1973), p. 162.

21. Gramsci, Selections, p. 349.

22. Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” p. 121. See also Gramsci, Selections, pp. 352, 360.

23. See Lukacs, History, p. 175.

24. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House, 1954), p. 20.

25. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, p. 119.

26. As Lukacs pointed out, grasping the totality means searching for interrelations. It means elevating the relations among objects to the same status as the objects themselves. (Lukacs, p. 154. See also pp. 8, 10, and 13.)

27. Marx and Engels, German Ideology, p. 114.

28. Lukacs, History, p. 39.

29. Karl Marx, Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy, trans. T. B. Bottomore (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1956), p. 232.

30. Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (New York: International Publishers, 1973), p. 125.

31. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1963), p. 668.

32. Gramsci, Selections, p. 424. See also Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” p. 122.

33. Lukacs, History, p. 22.

34. Ibid., p. 178. See also Gramsci’s contention that “for a mass of people to be led to think coherently and in the same coherent fashion about the real present world, is a ‘philosophical’ event far more important and ‘original’ than the discovery by some philosophical ‘genius’ of a truth which remains the property of small groups of intellectuals” (Selections, p. 325).

35. Ibid., pp. 225, 307.

36. Ibid., p. 340.

37. The women’s movement is debating a number of other important issues: race, lesbianism, power, etc. In this particular context, the role of class seems a useful example. I hardly need to add that what I have to say is simply a very general outline of the directions in which feminist theory can guide our analysis. For a range of approaches to the issue of class see Sennett and Cobb, Hidden Injuries of Class; Aronowitz, False Promises; Poulantzas, Classes in Contemporary Capitalism; C. Wright Mills, Power, Politics, and People (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963); T. B. Bottomore, Classes in Modern Society (New York: Vintage, 1966); or Richard Parker, The Myth of the Middle Class (New York: Liveright, 1972).

38. In addition to the above, see Alain Touraine, The Post-Industrial Society (New York: Random, 1971) and Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974), esp. part 5.

39. Poulantzas, Classes, p. 14.

40. Ginny Berson, “Only By Association,” The Furies 1, no. 5 (June-July 1972): 5–7.

41. Nancy Myron, “Class Beginnings,” The Furies 1, no. 3 (March-April 1972): 3.

42. Charlotte Bunch and Coletta Reid, “Revolution Begins at Home,” The Furies 1, no. 4 (May 1972): 2–3. See also Dolores Bargowski and Coletta Reid, “Garbage Among the Trash,” The Furies 1, no. 6 (August 1972): 8–9. Some of the essays from the Furies are collected in Class and Feminism, ed. Nancy Myron and Charlotte Bunch (Baltimore: Diana Press, 1974).

43. Clearly I disagree with Poulantzas who locates women on the mental side of the mental/manual division of labor. He admits that women tend to occupy the more manual jobs within the hierarchy of jobs on the mental labor side, but as he defines the working class (focusing almost exclusively on employment) the majority of the working class is male. To argue that women are part of the “penumbra around the working class” (p. 319) is to make the mistake Poulantzas himself argued against; it is to refuse to pay attention to political and ideological factors and even to refuse to pay attention to economic factors in any but the narrowest sense. When a woman from a working-class family takes a secretarial job this is hardly enough to make her a part of the petty bourgeoisie.

44. These statements come from Sennett and Cobb, Hidden Injuries of Class, pp. 97, 115, and 157. One of the most important effects of class is to make working-class people doubt they have a legitimate right to fight back.

45. Poulantzas, Classes, p. 233.

46. Ibid., p. 240.

47. Ibid., p. 257. Poulantzas correctly calls attention to the fact that there is no technical reason why science should assume the form of a division between mental and manual labor (p. 236). See also Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital, who documents the history of the increasing separation of the two forms of labor. The separation of mental from manual labor has particularly interesting ramifications where women are concerned, since they have been increasingly excluded from the exercise of technical functions in capitalism. An interesting example is provided by the increasing exclusion of women from the practice of medicine as medicine became a technical skill. (See Hilda Smith, “Ideology and Gynecology in Seventeenth Century England,” 1973).

48. Lukacs, History, p. 333.

49. More extensive criteria for choosing strategies are presented in Charlotte Bunch, “The Reform Tool Kit,” Quest 1, no. 1 (Summer 1974).

50. Rosa Luxemburg, “Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy,” Selected Writings of Rosa Luxemburg, ed. Dick Howard (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), p. 289.

51. Ibid., p. 293.

My thanks to C. Ellison, S. Rose, and M. Schoolman for their suggestions and encouragement, and to the Quest staff who helped me formulate these ideas. Parts of this article appeared in Quest: a feminist quarterly 2, no. 2 (1975), as a critique of the first national socialist feminist conference. In addition, parts were presented in a lecture series in socialist feminism at Ithaca College in the spring of 1977.