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- | ====== The suspended step of communisation ====== | ||
- | ===== Part I: Communisation vs socialisation ===== | ||
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- | >The ultimate point of the reciprocal implication between the classes is that in which the proletariat seizes the means of production. It seizes them, but cannot appropriate them. An appropriation carried out by the proletariat is a contradiction in terms, because it could only be achieved through its own abolition. (// | ||
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- | ==== The seizure of the elements of capital. Appropriation or communisation ==== | ||
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- | What is at stake in communisation is the overcoming of a defensive position, in which proletarians fight to maintain their conditions and therefore their reciprocal implication with capital, through a seizure of capital, not in the sense of a socialisation, | ||
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- | ==== The embroilment of communisation and socialisation ==== | ||
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- | If the action of communisation is the outlet of class struggle in the revolutionary crisis, the same act of seizure could be, as we have seen, either communisation or socialisation. Any action of this type can take one or the other form; it all depends on the dynamic and on the context, constantly in transformation. In other words: everything depends on the struggle against capital, which either deepens and extends itself or loses pace and perishes very quickly. Everything also depends on the struggle within the struggle against capital. The constitution of communism is embroiled with the constitution of one last alternative socio-economic capitalist form. Until communisation is completed there will be a permanent tendency for some entity to be constituted which strives to make the seizure of material means into a political and economic socialisation. The persistence of such a brake, able to be utilised by a capitalist counter-revolution, | ||
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- | ===== Past revolutions show us only too well: ‘the red flag can be waved against the red flag’ until the Freikorps arrive ===== | ||
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- | Capital ‘will not hesitate’ to proclaim once again that labour is the ‘only productive activity’ in order to stop the movement of its abolition and in order to reassert its control over it as soon as it can. This dimension can only be overcome by the victory of communisation, | ||
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- | ==== Communism doesn’t fight against democracy, but the counter-revolution claims to be democratic ==== | ||
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- | It is in the very name of the abolition of classes that radical democracy will do everything to maintain or restore elective structures, which it claims are necessary to prevent the formation of a new ruling stratum, one self-appointed and uncontrolled. The constitution of communism is embroiled with the constitution of a final form of socialism even if the movement that bore it, the labour movement, has definitively disappeared. | ||
- | The struggle to ‘bring to reason’ the fractions of the proletariat which are most active in the expropriation of capital will be all the more violent when it presents itself as the defence of the democratic revolution, refusing to let the minority compromise the gains of the majority. | ||
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- | ==== The defence of gains is the possibility of a counter-revolutionary phase ==== | ||
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- | Communisation will never make any gains. All the expropriations that constitute the immediate community will have their character as pure expropriations and wildcat takeovers contested. They will be proclaimed socialisations as soon as the movement decelerates, | ||
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- | ==== Extension is the movement of victory; deceleration that of counter-revolution. ==== | ||
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- | Without it being an explicit strategy, capital will struggle to recover social control in two ways. On the one hand, states will fight to re-establish their domination and restore exploitation. On the other hand, capitalist society will continue to maintain itself on the totally ambiguous bases of popular power and self-management. In formal subsumption, | ||
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- | ===== The revolution will not be won in a straight line ===== | ||
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- | Some fractions of the insurgent proletariat will be smashed, others will be ‘turned back’, rallying to measures for the conservation of survival. Other insurrections will pick up where they leave off. Certain of those turned back or bogged down will resume wildcat expropriations, | ||
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- | Proletarians who communise society will have no need of ‘frontism’. They will not seek out a common program for the victims of capital. If they engage in frontism they are dead, if they remain alone they are also dead. They must confront all the other classes of society as the sole class not able to triumph by remaining what it is. The measures of communisation are the abolition of the proletariat because, in addition to its unification in its abolition, they dissolve the basis of existence of a multitude of intermediate strata (managerial strata of capitalist production and reproduction) which are thereby absorbed into the process of communisation and millions (if not billions) of individuals that are exploited through the product of their labour and not the sale of their labour-power. At the regional level as much as at the global one, communisation will have an action that one could call ‘humanitarian’, | ||
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- | ===== Democracy and the solidarity economy will be the two big ideological constructions to defeat. ===== | ||
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- | Democracy and the solidarity economy will combine with other systems depending on the time and place. They will combine above all with the ideology of communities that could be very diverse: national, racial, religious. Probably more dangerous: the spontaneous and inevitable constitution of local communities ("we are at home here" | ||
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- | * the diversification and segmentation of the proletariat | ||
- | * the dissolution and absorption of multiple exploited strata outside of a direct subsumption of their labour under capital | ||
- | * inter-capitalist conflicts into which the proletariat is drafted, for whom these conflicts have a integrative and reproductive function. | ||
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- | All of this provides the counter-revolution with its force and its content, which are in a direct relation with the immediate, empirical necessities of communisation (its dynamic contradictions, | ||
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- | ===== There is no ideological struggle; the practical struggle is theoretical. ===== | ||
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- | One must not imagine the anti-ideological struggle as distinct from communisation itself. It is through communisation that ideologies are fought, because they are part of what the movement abolishes. The constitution of communism cannot avoid violent confrontations with the counter-revolution, | ||
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- | The embroilment of the revolution and counter-revolution implicates all organisation which the movement of class struggle takes on. Any given organisation, | ||
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- | ===== Communisation and socialisation do not form a contradiction ===== | ||
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- | The contradiction remains that between capital and the proletariat. It does not become an internal contradiction within the proletariat. Even if a total opposition between the two perspectives arises, they are embroiled with one another and both implicated in the contradiction capital–proletariat. The struggle of the proletariat against capital becomes the abolition of classes by the expropriation of capital. But this very action, in its opposition to capital, revives the affirmation of labour when it is interrupted by the capitalist class (it is there that the gains exist as we have seen). This provisional affirmation, | ||
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- | ===== The counter-revolution is constructed on the limits of the revolution ===== | ||
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- | This is what this text has tried to show a little more ‘concretely’. In the period that saw the revolutionary attempts from 1917 to 1937, the general structure of the capital-proletariat contradiction bore within it the affirmation of the class of labour and thus the construction of socialism. Now the contradiction bears within it the calling into question of class belonging and thus the general structure poses communisation. This structure doesn’t mean that limits don’t still exist, even if the direction of the movement is toward their overcoming. The limit is consubstantial with every revolutionary measure, and this limit is only overcome in the following measure. It is the class character of the movement of communisation which is its limit. This movement is the overcoming of its own limited character, since it is the abolition of classes and thus of the proletariat. The proletarian is the individual deprived of objectivity, | ||
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- | B.L., June 2009 | ||
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- | ===== Part II: Communisation vs spheres ===== | ||
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- | // | ||
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- | ‘Communisation vs Socialisation’ (the first part of ‘The Suspended Step of Communisation’) had two aims. On the one hand, it showed that seizing elements of capital might be ‘communisation’—that is, pure ‘dis-appropriation’, | ||
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- | In this process of class struggle, which leads to the abolition of classes, individuals were //ipso facto// posed as being beyond gender, since they established a community of immediately social individuals. | ||
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- | This second part of the text tries to explain this ‘ipso facto’. This overcoming perceived as naturally included ‘in the movement’—as something that goes //without saying//, due to the nature and content of the movement—should be subjected as such to critique. It is not sufficient to say that communisation, | ||
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- | The analysis of gender domination in capitalism shows that this domination is immediately identical to the division of all social activities into two spheres. | ||
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- | >The sexed character of all categories of capital signifies a //general// distinction in society between men and women. This general distinction acquires as its social content that which is the synthesis of all the sexuations of the categories: the creation of the division between public and private. This distinction is the synthesis because the CMP[capitalist mode of production] is a // | ||
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- | The revolutionary process of the production of communism will take place within and, most notably, //against// the generalised crisis of capital. The crisis of the reproduction of the relation of exploitation is, in equal measure, the inability of capital to exploit proletarians profitably and the inability of proletarians to offer sufficiently cheap labour power (sufficiently under its value) in order to valorise capital. In other words, proletarians cannot live on a prayer and, in particular, their wives cannot cook it into the reproduction of labour power! | ||
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- | Already in the present moment of the crisis (a crisis still in its beginning), there is an ‘illegitimacy of wage demands’. This means that demands for pay and/or working conditions are no longer ‘systemic’. That is, they no longer function, with capital, as a system able to combine an increase in the rate of exploitation (rate of surplus value) with an increase in real wages (a system described by capital’s proponents as the ‘sharing of productivity gains’). In the present moment, these demands are no longer adequate. In the deepening crisis of the class relation—in the moment when inter-capitalist exchanges are blocked and states are about to wage war against proletarians (and against each other, as well), in order to force the proletarians into trash-zones and thus to make possible the continuation of a savage exploitation—in this moment what is at stake is survival. The struggle against capital thereby becomes a struggle for survival itself. This will be the starting point, on a much larger scale, of what had already begun in Argentina in a limited and transitory way: the seizure of elements of capital. | ||
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- | Struggles against capital, against both its crisis and its anti-proletarian offensive, are already struggles concerning the reproduction of the lives of proletarians. Proletarians will seize those elements of capital necessary for their survival, and these seizures will be revolutionary actions against capital. Argentinian proletarians ‘recovered’ firms abandoned by their owners and got them up and running according to the well known principle: //We produce, we sell, we pay ourselves// | ||
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- | Anyway, generalised self-management is devoid of meaning. It would be overcome in the course of the struggle that self-management would necessarily have to wage against capital, as well as by the complete absence of a dynamic of accumulation internal to self-management. The latter can only represent a phase in a process leading either to communising measures (for the continuation of the struggle against capital) or to a latent or open counter-revolutionary regression. | ||
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- | In Argentina, the movements of the unemployed organised various activities: ‘production workshops’ (baking, collectively gardening, making bricks and packaging household products) whose products were destined for self-subsistence or for selling to others. These ‘workshops’, | ||
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- | Whether in a revolutionary situation or in every struggle in which they are opposed to capital, proletarian women always bring into question, practically, | ||
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- | The participation of women in wage-labour is not, as such, an incursion into the public sphere since it does not challenge the existence of that sphere. Indeed, women’s wage-labour is organised in specific forms—particular sectors, managerial hierarchies (the glass-ceiling) and wage levels. These forms, which are easily identified (and which have already been analysed by feminists—as well as by all sociologists and economists worth their salt), have been designed in order to preserve the existence of a private sphere for the reproduction of labour-power, | ||
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- | The market for women’s wage-labour makes the waged woman into //both// the form par excellence of restructured wage-labour in general (flexible, precarious) //and// a form that is, in itself, absolutely specific. The presence of women in wage-labour is thus a presence at once ‘disarmed’ and controlled—confined to a section of the public sphere that thereby becomes a sort of annex to the private sphere. It is only when the walls surrounding this annex are broken through (for example, in a strike), that working women erupt into the public sphere. | ||
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- | We could say not only that every women’s struggle is feminist, but also that every women’s struggle contains the opposition of women to their gender belonging – paradoxically, | ||
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- | Here are some extracts from an account of women’s struggles in Argentina: | ||
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- | >Women were first to blockade the roads when their companions found themselves jobless, but they were made invisible. They fought for food, for health and for dignity, as they were doing everyday in their homes. With struggle, organisation, | ||
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- | >‘To go out is a revolution’, | ||
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- | >In 2001, Viviana attended a parents’ meeting held in the space where children received after school tutoring. She liked it and began attending regularly. They discussed unemployment and various problems in the neighborhood, | ||
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- | >The first time Graciela Cortes went out, it was only a couple hundred meters from her house. She was 40 when she agreed to teach sewing to other jobless women. ‘Yes, it got me into trouble at home. In spite of the fact that I was still doing housework, still taking care of the children. I was doing everything, yet I had problems. I decided to go out. First politics was not really interesting to me, but when I began to miss the meetings, I realised politics was inside me. My husband would tell me not to go, but I explained to him: alone I won’t get anything, we need to be a multitude.’ | ||
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- | >— What good will it do to me to obey him if we eventually split? I have no regret. I did things I would never have done before. All that thanks to the sewing machine and Women’s Meetings. | ||
- | >— The Meetings? | ||
- | >— They open your mind. I changed in the Meetings. | ||
- | >— Why? | ||
- | >— You see every woman. | ||
- | > | ||
- | >For a while, Gladis Roldan was pleased to say that she was a member of the women’s subcommittee of the lead-committee of the inhabitants of the // | ||
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- | These quotes confirm that the existence of private and public spheres was practically challenged, but we must also consider occasions of very harsh opposition from certain male proletarians. | ||
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- | >There are female comrades who declare in the assembly: ‘I couldn’t come to the “// | ||
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- | The defense of the male condition is the defense of male domination. It is the defense of the existence of two separated spheres of activity, as we can perceive in the following example: | ||
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- | >– I can tell you the story of a female comrade who was involved in the movement when we were nine neighborhoods, | ||
- | >– Why? | ||
- | >– Because going out changes your life. | ||
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- | ‘Going out’ changes one’s life in the strongest sense. That women ‘go out’ into the struggle changes both its form and its content. In the relentless class struggle against the capitalist crisis, the suppression of the two spheres of activity is the condition for victory. For the abolition of classes is not a basis on which the abolition of genders could be based. One can only be accomplished with the other, and vice-versa. | ||
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- | The workers’ program never contemplated the abolition of gender, even under the form of an ultimate perspective beyond the famous period of transition—when only // | ||
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- | The defense of the existence of two spheres is the defense of the existence of economy and politics, of politics as the very condition for the economy.((The capitalist mode of production, in generalising both the market and wage-labour (which are its twin foundations) is the first mode of production to be a political economy, that is, an economy structurally separating production from domestic activity.)) The public sphere is by nature male and the participation of women in this sphere doesn’t change its nature. Vis-à-vis this political-economic sphere, the private sphere of reproduction persists even if ‘putting women back where they belong’ is difficult in a situation where various aspects of class struggle confront each other (popular power, self-management, | ||
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- | Communisation—the production of a community immediate to its members in and through a struggle against capitalist society—is the abolition of classes and of the state regardless of its form (communes, councils, unions, or cooperatives). Communisation is the abolition of all moments of public activity as separate from the private activity of reproduction, | ||
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- | Women are abolished by the abolition of the sphere that specifies them. The private sphere becomes ‘public’, | ||
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- | The abolition of the public sphere—as opposed to its reconstitution—is thus precisely what will be at stake in the struggle between the revolution and the counter-revolution. It will be, at the same time, the struggle between the abolition of the state and its reconstitution—or better, we might say that the struggle to abolish the state will be nothing other than the struggle to ‘privatise’ the public sphere! | ||
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- | In the public sphere, leaders of all kinds face a mass of anonymous and replaceable citizen-workers, | ||
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- | The public sphere is not literally ‘privatised’ any more than the private sphere is socialised, but it is abolished as a sphere involving relationships between average and anonymous members of classes. The singular, social individual abolishes both the social yet anonymous individual of the public sphere and the singular yet asocial individual of the private sphere. Just as the abolition of classes and of spheres are two aspects of the same communisation—by means of the de-capitalisation of capital and the abolition of all of society—so too the abolition of proletarians and of women are two aspects of the self-transformation of all workers—men and women—and thus of all persons into immediately social individuals, | ||
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- | We have seen how the ‘entry’ of individual proletarian women into the public sphere of struggle puts into question their definition in the private sphere, as well as how that entrance pits them against proletarian men. However, struggling proletarian men also come up against the capitalist offensive—which is both the capitalist crisis and a set of ‘painful but courageous’ policies that the state implements to combat the crisis—by taking it out on the bodies of proletarians. | ||
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- | Towards the end of the Argentine movement, women in several of the movements of the unemployed decided to constitute themselves as movements of unemployed women. Bruno Astarian understood these organisations of struggling women—in his interesting pamphlet on the Argentine movement (Échanges)—as a weakness, a division within the struggle which occurred towards the end of the movement. The ascendent phase of struggles often masks oppositions that later appear when those struggles decline—but that does not necessary mean that these oppositions constitute a weakness. From the point of view that considers the abolition of gender to be constitutive of communisation, | ||
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- | The self-organisation of women will be an unavoidable moment of the revolutionary process. This statement should be understood in the same manner in which we say, ‘self-organisation is the first act of the revolution; it them becomes an obstacle that the revolution must overcome’. The self-organisation of women will be the means given to (those who are still) women to combat that which defines them as women. It will thus also enable them to abolish themselves as such. The overcoming of the state and economy realises itself in the unification of activities: those that are productive as well as those that are reproductive (and those that occur in struggle). This unity will integrate childrearing just as much as car repair and armed combat, if it’s still necessary. //The organisations of women will be central because they will be, in themselves, precisely this unity//. Women, struggling as such, can only struggle for a unity that also unifies themselves—in the face of the cleavages that divide each and every one of them: into proletarian and woman, into citizen and woman, and into human being and woman! | ||
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- | However, women’s self-organisation will also have to struggle within itself against a tendency, which will necessarily exist, to limit its role to representing and negotiating for women’s equality (in recognition of women’s ‘indispensable contributions’). This ‘strictly feminist’ tendency will exist in connection with everything that promotes a socialisation of the economy and the state. It is likely that the most ‘radical’ women, who proclaim their will to abolish women as such, will be called out as ‘traitors to the women’s cause’, as well as to a real and non-sexist democracy. All those who oppose themselves—and these may be the majority—to democratic procedures and/or elected offices will be attacked for wanting ‘to confiscate the revolution for themselves and to constitute themselves as an elite co-opting the revolution at the expense of the masses’. | ||
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- | Struggling women and their organisations will have to unite all women without constituting an anti-sexist front: ruined petit-bourgeois women, peasant women, and all those who are ‘without employment’—including housewives, whether poor or more or less middle class. The movement of women in the course of the revolution—fighting to constitute a unity of struggling proletarians, | ||
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- | This private life is real insofar as it is asocial, public life is all the more false because it is directly social, that is to say, as false as are the economy and politics! | ||
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- | This life used to be private, but the revolution will be the creation of a new life at once intimate and public, totally feminine because it is no longer feminine at all, insofar as it is the abolition of the family, property and the state. | ||
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- | The communising current comes out of the critique and overcoming of left-communism and anti-Leninist councilism. True to its origins by not addressing this question, this current remained fundamentally anti-feminist in its period of total marginalisation. Feminist ideology was interpreted as one of those ‘modernisms’, | ||
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- | However, even if individual communisation theorists did not raise this question, any suspicion that the theory of communisation was itself androcentric (to say it clearly: macho!) must be rejected, since the revolution was posed as producing immediately social individuals—that is to say, individuals beyond any determination that society would give them in advance. The individual was considered to be immediately social, but the question of the distinction between genders remained a blind spot in the theory. The question was resolved ‘ipso facto’ without ever having been posed. | ||
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- | And so, this text—written by a participant in the group/ | ||
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- | It was not only the aim (that is, communisation itself) that sustained a blow. In class struggle, in communisation, | ||
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- | Today, a consensus seems to exist in the communising current, which considers the revolution as an abolition of genders as much as of classes. But a debate exists with regard to the question of whether there is a contradiction between genders of the same sort that exists between classes. It is important that this debate should not be only formal, but rather should take into account the crucial importance of women’s struggles in the present moment, as well as their specificity as a crucial element of the abolition of genders through the abolition of classes – and vice versa. That is the objective of this text. | ||
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- | B.L., June 2011 |